Private Angelo

by Eric Linklater

  ‘I’ve always been a student of affairs,’ he told Angelo, ‘and it’s a long time since I first discovered what’s really wrong with the world. The life of the world, you see, depends on three things: Production, Consumption, and Distribution. Now in our time, if you care to put it so, Science has gone to bed with Production and produced Abundance. So that’s all right. As for Consumption, the world is full of Consumers, a new one is born every minute, and their nature is such that they will consume anything that is put before them. So there is no difficulty there. But Distribution is a different bottle of wine altogether. Distribution has become Politics, and Politics is something that enables people who can find no other sort of pleasure to purse their lips and say, “No, you cannot do that until I give you permission!” Oh, politics is a powder to make a man spew! And I do not like that, Angelo, I do not think it is good. So then, when I am able to do so, I decide to dissociate myself from political distribution and be a Free Distributer. And what is the result? I make a lot of money and everybody is glad to see me. I feed my fellow-men, and I feed myself. I am a benefactor and I grow rich – and all because I have been thoughtful, I made plans! I saw what was desirable. I found the means to perform it, and with an abundance of good will I set to work.’

  Angelo drank a little wine, and reaching across the untidy table shook Sergeant Vespucci by the hand. ‘It is admirable,’ he said. ‘You are a good man, Sergeant. And in Rome, I suppose, you sell most of your produce in the Black Market?’

  ‘Naturally,’ said the Sergeant, ‘I have my agents in the Black Market. For a Free Distributer it is the only way.’

  ‘Have you not found the German authorities very troublesome?’

  ‘On the contrary,’ said the Sergeant. ‘No, I have had no difficulty with them. They are commercial, you see, and if a man is commercial you can deal with him. They are greedy, of course, and very suspicious, but if you flatter them and pay them lavishly you can get on very well with them. During the last few months I have been able to distribute German rations and German petrol, to the value of many thousands of lire, among Roman citizens who were greatly in need of them. – But what is going to happen now? That is what I ask myself. Will the Allies co-operate in so reasonable a manner? Speriamo, we say, and we can say no more.’

  ‘And when will you return to Rome?’

  ‘As soon as possible. I came here the day before yesterday, to avoid trouble of any sort, and when I can return without trouble I shall. And now let us have one more glass of wine, and then I should like to sleep for an hour or two.’

  The farmer in whose house they were was one of Sergeant Vespucci’s business acquaintances. He, while they slept, went to the wood where Simon’s little column had met the white cattle – he had recognized Angelo’s description of the scene – and on his return reported that a vast number of dead Germans lay upon the road and among the trees, but there was no sign of the Englishmen or their vehicles. Close questioning reduced the bodies he had seen to ten, but he still insisted that all of them were German, and Angelo was infinitely cheered by the inference that Simon and his men had survived the encounter. The farmer also brought news of the German retreat. The Tedeschi, he said, were leaving Rome that night, there was no doubt about it. The countryside was full of rumours and tense with excitement. People were going to and fro, with increasing boldness, and every one of them had some new story of the enemy’s plight.

  None of them went to bed, and several times during the night men came in, singly or two or three together, to ask what news they had and bring in exchange their own most recent information. At six o’clock in the morning a boy pushed open the kitchen-door and shouted, ‘They’re in! The Americans are in Rome!’ Then he disappeared, and though they at once pursued him, clamouring for details, they saw nothing more of him than his backside and the rear wheel of his bicycle. Stooped over the handle-bars, he was racing for the city.

  Sergeant Vespucci told the farmer’s wife to make some coffee, and went to harness his horse and trap. ‘Are you coming?’ he said to Angelo.

  ‘Do you think it is safe?’

  ‘I shouldn’t be going if I didn’t.’

  The coffee was excellent. ‘American,’ said the Sergeant, ‘from Naples. The Americans have very good rations, better than anyone else. Drink up, Angelo, I am becoming impatient!’

