The sacristy door creaked behind me.
‘Signorina Candiani!’ The priest was surprised. Giulia sat down beside me.
‘Now I understand…Paolo, you don’t want to disappear… you want to be with her. So it’s the devil who has made you blind and deaf!’
Giulia brushed my cheek with the back of her hand.
Don Lorenzo got to his feet and levelled his forefinger at my face: ‘You foolish refugee from a penitentiary, you need to stop thinking with your groin, your brain is up…’ – and here he leant forward to touch my forehead with his sweaty finger – ‘here. Not down there.’ His finger, propelled by the length of his arm, pointed at the place he meant.
I stood up, but Giulia placed both hands on the table, her fingers spread like duck feet, and looked me up and down: ‘The priest is right, you need to run away, and fast, the clock is ticking!’
Don Lorenzo turned to look at the blank wall. ‘God Almighty be praised,’ he said. He touched the little crucifix hanging there. He ran his fingers through his hair and then started pacing from one end of the sacristy to the other, eyes fixed on the floor. This was his sacristy. An inland sea, whose shores, inlets, and grottoes he knew intimately. He skirted sharp corners and objects without looking. ‘Yes, the clock is ticking…’ and he went on walking, brushing past the armoire, the credenza, the tripod that held the holy water, his head bowed, his hands gripping his breviary. ‘Perhaps the baron…is only waiting for Major Manca to give in and talk.’ His voice betrayed his anguish. He stopped, stuffed the breviary into a pocket of his tunic and placed his fists akimbo on his hips, as his gaze grew flinty: ‘Paolo…if they question you, remember to say nothing. They’ll think you’re doing it out of pride, out of patriotic loyalty, but if you try to lie they’ll trip you up, make you contradict yourself.’
He pulled open the drawer under the table and extracted an envelope that he tossed in front of me, grim-faced. ‘This is for you, a letter. It’s sealed. Carry it with you in your jacket wherever you go, from now on. This was an idea of your aunt’s: it says that you are serving your novitiate in this parish…Even if there’s a war going on, we’re still the Holy, Catholic, Apostolic Church…and Austria respects us! If they catch you while you’re trying to escape and find it on you, it could save your life, they won’t shoot a novice, or at least, they’ll take him to his parish priest…first.’ He suddenly swung around towards the door, as if he’d sensed a threat. He pulled a foot-long knife out of the drawer. The blade glittered in his hand, then next to his face, over his shoulder. He let it fly.
A thump. There was a rat, twisting and writhing, pinned to the foot of the door. Giulia and I exchanged a glance, speechless, horrified.
‘I got you, you bastard!’ The priest cackled and, under his breath, added: ‘Not all bastards come from Vienna.’
That corpulent priest was as quick and agile as a street thug. A smile stretched from ear to ear and his enemy, whether that be Satan or the Austrians, was gone: in that rat, run through and through, its paws stretched wide in the sign of the cross, the priest saw not a creature from the sewers, but a delicacy to be savoured at his blessed leisure.
I slipped the letter into my inside jacket pocket. We said farewell and left by the church door, avoiding the door where that foul creature had been crucified.
Thirty-Four
‘NO ONE WANTS TO TALK STRAIGHT ANY MORE, NO ONE WANTS to look me in the eye.’ Teresa punctuated her lament by spitting into the piece of canvas she was using to shine the copper pot. ‘Donna Maria wants you, laddie, out in the garden.’
My aunt linked arms with me. I was becoming her shadow, she asked me to accompany her everywhere. She was afraid of losing me, and she was afraid of losing Grandpa. We walked in silence. The afternoon air was sticky, filled with cicadas and small birds. Nearly all of the soldiers had left; many of them, at the field marshal’s orders, were helping the peasants with the harvest, which luckily promised to be more abundant than expected. We skirted the latrines and then the family cemetery. There lay the Valt, Rainer, Bozzi, and Spada families. They lay beneath Istria stone, an ironed sheet barely greyed by the rains, here and there marked by saxifrage and winter ice. The graves of the recently buried soldiers, in contrast, with the turned soil already green with weeds, made me think of the unmade beds in a barracks abandoned in haste at dawn. My gait sped up a little, and my aunt kept pace.
