After Hannibal (29 page)

Age and pain had made Adelio’s face stiff and immobile; the wine he drank did not slacken it. The face, like the body, seemed guarded against suffering, so that the movements of the eyes and the mouth were alarming almost, as if they set the whole man at risk, somehow imperiled him. When he began to speak it was slowly, with long pauses clearly habitual; but he showed no reluctance, seemed in fact resigned to the telling. He might have been sitting here waiting for this visit, this question. It is because I am the proprietor now, Ritter thought. He had acquired the right to knowledge along with the land.

“It goes back to the war,” Adelio said and he drank and refilled his glass. “You were hardly born then.”

“I was a child.”

“We knew Italy could not win. Some knew it from the beginning
but most knew it by the summer of 1943, when the English and Americans landed in Sicily. No one wanted the war to go on, only the fascists …”

Ritter nodded. The general circumstances of the time he knew already. The story was one that many Italians of Adelio’s age could have told. With loss of belief in victory resistance to the Mussolini regime had intensified. In a matter of weeks the Duce had been deposed and arrested. In September Italy signed an armistice on terms of unconditional surrender. When this was announced almost all the Italian units in the peninsula, as well as those in France and the Balkans, were either disbanded or transferred to the Germans. The country was thrown into confusion. The north was still under German occupation. Mussolini was rescued by German paratroopers and taken north. The Italian Social Republic came into being as an ally of Germany. The anti-fascist parties became active and the underground resistance movement grew stronger and bolder. In the areas still controlled by Germany large partisan formations began to emerge and there was effectively a state of civil war.

“You did not know who was your friend and who your enemy,” Adelio said, with a thin smile that seemed illusory, difficult to believe in, in that immobile face. “I was not fascist or anti-fascist. I wanted to have my life again.” He made a light gesture, opening his hands before him. The life he had come back to claim had been one of toil and privation but it was the reward of survival, it came accompanied by hopes of peace. “You Germans were the enemy then,” he said. “Now we give you our houses to live in.”

With the armistice he had done as many thousands of others, abandoned his unit, made his way back home. “They wanted us to
take up arms again, join the fascist militia. It was dangerous to refuse; they would shoot you if they thought you had sympathy with the partisans. They would shoot you as a deserter in any case. They came looking for us. I couldn’t stay in the house, it was too dangerous.”

So he had made a den for himself, down there in the side of the gully where there was already a natural cavity caused by the arching growth of the tree roots. His hands as he described it made the shapes of smoothing and leveling, indicated the depth with a slow vertical movement of the arm. The entrance was screened off by canes his father had planted a dozen years before. Impossible to see from above, the slope was too steep, virtually impossible from below, unless one stumbled upon it. A perfect hiding place. There, in that September of fifty years ago, with a blanket and provisions, he had been able to take refuge when they came looking for him. There was fighting in the hills around between the fascist troops and local partisans. Then one day, early in the morning, a clear morning, that clarity of light between summer and autumn when the elements conspire to make you feel regret at the prospect of loss, the shooting had come very close. He was woken by it, there in his cave. It came from just beyond, on the neighboring land beyond the gully, among the terraces and the rocky shrub.

He had stayed under cover, as far back as he could get into the interior of his cave, and prayed to escape notice. “I was afraid for my life,” he said. “Once I might not have admitted this so easily but now I am old I have less shame. There was a silence after the shooting and I waited for a while, then I came out to look.”

There were things he would always remember about that morning
and in his halting way he was eloquent enough to make Ritter see what these were. The radiance of the light, the clarity of outline. You could see every smallest indentation in the line of the mountains that bounded the horizon. The leaves of the canes were motionless and stiff—there was no wind. There had been rain some days previously and a shallow flow of water tinkled in the streambed. He had come crawling out of his cave, lain still among the canes for some time. There was no sound or movement anywhere. After a while he began to move cautiously along the slope. Then he saw the bodies, two of them, one at the side of the stream, the other high up on the farther bank, lying outstretched on the sagging net of the brambles, his face turned up toward the sky. He had fallen from the edge of the bank above and been caught there and held. The other was at the streamside, face down, as if he had died in the act of drinking. “I thought afterward that this one must have been shot somewhere higher up and made his way down there. He was looking for a hiding place, he was hoping not to die. Like me.”

They were local men from Torricella, near the lake. One was in his twenties, the other—the one by the stream—was just eighteen. Their people had come for them the same day. There had been eight bodies altogether, scattered among the terraces and in the shrub country higher up. All but one of them were partisans; they had come down too far into country too open and been surprised at first light by a patrol of militia. “We could have waited,” Adelio said. “We could have settled the scores later, when you Germans had been pushed farther north. It was only some weeks to wait.”

He had been shocked by the sight of these dead youths and, Ritter suspected, perhaps more by his own fear and sense of close
escape. He had never wanted to set foot there again and he never had, not even to hide. The weed and the shrub had spread, covering everything over, clogging the canes and drowning the willows. The path that led down had been obliterated. “My father, he never went there either,” Adelio said. “It is an unlucky place. The earth is not good there and the slope is too steep.”

This verdict, at once superstitious and pragmatic, was the one that Ritter carried away with him. The old man did not rise to see his guest out, but remained seated there at the table with his wine—a second bottle now. Ritter uttered his thanks and made his own way out of the house, back onto the street.

