Eastern Passage (15 page)

Originally we had intended to continue south to Sicily, on whose beaches the regiment had landed in July of 1943 as part of the first successful Allied invasion of Europe. However, after Ortona I could no longer stomach the bloody memories, so we turned our backs on war for a time in an attempt to escape the grim moods of battle, and became tourists. Crossing back over the Apennines to western Italy, we gaped at Rome, Naples, Pompeii, Positano, and such places as we became part of the frenetic flow of mostly well-to-do foreigners who were again enjoying themselves “doing Europe.”

Two weeks of flitting amongst historic monuments, famous art treasures, and the fleshpots and watering holes celebrated in glossy tourist guides were enough for me. In the last week of May I decided we should return to Britain, where I could refresh memories of the regiment’s relatively unbloodied sojourn during the early years of the war.

We turned north and after a long day’s journey came to Florence.

In 1944, when I had last been here, the Germans had held the north bank of the river and we the south. Although Florence had been declared an open city the Germans reminded us by firing occasional artillery salvos across the narrow waters that they were not to be trifled with.

One afternoon I had gone looking for a place to establish an observation post from which our artillery could direct counter-battery fire and had come upon a riverside estate behind whose high walls rose the cupola of a
palazzo
that looked as if it might serve my purpose. I walked through the open gates. Attached to the shabby and much-neglected
palazzo
was a large greenhouse, which, instead of flowers, housed a sculptor’s studio.

At that moment a shell screamed overhead and crashed into a row of houses beyond the walls of the estate. I thought this might be the ranging shot for a possible barrage. If so, a greenhouse would be a poor place near which to linger. I was about to dash for the shelter of the
palazzo
itself when movement behind the glass caught my eye. A white-haired man, handsome and erect, was working at a plaster bust. Another shell exploded and I dropped on my belly. When I cautiously rose again, the sculptor was still at work, apparently unperturbed.

Curiosity overcame caution, and I found a door and entered. The sculptor, who appeared to be in his seventies, glanced up, laid down his tools, and came toward me.

“Welcome, sir.” The vibrant timbre of his voice belied his apparent age. “Will you have some wine?”

As we sat on ornate iron chairs under that precarious roof drinking his wine, I saw that the greenhouse studio was full of plaster casts and draped figures – none of them finished.

“You observe my work is only clay and plaster,” he remarked, smiling. “Allow me to explain.

“In my younger years I cast my figures in bronze, but then I came to understand the futility of that. How long could even bronze outlast
me? A millennium or two perhaps. A fleeting moment in the torrent of the years. So now I work only in clay and plaster – honest materials of the moment – and I no longer harbour delusions of immortality.”

Later, as I walked with him through the greenhouse, an almost-life-size clay bust of a young woman caught my eye. He drew off the wet drapes covering her and she was lovely. Realizing that in a few weeks her clay would dry and crack, and she would disintegrate, I was half-inclined to think the old man mad.

Two days later the Germans took note of the high cupola of the
palazzo
and presumably concluded, as I had done, that it could serve as an observation post. Their guns removed it with Teutonic thoroughness – together with the greenhouse and most of the rest of the
palazzo
. Perhaps the old sculptor escaped. I never knew. That night we moved on to fight another battle.

Frances and I left Florence intending to follow the coast to Marseilles then drive north up the Rhone Valley. But that night when we stopped not far from Genoa, we heard that Sir Edmund Hillary had just scaled Everest. The news set us thinking about mountains – and changed our plans.

“What do you say we skip southern France and go over the St. Bernard Pass into Switzerland instead?” I asked my wife. “That way we’d get a look at Mont Blanc, and maybe the Matterhorn.”

“And
meet the St. Bernard dogs? Let’s do it!”

Next day, however, we learned the St. Bernard Pass was snowbound and closed to all traffic. Moreover, nobody had any idea when it might be open again. We looked at one another and decided to press on anyway.

