Death in Sardinia (44 page)

‘If you don’t tell me what I want to know in ten seconds, I shall do the following: I shall order one of my men to take one of those lovely little girls, tie her to the back of the car with a rope and go for a drive through the mountains,’ he said calmly. The women fell to their knees, and with their eyes popping out of their heads said in unison that everything was hidden in the cellar, behind a brick wall.

‘Get up,’ the commander said, walking away.

‘I don’t like worms that crawl along the ground.’ The Fascists had already gone to the lorries to fetch pickaxes, and four of them went back into the house. There was a sound of hammering for a few minutes, and then one of them came out, half covered in dust.

‘It’s all there, sir.’

‘Four of you stay here; everybody else, to the cellar,’ said the commander.

‘Yes, sir!’

In short order they removed a treasury of paintings and jewels from the cache and loaded their booty on to one of the lorries. They made the prisoners board the other lorry, and then the convoy left. The half-hour that followed was terrible. The Fascists raped the two women and beat up the men in front of the screaming children. Then the vehicles stopped along a mountain road in the middle of a wood. They made everyone get out and started walking through the trees. The captain led the way, whistling a march.

‘Where are you taking us?’ one of the women whispered, but nobody replied. The silence was worse than screams. The soldiers, on the other hand, seemed calm. They stopped in a clearing and made the prisoners stand in a line, with Benigno at one end and the old man at the other. The three children were in the middle, clinging to the women’s legs. The Fascists took about ten steps back and raised the barrels of their machine guns.

‘Shouldn’t we have them dig a pit?’ asked one of them.

‘In a week’s time, even their bones will be gone,’ said another.

‘It’s full of wild boar around here.’ Benigno didn’t believe such a thing could actually happen. He was wrong.

‘Fire!’ said the commander, and the Fascists started shooting. It was over very quickly. The children’s bodies were thrown backwards by the force of the bullets.The others fell like empty sacks. Then silence returned. The air smelled of gunpowder. Benigno felt his shoulder burning, but he was alive. He lay still, with his eyes half open, the better to pretend he was dead. He’d fallen back with his face towards the Fascists and saw everything. One of them pulled out some cigarettes and passed them round to the others.

Somebody moaned. One of the women was still alive. The captain went up to her and gestured brusquely for a pistol. One of the soldiers ran and put one in his hand. The captain released the safety catch and shot the woman in the head. He did the same with the old man and then the children. After shooting them all he arrived at Benigno and pointed the gun at his head as indifferently as if looking at his fingernails to see whether they were dirty. Benigno saw his face through his half-closed eyelashes … He saw the round, all-powerful eyes looking at him with indifference. But by this point he was playing dead in earnest and not moving. Indeed, he remembered thinking: Let’s hope he doesn’t see a vein pulsing. Half a second later, the captain pulled the trigger and the pistol clicked. The others were some ten yards away, chatting. The captain fired again, and again the pistol clicked. And all at once it started raining, big fat drops that made a great deal of noise when they hit the trees and the ground.There was a clap of thunder, and a second later the floodgates opened.

‘Bloody hell!’ the Fascists yelled, covering their heads with their jackets. The commander stayed back for another second, looking at the deserter’s body, then put the pistol in his pocket and ran off with the others. A few minutes later Benigno heard the lorries and cars drive away. As he raised his head, a sob rose up in his throat. He was alive. Still alive. He got on his knees, kissing the rain as it fell on his face, and started crying like a child. The bullet that should have killed him had remained inside the barrel. It was God who had done it. It was He who held it back … And then He sent the rain, the rain which crashed down like a waterfall, washing away the smell of his fear. His shoulder burned, but he had no other wounds. It all seemed so absurd to him. Before him lay the other bodies, pelted by the rain and bleeding, heads smashed in by that last bullet. The two little girls looked like rag dolls fished out of the sea. It was a scene so chilling, it didn’t seem real. Benigno stood up but had trouble remaining on his feet. He wished he could bury those bodies, but he had no tools and couldn’t move his injured shoulder without feeling great pain. He made the sign of the cross in the air, as he’d always seen the village priest do, then said ‘Amen’ three or four times and staggered away from that hell. He took meagre refuge under a large tree and uncovered the wounded shoulder. There were two holes in his flesh. The bullets had passed through him without stopping. The blood kept flowing out, washed away at once by the rainwater. Putting his shirt back on, he went towards a more densely wooded area. He didn’t even know where he was. A few hours later he reached a secluded farmstead surrounded by abandoned fields, and collapsed on the ground. Some peasants attended to his wounds and let him stay in the stall for a fortnight or so, then gave him some bread and pancetta and asked him please to leave. They were afraid of the Nazis and the Black Brigades. They’d heard tell of some terrible things, they said, wide eyed. Benigno understood, thanked them and went on his way.

