Liberation

by Joanna Scott

  But Mario had never condoned the alliance with the führer and in fact had grown so disillusioned with the war that just days before the British had pierced the Mareth Line between Libya and Tunisia, he had drafted an editorial making the case for a withdrawal of all Italian forces from North Africa. Though he’d never gotten around to printing it, events had proved that his argument was sound. Mussolini’s hopes for a new Roman Empire had dissolved in blood when Tunis fell, and now Italians were paying the heavy price for their leader’s arrogance.

  That the war would eventually reach Elba, Mario had never doubted. The Allied forces had moved through Sicily and Sardinia. On the mainland, they were pushing inexorably north. Everywhere, German resistance would fail. The abbey at Cassino had been destroyed. Vesuvius had erupted. Fascist guards were ripping off their insignia, replacing them with the king’s stellette. Tunnels had been cut into quarries outside of Rome and filled with the bodies of executed prisoners. Mussolini, wherever he was hiding, had nothing to say. The Allies had landed in Normandy. And in Piazza Repubblicà in Portoferraio on the little island of Elba, the Africans were making themselves at home.

  Mario Tonietti felt inclined to make himself at home here in Corrado’s residence, since he could think of nowhere else to go. Soon night would fall, and in the darkness the rules of war would be suspended again. He thought of Sofia Canuti. He wondered whom he could ask to get an accurate account of the dead. The challenge of accuracy made him wonder if his assistant, Dino, had returned to his desk. Dino, a young man with a right leg shorter than his left, feared boredom more than anything else. If anyone could succeed in gathering information amid the chaos of the past day, it was Dino. Mario wouldn’t have been surprised to learn that Dino had never left Portoferraio.

  Mario, unlike Dino, was not reckless. But envy was easily stirred in him, and the possibility that at the war’s end his assistant would be the one lauded for his heroic journalism was enough incentive for Mario to return to his Fiat, where he sat clutching the wheel while he tried to talk himself into an acceptance of his obvious duty. As publisher of La Voce dell’Elba and the future mayor of Portoferraio, he really should head back to town.

  Ambition had incited him to return to his car. Maybe ambition saved his life. He certainly was better off inside the Fiat than out in the yard when the area suddenly erupted with the cross fire between invisible troops in the eastern hills and in an old stone warehouse to the west. An errant shell burst nearby, filling the yard with flying rock fragments. The Fiat tipped to one side and then the other, seemingly in slow motion, and the driver’s-side window exploded in shards. Mario dove across the seat, hiding his head between his arms. He felt certain that the next sensation would be one of falling, that the earth would open up and the car would drop into a bottomless hole. But nothing like that happened. A period of calm followed the assault, a pause that could have meant the soldiers were reloading.

  He pulled himself upright, but his hand was trembling too violently to turn the key in the ignition. All he could do was wait for the next round of firing. But there was no next round. Instead, the voices of men calling to one another in the distance broke into the silence. The sound was hollow, the language indistinguishable.

  They were approaching the warehouse. If they reached it, they would advance to Corrado’s house. If they came to Corrado’s house, they would find Mario cowering in the Fiat, they would drag him out of the car, and they would beat him. That’s what he found himself envisioning right then, his speculation fueled by the stories he had heard during the past day and the past year: stories of innocent civilians who, for the crime of being in the wrong place at the wrong time, were stripped and flogged to a bloody pulp by soldiers wielding army-issued belts. The prospect was enough to give Mario the fortitude to depress the clutch and steady his hand, successfully connecting with the ignition system. The chassis rattled from the force of the motor. Mario, his back drenched in sweat, was able to steer in a U out of the yard and down the drive, half expecting the car to be battered by gunfire as he continued down the hill and half expecting to hear the laughing taunts of soldiers who believed they had exposed a coward.

