All Our Yesterdays (36 page)

And then one day she hurried quickly back to San Costanzo because La Maschiona's grandmother told her that La Maschiona was having trouble with the Americans, a
contadino
had told her some story, she hadn't understood it very well. Anna went back to San Costanzo and discovered that she had been lying on the bed for two days only, to her it had seemed such a very long time. Some of the
contadini
had taken La Maschiona into the barber's shop and were shaving her head, because they said it was she who had shown the German where the cellar was. La Maschiona was struggling amongst the
contadini
who had already started shaving her head, they had already shorn off half of her hair. Anna shouted to them to leave her alone.

With great difficulty she succeeded in getting La Maschiona out of the barber's shop, with the
contadini
storming round her and the barber taking La Maschiona's side and trying to sweep La Maschiona's hair out of his shop. La Maschiona was so frightened that she was not even weeping, they had torn the handkerchief off her head and she covered the shorn part of it with her hands. Anna and La Maschiona went up to the house. There the Germans had fired at the looking-glasses and had carried off the mattresses and the radio, they had emptied the wardrobes and wrecked the deck chairs. Anna set about sweeping away the pieces of glass and meanwhile La Maschiona was digging with the spade in front of the house because she had buried her winter coat there, but she did not exactly remember the spot where she had buried it, and besides, she was afraid of the dog coming to light.

La Maschiona went later to Scoturno di Sopra to fetch the little girl, but her grandmother had such a fright at seeing her with her head half shorn that she died after a few days, in any case her time had come to die because she was ninety-three.

The
contadino
Giuseppe was not made mayor. The new mayor was La Maschiona's seducer, who had fine black moustaches and a fine bearing and had inherited a large quantity of land from his sister who had been burnt by the Germans. He had suffered much through the war and the Germans, he had had that sister burnt and a son missing in Greece of whom nothing more had ever been heard. The
contadino
Giuseppe said he was very well pleased not to be mayor, and he went back to work in the fields in his tattered green hat, and sometimes he went to see Anna and spoke very ill of the whole village and of the new mayor, what on earth would Cenzo Rena have said if he could see who had been made mayor, a scoundrel who certainly robbed the community even worse than the previous mayor. They were talking in the village of putting up. a stone with an inscription on Cenzo Rena's house but the
contadino
Giuseppe was sure that no one would ever fork out money for the stone, San Costanzo was a filthy village and for this filthy village Cenzo Rena had died.

During the first few days after the arrival of the English a group of
contadini
had decided to go into the Marchesa's house and crop her hair, to pay her out for all the anonymous letters she had sent to police headquarters and for the arrogant way in which she had always behaved. And the Marchesa was there in her big chair, half dead with fright; while the Germans were still in the village she had become partly paralysed and her face was all twisted. With her was the doctor and they were playing cards, and the
contadini
had taken the cards and sent them flying out of the window. And then they had thrown open the cupboards and had found great numbers of pots of jam, the Marchesa was famous for her jam and they had set about eating the jam with spoons. The doctor had gone down to collect the cards out of the ditches in the lanes, and was cleaning them one by one on his jacket. But all at once the dressmaker arrived and started crying out about her two sons whom the Germans had burnt and about her daughter who had been the Marchesa's maid and had had that blow in the chest and it had broken something inside her and even now she was spitting blood. And she wanted to shave the Marchesa's head and was waving a shaving-brush. And the shouting made her ill and she fell on the floor as pale as death and the
contadini
called to the doctor to stop cleaning the cards and come upstairs. And the doctor had to lay the dressmaker on the Marchesa's bed and rub her temples with vinegar. The Marchesa was groaning and shrieking in her big chair, and in the end the
contadini
had gone away because they had seen that she was nothing but a poor old woman.

And the man with the corkscrew leg circled about all the time among the ruins of the former mayor's stable. On the occasion when the Germans had seized him as a hostage they had torn his shirt and so he had lost the diamond ring that Franz had given him. He looked for it all day long amongst the ashes of the stable and complained that now he would never be able to have those weights put on his leg to make it grow straighten.

Anna one day saw someone come limping up over the rocks and thought it was the man with the corkscrew leg but instead it was Emanuele ; she ran out weeping to meet Emanuele and Emanuele held her in his arms and wept a little too. He had heard about Cenzo Rena and Franz from an Englishman who had come from San Costanzo to Rome. And he and Anna went together to look at the wall of the village hall where Cenzo Rena and Franz had been killed.

