Once Night Falls

by Roland Merullo

  He tried to leave those thoughts behind, but they followed him along the path like the notes of Rachele’s nasal whine. Here was the house—Casa Weber, he was told, as the captain and his guard left him at the door and began setting up positions in the yard. He heard one of the soldiers say the house had once belonged to an Englishman! Gray stone, turrets, it had the look of a small castle. A peasant woman, hair wrapped in a red kerchief, greeted him with respect and led him through the front entrance and to an upstairs bedroom furnished with a bed and bureau. The walls were whitewashed as if it were a room in an asylum. There were two windows looking out on a view of La Maddalena’s low-lying landscape of wind-carved gray stone and lively green sea, but there was no mattress on the bed.

  “The mattress we will get tomorrow, Excellency,” the woman said apologetically. “We had barely any notice from the authorities. Only last night, we were told—”

  “Fine, fine, what is your name?”

  “Nicolina, Excellency. We are glad to have you here. There is a woman next door to do your laundry, and I will cook for you. And the soldiers will guard the house. The fish is fresh nearly every day, and, though they told me you can’t have radio or newspapers, you can walk and swim. And there is a man here, Vittorio, to play cards with.”

  “Bene, grazie,” he said. “Vittorio is also the name of my first son.”

  Nicolina stood there for a moment, her hands clasped in front of her apron, then eventually seemed to understand that her new guest wanted to be left alone. She excused herself and closed the door quietly behind her. Mussolini took off his jacket and rolled it into a makeshift pillow, then lay down on the steel coils. He had always been proud of his ability to endure discomfort. He’d skied bare-chested on the Abruzzan slopes; he rose early, usually on a few hours’ sleep; he ate little, even in the days when his stomach could have endured a larger meal. Usually these disciplines gave him a strange kind of peace.

  But peace was the last thing he was experiencing at that moment. An impenetrable darkness had fallen over him, a sense of hopelessness, of the future being emptied of anything worthwhile. He lay on his metal bed, listening for the sound of planes. But there was only silence now. Maybe later, he’d get up and write Claretta . . . if they would even allow him pen and paper. But what would he say? And what were the chances he would ever touch her flesh again?

  He rolled onto his other side. All those years, all that effort, and here he was, sleeping on metal coils with a wrinkled suit coat for a pillow.

  Nicolina had called him Excellency. At least they’d arranged for him to be taken care of by kind people while awaiting his destiny.

  There was a knock on the door. A man appeared there with a change of clothing and to ask what il Duce wanted for his midday meal. This man, too, referred to him as Excellency, was deferential, respectful. Perhaps he understood, as others in this country seemed not to, what this Excellency had done for people like him, what Italy would have looked like had this Duce not been in power the past twenty-three years. Perhaps he remembered the violent trade union demonstrations, the strikes that had crippled whole industries, the street crime and ruinous inflation, the way Italy’s reputation—even as one of the victors of World War I—had been turned to shit.

  When the man left, Mussolini got up and washed in the basin, changed into the brown trousers and white shirt, threw open the shutters, and stood there, looking out. Soldiers around the house, even a machine-gun emplacement! Beyond them, a road, a few plain homes, a stretch of stony beach, and two fishing boats in the small harbor. He could see the Persefone steaming away across the wind-whipped bay. A plane growled and crossed the airspace above the island. He squinted, trying to read the insignia, and could not.

  Thirty-Two

  In the early-morning hours, having awakened on his mossy bed before first light showed over the mountains of the Valtellina, Luca made the long trek down the hillside behind his mother’s house and waited, silent as a fox, in the trees behind her yard. Your son has come home, a killer, he thought as he watched the back door and ran his eyes across the roofline. The woman hiding in the attic was the same woman who’d welcomed him into her poor little house—moldy walls, crooked floors—a block from the lakeshore when he arrived to take her daughter out for the first time. That date, unforgettable, was for a musical evening at a villa in the hills, and it had cost him a week’s pay. Dressed in their finest clothes, he and Sarah had sat on wooden folding chairs on an expansive lawn. A uniformed server moved through the crowd, offering glasses of wine and small plates of various delicacies. They’d sat close to each other without touching, then kissed for the first time on the bus ride home.

