The Italian Wife (30 page)

To hell with it. Thousands of people. Too little space. Bodies jammed together. Attached to Isabella, Roberto’s progress slowed, squeezing the two of them through gaps too small for one. Tempers flared. A punch was thrown in his ribs but he ploughed relentlessly on and nothing would make him release his grip on her hand.

All the time the engine’s growl grew louder. Heads were starting to lift, eyes raking the empty sky until they found the tiny aircraft streaking directly in line with the field. Roberto didn’t waste time looking up. He knew exactly what it was they were up against from his one earlier glance. A Caproni, the two-seater biplane nicknamed the Caproncino because it was so small. But big enough to create a blazing inferno. If it crashed.

‘Roberto,’ Isabella’s voice scarcely made it to him over a burst of applause, ‘what is —’

‘Halt!’ Two burly Blackshirts with swarthy faces and matching moustaches stepped in front of Roberto, truncheons already in their fists. One placed the tip of it in the centre of Roberto’s chest and leaned his weight into it. ‘Where do you think you are going? It is a betrayal of Il Duce. Get back to…’

Roberto knew the point had come that made him fear for Isabella. He brandished his camera case at the Blackshirts.

‘Step aside,’ he snapped. ‘
Pronto
! I am the official photographer appointed by Chairman Grassi and I must return to my car to fetch more film for Il Duce’
s
departure.’ He could hear the Caproncino. So close. Circling now.

‘No, no one leaves. You remain here.’

Roberto looked at Isabella’s face. ‘Let the signora go to fetch it,’ he said sternly. ‘She is my —’

‘— wife,’ Isabella stated, and clutched at the arm of one of the Blackshirts, stumbling as if in pain. He tried to pull away from her but she hung on and whimpered at him, ‘I’m pregnant. Help me.
Per favore.
I’m bleeding…’

The Blackshirt recoiled with an expression of disgust and this time she let him go. ‘Get out of here,’ he ordered smartly and, using his truncheon freely on the throng of bodies, he carved a path for their exit.

‘
Grazie
,’ Isabella murmured.

‘Run!’ Roberto hissed at her.

The crowd was thinning here. They moved faster. Blackshirts were staring up into the sky as the aeroplane climbed higher and higher above the field, a tiny leaf spiralling up into the blue. He saw Isabella look up as she ran and for the first time register where the noise was coming from. The plane flipped over high above and Isabella’s jaw dropped open as it dawned on her what was about to happen.

She jerked to a halt.

‘No, Isabella!’

Roberto forced her forward but she dug her heels into the ground with a strength that surprised him and wrenched herself out of his grip. She started to push her way back into the crowd.

‘No, Isabella, don’t. It’s too late.’

She turned to him, her face twisted in anguish. ‘No,’ she whispered, shaking her head, ‘no, no, don’t say that. It’s not too late to warn —’

The plane came screeching out of the sky. Nose first, it roared vertically downward straight as an arrow, tearing through the flimsy layers of air above the spectators’ heads. Rushing at its target – the square platform that flaunted its presence with the boastful red, white and green flags. And at the black and gold banner that declared the Fascist grip on the rally.

The stampede started. Roberto knew it was coming, he could sense their fear in the air before they knew it themselves. He was already loping towards the perimeter of the field, his arm clamped around Isabella, pinning her to him. Her feet scarcely touched the ground and he could feel her heart pounding as thousands of feet came storming across the field behind them. A wild panic sent people charging from the aeroplane’s path, screams and cries lacerating the air.

Roberto had seen panic before. Knew what it did to people. It made them forget that they were human in their fight to survive. He risked a glance over his shoulder and was sickened to his core by what he saw. In the wave of panic the weak were being trampled in the crush. He yanked a terrified child from in front of the onrush of feet and pressed it sobbing into the arms of its father, but nothing could hold back the tide.

Suddenly the shrill screams were obliterated, as the impact of the plane made the ground shudder under Roberto’s feet. Tremors raced through the ancient marshland far below. He tightened his hold on Isabella and together they swung around to see the fuel tanks burst into flames. Fire leapt hungrily over the crumpled fuselage and the little Caproncino exploded with a deafening roar.

