3 September 1999
Morbegno
North Italy
The elderly man reached out his hand to stop the plastic cup sliding across the table, as the train tilted away from the lake and headed inland towards the yawning gateway to the Valtellina. He had just had a last gulp of the dark, bitter, lukewarm coffee it had contained and the cup, now almost empty, had insufficient weight to keep it still. He picked it up and looked around for a bin to put it in.
‘Please, let me.’ The young girl sitting across from him stretched out her hand to take it from him. There was a bin just to the side of her seat.
‘Thank you,’ he said, smiling.
She had the look of most kids nowadays, he thought. She was probably on her way back from college. Pretty, with long dark hair, and an attractive face, a Valtellina girl whose forebears would have been like his. But, how different her life would be to the generations of women who had gone before her. The fact that she was spending her days out of the valley; that would have been alien to those generations of women, and most of the men, too, who rarely left their villages, let alone travelled to the sides of the lake and beyond. People even commuted to Milan, he supposed, like those guys on the East Coast who trained in from Connecticut to New York every day. What a life! An hour and a half on a train there, and an hour and a half on a train back, with nothing to amuse you every day but the view – the same old same old, every single day.
Still, she appeared to be thriving on it. Smiling, he watched her lean back and stretch her limbs. The book she had been reading fell to the table and the pages flicked closed. She will have to search for her place when next she opens the book, he thought, thinking how fastidious his wife had always been about retaining her place in anything she was reading, had always kept the bookmarks that stores insisted on giving her when she bought those books that she used to lose herself in. The girl now reached into her bag, rummaging for something. Seventeen or eighteen, she would be, he thought, remembering another girl and another time.
He looked out of the window at the countryside rolling past. It was crowded. That was his first impression. There were lots of houses, lots of roads, lots of cars and lots of people. It seemed small, somehow. Much smaller than he remembered. The mountains had not changed, however, were unchanging. As they had come into view when the train exited the last of the series of tunnels that punctuated the view of the lake, he had expected to feel something special, some kind of call, like a priest long lost to the church finally being called back to his vocation. But, no, it was not like that. They were familiar, but only as familiar as the man-made peaks beneath which he had made his living these last fifty years.
She stood up, pulling her bag down from the luggage rack: a dark backpack of the kind worn by kids all over the world, the kind of bag he would have died for five decades previously, as he clambered up and down the valley sides between which they were travelling. They were coming into the station and the countryside had given way to modern housing. The train had begun to slow, rattling over points and crossings, bells ringing out and then fading.
His case was in the luggage rack near the door. He pulled it down and carried it forward, joining the queue of people, school and college kids and the first wave of homecoming office workers. The kids pushed and shoved each other, babbling away inanely. He liked that – the sound of young Italian voices – especially when they were tinged with the accent of the Valtellina. It had been so long since he had heard such sounds.
Eventually, after gliding slowly along beside the platform for what seemed like ages, the train screamed to a halt, its brakes protesting amidst the swishing of opening doors.
He stepped to the door and stood there, his case dangling from his right hand, his left hanging uselessly at his side. His face was old now, with lines carved into it just like his father’s face had been, as if a sculptor had been set loose on it. The eyes were still deceptively young, though, still bright and handsome as they had always been – ‘your secret weapon’, his wife had always said. Beneath the left eye was the deep shadow of the depression caused by a German pistol butt a lifetime ago.
‘Signore!’ said an irritated voice behind him, a finger jabbing him in the small of the back.
‘Oh, sorry … I mean scusi.’ he replied, not turning round. His senses were invaded by the crisp mountain air and the feeling of being where he belonged. He clambered down, unsteadily, unable to balance properly as he did so, having no other good arm to hold on to the rail at the side of the door.
He put his case down and rested for a moment, looking down the platform to where people were crowding through the narrow barrier, on their way to the comforts of home and family. He felt, not for the first time of late, a pang of envy that caused him almost physical pain. Then, just beyond the barrier, he saw the young girl who had been sitting opposite him fall into the arms of a good looking boy in a leather jacket.
She stepped away from him, holding his eyes with hers and laughing with the sheer joy of the moment, a tiny splash of red colouring her face as she flushed with excitement.
She would be a little younger than Angela when he first met her, he thought. He tried to remember her face, her smell, the feel of her skin; tried as he had for the last fifty years, but it had long gone from him, had become mixed up with the smells and feelings of all of those years, had mingled to such an extent that only now and then, in a particular situation – a certain smell of wet grass, or a certain scent of pine trees could he retrieve any of that time.
He picked up his case and walked down the platform to the barrier where the crowd of passengers was beginning to thin and beyond which lay the town.
Sandro Bellini – or Giovanni Pavesi, as he had been known these last fifty-odd years – stood at the window of his rented apartment in Morbegno, stirring a cup of coffee and looking out.
He thought back to another window on another continent. A street – modern, concrete buildings and sodden, brown leaves stuck to the pavement, turning to treacherous mush beneath the feet of pedestrians. The odd car turning left into the hospital car park and rain beginning to fall once again. The wettest fall in years, the evening news claimed, blaming it on the erosion of the ozone layer or pollution or the melting of the Polar ice caps. Weather could not just be weather any more. There had to be a conspiracy, even about that. As if Kennedy and all the other conspiracies that had been dreamed up in the last twenty-five years were not enough.
