The Girl on the Via Flaminia (8 page)

He made again one of those abrupt melodramatic movements of his. There was an uncomfortable silence. “Here,” the Englishman said, “let's have another bottle of vino.” He called out: “Mimi! Vieni qua!”

“Sì, sì!” Mimi cried. “Vengo!”

Bloody young Eyetie. They were all a bloody lot, the sergeant thought, the young ones, hanging around the cafés, black-marketing, with their hair oil and their swimming hot eyes. Bloodier than Wogs, standing there on the sidewalks, looking at you as though you'd just robbed the poor box. Should have knocked off a few more of them coming up the coast road from El Alamein, the sergeant thought. Better off all around. Bloody beggars. Chap couldn't have a party without one of them hissing at him.

The girl said, suddenly, “But why shouldn't Antonio lose his temper? We are all so careful! So afraid!”

Is she going to pop off too? the sergeant thought.

“There is nothing to be done,” Adele said. She was troubled. “Why should one be angry?” she said. “It's necessary to be hard. To be angry is wasteful and stupid.”

“If we had men!” Lisa said.

“Men!” Adele snorted. “We have fifty political parties . . . full of men!”

Robert looked at his watch again. “It's almost midnight.”

“I'm sorry you are not in New York,” Lisa said.

“Stop it,” Robert said to her.

“But you would have a wonderful time in New York,” the girl said.

“I'm having a wonderful time here,” Robert said.

Antonio looked at the girl. At least, there was one ally in the room. She was married to one of his unacknowledged enemies, but she was young, she would know the difference between victory and this kind of defeat. “It is different for you, signora,” he said to Lisa, politely. “You will go to America with your husband when the war ends. But us? We will stay here to be punished!”

“Punished?” Robert said.

“Yes, punished,” the boy said. “Because we made the war. Because of the regime. But how do you punish us? Tell me, signore . . . how? Do you go and pick the guilty one, and say, he's guilty, him we shoot? This is the bad one, he is responsible, him we imprison? No! The ax on all our necks . . . !” He leaned forward, trembling. His face was flushed and dark. He looked intensely at Robert.

“Don't look at me,” Robert said. “I'm not responsible.”

“Who is?” Antonio said.

“Christopher Columbus,” Robert said. “How the hell do I know?”

But Antonio knew. Yes: in his eyes, the uniform was the same. “When we go into the street,” he said, leaning forward, accusing them, because of the uniform, “what do we see? Your colonels, in their big cars, driving with women whose reputations were made in the bedrooms of fascist bureaucrats! With my country's enemies! Or your soldiers, drunk in our gutters. Or your officers, pushing us off our own sidewalks! Oh, the magnificent promises the radio made us! Oh, the paradise we'd have! Wait, wait—there will be bread, peace, freedom when the allies come! But where is this paradise? Where is it, signori—?”

“Antonio!” Adele said.

The boy's head turned fiercely. “I must speak! It's choking me!”

“Go to your room,” Adele said.

“The liberatori!” Antonio said. He laughed, a short hard quick laugh. There was no humor in it.

“Go to your room,” Adele said.

She took his arm. “Antonio! Do you hear me?” He allowed her to draw him away. “Yes,” he said, “I'll spoil the party. The Alleati must have their parties.”

“Basta,” Adele said. “Enough now.”

She drew him out of the room.

Ugo looked at them. “Excuse my son,” he said. There was a painful silence. “When the Germans were here,” he said, “I hid him—in the cellar. It was because of the arrests, they were arresting all the young who had deserted . . . and sending them north to the factories in Austria, and to the labor camps . . . He was two months in that cellar and I would bring him food.” He looked at them, as though possibly they would understand this: the two months in the cellar. “To live with fear, and with hatred, is bad . . . one changes because of it, and yet, when one has only one son, what else can one do? He's so changed . . . Always,” he said, “when I went to the cellar, Antonio would ask me: where are the Americans, are they close, why do they stay so long at Anzio? It was difficult for him—a soldier, young, and part of a defeated army—and then, to live like that, for two months, in a cellar . . .”

He did not finish. He means, Robert thought, to emerge into this, to come out of the cellar finally into this.

Outside, in the dark, there was a sudden sound of bells. Of bells, and of guns firing.

