by Gordon Kerr
He looked out of the window at the countryside rolling past. It was crowded. That was his first impression. There were lots of houses, lots of roads, lots of cars and lots of people. It seemed small, somehow. Much smaller than he remembered. The mountains had not changed, however, were unchanging. As they had come into view when the train exited the last of the series of tunnels that punctuated the view of the lake, he had expected to feel something special, some kind of call, like a priest long lost to the church finally being called back to his vocation. But, no, it was not like that. They were familiar, but only as familiar as the man-made peaks beneath which he had made his living these last fifty years.
She stood up, pulling her bag down from the luggage rack: a dark backpack of the kind worn by kids all over the world, the kind of bag he would have died for five decades previously, as he clambered up and down the valley sides between which they were travelling. They were coming into the station and the countryside had given way to modern housing. The train had begun to slow, rattling over points and crossings, bells ringing out and then fading.
His case was in the luggage rack near the door. He pulled it down and carried it forward, joining the queue of people, school and college kids and the first wave of homecoming office workers. The kids pushed and shoved each other, babbling away inanely. He liked that – the sound of young Italian voices – especially when they were tinged with the accent of the Valtellina. It had been so long since he had heard such sounds.
Eventually, after gliding slowly along beside the platform for what seemed like ages, the train screamed to a halt, its brakes protesting amidst the swishing of opening doors.
He stepped to the door and stood there, his case dangling from his right hand, his left hanging uselessly at his side. His face was old now, with lines carved into it just like his father’s face had been, as if a sculptor had been set loose on it. The eyes were still deceptively young, though, still bright and handsome as they had always been – ‘your secret weapon’, his wife had always said. Beneath the left eye was the deep shadow of the depression caused by a German pistol butt a lifetime ago.
‘Signore!’ said an irritated voice behind him, a finger jabbing him in the small of the back.
‘Oh, sorry … I mean scusi.’ he replied, not turning round. His senses were invaded by the crisp mountain air and the feeling of being where he belonged. He clambered down, unsteadily, unable to balance properly as he did so, having no other good arm to hold on to the rail at the side of the door.
He put his case down and rested for a moment, looking down the platform to where people were crowding through the narrow barrier, on their way to the comforts of home and family. He felt, not for the first time of late, a pang of envy that caused him almost physical pain. Then, just beyond the barrier, he saw the young girl who had been sitting opposite him fall into the arms of a good looking boy in a leather jacket.
She stepped away from him, holding his eyes with hers and laughing with the sheer joy of the moment, a tiny splash of red colouring her face as she flushed with excitement.
She would be a little younger than Angela when he first met her, he thought. He tried to remember her face, her smell, the feel of her skin; tried as he had for the last fifty years, but it had long gone from him, had become mixed up with the smells and feelings of all of those years, had mingled to such an extent that only now and then, in a particular situation – a certain smell of wet grass, or a certain scent of pine trees could he retrieve any of that time.
He picked up his case and walked down the platform to the barrier where the crowd of passengers was beginning to thin and beyond which lay the town.
Sandro Bellini – or Giovanni Pavesi, as he had been known these last fifty-odd years – stood at the window of his rented apartment in Morbegno, stirring a cup of coffee and looking out.
He thought back to another window on another continent. A street – modern, concrete buildings and sodden, brown leaves stuck to the pavement, turning to treacherous mush beneath the feet of pedestrians. The odd car turning left into the hospital car park and rain beginning to fall once again. The wettest fall in years, the evening news claimed, blaming it on the erosion of the ozone layer or pollution or the melting of the Polar ice caps. Weather could not just be weather any more. There had to be a conspiracy, even about that. As if Kennedy and all the other conspiracies that had been dreamed up in the last twenty-five years were not enough.
He had listened carefully to the doctor, almost unemotionally, hearing his own death sentence.
‘Inoperable, as we feared, Giovanni. Untreatable.’ The doctor had leaned forward, blinking, adjusting the wire-rimmed glasses on the end of his nose. ‘I’m sorry, but as you requested, and as I promised, I’m being quite blunt. There’s no hope for your condition. For a man of your years and with the advanced state of your cancer, I fear any treatment would probably prove fatal.’ He made a church-steeple of his fingers and placed them against his lips.
He had known it before the words were spoken, but, even so, a shudder went through his body. He realised he was afraid of death after all.
‘Thank you, doctor, I appreciate your honesty. How long … how long will it take?’ To his surprise, his voice shook slightly.
‘It’s always difficult to tell, you know, and very often it is entirely in the hands of the patient. I would think, Giovanni, you have, at most, a year. As I say, though, we are sometimes proved wrong.’
It was at that moment that Sandro had looked out the window and, as most people in that situation did, lived a burning moment of intensity, experiencing the leaves, the people, the cars and the rain in the gutters almost more than he ever had.
He had shaken the doctor’s hand and thanked him for being straightforward about everything and had walked out of the hospital, his mind strangely empty.