He had listened carefully to the doctor, almost unemotionally, hearing his own death sentence.
‘Inoperable, as we feared, Giovanni. Untreatable.’ The doctor had leaned forward, blinking, adjusting the wire-rimmed glasses on the end of his nose. ‘I’m sorry, but as you requested, and as I promised, I’m being quite blunt. There’s no hope for your condition. For a man of your years and with the advanced state of your cancer, I fear any treatment would probably prove fatal.’ He made a church-steeple of his fingers and placed them against his lips.
He had known it before the words were spoken, but, even so, a shudder went through his body. He realised he was afraid of death after all.
‘Thank you, doctor, I appreciate your honesty. How long … how long will it take?’ To his surprise, his voice shook slightly.
‘It’s always difficult to tell, you know, and very often it is entirely in the hands of the patient. I would think, Giovanni, you have, at most, a year. As I say, though, we are sometimes proved wrong.’
It was at that moment that Sandro had looked out the window and, as most people in that situation did, lived a burning moment of intensity, experiencing the leaves, the people, the cars and the rain in the gutters almost more than he ever had.
He had shaken the doctor’s hand and thanked him for being straightforward about everything and had walked out of the hospital, his mind strangely empty.
Within a few weeks – weeks in which he had walked the city by day and drunk himself senseless by night – he had begun to see things more clearly and had begun to put some order back into his life, or what remained of it. His wife had been dead for three years now and, as they had never had any children, he was free to do as he pleased. Therefore, he had tidied up the loose ends and made his plans, arranging the rental of a one-bedroomed flat in Morbegno and booking his tickets.
It had been a bad week. The doctor had warned him that the rigours of the journey might do this to him. He had wakened late the day after his arrival and had been unable to get out of bed. For two days he lay there, sick and in pain. The medication he had brought with him did not seem to work until late in the second day when he was able, at last, to sip a few spoonfuls of minestra. Gradually, some strength returned to his body and the waves of pain receded. For the next few days he did not stray far from the apartment, venturing only as far as the shop in the next street to buy bread and fresh coffee.
Exactly one week to the day after he had stepped down from the train, he woke up, restored to something approaching normal health.
He packed some bread and a bottle of water in a small backpack and, locking the door, stepped out into a crisp early morning.
He walked briskly towards the outskirts of the town, which was beginning to stir from its slumbers. Street cleaners washed and brushed down the areas outside the boutiques and shops and people who had to get to work early staggered sleepily towards their destinations.
The mountain peaks rose dramatically around him into a cold-looking, clear, blue sky as he followed the road towards the bridge that traversed the River Adda on its way down to the lake. The river was low and white rocks, worn smooth by the water of centuries, gleamed from its edges. Crossing the bridge, he turned left, heading westwards on the road that ran between Lecco and Sondrio.
In the cool mountain air he felt as good as he had for some time. The morning was still with not a breath of wind. Autumn frost was still some weeks away, and this morning, though crisp, was very pleasant for walking. As the valley widened out, he was amazed and not a little dismayed by the amount of building that had taken place along each side of the road. The entire road from Morbegno to Dulcino seemed to consist of houses, where, when he was a boy, there had been nothing. The villages and their growing populations were pinned like brooches to the valley sides.
The early hours turned into the hours of the day when people did things. Buses filled with schoolchildren began to sweep noisily past him, creating eddies of wind that pushed him to the side of the road. After an hour he stopped and clambered down to the riverbank to eat some bread and refresh himself with a small bottle of water he had bought. He also threw back the first of the fistfuls of pills that he had to take every day.
He walked on, the sun climbing higher in the sky and his heart pounding as he moved closer to his goal.
Dulcino’s heart had not changed. He rounded a corner and passed by a stand of trees and there it was, after fifty years still clinging to the side of the valley, a few hundred feet above the road. The buildings stood grey and dark amidst the gleaming white villas and bungalows that had grown around them during the last half century and which now completely surrounded them. In the centre was the church spire beneath which his mother had worshipped all her life. On this road, near where he was standing, would have been Luigi’s garage; the house in which Luigi and Angela had shared the few years of their short marriage was in the village of San Marco, visible a few miles to the east and several hundred feet higher up the valley side. Now, these villages, once as separate as different countries, were linked by buildings that lined the sharply switch-backed road that still snaked up the mountain.
He turned off the Sondrio road and began to climb up past the turn-off to Dulcino. The houses everywhere made it difficult to recognise anything. There had once been thick forest here and now it was gone. He persevered up the slope for about fifteen minutes, sweat beginning to glue his white hair to his forehead.
Suddenly, he knew he was there. There was an unfamiliar building, but it had something about it, something akin to seeing a childhood friend after fifty years apart. The overall look is different – there are wrinkles, different coloured hair, the nose seems to have grown, the eyes are hooded – but there is something at the core, behind the eyes, that tells you that it is him. Indeed, this building had suffered a great deal of surgery. There was a conservatory at the side, the windows were different, the roof was new; but there was no doubt in his head that this was the house he had grown up in and in which his mother had been shot dead by Cavalcanti and his henchman that terrible night in 1944. It was no longer isolated outside the village, but was surrounded by other, newer buildings. He passed merely a few seconds assimilating the bright red climbing frame at the side of the house and the blue Mercedes with Milan plates parked on the steep drive. He turned his back on the house and thought back to that night. He remembered nothing except finding a spot in which to bury his mother’s body. Across the road which now ran in front of the house was a fence and then a small stand of trees. It was there he thought he had dug a hole and there he thought he had interred his mother. Climbing the fence, he moved towards the trees, tears beginning to flood down his cheeks and stain his jacket. He lost his footing – his legs were tired after his long walk – and sat down on the dusty slope that led down to the trees. He held his head in his hands out of sight of the road and sobbed.
