Читать книгу The Sweet Hills of Florence - Jan Wallace Dickinson - Страница 14

CHAPTER 6

Florence

Resurrection

September 23, 1943

I will never forget the sound of his voice today. It was like hearing a ghost. No, a monster. A monster you thought was dead who then came back to life. People were terrified. How I have come to hate the wireless.

They had lived through more than twenty years of fascism, called il ventennio, then Mussolini’s dismissal, the defection by the King and Badoglio, weeks of uncertainty, the surrender and the German invasion. For nearly two months, Mussolini’s absence glowered over them. Then suddenly he was there: a little reedier, a faint tremor, but indisputably Il Duce.

After a long silence you can hear my voice again. Unless you present yourself immediately you will be considered rebels, ribelli …

It was Annabelle’s seventeenth birthday. In the kitchen, her mother and Anna Maria were making a celebration lunch, with whatever ingredients they could assemble. They had sugar and they had eggs – a torta, they said. A cake. Hearing his voice issuing from the cathedral arch of the Philco radio, Annabelle imagined a zombie rising from the grave like the story in an old book called The Magic Island. Why did we not drive a stake through his heart? Isn’t that what they did to vampires? Her mind twitched with more static than the radio. It made a lie of everything they thought they knew. We thought we were at war, said her uncle, but that was nothing; for us, the real war begins now.

The familiar voice on the wireless was a sharp blade rending the already tattered fabric of daily life. The heart went out of the birthday festivities.

September 24, 1943

We have heard through Enrico’s sources that Marshall Badoglio has officially surrendered and signed the full Armistice with the American President. His name is Roosevelt. Is that a Jewish name? It was on a ship called HMV Nelson off Malta. I looked up Malta on the map. It looks so small, so unimportant.

Sept 26

Yesterday we were bombed. Bombed! The noise, the fear, the confusion. It felt as if the whole city was turned into an inferno. They were supposed to hit the railway station at Campo di Marte. Rome was bombed dreadfully last week. Thousands injured and the Pope distributed money from one of the basilicas. He cares more about his precious Vatican not being bombed, Enrico says. We have been hearing for six months about the bombing of Milan and the dead and the damage but it was all like the cinema to us. Until now. You could hear it everywhere in the city. Anna Maria was screaming like a madwoman and Mamma could not comfort her. So the Allies are our friends. What good friends, killing us, she shouted. She was not even there. I was.

Annabelle walked her bicycle over the rough patches of the footpath. It was Saturday and she was going to visit Nonna’s friend Alma who lived near Campo di Marte. Alma had no telephone and Nonna was worried about her. She is getting on, she said, she is finding it hard to get out. Nonna Lucrezia always referred to ‘the old people’ as if she herself were not one of them.

The state of the roads and footpaths deteriorated more every day and it was harder and harder to ride the bici, for the huge potholes. There was no money, no time and no labour for mending roads. The Germans had other priorities. Towards the station of SM Novella, the surface improved and Annabelle re-mounted her bike to cross the piazza. At least with no cars it was easy to cross the great expanse in front of the station, though it was wise to be careful of Nazi trucks and fascist militia vehicles because these days they owned the road and never looked out for cyclists or pedestrians.

Thinking of that, she narrowly avoided running into the rear of a cart with a horse between the shafts. Laughing at herself for the near miss, Annabelle’s good humour was restored. It was not as if she could be spending Saturday in the country or at the seaside. The sky was clear. It was steamy, not unbearably hot, though to the north, heavy clouds were gathering. Was that a roll of thunder? A storm would clear the air. She pedalled faster, as she had not brought a raincoat.

The low grumble of the B17s was audible long seconds before the bombs fell. The planes came out of the north and out of the clouds and filled the whole world with their rage. The air rippled and trembled and the ground vibrated. Annabelle’s bicycle reared beneath her and threw her to the ground. The hot stones of the pavement scorched her hands and knees. In the seconds it took her to scramble to her feet, the scream of the bombs warned her the storm was upon them. Annabelle had never seen bombers before. She abandoned her bike and turned to run back towards the centre and then the bombs hit. There must have been thousands of bombs because they went on falling and falling and falling. Would they never stop? A curtain of noise and dust came down on the scene between Annabelle and the station. She could see nothing, feel nothing, hear nothing.

