Cousin has now arrived and calls Pin.
‘Pin, d’you want to see the battalion passing? Go down there, you can see the road from the edge of the ridge.’
Pin plunges down through the thickets and leans out beyond them. Below him he sees the road, with a line of men walking along it. They look different from all the others he has seen till now; brightly coloured, gleaming, bearded men, armed to the teeth, wearing the strangest uniforms; wide hats, helmets, leather jackets, bare chests, red scarves, bits of uniform from every army under the sun; and all their weapons are different and all of them unknown to Pin. Some pale, glum prisoners also pass. Pin thinks all this is too good to be true, that it must all be due to the sun reflecting on the dusty road.
Suddenly he gives a start; he’s seen a face he knows. There’s no doubt of it; Red Wolf. He calls him and they soon join each other. Red Wolf has a German weapon on his shoulder and is limping on a swollen ankle. He is still wearing his Russian cap, but now it has a star on it, a red star with a white and green circle inside it.
‘Fine,’ he calls to Pin, ‘you’ve got here by yourself; you’re a bright lad.’
‘God, Red Wolf,’ says Pin, ‘how on earth did you get here? I waited so long for you.’
‘Well, you see, when I left you I thought I’d have a look at the place the Germans park their vehicles near there. I got into a garden nearby and from a terrace I saw soldiers fully equipped and getting ready to move. I said to myself, they must be mounting an attack on us: if they’re getting ready now, they’ll be up our way by dawn. So I ran all the way up here to warn them, and everything’s turned out all right. But I twisted my ankle, the one that was so swollen when I fell that time, and now I’m lame.’
‘You’re amazing, Red Wolf, you really are,’ says Pin. ‘but you’re a swine all the same to leave me when you’d given me your word of honour.’
‘Honour,’ he says, ‘is due to the Cause first.’
Meanwhile they have reached Dritto’s camp. Red Wolf looks all the men up and down and replies coldly to their greetings.
‘You’ve got into fine company,’ says he.
‘Why?’ asks Pin, a little bitterly; he has grown fond of these people already and does not want Red Wolf to come and take him away again.
Red Wolf whispers in his ear. ‘Don’t tell anyone; but this is what I’ve heard. They send the duds to Dritto’s detachment, the cast-offs from the brigade. They may keep you here, because you’re a child. But if you like I can try and get you moved.’
Pin does not like the idea of being kept here because he’s a child; but the men he knows are not duds.
‘Tell me, Red Wolf, is Cousin a dud?’
‘Cousin is a man who has to be left on his own. He always goes round alone and is a good man and has guts. Seems there was some story about a woman he was in love with, last winter, who ended up causing the deaths of three of our men. Everyone knows it’s not his fault, but it still niggles him.’
‘What about Mancino? Is it true he’s a Trotskyist?’
Perhaps, thinks Pin, he’ll explain what that means.
‘He’s a Trotskyist, he’s an extremist, the commissar of the brigade told me so. You don’t agree with him, do you?’
‘No, no,’ replies Pin. Who knows? Perhaps Trotskyist means something degrading.
‘Comrade Red Wolf,’ exclaims Mancino, coming up with his hawk on his shoulder. ‘We’ll make you Commissar of the Soviet of the Old Town!’
Red Wolf does not even look him in the face. ‘Extremism: Communism’s infantile disorder,’ he says to Pin.
Chapter Six
Under the trees of the wood the ground is thick with chestnut husks and dried up pools full of hard leaves. In the evenings layers of mist spread between the trunks of the chestnut trees and shroud their bases, covered with the reddish sheen of moss and the bluish marks of lichen. The encampment can be sensed before it is reached, from the smoke rising above the tree-tops and the faint singing of a chorus, growing louder as one goes deeper into the woods. The hut is made of stone, two stories high, the lower storey with an earthen floor for animals, and the one above, made of logs, for shepherds to sleep in.
