Lambrusco (14 page)

“I meant,” I said, “about the way you talk, the only thing wrong is that, when you stop, I find myself looking forward to whatever you might say next.”

“Thank you for the compliment.”

“You're welcome. Now, I want to hurry and change my clothes. If I spend one more minute as I am, I'll go out of my mind. Like your hero, I'll have to send to the moon to get it back.”

He didn't ask if he could take my hand; he just did it. He led me down a short passageway that opened up into a big farmhouse-type kitchen, where a pair of windows had gauzy white curtains. The glass was unharmed. Moonlight was pouring in.

There were no pots on the stove or on the counters, and no sign of food, but the table had been set for four: four soup bowls on four plates, four wineglasses, four forks, four spoons. The Sabatuccis must have taken their dinner with them when they fled.

“Corrado, his wife, her mother,” said Etto, pointing out the chairs they would have sat in. “If you're wondering about the fourth person, it was supposed to be me. They had invited me, but then it was time to go into hiding. You don't need to feel like a housebreaker, in case you do. I belonged here, and you're with me.”

“I feel bad about San Guarino, Etto. I didn't always think of it in positive ways, in the past.”

“That's only because you're not in carpentry. Plus, you're someone, I believe, who'd find it unappealing that a village has only one road.”

“You don't sound so tired, suddenly.”

“I'm getting my second wind. I'll show you where the bathroom is. You'll need some light in there.”

He pulled out a cupboard drawer and took out two candles, a pair of small brass holders, and a box of matches, but instead of giving them to me or setting up the candles himself—the bathroom was just off the kitchen; its door was slightly ajar—he put everything down on the table, as if they belonged there, with the place settings.

“Etto, what's the matter?”

“I think I should go over to the sink and see if the water's running.”

But he just stood there. He seemed to need some help in figuring out the sink's location. He looked like a very old man out in public on an errand, who'd started out so optimistically, full of confidence, but was now in the act of discovering that he couldn't remember what the errand was, or where he'd come from, or if he'd ever stood on that particular sidewalk before, in front of that particular shop.

“Forgive me, but I was being delusional when I told you I have a second wind,” he said. And he covered his face with his hands, bent his head, and started weeping, almost silently at first, then more and more loudly, in heaving waves of sobs, with his shoulders shaking so hard, he could have been standing in an earthquake.

I wondered, should I reach for him, pat him, comfort him, as when Beppi had fallen as a child and hurt himself? Certainly, if there was ever a man who had the right to fall to pieces in a war, it was Etto.

Instead I went over to the sink, turned the tap.

“Etto! Water!”

He'd taken hold of the back of a chair. He must have worried that his tears would knock him over. Was this the first time in his life he'd ever cried? It certainly appeared so. He wasn't very good at it. His sobs had turned into hoarse little yelps, puppy-like—oh, he didn't need me to feel sorry for him, I thought; he was doing just fine on his own.

I picked up a bowl, filled it halfway with cold water, and carried it over to him. He was bent nearly double at the table. I said his name so he'd look up at me—which he did, yelping and snorting and shaking, and making me fear he'd cave in on himself and do something like convulse or stop breathing. I emptied the water in one big splash against his face.

His eyes opened wide; his mouth opened in a wide, amazed O.

I set the bowl down on the table. “That's quite enough of that, Etto. Please find something to dry yourself with. When I've finished changing my clothes, I'll expect you to stop behaving like you're three years old. And I'll appreciate it if, when I put on this garment, you hold back from making remarks about nuns, even if I resemble one, but without a veil.”

He looked at me, sniffling, dripping, blinking hard, straightening himself up to his full height. The tears had stopped. I thought, at first, that the reason he held out his arms to me was merely to make a large, shrugging-type gesture, like the one in the road when he talked about Dante.

Had he known I'd step into them? I hadn't known myself, until I did it. But there were his arms, circling me, pulling me toward him. We were almost exactly the same height.

My face was instantly wet, touching his. The top of his shirt was soaked. “Oh!” he said softly. “Lucia! My goodness!
Ciao!
” He did not appear surprised that this was happening.

“I really have to change my clothes,” I said, as casually as if embracing him, and then turning my head to kiss him, were the most natural things in the world—were things I'd done already, a thousand times. His mouth tasted salty like the sea.

“I'm sorry that I smell bad, Etto.”

“You don't!”

“I do.”

“Paolina Sabatucci,” he whispered, “keeps the good soap in the second drawer of the little bureau, just below the toilet window. The bar at the sink in there is very harsh, and strictly for Corrado, whose hands are so rough, he could just as well clean them with sandpaper.”

He reached both hands to my face, touching the tips of all his fingers to my cheeks, the sides of my forehead, my nose, my lips. He was taking his time about it.

“Does this hurt, Lucia?”