She was lifted off the pavement and thrown sideways against the walls of the cloisters of SM Novella. For long moments she lay immobile, blinded by the dust and unable to hear because … why could she not hear? She was deaf! Don’t panic, don’t panic, she said loudly. She could feel now, and what she felt was terror; her heartbeat was louder than the crashing stone walls about her and she did not seem to be able to get enough air. She shook her head from side to side and beat her ears with her hands. But no, she was not deaf. The streets were filled with sound and she could suddenly hear it all – screaming of bombs and screaming of people and running feet and moaning. By now her lungs were working again. She could see too. The horse lay still, between the shafts of its overturned cart. Was it dead? The driver was nowhere to be seen.

The predator planes droned off to the north, leaving the dead in their wake. Annabelle pushed herself straight and sat against the wall. Her chest was heaving and she could hear a sobbing that must be hers. Carefully, she prodded her arms and legs. Nothing broken. There was a large egg on the side of her head where she had hit the wall, but when she got to her feet she was not dizzy and she could walk. By now, the police and ambulances added to the noise. It was still impossible to tell what had happened as the dust was too thick, but it looked as if the bombs had fallen to the rear of the station. People ran back and forth with little idea of what to do, and an elderly man sat weeping in the gutter before her, his face a mask of dust, etched with wet runnels of tears. She touched him on the shoulder but he stared right through her. He was not wounded.

I wonder where my bicycle is, she thought, then, I must get home. Mamma, Mamma, she thought, or did she call it? Stumbling, she caught her foot in the hem of her skirt, which was torn and hanging to the ground. She bent and ripped at the material, tucked the hanging bits into her belt and kept walking. Keep walking. Keep walking. All about her was hell – a swirling storm with people at the centre. The air was sulphurous. She tasted blood in her mouth.

Not thousands of bombs, said Enrico, the next day. But certainly dozens, perhaps hundreds. There were thirty-odd aeroplanes. They were American, he said. B17s sent to bomb Bologna, but the cloud cover was too heavy so they decided to unload their bombs on the shunting yards of the railway station in Florence, but their aim was poor and they only hit some of the target and lots of the population. More than two hundred people dead, hundreds more injured. Until then, apart from an air raid a couple of weeks ago, Florence had largely been spared the destruction of the rest of Italy. People said it was because the Allies respected Florence as the centre of art.

‘Balls!’ said Enrico. ‘You watch. Once the Allies begin to move up, the bombs will fall like rain.’

It was three weeks since they landed at Salerno. The Americans will be here in no time, Anna Maria said often, unsure whether that was a good thing or bad. Annabelle was not confident. The grip of the Nazifascisti tightened every day. The streets were plastered with posters, proclamations, orders and deportations. The Germans, they’re not all bad, you know, said the local greengrocer. Yes, they are, Annabelle thought. She had no inclination to see Germans as people.

After breakfast, she set off to retrieve her bicycle. The walk along via Panzani to the station was familiar and normal but her heart rate escalated with every step closer to the piazza. Her hands were sweaty. She came to a halt at the back of SM Novella and had to steady herself against the same wall she had been thrown against yesterday. Her breathing was ragged – she did not know what she had expected but the sight of the horse’s body, covered in dust and flies, gave her an electric shock. She edged around the corpse, trying not to see the flies crawling in the horse’s nostrils and open eyes, to where she had fallen from her bike. It was gone. Someone would be glad of it. There was no damage apart from loose stones, the horse and the overturned cart. The horse must have died of shock. The bomb damage was all to the rear and the side of the station.

She turned down the road to the west of the station and tumbled into another world. Mounds of rubble filled the street where people scrabbled and scavenged among the bricks and stone and plaster, for small treasures from the life they lived before yesterday. The air was already thick with the smell of death and escaping gas. In the middle of a street reduced to a slag-heap, a single wall of three stories stood alone, doors and windows open, on the second floor, an iron balcony with a chair, the cupola of the Duomo framed in the vacant windows. Houses were open to the street, their secrets exposed, entire walls missing, many with rooms still decorated as if their residents had just stepped outside. It was embarrassingly intimate, like an old woman in her underwear, without her teeth. There were no stairs: curtains fluttered limply at windows onto nowhere and sofas hung at oblique angles to the road. It reminded Annabelle of the open-fronted dolls’ house she treasured as a child, now stored in the attic, but there were no figures in the rooms here – no-one sat to read beneath the ruched silk lampshade. No-one dreamed beneath the embroidered covers of the beds. No-one ate from the bowls still sitting on tables. On the walls, portraits of Il Duce hung askew. From time to time, the portraits, or pictures of mountain scenes, or photographs of grandchildren or calendars for the twenty-first year of the Fascist Calendar or crazed mirrors released their hold on the cracked plaster and fell, crashing into the debris with explosions of dust. A child’s rag doll spiralled from the tilted edge of a bedroom to the bricks below and lay still.

