The Villa Triste Page 5

  Sometime towards evening, Issa reappeared. She was covered in dust. The University students had formed groups of ‘civilian volunteers’, and were helping to get people out of the bomb sites, in some cases digging through rubble with their bare hands. Issa came in an ambulance, helping a very old woman and her husband, who was screaming like a banshee. His arm was broken in three places – painful, but he’d live. Trying to comfort his wife while they set the bones, Issa found me and kept insisting there must be somewhere where she could make the old woman a cup of tea. There was no tea, and ordinarily, I might have been angry with her for saying silly things and getting in the way – but not then. Then, all the anger I had felt towards her just hours before melted away, and for possibly the first time in my life, I felt sorry for her, for what I saw in her face. Because, for all her bravado, Isabella was not used to blood, and bone, and flesh. If I had had the time, I would have told her not to worry. I would have put my arm around her and told her that all of us are made of this.

  The next morning, I was told of my promotion.

  I had found a spare uniform in the linen store, and managed to tidy myself up enough to start my shift on time when the Head Sister, a small stern woman to whom I had barely spoken three words since she had accepted me at my interview almost a year before, called me into her office. I had no idea what I might have done, but all at once the preternatural calm I had acquired deserted me. My hand was shaking as I lifted it to knock on the glossy dark wood of her door. Somewhere in the back of my head, I think I must have believed that perhaps she had somehow had word of Lodovico and was going to tell me that he was dead.

  I stood in front of her desk feeling like a schoolchild. I had always found nuns uniquely terrifying, and I was sure she would look at me and know I no longer believed in God, and that I was too fond of creature comforts, perfume and engagement rings, and was an out and out coward to boot. It was all I could do not to look down and see if my socks had sagged.

  She was writing in a large ledger. Reading upside down was something I had always been quite good at, and I realized she was making lists of those who had died. When she put the pen down and looked up at me, I jumped.

  Her eyes were quite large and very dark, her skin pleated with soft lines. Wrapped in her habit, she might have been anywhere from forty to sixty. I recalled something I had heard once, about God’s children being ageless.

  ‘Signorina Cammaccio. You must be exhausted.’

  It didn’t sound like a question, so I said nothing. Actually, I did not feel tired. I had not even thought about feeling tired.

  She considered me for a moment. Then she said, ‘You will understand, it is hoped that the children’s hospital will be reopened as soon as possible. Sadly, a number of their staff were killed last night. Naturally, we will be sending some of our nurses to the new facility to make up the numbers.’

  She paused. I knew nothing about children and I hoped that she was not going to ask me to go – that she was not going to condemn me to weeks, or months, or even years, of looking into the faces of parents as I had last night. Of trying to explain to them why it was that God, or the Allied command, or the Germans, or the Fascists had seen fit to break to pieces the bodies of their little boys and girls.

  ‘This, of course,’ she continued after a moment, ‘will leave us short-handed.’

  She rested her elbows on the ledger, steepling her small pudgy fingers over the names of the dead.

  ‘I have had excellent reports of your conduct,’ she went on, after a moment. ‘And so, I am going to ask you to take on a new job. As of this morning, I will need you to take over as a ward manager.’

  I stared at her. The relief I felt at not being sent to the new children’s hospital lasted for about five seconds. Then it was replaced by something close to panic. I was a junior nurse. Most of the time I did nothing more than help with meals, sort linen that came in from the laundry, read aloud to patients, write letters for them, or occasionally hold their arm while they shuffled in baby steps up and down the ward and looked out of the windows onto the garden. I held trays of equipment for the sisters, watched while injections were given, and occasionally changed a dressing. I had done some science at university and the position at the hospital had been secured for me through a friend of Mama’s. That was the sum of my qualifications. For the last year, I had appeared when I had been told to, done what was asked of me, and gone home.

