Love and War in the Apennines (25 page)

Hanging on pegs above his bed was Abramo’s shot-gun, a sheepskin coat similar to the one which he had been wearing and an equally long, bright green canvas coat, for wet weather, which also had a hood and a series of capes over the shoulders which, he told me, his father had acquired when he had worked as a shepherd in southern France, after the first war. Besides the fire the only illumination was provided by a candle lantern. The candles he made himself with tallow rendered from the fat of the sheep.

After a while he returned.

‘You’re better,’ he said. ‘I knew you would be. That’s why I’ve got something special for you to eat,’ and he began ladling the contents of the pot into a couple of old army mess tins.

‘I shot a hare a couple of days before you came, but I get tired of eating them by myself,’ he said handing me one of the tins, together with a primitive wooden spoon and a slice of
polenta.

I had never eaten anything like this stew before and I never have since. The hare had been cooked with herbs and fungi and the gravy had been made with the entrails, and was so thick that long before I got to the bottom of my can it had congealed into a delicious jelly. There was no question of requiring a second helping, each can held the best part of one and a half pints; and when I had finished he gave me an entire cheese, the size and shape of a round, two-ounce tobacco tin, which he himself had made, using the milk of the ewes. Up here, apart from salt and the maize flour, which he used to make the
polenta
, which he ate instead of bread, and roasted as a substitute for coffee, he was completely self-sufficient. He told me he didn’t drink wine, it was too complicated to get it. It was bad enough now getting the grain
for his illicit still, out of which he did very well, selling the drink to the local farmers.

‘It’s those shirts that saved you,’ he said, when I was admiring the great, thick shirt of cream-coloured flannel with red stitches which looked as if it had come out of a folk museum and which I was wearing.

‘They belonged to my great great-grandfather. The wool came from the backs of his own sheep and my great great-grandmother spun it and wove it and then she made the shirts. I’m fifty, my father was eighty-seven when he died and my grandfather was over ninety. I don’t know how old my great grandfather was when he died, all I know is these shirts are very, very old, perhaps they’re the oldest shirts in the world that anyone is still wearing, and they’ve been worn by all the men in our family, but not every day you understand. We used them when we came home cold, and when we were in a fever. I always put one on and have a sweat when I am feeling bad. You have to sweat when you’re ill, that’s the way.’

I was hopeless at such calculations but it seemed to me, if what Abramo said was true, and there was no reason to doubt him, that the shirts in which I had been sweating out my own fever must have been made somewhere in the latter half of the eighteenth century, almost certainly before the French Revolution. Yet the quality of the material was so extraordinary that they were in good enough condition to be not more than five years old and to last another hundred.

Later, when I got dressed, Abramo made me wrap myself in one of his sheepskin coats and left me in the sun. ‘You’re lucky,’ he said, ‘that it’s a fine day. It’s been blowing a gale ever since you came. You were in the best place.’

Then he told me that when he took the sheep down to their winter quarters I could go with him. His farm was somewhere on
the far side of one of the ridges which led up to the summit of the mountain from the north-west, and his wife and daughters ran it during the summer when he was up on the mountain with the sheep. His only son was in Russia, with the Alpini, and, like the rest of them, had not been heard of.

‘You’ll be as safe with us as you will with anyone,’ he said, ‘although that’s not saying much. There’s no hurry. You can make up your mind in the next day or two.’

But there was no need for me to make up my mind. It was done for me. Towards evening, when the sun was already beginning to sink behind the main range, something which I had not seen in all the weeks that I had lived on the mountain, a small boy arrived at the
baracca
with some mysterious news which he communicated to Abramo who in turn gave it to me.

‘You are to go down to the village,’ he said. ‘An important decision has been made and I do not think that you will return, but if you do I shall be here for two days more, and my house is called La Maesta; but if you want to come tell no one at all. I will explain how to get to it.’

And he did.

We set off immediately. The little boy was not more than eight years old, but he was as agile as a flea. Far too agile for me at this moment, as weak as a jelly and encumbered with my rucksack. He took me down along the edge of the cliff, hopping and skipping in front of me, and occasionally waiting for me to catch up in a way which I found rather galling, as if I was an aged relative whom he had taken out for an airing. He was a strange, very self-possessed, solemn little boy with a cropped head which looked as if it was covered in brown velvet. He never spoke.

