Between Enemies (21 page)

‘You tell me about this general, a whole lifetime of adventures,’ he said when he saw me, ‘one of those lives tailor-made to be told as a ripping yarn…but boiled down by his own pen to a broth fit for nuns, while I’ – and he looked me in the eye and lowered his voice – ‘who enjoy a solid reputation as a good-for-nothing, am writing a story of money, love, and vendetta, in other words the very things…yes, the very things’ – and here he lowered his voice still further, until it had shrunk to nothing more than a throttled little rivulet of sound – ‘that make life worth living.’

‘Then why are you reading it, if it’s a broth fit for nuns?’

‘You’re more impudent with every day that passes! You see, laddie, unlike that fellow, that Ganymede, whatever his name is, who’s never opened a book in his life…I read because I like to and…when I happen across a Garibaldi…it pains me!’ I
wondered where he was heading with this. ‘With his courage and my talent put together something could have come of it.’ He was no longer talking to me, I don’t think he even knew I was there. He was talking to the air, to the stuccoes, to the walls.

The beans, sautéed with onions and red chili peppers, landed on our plates with a festive sizzle that would have curled up the whiskers of even a general.

Grandma had been keeping her eye on the two rivals since the beginning of the meal, and it was clear that she’d already staved off the worst a couple of times with small sharp kicks to her spouse’s ankle. A mass of insults was bubbling up inside Grandpa that threatened to sharply organize itself into a phalanx at any instant. And sure enough the phalanx poured forth the instant my aunt, who had a nose too long to mind her own business, thought of asking the Third Paramour his opinion on the financial disarray of the fatherland at war.

‘When the king’s coffers lie empty…’

Grandpa stole the scene from his rival by concluding the phrase in his own way: ‘…the subjects would be well advised to stitch their pockets shut…or fill them with crabs. And so you would appear to be a bookkeeper…the missing link between an accountant and a human being.’

The Third Paramour gulped down the mouthful of beans that for the past few seconds his tongue had been working to detach from his palate. He extracted the handkerchief from the breast pocket of his jacket and, with dishevelled grace, dabbed at his perfectly dry forehead. ‘You are, you are nothing but…an Othello. That’s what you are!’

‘And you’re a treacherous freeloader!’ Grandpa, had he ever found himself in Dante’s shoes, would have put tax officials,
priests, and accountants into Lucifer’s various mouths.

‘That’s still better than you, claiming to write a book that everyone knows doesn’t exist.’

His voice was cracking with emotion, the poor thing wasn’t used to quarrels.

‘It’s that cauliflower you have instead of a brain that doesn’t exist, not my book. And if it wasn’t for Madame Nancy…I would have strung you up from the foremast that very day,’ and he waved his fists in the big-foot’s face.

The Third Paramour stood up, slamming his napkin down on his plate, which was gleaming as if Teresa had just buffed it with a rag, and left, with a curt nod of his head to Grandma alone.

I felt called upon to offer my support to Grandpa: ‘His cologne smells of smoked mozzarella.’

Grandpa stared at Grandma with a satisfied half-smile. He poured himself a finger of cognac from his private stock and stared into the fire, folding his napkin: ‘Now I feel better.’

‘My fault,’ said my aunt. And she burst into laughter. To my surprise, my grandmother burst out laughing as well, until me, Grandpa, and even Loretta who was already clearing the table, were all united in a single chorus of laughter.

As Grandpa was tossing back his last gulp of cognac I said under my breath: ‘After all, Grandpa, the Third Paramour… he’s not all bad.’

‘I believe that,’ said Grandma, ‘even if you turned him head over heels you couldn’t hope for the clinking of a coin…He’s not all bad, but he’s not all good either.’

Twenty-Four

W
ITH
A
PRIL THE SNOW HAD CLEARED AND BY
M
AY SOME
of the officers began to leave. More and more lorries went through, and more and more carts, bicycles, mules and motorcycles. They came from Udine, from Sacile, from Codroipo, from Pordenone. Skinny youngsters passed by morning and evening on their way to the Piave, their uniforms flapping on them, bent under the weight of their packs, their helmets too big for them.

The Villa had lost its importance. Lodging there with the baron were only two or three junior officers, but none of them stayed for long. Some went off west, towards the front, others eastwards, on leave. ‘Like flies on a cow’s rump,’ commented Teresa. When he left his office, a ground-floor room on the side of the house furthest from the street, the baron spent his time with us. With Aunt Maria largely – tongues were already wagging in the village – but also with Grandpa and me. Only Grandma kept aloof, true to her principle of confronting the invader with her courteous discourtesy.

