The Wolf That Fed Us

by Robert Lowry

  Everywhere on the street were girls with soldiers—well-dressed painted girls who gazed up into the faces of their men. Nina Bonte remembered the American soldier she had met two months ago, that rather sissified, intellectual kid who’d come to the bar three days in a row and talked French to her before he’d finally gotten up enough courage to ask her to dinner. Surprisingly she’d found their evening together a pleasant break in the monotony of her days, and the next night she’d let him take her to his room. He had been a very shy, very gallant sort of fellow who had tried to give the matter of their lovemaking dignity by telling her that he was really very fond of her, and by recounting some of the things that had happened to him at Columbia, where he’d been a student in chemistry before the draft. When Nina had told him that she was a college graduate, he’d become even more attentive. He’d seen just by looking at her that she was intelligent, he said. That was why he’d spoken to her in the first place. . . . She smiled, thinking of Sergeant Lester Powers. That single evening was all they’d had together—he’d been here from Corsica on a five-day pass. Where was he now? Dead in southern France, perhaps. She didn’t really care where Sergeant Powers of the U. S. Army was now, yet the thought of him made her restless and dissatisfied, filled her with a yearning to do some of the things the pretty carefree girls here on the street were doing. An American soldier would be best—someone who couldn’t make any claim on her later. A clean intelligent person was what she wanted, even another Sergeant Powers.

  She had her bobbed blond hair curled at a shop on Corso Umberto, and then, walking quickly as if there weren’t a minute to lose, she headed for the Bar Nazionale.

  The place seemed rather empty to her this evening, in spite of the fact that she found it almost impossible to squeeze through the mob. She sat down on a bench beside the cash-register and swung her short legs. “Did Alfredo do a good job?” She took out a mirror and inspected her hair.

  “It looks very nice,” Teresa said from behind the cash-register.

  Nina fixed a stray curl before she put away the mirror. Now she studied her newly manicured nails—they were perfect. Tomorrow, she thought, I’ll go have a sulphur bath. She had money, she could afford to stay young.

  Somewhere to go tonight. After all, that was part of life too. She looked at the soldiers around her—disgusting creatures, most of them were drunk. She especially hated the English; they all seemed to have teeth missing in front and yet insisted on leering at you in such a knowing way. She would never have anything to do with an English soldier, she told herself. The Americans were better—healthier-looking, anyhow, and they threw their money around like water. The Americans were real bambini.

  Her eyes passed over and then returned to those two at the bar. One of them tall and blond, the other shorter, stockier, with dark hair—they were talking earnestly together. Now they were buying another drink and saying something to Teresa, who was laughing.

  “But of course it’s my sister,” Teresa was saying. “She works in the afternoon and I work in the evening.” She leaned over the bar and said to Nina, “They won’t believe you’re my sister.”

  The two soldiers turned to her and she smiled. “I thought we looked alike,” she said.

  “You speak English,” the dark one said.

  “I speak five languages,” Nina answered. “French, English, Italian, Spanish—and German.” She didn’t really speak Spanish, but she felt there was a good chance they didn’t either.

  “You’re prepared to deal with practically any kind of soldier who comes along,” the dark one said. “Did you work in the bar when the Germans were in town?”

  “Yes, we’ve been here for three years,” Nina answered.

  “I’ve been here for three days,” the dark soldier said. “We ought to compare notes.”

  “I mean I have worked in the bar for three years,” Nina told him. “I’ve lived in Rome all my life.”

  “Where are you from?” Teresa asked them in Italian.

  “San Cialo,” the blond one said.

  “Are you in the Air Corps?”

  “Si.”

  “Rome is beautiful . . . with many art treasures, yes?” It was what Teresa said to all soldiers.

  “We’ve seen too many picture postcards back in the States,” the dark one answered in English. “We can’t get worked up over the art treasures.”

  “You don’t like Rome?” Nina asked, offended.

