The Hero's Way

by Tim Parks

  We order a carafe of Trebbiano. Meanwhile darkness has fallen and the evening air has a mothy summeriness to it.

  ‘What did Ruggeri think of Hoffstetter?’ Eleonora asks.

  ‘He never mentions him.’

  ‘In his whole book?’

  ‘It’s only sixty pages.’

  ‘And Hoffstetter of Ruggeri?’

  ‘He never mentions him. In five hundred pages. They have completely different feelings about the march.’

  ‘But they do go through the same towns!’

  ‘In the same order.’

  ‘And Belluzzi?’

  ‘Belluzzi mentions Ruggeri’s diary in passing and says Hoffstetter exaggerates his own importance. But he takes at least half of his details from him. Without acknowledgement.’

  ‘They were jealous of anyone close to Garibaldi.’

  ‘I suppose so. They wanted all the limelight for their hero. Trevelyan too. Even Anita is only tolerated because she makes Garibaldi greater.’

  ‘Her passion and loyalty a measure of his charisma.’

  ‘The irony is that Garibaldi was modesty itself. Everyone who met him said as much.’

  We’re puzzling over this enigma – a hero without hauteur – when a new figure of evident charisma appears on the scene. A wounded soldier, no less, with two women in loyal attendance to enhance his greatness.

  A wheelchair is pushed through the gate but is too wide to move between the tables. A one-legged man is helped onto crutches and lurches towards the table next to ours. He’s young, tall and ruddily corpulent. A fleshy grin shows gleaming teeth and a mood of happy sensuality. He seems to have stepped, or hopped, straight out of a Rubens; a satyr in a white shirt.

  Leaning on one crutch, the man raises the other to salute friends here and there. Forza! someone calls. Our efficient waiter has the menu in his hand the moment he’s settled. Wine appears on the table. The man launches into stories to entertain his adoring escorts, an elaborately tattooed blonde and a prim brunette. At once the blonde is in stitches. A peel of giggles shifts the mood of the restaurant. Followed by another. And another. It’s time for us to go. When the waiter brings our bill, a flicker in his eyes tells me he understands. There’s a hint of the expression, pazienza, and of the sentiment, poveretto. Poor guy. What a pleasure, these moments of unexpected complicity!

  Later, I wake in the night and my body is on fire. My feet are ablaze. It’s intolerable but strangely pleasing too. I’m ripe with summer sun. I almost am the summer, after these long hours trudging the warm earth in the vegetable fervour of oaks and vines and brambles and olives. Summer stretched on a bed. Insomniac summer.

  We have the big windows to the terrace open and the night air stirs in the room. I think about the fat sensual man who had lost his leg. How alive he was despite his handicap. Or perhaps because of it. And I think of all the men who lost limbs defending the Roman Republic. Volunteers. Why did they do it? There were only 2500 garibaldini left, Ruggeri reckons, when they arrived in Terni. Fifteen hundred desertions. Those who found themselves near their homes were particularly prone to go. The Second Legion more than the First. But why did the others hang on?

  For this glowing body perhaps. I remember our sore feet in the soothing water of the lavatoio. I imagine the pleasure the men took in the cafés of Terni after that ordeal by thirst the day before. They were in life, and in it together. Which is maybe a way of saying they risked life, as a community, for a cause. ‘They danced in the bullets,’ Hoffstetter reports of the battle against the Neapolitans at Palestrina. Drunk on the pungent precariousness of it all, the men actually celebrated the arrival of enemy fire.

  I sit up in bed. Eleonora looks beautifully relaxed, sleeping on her side. I go to the kitchen to pour myself a glass of cold water then sip it in an armchair on the terrace looking out over the quiet city.

  DAY 7

  8 July 1849 – 31 July 2019

  Terni

  Six days they walked and the seventh they rested.

  That was the plan. But we both woke to emails requiring urgent work. I had an article to proofread. For London. Eleonora a few pages to translate. For Milan. In 1849 a man marching through the Italian hills was where he was. At most a horseman might gallop up with the news that an Austrian army was approaching Foligno just thirty miles to the north. Or that the French had passed Civita Castellana heading towards Orvieto forty miles to the north-west. But it was unlikely he would get letters discussing website servicing, or inviting him to subscribe to magazines. Today you have to work hard really to be where you physically are. The temptation is always to spread yourself across the globe, checking on news that doesn’t affect you: Trump, Syria, cricket scores. Or WhatsApping photos to family in London or New York. We decided to take a look around the town in the morning and spend the afternoon with our mini-computer and our work.

