Читать книгу The Sweet Hills of Florence - Jan Wallace Dickinson - Страница 13

CHAPTER 5

Florence 1943

La resa

September 9, 1943

Last night we listened to the radio in disbelief. The wireless is our lifeline now. The rumours were true then. Nearly six weeks since Marshall Badoglio took over. The war goes on, he said. Now we have surrendered. We did not know whether to laugh or cry. Was it good news or bad? Even today, no-one knows. Hiatus. I have learnt a new word.

The household was unnaturally silent, counterpoint to the confusion on the streets. Che vergogna. What shame, people said. Meno male. Grazie al Dio. Thank God, people said. People said this and people said that, more and more and more. For days now, tongues wagged: a whispered whirlpool of rumour and supposition and perhaps and maybe and what if. If a drunkard or a madman stood screaming incoherently on a corner, people stopped and listened, searching for meaning in his rambling. Omens were espied, entrails examined, auguries invoked, portents flickered. They were saying the King had signed an Armistice with the Allies. Now it was true. The war was over. Or was it? Would it still be true tomorrow?

It seemed to Annabelle the entire house had undergone a strange haunting and she was a wraith. Enrico flitted back and forth at all hours, with no time for her. He smoked cigarettes openly and no-one remarked. Her mother spent longer and longer inspecting bed linen and laundry and supervising poor Anna Maria in the kitchen, with excruciating directions for even the simplest of meals. Sesto pushed the lawnmower around the borders of the parched herb garden, chopped the wood, sat on the woodblock rolling cigarettes and smoking in silence. He no longer hung around the kitchen for a chat. Chatting had dried up everywhere.

The cinnamon perfume of her father’s pipe-tobacco filled the house – he smoked incessantly despite her mother’s warnings about its effects, and found any excuse to get out of the house to the farm. Annabelle would love to have gone out to Impruneta with him but he said the roads were too dangerous – and she was reluctant to leave town because of Enrico. Zia Elsa had almost disappeared, perhaps frightened into keeping to her rooms. Her husband kept to his study upstairs except for the evenings when they all gathered in the downstairs study for the Radio London news and Enrico’s report. No news of Claretta.

Outside, the muddy stink of the Arno, low and turgid, vied with the smell of drains and bodies. Annabelle was not allowed out on her bicycle. The heat simmered, turning the walls and roofs, the bell-towers and chimneys, into shimmering mirages. Running footsteps evoked fear. Florence held her breath. Oh for some rain, they all said. Storm clouds gathered but skirted around the city and the only things falling from the skies were bombs. There was an air raid on Florence yesterday but though they all heard it, the damage was not close to the centre. Shots spat out at random and a shout was enough to make Annabelle’s stomach drop out of her body.

She had constipation one day and diarrhoea the next. No-one mentioned homework or even registered her existence. Meals appeared and were cleared away, but she had no memory of eating them. Gatherings at the dining table were rare. She too retreated. At times, she climbed to the loggia from where she could see out over the rooftops to the Belvedere, where red poppies dotted the slopes around the fort. At others, she sat in her window seat with her legs tucked beneath her, chin resting on her hand, and gazed for hours on end into the street, or immersed herself in her books and her diary. Writing in her diary was the only thing that reminded her she was real – that and the itch of prickly heat. She had taken to biting her fingernails and her mother did not even scold her.

For weeks, Enrico had reported that the King and Badoglio were in negotiations with the Allies and now there was an Armistice signed. They had been, said Enrico, ‘screwed over by the Allies’ who had announced the unconditional surrender early to circumvent any wavering. The King and Badoglio fled to the south. Smoke hung over the city in the scramble to burn documents. Who was in charge? Would the Germans withdraw? What would the army do? There were no radio transmissions, no news. Government offices were deserted, phones dead, gunfire rattled about the city from the north – whose guns were they?

Rumours swirled, largely retailed by elderly men and women who could have no idea. Mussolini was dead. My cousin told me for a fact, said Anna Maria. The Allies were set to invade Florence from the south and would be here next week. It’s a known fact, said the crippled man who came to sharpen their knives. They had been in Sicily now for two months and Enrico said they had landed at Salerno two nights ago, but that was not yet a ‘known fact’. Salerno was a long way from Florence. Truckloads of Italian soldiers raced through the city, going where? To fight the Germans? Many questions, no answers. Soon a stream of those same soldiers, ragged, stunned and aimless, began drifting back from the north. In the sultry heat, tempers spilled and the pus of reprisal poisoned the city. Fascists, and possible fascists and sympathisers with fascists or anyone resembling a fascist, were hunted out and beaten or humiliated or killed. Professor Ottone Rosai had been beaten nearly to death.

‘What will happen to Roberto?’ Annabelle wondered.

Their cousin, a captain in the army, had been wounded in Africa, evacuated back to Italy just ahead of the surrender, and placed in charge of another division.

