The Villa Triste (6 page)

‘Cati!’ Isabella shouted. She took both my shoulders and shook me, hard. ‘You have to go to the hospital!’

I stared at her. I started to say I wasn’t hurt. And then, as if her shaking had rattled something loose in my brain, I understood.

In the next moment we were running – through the house, out of the front door, to the shed where we kept our bicycles. I had pulled mine out, and was about to get on it, when I stopped and shoved it at Issa, forcing her to grab the handlebars.

‘Mama!’

I started to dart towards the house, but Issa lunged and stopped me.

‘She’s in the cellar, with Papa. They put supplies down there a week ago.’

I looked down at her hand grasping my dress and noticed that something was wrong.

‘My uniform.’ The words came out as a mumble, the kind of muttering you hear crazy people making in the street. ‘My armband.’

‘It doesn’t matter.’

Isabella thrust my bicycle towards me. She said something else over her shoulder that I couldn’t hear and then, before I realized what was happening, she was gone, and there was nothing for me to do but follow her, out of the drive, down the hill and through the Porta Romana into the city.

By the time we arrived at the hospital, the first ambulances had come in. There were people running everywhere. Issa shouted something to me about a civilian defence group and pedalled away. I didn’t have time to wonder where she had gone. The moment I dropped my bicycle, a sister grabbed me by the arm. There was a woman holding a little boy. It took us the better part of ten minutes to convince her to let us look at him, to prise him out of her arms and discover what his mother must have known all along, that he was already dead.

The children’s hospital was not far away, and we got most of the casualties. Two nurses who had been trying to evacuate a ward that took a direct hit died in the corridor because we couldn’t get them into an operating theatre. There were babies screaming in bassinets. A little boy on crutches was looking for his father. A small girl with cuts all over her face was clutching a stuffed rabbit. And then the parents began to arrive, entire families looking for their children and grandchildren. One man ran up and down, a napkin still tucked into the front of his shirt, because his family had been eating Sunday lunch in Scandicci when a neighbour came running in and told them that the hospital where his daughter had had her tonsils removed the day before had just been bombed by the Allies.

The strange thing was that during all of that, as hellish as it was, I was not afraid. Standing on our terrace, I had been terrified. Literally rooted to the spot with fear. If Isabella had not dragged me, I doubt I would have moved at all. I probably would have stood there all afternoon and all night, shaking and staring like an idiot. But once I got to the hospital, once I had something to do with my hands – the fear fell away. It shattered like glass. And was replaced by a kind of nothingness. My fingers moved by themselves. My mouth spoke. My brain clicked and whirred. It chose the right instrument, moved methodically from one task to the next. During it all, if I had a thought, it was only this: Thank you General Eisenhower, Thank you Mr Churchill, if this is how you set us free.

Sometime towards evening, Issa reappeared. She was covered in dust. The University students had formed groups of ‘civilian volunteers’, and were helping to get people out of the bomb sites, in some cases digging through rubble with their bare hands. Issa came in an ambulance, helping a very old woman and her husband, who was screaming like a banshee. His arm was broken in three places – painful, but he’d live. Trying to comfort his wife while they set the bones, Issa found me and kept insisting there must be somewhere where she could make the old woman a cup of tea. There was no tea, and ordinarily, I might have been angry with her for saying silly things and getting in the way – but not then. Then, all the anger I had felt towards her just hours before melted away, and for possibly the first time in my life, I felt sorry for her, for what I saw in her face. Because, for all her bravado, Isabella was not used to blood, and bone, and flesh. If I had had the time, I would have told her not to worry. I would have put my arm around her and told her that all of us are made of this.

The next morning, I was told of my promotion.

I had found a spare uniform in the linen store, and managed to tidy myself up enough to start my shift on time when the Head Sister, a small stern woman to whom I had barely spoken three words since she had accepted me at my interview almost a year before, called me into her office. I had no idea what I might have done, but all at once the preternatural calm I had acquired deserted me. My hand was shaking as I lifted it to knock on the glossy dark wood of her door. Somewhere in the back of my head, I think I must have believed that perhaps she had somehow had word of Lodovico and was going to tell me that he was dead.

I stood in front of her desk feeling like a schoolchild. I had always found nuns uniquely terrifying, and I was sure she would look at me and know I no longer believed in God, and that I was too fond of creature comforts, perfume and engagement rings, and was an out and out coward to boot. It was all I could do not to look down and see if my socks had sagged.

She was writing in a large ledger. Reading upside down was something I had always been quite good at, and I realized she was making lists of those who had died. When she put the pen down and looked up at me, I jumped.

Her eyes were quite large and very dark, her skin pleated with soft lines. Wrapped in her habit, she might have been anywhere from forty to sixty. I recalled something I had heard once, about God’s children being ageless.

‘Signorina Cammaccio. You must be exhausted.’

It didn’t sound like a question, so I said nothing. Actually, I did not feel tired. I had not even thought about feeling tired.

She considered me for a moment. Then she said, ‘You will understand, it is hoped that the children’s hospital will be reopened as soon as possible. Sadly, a number of their staff were killed last night. Naturally, we will be sending some of our nurses to the new facility to make up the numbers.’

She paused. I knew nothing about children and I hoped that she was not going to ask me to go – that she was not going to condemn me to weeks, or months, or even years, of looking into the faces of parents as I had last night. Of trying to explain to them why it was that God, or the Allied command, or the Germans, or the Fascists had seen fit to break to pieces the bodies of their little boys and girls.

