The Marshal and the Murderer (14 page)

The doctor paused. Perhaps he was aware of little signs of Niccolini's restlessness. At any rate he smiled and got up from his chair to offer them a glass of vinsanto which he took from a hanging cupboard that had probably once held medicines.

'Have a drop of this, it's particularly good. I no longer drink any myself. One's needs get fewer and fewer with time. No doubt I'll eventually give up eating, too, and then my time will have come.' He chuckled, filling the tiny glasses with care. In the meantime I'm very glad to be alive.' He watched them drink, settling down again and refilling his pipe thoughtfully.

'Tina . . . Maria Cristina they christened her, and no brighter than her mother as it turned out -though whatever you may think of the life she leads it's still preferable to being shut in an institution.

'Once relieved of the burden of baby Tina, Maria went back to her old ways and before long Pietro couldn't hold his head up in the town. Up to then the problem had been kept pretty much in the family, as it were, since all she did was hang around ogling the men in the factory. But once the child was born she virtually ignored its existence and started going out. Little Tina was left to the mercies of her grandmother, much to the latter's fury. It even got to the stage where they tried locking her in at nights but night or day made little difference to Maria. Once, on the way back from my rounds on foot, I took a short cut through that orchard down there and found her plumped down in the grass with old Gino Masi, a peasant farmer who was sixty if he was a day. There was no wickedness in the child, she was completely amoral. By '43 there were the German soldiers. You can imagine perhaps why Pietro was eager to join the partisans and escape from what was an impossible situation. He was also in danger of being called up to fight for Mussolini's new Republic. Maria was pregnant again when he left in '44, and for a long time nothing was heard of him. As for Maria . . . well, by that time we had a detachment of twenty or so men of the Wehrmacht stationed up at the villa, most of which they'd taken over for their purpose and, needless to say, Maria found her way up there as often as she could escape the vigilance of her mother-in-law. She understood nothing of the war except that she was often hungry and that her husband had abandoned her. I saw her up at the villa myself many a time.

'The place is a criminal asylum now but in those days it was a mixture of barracks and hospital. We had no hospital here and there was no possibility of transporting the sick in '44. Apart from curfew and restrictions of movement, the Germans had requisitioned everything on wheels. I went up there late mornings and evenings after my rounds. Some of the patients were local emergency cases, but as the Germans retreated towards us from Pisa and from the south the place filled up with their wounded. The villa has seen a lot since the Medici built it. In many ways it's the focal point of the town - you might even say the town wouldn't have come into existence in its present form if the villa hadn't been built. It was the Medici who first brought a group of Spanish monks over here to make Majolica for them - a misnomer that, since it was really Spanish pottery but always imported via Majorca and the name stuck. If it hadn't been for the Medici and that handful of monks who started production up at the villa there wouldn't be the pottery industry that keeps the town going to this day. At any rate, it was from the villa that the Germans held the town under control - though I must say that, apart from their requisitioning, we had less trouble from them than from our local fascists, as vicious a bunch of hooligans as were ever let loose on the world. They cultivated the Germans up at the villa but they got little enough encouragement. The Germans could never quite understand the very personal and parochial nature of Italian fascism. Our local thugs enjoyed strutting about in uniform and contributed little or nothing to the war effort. For the most part the Germans kept out of local disputes and occupied themselves with controlling the town, requisitioning food and trying to defend the railway line and road along the Arno to Pisa.