Within a few weeks – weeks in which he had walked the city by day and drunk himself senseless by night – he had begun to see things more clearly and had begun to put some order back into his life, or what remained of it. His wife had been dead for three years now and, as they had never had any children, he was free to do as he pleased. Therefore, he had tidied up the loose ends and made his plans, arranging the rental of a one-bedroomed flat in Morbegno and booking his tickets.
It had been a bad week. The doctor had warned him that the rigours of the journey might do this to him. He had wakened late the day after his arrival and had been unable to get out of bed. For two days he lay there, sick and in pain. The medication he had brought with him did not seem to work until late in the second day when he was able, at last, to sip a few spoonfuls of minestra. Gradually, some strength returned to his body and the waves of pain receded. For the next few days he did not stray far from the apartment, venturing only as far as the shop in the next street to buy bread and fresh coffee.
Exactly one week to the day after he had stepped down from the train, he woke up, restored to something approaching normal health.
He packed some bread and a bottle of water in a small backpack and, locking the door, stepped out into a crisp early morning.
He walked briskly towards the outskirts of the town, which was beginning to stir from its slumbers. Street cleaners washed and brushed down the areas outside the boutiques and shops and people who had to get to work early staggered sleepily towards their destinations.
The mountain peaks rose dramatically around him into a cold-looking, clear, blue sky as he followed the road towards the bridge that traversed the River Adda on its way down to the lake. The river was low and white rocks, worn smooth by the water of centuries, gleamed from its edges. Crossing the bridge, he turned left, heading westwards on the road that ran between Lecco and Sondrio.
In the cool mountain air he felt as good as he had for some time. The morning was still with not a breath of wind. Autumn frost was still some weeks away, and this morning, though crisp, was very pleasant for walking. As the valley widened out, he was amazed and not a little dismayed by the
amount of building that had taken place along each side of the road. The entire road from Morbegno to Dulcino seemed to consist of houses, where, when he was a boy, there had been nothing. The villages and their growing populations were pinned like brooches to the valley sides.
The early hours turned into the hours of the day when people did things. Buses filled with schoolchildren began to sweep noisily past him, creating eddies of wind that pushed him to the side of the road. After an hour he stopped and clambered down to the riverbank to eat some bread and refresh himself with a small bottle of water he had bought. He also threw back the first of the fistfuls of pills that he had to take every day.
He walked on, the sun climbing higher in the sky and his heart pounding as he moved closer to his goal.
Dulcino’s heart had not changed. He rounded a corner and passed by a stand of trees and there it was, after fifty years still clinging to the side of the valley, a few hundred feet above the road. The buildings stood grey and dark amidst the gleaming white villas and bungalows that had grown around them during the last half century and which now completely surrounded them. In the centre was the church spire beneath which his mother had worshipped all her life. On this road, near where he was standing, would have been Luigi’s garage; the house in which Luigi and Angela had shared the few years of their short marriage was in the village of San Marco, visible a few miles to the east and several hundred feet higher up the valley side. Now, these villages, once as separate as different countries, were linked by buildings that lined the sharply switch-backed road that still snaked up the mountain.
He turned off the Sondrio road and began to climb up past the turn-off to Dulcino. The houses everywhere made it difficult to recognise anything. There had once been thick forest here and now it was gone. He persevered up the slope for about fifteen minutes, sweat beginning to glue his white hair to his forehead.
Suddenly, he knew he was there. There was an unfamiliar building, but it had something about it, something akin to seeing a childhood friend after fifty years apart. The overall look is different – there are wrinkles, different coloured hair, the nose seems to have grown, the eyes are hooded – but there is something at the core, behind the eyes, that tells you that it is him. Indeed, this building had suffered a great deal of surgery. There was a conservatory at the side, the windows were different, the roof was new; but there was no doubt in his head that this was the house he had grown up in and in which his mother had been shot dead by Cavalcanti and his henchman that terrible night in 1944. It was no longer isolated outside the village, but was surrounded by other, newer buildings. He passed merely a few seconds assimilating the bright red climbing frame at the side of the house and the blue Mercedes with Milan plates parked on the steep drive. He turned his back on the house and thought back to that night. He remembered nothing except finding a spot in which to bury his mother’s body. Across the road which now ran in front of the house was a fence and then a small stand of trees. It was there he thought he had dug a hole and there he thought he had interred his mother. Climbing the fence, he moved towards the trees, tears beginning to flood down his cheeks and stain his jacket. He lost his footing – his legs were tired after his long walk – and sat down on the dusty slope that led down to the trees. He held his head in his hands out of sight of the road and sobbed.
Sandro could not make sense of the centre of Dulcino. It seemed to contain the same buildings that it had all those decades ago, but there was hardly one which had not been tampered with. New windows, new roofs, a proper road leading down through the square in which the church stood, instead of the dusty track of his youth. It was familiar but very different. Cars – new and often with plates from other parts of Italy – were parked along the fronts of the houses. There was not the hubbub of sound he remembered from the past – the loud conversations between husband and wife, the rattling of cooking utensils, the screaming of children. It was silent, almost sanitised, he thought.