  “We feel like we’ve come out of the Middle Ages,” the dark soldier said. “After living in San Cialo for eight months, any big city where things are happening would look good. In San Cialo nothing happens, but nothing. People promenade on the streets in the evening and go to church regularly. They live in mud all their lives and yet their poverty doesn’t seem to mean anything, not even to them. It’s taken for granted and it’s pretty depressing. Sure we like Rome.”

  Nina looked at him curiously. He seemed to be challenging her in some way. Every other soldier had been properly ecstatic about Roman culture, yet he dared to compare it to “any big city.”

  “Perhaps you don’t know the significance of the things you are seeing here,” she said. “The historical background. Rome is the world’s most important city.”

  There was a sarcasm in his smile that chilled her. “I won’t list my college credits,” he said. “What I’m interested in is the Rome that’s alive today—the one where people who’ve been living under Fascism for twenty-two years suddenly find themselves more or less freed of the Fascists.”

  “We’re not Fascisti,” Teresa burst in, not understanding anything of what he’d said except this one word.

  “Of course you’re not,” he said. “Nobody is nowadays in Rome.”

  Nina felt her face flush and she heard her voice come over-loud: “You can’t accuse us of being Fascists. We’ve had to make our living like anybody else. You Americans seem to think that everyone who has made a living under Fascism is a Fascist.”

  The soldier smiled at her excitement. “The Fascists had control of the educational system in Rome for twenty-two years,” he said. “If they didn’t make good Fascists out of you it wasn’t their fault.”

  “I am a graduate of the University of Rome,” Nina told him, feeling annoyed with herself for wanting to impress him, “and the courses there were as impartial as any at your American schools.”

  “What did you study?” the blond one asked.

  “Political Economy.”

  Both soldiers smiled. “Political Economy in Mussolini’s University of Rome,” the dark one said. “And it wasn’t pro-Fascist?”

  “No,” Nina answered, really annoyed now. “We studied all governments.”

  “And I suppose you decided that democracy was the hope of the world.”

  Nina was too angry to answer. She got up and walked to the other end of the bar, pretending she had something to do there. But then she came back and sat down.

  “Don’t get so excited,” the dark one said, sitting down beside her. “You take an awful lot for granted. We didn’t say you were Fascists—you brought that up yourself.”

  Nina couldn’t resist looking into his large face with its bright brown eyes. It was a face with a good deal of mischief and curiosity in it. Who was this person, anyhow? Certainly he was different from most of the others who came into her bar and agreed with everything and were more intent on getting drunk and having a woman than anything else. Or perhaps, she thought, she was interested in him because he seemed interested in her—“intellectually.”

  “What’s your name?” she asked.

  “Joe. Joe Hammond. Meet Burt Hunter of the U.S.A.”

  Burt Hunter’s long thin face was not a stupid one either, she decided.

  “What part of America do you come from?”

  “He’s from the West Coast,” Joe said. “I’m from Chicago.”

  “Oh, Chicago,” she said, remembering the movies she’d seen.

  “Yeah,” he smiled, “Chicago. Where the
streets ring with pistol shots twenty-four hours out of the day and all night long the police spend their time picking up the bodies.”

  She looked at him seriously, not understanding his humor.

  “I’m not a gangster myself,” he went on, “just a newspaper flunky. But I’m proud to say that all my relatives are. Even my baby sister.”

  “You’re joking now,” Nina said. “But there are a lot of gangsters in Chicago, aren’t there?”

  He narrowed his eyes, she couldn’t tell whether he was amused or not. “Let’s not stop with gangsters,” he said. “Let’s run through the whole list of Italian truisms about Americans. A: All Americans are rich. B: Americans don’t get married, or if they do they get divorced right away. C: Americans are just simple children who know nothing about art, music or any of the fancy things. D: Americans spend all their time drinking, yachting and riding around in Cadillacs.”

  Nina wondered what he was driving at. It was true, she had believed more or less these things—though not put so bluntly perhaps. In general all Americans were rich—they didn’t know what it was to have to be poor like poor Italy. They had no idea of what the problems of real life were: all they could do was make money.