‘Never mind about Roberto,’ said Enrico, ‘it’s what the Germans will do that we should be worried about.’

The answer came two days later. As the German forces under Himmler’s right-hand man, SS General Karl Wolff, rolled through the country, the Italian Army had no idea whatsoever what to do – no orders from their King or Badoglio, no directives from the command. Nothing. As the Germans advanced there was practically no army left, and those who remained did not feel enthusiastic about Badoglio’s parting exhortation to oppose the Nazis.

Civilians were terrified and exhausted and could oppose no-one. On 11 September the Germans invaded Florence, arrested all Italian soldiers, and set up their barracks and headquarters in Piazza San Marco. The Germans took prisoners by the thousands, then tens of thousands, then people stopped counting. Most of the prisoners were shipped to Germany to labour camps. The rattle of machine-gun fire was a signal that an escaping prisoner had not made it, and the body lay where it fell until nightfall, when parents or wives came to take it away. The only mitigation came the in the form of the long-time German Consul, Gerhard Wolf, who did his best to help the citizens, warn the Jews, and head off the wholesale pillage of the city’s art treasures by Goering. Otherwise, German contempt for the defeated Italians seared the population like battery acid.

Under German command, the fascists were given untrammelled power to conduct their own affairs and counter-reprisals began in earnest. Major Mario Carità was given headquarters in via Benedetto Varchi and put in charge of the Office of Political Investigation with enough men to conduct torture and murder on a scale sufficient to please both the fascists and the Germans.

‘We are caught between two wolves. Carità is an animal. We have more to fear from our own people than from the Germans,’ said Enrico.

As the Major’s activities escalated, he was given more villas for detention of his victims. They were scattered throughout the city, and he set up in via Bolognese in what quickly became known as the Villa Triste – villa of sadness. Enrico and his friends were driven underground again. The Tuscan Committee of National Liberation was formed, and a concerted effort to get Jews out of the city and to plan a resistance began.

Gran Sasso 1943

High up in the clear mountain air of Campo Imperatore atop the Gran Sasso, Mussolini was not enjoying himself. The modernist circular architecture of the luxury ski resort glowered like a gun-emplacement on the bare plain, which was normally covered in snow. Carabinieri patrolled on all sides – at least two hundred of them. What did they think he was going to do? Try to escape? He had been dragged about the country like unwanted baggage and he was tired of it. For his own good, they said. To keep him safe. One of the Carabinieri who played cards with him at night, told him the Germans had been flying reconnaissance missions over their positions, looking for him, which was why he had had to be shifted about. Well, they would not find him here. The only way up was by cable car from the valley floor below.

He did not care. Tired and dispirited, he was uninterested in the war or the outside world. Food did not interest him. Neither did the gramophone they had offered, and he had not touched the violin. He had his books. At least up here was the silence he craved. The exclusion zone around Palazzo Venezia where he had forbidden car horns and traffic noise was all that had made Rome bearable, until he banned private vehicles and got some peace. Sipping his camomile, he picked at a sliced apple on a plate. Dressed in his blue and white striped pyjama top over his trousers, he was expecting his barber. He had not shaved for three days and it was probably time he tidied up. It was a little brisk – some snow had already fallen. Perhaps he should have the heat turned on. Wandering to the window to check the sky, he stopped dead, mid-stride.

Out of the sky, a squadron of German gliders appeared soundlessly, settling like blue cranes on the grassy slopes. One of the gliders landed heavily, tipping sideways. Soldiers spilled from them all and suddenly German paratroopers were everywhere. An Italian officer accompanied them. The Carabinieri were overwhelmed within minutes, without a single shot. Told in Italian to stand down or be executed, they willingly took the former offer.

Mussolini stood too, transfixed, at the window, until an officer entered. He introduced himself as SS-Obersturmbannfuhrer Otto Skorzeny, snapped to attention, gave the Nazi salute and said, ‘Duce, the Führer has sent me to rescue you.’

Mussolini nodded, replying flatly, ‘I knew my friend would not abandon me.’

Behind the gliders, a Storch aeroplane taxied to a halt on the tufty grass. Mussolini found himself dressed in his heavy dark coat and fedora and, and along with Skorzeny, crammed into the Storch, almost between the feet of the pilot. The overloaded little plane staggered beneath the weight of the three men but, assisted by the downhill slope and the skill of the pilot, Hauptmann Heinrich Gerlach, they reached into the air and stayed there. They had intended, said Gerlach, to rescue him with one of the Drache helicopters used for rescuing downed pilots, but the machine had broken down and the decision was made to use the Storch. A helicopter! Only Germany had helicopters.