By now the baron seemed to me one of the household. I was as accustomed to him as I was to the shortage of food, the thought of Giulia or the sleepiness of the countryside. For months now there had been no sound of gunfire.

On one occasion – it was towards the end of May and the
sunshine was quite warm – von Feilitzsch saw me passing his window. He left his office and caught up with me. ‘I’ll come for a little walk with you, do you mind?’

We walked together for a couple of hours, during which he told me about life in Hungary, where he and his wife had been for several years, and about Vienna, where his heart lay. He told me about the pastry shops, the girls, the concerts, the Strauss family, the avenues crowded deep into the night, the cinnamon-coloured shops. He spoke to me of that world of courteous smiles, of unspoken feelings, of neat flower beds and blue drawing rooms, the leisurely world in which he had grown up. Vienna for him was a friend who had died, and he was missing her.

‘You know, Signor Paolo, my father was someone who insured everything. My mother used to say he was the ideal client…the ideal gull, as it were, of every insurance agent. He would even have insured chickens if he’d been able to.’

‘My grandfather says that we live in a world based on the illusion that reason is in charge, and go to one without a shadow of sense to it.’

The baron halted and closed his eyes for a moment. ‘I
do
like your grandfather.’

There was the hint of a chuckle in his voice, and a slight smile on his lips. He liked to make fun of himself. When he drank tea he held the cup suspended right in front of his face for seconds at a time. ‘He makes love to his cup, watch out, lad. Seems like he’s soft as semolina,’ the cook had said. The cook was a wise old bird, but she was wrong. The major’s was not a simple character, and Grandpa had understood as much: ‘The child and the soldier in him are constantly at blows, but neither manages to gain the upper hand.’

‘Do you think you could kindly pass on a message to your aunt? It is something…of importance.’

I was taken aback by the baron’s tone of voice. It had suddenly become harsh, even unfriendly.

‘Certainly, Baron…Nothing…personal, is it?’

He halted again, and his eyes hardened disagreeably: ‘What do you mean? I am a gentleman, Sir.’

I noticed that his boots were dirty.

‘I didn’t mean to…’

We started walking again, slowly, because it was uphill now.

‘There is a squadron of British fighter planes…’

I fixed my eyes on the empty path before me, the tufts of grass motionless between the stones, the trees in the distance.

‘They are British, SPADS, single-seater biplanes. It is always the same squadron that goes back and forth above the roof of the Villa, always the same. Does the kingfisher mean nothing to you?’

I quickened my pace a little. ‘The king…what?’

‘It’s a bird. It’s the symbol of that pilot, the leader of the squadron. A pilot and a half, too. He flew straight through a burning captive balloon. They’ll have given him a medal.’

I struggled to show no feelings.

‘Please tell Donna Maria, and also your grandfather, that to transmit to the enemy any information, of any kind and by whatever means, is a crime, and the code of warfare punishes this crime,’ he said, lowering his voice slightly and stopping, so as to oblige me to look at him, ‘with death. When we find spies, we hang them.’

‘He got out of bed on the wrong side this morning,’ said Grandpa over his cup of white coffee. He was right; Renato
was not in a good mood. The major’s warning had left us all stunned. Grandma thought we should stop what we were doing for a while, but how could we warn Brian to stop what
he
was doing? And at a moment like this, with the Austrian offensive due at any time…Grandma had given orders to keep all the shutters of the bay window closed, meaning ‘Nothing to transmit,’ and seeing all the troop movements that were going on Brian would surely get the message.

‘But we can’t give up now, of all times,’ Grandpa had replied. ‘It’s now that our information is most important. That’s why the baron warned us.’

Grandma had no fears for herself, but for the rest of us, for the Villa, and for me. I was not afraid; I had grown fatalistic and kept repeating one of Grandpa’s little sayings, ‘To do anything good in life you have to count on a bit of luck.’

‘Do you think he’ll hang us?’ I was sitting with my legs dangling, and the hay was pricking my neck.

Renato handed me the tobacco pouch. ‘He doesn’t know how we send messages. And he doesn’t hang anyone. And as for the information, Brian sees it for himself, flying over the plain. The roads are choked with columns of carts and there are more and more camps. Mine is a different job.’

‘What is it?’ I lit the pipe.