  Not until he’d come to the paved extension of the Portoferraio road did he lift a hand to smooth his soaked shirt against his side, realizing only after he’d wiped his arm across his parched mouth that the sweat soaking him was mixed with blood. He couldn’t locate any wound, but the blood on his hand was a bright red. The color was enough to rouse in him a new, focused urgency. He was wounded. He’d never been wounded in war before. Now, at last, he had an objective. He must get himself to the hospital in Portoferraio. It was only minutes away. He’d show up bleeding, with a tale to tell about a brutal assault, how he had resisted, how he had survived. This would be enough to make him a hero. Mario Tonietti, the future mayor of Portoferraio.

  The car bounced over rubble in the deserted streets. In front of the broken dockyard gate, one of the front wheels popped. Mario kept going, the one wheel rim knocking angrily along the paving stones as he turned into a side street. He parked the car snug against a building, opening the door to the roar of an explosion somewhere to the northeast. Even from this distance it felt like a fist thudding against his chest.

  Over the old port the smoke that hung in the air didn’t smell just of burning wood and oil; it had that sharp, peculiar stink of singed hair, reminding him of the time when as a young boy he had leaned too close to a candle flame and burned his hair. The smell was unforgettable.

  He made his way over shattered stones in front of an apartment building that had been bombed back in September, its facade shattered, and last night had been bombed again, the structure pulverized, reduced to the broken walls of its foundation. The street beside it was deserted. Or Mario was expecting it to be deserted, and he wasn’t prepared to notice a boy kicking a chunk of plaster into crumbs as he exited a bar. Mario walked past the bar and at the open window caught sight of a flicker of movement as the barista wiped the counter. At the opposite end of the street he saw a carabiniere lighting a cigarette. Only as an afterthought did Mario decide to talk to him, but by then the man had disappeared around the corner.

  It was dusk, and the green shutters, closed tight along the street, gleamed as if freshly painted. Mario couldn’t decide whether it was odd that at this hour of the passeggiata there were so few people on the streets, or that in the midst of an invasion there were any people out at all, or that no one came up to him to ask if he needed help. Of course he needed help. Didn’t anyone care that the shirt of the next mayor of Portoferraio was soaked in blood?

  He walked on past the Municipio, which so far had survived undamaged. As he continued toward the hospital he found himself picturing something he’d only heard about: the arduous approach through the great hall in Palazzo Venezia in Rome, from the end with the doorway to the desk where Mussolini sat. He recalled a story he’d heard about a man from San Remo—a magistrate, the cousin of a friend of a friend—who had killed himself with a revolver simply because he’d been asked to appear before Il Duce.

  How do we know for what, precisely, we will be held accountable? One thing Mario Tonietti had learned from life was that as he grew older it became more difficult to tell right from wrong. And it became even more difficult to make a distinction during wartime. He had tried to please all sides and leave behind no record of corruption or treachery that could be used against him. But still he had to wonder about certain indiscretions—for instance, conversations with Rosa, his mistress. Rather, his former mistress. He’d grown tired of her and hadn’t visited her in months. He wondered how much of what she could say about him would be believed.

  Where was Rosa now? If she was at her home in via del Paradiso, he could visit her. He didn’t want to visit her. He wanted to take a bath and change his shirt.

  As he neared the hospital he noticed a new flurry of activity—an empty ambulance waiting with its motor running, a small crowd gathered in the piazzetta, and Fr
ench Colonial soldiers standing listlessly beside the entrance, their rifles cradled in their arms. To Mario’s surprise, they didn’t bother to interrogate him; they didn’t seem to care that he was there or that they had come to fight a war.

  Inside the hospital he was greeted by the same nun who had helped care for his wife, but before he could acknowledge her, she had disappeared into the crowd.

  Nearby, a woman on a gurney prayed to the ceiling. “Grazie, O Gesù Cristo, grazie O Gesù, per tutte le grazie di purità, per tutte le forti virtù che questa . . .”

  A priest murmured beside an unconscious man: “Domandiamogli perdono delle nostre negligenze. . . .”

  All around the hall, voices were raised in protest, in anguish, in appeal, all of them, even the most pious, marked by the shrillness of impatience. These were civilians—residents of Portoferraio who hadn’t managed to flee to the hills. The nurses moved quietly among the wounded, who were lying on gurneys if they were lucky, or who were simply lying where they had fallen from exhaustion. Though the generator was running, the room was poorly lit, and Mario found himself squinting to find someone he recognized. He was Signor Tonietti. And where was anyone he knew?

