Between Enemies

by Andrea Molesini

  ‘I have called you here to explain to you how we must behave from now on,’ said Grandma almost in an undertone. ‘Between these people and us I want there to be a barrier of tight lips and sour looks. After what has happened we cannot behave otherwise. We will put at their disposal whatever they would take in any case, which means to say everything – except our dignity. And this we will defend by maintaining a scornful silence. The village is virtually deserted, and the remaining old people cannot and must not attempt foolish actions like today’s. To get oneself hanged is downright stupid.’ She gave each of us in turn a straight look, and time for it to sink in. ‘Do nothing rash.’ And Grandma looked at me, just me. ‘We will have as little contact as possible with the enemy. Signor Manca,’ and she nodded towards the steward at the door, as she smoothed out the folds of her skirt with her bony fingers, ‘has offered to act as our ears and my voice, talking to the farmhands and referring to me alone, every day, as to what is going on. We have to be careful and circumspect.’

  All eyes turned towards Renato. All except those of Aunt Maria, who stared fixedly at some spot on the wall. The fact that the steward was there at all was already strange, but this investiture by Grandma bordered on the astonishing. ‘Our ears and my voice,’ is what she had said. I couldn’t believe it. I noticed that Grandpa looked saddened; not surprised, just saddened. He kept his eyes low, fixed on that old copy of the Touring Club magazine until it slipped from his fingers and ended up on the carpet.

  Grandpa didn’t take to Renato. ‘That fellow doesn’t say much and looks around him too much,’ he told me a few days after the steward’s arrival. ‘I bet my moustache that he could have the shoes off me while I was walking in the rain, and I wouldn’t know it until my feet were sopping.’ The truth is that it was Grandma and Aunt Maria who had a liking for that giant; it was they who had decided to employ him, despite the fact that the references from that Tuscan marquis were, according to Grandpa, rather nebulous.

  A heavy blow shook the door, once, twice, three times. A curt order in German. Renato undid the bolt and Aunt Maria went to stand at his side. The door creaked open. The soldier said something to my aunt which I didn’t understand. The steward stood aside and she followed the soldier down the stairs.

  ‘We mustn’t show any curiosity,’ said Grandma. ‘Paolo, catch up with your aunt and pretend you’ve got something to tell her. She’ll like to have you close by.’

  Grandpa looked at me with great sad-dog eyes, and leant down to retrieve the crumpled magazine with the mules and their loads of Talmone. ‘Run along, then,’ he said.

  There was a great coming and going in the garden. Swarms of troops with mud-spattered boots and uniforms, their faces drawn with exhaustion. I went to the gate. No one took the least notice of me. Aunt Maria was standing between the two sentries guarding the entrance, who were rigidly at attention. The captain, upright in the saddle, screwed in his monocle and brought his right hand up to his temple, as stiff as an iron wing.

  ‘Captain Korpium,’ said my aunt.

  The captain, with a twitch of irritation, ejected the monocle.

  ‘Madame, your river Piave was not favourable to us, but I am still in one piece. I dare say you are not pleased.’ He pronounced the Italian vowels with a studied precision that endowed them with a roundness hard to credit in the mouth of a foreigner. The hard edge of his voice struggled with a warmth diminished, perhaps banished, by the brutality of war.

  ‘Captain, have you had me summoned just to let me know you are still alive?’

  ‘I want you to enter the church immediately after me…Fetch the girls out: they will need to hear a woman’s voice. Call your maids, give me five minutes and not a second longer, then enter.’

  He turned his horse with gentle pressure of the heels, and went off at a walk.

  Aunt Maria turned swiftly to me. ‘Call Teresa and Loretta. Quick!’

  But they were both there already, as well as Renato.

  ‘Renato, we won’t need you at the moment.’

  The steward nodded. I noticed that Loretta was trying to catch his eye. Teresa gave her a diambarne de l’ostia accompanied by a snort.

  Teresa never took the name of the devil in vain, but preferred to use that nickname lest she should inadvertently conjure him up.

  I too started off towards the church, and Aunt Maria made no attempt to stop me. Teresa’s looks were black as a thundercloud.

  And the hoofs of the bay horse climbing the church steps were like the crackle of thunder that follows the lightning. Like drums out of rhythm, as if the trident of hell itself, fallen from the hand of Lucifer, were tumbling step by step down a rocky stairway.