‘May the Good Lord console their mothers.’
‘Grandpa thinks that you care more about the horses, and he’s not the only one who thinks so.’
‘With the horses, I can let myself go.’ She looked at me and smiled, squeezing my arm. ‘You men weren’t made to understand things; you’re summoned to action by a primordial instinct; all you care about is doing things and taking care of things; you’re afraid to stay in one place.’
Then, I’m not even sure how, we started talking about books, and the topic turned to my mother, who used to read to me until I fell asleep. I already knew how to read perfectly well at age five, but I liked to have books read to me. I don’t think it was sheer laziness; it was because I liked the sound of my mother’s voice, and the way she could make me feel the presence of the characters, their fear, their strength. I even asked her to read to me when I was nine and ten years old. She enjoyed herself, and often she’d dream up her own stories, while pretending to adhere to the book, down to the smallest details. I let her do what she wanted, I’d never object, except when she tried to soften certain instances of cruelty that I actually savoured with great relish.
According to my aunt all books worthy of the name tell the story of a continuous flow that resembles the glittering of river water. ‘It’s not the destination of the journey that matters…I don’t read books to find out how they end…The glittering that dazzles me along the way, that’s what I like. Look at our Villa, our roads filled with invaders, nothing will ever be the way it was, not even after we’ve kicked them out of our country, these foreigners. Everything passes and everything leaves its mark…and yet everything remains, we slowly fill up with wrinkles and…’
I was about to start crying, and I covered my face with my hands. My shoes lay still in the grass.
My aunt embraced me. ‘You won’t die,’ and she took my hands away from my face, gripping my wrists so hard that it hurt. ‘You aren’t going to die because I won’t let you, and that’s a promise. If it’s the last thing I do, I won’t let the baron kill you.’
I dried my face with my fingers. We looked at each other. Those eyes, green and still, knew my terror.
‘What about you, Aunt Maria, do you want me to run away too?’
‘Yes.’
‘Get across the Piave…but how?’
‘Tomorrow or the day after, at night, alone. Grandpa agrees. He’d only slow you down and after all…after all they’re determined to hang a Spada, but you’re just a boy.’
Aunt Maria pointed me to the chapel. ‘Let’s go in for a minute.’
The door squealed; it had been some time since the hinges had been given their regular dose of oil. The dankness swept over us with its pungent coolness. Far from the altar, the baron was on his knees in a corner. His eyes were half-closed and his head was bowed slightly forward, both hands together. My aunt told me to wait where I was. She crossed herself and, lifting the hem of her skirt just slightly, knelt down next to the baron.
They began talking intently in a low buzz, even though there was no one to overhear. Her lips were close to his. They ignored me. They stood up, I pretended to be praying raptly, tipping my head slightly forward, and to make it more convincing, I muttered under my breath, ‘Angel of God, my guardian dear…’ As a child, I was somewhat concerned at the thought that God didn’t have time for me, that He had too much to do taking care of the other matters of the world, so I had become fond of that other, little, private god all my own, my guardian angel. ‘Be at my side, to rule and to guide,’ I said, in a slightly louder voice.
‘Amen,�
�� said my aunt. At her side, grim-faced, stood the baron.
‘Signor Paolo…No one must know of this meeting. Three men have been killed and now three men must die. You are just a boy…but so was one of those killed, only two years older than you. I don’t like ordering executions, but this is the law of war… and then there’s that pilot, the Englishman.’
‘He was wounded and we…we are Christians.’
‘Colonel Herrick is an English pilot, and anyone who conceals an enemy…is an enemy of ours, and we kill our enemies, because that is what armies do, they kill…now…as the commander of the garrison, I have a certain degree of freedom… some leeway, not much, but let’s just say that I could manoeuvre sufficiently to save someone’s neck…’
‘Someone’s…neck, Major?’
My aunt gripped my arm and forced me to look at her: ‘If you know who killed them, you have to tell the baron! You have to tell him, you and Grandpa had nothing to do with it!’
Could it be that my aunt was asking me to betray Renato?
