Читать книгу The Secret Price of History - Gayle Ridinger - Страница 8

By noon the first day, Goffredo and Sandor had walked twelve miles. The river was deep, broad, and swift, and they'd walked much of that time through the grass and sand, hopping here and there over small irrigation canals. Sometimes Goffredo pointed to remains—of ancient animal bones or to the submerged village of Borgofranco, and Sandor would nod vigorously. But did he really understand that Goffredo was trying to show him how the river was alive and that it was merely returning what it had taken? Surely Sandor's Dunai did that too, but other things about the Po were probably unique. The Po's river bed was never at rest, for instance; its gravel was always churning noisily under your boat. You could say that it talked to you. Yet as he ate his cheese and bread there in the grass, he couldn't think of gestures to make that clear.

In the afternoon, Goffredo kept purposely to the path used by the mules or horses or men that pulled the barges or flat-bottomed boats against the current or in the absence of wind. He reckoned it was the quickest way to Isola Sant'Antonio. There, the Po met the Scrivia, the choppy little river that would take them south through a run of mountain valleys to Genoa, then on to Rome. In the meantime the sun was growing warmer; it made gleaming patches on the waterway and lit up the small green buds of the poplars on the opposite bank. The Po made an immense bend here, never shrinking however from its place on the flat horizon. The result was that it seemed suddenly still—not only, but the very air was still.

"There's nobody," Goffredo said, frowning. Usually the Po—and its facing banks—were dotted with people and their small boats. He himself had more customers from across the river than he did from the inland hamlets.

"War makes no people. Rampaging soldiers," replied Sandor.

"Rampaging soldiers?"

Goffredo repeated this, amused. He recognized it as a word he'd used the night before. What Sandor heard once, he used the next time. He himself wasn't likewise talented.

They gave themselves a brief rest around three o'clock in the shade of a tree, their rifles stashed against its trunk. Sandor's eyes scanned the thin lines of trees, arrayed in the same regularly-spaced fashion as an army regiment. They started walking again. And again they walked at such a fast pace—to be in Isola Sant'Angelo by dark—that it was an effort to talk.

The temperature dropped as the afternoon waned; the almost-spring became the as-yet-winter again, and their legs began to feel numb. As the sun shrivelled away, the sky whitened. They buttoned their coats and pulled out their caps. Over the river rose a mist; and then when Goffredo and Sandor rounded yet another river bend, they found the Po blanketed with fog.

Sandor stopped in his tracks.

"I hear talk," he said.

They could both hear the churning of oars.

"They're smugglers or men in small family fishing boats," Goffredo explained. People escaping from Lombardy-Veneto paid to be ferried across.

In the irrigated field to their right, which was clear of fog, a dog growled and barked. A farmer approached the dog and threw it a stick to fetch. Sandor waved at the man with both arms, suddenly jubilant, the way Goffredo had noticed he could get at times.

"Where's Rome?!" he hollered.

The farmer came close enough to return his shout but no further: "Don't know!!" Then he cupped his hands around his mouth and yelled even harder, "Don't walk there! There's dead people!"

He stood watching them continue on, ignoring his warning.

Ten minutes further along the bank, two pale naked bodies were sprawled in the mud at the water's edge. Two men with light brown hair and beards and glassy dead eyes, not old and not young. One lying on his stomach, his left cheek turned to the dirt as to a pillow, his thin arm extended over the grass as if protectively over a woman; the other on his back, his hair-knotted chest and genitals displayed to the heavens and the elements, his legs spread-eagle, his feet bobbing in the current.

Silence. Two men watching two men. Sandor and Goffredo were the two who could talk, breath, move, make decisions. The two who could leave.

"Stark naked as they are," Goffredo said, "you can't tell if they're Austrian, Piedmontese, foreign volunteers, or market folk who've been killed by highway robbers."

More silence. Of a respectful sort. Then Sandor said that he wanted to bury the bodies...to use their rifles to dig into the mud and give them a shallow grave. Goffredo said that unfortunately that wasn't possible; to be safe they needed to reach Isola Sant'Antonio by dark. Somehow this exchange of opinions communicated to each one an intuition: that Sandor was so big-hearted that he might sometimes need to be protected from himself, and that Goffredo was so practical-minded that he might on occasion neglect to do what was honourably called for.