  There was a freshness in the air that made the mere acts of moving in it and breathing delightful. In the east a narrow border of clouds looked like sheeps’ wool caught on a wire fence, but elsewhere the sky was a pale undifferenced blue. A pair of young jays fled noisily into a bush, the mother-bird chattering behind them. Webs of gossamer gleamed in the hedge-high sun.

  Sergeant Vespucci touched his mare with the whip. ‘She is a good one,’ he said. ‘Ten years old, but she had never done any work till I bought her. No real work; nothing but hunting. I bought her cheap, because her owner couldn’t feed her. But I am able to give her some corn, thank God.’

  They went at a great pace and met no soldiers on the road until they came within a mile or two of Rome. Then they encountered an American armoured car, and passed another, stationary, whose commander was watching the progress of the first. Some distance farther on they were stopped and questioned by an officer who, in the open top of his car, had been volubly conversing with someone unseen by radio-telephone. Their papers were in order, the officer accepted Angelo’s story that he had fallen sick while on a mission with a detachment of Force 69, and they were allowed to proceed. Then they approached a squadron of tanks. In the shade of tall trees they looked like monsters of a new pleiocene twilight, and as dinosaurs after breakfast might smell of blood, so these stank of petrol. The long gun that projected from the leader’s turret travelled slowly from side to side like the long stiff neck of a brontosaurus sniffing the breeze. On the road beside it a major was eating a doughnut. He beckoned to Angelo and the Sergeant, spoke to them with his mouth full, and after questioning let them go.

  Their road returned them to the Via Aurelia, where they saw a long line of soldiers moving out from Rome. Their drab uniforms were stained and dirty, they were laden with the tools and weapons of the infantry. They were bent by the weight they carried, and as if their potshaped helmets were intolerably heavy, their heads were bowed. The pallor of long fatigue lay on their faces, and it was many days since they had shaved. They took little interest in where they were going, but with downcast eyes followed the heels of the man in front.

  ‘And they have won their battle!’ said the Sergeant. ‘What in God’s name do the losers look like?’

  ‘What a dreadful burden victory must be!’ said Angelo.

  But when they entered Rome it became evident that the populace thought differently, and regarded the Allied victory as an occasion at least as splendid as the production of a new opera. Everywhere on the streets there were Romans who applauded the passing troops, held their hands high and clapped them loudly, tossed flowers into jeeps and tank-turrets, and boisterously demanded in exchange caramels, and biscuits, and cigarettes.

  Angelo and the Sergeant crossed the Tiber – ‘So they did not blow-up the bridges!’ said Angelo thankfully – and on the other side found more numerous crowds and listened to ever more jubilant applause. In every quarter the Americans were hailed as actors in a gala performance, and for some considerable time they responded very graciously. Like artists bestowing their autographs, they threw cigarettes, caramels, and biscuits to their admirers wherever they went.

  Sergeant Vespucci complained loudly against this prodigality. ‘It is bad for trade,’ he said. ‘They are worth a lot of money, all those cigarettes and biscuits, and they should be distributed in a fair and orderly manner to those who can pay for them. The Germans gave nothing away, they were very correct.’

  He stabled his mare in a little street not far from the Piazza dei Satiri and the trattoria where Angelo had once conferred with Fest and the German deserters, and then they went out to mingle with the crowd and
share the common pleasure. The morning was fine, the air grew warm, and the sun shone with a genial glow on walls the colour of honey or the colour of the ripe flesh of a melon. Even Sergeant Vespucci yielded to the general infection, and taking some flowers from a pair of little girls who did not know what to do, threw them to the crew of a passing field-gun.

  Presently, drifting with the crowd, they found themselves near the Campidoglio, and hearing that some ceremony was toward, climbed the steps to see what it might be. At the far end of the Piazza the double flight of Michelangelo’s staircase rose over a fountain to the great stone balcony of the Palazzo del Senatore. On the balcony stood a little cluster of Generals – in dress distinguishable from the common soldiers only by the white stars painted on their helmets – who, with maps spread before them on the broad stone balustrade, were busily conferring, active with their index fingers, and seemingly unaware of the spectators who stood below and gazed intently at the scene.