‘That little serving girl came to talk to me.’
‘Serving girl?’
‘That’s right, the young one, not the cook but her daughter, she came to see me and she told me things that I can’t pretend I never heard.’
Loretta must have followed us that day.
‘That servant,’ the major went on, ‘told me…’
‘Loretta is an idiot and the things she says count for nothing.’
The officer stared at me through slitted eyes: ‘That idiot, as you call her, led us to—’
A soldier threw open the door. It was the attendent. There was a brief exchange of phrases. The major crossed himself hurriedly and left without a word of farewell. My aunt took my right hand and squeezed it hard: ‘The officers from the secret service have arrived…’ We too left the room, and we saw them immediately.
They looked pretty beat up. They were white with dust to the tips of their caps. The first one, a barrel of a man – he was sweating like a pig – was walking up the lane through the park leading a lame mule by the bridle, while the second, tall and skinny, had dismounted from a bay horse that, even without the weight of its rider, seemed overburdened by its Pantagruelian pack. I offered my arm to my aunt and we joined them outside the stables, where they were handing over their mounts. As we approached them, my aunt slowed down and contemptuously offered her right hand to the fat man, who displayed the full amphitheatre of his teeth with a gap in the middle. His eyes were tired, hard and sky blue, and when he grasped my aunt’s hand it was only her prompt withdrawal of it that kept him from smearing it with a streak of slobber. The other man, in contrast, chose to snap to attention and click his heels, so that a cloud of dust billowed over us, snapped into the air by his patched trousers.
‘Not even during wartime…do you go around looking like that,’ said my aunt, lengthening her stride. When we got to the gate, we tried to leave but the two sentinels standing guard lowered their rifles to bar our way. We heard one bayonet scrape against the other.
Thirty-Five
GRANDMA WAS SO INTELLIGENT THAT SHE SOMETIMES FORGOT to understand her cook. Teresa, for her part, was sufficiently intelligent to overlook ‘li strambéssi de la paróna’ – the eccentricities of her mistress. But when Grandma’s silence lasted a whole day, even Teresa felt called upon to comment. ‘Paróna, el diambarne ve ciàma?’ Mistress, is the devil calling you?
Grandma stopped drinking her hot lemon concoction and replied with a bitter smile. She found it hard to put up with the idea of sharing confidences with the woman who administered her enemas. But the tragic present had swept away all boundaries. ‘That major,’ said Grandma with reddened eyes, ‘wants to hang us from hooks.’
There was a crash. Fragments of enamel covered my shoes, along with a splat of hot water, while the pitcher rolled until it hit the moulding. Standing motionless only a few steps away from the table she’d just cleared, Teresa was swept by a shiver, her face bright red, while silent tears rolled down her cheeks. Grandma stood up and did something I’d never have believed if I hadn’t seen it with my own eyes: she threw open her arms and gathered the cook in an embrace. And the two women hugged, their breasts crushed together, melting together their tears and their rage in the muggy heat of that July evening.
I entered the church, hoping to leave the grey chill behind me. Once I got over the sudden impression of darkness and absorbed the pleasant, damp coolness of the place, I glimpsed Grandpa sitting in one of the last pews. With the evacuation of the wounded, the church had turned back into a church again, with a few candles flickering under the statues of this saint and that. It had taken elbow grease and the muttered imprecations of a platoon of church ladies to restore it to a decent condition.
To see Grandpa sitting there was like finding a hair in one of Teresa’s cakes. I went over and sat down next to him. He looked at me without smiling.
‘Your reputation as a priest-hater is starting to wobble, Grandpa.’
‘To everything there is a season, and today doesn’t go hand-in-hand with sarcasm…I’m thinking, thinking, and I prefer to do it out here, in the fresh air,’ he glanced at me again, ‘where that cop of a grandmother of yours isn’t going to come bothering, plus today she’s doing her enema and she woke up with her heels on backwards.’
In his voice, which he was doing his best to keep on the usual ironic note, I heard anguish and bewilderment. I decided to leave him to his thoughts. I hadn’t had time to walk down the last step of the church courtyard before I heard the priest’s heavy footsteps behind me. ‘Signor Paolo, wait.’