Sandro could not make sense of the centre of Dulcino. It seemed to contain the same buildings that it had all those decades ago, but there was hardly one which had not been tampered with. New windows, new roofs, a proper road leading down through the square in which the church stood, instead of the dusty track of his youth. It was familiar but very different. Cars – new and often with plates from other parts of Italy – were parked along the fronts of the houses. There was not the hubbub of sound he remembered from the past – the loud conversations between husband and wife, the rattling of cooking utensils, the screaming of children. It was silent, almost sanitised, he thought.
He was spent and in sore need of a coffee and perhaps something a little stronger and had ventured into town in search of a bar. He found one just off the little square, small and modern, with a chrome-topped bar, being polished, as he walked in, by a middle-aged man with a dark moustache. In the corner sat two elderly men who had begun staring at him as soon as he had entered and on the other side some teenagers were making a lot of noise with a pinball machine, slamming its glass top, lifting the whole machine and banging it down on the floor again.
‘’giorno, signore,’ said the man behind the bar, barely looking up.
Sandro ordered a coffee and a whisky. He had acquired a taste for scotch in the States and it did, in fact, help him control the pain of his cancer sometimes when it was not too extreme.
He picked up a newspaper from the bar, went over to a table on the other side of the bar from the two old men and waited for his drinks.
‘Vacanza?’
The voice was a deep growl and came from one of the old men to Sandro’s right.
‘Scusi?’ he replied, lowering the paper. The barman silently placed his whisky and espresso on the table in front of him.
‘Vacanza?’ Are you on holiday, signore? We don’t often see Americans in the village, do we Giuseppe? You are American, signore?’
‘Indeed, yes, I am. Is it so obvious, then?’ He turned to look at the two men. They could have been older than him, but it was very hard to tell. Their lives had probably been tougher than his, all things considered. They also had the weather-beaten skins of men who had spent most of their lives outside.
‘No, it is not, signore. In fact, I might have said that you came from Dulcino, from your accent, or somewhere very close to it?’
It was a question and a menacing one. Sandro was immediately on his guard. He had spent the last fifty years as someone else. He had not even told his wife his real name. He had wiped that person out of history, not because of what he had done, but because of what he had kept hidden all those years ago – the truth about Luigi Ronconi. In doing so, he had become suspect and were Sandro to exist once more it might only lead back to those days.
‘Oh, no. No, I am from Sondrio. Originally, that is. I went to America after the war and have lived there ever since.’ Their cloth caps nodded together, their minds processing every word he uttered. Nervously, but trying to hide his nerves, he picked up and threw back his whisky. ‘But I must say, I am flattered that you think my accent is still strong enough to betray my roots.’
‘And the war, signore?’ asked the other one in a husky, breathless voice.
‘The war?’ He stiffened.
‘Where did you fight? Partigiano?’
‘Partigiano!’ he laughed, ‘No, not me. Wounded and captured in 1942 in North Africa.’ He indicated his left arm, hanging, as ever, uselessly at his side – although for once it was serving a useful purpose. ‘I was one of the lucky ones; spent most of it as a prisoner of war.’ He smiled, trying to appear confident and casual.
The caps across from him nodded in unison again, but their gaze was steely, their moist, dark eyes boring into him. He was unsure, but he could swear that there was a momentary flash of recognition in the eyes of the original speaker and he was sure – afraid – that he also had recognised the other man and had failed to disguise this fact.
‘Anyway, signori, it has been a pleasure. I must get on.’ He threw back the whisky, stood up, throwing a few thousand lire on the table, picked up his backpack and left the bar without looking back.
As he walked as nonchalantly, but as quickly as he could, out of Dulcino, down towards the main road, he failed to notice the two old men scuttling as fast as their aged legs would allow, out of the bar and into the town. They separated, arms flailing as they gesticulated to one another, one following Sandro at a distance, the other, coughing and breathing heavily, heading towards a house at the edge of the village – a house with two lions guarding its entrance.
Sandro decided that he would have to take the bus back to Morbegno but as he waited a full forty minutes at the bus stop, he failed to notice a small Fiat arriving and parking round the corner, its driver nonchalantly reading the Gazzetta dello Sport with one eye, while awaiting the arrival of the bus to Morbegno with the other. Another young man stood to one side of the car, leaning on a fence, smoking and casting regular glances in the direction of the bus stop.
It was early afternoon and the gaps between buses were a little greater than they would be at other times when people were coming home from school or work. For Sandro, however, it was all the same. And anyway the view of the mountains – the mountains upon which he had not gazed for so long – could never become tiresome to him. He stared at them, picking out paths and trails that he had followed as a boy. He named all the peaks, like a god naming all the good things on earth.