  Our apartment is slightly to the north of the centre. The monasteries where Garibaldi’s men camped are a half-mile beyond the river Nera, which circles the old centre to the south. The rivers in this part of Italy are disappointing, at least in summer, little more than muddy trickles. Despite the recent rain, the Nera is no exception. Fortunately, just beyond it there is an excellent sports shop where the owner, a genuine mountaineer, talks us through trekking poles and trekking socks.

  Just as yesterday in the pharmacy, I find a new fascination in browsing products I’ve barely thought about in the past. I see the importance of the way a trekking pole handle is shaped, the way it telescopes, how easily and securely you can fix its length. Meantime, the owner is thrilled by our Garibaldi project. He calls the other members of staff to the till. ‘These two explorers are mapping out a new walking route! They’re going to write a guidebook. And it passes through Terni! Right by our shop!’

  Everything comes down to business in the end. Eleonora tucks her new poles under her arm as we say goodbye.

  The Delle Grazie monastery is now an old people’s home, but the gracious public park around it still has more than enough space to sleep 2000 men. It’s a pleasure imagining them in their red shirts milling around us on the dry grass, among the cypresses and lindens, as we walk across to the second monastery, about a mile away, where the cavalry slept. ‘Marocchetti and I thought we might take advantage of the mattresses in the rooms,’ Hoffstetter remembers, ‘but we soon realized we were no longer used to such things. I slept fine on the bare earth: for each of my three horses I had a cloak and a big fur, with which I made myself the most enviable of beds. One horse stayed saddled, just in case, while one saddle served as a pillow. My boy, Ramussi, fared even better; he slept on the forage with a blanket and one of my cloaks.’

  Two fast roads have to be crossed to get from the park to the Basilica San Valentino, which is closed. We won’t be able to see the saint’s remains, which have lain on or under this holy site for 1800 years. Valentino is Terni’s patron saint. Young lovers come on pilgrimages. The church advertises a Betrothal Festival, a Silver Wedding Festival, a Golden Wedding Festival and a Free Guided Tour of the Basilica on 14 February. Would-be participants can book online, where they can also purchase San Valentino T-shirts and a plastic San Valentino statuette.

  A group of Frati Carmelitani Scalzi – Barefoot Carmelite Monks – watches over the saint’s remains twenty-four seven and were apparently doing the same in 1849. Belluzzi tells how Garibaldi’s men made fun of the monks and upbraided them for their laziness and easy lives. There was even some fat-shaming. Nevertheless, in 1882, six weeks after Garibaldi’s death, the friars did put up a plaque above a side door to record the hero’s passing. Fortunately Belluzzi noted down what it said because, aside from the first two lines, the words are no longer legible.

  In July 1849

  Giuseppe Garibaldi

  Venice-bound

  refreshed here the glorious remnants

  The citizens and the town council

  marked with reverence

  the great commander’s footprint.
/>   22 July 1882

  Remnants of what? Perhaps the monastery objected to any mention of the Roman Republic, which was anathema to the Pope. Perhaps the plaque has been allowed to fade on purpose. Still, one can’t help feeling that some mention of José and Anita would play to the monks’ San Valentino racket. It’s a missed opportunity.

  Back in town, the duomo has a different kind of footprint. Beside the door, at head height, the shape of a shoe is sunk three inches into the wall. It seems in fifteenth-century Terni there had been too much loving going on. Valentino’s influence perhaps. Laws were introduced to curb ladies’ scandalous indulgence in fine clothes, jewels and beauty products. High shoes were particularly in vogue, to create a seductive sway beneath long skirts. This shoe shape sunk in the wall indicated the maximum permitted height of a shoe from 1444 on. Three inches. Clearly the girls weren’t trekking.

  The sandals we’re wearing this morning have barely a half-inch of sole. We debated a month and more whether we should pack spare footwear. Even simple sandals weigh a pound or so. But you need to give sore feet some air. I imagine Garibaldi’s men might have killed for a pair of Geox.