Up in the hills, deserters had formed armed bands and were roaming the countryside like him, in search of food. Benigno spent a few months with one such group, sharing what little food they could get from the local peasants. They numbered nineteen, and the oldest among them was under twenty-five. During the winter they hid out in an abandoned stable. It snowed a great deal, and they suffered in the cold but felt protected. For several months they ate only chestnuts and the few wild animals they’d managed to catch with rudimentary traps.

In late March they set out again. When passing through one mountain village they learned that in the Langhe, some partisan armies had formed to fight the Fascists. Nearly all of his group decided to join them, Benigno included. He hadn’t quite understood what he was going to do, but it seemed like the right thing. And so the volunteers marched off, walking from sunset to sunrise and hiding wherever they could during the day. One evening, as night was falling, they were set upon by some triggerhappy Black Brigades along the banks of a stream. Three or four of Benigno’s comrades fell into the water at once, while the others scattered in every direction through the woods. Benigno himself ran for at least half an hour without looking back. When he finally stopped, he was alone again. His face was scratched and bloodied by the branches he’d run through, but he was still alive, again. He even managed to survive the great round-up of November ’44, hiding in an old tomb in a mountain cemetery. When the weather began to improve, he joined a band of partisan fighters as a cook and stayed with them until April of ’45. Then in May he set sail at last for Sardinia. For many years he continued to have nightmares about the day of the firing squad. He would see the round hole of the pistol’s barrel again, the indifferent eyes staring at him, and instead of clicking, the gun would fire …

‘When he used to sleep here with us I would hear him cry out in the night,’ said Pina, her wrinkled face lit up red by the flames. Piras looked asleep, but he’d listened carefully to the whole story and was turning something over in his head.

‘I didn’t know that story,’ said Gavino.

‘I know it by heart,’ Giovanni said, sleepy eyed.

‘Poor Benigno,’ Maria whispered.

‘He always said that every new day was a gift for him … but then …’ Pina said, trying to smile. Someone filled the glasses again. Giovanni relit his Tuscan cigar, tossed the match into the fire, and all at once started telling the story of a horrible vendetta that had taken place some twenty years earlier at Bauladu. Piras was unable to listen, however. He kept thinking of Benigno pretending to be dead, and tried to imagine himself in his place … He saw the Fascist commander approach, saw his eyes, saw the gun barrel and heard it go … click … click … click … click …

Rosa finished rolling the ‘cigarette’, licking the paper to seal it. She lit it, took two drags and passed it to Bordelli. It was already their second, but that evening neither of them felt like laughing. The Endrigo record ended, and the gramophone’s arm returned to its cradle. Rosa was having one of her rare evenings of melancholy. She’d spent Christmas Eve with her girlfriends. She’d got too drunk and vomited. But it had been a pleasant evening, as was only fitting for the baby Jesus’s birthday. At midnight they’d all sat in silence, listening to the church bells ringing, and then they’d put on some music and started dancing …

Now, however, she felt a little depressed. This often happened after a good party. As she watched the blinking lights on the Christmas tree and smoked that stuff, some memories came back to her, and she started telling stories, almost as if talking to herself. Having apparently understood the general mood, Gideon jumped into Rosa’s lap and started sucking her woollen sweater as if it were his mother’s teats. Bordelli lay on the sofa with eyes closed, listening … In his mind Rosa’s words turned into images as sharp as a movie’s …

Rosa was born in the countryside near Florence, in a small outlying ward of Tavarnelle. When she was six or seven she used to play with other peasant children who lived in the area. There were five of them, two girls and three boys. They used to spend every afternoon together, year round, happily excluded from the compulsory education of the Fascist government. They had boundless territory to explore and sometimes didn’t come home until after dark.