Eventually, the bus grumbled its way around the corner and slowed to a halt at the stop. It swallowed Sandro up and pulled out into the road again. The driver of the Fiat put down his paper, leaned across the front seat, rapping with his knuckles on the passenger side window and turned the key in the ignition. The other threw down his cigarette, opened the car door and quickly climbed in. The car pulled out into the flow of traffic that had been created by the bus’s ponderous progress and followed it in the direction of Morbegno.
Sandro had exhausted himself with his long walk of the morning. At the same time, however, he was also exhilarated. Walking back into his apartment, he was grinning and happier than he had been for a long time. He threw down his pack and sat on the sofa, stretching his tired legs and closing his eyes.
At first he thought it was a dream. He was running down a hillside, his feet thumping on the ground, somehow more noisily than they should be and making a different kind of noise, the wrong kind of noise. Gradually, consciousness began to seep into his head. Before he was fully awake, however, he could sense the pain in his gut: the same old pain that always heralded a few days out of the world, a few days lying in bed, searching for a place where it hurt no longer. A place in his mind or a place on the mattress, it did not matter; he just sought an escape from the pain.
Suddenly, he burst into consciousness. There was someone at the door. The knocking was gentle. It was not the officious knock of a policeman bringing bad news. It was more of an inquisitive knock, as if the person knocking were either unsure of whether there was anyone home or, indeed, if someone was home, whether it was the right door on which he or she was knocking.
He looked around. It was dark. He had been asleep for some time. He grabbed the small alarm clock that sat on the coffee table at the side of the sofa. Eleven-thirty! Who the hell could be at his door at this hour? And, anyway, regardless of the hour, he knew no one and no one knew he was here.
He hesitated a moment and then shouted out as the door once again rattled, ‘Okay, I’m coming.’
He was yawning and running his hand carelessly through his hair as he opened the door. There facing him stood two young men, one with a small pistol pointing at him.
‘Get your coat, old man. You’re coming with us!’ barked the one not holding the gun and nodding towards Sandro’s coat, which lay across a chair.
‘What … Why should I come with you? Who are you?’ The one who had spoken pushed past him and grabbed the coat. He walked towards Sandro and took his arm, propelling him out of the door.
‘Wait … I need my pills. I am ill. I need them for the pain.’
‘Okay, where are they, old man? Quick! Go and find them. And don’t try anything!’
Sandro was afraid and fumbled nervously with his one good arm at the bag that contained his various medicines.
‘Come on, hurry up!’ the one without the gun hissed again, looking nervously down the corridor in each direction.
They pushed Sandro ahead of them down the corridor after closing the door behind them. They went downstairs and he was bundled into the Fiat that was waiting just outside the front door of the building. A third man inside put the car into gear and drove out into the deserted road. Sandro sat blinking in the dark, feeling the barrel of the pistol making an indentation in his side.
They seemed to be travelling on roads with which he was unfamiliar, but at one point crossed a bridge over the Adda and turned onto the main Sondrio road, heading towards the lake. The two dark heads of the driver and the second man were outlined against the road ahead of him and he could feel the eyes of his third assailant boring into him from his left in the back of the car.
After a while, they turned off the main road and passed a sign indicating that they were entering the commune of Dulcino. At least he knew now where he was going. The question was, of course, why were they bringing him here? He knew inside himself the answer to that question, though. He had hidden from his past for fifty years, had wiped it away, had even changed his name. But, hardly a day or night had passed in all that time when he had not seen the faces of his six comrades in the instant before the explosion that had torn their bodies apart. Now, he knew it was time to face that past, to face the truth about himself.
The car pulled into the little square at the heart of Dulcino. He remembered the annual carnival that was held when he was a boy. The garish colours of the robes that clothed the heavy statue of the Virgin that the men would carry through the streets to the church. The tables would groan with food and wine, and music and dancing would go on into the depths of the night.
‘Get out!’ Sandro’s memories were interrupted by the one with the gun, who had walked round to his side of the car and had thrown open the door.
Sandro slid out of his seat and stood up stiffly.
‘Where …?’ he asked.
‘Over there. The church.’
The three men walked behind Sandro as he limped towards the dark silhouette of the church, which somehow looked menacing as midnight approached.
A dark figure leaned against the wall beside the door, the red tip of his cigarette illuminating his face as he inhaled a lungful of smoke. Seeing them approach, he stood up straight, throwing his cigarette away and knocked on the large church door. The door swung open and Sandro was directed to go in with a shove in his back.
The light inside was hardly better than outside. Large candles in recesses cast a dim, flickering light on the walls and a small, weak bulb splashed a pale, yellow glow down onto the pews.
The church was unchanged from when he had last been in it, all those decades ago. Behind the altar, the massive oil painting of the Madonna and Child that had hung there in 1940 still hung there, though the vivid colours he recalled were now a uniform brown and in sore need of cleaning. The gold of the ornate altar glinted as the candle light caught it and the ten or so rows of pews – it was a small church, barely big enough for this village now, he presumed – were filled with men, their heads all turned to face him as he stood at the door. This in itself was unusual. He remembered how, when he was a boy, the women would crowd into these pews and the men would wait outside, gossiping and smoking before pushing in at the door to stand at the back when the service began.