They looked up sharply hearing the bells and the guns.

“Midnight,” the Englishman said. “Happy New Year's.”

“But the guns,” the old man said, hearing them. “I hear guns.”

“It's the American Army,” Robert said, “celebrating.”

The Englishman stood up. “Come on,” he said. “Let's go out into the garden and see the fireworks. Listen to them.”

Pistols, bells, and then the sound of a machine gun.

“It's a bloody mutiny,” the sergeant said. “It sounds like a bloody mutiny.”

 

 

 

 

F
rom Porto Bardia to Tripoli. Between Barce and Derna the cliffs dropping to the sea. At El Aden the tanks burning.

The highway, and on one side of the highway, the desert, and on the other the mountains, and behind them, the English.

Is it bad, tenente?

Yes, bad.

Does it hurt much?

There was so much blood, and the blood had turned black, there on the edges of the bandage.

And they were on the truck, lying on the beds and the equipment evacuated from the field hospital, he and Volpini, and Volpini said jump jump when at Bir El Acroma the English had strafed the column, coming over, low, and you could see the flashes, intermittent, in the sunlight, short and fiery, and he jumped, limping grotesquely into the ditch as though the ditch would help. From December fourth to the twenty-third of December. See how he remembered the dates. How the dates clung. How the time was fixed. From December fourth to the twenty-third of December. The Retreat. And then it was Christmas Eve in Tripoli.

Again, again, again. Would it never stop? He had, he thought, firmly clinched himself on the present, denying it, denying those nineteen days, and yet it would not go away. The wound suppurated. The pus was there. The bandage black with blood. The memory did not heal.

No, he thought, lying in the darkness in his room, on the bed, turning his face to the wall, feeling the flush and the heat as though he were in fever, hearing the sounds of the celebrant bells and the guns firing, no, he thought, it was over, it was all part of the defeat, when his world fell to pieces, and nothing, nothing could possibly come of remembering any of it, Bardia or the burning tanks at El Aden, or the planes coming down again in the afternoon with their guns streaking and Volpini saying jump jump there at Bir El Acroma when he had jumped and the plane coming over and Volpini had jumped too late. Jumped, and the truck, in the disorderly column, veering off the highway, had gone over the twitching body there on the cement, Volpini, and he lay in the ditch. That was nothing to remember now for none of it was real except in his memory, and only this was real now: the dark streets, the Americans shooting drunkenly in the holiday night, the lire down, all the whores, and the indigestible bread.

He was Antonio, he thought: the African lieutenant was dead, in the desert, with Volpini, dead with the smoking overturned tanks and the German motorcyclists racing through the disorderly column, attempting order. What was it Volpini had said of the campaign? The temptation in the desert. But he had meant the empire. The invisible impossible bloody empire. An empire of sand and death and illusion. If Graziani had driven through to Suez it might have been different. If they had mounted the double attack, northern and southern. But the whole campaign, from the first, had been a scandal. It had all been sand and death and illusion and the fiery streaks out of the sky.

Perhaps it had been doomed from the very beginning. Doomed long ago, fixed in some historical destiny, fixed in some ill-fated star of Graziani's, fixed so that the fuel should fail when fuel was needed, fixed so that the shells should lie on the piers in Naples when there were no shells at Mersa Matruh for the guns of the bersaglieri. All of it fixed. Determined far in advance. Reckoned and destined, all of it, before he, Antonio, had been born, or had gone, in his neat-booted ignorance, into the hold of the transport sailing from Augusta.

Now it was over. A campaign. A retreat. A defeat suffered. The truth of all of it, when the documents would be finally revealed, possibly different from what he thought of as the truth. Only the wound, that was to be his truth, the undeniable one, the one documents had nothing to do with, as another's would be his blindness or his handless arm. From Bardia to Tripoli. Between Barce and Derna the cliffs dropping to the sea.

Does it hurt much, tenente?

He could hear the guns and the bells.

