Love and War in the Apennines (16 page)

Almost immediately afterwards Signor Zanoni appeared in front of the house and signalled me to come and as I got to the door where he was waiting, a huge brute of a dog tethered to a running wire which gave it more scope for attacking intruders than it would have had on a chain alone, leapt out at me from
where it had been lying in wait, snapping and snarling, longing for nothing better than to be at my throat.

‘What was that noise I heard after you went to the house?’ I said as soon as we were out of range of it. ‘It wasn’t the dog.’

‘Noise?’ he said. ‘Oh, that was Agata, Luigi’s wife, calling Armando, the boy who works for them. She’s a good woman Agata, but she’s got a terribly strong voice.’

‘It’s not going to be easy,’ he went on. ‘They’ve just heard that anyone who helps prisoners of war will be sentenced to death.’

‘I never heard that. Is it true?’ I said.

‘I told them. I had to. It would not have been right to do otherwise.’

‘Then you knew?’

‘It was announced four days ago. I heard it down in the village. Luigi has a radio but it doesn’t work very well. None of them up here go anywhere, except on Sundays, and yesterday it was raining so much that they all stayed at home.’

‘Did your wife know?’

‘Yes, she knew.’

If they knew then the doctor must have known and Wanda and her father must have known, and Giovanni and his father and mother, and the Baruffas. All of a sudden everything seemed much less simple than it had done.

‘Mind you,’ he said, ‘I don’t think they would dare do it, shoot people I mean, and neither do any of these people here. The Government, or what is supposed to be the Government, would have to shoot hundreds, perhaps thousands, I don’t know how many, but, all the same it’s making them think. It’s making me think; that’s why the people here haven’t decided about you yet. They want to see you first.’

I said that I didn’t think it was right to ask them to take me now that I knew about the death penalty.

‘Then there’s only one thing you can do, Enrico,’ he said, ‘and that’s come back with me. It’s quite simple, really.’

‘Let’s go in,’ I said.

There were five people in the kitchen, two men and three women: the farmer, a tallish, erect, thin man who, to me, looked exactly like Company Sergeant-Major Clegg of the Grenadier Guards, the one who used to scream at us outside the Old Buildings at Sandhurst; his wife, who was about the same age as he was, fiftyish, who had a pale face with a front tooth missing; and two young women, one with short, black hair, who was obviously the daughter, thin and slight like her mother, the other a big, powerful girl, an Amazon with long auburn hair to her shoulders. The other man was a stocky, muscular youth with dark, greasy hair, carefully combed. All of them were wearing working clothes and big, mountain boots. The girls were washing up in a stone sink, the signora was stirring up the fire which had only recently been lit, and her husband was sitting at the table on which there was a bottle of wine and two half-charged glasses. There was a feeling in the air as if a lot of talking had been done. The farmer had his hat on, as did Signor Zanoni.

I was introduced to the company in a general way, no names were exchanged, and there was a good deal of rather remote
buon giornoing
, and when this was over I was invited to sit down at the table and I was given a glass of wine, which was extraordinarily acid, and some very good bread and some slices of sausage. Then they began to talk, or rather Signor Zanoni and the farmer began to talk, in a dialect that was so deep that I could make nothing of it, with the wife throwing in an occasional sentence, or a word, from the fireplace where she stood with her arms folded tightly across the place where her bosom would have been if she had had one. Up to now the only time I had heard the mountain dialect had been a muffled version of it, coming up through the floor of
Signor Zanoni’s bedroom. Hearing it unfiltered and close to I found it equally incomprehensible.

As no one in the room took the slightest notice of me while my fate was being decided, I was able to look around me. It was long and high and the walls and ceiling, which had once been white, were now the colour of old ivory. At the far end of it a window looked out over the plateau to the ridge above the village. There was a fireplace with a high shelf over it, crowded with the sort of objects which end up over fireplaces, in this case a cast-iron coffee grinder, some dried bulbs, a piece of palm leaf left over from some bygone Sunday, a number of curled-up picture postcards and a book with the title
Lunario Barba-Nera
in archaic type.

