Lambrusco (25 page)

I remembered a magazine article from Rome about a famous soprano—I couldn't recall who it was—who coughed seventeen times in six lines. The audience, the article said, loved it. The singer was called out for so many curtain calls, she finally shouted, “Let me go home, I beg you! I'm so tired!” As if they were holding her captive. Dramatic flair, it was called.

I'd
never
make a sound that wasn't singing in an aria. If I coughed while singing Violetta, or Mimi, or any other dying heroine, the waiters would come with lozenges, a glass of water, aspirin; someone would look for Ugo, who'd come running, a big mistake; Beppi would jump from his nearby chair with his arms out, ready to catch me, as he'd assume I would faint, fall, crack my skull.

Chaos, it would be, with one tiny cough.

“I have thirty grenades in my arms for twenty-nine invaders,” I said to myself. I wondered what the next line would be. I wondered if putting it the other way around would be more useful—as if being realistic had a use.

I wondered how the farmers would feel if I explained that the gossip about Beppi was outlandish, that he'd only blown up one truck. “Oh, we knew that all along,” they'd probably say. “But the reality wouldn't make a good song.”

Funny I hadn't lied about describing operas. “I've never been to an opera.” I hadn't planned to say it. A lack of energy, I decided. I didn't have it in me to come up with the deceptions I'd used in the past, at the restaurant, anywhere, when someone asked the same thing. Oh, back in Sicily before I married Aldo, you know, I went here, I went there, I had pre-performance suppers with such-and-such, and here on the mainland, every prominent house, I've been there, I've seen this, I've seen that, all inspiring, and if I had the time, I'd tell you all about it.

It felt good not to be moving. I waited for Adriano to get the engine going again. The pause was like a brief intermission.

Thirty grenades, twenty-nine enemies in my neighborhood. The tune would have to be lively, like my own squad's song. Back home, they'd often sung it a bit too merrily, sometimes clapping their hands and stomping, as if it were written to commemorate something pleasant.
Oh you ask me why I closed up my shop, brought up my boat to dry land, walked away from that restaurant.

I could hear myself singing it, the only soprano among all those male voices.

Do you want me to say I went into the hills with guns

Because of love in my heart for liberty,

With the fight in my blood for the freedom of my country?

I will tell you, please, put your fancy explanations up your ass.

I went into the hills with guns…

“What's happening? Have we stalled?” said the farmer called Toto.

We hadn't stalled. Adriano had shut off the truck on purpose, because of the obstacle just ahead in the road. What obstacle? Animals? Had they let out their sheep?

No, not animals. Remember that grain warehouse, about four hundred years old, four villages had used it? A great deal of what it used to be was in the road. Stones. Many. A little mountain.

“Fuck,” said Adriano's father. “Fuck, fuck, fuck. Fucking Americans. Fucking
bombs.
” Still, as the tailgate was lowered, and I was helped to solid ground, I had no idea that in just a few minutes, I'd be calling to mind what Etto Renzetti had said about Dante, long ago on the night I kissed him in San Guarino, in that moonlight—kissed Etto Renzetti, and felt so young! Right now I was too busy stretching myself, stomping my feet to get my muscles working again, and singing in my head, all the while, the rest of my partisans' song.

C
ASSAROMILIA
.

Dante Alighieri had problems, but he was never bombed. It's not a metaphor if you've been bombed. Perhaps now, in my arms, you'd like to discuss my hickness—that is, if you're not wishing I was Ugo Fantini. But if you are, I don't mind, as it's the greatest joy of my life to be holding you, under any circumstances at all.

Was that how Etto had put it, exactly? In my arms.

Grenades for my enemies, in my arms. Thirty for twenty-nine.

“Signor Venturoli,” I said to Adriano's father, “what are those shovels for?”

“Call me Berto.”

“Berto, what are those shovels for?”

“A chore.”

“What are those linens for? Your son's arms are full of them, and also the arms of the young man called Nico, and two others whose names I didn't learn.”

“Those are Venturolis. My brother's sons.”

“I had the idea that it's laundry.”

“Well, at one point, it was, so you're not mistaken.”

If only that mountain of rubble in the road were higher! If one more wall had been blown this way, my view would have been blocked.

People. Impossible to know how many exactly. Enough to fill the window-side tables at the restaurant. They looked like an audience.

They stood near one of the bombed houses—no, not a house. A church. In the midst of the rubble was a section of pews, undamaged, and a baptismal font, with part of the bowl missing, leaning sideways against what appeared to be part of the altar rail.

The Church of Saint Someone. Weary Tower. Like it thought it had a bed behind it, waiting. Stefano, that was it. San Stefano. Bombed. That was what they'd been talking about in the truck.

“What are those people doing?”

“Praying,” said Adriano's father.

“All I've been trying to do is go to Mengo.”

“Listen to me. I don't feel right about a woman being left on her own. But this is no place for you. Wait for us down here in the truck. We'll take you where you want to go, later on.”

