Between Enemies (2 page)

I was fond of Grandpa. He abandoned his nightcap only at about ten in the morning, and even then unwillingly. That night, however, he had to manage without it. A private and a corporal had tied him to a chair, and while one jabbed his rifle butt into his breastbone and the other tickled his throat with the point of his bayonet, they had tried to force him to say where the family jewellery was hidden. It was lucky that Grandma, unbeknownst to him, had managed to hide the most precious things – along with a handful of gold sovereigns – in the bag of one of her enemas: objects too humble, and too closely associated with faeces, to tickle the appetite of the predators.

‘I am concerned for Maria…Of course, if there’s anyone who can put a scare into a German it’s her,’ said Grandpa, flopping down on the palliasse. The dry maize leaves of the stuffing crunched beneath his weight. He gazed up at the beams with moist eyes, but he didn’t want me to sense his fear: our lives, our property, everything was at the mercy of the enemy. ‘War and loot are the only faithful married couple,’ he said.

I lay down beside him. Grandpa was really fond of my aunt: ‘She’s a woman of grace and initiative,’ he would say. She was the daughter of his brother who had gone down in the wreck of the
Empress of Ireland
in May 1914, along with his wife and my own parents, during the voyage which everyone in the family called the Great Disaster. Since then she had been entrusted
with the running of the Villa, perhaps because my education was seen to, albeit with fitful zeal, by my grandmother. ‘Have you ever looked closely into your aunt’s eyes? So green, and as firm as two stones. D’you know what sailors say? They say that when the water turns green the storm engulfs you.’ Grandpa had never been to sea, but his talk was full of nautical slang and sea-captains’ oaths: ‘steady as you go’, ‘splice the mainbrace’, ‘if I catch you at it I’ll hang you from the yardarm’; though this last one had been banished from his discourse ever since, immediately following the Great Disaster, he had asked me to address him with the familiar
tu
.

Everyone had become very kind to me after the sinking of the
Empress
, and I had made the most of it. The best part was that I had not suffered, at least not as much as might be expected. My parents were practically strangers to me. They had sent me to boarding school to relieve themselves of a burden, or – to be more charitable – because they thought that a father and mother are unsuited to the task of educating their children. My school was run by the Dominicans, and the good Fathers considered physical fitness at least as important as that of the soul, regarding which they were, amazingly enough, inclined to admit a certain degree of ignorance.

On that fatal day the headmaster – an authority on St Dominic de Guzmán, who to us boys seemed a hundred years old because of his snow-white beard and his stoop – sent to fetch me. His study, lined with large leather-bound books, measured about three paces by four, in which the smell of mould, paper, ink, armpits and grappa struggled for dominance. He looked up from the manuscript he was consulting, gave me a square look with great blue eyes further enlarged by his lenses, and said, ‘Sit down, young man.’ He made no preambles and did not soften
the blow with any rigmarole about eternal life. He spoke firmly, without a pause.

I made no pretence at feeling sad. ‘I won’t miss them,’ I said.

He blinked, then gave me a stern look. ‘There are things one comes to understand only with time,’ he said before burying his nose in his manuscript again. Perhaps he didn’t even hear me leave the room, but those words of his stayed with me. He was right, the blow came later; the wound opened little by little, and little by little it healed.

Grandpa didn’t take his eyes off me.

‘So what happens now, Grandpa?’

‘Now, laddie,’ (as he liked to call me) ‘we keep our mouths shut and let them loot us. This lot wouldn’t think twice about skinning us alive. Have you heard what they do with the farmhands? Make them stand up against the wall and then throw buckets of water all round the house in search of their copper cauldrons and other treasures. Where the soil is freshly dug the water sinks in at once.’ He smiled, because he smiled when he was afraid. ‘Two kilos of copper can buy a pig…but I put my trust in your grandmother. She told me where she’d hidden the artificial jewellery, making out that it was the good stuff. They won’t find the real stuff even if they dig up the whole garden.’ He heaved a sigh. ‘Luckily they’ll be leaving tomorrow.’

‘But then . . . our front line! Do you think it won’t even hold along the Piave?’

‘The war is lost, laddie.’