  Everyone in the room was busy—busy dying, busy healing, busy saving souls. Only Mario had nothing to do. He wasn’t even suffering any ill effects from loss of blood. In fact, he felt stronger than ever and had the impression that he’d taken a wrong turn somewhere and ended up in the hospital by accident.

  The man with a bandage taped on his forehead, the blood seeping through the gauze to make a pink X—he looked like he belonged. Mario’s gaze settled on this man, who was carrying a jug and offering cups of water to the injured, limping through the crowd, his face serene, his patience infinite. This great, calm man . . . why, it was Dino!

  Of course it was Dino. Naturalmente. The most purposeful man there—of course it was Dino. And Mario was sufficiently clearheaded to stand there for long enough to calculate the effects of Dino’s public service and then to devise a strategy of his own.

  “Dino!” Staggering, he put a bloody hand on the younger man’s shoulder as he passed.

  “Mario! Mio Dio!”

  “Let me assist you,” Mario offered, lifting the stack of paper cups from Dino’s hands.

  “You’re injured,” Dino said. Mario signaled acknowledgment with a smile. Yes. Dino was injured, too, but Mario was worse. He should sit. No. Pour the water, Dino, and look at Mario Tonietti, a wounded man moving among the wounded, handing the thirsty, battered civilians of Elba cups of fresh water.

  He saved the last cup for himself, gulped the water so fast he choked. Dino bloodied himself trying to steady Mario. Miraculously, an empty chair appeared—a wooden chair with a woven bottom that had a little split in the middle, Mario noticed as he sat down. But if it would support him, it would do. Indeed, it was as good as a throne. Mario Tonietti sat while a nurse, summoned by Dino, lifted his shirt to examine his wounds. He felt the welcome coolness of wet gauze on his back, then the painful sizzle of antiseptic. The nurse held up a small splinter of glass in her tweezers for Mario to see, then dropped it in a nearby bucket. She kept working, digging gently into his skin with the tweezers, while Dino stood nearby, staring stupidly, helplessly, his hands pressed together in front of his lips.

  “Now, tell me,” Mario began, but he didn’t know how to continue. Tell me what happened? Tell me what I don’t know? Just tell me.

  Dino opened his hands. “Corrado is dead,” he said.

  Mario gasped, and the spasm caught the nurse by surprise, causing her hand with the tweezers to jerk forward against his shoulder.

  “Basta!” Mario cried.

  The din in the room subsided for a moment as everyone turned to see the man who couldn’t endure the poke of tweezers: the future mayor of Portoferraio. Mario apologized quietly, earning from the nurse a winsome smile and a pat on his wrist.

  “He was caught in his yard,” continued Dino in a low voice, the voice that a sober man might use with a drunk. “The Germans shot him in the stomach. But he didn’t die.”

  “Ma che! He’s dead or no?”

  “Corrado is dead. Fernanda left him there in the yard —”

  Fernanda, Corrado’s wife—“She left him to die?”

  “She had been hiding in her closet in the house. When the Germans were gone, she came out and found Corrado bleeding. She ran for help. While she was gone the Africans arrived. They found Corrado. They soaked him in petrol and tossed a match on him. Fernanda ran all the way to Bernardo’s—by the time they returned to the yard, the soldiers had moved on.” Dino looked inside the jug as though hoping to find water there, but it was empty. “Bernardo put Corrado in the car,” he said. “He started to drive him to the hospital. Then he changed his mind and drove him to the morgue. I went to see him there this morning.”

  What did you see? Mario wanted to ask. Corrado’s skin must have been as black as charcoal. As black as the burned wood scattered around his yard. Freedom has a cost, the French would say. The cost is too dear, Mario would have wanted to argue. For a lesser price we choose the Germans. This would have been the advice offered by the future mayor of Portoferraio if there had been time to consider the options.

