In the house amid the olive trees where they had been evacuated, their half-blind ninety-year-old grandmother was a big black question waiting. There was a long history of wars in her, in her pitilessly clear memory: there was Curtoza, there was Mentana, wars with trumpets, wars with drums; now they had to explain to her about the SS, about the war that took away mothers. Better to cobble together a story about an earlier-than-expected blackout, a blockade set up by the Germans in the city, which had kept her daughter from returning, sent her son-in-law down to keep her company.
But the house was a forest of questions, and the brothers preferred to go up and have dinner at the Communist’s. That day the Communist had butchered a calf for Biondo’s band and had cooked the tripe: he had invited them to eat with him. The brothers went up talking about killing.
The Communist’s house was a single low room; seen from the outside, at night, it looked like a heap of stones. The butchered calf was hanging on an olive tree a short distance away. Inside, the house was dark, with no candles. The brothers sat at the low table, mute, on two tree stumps. The Communist’s woman filled their plates with tripe in sauce and olives. The brothers stuck their forks blindly into the heavy food. Near the ceiling there was a rustling sound, like wings beating: in the darkness of a niche the brothers could make out the Communist’s falcon, Langàn, captured in the mountains in spring, a souvenir of the camp in Langàn, legendary in the memory of the old partisans, and of the great battle lost in July.
The child, sitting on the woman’s lap, began to laugh at the falcon; it wasn’t their child, but the son of a carabiniere who, fleeing, had entrusted him to the Communist. Then they began to talk, first about hiding the calf until Biondo’s men came to get it, then about the whys and hows, who had been the informer.
The Communist was a short man, with a large bald head, who had traveled the world and was skilled in every trade. He was a man who knew the bad and the good of life, he saw things go badly but knew that one day they would be better, he was a worker who had read books, a Communist. He worked by the day on the farms, because the air of the city was no longer good for him; and he worked well, he was knowledgeable about sowing, about vegetable gardens. But even more he liked sitting on walls and talking about the things that are lost in the world, about coffee that is burned in Brazil, about sugar thrown into the sea in Cuba, about cases of meat that rot on the docks in Chicago. And his memories of a life marked by poverty, emigrations, carabinieri; memories of a man kicked around by life, a man who is interested in everything, in the bad and the good in the world, and who thinks about it.
When they went through the fields—the older brother carrying a book or two, hiding in streams if the Black Brigade should come up, the younger always looking for pistol bullets, machine-gun magazines—they’d meet him coming along the paths holding the carabiniere’s child by the hand and explaining to him the names of the plants: a small bald man in wrinkled black clothes. And then they began to have conversations: with the older he discussed Lenin and Gorky, with the younger gun calibers, automatic weapons.
Now a silence swollen with blood and rage surrounded the brothers, and the words sank into it. Only the woman could provide a little warmth in that darkness, and she tried to cheer them. She was a woman still young, slightly faded, one of those women whose sweetness makes no distinctions between a mother’s and a lover’s, as if that boundary didn’t exist in them; she was a companion of the Communist, a woman who has understood why people suffer and goes to the city with guns in her shopping bag.
When they finished eating, the brothers and the Communist took the path through the woods, with blankets over their shoulders, heading off to sleep in the hiding place that Giglio had showed them. Passing through the vineyards they heard footsteps in the darkness, and the younger cried, “Halt! Stop or I’ll shoot!” while the others hit him on the back to shut him up. But it was Walter, coming to join them, to sleep in the cave, too.
The younger brother and Walter were inseparable, always roaming the countryside armed with guns, following the tracks of the Fascists, and acting like bullies with the evacuees, valiant with the girls. The older brother was a dreamier type, like a guest from another planet, maybe not even capable of loading a gun. He was capable of explaining what democracy is, and communism, he knew the histories of revolutions, poems against tyrants—things also useful to know, but there would be time to learn them later, when the war was over. And his brother and Walter, after listening to him for a little while, began to argue again over a holster or a girl.
But now the two brothers had a thing in common, and something had changed in them: the interest in the life they were leading, the stakes, no longer outside them but in their depths, in their blood. The struggle, the hatred of the Fascists, were no longer what they had been—for the older a thing learned in books, encountered in life as if by chance, for the younger an act of bravado, a walk along the mule track carrying bombs to scare the girls—but were now the same, a thing in their blood, as deep in them as the meaning of mother, a thing determined once and for all, which would be with them throughout their lives.
It was also the cold, when they went down into the den, that made them curl up close to each other. They wanted to sleep, a heavy sleep that would bury them, that would cancel out the dreams they had, imagining the hotels where the Germans hold their prisoners, where the SS pace corridors kept lighted all night. From now on they would carry that offense in the most childlike depths of their souls, avenging themselves, continuing to avenge themselves even when mother and father returned, offended to the roots of their life, for all their life. And what frightened them most was the thought of waking up the next day and suddenly remembering what had happened.
