Читать книгу The Sweet Hills of Florence - Jan Wallace Dickinson - Страница 15

CHAPTER 7

Florence 1943

October 13

We are officially at war with Germany. So Marshal Badoglio informed us today on the radio. From Brindisi where he and the King are hiding. What has this been then, if not war?

Life had become a series of spies spying on spies spying on spies who in turn spied on others. In every bar and tobacconist, at every bus stop or bakery or fishmonger, gossip changed hands like black market goods. Everyone was under suspicion. The old men who drank their coffee each day at the edge of every piazza and in every bar, were certain they detected in this stranger or that visitor or even that neighbour, a spy for the Germans or a spy for the fascists or a spy for the partisans, depending on where their own sympathies lay. Only two doors away, that week, a body was found in the courtyard, executed it was said, by the rebels for having been a fascist spy. The boy was barely older than Enrico. His family were fascists. Was he a spy? Who could know? Enrico said he had heard nothing about it, but then he might not tell Annabelle even if he had.

Enrico said Claretta and her brother Marcello had been spying for the Allies. He is only saying that because he hates them, Annabelle thought. How would he know? And anyway, she was beginning to sound as if she were playing a game of ‘Simon says’. Enrico says this and Enrico says that. Why won’t you tell me? Why won’t you trust me? Why won’t you let me come with you and help you? She pestered him at every turn.

‘Because it is not safe, it is too dangerous for you. Knowing puts you in danger. And anyway, Ciccia, you have the bad habit of writing everything down.’ He kissed his forefinger and placed it on her forehead.

Sometimes she could hate him! The side of her mouth twitched. Why does everyone in the family simply accept that Enrico is in charge? Why do they all have to do what Enrico says? She knew the ‘Simon says’ game came from Cicero: Cicero says do this. Enrico is beginning to think he is Cicero. He is not Cicero – but if he is not careful, he will meet the same end.

The country was split into two: the Kingdom of the south under Victor Emmanuel III and Badoglio, with the Italian Social Republic, the Republic of Salò, under Mussolini in the north.

‘Puppets at both ends of the Peninsula and the Allies fighting the Germans in between,’ her father said.

Not that he said much these days, but he too warned her about her diaries.

‘Even Anna Maria can no longer be trusted,’ he reminded her.

They all knew Anna Maria had long ago fallen, as she often said, beneath the spell of Il Duce’s deep and beautiful eyes, and could not understand the family’s agnostic attitude to the regime. Or to life, for that matter.

‘He is friends with the Pope,’ she told Annabelle, replacing a pin in her thinning grey hair where the pink of the skull showed through. She retied the strings of her apron beneath her bosom firmly, to deflect argument. ‘One of the best things Il Duce ever did was he put back the crucifixes in the schools and courtrooms when I was a girl.’

Like thousands of couples across the country, she and Sesto had given her wedding ring to Il Duce for the war effort in Ethiopia in the euphoria of ‘The Day of the Wedding Ring’. Bishops and nuns gave their gold rings too, and even cardinals contributed their gold chains. Think of it, said Anna Maria, our Queen gave her ring and made a speech for us on the day.

Now Anna Maria and Sesto and their compatriots were afraid of the Germans and the Allies, and torn between Il Duce and the King. No-one had any confidence in the King, widely hated for deserting them. King Victor Emmanuel had never inspired much confidence. A lonely prosaic ditherer, he was too short, too bored, too French, to wield any authority. He could easily have ordered his army to stop Mussolini twenty years ago and he had been too weak to do so. Now the two men were bookends to a history of failure – parroting Enrico again, but this time Annabelle agreed with him.

Italy was divided by scratches on the map: the Gustav line, the Caesar line, the Albert line, the Heinrich line and lastly, the Gothic line. Enrico drew them on the map for her, but the country was divided by far more than ink marks on an atlas. Italy had almost ceased to exist. The city was littered with leaflets falling like summer snowflakes, urging all men and boys to join up, to enrol to fight for the RSI. They could join the Decima Mas, under Prince Valerio Borghese. Or there was the Muti Battalion of Blackshirts, or the Fascist Republican Militia. The important thing was to join, before it was too late.

Her father was spat upon in the street last week, for not supporting the new Fascist State. He had not supported the old one, but this was different. Men, workers who had tipped their caps to him, stalked past without greeting. Anna Maria gave in her notice and then, unsure how she would eat without the bit of food that came from Impruneta, baulked at the prospect and retracted it.

In households throughout the city, the quandary of whether to flock back to the known world of Il Duce, or run to the dubious protection of the King and the Allies, or throw in their lot with the partisans, divided fathers and brothers and cousins. In the streets, the sodden leaflets rotted underfoot into sludge, making the stones slippery and dangerous. Or more slippery and more dangerous. The war had been going on for nearly three years, but now the real war came calling, came right into their homes, and it wore the faces of foreign soldiers, both Allies and Germans. In every corner of the country people were forced to choose. Nazifascisti they said. Germans and Italians. Allies, Germans, Italians – they all killed you.

