Lambrusco (17 page)

Well, mother, wife or girlfriend, and sisters, too, if he had some, couldn't hold it against me for wanting his boots, especially since I already had his clothes. And the reason I was barefoot in the first place was that I'd been
bombed by an American.

I'd lost two Berettas because of that American, besides my shoes. My feet were as raw and aching as if I'd walked on broken glass, which, quite possibly, I had done.

There weren't any pistols lying around for me to seize and make off with, but those boots were just sitting there. They were made of good brown leather, ankle-high, in excellent condition, with thick black soles. They looked like my size.

I saw I had a chance. In the noise and confusion, I might not be noticed in a dash toward that cot across the room. It was close to the surgical area, where makeshift curtains of tent canvas had been strung up on ropes. They'd collapsed, along with part of the outside wall.

Mortars, I guessed. Sunlight appeared in places that five minutes ago were solid stone. The surgical area consisted of a high old marble-topped table, probably from the
palazzo
's dining room. The canvas had toppled on most of it, like a soiled old tablecloth at the end of a meal, as if whoever cleared away the plates and glasses and silver had forgotten it.

But it didn't fully cover the body of a man along its length. A soldier. A big one. His rigidity contained the look of someone who had died. His shirt had been torn open. Blood was everywhere, slowly being absorbed into the canvas.

“Lucia! Come! We're going into the cellar!”

Lido pointed to a back door. He couldn't understand why I wasn't in a hurry to go. He'd never been under fire before. I shook him off me. I could get to safety on my own.

“Go, go,” I said. “I'll be right behind you.”

“You have to go first.”

“I'm older than you, so do as I say. Go on.”

I hadn't needed to mention my age. I was the widow of his first boss and the mother of his second, but who was the one who'd kept everything going all those years? Did people pour into Aldo's for the food? The location? There were a dozen better restaurants on the coast!

He had no choice but to obey me, and anyway, I couldn't bring myself to ask him to get the boots for me, or even to mention them. He hadn't looked over at that part of the room since the shooting had started. He didn't know about the soldier on the table. He hadn't seen anyone dead from a war yet.

Off he went. I lowered my head, as if caught in a storm, and made a beeline for the boots. I was able to shut away everything else—all movement, all noise. I was good at it. It was the same thing that went on at Aldo's, when it was
time to go on, Lucia,
and I'd make my way to the front, to the spotlight-spot, through obstacles of tables, chairs, diners, waiters, outstretched arms and legs, those crabs off Lido's tray that night, and sometimes babies, crawling about underfoot, or a kitten or puppy some patron had smuggled in, undetected by the staff until it jumped out from its hiding place and I'd manage, just in time, not to step on it.

Did the clatter from the kitchen bother me when I was singing? Did a patron, in a fit of coughing? Or cars going noisily by in the road? Or Fascists, taking out guns and laying them alongside their plates?

I squatted down to get the boots, leather shiny and newly cleaned. I clutched them to my chest, as I'd held on to my purse long ago last night in the Saint's Grove, lying on the seat of what used to be Ugo's car.

Oh, no, I thought, my purse.

Where was it? There weren't any candy boxes full of bullets in it—Annmarie had taken them for the Lugers. If the Americans had it, they'd have searched it. Had it been with me when I walked in the moonlight with Etto? I couldn't remember. What about when I'd thrown myself into his arms? Was it hanging on my shoulder when I kissed him?

What was I going to do about Etto?

He was certain to be out there somewhere, waiting for me, watching for me, troubled and frightened and upset and possibly in shock all over again, if it had worn off the first time. How could I undo kissing him, embracing him?

“It was the moonlight,” I might say. “Etto, the moonlight made me a little crazy.” My purse was nowhere to be seen. Etto would take it badly. He'd gone to so much trouble to find it for me. “I'm sorry to disappoint you,” I could say, and really mean it.

I did not look at the jockey soldier, but I knew that he had died. I could feel the presence of death without looking, like a change in the temperature.

A dead American was on the cot just behind me, and a dead American was on the marble table just above me. You have to learn in a war to pretend to be wearing a blindfold. I'd only just thought of this, but I said it to myself as if they were words of wisdom, handed down to me by someone who knew what they were talking about.

