The Villa Triste (4 page)

‘For God’s sake, Cati!’

Isabella spun around, a serving plate in her hand that, for a moment, I thought she was going to throw at me.

‘Don’t you understand?’ she said. ‘They’ve left their regiment. They’re deserters.’ She waved towards the sitting room. ‘If anyone sees them, if anyone says anything—’

‘You can’t think Emmelina—’ I stared at Isabella, amazed. And angry. ‘What?’ I asked. ‘Inform on them? On Enrico? You think Emmelina would inform on Enrico? She loves him. She loves all of us. She would never—’

I was genuinely shocked. Isabella shook her head.

‘We can’t take any chances,’ she said grimly. ‘She might mention something. She might not mean to, but—’

I shook my head in disgust. ‘That is ridiculous.’

‘It isn’t.’ Issa looked at me. ‘It isn’t,’ she said again. ‘You’ll see. We aren’t going to be able to trust anyone.’

So this was it, I thought. This was the real poison the occupation would bring to us.

‘Well then,’ I said. ‘What about him?’ I waved towards the sitting room. ‘What about this – what’s his name, Carlo? Who’s he? For all you know, he might be a Nazi spy.’

‘He isn’t.’

Issa said it with a calm that suggested she had already considered the idea and rejected it.

‘Oh, yes?’ I ran my hand through my hair, shaking it loose of its dusty pins. ‘Well, how do you know?’

‘Because,’ Issa said, turning towards the pantry, ‘he’s one of us.’

Dinner was not, in the end, an utter disaster. The strangeness of the menu gave the meal a slightly Dionysian air that was enhanced by the fact that Papa had gone down to the cellar and retrieved several bottles of his best wine, while Mama had laid the table with our best china and silver. I had decided, while lying in the bath, where I had retreated after my argument with Issa, that I would fix the situation with Emmelina in the morning regardless of what my sister thought. In the meantime I intended to enjoy the fact that my brother was not only not dead, but at home. Everyone else apparently felt the same way. We ate and drank with exuberance, expecting to hear jackboots in the drive at any moment.

It was in this atmosphere that Enrico told their story.

On the morning after the armistice, their commanding officer had called his junior staff together and told them to send their men home. He had received news that the Germans were interning Italian troops – rounding them up and herding them onto trains that would ship them east, to either German labour or prison camps. With Badoglio and the King having fled south to get behind Allied lines – we now knew that that was where they had gone – the country was effectively without a government. The army was rudderless. Determined not to give in to the Axis, they were without any plan that enabled them to stand with the Allies. With tears in his eyes, the Colonel, who had fought through the previous war and through Russia and somehow survived both, had told his junior officers that it had come to this. That the best he could do for them was advise them to desert and give them the option of staying out of German hands. He hoped they would carry their honour with them, and join the fight that was to come in the best way they saw fit.

Within hours, the barracks were empty. Enrico and Carlo managed to get a train as far as Chuisi. There they heard stories of German troops, of newly resurgent and invigorated Fascisti, and of POWs – Allied officers and soldiers who had either been released or stormed their way out of prisons, many of whom spoke no Italian at all, and who were roaming the countryside trying either to move north to get into Switzerland or France, or south to join the assault at Salerno. After listening to all this, they had decided that it was wiser to stay away from both towns and train stations. They got a lift in a farm lorry to Castellina, then another to Galluzzo. From there, they had walked.

It was an hour or so later when Enrico joined me in the garden where I had gone to retrieve my bicycle and to close the gates I had left open. The others were on the terrace, talking quietly and smoking, the tips of their cigarettes glinting like fireflies as they watched the lights of the city.

‘Cati.’

He caught the handle of the shed as I was wheeling my bike inside, then held it as I came back out and slid the pin through the latch.

‘I wanted to tell you,’ he said, ‘what I heard about the navy.’

