Between Enemies Read online

  ‘So you’re all better,’ I said, lifting him by one arm. He was skinny, and there was hunger in his eyes. He nodded his head up and down, and he reached around for Dog with hands that trembled slightly. I took him to our table and my aunt ordered some hot milk, a bowl of polenta, and a dish of sopressa salami. Adriano had set Dog on his lap. The poor animal’s coat was thick with scabs of mange, and one ear had been broken by a swung stick, or some other trick of fate.

  ‘And how is your Mamma?’ asked my aunt.

  The child pulled his mouth away from the polenta. ‘She died two days ago.’ There was no emotion in his voice. He downed the milk in a long gulp and then went on eating. Dog was eating too. Adriano stuffed nearly all the sopressa into his pocket: ‘For tomorrow.’ The fear of hunger was stronger in him than hunger itself. There was something at once candid and cruel in his tight little face, a snarl that came from deep within. As he chewed, he stared at my aunt with a look of love, and my aunt returned the glance with eyes veiled with sweetness: ‘Adriano, that’s your name, isn’t it? Come see us at the Villa whenever you like, our Teresa…’ And here she broke off, because a gigantic sergeant was glaring in our direction. He came towards us without needing to elbow his way through the crowd. His chest served as the prow of an icebreaker. He lowered his face, all whiskers and sideburns, to the child’s head. He stank like a sow.

  ‘I’m thinking I’m recognizing you!’ he said, practically bellowing. ‘You thief! You stealing my dagger!’

  Adriano vanished just as fast as his dog.

  The sergeant made no attempt to go after them. He shot us a grim look which he followed up by showing a rake’s worth of dirt-coloured teeth. Then he went back to the bar, leaving his stench behind to keep us company.

  ‘When this war is over, the world will belong to people like him,’ said my aunt. ‘Our earls, our dukes, our gentlemen, and all their vons…so many hulks drifting with the tide; they don’t have – they won’t have any strength left to throw into the battle.’ She paused, looked at Grandpa, then looked at me with a hint of melancholy: ‘We no longer have tears or smiles, all we want is to rest,’ she sighed, and caressed my face with the back of her hand. ‘It will be them, the sergeants, who will run all this misery that our fine manners only serve to offend.’

  Grandpa looked down into his empty mug. ‘Yes, we’re sailing ships surrounded by steamers, no two ways about it.’ He fell silent for a moment. ‘And after the time of the sergeants, you’ll see, then will come the time of the corporals of the day.’

  The sound of engines emptied the inn. We went outside too, leaving a couple of old lire on the table.

  Three Fokkers, flying at low altitude, were pursuing a Caproni plane with Savoy insignia. They’d gone overhead less than ten metres over the roof. On their wings were the black crosses of the Teutonic Order. The tail of our aircraft was spewing smoke. The Fokkers were machine-gunning the Caproni from all directions. The bomber headed straight for the river in desperate flight. I managed to see that the upper wing was shredded at the centre, directly above the pilot, while the machine gunner was keeled over to one side, no longer firing.

  I clutched at Grandpa’s arm: ‘Do you think he’ll make it?’

  There was a burst of flame, perhaps the fighter planes had centred the fuel tank. Black smoke rose from behind a hill, to the west. The little knot of sergeants and corporals joined in a round of cheers –’Hurrah! Hurrah!’ – and immediately the inn sucked them back into its fumes, amid laughter and backslapping.

  We walked back to the Villa with downcast eyes.

  I thought of the two men burnt alive, hoping to myself that they’d died on impact. I watched the Fokkers fly off towards Sacile, by now at high altitude, three small crosses motionless up in the sky. Not a cloud in sight. The sky was pale blue, lightly etched by the wrinkle of a flock of birds flying parallel to the horizon, the first migratory birds of the season.

  An aircraft in flames, the shooting of a nightingale, the killing of a horse: we talked of nothing else all through lunch. The image of death is all the more terrible if what dies is something noble and beautiful, something that flies, that sings, that gallops. My aunt told us that she’d talked about this with the baron. She told us that the Germans see death as a blue-eyed smooth-skinned lad, smelling faintly of soap. Whereas we Italians think of it as a woman, young and nicely dressed.

