The Villa Triste Read online

  I spent the remainder of the day carrying boxes downstairs where they were being bricked into a wall which had been hastily torn down for the purpose. Picking my way through dust and rubble, I refrained from thinking about hygiene, or the lack of it, or the fact that any German would surely recognize a newly bricked wall when he saw one. The decision had been made, and we slaved like worker ants. By the time I left, I was so tired I could barely cycle home. The heat had lingered. The sun was silver-pink on the river. People were loitering in the warm evening, just standing on the bridges, staring into the water or up at the hills, as if they were saying goodbye.

  I wound through the Oltrarno, where I passed an abnormal number of people pushing carts and wheelbarrows laden with God knows what. Overnight, we had turned into a city of burrowers and hiders – victims of Requisition Fever. Even Papa had been infected. The night before, on one of the few occasions he had spoken after Mama left the table, he had announced that he was having the mechanic come to take the wheels off the car. It would be put up on blocks in the shed. Common wisdom said that if you wished to keep your car at all, this was the only way to do it. I wondered if Massimo was busy doing the same thing at this very moment. Personally, I thought the Germans might find an entire city of wheelless cars somewhat suspicious. It also occurred to me that if Lodo was still alive and somehow managed to appear at the appointed time and hour, I would probably have to walk to my wedding. Or sit on the handlebars of Papa’s bicycle.

  I turned up by Santa Felicita and saw that the side gates to the Boboli Gardens were open. I was half tempted to stop and go in, to see if there were digging parties interring knives and forks and pots and pans and whatever else they could manage under shrubs and in the grottoes the same way we had bricked our precious supplies into the cellar walls. But I was too tired and too dirty. My uniform was covered in dust. I could feel grime in my shoes. Even the pins in my hair felt dirty. I made my way out through the Romana Gate. Then my legs failed me. At the bottom of our hill, I got off and trudged, pushing my bike.

  I don’t know what it was that made me stop on the hill and look up at the house. But the moment I did, I knew something was different. Even here, higher up where there was often a breeze, it was stifling. The heat pressed down like a broad, heavy hand and in the thick evening light our house seemed to waver like a mirage. The ochre tiles on the roof looked soft, as if they were melting. I half expected to see streaks, long and dull red, on the greying plaster. The gate to the drive was closed, which was odd. Behind it, the huge grey-green pine tree, its boughs dripping towards the lawn, looked as if it were swaying, although the air was perfectly still.

  At first, I thought it was exhaustion – that I was so tired I could not keep the world still around me any more but was instead watching it simply melt away. Then I realized my heart was running too fast. It was beating inside my chest, flailing its fists like something trying to get out.

  I almost dropped my bike in the street. When I did get to the gate, I was in such a hurry to undo the latch, my hands suddenly all thumbs, that I left my bicycle propped against the stone column and heard rather than felt myself running up the drive. I must have looked wild, with my eyes wide and my mouth gaping, when I burst through the front door and then into the sitting room and saw them all standing there. Mama, Papa, Issa, and Enrico.

  I don’t remember what I said, if anything. All I remember is the feel of Rico’s arms, and the smell of his shirt, of mothballs and soap. I remember him lifting me off my feet and swinging me around, the way he did when we were children and he used to tease me about who was stronger.

  ‘You’re not dead. You’re not dead!’

  I do remember, idiotically, that I said that.

  And I remember that Rico laughed, and finally put me down and said, ‘No, I’m not dead.’ And that that was when I looked around and realized there was someone else in the room, a tall blond boy I didn’t know.

  My hand went to my hair. Suddenly embarrassed, I was aware of my grubby uniform, my armband that had slipped.

  ‘Cati,’ Enrico said, ‘this is my friend and fellow officer, Carlo Peralta. Carlo, my other sister, Caterina.’

  ‘How do you do?’

  He was a good head taller than I, and, even in what I realized were a set of my brother’s old clothes that were far too short for him at the ankles and wrists, quite simply one of the handsomest men I had ever seen. People say this all the time, but Carlo truly did look as if he had been sculpted by the hand of God. His hair was almost as blond as Isabella’s. The features of his face were clear and strong without being hard. His smile was quick and generous, and in the shadowed light of the sitting room, I could see that his eyes were hazel, almost gold, like a cat’s eyes. I dropped his hand abruptly, and turned towards Rico.