  It was painful to remember those days, that luxury, hard to believe it was anything more than a dream. Harder still to think about Sarah alone in the cabin and her mother suffering in the attic heat. As a boy, he had sometimes asked his parents to let him climb up there, and on those days, he’d concoct imaginary worlds with a few old boxes and the extra set of pots and dishes his mother had inherited and which the family never used. One of his grandfathers, long dead now and a veteran of the Great War, had made him a gift of a set of painted wooden soldiers, tanks, artillery guns, airplanes. On cool fall Saturdays, he’d set up imaginary battles on the boards of the attic floor, make heroic assaults, fly the miniature wooden plane over the front, machine-gunning the enemy.

  He remembered it now with an odd mixture of nostalgia and shame. War had seemed so simple then, his own heroism inevitable. Now he understood all too well that war was the most purely evil aspect of life. Sin in the flesh, not thrilling or romantic in the least. And heroism, he suspected, was always, always, peppered with terror.

  Even before the Germans arrived, he’d witnessed that evil and that terror: the Blackshirts and Fascist squadristi marauding through the streets looking for victims to beat and torture. One of their favorite entertainments, in the name of il Duce, of course, was to find someone who displeased them—a union member, a liberal journalist, a socialist, an academic—hold the man down, and pour castor oil into him by force, filling his belly with it until the man begged them to stop, and then, when they stopped, he’d shit his pants and vomit and often enough end up dead of dehydration. Tormented, humiliated, tortured, and killed. And these were Italians murdering Italians.

  He remembered that his father had kept a photo of Giacomo Matteotti up in that same attic, between the pages of a family scrapbook. He wondered if it might still be there. Matteotti had been a socialist, his father told him, and had stood up to Mussolini—perhaps the only politician in all of Italy with the courage to do so. One day he’d been snatched from the streets of Rome by a carful of these squadristi. Pulled into the back seat as he walked home from his office. A few days later, his body, brutally beaten, was found in a ditch in the hills east of the capital. Matteotti was a popular figure, a hero to many, and his death, and the obvious connection to Mussolini, had come within a whisker of toppling il Duce.

  As he waited, Luca tried to understand Mussolini, tried to probe the man’s mind. It all came from the urge for power, he supposed. But, having so little urge for that kind of power himself—the power to injure others—it was a difficult concept to grasp, a puzzle. It was like the situation with the Jews, another puzzle. In the early years, Mussolini had said nothing about Jews. He’d even had a Jewish mistress for a time, and the woman, Margherita Sarfatti, had remained his friend and adviser until she fled to South America in 1938 when, under Hitler’s influence, Mussolini instituted the “racial laws.” Everyone knew this. Until that year, even Fascist Party membership had been open to Jews. And then, by some evil magic, Mussolini had fallen under Hitler’s spell, and his urge for power had been twisted even further. Now it wasn’t just labor organizers and socialists who were the enemies but Jews, all of them, even completely powerless ones like Sarah and Rebecca, people who would cause no trouble at all to anyone, ever.

  As time went on—1939, 1940, 1941—Italian Jews were torm
ented, stripped of their jobs and titles, as if Mussolini were a little boy trying to please his violent older brother. One could imagine him signing the new decrees and looking north and west, catching the brother’s eye, hoping for a nod of approval.

  But Mussolini himself had never sent Jews to the work camps. That was a new development, Hitler’s idea, and the rumors flew. That they weren’t really work camps at all but death camps. That there was a fleet of trains bringing them to these camps, like cattle, by the hundreds of thousands. Luca had heard of these things but never witnessed them with his own eyes. Still, from the stories about the squadristi and Matteotti, he understood that violence fed on itself, achieved a kind of mob momentum, and that it wouldn’t stop until it was met by violence from the other side.