In what must have been about a quarter of the time it had taken me to climb to the Castello, we were at the edge of the woods, where I had met
Oberleutnant
Frick. The next part was
slower. It was getting dark now; and we came to a place where there were what appeared to be a series of smaller cliffs one above the other, a labyrinth without any visible tracks in it, and I was glad to see that in this difficult terrain even this super-boy had difficulty; but eventually we emerged from it on to a long, bare slope of rock which led steeply downwards away from the cliff edge and here he recovered his speed and went racing down it in front of me. Soon the rock ended and we were on scree, and he went glissading down this in much the same way as one of the Indian Army officers in the
orfanotrofio
told me that he and his men used to tear down the steep sides of the ravines on the North-West Frontier when they were withdrawing from an outlying picket in order to escape ritual mutilation by the oncoming Pathans. Here, under the ridge, there was no wind and the smoke from the village, which was now just visible immediately below us in the dusk, sank down into the dark gulfs between the houses which were its streets and passages. And when we reached the bottom of the slope the little boy turned to me and spoke the only words he had uttered during the entire journey, except when he was talking to himself, which he did pretty incessantly when he was trying to work out what was the best way round some insurmountable rock.

‘Ecco, il paese!’
he said.

We were at the back of the village. This was the way the Germans had come down into it. The dogs were barking furiously now, just as they must have barked that night to no avail, dozens of Neros. Had Luigi really shot him? We went into it under an archway and down a narrow, cobbled alley as rough as a mountain track between tall houses and past the open doors of
stalle
from which came the smells and snuffling sounds of animals. The air in these lanes was thick with the smoke that had sunk down into them from above. It was more like the East than Europe. If London was
la citè d’la fumarassa
what did the inhabitants think this was? Finally, the little boy stopped outside a stone doorway on which I could feel but not see some sort of carving. Then he knocked twice and said ‘Pierino’, the door opened and I followed him in.

As usual, I found myself in a kitchen, but a more ancient and splendid kitchen than any I had ever been in. The house itself was medieval; the owners people who wanted it to be like that. Sitting around a really massive table that looked as old as the house there were six men, five of whom, the ones who had their hats on, I recognised as those I had met at the dance who, between them, shared only two surnames. They were all hard, lean men. The fifth was very different. He was fat and he wore square horn-rimmed spectacles. His hair was
en brosse
, like the
maestro
’s, but though he wore country clothes he didn’t look like a real countryman. The effect produced by the whole lot of them looking down the long table towards me where I stood, a ruinous figure by the door, was of some sort of Selection Board; but what they were selecting it was difficult to imagine.

There were a number of wine bottles on the table and each man had a charged glass in front of him. The little boy withdrew. I was motioned to take a seat and a glass of wine was poured for me. There was no small talk. The Chairman of the Board, for that was obviously what he was, said carefully and very slowly so that I could understand, ‘We have been talking about you among ourselves for some days. Many of the people in this village and in the farms round about have sons and relatives who are being hunted by the Germans. Three of them were taken the other day. Some of them have sons in Russia of whom, so far, there is no news and who may never return. They feel that you are in a similar condition to that of their sons who, they hope, are being given help wherever they are, and they think that it is their duty to help you through the coming winter, which otherwise you will not
survive. I speak for them because my father was born here, and they have asked me to do so. And as it has now become too dangerous to shelter you in their houses, they have decided to build you a house which no one except the people assembled in this room, our families and one other person, and he is a kinsman, will ever hear about. The work will begin at dawn tomorrow.’

We left the house singly at half past four the following morning, after drinking acorn coffee with
grappa
in it. I had a terrible hangover. After a marvellous dinner prepared by the elegant wife of the mysterious chairman, during which I had complimented her on the excellent mud she had produced, confusing the word for mushroom
fungo
with
fango
, which had put everyone in high good humour, the five of them had settled down to a carouse, in which I had been invited to join, as a result of which I had slept soundly in a
stalla.

We met at the foot of the scree where I was sick and then felt better. Each of us was carrying one or more of the implements that would be needed, picks, spades, a saw, a felling axe. A mule carried the rest of the heavy gear lashed on either side of a pack saddle; crowbars, a sledge-hammer, provisions, and the most impossible thing of all for human beings to carry through a forest, two pieces of corrugated iron which had been specially bought in one of the bigger villages down in the valley.

The mule made light of the weight it was carrying, perhaps because it was a small load for a mule. Full of energy at this awful hour, it went up the screes and slabs at a good three miles an hour. Reluctantly, the Chairman of the Board had remained
behind. It was obvious that he was not a fit man and would have to content himself with spinning the webs in which we were all enmeshed and contemplating the results of having spun them, just like a real chairman, behind an uncluttered desk.

By the time we reached the ridge the cocks in the village were beginning to crow and soon first light began to seep through the trees. It was a melancholy morning with a soft, penetrating rain falling. The route we followed was more or less the same one that the small boy, Pierino, had used when he had brought me down the mountain the previous evening, in reverse: except that these men knew it better than he did and avoided some of the more difficult obstacles; and quite soon we reached the place where the small cliffs were, and here we halted and I was left alone with the mule while the others went off in various directions to look for a suitable site.

