Dead and Alive (11 page)

But when they went to the house Furigo, who had built it with his own hands, rushed up to them, pleading. Galliani was with him. The soldiers thrust him aside and went to the little wooden porch of the house, one carrying a tin of petrol and the other a torch made of petrol-soaked rag tied to the end of a stick.

As the soldier with the can splashed the petrol on to the wood of the porch Furigo seized his arm. He was crying, pleading, on his knees. The soldier brought his boot up sharply, catching the farmer on the chin. And as he fell back he tipped the rest of the petrol on to him. Without hesitation the other thrust the flaming brand against the wretched man’s clothing. Furigo rose with a
terrible shriek—he was a sheet of flame. The women said that for a moment they saw him, running, lit up by the flames, his eyes wide, his mouth open, shrieking terribly. Then his flesh had blackened and suddenly he had seemed to shrivel and collapse.

At the same time a shot rang out. Galliani, who had been struggling to prevent the soldier from setting fire to the wretched man, staggered and fell with blood oozing from a throat wound. Furigo’s wife, who had followed her husband, watched him burn alive and then with a shriek turned on the Germans and attacked them with her bare hands. They shot her too—in the face. Then they threw her body and Galliani’s into the porch and set light to it.

“The smell of burned flesh was in the valley for days,” one of the women said. Her eyes were dilated. She was re-living the ghastly scene as she told it to us.

“And Signora Galliani and the girl?” I asked.

There had been no work, no food but what they could beg from the Americans passing through. The Signora knew of a man who owned a farm at Pericele up in the Abruzzi to the east of Rome. Early in July she and the girl had left Itri, walking north along the dusty road towards Rome.

I looked round the olive groves, so serene and quiet in the hot sun. It seemed incredible that these silvery-leaved trees had once been dumb witnesses to the horrible scene that these two women had described. I thanked them and gave them some money, and we went back down the track leaving a swirling cloud of dust rolling in our tyre tracks.

“Pericele?” Boyd asked as we reached the road.

I nodded.

The driver turned left and we went down the valley to Fondi and Terracina. Round the towering quarry-scarred headland we launched out on the arrow-straight road that runs through the Pontine Marshes to the Alban Hills and the Appian Way into Rome. We stopped once near Terracina to get the dust out of our throats with
cocomero
, the red country melon of Italy that is full of pips and water, and again at Genzano where we had good
vino bianco
in a little
trattoria
perched high above a small lake clutched in the bowl of what had once been a crater.

The map which we had brought with us showed Pericele to the east of Tivoli. “We’d better stay the night in Rome,” I suggested to Boyd.

The Eternal City seemed strange without the mass of khaki that had filled its wide pavements to overflowing when last I had seen it. We came into the city by way of the Colosseum and that monstrous wedding cake of a monument that dominates the Piazza Venezia. The Via del Tritone, once the Broadway of Rome with more GI pick-ups to its credit than Shaftesbury Avenue before D-Day, looked comparatively deserted. There were fewer bicycles and fewer tarts.

I went straight to the Hotel de la Ville where I had stayed a night when it was crowded with British and American war correspondents just after the Fifth Army had entered the city. The Fascist name, Albergo Citta, had been dropped.

After booking a room on the seventh floor with a terrace, I fixed Boyd and the Italian driver up at a Swiss
pensione
opposite. Back in my room I was suddenly conscious of a sense of loneliness. I went out on to the terrace and looked across the mellow brickwork of the ancient city to the great crouching bulk of St. Peter’s dome beyond the Tiber. Back in the dim past of the war I had stood on one of these terraces and looked across to the Gianicolo, and I had the same feeling now as then—of a city that was outside the reality of life.

Rome is a city, founded on religion, that has degenerated to a point where its people pay lip-service only to its five hundred churches and to the great sprawling palaces of the Vatican, living a life of pleasure in which any sense of responsibility to the world at large is totally lacking. That was what the war correspondents had told me that first night in the hotel bar. Whilst the guns were thundering
at Trasimene and there was starvation in the refugee-crowded back streets, Rome society had talked mostly of parties and how nice it had been the year before when they could go out in their cars to villas at Frascati and Tivoli and Ostia for the hot summer months.