Roberto couldn’t hear right. He was crouched at the side of a man on the ground whose leg was shattered. The bones had come adrift, sticking out at the wrong angles, and the skin on one side of his face was burned to a glassy blistered shine. His lips were moving. But Roberto heard only a dull whirr of sound. Was it the man? Or was it him?

He was holding the unknown man’s hand, sorrow making them cling to each other as they stared out at the carnage around them. The lips kept moving and it dawned on Roberto that the word that they were mouthing over and over was
sigaretta
. He rummaged in his camera case, found half a pack, lit one and set it between the wounded man’s blue lips.

‘You’ll be all right, my friend,’ he reassured him. ‘The doctors are here. They’ll get you to hospital where you’ll be fixed up.’

The man nodded and forced a smile. His teeth were broken. A nurse descended and summoned stretcher-bearers who whisked him away to wait in the queue for ambulances. Roberto rose to his feet, breathing fiercely. It was hard not to hate. When he saw all the suffering strewn around him, it was hard not to harbour the bitter hatred that was lodged in his chest tight up against his breastbone. The stage and the flimsy biplane that had both been constructed of wood and canvas had been totally incinerated and he could see the Gipsy engine, mangled and twisted, sprawled off to one side of the blackened mess, having barrelled through the crowd in a storm of shrieking whirling metal.

Cries of pain. Howls of grief. They littered the field. Bandages fluttered and blood seeped into the earth. People rushed to help and to offer comfort. To hold a hand. And behind each act of kindness Roberto knew there lay the silent guilty thought:
Thanks be to God that it was you and not me
.

How could one man do this?

The question clawed at Roberto’s mind, and he moved over to where Isabella was working, tying a tourniquet on a man’s arm. Just the sight of her calm, dry-eyed face and the swift efficient manner in which she twisted and knotted the rubber tubing around his bicep made him recall his own profession.

Quickly he put the Graflex to work. He had to record this day of infamy and it was easier, always easier, to look at it through the glazed indifference of his camera lens than through his own eyes. But when his stomach had had all it could take, he returned to check on Isabella. A great swath of the skirt of her green dress was torn away, a bandage for somebody, and she was kneeling on the ground talking with a tall man who wore spectacles and carried a stethoscope around his neck. He was dealing with a woman’s stomach wound and his hands, like Isabella’s, were swift and efficient, not afraid of handling shredded flesh.

Roberto had no intention of disturbing her at work, but it was as if Isabella could sense him, as if she could smell his skin or hear his heartbeat, because she immediately lifted her head and looked for him. It was one of those moments that would weave itself into the fabric of who he was. That fraction of a second before she remembered that there were others around, that a doctor was close to her elbow. That infinitesimal moment.

As she rose to her feet her blue eyes widened, warm and beautiful, and she looked at him as though there was no one else on the face of the earth she wanted to be looking at right now. He wanted to tell her that when he thought she was about to die on the rally field, he knew a part of him would die too, the part of him that mattered. But now was not the moment.

‘I’m all right, Roberto,’ she said at once.

Her hair was scraped back from her face and tied out of the way with a bootlace. She reached up and touched it, and he knew that what she really wanted to do was touch him.

‘Roberto?’ The doctor’s head shot up from where he was tending the woman on the ground. ‘Is this
the
Roberto, Isabella?’

‘Yes, Papa. This is Roberto.’

Her father? Yes, he could see it now. The eyes. Their directness.

‘I’ve heard things,’ Roberto told them, ‘as I’ve been going around the field with my camera.’ His eyes travelled to the carabinieri patrolling past them and the brigade of Blackshirts spread out in force across the field.

‘What is it, Roberto?’

‘Mussolini escaped. Alive.’

He described for them the conflicting reports of the assassination attempt – that Il Duce was unhurt, that he’d lost a leg, that he was alive but wounded by a piece of flying metal that had sliced open his cheek to the bone. Isabella listened, her face intent, her eyes on his.

‘Mussolini is alive?’ she whispered.

‘Yes.’ He nodded grimly.

‘Mussolini is alive? The plane didn’t kill him?’

‘It’s true. The suicide plan failed to kill him.’

She stood mute, her eyes huge and unblinking. For a split second her face started to crumple and then grew livid with rage.