As we entered the mouth of the Aosta Valley, the mountains began to appear through rifts in the overcast. The clouds were luminous with unseen sunlight. Slabs of wet, green stone in marble quarries along the road glowed eerily. Grape terraces marched up
steep slopes until they were lost in the high mists. We climbed higher and the valley narrowed. After a couple of hours it unexpectedly widened again to reveal the city of Aosta.

It was now almost dark, and time for us to roost. The Albergo della Corone e Poste in Aosta’s main square looked like our kind of place. Its several ancient buildings surrounded a roughly cobbled inner courtyard where post carriages had once rattled and horses had been stabled. The guest rooms within were panelled in dark woods and dimly lighted by leaded windows.

All was presided over by three brothers in their sixties. Frédéric, the courtly middle brother, showed us where to sign the book. Balding, vivacious Domenico led us to our wainscotted room overlooking the square. The oldest brother, portly and rubicund François, escorted us in to dinner then became our waiter, wine steward, and general factotum.

He served us minestrone, steamed trout, tender little steaks with artichokes, strawberries and cream, fresh apricots and cherries, cheeses, and a variety of local wines. Between times he entertained us with tidbits about the history of the Valle d’Aosta. We were the only guests, so the other brothers joined us for coffee and liqueurs.

Glowing with good food, wine, and company, we went to bed under a feather comforter. The steady rumble of rain on lead-sheathed roofs sounded like a benison.

The rain pelted down all night, the wind whined in the chimney pots, and the barometer plummeted. After a late, luxurious breakfast, I dashed across the square to the regional tourist office. The woman behind the desk shook her head regretfully.

“The St. Bernard passes are still closed, I think,
signore;
but if the telephone is working I will call.”

For a long time it produced no response. When it did, the news was not good. Two ploughs, one working from each direction, had failed to cut paths through the snow fields of the Great St. Bernard.
A hurricane was blowing through the Little St. Bernard. Snow and sleet were beating down on both.…

She smiled sympathetically and suggested we forget about the mountains for a while.

The Albergo Corone was warm and snug so we settled down to endure the delay in comfort. During breaks in the weather, we walked about the old town, explored the countryside, or sat in the snug drawing room of the hotel while one or other of the brothers regaled us with stories about the Valle.

The brothers were a saga unto themselves. Fleeing religious persecution, their paternal ancestor had come over the Little St. Bernard from France late in the sixteenth century.

“He was a dissenter from the Roman faith who only escaped burning because he had a good horse and good sense,” François told us. “He led that horse, or it led him, across the pass in mid-winter. The Valle applauded independent ways so it took in horse and man. They went to work for a hostelry. Both produced big families. In time our family took over this hotel while the progeny of our ancestor’s horse carried the mail and hauled coaches from one end of the Valle to the other.”

“Yes,” added Domenico, “and the offspring of both were all dissenters. They still are.” He grinned at his brothers. “We three manage not to agree on anything for very long.”

There were no post horses at the hotel now but the equine branch of the family still prospered in the nearby Gran Paradiso National Park, where they earned their living carrying visitors into an alpine wilderness.

The peaks and valleys of the Gran Paradiso were home to some of the last wild wolves in Europe; to the almost equally rare chamois (a sheep-like antelope); and to the ibex, a wild goat that a century ago was abundant all through the Alps but now survives, precariously, only in a few parks.

“All the wild creatures are going,” said Frédéric gloomily. “That is man’s law. Unless a creature becomes our slave it must go. Even the lammergeyer, that wonder of the skies, must go. That is man’s law.”

Lammergeyers are enormous birds of prey closely related to eagles. In all of Europe, they still existed
only
in the Gran Paradiso, where at the time of our visit fewer than ten remained. Yet even in the park they were persecuted – for their eggs, which were sold to rich collectors for as much as five thousand dollars each!

One night the weather broke, and in the morning we heard that ploughs had reached the col of the Grand St. Bernard. It was time for us to go. The brothers gathered in the courtyard to wave us off and to give us a farewell present. It was a short-handled shovel.

“Leave it in the hospice at the Pass,” Domenico told us. “You may not need it but then again you may.”

They gave us another parting gift as well. When we stopped that night, we found six straw-wrapped bottles of their own best wines stowed in Liz’s trunk.

