Turn to Stone

by James W. Ziskin

  Teresa produced a handkerchief—not the one I’d given her—from a pocket of her robe and covered her mouth, hiding and stifling the silent scream trying to find release from her throat. The agony on her face—the abject terror bubbling up in her blood-red, watery eyes at the memory of the horrors she’d witnessed so long ago—struck me dumb and powerless to move.

  “Chema wailed, pobrecito, because he had no words. Couldn’t speak yet, but he called to me to come for him. I . . . he was gasping for air. I wanted to kill myself to stop his voice from reaching my ears. I lost my wits and raged and suffered a seizure. A fit. I fell to the ground and thrashed about like a madwoman until I lost consciousness.”

  I smeared the tears across my cheeks and snorted back the effluence threatening to run from my nose. Choking on my own breath, I strained to wheeze some air down my throat, swollen and aching from the involuntary pathos her story—her distorted, tortured face and strangled voice— had triggered in my chest. The violence of my own reaction surprised me, but there was no stemming it, consciously or rationally. The only path out was to take her hand and hold it fast until she’d finished.

  “The Italians were retreating, the Republicans advancing,” she whispered as if divulging a secret no one else should hear. “Night was falling when I finally regained consciousness. It was cold. There was sleet. And silence from the ruin that had been our home. I pounded on the pile of debris with my fists and wept for my lost son.”

  Teresa stopped. She took my chin between her right thumb and forefinger, as a mother might do to demand full attention from a distracted child. Her eyes sparkled at mine in the low light, but her voice was strong again, her weeping at an end.

  “I knew I was alone now and forever in the world,” she said, holding my gaze. “My husband dead, mother-in-law gone, and my Chema buried alive . . . And then four men in black uniforms appeared, looking like demons from hell. Their leader was a tall, homely man with a bandage over his left eye. Dried blood covered his entire face. Even though I was mad with sorrow over my son, I still felt fear. Fear of this evil-looking creature.

  “He asked me why I was weeping. I told him about my Chema, and he insisted I show him where I’d heard my baby’s cries. Then he ordered the three other soldiers to dig. Brick by brick, beam by beam, bloodying their hands on his command, they rooted through the rubble like pigs after truffles. Even as the enemy drew closer, they continued to dig. And finally, in the icy rain, the tall, ugly man with one eye and teeth too large for his mouth, emerged from the pit with my cold, motionless baby. He held him by the ankle with one hand like a strangled chicken as he climbed out of the wreckage. Once back on solid ground, he cradled my Chema properly to his chest. And he rocked and warmed my boy until he started to whimper. The man in black started to whimper, not my baby.”

  I cast my head down and sobbed, unwilling to hear the devastating ending. Teresa grabbed my chin again and forced me to look at her.

  “The man was weeping. My son was giggling. My Chema was alive.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

  With my face still tingling from the emotions brought on by Teresa’s story, I prescribed another short glass of whisky to calm myself. Exhausted from the long day, which had included stealing Franco’s scooter and crisscrossing Florence, I needed rest. So, at length, I switched off the bedside lamp and slid between the sheets. Drawing ten deep breaths, I willed myself to embrace imminent sleep. I was drifting off, with all thoughts of murdered professors, the horrors of the Spanish Civil War, and clumsy, unwelcome late-night suitors, melting into the night. Vaguely aware of my consciousness slipping away, swirling into slumber’s gentle eddy, I surrendered to the peace.

  Then Ermenegildo crowed beneath my window, breaking the spell as if smashing a mirror.

  TUESDAY, OCTOBER 1, 1963

  I managed to sleep for three hours, but only after I’d tiptoed downstairs, armed myself with three of the bocce balls the others had left out earlier, and—eschewing the underarm-toss rule—flung them overhand at the source of my sleep deprivation. Impressive how fast roosters can run when given a little encouragement. Ermenegildo shot out of the garden, squawking like a dual trumpet air horn, and disappeared far into the darkness beyond. I returned to bed.