It didn't hurt. His touch was feathery, tender. My eyes were closed. I felt that he'd had the idea to examine me as if he'd just become blind.

Ugo had a gentle touch, Aldo had always said. Ugo was an artist when it came to poking around in sensitive places. Beppi thought so, too.

Oh, no. Just as I was feeling so light, so airy, without pain of any sort, the image of Ugo Fantini began to appear in my mind, as it used to, sometimes, when the man who was touching me was Aldo.

Ugo's face. His eyes, his thick eyebrows, the little scar on his chin. His eyebrows furrowing like they did when he was frowning at something. I'd never thought about him in this way before, but it occurred to me now that he was always frowning at something, always expressing disapproval: stern, stern Ugo.

If he were a composer, he'd be Verdi. Who'd want to imagine Verdi's fingertips against their skin?

I opened my eyes. “Etto, I have
got
to change my clothes.”

“Can you do me a very small favor? Will you promise me, as I remember that there's a mirror on the toilet wall, which may or may not be broken, you won't look into it, not even one glance?”

Not looking into mirrors at certain times was something I was used to. It didn't seem surprising that he'd mentioned it, as if he already knew that about me.

Ceremoniously, as if we were dancing partners leaving the floor, he slipped an arm around my waist and steered me toward the Sabatuccis' bathroom. The door was only open a few inches, and he reached for the handle to push it the rest of the way. Nothing happened. He leaned a shoulder against it, pushed again. Nothing. He gave a little grunt and tried harder.

“Excuse me,” said a voice. A child had come up behind us.

Rudino Pattuelli. “With all respect,” he said gravely, “if you had looked at that side of the house, which we just did ourselves, you would have seen that it's partly caved in. The problem with the door not opening is that there's a bathtub against it, along with lots of other things.”

There were four of them: Rudino, the first set of twins, and the eldest, Marco. “The tub looks new. So does the plumbing. I wonder when they got it,” said a twin.

“I bet it was that ugly old Moscone who did the job,” said the other twin. “Remember him? He had pimples on his nose. He had hair as thick as a beard in his ears. When they threw us out of the village, he said if we ever returned, he'd come after us with the longest length of iron he had.”

The devils! How long had they been standing there?

“What are you doing here?” cried Etto.

Marco stepped forward to respond, in an official-sounding way, which he must have picked up from Annmarie. “We were ordered to find you so we could tell you—in case you didn't hear the truck and the jeep, even though they've been blowing their horns, and everyone's been calling for you—it's time to go.”

“I notice your head's all wet, Signor Renzetti,” said Rudino. “If there's water left in the pipes here, I hope you didn't drink it. It's probably contaminated.”

“We're being evacuated,” said Marco. “By the American Army.”

“They're very sorry about how everything's wrecked, but it wasn't their fault,” said a twin. “When the bombing happened, they were in it, not doing it.”

“San Guarino looks like the moon,” said Rudino. “If the moon had a village on it, this is what it would look like if a giant rock from outer space crashed into it.”

“I had two black eyes once, when I fell off Grandpapa Galto's roof,” said the other twin. “I landed on rocks.”

“Are you Sandro?” said Etto.

“Mario.”

“He's Sandro,” said his twin.

“I don't care who you are. I don't care about your grandfather's roof. Stop talking about black eyes,” said Etto. “No one here has black eyes! I can't imagine why you'd bring up that subject!”

“The army said to hurry,” cut in Marco. “They're not happy about having to wait, but Annmarie told them, Signora Fantini, you're a famous opera star. If they ask for your autograph, please comply.”

“I will,” I said. “Now all of you go outdoors with Etto. I'll follow along in a moment. I have a few small things to care of, on my own, privately, before I'm able to get into a truck, or a jeep.”

“Goddamn,” muttered Etto. He gave me a long, sad look, as if he were about to start crying all over again. “God
damn.
”

T
HE BLOND,
blue-eyed, square-jawed, impeccably close-shaven medic was pleased to tell me his name: Frank Lamb.

Lamb like what's born from a sheep,
agnello.
Or like the first part of what he'd heard was a certain type of
booze
in this part of the world, an Italian sort of champagne, lam-boo-so, lam-booski, who cared what you call it? He was looking forward to having some. It was only a matter of liberating whatever town had the best
package store,
and
bam,
he was going to be a happy guy, for a change. All he'd had so far in Italy by way of the national beverage was one sip from a bottle of something so thick and dark red, well, never mind what it looked like, or what it tasted like.

I was his first-ever opera singer, his first laywoman wearing (when I'd come in) the clothing of a nun, not counting a veil; his first survivor of a burial—sorry about the bombing; and, best of all, his first mother of a heroic partisan. But that was the thing about Italy. You think you know what to expect and all you get are surprises, at every turn.

