The Villa Triste

by Lucretia Grindle

  ‘Those are my girls.’ Achilleo Venta wheeled himself over to the window. His face and voice softened as he looked down at the huge black-and-white pigs. ‘Finest mothers in the universe.’

  He looked over his shoulder at Pallioti. ‘You know anything about pigs?’ he asked. Then he started to laugh. ‘No joke intended,’ he chortled. ‘Of course you don’t know anything about pigs. You don’t know anything about any animals. Don’t know anything about any-lucretia Thing that happens outside the walls of your fancy cities. Where did you come from, Rome?’

  ‘Florence.’

  Pallioti thought he saw something flicker in the old man’s face. A moment later, Achilleo Venta said, ‘I almost died there. But I didn’t.’

  ‘What happened?’

  It was Eleanor Sachs who had asked the question. As she stepped closer to the wheelchair, it occurred to Pallioti that the old man was not much bigger than she was. In her jeans and running shoes, with the jacket and no make-up, what vestiges of adulthood there were that hung about her seemed to have been peeled away. Standing between them, he felt as if he had tender old age on one hand, and vulnerable youth on the other.

  Achilleo Venta looked up at her.

  ‘Pneumonia,’ he said after a moment.

  He wheeled his chair in a slow half-circle. One of the mittens caught in a spoke. He tugged at it angrily.

  ‘At least that’s what they told me. You ask me’ – his fingers worked at the safety pin – ‘I think it was just death. Everyone was dying, that God-awful winter. They said it was pneumonia. But I know.’ He peered at Pallioti. ‘I saw. People just died. They just died because they wanted to. Because they couldn’t stand it any more. Living like rats.’

  Pallioti leaned down and unclasped the pin. He untangled the mitten and handed it to the old man.

  ‘Pneumonia, despair.’ Achilleo Venta looked at the mitten and dropped it on the floor. ‘What’s the difference?’ he asked. ‘In the end? Six months, I was in the hospital. I suppose they kept me alive. I was there then, too.’ He pointed towards the wall. ‘Over there, that’s me. 11 August 1944. I got a medal for it. It wasn’t over then,’ he added, nodding, his jaw working, chewing on the memory. ‘The fighting went on for days, but no one likes to remember that.’

  Achilleo Venta stared at the mitten on the floor. He shrugged, his frail shoulders rising and falling inside the worn jacket that was too big for him.

  ‘You had to go in,’ he said. ‘They sent us in, building after building. One by one, to clear them out. Like rats. Shooting the Fascisti, it was like shooting rats.’

  Crossing to the wall, Pallioti peered at the black-and-white picture Achilleo Venta had pointed to. A row of young men, no older than boys, stood beaming in front of a wall of rubble. They were in shirtsleeves. Several wore shorts. Some shouldered rifles. Others held handguns. In a separate frame beside it, in a case identical to the one Maria Valacci had shown him, a medal nested on a bed of white satin, its ribbon bright beside the faded photograph.

  ‘Is this Massimo?’ Pallioti tapped vaguely at the glass.

  Without looking up, the old man nodded. ‘Second from the left,’ he said.

  It had been a guess, but now, peering at the picture, Pallioti picked out the square face, the bold, flat features and the broad shoulders that already suggested the barrel chest of the man on the video tape.

  ‘Did you know him well?’

  He asked the question quietly, hoping it was not a push too far, that it would not clamp down whatever trapdoor it was that had opened in Achilleo Venta’s mind and made him decide to ‘grant this interview’ after all.

  ‘Did,’ he said, snorting. ‘Still do. Always will. Not much choice.’

  ‘Why is that?’

  Pallioti turned around. The old man had wheeled himself close to the glass and was staring intently down into the field. One of the largest sows had given up rooting and was scratching her back, swaying in time to absent music as she rubbed against a muddy chain that had been looped between two posts.

  ‘He’s my cousin,’ Achilleo Venta said finally. He looked up. ‘Balestro. That was my mother’s name. He’s her brother’s boy. My cousin, Piero.’ He snorted again. ‘Always bigger than life. Always better than anyone else. That’s why we called him Massimo. I worshipped him.’

  Pallioti could sense as much as see the look on Eleanor Sachs’s face. Before he could stop her, she asked, ‘Why didn’t he change his name, like the others?’

  The old man spun the chair towards her, wheels creaking. There was apparently nothing wrong with his hearing.