All this was half a century ago, he thought, as he began the walk homeward. Time enough for resignation, for habitual reference to bad land and bad luck. The death Adelio had hidden from was close to him now again. But that remote September morning had still been clear to the old man’s mind, the peculiar horror of it vivid as ever. As clear, he thought suddenly, as that March afternoon not much later has always been to me, my uniformed father in the white room. For a while, as he walked, the two memories were fused, his own and the one borrowed: sound of water, sprawl of death, the scatter of almond petals on the desk, the moving mouth. There were more ways than one of covering things over but however it was done the result would always be a sepulchre.

He had left the public road now and started along the
strada virinale
. As he did so a car passed him with an elderly couple in it—he recognized them for the Americans whose house lay between the Chapmans’ and his own. He waited some moments for the dust of their passage to settle. The surface of the road was dried out and
hard, pale yellow in color, checkered with shade from the poplars that ran along one side of it. Huge flaring poppies grew here and there along the edges. A chaffinch was singing somewhere, the same brief refrain, loud and full-throated. Ritter moved forward again, very slowly. He had opened a sepulchre back there in the gully. It was as if he had gone back to his boyhood and been permitted to stand there at the Fosse Ardeatine and see the scattered bodies of the shot people before their executioners had blasted the earth to cover them …

These thoughts brought him once more to a halt. As he stood there, head down, he heard from somewhere ahead of him a strange roaring sound like a sustained explosion. It was followed by an aftermath of slighter muffled crashes, as if some metallic beast had begun by roaring and ended with sobs.

Monti heard the sound too, rather more distantly; but he was intent on his own purposes and did not think much about it. Some sort of decision he had come to already, though he had not been fully aware of it, as he stood there in the cellars of the Rocca Paolina, felt the place shudder around him, watched that descent of white dust.

He had gone back to his car and driven home. Now as he moved restlessly back and forth between sitting room and bedroom, from inveterate habit he sought corridors of escape into the past, tried to wriggle free from the weight of deciding and acting through the contemplation of decisions and actions made by men long
turned to dust. He thought again of the Pope’s great fortress, built on the ruins of his enemies’ houses, cemented with their blood. Paul had wanted, every day of his residence there, to celebrate the entombment of the Baglioni, stamp on their skulls, resurrect and kill them over again as he looked down from his terraces over the gardens that had been theirs. And all the time, very slowly, through obscure historical processes, the enemies were gathering who would one day demolish this vast monument and raze it to the ground.

The same destiny awaited all habitations, whether brought about by human violence or the more patient violence of time and weather. But we can hope for temporary shelter, he thought. It is all that life offers. The past cannot give it to us nor the future, only the present as we live it day by day. He glanced for some moments around the walls of this rented house which had nothing of himself in it but his loneliness. All at once he was swept with pity for his wife and for himself and with need for her.

It was the first impulse of love he had felt since her leaving; and it was almost immediately followed by fear. He took out Laura’s letter and read it again quickly. Nowhere in it was there any explicit statement that she would wait till she heard from him. It occurred to him now that all his assumptions might be wrong. She might not wait for a reply. She might decide to come and see him or she might change her mind again and go off somewhere. How could he have thought she would wait there tamely till he saw fit to answer? It would seem like waiting for permission.

Monti had never deluded himself that he was a man prompt to action; he had maintained a sort of passivity in the face of life, somehow existing in a place adapted to his shape, hollowed out for
him. He had settled into the role of injured party as if in this way his merit might be recognized, his loss restored. But he knew now, with a force of conviction that seemed like joy, that one must restore one’s own losses or confirm them forever.

Whatever Laura decided, he must forestall her, he must get to her first. He would go to her now, he would leave now. Ten minutes to pack a few things. By eleven o’clock he could be in Turin. He would phone from a bar on the way to make sure she was alone when he arrived.

Not very far away Cecilia Chapman had also begun to pack, taking advantage of the fact that she had the house to herself. Harold had gone to report matters to Mancini. Nothing, it seemed to Cecilia, demonstrated her husband’s essential servility so much as his present devotion to this devious lawyer. He had not asked her to go with him.

As she selected the things she would most need, Cecilia was surprised to find herself so determined and methodical. The decision to leave Harold had come with the force of things long overdue, things that had been silently beseeching recognition for a long time. It had come with irresistible force while she watched the look of triumph deepen on his face at the crushing of the Checchetti. Small things lead on to great, she said sagely to herself, as she selected among toiletries. It was not these wretched Checchetti—still going ant-like back and forth in their long task of bringing in the wood—it was not they who had been the cause. They were merely the
occasion. She knew now what self-distrust had prevented her from knowing before: it was dislike for Harold that all these years she had been trying to overcome. She had called it by other names, she had thought it other than it was: her own inadequacy, her problems of adjustment to the married state, her failure, after the first year or two, to be much roused by Harold in bed. With all the considerable store of humility at her disposal she had looked at her own shortcomings and found the blame there. Now, with an exhilaration she was never to forget, she acknowledged the truth of things. She disliked Harold, she found him oppressive. She disliked his feet in their shoes and his aftershave lotion and the shape of his behind. She disliked the crudeness of his desire to better himself. She disliked the manner and nature of his laughter. These things she disliked not only in themselves but because they seemed collectively the emanation of Harold’s soul. And she knew that time would only serve to intensify this feeling.