  At that point—just when news reached him that the Germans had begun rounding up Jews in France and sending them away—he’d told Sarah that similar arrests would soon happen in Italy, and he’d convinced her, against her will, to leave her home and move to various safe places and then up to the cabin. He’d told his mother to warn Rebecca and, as it turned out, not a second too soon. Two days later, the Gestapo came to their house on Quercia Street in the flats down by the water. They’d smashed windows and taken what little of value they could find. But Sarah and Rebecca were gone.

  Now he hid in his own back yard, waiting to see his mother.

  Shortly after first light, she emerged, as he knew she would, and brought out food for her hens, collected the eggs, filled a bowl of water for them. Luca counted eight now instead of nine. He wondered if a fox or one of the local dogs had gotten a free meal. It would mean fewer eggs.

  He watched his mother move on her heavy legs and aching hips, and tried to imagine guiding her and Sarah and Sarah’s mother over the mountains into Switzerland. Six kilometers it would be, no more. But in places, the terrain was all but impassable, steep as a ladder leaning against the second story of a building. And the border was heavily guarded by soldiers who set their dogs on you first and asked for identification later.

  When his mother finished her chores, Luca made his low two-note whistle, then the coo of a dove. He watched the joy bloom on her face; saw her look around, as if casually, glancing twice at the Rosso house; and then saw her step into the woods as if searching for some lost item there or hunting for berries or ferns to stanch her hunger. Without much difficulty, she was able to climb up as far as the stone behind which he hid. She looked around again, then reached down and put her hand on the side of his face as she’d always done. He held the hand there briefly and asked how she was.

  “Fine, Luca,” she said. “Everything the same.”

  “I know when you’re lying,” he told her, and she looked back again, then crouched down and told him about her new duties—cooking for the Germans!—and then, after more hesitation, about the way she had been treated and the visit from the redhead.

  Listening to her voice, watching the face he knew so well twitch with humiliation, Luca felt a familiar tightening in his chest. He was breathing through his nose, lips pressed together; he was remembering the fury—almost a satanic spirit—that had come over him when he’d stabbed the Fascist. He was remembering the scene at Piazzale Loreto. He pictured the SS man making his mother suck crumbs of cheese from his finger, and he suddenly knew that he would kill again. He understood perfectly now, from inside his bones. He let the fire build. By the time his mother finished speaking, he already knew what he would do. “I’ve brought you some mushrooms,” he told her, squeezing the words out between his teeth.

  “I know. You always do.”

  “No, Mother. I’ve brought you some lepiota.” He took the small mesh bag from his backpack and handed it to her. “Please be careful with them. Don’t use them unless it’s an emergency. But if you have to, one day, when you feel the time is right, when we decide you’re ready to escape, mix them into a cacciatore and let your new friends have a fine last meal.”

  His mother hesitated, fixed him with a look. Not judgment, not even surprise, just a kind of curiosity, as if she were wondering what had become of her gentle son. Instead of resisting, as he expected, she said only, “How long will it take? For them?”

  “An hour at most. One very bad hour. By then, you and Rebecca will be gone.”

  “How?”

  “Up, over the mountains.”

  “And then how?”

  “I’ll find a way.”

  She nodded, glanced down at the mesh bag and then at him, almost as if it gave her a physical pain to see his face so infrequently. He thought she might change her mind then, refuse to take the lepiota, and part of him wished she would. But she held on to the bag and stood up. Her legs were strong, he thought; she’d be able to make the climb.

  “How is Rebecca?”

  “Alive.”

  “Sarah’s alive, too. Tell her mother she’s—” He’d started to say the beautiful word incinta, pregnant, but then, for some reason, he felt a spasm of superstition and held it back. “She’s well, Mother. Tell Rebecca she’s well.”

  A weak smile. His mother made the sign of the cross over him and then, before leaving, said, “Don’t take them yourself, Luca. The lepiota. Please don’t ever do that to me.”

  “I never would,” he said. “You don’t take them, either.” She nodded, touched the top of his head with two fingers, and made her way back to the house.