I searched his face, my eyes taking a moment to adjust to the dark, to find the familiar contours of his straight nose, his chin, his high cheekbones that were so like my own. I knew that his eyes, like mine and Issa’s, were dark blue, but I couldn’t make them out, couldn’t read whatever message they might be holding for me.

Enrico and I had not seen much of each other since I had started as a nurse and he had gone into the army. Standing there, I realized that I hadn’t known, until I dashed into the sitting room and saw him, until he had lifted me off my feet, how much I had feared that he was dead. Or how much I had wanted him to come home. He had always been the leader, even when we were babies. As adults, we had the same hands, the same arch to our brows, the same frown. Yet, despite our physical resemblance, and the fact that barely two years separated us, my brother had always been closer to Issa than to me. They were alike, and took after Papa in their love of all things outdoors.

‘Have you heard?’ he asked. ‘From Lodo?’

I shook my head, suddenly uncertain of my voice.

‘Come.’ Enrico took my shoulder. ‘Let’s walk.’

We climbed slowly up the slope at the side of the house, beyond the loggia and away from the terrace.

‘I don’t know anything for certain.’ His voice had dropped to a murmur, the words mingling with the soft fall of our footsteps in the grass. ‘But we heard that most of the fleet have reached Malta. They turned at once, as soon as the armistice was announced. They mean to put themselves under Allied command. That’s probably where he is.’

He stopped. We were under the drooping boughs of the big tree. When we were children this had been our hideout. Even after the oppressive heat that had boiled up during the day, the soil was damp and cool and smelled of moss and pine needles.

‘How is Mama?’

He didn’t look at me as he asked the question.

I shook my head.

‘I don’t know. The same.’

The unspoken flowed between us. My brother had never said anything, but I knew that at times he found our mother’s love for him a burden, as if he carried a weight for the three of us.

He nodded.

‘Communication’s almost impossible,’ he said a moment later. ‘Everywhere. Rome is cut off. And everywhere south. If Lodo doesn’t contact you, it isn’t because he doesn’t want to.’ He looked at me. ‘Or because he’s dead,’ he said. ‘You mustn’t think that.’

Despite the stories I told myself, it was, of course, exactly what I thought.

‘This is going to be bad,’ Enrico said suddenly. ‘All of it. The Fascistoni will come back. The Germans will put them back, to make it look as if there is at least some support for the occupation, and they’ll want vengeance. They’ve been locked up. Humiliated. They’ll come after their enemies. Which is just about all of us.’

‘But the Allies—’ I blurted. ‘The next landing. Surely—’

Enrico shook his head.

‘It isn’t going to happen, Cati. A second landing. What we’ve heard is that they’re barely hanging on at Salerno. The Germans are fighting like demons. They have to. It’s their only chance. That’s why Hitler sent Kesselring. They’re not going to give up easily. They can’t.’

The glow of the wine evaporated like smoke. In its place, I felt a sort of hollow sickness, as if everything inside me was turning cold and leaking away.

‘What are you going to do? You and Carlo?’ The question didn’t come out as much more than a whisper.

‘You can’t tell anyone. I mean anyone outside the family. Anyone at all.’

I started to snap ‘you mean Emmelina’, but something stopped me. I could feel as much as see Rico frowning. His voice was the same one he’d used when we were children and he was swearing me to secrecy over a catapult that broke a neighbour’s window, or a penny whistle he’d stolen from the shop at the bottom of the street. I wondered if I should raise my hand, prick my thumb and mingle my blood with his.

‘ I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘Cati, I’m really sorry. That I won’t be here. That you’ll have to take care of everything. Of Mama. And Papa,’ he added almost as an afterthought. ‘And the house. I’ll contact you when I can. I promise.’

I wanted to beg him to change his mind. But I couldn’t. Enrico would not be much good to any of us interned in a labour camp in Germany. I tried to take a deep breath. I tried to sound brave.

‘Where are you going?’

