Miracle at St. Anna (Movie Tie-in) (15 page)

The news of Gabriella's heroic death spread through the Apuane Alps and Tuscan valleys like lightning. It was then that the great Black Butterfly struck.

For several weeks, the Black Butterfly spread rumors in the valley around Bertacchi that on a certain date, at a certain time, he would show up with an entire army to revenge Gabriella's death. As expected, an Italian spy alerted the German authorities and the SS arrived in force on the appointed date, surrounding the village. But the Black Butterfly did not appear. He watched, hidden in the mountain forest, with his binoculars, and marked the SS commander who perpetrated the torture on poor Gabriella. The Germans departed after a few days, thinking the threat was empty. But Peppi had other plans. He secretly followed the officer's squad, which moved on to terrorize other villages in the Tuscan valleys. He waited and waited, waited a full six weeks, until the officer was relieved and rotated out. He and a small group of his men followed the officer to Viareggio, where, posing as mule skinners, they caught him along with a squad of eight German troopers who were also heading out for a relief rotation. The eight German soldiers, Peppi freed. The SS commander, though, he did not.

Patiently, and to the nth degree, the Black Butterfly exacted the same torture upon the SS commander that the commander had exacted on Gabriella of Bertacchi. He hog-tied him to a tree. He taped his mouth. He pulled off his breasts with a strange tool. He waited a day, then pulled out his eyes with dental pliers. He let him bleed. When he was done, he pulled off the commander's testicles and stuck them in his mouth, then carried the SS commander's body seventy-eight kilometers back to the same square where Gabriella of Bertacchi had been savagely killed, and waited.

Once a year, the sun sets twice a day in the Serchio Valley of Tuscany. It hits the eye of the Mountain of the Sleeping Man, and disappears behind the top oval of the encirclement of rock. It hides there for a few minutes and reappears again right through the center of the eye before disappearing down the mountain again. It was during this moment that the Black Butterfly sent a message to the people of Tuscany that would never be forgotten.

The German commanders who were running Bertacchi did not know the sun set twice, so when darkness came, they were safely settled in their headquarters near the village gates. The villagers, however, as was their custom, stood outdoors in the town square to watch the yearly phenomenon.

The sun disappeared, and darkness came. When the sun appeared again, minutes later, there, in the center of the village, was a ghastly sight. Hanged from the same tree as Gabriella was the SS commander, his decomposed body wracked and sliced, his breasts pulled off, his eyes gouged out, his testicles shoved in his mouth. A sign strung across his neck read: “
Viva Italia.
Love, the Black Butterfly.” Then the sun disappeared again, and night came for good.

The sight of the German commander had the opposite effect on the villagers than that one would expect, for they had no doubt that reprisals would be swift and merciless. The SS promised to kill sixteen civilians for every SS trooper killed, and this corpse they were staring at was no trooper's. This was an officer. Many turned and fled into the woods and forests and never came back. But the few who stayed were witness to a remarkable turn of events, for the village spy who had turned in Gabriella saw the corpse of the SS man and panicked, revealing himself. He sprinted to the nearby German headquarters to tell the commander in exact detail what he had seen, but when he returned with a large squad of shaken Germans who shined their flashlights and lamps on the spot, the SS commander's body was gone. The piazza was clear. Swept clean. It was if nothing had never happened.

The Germans knocked on doors and demanded of the villagers, “Who has done this?” but to a man and woman, the villagers denied it, for even knowledge of a rebellious act could bring terrible reprisals against their sons and daughters. It was the cleverest of clever moves, for, as the villagers later explained, there was no body in the piazza and therefore no one would be punished, and, secretly, Gabriella's death had been revenged. No, we saw no body, they told the Germans. Nothing happened here. This piazza is as it always has been, as it was before night fell. There is a curfew, is there not? We saw nothing.

The German commander ordered the spy to be jailed for lying. He was sent to prison in Castelnuovo di Garfagnana, where news of his dastardly betrayal of Gabriella had long preceded his arrival. He was jailed with several socialists, communists, bandits, and true partisans. By the time the Germans sorted out the truth about the missing SS commander and hastily sent word to free him, he was, as they say in Sicily, calling the fishes—long dead. He did not last six hours in prison.

