The Italian Wife

by Kate Furnivall

  She gave him a smile. ‘I’m more all right than Carlo Olivera is. How bad is he?’

  ‘Bad enough.’

  ‘He should be in hospital.’

  ‘That would be a death warrant, so what’s the point? Thank God for your Roberto’s strong back. Olivera would never have made it this far on his own.’

  The tunnel had emerged halfway down the side of a mountain, surrounded by forested slopes in every direction and overlooking a verdant valley far below. Shadows slid from mountain to mountain like thieves on the run and grey rock ledges rose from the greenery as though trying to keep watch, their skin wrinkled and ancient. It was a world that was alien to Isabella, one that made her uneasy because there was always something unknown hidden in a forest. Something that laid its fingers on your soul.

  ‘You should have told me, Papa.’

  ‘How could I? You were unhappy enough. It was easier to lay the shooting at the door of a known Communist insurgent.’

  ‘Why did she do it?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘You’re lying, Papa.’

  He sighed and walked back to his patient.

  They know we’re here.

  Roberto’s words drummed in Isabella’s head and made the hairs rise on the back of her neck, ice cold. Her eyes darted from tree to tree. From rock to rock. Searching for a face, the glint of a rifle barrel, the movement of a shadow.

  They kept away from the bumpy track that ran along the hollow of the valley, and forged a path between the trees. It was harder going, especially on Roberto with the chalk-faced Communist on his back, but it was safer. Rosa trotted alongside her father, her hand resting on his thigh, her teeth clenched together in distress. They walked fast, up over the next ridge and down into a further wooded valley that was smaller and steeper. More secretive. No one spoke.

  For an hour the silence held them in its grip. The only sound was the splash of a heron as it took off among the reeds, rising into the air on the morning thermals and arcing off down the valley. Isabella was jumpy. She started at the rustle of branches brushing against each other in the wind and trod carefully over the carpet of autumn leaves under her feet. The forest was decaying, wet and lush, roots tangling, the earth was dark and muddy. The world was becoming quieter.

  Only Roberto’s breath behind her remained constant. She listened to the rhythm of it, step by step. She offered to carry the rifle for him but he gave her a bleak smile and declined to relinquish it. That told her too much. She kept her eyes scouring the mountainside on the opposite slope across the valley – it was the obvious place from which to launch an attack – but nothing moved. Beyond it lay the blur of further mountains.

  She tried to hold back the anger that was growing in her each time she looked behind at the burden on Roberto’s back. She wanted to throw Olivera’s broken figure to the earth and make Roberto run. Run on those long legs of his to somewhere safe and uncharted. Somewhere too far away for Mussolini to stretch his grasping fingers and steal Roberto’s life. She wasn’t willing to exchange Roberto for anyone else’s life, however hard they were fighting for Italy’s salvation.

  She was selfish when it came to Roberto. No one else could have him. He was hers to love and to spend the rest of her life with, talking far into the night about fishing or horses or building a fine new school or… Anything. Just talking. Heads together on a pillow. Hands entwined, stroking each other’s skin absent-mindedly while they discussed whatever it was that took their fancy at that moment. Committing to deep memory the feel of each other’s fingertips.

  She wouldn’t let him go.

  She wouldn’t.

  43

  The shot, when it rang out across the valley, missed its target. It slammed into Roberto instead of into the Communist hunched on his back. The crack of the rifle shattered the silence and sent Roberto spinning to the ground, Olivera crashing down beside him.

  Isabella heard the breath leave Roberto’s lungs and the air seemed to fracture around her. It was ten years ago, all over again. The rifle shot. The birds rising in panic. The blood on the shirt. For years the images had crept under the covers at night with her and now they were here again in broad daylight.

  She was struck mute with horror. Roberto. His name filled her head. Roberto.

  She hurled herself to the ground at his side. His eyes were closed. Not staring doll’s eyes like Luigi’s. Grief howled like a pack of wild dogs in her ears and her mind became clumsy, but her hands worked with swift efficient movements, as she’d seen her father do a thousand times. She eased back his jacket to open the site of the wound at his collarbone and managed to start breathing again when she saw his eyelids flicker open.

  ‘Papa!’

  She summoned her father who was busy pressing a pad on to Olivera’s chest to stop the bleeding.

  ‘Papa, come here.’

  He scurried over just as another bullet sent a spray of dark earth skittering over Olivera’s cheek.

  ‘Get under cover,’ Roberto hissed sharply to Isabella. He tried to sit up, but Dr Cantini and Isabella took his arms and edged him back behind a broad fir tree that hid him from view from across the valley. ‘Dottore,’ he said, ‘I’m all right. See to him.’ He gestured at Olivera.

  But Luca Peppe was already dragging his leader into the shelter of a tangle of bushes with Rosa, while Alessandro dodged behind a tree and took aim with Peppe’s rifle. Dr Cantini took a look at Roberto’s wound, probing with expert fingers.

  ‘A scratch,’ he announced with an encouraging smile.