  In short, my ‘nursing’ was nothing more than an acceptably genteel hobby, something to keep me out of the house and occupied until I got married. The ward managers, on the other hand, were senior sisters. They arranged work shifts and controlled supplies, made decisions about beds and food. I had only the vaguest idea of how any of this was done.

  ‘But, Sister!’ I blurted. ‘I can’t.’

  She cocked her head and looked at me. ‘Can’t?’ she asked.

  ‘No!’

  ‘But, my dear, you have two years of university education, do you not?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘But—’ Flustered, I shifted from foot to foot. ‘I’m merely a junior nurse.’ My voice sounded small and disturbingly childish. ‘I have no idea what to do.’

  At this, she smiled. Then she stood up, and came around the desk, and took my hand.

  ‘My dear girl,’ she said. ‘In the days that are going to come, none of us are going to have any idea what to do.’

  It was late evening when I finally left. By the time I got to our street, I couldn’t even trudge up the hill. Instead, I had the odd sensation that I was gliding, hovering an inch or so above the cobbles, as if I myself had also died but was simply too tired to attempt leaving earth. As I put my bike away, I registered dimly that neither Issa’s nor Papa’s bicycle was in the shed. I knew that they had both taken to staying late at the University, but I didn’t have the energy to sort through what this might mean, or why it niggled in the back of my brain. Instead, I pushed the pin through the latch and walked back along the path.

  Thick light fell through the trees. Dusk was fringing the edge of the garden. In another lifetime, and if the car had not been hunched under its shroud, I might have thought Papa and Mama had gone out for a drive, up to Arcetri, or to Piazzale Michelangelo to watch the sun set over the city. I took out my key, but the front door was not locked. When I pushed it open, the house felt empty.

  There were no lights on. I walked down the hall. Untouched by the last of the sun, the rooms on either side – Papa’s study behind its open door, the dining room and sitting room – seemed leached of colour. And wavering, as if they were underwater, and the furniture – the tables and chairs and photographs – might slip their anchors and float free.

  I blinked. Then I crossed the dining room and pushed open the kitchen door. Plates from the breakfast or lunch my parents must have eaten had been washed but not put away. The leather silver canteen was closed and locked, its brass key bright in the shadows. The wine glasses sat ghostly on their shelf. There was a coffee cup on the counter, a dark outline of lipstick kissing its rim.

  ‘Mama?’

  There was no answer. I said it again, a little louder, and this time heard in my voice the telltale high note.

  ‘Mama?’

  My shoes clacked on the tiles. I let the door swing shut, crossed the dining room and hall and went through the arch into the sitting room.

  ‘Mama, are you here?’

  The glass doors to the terrace were closed. The table and chairs beyond were empty. Suddenly, I was gripped by the idea that no one lived here. That I had not been wrong after all when I looked in the mirror at the bridal salon. Because somehow I had slid through time, and dropped into a future where all of us were ghosts.

  I turned and ran up the stairs.

  ‘Mama!’

  I banged open the door to my own room, to Isabella’s beyond, to my parents’ room across the hall, and finally to Enrico’s.

  She was sitting on Rico’s bed, holding one of his sweaters, stroking i
t as if it was a cat, her hand moving back and forth like a metro-nome. The ring my mother always wore – the same ring that had been my grandmother’s, an aquamarine surrounded by diamonds – glinted in the light from the open window.

  I was standing not ten feet from her, but she didn’t look at me. Instead, her dark-blue eyes were fixed on the window sill, as if she could see something there, something beyond the branch of the tree and the roof of the house in the street below. A picture, perhaps, of the children we had once been. Of the past we had lived, the one she traced, moving from object to object, with the tips of her fingers.

  I turned and had started to leave the room when she spoke.

  ‘Cati?’

  I had not bothered to turn on the lights. It was nearly dark. I looked over my shoulder. My mother was not much more than a ghost herself. Her dress melted into the shadows. Her legs, her arms and hands, appeared so pale they shimmered. Her beautiful hair was colourless.