Meanwhile, in the town of Bertacchi, the few villagers who remained awakened in the following weeks to find at their doorsteps bread, wine, baskets of chestnuts, even jars of olive oil, which was so scarce it was almost priceless. The caretaker of Gabriella's two toddler daughters found two small sacks of pure gold bullion in a basket underneath the children's bed and two gold necklaces with the word “Love” etched into them. The two became rich women after the war—one became a provincial governor. The Black Butterfly, however, the young poet from Castelnuovo di Stazzema also known as Peppi, was never seen by anyone in Bertacchi during or after that event. He was a rumor, a wisp, a thought, his exploits bragged about by those who admired him, loathed by those who feared he had only prolonged the agony of losing to the Germans. As the war dragged on and his feats grew, the Germans placed a price on his head, though it was senseless. How can you catch a person who does not exist? Even the Italians were not sure. He was rumored to have joined the ranks of the Buffalo Soldiers from America, who were said to be marching up from the south and fighting like the sons of black Hannibal and were so taken with him that they carried him back with them to America, where he was rumored to own a nightclub in Harlem named after him, which was filled with black butterflies that flew along the walls and ceilings as the Negroes jitterbugged to jazz music.

Unfortunately, none of those rumors was true. Peppi the Black Butterfly never went to America. He never even left Tuscany. In fact, Peppi the Black Butterfly had never met a Negro before December 1944. But it was that meeting, a confrontation in the town of Bornacchi, at the foot of the Mountain of the Sleeping Man, that would forever cement his reputation as a man who never forgets his friends, who punishes his enemies dearly, and who kills you with his love.

10

PEPPI

From high atop his perch on Mt. Caula, overlooking the town of Bornacchi, not more than five hundred feet above the tiny house where the four Negroes had spent the night, a lone twelve-year-old Italian boy sat below a shelf of rock that covered him from the driving rain and watched the four soldiers emerge from the house into the daylight. It was dawn, and the rain would not stop. It fell in endless sheets, pattering and splashing, raking across the horizon and swelling the creek that ran in front of Ludovico's house, splashing heavily against the rocky shore.

The boy leaned forward to see more clearly as the Negroes sleepily approached the swollen creek, dipped their faces in it, stood up, took a wary glance at the ridges around them without seeing him, then knocked on the door of Ludovico's house. The boy whistled softly, and the trees and bushes behind him gave way to three moving figures that emerged from the thick forest's trees and rocks like shadows. The four partisans, Italian Resistance fighters, the oldest no more than twenty-six, armed with carbine rifles and bandoleers, gathered at his shoulder and observed the four Americans in silence. They watched as Ludovico opened the door, glanced hurriedly at the ridges above the house, then let the four men in, closing the door swiftly behind them.

“Old Man Ludovico's got protection now,” one of the partisans quipped.

“He's got a lot to protect, all those rabbits,” another mused.

“That tall one, that's the biggest Negro I've ever seen. Maybe he's Louis Armstrong, eh, Peppi?”

A short, thin, prematurely balding man with a small forehead and piercing black eyes stood apart from the three and watched in silence. He knelt down on the ridge and made a small circle in the mud, drawing with a stick, ignoring the fascinating phenomenon of the Negroes below. Peppi, the Black Butterfly, looked nothing like the force he was believed to be. He was frail compared with the others, with a lightness to his frame that seemed ill-suited to the ruggedness the mountains demanded. He had turned twenty-six that morning. He'd written a poem about it the previous night. The poem was about the silences that lived inside of him, the yawning valleys where he'd left himself when the war began, before the bottomless rage inside him had grown into the silent, furious butterfly. He'd wanted to read his poem to the others when he arose but saw no use. There was no time for that anymore. He'd been promoted to lieutenant now, still a member of the infamous Valenga band, which had grown from the original twenty men to nearly two thousand, an unmanageable size, far too large for his taste. There were too many spies, too many political opinions, too many errors, and debacles abounded. To make matters worse, the Germans had offered ten thousand lire to any Italian who could kill or capture him, and as he grew more effective the offer had grown to fifty thousand lire, then to a hundred thousand lire, now a hundred thousand lire and a bag of salt, the last of which had finally closed the circle around him, buying traitors until the Black Butterfly had no one left to trust save these three—and one of them, Ettalo, was only twelve. Every morning Peppi woke up and crossed himself, thanking the Virgin Mary for letting him see another sunrise in a world where a bag of salt was worth more than a man's life. Twenty-six years God had let him live. It seemed like twenty-six lifetimes. He looked down at Ludovico's house and shoved the poem he had written deeper into his pocket.

“The Americans are not who we need to see,” he said. “Our business is with Ludovico. We wait till they leave.”

“In this weather?”

“The Germans can't move, either. Neither can our traitor.”

“Whoever led the Germans here is gone, Peppi.”

“Maybe. Maybe not. But Ludovico has a mule, electricity, and new rabbits. At least fourteen rabbits. That's a lot of rabbits. He will show himself alone at some point, and when he does, we will ask him how he got those things.”

Rodolfo, a short, stout youth with big ears, sidled up next to Peppi, set his rifle down, and blew into his hands. He was twenty-four, just two years younger than Peppi. He'd studied English in Rome. He'd been an artist before the war. Had Colonel Driscoll seen him, he would have recognized the young man as the shabby priest who had been in camp to warn the Americans about the pending German attack.