  ‘Because they think of death as “der Tod”, while for us death is “la Morte”,’ Grandpa brusquely dismissed the topic, impatient as always when someone other than him was doing the philosophizing.

  Teresa had made a roast that aroused the suspicion, something that happened with increasing frequency, that it might be cat meat; I thought it was delicious, but my aunt got up and said to the cook: ‘Come with me!’ I stood up and started to follow, intending to eavesdrop, but Grandma stopped me short.

  ‘She’s going to tell her that roast cat isn’t fit for us to eat,’ said Grandpa, ‘but it won’t be long before we’ll be licking our fingers at the thought of a roast of that description.’

  The room was filled with smoke. The chimney hadn’t been scoured for months now. The rout of Caporetto had taken with it a great many professions and their absence could be noticed in many small details of life. My aunt started to cough, which was greeted with a polite smiles by the baron and General Bolzano, who was making his first entrance into the Villa.

  The general was a powerful-looking man, with pale eyes and a clear voice. He was practically bald, he wore grey suede gloves. Inside him too there seemed to be something grey, something that slid out of his eyes and filled anyone who looked at him with sadness. And his eyes were everywhere. He immediately caught my interest. He reserved a long glance for my aunt and me, sensing our embarrassment, understanding the unease of being guests of the enemy in the home of one’s own people, and he knew – oh yes, how he knew – that this outrage would not be lasting. When he lifted my aunt’s hand to his lips, it was not merely his head that curved over it: ‘Madame, I pray that you will believe that my gratitude for your patience is dictated by more than the mere obligations of courtesy.’

  ‘Your words, General, really touch me,’ said my aunt to the amazement of one and all, ‘because you, like me, live in a world that no longer exists.’ She pulled back her hand and flashed him a broad smile.

  The general took a step back, stiffened, and clicked his heels. Looking her in the eyes, he nodded.

  We were served by the attendants of the general and the major. Our palates had been seduced by Teresa’s stew, which charmed even the walls and the chairs. By now, there were no longer any dogs, cats, or rabbits to be seen in the area, and even mules, horses, and rodents had become infrequent sights: no one was surprised any more.

  Bolzano praised the cook’s skills, saying that the dish reminded him of his childhood in Vienna at the home of his grandparents. ‘We had a Friulian cook, from Talmassons, and her spezzatino was unrivalled.’ He smiled, eyes wide open, as he stared at his empty bowl: ‘Until today, of course.’ There wasn’t enough of the stew for second helpings, but we consoled ourselves with a second round of polenta, which was sprinkled, in the absence of butter, with Riva olive oil, compliments of the general.

  The baron’s attendant was a long asparagus of a man, closer in terms of the expression on his face to the vegetable than to homo sapiens; the general’s attendant, on the other hand, was pear-shaped, and in his docile gaze it was possible to detect something of that fruit’s sweetness. The pair of them worked in concert, with exquisite savoir faire: a viola and a cello in a Mozart quartet. They knew what the officers and Donna Maria wanted before they were asked, and they took care of me as well. The pear-man filled the glasses. The asparagus wobbled without ever rattling the silverware on the plates as he removed them. Their gestures, their neatly pressed uniforms, were eloquent expressions of the desire to rescue at least a memory of the courteous old way of life from the hurricane of mud and death that was sweeping away nat
ions and families.

  ‘If our love of good manners were ever to fade, what would separate us from the behaviour of brigands?’ the baron asked point-blank. ‘It’s easy for the knights of the air…Pilots kill gracefully, the sky separates them.’ With one hand he designed a figure of eight over his plate: ‘Eagles against falcons, falcons against sparrows, but men who dig in the mud live with the stench of corpses…they see the ravaged corpses of friends and enemies mixed together in the gravel and grit and turn into dirt; how do we foot soldiers remain men?’ He looked at my aunt and raised his glass; the Marzemino glittered in the candlelight: ‘It’s just lucky that we still have the ladies.’