* * *
The next day the older brother was sitting in the barren land between the farms and the woods when ships appeared on the sea and began to bombard the city. They always began at that hour: first you saw the shot like a spark on the ship, then you heard it take off, then the arrival. He was waiting for his brother, who hadn’t returned, having gone down for news. What they’d heard so far wasn’t reassuring: their mother detained by the Germans as a hostage, their father, stricken by an attack of his illness, admitted to the hospital.
The city was spread out below him beside the sea, the city now forbidden to him, with the smell of death for him in the circuit of its streets. And in the heart of the city his mother a prisoner. And cannon shots, like fists, from the flat blue striped sea, as if from a void, against his city, against his mother.
A powder magazine must have exploded in the city: you could hear a rapid succession of booms that did not come from the sea. Soon a cloud rose over the houses, with black dots swirling at the top; the explosions filled the valley. If the smoke thinned, the devastated houses could be glimpsed collapsing into ruin.
Then the boy thought of himself, ragged, hunted through the woods, his father in the hospital, his mother a prisoner, his city and his house being destroyed before his eyes, his brother who didn’t return and perhaps had been captured; and yet he felt almost tranquil, as if in the right, in the normal, as if life for him were normal just as it was at that moment.
His brother arrived with a container of polenta and better news: his father was playing sick in order not to be imprisoned and to get himself guarded in the hospital, so that they would let the mother go; the mother was a hostage and sent word to be careful and not to worry about her; down below the torpedo boats of the Tenth Flotilla* had exploded and destroyed half the town.
Giglio had come up with him, full of enthusiasm at seeing the bombardment, like the bad soul he was, and was pounding his fist on his palm, shouting, “Come on! Come on! Get going! Knock it all down! My house first of all! All the Fascists dead! All the others safe! Some wounded! Get going! My house first!”
* * *
The next day they went with the Communist to Biondo’s camp, to take him the meat from the calf. The men were arme
d to the teeth; they went down to the city every night, to provoke gunfights.
They roasted a quarter of the calf on the spit and began eating it all together around the fire. They talked of comrades killed and tortured, of Fascists executed and to be executed, of the Germans one might be able to eliminate.
“But,” said the older brother, “it’s better if we don’t touch the Germans. Because my mother is among the hostages and it’s better not to play around.” Yet there was something in the words he said that didn’t convince even him, a kind of renunciation, as if he had at that moment abandoned his mother to those who had captured her. And he was ashamed of the silence that followed.
On the way back, talking to his brother, he said, “I don’t feel like going on with this life of deluxe rebels. Either we’re partisans or we’re not. One of these days we ought to take the mountain path and go up and join the brigade.”
His brother said he had already thought that.
* * *
Then, returning, they stopped at Rocche del Corvo, to whistle for Giglio. And while they waited for him, sitting on the edge of the gully, the Communist was wondering how the rocks had formed, and the gullies, and the mountains, and how old the earth was. And together they discussed the rock strata, the ages of the earth, and when the war would be over.
The Wait for Death in a Hotel
At a certain hour of the morning the wives of the prisoners would arrive and start to gesture, their faces turned up toward the windows. From the top floor the men leaned out to ask, to answer; and the women’s hands, below, and the men’s hands, above, seemed to want to reach each other through those few meters of empty air. The big hotel, recently demoted to a barracks and prison, had no features, like bars or perimeter walls, that would help the mind make that sense of lost freedom concrete. Only that vertical distance between them, short but also desperate, remained to feed their anguish, between those with their feet in the flower beds, still masters of themselves, and the others, who’d been led up there as if already to a land of no return.
Every so often one of the prisoners at the window turned toward the hallway and called a name: “Ferrari! Ferrari! Your wife’s down there!” The one who’d been called made his way to the already crowded window and began to smile faintly, make gestures intended to be resigned.
Diego never looked out; his family was far away, scattered by the war. He was tired of that uninterrupted ripple of predictions, hypotheses, good news and bad that the coming and going in the hotel garden pushed up there. Seeping into him along with the weariness of his nerves was a taste for letting go, drifting toward ruin or an always-hoped-for miraculous salvation, a wish for summers spent lying on the sand at the edge of the water, a wish deposited by too many summers of water and sand, which had led him, a lazy and inexperienced youth, here, to his first useful summer, now ending.
But time was a spiderweb of tense nerves, a puzzle that could be put together into countless shapes, all without meaning. Bewildered, men who had been captured at random on the streets walked back and forth on the linoleum of the bare rooms, where the white lips of sinks and bidets, stopped up with putrid water, sneered.
The day before, when he was brought there from the prison fortress, where he had been for a day and a night with other men, now perhaps killed, it had seemed to him that he was being exhumed, arriving in the airy hotel, with around him the warmth of those men who were ignorant and quick to hope. He had laughed and joked, finding them again; Michele, the comrade with whom he had been captured, was also among the prisoners in the hotel. Meeting again, they greeted each other gladly, healthy and united, after a day and a night when, separated, each had feared for the other. Diego felt moved and at the same time stronger, caressing Michele’s rough coat, the large, smooth bald head that came up to his chest. Michele giggled nervously, with his bad teeth, and asked, “What do you say, Diego, will we cheat the Nazis?” Diego said, “I say we’ll do it. We’ll cheat the entire Third Reich.” “Even Von Ribbentrop?” “Even Von Ribbentrop. Even Von Brautchitsch. Even Dr. Goebbels.” And they had squatted near a cold radiator to dispel their nervousness in laughter and jokes (they still didn’t know that many of those captured with them had already been killed), and Diego felt the contentment of one who comes out of prison after years inside.