Emanuele, during the time when the Germans were in Rome, had been editor of an important secret newspaper and twice the Germans had put him in prison but his friends of the secret newspaper had managed to get him out again. He had slept all over the place, even in a convent, and had eaten almost nothing, for months and months nothing but turnip-tops, because he had no money and the little that he had he gave to the secret newspaper. But he had become very fat. And Giustino was still in the North and he had heard that he was fighting with the Partisans in the mountains and called himself Balestra. And Danilo had been in Rome for a bit and then had gone to the North, he had made a parachute descent from an aeroplane, and Danilo as a Partisan called himself Dan. And Mammina, with Amalia and Giuma, was in Switzerland, and Giuma had got married to an American woman doctor whom he had met at Lausanne. Emanuele had messages from them every now and then through the Red Cross. Of Concettina he knew nothing.

Emanuele stayed only one day at San Costanzo because he was very busy indeed in Rome with this newspaper, now no longer secret, which had to be put together every day.

Winter came and the English went away and La Maschiona sighed over her coat, which had got all spoilt from being under the ground. Her hair had grown again a little but she still trembled at the remembrance of what they had done to her, if Cenzo Rena had been there they would not have acted like that. She and Anna went to the cemetery on Sundays, and La Maschiona prayed on the graves of Cenzo Rena and Franz and her godfather, who had now also been buried within the enclosure of the cemetery and was at peace. La Maschiona knelt and prayed, but Anna did not pray because her father had always told her it was stupid to pray, if God exists there is no need to pray to Him, He is God and He understands what has to be done without being told.

The English went away and some Fascists arrived from Rome, they had been banished there and they had to keep on ringing the bell at the police station. The Fascists lived at the inn and slept in the Turk's room, and they walked up and down the village square just as the Turk had walked up and down, and they complained to the police-sergeant of the cold and of the food at the inn. The police-sergeant had ended by marrying his sister-in-law with the pear-shaped breasts, and now she was pregnant and no longer had pear-shaped breasts, all you could see was a big paunch and no kind of breasts at all, and the twins had no curls because their stepmother said she had no time to stop and put curling-pins on their heads in the evening. The twins had round, cropped heads, and the police-sergeant, to comfort himself, said that Cenzo Rena liked children's heads to be cropped. He had got together a little furniture again with money borrowed from his parents-in-law, but prices had risen and he had not been able to buy himself another pier-glass.

The police-sergeant and the
contadino
Giuseppe remained friends for a certain length of time, because together they remembered Cenzo Rena, and what sort of a man he was. And together they also remembered the card games on the sacks of potatoes in the cellar and the night they had run away to Borgoreale, creeping through the pine wood and drinking wine out of the flask. But then they began to quarrel over the King. The
contadino
Giuseppe did not want the King and the police-sergeant, on the other hand, did want him, the
contadino
Giuseppe said that the King had betrayed Italy because after the armistice he had run away, and he wanted him to be hanged, in effigy anyhow, but the police-sergeant did not like to hear his King spoken of like that. They went on quarrelling for a little but then they stopped even quarrelling and ceased to greet one another when they met in the street, the police-sergeant told everybody that the
contadino
Giuseppe was a revolutionary and Giuseppe said that the police-sergeant had almost died of fear that night they had escaped to Borgoreale and that he had more or less to carry him in his arms through the woods.

And then the North was liberated and Mussolini was killed and hung up in a square in Milan, and the
contadino
Giuseppe said that the same ought to be done with the King. When people spoke of all that the Partisans in the North had done the
contadino
Giuseppe became bitter and said that in their own country, where people had no spirit, nothing had been done against the Germans, only Cenzo Rena had died for their own miserable country. And if somebody then reminded him that he himself had killed a German, he would blush and turn away his head because it was a story he did not like to remember.

Anna left with the little girl for her own town. She had had a letter from Concettina saying they were all alive and waiting for her, Emanuele would come and meet her with a car at the station in Rome. La Maschiona was to have gone too, and Anna had bought her a pair of shoes with heels, but when the moment came to leave La Maschiona was not to be found and Anna then discovered her in her mother's kitchen, she was wearing the shoes with the heels and was weeping and refusing to go. She was holding tight to her mother and saying that never would she walk with those shoes with heels, she liked to see them on her feet but not to walk in them. And her hair had not yet grown properly and what in the world would the people in the train think when they saw her hair?

So Anna and the little girl went off alone in an American lorry, and the whole village was in the square to see them go and they shouted to them to come back soon because things might be very bad in the North and there might be hardly anything to eat. At San Costanzo the veal nights had begun again but the mayor had said that in a short time veal would be sold in the daytime by the light of the sun and there would be some for everyone.

