The Reluctant Tuscan (26 page)

“Too bad we're not more like America,” Mario lamented, “where everything is so—”

“I hope you're not thinking that we've soured on Italy because of this accident,” Nancy said.

“It was the furthest thing from my mind.”

“Because if that's what you came over here to find out, you can go home and take your moldy vegetables with you!” I had to hold Nancy to keep her from grabbing the box with her bad shoulder and throwing it at him.

“My dear woman!” Mario exclaimed as he backed away from the window. “Don't get your knickers in a twist.”

“We're staying, Mario,” Nancy proclaimed. “And, no matter what it takes, we're going to get our house finished.”

“Bully for you.” He turned to go, and in his hurry he almost tripped over Tiberius, who was sniffing at whatever was stuck to Mario's heel.

“And here's something else,” she hollered after him as she squeezed my hand. “We're going to get remarried in that house! And we're going to live there for a long, long time and be so damn happy, it'll make both you and your sister miserable!”

I
learned the story of how the town was liberated from two of the men who were there that day. I had gone into the village to pick up one of Nancy's prescriptions at the
farmacia
when I heard voices that were distinctly American. Sitting at the café was an elderly black man in the company of a young couple with their nine-year-old son. They were being hosted by Uncle Carmuzzi, who had smuggled in a bottle of his home-brewed wine and was plying them with it.

I struck up a conversation and they invited me to join them. I had figured out they were here for the
festa
, because aside from Nancy and me, we didn't get many Americans in this neck of the woods.

The man's name was Robert Hilliard, from Louisville, Kentucky, and he had traveled here with his daughter, his son-in-law, and his grandson to show them the town he had helped liberate during World War II. After a few glasses of wine, we got around to what had happened that day as former sergeant Robert Hilliard and former partisan guerrilla Uncle Carmuzzi each told me their side of the story.

 

 

Angelino Carmuzzi caught
the squirrel with his bare hands. After skinning it, he and his sister, Mariella, shared slices of raw meat in the grainy darkness of a ditch that ran alongside the Via Apua. In the distance they heard the constant rumbling of heavy artillery and an occasional staccato burst from a machine gun as it pointed its long finger of tracer shells across the landscape. But their ears disregarded those sounds, straining to listen only for the tread of marching boots or the diesel whine of a tank.

Suddenly there was a short, nervous bird whistle, followed by the stumbling footsteps of Pietro Pingatore tumbling into the ditch.

“Sono venuti!”
he whispered, his face glazed with sweat. “They're coming!”

The three of them clambered out of the ditch and proceeded down the road. Eyes darting from side to side, they silently stepped around shell holes filled with pools of oil-stained rainwater from yesterday's downpour. Twice they had to jump back into the ditch when fighter planes roared overhead at treetop level. The planes were American, the Luftwaffe having been blasted out of the skies weeks ago, but they had still had to dash for cover because the fighters were strafing anything that moved.

When they approached the junction where the road branched off toward the marble quarries, they readied their machine guns. Since the fall of Livorno three days earlier, elements of the 29th Panzer Brigade had been spotted retreating on this road, and they well understood the German army's policy of shooting partisans on sight.

They were walking slowly when Mariella stopped them by silently putting out both arms. She was sniffing the air when she detected something. Something good. Then, out of the mist, they saw the outline of six soldiers coming toward them. By the shape of their helmets and silhouettes of their rifles, they instantly knew.

“Americani!”
Angelino yelled.

“Halt!” Sergeant Hilliard hollered. Weapons were leveled as both groups cautiously approached.

“Viva America!” Pietro Pingatore called out. “Viva Franklin Roosevelt!!”

“Siamo partigiani!”
Mariella squealed, hoping they would understand that they were all on the same side.

“Okay.” Sergeant Hilliard waved at them to come forward. “Slowly.”

