Don't Shed Your Tears for Anyone Who Lives on These Streets

by Patricio Pron

  * * *

  —

  I could destroy it all, he thinks; the pages written in a cramped, awkward handwriting that seems to convey urgency, the paper constructions gathered by the other man, which must be meaningful to him, must be a source of nostalgia or pride. Linden thinks destroying the man’s work would hurt him in an irreparable way, but later he understands that, in some sense, the other man has beaten him to the punch.

  * * *

  —

  An animal wanders around the shed for a good part of the day and Linden realizes it’s the dog they saw the day before; seeing it start to scratch at the door he and Borrello fixed, he also realizes the dog is the one who broke it in the first place. This time the planks are new and the animal can’t break them; after failing, it starts to scratch beneath the sill, sending dirt and splinters to one side in the attempt. Linden can hear the dog snorting each time it rests its snout on the ground, and something similar to Borrello’s cough. The dog’s urgency to get inside is incomprehensible to Linden: it can’t be hunger—though the dog is obviously starving, and may have been abandoned and hungry for days—because there’s nothing to eat inside the shed. The animal has chosen him, he thinks, but that doesn’t give him any joy. During his first days in the mountains they had a dog who spontaneously joined them when they attacked the carabinieri station in Ivrea; they had to kill it because they were afraid its barking would give away their location: they took a vote and the task fell to Linden, who tried to ensure the animal suffered as little as possible; but it did suffer because he wasn’t able to break its neck in one blow. He’d found the decision to kill the dog overzealous and, in general, a mistake; he remembers the animal’s eyes and having killed it pains him more than having killed people. In the skirmishes that took place when they went down into the valley or in the forest, his opponents were armed, so their deaths took on, in some sense, a necessary quality, and besides they were done from a distance, without it being clear who killed or wounded whom, which allowed those who wanted to brag to do so and those who wanted to avoid responsibility—like him—to also do so. But the dog, of course, wasn’t armed, it wasn’t at a distance, it hadn’t been taken down in any specific action, in no act of justice or vandalism that could later be justified as an act of liberation; the animal had died by his hand, looking into his eyes, and only after a long while in which it had tried to defend itself without hurting him, which seemed to Linden an awareness on the dog’s part that its survival didn’t depend on eliminating its aggressor. The dog’s death is one of the many mistakes they made, but it’s the only one Linden laments, even though—in a different way—he also laments not knowing who betrayed them, and having condemned an innocent man in a secret vote that now seems completely unfounded. Maybe they’re all dead already and no one is responsible for these mistakes, except him and the mole, if the mole is still alive. Linden throws the pewter mug against the door and the dog whimpers off. Linden closes his eyes.

  * * *

  —

  Borrello returns that afternoon; his cough gives him away as he climbs the path that leads to the house. After stopping there, he opens the shed door and helps Linden out, limping, and then sits by his side in the same spot as the day before. “I was in Borgosesia,” he tells him. “The Allies bombed Milan again; two hundred children died in an attack on a school in Gorla.” Linden doesn’t say anything; he has the impression the other man would rather he didn’t. “The Allies have taken Aachen, but they haven’t broken the Gothic Line between Florence and Bologna, so they still haven’t reached the Po Valley,” he continues. “There are only refugees in Borgosesia, but the government seems to be holding firm, and there are rumors they’ll pay a certain amount of money per head to anyone who turns in partisans,” he says. “Are you going to turn me in?” asks Linden without looking at him. Borrello doesn’t answer: the dog has returned and is again traveling the imaginary line that separates the property from those around it. Seeing the animal, Borrello stands and heads over to the house. Linden tells himself he doesn’t want to see what will happen next, but he sees it before it even happens, when his mind flashes back to the slow death of the other dog, in his arms. When Borrello comes out again, however, he is carrying a knife and a bit of pork fat; he sits down, cuts a piece, and flings it far, in the dog’s direction. The animal lowers its forehead, heads cautiously over to where the piece fell, and gobbles it up. Borrello titters; it’s the first time Linden’s seen him do that; he cuts another piece of pork fat and tosses it somewhat closer. The animal lets out a snort and swallows the second piece: forehead lifted, it’s sniffing the air while moving its head from right to left, trying to guess where the next piece will land. Borrello drops the fat almost at his feet and the animal hesitates for a moment, then slinks through the grass and gobbles it up while keeping an eye on him. Borrello extends one hand and the dog approaches and takes the piece from his palm with the utmost delicacy. The animal begins eating while it looks in turn at each of the two men. Linden can see that it’s young, little more than a puppy; it must have belonged to one of the families in the area who left seeing that the war was headed their way, or for some other reason. When Borrello runs his greasy hand over its back, the animal lets out a thin stream of urine.