I was not to call him a doctor. He was a long-distance truck driver, hailing out of Seattle in the state of Washington—not the Washington where the government was, but the other one, the big one, West Coast, the Pacific Ocean, a real state. When you said the one where the government was, you had to also say
District of Columbia.
It was complicated. Even Americans didn't fully understand it.

He'd been all over America. He'd haul anything—lumber, hardware, food, iceboxes, you name it. He preferred cargo that was not alive, but he couldn't afford to be picky. He'd driven pigs, chickens, circus animals, rabbits, goats, lambs like his name, and once, for a zoo, a zebra, which turned out to have been a white pony on which a con man had painted black stripes.

He'd done it all and he was only twenty-eight. They'd assigned him to be my medic because he was the only one in the unit who spoke Italian. The American Army felt I was worthy of special attention.

I was his first-ever patient, in addition to the other firsts.

The unit hadn't been large to start with. Twenty men. For the time being, as I must have figured out for myself by simply looking around, a large percentage of them were in these beds, in varying degrees of injuries and recoveries, as a result of having met up with some Germans. The rest of the army wasn't near this part of the country yet.

This unit was an advance group. Ground reconnaissance. Pioneers, you could say.

Long ago in America,
pioneers
were the people who left their homes in the East and in the middle, and traveled across enormous stretches of wild, hostile land, meeting peril at every turn—blizzards, Indians, wolves, tornadoes, accidents, bandits, diseases. Whatever you could think of going wrong, it did. The ones who stayed alive built houses and set up farms on land they didn't have to pay for. Then many of them died of starvation, waiting for the crops to come in. Compared to that, Germans with heavy guns was a minor inconvenience. It was always good to put things in perspective.

I was not to apologize for all the vomiting. The tricky part about head injuries was that so many of the symptoms took a while to kick in.

I probably hadn't broken anything. It seemed to him that all my bones were in one piece. If my skull had been fractured, even with a crack the width of a hair, it was a pretty good bet I would not be just a little while away from holding up my part of a conversation with him. Which he felt certain I was.

Heads were pretty good with self-repair. Faces, too. Also jaws. And eyes especially. Eye bruises always looked worse than they were. The reason why injuries to the head should cause vomiting, he didn't know, but probably, actual physicians didn't know, either.

Sorry he couldn't offer me morphine, but it said in the medical kit directions, “Do not administer to head injuries.” The
codeine sulfate
seemed to have had an effect. I seemed to be a little more relaxed, now that it was in my system. He was hoping it would stay there. If I didn't manage to keep it down, I'd be faced with the reality that all they had left to kill pain with was nothing.

Could I try to stay awake? He wasn't calling what was wrong with my head a
concussion,
but just in case, it said in the handbook that if one was suspected, the patient was required to stay alert. Sleeping before the danger had passed could result in a sleep that would never be all the way awakened from. In other words, a coma.

It was a shame they couldn't allow civilian visitors. But this was a military place. Regulations were regulations. Wherever they'd taken my friends—well, don't worry, they'd be safe.

Sorry there weren't screens to separate the cots. Sorry there weren't any interior walls, just this one huge room. But at least we had a roof. Well, most of one. Good thing it wasn't raining.

It was terrific I hadn't been cut up. No abrasions, no broken skin. Ice would be the perfect thing. Too bad there wasn't an icebox in this
dump.

It had looked so spectacular from the outside. His first
palazzo
—that is, his first one to go inside. It must have been abandoned around the time when there were still Roman emperors. Italy was his first foreign country not counting Canada, next door to his home state. Five minutes after he'd stepped foot on Italian soil, which was about two weeks ago, he got sick of saying the word “old” to describe things. That also went for “ancient.”

I could rely on him, honest. His medical background was road-and-wheels first aid, but it came in handy. He'd had a lot of experience with pulling over to help accident victims. When you're out on the road, one thing you could count on was that someone was always smashing into something.

One time when he was hauling oranges across a California desert, he happened on a guy hauling water. The guy had fallen asleep at the wheel and crashed into a cactus the size of a
redwood.
All the water in his tank leaked out and evaporated. He wouldn't have died of thirst, though. He'd have died from not having anyone apply first aid to his face and head wounds, plus tell him to
stay awake.
Now, that had been a fractured skull. The guy never drove again.

A redwood was a big American tree, so tall it was unimaginable to an Italian. Did I know about a desert personally? He was asking because he thought he detected a response. Sorry if he was wrong about that. What would an Adriatic Italian know about deserts?

They were the worst place to drive. Nightmares. All that sand. Sand was such a
killer
! Don't even get him going about sand.

The reason he knew Italian was that his second stepfather—there'd been four—had emigrated from somewhere in Umbria.

A stonecutter. He'd worked on American churches, not just Catholic ones, then he ended up in the concrete business, sidewalks and house foundations; a nice guy, never learned a word of understandable English except swears. Even though his mom broke off with him, Frank kept in touch. The other three stepfathers as well as his mother's first husband—that is, the guy who wasn't a step—weren't worth talking about. Sometimes Frank told people that his actual father was the Italian.