‘The organization helps—’

‘Prisoners to escape?’ I was aiming to surprise him.

‘Go on with you! Who’s going to escape? Nobody wants to go back to the trenches. The deserters, they’re the ones we want. It gets harder and harder to cross the river. Deserters – Czechs, Slovenians, Bosnians – they bring us up-to-date, precise information of the kind that can change the course of the fighting,
not the kind we give about troop movements. One reconnaissance plane is enough for that.’

‘Why are you telling me?’

‘Because at this point you’d better know what we’re really signalling with those shutters. They don’t tell what you’ve been led to believe, but rather when, where, how and who will be crossing the river.’

‘Why haven’t you told me before?’

‘Didn’t need to before, but now…You might be useful to the organization…In case they kill me.’

‘Tell me everything, then.’ I was less frightened than excited.

He blew smoke into my eyes. ‘That’s enough for now, Paolo. The rest when necessary. How about stretching our legs?’

We took a turn around the village. No one was about. We paused to smoke for a while with the innkeeper, who with the return of good weather had put a bench outside the inn door. Even the inn was deserted.

‘They all go to Sernaglia. All the money now goes to Sernaglia, and the girls, the ones who ply their trade, they go where the money is, in Sernaglia! Ah…times ain’t what they used to be.’ His pipe between his teeth, he patted the pocket of his tattered apron with his palms. ‘And now this place is empty.’

This was said in our dialect, which Renato liked and understood well, though he couldn’t speak it. In the village he was known as ‘that bloody Tuscan’, envied because he’d ‘found a cushy job’. But the innkeeper had taken a liking to him, and there was always ‘a drop of grappa’ for us. We drank in silence for a long time, smoking away and gazing at the treetops. Then the host, showing us all the gaps he had between his teeth, took Renato aside and said something in his ear. It crossed my mind that he too was in Intelligence.

On our way back to the Villa we circled round the church, just to lengthen the walk and talk about this and that.

From far away came the boom of a cannon, then a second, then a third. The church windows rattled above our heads.

‘They’re adjusting their range-finders, testing their trajectories. And meanwhile putting a scare into the new arrivals down there in the trenches. Listen, now the Italians are returning fire.’

By now one roar followed hard upon another, and the rhythm increased to a continuous battering. The windowpanes were one continuous rattle. We moved away from the church.

‘It’s odd, this drumfire. I thought they were short of ammo.’

‘A dress rehearsal?’

‘Maybe. Rations have been improved these last few days. They’re doing their level best to raise the morale of the troops, but I don’t think they can achieve much.’

‘D’you think they’re in such a bad way?’

‘Look at their uniforms, they’re all in rags and they’re hanging off them.’

He quickly led me to a spot near the chapel. With the first warm weather the stink of the latrines had intensified. I wrinkled my nostrils.

Renato took his dead pipe from his mouth. He used the stem to open a little gap between the leaves of the lime tree. ‘See those lines?’

‘Laundry…underpants,’ said I.

‘Of the emperor’s officers.’

‘So what?’

‘Try to describe them. Take a good look.’

‘Pants hung up to dry…What else? Well…rather tattered.’

‘Only
rather
? Let’s call them holes attached to scraps of pants.’ He gave me a serious look. ‘If we win it won’t be because Diaz is
better than Boroevic. All generals are good at coming on tough when others are doing the fighting. No, we are going to win because of those tattered underpants. You don’t win if you’re in rags. Do you remember that prisoner from Ancona, down at the depot a couple of weeks ago? He belonged to a captured patrol of ours. The chap who got talking to your grandfather, remember?’

I nodded.

‘He had a new uniform, with all the buttons attached, and boots of real leather, not cardboard. If this is the underwear of the officers, the gods of the Danubian empire, just imagine that of the infantry who have to wade up to their chins to cross the Piave.’ He replaced his pipe in his mouth. ‘If you are reduced to rags then you’re a down-and-out, and an army of down-and-outs never won a war. We are going to win because America has made us a vast loan. I don’t think the Kingdom of Italy will ever manage to repay it, but in the meantime the war will be ours. And what goes for us goes also for the French and for the British. What’s needed in combat is food, water, clothing, munitions, and all these things have to be transported and distributed when and where they are needed.’ He spoke passionately, not looking at me but at the air before him. ‘It’s been a while now that they’ve been eating their mules, and now even rats are running short.’ He shook his head. ‘Those underpants tell their own story.’