  Thirty-Three

  For Don Claudio, it was a walk of almost thirty minutes from Milano Centrale station to the curia where Archbishop Federico Maniscalco had his offices. Women nodded to him and made the sign of the cross as he walked from the station—at the pace of an elderly dog, he thought. German soldiers and two smiling carabinieri eyed him with scorn. He was used to that now. At one point, he stopped and, pretending to scrape something from the bottom of his shoe, peeked down the sidewalk behind him. No one following.

  He went on, passing in front of the magnificent Duomo with its concrete turrets reaching into the sky and its massive stained glass windows. He found himself wondering if the Allies would bomb that, too, in the name of victory, if all of his country’s great storehouse of beauty would be sacrificed on the altar of war.

  At the curia, not much had changed since the Germans appeared, at least not on the surface. The same red door with the crucifix above, the same sleepy guard outside, spilling over the edges of his metal chair and making a desultory perusal of La Gazzetta dello Sport. Don Claudio sometimes passed the time wondering if there was a way to measure how much of life had changed or remained unchanged since Italy entered the war. The churches were as open as they’d ever been. Much less traffic on the roads, many more military vehicles, a half or a third of the food that had been available, at three or four times the price. A dearth of young and middle-aged men on the sidewalks, more propaganda on the radio. At the station, he’d heard a woman saying that there were reports of uprisings on the streets of Naples, but here in the north, things were more or less quiet so far, under the steely German ombrellone. If there were a numerical measurement, he thought he might be able to say that 40 percent of things were as they had been in earlier years. And there was already so much suffering. What if that number went to 30 percent or even 20? How would they be able to endure it then? And what must the number be now, in Sicily, where the Allies had landed?

  Inside the curia, he went past Bruno the guard—raised eyes, a nod, the shadow of a smile; God knew what secrets the man kept—and up the stairs to the archbishop’s office. Though everything in this building seemed the same, the archbishop had told him there were spies among his staff; he was sure of it. The Germans offered food and other favors for bits of information, and sometimes even a devout church worker was desperate enough to succumb. Who saw the archbishop, how long he stayed, what were his habits—these were the kinds of things they reported on. Probably the appearance of the evil Austrian on the train had been the result of a spy’s information: they were watching Don Claudio now, tracing his
movements. He’d have to be even more careful, especially with Luca’s visits.

  The archbishop, a brilliant man, really, and the one who’d recruited Don Claudio, had now started playing the radio in his office during meetings. It served two purposes: made him seem like a loyal member of the Church hierarchy, anxious to hear news of the latest military triumph, eager for political encouragement and Fascist victory, and made it next to impossible for anyone to listen in on his conversations. But as Don Claudio knocked and then opened the door into the large office, he encountered nothing but silence. Unprecedented. Whenever he’d been summoned to Milan, the archbishop had been waiting there for him precisely at eleven. The hand of fear took hold of him again. The archbishop was never late.

  He sat in a chair in front of the desk and began to pray. Ave Maria, piena di grazia . . . A quarter of an hour passed, half an hour. He was on the verge of getting up and going out to speak to Bruno when he heard the door open behind him. For a second, he dared not turn around, and then he heard his friend’s greeting, a click, and the voice of a radio announcer spouting lies about victories in Greece.

  The men embraced. Instead of sitting behind his desk, the archbishop lowered himself into a leather armchair beside a small table. Don Claudio swiveled his chair around to face him.

  Federico’s thin cheeks were paler than usual, as if he were in the grip of an illness, but his gaze was as strong as ever, his gray hair cut close to his scalp, his lips set in an expression of the deepest calm. “How is attendance at Mass, my Claudio?” he inquired. “How is the building? Repairs needed? Do you have any funds? How is your own spiritual life?”

  With the possible exception of the last question, Don Claudio knew the archbishop’s curiosity was merely pro forma, a feint for listening ears. Still, he answered in great detail. It had to seem that spiritual business had required this trip to Milan. In the old days on his visits, Don Claudio would sleep over in the rectory; he and Federico—friends since seminary days—would go out for a meal, sit up late into the night drinking wine and talking, making jokes, playing cards. But that would draw suspicion now, given the new dimension of their relationship, and so they kept it to one brief meeting every month, sometimes with the loud radio playing beside them, sometimes on a park bench with a view in all directions.