The prison was an old fortress at the port, where the German antiaircraft artillery was later installed. The cell where they were locked up had served as a disciplinary pen for German soldiers; on the walls were phrases written in German by homosexuals: “Mein lieber Kamarad Franz, My dear comrade Franz, I’m locked up in here and you are far away from me.” “Mein lieber Kamarad Hans, Life was happy when you were near.”
There were twenty of them in the narrow cell, lying on the floor one beside the other. An old man with a white beard, dressed like a hunter, the father of one of them, got up every so often in the night, climbed over the bodies, and went to urinate in a corner, with an effort. The bucket in the corner was perforated with rust holes; in a short time, the old man’s urine soaked the floor of the cell, under their bodies, like a river. Inhuman howls of command, as of men who wish to become wolves, rose from the echoing spaces of the fort at every change of guard.
The barred window looked onto the cliff; all night the sea thundered, driven against the rocks, like blood in the arteries and thoughts in the whorls of a skull. And each of them had in mind the corner he shouldn’t have turned, so he wouldn’t have ended up in there: Diego, the corner that, turning with Michele to escape the roundup, had put him face-to-face with the Germans outfitted for war, stopping passersby in the middle of the street a few meters away, as in the opening scene of a film.
It was a chain of sensations and images that continued to tell in his mind like a rosary, to persuade him again that it couldn’t have happened otherwise: while he was locked up in a cell with the writings of German homosexuals on the walls and the old man who went on peeing in the dark; and now, amid the flaking stuccowork of the hotel’s top story, suspended between death and life, with men lying on the floor as if overcome by vertigo.
Every day a certain number of them were sorted out: to life or to death. In the morning the marshal and Pelle-di-Biscia, Snakeskin, came up with a bundle of documents in hand; those whose documents were given back were free and they left. They could be seen embracing their wives and going off arm in arm, trampling the plants in the flower beds, under the rain of envious gazes.
At night, on the other hand, a lead-gray truck with armed soldiers sitting in it stopped in front of the hotel; the marshal and Snakeskin came up and called out other names, and every night some of them went away surrounded by the helmets of those soldiers. The next day their women would stand below the windows and ask, and then go from one command to the next entreating the interpreters: no one knew where they had been taken. Other women would speak of shots heard at night, from the evacuated areas of the port.
For Diego and Michele, too, this was the choice: freedom or death. Either their documents were acknowledged to be in order, and then it was the big swindle of the whole Reich, to be recounted in the cottages at night accompanied by the laughter of comrades, or it was the lead-gray truck that disappeared amid the damaged houses near the dock, Snakeskin having been the informer.
Snakeskin had reviewed them as soon as they arrived, lining up in front of the hotel, to see if he recognized any former comrades. As he walked he rubbed his hands, which must be sweaty: Snakeskin, a slender youth in the close-fitting uniform, wetting parched, smiling lips with drool. He was pale, with a thin mustache of yellowish fuzz and cold-reddened nostrils and eyelids. His eyes sparkled with emotion at feeling that he, a slender youth, was the judge of the lives of these men, who held their breath at his every word, his every gesture.
They were moments of intoxicating triumph, but always crowded with anguish; every time he appeared in the hotel hallways the inmates swarmed around to ask him, to urge him; they called him by name: “Tullio, Tullio.�
� He looked at those men who were docile around him, but he saw hatred emerging sharp-edged behind their humility; to one he had said, “Today you court me, tomorrow you’ll shoot me in the back.”
Snakeskin sometimes saved, sometimes killed: he was capricious and evasive. Many had known him before, when he was one of them, and had believed they were lost, seeing that they were interrogated in his presence: he had pretended not to know them. Others who hoped he would be merciful thanks to old favors or friendships had seen him bare his teeth against them, put them in play like mice. Snakeskin sometimes seemed lost on the pathway of blood, sometimes prey to remorse.
Inspecting them, he had stopped in front of Michele and said, “We two have seen each other somewhere.” Michele had pulled in his neck as if a cold drop had rolled down his back, and on his face was a dazed expression of ignorance.
* * *
Diego sat on the tile floor of the hall with his hands on his knees. Michele was next to him, looking out the window. He was waiting for his wife, who had gone to speak to Luciano, an interpreter for the SS who worked for the committee and had undertaken to get them out. Michele’s wife was much younger than he, a girl bride. She had big cloudy gray eyes, something severe in her face, which was crowned by smooth black hair, something cheerful in her thin body, in the short lilac dress. Seeing her, you were sorry that life was what it was, painful and obscene, and that everything was not settled and peaceful. Diego would have liked to wander with a woman like that through sunny places without injustices.
Last Comes the Raven Page 8