  ‘Why would he?’ he demanded, his voice heavy with sarcasm. ‘Why would Piero Balestro change his name? He had nothing to hide! He was a hero! He had nothing to be ashamed of. Oh, no. Not Massimo!’ He rolled the words on his tongue, making them sound obscene. Startled, Eleanor Sachs stepped backwards. The mitten scuffed under her shoe.

  Achilleo Venta laughed. ‘Massimo,’ he said, ‘always was better than all the rest of us.’

  Pallioti bent and picked up the mitten. He placed it on the table. Achilleo Venta sat in his wheelchair, his chest heaving. His mouth worked. A thin line of saliva dribbled onto his chin. He wiped it away, shaking his head as if the anger had both embarrassed him and taken him by surprise. ‘Peter Bales.’ The words were not much more than a whisper. ‘That’s the name he used sometimes. Afterwards. When he felt like it. Peter Bales. If that’s what you want to know.’

  Pallioti waited a moment. Then he asked, ‘Why did you say “ashamed”?’

  ‘Huh.’ The old man waved a hand, shooing the question away.

  Pallioti persisted, gently.

  ‘Signor Venta,’ he asked again, ‘why would Massimo be ashamed?’

  Achilleo Venta looked down at his lap. He shrugged, trying to cover the bitterness that had erupted – shown itself, Pallioti suspected, after a lifetime of being tamped down, hidden away like a dirty black kernel in Little Lamb’s heart.

  ‘We all have something to hide,’ Achilleo Venta muttered finally. ‘Isn’t that what they say? Even if you’re a fancy doctor.’

  ‘Piero Balestro was a doctor?’

  ‘Was. Later.’

  As he spoke, the old man’s voice sank to something like a murmur. The words were stilted, muttered like a prayer, a secret catechism of resentment that Pallioti suspected he had recited to himself day after day, year after year, like a rosary.

  ‘The rest of us get shot at. Find our houses in ruins, burnt, trampled, shat in. Have to beg for our bread. Starve. Dig fucking German mines out of our fields, if we live to get back to them. He goes to a fancy medical school. In America. Doctor Peter Bales.’

  ‘How did that happen?’

  Achilleo Venta stared at his hands, lying half useless in his lap. ‘You want to know more, you’d better ask him.’

  Pallioti nodded. ‘I’d like to.’

  ‘Well, it isn’t difficult!’ The old man’s head snapped up. Anger made his voice tremble. ‘He lives in Siena. Massimo, Massimo,’ he muttered, turning his chair away. ‘Biggest damn house on the damn block. Il Castello. Il Palazzo. Of course.’

  Over the bent figure, the hunched shoulders and the faded wool of the blue beret, Pallioti met Eleanor Sachs’s eyes. Her face was a combination of confusion and excitement. They had found Massimo, almost without having to look, but neither of them had any idea what it was, exactly, that had upset Achilleo Venta quite so much. Apparently just the fact of his cousin’s existence. And perhaps that was enough. Perhaps it had always been like that, Pallioti thought, since they were little boys. Blood didn’t take much account of subtleties – of once removed or twice. Cousins might as well be siblings. Love and hate, jealousy, devotion, it was all knotted into a lifetime. Throw in a war, a struggle for survival, and who knew what could happen.

  ‘Signor Venta,’ he asked gently, ‘was your cousin Piero, Massimo, the leader of your GAP unit?’

  Achilleo Venta looked up, his face momentarily blank
, as if he was surprised to find Pallioti and Eleanor in the room. Then he shook his head and said, ‘Of course. Massimo was always the leader of everything, wasn’t he?’

  ‘Did he give you your name?’

  ‘Little Lamb.’ Achilleo Venta smiled, but his hands moved fretfully in his lap. ‘That’s what my mother called me when I was a baby,’ he said. ‘It made Massimo laugh. He thought it was a big joke.’

  ‘Not a very funny one.’

  ‘Doesn’t matter.’

  Achilleo Venta fingered the remaining mitten that dangled from his jacket sleeve.

  ‘I hated it,’ he said after a moment. ‘But he always had to be the boss. Or at least, he thought he did. Others thought different, but why would that matter?’

  ‘Which others?’ Pallioti bent down, trying to see the old man’s face. ‘Lilia?’ he asked.