  ‘But how did you get here?’ I asked. ‘What happened? When did you arrive?’

  Papa put his arm around Rico’s shoulders; together they looked like a younger and older version of the same person. Isabella, who was unusually quiet, was loitering by the terrace doors.

  ‘Supper,’ Mama said. Which was not an answer to my question. She smiled, reached out and touched the side of Enrico’s face, brushing his cheek with the tips of her fingers as if she could not quite believe he was real. ‘I must get the supper.’

  As she said it, I looked through the archway into the dining room, and noticed that something was wrong. The table was not set; there was no noise, and no smell of cooking, coming from the kitchen beyond.

  ‘Where is Emmelina?’

  ‘I told her not to come.’ My mother answered without taking her eyes off Enrico’s face, as if she was afraid that if she stopped looking at him he would vanish.

  ‘We thought it better.’ My father looked at me, saying something with his eyes that I didn’t understand. ‘Now, who would like a drink?’ He clapped his hands. ‘There’s something still, I’m sure, in the bar!’

  ‘I’ll get the food. Everything’s cold,’ Isabella muttered.

  I followed her, waiting until the door was shut and we were out of earshot before I asked, ‘Issa, what’s going on? How did they get here? Where’s Emmelina?’

  ‘I went round this afternoon and told her we wouldn’t need her for a bit. I said Mama had flu and she shouldn’t come in case she caught it.’ Issa didn’t look at me as she spoke.

  ‘What?’

  I could barely remember a time when Emmelina had not been in the house. She even came in at Easter. The idea that she would not nurse my mother, or any of us, if we really were sick, was absurd.

  ‘Why?’ I asked.

  Mama could barely boil an egg, and Issa was not much better. Apart from anything else, the reality of this arrangement meant that preparing meals would be left to me.

  ‘Issa!’ I protested.

  ‘For God’s sake, Cati!’

  Isabella spun around, a serving plate in her hand that, for a moment, I thought she was going to throw at me.

  ‘Don’t you understand?’ she said. ‘They’ve left their regiment. They’re deserters.’ She waved towards the sitting room. ‘If anyone sees them, if anyone says anything—’

  ‘You can’t think Emmelina—’ I stared at Isabella, amazed. And angry. ‘What?’ I asked. ‘Inform on them? On Enrico? You think Emmelina would inform on Enrico? She loves him. She loves all of us. She would never—’

  I was genuinely shocked. Isabella shook her head.

  ‘We can’t take any chances,’ she said grimly. ‘She might mention something. She might not mean to, but—’

  I shook my head in disgust. ‘That is ridiculous.’

  ‘It isn’t.’ Issa looked at me. ‘It isn’t,’ she said again. ‘You’ll see. We aren’t going to be able to trust anyone.’

  So this was it, I thought. This was the real poison the occupation would bring to us.

  ‘Well then,’ I said. ‘What about him?’ I waved towards the sitting room. ‘What about this – what’s his name, Carlo? Who’s he? For all
you know, he might be a Nazi spy.’

  ‘He isn’t.’

  Issa said it with a calm that suggested she had already considered the idea and rejected it.

  ‘Oh, yes?’ I ran my hand through my hair, shaking it loose of its dusty pins. ‘Well, how do you know?’

  ‘Because,’ Issa said, turning towards the pantry, ‘he’s one of us.’

  Dinner was not, in the end, an utter disaster. The strangeness of the menu gave the meal a slightly Dionysian air that was enhanced by the fact that Papa had gone down to the cellar and retrieved several bottles of his best wine, while Mama had laid the table with our best china and silver. I had decided, while lying in the bath, where I had retreated after my argument with Issa, that I would fix the situation with Emmelina in the morning regardless of what my sister thought. In the meantime I intended to enjoy the fact that my brother was not only not dead, but at home. Everyone else apparently felt the same way. We ate and drank with exuberance, expecting to hear jackboots in the drive at any moment.