And then one had waited so long there in the cellar, and there was always the half-shame that one had deserted, even though the Army was no longer one worth fighting for, and in the battalions the Germans had spread false and misleading rumors, and regiments, full of conflicting stories, had surrendered their arms, and the news of the peace was deliberately kept from the troops. Even though it had been that kind of an army there was the half-shame always because of the desertion. And more difficult because one was young and an officer. Then, lying there, on the blankets, in the cellar, waiting for one's father to come down into the darkness and to feed one. Thinking there in the darkness always about it. Remembering how Volpini had liked to hunt. How they had planned when it was over to have a great deal of hunting and the rabbit stew that Volpini had sworn would taste like no other, and then, the retreat, like rabbits themselves, and the others doing the hunting. Perhaps it would have been better not to have hidden, not to have stayed there, in the cellar, in the darkness, but to have gone north, to have gone into the hills, they were organizing then in the hills, and the combat groups were being formed there. Many had gone off, and it would have been better he knew now, in his room, hearing the guns, to have gone off, to have fought there, in the marshes, in the forests, and even to have died there under those conditions of unequal warfare. For now there was nothing left at all but the corruption, and this house, and the soldiers of those armies he had thought were to be armies that would welcome him, but which did not welcome him, which perhaps despised him as he despised them, coming here to have his mother serve them food and wine, to sit drunken in the dining room.

There was a ripping sound in the night, and he recognized a machine gun.

They could afford to celebrate with ammunition.

In the darkness he got up, moved toward the table, switched on the small lamp, and took out again his bullet. He held it under the light of the lamp, smooth, a little flattened, and he imagined he could still see the slight indentation the forceps made, and still see the Bavarian doctor extending it toward him, held between the clamps of the forceps, saying, “Here, you might want this, a souvenir,” on that Christmas Eve in Tripoli.

And afterward he had had such a high fever.

Outside, now, while he turned the bullet carefully and slowly in the lamplight, they were celebrating: the bells all rang, and guns in the hands of those who were involved in his defeat, and now in the continuing humiliation of his country, fired in short happy bursts.

 

 

 

 

I
n the bedroom, the sound of bells could still be heard, bronze and heavy. Robert had brought the bottle of cognac with him into the room. The lamp was lit.

She lay on the red bedspread. She had covered herself with the raincoat. She looked quite small and tired.

“Would you like some cognac?” Robert said. “Ugo thinks I was overcharged for it.”

“No,” Lisa said.

“It'll warm you. Besides, you ought to celebrate the New Year's.”

“You celebrate it,” the girl said.

“The bartender said it was pre-liberation cognac,” Robert said.

“I believe you. It is very good cognac. But I don't want any.”

“Okay.”

He drank the cognac he had poured for her.

They were still firing their guns, and the bells rang.

He thought of the bell ringer, some priest, cold in the church tower, swinging the great ropes. Now, up there, he assumed, the bell ringer was in the tower, the starlight would be visible beyond the shape of the dark belfry and the hanging swinging bells, and how the sound must be deafening. He would be an old man, like the priests in the church of the Capuchins, the caretakers of the sacred skeletons whose bones they made into altars, and he wore, not sandals probably, but thick army boots, as he had seen some of the priests wear, and a rope was tied around his waist, and his hands would be calloused by the ropes. That priest would make that music, and the soldiers made their own. But the priest wouldn't be drunk. He would be diligently devout. He went toward the bed and sat down beside her.

“It's midnight,” he said. “Usually we kiss at midnight on New Year's in America.”

He leaned down towards her.

“No,” the girl said.

“Why not?”

“I'm tired,” Lisa said.

They were all out at parties, he thought, at home; parties at somebody's house or parties at some restaurant, and the shops in Times Square had boarded up all their windows. They were waiting for midnight in his own country, and the crowds were beginning to gather under the electric teletype in the square, moving sluggishly and thickly from the square to the circle, with horns, blowing the horns, pushing, endangering the plate glass, the tin horns blowing and the auto horns blowing, and passing under the marquees of the theaters and in front of the movie houses where, because of the cold, the cashiers in the cages wore their fur coats and the barkers outside the movie houses wore their operatic capes. Then the hats, the liquor, the waiting for the clock to strike; and how, when it did and you were young, you went to the window and blew on a tin horn or rattled a cowbell out into the frosty darkness, and shouted, and when you were older you kissed and shouted. The very last party he could remember having been at on a New Year's Eve he had been very drunk. But here, he wasn't even drunk, there were no paper hats, there were no tin horns, and the girl he had was too tired to kiss him.

