Between Enemies Read online

  On our way back we stopped and leant against a fence in front of a simple wayside shrine, from which the emaciated figure of a deposed Christ regarded us with an air of resignation. The sculptor had forgotten to give him closed eyes. I lit my pipe and handed Renato back his pouch.

  ‘Good, this tobacco, if slightly bitter.’ I was starting to give myself airs.

  ‘Thanks be to Queen Victoria.’ Renato raised his pipe heavenwards. ‘Because even the enemy smokes English tobacco. When all is said and done, corruption is a universal lubricant, for good or ill.’

  I too raised my pipe heavenwards. ‘Thanks be to the late queen and her gold sovereigns.’ I was forcing myself to be jolly. ‘Who knows…Maybe Adriano has got better.’

  ‘Those potatoes will help him for sure.’

  ‘It hasn’t been only the Germans who’ve reduced them to this.’

  ‘No, toil, soot, ignorance, and now the war. The Huns are just the last straw.’

  We went on our way; it was downhill all the way to the Villa. We passed two soldiers on their way up, their uniforms patched and unlit cigarettes in their mouths. Crushed beneath the weight of their packs, they didn’t even glance at us.

  There was not a breath of wind. Only clouds, snow, empty houses, leafless trees.

  Twenty-Two

  ‘NOT A PENNY IN HER PURSE, NOT A TOOTH IN HER HEAD, but a whole barrel full of children instead,’ sang Teresa to herself as she came and went in the steam that billowed from the cauldron. It was there, at the fire, at the heart of the kitchen, that it all began. In the cauldron two and a half litres of water were on the boil. They had to boil for twenty-five minutes ‘because that way twenty per cent goes off in steam’. For Grandma the cleanliness of the bowels was more important than that of the soul.

  Like all rituals, the enema demanded its liturgy, and Grandma was partial to cosmic coincidences. ‘No enemas on windy days’ was her dogma. With her daughter’s assistance Teresa decanted the purified water into a round-bellied bottle with a narrow neck set at an angle. In the pot was one leaf of mint and one of tarragon.

  Then came the solemn procession. Loretta, followed two steps behind by her mother, hands gloved in white silk as if she were a general, bore the alembic containing the precious fluid. On reaching Grandma’s bedroom – which on the chosen day was always spotless from top to bottom, with clean sheets and a blazing fire – Loretta’s task was to set the alembic down on the table at the foot of the bed and disappear. Once alone with ‘the mistress’, Teresa selected the enema. If there was snow and sunshine – the ideal day – the bag was round with a long tube, whereas if there was damp in the air the choice fell on a square bag with a short tube.

  Of the most delicate phase of the ritual, the interplay of backside and nozzle, nothing is known. For the occasion Teresa would put on her lace cap – it towered white and cock-eyed over her bun – and regarding certain matters she kept mum.

  If Grandma was pleased Teresa would get a reward, sometimes cash, at other times a few hours off. The cook preferred the former, because freedom is a coinage more difficult to spend.

  An outstanding page in the family chronicles was the ‘December Yell’. On that occasion, in the course of the ritual, Grandma gave a yell that pierced the walls, the cook rushed out of the room white in the face, and Grandma didn’t speak to her for a week. At lunch Grandpa poked fun at her: ‘There’s nothing more tragic than a clumsily penetrated anus.’

  ‘If you weren’t the good-for-nothing that you are, a good rinsing of the bowels would do the world for you. Those cobwebs in your head all come from your infected intestines.’

  Grandpa usually let it go, taking his wife’s intellectual superiority in good part. But that time he came back at her tit for tat: ‘Nancy, when you talk like that you sound like our P.M. Orlando when he says “I’ll reduce the National Debt”.’

  Grandpa was on good-natured terms with the world, but he could not forgive ‘that pettifogger Orlando’ for having granted all combatants a life-insurance policy starting on 1 January 1918. ‘In this way the youngsters who stopped von Below and Boroevic on Monte Grappa and on the Piave…they won’t leave so much as a bag of beans to their families. And then they say Italians have no sense of State! But it’s the State that has no feeling for the Italians.’

  *

  At nine o’clock Operation Enema could be said to have been brought to a close. Everything had gone splendidly. Teresa’s pocket tinkled and her bun re-emerged from her cap. Harmony reigned at Villa Spada. But at mid-morning came news of a new decree from Boroevic. Laundry hung up outside to dry must be restricted to three items at a time. The field marshal was afraid of the imminent spring.