I imagined Switzerland. Rico had climbed in school. He had relished the summer holidays my father took us on as children, walking the drovers’ paths through the Apennines. I imagined a series of trains, lorries, farmers’ carts, hikes that would get them into the Alps, and then out – over a pass higher, colder, more dangerous than I could ever face.

He paused for a moment. Then he said, ‘There’s a group – you’ll hear more about it – the CLN.’

‘CLN?’

Enrico smiled.

‘
Il Comitato di Liberazione Nazionale
,’ he said. ‘It’s why we came. To join the fight.’

‘The fight?’

I don’t think I even spoke the words. I had heard them once already this evening, through a haze of wine and candlelight. Then, luxuriating in the fact that my brother was home, that we were having a family meal where even Mama seemed happy, I had not been paying much attention. This time they sounded sharp and hard, something sitting in my stomach that I had been forced to swallow.

‘Carlo’s from the Veneto,’ Enrico was saying. ‘He knows people. They’re already organizing there. We’re going to do the same thing here. In the mountains.’

One of the things my family professed to love about this house, supposedly the reason Mama’s grandfather had bought it instead of one in the city, or on the then-fashionable Poggio Imperiale, was the fact that you could see the mountains from the terrace. Rising behind the city, the slopes were dun, grey, or green. Above them, no matter what time of year, the peaks were tinged with white.

Enrico nodded.

‘We’re going tonight,’ he said. ‘We won’t be here in the morning.’

He was as good as his word. The next morning when I woke up, Enrico and Carlo were gone. By noon, the Germans had arrived. I watched them, standing in a silent crowd, as they marched down the Lungarno, their boots shined, the engines of their jeeps and staff cars and lorries humming, their uniforms immaculate, their broken black spider hovering above them.

Just in case we didn’t understand, the news on Radio Roma that afternoon was broadcast in German. The next morning, Kesselring himself spoke to us. Smiling Albert informed us that ‘for our own protection’ we were under martial law. All communications and train lines had been taken over. With immediate effect there would be no private letters. No ‘uncontrolled’ telephone calls. And no resistance. Anyone going on strike, or found ‘aiding or giving succour’ to Allied POWs would face trial by court martial. Former members of the Italian forces were to report at once to the nearest German command. Squadrons of Italian volunteers would be formed, he said, to continue the glorious fight. What would happen to those who chose not to volunteer was not mentioned.

It did not need to be. We might have been shocked by the occupation, stunned like animals who have been startled by a large noise, but we weren’t stupid. It didn’t have to be spelled out. At the hospital the next day, a nurse who lived near Campo di Marte told me she had seen closed trains. Trains made up of carriages like the carriages used for transporting animals, but with human hands waving through the slats.

That evening, just before I left, one of the doctors walked into our tiny staffroom. He told us that since no one knew what was going to happen, all days off, all leave had been cancelled. Then he announced that the Germans had ‘liberated’ Mussolini.

The first announcement did not surprise me, and I suppose after what Enrico had said, the second shouldn’t have. But it did. Hearing
Il Duce
’s voice on the radio two nights later was like hearing a creature from a nightmare.

Without the possibility of a phone call or a telegram or a letter, I was reduced to hoping that Lodovico would somehow miraculously simply appear. He didn’t. But Emmelina did come back. I had gone to see her on my way to work the morning Enrico left, just as I had planned, and told her that Isabella had been mistaken. Mama’s flu was not contagious, after all. Really, it was just a cold. Overexertion after the excitement of her birthday party.

It was the first time I could ever remember lying to Emmelina, and I knew perfectly well that she didn’t believe me any more than she had believed Isabella in the first place. As I stood in the doorway of her tiny house, shifting guiltily from foot to foot, Emmelina had given me her sideways look, but said nothing. When she asked if we had heard from Rico, I simply shook my head. Then I said I had to go or I was going to be late, and got on my bike and pedalled, my eyes filling with tears because something infinitely precious had been broken.