  “It is true,” she said. “I know you joke, but it is true that Americans are not poor like so many in Italy are poor.”

  Both of them were looking at her, grinning. Joe took her hand and squeezed it. She glanced down at their hands together and added, “Yes, and you’re all the same about holding hands too.”

  Yet when seven o’clock came and it was time for the bar to close, Joe and Burt just said goodbye and left—neither of them even hinting that they might want her to come along. She felt vaguely irritated. As she helped Teresa straighten out the cash-register she tried to remember what it had been about them that had irritated her so much. And then she knew: it had been his holding her hand, practically making love to her, and at the same time laughing at every word she said.

  But Nina Bonte’s curiosity about anybody was limited to the impressions of a moment, and when she got up the next morning it was with the hard simple thought that at ten o’clock she would go down to her bar and prepare for another big day of money-making.

  At eleven o’clock the iron shutters were lifted and in came the thirsty, noisy liberators of Rome. And behind the bar Nina, who had not lost the war, waited for them, her left hand resting on the cash-register, her legs crossed, her skirt exposing two inches of bare flesh above the knee. The pounding of her heart increased with the number of soldiers demanding drinks, and she was in no mood to be kidded when a voice at her elbow said: “Trouble with Americans, we’ve never been told that Fascism is just an extreme form of capitalism, just another way for the few to make more money at the expense of the majority.”

  She looked up into Joe’s big amused face.

  “We all live as we have to,” she said. “If it is necessary to be a Fascist to live, then I’ll be one.”

  “I know,” Joe said, sipping his glass of anisetta. “If kicking the Jews, the Ethiopians, the Spanish Republicans, the Italian Socialists pays, a lot of people will do it.”

  “You have no right to talk to me like that,” she told him. “You know nothing of me, my family, or what I have been or done. You have no right to criticize me. I’m working hard now and making all the money I can so that someday I may live the kind of life I want to live.”

  “And what kind of life is that?”

  “I want to make money to travel and to live so that I will not have to be stingy or deny myself anything. Now is the time to make money in Rome and with your permission I intend to make it.”

  “I don’t doubt you will. So you must be pretty busy.”

  “I am busy,” Nina Bonte said, the bartenders thrusting lire toward her which she ignored. And then she felt a need to explain herself to him. What sort of person did he think she was? “I do not really like to work so hard and shout at everyone,” Nina said more softly. “I am really lazy. I like to lie in the sun and let life go by.”

  “You mean making money is just a bad habit you’ve fallen into?” His lips curled upward though she wasn’t sure he was smiling.

  But the bartenders were waving money in her face and she had to quit the conversation and make change for five minutes. Then she looked back at him. “You don’t understand me,” she told him. “You don’t understand the kind of time we live in.” She glimpsed herself as a person pleading that she too was a human being, a young girl, not a hardheaded Fascist business woman; to change the subject she asked, “Where’s your blond friend today?”

  “He wanted to sketch an Italian selling fruit,” Joe said, “and I wanted to come over here and see you. So we compromised—each did what he wanted.”

  She was flattered but she kept herself from smiling. “And why should you want to see me?” she asked. “You don’t seem to approve of me.”

  “You’re alive,” Joe said. “I approve of everything that’s alive.”

  “I don’t understand what you mean.”

  “I’m not sure I do either. But that’s the way I feel.”

  Again there was the rush of lire and she had to turn away from him. She looked wildly around the crowded bar—a real madhouse of hoarse laughter, loud talk, glasses and bottles clinking. She had the desperate feeling that unless she screamed at the waiters and bartenders she’d be losing money, and she wondered why she was neglecting this to talk to an American private who evidently didn’t approve of her to begin with.

  But she turned back to him anyhow, and he said, “I want to take you to lunch, Nina. Will you be doing anything after you’re through here?”