'At least they fed my patients in the hospital and I could sometimes manage to get a little food or medicine out of them for the more desperate cases on my rounds. That was mostly thanks to the cook, though the sergeant knew well enough that I rarely left the villa empty-handed and turned a blind eye. The cook came of Bavarian peasant stock, built like an ox, Karl his name was. I often wonder what became of him. He always said he wanted to come back here when the war was over but perhaps he didn't even get home alive. Every day, after my hospital round, I used to go to the kitchen and there he'd slam a bowl of soup down in front of me and bellow "Eat!" Then he'd pinch my arm and roar with laughter because I was so thin. While I ate he would point around him at all the objects in the kitchen and demand that I tell him their names in Italian. He'd repeat each one after me^ frowning so much with the effort that his eyebrows met in the middle. His accent was so thick that he could get nowhere near the right pronunciation but he was always pleased with the results himself.
"Ja, jal"
he'd bellow with a big grin when he'd managed to get the word out, and then he'd point at another object and the frown of concentration would return. He rarely remembered a word from one day to the next and with each bowl of soup we'd start all over again from scratch. He took little or no interest in the progress of the war, just went on with his job as best he could, waiting for it to be over. Only occasionally, when he'd had a glass of wine too many, he'd get maudlin and start showing me photographs of his wife and children with big tears in his eyes. "In Germany," he'd explain, as though I couldn't possibly know where he came from. Certainly he didn't know why he should be here.

'As for the sergeant, Sergeant Janz his name was, he was always in a temper about something and almost every time I went up there the first thing I'd hear would be his voice howling with rage. The reason could be anything from an Allied bombing raid to a missing button, it was all the same to him, just one more attempt by fate to get at him. He was overweight with blond, almost colourless hair and white skin that burned to a fierce red in the sun. He could work himself up into such a rage that he would swell up like a huge toad and make his eyes pop out. His men were so accustomed to his rages that they never turned a hair, and after a while I got used to him, too. From what I managed to understand, he was a professional soldier and he was furious that a war had come along to disorganize his perfectly orderly life. Only once was there an incident involving him that frightened me. It happened in the summer of '44 when tension was at its highest. Our trouble was that we were right at the outer edge of two fronts, with fighting at Pisa and Leghorn to the west and movement towards Florence to the east and when the Allied advance guard came up to the Val d'Elsa, unfortunately for us and for Empoli, too, they deviated to the south of us on one side and to the north of San Miniato on the other. Between that time and our eventual liberation there were terrible reprisals and the incident involving Sergeant Janz could well have been expected to end in a bloodbath. Goodness knows, the provocation was sufficient.

"What happened was that, because of severe communications difficulties caused by the Allied bombings, the Germans had set up a telephone wire connecting them with their Praesidium Command at Signa. It was old Gino Masi - the one I told you I'd surprised in the orchard with Maria - who caused the disaster. I'd seen him that morning, as I often did omny way home, collecting dry brushwood not far from here to store for winter kindling. I remember him pausing and straightening up for a moment to wipe the sweat from under his hat and raise his hand in salute. I'm in an isolated spot up here and it wasn't until the early evening when I set out for the villa that I heard anything. I'd found myself a battered old bicycle by then and as I rode through the central square it was soon obvious that something was up. There wasn't a soul in sight and the silence was so thick it made me think a bomb was about to go off. Every shutter in the square was closed, but when I passed the bar I saw that the metal shutter that rolled down over the doorway was open just a crack at the bottom. I slowed down and got off my bike. I could hear a low murmur of voices inside so I tapped and said who I was, asking what had happened. They Wouldn't open up but a woman's voice answered softly that someone had cut the German telephone wires and that partisan activity was suspected. The soldiers from the villa had ordered everyone to stay indoors and were out searching for the break in the wire and the culprits. I pedalled on for a few yards along the empty street, listening to the rattle of my bicycle chain and thinking. As far as I knew, the partisan brigades were fighting further to the south and west of us and an isolated incident like this seemed unlikely. All of a sudden I put the brakes on, almost fell over, turned my bike and began pedalling as fast as I could. A picture had just flashed into my mind of old Masi as I'd seen him that morning. He'd been binding his kindling with wire! It may well be that the thought had half formed itself at the moment I saw him, the thought that he had wire when you couldn't get hold of it at any price in those days. I went on pedalling furiously and the people who were no doubt watching the street through the slats of their closed shutters must have thought someone was dying or that the Germans were after me.

'When I reached old Masi's cottage it was too late. The sergeant was there with four of his men. And someone else was there, too: young Ernesto Robiglio.