“You were out pretty late,” Robert said. “Who was the friend? The one who talked so much?”

“A friend.”

“Does your friend have a mustache?”

“What?” she said.

“Maybe your friend sings arias through his mustache,” Robert said.

“Why should it matter?”

“It doesn't,” he said, sitting there. He thought suddenly of something that had happened: they were coming down the Corso, at night, in a weapons carrier, and an MP blew a whistle, and they stopped the weapons carrier, and the MP hoisted a guy up into the truck. He'd been shot. He'd been shot in the foot. It had happened in the dark under the arcade. There had been a girl with the soldier, and then somebody in the darkness of the arcade had shot him. The foot bled into the floor of the weapons carrier. The guy's boot was full of blood.

“No, it doesn't matter,” Robert said. “Except you know how the Americans are.”

“No,” she said. “How are the Americans?”

“Suspicious,” he said.

“Really?”

“And jealous.”

“What a surprise,” she said. “I did not think the Americans were capable of jealousy.”

“They're capable. Where were you?”

“It does not matter.”

“If you say that again,” he said, “I'll—”

“Yes?”

“Break your neck.”

“It does not matter,” she said.

“Goddamit!”

“Are you angry?” she said.

“No!”

“I thought you were angry,” she said. “But I forgot. The Americans are above anger. Only Antonio is stupid enough to get angry.”

He took her arms, knowing he was hurting her.

The guns fired sporadically in the distance. They were still celebrating.

“Are you trying to get me to blow my cork?” he said.

“Che dici?”

“Blow my cork,” he said. “Steam me up!”

“I?” she said. “Impossible.”

“Yes, you!”

“But I'm just a girl,” she said. “An Italian girl you met in a war. An adventure. How can I possibly make you angry?”

“Go ahead,” he said. “Talk.”

“If I annoy you, I'll stop.”

“Don't stop,” he said. “It'll kill you if you stopped now. Go on. You were being an adventure.”

“Well, it will amuse her.”

“Amuse who?”

“Some American girl,” she said. “Your fiancée. The one you pretend not to have. It will amuse her when you are in bed together. Your story about the Lisa you met in Rome.”

“Yes,” he said. “She'll love it.”

“It will be very funny,” she said. “How once in Rome during the war you lived with an Italian girl because she was . . . unlucky.”

“Are you finished?” Robert said.

“Yes. I will make a very funny story, no? You see? Why should it matter what I do or where I go?”

“Except it happens to,” he said.

“No. It does not matter. It is not important.”

He could imagine them firing the guns. They were out in the dark, behind the stadium probably where they held the track events in the summertime, drunk, firing the forty-fives they had picked up or the Berettas they had bought. They might even send up some flares, if somebody had a flare gun.

“It's important all right,” he said. “Don't you worry about it being important.”

“Yes?”

“Because I like you.” Not love you; he noticed that he was careful. She turned away, almost smiling.

“Should I be flattered? Yes. I am flattered.”

“I think I will break your neck,” he said. He thought of them out in the dark, drunk, and firing their guns. Maybe that was how he, too, should have celebrated New Year's. He had a gun, too. They all had guns.

“You know,” she said, “perhaps this winter it will snow, too. Just for the Americans. I think it may now just for them.”

She looked hopefully at him.

He took his hands from her shoulders.

“All right,” he said. “Tell me what you want. Obviously you want something.”

“I? Nothing.” She looked faintly astonished. “I have everything, haven't I? You heard Antonio. How lucky I am! I am going to America. They won't escape but I will.” She turned away again, painfully. “Che buona fortuna!”

He stood up. She lay there, curled up on the red bedspread, under the raincoat. It was again cold enough in the room for his breath to steam. It was some New Year's.

“Do you like me at all?” he asked.

“Così così . . .”

“Tell me the truth.”

“Does it matter?”

“Yes.”

Her voice changed. She was not pretending anything now. Her mouth was close to the cold pillow.

“I think I hate you.”

He could feel himself drain. Anger, annoyance, desire for her, went away. There was an emptiness, an astonished sort of emptiness. That, and a faintly sick feeling. It was as though he had run into a wall. Or was in a room, suddenly, without doors. That, and hearing the guns, thinking at least out there he would have been drunk and it would at least feel like a kind of celebration.