  ‘I miss him.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I know.’

  ‘Are you afraid?’

  The question hung between us.

  I nodded, my hand lingering on the doorjamb.

  ‘Every day?’ she asked. ‘All the time?’

  I nodded again.

  My mother looked down at the sweater in her lap. Her hand hovered over it, floating in the half light.

  ‘I didn’t think it would be like this,’ she said.

  In the weeks that followed, I did not see much of my family. My new duties increasingly kept me late at the hospital, and demanded that I arrive early. I even began, on occasion, to stay through the night, sleeping in a chair in the staffroom, when I slept at all. Autumn deepened. The nights drew in, and seemed, when I was at home, to bring ghosts with them. They clustered in the rooms where I had grown up. Flocked under the old cedar tree and lingered by the shed. But mostly they seemed to stare at me through my mother’s eyes, as if they had come to dwell inside her.

  She left me plates of food. Pieces of cheese. An apple with a silver knife beside it. A slice of ham on the increasingly frequent nights when I did not get back in time to cook dinner. When I did, she often sat at the kitchen table, watching, and smiled at me, her face wistful, her fine features faintly blurred, as if she were looking out from behind a mirror. The sensation was alien and unexpected, and made me feel so guilty that I began to fancy our roles had been suddenly reversed. That I was now the one who had never paid enough attention, never given enough love, and that my neglect had somehow left her prey to phantoms – allowed them to lure her into a strange cold place beyond the glass.

  The sensation was deeply uncomfortable. Yet in some strange way, it drew us closer together. We never spoke of it again, but I became quite certain that – even though she had the luxury of knowing he was still alive – she kept Enrico close beside her in the same way that I kept Lodo. More than once, when we found ourselves alone, I had the mad thought that there were not two of us seated over breakfast, but four. That Mama and I were both sharing our toast and our thoughts, not only with each other, but with Lodo and Enrico, too. The angels who hovered at our right shoulders.

  The children’s hospital was reopened in a borrowed villa. The arrangements were made quite quickly, largely thanks to the German command, who vacated one of the properties they had requisitioned in order to allow the children to move in. They were, by all accounts, exceptionally helpful, even volunteering to set up the makeshift wards, an act of generosity that left everyone involved feeling both grateful and confused.

  By mid October the Italian ‘government in exile’ – in other words, the King and Badoglio who were hiding safely behind Allied lines in the south – had finally got round to stating the obvious and declaring that Italy was at war with Germany. We had resented the Germans and been afraid of them before, of their marching and their flags and their tanks. Now they became officially our enemies. What they might do terrified us. But they were also, on occasion, capable of such civility. Even outright kindness. It was hard, sometimes, to understand exactly what one felt about them.

  At about this time, rumours began to seep out of Rome – stories of raids on the Jewish ghetto, of sealed trains travelling east. We believed them and didn’t believe them. We told ourselves that most of the German soldiers probably loved this war and Adolf Hitler no more than we did, and were just decent men trying to serve their country.

  No such conflicting feelings, on the other hand, were aroused by our compatriots. Enrico had been exactly right in his prediction. The Fascists were not only back – they had returned bloated on triumphalism and bent on revenge, and were, if anything, more loathed and more loathsome than before. Certainly they were more dangerous.

  It became clear that the German command had more or less turned the policing of Florence over to the forces of the Republic of Salo – or as we called it the Republichini, the little republic – and in particular, to one Mario Carita. No one knew much about him, at first. But as summer died and autumn dropped down, his black-shirted thugs, known as the Banda Carita, had begun to appear on the streets. Rumours travelled with them the way flies travel with corpses. There was a house on the Via Ugo Foscolo where it was said screams were heard at night. And another, on the Via Bolognese, which people began to call the Villa Triste.