  ‘What are they looking for on their maps?’ asked Angelo. ‘Do they not know where they are?’

  ‘It is always the same with Generals,’ said the Sergeant. ‘They and their maps, they are like a woman with her knitting. When there is nothing else to do, out it comes.’

  There was at sudden commotion in the small crowd as two cars drove up, and from them, before they had stopped, sprang a dozen men so fierce of aspect, so ponderous yet quick in movement – they ran with a jungle-stoop – that Angelo caught his breath in a momentary gasp of fear. He thought, in that startled second, they were assassins and this a plot to murder the victorious Generals in their hour of triumph. But then he perceived that the newcomers wore American uniform, and the implements they carried were merely cameras.

  Some of the photographers, disdaining the marble staircase, ran up the balustrade that curved like an elevated bow high above the fountain, and presented their cameras at the Generals on the balcony as if they had been highwaymen and were holding them to ransom. The Generals affected disregard of their presence but assumed a more intense interest in their maps, or a more authoritative demeanour. Then, to placate the photographers who had arrived by the normal route, they turned attractive profiles in their direction and put on expressions of sapient authority. Every new pose excited the photographers to fresh demands, and some of them now clambered to window-sills above the group, so that they could secure a picture of helmets bent in studious contemplation; while others, clinging with one great hand to the balustrade, like apes in an equatorial forest, lowered themselves to some perilous roost on a scanty foothold of baroque ornament, and tilted their cameras upward to obtain a view of military jawbones in steely outline and soldier-nostrils adequately distended.

  What terrifying faces they have, and with what passion they go about their business, thought Angelo as he contemplated a photographer poised like a chamois on a little peak of carved stone – another hanging like a sailor from the yard-arm – a third press closely in like a throat-specialist with his laryngoscope – and a fourth like Death himself command his victim to be still. And how meekly, yet in what comely postures, the Generals obeyed!

  Posterity, said Angelo to himself, will look at these pictures and admire them. But posterity will know nothing of what I have seen, and that is the bloodshot eyes of the photographers who took them, their maniacal expression, and long simian arms. How I wish that I could live for ever and tell my great-great-grandchildren about life!

  His thoughts were interrupted by a dearly loved and well-known voice. ‘Angelo!’ it said. ‘My dear boy, how are you, and what have you been doing all this time?’

  He turned, and with a blink of astonishment recognized the Count. Astonishment, because the Count had changed so much. He was bare-headed, and his hair was white as growing cotton. He still carried himself jauntily enough, but his clothes, though they were not exactly shabby, had the look of a suit that is worn without much relief. His shirt was in its second day, and his shoes had not been cleaned that morning.

  ‘Oh, my dear – my dear Don Agesilas!’ cried Angelo. ‘What has happened to you?’

  ‘Come, come,’ said the Count, ‘do I look like the victim of circumstance?’

  ‘No, not at all,’ said Angelo in a hurry, ‘but it is so long since we have met that something or other must have occurred. No one, in times like these, can live for more than a week or two without things happening to him.’

  ‘That is perfectly true, and when I tell you the whole tale of my adventures you will, I have no doubt, be properly astonished. But I should not like to think that I show any sign of misfortune, or carry the visible scars of unhappiness.’

  ‘No, indeed you do not,’ said Angelo. ‘You are looking very well, and white hair suits you wonderfully.’

  ‘Not white!’ exclaimed the Count. ‘I admit to a touch of grey above the ears, such as you might expect in a man of my years, but surely you cannot call it white?’

  ‘It is the way the sunlight falls upon it,’ said Angelo apologetically. ‘But now when I look at it more closely – oh yes, I was quite mistaken.’

  ‘You gave me a little shock,’ said the Count with a smile, ‘but think no more of it. Tell me, instead, about your own affairs. What fortune have you had, and why do you wear that uniform?’

  ‘I am now serving with the English,’ said Angelo, and turned to speak to Sergeant Vespucci and bring him into the conversation. But the Sergeant had gone, and as he was about to comment on his disappearance it occurred to him that Vespucci, perhaps, was unwilling to meet his late commanding officer for reasons best known to himself. So Angelo said nothing about him, but asked the Count what news he had had from Pontefiore.

