Authors: Timothy Williams
“It would never have occurred to me it was you who’d murdered all those old partisans.”
She laughed.
“And even if I had found out that you were the mother to my brother’s child, what would I have done?”
She raised her glass. “To your health.”
“If anything, I would have tried to help you—because that’s what you needed.”
“I need nothing,” she said and drank.
“You had loved Italo Trotti.”
“I will always love Italo.” The smile vanished. She looked down at her glass and for a few moments there was silence. Then the Baronessa raised her eyes. “I always tried to do what was best.”
“Like killing people?”
“For Italo’s sake, I always tried to do what was best.”
“You wanted to kill me.”
“You cannot understand. You didn’t know Italo as I knew him.” Her voice had lost its brittle edge. It was almost dreamy and she sat staring into her half-empty glass. “The people in the village could be so spiteful. They always accused me of being pro-German—of being anti-Italian. But I was a better patriot than your partisans ever were.” She raised her chin towards Fra Gianni.
The priest remained by the door, silent like a stubborn child refusing to sit down.
“When I married Pauli, I thought I was doing my patriotic duty. Duty towards our two countries, duty towards the Duce, towards the Axis. Towards the marriage of Italy and Germany.”
“You loved the Baron von Neumann?”
“He never did anything to harm me.” The smile softened her face. “Pauli was a good man.”
Outside the house, the sound of the river joined that of the wind. The cold smell of the hills.
“I spent the first year of marriage in Germany, and it wasn’t until 1943 and the bombing of Hamburg that I returned to Santa Maria.”
“You told me that you were in Germany at the end of the war. You now admit you were in Santa Maria?”
A bland smile. “I was happy with Pauli—very happy. A good man—and after so many years of poverty, with Pauli there was no longer the nagging problem of where the next meal was coming from.” She nodded. “We are a good people, we, the Italians. We are good and we have generous hearts. But, in our memory, there is always the fear of hunger. And here in the hills, we have never been rich. You know that, Piero Trotti. You’re of humble, hard-working stock.”
Trotti did not reply.
“When war broke out and there was the possibility of selling food on the black market, people were willing to do anything to make a bit of money.” She gestured towards the priest. “About
these things, Gianni is so naive. He likes to see everything in black and white. For him the Fascists were all bad and the partisans were all good. He doesn’t understand that our politics were determined by self-interest—and hunger. But then he doesn’t know about the hunger and the poverty of living in these hills. He is from Piemonte.”
“I have lived here for more than forty years, Baronessa.”
“And still you don’t understand, Gianni.”
“Understand what?”
She took a quick gulp of schnapps and smiled as the liquid descended her throat.
“What don’t I understand?” The priest’s voice was aggrieved, like that of a little boy’s.
She turned to Trotti. “Gianni is a good man. Not very intelligent, but good, with a kind heart. Unfortunately, like so many Italians, he doesn’t like to face up to the truth.” She spoke as if the priest were still in his presbytery. “Or rather, Gianni prefers to create his own truth. He has got it into his head that all the partisans were good and everybody else was wicked.” She turned to look at him, her head to one side and talking like a schoolmistress. “Goodness isn’t something that you’re born with. Goodness comes with the freedom from drudgery, with the freedom from back-breaking toil. Goodness comes from knowing that you can spare the time to help your friends.”
The priest said, “We are all born with goodness in our hearts. And evil.”
“The hills are a hard taskmaster. You know that, Piero Trotti. The hills have made us a tough and determined lot. The incessant labor. A land that would yield nothing without a struggle.”
Trotti held up his hand. “You loved my brother?”
“Of course I loved him. I was a pretty girl in those days, and I could pick and choose. But Italo wasn’t like the other men.” She stopped and looked at Trotti carefully. “You have eyes a bit like his, Piero. So sad—and yet so warm. Intelligent, brown eyes. And when I saw those eyes again—when Italo returned from Russia, it was as if he had never been away … as if I had never been married.” She smiled to herself.
“You had an affair with him?”
“How else, Piero Trotti, do you think I got pregnant?”
“You were a married woman in 1944.”
“You are all the same.”
“You had been married to the baron for three years.”