Perhaps those words belonged in a song:
A blindfold in a war, a blindfold! Pretend to be wearing a blindfold!

Gunfire was still going on. I could pick out the different sounds of pistols, rifles, shells.

I knew there was a cellar to go to because Lido had said so. I didn't know what town this was. I didn't know where I was. I'd have to remember to tell Frank that there are
middles of nowhere
in Italy after all.

There was no sign of him. Outdoors for a smoke. The Umbrian's stepson.

The boots felt all right. A bit heavy, but all right. I'd have to forget about my purse. I'd have to start making a list of the things that had been lost: the black market flour, my purse, my good wool coat, my own clothes, my shoes, the Berettas, the habit, Ugo's medical bag, Ugo's car, Etto's factory.

Beppi couldn't be on it.
We're going to find him, you know.
The list was for things I knew I'd never see again. Beppi was somewhere. When I found him, I'd know exactly where he was.

“Grazie, americano,”
I said to the jockey soldier from Kentucky, without looking at him. “I'm grateful for the
fatigues
and the boots. May you rest in peace forever, to make up for the hell you have died in. If I believed in a thing like heaven, I'd hope—like the Umbrian's stepson, wherever he is—they have horse races, and you enter them all, and win all of them, amen.”

T
ITO
R
ONCUZZI,
the butcher, was one of those staunch, stout Mengo men who were called by their surnames, like Nizarro. He was old enough to be Lido's father; it seemed he'd decided to make the most of it. “You're in trouble, Lido.”

With his solemn, chubby face, and the pale dome of his head, and the half-moon of tidy, gray-black hair around the back, in a perfect crescent, exactly from the top of one ear to the other, Roncuzzi carried a weight of authority. His high forehead was multi-wrinkled, like a sideways swatch of corduroy. His deep-set eyes held the gleam of someone who is self-possessed, confident, and irreproachable: a world unto himself.

He looked like a painting of a medieval monk in a shadowy cell of a room, in any city in Italy—a monk whose age you could measure in centuries, who looked out at the world with an expression full of character: thoughtful but not bookish,
simpatico
but highly judgmental, shrewd but not narrow-minded, decent but not sanctimonious, openhearted but discreet, and involved one hundred percent in all things of the senses which life had to offer, as if, behind him, blocked from view, there was a happy, large-bosomed woman, by a table laid with brandies, wine, all sorts of delicacies, and naturally, platters of excellent meat.

His father, also named Tito, had been a butcher. Both his grandfathers had been butchers. His wife, originally from Mirandola, was the daughter of one. The elder of their two daughters had married one, and she'd gone to Mirandola with her husband when he took over the shop of his grandfather-in-law, at his death.

But the other daughter, Valentina, seventeen, was an independent-minded girl who refused to eat anything that had once been alive. She had plans to go into office work, perhaps in accounting—she was good with numbers. The war had halted her schooling. She didn't want to work for her father; she never went into his shop. She liked to think she'd landed in that family by mistake.

Roncuzzi didn't come to the restaurant unless it involved deals; he liked to eat at a
trattoria
that only served seafood. But his family used to turn up often. His wife and daughters had the right to request songs.

Only Valentina ever had, and it was always the same thing,
La Bohème
—the stove, the freezing apartment, Paris, and Rodolfo, Rodolfo, Rodolfo. Eventually, we realized she'd set her sights, as Beppi had put it, on Cherubino.

“Mama, don't encourage her.” He couldn't bear the thought of losing Roncuzzi; a lovesick, underage daughter of a principal supplier, he didn't need.

He wouldn't let Lido near Valentina's table. He told him he'd have the cooks cut off his beautiful hair if he so much as looked at her; he'd be cranially skinned, like a rabbit. “Mama, if that girl wants a seducer, go to an extreme and give her
Don Giovanni.
It's the one thing Mozart did well, like an Italian. Set it up nicely, then give her the floor as it opens at the end, and he drops feet first, shrieking and howling, to his infernal, everlasting reward.”