Donna Maria didn’t get a wink of sleep. She told me so the next morning. It wasn’t fear, for in her mind there was simply no room for fear. She was afraid neither for herself nor for us. ‘These jackals have other things to keep them busy, but if
they reach Venice there’ll be no end to the looting. And now they are here, in my garden, in my rooms, in my kitchen, and they’re digging the latrine in the soil which is the resting place of my mother and of yours.’ It wasn’t true. Teutonic efficiency had not yet envisaged drain fields, but my aunt had a meticulous imagination, thirsty for details, and especially the most disagreeable.

In the dead of night she had heard a horse neighing. The sound came from the portico. The neighing of horses always gave her gooseflesh because she loved horses. She had seen them dragging the last of the rearguard’s carts; she had seen them refusing the bit, tossing their heads, digging in their hoofs when they passed by the corpses of mules with their thighs slashed open by the bayonets of hungry infantrymen. ‘They have a sense of foreboding at the death of one of their own kind, just as we do ourselves.’ It was so unjust that they were made to suffer. ‘It is men who make war; animals have nothing to do with it. And then…maybe they are closer to God…they are so simple…so
direct
.’

At about three in the morning Donna Maria had got up, taking care not to wake Teresa who was sleeping at the foot of her bed. She went to the window. There were bonfires everywhere. The troops were unloading huge crates marked with the arms of the House of Savoy: the municipal warehouse had only partly burnt down. She saw the captain on horseback among the tents. The ground-floor windows were aglow with the yellow light of paraffin lamps. All of a sudden she felt she was being watched. She turned. Loretta was standing only a metre away, stock still, her long, long hair dangling and her eyes fixed on her. ‘What’s the matter?’

The servant lowered her eyes.

‘They won’t harm us,’ said Donna Maria softly. ‘They’ll take it out on the Villa, and with the farmhands’ houses, but nothing will happen to us. Go back to bed.’ And back Loretta went to her palliasse, which emitted a crunch of dried leaves.

Grandpa’s was a laughing face even when he was sad. Not even he slept a wink, but he pulled his sheet right up to his moustache and made a gentle pretence at snoring. I watched him in the darkness. Grandpa’s moustache was a bristly rake, the tips of which attempted a risky handlebar effect. It was a sign of his contrariness, his wish to poke fun at the conventions which his plump chin, carefully shaved, paid homage to. I was amused by his childish eccentricities, partly because they constantly irritated Grandma, who would retaliate by inviting the Third Paramour to dinner.

The doors were no longer banging, the German voices sounded more sleepy, as did the noise of the boots, of the hoofs and even of the motorbikes.

I listened to my thoughts buzzing around in the muddle of somnolence. Big thoughts, about faraway things, sufficiently intangible as to not make me feel responsible. I thought of the rout of our Second Army more than of the occupation of the Villa; I thought of the ceaseless stream of peasants and infantrymen, the carts of the poor and the motor cars of the generals, of the wounded men abandoned in the ditches. I had never seen so many eyes ravaged by terror. The eyes of women with bundles slung round their necks: lifeless bundles and whimpering bundles. I would never have believed that the pain of a whole people in flight, a people to whom until then I had not been aware of belonging, could have affected me so deeply as to become mine, a pain of my own. There was no believing in
what the generals Cadorna, Capello or the Official Gazettes said, but in pain, yes there was. It was like a massive boulder on my breast. The voices of the barbarians rang in my ears, those abrupt orders, the squeal of brakes, the thud of packs dumped down on stone. Images of stamping men and mules, and doors smashed in. My lips were parched, my tongue a piece of bark. I was a fly in an upside-down tumbler, twisting and turning on the mattress, dashing myself against the glass.

Two

R
ENATO LIT HIS PIPE WITH A PIECE OF BURNING STRAW
and his face vanished into the smoke, from which there first emerged his long, sharp nose, then his pale eyes. He had arrived to act as steward at the Villa in mid-October, with references from a Tuscan marquis, an old friend of Grandma’s. Although maintaining a proper distance, the very heart of authority, my aunt didn’t manage to conceal her liking for this lame giant with his one metre ninety and over a hundred kilos.

‘What are they doing with those big tubs?’

