Lambrusco (15 page)

Mallo must have made an impression on me, seeing as how she was a lady player of golf. Some guys had been mentioning that. She was a golfer and she was also a girl with a criminal record. Sure, she'd got off the charges against her by getting recruited into Intelligence—did I know that? Did I know what he was talking about? Did I know I'd been associating with an American criminal?

That subject would probably come up again. Were my clothes satisfactory? It was a uniform of the smallest guy in the unit. That was him over there, Peewee Wilkins, in the bed by the curtained-off operating area.

He came from Kentucky. Besides being a GI, he was a
jockey
—well, he'd hoped to become one before the war interrupted his life. So far, all he'd done was shovel a lot of manure and do training runs.

Did I know what a jockey was? It was the person who sat on the horse in a race. Peewee's home state was half in the South and half in the North. This division had been established in the Civil War, which no American would ever attempt to explain to a European. It was just too emotional. The state of Washington, way up in its private corner, had not existed in Civil War days. So Frank had no personal connections to that conflict.

Peewee had never said what side of Kentucky he was from. He didn't need his shirt and trousers. He wasn't going anywhere soon, having met up the other day with German fire.

He was not looking good. It might happen that he'd never need his clothes back. That was all he wanted to say about Peewee. A good man. Maybe there'd be racetracks in heaven.

Sorry my friends weren't allowed in to see me. Sorry I'd been separated from them. Was that older woman who screamed at the sergeant a relative? I could fill him in on that later. And what about that guy who tried to get in, on the basis that America owed him a favor plus a new furniture factory? Not my husband, obviously. I wasn't wearing a wedding band. I was a widow, right?

Was the furniture guy an admirer? I must have had hordes of them.

He himself had never been to an opera but he knew a truck driver who went through New York City sometime around the war before this one, around 1917. It was his first time there. He'd left his truck at a depot. He went to Central Park to see what it was like—this guy was from the West. He'd never been in a big eastern park before. And what did he happen upon?

He happened upon an outdoor show with one of the most famous, most legendary Italians there ever was, not counting Christopher Columbus: Enrico Caruso. It was Caruso himself, up on a stage, singing the song by George M. Cohan that every American knew by heart—well, at least the chorus. “Over There,” it was called. It was a fighting song, patriotic.

“Over there, over there,” went the chorus. “Send the word, over there, that the Yanks are coming, the Yanks are coming.”

“Over there” was Europe, which was now, for him, here.
Yank
was a word I'd probably heard before, with a general meaning, for all Americans, although there were many Americans who found it insulting. It was not the same as a
Yankee,
which was a baseball team.

Maybe after the war, baseball would come to Italy. All the partisans could form teams with their
buddies,
having learned a few things about teamwork. His Umbrian father used to say that the basic nature of an Italian is anarchy. But that was before partisans.

Poor Italy. Did I know that Mussolini was on the cover of the most famous magazine in America,
Life
? This was maybe five or six years ago. Lots of Americans had thought he was
fabulous.

The Umbrian had sent Frank a long letter when he'd heard about the orders to head for Italy. He'd taken it personally.

In the letter, he quoted from something Mussolini wrote. It was called “The Doctrine of Fascism,” and Frank remembered some of the quotes because the Umbrian had written them in big capital letters, with much underlining, and a note on the side that said “Memorize this!”
In rejecting democracy, Fascism rejects the silly untruth of political equality. Liberalism spells individualism, and Fascism, thank God, curtails harmful liberties.

The Umbrian, not that he could vote, because he was in America illegally, was a
Democrat
in his sensibilities, and a man with a conscience. It really burned him up that Mussolini made such a big show of how his dictatorship was based on God.
I, Benito Mussolini, acknowledge myself as the most spiritual man of this country! That's how I got to be a dictator! What people love best is authority!

“Son,” the Umbrian had written, “going to the bar and throwing darts at Mussolini's face on the wall isn't giving me the satisfaction I had hoped for, so please, while you're in my country, go and put a bullet through his stupid, dangerous heart.”