  Between the basilica on the outskirts and the duomo back in the centre, we had to negotiate a busy roundabout, from whose grassy centre rises a hundred-foot spire of rusty, coppery metal. It’s another Arnaldo Pomodoro. The Spear of Light. In Piazza della Repubblica on the other hand there’s a moving inscription to local partisans killed fighting Nazi occupiers.

  This trip, I must say, is opening my eyes; it’s as if we’d been drawn into a great debating chamber where different eras have laid out their wares and staked their claims. Our own offers mostly rapid roads and empty gestures. The Spear of Light needs to be so tall because otherwise the passing cars would miss it. The drivers are on their phones, and will still be busy talking when they cross Ponte Garibaldi, where the partisans were shot.

  Back in the cool of the flat, I get to work correcting the proofs for my article. But my body is still pulsing with summer and I can’t think of anything but setting off tomorrow morning, striking up the stony hills. I’m thirsting for the sun, the heat, the sweat. And the company of the General, Anita, Bassi, Hoffstetter. And Forbes now too.

  Instead of focusing on my text, I keep checking my blisters. For the nth time I enquire of Google if it’s better to lance them or leave them be. Neither folklore nor sophisticated medicine seems to have resolved this conundrum. If you have to keep walking, one site suggests, lance your blisters at once. Otherwise leave them be.

  On a shelf behind a glass door, the deceased occupant of our flat has left a tin with needles that might last have threaded a button in the 1960s. I hold one over a gas flame in the kitchen, then get to work. Toe by tormented toe, it’s surprising how transparent the liquid is. Dewdrops almost.

  Towards five I hand over the computer to Eleonora, who is equally impatient to have this nonsense of work behind us. While she translates, I use my phone to buy online storage for my photos and look through those I’ve taken so far. Hundreds. The scratchings in the cellar of Villa dei Romani. The terrace in Vacone. What would Garibaldi have photographed, I wonder? As Hoffstetter describes him, the General was an obsessive observer of landscapes. No sooner had his men arrived in a new place, than he would be changing horses and off again, exploring the surrounding countryside, imagining every possible military scenario, returning to give detailed orders as to where checkpoints must be placed. ‘He was tireless,’ Hoffstetter remarks. Wherever there was a tower he would climb the steps to the top and gaze north, south, east and west.

  Garibaldi’s Google album would contain endless panoramas that only he knew how to interpret. Hoffstetter’s would be full of pictures of Garibaldi, and of his beloved horses, and the interiors of fashionable cafés. Otherwise one has the impression the German would have been a CCTV man. His 500 pages are packed with details of exactly where and at what intervals he placed the sentinels each time they camped, what was in their field of view and how often they were to go back and forth to contact each other. It was a policy rewarded in Terni by the capture of a spy, an Austrian soldier in peasant clothes who had been sent south to get a close look at the garibaldini. By the rules of war, such a man could have been stood against a wall and shot. Many clamoured for it. But Garibaldi’s severity was reserved for the unworthy among his own soldiers. The Austrian was closely guarded and forced to walk with the column during the coming days. That way he was neutralized, and perhaps also indoctrinated in the philosophy of freedom.

  On the terrace, eating baked aubergine and quiche, Eleonora and I discuss spie – spies. It was a word frequently used at the university where we met and worked. It was known that certain members of staff would report any criticism they heard to the head of faculty. Or forward him your emails. Spie. ‘Spies were the special curse of Italy,’ observes Trevelyan, talking about the 1840s. ‘Our enemies,’ Garibaldi complained in his memoir, ‘always found a throng of traitors ready to spy for them.’

  But the evening is pleasant on the seventh-floor terrace in Terni as the sun sinks and the shadows lengthen. We have just opened a bottle of wine when Eleonora asks, ‘What’s that?’

  It’s the sound of a key turning in a lock. And now a squeak of hinges.

  Spy?

  ‘C’è nessuno?’ a voice calls. Anyone there?

  Our host’s mother has come to water the multitudinous plants. An elegant woman in skirt and blouse, she unravels a hose and sets to work.

  ‘Don’t mind me,’ she says cheerfully.

  We offer her a glass of wine, which she declines, but then she hurries to a tub of tomato plants, washes four small red fruits with her hose and brings them to our table. They taste warm and sunny.