  The captain shouted an order. Two privates and a sergeant forced the church door, which opened with a grinding of metal. The church within was almost as bright as daylight. I sidled in behind a pillar. There were candles everywhere, on the pews and on the altars. The bay reared up, and the captain drew his sabre. I saw the girls clinging tightly to each other, five of them, sitting on the steps of the high altar. They were naked. Four soldiers got to their feet in various places. I heard the sound of a wine fiasco rolling about. The captain’s horse approached the tallest and burliest of the men, whose jacket was open and chest bared as he held out his hands to ward off the blow. The flat of the blade struck him on the head. There was a sharp cry. It didn’t come from the soldier, who crumpled to the ground, but from the girls. The fallen man tried to struggle to his feet, but his legs folded beneath him and he fell again, face down as if he had a broken back. I saw another two men get up in different parts of the church. They quickly formed a group, reached the high altar and stood shakily in line at attention.

  The captain walked his horse round among the overturned pews, extinguished a cluster of candles at one swipe, and drew up with his horse’s nose almost in the soldiers’ faces. The girls were all gazing silently towards the door. The captain uttered a few words which I didn’t understand. The men might have been made of wax, like candles gradually melting. I watched them leave in Indian file, completely mute, heads hanging; a squad resigned to an ancient tradition of discipline and death. The struck man lay still. The captain rode over him, the horse taking a long step to avoid the body. In came my aunt with the two servants. Spotting me, she said, ‘See to Don Lorenzo. Look in the tower.’

  I found the priest bound to the circular staircase of the bell tower. I pulled out the piece of rag he was gagged with. He said not a word, but panted like a thirsty dog. He avoided my eyes. It took me a good three minutes, maybe more, to untie all the knots. When I had finished he gripped my shoulders with both hands and croaked something, of which I only understood the word ‘water’. I realized that the poor man had not had a drop to drink for two days. With me supporting him we tottered round the forecourt, he with his cassock encrusted with urine. The sacristy door was ajar, the lock smashed. In we went and I led him to the locker where the pump was. I have never seen anyone drink as he did. Then he put his bald head under the icy water and kept it there, motionless, while I pumped the handle.

  Yellowish trickles ran down into his collar and down his cassock. He raised his head and heaved a heavy sigh.

  ‘Don Lorenzo…Will you be all right?’

  He turned his small eyes on me. ‘Those girls…The godless bastard Huns!’ he whispered in the distracted tones of pious old dames telling their beads. ‘And in the Lord’s house!’ he added with effort. ‘Under the very eyes of the Blessed Virgin! But He’ – pointing up towards the mould-blotched ceiling – ‘He sees all and He provides.’

  ‘If it’s any consolation to you, Father, I think their captain also sees and provides. One of the Huns is laid out in the middle of the church with his head split open.’

  Don Lorenzo wrinkled his ‘alopecic pate’, as Grandpa liked to call it, and hurled in my face a mephitic blast of syllables: ‘Don’t be insolent!’

  I followed him into the church. The candles were guttering out. With the hel
p of Teresa and Loretta, my aunt had taken the girls away. I felt something warm on my fingers. It was a dog’s tongue.

  ‘All these candles, these tiny flames…Do you hear their voices too?’ The priest clutched my arm so hard it hurt. ‘What happened here…’ He fell silent for a moment. Then: ‘A legion of angels will destroy them utterly,’ he added, his eyes fixed on the ground. And he sat down heavily on the altar steps.

  The dog, an army Alsatian, started licking his folded hands. It was then that I noticed Don Lorenzo’s eyes were welling with tears. I left the church on tiptoe, as if I were disturbing a dying man. A weary sadness took possession of me, as when one thinks of a friend who has died, of how unjust his absence is, of the voice we shall never hear again, of how he left us without any reason in the world.