  ‘And we thought we were the only ones signalling to aircraft that way,’ commented Aunt Maria.

  That ‘three at a time’ meant overhauling the code, not a very difficult matter for Grandma, who in any case was that day rejoicing in exceptional purity of the bowels, But how were we to pass on the key of the new system to Brian?

  Grandma Nancy had the fire lit in the big dining room, as the Austrians didn’t use it as much as before. She told Teresa to lay the table and announced that for supper we were going to have something to write home about. She kept her promise. In the evening we opened a flask of wine to go with a dish of stewed meat that was not too leathery, given the evil times.

  Having interrogated our taste buds and had a brief exchange of opinions, the entire family said ‘cat’.

  Teresa said ‘diambarne de l’ostia’.

  And all of us in chorus repeated the word ‘cat’, to suppress the supposition that the C might not be an R.

  ‘I’m not saying, I’m not saying. Cook is what I am and cook’s job is to cook, not talk.’

  End of investigation.

  The new code was as simple as it was effective, according to Grandma. We need not hurry to deliver it, as we could get by with the system of the shutters, which had escaped suspicion by the military authorities. But I was starting to feel the pinch of boredom, so I caught the ball on the bounce and volunteered for a mission. To my surprise no one raised an objection. Aunt Maria would talk about it with the steward immediately after supper.

  Giulia was still avoiding me, and maybe this was my chance. Her craze for adventure would winkle her out.

  Going on for midnight my aunt came to see me upstairs, where I was playing cards with Grandpa. She knocked, then came straight to the point. ‘It appears that at Vidòr the Englishman shot down a captive balloon. He blew it up with machine-gun fire and then, unable to avoid the burning balloon, flew straight through the flames, risking being burnt to a cinder. The Austrian in the basket escaped by miracle. The whole valley is talking about it and Renato says we must start signalling the lorries pulling balloons, not just the troop movements.’

  Next morning I went looking for the steward first thing after breakfast. He was sitting on the edge of the hayloft with legs dangling, stripping the bark off a branch with a knife. His pipe was smoking gently. I asked him if he had a plan.

  ‘We’re leaving in an hour. Your grandfather’s coming too.’

  ‘But he’ll slow us up.’

  ‘He’s only coming as far as the bottiglieria in Solighetto, where he’s at home. We’ll leave him there and head up for Falzè. Your grandmother’s friend is lending us his gig.’

  ‘Go on with you…D’you mean the Third Paramour? Is he coming too?’

  ‘No, he’s not, but Signorina Giulia is. And watch it. The Third…nincompoop thinks we’re all going to Solighetto just for a drink and to buy a demijohn.’

  ‘When and where?’

  ‘Half past nine in the piazza.’

  I met Grandpa on the stairs.

  ‘Have you heard I’m coming too?’ He was as happy as a sandboy.

  ‘As far as Solighetto.’ My douche of cold water riled him a bit, but his smile got the better of it.

  Giulia and the Third Paramour were seated on the box. It was a two-horse carriag
e, a luxury affair. But when they drew rein I noticed that the two horses were mere skin and bone. No oats for past weeks, just rubbishy fodder: hunger had struck even the livestock. Grandpa was leaning on the arm of Loretta, whose face darkened as soon as she saw Giulia.

  There was hatred in the eyes of the servant, challenge in Giulia’s.

  The Third Paramour dismounted and helped Grandpa climb into the seat behind the box. He emitted a couple of feeble simpers and set off towards the Villa along with Loretta.

  I sat beside Renato, who took the reins; Giulia sat behind with Grandpa. The inn in the piazza was empty. The innkeeper, stretched out on a bench by the door, waved to us and asked us to bring him a demijohn of red wine. ‘These Krauts, they drink more than oxen in summer.’

  The two nags were already breathless. Renato slowed them down to a walk.

  ‘Lucky we’re not going far,’ said Grandpa.

  We were stopped by a patrol right at the edge of Solighetto. The officer addressed Grandpa directly, and in French, as if Renato and I were non-existent. Grandpa opened his cloak, reached into his jacket pocket and drew out a document written in German, stamped all over and signed by Baron von Feilitzsch.

  ‘Refrontòlo,’ said the officer.

  ‘Refròntolo,’ Grandpa corrected him.

