Liberation

by Joanna Scott

  Adriana felt too comfortable to open her shutters. She wanted to lie there and think about peace. It hardly mattered if the day’s weather turned bad. A good soaking rain might even be welcome. The sound of the drops splashing on the palm fronds was a nice sound. And the scent of the vineyard after a storm was a nice scent.

  She just wished she didn’t have to enjoy this new serenity all by herself. If only she had a sister. Or a pet. Someday, she promised herself, she would have her own dog, one as gentle as Pippa, to keep in her room. And she would keep other pets: goldfish, parakeets, a baby goat, and a cricket. And she would keep a kitten just like the one in the boathouse.

  The boathouse made her think of her soldier. He was somewhere in the olive grove, perhaps still asleep. But when he did wake he would be ravenous. The bread and cheese she’d left him for his supper had hardly been sufficient. This morning she would bring him figs and plums, along with bread. Or better, she would invite him to come inside and eat his breakfast in proper fashion at the table. She would find him clothes to wear, and she would introduce him to her mother and Luisa.

  She dressed slowly, stepping into her skirt as though it were a ball gown, and buttoned her shirt, then unbuttoned it when she noticed a stain on the front. She put on a half-sleeved cotton sweater instead and slipped her feet into straw sandals. Unable to locate her brush, she smoothed her tangled hair with her fingers, twisting it into a single braid.

  Paolo’s voice was the first she heard as she descended the stairs. He was imitating a dog yelping in pain, and when she entered the kitchen, Adriana found him hopping around with his forefinger in his mouth.

  “Buongiorno, Paolo,” Adriana said.

  “Ahi,” he moaned.

  What a silly dance. But where was her mamma? “Mamma, dove sei?” She was not in the kitchen; neither was Luisa. But the shutters and windows were open, and Paolo was here to welcome Adriana to this new era of tranquillity.

  “Mamma, where are you? Mamma!” She grabbed a plum from the bowl, gripped it in her palm to test its ripeness, then sank her teeth into the fruit. Casting the sophisticated half-lidded glance that in the past year she’d perfected, she asked, “Isn’t it time for you to go home, Paolo?”

  “Ahi,” he repeated, holding his finger up to examine it before slipping it back into his mouth.

  “Tu sei un’ idiota, Paolo!”

  “E tu . . . e anche tu, Adriana!”

  Certainly Paolo wouldn’t be acting so stupid if life had not returned to normal. Adriana wiped her hands with a dish towel. She found another towel in a drawer, knotted it to form a little sack, and filled it with plums and a thick slice of bread—provisions that were precious during war and yet still in abundance in the kitchen of La Chiatta.

  With her back turned to Paolo, she asked him if he’d hurt himself. Certo! Couldn’t she see? He’d burned his finger trying to stir the charcoal in the stove!

  Adriana offered him a shrug. Too bad, Paolo. Ciao! She headed out of the kitchen, following the smell of coffee up the stairs and into the salotto, where she found her mother sitting with Lorenzo and his wife, the three of them absorbed in a whispered conversation. They fell silent when she appeared in the doorway.

  Tucking the sack of food around the corner, she offered “Salve” to the visitors and took her place on the sofa, snuggling beside her mother, who greeted her in her usual serene voice but whose haggard face suggested that the night had indeed been twenty years long and now Giulia Nardi was twenty years older, her eyes framed in muddy pockets, her hair glittering with gray strands that Adriana hadn’t noticed before.

  “Is it over?” she asked.

  Yes, her mother assured her. The fighting was over. The Germans had hoisted the white flag at Marciana Marina. The Allies had taken command of the island and had promised to deliver fresh supplies within the week. The guns were silent. No more bombs would fall on Elba.

  “Never again?”

  “Never again.”

  Her mother’s tone of voice when she said never again, mai più, suggested that she wasn’t inclined to offer proof. She was too tired to offer anything more than the assurance they all wanted to hear. Never again. It was the first thing her mother had ever told her that Adriana didn’t believe.