The partisans approached each of them, thinking that the first light of dawn was playing tricks on their eyes by making the faces and hands of all the soldiers look black. The Italians looked at each other in confusion. Was this some new kind of camouflage invented by those ingenious Yanks?

“We-are-try-in'-to-get-to-Pietra-santa,” Hilliard said pronouncing each syllable as he pulled a map out of his shirt pocket.

But the partisans could not look at the map because their eyes were riveted on the soldiers' skin. Surely this wasn't the color of Americans, they wondered. These faces were not like those of Jimmy Cagney or Gary Cooper, whom they had seen in the few Hollywood movies that had managed to play there.

“Pietrasanta?” Sergeant Hilliard repeated, pointing up the road.

“
Sì, sì,
Pietrasanta,” Angelino Carmuzzi said. Then he tried to explain how they must first come to Cambione, which was on the way. For even though the Germans had pulled out two days ago, until the Americans occupied the town, there was always the chance the Nazis would come back.

The two groups proceeded down the road, each eyeing the other with curiosity. The GIs were not altogether convinced that these Italians weren't really pro-fascists leading them into a trap, and the partisans were unaware that they had stumbled into the advance units of the 92nd Infantry Division, an all-black fighting unit known as the Buffalo Soldiers.

After marching for the better part of an hour past the rusted hulks of burned-out armored cars and an occasional dead horse lying in the road, the GIs and the
partigiani
reached the ancient Roman wall. There, in the full light of dawn, they saw that half the town had turned out to welcome them with flowers, bottles of wine, and homemade American flags. Black faces split open with wide, toothy smiles as the Buffalo Soldiers passed out chocolate bars and packs of Lucky Strikes. While the crowd cheered, and an impromptu band played, the mayor looked at the partisans quizzically.

“Loro sono Africani?”
he asked. “They're Africans?”

“Loro sono Americani,”
Angelino Carmuzzi replied. “They're Americans.”

 

 

We decided
that the Festa della Liberazione would be our first public appearance. We were hoping to marshal whatever sympathies we had accrued, by being both accident victims and Americans, into a way to get our house moving again. And like a complex military operation, Nancy and I drew up our plans to target Marco Mucchi, isolate him outside the fortress of his office, and soften him up until his bank unfroze our money.

Nancy would spearhead this operation, so she woke early to dress for battle. She chose black to properly frame the hospital whiteness of the plaster cast on her arm. Her dress was lacy, sheer, and clingy, yet respectful to the point of somber, and all topped off with an antique wooden crucifix, designed to say that only through strong faith were we able to endure this catastrophe.

The holiday fell on the hottest day of the hottest month of the hottest summer anybody could remember. The sun had baked all the stone surfaces of the Piazza Maggiore until it felt like a kiln, and the only relief was a seat close to the fountain or the chance that a passing pigeon might flap its wings near your face.

We waited for the actual ceremony to begin before making our entrance. The mayor, select capos from the Comune, and several prominent local poobahs were seated on the podium set up at the open end of the piazza. The United States of America was represented by an assistant under secretary from the consular office in Florence and a lieutenant colonel from the NATO base at Camp Darby. We chose the moment when the makeshift marching band made up of volunteer firemen and local
forestale
(forest rangers) struck up the national anthem. As the opening strain of “Oh, say can you see . . .” played on in a brassy, off-tempo way, we entered.

Nancy was on my arm and our steps were slow, but steady, in testament to our resolve to overcome any adversity. I could feel all eyes upon us, and when I looked over to Nancy, her chin was trembling, but her head was high. She looked like Greer Garson coming out of the bomb shelter after the blitz in
Mrs. Miniver
. I could feel gratitude and affection pouring out of each one of our friends and neighbors as we passed. Italians love high drama, and we were giving it to 'em, baby, we were giving it to 'em.