Other times they would stop in front of Andrea’s house, which stood on an embankment supported by a dry retaining wall and looked out over the surrounding countryside. The vineyard descended in terraces down to a drainage trench they called ‘the fallen waters’. Opposite them rose a big hill entirely covered with a dense, dark pine forest; and here and there the pointed black tips of cypresses stuck out above the boughs of needles. Everyone called the hill the Witches’ Mount. One afternoon Andrea told them that there was a creature called the Monster of the Three Goats, half man, half beast, who roamed the pine wood at night and killed everyone he came across. Nobody believed him. It was a tale a little too tall to swallow. But Andrea swore it was all true, crossing his fingers over his lips and kissing them to prove it. And all at once they saw an old woman, thin as a rail, walking along the grassy path below the embankment. She was wearing a black scarf over her head, her bright white hair sticking out everywhere and reflecting almost blue in the light. She was coming towards them.

‘She’s a witch,’ said Rosa, biting her lips.

‘Hush! She’ll hear you.’ The old woman continued walking, head down, as if she hadn’t seen anyone. When she was directly below the embankment, she looked up and said: ‘Ciao, Andrea, don’t be such a stranger.’ And she kept on going. Everybody turned and looked at Andrea, but he bit his lips and said he’d never seen her before in his life. They all called him a liar, saying he was just playing games, then they all got up and went down below to follow the old woman. They ran down the path and, rounding the bend, came to a halt. The woman was nowhere to be seen. They looked around. The spot where they stood afforded an open view of the entire valley and some hundred yards down the path … But there was no sign of the crone anywhere. And yet only a few seconds had passed. Splitting up into two groups, they started running in different directions. Three of them descended the slope, jumping from terrace to terrace, while the other two continued down the path.They ran hard, hoping to catch the old woman up and prove to themselves that what they were thinking was wrong. But the crone had vanished. When they regrouped, they all started walking home in silence, repeatedly looking back. They decided to find out who that old woman was. The following day they asked around whether anyone knew an old woman with white hair, as thin as a beanpole, but nobody knew anything. In the end they resigned themselves to the fact that their fears were right … The old crone was a witch.

‘If I close my eyes I can still see her,’ Rosa said, leaning her head back on the sofa.The cat had stopped sucking her sweater and was asleep without a worry in his head …

‘I agree that she was a witch,’ Bordelli said without opening his eyes.

‘I feel a little sad …’ said Rosa.

‘Why?’

‘I don’t know … I wish I could become a little girl again and start all over.’

‘And what would you do?’

‘Something else,’ she said, stroking Gideon’s belly. They sat in silence. All they could hear was the purring cat, who lay on his back on Rosa’s legs.

‘Are you asleep?’ she asked softly. Bordelli didn’t answer. He was drifting off, making no effort to prevent it. A few minutes later he was snoring.

Piras woke up very early. He ate a slice of bread with fig jam, drank a cup of coffee, stuffed a few
papassinos
into his pockets, went outside and started walking. The sky was clear, and although the sun hadn’t yet risen, he could see rather well. He took the road to Seneghe and got busy with his crutches. A light fog hung over the woods. He breathed deeply, enjoying the feeling of the cold air in his lungs. He felt so restless he was jumping out of his skin. At last he had in hand a plausible explanation for what had happened to Benigno, and he wanted to try to sort it all out.

Pintus might well have been one of those Fascists in Asti, maybe even the commander. Two women, an old man, three small children and a deserter, slaughtered like dogs so as not to leave any living witnesses to the pillaging of the villa. Who knew how many other similar outrages had taken place. But unlike the other victims, Benigno had survived, and twenty years later he’d recognised one of his killers by accident when negotiating the sale of a plot of land. It made perfect sense. But perhaps it was better to try to reconstruct each stage carefully, to see whether the story held together.