On the right of the fireplace was the sink at which the girls were working; close to it there was a cast-iron stove with a silverpainted stovepipe rising from it which vanished into the wall just under the ceiling, and behind me, where I sat facing the fireplace there was a tall, dark cupboard and a chest on short legs with a removable table-top, a piece of furniture known as a
madia
, in which the flour which was used to make the
pasta
was kept, a piece of furniture which every house I had been to in the
pianura
and the mountains possessed. And on a box under the window there was a dilapidated radio set with wires sprouting from it, which must have been the one that had not given the information about people who helped prisoners of war being shot.

After what seemed an eternity the conversation rumbled noisily to a close, rather like a train of goods wagons coming to rest in a marshalling yard. It was the signora who was responsible for these effects, with her deafening interjections. Pound for pound she was the noisiest woman I had ever met. It was she who had uttered the bloodcurdling call to the boy Armando, to bring him in from whatever he was doing, to attend the family council.

Now her husband was filling Signor Zanoni’s glass from a fresh bottle, at the same time looking at me as he poured it, with the air of someone who was about to acquire a slave. Watching him performing this difficult feat, I felt that something had been concluded.

‘Luigi is of the opinion that if you want to stay here it is all right,’ Signor Zanoni said at last. ‘And so is Signora Agata, as long as things stay as quiet as they are. There’s a lot of work to be done in the fields and they will be glad to have you, but they can’t pay you anything. They’ll give you your food and a bed. When you’re working outside you will have to keep away from the path to the house, always. You’re sure to be seen by someone wherever you’re working, but if anyone asks who you are they’ll say that you’re someone from Genoa, a fisherman who’s been bombed, and isn’t quite right in the head. If anyone does speak to you act as if you’re stupid and pretend that you’re deaf and dumb. You’ll have to keep your sack of stuff up in the woods above the house in the daytime, in case you have to run for it. Dig a hole and cover it up so that when it rains it won’t get wet. If you have to escape at night there’s a way out over the roof of the
stalla
from the second floor. They’ll show it to you. If you need me at any time, one of them will bring me a message. And I’ll arrange with the Baruffas so that when your friends come for you they’ll send them to me. Now they’ll show you where your room is and they’ll give you some clothes to work in. The ones you have won’t last more than a day or two in the fields and they don’t look right.’

The room to which Agata’s daughter, Rita, the thinner of the two girls, escorted me was high up under the eaves of the building and we climbed up to it by a series of steep and flimsy staircases. In it there was a window at floor level which faced north and by kneeling down it was possible to look out along the track
which led to the farm. I found this out while I was helping her to make the bed up. It was a very dilapidated bed but the bedding was very clean. And I was glad when she provided me with a
vaso da notte
, which may seem an unimportant detail, but released me from the necessity of descending all those stairs in the middle of the night and having to face that revolting dog in the yard.

When I got back to the kitchen Armando, the black-haired boy, and Dolores, the big girl, had disappeared and Signor Zanoni was about to leave. I had changed into the working clothes which Agata had given me and they looked a hundred years old. Signor Zanoni’s working suit was composed of shreds and patches; but, at least, it covered his nakedness completely. Luigi’s was made up of dozens and dozens of holes connected by pieces of black velveteen that was so tough that I wondered how the holes had appeared in it in the first place. It looked like a nineteenth-century poacher’s suit in which the occupant had been caught in the cross fire from several gamekeepers’ shot-guns. Nevertheless, I was delighted with it. Wearing it I felt that I was a part of the scenery.

I accompanied Signor Zanoni to the door and as soon as we got to it the dog began baying for blood.

‘That’s a brute of a dog,’ Signor Zanoni said (U
n cane proprio brutto
, was how he actually described it). ‘Keep out of its way, it’s starving. I’d shoot it if it was mine, or else I’d feed it. Everything’s kept very short here; but I’ve told them that if they want you to work they must give you enough to eat. They’re not mean, but they’re all used to doing without much. And I’ve told them that it’s no good them speaking
dialetto
to you because you won’t understand.’

‘Don’t forget us,’ he said. ‘We won’t forget you.’

I shook his hand and watched this small, kindly, resourceful
man as he walked along the path that led down to the Pian del Sotto.

