The Italians at Cleat's Corner Store (26 page)

When he became conscious of the silence, he threw the scarf from his eyes. He shook the beast towards his men for approval, like it was a hunting trophy. The soldiers stood and removed their cigarettes from their mouths, hesitating before starting up a solemn and dutiful applause. Vittorio had also pulled off his blindfold, panting. The captain offered him a broad grin, a bruised hand, but his brother only wiped his face on his sleeve and pinned the German in his sights for a long moment. Captain Schlosser, perhaps coming to his senses, lifted the piglet between them and offered it up to Vittorio. Everything seemed suspended. A dog barked; a child began to cry. Vittorio cracked his neck and snorted through his nose, making a bloody expectoration in the chalk at his feet. He walked to the wall and jumped over it, leaving the captain standing in the arena, the mauled piglet dangling from his fist.

Lucio became aware that Otto had gone. He caught sight of him striding towards the ring. But instead of joining the men thronging about the captain, he cut across the ridge, walking briskly away from the slope of spectators on the campo below. Searching ahead of him to see what Otto had seen, Lucio could make out a figure bound for the mule track up Collelungo. It was his mother. The shape and the sway of her was unmistakeable to him. He knew she was hurrying away from the festival,
away from all that ugliness, just as he wanted to, losing herself between the moonlit brambles without looking back.

He bent to pick up the journal Otto had given him, intending to set off after them, but he paused. Where Otto had sat, something lay across the flattened grass, thin and black as charcoal. He prodded at it with his toe, thinking it might be a lizard or a young grass snake, but the thing was inanimate under his foot. When he picked it up, he felt its softness between his fingertips, the lush texture of velvet. The ribbon was no longer than his hand, too short to have come unthreaded from a collar or a cuff, to have been tied about a woman's hair. It was no more than a remnant, an offcut — a memento. He ran the velvet over his lips and recalled his mother's curls.

When he straightened he saw Otto on the mule track, his pale hair attracting the moonlight like something metallic under water. Lucio slipped the ribbon inside his journal and turned his back to the mountain, making his way down over the ridge and towards the village.

They knew the war was changing. But only after the festival did they actually see it for themselves. One November morning, there was a foreign stillness to the air: it reminded Lucio of the partial eclipse he had once witnessed, hearing it long before he had seen it. The birds had started up their frenetic evening song, even though it was barely midday, and there seemed a heightened flurry of insect activity in the grass. Fagiolo's mules had skittered and whinnied in their paddock, and dogs barked at the breeze that sounded like a distant train. Then everything became mute, holding its breath, as the shadow inched across the meadow, and he had imagined a stony chill like the Angel of Death passing overhead. Even when the summer day returned — the mules bowing their heads to the grass once more, the ants busy circling his boot, as though it had all been in his head — everything seemed changed to him. He recalled he had shifted his foot fractionally and let it hover over the black line of the moving ant trail. He could hear his blood in his ears, the thin, shallow breath in his throat, the very smallness of life all about him, clinging to its tenuous thread.

He remembered all this as they walked under the canopy of chestnuts lining the road to Cori. No birds sang, and the verges dripped with quiet. Even Viviana seemed spooked. The donkey, with its load of olives to be pressed, stopped dead and shook at its bridle.

‘Cammina, su!' Vittorio grumbled. ‘Useless beast's as lazy as Padre Ruggiero himself.' He put up a hand to slap it on the rump, but Lucio caught his wrist. ‘What?'

They heard a rope creaking, the flies fizzing among the branches, paper fluttering in a scuff of breeze. The body had been there some days, they guessed, the face pecked at by birds, the stench as stunning as heat from an opened oven door. Viviana let out a hesitant growl.

‘Jesus Christ and all the saints.' Vittorio swallowed hard. ‘Fuck.' The feet of the hanging man were bare and blue as stone: someone had already stripped him of his boots and socks. Lucio noticed his gnarled toes — the feet of an old man, bunioned like Nonno Raimondi's had been. He ran to the ferns on the other side of the road and retched.