Again he felt a hand in the small of his back, pushing him towards the front. He turned to face them when he got there. In all, there must have been about fifteen of them, most of them young or middle-aged, but in the very front pews sat four elderly men, leaning forward and staring hard at his face.
‘You are Alessandro Bellini?’ The voice came from the back of the room. It was the priest and as he approached Sandro, Sandro noted that he was not a young man. A flick of white hair dropped down over his right eye and he reached up to smooth it back into place across the top of his head. ‘I am Don Matteo, the village priest.’
‘It is him, the bastard.’ One of the elderly men stood up and pointed angrily at Sandro.
‘Sit down, Marco, sit down. We have to establish a few things before we throw accusations around.’ Another, younger man had stood up in the row behind Marco and put his hand gently on his shoulder, pushing him back down into his seat.
Sandro looked around the faces in the pews. The light from the candles gave them a manic glint as they stared at him.
‘What is this?’ asked Sandro, ‘Why am I here?’
‘Are you Alessandro Bellini?’ asked the priest, ignoring Sandro’s question.
‘I haven’t been for more than fifty years,’ he blinked nervously in the dim light, ‘but yes, I was born Alessandro Bellini.’
One of the old men at the front slumped back in his seat, placing his head in his hands.
‘You are the bastard who informed on our partisan unit, then!’ Another of the elderly men half stood up, gesticulating at Sandro. Again, a calming hand from behind forced him back down onto the pew.
Sandro stared at him and felt a tear well up in his eye. He had slept next to these men in the hills in 1944, had fought beside them, would have gladly laid down his life for them. It was time for the truth.
‘Could I have a seat, please? I have a bad leg and I am ill, I have cancer. If I don’t sit down, I’m afraid I will fall down.’
The priest brought over a cane chair and Sandro lowered himself onto it with relief.
‘Yes, I am Sandro Bellini, but I swear to you I did not betray the unit’s activities to the Germans.’
‘Bugiardo!’ A shout came from the front pew.
‘I am not a liar.’ Sandro answered quietly.
‘Well who did then, if it wasn’t you? Who told them about San Giorgio and about our rendezvous, if not you?’ The first old man, who Sandro realised was one of the two men from the bar earlier that day, was spitting these words, leaning forward, his hands gripping the front of the pew. ‘How come you are the only one who got away? Doesn’t it seem strange to you that you alone survived both incidents when so many died? You were the only one to survive the second. It certainly seemed strange to us back then. Your friends, the Germans, let you crawl off into the night like the snake you are. And then you disappeared before we got to you.’
‘Is it any wonder I disappeared!’ Sandro, himself, leaned forward in his seat. ‘They tried to kill me but murdered my mother instead. I was innocent, but who was going to listen to anything I had to say? I knew the brigade was going to send someone after me and finally Cavalcanti, l’Assassino, came. But he killed my mother.’
‘What is the truth then, Alessandro Bellini? If it wasn’t you, are you saying you know who informed on the unit?’ It was the priest, speaking from a dark corner on his right.
Sandro sat back in his chair, feeling a wave of pain and nausea. He suddenly realised how cold the church was. Its grey stone walls were radiating the chill of the night and his frail body, weakened by his illness, began to shiver.
He started to speak, hesitantly at first and then more and more confidently. He told them everything, about Angela, about Luigi’s treatment of her, about the English captain and his discovery of his body with the single bullet hole in the back of his skull and, finally, about the German officer and how he had sought him out and left him for dead.
When he had finished speaking, the men’s breathing was audible in the silence that followed.
‘Why should we believe you?’ asked the priest. ‘Why didn’t you tell this story back then?’ Why leave it fifty years to make your peace and regain your reputation?’
‘This story would have stayed with me; I would never have told anyone, if you had not found me. Luigi Ronconi was a broken man. He had lost everything and finally, I think, he lost his mind. It was not Il Falcone who told the Germans what our plans and activities were. It was a broken man convinced that one of us had betrayed him and cost him his wife and child. He couldn’t work out who had done it, so in his confused state, he tried to take care of all of us. But he was still killing Germans, even then. His anger turned into an anger against the whole world. God help him wherever he may be now.’
‘God help Luigi Ronconi? The other way round, you mean!’ The priest laughed and a few of the others joined in, but not the old men at the front who continued to stare without expression at Sandro. ‘You really don’t know what became of Luigi Ronconi?’ The priest looked incredulously at Sandro and then told him about the amazing success story that had been Luigi’s life after the war.
‘He’s still alive?’ asked Sandro, astonished at what he had been told.
‘Yes, he is, but it is incredible that you haven’t heard of such a man, even in America.’
‘I kept myself to myself all those years. My wife and I ran a diner in New York. We worked morning till night for close to forty years. After the war I didn’t have much time for the outside world.’
A silence descended on the room.
‘I don’t believe him. Il Falcone was a hero. He has been decorated by the government for his actions in the war,’ said one of the old men.
‘I agree,’ said another on his left. ‘Ronconi was our leader until his wife disappeared. He went off the rails and disappeared too, but any man would go to pieces in such circumstances. He would never have betrayed us.’
‘I don’t know,’ said a third. ‘Sandro was a good man, too. He was young and also went through a lot. I fought alongside him and thought highly of him.’
