Between Enemies

by Andrea Molesini

  Grandpa put his free hand on my shoulder and said in a low voice, ‘Did you hear that? Now your aunt has started competing with Don Lorenzo.’

  Grandma took her hand off his arm. ‘Pipe down, you good-for-nothing.’ And she took Aunt Maria’s hand as she entered the gateway. The sentry – there were no longer two of them – sprang to attention, but a moment later, when Grandpa and I passed him, he pointedly relaxed into a slovenly stand-at-ease.

  We all lunched together in one of the upstairs rooms. No mention was made of the bell. We ate boiled greens and hot broth that tasted of soil. Grandma didn’t touch a thing. Loretta, steady on her feet but surly in the face, brought us a slice of apple tart filched by Teresa’s swift hands from the gluttony of the officers eating in the big dining room on the floor below. ‘All we now get is the scraps,’ said my aunt, as she cut the slice into four. I glanced at Loretta. Her hands were a little unsteady, but on her lips was a smirk, and she was certainly thinking, Your leftovers is all I ever get.

  While I was savouring the last precious mouthful of tart, Grandma said, ‘Giulia’s elder sister died last week. Don Lorenzo told me.’

  Why had Giulia told me nothing about it?

  ‘A merciful release,’ said my aunt, placing her knife and fork correctly together on her plate. ‘That poor girl, reduced to skin and bone. I saw her last year…yes, it was fifteen months ago, in their house at San Polo.’

  ‘And her mother…a saint,’ put in Grandma.

  I looked at Grandpa. He was drumming his fingers on the handles of the cutlery and moving his lips imperceptibly as if reading. His thoughts were elsewhere. He lit a cigar and asked for an ashtray, which Loretta promptly brought him.

  ‘It has been a terrible business,’ continued my aunt. ‘She was reduced to an absolute skeleton; only the face was left of the woman she was. I couldn’t even look at her. Just too, too distressing.’ She shook her head and turned a hard look on me. She realized that I was not in the least upset at the fate of her friend. Then she said sharply, ‘You must watch your step with that Giulia.’

  ‘You should know, Paolo, that when your Giulia attained the age of eighteen…’ I knew at once from her tone of voice that my aunt was about to deliver me a lecture she’d had up her sleeve for quite a while. ‘It must have been early August of…1911 because…well, it doesn’t matter…That day, during the birthday party…’

  But I already knew all about it. How could I not have known? In a city like Venice, the event was front page news. And for some things antennae sprout early in children. Giulia had had a lover, a friend of her father’s. An old man whom everyone called ‘a fine figure of a man’, though what I remembered of him were his crooked teeth. That evening her lover had put his chrome-plated revolver barrel into his mouth. He’d done it in front of everyone, in front of the birthday cake a span high with all the candles lit ‘while awaiting the puff of the lovely eighteen-year-old with the flame-coloured hair’, as the Gazettino put it. A masterful coup de théâtre, with the brains spurting out and the removal of shreds of pulpy matter from the chandelier, that occupied half a paragraph in the leading article. The grown-ups – one thinks this way at the age of nine – were divided into two parties: ‘She’s a good lass who’s had bad luck’, and ‘It was she who made his brains burst out of his ears’. But in such disputes, we all know, the dead have a certain advantage. ‘Tombstone and Truth are total strangers,’ was Grandpa’s inescapable maxim. Giulia, the night of her eighteenth birthday, had earned the label of belle dame sans merci, not least because the suicide was a prince of the lawcourts with a wife and three children.

  Until then I had always pretended to know nothing about it, but the talking-to that awaited me was just too much. ‘Aunt, I know about the lawyer in Venice, a man who—’

  ‘Was it Giulia who told you?’

  ‘Not a word. But I have heard certain things…Do you think I don’t see what happens when she walks down the village street? And then, when I was in Venice it was on everyone’s lips.’

  ‘Don’t tell me that my son…that your father talked about it with your mother in front of you!’ said Grandma, in her voice a trace of venom.

  ‘No one has spoken to me about it. Ever.’ I got up and left. I was livid.