“You men can’t understand—because you can’t love. You don’t know what love is—true, disinterested love.” She shook her head. “I loved Pauli—very much indeed. Perhaps, at first, I was impressed by the uniform—Pauli was so splendid in his uniform. And perhaps the idea that a simple peasant girl from the hills could become a German Baronessa.” A snort of humorless laughter. “A Baronessa with bare feet. I was flattered—flattered by all the attention, and by the possibilities.”
There were the photographs of Pauli again, looking down from the piano. Pauli in the uniform of the Wehrmacht, Pauli smoking a pipe and swinging a golf club. Pauli—his hair now thinner—and a little boy on a windswept beach of the North Sea.
“I loved Pauli very much.”
“And my brother? You loved him, too?”
“With Italo it was different, quite different. I loved Pauli, of course. I loved him and I gave him two daughters of his own. He was a good man and I respected him. But Italo was different.”
“In what way was my brother different?”
“You ask such stupid questions.”
A flash of anger. “I loved my older brother.”
“Of course you did, Piero Trotti. Everyone loved him.” Again she glanced at the photographs and there was disappointment on her face. “I had always loved him—before the war, before he ever left to go into the army.” She closed her eyes. “It must have been 1937—no, 1936—when they sent him to Africa. That’s right, he was just eighteen.” A smile of nostalgia. “We all loved Italo—so young, so good. He was ten years younger than me and for six marvelous months …”
“In 1936?”
“You were still at school, Piero Trotti. You think I don’t remember you? An ugly little child you were even then—Italo and I used to joke about you. Thin as a rake—and your long,
sharp nose. With your darned trousers and wooden shoes that were two sizes too big for you, you were not a very attractive child.”
“You flatter me.”
“You could never have been like Italo. You have always been a stubborn and opinionated person, Piero. The complete opposite of Italo. Even as a child, you behaved like a self-righteous priest.” She laughed. “No wonder you became a policeman.”
“You loved my brother—and yet you wanted to murder me. Because you were afraid that I would find out about the past.”
“The past?” She laughed. “You cannot change the past, Piero, not you or anyone else.”
“But you wanted me dead.”
She nodded. “Of course.”
“Why?”
“Because I hate you.” She smiled the same coquettish smile.
“What harm have I done you?” Trotti could not hide his surprise.
“Like your mother, Piero Trotti. Stubborn and self-righteous.”
“Stubborn enough to want to know why you felt you had to kill me.”
“A horrid, snooping policeman. A horrid little man.”
Trotti had started to tremble. “Instead of me, you killed a young woman—an innocent young woman.”
The Baronessa was no longer listening. She had turned and was now addressing Fra Gianni. “And then Italo came back. We all thought he had died. After so many years away, fighting all those wars, Italo came back. He didn’t know. I was married and I’m sure that it was his determination to see me again that helped him stay alive. In Russia he suffered frostbite—but he returned. Italo returned for me—for the only woman he had ever loved.”
“Italo was sick.”
“You are so like your mother, Piero Trotti.” She faced him. “Your mother was a calculating woman. A cold and calculating woman who thought I could get food and medicine from the Germans for her son. It was she who told me that Italo was back. Oh, she hated me, she’d never wanted her son to go with me. She
said I was too old for him. But that didn’t stop her from telling me he was in hiding in the hills—hiding with the partisans.” Her eyes went from the priest to Trotti. “Whatever I did, I did for Italo. Not for that old woman.”
“Mother died earlier this year.”
She poured more schnapps into her glass. Her pale hand reminded Trotti of a bloodless insect. “So the priest tells me.”
“Pauli von Neumann knew that the child was not his?”
“Italo’s boy?”
Trotti said, “The man I just met in Como. The German with a strange name. And a rifle in the boot of his car.”
“Wolfgang is a dreamer. A poet and a dreamer.”
“Your husband knew it was not his child?”
“You believe I would lie to Pauli?”
Trotti shrugged.
“You are a peasant, Piero Trotti, and you take everybody for a peasant like yourself.”
Fra Gianni spoke. “You lied to me all these years.”