  Four

  THE DAYS PASSED UNEVENTFULLY. IF IT HADN’T BEEN FOR the helmets, rifles and uniforms, one would scarcely have thought there was a war on. The artillery barrages became rarer, and always in the distance. Hordes of prisoners, commanded by Austrian non-commissioned officers with the rough manners of gang overseers, were clearing the roads, ditches and footpaths of the wreckage left during our retreat. Most of the carts, bicycles, motorbikes and lorries abandoned by our routed forces had been removed during the earliest days of the occupation. Everything was engulfed by the repair shops which the victors were busy getting into operation again. The enemy troops had plentiful rations, Italian foodstuffs which had survived the destruction of the army depots, while trains loaded with flour, cows, fabrics and furnishings were making their way to Vienna, Budapest and Berlin.

  The homes of the country people, but even the big houses of the gentry, were ransacked again and again. Resistance was out of the question; the least one could expect was a jaw smashed with a rifle butt. The young women in the outlying farms were smearing their faces with pig-dung and stuffing bundled-up rags into their clothes to make them look disgusting, pregnant, altogether unappetizing.

  ‘Opening their legs has never done women much harm,’ said Grandpa in dialect, which he used to fall back on for his lewder utterances. He had always liked to scatter his good-humoured sarcasm over the world, especially when the world seemed even more scared than he was.

  Captain Korpium had given Don Lorenzo a safe-conduct for the raped girls. After a brief visit to the medical officer’s tent, his problem cleared up with a drop of cordial, the priest had taken them off in Grandpa’s gig just as dawn was rising over the hills. He got them out before their parents and siblings could see them. ‘Better not to rub salt into the wounds,’ he said to Donna Maria as he climbed onto the driving seat. My aunt saw the girls off with the ghost of a wave. They did not reply, or say a word, or do anything at all except keep their staring, bewildered eyes fixed on the back of the priest’s hat. When the gig passed through the gate the sentries sprang to attention. I followed the whole scene from up above, glued to the window along with Grandpa, who was stroking his moustache to give it some semblance of shape. Neither of us had slept a wink. A silence more stolid than that of the mules had fallen upon the garden, the streets, the Villa, the entire village.

  It took three days to recover all the medallions of the Madonna, because two of the dogs had ended up at Pieve di Soligo, and were only found by a company of Bosnian pontoon-bridge builders returning, decimated, from Segusino.

  All that had taken place in the church had to be erased from the memory of the village. The medallions were collected up by the priest’s housekeeper, a woman of sixty or so about the height of a tub of cheese and with a face carved out of boxwood, who hung them all round the neck of the Virgin, a blue and white wooden statue standing beside the altar in the left-hand nave. In this way the little housemaid-like face of the Queen of Heaven was suffused with the light of reflected gold. But it didn’t last long, because Aunt Maria was furious: ‘A hen has more sense than you,’ said she, towering over the housekeeper. ‘Take away those foul baubles. Give them to the blacksmith and have him melt them down, at once! Don Lorenzo will find a good use for the metal.’ My aunt then spent half an hour in church telling her beads. She thought it a point of honour, a personal matter, to mollify the affront suffered by the Virgin Mother. Poor Aunt, she really did believe in the Church. She thought of it as a relic of the Roman Empire, and the only political institution worthy of respect out of all that have set up house in this martyred peninsula of ours. Besides, after the Battle of Caporetto it was not easy for anyone to put their trust in a dwarf king and his pack of imbeciles.

  ‘It’s odd,’ I had heard Grandpa say more than once, ‘that such a tough customer as your aunt is such a God-botherer.’ Grandma, on the other hand, had her own ideas about it: ‘Ever since she was little Maria has relied only on herself, on what one can see and touch, not on the twaddle of the black beetles.’ She had studied with intention to become a schoolteacher, but then – the war in Libya had begun just two days after her thirtieth birthday – she joined up in the Red Cross. I was very fond of her, because she was different, as if there were something masculine in her, and then because our parents, hers and mine, had all died together in that shipwreck. I don’t think I ever met anyone more conscious than she of her rank in society. She knew in her innermost being that privileges are paid for by responsibilities, and these were two things to be borne with grace. But, ‘Grace,’ she would make a point of saying, ‘is a gift from God, not something to be come by on request.’ In the melancholy of her features I could discern a barely concealed trace of despondency which ill fitted the generosity of her nature.