Finally, one of them beckoned to the others who joined him and they stood together for some time pointing and talking until, at last, they summoned me to join them too.

‘This is the place where it will be,’ the man who had chosen it said. He was a tall, lean, handsome man with long white hair, a nose like an eagle’s beak and quick, unstudied movements, very much like those of the small boy, Pierino. It was obvious that he was the one who was in overall command of the operations in the field. His name was Francesco.

The place which had been agreed on was in one of the clefts between the cliffs and it was a good one for the purpose. No one in their senses would try to force a way through it, and if they did they would get nowhere. It was a cul-de-sac filled with trees. The only thing I could see against it was that once the leaves were gone any sort of hut standing in it would be conspicuous; but I had not taken into consideration the ingenuity of these mountain men.

First they dug out a number of trees by the roots from the bottom of the ditch. When I say ‘they’ I have to include myself in a minor way because I, too, was allowed to work under supervision. Then they dug a trench, piling up the spoil about ten feet away from the innermost cliff and parallel to it, except at the ends where it curved in to meet it. This took much longer than they thought because while they were digging it they uncovered a perfectly enormous rock, much bigger than anything I had ever met with on the Pian del Sotto. They had a long discussion about this rock, whether or not they should abandon the site and start again somewhere else, but they decided to continue as it would be impossible to cover up the traces of their work. So they dug around it until it was almost free and then the most vigorous of them hit it with a sledgehammer many times without any result, and then they had a
merenda
, during which we ate bread and sausage and drank wine with the soft, very wetting rain falling on us. Listening to them I gathered that they had more or less decided to light a fire over it and try to split it with cold water; but they seemed to be waiting for someone else to arrive whose opinion they respected.

Then, as if he had been waiting for his cue, an old man appeared on the cliff above us and looked down rather critically on the party assembled below. He carried a long-barrelled hammer-gun, similar to Abramo’s, although it was now strictly forbidden to possess any kind of firearms, and he held one of the green umbrellas over his head. He was accompanied by a long, lean, good-looking dog which had a coat which looked like tortoiseshell, and after he had drunk some wine they showed him the rock. His name was Bartolomeo.

He went over it with his hands, very slowly, almost lovingly. It must have weighed half a ton. Then, when he had finished caressing it, he called for a sledgehammer and hit it deliberately
but not particularly hard and it broke into two almost equal halves. It was like magic and I would not have been surprised if a toad had emerged from it and turned into a beautiful princess who had been asleep for a million years. Even the others were impressed. There was no need to ask what this old man’s profession had been. Although he looked like a man of the woods he must have spent some part of his life either working in a quarry, or as a stone-mason.

The rest was easy. He gave the two immense halves a few more light taps and they broke into movable pieces. Then he produced a smaller hammer from a bag and for the remainder of the time he was with us, except when he was making a chimney for the hut which he did by cutting a deep groove in the face of the cliff, he knapped these pieces into small blocks which he used to build a dry-stone wall on the inner side of the earthwork which had been made with the spoil from the trench.

While he was working away the rest of the party got on with their own tasks. Using the trunks of the trees which they had cut down two of them made an immensely strong framework to support the roof. To me it seemed unnecessarily robust; but at this stage I still thought that they were building a conventional hut. Then, before they put it on, they waited for the other two to finish their jobs. One was making a couple of beds inside the hut, the other was stacking a big mule-load of firewood inside it. When the beds were finished and the fuel was in they put the framework of the roof on: the upper end was embedded in the cliff, the lower end rested on the wall Bartolomeo had made on the inner side of the rampart and when this was done they wired the corrugated iron on to it and covered the whole thing with a thick layer of earth and stones and moss all the way down from the cliff to the ground so that, when it was finished, it looked from any angle like an old overgrown rock fall and it was so well-covered that
when we jumped down on to it from the top of the cliff it gave off a solid sound and was completely immovable. The entrance was hidden under the roots of a beech tree which grew out of the side of the cliff, and when a piece of old sacking was draped over it, because of the angle of the wall it was completely invisible.

Late in the afternoon, when the work was almost finished, the wives of three of the men who had been building the hut arrived. On their backs they carried pack-baskets of plaited willow loaded with rice, which was priceless and had been bought on the black market, salt, cheese, bread, acorn coffee and cooking and eating utensils, enough for two persons.

‘In case you want to get married, that’s why they’ve made two beds,’ one of them said, and the three of them had a good laugh at this.

When all this stuff had been stowed away inside the hut the men lit a fire in the new fireplace and when he saw that it drew well and didn’t smoke Bartolomeo went off with his dog without saying a word to anyone.

