A Merry Dance Around the World With Eric Newby (17 page)

‘No, you can’t sleep in my hay,’ he said after another equally long pause. ‘You might set it on fire and where would I be then? But you can sleep in my house in a bed, and you will, too, but before we go in I have to finish with Bella.’ And he went back to milking her.

I shall never forget the moment when Signor Zanoni led me through the boiling slush in the yard and into the kitchen. It was more like a cavern than any room I had ever been in. One wall of it was part of the mountain, a great, smooth, shiny protruding rock which had been partly hollowed out to form the fireplace, itself a cave within a cave, as black as the outside of the copper pot which was suspended over the fire on a long chain, and the other three walls were made of rough blocks of undressed stone, some of them boulders, which heightened the illusion that this was an excavation rather than a room. In it the hot embers of the fire gave everything a reddish tinge and lamps hung on hooks on the walls which were nothing more than iron dishes filled with oil in which the wicks floated, the sort of lamps the Etruscans might have used while digging their tombs.

On one side of the fireplace there was a niche in the rock with a seat in it which was occupied by the oldest woman I had ever seen. Everything about her was black, except for her face which was so wrinkled – and the wrinkles were so regular and so close together – that they were like the contours of a steep-sided valley on a large-scale map. She wore black felt shoes, thick black stockings, some kind of long black garment the sleeves of which concealed her hands, and a sort of black coif or hood which hid her hair from view, if indeed she had any. And when I was taken forward to be introduced to her, which was the first thing that was done, I found that even her eyes were invisible, hidden behind a pair of thick pebble glasses in wire frames which pressed against her eyeballs, so that the water in them turned to steam in the heat of the fire. I spoke to her and her lips moved but no sound came from them. It might have been a welcome that she was trying to utter, or it could have been a prayer.

Then I was made to take off my wet clothes behind a high-backed wooden settee and I was given a big brown blanket to wrap myself in. Signora Zanoni made me sit down at a table and I was given
gnocchi
to eat,
pasta
made with potatoes and flavoured with tomatoes, and some rough red wine to drink, and she encouraged me to eat more, while three small children peeped out at me from behind her skirt like mice, and I was made to drink more wine by her husband. Later I was taken up a staircase that was like a ladder to a bedroom on the upper floor of the house where I exchanged the blanket for a long, hand-knitted vest which smelt of sheep and reached down below my knees.

The bed was high and white and ghostly-looking in the light of the single candle, and there was a great lump in the middle of it that looked very strange to me.

‘It’s the priest (the
prete),’
said Signor Zanoni. ‘You’ll be warm enough when he gets out of it.’ What he said sounded almost obscene on the lips of a man like this, but then his wife peeled back the sheet and blankets for a moment, long enough to remove from it a strange contrivance, something that I had never seen before, or even heard of – an iron pot full of hot coals from the fire on a wooden base with a framework of laths over it to stop the bedding coming in contact with the pot and catching fire. This was the priest, a dangerous apparatus which, in its time they told me later, had burned down many houses.

Then they went away and I climbed up into the bed and burrowed down into it between the rough, white sheets. It was the best bed I have ever slept in before or since. It was as warm and soft as a woman and almost equally alive. I was almost tempted to talk to it but instead I fell asleep laughing with sheer joy while the thunder rolled and the rain beat down on the roof overhead. At this moment, about seven o’clock on the night of the twenty fifth of September, 1943, there could have been few people in the whole of Fortress Europe more contented or fortunate than I was.

It was unsafe to remain in Signor Zanoni’s house because it was too near the track and he decided to take me to the house of a farmer who lived at a lonely place called Pian del Sotto.

I picked up my pack, the contents of which were now dry, having been by the fire for two nights, and followed Signor Zanoni out of the orchard and down to the left bank of the stream by a path that was so overgrown and overhung by bushes that it would have been invisible to me, where we crossed it by four big stepping stones. Then we scrambled up the bank through the undergrowth, and after he had made sure that there was no one about we crossed the track which led up from the hump-backed bridge and entered the wood, the one from which the cuckoo had called but which was now silent.