‘Come with me,’ a voice said. It was Luigi. It was the first time he had spoken to me, apart from wishing me
buon giorno.
I followed him round to the back of the house where the fields swept uphill to the edge of the woods in all their stoniness. Many of them could scarcely be called stones. They were rocks and boulders which had come rolling down off the mountain. It was like looking out on a parable.

‘I want those fields cleared of stones,’ he said, quite casually. ‘All of them. I should start with that one up there. The others will help you with the big ones, when they’ve finished what they’re doing, in a week or two. There’s a cart over there,’ he indicated a vehicle with solid wooden wheels and sides made from the plaited stems of osiers. It looked like a primitive chariot.

‘What shall I do with them,’ I said, ‘when I’ve put them in the cart, the stones?’

‘You can do what you like with them,’ he said, ‘as long as they don’t stop on my land.’

Then he looked at me, and seeing that I was genuinely puzzled, he gave me the same kind of foxy grin that Sergeant-Major Clegg used to when he announced to us that there would be no weekend leave.

‘You can throw them over the cliff,’ he said. ‘You can start now.’

And he went back into the house.

So life went on at the Pian del Sotto with Luigi, Signora Agata his wife, Rita the daughter, Dolores the help, Armando the ploughboy and me. Work started in the open when the sun rose or, if it was not visible, which was often, when it was deemed to have risen, about six, and stopped when it had gone down behind the mountains and the plateau was in deep shadow, which was probably about five-thirty. Perhaps it was earlier or later, there were no clocks in the house and no one had a watch as far as I could see. None of them would have been much the wiser if they had owned watches, as the strange vagaries of official war time in Italy which were as complicated as our own in Britain, ensured that no one knew what time it really was, and were incomprehensible to country people who never took any notice of it anyway.

I only know that it was still always dark outside when Agata used to climb up to the landing below my room and shriek up the shaft of the staircase to my room like a banshee
‘EEENNNRIIICO! E L’OOORA!’
(‘IT IS THE HOUR!’) which never failed to make me leap from my bed in terror, believing that the Germans had come, the
milizia
were at the door, the house was on fire or the dog had broken its chain, or that all these
things which I feared most had happened at once. Then I used to light my candle, struggle into my dank clothes, sometimes putting a foot through a hole in the trousers or an arm through a gap in the elbow of the jacket, wrestle with my boots which I prudently kept under the bed, and stumble down the dark staircases and outside into the yard with the
vaso da notte
in one hand, its contents slopping about, still more than half asleep, but hearing Agata’s awful cries as she woke the other members of the household who were asleep in other parts of the labyrinthine building –
‘DOLLORESSS! … ARMAAANDO! … REEETA! … E L’OOORA!’

The only one she never had to call was Luigi. He was already up.

In the yard where the dog, Nero, although it didn’t answer to this name, or any other, was lying in wait for me, I used to hurl the contents of the
vaso da notte
in its direction, giving myself a mark if I scored a hit. Then, if it was not raining – if it was I skipped the next part of the programme – I went behind the house into the yard where a pipe delivered a jet of water from a perennial spring on the mountain side into a large stone trough which looked like the bath of some Roman senator, and under this I used to put my head and wake up with a jolt and then clean my teeth with the water which was so icy that it made them ache (at the Pian del Sotto I always woke with a taste in my mouth as if I had drunk too much the night before, which was something I never had the opportunity of doing), and finished up by rinsing my
vaso da notte
and secreting it under a disused barrel, to save myself the trouble of climbing all those stairs again, in order to put it under the bed.

Back in the house Luigi was already sitting at the table, wearing a black velveteen suit, a newer version of the one he had given me, and a felt hat, which he wore both in and out of the house.
Luigi was always neat. He might have been about to set off for a weekly market, rather than to muck out pigsties and cowsheds or any other of the dirty jobs he would certainly be doing in the first hours of the morning. To my greeting, while his wife banged grumpily about the stove, as well she might having already been up for an hour or more milking the cows, he would answer, invariably; ‘There’s a lot to do today,’ as if on all the preceding ones there hadn’t been.