  Twenty-One

  GRANDMA HAD TOLD US TO WAVE AT ALL ALLIED AIRCRAFT, meaning to give the impression that we were overcome with impulsive and consequently innocent patriotism. A subtle ploy, but wasted. The soldiers took no notice of us, and still less did the officers, who whiled away their time smoking, playing cards and drinking an insipid brandy that according to Grandpa tasted of dry dung, iron and rotting leather, ‘the same taste as war’.

  The captain and the lieutenant quartered in the Villa often went off in the morning and returned only at sunset, on an open lorry with two church benches screwed to the platform. They went in the direction of the Piave, where very little was happening. The baron, however, always went out mounted on his Arab, and on sunny days, in the middle of the snow-covered park, he would now and then stop and hold a conversation with it. He would put his mouth to the animal’s ear and move his lips. Rumour had it that to his horse he spoke only in French, but according to Grandpa that was ‘one of your aunt’s vagaries’.

  On one occasion von Feilitzsch told my aunt that he hated motor engines. ‘They frighten horses, and for that reason our emperor – he meant Franz Joseph, not young Karl – wanted no armoured cars in his army.’ And by saying so he had, if not opened, at least scratched at the tough yet fragile heart of Donna Maria.

  *

  It was the library of Alexandria, the story of how it was burnt down, that held the floor that evening in front of the fire. It all started with a squabble about pipes. Aunt Maria said that a gentleman can smoke a pipe within the four walls of the house, but in the street or at the inn only cigars and cigarettes were permissible. Grandpa – who loved to disagree – protested, flourishing his cigar like a dagger, until a spark flew off it onto the folded newspaper on my aunt’s lap. A tiny tongue of flame set off a hubbub that ended with ‘It’s not as if I were Caesar! It wasn’t I who burnt down the library of Alexandria,’ casually thrown by Grandpa into the calm in the wake of the storm. Giulia had not spoken a word all through supper, but at this point her eyes opened wide. With fire and with flame: ‘You don’t know what you’re talking about, Signor Gugliemo. Your Gibbon, petty bourgeois that he was, had it in for the tyrant. That night of two thousand years ago it was the warehouses on the docks that went up in flames, not the Royal Library.’

  Questioning Gibbon to Grandpa was like questioning the Gospel to Donna Maria. To be gibed at by a ‘flirtatious minx’ was just too much. But Giulia’s assertion suggested some measure of competence, and Grandpa needed a long minute to gather his resources and plan his counter-attack. He puffed at his cigar until he was stroking the moustache he thought he still had. ‘Dear Signorina Candiani…Caesar was under siege, trapped in the accursed palace, with a handful of centurions, but he won! And he won because, though under siege, he fought as though he were the besieger. The torches he flung onto Ptolemy’s ships set fire to everything…In short, you only have to read Lucan.’

  ‘No!’ Giulia’s swarm of freckles threatened to take wing. ‘Gibbon doesn’t take sufficient notice of the topography of the place. It was the harbour that caught fire, and the scrolls were there ready to be shipped to Pergamum. They made a mass of money out of those scrolls, more than they did with wheat, much more…The library was a long way from the palace. That was burnt down centuries later by some caliph. For him, everything that wasn’t in the Koran was the work of the devil.’

  I don’t know if Giulia knew what she was talking about, but the assurance with which she said it put Grandpa on the defensive. ‘I’ll have to re-read it,’ was all he said, as he took refuge in his cigar. Luckily, a rap-rap at the door dispelled the embarrassment.

  It was Renato. Grandma and Aunt Maria motioned to us to leave the room, and for once G
randpa seemed relieved. He set off for the Thinking Den with a goodbye gesture that bordered on rudeness, and I could be alone with Giulia for a while.

  I gestured towards the silkworm hatchery and she followed me there. We crossed the garden almost at a run, with no overcoats. The cold air blurred the odours and the snow crunched beneath our boots. I looked up: it was a starry night. It seemed to me that the atmosphere was propitious. I kissed her, but to my surprise she turned her face away. I told her she had been magnificent with Grandpa, that she had held her end up cleverly and tactfully, and that there was something magic about her. I tried to kiss her again. This time she put her hands on my chest and pushed. I clasped her hips, but she shoved me away by force.