They started walking again. There was less than an hour of light left. They cut across canals and swamp land to the tiny, swampy 'island' of Isola Sant'Antonio, which every so often disappeared under water when there was a flood of the rivers Po, Tanaro, or Scrivia—a place Goffredo had heard about as a child for its marsh invested with especially bad mosquitoes and its woods lurking with especially bad bandits. The often-rebuilt tavern was just a shanty in a clearing of trees. They heard singing coming from behind the half-banked shutters.

"No Austrians," Sandor sentenced after a moment. "And guns all different." He pointed to the row of rifles leaning against the wall by the door.

They went in, ducking under the low door beam and taking a step down on to the rough stone floor. The dim, smoky room smelled of burning coals, seared meat and cooking rice. Their arrival was noticed: at the wooden table closest to the fireplace, a group of young men fell silent, their eyes fixed unwaveringly on their tablemate opposite. Only the two sitting at the ends glanced at Sandor and Goffredo with diffidence.

Goffredo Morelli acknowledged them with a nod.

"Good evening," said Sandor Kemenj boldly, addressing the candle-lit room in general.

No one but the innkeeper with his wife and daughter took notice of this greeting. Sandor followed Goffredo to a table by the wall, and as his friend ordered their dinner, he kept track out of the corner of his eye of the table of youths by the fireplace. There were seven of them; all of them had moustaches, except a boy (one of those in a red jacket) who looked to be too young to grow one and a man with a black beard—the one with eyeglasses and wavy black hair parted down the middle, whose eyes roamed the table with a look of authority that kept the others in check.

A moment or so later, the tavern girl set in front of Sandor a dish with a strange yellowish mound of things on it.

He looked at Goffredo inquisitively.

"Fried frogs," Goffredo said.

Sandor was horrified.

"We've walked all day," said Goffredo. "You've got to eat something."

Sandor raised the fork to his lips, smelled the morsel (it smelled like all fried meat), made the consideration that it was a small breaded bone, more microscopic than a quail thigh, chewed the crunchy bit….and then dug hungrily into the remaining pile.

"There's a reason for everything," Goffredo said. "Foreign armies have invaded this land for centuries, so we have had to learn to eat.everything. And this everything is good." To tease his friend, he added, "You Croatians don't know how to eat."

"Hungarian, not Croatian!"

Goffredo grinned. The room reverberated with the competitive sounds of gusto again as the hungry men ate and drank and talked.

"Good this, but last night different," Sandor said about the wine.

Goffredo hushed him. The others in the room were talking now about the new pope who had fled, Pius IX. Two of the group did most of the talking—the red-haired man who kept talking about Switzerland, his home country, and the fellow with thick glasses whom the others called Laffranchi.

With open curiosity Laffranchi eyed Sandor, still seated at the table by the wall.

"He's my friend," explained Goffredo.

"I've never seen an Austrian in peasant clothes. We only get Austrians in uniform."

Sandor came bounding over. "I not Austrian. Hungarian!"

Goffredo explained that they were headed to Rome to help Garibaldi.

On an emotional note, Laffranchi confessed that he was a volunteer as well. "This is my group. We're university students. We're also joining the fight to save the new Roman Republic."

"We hear that the people in Rome are fearing an external attack," said the thin man of the group excitably. Maybe from Austria or maybe from France."

"They won't succeed in taking the city with Garibaldi there to defend it," was Laffranchi's impetuous reply, his voice half-covered by the start of a song, led by the beardless boy at the table. The chorus went round the table. They were young, they were exhilarated, they were together. And on their table was wine. The red-haired fellow reminded them that there were other foreigners present, and then turned with a raised glass of wine towards the corner table where a broad-shouldered balding man sat with lowered eyelids, half-asleep. On a big breath he bellowed, "All roads lead to Rome!"

The dozing man immediately opened his eyes and shouted "Rome! Rome!"

"To Rome from Poland," the Swiss toastmaster suggested, and the balding man in his sleepy daze chanted, "Polska Rome Polska Rome!" before his head fell heavily back on his folded arms.

Their new chorus was suddenly interrupted.

"Horses outside. Austrians!" The hands of the inn-keeper's wife flew to her face and she looked at her husband in alarm.

"What Austrians?" Scowling, he set two fresh pitchers of wine on the students' table.

"Horses very fast," said Sandor, his head cocked.

"Piedmont deserters," hazarded Laffranchi reluctantly. "Looking for food…or worse."

The rhythmic thundering came closer and closer, like a wave rising against the house. Then what seemed like an imminent avalanche subsided into a clomping noise that passed from one wall to the other, encircling the inn.