Further north, it was easier to choose between the Germans and the Allies, but the fascists made people choose between Italians or Italians. Betrayal was in the drinking water. When Annabelle looked at the lines on the map, drawn in red ink, she saw only blood.

Anna Maria could have been any one of the thousands of elderly women of the city – gaunt, stringy, malnourished, enduring. Her mouth had been full and soft once. Sesto loved to run his tongue around the ridged outline of her lips. It always seemed to make her pregnant. That was long ago. Now her mouth was as thin as the rest of her, no more than a pencil-line of anxiety. She liked this family well enough. They were not bad people on the whole, but she struggled to understand their ways. They did not go to Mass, but the nobility could do as they wished in that regard; they were not like her kind. They did not belong to the Party and that worried her, even more since the unbelievable events of recent months. However, a job was a job, and without one they would starve. There was food here and these people were kind.

The comings and goings of recent weeks worried her more than ever but she had long since learned not to know things. The house teemed with silent activity. The Signora was not herself lately and it was hard to follow her orders, but Anna Maria simply nodded and then did as she wanted because it was ages since Signora Eleanora bothered to follow up her instructions. Spoilt they were, these women. Anyway, Anna Maria was an honest person and could be trusted to do what was right. Signorina Annabelle was also behaving strangely, and Jesus, Mary and Joseph, let us not even think about the Signora Elsa! A sly one, that. Up to no good. Had them all fooled, if you asked her. Put on airs and graces, floated about like a deficiente, but she was not as dumb as she made out. And the boy was trouble, Enrico. Always a wild one, him. His mother’s fault. He would be up to no good in the mountains. She prayed for them all at night because if he got killed, Signora Eleanora would go mad. She loved him like her own son and she was not strong. She has never had to work. Not one of them has ever had to do a day’s work in their lives.

They worried about her too, she knew. She heard the Count telling his brother to be cautious, even in the house, but there was no need. She and Sesto had their own daughters to worry about and they both agreed that Gino, one of the sons-in-law who was missing, was probably in the mountains too, God help us. This was not like any other war. It was tearing families apart. How could you know what to think? Her mouth got thinner and straighter with each day.

Her stomach was the one rounded thing about her and that was only because her uterus had dropped. It gave her trouble, yes it did, but there was nothing to be done about that. Old age. She rubbed methylated spirits on her knees every night but they still creaked and gave her pain. Her breasts, once full, now hung low, loose flaps of skin beneath her enveloping floral apron and the endless layers of undergarments she wore to keep warm. She never seemed to be warm enough. Her wire-rimmed glasses were no longer the right prescription but there were no more to be had now, so she squinted through gimlet eyes to perform even the simplest of tasks. Sewing had become a purgatory. She probably did not clean corners as well as she used to but no-one cared, though the Count could get very gruff if there were stains in the coffee cups so she was careful there. Reading had never been part of her job so it did not matter that she could no longer read. She had never been able to read more than a few words anyway. No-one like her could. What do we need to read for? It’s all bad news anyhow. Her children had been to school and she was proud of that. See, that was Il Duce too. Four years of school, they had. One of them had nearly five.

Il Duce offered Anna Maria and Sesto a life they had never dreamed of. Her elderly parents embraced the Party with all their hearts and so did she and Sesto. They were wood-burners, Carbonai. Her parents were also wood-burners. They cut the timber from the forest, split it into large faggots, bundled it and hauled it down to their pits where they began the long process of carbonisation to turn the wood into fuel. Hard, hard work, it was. Made you old before your time. From early spring to late autumn they lived in a shack high in the valleys. While the men cut and hauled the timber and tended the fires that rendered it into fuel that filled their lungs with the smoke, the women hauled water and gave birth alone and tried to keep their families alive. Two dead babies and two live daughters, Anna Maria and Sesto had. Two little grassy mounds sprinkled with mountain flowers, on the high side of the valley where the sun would warm them each morning. Two little wooden crosses. Two little boys who seemed so perfect but did not breathe. Well, who could understand the ways of Il Signore. Our Lord. It was not for her to question these things. She just had to get on with looking after the ones she was given. Teach them their prayers and how to survive in this world. Some even tried to teach their children to read and write but few had time for such luxuries. No-one had ever told them they counted for anything.

‘Tell me,’ Annabelle said to her one day, perched on the edge of the kitchen table, ‘tell me what it was like in the mountains.’ She patted the old woman’s veiny hand.

Anna Maria enjoyed answering the girl’s questions about her life. She often came to the kitchen. She was lonely, poverina. So many people in this house, but they were all lonely. Anna Maria had never worked for the nobility before and their ways were certainly different. She clucked her tongue.

‘You couldn’t understand,’ she said. ‘We had nothing. No-one cared about us. Not the government, not the King, no-one. We had never been given anything in our lives. The socialists promised us everything but we never saw them. Maybe they helped the workers but not the contadini. Il Duce helped us. He gave us respect – and gifts: blankets in the winter and suchlike.’