  They both had a good laugh.

  With a wave of his right hand the officer motioned to Renato to drive on.

  Solighetto was a ghost-town, but the bottiglieria – where Grandpa had made friends, according to him, with the storekeepers of the army depot – was always crowded.

  ‘This is where I leave you,’ said Grandpa, giving Renato two taps on the shoulder. ‘I’ll wait for you till evening. If anything should happen…no, no, it can’t happen. Off you go.’

  On our way out of town we passed a bevy of peasant women. They were selling eggs, and one of them even trying to sell herself, but the goods were not at all appetizing. The troops were coming and going, their cloaks unfastened, their jackets all rumpled, and the eggs ended up in their bellies just as they were, cracked open and drunk raw. They paid with the money of the army of occupation, worthless paper which the women were obliged to accept, but when some tender-hearted fellow gave them a half a krone or his ration of black bread, then there was an exchange of smiles, as black as the bread or the rags of the women’s clothes.

  ‘It’s a nightmare,’ I said.

  Renato cracked the whip. ‘It’s poverty,’ he said. ‘Poverty, like the war, seems never-ending.’

  ‘We’re in philosophical vein today,’ said Giulia. She was curled up in a corner of the seat, wearing an absent air.

  We aimed for Barbisano. Without Grandpa’s weight the horses moved more briskly. The snow on the roadway was black and mushy, but here and there in the fields were patches of brown earth. From the leafless trees, silent black birds watched us pass by. Only occasionally did their metallic cry break the stillness. The guns were silent, the bells were no longer, and on the hushed hills – stripped bare by winter and the ravages of armies – those raucous cries sounded to my ears like a harbinger of death.

  A stone’s throw from Barbisano, Renato steered the cart off the road and halted under two oaks with trunks a metre wide. ‘There’s a camp just round the bend, a company of Kaiserjäger. Wait for me here with the cart. No civilians allowed beyond this point.’

  ‘Then how will you get by?’

  ‘That’s my business. Wait here for an hour and a half, not a minute more.’ He waited to give me time to fish out my watch. ‘If you don’t see me in an hour and a half go back and pick up your grandfather. That’s all you need to know. If someone spots you, you’re here for a secret tryst. It shouldn’t be hard to make that convincing.’ With which he squeezed my knee. I smothered an ‘ouch!’ and smiled. I looked back at Giulia. She was frowning.

  Renato made fast the reins and jumped down. He set off at a fast walk, without more ado. The horses lowered their necks to sniff at the hard ground.

  ‘Let’s get under the carriage,’ said Giulia.

  We lay down on the leather sheet Grandpa used to keep his legs warm when he sat on the box. I stroked her hair and she let me. She was looking at me with a kind of faked surprise that puzzled and irritated me. I kissed her on the lips, gently. She let me.

  ‘Turn sideways…You certainly have got a nose…It’s like the foresail of a yacht.’

  I pulled back, but didn’t manage a laugh.

  ‘Let me smoke your pipe.’

  I fished in my pocket and handed it to her, offering her the tobacco pouch: ‘Shall I fill it for you?’

  ‘I don’t think that needs a diploma.’

  The cold from the icy ground struck my back, even through the leather sheet and my overcoat, but there, with Giulia beside me, I had a feeling of elation that warmed me. She lit my pipe. The smoke formed wreathes against the bottom of the carriage which was our roof.

  ‘What do you think of Renato?’ I asked, trying to sound nonchalant.

  She looked straight at me and blew smoke in my face with a mocking smile. ‘You don’t like the way I look at him, do you?’

  ‘Why? How do you look at him?’ I babbled.

  Her face grew serious. Her freckles burst forth in a swarm.

  ‘He ought to be punished,’ she said. ‘There’s a man who ought to be punished.’

  Twenty-Three

  ‘THEIR MADONNA HAS LONG HAIR, WORN LOOSE, LIKE A cabaret chorus girl.’ Grandpa was drunk and he was using all ten fingers to sketch out in the empty air what he was seeing. ‘And around her yellow head…there are twelve stars, twelve of them. I counted them, and I know how to count to twelve. And all around her body, almost all the way down to her feet, are beams of light all made of gold. And the chorus girl is crushing the serpent with her feet. And on the back of the banner… because they turn it around, you know…they turn it around to show you the other side…’ The cart jerked and bounced, but his voice, in spite of his state of euphoria, remained firm and confident. ‘On it is a golden eagle with wings spread, and on its chest is the coat of arms of Hapsburg, Austria, and Lorraine. The right claw grips the sceptre and the sword, the left claw grips the orb with the cross of the priests…’ he hacked and spat. The phlegm flew to the dirt road.