‘CAFFÈ?’
Agata would say, as if there was some choice, and plonked down before me a bowl of unsweetened acorn coffee – the sugar ration was practically non-existent and if there had been some way of getting one for me it wouldn’t have been wasted in coffee. But although it was made with acorns the milk was fresh and the bread, which was stale, tasted much better than newly baked bread in it.

While I was drinking the
caffè latte
, very slowly so as to make it last as long as possible, the others came drifting in one by one, as sleepy as I had been before my visit to the trough: the girls finishing their dressing as they came, with thick, pendulous lower lips which looked as if they had been biting them in their sleep, which gave them a sullen look, both dressed in black pullovers, short dark skirts over which they were tying their aprons and white, home-knitted socks which they turned down over their mountain boots when they eventually put them on. They stood together in front of a small mirror which hung on the wall with pins in their mouths, combing their hair, barging one another out of the way to have a better view, and then trying it up in scarves, so that they looked like a couple of female pirates.

The last to appear was Armando, wearing a thick, sleeveless white pullover which still had the natural grease of the animal in it and smelt like it, just as the enormous garment I had put on
that night at Signor Zanoni’s had done. Under it he wore a shirt, and beneath that a vest of the same make as the pullover. Armando had an enormous stomach for a boy of his age, and an equally large bottom. Why he had not been called up was a mystery. Perhaps he had been a soldier and had run away at the Armistice. He never offered any information about himself and neither did any of the others. It seemed better not to ask; but altogether he was an unforgettable-looking character. His trousers were supported with the utmost difficulty by a broad, low-slung leather belt, of the sort with which, a little later in life, I could imagine him beating his wife, and his trousers always had the flies gaping wide open. He wore very rural boots with wooden soles and bright yellow uppers which reached half-way up his bulging calves. I had never seen anyone with so many natural protuberances. As soon as he sat down at the table he invariably put his head on the table and at once fell fast asleep again and only woke when one of the girls pulled his hair and shouted
CAFFÈ!
in his ear. They enjoyed doing this.

While they were all slurping away at their
caffè latte
Luigi used to announce what each of them was to do that day. None of them appeared to pay the slightest attention to what he said; but they used to do what he told them all the same. The only one he never addressed himself to was me. There was no need. I knew what my job was on the Pian del Sotto. It had been laid down for me that first afternoon.

By the time he had finished telling them it was time to start. I went out to where I had left my prehistoric cart the previous evening, empty, and in the part of the field where I had been filling it. This was how I arranged it because the more boring and repetitive the job, the more imperative it is to develop some kind of theory about it in order to stop oneself going mad; and I had found that there was nothing I disliked more than starting off in
the early morning by hauling a cartload of stones down to the cliff; throwing them over it and then dragging the cart up to the place where I was working, except pulling the empty cart up from the cliff edge, having thrown the stones over it the previous night, or, something I had never tried because I knew I would hate it, leaving the loaded cart on the edge of the cliff and throwing the stones over it first thing the next morning.

The truth was that the only thing I really enjoyed was the moment when I let the stones go down over the cliff, and sometimes I used to have crazy dreams about returning after the war when I had made a fortune, and employing people to fill carts with stones so that I could empty them over the cliff.

I had also developed theories about how the stones should be harvested. At first I began by throwing them straight into the cart and every so often, when I had cleared a few square feet of ground, I used to pull it after me on to a nice, fresh, stone-filled part; but after a while I got tired of doing this and I started making heaps of stones over a wider area and then making several journeys in succession with the cart to the cliff, but then I got fed up with spending so much time doing the same job – first making endless mounds of stones and then making endless journeys to the cliff edge – so I reverted to chucking them straight into the cart.

It was not so much that I was bored, though I was bored, and could understand why people doing repetitive jobs either strike or perform them very slowly – at least my stones were not of a uniform size and shape and I did know why I was picking them up. What really worried me was that I was sure that there must be one way of doing this job which was more labour-saving than any of the others. I could have asked Luigi or Armando what they thought was the best way, but it seemed a stupid question to ask.