  She was going to refuse, believing it would be a moral victory over him to turn down a four-hundred-lira dinner when every other girl in town was selling her body for one. But as suddenly she changed her mind. Just what kind of person did he figure her to be? She’d show him that she was a young girl too and not the sort of horror he evidently thought she was. She’d been to college, she could hold up her end with him any day. Could eat his four-hundred-lira dinner while she was doing it, too, and give him nothing in exchange. That would be victory enough.

  The electricity was off in Rome and they sat over in the dark corner of the restaurant with only a candle for light. Finding herself hungrier than she’d realized, Nina Bonte attacked her steak avidly.

  Afterward they drank Benedictine and smoked.

  And always she felt those bright curious eyes on her, as if there were dozens of questions in his mind too difficult to phrase. He’d surprised her by not making love to her, by not even mentioning love as a personal thing that might be possible between the two of them—for a day or a week, the schedule love kept now in Rome. He wanted to talk about her, about the kind of kid she’d been, the thoughts she’d thought, the schools she’d gone to. He listened eagerly to everything she said, giving it a flattering importance. With the help of the liqueur she warmed to him, yet she couldn’t understand. Didn’t he want what all the other Americans who came to Rome on furlough wanted—a woman, a day or two rescued out of the drab life of a soldier?

  Just when she was sure that he didn’t, he reached out and brushed a lock of hair from her forehead, saying, “Come on to my room with me, Nina. I want to make love to you.”

  They went up the obscure stairway hand in hand and stopped before the big oak door marked GIORGIO VALSETTI. They waited as footsteps from far back in the apartment came closer.

  Nina stepped to one side so that the person opening the door wouldn’t see her. “Tell them to go into another room,” she said.

  Joe did, and then she followed him through a dining-room, down a little hall and into the bedroom.

  After the door was closed he held her by the shoulders at arm’s length and looked down at her, smiling. “Nina Bonte,” he said. “So you weren’t really married to that cash-register after all.”

  “It’s hot,” she said. She began to undress.

  “Now,�
�� said Nina Bonte, smoking a cigarette as she lay beside him on the bed, “now do you think I’m a Fascist money-greedy person who hates the Americans?”

  He looked at her with that grin. “Oh you can be a Fascist and still like to make love, Nina.” He put his hand on her arm. “Fascism is just another convenient system for a small clique of people to get power and wealth at the expense of the general public. The old feudal idea, you know, only on a larger scale. It’s the myths that people build up in their minds about Fascists that are really surprising. I mean, Americans think of Italians with the same kind of innocence that Italians think of Americans. A year ago we believed that Italians lived and died by the word of Mussolini. We thought that all Italians looked alike—small and dark, with large noses and black eyes—thought alike, acted alike. We never saw them in terms of ourselves—I mean in terms of people who liked to eat, sleep, work, make love, et cetera.”

  “Yes,” she said evenly, “you did not bother to find out what you were doing before you sent your troops.”

  He punched his cigarette out in the ashtray beside the bed. “I don’t imagine you ever really believed that Americans were human beings either. I’ll bet right now that you don’t know there are Fascists, Democrats, Communists and Anarchists in America, just as there are in Italy. . . . Look, Nina, I don’t think you’re a Fascist in the way that most people think of a Fascist—somebody with his hand stuck up in the air threatening the rest of the world with war and slavery. But I believe this: you helped the cause of Fascism by taking as much personal advantage of it as you could. And you had the same excuse that the exploiters under any system have—that it’s necessary to take care of yourself or nobody else will.”

  She lay there in the room of this man who dared say things like this to her, burning with anger. She smashed her cigarette into the tray and jumped up. She began to put on her clothes, slipping into her silk pants, her dress, her sandals, standing before the mirror combing her hair furiously, containing herself, knowing that if she spoke she’d begin to scream things that would make her ridiculous. Maybe he’s Jewish, she thought. How did she know with whom she was dealing? What a fool she was. And to think that after she’d slept with him he could still talk like this to her.