  I sat alone in the sala colazione at nine. With each sip of coffee and bite of brioche, my tender lip provided a reminder of the ill-advised pass Franco had made a few hours before. I shuddered at what my friends must have thought had been going on. Pushing that to one side, I reflected on Teresa’s story of Bondinelli and Spain.

  The rescue of little José Maria was the spiritual turning point in Alberto Bondinelli’s life, I was certain of it. He left the Black Shirts shortly thereafter. That cold afternoon in March 1937 was the moment he’d welcomed God back into his heart.

  Teresa told me her son was now training to be an airplane mechanic in Madrid. And she gave all credit to her benefactor, Alberto Bondinelli. He’d saved the boy’s life, paid for his education in a Catholic school in Guadalajara, and even sent his mother money every month for ten years. Then, when Bondinelli’s wife died, he brought Teresa to Italy and gave her a job and a roof over her head.

  I dipped my brioche into the bowl of coffee and conjured her face, so earnest, trusting, and sure, as she’d told me only a holy man could perform so much good. What was I to believe? Could a man change? Shed his sins, his scorn for God, and his bitterness at the loss of his sister? Could a bad man turn to good? Like Ruttonaccio in Lucio’s story from our first night at Bel Soggiorno? But, I reasoned, Lucio’s villain was a fraud. A scoundrel to the end, only playing at piousness. All the same, he had unwittingly achieved some good in death. The poor debtors had been released from the burden of paying back the money.

  So who’d painted the true portrait of Alberto Bondinelli? Teresa, who saw a saint? Or Lucio, who saw an imposter?

  “Oh, it’s you,” said Giuliana. She’d just entered the room. “I didn’t know anyone was in here.”

  “Come sit,” I said, eager to disabuse her of the notion that I was sleeping with Franco. Or Bernie, for that matter.

  She wavered at my offer. I’ve seen children at the dentist’s more eager to take a seat. But, in the end, she joined me. I asked her what she’d wanted to tell me the night before.

  “I’m not sure I want to say now.”

  “Because Franco was in my room?” I asked. “I swear, Giuliana, he forced his way inside. He was drunk. After two glasses of wine, that man has no self-control.”

  She eyed me guardedly, still not ready to share. So I took the lead.

  “I met your grandmother yesterday,” I said.

  That got her attention. I knew she’d visited her grandmother the very day Bondinelli died. So I wondered, was she worried? Or perhaps just curious to hear what I’d learned?

  “Mia nonna?” she asked. “How? What about the quarantine? And the policeman at the gate?”

  “Minor obstacles. Your grandmother is a lovely lady.”

  “Congratulations, Ellie. You wasted your time searching her out. She doesn’t know anything about Bondinelli. She’s not my witness.”

  “Maybe not. But she told me some things that surprised me. For instance, why didn’t you say your father lost his job at the university when the fascists passed the racial laws?”

  She hadn’t been expecting that. “I don’t like to share my family’s tragedy with others,” she said. “It’s nobody’s business but my own.”

  That hardly held water in light of my experience with her. She’d always seemed more than willing to point out that Jews and workers in general, and her own family in particular, had suffered the oppression and prejudice of Christian bourgeois society in Italy.

  “I was saving that for the right moment,” she volunteered when I failed to respond.

  “You didn’t think your turn at storytelling was the right moment?”

  “I wanted to. But I decided it would be more powerful to stand up and announce it at Bondinelli�
�s funeral.”

  “That would be quite a dramatic farewell. A cruel addio.”

  She seemed pleased by my observation. Then she rose to leave, but I stopped her.

  “Your grandmother directed me to your uncle, Alfredo Levi. I visited him, too.”

  “You’re still mistaken, Ellie. My uncle isn’t the witness either.”

  “I know that,” I said.

  She hesitated then scrutinized me from above. “You’re clever. But not clever enough.”

  “Will you show me the photograph you took from your uncle’s house?”

  “What? No. I didn’t take anything.”

  “Giuliana, your witness is dead, isn’t he?”