I knew from Marcellina that, one night at the restaurant, Valentina composed a note to Lido, and gave it to the waiter at her table to be passed along. The waiter was Nomad, one of the youngest; if it weren't for Lido, he would have been the handsomest. He must have seemed, in Valentina's eyes, sophisticated and bohemian, from his experience living abroad, even though it was England, not France.

Naturally, Nomad read the note before tearing it up and dropping the pieces in the kitchen fire. It contained the directions to a private little stream behind the villa of a friend of hers, where Valentina spent weekend afternoons. “How I love that bubbly water! How I look forward to talking together! How lonely I am!” Then the takeover had happened.

Roncuzzi couldn't have known about any of that, or he wouldn't have talked to Lido so amiably.

“You were lucky,” he was saying. “But remember, in the future, the next time you go into an unfriendly building, especially if you're trying to rescue someone, you'll have planned what to do if your first plan fails, which, I promise you, nine times out of ten, will happen, war or not.”

Lido nodded at him self-righteously. He was bursting with the desire to defend himself. Until now, he'd been quiet.

With all respect, he felt he'd done nothing wrong. He could swear he'd never said “cellar” in the way I thought he had meant it. When the attack had begun, he came to the conclusion that it was not a good idea to stick around, so he'd said, in a general way, something like, “Lucia, come on, there's a cellar.” It was fully nonspecific.

He'd simply assumed that the
palazzo
taken over by the Americans had a cellar.

Who wouldn't have thought the same? Attack, cellar! The two things went together like rain and umbrellas.
Palazzi,
including run-down, abandoned old ones, were all the same. You had a roof, you had walls, you had floors, you had mosaics, you had a cellar.

It was common sense. He hadn't lost control of himself when the Germans turned up for a battle. He hadn't panicked. If the other partisans suspected he was out of his depth as a partisan, they were wrong. Did anyone care that he was the only man in that battle who didn't have a gun?

He didn't have a gun! He was supposed to get a Luger from my run. It was his turn! Why did he have to be the last one to get a gun, which he never got? Even Galto Saponi had a gun, and he was
old,
and all he'd ever done was fish. What kind of a squad let old people on it? Every other one had young men only. Half this squad was middle-aged! Didn't anyone think that was weird? It was weird! If someone came to Italy and took photographs of squads and put them together in a scrapbook, all the other squads would look
youthful.
One squad alone would look like it had guys who'd gone back to their old school for a reunion!

“Roncuzzi, are you going to let him get away with that?” said Geppo.

“Yes, because he's guilty and he knows it, and he's letting off steam.”

He wasn't just letting off steam! He felt that I had no right to be so mad at him. When he said at the
palazzo
hospital—when the attack had begun—that we were going to hide in the cellar, he was speaking hypothetically! He'd never said he
knew
there was a cellar, or where it was, or how to get there.

In fairness, he deserved some credit! That tipped-on-its-side American truck in the
palazzo
yard had offered plenty of protection. He was a fully competent partisan! He'd done stupendously well with his impersonation of an idiot! Why was everyone picking on him?

His plan had been, hide in the cellar, then, as soon as possible, get to the golfer and her friends. Right here. This was the meeting place. Honestly, no one would have predicted that the golfer and her friends would not have been waiting as promised.

He wasn't saying that the golfer was a cowardly runner-away, or a driver-away, since the car was gone, too. He didn't want to insult her. He knew she'd been helpful to partisans, and to me—this wasn't personal. But still, an empty space where someone's supposed to be waiting for you was a really, really empty space. One naturally felt a little suspicious.

He was willing, though, to say he was sorry for not having planned ahead of time where to go, specifically, in case of an attack, or if the original plan fell apart. But how was he to have known that? This was his first war!

It had turned out well! The escape had been accomplished! And it didn't matter that Roncuzzi and Geppo had been looking for Beppi, not us, when they found us.

A satisfactory outcome! The Germans had retreated! The American Army held on to the
palazzo,
not that it did partisans any good, since that entire unit was
antipartigiani.

And if there'd been a cellar to hide in, we never would have been rescued. Geppo was all right with tight, dark spaces, but Roncuzzi, absolutely, would have had none of it, and they never would have separated. It was a blessing there hadn't been a cellar! Why were we talking about fear and mistakes, instead of the joy when we were found accidentally?