Roused from his torpor, Mussolini was thrilled. He and Hitler were obsessed by flight. Mussolini and both his sons were pilots. Italo Balbo was his great friend and Marshal of the Italian Air Force which, in the 1920s, Balbo built from the ground up under Mussolini’s patronage. Through the twenties, Mussolini animatedly informed his rescuers, he financed aviators to fly all over the world, and Balbo flew two transatlantic flights. It was only ten years ago, he raved, that an Australian aviator crashed his plane and died on the slopes of a Casentino mountain. Il Duce had his body retrieved and gave him a State funeral in Florence. We are living in the age of flight, he enthused.

The enthusiasm was brief. He was unshaven, ill and spent. After the initial excitement he sank into silence, gloom and apathy, shrinking into the carapace of his dark hat and overcoat.

When asked where he would like to go, he replied, ‘Take me home to Caminate. Where else? I am already dead and buried.’

When he found he was on his way to Munich instead, he simply shrugged, hunched himself deeper into his coat and went to sleep.

On arrival in Munich, Mussolini found his family waiting, but still could not manage enthusiasm. He was crumpled, tired, sunken-eyed, wanting to sleep forever. He was glad they were safe but the sight of Rachele was certainly not enough to rouse him – being back under her thumb was not a prospect he relished. She would be sure to begin issuing orders and instructions and harangue him about what was to happen – and he did not care what was to happen. He was glad enough to see his eldest son Vittorio, though; his hug, if tepid, was genuine. The next day, he was no more vital – at his meeting with Hitler, he rambled and mumbled that he wanted to retire and go home. To avoid the fear of civil war in Italy, he claimed.

Hitler was having none of it. ‘Utter rubbish,’ he replied. ‘Here is what you will do.’

Mussolini must either return as the leader of the Italians and continue the fight alongside Germany, or Hitler would take over Italy himself. If Mussolini agreed to return as leader, he must undertake to have all the traitors who had voted against him executed, including his son-in-law, Count Ciano. To Hitler, his old friend appeared smaller, shrunken and diminished, and though he found it hard to regain the old adulation, he loved him still and he needed him.

Two weeks later, with SS General Karl Wolff, ‘Supreme Leader of all SS Troops and Police in Italy’, Mussolini was flown to Gargnano on the shores of Lake Garda as head of the newly formed Italian Socialist Republic. The Republic of Salò.

Back in Novara, Clara was even more tired and almost as resigned – she was convinced by then that Ben was dead and that she soon would be. Her mother carped at her to take a little more trouble with her appearance, but it was not easy to maintain standards in the convent, and really, who cared? She would write a letter for every one of the days of her imprisonment. At least she could do that.

Neither distances, nor walls nor bars, nor jailers, can keep me from you. I love you. I love you. I think of you night and day.

And then, out of the lowering sky, like a bolt of lightning came the news of the Armistice and of Mussolini’s rescue. She fell to her knees and drew out her rosary. She should have known Saint Rita would look after him, with all the prayers she had offered up. Claretta’s sobs of relief ricocheted throughout the corridors but did not generate much rejoicing for her. Now he will have us set free and send for us, she knew. She took up her pen.

Suddenly, they tell us you will speak on the radio tonight at 9.30 from Germany. I have a shock to the heart. I begin to tremble … and in the profound silence, the radio sends me your voice, your voice, your voice. My Ben, my Ben. A convulsion, a shudder, a burst of unstoppable crying, sudden violent sobs that I try to suffocate in the arms of Mimi. I cannot, I cannot stop myself, it is all my soul that overflows, I hear you, I hear you, you speak, you are love, I live still to hear you, it is you.

Some time later, one of the prisoners told her that Il Duce was now on Lake Garda and that he was back in charge of the government – what could it all mean? Never mind, as soon as he got them out, she would know everything. The days passed and the nights did not and no news came from Ben. It was not possible that he had forgotten them! Or was it all lies and he was really dead?

Giuseppina complained to her daily. ‘Find a way to contact him. It is impossible to think,’ she huffed, ‘that he is free and we are still here, locked up with these common felons.’

Then one day, after a lifetime had passed, one of the elderly nuns, looking furtive, produced the local newspaper for Clara – the girl might be a sinner, she said to her sisters, but she was suffering, poverina. Greedy for news of any sort, Clara rushed to her cell to read it, only to learn that Rachele and the family had joined Ben on the lake. So it was true. The words tumbled over each other on the page as if the ink had run – the heat of her rage almost set her clothes on fire. Her breathing escalated to danger point and she began to hyperventilate. Knowing what would follow, her mother called for help – she was smaller than her daughter and could not hold the weight as Clara collapsed forward over her. The nuns ran back and forth carrying damp cloths and water. They too would be relieved when that fractious family was released. The sooner the better, they muttered.

At last, Clara managed to get a letter smuggled out through the nuns, who sent it to the German headquarters in Novara, and the very next day, a German staff car arrived with an SS escort and collected the whole family. They were taken, not to Ben, but to Merano.

‘At least it is not prison,’ said Giuseppina, ‘and Merano has always been a very nice town.’