He was wearing his old patchwork suit and from a metal clip on the belt under his jacket he took a billhook and began to cut a way up through the brambles between the trees. They were mostly oaks and some sort of thorn-bearing tree which I had never seen before. The oaks were not like English oaks. The trunks were mostly small enough to encircle with two hands and few of them were more than twenty feet high. Perhaps if they had been thinned they would have done better, or perhaps they were just small by nature.

‘Colle del Santo,’
Signor Zanoni said. ‘It’s not far now, only about twenty minutes from here if you use the track. It’ll take us a bit longer.’

We were on a little pass, the meeting place of two tracks which crossed one another diagonally and we were between the two lower arms of the crossing. The track on the right was the one from the mill which we had by-passed by coming up through the forest. It continued over the pass and downhill into the head of another valley on our left and then through meadows to a small village of stone houses, larger versions of Signor Zanoni’s, huddled together on the mountainside below a wooded ridge from which long, bare screes poured down towards it. Along this track a man was urging two heavily laden packmules towards the village under a sky that was now cold and threatening.

The other track wound up around the edge of the wood to our left and continued straight up the mountain beyond the crossing between two long hedgerows of bramble, and this was the one we took. In spite of being near a village this windswept pass with a splintered, dying chestnut tree on one side of it and a little shrine with a worn carving of some saint on the other, from which it took its name, had a very remote feeling about it.

We went up the outside of one of the hedges which was high enough and thick enough to hide us from anyone who might be using the path itself and after forcing our way up through another wood we came out on the edge of it, in a little promontory of trees, the only part of it which had been able to raise itself above the relative shelter of the slope on which it grew. We were on the edge of an inclined plateau about half a mile long and between three and four hundred yards wide, in which the fields swept down at a crazy angle to a cliff formed by an enormous landslide which appeared to be still going on. Apart from some root crops there was nothing growing. The harvest had already taken place and the rest of the fields were nothing but expanses of stubble and stones, although some of the less rocky ones had been ploughed. Some looked as if they had never been cultivated at all. Towards the northern end of the plateau, which was completely exposed to all the winds of heaven, except those from the west from which it was sheltered by the bulk of the mountain which was covered with forest and which soared above it, stood a great, bleak farmhouse, faced with grey cement and with so many storeys under its red-tiled roof that it looked like some rural skyscraper.

‘Pian del Sotto,’ Signor Zanoni said. ‘We’re nearly a thousand metres here.’

He went on alone towards the house, where I heard him being welcomed by a furious dog, while I stood at the edge of the wood with the wind moaning through the trees, waiting for whatever was going to happen next. It was certainly a lonely place. Far below, beyond the end of the landslip, were the fields full of grass and clover that I had seen from the Colle del Santo and I could just see the stone roofs of the houses in the village. Here, we were almost as high as the ridge under which it stood and now, for the first time, I could see part of the main ridge of the Apennines running down along the borders of Tuscany, with long slanting lines of rain in the sky above it as if someone had been scribbling with a black pencil on a sheet of grey paper.

I was becoming cold now and I was more tired than I had expected to be after such a comparatively short journey. I was not as fit as my occasional bursts of activity in the
orfanotrofio
had led me to believe but my ankle seemed completely mended. At least I could run if necessary.

I heard a window open somewhere in the house and then an awful scream as if someone was being murdered,
‘ARMAAAHNDOOOO!’
was what it sounded like, sufficient in a place such as this to make my blood, already chilled by the keening wind, turn to ice. What on earth was going on inside this forbidding-looking building? Had the occupants done away with Signor Zanoni? Perhaps they were all in-bred and mad as hatters.