  ‘What’s the matter?’

  ‘I don’t want it.’

  ‘It’s so cold…’

  ‘Stop it.’

  ‘But what’s wrong?’

  A crunching of snow. We turned towards the park. ‘Who’s there?’

  The crunching came nearer and Renato appeared from the darkness. ‘Hop it, the patrol’s doing its round.’

  ‘Come with me,’ I urged.

  ‘No,’ answered Giulia. ‘I’ve got to speak to Renato.’

  It was a stomach punch.

  ‘I’m coming to see you for a moment,’ said Giulia, drawing close to the major, who pulled a strange face, almost a scowl.

  I stood stock still, unable to believe my ears.

  ‘No,’ said Renato firmly.

  Giulia, without so much as a glance at us, ran off into the night.

  I would have liked to follow her, but was rooted to the spot.

  ‘Don’t give it a second thought…better to let her go. Now, off with you.’

  There was affection in his tone of voice. I felt my heart in my boots.

  ‘Come on, get out of here! They’ll be here at any moment. See you tomorrow.’

  ‘’Night.’ I was weak at the knees. I opened the door to the kitchen, heard the Aaalt! of the patrol. But I was already indoors. I took the stairs at a run and reached the bathroom just in time to bring up my supper into the lavatory.

  I took off my shoes, undressed in the dark and groped my way to bed. A glimmer of light filtered in at the windows. Grandpa was pretending to be asleep, not snoring and wearing his cap cocked at a rakish angle.

  ‘That lass…what does she know about Lucan, or Gibbon? A petty bourgeois, she called him. Just because he detested priests. Believe me, that one’s a…a pain in the neck.’

  ‘What have priests got to do with it?’

  ‘Buddha doesn’t like Austria.’

  ‘Grandpa…do you ever pray?’ I half-closed my eyes to peer at him, but all I could make out was his rotund outline.

  ‘I wouldn’t know what to ask for. See here, laddie, if you ask for the wrong thing and you get it, where does that leave you? No, I don’t pray. Right now you would like to ask God or whatever for Giulia to be yours, but no one, and especially not you, can know whether that would be a good thing. No, I don’t pray. For my part I look at my Buddha. Sometimes I look at him for a whole half an hour and he says nothing. That way we understand each other.’

  I said nothing.

  ‘A word of advice, laddie: look at her less and touch her more.’

  Von Feilitzsch was stroking the nose of his Arab and talking into its ear. The horse nodded its head, rattling its bridle. Walking side by side they looked like old comrades-in-arms exchanging gossip about barrack-room life or the fanfaronades at court.

  Donna Maria was also leading a horse by the reins and stroking its white-streaked nose. The horse was a bay belonging to the Imperial Army and entrusted to her care through the intercession of the baron. For the past three days bad weather had confined the animals to their stables, so they were nervous, and the dazzle of the snow did nothing to calm them. The baron joined my aunt under the big lime tree at the edge of the park. After the usual greetings, they set off up the hill, leading their horses side by side.

  Renato and I were following, thirty metres behind them. Our rucksacks were crammed with potatoes for the Brustolons, our share-croppers, a proud and loyal family. I liked them because of Adriano and his Pomeranian, by the name of Dog. Adriano had chest pains, a worrying symptom according to the medical officer, a moustachioed beanpole of a man, but the priest had told us, ‘They’re hungry! It’s not pneumonia, it’s hunger!’ In mid-January the troops had stripped them bare down to their bootlaces. Not so much as an egg had they managed to hide. So Donna Maria, with Grandma’s agreement, had decided to give them ten kilos of potatoes. The head of Queen Victoria still counted for something.

  The stratagem of an outing with the baron was one of my aunt’s bright ideas, because following in their wake no one would think of lightening us of our loads of potatoes. It wasn’t far to the Brustolon house, just enough for the horses to stretch their legs. Major von Feilitzsch had all the signs of being mild-mannered, but early in February his provisioning problems had grown worse, so that looting was tolerated, or even encouraged, by the area commands.

  ‘Giulia is avoiding me…I saw her for a moment yesterday and…I don’t even manage to…’

  ‘Some women are like that. What you want you have to take, not beg for.’