  It had been a guess, but Achilleo Venta nodded. He was watching his hands, the gnarled fingers plucking at a hole in the thumb of the mitten. He found a loose thread and yanked it.

  ‘Lilia,’ he said. ‘Lilia, and the other one. The boy. Not that they were ever apart.’

  ‘They were each other,’ Pallioti murmured, his eyes fastened on the old man’s face.

  Achilleo Venta nodded. His hands stilled. ‘They were each other.’ He looked up at Pallioti. ‘Massimo couldn’t stand that,’ he said. ‘But he didn’t get everything, not everything he wanted.’

  ‘Not Lilia?’

  Achilleo Venta smiled. His cracked lips stretched over toothless gums. ‘No,’ he said. ‘Not Lilia. And she was worth ten men.’

  ‘Were you in the hospital, still, in June?’

  The old man nodded. His eyes were fixed somewhere behind Pallioti, and far farther away than that.

  ‘They took me to Fiesole. To the monastery where they kept the crazy people, and the invalids. The weaklings, like me. They said there was something wrong with my lungs. In June, Massimo came. He took me away, found a doctor. He got me drugs. Then we went back to the city. To shoot rats.’

  ‘And Lilia?’

  The rheumy eyes looked back to Pallioti, fastened on his face.

  ‘Gone,’ the old man whispered. ‘All gone.’

  ‘Papa!’

  Pallioti felt a rush of cold air and turned around to see a very large person standing in the open doorway. With her padded hunter’s coat, overalls and boots, it was hard to tell if she was a woman or a man. Only the braid of long dark hair hanging over her shoulder gave her away.

  ‘Signora Venta?’ Pallioti straightened up as she strode into the room.

  ‘Who the hell are you?’ she said, ignoring his outstretched hand. ‘And what the hell are you doing in my house?’

  Pallioti regarded her for a moment, and decided politesse was pointless. He pulled his credentials out again.

  ‘Your father has been kind enough to give us his time.’ Pallioti caught Eleanor’s eye. ‘It was very gracious of him, and we are just going.’

  ‘Now, wait. Wait a goddamn minute,’ she exclaimed. ‘My father’s an old man, a hero. You can’t just come in here and—’

  Agata Venta made a snatch for the proffered credentials but was not fast enough. Her hand was still hanging in mid-air and she was still protesting as Pallioti took Eleanor’s arm and propelled her quickly towards the door. He raised a hand to the old man, and was sure he saw Achilleo Venta smile.

  A pair of dead pheasants lay across the top of the balustrade, their disjointed heads staring limply down into the yard. A broken shotgun had been dropped beside them. Pallioti could not see the dog; presumably it was chained up somewhere. As they emerged it let out a furious volley of barking. They had started down the steps, Eleanor just ahead of him, when a voice called out.

  ‘Dottore!’

  Pallioti turned around.

  In his haste to wheel after them, the rug had slipped off Achilleo Venta’s lap, revealing small bent legs encased in green woollen trousers that had seen better days. A red patch of sock showed through a hole in the slippers that were laced onto his feet like a child’s. Under the jaunty tilt of the faded blue beret, the old man’s face was lit up. His milky eyes blinked.

  ‘Do you know what I called him?’ he asked. ‘Massimo? I was his Little Lamb. But do you know what I called that bastard behind his back?’

  Pallioti shook his head.

  Agata Venta had come out onto the portico behind her father. She loomed, towering over the back of his chair. Her mouth had opened. She was reaching for him, but something in the old man’s voice stopped her.

  ‘Jesus Christ,’ Achilleo Venta said. He let out a bark of laughter. ‘That was my joke.’

  Grasping the wheels, he rolled towards the top of the steps.

  ‘Jesus Christ.’ He jerked the brake on the chair. ‘That’s what I called Massimo.’ His bird-like chest rose and fell. His eyes fastened on Pallioti’s. ‘Do you want to know why?’ he asked.

  Pallioti nodded. He could feel Eleanor Sachs’s hand, her fingers digging into his elbow.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I called him Jesus Christ’ – the tendons in the old man’s neck strained as he leaned forward – ‘because it was a miracle. Jesus Christ,’ Achilleo Venta whispered. ‘Because he went to hell. Then, after three days, he came back from the dead.’

  Chapter Thirty

  ‘What just happened back there?’