  * * *

  —

  When Borrello returns from this next trip, he pulls some dark corduroy pants from his backpack and spreads them out. “Here you go,” he says, looking away. “This was all I could get.” Linden considers the offer for a moment and then starts to take off the pants he’s wearing, which the other man cut to one knee so he could put on the splint; as he does, he drops the awl. Borrello hears the sound it makes when it hits the ground and he turns: he looks at Linden as if for the first time. The object lies on the ground at an equal distance between the two men, completely inert and senseless, Linden realizes. Borrello takes a step toward him, picks it up, and chucks it in the direction of the mountains. That night he locks Linden in the shed again, while he sleeps in the house.

  * * *

  —

  He attacked the carabinieri station with a young guy who worked at Fiat, while on their way into the mountains; they had been introduced to each other by an engineer who’d lived in the same house as he did, in the north of Turin. The single engineer had never hidden his antifascist feelings, but he swathed them in a jokiness that kept him safe from reprisals, as if he—a single guy who often wooed the young ladies who lived in the building, sometimes giving them perfumes as gifts—had the ability to pass off his criticisms as just venting among the obviously like-minded. Every manifestation of discontent on his part actually seemed like contentment and each rejection, support. Linden never heard of his having success with any of the young women in the building but, in some sense, he was successful with Linden, as Linden really believed he was a fascist; so his invitation to head into the mountains was a surprise. The best word to describe him was perhaps “meticulous”; he always had his hair and mustache perfectly trimmed, and he usually shaved twice a day, in the morning and at night, which was very annoying for the young women who shared a bathroom with him when they were trying to prepare for their dates, which were never with that single engineer, who tried to stay fit and young—though the last time Linden saw him, he seemed surprisingly aged.

  * * *

  —

  The young Fiat worker died six days later during an attack on a truck heading up to the Luserna San Giovanni quarries transporting explosives. The truck was guarded, and the guard opened fire.

  * * *

  —

  A day before he died, the young man had confessed that he was the one traveling around the outskirts of Turin at night, destroying fascist symbols, for example, ripping the fasces off of houses built by the government. The police had been looking for him for weeks, with no success; he’d also been mentioned in the press.

  * * *

  —

&
nbsp; He said something had to be done. But he never said what, and Linden never asked. Never.

  * * *

  —

  One morning, two days later, Borrello discovers that the dog has dug under the shed door and slipped inside during the night; curled up in Linden’s blankets, it observes Borrello without surprise when he opens the door. Borrello had gone back down into town the day before; he’d also bought a newspaper, which he read in the house, in silence, with a worried expression printed on his face. Before passing it on to Linden, he carefully cut out an article, without comment; he’d bought some lamb bones for the dog, which he hung overnight from one of the house’s overhangs, in a net, so the cold would keep them fresh and the dog couldn’t reach them. Now the animal is pacing around them and looking up at them with a worried expression that reminds Linden of Borrello’s and makes him think of a statement often repeated by some members of the Resistance: that the volunteer militias of the Salò regime, and its informants and collaborators, fought only for money. Maybe it’s true, thinks Linden, but Borrello, who is obviously a fascist, or was, contradicts what his comrades-in-arms said, as he doesn’t seem to receive any remuneration for his ideas; in fact, he seems to have renounced all remuneration and everything superfluous in order to hold on to something essential that Linden doesn’t even understand. In that renunciation he seems to be inflicting a punishment on himself, but Linden doesn’t know what Borrello renounced or how much what he renounced and the renunciation itself meant to him; and Linden doesn’t know anything about the other man’s life, except that he wrote books, which Linden has been studying over the last few days without understanding much of anything, and made objects, which don’t look like books but maybe can also be read somehow. Linden also knows that the other man studied medicine at some point: Borrello told him that to distract him or perhaps to distract himself as he changed his bandages the previous day. “The head wound is already practically healed,” he told him; the leg wound, on the other hand, is still open, though the bone is no longer visible and he is feeling less pain. Borrello had started to cough more than usual, and sometimes seemed to be choking. While he dressed Linden’s wounds, the dog remained at a distance, as if it feared that the wounds or the deep, violent coughing could be contagious.

  * * *

  —

  Borrello leaves him in the shed again that night, but he goes without locking the door, and Linden believes it to be some sort of message: he can escape, if he wants, he can leave when he wants to and is able. Borrello was more absent than usual throughout the day: he dug up some potatoes and some spinach that was practically covered by weeds and he washed up behind the house with water from a pump. Linden watched him, absorbed in his thoughts: on a few occasions Borrello pulled a newspaper clipping out of his jacket pocket and read it, over and over, as if it were written in an incomprehensible language. That night he left Linden a few extra blankets, the ones he’d used to make a bed in the house, but Linden’s main source of heat during the night comes from the dog, who sleeps curled up at his feet and sometimes snorts and growls, as if facing enemies in its dreams, enemies that are sometimes strangers and sometimes familiar.

