Lambrusco (18 page)

I hadn't had time to count bodies. Many.

What about along the way to the hut where
Annmarie wasn't waiting
?

Many more. I'd kept my eyes looking nowhere but straight ahead. No details. Not all the bodies had been lying flat. I'd noticed shapes. Some of them had appeared to be kneeling. Some of them had been curled up, with knees bent high, and hands covering faces, and chins nearly touching the knees, as if the people who'd lived inside the bodies had tried to make themselves tiny.

Don't think about Annmarie. Don't try to guess where she was.

“Lido, face it, you had a mission, which you screwed up by having a Plan A, and not a Plan B, at least, not a Plan B that was based on actuality,” said Roncuzzi. “Please never do that again. Please expect bombs and guns all the time. But you and Lucia came out of it all right. You made a good idiot back there with the Americans, and we're proud of you. That was something you did in an exemplary way.”

“Thanks. Am I off the hook?”

“For now,” said Geppo.

Roncuzzi bit into a piece of
piadina,
which looked far from fresh. He'd taken it out of his pocket. He chewed it carefully, in a ruminating way. “Is it true some Americans are afraid of us?”

Lido bobbed his head. “Terrified. They think we should work for them. They think if we have guns, and we're not in their control, we might feel like shooting GIs along with Nazis.”

“It's a reasonable speculation,” said Roncuzzi. “Immature, but reasonable, considering what they've been doing to us. What was the diversion outside the
palazzo
supposed to be?”

“An American Army friend of Annmarie's, a lieutenant, had one of those horns they call a
bugle,
” Lido answered. “He was supposed to play a song in the courtyard, a song which, apparently, makes Americans drop what they're doing and start singing, or at least pay careful attention. I don't know what the song is. Maybe it's patriotic. If Lucia and I hadn't made it out the window by the time it was over, the horn player was going to take requests.”

Roncuzzi gaped at him. “A horn player? And they turned their tails and left you as soon as the Germans attacked? And you're interested in not saying that was cowardly?”

“I'm just trying to not be depressed,” said Lido.

“I roasted these chestnuts myself, Lucia,” said Geppo. “At a charcoal fire near a goat pen, where there wasn't a fence. The wood had been taken for fuel and it was all used up. The boy who was minding the goats—of which he only had a few, and they didn't look good—gave them to me in exchange for a voucher for a free lunch every day, back-to-back, for one month, starting from the first day we reopen. I didn't have anything to write the voucher on, and I didn't have anything to write with, but he said he would trust us. He's the skinniest boy I ever saw. I looked at his ribs through his shirt, every one of them. His whole life, he's been wishing he could go to Aldo's. He wants to eat veal.”

“But we only open for lunch four days a week, and they're not back to back,” said Lido.

“Beppi said when we're open again, we're never closing. Lunch, dinner, every day.”

“That's good news,” said Roncuzzi. “The orders will pour in.”

His shop was shut down at around the same time as Aldo's takeover. His wife and Valentina had gone to the other daughter's house in Mirandola. We didn't talk about this, but it was common knowledge that Roncuzzi's son-in-law got along well with Fascists. “Blackshirt-friendly.” That shop of his was still in business, was prospering.

I wondered what Valentina Roncuzzi was eating there. I wondered what feelings had come over her when she learned that her father would join a squad of mostly waiters from Aldo's, including Lido Linari. A girlish lightness? A woman's smile curving slowly, privately?

Had the Americans bombed Mirandola? Was Valentina all right? Was she hoping her father was close to Lido, keeping him safe for her? Was she alone in a room, looking out a window right now—if it wasn't boarded up—at the last orange haze of this sunset? Was she waiting to see the moon come out? Was she pining for Lido? Did she touch her mouth with the tips of her fingers, imagining kissing him, imagining making love with him, in spite of the war?

And I wondered where Etto Renzetti was. The Umbrian's stepson had said he'd tried vigorously to get into the
palazzo
to see me. With Marcellina.

I didn't want anyone to know I had no memory of how I'd got there. I'd kissed Etto. I'd listened to a Pattuelli talking of black eyes, then I'd dressed as a nun without a veil, in that moonlit, half-bombed house. Then I was in an American bed—an army cot—in different clothes. Mosaics on the floor.