Dino and Flavia had saved us two seats in front, and we got to them just as the mayor finished his speech and introduced Angelino Carmuzzi. The old man stood up and nodded to the applause, and I realized how differently I now saw him from that first time at Dino's party when Uncle Carmuzzi had fought with Dottore Spotto over my approval for their homemade wines. How different this gnarled old man was from the brave twenty-two-year-old hiding in a ditch, waiting for the Americans to come free his village.

Uncle Carmuzzi paid tribute to the other members of his little band of partisans, reminding the audience that small groups such as theirs, operating all over Italy, managed to pin down twenty divisions of German soldiers and keep them from being used at Normandy. His voice wavered when he reminisced about Pietro Pingatore, father of Mario and Vesuvia, who were sitting two rows in front of us. Not to be outdone by our theatrics, Vesuvia clutched her heart and sobbed dramatically at the mention of her father's name, reminding the town how she had dutifully cared for him during that long and fatal illness that took his life in the bitter winter of 1986.

Any Italian in the crowd who was not crying already completely broke down when Angelino Carmuzzi offered up a prayer for his sister, Mariella. Small and frail as a baby bird, she had survived countless firefights and ambushes with the enemy, only to step on a German land mine two months after the war.

And just when you thought it couldn't get any more emotional, the mayor introduced the last survivor of the American platoon that liberated their town. Former sergeant Robert Hilliard, seventy-nine years old, stood up in a slightly bent military posture. The elderly black man walked stiff-legged to the microphone, saluted the mayor, and embraced Angelino Carmuzzi.

The crowd cheered, the band struck up “The Stars and Stripes Forever,” and I started crying.

“Nice touch,” Nancy whispered to me.

“I'm not faking,” I sniffled.

Oh, my God, what was happening to me? I'd turned into an Italian. An Italian woman!

 

 

After an Italian
has a good cry, he has to eat. And then dance.

Long banquet tables had been set up ringing the piazza, and in spite of the heat, outdoor kitchens were churning out prodigious quantities of
penne alla carbonara
and
risotto con funghi
. People of all ages and walks of life sat together, laughing, shouting, eating, and drinking toasts to everything and everybody.

We didn't sit, but circulated, thanking many of our fellow
cittadini
(citizens) for their kindness and reassuring them that, despite any rumors to the contrary, we still loved Italy and had no intention of leaving. We also spent some time chatting with the Hilliard family. Robert's wife had passed on some years ago, so he had been brought here by his daughter and son-in-law.

He told us how different it had been back then, when the armed services were segregated, and even the fabled 92nd Infantry was made up of black foot soldiers under the command of white officers. As we chatted, various people came up to shake his hand and thank him. I commented that the Italians seemed as glad to see him today as they had been back then, and he joked that if his rifle company had taken a different fork in the road, Cambione would have been liberated by soldiers from the Brazilian Expeditionary Force, who were operating on their right flank. That made me smile to think about samba music and how different this party would have been.

As we were talking, Uncle Carmuzzi came over with another bottle of his homemade wine. He had been saving this bottle for this occasion and he assured us that more than mere
vino
, it was closer to being an elixir of the gods. He filled our glasses and we drank several toasts to the eternal friendship between the peoples of Italy and the United States.

Shade was now covering the center of the piazza, so the folding chairs were cleared away and couples began to dance to the synthesized melodies of a local Bar Mitzvah band. For a country that seems to be organized along chaotic lines by a people with a deep-seated sense of anarchy in their souls, Italians dance in a highly structured way. The couples executed a rather intricate four-step fox-trot, where everybody moved at the same speed in the same counterclockwise direction, like many small wheels turning inside one gracefully turning pinwheel.

But we hadn't come to dance. We were here on business, and to that end we were surreptitiously stalking the vice president of our bank, Marco Mucchi. We waited until he got his wife and two small daughters seated at a table, and when he went to bring them food, we positioned ourselves at the end of the serving line so our backs were to him as he fell in behind us.

Just as he was about to greet us, Nancy's knees buckled and she started to swoon. A surprised Marco Mucchi caught her.