  At the end of the month, the weather broke. There was a chill at sunset. The thick honey light of late summer, the light of harvest and evening walks, vanished and was replaced by a succession of sharp, crystalline days. So sharp, that one morning, when I had got up very early, I realized that I would be quite cold cycling with just my thin coat over my uniform. It occurred to me, as I laced up my shoes, that I might borrow a coat of Issa’s, or ask Mama if she had an old one. But no one else in the house was stirring, so instead of waking them I tiptoed into Enrico’s room, just down the hall from mine, thinking I would take one of his old jackets. But when I opened the wardrobe, it was empty. There was nothing in it at all. Not even on the rack where his shoes and boots had been lined up. I stood for a moment, confused, trying to push back the now-familiar feeling that time was not running in an orderly progression, that instead it had got all mixed up and tipped me into a future where we no longer lived in this house, no longer even existed.

  Telling myself that these fancies were one thing when there were shadows – I had always been afraid of the dark – but altogether too stupid for the morning, I turned to the bureau, and was more relieved than I should have been to find his box of shirt studs and cufflinks in his top drawer beside the silver-backed brushes that had been my parents’ twenty-first birthday present to him.

  It was the night after that when I came home so late that there was not even a sliver of light showing through the chinks in the shutters. For the first time I could remember, the house was completely dark.

  I left my bicycle in the shed and crept along the path as quietly as I could, turning my key in the front-door lock, and actually freezing, stopping dead when it clicked, as if I were a thief. Easing the door closed behind me, I slipped my shoes off, then turned and locked the door again. My stockings whispered on the tiles. I started towards the kitchen, thinking that, unappealing as the offerings left for me usually were, perhaps I was hungry.

  I had my hand on the door when something stopped me. There was no sound I could make out, no change in the shadows. But nonetheless I stood there, absolutely convinced that someone was waiting for me in the darkness on the other side.

  I could hear the faint huff of my breath, hear my heart beating. Or was it someone else’s?

  My hand lowered slowly. I stepped backwards, shuffling on the cold floor in my stockinged feet. When I bumped into the edge of the dining-room table, the noise hung in the air.

  Without thinking, I turned and darted across the hall. I grabbed the stair banister, no longer caring how much noise I made, and once in my room, turned the key in the lock and sat on the edge of the bed, wondering if I was losing my mind.

  Finally,
I stood up, went into my bathroom, and splashed water on my cheeks. When I looked in the mirror, I felt a pang of relief that Lodo was not actually standing beside me to witness the fear on my face. The thought made me smile. It wasn’t until I’d peeled off my uniform, and pulled a nightdress over my head and walked back into my room, that I noticed that the wardrobe door was ajar.

  I stood for a moment, looking at it. Then I told myself not to be idiotic. Crossing the room, I yanked the door open and jumped backwards.

  My wedding dress had been delivered and hung in my wardrobe on its padded and scented hanger, swaying gently, as if it were dancing to unheard music.

  I heard about the train the next afternoon. By this time, it was impossible to tell where stories, bits of information, or rumours came from. They simply sprang up, travelled like seeds on the wind, and took root. This one had grown, and was even bearing fruit, before I became aware of it.

  I was standing in an upper corridor, looking down over the hos-lucretia pital’s courtyard. The building had once been a convent, and the square at its centre was still ringed by a fine cloister and planted with brightly coloured beds. The patients loved them, but a few days earlier it had been decided that we could no longer afford the luxury of a garden. At least not for flowers. I was watching as the last rose bushes were lifted out and the soil was turned and tilled and made ready for the planting of potatoes. And cabbages. And beans. Food was getting more and more expensive. While flowers were good for the soul, it was becoming increasingly obvious that, regardless of when the Allies arrived or didn’t, we needed to survive the winter.

  My thoughts were running aimlessly along these lines. I was considering carrots, and whether I could afford to buy myself a new coat, and whether it had been entirely frivolous to tell the old gardener when he had sidled up to me that of course he could keep the clump of irises in the western corner since they were the emblem of the city, when I sensed someone standing beside me.