One thing I knew was that it was impossible to fill the cart completely and still pull it. I had done this the first time and had then had to partially unload it. Probably the best way of resolving the whole problem would have been to have left the cart out of it altogether, and done nothing but make heaps of stones until there were no more left, or I got too old to pick them up, and then persuade Luigi to harness the bullocks to some bigger vehicle of which there were various sorts in the yard, and with the help of the others, load the stones into it; but as I could see no possibility of being allowed to have a bigger cart and the use of the bullocks, except in the case of the largest boulders, I carried on in my own, primitive fashion.

The actual stones, to the removal of which, after a few days, my entire life seemed to have been dedicated, were almost white on the outside where they had been exposed to the wind and sun and dark and damp underneath. They were of all shapes, and varied in size between the sort of stone with which I imagined David had slain Goliath, about as big as a tangerine orange, and red boulders which were embedded in the earth from which I was supposed to excavate them, using a long-handled instrument called a
vanga
, a sort of spade which had a small projection on it above the blade with which one pressed it into the earth. Some of these boulders were so large that when I had dug round them I found that, like icebergs, the greater part of their bulk was below the surface, and these I abandoned. How Luigi, or anyone else, had managed to cultivate land with so many rocks on it in previous years remained a mystery to me until the day after the first heavy rain fell, when I found that a piece of ground which I had cleared completely was again full of stones. Some had fallen from the mountain side and some which had been buried under the soil, had come up overnight, like giant mushrooms, to which they bore a certain resemblance.

When the cart was just sufficiently full of stones that I could still move it without rupturing myself, I used to heave it down to the edge of the cliff, a distance which could be anything up to three hundred yards, let down the back of the cart, lift the handles and tip it up, allowing the stones to roll down over the edge and listen to them as they landed with a satisfying crash at the bottom of what, I imagined, must be someone else’s property.

The first time I did this the cart got out of control and nearly followed the stones over the edge with me clinging to it. I was glad that nobody had seen this happen, at least I thought that nobody had seen it, until I got back to the kitchen that evening, when Luigi was sitting at the head of the table with his hat on the back of his head.

‘You watch that cart,’ he said. ‘It’s a good cart. If that goes you’ll have to carry them down in your hands.’

On those parts of the Pian del Sotto which were relatively stone-less Armando had already begun to plough, using a very ancient-looking wooden plough with iron blades, which was drawn by two bullocks called Stella and Bionda. They were tough, corpulent, greyish-white animals with short necks and legs. When Armando talked to the bullocks, which he did constantly, telling them to stop or start or turn or simply urging them on, and at the same time walloping them with a long stick, for he was a rather brutal boy, the air was filled with his cries:
‘OLAAA! … STELLAA!… OLAAA!… BIONDAA! … LEIII! … LE III! … PORCA LA MISERIA! … LEIII! … DAIII!… DAIII LA …
’

The only thing that ever changed were the oaths – what were known as
bestemmia
– he interjected between these exhortations, most of them involving the defiling in various disagreeable ways of the Father, the Son, the Holy Ghost, the Virgin and the Host,
or all of them together. Sometimes they were so terrible that I would not have been a bit surprised if the Almighty had got tired of being baited in this way and had hurled down a great thunderbolt from wherever he resided and obliterated Armando, a sitting target, exposed on the Pian del Sotto. But at least Armando’s
bestemmia
was more varied than that of his counterparts in Australia where I had been in the year before the war, sitting astride their tractors ploughing their thousand-acre fields, monotonously chanting the only oath they knew, ‘fuck, fuck, fuck!’

In fact most of the time the Pian del Sotto was a thoroughly noisy place. It was not surprising. Unless you employ a messenger who does nothing else but run to and fro between them, or they possess some kind of signalling apparatus, any communication between the occupants of a piece of land half a mile long, most of whom are widely dispersed over it and the remainder of whom are hidden away in a congery of buildings all of which have walls at least two feet thick, and none of whom are disposed to give up what they are doing in order to speak to one another, is bound to involve a good deal of shouting.

On the Pian del Sotto, where no one seemed to know where any particular instrument was at any particular moment, the house was, of necessity, a sort of telephone exchange with Agata, who rarely emerged from it except to milk the cows and bake the bread, the switchboard operator in charge, either demanding information herself or relaying the demands of others, constantly throwing open one or other of the innumerable windows, doors and hatches with which the house was furnished in order to do so.