I tried to picture Etto and Marcellina at the guarded
palazzo
front door. I wondered what their reactions would be concerning my outfit. Marcellina would accuse me of conspiring with the bombers; she'd scream at me to change; she'd tell me I'd be better off naked if there was nothing else to put on. “The pants are very becoming, but I thought you were much more attractive in the habit, not that, when I held you in my arms, I felt that I was kissing a soon-to-be nun,” Etto might say.

When I kissed Etto, I felt young. As young as a girl like Valentina.

“Lucia, it's getting darker. Those
anziani
are looking at us uncomfortably. We'll have to give up on our American friend with the car. I'm not saying she won't show up for you, but we'll have to leave soon. First, you have to eat something,” said Geppo.

“As moderately well as you look, Lucia, you might do well by having a doctor examine you,” said Roncuzzi. “I wonder where Ugo Fantini is.”

“I wonder where everyone is who's not us,” said Lido. “I wonder if we have to go through the rest of the war like this, walking around looking for everyone who, you don't know where they are.”

“Pincelli went with Galto to the Pattuellis' village to see what happened to the church the Americans blew up,” said Roncuzzi. “Poor Galto was going out of his mind, worrying about his daughter and Mauro and his grandchildren. Ugo might be there, too. Nizarro's looking for Beppi, like we are. It's not as bad as it could be. I'm trying to keep up my spirits.”

“Nomad went with the Batarras to Ravenna,” said Lido helpfully.

“Do you know where anyone is, Lucia?” said Roncuzzi.

I'd decided to follow the example of the silent
anziani.
I thought, “I know where Aldo is. Inside the earth. Put there from natural causes.”

Some of those shapes in the
palazzo
yard did not appear to have been part of nature in any way. Heaps of clothing. Mineral-hard helmets. One body on top of another, two, three.

I wondered if Valentina Roncuzzi was being successful at getting food—vegetables, cheese, eggs, macaroni, bread, nuts, fruit—through the Fascist connections of her brother-in-law. I wished I could send her a message, even though I'd never spoken to her before. I felt bad that I'd never sung her requests. I wished I hadn't listened to Beppi, telling me not to encourage her.

“Stay alive, Valentina. Puccini! Rodolfo! Surviving is worth the effort. Go home at the end of the war and throw yourself at Lido Linari, as wrong for you as he is, and in spite of the trouble it will cause. If you already feel, ahead of time, the romance between you will last only one hour, don't be stupid about it.
Have
it.”

“Lucia, here.” Geppo had peeled three or four chestnuts, which he'd broken apart into very small pieces. He held them out in the palm of his hand, like someone feeding pigeons in a
piazza.

What possessed me to slap him, I didn't know—Geppo Ravaglia, of all people, the most even-tempered man who'd ever drawn a salary from Aldo's.

He was younger than Beppi by several years, but he'd always seemed much older. I'd never heard of him quarreling with anyone, and that included Mariano in the kitchen. Mariano would interrupt himself in the middle of a demented-sounding shouting fit, directed at one of the cooks, if Geppo happened to appear. “
Ciao,
Geppo, how are things going? Is there anything you need?” Then he'd go back to yelling at the cook.

Aldo used to say that the reason he'd hired him, having stolen him from a wealthy family in San Marino, where he'd been some sort of butler, was that it couldn't hurt business to have someone around who was a genuine amateur intellectual and a perfectionist, as maddening as that could sometimes be. No one set a table half as well as he did. No one folded napkins as perfectly.

“The Etruscan,” he was called. He'd come from a town north of Rome. Viterbo. He'd grown up in a house near the museum there.

He was obsessed with Etruscans. He'd talk to customers about the subject as if talking about his present-day neighbors and friends: their coins, their sophistication, their clothes, their sublime, astonishing tombs, their intelligence, their meals, their pottery, their elegant, extremely admirable stone faces.