  I don’t know why I did what I did next. But I could feel something stirring within me all the way down to the pit of my stomach and, as if the portrait of my great-grandmother as a girl, behind me, had come to life in order to speak through me, I leapt to my feet and said, in a harsh voice: ‘Enemies remain enemies even at the dinner table. Even though you have fine manners, there are weapons backing you up, weapons that kill Italians, and that’s something I’ll never forget.’ There was a rage deep inside me, and I have no idea where it came from. My aunt stared at me, uneasily, and the general seemed to have turned to stone. At that point I clicked my heels and nodded my head in the officers’ direction.

  ‘Sit down, Paolo!’ said my aunt.

  The skin on my face was afire. I ran out of the room and right at the door ran headlong into the pear-man who was coming back with the coffee. The tray clattered to the floor in a cacophony of hot sprays.

  I breathed in the chilly air. The moon was out, a slender arc floating above the trees. I’d never noticed before that day that the moon, in our sky, is always upright, warlike. Without thinking about it, with the blood pounding in my temples, I went towards the hayloft, towards Renato’s quarters. The barchessa was illuminated with a warm and uncertain light, and among the mules, three soldiers were throwing dice, seated on a dismantled engine. They looked up. I heard them laugh as I went by. Then I saw Loretta emerging from the steward’s quarters with her hands clapped over her face.

  The following morning, at the first light of day, the biplanes of Brian’s squadron flew over the roofs of the town and an avalanche of tricoloured pamphlets plugged up the downspouts and gutters of Refrontolo, obliging a company of Uhlans, expected at Moriago, to break march formation in order to act as street sweepers, thus protecting the illiterate minds of the Venetian peasants from the propaganda of the Triple Entente.

  The Third Paramour had been invited to lunch and Grandpa looked like an angry owl. He wandered through the Villa declaiming, with Garibaldi’s autobiography open in his left hand and his right forefinger pointed straight up at the ceiling stuccoes, where apes and tortoise, on the shores of a pale green pond, displayed their indifference to human suffering.

  ‘You tell me about this general, a whole lifetime of adventures,’ he said when he saw me, ‘one of those lives tailor-made to be told as a ripping yarn…but boiled down by his own pen to a broth fit for nuns, while I’ – and he looked me in the eye and lowered his voice – ‘who enjoy a solid reputation as a good-for-nothing, am writing a story of money, love, and vendetta, in other words the very things…yes, the very things’ – and here he lowered his voice still further, until it had shrunk to nothing more than a throttled little rivulet of sound – ‘that make life worth living.’

  ‘Then why are you reading it, if it’s a broth fit for nuns?’

  ‘You’re more impudent with every day that passes! You see, laddie, unlike that fellow, that Ganymede, whatever his name is, who’s never opened a book in his life…I read because I like to and…when I happen across a Garibaldi…it pains me!’ I wondered where he was heading with this. ‘With his courage and my talent put together something could have come of it.’ He was no longer talking to me, I don’t think he even knew I was there. He was talking to the air, to the stuccoes, to the walls.

  The beans, sautéed with onions and red chili peppers, landed on our plates with a festive sizzle that would have curled up the whiskers of even a general.

  Grandma had been keeping her eye on the two rivals since the beginning of the meal, and it was clear that she’d already staved off the worst a couple of times with small sharp kicks to her spouse’s ankle. A mass of insults was bubbling up inside Grandpa that threatened to sharply organize itself into a phalanx at any instant. And sure enough the phalanx poured forth the instant my aunt, who had a nose too long to mind her own business, thought of asking the Third Paramour his opinion on the financial disarray of the fatherland at war.

  ‘When the king’s coffers lie empty…’

  Grandpa stole the scene from his rival by concluding the phrase in his own way: ‘…the subjects would be well advised to stitch their pockets shut…or fill them with crabs. And so you would appear to be a bookkeeper…the missing link between an accountant and a human being.’

  The Third Paramour gulped down the mouthful of beans that for the past few seconds his tongue had been working to detach from his palate. He extracted the handkerchief from the breast pocket of his jacket and, with dishevelled grace, dabbed at his perfectly dry forehead. ‘You are, you are nothing but…an Othello. That’s what you are!’