  ‘Papa! How bad is it really?’

  ‘All right, the bullet has smashed your left clavicle, your collarbone. It is lodged inside there. I’ll do what I can to stem the bleeding.’ He worked quickly, before taping a pad over the area and tying Roberto’s arm up in a sling.

  The whole time Isabella’s gaze was fixed on Roberto’s face, following each flinch of his eyes or grimace of his mouth. She felt sick inside from the blood and the pain and the hatred. She wanted to take his hand in hers and walk him away from this valley of death.

  ‘Help me up, Isabella.’

  She didn’t argue. She tucked her shoulder under Roberto’s arm and eased him to his feet.

  ‘Pass me the rifle.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Isabella!’

  ‘No. Isn’t this enough?’

  He gently held her chin in his hand and gave it a tiny shake. ‘My love, there is no way out of here now for us. We die or we fight.’

  ‘No. If we fight we’ll die.’

  He leaned forward and kissed her forehead tenderly. ‘I won’t let you die.’

  For a long moment their eyes locked and then she turned and picked up the rifle.

  ‘You can’t fire it,’ she said flatly. ‘Not with a broken collarbone and a bullet inside you.’

  ‘No,’ he said in a soft voice, ‘I can’t.’

  She looked down at her own bandaged right hand and at Roberto’s patched left shoulder. She smiled oddly at him. ‘Together we make one person,’ she said.

  ‘Yes, Isabella. Together we make one person.’

  A shout of alarm from Alessandro jerked their attention back to the valley. ‘There on the ridge. Look! It’s the carabinieri.’

  Peppe snatched his rifle from the boy and zigzagged forward through the trees. Two shots rang out from the mountainside across the valley but they snicked harmlessly into the trunk of a larch, spitting pieces of bark into the air. Isabella’s pulse raced as she saw Peppe take aim and return fire.

  ‘Isabella,’ her father ordered, ‘get down.’

  But Isabella was off and running over to their right, step for step behind Roberto. Ducking behind bushes, swerving between trees, darting over fallen branches. The leaves under their feet silenced their footsteps; they kept low and in the shadows. Luck was on their side. The sun was behind their mountain, so their slopes were in shade, while it glared full in the face of the opposite side of the valley. A dark uniform stood
out like a black cat in snow.

  A smattering of shots was exchanged between Peppe and the carabinieri, and Isabella could see the uniforms spilling down from the higher slopes to the valley floor, though how they hoped to cross the open wetland there, she didn’t know.

  ‘Roberto, how did they find us?’

  He grimaced. ‘Informers must have told them about the tunnel. Nowhere is safe in Mussolini’s State of Italy. He has poisoned the minds of Italians and no one can trust his neighbour any more. So Sepe has sent his forces to scour the hillsides for us.’

  Still Roberto kept moving further down the valley and Isabella had to work hard to avoid tripping on the roots that writhed and twisted in her path. She knew what he was doing. Exactly as he must have done a thousand times when out hunting deer or wild boar in his forests at home. Outflanking them. She kept glancing across to the other side of the valley as she dodged behind trunks, dragging breath into her lungs, and bit by bit the far side of the rocky ridge came into view.

  ‘There.’ Roberto stopped dead and pointed.

  Tucked down beside the ridge in the safety of its overhang were three uniformed figures. Even to Isabella it was clear that the middle one was thin and angular, with a wealth of silver braid adorning his jacket and bicorn hat as he gesticulated at the others, issuing orders. It was Colonnello Sepe.

  ‘Now,’ Roberto whispered.

  He raised the rifle in his right hand and tucked it tight against his shoulder. Isabella stood in front of him with the barrel resting on her shoulder, taking the weight of it, and with her left hand she steadied it as Roberto sighted along it. When he was satisfied, he said again, ‘Now.’

  He pulled the trigger. She felt the kick. The recoil.The crack of the rifle was so loud it made her ears ring, just like on that day in the Milan market, but Roberto kept an arm around her from behind, holding them both together.

  The dark figure fell. Across the valley it looked small and insignificant, with other spiky figures fussing around it. Neither Roberto nor Isabella spoke, neither of them said the words, We have killed a man between us. Not out loud. Not for others to hear. But she could feel the shivers that gripped him at the thought of having taken a human life, and she knew neither of them would forget this day. She held him. Her cheek on his rough jacket, aware of the Communist’s blood that had soaked into its fabric. In the same way that the Communist’s hatred had soaked into her.

  She stared in silence out across the valley, shocked by the calmness of her thoughts, by the certainty that she could kill again if she had to.

  Is that what Luigi found? That the first time was hard but the second time came easier? And easier still the time after that. Isabella stood on the side of a windswept mountain and felt she understood her husband just a little more than before.

  ‘They’ll go now,’ Roberto told her. ‘Without their leader, the carabinieri will have no stomach for the fight. They’ll be frightened they will have to answer to someone for that bullet.’

  But even as they watched, a column of Blackshirts came marching up the valley.