Then they showed me how to work the fire so that it wouldn’t smoke me out, and they told me that I shouldn’t light it in the daylight until the weather got really cold, except to make coffee in the early morning. They showed me how to conceal the hole at the top of the chimney with a special stone when the fire wasn’t alight and they showed me where I could get water, by going through the labyrinth and then down over the cliff edge a hundred and fifty feet or so, to a place where a little spring issued from the rocks, which, they said, no one used anymore. And they told me how important it was to cover my tracks when returning to the hut – the last thing that they themselves did was to pick up every chip of wood – every small piece of wire that had been left over from the building operations, and all the match sticks they had dropped. No one threw away cigarette ends at this stage of the war.

Then we all went into the cave, for that is what I had decided to call it, and they blew up the fire and we drank some wine together. And then they told me that only they themselves or their parents or their children would visit me with supplies, and that so that I would know that they were members of one or other of these two families, they would give us a password and this would be
Brindisi.
In this way, Francesco, the man with the eagle nose, said they hoped to prevent the news that I was still in the neighbourhood from spreading.
‘Ma!
’ Someone said doubtfully. ‘
Speriamo
,’ they all said and the women crossed themselves.

Owls were beginning to hoot in the forest now. They picked up their instruments, the mule was already loaded, and then they wished me good luck and told me not to stay in the hut all day or I would become
triste
but to take care; and then they went away together down the mountain and I was left alone in the dwelling in which I was to pass the winter – the final refuge, and the triumphal artifact, of the men of the mountains.

The day on which I took up residence in my cave was the twenty-seventh of October, a Wednesday. And for the next week the weather was wonderful, each day seeming more beautiful than the one before, as the leaves turned, quickly now, from green to gold. They were days with the same, unforgettable loveliness that I remembered from the year before when I had been a prisoner in the barracks in Rome, and had watched the horses being put through their paces on the tan. The days were warm, and although the nights were cooler now the air still had a feeling of the south and the sky was for the most part cloudless and ablaze with stars. Only in the very early mornings was it really chilly.

In the course of them I forgot how evil the forest had seemed. It had reverted to its arcadian state, only now that the ploughing was finished and the sowing was done, it was filled with entire
families out woodcutting, and the noise they made as they called to one another while they worked, and the din made by the great, loaded sledges as they crashed downhill through the tunnels, or were dragged up through them, with the drivers
Ola
ing to encourage the beasts was positively deafening in this otherwise quiet place. For me it was a good thing that they did make a noise, otherwise I would certainly have stumbled on some of them unawares, and although they would almost certainly have been pleased to see me if I had done so, the whole point of the plan was that it had been given out that I had left the district.

In fact, it became a sort of game which helped to pass the time – to get as close to them as possible without being seen, and also avoiding the
fungaia
, whose owner I had no desire to meet. And in playing it I discovered a whole subsidiary network of very small paths which, except where they crossed them, some of them being no more than eighteen inches wide and mostly overgrown, were independent of the tunnels, so that a map of the mountain on a scale large enough to include them – and such a map never could be made – would have shown the whole of the wooded part of it covered with innumerable small veins, as well as the large main arteries.

Using these minute tracks I made long excursions through the woods, and one day I came out on a long, bare ridge of the mountain which ran north and south and from it I looked down on a large village. And I realised then that this must be the lair of the
segretario
who was so keen on catching me. I thought how excited he would have been if he had known that I was so close, although it was difficult to understand why he should be so interested in harassing a single prisoner of war.

On the way back from this excursion I heard, just below me in one of the tunnels, the voices of what seemed to be the entire party from the Pian del Sotto. For once they were not quarrelling,
but talking to one another for the sheer pleasure of it; but still at the tops of their voices, and for a moment I had an insane desire to break through the few yards of vegetation which separated us and have a great re-union with them.

Every day, before I set out, I climbed down over the edge of the cliff to the spring to draw water and wash myself and shave and, once or twice, I saw a fox but I never saw any other animals except squirrels. There were not many birds in the woods now, but sometimes a woodpecker would start work somewhere nearby and it always gave me a fright when it did.

The spring was in a singularly beautiful situation below a little rocky overhang which was covered with moss and fern. The water welled up in a basin that would have been deep enough to bathe in if I had not minded spoiling it; but even if there had been another source I would not have done so. It was too lovely a place, one in which I would not have been at all surprised to meet the god Pan. Even so I never visited it more often than I needed to because the labour of clearing up every sign of my presence, which included walking backwards from it and obliterating my footprints on the muddy path as I went, was too great and was even more difficult while carrying a vessel full of water. As it was I often had to return to it because I was afraid that I had left a blob of lather, or a piece of soap on a rock, and usually I had.