  Feeling woolly headed after my long night and early-morning bocce ball match with Ermenegildo, I wanted nothing more than a quiet nap. A couple of hours before lunch, I slipped into the gazebo behind the house and treated myself to some stories from the Decameron I’d bought the day before, including the ones Lucio, Giuliana, and Veronica had borrowed. At length, overcome by drowsiness, I put down the book and closed my eyes. Hidden from the others, I could still hear them from time to time a short way off, chatting, laughing, whispering. I even caught bits of conversation between Bernie and Lucio as they wondered where the missing bocce balls had gone.

  I dozed. The air was sweet and comforting. That perfect temperature created by the delicious marination of cool shade and nearby sun-fueled heat. Eyes closed, I breathed in the odors surrounding me, from earthy to spicy to pine oil. The affronts of fatigue slowly lifted their siege as an hour, then another, passed. If not for the hooded crow that fluttered into my space in pursuit of a scampering lizard, I might have slept through lunch. I started, and the crow took flight, having missed his chance at a meal. I propped myself up on an elbow and squinted at my watch. Nearly one. I became aware of wafting cigarette smoke.

  “Cucù,” came a voice to my right. Oh, God, it was Max Locanda, and he’d been watching me sleep. “Time to eat soon,” he said, looking quite comfortable with legs crossed, cigarette fuming between his fingers in his usual fashion.

  “How long have you been there?”

  “Long enough. I was waiting to see if you talk in your sleep.”

  “I wouldn’t need to nap in the middle of the day if you chopped off that damn rooster’s head,” I said in English. My mind was too bleary to work out words like nap and chop in Italian.

  He chuckled, stubbed out his cigarette, and said Ermenegildo was part of the family. He couldn’t bear to lose him. A long pause followed before he spoke again.

  “May I ask you a question, Ellie?”

  I nodded.

  “Have you changed your opinion of Bel Soggiorno?”

  “How do you mean?”

  “You were decided to leave when the police imposed the quarantine. But now, after a few days here, have you changed your mind?”

  “If you want to know if I’d like to come and go as I please, yes, I would. And if you’re wondering if I’ve modified my views on fascism, no.”

  “No one is trying to sell you fascism. It’s dead and gone. Part of history now. This country made a bad choice in embracing Mussolini. Especially when you consider how the war ended.”

  “So if the Axis had won the war, Italy would have made the correct choice?”

  “Lasciamo stare these hypothetical discussions of politics and history. They don’t matter. This is our reality, and we must live it. There’s no other choice.”

  I sat up, smoothed my hair and skirt, and stifled a yawn that would have been unladylike had I allowed it to escape.

  “Was I wrong to tell you why I sent Vicky away?” he asked.

  How to answer that one? I certainly didn’t want to encourage him. But at the same time, if I was being honest with myself, I’d felt dangerously flattered by his confession. It was the old contradiction: it’s nice to be asked, even if you don’t want to.

  “I think you sent her away for reasons that have nothing to do with me,” I said. “She’s not right for you.”

  “Because of my age?”

  “No. It’s hard enough to find love. People should grab it where they can.”

  “I certainly do not love Vicky. She was a divertissement,” he said with a Gallic flourish. “But . . .”

  “No, Max, don’t.” It was fortunate that we were conversing in English at this point, because I was afraid I’d slip into using tu with him had we been speaking Italian. And I didn’t want to know where that might lead. For one thing, my lip was still swollen from Franco’s head butt the night before, and kissing was out of the question. For another—well—this was Massimiliano Locanda, a man of questionable character who, by his own admission, cared for nothing, followed no guiding principles except a devotion to epicurean pursuits. I didn’t want to continue a relationship with him after the date I was given permission to leave Bel Soggiorno behind. Not a friendship, not a fleeting romance, not a steamy sexual encounter. Nothing. Exactly equal to the sum total of Max’s values.

  He respected my wishes and went no further. But I had questions for him.

  “I know what happened to Alberto in Spain,” I said.

  He nodded in a distant, distracted manner, as if he was thinking of something else. Or perhaps weighing my exact words. “Are you referring to his eye?”