Sorry to get a little carried away. Maybe he was, himself, in his interior, besides speaking the language, Italian, if I could imagine someone inheriting something from someone who wasn't their actual parent.

One day, when the Umbrian was still married to his mother—he was a gardener—he called Frank outdoors to look at his tomatoes, which were spectacular. He'd taken a fat, juicy red one off the vine. He broke off the stem at that
belly button
spot a tomato always has, the
ombelico.
He held up the tomato for the purpose of being sniffed. He said, “This is what my soul smells like, and now, so does yours.”

That was what you'd call spiritual. That was what you'd call the opposite of Mussolini.

Sorry about the surroundings. He didn't have the words to apologize enough for this place. He just couldn't understand why the officers of his unit picked the worst-off
palazzo
in Italy.

Nice floor, though. Nice tiles. Someone had said that this area was famous for mosaics. In America you'd never see a floor full of artwork like this. It was really something. Julius Caesar–type guys in togas and sandals, ladies with big round eyes, very classical. Boats, plants, trees, dogs, all kinds of things. Imagine walking on the art! Only in Italy.

Perhaps later on I could talk to him about outstanding Italian artists. He was willing to open himself up to an educational experience. All those painters to find out about! Michelangelo, for example, who decorated the Vatican. And the guy who painted that world-famous lady, Mona Lisa. Did my son like paintings? He already knew that his name was Giuseppe, in honor of that revered and famous patriot, Garibaldi, whose footsteps, it appeared, he was following.

Probably, there were so many Italians named for Garibaldi through the years, you'd never be able to count them. There was nothing special in parents wanting to endow their babies with an extra edge. But all those other Giuseppes had not gone out of their way to be heroes.

I must be proud of him. Did any operas have mothers of heroes as the leading lady? If so, when I got myself back to my career, I'd play them with gusto, with an extra layer of emotion from my war experience.

He never imagined he'd say this in his life, but
geez,
he wished he knew about opera. Someone had told him I'd appeared ten times on the stage of that top-notch pinnacle of theatrical places, La Scala.

Was that in Rome? He was hoping he'd get to Rome. Did I ever hear of the movie
Roman Scandals
? It was American. He'd seen it six times. Three evenings and three matinees. It was playing in some town he'd got stuck in—not in Nevada—for most of a week, in a flood that had washed out the road; it was always something. A swell film, though. It was about a decent, ordinary teenage boy—this was very complex, so never mind the details—who traveled backward in time to ancient Rome, and ended up in an emperor's court, very lavish, with fancy costumes and dancing and singing, not all of it awful.

The boy lived in a town called Rome, but it was in Oklahoma. It was unbelievable how many small American places were named for European big ones. Paris, Berlin, Poland, you name it, it was on the American map. Oklahoma was a state in the West—
hey!
What was that? Was I trying to nod my head? Did I know about Oklahoma? It would be amazing if I did. Maybe tourists from that state, or maybe fans of mine, before the war, had told me about it?

Or maybe I'd heard about that particular American state from my son. He'd heard I didn't know where Giuseppe was, but then, there were an awful lot of mothers in the world right now of whom one could say the same thing, not that it was any consolation. His own mother had decided to take up with a lady back home who told people's fortunes and claimed she did mental telepathy. Like talking to someone on the telephone without the telephone.

It wasn't, so far, effective. By now his
mom
could have been well into the process of getting herself another marriage. “Make sure you come home from the war in one piece so you can find out who my husband is, in case I don't reach you through brainwaves,” she had said, which was a pretty good reason to put effort into staying alive. He was hoping she'd go back to the Umbrian. He was planning to pull some strings with her on that.

Mother-and-son emotional blackmail, you could call it. Anyone who was ever a son, or a mother of one, if they loved each other, would know exactly what that meant. It didn't need an explanation. He had the idea that I was pretty fond of Giuseppe, that we confided in each other all the time.