‘Bastards,' Vittorio said. They squatted together with their backs to the corpse, staring vacantly into the undergrowth. It seemed to glimmer in the weak sun through the trees, with tiny points of light like early stars in winter. His brother reached out and picked up several bullets from the leaf litter, shuffling them in his palm and blowing on the casings until their unspent charges were revealed. He pocketed them, glancing at Lucio. Then, without speaking, he scoured the bushes with the toe of his boot, perhaps hoping he might find the gun that went with them.

‘See what your German friends are doing now?' His brother motioned to the swinging body and looked at him as if he could barely contain the contents of his own stomach. ‘You see, Gufo? You think no one sees you — Mamma and you at Collelungo, meeting that blonde one. The translator.'

Lucio turned away, but his brother caught him by the arm.

‘Things have changed. Weren't you listening at the fountain? They're rounding up boys as young as sixteen. They say it's for the new Fascist army, but the talk is they're being sent to Germany, to work in factories.' He was staring at Lucio but his focus seemed elsewhere, on some other image. ‘How long do you think it'll be before they get to us?'

Last winter, Vittorio had been cursing the years between himself and the older Avanguardisti, imagining the envelope from Rome, stamped with the axe and rods, bearing his own name. But now Lucio could sense other longings in him, other ambitions coming to the surface, crossing his brother's face like clouds changing the colour of the lake at Montemezzo.

Behind him the rope creaked softly. Lucio saw the paper pinned to the old man's chest.
Harbouring Deserters
,
Possessing Firearms
,
Anti-German Activity
. It read as bluntly as a market-day list.

His brother glanced over his shoulder at the noise. ‘Let's do the business in Cori and get out of here.'

The next morning they were silent as they followed the road home, the only sounds the donkey's lazy shuffle on the chalk path, the bullets jangling in Vittorio's pocket as he ran his fingers through them.

He thought of Otto. He knew his brother was right. Everything about his friendship with the German should have felt wrong. But it didn't. Walking through the woods of Montemezzo with Otto and Viviana felt more real to him, more precious than any memory he could conjure of his father. And seeing his mother watching them from the rocks as they dived and resurfaced in the lake at the close of a summer day, her mouth open, her laugh skimming across the water between the two of them, brought him more happiness than it ought to. As for his mother's lantern, which he would track from the battlement wall as it swung up the mule track to Collelungo, and the torch that winked its impatient answer along the ridge, he would only lower his head and squint, until they became no more than fireflies, flickering to each other as nature dictated they must, on the last balmy nights before autumn.

They turned in at Padre Ruggiero's to deliver his share of the olive oil. The priest was expecting them and came to the gate.

‘Is it true?' he called before they had finished the climb towards his villa. ‘Did they hang Giacomo Luigi?' He saw the answer in their faces and he crossed himself, mouthing a prayer before sizing up the two casks of oil. He pursed his lips, evidently disappointed with the yield, but continued on the subject of the hanged man. ‘Still, Giacomo was a known Communist. They even said he encouraged the formation of resistance groups. At his age, I ask you? I wonder he had the energy.'

He rested a hand on each of their shoulders. ‘They'll be the death of us, these partisans — you understand that, don't you? The Germans will retaliate. You must see the danger that poses for normal, honest men and women like the Montelupinese?' They nodded dutifully, but Lucio saw Vittorio's shoulder inch away from Padre Ruggiero's hand. ‘That's why I want you to promise that if you hear anything of partisan groups or the GAP in these parts, you come and tell me. Even if it's someone you know, even if it's a friend. Is that understood?'

They gave their word and Padre Ruggiero climbed the steps of his verandah once again. Eager to be gone, they headed below to store the oil, but as they re-emerged from under the house, Lucio saw the priest's jowly face still at the balcony railing, his pale eyes following them from above, scanning the shape of their jackets, their trouser pockets as they left his cellar.

‘And Primo, don't forget,' he called, ‘I'm expecting you at the head of the litter during Santa Lucia's procession this year. Your father would want it.'