  It was in this atmosphere that Enrico told their story.

  On the morning after the armistice, their commanding officer had called his junior staff together and told them to send their men home. He had received news that the Germans were interning Italian troops – rounding them up and herding them onto trains that would ship them east, to either German labour or prison camps. With Badoglio and the King having fled south to get behind Allied lines – we now knew that that was where they had gone – the country was effectively without a government. The army was rudderless. Determined not to give in to the Axis, they were without any plan that enabled them to stand with the Allies. With tears in his eyes, the Colonel, who had fought through the previous war and through Russia and somehow survived both, had told his junior officers that it had come to this. That the best he could do for them was advise them to desert and give them the option of staying out of German hands. He hoped they would carry their honour with them, and join the fight that was to come in the best way they saw fit.

  Within hours, the barracks were empty. Enrico and Carlo managed to get a train as far as Chuisi. There they heard stories of German troops, of newly resurgent and invigorated Fascisti, and of POWs – Allied officers and soldiers who had either been released or stormed their way out of prisons, many of whom spoke no Italian at all, and who were roaming the countryside trying either to move north to get into Switzerland or France, or south to join the assault at Salerno. After listening to all this, they had decided that it was wiser to stay away from both towns and train stations. They got a lift in a farm lorry to Castellina, then another to Galluzzo. From there, they had walked.

  It was an hour or so later when Enrico joined me in the garden where I had gone to retrieve my bicycle and to close the gates I had left open. The others were on the terrace, talking quietly and smoking, the tips of their cigarettes glinting like fireflies as they watched the lights of the city.

  ‘Cati.’

  He caught the handle of the shed as I was wheeling my bike inside, then held it as I came back out and slid the pin through the latch.

  ‘I wanted to tell you,’ he said, ‘what I heard about the navy.’

  I searched his face, my eyes taking a moment to adjust to the dark, to find the familiar contours of his straight nose, his chin, his high cheekbones that were so like my own. I knew that his eyes, like mine and Issa’s, were dark blue, but I couldn’t make them out, couldn’t read whatever message they might be holding for me.

  Enrico and I had not seen much of each other since I had started as a nurse and he had gone into the army. Standing there, I realized that I hadn’t known, until I dashed into the sitting room and saw him, until he had lifted me off my feet, how much I had feared that he was dead. Or how much I had wanted him to come home. He had always been the leader, even when we were babies. As adults, we had the same hands, the same arch to our brows, the same frown. Yet, despite our physical resemblance, and the fact that barely two years separated us, my brother had always been closer to Issa than to me. They were alike, and took after Papa in their love of all things outdoors.

  ‘Have you heard?’ he asked. ‘From Lodo?’

  I shook my head, suddenly uncertain of my voice.

  ‘Come.’ Enrico took my shoulder. ‘Let’s walk.’

  We climbed slowly up the slope at the side of the house, beyond the loggia and away from the terrace.

  ‘I don’t know anything for certain.’ His voice had dropped to a murmur, the words mingling with the soft fall of our footsteps in the grass. ‘But we heard that most of the fleet have reached Malta. They turned at once, as soon as the armistice was announced. They mean to put themselves under Allied command. That’s probably where he is.’

  He stopped. We were under the drooping boughs of the big tree. When we were children this had been our hideout. Even after the oppressive heat that had boiled up during the day, the soil was damp and cool and smelled of moss and pine needles.

  ‘How is Mama?’

  He didn’t look at me as he asked the question.

  I shook my head.

  ‘I don’t know. The same.’

  The unspoken flowed between us. My brother had never said anything, but I knew that at times he found our mother’s love for him a burden, as if he carried a weight for the three of us.

  He nodded.

  ‘Communication’s almost impossible,’ he said a moment later. ‘Everywhere. Rome is cut off. And everywhere south. If Lodo doesn’t contact you, it isn’t because he doesn’t want to.’ He looked at me. ‘Or because he’s dead,’ he said. ‘You mustn’t think that.’

  Despite the stories I told myself, it was, of course, exactly what I thought.