“I couldn't ask you to do that.”

“You didn't ask. I offered. Will you do that, wait here?”

“For how long?”

“Until we're finished.”

He spoke with farmer bluntness, and with a sad, heavy weariness. Just beyond him, I spotted a footpath, like a way out of a maze. It seemed that a signpost was there, with my name on it, saying “Path to Home.”

“Your advice is excellent,” I said. “Thank you for helping me.”

Then looking back to Cassaromilia, watching him walking away—I didn't want to make my escape until he was out of sight—I saw them.

I hadn't known. I had always called the Pattuellis' village “the Pattuellis' village.” Everyone did. Mauro himself had called it “our village” or “the place we moved to when we got thrown out of San Guarino for not working at Etto's factory, and also for having too many children who, let's face it, are a little unconventional.”

All of them. I took inventory and realized that this felt normal: the counting up of familiar faces, looking for absences. It was the same way Aldo, then Beppi, counted the silver and small objects that could have been put into pockets, after an event with guests who weren't personally known to the restaurant. All the spoons are here, all the forks are here, all the knives are here, Mauro, Carmella, Marco, Francesca, the first twins, Rudino, Antonella, the second twins, and Beppina, squirming in Carmella's arms, looking cross. She must have felt she was too old to be held like a baby. Beppi was the same way, at that age.

And Carmella's father was there, Galto Saponi the fisherman, standing rigidly, with his head bowed low, so that it seemed his body had formed a question mark, and who was that beside him? Ferro Pincelli, older brother of the apprentice cook, pimply little Rico?

Yes, Ferro, there he was, as lean and fit as ever, wearing a dark cap pulled down on his forehead, all the way to his eyes. He always wore caps when he was out in the world among strangers; he didn't like being looked at strangely, for the color of his hair. His father was Apulian, from the toe of Italy, but his mother was as much a Scot as Robert Burns, whose poetry she had translated.

Ferro used to ask me to sing poems called “Red, Red Rose,” “My Heart's In The Highlands,” and “The Jolly Beggar.” But no one had been able to find sheet music for them, although his mother had said music existed, and then the war came. I didn't do recitations.

I remembered that Ferro had been a soldier. The Italian Army was where he'd learned waitering. He'd been a valet to a general. Before that, there'd been boyhood Fascist camp and weekend drills—he'd been a star. He'd been decorated. He'd once shaken hands with Mussolini.

He was obsessed with physical fitness. He used to slip outdoors between customers in the middle of his shift to do calisthenics; he kept barbells in the wine cellar.

Once in the parking lot, late, some staggering-drunk officers started singing anthems, and poor Ferro, washing a table, moved his lips with the words from the instant they burst into
“Giovanezza,”
that Mussolini favorite. When he realized what he was doing, he was so upset that he cried out, “I thought I'd unmemorized those goddamn words! I nearly killed myself unmemorizing them!” He picked up the bucket of water he'd been dipping his sponge in, poured it out on his head, threw himself down to the floor, and began performing push-ups, frenetically, with one hand behind his back. They couldn't get him to stop, until Beppi refilled the bucket and emptied it on him.

Well, they all said later, goddamn that song—it's been cemented in all of our brains.

Ferro had a wife and four children, all dark-haired. Why had his Scottish mother come to Italy in the first place? It seemed sad not to know.

A pleasant lady. Whenever there'd been tourists from Scotland, she'd show up at the restaurant to talk about Robert Burns. She lived with Ferro and his family. The Apulian had died around the same time Aldo had his first heart attack. Poor man, his death hadn't received much attention, with everyone going crazy over Aldo.

What were those lines? Ferro used to quote from them, in English:
bonny, lassie, sire, lads, auld lang syne.

I was alone, leaning against the truck. I should have learned some of those poems, such as the one about the red, red rose.
“Rosa,”
I said to myself. I tried to remember what a red rose looked like, smelled like. I tried some words like the opening of a song.
“Rosa rossa rossa…”

It wasn't a song. The graveyard next to the church had been bombed. Bombed and bombed and bombed.

The little cemetery was like a field that had just been tilled, ready for planting. The bones could have been old bulbs, or forgotten potatoes, or bits of objects with archaeological significance—medieval tools, Roman statuary, prehistoric creatures whose skeletons had fossilized. The coffins seemed to have bobbed to the surface as if they'd been stuck at the bottom of the sea, and whatever had bound them down there had come loose. They'd risen up with a current and, meeting air, they fell apart.

It seemed that more bombs had fallen here than on San Guarino and the Galimbertis' house combined.

How much simpler those were! All that wreckage: Etto's factory, all those houses, the train station, which I'd been part of. And openings in walls that were big enough to walk through. And the stuff of people's lives catapulted haphazardly outdoors, all strewn and shattered.

Simpler, yes. This was different. You wouldn't think tombs would yield their contents.

