The Girl on the Via Flaminia (3 page)

“They're gay,” the girl said. “For them it's a gay war.”

“No,” Nina said, “not really; they're not really gay. Really they're a gloomy people, the Americans . . .”

“And your captain?”

“That's something else.”

“Will he marry you?”

“The man has a wife somewhere. Ohio . . . and she's cold and ungrateful and extravagant . . .”

“Why doesn't he divorce her?”

“Oh,” Nina said, “it's wonderful how many cold wives the Americans have they do not divorce!”

“Che brutta guerra,” the girl said.

“Sì. But what shall I do—cry my eyes out? Or jump in the Tiber? There's enough corpses on the bottom now . . . and it's better to eat and to go to Florence when one can . . .”

“Or wait,” the girl said, “in a house for some Roberto . . .”

“Yes, even to wait in a house for some Roberto,” Nina said.

“But,” the girl said.

“But what?”

“He may not like me.” Nina looked at her, and smiled slightly. The light lay on the fine skin. Her hair shadowed her eyes.

“My dear,” she said, “would you like to bet?”

 

 

 

 

E
ccolo!” Adele said, coming in through the doorway, carrying a tray. “The coffee . . .” The coffee steamed on the tray.

Behind Adele appeared a tall thin old man, a newspaper tucked under his arm. His spectacles sat on his forehead. He looked into the room.

“You are still here?” Ugo Pulcini said to Nina. “I thought you'd already be high in the mountains.”

“My husband,” Adele said. “This is the Signora Lisa. She is taking Nina's room.”

“Ah,” Ugo said, “with the American husband.” He came into the room. “In Milan once—before the war, it was all before the war—I knew an American girl. A schoolteacher. At the Hotel Tuscania . . .”

“So!” Adele said, looking at her husband.

He smiled, deprecatingly. “An old transgression, my dear . . . 1920! She was making a summer tour. I remember she ate little sandwiches, and in the hotel there was a bar with a special fountain for American schoolteachers . . . a bar with carbonated water and ice cream . . .”

“Did she enjoy her tour, Ugo?” Nina asked.

“It was 1920 . . . a quarter of a century ago! Besides, I had a great curiosity about American women.”

“Did you satisfy it?” Adele said.

“To an extent, my dear: to an extent.” He sighed. “You see how far back I have to go to find a pleasant memory?”

“Drink your coffee, Don Giovanni,” Adele said.

“Now, of course, the tours are different,” Ugo said, sitting down. He sighed again, thinking perhaps of the carbonated water. “There are no more schoolteachers who eat little sandwiches at the Hotel Tuscania . . . now there are only soldiers who scratch their names on the walls of the Colosseum. Yes, among the names of the martyrs, and the ghosts of the great gladiators, their names, and some obscure village they come from.”

“My husband talks,” Adele said to Lisa, apologetically. “He talked himself into the Regina Coeli once.”

“Have you been in prison, Signor Pulcini?” the girl asked.

“My dear, we have all been in prison,” Ugo said. “It was not too unpleasant. My wife used to come with chicken soup . . .”

“While he played cards in his cell,” Adele said.

“She resents my martyrdom,” Ugo said, smiling. “Well, one makes all sorts of mistakes in one lifetime.” He looked at Nina. “Would you possess, my dear,” he said elegantly, “an American cigarette? All day I've smoked nothing but Nazionali.”

“For a martyr?” Nina said.

“Perhaps,” Ugo said gently, “I should fall in love with a captain?”

“Or a schoolteacher.”

“Eh, my schoolteacher days are over,” the old man said. He took a cigarette from Nina's extended pack, and lit it. Smoke flowed from his thin nostrils. “Even a cigarette has become a luxury in Europe,” he said.

Outside, in the hallway, the doorbell rang again.

“Ah!” Nina said, hearing the bell. “Finalmente!”

She went out quickly into the hail.

Ugo smiled at the blonde girl. “Your husband, signora, does he like Italy?”

She was looking toward the door.

“I don't know,” she said.

He came into the room, smiling at them because he was not sure of his reception, and because they were strangers, carrying a musette bag, a little wary, a little uncomfortable, with Nina holding his arm. “Ecco,” she said, “the husband!”

He looked at them and at the girl. He was not quite sure yet, and he was being careful, and he was being polite. “Buona sera,” he said.