  Neither of them had spoken since leaving the farm. Pallioti had reversed and turned quickly, driving down the rutted track, the sound of barking trailing after them like smoke. That had been five minutes ago. Now, Eleanor Sachs was staring out of the window. She ran a hand through her hair and shook her head.

  ‘He called Massimo Jesus Christ,’ she said, ‘because after three days he came back from the dead. What does that mean? I’m telling you,’ she added, ‘he’s lost it. Is this about Massimo being in the Villa Triste? Was it, what? Three days? Four? Why does it matter anyway? Who’s counting?’

  Achilleo Venta, Pallioti thought. Achilleo Venta was counting. He’d been counting for the better part of sixty years.

  The old man’s words bounced in his head – jumbled with pictures of a bright-blue mitten, stained woollen trousers, walnut skin creased and folded as a baby bird’s.

  They came around a corner. He focused on the ribbon of road. He had turned in the opposite direction coming away from the farm, suddenly sure of where he was.

  ‘I have to think,’ he said, and abruptly turned left.

  Eleanor Sachs clutched at the dashboard as the car swung across the road. They slowed, pulling into the empty apron of a parking lot. She looked around.

  ‘What is this place?’ she asked.

  Pallioti glanced up. Beyond the Renault’s tinted glass, a damp field still littered with traces of last night’s snow stretched to the slope of Monte Siepi. In the middle of it the skeleton of a ruined church rose up, its windows empty, arches naked against the leaden sky. It was every bit as forlorn and magnificent as he remembered. A flight of crows lifted from the broken wall of a cloister, spiralled like black kites and landed again. He killed the engine.

  ‘San Galgano.’

  Eleanor Sachs looked at him. ‘San Galgano?’

  Pallioti nodded. ‘Built in the twelfth century, by the same monks who built Siena. Cistercians. They were excellent bookkeepers, among other things. It was abandoned by fifteen hundred. The campanile actually collapsed during Mass.’

  ‘Oh.’

  Eleanor leaned forward, her hands resting on the dashboard. ‘I’ve heard about it,’ she said. ‘I’ve just never seen it before.’

  In the grey light of the November day, the building seemed to float, its ruined walls melting into the whitening sky, the eye of its rose window staring, sightless, across centuries.

  ‘Galgano met St Michael,’ Pallioti said. ‘On the hill, over there. Afterwards, he gave up being a knight and became a hermit. When his family came to try to talk him out of it, he thrust his sword into a stone and offered i
t up to the archangels.’

  He was aware of Eleanor watching him. He turned to her and smiled.

  ‘Later,’ he said, ‘three villains tried to steal it. But the stone cried out, and a wolf came and chewed their hands off. You can see them,’ he added. ‘There’s a chapel on the hill. The stone and the sword are still in the floor. The hands are in a glass case.’ He opened his door. ‘I have some calls to make. There’s a cafe, beyond the chapel. Let’s meet in ten minutes for a cup of coffee.’

  She nodded without speaking and got out of the car. A minute later, Pallioti stood watching her over the roof of the Renault – a small dark figure, picking its way across a wet snowy field towards a ruin.

  ‘I don’t believe that’s a human hand,’ Eleanor Sachs said. ‘It looks more like a monkey’s paw to me. And it certainly isn’t eight hundred years old.’

  She blew on the top of her coffee. Pallioti smiled.

  ‘I don’t suppose you believe Petrarch’s cat is Petrarch’s cat, either.’

  ‘Certainly not.’

  She rolled her eyes and reached for a packet of sugar. Apart from the two women behind the counter, they were the only people in the cafe. It was barely noon. Eleanor Sachs emptied the sugar into her coffee and stirred it with a small plastic stick. Then she looked at him.

  ‘Did you make your phone calls?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘So,’ she asked, ‘will you tell me who Lilia is?’

  ‘The GAP unit – the three men were arrested during an attempted assassination, outside the Pergola Theatre, on Valentine’s Day. She was shot, but she got away.’

  ‘And she was the woman the all-powerful Massimo couldn’t have?’

  Pallioti picked up his own cup and regarded her for a moment. The cold had put a blush of pink into her cheeks.

  ‘That’s right,’ he said. ‘At least, I think so.’

  Eleanor eyed him.

  ‘Worth ten men. She must have been something.’

  ‘Yes, I think she was.’

  ‘What happened to her?’

  ‘She’s dead.’