  “No.”

  “He lost it there. He wore a glass one, you know. You couldn’t really tell it was glass unless you looked closely.”

  “His eye meant nothing to his soul,” I said.

  Again the knowing nod. “Then you know about the child?”

  “Yes. Why didn’t you tell me before when I asked you? Why didn’t you tell me just now?”

  He shrugged off my accusatory tone. “Alberto wanted it that way. No one was to know. He was intensely private about his past. The way he left the Church and how he returned to it. I know of no man less prideful than he.”

  Had I not known better, I might have assumed Max regretted his friend’s death. But he didn’t. At best, he was incapable of anything beyond taking note of a sad event and experiencing a vague preference that it not be so. But true sadness? No.

  “What about the war? What did Alberto do in the war?”

  “He was a mutilato di guerra, of course. With only one eye, he couldn’t serve, so he taught at the university. The army had little use for him if he couldn’t fight.”

  “Not even to provide information?”

  Max looked taken aback. “What are you suggesting? That Alberto was an informer? An agent of some kind?”

  “I never met the man. I can’t say. But do you think it’s possible?”

  “You said yourself that Alberto found his soul again in Spain. He wasn’t about to turn spy.”

  “What about those stories that he was with the partisans? Was he recognized by the government after the war?”

  “Of course not. He was too private. Too modest. He never put in for any recognition or certificates, if that’s what you mean.”

  “Then how can you be sure he was with the partisans, not against them?”

  Max said he would explain. Italy’s situation had become complicated when the war started going sour in 1943.

  “In September of that year,” he began, “the king, Vittorio Emanuele III, signed the Armistice with the Americans and the British. Armistice is perhaps too grand a word. It was a capitulation. A surrender. The king had little choice, of course, given the direction of the war. The Allied invasion of Sicily and Southern Italy was already well under way. Two months earlier, the king had dismissed Mussolini, who remained under house arrest at Campo Imperatore.

  “The armistice created confusion up and down the peninsula. Citizens and soldiers and mariners alike wondered where their loyalties lay. Were we still allied with the Germans? Should we throw down our arms and welcome the invading Allies? And what of Il Duce? From one day to the next, Italy’s role in the war became uncertain. Many Italians were tired of the penury, the lack of food,
and the humiliation the fascists had brought upon our country. Others, the Communists, socialists, and even the liberali and conservatives, wanted to rid the country of foreign occupiers, specifically the Germans in the central and northern regions. In the south, the Americans, British, and Canadians were greeted as liberators.

  “At the same time in the north, the Germans ‘rescued’ Mussolini from his arrest and installed him as head of their puppet government, the RSI, Repubblica Sociale Italiana. A most confusing, chaotic time in our history. I, of course, was still in East Africa, a guest of our British friends and experienced no confusion at all.”

  Max seemed to relish the role of storyteller. He was in no hurry to get to the point. It left me wondering if he was nostalgic for the period he was describing or merely happy to hold forth with his considerable knowledge and wit.

  “When the king signed the armistice, he gave little instruction or guidance to the military. As a result, generals and soldiers alike were unsure of what attitude to take toward our former allies, the Germans. In Rome, in fact, some troops resisted the Germans’ attempts to disarm them. And our great battleship Roma was sunk by German bombers to prevent it from falling into Allied hands. Fifteen hundred Italian sailors perished.”

  He took a moment to light a new cigarette then continued.

  “The Germans occupied the peninsula from the Alps in the north to the battle lines in the south. They took possession of our gold reserves, deported prisoners of war to Germany to prevent their liberation, and disarmed the Italian soldiers wherever they met them. And the resistance sprang up in the middle of the chaos. Our former allies were now the enemy. Twenty years of fascist rule and its spectacular demise lit a passion in Italians. They wanted change. Democracy, socialism, Communism . . . And they wanted revenge. Former servicemen, deserters, private citizens, even women, took up arms against the Nazis and Mussolini’s puppet regime. Alberto was one of them. He became a partisan. I know it for a fact.”