  “O Cuore di Gesù, pieno di bontà e di amore, io credo nell’amor tuo per me!”

  Someone called for a basin because her child was vomiting. Someone wanted morphine. Someone else wanted water. Dino, more water—quick! A nun stamped papers at the desk. A doctor appeared from nowhere and whispered to the priest. The priest nodded and went on praying. The doctor disappeared again.

  The dimness of the light together with the heat of the room had the effect of muting reality, giving it the distance of a motion picture on the screen at the Cinema Moderno, though without the deliberateness of rehearsed actions, rather with an abrupt spontaneity, like images of crowds on a newsreel. But the smell was not the smell of a theater. It was the same stink Mario had smelled out in the street. It was the smell of his friend Corrado, and Mario imagined that such an odor would cling to his own skin forever.

  The nurse squeezed him on the hand to indicate that she had finished her work. She hadn’t said a word to him the entire time, and as he watched her walk away he wondered what she really thought of him.

  He was becoming aware of his fatigue. He closed his eyes and let himself imagine diving from his sailboat into the clear water off Pomonte. Would the sea wash away the lingering effects of this war? He had promised to take his niece sailing again this summer. But now they must wait for this final offensive of the war to come to an end. After the armistice, Mario and his little niece would go for a sail and take turns diving into the sea. This had become their custom: spending long, languorous Saturdays in August together. She would tell him stupid jokes, and he would pretend to laugh, and sometimes he would forget that he was just pretending and he really would laugh.

  This adopted child of his dead wife’s sister—she was as beloved as a daughter to him. That’s why he’d left Portoferraio last night after the first wave of the surprise invasion: not to protect himself but to protect his niece. Amazingly, he’d succeeded. When the soldiers did finally arrive at La Chiatta, Mario had managed to distract them, first with grappa, then with talk of harbors and beaches and roadways. Giulia should consider how the visit of the soldiers would have gone differently had Mario not been present. Giulia should consider what Mario had done for her and her daughter.

  Pride had a sedating effect. With some astonishment, Mario calculated that he hadn’t slept for over thirty-six hours. Even here, surrounded by the results of an ill-planned, unjust invasion, he enjoyed the feeling of accomplishment. He hadn’t managed to save Corrado—how could he have? All he could do for Corrado at this point was avenge him. But he had saved his niece, and come August he would watch her balance on the rail of his sailboat, lift herself on her toes, and dive, disappearing with barely a splash. It was pleasant to imagine.

  WHEN ADRIANA WOKE o
n the morning of the third day of the liberation of Elba, she felt as if she’d slept for twenty years. The fact that her mother had let her stay in her own bed was enough evidence that the world she’d woken to was fundamentally different from the world she’d left behind the night before. She wasn’t sure what, exactly, had changed. But had things remained the same, she would have been tumbling out of the cabinet right about now, aching and hungry and annoyed by the inconvenience of it all.

  Her first impression of the morning was that the veins in the tile floor, lit by cracks of daylight shining through the shutters, had a reddish tint, indicating that the rising sun was veiled by clouds. It would rain before the day was over. How disappointing. Rain was almost always disappointing, except on a hot August afternoon. Today was only the nineteenth of June.

  Disappointment sharpened her consciousness. She remembered that there was a war going on. Yet somehow she sensed that the worst was over. Whoever was dead was dead, and whoever had survived would stay alive.

  The pleasant coolness of her pillowcase against her cheek accompanied the transformation of disappointment into blissful relief. She was still alive. And without confirming it, she knew that her mother was alive. And Luisa and Paolo and Uncle Mario and Ulisse and his family and Signor Lorenzo and his household—they were all still alive. Everyone familiar to Adriana was still alive.

  Feeling happy and lazy, she became aware of the fragrance of caffè. To heat the water for caffè, the charcoal must have been burning in the stove, and if the charcoal had been lit, then the invasion must be over. Either the Germans or the Allies had surrendered. The skies were quiet. All over the island, people were lighting their stoves, heating water, and flinging open shutters to let in the cool morning air.