  44

  They hid in a cave. The mountainside was pockmarked with them, each one known to Olivera and Peppe, each one prepared with undergrowth spread over the entrance, water, straw and kindling hidden away inside. A man could hold out here for weeks.

  The air in the cave was cool, the walls rough and glistening with moisture. Moss grew near the entrance like a green carpet but deeper inside the limestone rock there was a coppery taste in the air. As if the mountain breathed its ancient memories into the hollows within itself.

  ‘Take this.’

  Isabella was bathing Roberto’s wound with iodine. Her fingers opened his mouth and placed one of her father’s pills on his tongue. She could feel the heat building in him, the fire under his skin, and the jagged edges of the wound were looking raw and angry. She dropped a kiss on his dusty tangle of chestnut hair and rubbed her cheek across it. The bullet needed to come out but it was too dangerous for her father to attempt it here. She had to get him home.

  She crossed over deeper into the cave to where her father was seated on the ground next to Carlo Olivera who was lying on a bed of straw. Rosa lay tight alongside him, her hair touching his jaw, the chain of her mother’s crucifix wrapped around her wrist. Isabella crouched down beside them and could see plainly that Olivera didn’t look good. His skin had changed from chalky white to a greyish-blue colour that didn’t belong on skin, and deep lines of pain were gouging themselves down his cheeks. His eyes were closed and her father’s brown coat lay over him.

  ‘How is he?’ she asked in a low murmur, resting a hand on her father’s shoulder.

  The cave altered sound. It buffed the edges off words, making them softer, absorbing them into its rock walls.

  ‘He’s not too bad,’ her father said in his professionally cheerful tone, designed to give patients hope. ‘He’s had bad wounds before and come through them. I’ve patched him up more times than either of us can remember. He’s tough. Isn’t that so, Carlo?’

  The Communist’s mouth curved in a smile and his eyes dragged themselves open. ‘You can’t kill weeds.’

  Rosa lifted her head to watch her father’s face.

  ‘We’ll get you out of here tonight when it gets dark,’ Dr Cantini assured him. ‘Peppe is out there checking on the patrols. We’ll fix you up, so you can make Mussolini curse your name for years to come.’ He patted his friend’s limp arm.

  ‘You always were a rotten liar, Cantini.’

  ‘Don’t give up, my friend. Not yet.’

  The muddy blue eyes of the Communist settled on Isabella’s face and she could feel the force of them even now, the strength of will that had made him such a thorn in Mussolini’s side.

  ‘It is strange, Cantini, is it not’ – his words came in short bursts between each laboured breath – ‘that despite our friendship, our families have brought nothing but grief to each other.’

  Isabella’s father turned to look at her, his large head seeming unsteady, as though suddenly too heavy. ‘My daughter has the courage of a lioness.’

  Isabella blinked. Missed a breath. She had no idea. No idea that he thought such a thing.

  ‘Papa, thank you.’

  She kissed his cheek but he became gruff and businesslike.

  ‘How is your Roberto doing?’

  She would not be sidetracked. ‘Tell me what happened. If I have courage, I can bear the truth. Why did Allegra Bianchi shoot Luigi and me? And why did she leap from my tower?’

  Her father shook his head. ‘Leave the past where it is, Isabella. Think of your future.’ His eyes drifted to where Roberto was standing in the cave mouth, watching for movement among the trees beyond the barrier of branches. He was giving them privacy.

  ‘No, Papa. I need to know…’

  Before her father could refuse her again, Carlo Olivera raised a weak hand to silence him.

  ‘She has a right to know,’ he said softly.

  ‘No, Carlo, she has no right to —’

  ‘He was her husband.’

  Her father’s anger hardened his voice. ‘That’s why she does not need to be told.’

  ‘Signor Olivera, I have helped you today. I am asking you to help me now. Tell me why your wife shot us.’

  ‘I’m sorry, old friend,’ the Communist brushed his hand on her father’s arm, ‘but…’ A sudden cough ripped through his wounded chest and blood coloured his teeth.

  ‘Don’t talk.’

  But her father’s glare did not silence him.

  ‘Rosa, go and see if Luca Peppe is in sight yet. He will know what the Blackshirts are doing.’

  ‘No, Papa, let me stay.’ The child’s thin arms tightened around him.

  ‘Go, Rosa.’

  She gathered up her limbs and jumped to her feet. He waited until she was out of earshot before he continued.

  ‘My wife shot your husband because of what he did.’

  ‘You mean burning the
building with people in the attic.’ Isabella shuddered again at the image. ‘That was —’

  ‘No. Not that.’

  ‘What then?’

  ‘He came with his Blackshirt friend, Giorgio Andretti, to the house where my wife was living. They had found out where she was.’ His lungs were starting to rattle as he spoke. ‘They knew I was in Rome. Working with union men and organising strikes for better conditions. I was there for two months.’

  ‘Did he interrogate her?’

  Isabella pictured the truncheon in Luigi’s strong fist. Heard in her head the crack of it on fragile bones.