Without turning, Vittorio held up one hand in acknowledgement, as Lucio had seen him do so many times to boys in the schoolyard. But with the other, his brother made the cornuto behind his chest and spat as he led the donkey down the hill. ‘Go fuck yourself,' he mumbled.

They stopped at Rocca Re from habit. Lucio suspected it had become a superstition of Vittorio's: to stand on the rock and make his mark before passing. The donkey wandered into the meadow to graze.

‘What are we doing, Guf?' his brother asked. ‘I mean, what are we
doing
?' He paced the great stone overhang, the bullets ringing in his pocket. The valley dripped dully before them: pockets of mist wreathed the mountaintops and threatened to shroud what was left of the day, while the smoke of a bonfire rose in the bare orchards on the Prugni rise.

‘I can't bear this waiting,' Vittorio continued. ‘Everyone here just sits around and waits — waits for the food to run out, for the Nazis or Mussolini's thugs to round us up, for the Allies to arrive. What difference will it make? Someone else is always telling us what to do.'

Lucio shifted his hands in his pockets and felt the familiar stub of his pencil. He couldn't think the way his brother did. He wanted to study the twist of smoke in the valley, the scribble of trees on the ridge; to see the sun appear in the thinnest gap of clear sky above Carpeto; to witness the range fire up for an instant like it was dipped in copper.

‘Well, I'm not sitting around any longer,' Vittorio announced. He drew out one of the bullets, holding it up in front of him. It winked, bright and complicit, as he positioned it on the ledge. He jumped back down to the path, returning with a rock the size of his fist in each hand.

‘What are you doing?' Lucio asked. He felt a looseness in his stomach, the apprehension of what his brother might do next.

‘I'm going to go back up to Cori. I'm going to join that gruppo.' He set down one of the rocks at his feet, and with the other he took a practice swing at the bullet. ‘They've got eyes and ears all through these mountains. I heard Scarvacci say so when he was pressing the oil.' He squinted and pointed the finger of his free hand at the tiny golden casing glinting on the granite a few feet away. ‘He said they wanted someone like me, someone who knows the passes through the ranges, who can travel quickly without raising suspicion.' He raised and lowered his chin, realigning the bullet in his sights. ‘But if they take me, you'll have to forget that Primo ever existed. It's the price of a freedom fighter, see. I'll be Fulmine
from now on, I've decided.' And channelling his new name, he released the rock at lightning speed. There was a metallic ring, the beginnings of a whistle; then the explosion bounced back at them from across the range, sudden and vast and unruly. Ravens rose to shred the echo with their caws, and a pair of quail beat out their applause from the scrub below. When the boom faded, a chip of rock crumbling at the precipice pattered down upon the brush and scree, the sound as soft and innocent as rain.

His brother was finally still, but Lucio saw his mouth beginning to stretch into that dangerous grin. Vittorio yelled, an indistinguishable word, half jubilant, half animal cry, and grabbed Lucio behind the neck with one hand. ‘See?' he said, as if the lucky hit was a sign of divine approbation. He balanced on the lip of the overhang, his arms wide. ‘Sono re!' he cried down into the valley, which still seemed to shiver with noise. ‘Sono re!'

And at that moment, Lucio believed his brother really could be the master of anything he chose.

Leyton
1950

‘Don't see why her ladyship's books are any better than them in the mobile library,' Aunty Bea was saying. She was buffing a silver platter in the scullery of Leyton House.

‘I wish you wouldn't call her that,' Connie said quietly, pulling against the doorjamb, eager to get away from her aunt. ‘The library here has … proper books, a hundred times more than the library van.' The sneer behind her words was audible and she knew she would pay for it.

‘Oh, I see.
Proper
books, are they?' Aunty Bea sniffed. ‘Good thing I dusts all them
proper
books as everyone's falling over themselves to read.'

Her aunt was aching for an argument. She could tell by the set of her chin, by the way her eyes scanned, as though searching for a loose thread that she might pull to unravel her. Connie knew what it was about. Through the autumn, Aunty Bea had been content with Connie's avoidance of the Big House. There was always a note of satisfaction in her aunt's voice when she told Connie how Mrs Repton had been asking after her.