  ‘And you’re a treacherous freeloader!’ Grandpa, had he ever found himself in Dante’s shoes, would have put tax officials, priests, and accountants into Lucifer’s various mouths.

  ‘That’s still better than you, claiming to write a book that everyone knows doesn’t exist.’

  His voice was cracking with emotion, the poor thing wasn’t used to quarrels.

  ‘It’s that cauliflower you have instead of a brain that doesn’t exist, not my book. And if it wasn’t for Madame Nancy…I would have strung you up from the foremast that very day,’ and he waved his fists in the big-foot’s face.

  The Third Paramour stood up, slamming his napkin down on his plate, which was gleaming as if Teresa had just buffed it with a rag, and left, with a curt nod of his head to Grandma alone.

  I felt called upon to offer my support to Grandpa: ‘His cologne smells of smoked mozzarella.’

  Grandpa stared at Grandma with a satisfied half-smile. He poured himself a finger of cognac from his private stock and stared into the fire, folding his napkin: ‘Now I feel better.’

  ‘My fault,’ said my aunt. And she burst into laughter. To my surprise, my grandmother burst out laughing as well, until me, Grandpa, and even Loretta who was already clearing the table, were all united in a single chorus of laughter.

  As Grandpa was tossing back his last gulp of cognac I said under my breath: ‘After all, Grandpa, the Third Paramour… he’s not all bad.’

  ‘I believe that,’ said Grandma, ‘even if you turned him head over heels you couldn’t hope for the clinking of a coin…He’s not all bad, but he’s not all good either.’

  Twenty-Four

  WITH APRIL THE SNOW HAD CLEARED AND BY MAY SOME of the officers began to leave. More and more lorries went through, and more and more carts, bicycles, mules and motorcycles. They came from Udine, from Sacile, from Codroipo, from Pordenone. Skinny youngsters passed by morning and evening on their way to the Piave, their uniforms flapping on them, bent under the weight of their packs, their helmets too big for them.

  The Villa had lost its importance. Lodging there with the baron were only two or three junior officers, but none of them stayed for long. Some went off west, towards the front, others eastwards, on leave. ‘Like flies on a cow’s rump,’ commented Teresa. When he left his office, a ground-floor room on the side of the house furthest from the street, the baron spent his time with us. With Aunt Maria largely – tongues were already wagging in the village – but also with Grandpa and me. Only Grandma kept aloof, true to her principle of confronting the invader with her courteous discourtesy.

  By now the baron seemed to me one of the household. I was as accustomed to him as I was to the shortage of food, the thought of Giulia or the sleepi
ness of the countryside. For months now there had been no sound of gunfire.

  On one occasion – it was towards the end of May and the sunshine was quite warm – von Feilitzsch saw me passing his window. He left his office and caught up with me. ‘I’ll come for a little walk with you, do you mind?’

  We walked together for a couple of hours, during which he told me about life in Hungary, where he and his wife had been for several years, and about Vienna, where his heart lay. He told me about the pastry shops, the girls, the concerts, the Strauss family, the avenues crowded deep into the night, the cinnamon-coloured shops. He spoke to me of that world of courteous smiles, of unspoken feelings, of neat flower beds and blue drawing rooms, the leisurely world in which he had grown up. Vienna for him was a friend who had died, and he was missing her.

  ‘You know, Signor Paolo, my father was someone who insured everything. My mother used to say he was the ideal client…the ideal gull, as it were, of every insurance agent. He would even have insured chickens if he’d been able to.’

  ‘My grandfather says that we live in a world based on the illusion that reason is in charge, and go to one without a shadow of sense to it.’

  The baron halted and closed his eyes for a moment. ‘I do like your grandfather.’

  There was the hint of a chuckle in his voice, and a slight smile on his lips. He liked to make fun of himself. When he drank tea he held the cup suspended right in front of his face for seconds at a time. ‘He makes love to his cup, watch out, lad. Seems like he’s soft as semolina,’ the cook had said. The cook was a wise old bird, but she was wrong. The major’s was not a simple character, and Grandpa had understood as much: ‘The child and the soldier in him are constantly at blows, but neither manages to gain the upper hand.’