All right, so there'd been a bit of a fright when I'd run out of the
palazzo
and felt confused, without a cellar I'd thought was there. It was only a couple of seconds!

Roncuzzi was claustrophobic. He was worse than Beppi about it. Once, in his apprentice days, he'd been stuck in a meat locker for four hours. He didn't want to talk about it, but he never wanted to experience anything like it again. That was the reason why most of the walls of his shop in Mengo were glass.

“It's true, Lucia,” said Roncuzzi. “I'm not taking Lido's side, but if you don't count Beppi, I believe I'm the most claustrophobic human being there ever was.”

“I didn't know that,” said Geppo. “Are you feeling that way now?”

“No, this place is all right. Depressing, but all right.”

The stone farmhouse—a hut, actually, consisting of one room—must have once been part of the
palazzo
's estate. The four of us were seated at a rough old table in front of a fireplace that looked and smelled as if it hadn't been used for a long time. We sat on upside-down wooden barrels that smelled like apples. There were six. No chairs. It seemed no one had lived here for years.

There was one small window, with closed shutters. Boards had been nailed in crossbars on top of it. There was no plumbing, no water, no sink, not even a basin. The only other furniture was a narrow bed made out of logs. The mattress was flattened straw. No blankets, no sheets, no anything. But people were living here: the four old women and two old men who'd let us in. Their average age was probably eighty. There hadn't been room inside for us all.

Only one of them spoke to us: a soft-faced, gap-toothed woman who appeared to be the oldest. She was the one with the most wrinkles and seemed to be their leader. She didn't look Romagnan—although the others did—but she spoke in dialect, which Roncuzzi translated for me. I'd never got the feel of it.

“We'll let you hide here for one hour and then you leave.”

The two waiters and Roncuzzi had questioned them but got nowhere. Why are you here? Where did you come from? Where are your families? Are you related? Are any of you married to each other? Are you wounded? Are you sick? Are you lost? Do you know who this famous lady is, in her American-uniform disguise? Why aren't you answering us? You're safe with us, for Christ sake, we're partisans.

No response whatsoever. “Stubborn beyond words, and twice as tough,” Roncuzzi had said. “If they were cattle, they'd never end up on anyone's plate. The knife does not exist that would allow me to section them.”

The
anziani
had crammed themselves together on a pew-like bench just outside. The low doorway was very small. The door was open; dusk was falling. It seemed as if they'd stepped outdoors to enjoy the sunset.

Maybe they'd come from one of the boardinghouses near the shore. They wore too-tight coats, all strangely bulky. They must have been wearing layers, perhaps of all the clothes they owned. One of the men was completely toothless. The woman who'd spoken to us wore a green-and-gold kerchief around her head, tied in the back. It was hard to make out the design of the cloth; it was filthy. It was possible that some of those stains were bloodstains.

They had no belongings, nothing.

It was chilly and damp. My fatigues did little to hold back the cold. Roncuzzi offered to give me his jacket, but I didn't accept it. He'd been away from Mengo for quite some time, but still, it smelled like a butcher's shop. I wondered if his daughter Valentina made him take a bath when he went home at night, before she'd kiss him to say
ciao.

I knew I should try to eat. The two waiters and Roncuzzi looked at me gently, hopefully. The pain in my face had started up again, worse than ever. It was centered around my forehead and eyes. The tightness of my skin made me know that there was swelling.

“What do I look like?” I said, and they rushed in with all the ways they could think of to say fine, fine, perfectly normal, same as always, a little under the weather, sure, but only from exhaustion and the war, and nothing time itself won't cure.

“Do I have black eyes?”

They looked shocked that I would imagine such a thing.

“Do I have bruises?”

They were even more shocked.

It didn't matter what I looked like. How many soldiers had I counted, dead or dying on the ground, in the time it took me to go with Lido from the back door of the
palazzo
to that bombed-to-its-side truck?

The color of the truck was dull green.
Army drab,
Lido had called it. He'd enjoyed the symmetry of the two of us finding shelter in the same type of vehicle Beppi had exploded. Same vehicle, different army. We'd been lucky.