Then there was the miracle of Sesto’s teeth. Even if he did complain all the time that they hurt and made him look like an asino, and even if he did take them out to eat and leave them grinning at her from the sink or the kitchen table, he could not manage without them and he would not have had dentures at all if not for Il Duce. She herself, now, she did not need them. She still had a few good teeth left in her head and they would see her out. Se Dio vuole, God willing! She crossed herself. And a sewing machine, he gave us, imagine that! He told us we were Italians. He gave us a schoolroom.

‘For years after that war killed my uncles and crippled my father, he looked after us. He loved us.’

It was the Blessed Virgin Mary that gave Sesto the accident that meant he was no good for this war, she thought. Her eyes misted. She said a rosary of thanks for that, once a week. ‘We lived in a baita up in the valley. In a cowshed. It took days to walk down to the town and the townspeople looked down on us and our children anyway.’

She raised her hands, palms open, and dropped them again with a shrug, helpless in the face of a world overturned. ‘We believed in him. It is our fault things did not go well for him. It was not his fault. Se lo sapesse Il Duce. If he knew about the bad things people did he would have been angry but they kept it all from him. We were not up to the faith he placed in us. He was the only thing we ever had to believe in and we failed him. What are we to believe in now? We let him down.’

The babies who died were boys and only the girls survived, so Anna Maria and Sesto had no sons to send to war for Il Duce. She was secretly glad of that but it shamed her even more. She should know these things, the signorina. She was a good girl, even if she was a bit spoilt. She cared. She hiked at the garters holding the heavy stockings sagging at her ankles.

‘Though I don’t know what more we could have done. And now this changing sides – it’s wrong. I don’t want any more war but it’s wrong. It brings shame upon us. You don’t know what it is like – you never believed in him. For us it is unbearable. We have nothing left to believe in if we don’t support him now.’

Her tone was limp. It was hard to believe in this new Duce who seemed so far away – a ghost. She tied her apron tighter about her stomach and pounded the flour on the scrubbed wooden tabletop. They added all the seeds and husks they could gather to the bread these days. ‘You all talk about hunger as if it is something new. We always knew hunger. We never had enough to eat. We had no medicine. We did not have water except what we hauled from the stream, an hour’s walk away. Il Duce gave our village an aqueduct, you know. We had only the food we managed to grow. We only knew hunger until Il Duce began to look after us. It is that terrible woman who brought us all to this.’

She made the sign of the cross.

‘What have you got all over your jacket?’ Annabelle carried Enrico’s tweed jacket from the hook inside the wardrobe under the main staircase. A large patch of the luminous greens and browns was matted into a single colour with a rusty paste. ‘It looks as if you went hunting in it.’

‘What were you doing in that cupboard? Give it to me.’ He jerked it from her.

‘Mind your own fucking business!’ he shouted as she opened her mouth to answer.

She struggled to stop her chin trembling. She had been looking for a pair of old boots to give to a man who had come to the door asking for food. She tried to explain but Enrico was already gone, with a bang of the door. He had never shouted at her before. What had he been up to? The anti-fascists were active everywhere now. Communists, the butcher told her, all communists. But she knew Enrico was not a communist. She had seen a small paper called La Libertà in his room, belonging to something called the Action Party, but what action, she was unsure. He went out at night to meetings of this party and Annabelle was convinced his mother had gone with him on occasion, bizarre as that seemed. Reports of the clandestine newspapers and leaflets, and the cutting of telephone-exchange wires and derailing of trains and other acts of sabotage, were in the news every day – the acts of traitors and rebels who would be shot when caught. Bolsheviks, communists, saboteurs, socialists.

The eleven o’clock bulletin brought no good news but it was habit. Annabelle was almost asleep, curled into the high wing-backed armchair, a cushion under her arm.

‘Why don’t you go to bed, Ciccia,’ Enrico said.

‘Why don’t you mind you own business,’ she snarled. ‘I’m not tired.’

Her father, busy tamping tobacco into his pipe, glanced up in mild surprise, shrugged and returned to the ceremony of the pipe – one of the few pleasures still left to him. As the deep gong of the clock boomed eleven, the news broadcast began.

A German officer of the 90th Panzergrenadier Division was assassinated in Florence last night by two socialist traitors. A hand grenade was thrown into a bar in via Faenza, where five officers were the last customers, enjoying a nightcap. One was killed and the others wounded. It is believed one of the assassins was wounded in the attack.

Annabelle sat straight in her chair. Her pulse pounded in her ears. The news bulletin must have continued but she heard nothing else. She looked at the wall, careful to avoid Enrico, who tensed but did not turn his head. Her father clucked his tongue and noticed nothing.

Annabelle said, very quietly, ‘You are right, I am tired. I think I will go to bed.’

Her legs were rubbery. Of course it was blood on his jacket. As she left the room, the radio voice continued:

The German High Command has not yet announced the reprisals for the act of barbarism committed in via Faenza.