A girl came out on to the terrace of the neighbouring room and shot me a quick glance beneath a mop of dark hair. She wore a white evening gown cut low to disclose the swell of full sun-tanned breasts. She leaned upon the balustrade and looked down on to the roof garden across the street where people were sitting at ease in the evening sun watching two children playing hide-and-seek with shrill voices in and out of the green shrubs.

A thick-set man with an almost bald head came out and joined her on the terrace. They held hands for a minute or two looking out across the warm bricks of the ancient city to that monstrosity of white marble in the Piazza Venezia that looks more like a monument to the fallen pretensions of fascism than a memorial to the dead of the first World War. Then they went back into their room.

That is Rome—old men, rich in corruption, and smart attractive women with no souls, offering their bodies in fee for security with side-kicks on the quiet for pleasure.

I turned back into my room, the sense of loneliness strong in me. It was a feeling that not even the exotic warmth of a bath could dispel. But as I lay relaxed in the soapy water with the sunlight slanting in through the open french windows, I understood the reason for it. For three months now I had been married to a ship. For three months I had been fully occupied, mentally and physically. I had been living with men who were alive and interested in doing a job. Now I was alone for the first time since my arrival at Trevedra—and I was alone in this pleasure city where people went to bed together too often and loved too seldom. When I had been here before the essential rottenness of its way of life had been half-hidden beneath the purposeful khaki figures of men who knew where they were going and
intended to get there. Now Rome had been handed back to the Romans. The little men with bad teeth and a penchant for fish and chips and their big slouching, gum-chewing, hunker-squatting allies were gone. And I was in civvies instead of a naval uniform.

The sense of loneliness was inevitable.

Dinner was in the tiled courtyard on the second floor. I had a table to myself and a bottle of Spumante. And then I strolled up to the gardens of the Villa Borghese and watched the sun set behind the dome of St Peter’s in a gold and purple sky.

Back in my room at the hotel the first thing I noticed was the faded photograph of Monique Dupont lying on the table by my bed. I could not remember taking it out of my suitcase. But there it was—the picture of a girl of fifteen. Now she would be twenty-two, and if all went well I should meet her to-morrow.

I lay awake till the moonlight flooded the room and the tiles of Rome gleamed white between the bars of the balustrade—thinking about the girl. Though it was more than a month ago that I had read it, her mother’s letter was still fresh in my mind. I had read it on the sands of Plymouth Sound. Now I was in Rome on my way to meet this girl whom I only knew through an old and faded photograph. It was a strange quest. But now that I had undertaken it and come so far in my search it had become almost a personal thing.

Just over two years ago she had been working on a farm in Itri. She had then travelled to a place near Rome after the fall of the city. Presuming that she was an attractive girl, what would be the effect of a nature half English, half French, exiled in war-torn Italy for six years? Clearly she would have seen more of life than most girls of her own class at that age. She had been in Naples during the bombing. She had lived in the disease-ridden, garbage-cluttered streets beyond the Via Roma for three months. She had worked as a farm girl and seen the farm and its owners destroyed by the Germans, She had trekked north to another farm.

If she were still at that farm, she would have been there for over two years. Allowing that she was a normal, passionate girl, with as much of the animal as there should be in a human being, what would have become of her? Would she have married a local farmer’s boy? Or would she still be with her aunt, a young woman working on a farm with half the village lads sniffing round the house? Or—far more likely—would I have to seek her in Rome itself, a typist, the wife of some shopkeeper or the mistress of a business man?

In view of the thoughts that kept me awake so long, it is not surprising that I started out for Pericele in the morning with a sense of excitement not unmixed with foreboding.

The sulphur springs on the way to Tivoli were open. And in Tivoli itself there were tourist buses in the square outside the Villa d’Este, the great house where the Borgias once lived. One wing had been destroyed by bombs. The rest remained, a monument to man’s fascination for the sound of falling water. The gardens of the villa fall steeply to the gorge that contains the water of the falls and every path ends in a fountain or is arched with water.