‘But if this is true,’ said a voice from the darkness, ‘we have to do something about it. The world should be told about Luigi Ronconi.’
‘If it is true. Pah! It’s a lot of nonsense. He’s had fifty years to prepare his story, just in case he got found out.’
Another silence enveloped the chill air of the church.
‘You say you are ill?’ the priest asked Sandro.
‘I have cancer of the stomach,’ Sandro replied. ‘I came to the Valtellina to die.’
‘The sooner and the more painfully the better,’ muttered a voice from the front pew. Sandro threw a pained look in the direction of the voice and the priest glared at the speaker.
‘How can you prove that what you say is true?’ asked the priest.
‘I don’t think I can,’ answered Sandro. The German, Weber, is the only one who can prove it for me. But I presume he died in that attic when I left him behind with the rats.’
‘We need to talk,’ said the priest to the figures in the pews. ‘Take signor Bellini outside and wait with him.’
Sandro stood up. He felt that the priest was beginning to believe him. The fact that he called him signor was significant. The three figures who had brought him here appeared at his side again and they walked out into the cold night air. The door closed behind them and cigarettes were passed round. Sandro declined. He had not smoked since his illness had been diagnosed.
He leaned against the wall and looked up at the pinpoint stars that shone coldly in the heavens.
A shooting star fled across the sky and he made a wish, as his mother had always advised him to do when he saw one. The others stood stamping their feet and talking quietly a few metres away. He felt strangely still. It was as if he had emptied himself out and he now felt fresh and clean and even, he smiled to himself, pure. As for whether they believed him or not, that was up to each of them.
The door of the church opened and the priest stepped out, rubbing his arms to get some warmth into them.
‘It is hard to arrive at a consensus, signor Bellini. Some of the men believe you and want to challenge Luigi Ronconi, take the story to the newspapers. Others don’t believe you, especially your former comrades, and want you handed over to the authorities.’
‘But what about you, Don Matteo? What do you think?’
‘I became involved in this because I feared it would get out of hand. There has been an unspent anger in this village since the war. So many families lost their men on the night of the San Giorgio incident and then, later, in the other incident which you survived. Everyone knew there was betrayal involved and your name has been demonised here for fifty years because you disappeared. It was even believed by some of the more bitter amongst them that you killed your own mother.’
‘What?’ Sandro could not believe what he was hearing. ‘How could they believe such a thing?’ He shook his head, his face creased with grief.
‘Cavalcanti obviously never owned up to his mistake and it has been added to the terrible mythology that was created around you.’
‘So, Don Matteo, what happens to me now?’
‘Nothing, signor Bellini. We will return you to Morbegno. It’s accepted that you are unlikely to disappear again after sharing your story with us. We need to discuss it – especially the older members of the community – and investigate what you’ve told us. We know where to find you.’
With that, he told the three younger men to drive Sandro back to Morbegno, which they did in silence, but this time without the threat of a gun. He climbed out of the car and made his way upstairs, a rising tide of pain beginning to engulf his body.
He fumbled with the key in the lock, and on entering his flat, collapsed on the bed, stretching his body in an effort to dissipate the pain to its extremities. It was unsuccessful, however, and he disappeared deeper than ever before into a world of pain, a world that made him hope that the wish he had made outside the church when he saw the shooting star would come true.
He had wished for death.
*
These episodes of complete collapse and endless pain, were like a kind of labour. They had to be endured for a longer period each time, but the end would be death and not birth.
He lay on the bed for four days wearing the clothes he had worn that night at Dulcino, now and then reaching out for a fistful of pills and occasionally, with shaking hands and perspiring brow, holding a glass under the tap to drink some water. He drifted into corners of his being he did not know existed, hours passing like seconds and seconds passing like hours. Eventually, he awoke and the pain had subsided, like the tide leaving a beach after a wild and stormy night.
He staggered to the bathroom and ran a hot bath, barely able, in his weakened state, to twist the tap and make the water flow. He climbed in and let the filth that had gathered on his body seep away. A renewed strength entered him and he took to the streets to sit in a bar and watch this world go by, this world for which, having dispensed with his past, he felt a brand new affection.
Simple things touched him – a well-dressed, middle-aged woman, a young man roaring up to the pavement on a scooter, a dog sniffing lamp posts. The world was his again, after more than fifty years.
A couple of weeks passed in which he had mostly stayed in the flat, reading and watching television.
One night, he had been out, buying some pasta for dinner and had come upstairs with happy anticipation of cooking and eating, although his increasingly emaciated body retained almost nothing that he ate for very long.
Rounding the bend in the corridor at the top of the stairs, his heart skipped a beat as he saw the dark figures lounging against the wall. It was the same pair that had collected him in the middle of the night a fortnight ago.
‘Buonasera, signori,’ he said with false bonhomie.
‘Signor Bellini, il padre says he would be very much obliged if you would accompany us to Dulcino.’
Sandro was struck by the difference in their approach compared to the last time they had arrived on his doorstep. They were courteous, deferential. Something had happened.
‘Yes, just let me put this inside.’ He unlocked the door, put the bags he was carrying on the floor and locked up again.
He was filled with curiosity as they sped along the road to Dulcino. They would have come to some kind of decision, he thought. But it would take some powerful evidence to convince the elderly partisans. He had not been able to come up with anything in fifty years except his own words and he thought it unlikely that they would have found anything.