  Never again was an unconvincing promise. Never again didn’t protect against surprise. Given that the worst usually happened unexpectedly, any protection Giulia Nardi had tried to provide for her daughter during the recent days had been superficial. That soldiers had come and gone without incident, the fires had burned elsewhere, and the bombs had fallen to the east and west was no more than good luck for the residents of La Chiatta. And good luck was only one possible outcome. Never again had no relevance.

  And now Adriana’s mother and the Signori Ambrogi thought they were protecting Adriana by keeping her from hearing their exchange of information. Didn’t they realize that ignorance was an inadequate defense? Adriana wanted to compare what she’d imagined with the facts of the past few days. But in this immediate aftermath, facts were thought to be dangerous. The adults didn’t realize that imagining was almost equal to knowing. They assumed that a ten-year-old girl—almost eleven—mustn’t hear about any form of death: not the deaths of children or the deaths of grandparents, not the deaths of Germans or Africans or Frenchmen or Italians, and not the deaths of partisans or Fascists or Jews.

  Lorenzo had been holding an unlit cigarette and a wooden match. During the pause in conversation, he struck the match and lit the cigarette. But when he shook the match it kept burning. He shook it more forcefully, and the flame flared and jumped down the stem before it went out. His wife exchanged a look with Giulia that seemed to communicate some mysterious understanding. Confused, Adriana pressed closer to her mother, finding some comfort in what was now only a remembered impression of her mother’s indomitable strength.

  The adults had nothing to say in Adriana’s presence. While Lorenzo smoked, his wife unclapsed and clasped her watch. Giulia turned the saucer beneath her demitasse as if turning the face of a clock. Adriana heard Luisa bustle down the stairs and into the kitchen, where she spoke sharply to her nephew. She heard Paolo’s peevish reply of sì, sì, sì. She heard the distant crying of Ulisse’s infant son. And out in the courtyard she heard a dog barking and Ulisse’s older boys, Aldo and Marco, calling to each other.

  Rather than sneak outside again without permission, Adriana looked toward the windows and back at her mother with an expression meant to indicate her desire. “Posso?” May I? The war is over, Mamma! Adriana wanted to remind her. Ulisse’s boys were playing in the courtyard, where they had played hundreds of times before.

  Yes, she would have to be allowed to go outside again after her mother had promised that the bombs would never again fall on Elba. Mai più.

  D’accordo, Adriana, go play.

  What Giulia Nardi really said was “Sì, vai,” yes, go. But she warned her not to make trouble. “Do not wander, Adriana.”

  “Mamma . . .”

  “No farther than the courtyard.”

  “Sì, Mamma, sì.”

  Outside, Pippa leaped toward her as she jumped from the bottom step, almost knocking Adriana off her feet. She rubbed the furrow between the dog’s ears. Sensing her mother watching from the window, she bided time tossing sticks. With the two boys, she threw the sticks far into the field, and while she waited for Pippa to lope back with her prize, she pulled weeds from between the courtyard stones.

  Eventually her mother moved from the window. A few minutes later, Adriana returned inside, calling out a greeting from the hall. She wanted her mother to hear that she was inside. But she was there just to fetch the supplies she’d gathered for her soldier, and when she went outside again, her mother didn’t need to know.

  She was sorry to have wasted time. By this hour her soldier was sure to be awake. He’d wonder where his breakfast was. He’d worry that he’d been forgotten. But Adriana would never forget him. To prove that she was fond of him, sh
e stopped in at the cantina, entering quietly so as not to disturb Ulisse’s wife and baby and Signora Fausta upstairs. She filled a bottle with wine from the cask, plugging the neck with the only thing on hand—a rag stinking of turpentine. But she was confident that her soldier wouldn’t mind if his meal was less than perfect. Surely he would appreciate the effort.

  From the terrace she had a better view and could see the edge of the cloud bed to the west and the blue sky behind the peak of Volterraio. The wind mixed the scent of lavender from the meadows below Santo Stefano with the smell of the choppy sea and the faint scent that the dog’s fur had left on her hands. A blackbird in the box hedge whistled angrily as Pippa led the way through the opening to the field. In the distance, a spray of dust followed a jeep winding its way along the road toward Rio nell’Elba.