You could get away with that sort of thing in America. His mom was in the trucking business, too. In the office end of it. It used to be that he vowed to himself, his whole childhood and adolescence, that no matter what happened in his life he'd get married one time, and that would be that, but unfortunately, or very luckily, depending on how you looked at it, God had given him a disposition that was favorable for the ladies. He wasn't trying to be a braggart, but people often told him he resembled the great American actor Spencer Tracy.

Did I know who that was? In Hollywood he was a king. The greatest thing about him was that he proved you don't have to be suave or even handsome to have women adore you.

Personally, the business with the self-vowing had not worked out. The number of wives he'd had already was two. He didn't have anything lined up for sure for when he got home, but there was a girl in Nevada—another desert state—who'd told him to stop by, to find out if she was still available.

Linda was her name. He'd met her about a year ago at a roadside diner in the
middle of nowhere.
She had hair the color of honey. She was a waitress. There'd been letters back and forth. She could actually be waiting for him. You never knew.

It might be all right to settle down in a place like Nevada, not Reno or Las Vegas, which were cities people usually thought of when you mentioned the state, but maybe one of the lesser-known ones, like Crystal Bay, Silver City, Armagosa, Blue Rock.

He was thinking about it. He'd done some research before he'd shipped out. He'd memorized some names of Nevada places. There was also a town called
Last Chance.
He'd been getting sick of the coast as a base of operations. As a whole, the state of Washington was pretty fucking wet. It rained about three hundred days a year.

Did I know that American word,
fucking
? It came from
fuck.
He only mentioned it because he felt I needed to have a sense of it, considering the company I was in. It was the most popular word in the army, and the most useful word in the English language. Just the other day, a
pal
of his who used to be a college boy came up with the insight that you can use it as a noun, an adjective, an adverb, and every other thing there is. A great, great word. He felt I must have heard it a thousand times since they'd brought me in.

It was impossible to say the
middle of nowhere
regarding a geographic location in Italy, because everywhere was somewhere. But Americans said it all the time. If he had a
nickel
for every hour on the road he'd gone nearly out of his mind from having nothing to look at, because nothing was there, just road and dirt and maybe some trees now and then, or cacti, he'd be rich. A nickel was a coin. It was the second-smallest-in-value portion of an American dollar, after
penny.

Was it unbelievably difficult for me not to talk, seeing as how I was Italian? Soon it would be all right. He and I could have a fine, two-way conversation at some close future point. For the moment, absolute stillness was required. The bones of my facial structure would benefit from the inactivity. The cloths on my face had the need to be aligned, unmoving. He'd do everything in his power to keep them cool and damp for me.

That nun's outfit was bound to be around somewhere. He'd try to find it, but it was in pretty bad shape. He wasn't planning to ask me questions about my reason for having worn it. You don't go into someone else's country in a war without learning that it's impolite to intrude on personal affairs. Had I lost the
wimple
somewhere? He wasn't Catholic, but he'd heard that wimple was what you called a nun's veil. It was obvious I wasn't a nun because my hair was too long for it, and anyway, he knew about my son.

Most Americans called what I did
throwing up.
I looked nice in khaki. The shirt and trousers didn't fit too badly. Sorry they couldn't give me any, you know, underwear.

Sorry there weren't any women soldiers to have borrowed a proper outfit from. Or nurses. The name of the female branch of the army was Women's Army Corps.
WACs,
for short, like
cera,
the wax of a candle, but not like
wacky,
which meant
nuts in the head.
They were very responsible. American military women were the best in the world.

And those gals in Intelligence! Classy and brainy, every one of them. But I must have an inkling of how terrific they were, from having spent some time getting to know, he'd heard, a girl by the name of Malone.

Mallo
was her nickname, he'd been told, like the candy.

Did I know what that was, a
Mallo Cup
? It was a round little chocolate bar with marshmallow cream in the center. It came in a bright yellow wrapper.
Marshmallow
was gooey white stuff, highly sweet. You called it a cup,
tazza,
because it was made in
cupcake
pans—yes, cake,
torta.
To call a pretty girl a cupcake or a
torta della tazza
was an act of affection and admiration.

But as I was likely to have discovered myself, a word like that might not be a
big hit
with a girl like Mallo.

He'd heard she was tough. Too bad she'd disappeared. Too bad she wasn't trying to get inside to pay me a visit, see how I was. The army couldn't stop her like they stopped the civilians. She was army herself. Well, Intelligence.

Was I having some uncomfortable feelings of annoyance and even anger toward that American acquaintance of mine? I might want to say a few things about that later. Army Intelligence people were always up to things they didn't always remember to tell other army people they were up to.