We took the Arsoli road east as far as Vicovaro, and then turned left up into the hills past the Villa d’Orazio, where the poet Horace wrote his odes, sublimely oblivious over his rich red Tuscan wine that they would become the bane of children studying the classics through the ages.

Pericele was another of these mountain villages perched precariously on top of a hill. It was almost like being back in Sicily, for a naval officer does not get far inland and this was my first sight of the Abruzzi Mountains. We were already more than 2,000 feet up. All around us were peaks rising to 5,000 feet. They hemmed us in, so that there was no air and it was hotter than it was down in the
campagna.

We passed the rusting remains of a burnt-out tank and the brown twisted carcases of two lorries that had clearly
been stripped by the local inhabitants of all useful parts in the same way that vultures strip the flesh from a dead animal. The grass was still lush here in the valley. The road ended abruptly at a blown bridge that had still not been repaired and we dipped sharply to the bed of the stream on a diversion that had originally been bull-dozed by Eighth Army engineers. The broken arches of the bridge that had once spanned the fosse strode across the floor of the little valley like petrified giants raising their gaunt mortar arms to heaven in impotent fury.

Though time had weathered the destructive effect of high explosive, it was still clear that for a brief moment war had filled this little valley, now lying lazy and pleasant in the heat, with the thunder of guns and bombs and the chatter of small arms fire. There were bullet scars on the stone work of the viaduct and the roof of the little church on the other side of the stream showed the brighter colouring of new tiles as though they were battle scars.

Beside the empty stream ran a small stone aqueduct. And though it was the dry season, it was still feeding water into big concrete storage tanks. These tanks held the water that kept the grinding wheels of a mill half-hidden among the trees at the end of a short track turning all the year round.

And nigh above the valley and the little church and the broken arches and the mill towered the village of Pericele. The windows of its houses looked out above our heads to the mountains and there was no sign of life.

A bullock cart was coming down the track on the other side of the ford. A woman walked beside two great lumbering beasts. A man, walking up the track, shouted and waved a short cane. He quickened his pace. The bullocks stopped. The woman cringed away from him as he approached the stationary cart. He towered above her, a big man in riding breeches and gaiters. He pointed to the yoke. The cane flashed twice in the sun. The girl flung her arms up, her back against the side of the cart.

And then the scene was suddenly normal again. The bullocks were plodding on down the track. The woman was walking beside the cart, having adjusted the yoke. And the man with the cane was walking on up the track to the main road. As we splashed through the ford I was wondering whether he had really struck her or whether I had just day-dreamed it.

The bullock cart pulled in to let us pass. It was piled with dung and the flies buzzed incessantly. The driver was not a woman—it was a girl. She was tall and fair-haired, which is unusual in the peasants of the Tuscan hills. Her face was pale and strained. It was not beautiful, but it had a quality that made me look at her closely. She wore a plain black dress. It hung on her loosely, for it had no belt. Her feet were bare and grey with dust, her hair hung damply on her head. But she had a certain pride of body—her breasts thrust tautly at the sack-like dress and she walked erect and easily. Her eyes met mine as we drove slowly past the cart. They were grey unhappy eyes.

We rejoined the interrupted road and turned up the hill to Pericele. I looked closely at the man with the cane as we passed. He was big and thick-set with heavy brutal features. Somehow he seemed to fit the primitive surroundings. He walked with the air of a man who was cock of his own particular walk. He was like a prize bull—a powerful animal of a man with a passionate nature and a hasty temper. I felt sorry for the girl with the grey eyes. Clearly he regarded her as a serf.

But I didn’t stop. To explain to a man that women should not be beaten to ensure that they do what they are told was clearly a waste of time up here in the hills—and dangerous. The law does not mean all that much up in the mountain villages where the feudal system still exists in fact, though not in theory.

Dark stone houses, buzzing with flies, closed in on us as we climbed the road to the village. Faces appeared as though by magic at every window. And women, fat and
slovenly and work-worn, crowded to their doorways to see us pass, a thousand brats clinging to their black dirt-stained skirts. Young girls, olive-skinned, dark-eyed and sexually uninhibited, smiled and giggled at us as we went-by.