  Just as she’d hoped, the blanket she’d left the night before was gone. After scanning the area for some sign that her soldier had been there, she set off through the olive grove in search of him. This time she didn’t call out. She tried to walk as quietly as possible over the crumbled soil and clumps of stiff-leafed grass, for she’d decided that her soldier was a timid fellow and her pursuit might frighten him.

  She had left the villa shortly after nine in the morning. For the next half hour she and Pippa searched the olive grove and vineyard. Aldo and Marco followed her from a distance but eventually grew bored. After they’d returned to the cantina, she went to search the boathouse. She reminded herself that there was nothing to fear as long as the shutters at La Chiatta were open and the stove was lit. She would keep looking for her soldier until she found him.

  Pippa dashed ahead of her through the gate to the little pebble beach. While the dog splashed in the water, Adriana wandered along the shore. Two seagulls landed and briefly ran along on either side of her before they took flight again.

  Though she didn’t find any African soldiers on the beach, she did see a gray toad tangled in seaweed and lying spread-eagled on its back, its pale belly covered with minute black specks. It was floating in the shallow water between the reeds and the rocks, with one of its legs snagged on a submerged stick that held it in place against the current of a small estuary stream. Impulsively, she reached toward the toad, intending to turn it right side up. Not until the carcass bobbed at the touch of her finger did she realize that the toad was dead.

  A dead toad was a repugnant sight, and it was enough to make Adriana consider the possibility that her soldier had died during the night. If he had died, she coldly wished that he had first dragged himself at least as far as the Ambrogi fields—then Adriana would only have to hear about what Lorenzo’s gardener, Nino, had found. She didn’t want to be the one to find a dead soldier floating in shallow water. She didn’t want to experience something she didn’t want to remember.

  Returning through the gate with Pippa, shifting the sack of food to her left hand, the bottle of wine to her right, she paused at the wooden step of the boathouse, too fearful to enter, and headed on through the vineyard. She reassured herself as she continued her search by imagining how if she did find the soldier alive she would invite him to stay at La Chiatta until the fighting had ended, and then, with her mother’s help, she would book him a passage home to his own country. Thanks to Signora Nardi and her daughter, he wouldn’t have to go back to the war. Never again.

  Pippa ran ahead, disappearing into a small, dense pineta. Adriana walked along the edge of the grove to the point where the land started to slope upward, the trees giving way to scrub grass and big scallop-shaped pieces of slate. By then, midmorning, the grass was shimmering below the gray sky, whipped by the wind. Patches of fog leaked from the clouds. Beyond the tip of the Portoferraio peninsula, the sea was dark with the front sheet of approaching rain.

  Thousands of years ago this land had been terraced for iron mines, crisscrossed with mule tracks, and crumbled stone walls still extended in strips along successive levels. When Adriana reached the top terrace at the edge of La Chiatta’s land, she called for Pippa. But the dog was nowhere in sight and didn’t answer with a bark. The silence was ominous, Adriana thought at first, until she heard the quiet sounds that filled the air—the brush of wind, the rattle of a motorbike heading toward La Lampara, and a low, steady trickling, like the sound of water running through the pipe below the kitchen sink

  Ahead of her, the land dipped in a jagged descent to a ravine overgrown with ivy and woodbine. When she was a small child, no more than six or seven years old, Adriana had come to this ravine with Ulisse and his eldest son, and she’d been stung on her hand by a bee. She remembered it as a dark, damp place that hummed with the buzzing of thousands of angry insects, and she’d had no inclination to return.

  She didn’t want to go down there now. Clutching the sack and the bottle of wine, she decided that she’d been gone from home long enough. She would head back before the storm moved inland.

  She glanced at the ground, preparing to take a step, and was momentarily jolted by the absence of her shadow before remembering that the sun was hidden by the clouds. The air seemed to hold remnants of last night’s darkness, and it felt to Adriana that time had blended, putting her at once inside the cabinet below the sink, on the beach, and in the northwest corner of the Nardi estate, where she took a step toward the ravine instead of away from it, drawn by what she thought was a faint light, barely perceptible, glowing from below the edge of the grassy shelf.