Almost immediately afterwards Signor Zanoni appeared in front of the house and signalled me to come and as I got to the door where he was waiting, a huge brute of a dog tethered to a running wire which gave it more scope for attacking intruders than it would have had on a chain alone, leapt out at me from where it had been lying in wait, snapping and snarling, longing for nothing better than to be at my throat.

‘What was that noise I heard after you went to the house?’ I said as soon as we were out of range of it. ‘It wasn’t the dog.’

‘Noise?’ he said. ‘Oh, that was Agata, Luigi’s wife, calling Armando, the boy who works for them. She’s a good woman Agata, but she’s got a terribly strong voice.

‘It’s not going to be easy,’ he went on. ‘They’ve just heard that anyone who helps prisoners of war will be sentenced to death.’

‘I never heard that. Is it true?’ I said.

‘I told them. I had to. It would not have been right to do otherwise.’

‘Then you knew?’

‘It was announced four days ago. I heard it down in the village. Luigi has a radio but it doesn’t work very well. None of them up here go anywhere, except on Sundays, and yesterday it was raining so much that they all stayed at home.’

‘Did your wife know?’

‘Yes, she knew.’

If they knew then the doctor must have known and Wanda and her father must have known, and the Baruffas and all the other people who had helped me. All of a sudden everything seemed much less simple than it had done.

‘Mind you,’ he said, ‘I don’t think they would dare do it, shoot people I mean, and neither do any of these people here. The Government, or what is supposed to be the Government, would have to shoot hundreds, perhaps thousands, I don’t know how many, but, all the same it’s making them think. It’s making me think; that’s why the people here haven’t decided about you yet. They want to see you first.’

I said that I didn’t think it was right to ask them to take me now that I knew about the death penalty.

‘Then there’s only one thing you can do, Enrico,’ he said, ‘and that’s come back with me. It’s quite simple, really.’

‘Let’s go in,’ I said.

There were five people in the kitchen, two men and three women: the farmer, a tallish, erect, thin man who, to me, looked exactly like Company Sergeant-Major Clegg of the Grenadier Guards, the one who used to scream at us outside the Old Buildings at Sandhurst; his wife, who was about the same age as he was, fiftyish, who had a pale face with a front tooth misssing; and two young women, one with short, black hair, who was obviously the daughter, thin and slight like her mother, the other a big, powerful girl, an Amazon with long auburn hair to her shoulders. The other man was a stocky, muscular youth with dark, greasy hair, carefully combed. All of them were wearing working clothes and big mountain boots. The girls were washing up in a stone sink, the signora was stirring up the fire which had only recently been lit, and her husband was sitting at the table on which there was a bottle of wine and two half-charged glasses. There was a feeling in the air as if a lot of talking had been done. The farmer had his hat on, as did Signor Zanoni.

I was introduced to the company in a general way, no names were exchanged, and there was a good deal of rather remote
buon giorno
ing, and when this was over I was invited to sit down at the table and I was given a glass of wine, which was extraordinarily acid, and some very good bread and some slices of sausage. Then they began to talk, or rather Signor Zanoni and the farmer began to talk, in a dialect that was so deep that I could make nothing of it, with the wife throwing in an occasional sentence, or a word, from the fireplace where she stood with her arms folded tightly across the place where her bosom would have been if she had had one. Up to now the only time I had heard the mountain dialect had been a muffled version of it, coming up through the floor of Signor Zanoni’s bedroom. Hearing it unfiltered and close to I found it equally incomprehensible.

As no one in the room took the slightest notice of me while my fate was being decided, I was able to look around me. It was long and high and the walls and ceiling, which had once been white, were now the colour of old ivory. At the far end of it a window looked out over the plateau to the ridge above the village. There was a fireplace with a high shelf over it, crowded with the sort of objects which end up over fireplaces, in this case a cast-iron coffee grinder, some dried bulbs, a piece of palm leaf left over from some bygone Sunday, a number of curled-up picture postcards and a book with the title
Lunario Barba-Nera
in archaic type.