  * * *

  —

  What could they hope to know about the motivations of someone like Borrello, he’d wondered a couple of times. What could they know about events happening in Rome and places like that, they, who had never visited those places, who remained isolated in the mountains in a state of permanent tension, all of them in the mountains for different reasons and fighting against different enemies, sometimes strangers and sometimes familiar: a disrespectful work supervisor who happened to be a fascist, a neighbor who reported them to get a little bit of property, someone luckier than they were, who’d managed to rise slightly above the irrelevance all lives transpire within, and get a political post or something like that. The orders they received came from the political headquarters in Turin, through a mail system that muddled their justification, if they’d ever had one, and all they could do was act accordingly. None of them had much schooling, which filled them with a mix of shame and pride, the latter because they—those who’ve been excluded from history—now find themselves making history. He likes to remember the monikers of his brigade members and their professions; he’ll forget the names over time, but not the jobs: there was a miller; a Communist typographer; a former carabinieri officer who’d deserted the Royal Army when the situation became untenable; a lathe operator; two bricklayers; an accountant from Turin; two local brothers, about whom they said one was a man of few words and the other even fewer; the brigade’s political leader had worked in the Olivetti factory; there was a fourteen-year-old orphan who took care of the food and the mules, including La Petacci; five workers from the quarries who had joined them after an attack and were specialists in explosives; a British paratrooper they’d liberated from a police station; and a carpenter—him.

  * * *

  —

  One of those men had betrayed them, however. Linden has no doubt about that.

  * * *

  —

  He is woken by screams; they’re coming from the mountains, but rebound off them and seem closer than they actually are. Linden doesn’t yet understand the significance of the words, but he recognizes the familiar sound and violence of orders in German. The voices get close enough that he can also hear the stomping of half a dozen boots approaching along a path of rocks and pebbles, as well as some words in Italian. Someone kicks opens the door to the shed. It’s Borrello. “Whatever happens, don’t go out,” he orders, frightened.

  * * *

  —

  The six men are Waffen-SS, so Linden imagines most of them will be Italians, but actually only two are. When they approach, skirting the ravine, and enter the visual field offered by the slits in the shed’s walls, he sees that the SS have a man with them: he is dressed like a peasant, but Linden immediately understands that he’s another partisan. When the SS arrive, the dog escapes: it stops and watches them all from the property line, sniffing the air with its head lifted, pacing uneasily, expectantly. Borrello comes out of the house and goes over to them; he doesn’t speak. The German sergeant does, and one of the Italians rushes to translate; however Linden doesn’t need the translation. The sergeant asks to see Borrello’s papers, and he hands them over; after the sergeant verifies that they’re in order, he demands to know if he’s seen anything unusual in recent days. Borrello says no. The men look around and their gazes land on the shed. Linden holds his breath and instinctively withdraws from his lookout point as if they could see him there, but then immediately returns. The Italian suggests to the German sergeant that they investigate, but his superior officer seems not to hear him. “Do you live alone?” he finally asks through his interpreter. Borrello doesn’t respond. “He lives with the dog,” says one of the German soldiers, pointing to the bag of bones hanging outside the house. They all laugh and the situation seems to ease for a moment. Linden whispers to himself that they’ll end up just leaving, and the heat of his breath surprises him when it ricochets off the wall planks and hits him in the face: it’s a heavy breath, sullied by sleep and lack of food, but also by fear. The soldiers have formed a semicircle around the hanging bag of bones and are pointing at it, smiling, when one of them leaves the group and moves in Borrello’s direction: Linden gets a look at him, and almost cries out. “You don’t remember me, but I remember you,” the man says. Borrello looks at him for a moment. “Take off your helmet,” Borrello orders: the other man does, while the remaining Italian translates for the Germans, whose interest has moved off the bag of bones and onto the two men. “You used to have thick black hair,” says Borrello finally, “so we all called you ‘Blondie.’ You were with us when we expelled the rector from the university and put one of our own in his place. You once punched a young Communist and he came back with his comrades: word spread and we went to your aid. It was in the square, in front
of the cathedral. They brought sticks, but we had pistols. And there were more of us. You were always with the guy they called ‘The Roman,’ who died in another scuffle, at the Porta Trasimena,” he says. (You pretended to be a former carabinieri officer who had deserted, thinks Linden in silence. You said you were a Communist and that your name was “Monaci Luigi” but you asked us to call you by your nom de guerre, “Zosimus,” which you’d chosen because you were the oldest in the brigade and the most experienced. You gave us military training, you were in charge of target practice and weapons.) The other man nods. “He’s one of us, I know him,” he says, returning to the circle where the other men are. “He’s one of us?” asks the sergeant sarcastically; when he takes his pistol off his belt, the dog, expectantly silent on the property line, starts to bark, as if wanting to warn someone of the danger, but Borrello doesn’t move. The sergeant puts the pistol in Borrello’s hand and orders the interpreter to translate; then he says, pointing to the prisoner: “Kill him. If you are one of us it won’t be difficult for you. He’s a rebel bandit. We captured him last night. Or kill the dog, if you believe this man’s life is worth more than his. You decide.”