I realized I had a connection to people who had been buried, and now were not. I felt I could speak to them. “I was buried myself, in a bombing, not far from here, in San Guarino.”

Here and there, as if someone looped rags to dry on a clothesline, and a wind had whipped them off, I saw cloths from wrappings, all tattered, and filigreed with rips and holes. Pine boards were everywhere, like wrecks of boats on a shore. The ground was heavily cratered, as if an extraordinary storm of rocks had pummeled the earth, as if an evil-minded giant of a god had been at work here, hurling boulders with his massive arms, turning this place into a hell.

Not all the houses had been destroyed. Maybe one of the all-right ones belonged to the Pattuellis, who hadn't noticed me. They weren't looking in my direction.

On the ground, between the people who were standing there praying, and the ruins of what used to be their church, there were bodies laid out in a row, still uncovered, being looked at. A dozen? No, more than a dozen, many more.

The fog had thickened, just above what few trees had been left standing. Bombed trees. Nightmare trees, under a cover of hard-looking fog, unmoving, not descending, not swirling. There must have been fires. The trees still rooted in the ground had few branches left, if any.

Maybe a great deal of the ash lying everywhere had been leaves. Maybe some of it had been clothes: dresses, suits, socks. Maybe some of it had been hair.

An eerie light. White-gray. Not quite twilight. Not sunlight. Beppina Pattuelli slipped out of her mother's arms and took hold of her grandfather's hand, looking up at him.

Those children should not have been looking at what they were looking at. The older ones were like sleepwalkers who'd paused for a moment: stillness, blankness, terror. The younger ones looked droopy and tense and ferocious, like children who've stayed up past their bedtime and plan never to sleep again.

The farmers had reached them. Two of the teenagers, lagging behind, had pulled up their shirts to cover their mouths. The group opened to receive them, and there, I saw, was the Triumvirate.

So this was what they'd been talking about in the Saint's Grove in San Guarino. This was where they'd rushed off to, with Ugo. And the children had found their way here. Of those bodies on the ground, waiting to be covered, waiting for burials, some were very small. Their school friends. Their playmates.

Ugo had been here. He'd been on his way to the Galimbertis' mostly wrecked house from here. Our paths had crossed again. I understood why he'd not been needed here. No one needed a doctor in Cassaromilia.

“On the same day, I suppose, you and I came up from having been under the ground,” I said. I was back to talking to the old dead.

The old dead had no skin. I had skin. I hadn't really been under the ground, only the blown-apart stones of the San Guarino station. I realized the difference. It seemed like a very small one.

The Triumvirate's faces came fully out of obscurity: white-haired Cesare, round-faced Zoli, and that son of a bitch Cenzo Ballardini, the one man in Italy I most wanted to speak to, not counting Beppi. He looked tired. He looked grimy. He looked bewildered. He looked angry. He looked stunned.

A farmer with two shovels handed one to Zoli. He gazed at it as if he couldn't remember what it was or how it worked. The only thing a waiter ever did with a shovel was ply it on the compost pile far out behind the restaurant, a job usually handled by little Rico. Sometimes Beppi went out there to do it himself, to work off steam from some argument, but he'd never do much. He'd just make a good posture about it. He couldn't stand the smell: clamshells, eggshells, fishbones, vegetable peels, stalks of things that couldn't be eaten.

At tilling time, a Mengo farmer who grew most of the restaurant's produce came over with a wagon to take it away. It was Zoli who'd made the fence to enclose it to keep out dogs, cats, vermin: a good fence, high, steel mesh, chicken wire. Cenzo had helped him.

A smell like that compost was everywhere, with no escape vent, not with that fog. The fog was just like a closed trapdoor.

The prayers were over. There was no priest in sight, leading them.

Back at the Galimbertis, were they all in the cellar, waiting for the sounds of the Folcore bombing? There was a cellar. The fog might not have reached them, not yet. Maybe Annunziata had brought her bean soup down there, in case the house was bombed again. Was Marcellina in Polpo's arms, terrified, praying, waiting for the not-thunder thunder, boom boom boom boom and that would be that, and they'd all climb out in silence, to return to what was left of the world, if anything was left?

“Stay in that cellar,” I said, as if my words could escape, compressing the distance from here to there. “Stay, so I know where you are.”

There was another significant movement among the living. Cesare Morigi stepped forward and walked over to what must have been the front door of the church. He stepped carefully, picking up his feet in what looked like exaggerated, too-slow motions, the way a mime might act out climbing up a staircase.

He was going to sing. What song would he choose?

He raised his arms a little, as if shrugging in apology. I saw him make grimace-like motions. I knew he was nervously exercising his jaw.

Poor Cesare, that baritone, that lion of a man, a real Leo, singer at weddings and funerals, frozen with stage fright the one time he'd had the chance to sing at the restaurant. I'd gone to his house to comfort him. For him I had broken my rule of never visiting waiters.