They did not head for the church this time. Instead, they pulled up outside a long, low building that looked like it might be a village hall. Inside, men – the same men, it seemed – were seated haphazardly across the space of the hall. At one end was a table and seated on one corner of it was the priest, talking to a large, long-haired man wearing a leather jacket and jeans too tight for a man of fifty-ish.
‘Ah, signor Bellini, thank you for joining us again.’ He reached out his hand and Sandro took it. ‘May I introduce to you Antonio Ronconi, son of Luigi Ronconi.’ He indicated the man standing beside him. He smiled. ‘I don’t think you’ve seen him for quite some time.’
Sandro felt the ground shift beneath his feet. He saw a baby grizzling in Angela’s arms, smelled once again the forest floor, heard the rain rattling on the boulder above them and felt Angela’s skin beneath his fingertips.
‘But … but how can it be …?’ The priest saw the anguish pass over Sandro’s face and placed a hand on his shoulder to steady him.
‘Signor Bellini. Padre Gaspardi has told me what happened between my mother and you …’
‘But you are dead. I mean, the baby … Antonio … is dead. The camps … How can it be you?’
‘I was lucky, signore. My mother gave me away to a German guard whose wife was unable to have children. I wasn’t Jewish or a gypsy, so I was a good find for them. They brought me up for a few years and my father, Luigi, who had been searching Europe for me, having heard that I had somehow survived, eventually found me and brought me back to Italy to live with him.’
‘And Angela? Your mother?’
‘She did not share my luck, I fear, signore. She died in the camp not long after she handed me over. My German father told me later.’
‘And your father? Luigi Ronconi?’
‘Like you signore, he is old, and he is also not a well man. He is probably in his final months.’
Just then, a couple of men entered the hall and nodded to the priest and Antonio Ronconi. The priest went over to them and they started a hushed conversation.
Sandro could not take his eyes off the man whose mother he had loved as much as he had loved anyone or anything in his life. He could see her face once again in front of him – the dark eyes and the large, sensuous lips. Even the long, dark hair reminded him of her. He felt almost faint as he stood there and had to lean on the table for support. Still, however, the eyes of the elderly partisans bored into his body like bullets.
‘Okay, signori.’ The priest addressed the men who gathered together around the room. ‘You all know signor Ronconi. With his help we have discovered some unexpected new information, or rather testimony which we think goes some way towards supporting what signor Bellini told us two weeks ago.’ He nodded to the men at the back of the room and they disappeared through the door for a few seconds.
They re-emerged with another elderly man, a stooped figure with white hair and a severely disfigured face. His left ear was missing and he wore a patch over one eye.
‘Signori,’ the priest began. ‘you will recall that signor Bellini told us that he had been told by a German officer – Obersturmführer Erich Weber – that Luigi Ronconi was the informant.’ He stopped and looked around the room. A few heads nodded, but the old men sat impassively. ‘Well, signori, the man standing in front of us now is Obersturmführer Erich Weber.’
There was a gasp around the room. Sandro himself almost collapsed. Weber. Yes, even with only one eye there was still that haunted look about the man. There was still a cruelty, even behind the red welts that landscaped his face.
‘But I left him for dead! How …’
‘Ah, it’s you. The one-armed soldier.’ He straightened up and stared hard into Sandro’s eyes across the room. His Italian was broken, as it had been fifty years ago. ‘How I have hated you all these years for not finishing me off that night.’ His face, or at least, the half of his face that had not been rendered inhuman, broke into a sneer.
‘But, the rats, how did you …?’
‘Oh, the rats were doing their job, don’t you worry about that. You see the results before you.’ He laughed. ‘I managed to dislodge the gag you put on me and screamed so loudly that they could hear me a couple of streets away. A patrol came and freed me, but it did take some time for them to find me, as you can see.’
The priest spoke again. ‘Signor Weber has promised to tell us what he knows about the informer in return for being allowed to return to Zurich where we found him and proceed with his life.’
There was a howl of protest around the hall.
‘No!’ The priest raised his voice. ‘Quiet!’ The room became silent. ‘I gave my word that this would be allowed.’
‘But he is the scum who killed our fathers, our friends. He can’t be allowed to just leave. He deserves to be shot!’
‘No! That will not happen. I have given my word, as a man of God and if any of you take the law into your own hands you will be acting against the will of God and I will see that you will suffer for it.’ The voices were stilled. He looked around the room, catching the eyes of every one of them. He then hissed between clenched teeth, ‘The war is over. It ended more than fifty years ago. Many men did things they are ashamed of. On both sides. This is the only way we are going to find out the truth.’
‘Ah, the truth,’ laughed Weber. ‘I agree, it is time for the truth.’ He walked away from the men who had brought him into the hall towards a chair. ‘Please excuse me if I sit, meine Herren. My aged legs are not what they once were, when I used to run up and down these lovely mountains of yours like a chamois. In fact, it was on one of those runs that I first encountered the object of your attention, the informant. He knocked me over as I ran on a trail just above Morbegno. I remember it was pouring with rain and he was soaked and covered with mud. It was dripping off him, as if he had been rolling on the ground. Perhaps he had. I thought he was going to kill me then and there. I had been warned about my habit of running, especially as I was, naturally, unarmed – difficult to run with a pistol strapped to your side, eh? Anyway, he told me that in return for information he would in turn pass information to me.’