It wouldn't have taken much, of course, to discover who'd cut that wire. Masi's cottage was the only house in the area where they'd found the gap in the wire, and there were the bundles of kindling stacked outside his door in the evening sunshine for all to see. The old man himself was standing in the doorway with four machine-guns pointing at him. I think at that point he still had no idea what he'd done. The sergeant, purple with rage, was screaming at him in German and naturally he didn't understand a word. I stayed at a distance under a peach tree, watching. It seemed inevitable that they would shoot him. I couldn't follow the sergeant's tirade any more than old Masi could, but then young Ernesto spoke up, moving forward and pointing to the wire-bound bundles. I couldn't hear exactly what was said but I saw Masi push back his crumpled hat and scratch his head. He tried to explain himself, opening his big hands to express his ignorance and gazing at the offending bundles in dismay. Then the sergeant began shouting orders and the four soldiers shifted their positions slightly. I thought to myself, "This is it," and half closed my eyes so as not to see him go down, waiting for the burst of fire. There was silence and then another burst of shouting from the sergeant. I opened my eyes properly and saw the sergeant stumping away, still roaring, and his men following. Masi was still in his doorway staring after them, as perplexed as ever. There was no sign of Ernesto. The telephone wire was repaired and nothing further was heard of the incident. Nevertheless, Ernesto's part in it became known and after that people were afraid of him. He was generally to be seen hanging around the Fascio during the day but then I began to see him slinking about after dark, too. I had a pass to be out after curfew because of my work and once or twice I'd seen him racing off in a great hurry on a motorbike. Obviously the Germans up at the villa had disappointed him. Ernesto found the congenial company he was looking for among the SS, as we soon found out.

"The summer wore on, the harvest was got in and promptly requisitioned, the Allies still didn't arrive. Maria was up at the villa more often than she was at home, but since her husband was fighting with the partisans most people held their tongues, at least in front of old Signora Moretti who, poor thing, was saddled with two tiny grandchildren and in danger of losing her only son. If she held her tongue, too, it was because they'd have had little enough to eat if it hadn't been for Maria who never left the villa without a big bagful of food.

'Then one hot night in July, Maria's husband, Pietro Moro, came home.'

'I've often wondered since what would have happened to him if things hadn't gone as they did, and found no answer. Looking back, it seems that things couldn't have gone otherwise, as if all his short life he had been moving step by step towards the inevitable end and that nothing could have prevented it, though God knows I tried that night to save him from himself and what was awaiting him. In this very room.

I'd seen Maria that day, in fact, as I was toiling up the hill to the villa, pushing my bicycle. She was coming down in a thin flowered frock and broken sandals, carrying an old shopping-bag heavy with food. She smiled and said hello to me, little knowing that not many hours afterwards she was to go up that hill again and that it would be years before she would come down. Long, silent years.

'That night, it was after midnight, I think, though I didn't know the exact hour, I was awakened by what I thought had been a faint scratching at the shutters of my bedroom window. At first I lay still, thinking I'd been mistaken. All I could hear was the sawing of the cicale out there in the hot darkness. Then the faint scratching came again and someone whispered my name. Without lighting the oil lamp on my bedside table, I got up and unlatched the shutters. The window was already open because of the heat. Pietro climbed in and stood there swaying, his face a pale blur in the darkness. I took his arm and led him in here where the blackout was more efficient and I could light a lamp. Even then I had to guide him to a chair and sit him down. I saw some terrible sights during the war but I can't begin to describe to you how the sight of that boy horrified me. He was badly wounded and his torn clothes were soaked in blood, but it wasn't that. It was his eyes. They seemed to be staring back at me from beyond the grave . . . and the truth of it was that they were. Once I'd seen his wounds I took him through there to the surgery where I undressed him. He was carrying a pistol but he refused to give it up. He held it in his hand as I worked, his knuckles showing white through the dirt as he gripped it in pain. I cleaned his wounds as best I could. He'd been hit in four places by machine-gun bullets. One of them was lodged in his groin and I couldn't risk trying to get at it under those conditions. Once he was bandaged up I dressed him in some clothes of mine which once would have been far too tight for him but which hung loosely on him now. He'd had little enough to eat of late by the look of him. I heated up a bowl of ersatz coffee and gave him a piece of the darkish bread which Karl had produced from our grain harvest.