  ‘This is going to be bad,’ Enrico said suddenly. ‘All of it. The Fascistoni will come back. The Germans will put them back, to make it look as if there is at least some support for the occupation, and they’ll want vengeance. They’ve been locked up. Humiliated. They’ll come after their enemies. Which is just about all of us.’

  ‘But the Allies—’ I blurted. ‘The next landing. Surely—’

  Enrico shook his head.

  ‘It isn’t going to happen, Cati. A second landing. What we’ve heard is that they’re barely hanging on at Salerno. The Germans are fighting like demons. They have to. It’s their only chance. That’s why Hitler sent Kesselring. They’re not going to give up easily. They can’t.’

  The glow of the wine evaporated like smoke. In its place, I felt a sort of hollow sickness, as if everything inside me was turning cold and leaking away.

  ‘What are you going to do? You and Carlo?’ The question didn’t come out as much more than a whisper.

  ‘You can’t tell anyone. I mean anyone outside the family. Anyone at all.’

  I started to snap ‘you mean Emmelina’, but something stopped me. I could feel as much as see Rico frowning. His voice was the same one he’d used when we were children and he was swearing me to secrecy over a catapult that broke a neighbour’s window, or a penny whistle he’d stolen from the shop at the bottom of the street. I wondered if I should raise my hand, prick my thumb and mingle my blood with his.

  ‘ I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘Cati, I’m really sorry. That I won’t be here. That you’ll have to take care of everything. Of Mama. And Papa,’ he added almost as an afterthought. ‘And the house. I’ll contact you when I can. I promise.’

  I wanted to beg him to change his mind. But I couldn’t. Enrico would not be much good to any of us interned in a labour camp in Germany. I tried to take a deep breath. I tried to sound brave.

  ‘Where are you going?’

  I imagined Switzerland. Rico had climbed in school. He had relished the summer holidays my father took us on as children, walking the drovers’ paths through the Apennines. I imagined a series of trains, lorries, farmers’ carts, hikes that would get them into the Alps, and then out – over a pass higher, colder, more dangerous than I could ever face.

  He paused for
a moment. Then he said, ‘There’s a group – you’ll hear more about it – the CLN.’

  ‘CLN?’

  Enrico smiled.

  ‘Il Comitato di Liberazione Nazionale,’ he said. ‘It’s why we came. To join the fight.’

  ‘The fight?’

  I don’t think I even spoke the words. I had heard them once already this evening, through a haze of wine and candlelight. Then, luxuriating in the fact that my brother was home, that we were having a family meal where even Mama seemed happy, I had not been paying much attention. This time they sounded sharp and hard, something sitting in my stomach that I had been forced to swallow.

  ‘Carlo’s from the Veneto,’ Enrico was saying. ‘He knows people. They’re already organizing there. We’re going to do the same thing here. In the mountains.’

  One of the things my family professed to love about this house, supposedly the reason Mama’s grandfather had bought it instead of one in the city, or on the then-fashionable Poggio Imperiale, was the fact that you could see the mountains from the terrace. Rising behind the city, the slopes were dun, grey, or green. Above them, no matter what time of year, the peaks were tinged with white.

  Enrico nodded.

  ‘We’re going tonight,’ he said. ‘We won’t be here in the morning.’

  He was as good as his word. The next morning when I woke up, Enrico and Carlo were gone. By noon, the Germans had arrived. I watched them, standing in a silent crowd, as they marched down the Lungarno, their boots shined, the engines of their jeeps and staff cars and lorries humming, their uniforms immaculate, their broken black spider hovering above them.

  Just in case we didn’t understand, the news on Radio Roma that afternoon was broadcast in German. The next morning, Kesselring himself spoke to us. Smiling Albert informed us that ‘for our own protection’ we were under martial law. All communications and train lines had been taken over. With immediate effect there would be no private letters. No ‘uncontrolled’ telephone calls. And no resistance. Anyone going on strike, or found ‘aiding or giving succour’ to Allied POWs would face trial by court martial. Former members of the Italian forces were to report at once to the nearest German command. Squadrons of Italian volunteers would be formed, he said, to continue the glorious fight. What would happen to those who chose not to volunteer was not mentioned.