Ten minutes after leaving Aosta we were climbing into heavy clouds that dimmed the car lights to a pallid glimmer. The scenery we
should
have seen must have been spectacular. To the right the Matterhorn, and to the left Mont Blanc. We saw nothing. In second gear, sometimes in first, we groped through an impenetrable murk. So it went for an hour, by which time we had climbed six thousand feet.

Then we emerged between two layers of cloud and could see a little way about us. Behind was the steeply inclined trough of the valley, clogged with roiling clouds. Around us was arctic tundra, barren and rocky, leading the eye to the snowy peaks of mountains on a level with us. Ahead was a wall of rock rising, so it seemed, perpendicular to our path but scarred by a road climbing its face in tortuous switchbacks.

We drove on and in places our wheels spun. Water vapour reached the carburetor and the consequent lurchings did nothing to ease the strain of manoeuvring along the ledge. Snowbanks appeared and grew deeper until they hemmed us in, sometimes ten feet deep. Masses of wet snow slid into the ruts and several times we had to halt and dig our way clear. The murk closed in again and brought with it a driving wind laden with sleet that clogged the windshield wipers.

The desolation seemed absolute until we swung around the last hairpin bend of hundreds and there before us was the striped barrier of a customs post. Seldom have I seen a sweeter sight.

Only one man was on duty, a half-frozen youngster who gaped at us from a face blue with chill then quickly raised the barrier to let us by. He was a realist who understood that passports and papers were meaningless up here.

“Go with God!” he cried, and fled back to his hut.

We were now on the col at more than eight thousand feet. A gale from Switzerland drove over the pass into our faces. Liz crawled on until the grey bulk of the hospice of St. Bernard loomed ahead. An unadorned, massive, oblong stone structure several storeys high, it looked more like an enormous barracks than a hospice. It seemed to be abandoned. Nobody came to the heavy door when I pounded on the panels, but it was not locked so we pulled it ajar and went inside. We wandered up and down damp, stone-slabbed corridors, finding no human beings. Finally I summoned the courage to hammer on a heavy bronze bell. The echoes died into silence, and we were about to leave that dark and frigid place when a lay brother appeared. He was dwarfish in stature, hard of hearing, and not pleased to see us.

By this time I wanted only to be safely down from the pass into springtime again, but Fran was adamant about the dogs. They had brought us this far and we were going to see them. Where were they? The lay brother gestured toward the door but declined to be our
guide. So we went out into the storm, wondering if we stood a chance of being rescued ourselves if we went over some unseen cliff.

A path marked by a red rope strung on long poles wandered off over the drifts. Sinking knee-deep in wet snow, we followed the markers until we came to a low stone building. The door swung open at my touch but again no human being was there to receive us. Presumably the dogs’ guardian was holed up in the monastery with the rest of his tribe of troglodytes.

Several St. Bernard dogs were curled up in too-small pens, noses under tails. With some trepidation, we walked down the corridor between the cages to the pen of a gigantic beast whose name, according to a tag on his cage, was Barry. Barry woke slowly, peered at us from bloodshot eyes, and laboured to his feet. I reached through the bars and scratched his ears. When I desisted, he raised an enormous paw, intimating that I had better scratch some more. I did as he wished, while suggesting that he was a shirker who ought to have been out doing his duty in the storm. He gaped hugely as if to say, “My grandfather might have gone out in weather like this, but those were other days.”

We left the icy kennel feeling dispirited, for it was clear that in this new age the magnificent dogs were merely objects for tourists to stare at. Returning to the hospice, we managed after a great deal of difficulty to find another monk. When I explained that I was a writer and interested in the story of the hospice, he led us into a chill vault that served as a museum and left us there.

The museum offered faded collections of plants, badly stuffed birds, stone implements jumbled in confusion, and a moth-eaten
stuffed
St. Bernard dog. In addition, there were a few faded pictures. One was of the original Barry who was credited with having saved the lives of twenty-two travellers caught by blizzards on the pass. For the rest, only empty collars, cracked with age and green with mildew, hung on a damp stone wall.