To her left, a team from the Misericordia worked with shovels and picks while behind them, an elderly woman stood rigid, her face impassive and her eyes fixed on some distant point, as another, younger version of her sobbed and beat her fists against her temples. Poverina, said a man to Annabelle, her baby is under the rubble. Annabelle wanted to turn and flee but her legs would not move. Farther down the street, a whole palazzo lay on its side. The bodies of the dead and the wounded had been removed, but only those on the surface. Beneath the debris lay others, frantically sought by teams of family and friends and city workers. They worked silently, so as to hear any call from under the wreckage. But no call came. Finally she turned and wobbled away.

Annabelle’s centre of gravity tilted sideways with the bombing. She developed a tic at the side of her mouth that twitched constantly. It was as if some part of her were damaged, though there were no external wounds. She would never feel safe again – there had been no air-raid warning, there were not enough shelters, not enough rescue-workers. There was not enough food and even less faith. She had stopped asking Enrico for news of Claretta but she gleaned bits and pieces of news from the newspapers. The family had been released from prison and sent north, she read. Enrico did not understand. Better not to raise it with him – it only made him angry. No matter what Enrico did, she would always love him. She would never leave him. She would be loyal to him forever. Why could he not see that Claretta had no choice?

The North 1943

September 23, 1943

I hear my beloved’s voice. I will never forget the sound of his voice today. My prayers to Saint Rita are answered.

‘Ben, my great Ben. Amore mio.’ From Merano to Gargnano, the letters sped back and forth for a month. ‘Everything I am is yours and belongs to you in every moment of your life. The only thing you have ever done wrong is to place your trust in the dwarves around you who let you down.’ Her love for him, she wrote, despite all, ‘retains the pure and spotless light of the dawn of life.’ She begged him to send for her. His replies were muted and nerveless. ‘Mia cara Clara, if you only knew how bitter and full of ashes my mouth is.’ He was too tired. Hitler however, was not inclined to let the romance lapse. He needed the Duce in better form and he ordered General Wolff to bring Clara to Lake Garda.

The surface of the lake glittered beneath a soft blanket of mist. It was almost October. The leaves were turning, there was a mist every morning. Behind the villa, the vines stretched up the hillside, golden, russet, yellow, ready for the vendemmia. From the terrace of the villa, Claretta watched Ben’s car inching up the gravel drive. Shivering slightly, she crossed her arms and turned back indoors, wishing she had thrown a cardigan over her shoulders. She had spent hours deciding what to wear, then returned to her original choice of high-waisted slacks and an open-necked shirt with the collar turned up. She had put on lipstick then wiped it off. Now she glanced sideways in the mirror – too thin, too drawn, too old. No matter, it was the best she could do for the moment. She undid the top button of the shirt and adjusted her cleavage – at least she still had a little. Taking several deep breaths, she closed her eyes for a moment.

At the crunching of gravel and the slamming of car doors, she took another unsteady breath and stood very straight, a vein pulsing at the side of her throat. The heavy footsteps on the stone stairs could not be Ben, and yet there he was, in the French doors – too thin, too drawn, too old.

‘Oh my darling, what have they done to you?’ She rushed at him, and he allowed himself to be held and the front of his tunic to be soaked with her tears. She felt as if she were the taller.

With her hands on either side of his face, she gazed into his eyes, willing him to respond. His breath was sour. He patted her shoulder, nodding, nodding. She led him to a sofa before the fireplace and he allowed himself to be seated, as if he were blind. He was still nodding. He was here, wasn’t he? That would have to be enough for now. Ben was more than sixty. He was shocked, frail. It would be all right. He still needed her. She poured him some tea and coaxed him into speech. He said nothing about ending it and he assured her he had no interest in other lovers, she was his great love, she had no cause for jealousy.

She had no cause for celebration either. This was a different man.