“Signor Pulcini . . . Signora Pulcini . . .” Nina said, beside him, and he smiled again at the tall dark woman with the gray hair and the black dress, and at the old man holding the cigarette elegantly between his thumb and forefinger. The girl in the raincoat had not moved, and she did not smile. “This is Roberto,” Nina said. “Guarda! Isn't he intelligent looking for an American? And such a mouth!” She sniffed at him. “How many cognacs did you have?”

“One,” the soldier said.

“One?”

“And a chaser.”

“What chaser?”

“A cognac.”

“You must make him stop drinking, Lisa,” Nina said. “None of them will have stomachs by the time they go home.”

“I was asking your wife, Signor Roberto,” Ugo said, “just before you came if you liked Italy.”

He glanced again at the silent girl. He did not know how much was understood among them, and he was not sure of the kind of house he had come to.

“Do I?” he said to the girl sitting there in that taut quietness at the table.

She still did not smile.

“Do you?” she said.

“Yes,” the soldier said. “I think it's pretty nice.”

“But very much destroyed, no?” Ugo asked.

“No,” the soldier said. “Surprisingly. I didn't expect it to be as nice as it is.” He slipped the musette bag from his shoulder. “As a matter of fact,” he said carefully, “it's much prettier than I thought it would be. Much more.” He hoped she understood, for Italy now was much more beautiful than he had thought coming across the Ponte Milvio in the cold, looking for a house on the Via Flaminia. And he thought, by the quick glance she gave him, that perhaps she had understood, and he hoped that she was pleased.

Behind him, now, somebody said, “Mamma,” and then a young man come into the room. He was handsome, intense, and he was very tightly belted into an almost bleached raincoat. He stopped as he saw the strangers. “Scusate . . .”

“This is my son, Antonio,” Adele said.

Nina glanced again at her expensive wristwatch.

“Dio, the time! My captain'll kill me.” She went quickly to Lisa and kissed her. “Until I return,” she said. She shook hands with Ugo and Adele. “Arrivederci.”

“Remember,” Ugo said, “it's cold in the mountains.”

“Come,” Nina said to Antonio. “I'll kiss you too.”

“No, grazie,” the boy said.

“Not even a little one?”

“Save it for the Alleati,” Antonio said.

She turned. “What a grateful son you have,” she said to Adele.

“I kissed better girls in Libya,” the boy said.

“But dirtier,” Nina answered.

“Only their skin,” Antonio said.

“Are you insulting me, darling?” Nina said.

“Who could insult you, carissima?” the boy said. Nina shrugged; he was obviously hopeless, and she was late. “Arrivederci, Roberto,” she said, touching Robert's arm.

“Good-by, Nina,” the soldier said. He looked at her. “And thanks.”

“Be good to her,” Nina said. “She has wonderful shoulders. Come, help me, Adele.” She picked up her valise. “Addio,” she said once more, and she went out of the dining room, and they could hear her voice, talking incessantly to Adele until the front door slammed.

“Florence,” Ugo said, after a little pause. “How far is it? A hundred and fifty kilometers. But now it's a tremendous journey.”

Robert took a pack of cigarettes out of his shirt pocket. He held the pack toward the old man. “Cigarette?”

“Ah, grazie.” Ugo broke the cigarette carefully into two parts. “Half for now, half for later,” he said. He put the second half into the pocket of his vest.

Robert extended the pack now toward Antonio.

“Smoke?”

The boy, belted so dramatically into his bleached raincoat, his smooth black hair combed to a peak on the nape of his neck, drew a blue and crumpled pack from his own pocket. “I prefer our own,” he said deliberately.

“Nazionali?” Robert said. “They're pretty bad, aren't they?”

“But they are ours,” the boy said.

Robert glanced up into the tense and dark face. He drew his own pack of cigarettes back. He allowed himself to smile a little. The old man drew luxuriously on the half of the cigarette between his lips.

“What a day it was,” he said, “the day you took Rome. What a celebration. Were you here, Signor Roberto, then?”

“Yes,” Robert said. “I was here.”

“What a festa!” Ugo said, shaking his head. “Do you remember, Antonio, how at three o'clock in the morning the people were dancing in the streets? Nobody could sleep.”

“Perhaps we celebrated too soon,” Antonio said.