  My ideas regarding Giulia were woolly. I didn’t manage to get together a strategy, even temporary. And I was upset by the idea that I could no longer trust Renato, I was jealous, and ashamed of it.

  ‘There are things we don’t fathom…Women, they’re like war…What do we know about war, and who unleashed all this on us?’

  ‘Homer says that it’s a gift from the gods, that without war there’d be very little to write about.’

  ‘Go and tell that to the men in the trenches and see how you come out of it. You’d be lucky to have a tooth left in your head and a single unbroken bone.’

  ‘The rape of Helen and the burning of Troy are—’

  ‘Yes, yes…The King of Sparta betrayed, a prince shot in Sarajevo…Let’s just repeat what they tell us at school! Come off it…’ He gave a short laugh. ‘It’s a load of rubbish. No one really wanted this war, not the peoples concerned, nor the governments. It just emerged from the boiling pot of dynasties that are decrepit and worn out, but have not, alas, forgotten their old dreams of grandeur. And the spoon that stirred the pot was in the inept hands of diplomats who for generations had dealt only with ordinary matters: ships, railways, money. The enormous turmoil took everyone by surprise, Serbia, Austria, Russia, Germany, France…One mobilization followed another, and when you put millions of young men into uniform you’re compelled to do something with them. Otherwise, with rifles in their hands instead of spades, they’ll overturn the pot and so long to all your crowned heads.’ He looked me straight in the eye. ‘Women, on the other hand…they have power over us, they use their weakness to put us down and make us do what they want. It’s they who corrupt us, while we, to assert ourselves, crush them. Corruption is the most subtle way of commanding, the crafty way, the woman’s way.

  ‘Horses are also feminine,’ he said after a second or two. ‘If you don’t make them feel the grip of your knees you end up on the ground.’ And with a tilt of his chin he drew my attention to my aunt and the baron, who had now mounted and were setting off at a walk.

  We reached the Brustolons’ in little over an hour. The baron and Aunt Maria drew rein less than ten metres ahead. They both gave us a wave.

  The house was a mere hovel. The wooden shingles of the roof had in several places given way under the snow, and the wooden gutter had snapped right over the door. This was opened by a woman no taller than our king, a mere metre and a half. She looked about seventy, but was certainly fifteen or twenty years younger than that. She was bony, with little eyes close to her nose and, even if she had only three teeth, two on top and one below, she spoke distinctly.

  The room was black. Black were the walls, black were the three chairs, the table, the bread store, the empty shelves around the fireplac
e.

  ‘I’m Paolo Spada. I’ve been sent by Signora Nancy.’

  ‘Potatoes!’ announced Renato, emptying his rucksack on the table. The woman’s eyes widened, became two chestnuts. I tipped my bag out too, and the chestnuts turned to plums, and when the last potato rolled down onto the blackened earth floor, for a moment they became two peaches. The woman thanked us with a volley of Hail Marys and incantations.

  ‘Is she afraid the devil’s going to eat the potatoes?’ I whispered to Renato.

  ‘The troops are worse than the devil, as she well knows.’

  ‘How’s Adriano? I’m the one who gives him history lessons. I’m helping the priest.’

  The woman’s eyes shrank again, small and hard: ‘Schooling has never given anyone anything to eat.’ With which she took a pinch of tobacco from her apron pocket and rolled a cigarette with her sparrow-like claws. Renato lit a match and held it near her face. She drew on the cigarette as if to suck in the whole Piave and, with impeccable pronunciation despite her lack of teeth, said in pure Italian: ‘A curse on you and your schools and your wars…And a curse on your charity too!’

  I was sorely tempted to take the potatoes back.

  But the woman opened the lid of the bread bin, which was smothered in soot like everything else, fished out a rusty bayonet and banged it into the table between us and the potatoes. From the other room came a bark from Dog, startled perhaps by the bang. The house consisted of two rooms: one for sleeping, being ill and dying in, when one had to die, and the other for living, smoking sausages and eating in, when one had anything to eat. I would have liked to call out to Adriano, but we left without any goodbyes while the bayonet was still vibrating, its point buried in the wood.