I turned around. A whiff of his breath curdled my nose and my guts. When he caught a glimpse of the look on my face, the priest stepped back. ‘Yesterday, the non-commissioned officers invited me to eat with them at the inn, and the soup had…more grappa than soup. And they sang songs with lyrics like Krieg-Sieg, Not-Tod, and then they said things, things that bode ill for us…for you.’
He turned to look at the soldier with his rifle slung over his shoulder; the man had just hoisted his butt up off the bollard on which he’d been sitting, he never lost sight of me for a second. ‘Let’s take a little walk together, Paolo…just out to the gate… This morning, at dawn, your servant, Loretta, came to say confession.’ He linked arms with me and we headed off towards the Villa, while the soldier followed us, moving at a slow, short gait. ‘Those damned people know everything, you understand, everything. I can’t tell you anything more…sacrament of the confessional…but they know everything!’ We were walking with our heads bowed, and we shortened our gait to make the walk last longer. ‘Austria wants to exact a tribute of Italian blood… Last night they loaded the Englishman onto a lorry heading for Udine. And they’re not giving Renato anything to drink…in this heat…he’s toughing it out…but…after all, they already know everything. And Donna Maria has less power than she thinks, certainly much less than she hopes. After losing the battle, they certainly can’t afford to let their immediate backlines deteriorate into a threat.’ The words were galloping over each other in their haste to get out of his mouth, as if he were afraid of losing some: ‘The idea of executing the Spadas…a family of nobles! Dogs don’t eat dogs, the peasants say.’
‘But maybe…’
He stopped and jerked me around so that I was forced to look at him. ‘What I know is that they won’t be satisfied with hanging the steward.’ He started walking again, slowly, slower and slower, head bowed: ‘They won’t touch a hair on the ladies’ heads…but you…you need to run for it, tonight, tomorrow could already be too late.’
There was something in the priest’s voice that was at once desperate and imperious.
‘They’re spying on everything, even my mail, and I can’t send you to a monastery…you have no choice but to get to the other side of the river.’
At the gate there was a single soldier standing sentinel. He looked weary, a boy no older then eighteen or nineteen, skinny as a stick, with
a heavy helmet riding low over his ears.
‘Tonight, come to church to hear vespers, at the end of prayers I’ll hear your confession in the sacristy, and you can escape from there. After that…well, after that, good luck, and may the Good Lord protect you.’
Thirty-Six
I SPENT THE AFTERNOON TALKING OVER THE DETAILS OF MY escape with my grandparents and aunt. The priest’s plan was discarded immediately because the baron had also put a guard at the sacristy door. I shoved a blanket, a knife, a burlap sack with some dried polenta and a tin full of red marmalade into my rucksack.
Grandpa and my aunt and I studied a military map that was two years old, but it was all we had. I told them that Renato had taught me how to move through the woods, an exaggeration they pretended to believe. Grandma told me to leave town immediately, and warned me not to try to get in touch with Giulia: the baron had just had her arrested and shipped off to Conegliano with a Red Cross convoy.
When we made our farewells, late that night, the moon was out, huge, round, and riding high in the sky. ‘You won’t get lost.’ Grandma hugged me with all her strength, but she held back her tears, as did my aunt. Grandpa concealed how moved he was by talking about his Gibbon and his Beelzebub: ‘I’ll leave them to you, you’ll certainly be able to make good use of them. Join up with the deserters at Falzè, that’s where they cross the river. But if everything goes wrong, just head north, towards Follina, and from there towards the mountains, and you’ll see, you’ll find someone willing to help you…’ There was a strange confidence in Grandpa’s voice; when I wrapped my arms around him and hugged him with crushing strength, I felt him choke back a sob. We were just a footstep away from the door that gave onto the courtyard; the women of the house had left us alone. Grandpa twisted the knob that extinguished the flame in the lamp. I pulled open the door and slipped out. I didn’t hear the door shut behind me, and I didn’t turn to look, knowing full well that Grandpa was standing there, behind me in the dark, watching the first things I would do.
Between Enemies Page 22