  Giulia sat on the box, wedged between the steward and the demijohn of wine, the official excuse for the trip.

  ‘What none of you know is that the coat of arms…that coat of arms contains the heraldic crests of all the empire’s kingdoms and fiefdoms…Now, I say, the second escutcheon from the left…no, from the right…is the crest of Lombardy–Venetia, and we’re not fooling around. The Krauts want to take back their old territory, don’t you doubt it for a second! And you know what this old man who’s had too much to drink has to say about it? I say that they’re right, by the name of San Cipresso… in that…low-life inn, with a capital I…I didn’t really have that much to drink…There’s an innkeeper who speaks pretty good French even if he was born in Bohemia, and the man told me that our king, who’s knee high to a grasshopper, isn’t worth a drop of grappa…If you try to stack him up next to their…What the devil do they call him…? Their emperor, that’s what they call him.’

  Renato turned and looked at him. ‘I have the feeling your innkeeper must have been thinking of Franz Joseph, not Karl.’

  Giulia laid her hand on Renato’s arm, and he turned his eyes back to the road ahead and snapped the whip in the air. I felt a stab of jealousy, but I wouldn’t have admitted it even under torture. I looked at Grandpa, who smiled and half-closed his eyes, then looked straight up at the sky, and leant closer, his mouth reeking of wine pressed close to my ear: ‘C’est la vie, laddie.’

  The morning air was icy. ‘That baron…There’s something childish about him, and I don’t trust the naïve,’ my aunt spoke in an undertone. ‘We need to watch out for him. The Englishman has been noticed…He always flies over twice…and always just above treetop level. And then that kingfisher of his is al
l anybody talks about, he’s the one who has it in for the observation balloons…Major von Feilitzsch is no fool.’

  ‘Hanging is interesting,’ said Grandpa, who was walking between me and her. ‘To die kicking without making any noise, a firing squad is just too…too boom! That’s it. A hangman’s knot is slow, a faint creak, discreet and lethal.’

  ‘Stop trying to be a poet, Grandpa.’

  ‘Lower your voice,’ said my aunt, pointing to the soldiers who were grooming their mules.

  Grandpa linked arms with us: ‘Come, come,’ he said, quickening his pace, ‘let’s go to the inn, at this time of day they serve piping hot coffee, and we’ll have a chance to sense what’s in the air.’

  ‘Let’s hope the coffee isn’t some kind of grappa extract,’ said my aunt.

  ‘Yes, and that they’re not serving goat milk,’ I added.

  We walked into a funk of sweat and alcohol. The innkeeper was sleepy. The non-commissioned officers were all on their feet, chattering loudly over their large steaming mugs. The innkeeper’s mother was from Naples so the man knew how to make a good cup of coffee. He pointed us to a table. My aunt didn’t seem displeased at being the only woman in the place and I had the impression that, as she took a seat with studied gracefulness, she might have hiked up her skirt just enough to allow a glimpse of calf, contented at the subdued stir she sent across the room.

  The innkeeper ran his filthy rag over the table. ‘What can I bring you?’

  Grandpa, who seemed more of a sage when seated, looked the sweaty little man up and down – the man had grown a Hapsburg-style set of whiskers – with the expression of a good housewife spotting a cockroach on a clean pillowcase. My aunt came to his aid: ‘Three cups of coffee with hot milk, and no grappa, if you please.’

  ‘Madame, we’re fresh out of grappa,’ he said, using the dialect term sgnappa. The innkeeper twirled his moustache with all ten fingers: ‘These Krauts drink up everything in the house and pay with tin money.’

  The coffee with milk was dark, steaming, and delicious. The cups were sparkling clean. For a moment, as I sipped it, I felt sure that this, not the taste of Giulia’s lips, was the flavour of happiness. A furious whirl of canine barking rushed in: I immediately recognized Dog. The fire had just been stirred back into flame, and Grandpa stood up to hold out his hands over the heat. Adriano came in behind the dog, and slipped and fell, legs in air, to the laughter of the big mustachioed men.