‘Looking for copper. They think we’re simpletons like the farmhands, who bury the stuff near their houses. Your grandfather told them about some valuables and now they’re hunting for the bits and bobs. They’re methodical, but not very astute.’ His voice was of a sombre baritone, yet each syllable came out clear and clean. He was very observant, and uncommonly intelligent, so it was not easy to think of him as a servant. And then his vocabulary was too precise and extensive. Grandpa and Aunt Maria said he was a true Tuscan, but there was something else about him I couldn’t put my finger on, and that perplexed me: he was too clear-minded, too sure of himself.

‘Did they threaten you?’

‘I gave them a couple of things of small importance, the mandolin and the big copper cauldron from the cowshed, which I’d
hidden under the straw to make them think they were more valuable than they are. They stuck a barrel right between my eyes. I put on a show of reluctance at first, but didn’t overdo it. You don’t get yourself killed to save your employer’s possessions.’

‘They don’t look so ferocious today.’

Renato disappeared behind the smoke again. I liked the shape of his pipe, with a four-inch-long almost vertical mouthpiece and a blackened brier bowl. ‘The ones who left here this morning had a nasty look to them,’ he said. ‘And tomorrow we’ll know whether, as rivers go, the Piave turns out a better barrier than the Tagliamento was.’

‘Grandpa says the war is already lost.’

He looked me straight in the eye. I looked at the ground. ‘Italy is feminine,’ he said, raising his voice a little, ‘whereas Germany is masculine. Where women are concerned,’ he added, almost in a whisper, ‘you can never tell. We have lost one army, but if the rest of our forces rally…The front is far shorter now, and we could prove a tough nut to crack.’

I turned towards the gate, where there was a sudden hubbub. I made out the silhouette of Giulia, who was hugging some dangling object to herself, something the two sentries were trying to wrest from her hands. ‘I’ll go and see…’

‘You will do nothing of the sort. Donna Giulia is quite able to fend for herself.’

His tone conveyed an order, not a piece of advice.

‘Better to leave the women to it. And that one doesn’t speak much, but when she does, it’s fireworks.’ He chewed on his pipe-stem. ‘Poor sentries,’ he added, fanning the smoke away with his big, horny right hand. His eyes were smiling. I realized that he guessed what I felt for Giulia, and I blushed again. ‘You see? She’s already got out of it.’

I went to meet Giulia. She had the sun behind her and it took me a while to make out what it was she was holding. A gasmask, one of those with a snout. ‘Hello,’ I said, suppressing my excitement.

Giulia held up the gasmask to hide a rather crafty grin. The snout hung down onto her swelling breasts, which even her padded jacket barely restrained. The two glass eyepieces made her look like a giant insect, and the pot at the end of the snout added a Martian touch. ‘I picked it up for half a bucketful of carobs. This German wanted a kiss and I slipped him the carobs. Even horses don’t like them much.’ She laughed, and taking the mask from her face released a swarm of freckles.

‘A bit macabre, your headdress.’

‘I think it suits me. You told me yesterday that my eyes are too blue. With this I’ve got eyes like a hornet.’

‘Come on, let’s go indoors. Too many soldiers here.’

Out of the corner of my eye I caught a glimpse of Renato following a sergeant towards the wood with a shovel over his shoulder.

‘Let’s hope they’re not making him dig his own grave,’ said Giulia.

‘They’re going to dig a trench further off, in case the wind blows this way. These toff officers have delicate noses,’ said Teresa as she stood aside to let us in. It took a little while for my eyes to adjust to the darkness of the kitchen. There were five men round the fireplace, one of them Italian, a prisoner. They looked at me unseeingly. They were blotto. One of them, his tunic unbuttoned, was stirring polenta over a sparkling blaze. Without weapons on their belts they had a cheery look, as if the war had gone away along with the officers who had left at dawn.

With the staring eyes of famished men the soldiers gazed at
Giulia as she made her way between the blackened pillars. To take the edge off my agitation I took a deep breath of the odour of mould and polenta. The Italian gave us a sketchy greeting, while the others looked away, pretending a sudden interest in the cauldron. In them I no longer felt the arrogance of the marauders of last evening, but more the embarrassment of uninvited guests, prisoners of a foreign language, almost regretful at being unable to exchange courtesies. Bavarians or Prussians as they might be, their firesides at home couldn’t be all that different from ours, and their employers must have had kitchens no less spacious than this one. Giulia went through into the drawing room, and I followed her.