  Eleonora enthuses on the comforts of the big flat. It was her mother-in-law’s, the woman confides, directing a jet at some prickly pears. ‘Poor soul.’ But her son enjoys the job of renting it out. Plus their holiday home by the sea. ‘We have a place near Lido di Tarquinia if you’re interested.’ The boy worries her, though; he still hasn’t finished his degree. ‘He just can’t pass his English exam.’

  ‘Have him spend the summer in England,’ Eleonora suggests.

  ‘Yes,’ she says, ‘we’ve discussed that.’ Her voice becomes vague; perhaps she doesn’t want her son to go away.

  ‘If you wanted to stay a while in Terni,’ she proposes, turning to a row of geraniums, ‘you could pay for the apartment by giving him lessons.’

  I smile. Eleonora tells her we have to be off on our travels at dawn. Once again she explains our project and lists the towns we’ve walked through.

  ‘Stroncone!’ the lady cries. ‘I have a surgery in Stroncone once a week.’ She’s a doctor.

  We enthuse over the beauty of Stroncone, the sadness that these beautiful medieval borghi are almost depopulated.

  ‘Only the old people left,’ she observes.

  ‘We’ve noticed an awful lot of old people’s homes,’ Eleonora agrees.

  ‘Ageing relatives,’ I suggest, ‘keeping the borghi alive with their dying.’

  My humour isn’t appreciated. Our hostess shifts her attention to a lemon tree.

  After a short silence she says, ‘You must be a professor. Right?’

  ‘Is it so obvious?’

  ‘I like to guess what people do.’ She waves the hose back and forth. ‘Not an economics professor, I don’t think.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Not mathematics.’

  ‘Never in a million years.’

  ‘Or history.’

  ‘Why couldn’t I be a history professor?’

  She shakes her head. ‘History professors are boring!’

  ‘I love history.’

  She lingers over an agave.

  ‘Philosophy!’

  ‘I wish.’

  When I tell her I am, or was, a professor of translation, she again says how nice it would be if I could teach Francesco.

  She circumnavigates us
now and starts to pour water into the roots of a big wisteria that sends its tendrils along the railings and up the pillars to the eaves.

  ‘About Garibaldi, though. There’s a story about my great-great-grandfather, if you’re interested.’

  ‘Please!’

  ‘It seems one day he went out, here in Terni, to buy some tobacco or something, you know how men do, and never came back. That is, he came back ten years later. He’d joined Garibaldi and stayed with him for all those years.’

  ‘Fantastic,’ Eleonora says.

  ‘Except . . .’ I open my mouth to make the obvious objection, but catch a warning glint in Eleonora’s eyes.

  ‘My grandmother was very proud of him, her grandfather.’

  The truth is, Garibaldi never kept an army together for any longer than the time needed to fight the battles that had to be fought. What was this man doing for ten years?

  ‘Be hard to disappear like that today,’ Eleonora offers.

  ‘Thank God,’ says our hostess, thinking of Francesco perhaps. She coils her hose. ‘Just leave the keys on the table. And buon viaggio!’

  We lay out our clothes and prepare our backpacks. In bed we read how Garibaldi put Forbes and his 900 men at the head of the Second Legion, where most of the desertions had occurred, and had him lead the column out of Terni in the early evening. Not as an honour, Belluzzi says, but for fear that if the Englishman went last the angry populace would throw stones at him.

  PART TWO

  Hope

  DAY 8

  9–10 July 1849 – 1 August 2019

  Terni, Cesi, San Gemini Fonte, Carsulae, Acquasparta – 16 miles

  Cesi

  ‘Venice-bound’, says the plaque on the Basilica di San Valentino. But when he stopped in Terni Garibaldi had no clear idea where he was heading. Venice was the last city where a revolutionary government was hanging on, but tremendously difficult to reach. Two hundred and fifty miles away. With the high Apennine chain between, then the barrier of the Po Delta, miles and miles of marsh and deep-water channels. Plus the obstacle of five Austrian armies, one of which had the slowly starving Serenissima in the grip of a tight siege, aided by a well-equipped Austrian fleet blockading any approach from the sea. For the moment it seemed easier to head for Tuscany, trusting advice that the Tuscans were ready to rise at any moment, if only someone would lead them.