“But why?” he said. There seemed so little reason for it. There really seemed so little reason for it. “I didn't think I was that bad . . .”

“It was not possible,” she said.

Possible? What had possibilities to do with it? He looked into his own emptiness.

“Then why did you start? Why did you tell Nina yes? Why did you have me come here?” Through the darkness, carrying the musette bag, expecting something. Not so long ago.

“Because,” she said, “I thought nothing was important any more. Because I thought everybody had a soldier. The Americans were rich, they have so much. I thought why not? Take one too. It's so simple!”

“Wasn't it simple?” he asked.

“No!”

“But it is simple,” he said. The emptiness was simple, too. Not feeling at all was simple. Guns and drunkenness were simple. “I was lonely,” he said, “you were hungry. What could be simpler? I didn't ask you to love me.”

“No,” she said. “Just to go to bed with you.”

“Yes.”

“How simple!”

“Yes,” he said stubbornly, because it was so, because it seemed so to him. She did not know how simple that really was. The other things were complex. The being lost, the nights in a long room where somebody shouted in his sleep, or somebody cried, or somebody coughed, that was complex. Thinking was complex. Thinking what a gun was doing in your hand. Why you went on and on when there was no apparent and true reason why you should go on and on. Why at no point you resisted. Why you let it all happen. “I thought it was simple,” he said.

“You should have found someone who thought so, too,” she said. “You were kind enough, even generous—you brought the food, and I had real coffee, just as we had arranged. And you asked so little . . .”

“I wanted a girl,” he said.

“And it was not important how,” she said. “Or what she felt. So little—that she should be warm, that she should be here when you wanted her . . .”

“Is that wrong?”

“No,” she said. “No. Why should it be wrong if you don't think it's wrong?”

“You needed the food.”

“The food! Yes. Didn't I? I did not need anything but the food!”

“I don't care about the other things,” he said, slowly. It was a time to be absolutely truthful. “I don't think I care anymore about the other things.” He would try. He had never really explained it. The way things had changed. But he would try. Here, in this room, cold enough to make his breath steam. And while a celebration of which he was no part was going on. “I wanted a girl,” he said. “I don't think I wanted love. I wanted a girl because I didn't like to have to stand under the trees on the Via Veneto or to go under the bridges. I wanted to get away from the Army. I wanted to have a house I could come to, and a girl there, mine. I wanted it as simple as that, as simple as it could possibly be. And I thought I would just be exchanging something somebody needed for something I needed. Something somebody wanted for something I wanted.”

“The black market,” she said.

“Yes,” he said, “the black market, if you want to call it that. Everything's in the black market now. And I didn't want money for what I had. But you don't want it simple like that, do you? That's wrong. That's ugly. You have to complicate it with love. Oh, you'll climb up in the hayloft all right, but you have to be in love before you climb up the ladder, don't you?”

“Oh,” she said, “you are so delicate. You understand a woman so well!”

“I'm a dumb American,” Robert said. “You said that before.”

“From such a great country! With such sympathy for human unhappiness!”

“We do all right,” he said.

“Yes,” she said, “and you will make Europe so grateful to you!”

“I'm not interested in Europe.”

“What are you interested in?”

“Me.”

“Bravo!” she said. “How honest!”

“Yes,” he said. “And that's a hell of a lot more than I can say for Europe.” He went to the table, now that it was all said, and filled the small glass with cognac, and drank it. The firing had almost died away. Tomorrow, now that it was all said, he could go out with them again, under the bridges, under the trees. He put the glass down. “Well, it was a lovely New Year's.” She still lay there, huddled up, not looking at him. He thought of how pretty she had looked the first time he came to the house. He thought regretfully she was still that pretty. Her hair lay blonde and soft on the pillow. “I guess this finishes it,” he said. “You figure out some excuse to tell the Pulcinis tomorrow. Tell them my outfit left town. We moved up north.” He looked at her. He thought: shall I ask her? No, he thought: she'll say no. “Would it be all right,” he said, “if I kissed you Happy New Year's anyway?”

She turned her face deeper into the pillow.

He went and stood beside the bed. “I ought to kiss somebody a Happy New Year's.”

He bent down and kissed the visible corner of her mouth. Her face was very cold. He looked at her for a moment and then went out of the room.