Now there are men above and below, sleeping on piles of fresh bracken and hay; as there are no windows through which the smoke of the fire on the ground floor can escape, it curls round under the slate roof and burns the eyes and throats of the men forcing them to cough. Every night the men crouch round the fire, lit under cover in case it is seen by the enemy, and crowd up together, with Pin in the midst of them, lit by flickering flames and singing away at the top of his voice as he used to in the tavern in the alley. The men look rather like the men of the tavern too, sitting there with hard eyes and splaying elbows, though they are not gazing resignedly into purple glasses; their hands are on the barrels of their weapons and tomorrow they will be going out to fire them against other men; against the enemy!
It is this that makes them different from others, this that gives Pin a feeling new to him, that he has never felt before; it’s their having enemies. In the alley there was shouting and rowing and insulting between men and women going on night and day, but there was never this bitter longing to meet the enemy, a longing which keeps these men awake at night. Pin does not yet realize what it means, to have enemies. To Pin there’s something as disgusting as worms about all human beings; and something good and warm, too, which draws him to their company.
But these men can think of nothing but the enemy; they’re like lovers; when they say certain words their beards quiver, their eyes glisten, and their hands stroke the barrels of their rifles. They do not ask Pin to sing songs about love or comic songs that make them laugh; what they want are songs full of bloodshed and violence, or others about prison and crimes which only Pin knows, or others so obscene that they have to be shouted out with hatred. Yes, these men fill Pin with more admiration than any others ever have: their stories are all about lorry-loads of men slaughtered and spies executed naked in ditches.
Below the hut the woods straggle off into strips of meadow, and there, it is said, spies are buried; Pin is a little afraid of passing that way at night, in case he feels a tug at his heels from hands growing up through the grass.
Pin is now accepted as one of the band; he is in everyone’s confidence and knows the right phrase to make fun of each man, or get them to chase him, or tease them, or make them lash out.
‘Hell, chief,’ he says to Dritto, ‘they say you’ve got your uniform all ready for when you leave the hills, with badges of rank, spurs and sword.’
Although Pin jokes with the leaders, he always tries to keep on the right side of them, for he likes to be in with them in case he can get off guard duty or some other job.
Dritto is a thin, young man, the son of emigrants from Southern Italy; he has the smile of a sick man, and lids always lowered over his long lashes. He is a waiter by profession; not a bad profession as one lives with the rich and only works alternate seasons; but he would much prefer to lie in the sun all the year round, with his thin muscular arms behind his head. Instead of which there is some demon in him which keeps him perpetually on the move and makes his nostrils quiver like antennae and gives him a subtle pleasure in handling weapons. They are doubtful about him at brigade headquarters as he has had unfavourable reports from the Committee, for he always wants to act on his own in battle and is too fond of giving orders and not fond enough of setting an example. But he can be brave when he wants to be and there are not many men capable of leadership available; so he has been given this detachment, which is considered unreliable, and useful mainly to dump men who might harm others. Dritto is offended about this and inclined to play up to brigade headquarters; every now and again he says he is ill and spends entire days lying on the fresh bracken in the hut, with his arms behind his head and his long lashes lowered over his eyes.
The detachment needs a good commissar to keep its leader on the right lines; but the commissar, Giacinto, is
perpetually tortured by lice, which he has allowed to spread all over him and which he can no longer hold in check, so that he is beyond exercising any authority either over the commander or the men. Every now and again he is called to battalion or brigade headquarters to report on the situation and discuss means of dealing with it; but it is all wasted breath, for as soon as he gets back he starts scratching again from morning till night, and pretends not to notice what the commander is doing or what the men are saying about him.
Dritto takes Pin’s jokes with a quiver of the nostrils and that sick smile of his, and says Pin is the best man in the detachment and that as he himself is ill and wants to resign they might as well put Pin in command, for things are bound to go wrong anyway. Then the men all turn on Pin and ask him when he is coming into action with them and if he can aim and fire at a German. This makes Pin angry, for in his heart he knows he would be frightened to be in the middle of shooting and is not even sure if he would be capable of firing at a man. But when he’s surrounded by these comrades he tries to convince himself that he is like them, and begins describing what he will do when he’s allowed to go into battle, holding his fists under his eyes as if he were firing a machine-gun.