  As she climbed into the ravine, the light faded, giving the impression that someone holding a torch was withdrawing as she descended. The air, sweetened by the flowering woodbines, had the graininess of dusk. Pebbles rolled ahead of her feet along the rough path. Somewhere quite close to her a thrush started piping but was silenced when Pippa, waiting down at the bottom of the ravine, barked happily at Adriana’s approach.

  By the time she reached the spring, she became aware of knowing what she would find before she actually found it: a dead soldier wrapped in the blanket. And though it took her a few minutes, she did find something close to what she was expecting: the sausage of his bundled legs extending from between two rocks.

  The sight was too terrible to contemplate, so she turned from it, calling Pippa to her side, intending to run as fast as she could back home and tell her mother what she’d seen. But she hadn’t gone far when the dead man spoke: “Où allez-vous, madamoiselle?”

  She tried to stop. Her knees buckled and she fell forward, scattering the food and listening helplessly as the bottle bounced twice and shattered on a piece of slate. “Merda!” she said. It was the first time she’d ever spoken the profanity aloud. She was surprised by its immediate rejuvenating effect, and she let herself say it again in a more studied way. “Merda!”

  From behind a boulder came the sound of the dead man’s laugh. “La petite princesse,” he said to her. “Why didn’t you come sooner?”

  “Me?”

  “All this time, I have been waiting for you to find me.”

  She wanted to explain her mistake, but she couldn’t summon the rules for the tense in French. “I think you are dead” was the best she could manage.

  He laughed again, pushing himself up to a sitting position so Adriana could see the whole of him wrapped in the blanket, which he’d hooded over his head and pinched closed beneath his chin. His top teeth, she noticed, were perfectly even, but the bottom teeth looked like pebbles stuck haphazardly in the gum. His lips were cracked with a brown that was either dirt or dried blood. Only his right cheek dimpled when he smiled. His dark face gleamed with the brilliance of polished steel, and because magic seemed inevitable in this place where dead men came to life, she let herself conclude that the soldier’s face was the source of the glow she thought she’d seen from the top of the ravine.

  Pippa sat beside him, panting lightly, grinning a grin of lazy pleasure. Adriana found her own pleasure growing. She was pleased to be in the soldier’s company, pleased to be having this adventure, pleased to offer whatever help she could. Spille
d wine didn’t matter. She could bring more.

  The soldier’s voice faded from a chuckle into a contemplative silence. She watched him watching her. He was studying her eyes, gazing at her with frank interest. She suspected that he was judging her age. She tried to estimate his. He was eighteen or nineteen. No, he must have been seventeen, or even fifteen or sixteen. He was just a boy! She could see his youth in his eyes and his silly dimple. He had the round, smooth chin of a boy, the flat hairline of a boy, the blunt fingernails of a boy. He was too young to be a soldier. He should have been in school. Or if he wasn’t in school, he should have been delivering messages and doing chores, like Paolo.

  If he was Paolo’s age, then Adriana could let herself feel some measure of condescension. The African soldier was more than a little ridiculous. She found all boys ridiculous. And here was one stupidissimo ragazzo who must have lied about his age in order to be accepted into the military. There were plenty of Elban boys who had done the same thing just so they could wear uniforms—boys who found their heroes in stories about the rough Italian Arditi and who waved their rifles and sang crude songs all the way to the front. A noi, a noi, a noi! Here was their African equivalent, a boy who couldn’t even grow a mustache and who smelled like an ox!

  Yet she didn’t have to persuade herself that there was more to him than to most boys his age. It was his helplessness that mattered most. He was lost and alone, with a shine on his face that Adriana began to perceive as evidence of sickliness. He might need a doctor. This was a concern worth expressing. Forgetting that he couldn’t understand her, she asked him in Italian if he wanted her to take him to Doctor Grini. He shrugged. She decided he should eat something, and she began gathering the fruit and bread to arrange in front of him. “Marocchino?” she asked him. Was he Moroccan? But she must speak in French, she remembered. “Marochine?” She knew there were Moroccans fighting with the Allies. Moroccans wore white robes and red scarves, and for no reason they fired bullets into the walls of villas—or worse. But he wasn’t a Moroccan. He was a Senegalese, he said. He repeated the word: “Sénégalais.”