“Today, we are the Etruscans, and the
fascisti
are those old-time Roman homicidal bastards. But because we know our history, we know we don't have to be doomed,” he'd say to customers who weren't Fascists. “You should order the lobster tonight, for solidarity with creatures who have excellent systems of self-defense.” He was equally at home with people with educations and people without.

No one held it against him that he'd had almost no formal schooling. He was unable to add up a bill, and had to have Beppi do it. A customer would order spaghetti with squid and he'd say, “Good choice, that's just what an Etruscan would do. Did you know our Roman ancestors began the process of exterminating them by smashing tablets on which their language was written? They cut off the hands of every Etruscan caught writing. Then they took over their irrigation system. And finally, they stopped being so subtle, and just slaughtered them. I recommend the roast pork for your next course, with a side of peas, do you agree with me? An Etruscan would answer yes to that, by the way.”

He called himself “a private ancient historian and archaeologist who earns a living as a waiter.” He'd come to Romagna to look for burial sites. He wanted to create a new museum, perhaps near Aldo's, not that he'd found anything to put in it. He didn't have a building yet, either.

He'd been waiting out fascism, even when things kept getting worse. The Fascists hadn't wanted him to dig. “No digging.” He was probably being watched, but he dug anyway, late, late at night, feeling his way into the past. He was never assigned lunch shifts because that was when he slept. He had married, not long ago. Younger than Beppi and married.

His wife was a Mengo girl, someone's sister. A cook's? Yes, Fausto Fabbi's sister, blond like he was. There was one child, an infant, a boy.

All these things, these facts, presented themselves in a vivid way in my mind, crowding each other, as if striking Geppo were a stone thrown into a pond, and these were the ripples.

I threw water at Etto, I remembered.

Throw water on one man in moonlight and the next day, by light of the setting sun, take a swing at another. There seemed to be something rational about this. Something consistent. I wasn't sorry I'd hit Geppo. What was happening to me? It wasn't that I'd merely swatted him away. I'd discovered a hidden reserve of energy, and with a long, wide thrust of my arm, I hit him hard. I hadn't realized my hand had been fisted.

“I'm not hurt. It's not a problem. Don't apologize. Don't even think about it. Larth hits me harder than that all the time, in far more sensitive areas,” Geppo was saying to me.

I didn't know who Larth was.

“My baby,” said Geppo. “The name is Etruscan.”

“Remember what Beppi said about it?” said Lido. He was trying to hide his relief. He was glad I'd swung at Geppo, not him. “He said it's awful. He said it's like the sound of a fart. He wanted you to change it.”

“Well, I didn't,” said Geppo.

The pieces of chestnuts went all over, mostly on the floor, like the time Lido dropped crabs off his tray because Beppi had compared him to a girl.

Who would have thought the toothless old man on that bench could come inside so quickly to pick them up? He looked as if he hadn't moved fast in fifty years.

Roncuzzi leaped up from his chair. The old man was on his hands and knees next to it, feeling for crumbs below the table.

“He's the oldest man I ever laid eyes on, and he's starving!” Lido cried.

Roncuzzi had just finished eating the last of his bread. His hand went to his chest, just above his ample belly, as if he'd felt a terrible urge to protect the bit of food inside him: a guilty look came over him. The lines of his face wavered in sad confusion.

“We didn't even ask these people if they were hungry,” said Geppo. “We're Italians, for Christ sake. We're Italians and we haven't got food. You know what I think about the parable of Christ on the hill with the loaves and fishes? I think it's bullshit. I think there won't be a Catholic left in Italy when this is all over.”

Roncuzzi took hold of the old man's elbow and pulled him up to his feet, which looked as easy as if he'd picked up empty clothes.

The bench outside emptied all at once, like at a soccer match. Maybe the
anziani
thought Roncuzzi meant harm to their friend. But it became apparent that they had lost what self-control they'd had. They came crowding inside, letting out strange hissing noises, and little yelps and muted groans.

They wanted the few chestnuts on the table that hadn't been peeled yet, and the shells Roncuzzi and the waiters had tossed into the fireplace, as if they hadn't been picked completely clean.

Lido and Geppo had bread in their hands, but the two of them were quick to put it in their pockets. Lido got the rest of the chestnuts before anyone else did.