Wordlessly, a thin man pulled open the door.

"NO!" shrieked the inn-mistress. "It's bandits, then! Close it," she ordered.

Wordlessly, the thin man stepped outside.

Those inside listened, stunned, to the next galloping circle round the building. Then the red-haired man stepped outside as well.

A moment later, Laffranchi followed.

Thinking of their rifles, Sandor and Goffredo went, too.

There was a half moon in the sky and the men in a row by the wall watched the strange race of four chestnut horses fully saddled but riderless. They had escaped from the battlefield. Their bridles bounced and whipped against their manes and their saddle horns; there were no commanding hands for them. Their stirrups flopped and twisted against their sides; there were no booted feet for them.

"The men on them died for a stupid king," said the thin man.

Laffranchi drew a breath. "We've lost, but they are lost."

Finally, when the lead stallion had swerved to the right and conducted the others back into the woods, the men went back inside. With pursed lips, the inn-mistress shut and bolted the door. The inn-keeper offered a round of grappa on the house, for, he claimed, they all had peculiar looks on their faces.

"Here," he said as he poured, "put the man back into you."

Put the man back into you.

Put the man back into you.

The most fervent believers went to bed.

The next morning Goffredo and Sandor set off with the others towards the Scrivia, to pick up the trail for Genoa. The students had insisted that this was the only feasible route to Rome. From Genoa they would find passage on some steamboat or clipper and make their way to Civitavecchia, then walk inland to Rome. If they walked directly to Rome from here, they would have to go up and down the countless hills and mountains of the Apennines, they argued. They were not used to that. They were from flat river villages, or at most from a university town like Pavia. They calculated it would only take them a week or at most ten days to reach Garibaldi, doing things in the sensible way.

As things turned out, they had to make a detour. A huge detour. This derailment all began with the students' whinging about food. After three days along the river and sleeping under trees, they had had enough. Arriving in the town of Busalla, they declared they would go no further without scrounging up something decent to eat first. Goffredo offered them his last sarass but they wouldn't hear of it. "Enough of your damn cheese," Laffranchi said.

Sandor exchanged low words with Goffredo. These students could use a year or two of experience in a military barrack at the edge of the Empire. He was tired of their easy fatigue, whining, refined political distinctions, and railings against the last pope. Sometimes he felt they didn't grasp the significance of these days, these months. It was their chance! When Kossuth had tried to give Hungarians a country last year, he Sandor had been thousands of miles away doing mindless patrol duty.

A farmer to let them sleep in his stable and to give them some hot rice and a jug of his wine. After they'd filled their stomachs, the students sprawled spread-eagle on their backs in the warm hay. When evening came, they started to sing a song about Garibaldi's two loves, but Sandor hushed them.

The following morning brought worrisome news. A mule caravan of four traders with a load of salt and salted fish to sell in Busalla, gave them news of another revolt of citizens, this time in Genova, against the Piedmontese Guard who they were certain would surrender to the Austrians.

"The citizens are armed. Guns were distributed at the Arsenal yesterday," recounted the one with grey in his beard.

"Without a fight?" Laffranchi asked.

"That's right. By direct order of General Avazzana, head of the Militia. We can't just wait and let Austria crush us."

Goffredo imagined them: men, women, and children, all with guns to the barricades. Priests with rifles on their shoulders and a cross swinging around their neck. But when the younger trader added that Victor Emanuel II was sending the bersaglieri to put down the revolt, his heart sank. Another colossal mistake by the Royal House of Savoy. What was the new King thinking?

"I say no to Genoa," the red-haired man from Switzerland declared. "I say we follow the overland route, the Via Francigena, to Rome."

They put it to a vote, and while the Swiss man's proposal prevailed, the division between them seemed truly permanent now. On the one hand, there were the students, with their cocky, young-man feeling of being more radical and courageous, and their comments in Latin or Greek to the exclusion of the others; on the other hand, there were Morelli, Kemenj, the Swiss man and the Pole. "I am afraid for them," Sandor murmured to Goffredo. "There'll be blood in Rome, lots of blood."

When they climbed their first hill up from the river in the morning, the sea came into sight.

"Bello!"

"Bello!"

"Madonna, che bello!"

None of them had ever seen it before.

Its blueness. Its horizon. It did not care how much they had studied or how radically they believed. It whetted their sense of curiosity; it offered them its calm.

It took them close to a month to walk to their war in Rome.