They travelled first on the lorry and then on a goods train which stopped every moment. And at the station in Rome there was Emanuele waiting for them and they got into the car and then began the journey through villages with ruined houses and past fire-blackened, contorted lorries like caryatids along the road.

And Anna saw Giustino again, Giustino who had been Balestra, and Concettina and Emilio and Concettina's little boy, and she saw the road by the river again and the soap factory and Ippolito's seat and her own house and the house opposite, where Amalia, all dressed as a widow, was furiously sweeping the garden. And Mammina, too, was dressed rather like a widow and had grown very old, with grey hair and her face all wrinkled, and Emanuele said she had become very mean and kept everybody hungry. But Concettina also had become mean, Giustino said, because she had not understood that prices had increased since the war. You could scarcely recognize Concettina in the way she dressed now, with coarse cotton stockings reaching to her knees, and always a smell of sweat and a worried, bitter face. During the whole time of the Germans she and Emilio had remained at Le Visciole and she had kept Emilio in pyjamas all the time in his own room because she was afraid partly of the Germans and partly of the Partisans. Emilio no longer looked in the least like a calf and he was still pale and puffy from the time he had been shut up, and the black feather-brush which had once looked so gay on his forehead had lost its stiffness and its colour and hung rather to one side. He too had become mean and was always considering what to do to save money. And their little boy was dressed like a grown-up man with a tie and brilliantine on his hair, and Giustino said that Emilio and Concettina were a miserable couple and spent their whole time together wrangling and putting brilliantine on the boy's hair. Concettina never stopped talking about the terrible frights they had had at Le Visciole with the comings and goings of the Partisans and the Germans, the doctor with the hair like chicken's feathers was looking after the wounded Partisans and the Germans had seized him and he had died in Germany.

Anna asked Giustino if she too had changed much and Giustino said yes. She was fatter and she had a few grey hairs, Giustino said she had come to look like their mother in the portrait. The portrait was still hanging in the dining-room, but it had become darker with the years, it was rather difficult now to distinguish the frightened, tired features of the face. But the important thing was
not
to look like Concettina, Giustino said. As for changing, he himself was changed too and he no longer had any desire for anything. When he was Balestra he had been very happy, fighting in the mountains with Danilo, and Danilo had been extraordinary then, you couldn't imagine what Danilo had been like when he was a Partisan and called himself Dan. They had been great friends then, Giustino and Danilo, and when there was a pause in the fighting they remembered together all sorts of things which they thought they would never be able to have again, because they thought they were going to die. And since they thought they were going to die they lost all their shyness and told each other all kinds of things, and Danilo had spoken to him about himself and his wife and about how troubled he was because after the war, If he did not die, he would have to tell his wife that they could not stay together any more, he had another girl and they had had a child. And Giustino had told him not to worry because he, Giustino, would take over his wife. And they had laughed together over this but it had not been a nasty kind of laughter, it had not been the laughter of a couple of cynics, it had been a perfectly fresh, light-hearted kind of laughter. But after the liberation Danilo had made a speech there in the town, an important speech, and Giustino had stayed listening to him for some time, and the man who was standing far, far away and high up on the platform was someone he did not know, someone who was not in any way his friend. Certainly he didn't make at all a bad speech, said Giustino, and people clapped their hands loudly. In fact it had been almost too fine a speech, almost too well composed, with pauses and vocal explosions and even something to make you laugh now and then. Giustino had wondered all at once whether it was not perhaps a feeling of envy that he had, because he himself was not high up there on the platform amongst the flags but lost in the crowd of people listening. He had started thinking about a speech that he himself might have made if he had been high up there. A speech that was made entirely of words like the ones he and Danilo used to say to each other at night when they were going to blow up trains, and they had Germans all around them and thought they would be killed. He wondered why Danilo had not made his speech in the words of those days. Giustino had stayed listening for a bit and then had gone away, and he had heard the voice shouting and the voice had made him feel rather cold. And it seemed to him that Danilo was once again as he had been when he had come out of prison many years ago with a hat like a policeman's, and they had all sat round him and had hardly recognized him. For it was not at all easy to come well out of prison, said Giustino, just as it was not easy to win well or to speak true words in victory speeches. In the long run, blowing up trains was much easier. But this was all nonsense and Danilo was a very good chap, there were few like Danilo, Giustino said. When Danilo had come down from the platform and had seen Giustino again he had asked him why he had not come up on to the platform too and made a speech, and he had asked him if his speech had been good and Giustino had said yes.