‘You mean,’ she shouted, as she swung an arm in a wide arc to indicate what looked like a battlefield around them, ‘that this was for nothing? All this. For nothing?’

‘Not for nothing, Isabella,’ Roberto replied quietly. ‘We will all pay for this.’

26

‘Water?’ A rasping cry rattled down the hospital ward. ‘
Acqua, per favore
.’

Isabella limped up to the far end with a jug of water, poured some into a glass and sat down with the patient to help him drink it. He was a young man running a fever. Sweat clogged his hair and stung his eyes. One of his lungs had been punctured.

‘Try to rest,’ she murmured and held his trembling hand as he lay back on his sweat-stained pillow with a sigh that seemed to drag the life out of him. He let his eyes fall shut.

‘Talk to me,’ he muttered through parched lips.

So she talked. About the only thing she knew. Her architecture. She told him the story of the disputes it took to settle whether the police station should be allowed a small tower of its own, and she told it in such a way that he smiled and flashed his fine white teeth at her. When he finally drifted into sleep she stayed with him, as though somehow her presence was a weapon against his fever.

It was dark now. Yet the muted edges of night failed to bring silence to the ward where the moans and sobs and murmurs of comfort continued as each hour shuffled past. Isabella was so weary that her bones felt ready to crack but she didn’t close her eyes. The images from the rally today were too vivid, stuck like burrs on the inside of her head, and when she heard footsteps approaching the bed, she swung around, a smile leaping to her face in the hope that it might be Roberto. It was her father.

‘Isabella, what the devil are you doing still here? I thought you’d gone long ago.’ He spoke in a loud whisper. ‘Take yourself off home and get some sleep.’

‘I don’t need sleep, Papa.’

‘I’m the doctor, Isabella, and I’m ordering you to get some sleep.’ He rummaged in the capacious pocket of his jacket, pulled out a bottle of tablets and tipped two in her palm. ‘Go home, take these, and I’ll see you tomorrow.’

‘Aren’t you coming?’

‘No. I’ll be spending the night here.’

‘Oh, Papa.’

‘Go.’

Isabella’s hand closed over the tablets. There was a time not so long ago when she hadn’t been past begging for these, anything to block out the crippling images whirring inside her head. A white powdery pill that had the power to block out the sound of her back splitting and to rid her of the vision of her husband’s dead doll’s eyes. She had welcomed the physical pain because when it was all-consuming it meant she could think of nothing else.

But not now. She slipped the tablets back into her father’s hand. ‘I’ll go,’ she said, ‘but I won’t use these. Give them to someone who needs them.’

‘I thought that someone was you.’

‘Not any more.’ She smiled up at him in the dim light thrown by the lamp on the central table in the ward and kissed his cheek. ‘Maybe you should take them yourself.’

‘Pah! I never take tablets.’

She laughed softly at the irony of it. But her gaze settled on the rows of beds packed together so tightly and the smile drained out of her. ‘What will happen?’ she asked under her breath.

‘None of us knows.’

‘The pilot is dead. So no one can prove why he did it.’

‘Colonnello Sepe is not going to need proof,’ her father pointed out with a cold twitch of his mouth that people who didn’t know better would have taken for a smile. ‘Go home,
cara
mia
, and don’t leave the house tomorrow. Keep off the streets. Take a taxi home. Speak to no one.’

There were no taxis outside the hospital at this hour. It was late at night and the town was holding its breath after the horrors of the day. Isabella knew it wasn’t over, not yet. The moon picked out patches of mist slinking like stray dogs in the gutters, and behind the shutters of the houses and apartments lives were being stitched back together.

She would walk home. She needed to feel the wind in her face and to let the night air dispel some of the things she’d seen in the hospital tonight. But she knew where her feet would lead her, even if she pointed them towards home, so she decided not to fight it. The house with the green door was some distance from the hospital but it didn’t matter. That’s where she would be heading and it wasn’t just a courteous need to thank Roberto.

It was a craving.

Isabella strode quickly through the hospital gates, her leg dragging more than usual because of tiredness. She looked across the road. She didn’t know why. Something pulled inside her, something drew her eyes to the dark spot opposite where two buildings almost met. There was a polite gap between them, a narrow alleyway going nowhere, and that was where Isabella’s eyes looked tonight.