“Because you are a fool, Gianni. A priest and a fool.” She turned back to face Trotti. “Of course I told my husband. Pauli wasn’t happy. But he was good—and he understood. And later we had our two girls.” She raised her eyes towards where Fra Gianni was standing. “Ours was a very united family. I spent twenty marvelous years in Germany. And my daughters now write to me regularly.”
“When you came back in 1965, it was then that you started murdering the old partisans?”
“After the war Pauli and I lived in Hamburg. We were very happy. Of course sometimes we quarreled. But we were very happy—and soon after he died, I returned to Italy—and to the hills.”
“You murdered Italo?”
“Italo?” Her eyes flickered.
“It wasn’t the partisans—it was you who murdered Italo—just as you tried to kill me.”
“I
WAS IN
Como with your son. He is in jail. I came here directly with the Captain of Carabinieri.”
“A dreamer. Wolfgang is a dreamer like his father.”
“Why did he change his name?”
“What name?”
“Schuhmaker—when your name is von Neumann?”
She shrugged. “Pauli’s idea—he didn’t want the children to be laughed at at school. Very egalitarian, Pauli—he was ashamed of being an aristocrat. That’s why he married a peasant girl—an Italian peasant girl.”
“And you gave the gun to your son?”
“I didn’t give him anything, Piero Trotti.”
“Why did he have the gun in his car?”
“You must ask Wolfgang.”
“He refuses to talk.”
“Wolfgang is a good boy—but he can never be like his father. Because Italo was very special.” She smiled. “Italo was in love with me. And it was his love that kept him alive during the march through Russia. That terrible march through the snow when he lost two of his toes.”
“I recognized him.” Trotti turned to look at the priest. “When I first saw the German, I thought it was my brother. He was sitting in the small cell and it was as if Italo had never died. The
same face as Italo—older, and beginning to lose his hair. But still the same face.”
“Not the same eyes. Nobody ever had those dark brown eyes.” The Baronessa shrugged. “Wolfgang wanted to help me—that’s why he came down from Germany. And that’s why he wanted to keep the gun.”
“He could have thrown it away—thrown it in the river.”
“A family heirloom?” A laugh. “He was furious I ever took it in the first place.” She glanced at the two men. “Strange how Wolfgang was so close to Pauli. He wasn’t the boy’s father and yet …” She faced Trotti, put her fist to her chin. “I was a good mother, you know. I loved my children—we still write. I am very fond of Wolfgang, who is so like his father. But I could never love Wolfgang the way I loved Italo. You understand that, don’t you?”
Trotti did not reply.
Gianni had sat down on the arm of the settee where he had poured himself a drink. He now held the empty glass between his large hands.
“What are you going to do with me, Piero?”
“What do you think, Baronessa?”
The muscles at the corner of her mouth tightened. “A spiteful and vindictive person—even as a child.” She folded her arms. “With you, Piero, I can expect the worst.”
“I must do my job.”
“It was my fault—I shouldn’t have talked so much. I shouldn’t have told you everything. I regretted it immediately. You are more intelligent than the priest, I was suddenly afraid …” She hesitated, then smiled the same coquettish smile that she had used before. It softened her face and lit up her eyes. “You are going to throw an old woman into prison?”
“An old woman who killed a young girl in the prime of her life.”
“Like a priest, Piero.” A gesture of irritation, but the girlish smile remained. “At times, you can be so self-righteous.”
“Brigadiere Ciuffi worked for me, Baronessa. It may not mean much to you—but I was responsible for her. She was an intelligent and good person. She was not beautiful—not beautiful as you were. But kind and hard-working.”
“What are you going to do with me?”
“I swore that I would find her killer—and I would see the killer punished.”
She frowned. “You are a vindictive person, Piero. You always were. That’s why Italo always said—”
“What do you know about Italo? You went to bed with him, you spent a few moments with him—and you think you know all about my brother? What do you know? You don’t own him. Because he gave you his child doesn’t mean that you own him, that you own his memory.”
“I brought him back to life. Without me, without my love and my caring, he would have died.”
“You murdered him.”
A brittle, mocking laugh. “You say such outrageous things.”
“You couldn’t have him as a husband—because you would never have given up your German baron and his wealth to go and live with a crippled war veteran. That was out of the question. Live with a poor Italian peasant when you had done everything to escape? When you had a house and money in Germany?”