‘NO ONE WANTS TO TALK STRAIGHT ANY MORE, NO ONE WANTS to look me in the eye.’ Teresa punctuated her lament by spitting into the piece of canvas she was using to shine the copper pot. ‘Donna Maria wants you, laddie, out in the garden.’
My aunt linked arms with me. I was becoming her shadow, she asked me to accompany her everywhere. She was afraid of losing me, and she was afraid of losing Grandpa. We walked in silence. The afternoon air was sticky, filled with cicadas and small birds. Nearly all of the soldiers had left; many of them, at the field marshal’s orders, were helping the peasants with the harvest, which luckily promised to be more abundant than expected. We skirted the latrines and then the family cemetery. There lay the Valt, Rainer, Bozzi, and Spada families. They lay beneath Istria stone, an ironed sheet barely greyed by the rains, here and there marked by saxifrage and winter ice. The graves of the recently buried soldiers, in contrast, with the turned soil already green with weeds, made me think of the unmade beds in a barracks abandoned in haste at dawn. My gait sped up a little, and my aunt kept pace.
‘May the Good Lord console their mothers.’
‘Grandpa thinks that you care more about the horses, and he’s not the only one who thinks so.’
‘With the horses, I can let myself go.’ She looked at me and smiled, squeezing my arm. ‘You men weren’t made to understand things; you’re summoned to action by a primordial instinct; all you care about is doing things and taking care of things; you’re afraid to stay in one place.’
Then, I’m not even sure how, we started talking about books, and the topic turned to my mother, who used to read to me until I fell asleep. I already knew how to read perfectly well at age five, but I liked to have books read to me. I don’t think it was sheer laziness; it was because I liked the sound of my mother’s voice, and the way she could make me feel the presence of the characters, their fear, their strength. I even asked her to read to me when I was nine and ten years old. She enjoyed herself, and often she’d dream up her own stories, while pretending to adhere to the book, down to the smallest details. I let her do what she wanted, I’d never object, except when she tried to soften certain instances of cruelty that I actually savoured with great relish.
According to my aunt all books worthy of the name tell the story of a continuous flow that resembles the glittering of river water. ‘It’s not the destination of the journey that matters…I don’t read books to find out how they end…The glittering that dazzles me along the way, that’s what I like. Look at our Villa, our roads filled with invaders, nothing will ever be the way it was, not even after we’ve kicked them out of our country, these foreigners. Everything passes and everything leaves its mark…and yet everything remains, we slowly fill up with wrinkles and…’
I was about to start crying, and I covered my face with my hands. My shoes lay still in the grass.
My aunt embraced me. ‘You won’t die,’ and she took my hands away from my face, gripping my wrists so hard that it hurt. ‘You aren’t going to die because I won’t let you, and that’s a promise. If it’s the last thing I do, I won’t let the baron kill you.’
I dried my face with my fingers. We looked at each other. Those eyes, green and still, knew my terror.
‘What about you, Aunt Maria, do you want me to run away too?’
‘Yes.’
‘Get across the Piave…but how?’
‘Tomorrow or the day after, at night, alone. Grandpa agrees. He’d only slow you down and after all…after all they’re determined to hang a Spada, but you’re just a boy.’
Aunt Maria pointed me to the chapel. ‘Let’s go in for a minute.’
The door squealed; it had been some time since the hinges had been given their regular dose of oil. The dankness swept over us with its pungent coolness. Far from the altar, the baron was on his knees in a corner. His eyes were half-closed and his head was bowed slightly forward, both hands together. My aunt told me to wait where I was. She crossed herself and, lifting the hem of her skirt just slightly, knelt down next to the baron.
They began talking intently in a low buzz, even though there was no one to overhear. Her lips were close to his. They ignored me. They stood up, I pretended to be praying raptly, tipping my head slightly forward, and to make it more convincing, I muttered under my breath, ‘Angel of God, my guardian dear…’ As a child, I was somewhat concerned at the thought that God didn’t have time for me, that He had too much to do taking care of the other matters of the world, so I had become fond of that other, little, private god all my own, my guardian angel. ‘Be at my side, to rule and to guide,’ I said, in a slightly louder voice.
‘Amen,’ said my aunt. At her side, grim-faced, stood the baron.
‘Signor Paolo…No one must know of this meeting. Three men have been killed and now three men must die. You are just a boy…but so was one of those killed, only two years older than you. I don’t like ordering executions, but this is the law of war… and then there’s that pilot, the Englishman.’
‘He was wounded and we…we are Christians.’
‘Colonel Herrick is an English pilot, and anyone who conceals an enemy…is an enemy of ours, and we kill our enemies, because that is what armies do, they kill…now…as the commander of the garrison, I have a certain degree of freedom… some leeway, not much, but let’s just say that I could manoeuvre sufficiently to save someone’s neck…’
‘Someone’s…neck, Major?’
My aunt gripped my arm and forced me to look at her: ‘If you know who killed them, you have to tell the baron! You have to tell him, you and Grandpa had nothing to do with it!’
Could it be that my aunt was asking me to betray Renato?
‘That little serving girl came to talk to me.’
‘Serving girl?’
‘That’s right, the young one, not the cook but her daughter, she came to see me and she told me things that I can’t pretend I never heard.’
Loretta must have followed us that day.
‘That servant,’ the major went on, ‘told me…’
‘Loretta is an idiot and the things she says count for nothing.’
The officer stared at me through slitted eyes: ‘That idiot, as you call her, led us to—’
A soldier threw open the door. It was the attendent. There was a brief exchange of phrases. The major crossed himself hurriedly and left without a word of farewell. My aunt took my right hand and squeezed it hard: ‘The officers from the secret service have arrived…’ We too left the room, and we saw them immediately.
They looked pretty beat up. They were white with dust to the tips of their caps. The first one, a barrel of a man – he was sweating like a pig – was walking up the lane through the park leading a lame mule by the bridle, while the second, tall and skinny, had dismounted from a bay horse that, even without the weight of its rider, seemed overburdened by its Pantagruelian pack. I offered my arm to my aunt and we joined them outside the stables, where they were handing over their mounts. As we approached them, my aunt slowed down and contemptuously offered her right hand to the fat man, who displayed the full amphitheatre of his teeth with a gap in the middle. His eyes were tired, hard and sky blue, and when he grasped my aunt’s hand it was only her prompt withdrawal of it that kept him from smearing it with a streak of slobber. The other man, in contrast, chose to snap to attention and click his heels, so that a cloud of dust billowed over us, snapped into the air by his patched trousers.
‘Not even during wartime…do you go around looking like that,’ said my aunt, lengthening her stride. When we got to the gate, we tried to leave but the two sentinels standing guard lowered their rifles to bar our way. We heard one bayonet scrape against the other.