  Donna Maria had left the house in Venice a month after the Great Disaster and had taken me with her to Refrontolo. Grandma had immediately entrusted her with the running of Villa Spada. Partly to distract her thoughts, of course, but also because this came in very handy, as she herself was rather devoid of practical sense. Since then Aunt Maria had administered the Villa and the farm with a firm hand, thrift, and a touch of daring, managing even to make a success of the miserable patch of vineyard that stretched from the little temple as far as the ditch that marked the border of our grounds. Of her passion for horses, which she bought, broke in and sold, the malicious tongues in the village used to say, ‘She mounts them because no one mounts her.’ Unlike intelligence, to quote one of Grandpa’s maxims, stupidity knows no bounds.

  Those were days when the tramontana was blowing, and time and again the sleet beat and beat against the windowpanes. ‘Paolo,’ said Grandma, ‘just think of a swarm of birds that veers round in the twinkling of an eye and in perfect formation; and fish do the same in a stream. It takes the mathematics you hate so much to describe such a wonderful thing. Only a formula can capture that miracle of nature which your Fokkers and your SPADs try in vain to imitate.’ She spoke from her bed, her back against the headboard, the blankets pulled up to her waist. She was wearing a white dressing gown bordered in pink and topped off with a lace collar. In her eyes as she spoke I saw that same sleet that whirled against the windowpanes. I was on my feet near the chest of drawers, staring at the coat-stand hung with enemas, in full view through the open bathroom door.

  ‘You sneaked it away under their very noses, didn’t you, Grandma?’

  ‘You are very good at changing the subject,’ she smiled. ‘Yes, they searched everywhere. They even unscrewed the legs of the bed, but they’re better at fighting than they are at thinking, because thinking takes more effort. You don’t want to make the effort to get to like maths, but it’s worth it. You have to work hard to understand the simple things, which are the most difficult, and then suddenly, when you least expect it – just you see – everything falls into place.’

  There was no way of dinning it into her head that I just wasn’t cut out for maths, and if I had gone on protesting how hopeless I was it would have upset her too much. ‘Human beings don’t give up their illusions, even on the point of death,’ Grandpa used to quote from the dictionary of proverbs stored in his head. The family legend was quite clear on
one matter: Grandma Nancy had shown an outstanding gift for numbers even as a little girl. The daughter of a Venetian astronomer, at sixteen she had gone with her father on a journey through the deserts of Mauretania, along with some English friends of her mother, who was a Scot of the Clan Bruce.

  Great-Grandma Elizabeth had died rather young, at forty-two, of a disease the doctors had not managed to diagnose in time, perhaps leukaemia. So when she was twenty-one Grandma Nancy found herself motherless, with a father in great distress. She took care of him and, in no less a place than Burano, managed a small corn-meal biscuit business which had belonged to her mother. They went to Edinburgh to take possession of their Bruce inheritance, sold what was left of it and returned to Italy. Nancy realized almost at once that it was not easy for a young woman to work with a bunch of men accustomed to regarding the gentle sex as divided into three categories: mothers and sisters; wives and daughters; maidservants. Her father died barely two years after her mother, at which point – managing not to get too badly swindled – she sold her business to the owner of the bakery. On the advice of a Venetian notary friend of her father’s she used the money to buy property, including the Villa at Refrontolo.

  The years that followed were the happiest of her life. She resumed her studies and spent every spring and summer in London, where she was one of a group of mathematicians, who recognized and appreciated her talent, thus helping her to allay the suspicion which – even in England – a lady with great intellectual endowments was likely to arouse. She used to spend the winters in Venice and Paris, along with the gilded youth of half of Europe, until finally she married Grandpa Gugliemo, who was two years her junior.

  With the outbreak of war the exchange of letters between Grandma and her mathematician London friends had become more intense. At the end of the summer of 1917, after the eleventh Battle of the Isonzo, she had a visit from one of them, by the name of Sir James, who spoke good Italian because he had lived for a while in Tripoli. He was a tall, thin man with snow-white hair and an impressive nose. He smoked great rolls of foul-smelling tobacco and wore grey pullovers, never a jacket or a tie. I don’t know what they talked about, but they spent the evenings together, and several times I came across them strolling along the stream. They often went all the way to the old mill, and Sir James always came back with a bag of flour for Teresa’s store-cupboard. One thing was abundantly clear to me: the two of them shared more than their common passion for mathematics, which they managed to talk about even at dinner, raising more than one protest from Grandpa.