He was spent and in sore need of a coffee and perhaps something a little stronger and had ventured into town in search of a bar. He found one just off the little square, small and modern, with a chrome-topped bar, being polished, as he walked in, by a middle-aged man with a dark moustache. In the corner sat two elderly men who had begun staring at him as soon as he had entered and on the other side some teenagers were making a lot of noise with a pinball machine, slamming its glass top, lifting the whole machine and banging it down on the floor again.
‘’giorno, signore,’ said the man behind the bar, barely looking up.
Sandro ordered a coffee and a whisky. He had acquired a taste for scotch in the States and it did, in fact, help him control the pain of his cancer sometimes when it was not too extreme.
He picked up a newspaper from the bar, went over to a table on the other side of the bar from the two old men and waited for his drinks.
‘Vacanza?’
The voice was a deep growl and came from one of the old men to Sandro’s right.
‘Scusi?’ he replied, lowering the paper. The barman silently placed his whisky and espresso on the table in front of him.
‘Vacanza?’ Are you on holiday, signore? We don’t often see Americans in the village, do we Giuseppe? You are American, signore?’
‘Indeed, yes, I am. Is it so obvious, then?’ He turned to look at the two men. They could have been older than him, but it was very hard to tell. Their lives had probably been tougher than his, all things considered. They also had the weather-beaten skins of men who had spent most of their lives outside.
‘No, it is not, signore. In fact, I might have said that you came from Dulcino, from your accent, or somewhere very close to it?’
It was a question and a menacing one. Sandro was immediately on his guard. He had spent the last fifty years as someone else. He had not even told his wife his real name. He had wiped that person out of history, not because of what he had done, but because of what he had kept hidden all those years ago – the truth about Luigi Ronconi. In doing so, he had become suspect and were Sandro to exist once more it might only lead back to those days.
‘Oh, no. No, I am from Sondrio. Originally, that is. I went to America after the war and have lived there ever since.’ Their cloth caps nodded together, their minds processing every word he uttered. Nervously, but trying to hide his nerves, he picked up and threw back his whisky. ‘But I must say, I am flattered that you think my accent is still strong enough to betray my roots.’
‘And the war, signore?’ asked the other one in a husky, breathless voice.
‘The war?’ He stiffened.
‘Where did you fight? Partigiano?’
‘Partigiano!’ he laughed, ‘No, not me. Wounded and captured in 1942 in North Africa.’ He indicated his left arm, hanging, as ever, uselessly at his side – although for once it was serving a useful purpose. ‘I was one of the lucky ones; spent most of it as a prisoner of war.’ He smiled, trying to appear confident and casual.
The caps across from him nodded in unison again, but their gaze was steely, their moist, dark eyes boring into him. He was unsure, but he could swear that there was a momentary flash of recognition in the eyes of the original speaker and he was sure – afraid – that he also had recognised the other man and had failed to disguise this fact.
‘Anyway, signori, it has been a pleasure. I must get on.’ He threw back the whisky, stood up, throwing a few thousand lire on the table, picked up his backpack and left the bar without looking back.
As he walked as nonchalantly, but as quickly as he could, out of Dulcino, down towards the main road, he failed to notice the two old men scuttling as fast as their aged legs would allow, out of the bar and into the town. They separated, arms flailing as they gesticulated to one another, one following Sandro at a distance, the other, coughing and breathing heavily, heading towards a house at the edge of the village – a house with two lions guarding its entrance.
Sandro decided that he would have to take the bus back to Morbegno b
ut as he waited a full forty minutes at the bus stop, he failed to notice a small Fiat arriving and parking round the corner, its driver nonchalantly reading the Gazzetta dello Sport with one eye, while awaiting the arrival of the bus to Morbegno with the other. Another young man stood to one side of the car, leaning on a fence, smoking and casting regular glances in the direction of the bus stop.
It was early afternoon and the gaps between buses were a little greater than they would be at other times when people were coming home from school or work. For Sandro, however, it was all the same. And anyway the view of the mountains – the mountains upon which he had not gazed for so long – could never become tiresome to him. He stared at them, picking out paths and trails that he had followed as a boy. He named all the peaks, like a god naming all the good things on earth.
Eventually, the bus grumbled its way around the corner and slowed to a halt at the stop. It swallowed Sandro up and pulled out into the road again. The driver of the Fiat put down his paper, leaned across the front seat, rapping with his knuckles on the passenger side window and turned the key in the ignition. The other threw down his cigarette, opened the car door and quickly climbed in. The car pulled out into the flow of traffic that had been created by the bus’s ponderous progress and followed it in the direction of Morbegno.
Sandro had exhausted himself with his long walk of the morning. At the same time, however, he was also exhilarated. Walking back into his apartment, he was grinning and happier than he had been for a long time. He threw down his pack and sat on the sofa, stretching his tired legs and closing his eyes.