‘This, of course,’ she continued after a moment, ‘will leave us short-handed.’

She rested her elbows on the ledger, steepling her small pudgy fingers over the names of the dead.

‘I have had excellent reports of your conduct,’ she went on, after a moment. ‘And so, I am going to ask you to take on a new job. As of this morning, I will need you to take over as a ward manager.’

I stared at her. The relief I felt at not being sent to the new children’s hospital lasted for about five seconds. Then it was replaced by something close to panic. I was a junior nurse. Most of the time I did nothing more than help with meals, sort linen that came in from the laundry, read aloud to patients, write letters for them, or occasionally hold their arm while they shuffled in baby steps up and down the ward and looked out of the windows onto the garden. I held trays of equipment for the sisters, watched while injections were given, and occasionally changed a dressing. I had done some science at university and the position at the hospital had been secured for me through a friend of Mama’s. That was the sum of my qualifications. For the last year, I had appeared when I had been told to, done what was asked of me, and gone home.

In short, my ‘nursing’ was nothing more than an acceptably genteel hobby, something to keep me out of the house and occupied until I got married. The ward managers, on the other hand, were senior sisters. They arranged work shifts and controlled supplies, made decisions about beds and food. I had only the vaguest idea of how any of this was done.

‘But, Sister!’ I blurted. ‘I can’t.’

She cocked her head and looked at me. ‘Can’t?’ she asked.

‘No!’

‘But, my dear, you have two years of university education, do you not?’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘But—’ Flustered, I shifted from foot to foot. ‘I’m merely a junior nurse.’ My voice sounded small and disturbingly childish. ‘I have no idea what to do.’

At this, she smiled. Then she stood up, and came around the desk, and took my hand.

‘My dear girl,’ she said. ‘In the days that are going to come, none of us are going to have any idea what to do.’

It was late evening when I finally left. By the time I got to our street, I couldn’t even trudge up the hill. Instead, I had the odd sensation that I was gliding, hovering an inch or so above the cobbles, as if I myself had also died but was simply too tired to attempt leaving earth. As I put my bike away, I registered dimly that neither Issa’s nor Papa’s bicycle was in the shed. I knew that they had both taken to staying late at the University, but I didn’t have the energy to sort through what this might mean, or why it niggled in the back of my brain. Instead, I pushed the pin through the latch and walked back along the path.

Thick light fell through the trees. Dusk was fringing the edge of the garden. In another lifetime, and if the car had not been hunched under its shroud, I might have thought Papa and Mama had gone out for a drive, up to Arcetri, or to Piazzale Michelangelo to watch the sun set over the city. I took out my key, but the front door was not locked. When I pushed it open, the house felt empty.

There were no lights on. I walked down the hall. Untouched by the last of the sun, the rooms on either side – Papa’s study behind its open door, the dining room and sitting room – seemed leached of colour. And wavering, as if they were underwater, and the furniture – the tables and chairs and photographs – might slip their anchors and float free.

I blinked. Then I crossed the dining room and pushed open the kitchen door. Plates from the breakfast or lunch my parents must have eaten had been washed but not put away. The leather silver canteen was closed and locked, its brass key bright in the shadows. The wine glasses sat ghostly on their shelf. There was a coffee cup on the counter, a dark outline of lipstick kissing its rim.

‘Mama?’

There was no answer. I said it again, a little louder, and this time heard in my voice the telltale high note.

‘Mama?’

My shoes clacked on the tiles. I let the door swing shut, crossed the dining room and hall and went through the arch into the sitting room.

‘Mama, are you here?’

The glass doors to the terrace were closed. The table and chairs beyond were empty. Suddenly, I was gripped by the idea that no one lived here. That I had not been wrong after all when I looked in the mirror at the bridal salon. Because somehow I had slid through time, and dropped into a future where all of us were ghosts.

I turned and ran up the stairs.

‘Mama!’

I banged open the door to my own room, to Isabella’s beyond, to my parents’ room across the hall, and finally to Enrico’s.

She was sitting on Rico’s bed, holding one of his sweaters, stroking it as if it was a cat, her hand moving back and forth like a metro-nome. The ring my mother always wore – the same ring that had been my grandmother’s, an aquamarine surrounded by diamonds – glinted in the light from the open window.

I was standing not ten feet from her, but she didn’t look at me. Instead, her dark-blue eyes were fixed on the window sill, as if she could see something there, something beyond the branch of the tree and the roof of the house in the street below. A picture, perhaps, of the children we had once been. Of the past we had lived, the one she traced, moving from object to object, with the tips of her fingers.

I turned and had started to leave the room when she spoke.

‘Cati?’

I had not bothered to turn on the lights. It was nearly dark. I looked over my shoulder. My mother was not much more than a ghost herself. Her dress melted into the shadows. Her legs, her arms and hands, appeared so pale they shimmered. Her beautiful hair was colourless.

‘I miss him.’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I know.’

‘Are you afraid?’

The question hung between us.

I nodded, my hand lingering on the doorjamb.

‘Every day?’ she asked. ‘All the time?’

I nodded again.

My mother looked down at the sweater in her lap. Her hand hovered over it, floating in the half light.

‘I didn’t think it would be like this,’ she said.