Surely I knew that, back in my hometown, my son had blown up four German artillery trucks, a tank, and a bunker, before going into hiding. Everyone was talking about it.

In fact, when Frank first heard of it, from the sergeant, the name he'd heard was
Baldi.
The way it had been put was, “A hotheaded partisan named Baldi, for Garibaldi, is causing a lot of trouble, and who the hell is Garibaldi?”

Imagine not knowing about that fearless giant of nineteenth-century Italy, who probably had a statue to his memory in every
piazza
in the kingdom!

He wasn't giving away any military secrets here, and he wasn't worried about being eavesdropped on, as that was a benefit of speaking a different language, but he felt it was only fair to let me know, friendly like, that the American Army had some anxieties about Italians with guns and explosives, even though everyone was on the same side now.

You could see the rationale. You could imagine a bunch of generals sitting around in some other
palazzo,
nicer than this one, newer, asking questions like, “Hey, how are we supposed to know the locals won't start aiming those weapons of theirs at us?”

There'd been
copycat
demolitions by partisans all over the place. A German car in Rimini, a tank near Cattolica, a munitions hut by the sea—it added up.

Copycat was when someone followed the example of someone. It was American slang. Copying. It didn't have anything to do with a cat, like the expression
letting the cat out of the bag,
which meant telling secrets you were supposed to keep to yourself, and which he'd sort of done by telling me about the nervousness of the army regarding partisans.

It was only the up-ups who were wary of locals. With the GIs it was a different story. A GI was at the bottom of the ranks, like himself. GIs were of the opinion that they could use all the help they could get.

Guiseppe had a brigade, right? All trained sharpshooters, right? And ex–Italian Army, right? Experienced Adriatic fishermen, some of them, right? Fishermen who knew a few things about
harpoons,
right? A harpoon was what you killed a whale with, or any large fish.

He would enjoy it if, when I was able to talk, I'd talk about my son. He was hoping to hear everything about him! It would break up the tedium. It would appease the depression of looking around and seeing so many of his friends knocked out of commission.

Wasn't it astonishing that American officers would get all worked up about armed, non-uniformed Italians, when they were all pointing guns at the exact same target? It made you wonder. He personally would especially be delighted to hear about how Giuseppe was getting his guns.

Probably what they had for guns were Berettas. That was his guess. There was probably a storehouse somewhere. Someone's cellar? Barn? One of those fishermen's huts near the beach? Under cover of darkness, the partisans would make their way there, carrying well-concealed objects to add to the stock of their arsenal. Well-concealed objects from where, one wondered.

Did they have a
clubhouse,
the brigade? A place where they met, spent some time, privately? A sort of headquarters, in other words.

Clubhouse was the word Mallo Malone might have used for it. Did she ever visit it? She was pretty tall, right? She must have stuck out like a sore thumb.

Here. Time to take the cloths off. Wasn't that better? Already the bruising appeared to be healing, as minimal as it was. There was nothing to be anguished about. The swelling was almost gone. There was nothing a little makeup wouldn't artfully conceal.

Hold on a minute. Who was that, coming over here? An unfamiliar person. It must have been all right, though, or he'd never have made it past the guards.

Oh, an orderly. A GI, as he'd said, was at the bottom rank, but an orderly was even lower. This was probably that new one. They didn't usually hire Italians, but he'd heard they'd picked one up on a country road, poor kid. They'd said he was desperate for work.

Confidentially, the kid was maybe the same age as himself, but you had to call him a kid because it seemed he was deficient when it came to mental capabilities. In America you called someone like that
retarded.
Or you said,
he's not playing with a full deck,
like a deck of cards.

“
Ciao,
Orderly, with your mop and your bucket!
Parlo italiano,
as you can see,” said Frank, pronouncing each word slowly. “Be careful not to bother this injured lady. She's very important. She's an opera star. I'm your superior, but you can call me Francesco. What's your name?”