This excites him; he thinks of the Fascists and when they beat him and of these bluish and hairless faces at the interrogation; ta-tatata, they’re all dead, chewing the carpet under the German officer’s desk, with bleeding gums. He too feels that sharp rasping urge to kill, even to kill the militiaman hiding in the chicken-coop, stupid though he is, perhaps just because he is stupid, to kill the gloomy sentry at the prison too, gloomy though he is, just because he is gloomy and his face is all hacked about from shaving. The urge is remote, vague, like the urge to love; it has an exciting and unpleasant taste like cigarettes or wine, an urge which all men have, he can’t understand why, and which if satisfied would probably be pleasurable in some secret, mysterious way.
‘If I was a boy like you,’ says Long Zena, ‘I’d nip straight down into town, shoot an officer, then escape up here again. No one would take any notice of a boy like you and you could get right under their noses. It would be easy for you to escape, too.’
Pin gets furious; he knows they say these things to make fun of him, and then won’t give him any weapon or let him leave the camp.
‘Send me,’ he says, ‘and I’ll go, you’ll see.’
‘All right, go tomorrow,’ they say.
‘How much d’you bet that I’ll go down and do in an officer, one day?’
‘Come on, Dritto,’ say the others, ‘you’ll give him a weapon, won’t you?’
‘Pin is assistant-cook,’ says Dritto, ‘his weapons are a knife for the potatoes and a ladle.’
‘To hell with all your weapons! Why, I’ve got a German naval pistol that’s better than any of yours!’
‘Really!’ say the others. ‘And where d’you keep it, at home? A naval pistol; it must be one of those water ones.’
Pin chews his lips; one day he’ll go down and dig up the pistol, and do wonderful things with it that will astonish them all.
‘What d’you bet I’ve got a P.38 hidden, somewhere only I know?’
‘What kind of partisan are you, keeping arms hidden? Describe the place and we’ll go and fetch it.’
‘No, it’s a place no one knows but me, and I won’t tell anyone.’
‘Why not?’
‘Spiders make their nests there.’
‘Oh, go on with you. Spiders never make nests. They’re not swallows.’
‘If you don’t believe me, then give me one of your weapons.’
‘We got our weapons for ourselves. We con-quer-ed them!’
‘Hell, I conquered mine too. In my sister’s room, while the guy was …’
The others laugh, they don’t understand what he is talking about. Pin feels like going off with his pistol and being a partisan all on his own.
‘What d’you bet I’ll find your pistol for you, your P.38?’
The question is asked by a slim youth with a perpetual cold, the shadow of a moustache, and parched lips flecked with saliva, called Pelle. He is polishing the bolt on a gun, with a rag, very carefully.
‘I’ll bet your life you’ll never find the place where spiders make their nests,’ says Pin.
Pelle stops rubbing a second. ‘Listen, you snot-nosed kid, I know that river-bed inch by inch, you can’t even guess the number of girls I’ve had on those banks.’
Pelle’s two passions are weapons and women. He won Pin’s admiration by his knowing talk about the qualities of all the prostitutes in the town and by saying things about Pin’s sister that suggested he knew her well too. Pin feels a mixture of attraction and repulsion for him, so thin, with that perpetual cold of his, forever telling stories about girls he has grabbed by the hair and tricked into going out into the fields and then had there, or about the new complicated weapons issued to the Black Brigade. Pelle is young but has been all over Italy camping with the Young Fascists, and he has always handled weapons and visited brothels, even before reaching the prescribed age.
‘No one knows where the spiders’ nests are except me,’ says Pin.
Pelle laughs, showing his gums. ‘I know,’ he says, ‘I’m going down into town now to get a tommy-gun from a Fascist’s house, and I’ll look for your pistol too.’
Pelle goes down into the town every now and again and returns loaded up with weapons; he always seems to know where there are hidden weapons and who has them, and risks capture every time in order to increase his armoury. Pin is uncertain if Pelle is telling the truth; perhaps Pelle is the great friend he has been seeking for so long, who knows all about women and pistols and spiders’ nests too; but those reddish, cold-ridden eyes of his are frightening.
‘And will you bring me it, if you find it?’ asks Pin.
