THE SKY WAS MURKY, AN ENCRUSTED STEWPOT. DRAWN UP in double file in front of the church was the Hungarian contingent in full strength. It filled nearly the whole of the unpaved road down as far as the Villa gates. We were there too, all of us, not in answer to an invitation but because Grandma and Aunt Maria said we were duty bound to do so. There were no rowdy children, no barking dogs. The alleyways were hushed. Half a dozen pious old biddies, swathed in vast black shawls, were telling their beads at the foot of the church steps. Don Lorenzo had been locked up in the sacristy with half a keg of cordial, guarded by two sentries.
Von Feilitzsch was wearing, hanging from a raspberry-coloured sash, a purple cross with the monogram of the late emperor – F J – glittering on a gold chain, supported by the beaks of the two-headed eagle. Their claws gripped a scroll bearing the words ‘Viribus unitis’. They too like to call themselves heirs of Rome, I thought.
The bell weighed a hundred kilos, and it was lowered with all the necessary caution. The ropes were handled by twelve infantrymen. It hit the ground with a dull thud. A short silence ensued. The major crossed himself, and the sign of the cross swept along the line of troops like a flutter of wings. We too crossed ourselves. Aunt Maria’s eyes, as she stood erect beneath the arch of the church door, flashed with anger.
The ceremony was over in a few minutes. The noise of the breaking of ranks merged with that of the approaching cart, drawn by two oxen with sawn-off horns. The bell was destined for some depot or other, thereafter to be melted down, or simply forgotten. Its voice would become a memory only.
‘With the same sacred symbols, the same God,’ said Grandma, walking arm-in-arm with Grandpa Gugliemo, ‘we ought not to be making war on each other.’
‘They lowered their eyes, did you notice? They were ashamed of what they were doing.’ Aunt Maria was deeply outraged, more so even than for the sake of the raped girls. ‘Field Marshal Boroevic, may you die alone with your nightmares, before the fires of hell strip the flesh from your bones!’ I had never before heard her curse anyone. She usually preferred irony to invective.
Grandpa put his free hand on my shoulder and said in a low voice, ‘Did you hear that? Now your aunt has started competing with Don Lorenzo.’
Grandma took her hand off his arm. ‘Pipe down, you good-for-nothing.’ And she took Aunt Maria’s hand as she entered the gateway. The sentry – there were no longer two of them – sprang to attention, but a moment later, when Grandpa and I passed him, he pointedly relaxed into a slovenly stand-at-ease.
We all lunched together in one of the upstairs rooms. No mention was made of the bell. We ate boiled greens and hot broth that tasted of soil. Grandma didn’t touch a thing. Loretta, steady on her feet but surly in the face, brought us a slice of apple tart filched by Teresa’s swift hands from the gluttony of the officers eating in the big dining room on the floor below. ‘All we now get is the scraps,’ said my aunt, as she cut the slice into four. I glanced at Loretta. Her hands were a little unsteady, but on her lips was a smirk, and she was certainly thinking, Your leftovers is all I ever get.
While I was savouring the last precious mouthful of tart, Grandma said, ‘Giulia’s elder sister died last week. Don Lorenzo told me.’
Why had Giulia told me nothing about it?
‘A merciful release,’ said my aunt, placing her knife and fork correctly together on her plate. ‘That poor girl, reduced to skin and bone. I saw her last year…yes, it was fifteen months ago, in their house at San Polo.’
‘And her mother…a saint,’ put in Grandma.
I looked at Grandpa. He was drumming his fingers on the handles of the cutlery and moving his lips imperceptibly as if reading. His thoughts were elsewhere. He lit a cigar and asked for an ashtray, which Loretta promptly brought him.
‘It has been a terrible business,’ continued my aunt. ‘She was reduced to an absolute skeleton; only the face was left of the woman she was. I couldn’t even look at her. Just too, too distressing.’ She shook her head and turned a hard look on me. She realized that I was not in the least upset at the fate of her friend. Then she said sharply, ‘You must watch your step with that Giulia.’
‘You should know, Paolo, that when your Giulia attained the age of eighteen…’ I knew at once from her tone of voice that my aunt was about to deliver me a lecture she’d had up her sleeve for quite a while. ‘It must have been early August of…1911 because…well, it doesn’t matter…That day, during the birthday party…’
But I already knew all about it. How could I not have known? In a city like Venice, the event was front page news. And for some things antennae sprout early in children. Giulia had had a lover, a friend of her father’s. An old man whom everyone called ‘a fine figure of a man’, though what I remembered of him were his crooked teeth. That evening her lover had put his chrome-plated revolver barrel into his mouth. He’d done it in front of everyone, in front of the birthday cake a span high with all the candles lit ‘while awaiting the puff of the lovely eighteen-year-old with the flame-coloured hair’, as the Gazettino put it. A masterful coup de théâtre, with the brains spurting out and the removal of shreds of pulpy matter from the chandelier, that occupied half a paragraph in the leading article. The grown-ups – one thinks this way at the age of nine – were divided into two parties: ‘She’s a good lass who’s had bad luck’, and ‘It was she who made his brains burst out of his ears’. But in such disputes, we all know, the dead have a certain advantage. ‘Tombstone and Truth are total strangers,’ was Grandpa’s inescapable maxim. Giulia, the night of her eighteenth birthday, had earned the label of belle dame sans merci, not least because the suicide was a prince of the lawcourts with a wife and three children.
Until then I had always pretended to know nothing about it, but the talking-to that awaited me was just too much. ‘Aunt, I know about the lawyer in Venice, a man who—’
‘Was it Giulia who told you?’
‘Not a word. But I have heard certain things…Do you think I don’t see what happens when she walks down the village street? And then, when I was in Venice it was on everyone’s lips.’
‘Don’t tell me that my son…that your father talked about it with your mother in front of you!’ said Grandma, in her voice a trace of venom.
‘No one has spoken to me about it. Ever.’ I got up and left. I was livid.