‘What information could he possibly expect you to give him?’ the priest asked.
‘Well, padre as it was, of course, none other than Il Falcone, himself – Luigi Ronconi – there was only one thing in which he had any interest. Where were his wife and child and could he exchange them for information?’
Sandro looked around the room. Many heads were lowered. The old men had ceased looking at him and were staring now at the German who told this story as if he were in a bar, regaling his friends with a joke or a funny story. Antonio Ronconi looked on without expression or emotion.
‘I asked him for something on account, as it were,’ the German went on. ‘He told me about the San Giorgio operation. I told him I would do what I could about his wife and child. We met again in the same manner a week later. His information had been good and so I lied to him and said that I could probably get his family back from Germany, if he would just give me some more information.’
‘You never had any intention of returning his wife and child?’ the priest asked him.
‘No, or, at least, even if I did intend to do it, it would have been absolutely impossible. Once people went into those camps they were lost forever. At the same time, however, I wanted the information that Il Falcone was giving me. It was gaining me a wonderful reputation and I was heading for a big promotion if I could string him along a bit longer. So, he gave me the information about the monthly rendezvous and, well, signori, I think you know the rest.’
‘Bastardo!’ shouted one of the old men, tears of anger rolling down his face.
‘We’ve heard enough. Take him away.’ said the priest quietly to the men at the back of the room.
Weber turned as he got to the door and spoke directly to Sandro.
‘Remember what I said about the look in a man’s eyes in the instant before death, my friend? I see it in yours now as I see it in mine every morning. The shadow of death brings us together once again, it seems.’
A light drizzle played across the valley, obscuring the peaks. Sandro had set out before the town had wakened, his pack filled with a chunk of yesterday’s stale bread and a bottle of Sassella, the local wine that he had always drunk in New York in the forlorn hope that it would give him a sense of place, of this place. It never did, however.
He had picked up his bottles of brightly coloured pills and had put them in his pocket. For all the good they did. The pain was evolving now. It was almost constant and could really only be dealt with by filling his mind with other things. Even that, however, was becoming difficult.
He had walked for half an hour before getting on the first bus of the morning. At the village before Dulcino, he got off and climbed a narrow, pot-holed road that led him up beyond the village. He stopped and gazed up at the jagged top of the mountain on whose lower slopes he stood, looking for familiar landmarks. Gradually, the memory of the mountain came back to him. He could once upon a time have mapped its every part.
He plunged off the road and headed steeply upwards, the trees shielding him from the drizzle, which was now turning into a heavier shower. He made slow progress as the morning wore on. The going was hard and he was experiencing increasing pain in his stomach. Every ten minutes or so he had to stop and catch his breath.
Eventually, he reached his objective: a large slide of gravel and rocks. He had last stood there, looking down on the Valtellina so long ago – how different it now was. Buildings and roads stretched across the valley floor and even up the opposite side of the valley. He took out a piece of bread and sat on a large rock, chewing it and surveying the view. After fifteen minutes, he picked up his bag and started heading back down the mountain in a different direction to the one by which he had arrived at this familiar place.
He rounded the boulder unexpectedly, just as he had the afternoon that he had bulldozed into Angela and had knocked her and the baby to the ground. Once again, however, the breath was sucked from his body and his legs trembled. He stopped and placed a hand on the rough grey stone that had sheltered them back then. He waited, but there was no sound save the constant Morse code of the rain battering the higher branches of the trees.
What had he expected? Angela bursting through the trees, rain dripping from her long, dark hair, her beautiful smiling face flushed and cold to the touch? He smiled at his ludicrous notion and then grimaced as the pain that had subsided for a few minutes returned with a vengeance.
He knelt down and crept beneath the boulder, lying on his side. Pulling his bag towards him, he took out the bottle of wine, held it between his knees and removed the cork. He looked out from his vantage point and once again he smelled the scent of the pine trees and the odour of the rain. For several minutes he lay there, taking long draughts from the bottle and examining the grass and stones around him for signs of his past self, for signs of Angela. He then put his hand in his pocket and took out the bottles of pills. He took another long drink from the bottle and unscrewed the tops of each of them, lining them up in front of him.
He poured the contents of the first into his cupped hands and put them into his mouth, washing them down with the wine, now beginning to feel a little drunk. The contents of the second bottle followed and then the third.
He lay back on the slightly damp grass and closed his eyes. Around him, the rain shifted blades of grass, bounced off tiny stones that had not moved for decades and dripped from the boulder above him into tiny puddles that the earth swallowed up immediately.
She emerged from the bushes, untouched by the rain. Walking towards him, she ran a hand through her hair, pulling it away from her face and smiling, reaching out her hands to him. Slowly, he stood up and walked towards her, feeling already her cool, smooth skin under his fingertips, the movement of her body beneath his and the draught of her damp breath on his cheek.
Once again, he removed his jacket and laid it on the ground under the boulder, pulling her towards it. She lay down and he lay beside her, enveloping her with his arms. Slowly, their bodies began to melt into one another until they existed no more.
The only sound was once again the careless rattle of the rain, running in rivulets to the edge of the clearing, washing away memories.