  ‘None at all,’ said the Count. ‘Very little news comes to me now, for I am, in truth, little better than a ghost. Officially I died in early March. But come, let us find a quiet place in which to talk and exchange our stories in peace.’

  A short distance from the excited streets they found the old Forum empty and calm and still, like the garden of a deserted house, so they sat themselves comfortably on the turf under a large tree, and the Count told Angelo about his flight to Montenero, his arrest by the Germans after Fest had killed the two strangers, and his nightmare journey to the cave. Angelo fell into an extreme agitation as he listened, and the Count, seeing what an appreciative audience he had, spared no pains to make his recital as dramatic as possible.

  After their last-minute reprieve, he explained, they had been taken back to the school, and there he had seen Fest, himself a prisoner, walking between his guards. They had had an hour or so in which to contemplate with tears and wonder their good fortune, and then the bombers had come. Only a few bombs had fallen in Montenero itself, but they had caused great confusion and laid open the school as if it had been a doll’s house. How many of the prisoners succeeded in escaping from that smoky chaos the Count did not know, but he thought a good many, and perhaps nearly all of them. He himself had spent most of the day in a barber’s shop, wrapped in a sheet with lather on his face, and whenever the Germans came in, searching for the fugitives, the friendly barber was shaving him. But in the evening the barber had grown frightened, and refused to help him further. The Count had passed a miserable night, playing in the streets a desperate game of hide-and-seek, for the Germans were still hunting the runaways, because Fest was among them. He had heard this news in the barber’s.

  ‘And then in the early morning,’ said the Count, ‘when I was very nearly at the end of my tether, I found safety. To be precise I smelt it. There was a baker’s shop at the end of a lane down which I was slinking like a thief. He, poor fellow, was already at work, and the scent of his labour was delicious. I was drawn to it like a starving kitten to a saucer of milk. And then, as I approached the open door of the bakehouse, I heard a woman’s voice raised in anger. Cautiously I peered in, and there was the baker’s wife berating and denouncing her little husband for some newly discovered fault, I know not what. He was a scrubby fellow, black-avised, with the flo
ur showing white on his hairy arms and smearing his unshaven cheeks. But she was splendid! She had crossed the lane, from their house on the other side, on her bare feet, clad only in her night-gown, and against the light of an oil-lamp I could see the shape of her body. It was a body of the sort that one turns to for comfort. Nothing of grossness about it, I assure you of that, but rather for the winter than a warm May. So I waited until the connubial dispute was done, and when she came out I spoke to her.

  ‘She was quick-witted and no great argument was necessary. She told me to follow her, and closed the door of the house behind us. I saw then that her face also was handsome, in the hardy way of our countrywomen, and her age about twenty-eight or thirty. She smelt of new bread and the warmth of a pillow, and I almost forgot the distress I was in. Bless her heart, she was good to me and kept me hidden all that day, and later she smuggled me out of Montenero into the country where she had a sister who had married a farmer. An older sister, a dozen years older perhaps, but in her day she had been just such another as the baker’s wife, and though she had lost her looks she liked to have a man in the house to make much of. And I needed care by then, for I was suffering like one of the damned from all the fears that I had previously kept at arm’s length, but now came crowding in upon me like chickens to be fed. What I needed was simple kindness, and I found it in a very simple house.’

  ‘It was no more than common courtesy to look after you,’ said Angelo.

  ‘Is such courtesy so common? I am glad to hear it. But these people, mark you, were also tactful. For it fell to the farmer’s lot to inform me that I was dead, and he did it with the utmost delicacy yet with genuine feeling, and assured me that his regard for me was undiminished. The Germans, you see, had announced the execution of all whom they had arrested for the murder of the two men killed by Fest. Many of us, perhaps most of us, had certainly escaped, but the Germans had their dignity to consider, and the inevitability of their justice had to be asserted. So they put up a notice that said we had been shot.’