Pelle’s grin is all gums: ‘If I find it, I’ll keep it for myself.’
It is difficult to get Pelle to give up any weapons; every day there are rows at the detachment about Pelle not being a good comrade and claiming to have owners’ rights over all the weapons he’s acquired. He had joined the Black Brigade before going into the partisans, so as to have a tommy-gun, and had gone round the town at night shooting at cats. Then he had deserted from the Black Brigade after emptying half their armoury; since then he had always gone back to the town at regular intervals and found strange new automatic weapons and grenades and pistols there. He often talks about the Black Brigade, painting it in diabolic colours, but always with a certain fascination. ‘At the Brigade they say this … they do that …’
‘All right, Dritto, I’m off, as we agreed,’ says Pelle now, licking his lip and giving little sniffs.
The men are not supposed to go and come on their own as they feel like it, but Pelle’s expeditions are always fruitful; he never returns empty-handed.
‘I’ll let you go for two days,’ says Dritto, ‘not more, d’you see? And don’t do anything silly and get yourself captured.’
Pelle goes on licking his lips. ‘I’ll take the new Sten,’ he says.
‘No,’ says Dritto, ‘take the old Sten. We need the new one.’
The usual argument.
‘The new Sten’s mine,’ says Pelle; ‘I brought it here and I’ll take it when I like.’
When Pelle grows quarrelsome his eyes get redder still as if he were about to burst into tears and his voice becomes even more nasal and stuffed-up. Dritto, on the other hand, is cold and inflexible, and gives only a quiver of the nostrils before opening his mouth.
‘In that case you don’t move,’ he says.
Pelle begins a long complaint, boasting of his own merits and saying that if that’s the way he’s treated he’ll leave the detachment and take all his weapons with him. Suddenly Dritto gives him a sharp slap on the face. ‘You do just what I tell you, see?’
The others look on, approvingly; they have no more liking for Dritto than for Pelle, but are pleased to see their commander make himself respected.<
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Pelle stands there sniffing, with the red marks of fingers showing on his pale cheek.
‘You’ll pay for this,’ he says. Then he turns and leaves.
It is misty outside. The men shrug their shoulders. Pelle has made scenes like that before and has always returned with another haul. Pin runs after him. ‘Say, Pelle, my pistol, listen, that pistol …’ he calls, not quite knowing what he wants to ask him. But Pelle has vanished and Pin’s shouts are muffled in the mist. He returns among the others, who have straw in their hair and sour looks.
To liven up the atmosphere and get his own back for the way they made fun of him Pin begins jeering at those least able to defend themselves and who can most easily be laughed at. He settles on four Calabrians nicknamed Duke, Marquis, Count and Baron. They are brothers-in-law, who left their own village to come and marry four sisters from Calabria who had emigrated up here; they make a group on their own, under the leadership of Duke, who is the oldest and can get himself respected.
Duke wears a round fur cap pulled down over one cheekbone, and has straight moustaches on a square proud face. In his belt is a big Austrian pistol; this he pulls out and thrusts in the stomach of anyone who contradicts him, grunting some truculent phrase in his angry-sounding dialect, full of double consonants and strange endings: ‘I dddon’t gives a fffuck!’
Pin copies him. Then Duke, who cannot stand being jeered at, runs after him waving the Austrian pistol and shouting: ‘I’ll bbblow your bbbrains out! I’ll rrip your bbballs off!’
But Pin is taking the risk because he knows that the others are on his side and that it amuses them to make fun of the Calabrians; Marquis with a face like a sponge and hair low on his forehead; Count, thin and gloomy as a mulatto; and Baron, the youngest, with a big black peasant’s hat, a swivel eye and a medal of the Virgin hanging from a button-hole. Duke’s job had been slaughtering for the black market and whenever there is an animal to cut up he asks to do it; there is some dark blood-cult in him. Often they go off, all four of them, down towards the valley and the carnation plantations where the sisters, their wives, live. And there they have mysterious duels with the Black Brigade, ambushes and vendettas, as if they were waging, on their own, a war caused by ancient family feuds.
The Path to the Spiders' Nests Page 10