“I say we get Ludovico before the rest of the Americans come,” Rodolfo said. “I told them the Germans are coming. They won't be long. Once they come, we'll have to explain everything to them. They'll take over, and they'll answer to no one. Our chance will be lost.”

“No. We will wait,” Peppi said. “Whoever has shown himself to Ludovico may come back to claim another prize. We'll see. Maybe Ludovico is not the one.”

He hoped he was right. Peppi liked Ludovico. Like all of them, he'd known the old man all his life. Before the war, Ludovico had been the town blacksmith, who gave them free horseshoes and taught them to fish for eels and play soccer. He was the first in the village to get electricity, which he'd shared with everyone. He'd walked all the way to Forte dei Marmi to get it, twenty-five miles, paying two power company men five hundred lire apiece to run poles all the way from Forte dei Marmi to Bornacchi, which, Peppi had to admit, showed great foresight. But Ludovico had changed after his wife died. He'd become bitter and aloof, retiring to his house and olive fields, obsessed with his daughter and her marriage, removing himself from village life and paying Ettora the witch enormous sums so that his daughter would get pregnant—a waste of money. Most important, he was a Fascist, and while he claimed impartiality to everyone he knew, no one could be impartial now. No decision was a decision. To not take sides was to take sides. Peppi's own brother was a Fascist who had been drafted into the Italian army and sent to Russia and hadn't been heard from for months. Peppi hoped he wouldn't come back soon, because now nothing was promised and nothing was forgiven. Rodolfo's brother Marco was a Fascist whom they'd killed in the Ruosina Pass in a firefight two months before. Marco's body fell from a ridge and was caught on a ledge of jagged rock that no one could reach. He stayed there two days before Peppi's pleas made both sides stop fighting long enough so that Rodolfo could climb up the precipice and bring his brother's body down. Fascists and partisans alike buried Marco in his beloved mountainside and stood side by side at his grave. Rodolfo wept and wondered aloud how to tell his mother. “Marco wanted to be mayor of Bornacchi,” he said. “Don't you remember? He taught us to mix drinks and hunt wild boar so that we would vote for him when he grew up.” The partisans and the Fascists had wept together, refusing to look at one another, but after the prayers were said and the hugs were delivered, they departed and the next day fought each other with even greater animosity.

Peppi dug his stick into the thick mud until it was buried up to his fingers. “The Negroes change nothing,” he said firmly. The three partisans watched him in silence, expecting he would say more. But he said nothing more. Even if the Negroes had the entire American army behind them, he thought bitterly, that would not make the problem of the church go away.

Even to think of the church made his stomach hurt, and the sorrow that drowned his heart made him weak and dizzy. It was a nightmare that had begun horribly. Six weeks before, he and his little band—the sons of farmers, olive growers, and grape pickers who had taken up arms and fled into the mountains when they could no longer stand watching the humiliation and suffering of their starving families—caught two SS soldiers on patrol near an olive grove outside the nearby town of St. Anna di Stazzema, less than a mile up the mountain from Bornacchi, where they sat. They had caught them by accident, while one of them was pissing, and wiped them out. It was a sloppy operation, not the kind Peppi liked, full of mad screaming and terror. They had tried to capture the Germans, but one had yelled trying to alert his nearby comrades, and the other had almost escaped, then begged for his life, dying in a gurgling of blood from Rodolfo's clumsy knife wounds. Rodolfo in particular had behaved terribly and viciously, but there had been no time for admonitions. They finished the job quickly, then fled into the caves of Mt. Paladonia and split up, during which time Peppi escaped by the skin of his teeth thanks to an old farmer who routed him around a waiting German patrol while the rest were on their own. He hid in terror as two companies from the 16th Panzer SS Division rolled through the mountain with mules, dogs, artillery, and five hundred men, wiping out everyone and everything in their path as they turned over every rock, tree, and boulder trying to find him and his band. The four made a prearranged rendezvous in another village several kilometers away two days later, where a terrible fight broke out among them, which was further exacerbated by the surprise arrival of a German patrol, which forced them into the mountains again. They hid in caves and underground caverns that had been formed by nature hundreds of years before, at times forced to separate, each unsure of the location of the others, trembling as the dogs sniffed and the German soldiers chatted just feet away. They starved that way for ten days, sometimes together, sometimes apart, eating olive twigs and chestnuts, totally dependent on a woman farmer who was brave enough to supply them with a bit of bread. When they finally met up and emerged from the foothills at the woman's farm, exhausted and starving, the woman farmer had a pasty look of shock on her face. She blurted, “They killed everyone at St. Anna.”