But the old man was remembering; six months had gone by, and now, in the streets, the vivas painted on the outer walls of the Vatican were fading, the names of the martyrs were fading, the proclamations and the posters with the clenched fists and the squadrons of planes in the painted sky were torn and shredded by the cold wind; and the cabinet was falling, and eggs were thirty lire an egg. “I remember,” the old man said, “at midnight on the third of June . . . all day the Germans going by, out of the city—and a truck burning . . . and a militiaman painting out the big M on his motorcycle and putting in its place a white star. Soldiers and machines, all going north . . . Then in the morning the guns again, closer . . . and then at night nobody sleeping, nobody could rest . . . And that evening—do you remember, Antonio?—in our doorway fell a wounded German. Ich will wasser, hilf mir, hilf mir! . . . All blood up here in the shoulder, and Antonio would not go out of the house to give him water . . .”

“I'd spit in his mouth,” the boy said. “That's the water I'd give a German.”

“But I took a rag, and wet it, and squeezed the water between his lips,” Ugo said. “Why?” He shrugged. “I did not like him dying in the doorway. Then in the evening, dark, I'm in the house, and it's one o'clock . . . I slept, dreaming, and then there's a noise outside the window. I stuck my head out. Outside, on the street, an armored car. I thought—a German? Or perhaps . . . perhaps! And I ran out into the street. What is it? I shouted: English? And somebody shouted: No, no, Americano! And the men are from Chicago! A thousand things ran through my head . . . to call Adele . . . to lock the door . . . and I shouted, because I could think of nothing else to shout: Viva la Chicago!”

The stub of the cigarette had burned down between his fingers, and now, forgetting he was to save the other, he took the broken half from his vest pocket. “What a celebration! What a festa it was that day!” He put the small stub gently and carefully between his lips, nodding at the great memory, the unforgettable experience.

But the boy stood there, in the belted almost white raincoat. “Yes,” he said. “We are liberated.” He drew on the Nazionale. “We are liberated, aren't we, Signor?” he said to Robert.

“Sure,” Robert said.

He made a sudden, almost convulsive movement, pulling the cigarette from his mouth. He crushed it into an ashtray. “You're quite right,” he said. “Our cigarettes, they stink.” He looked at his father. “What a festa we're having now,” he said. “Excuse me . . .” and Robert watched him, with high hunched shoulders and the bitter angry young face under the meticulous haircomb, go abruptly out of the room; and then the old man, troubled, followed the boy out. What was incredible, Robert thought, in the small silence, was that it was only six months ago that Ugo had shouted “Viva la Chicago”; six months, it was only six months. The difference, he thought, was that now you came on a cold extinguished night to a house like this, and there was a girl there, waiting, and an arrangement of a kind. Yes: the difference was that now it was all deals and arrangements, and he had made one, too, for his own reasons. “Six months,” he said aloud. “You wouldn't think it was that short a time.”

“What?” he heard the girl at the table ask.

“The liberation,” he said. “It's only six months. We're coming to the first Christmas we've had since it.”

“Have you been in Italy long?” she said.

“Long enough,” he answered. And then realized they had been talking; and that he still knew nothing about her, nothing at all, and he did not actually know whether she had accepted, and how he was to proceed if she had, and why she did not do something to make it easier, or to get out of that chair there, or what kind of a house this house was, and who the people were in it. “Doesn't it ever snow in Rome?” he said.

“No,” the girl said.

“Never?”

“If you like snow,” she said, “you should go to Switzerland.”

“I might at that,” he said. “One thing about a war, you travel. Switzerland and snow. Have you been in Switzerland?”

“Before the war.”

“I meant before the war,” he said. “Nobody travels now but the armies. And that's no way to travel.” Then, very carefully, he said: “What did Nina tell the Pulcinis? That I was your husband?”

“Yes.”

“When were we married?”

“A year ago,” she said. “In Naples.”

“Oh.” He paused. He was being funny. “Was it a nice wedding?”

“I don't know,” the girl said. “I wasn't there.”

He put the musette bag on the table. He would have preferred going into whatever room it was she had arranged in this house. He supposed there was a room; Nina had said there would be a room. But the girl did not move away from the table. “Do you have a family?” he asked then.

“My father.”

“In Rome?”

“No; in Genoa,” she said. He had, then, briefly a feeling of being glad that there was nobody. There being nobody seemed to make it simpler, although he did not know why he should want it simple. “You bombed Genoa,” she said, “and my father thought I would be safer in Rome.”

“Me?” he said. “I didn't bomb Genoa.”

“Your countrymen.”

“Oh.” He looked at her, but he did not want to accept what looked like antagonism and trouble. She was so much prettier than he had expected. Her prettiness excited him. He did not want any trouble at all. It was to be very simple: a musette bag, and the room arranged for, and whatever money would be required.

“Genoa's in the north, isn't it?” he said. “Where Columbus came from.”