After Hannibal (17 page)

It was to occur to both the Greens, in the light of later events, that a sort of threat was contained in these words. But at the time they were too busy grappling with the sum of twenty million lire.

“That is something like thirteen thousand dollars,” Mr. Green said. “We will have to think it over.”

“Of course. Bear in mind that you will have a band of reinforced concrete a meter in width encircling the premises, holding them in a grip of steel.” Blemish was carried away into poetry by his desire to get the Greens to agree. “Firm against tempest and storm,” he said. “Steadfast and sure while the billows roll. I don’t know if I mentioned this but we are proceeding on the advice of our surveyor, what they call a
geometra
here, whom you haven’t met as yet, I think, but he is very aware of safety precautions in this area, which as we all know is an earthquake zone. He is a real stickler for safety, our
geometra
. Of course, Esposito, I daresay Esposito would accept it if you said you didn’t want this work done, but we might run into trouble over the planning permission and then the
work would have to be suspended while they went fully into things.”

Blemish paused, looking from one Green to the other. “That can take time in Italy. It would be very uncomfortable for you, apart from anything else.”

On this note he took his departure, leaving Esposito still talking to his phone. It had been a good exit line but as he drove home a mood of self-doubt descended on him. It was not often that Blemish admitted weaknesses or fallings-off, even to Mildred; but when he got home again after this interview with the Greens he felt obliged to acknowledge that he had talked rather too much.

“I am pretty sure they will agree to have it done,” he said. “When it comes to foundations people tend to pay up; nobody likes to think that his property is liable to subsidence. It isn’t that, it’s the lapse in professionalism that bothers me. I went on too long from the business psychology viewpoint, and just at the wrong time, just when they said they were going to consider it.” He brooded for some moments, then said with deepened self-abasement, “It has always been a tendency of mine to gild the lily. When people say they are going to consider something, you show quiet confidence, you don’t start urging them, not at that point; it looks like weakness. These Greens somehow bring out the worst in me. I must say I don’t like that couple, I don’t find them
simpatico
at all.”

Seeing that her man was downcast and in need of reassurance, Mildred came padding toward him. “You are just tired, my love, that’s all,” she said. She nestled against him and he smelled her warm body odor and the mingled aromas of baked meats that came to him from her gingham apron and the steam of sauces that got into her
hair. “I am quite sure you handled it all perfectly,” she said. “I wouldn’t think about those silly Greens a moment longer; they don’t sound the sort of people we would care to know.” To take his mind from things she nudged him gently with her pelvis. Blemish felt a stirring in his loins. “Shall we dress up tonight?” he said.

“Oh, yes, do let’s.”

First they had one of Mildred’s medieval dishes, one which she was trying out for the very first time, sweet-sour spiced rabbit. This was a rich dish, containing a quantity of pork dripping and currants and red wine.

“Delicious,” Blemish said, swaying his head on its long neck to show a sort of hypnotic bliss, like a charmed snake. “This will be a popular one with the customers. I’ll get fat if you go on feeding me at this rate.”

She regarded him fondly. “You’ll never get fat,” she said. “You are always on the go, morning till night, working to get the money together so we can have our dream house and our medieval restaurant just as we want them. No one could be a better breadwinner than you are.”

“Well, Milly, I do my best,” Blemish said.

Afterward they dressed up. Blemish had always gone in for this, even before meeting Mildred, when he was still living alone. He had loved being in costume as a child and could still remember every detail of his outfits of those days, his pirate eye patch, the tasseled fringes on his cowboy holster, the shiny buttons on his fireman’s tunic. Later it had become a need of his nature, feeding fantasies of success and achievement. By good fortune, in Mildred he had found an enthusiastic convert.

They had donned quite a variety of costumes in their time together. In the London days, Blemish had spent a fair amount of the money at the shops of theatrical costumiers. There had been a military phase, with Blemish as a guards officer and Mildred as a sort of regimental girl mascot in a pleated skirt and high boots. In their sporting days Blemish was a high-scoring striker in Liverpool colors and an excitingly constrictive jockstrap, while Mildred had worn a lacy Wimbledon getup with a sort of ballet skirt and white satin panties. They never transdressed; Mildred was traditional in her views and could not have respected a man who made himself effeminate.

Now of course, since the idea for the restaurant had come to them, everything was medieval. Blemish’s long legs were encased in stretch-nylon hose and he wore a skirted tunic and sported a codpiece—he had given up the jockstrap with reluctance. All these items had been fashioned by Mildred, who was good with her needle. She herself wore a tight-fitting, low-cut bodice that drew her breasts together and the sort of hooped skirt called a farthingale. This last was rather out of period but Mildred liked it as she wore nothing underneath, which gave a stimulating sense of air and freedom to all her lower parts.

As Blemish pursued a squealing Mildred around their double bed, finally brought her down, searched to disencumber her broad behind from the plastic hoops of the farthingale, as he maneuvered her into the position of readiness for the mode they both preferred—doggy-fashion they jokingly called it—as he felt himself more than filling out the medieval codpiece, triumph of conquest and restored commercial confidence caused him to put more than
the usual emphasis into the ritual abuse he now heaped on his partner and to enjoy more keenly the ritual whimpering with which she answered it.

Ritter had reached the grove of canes some two thirds of the way down. The canes grew close together and the older ones were more than twice his height. As he crouched among them they obscured his view of the sky, enclosing him in a world of stems and roots and thickets of undergrowth. They leaned in all directions, snared and dragged down by thick ropes of bramble and creeper and wild vine. Streamers of bryony and honeysuckle laced through them.

It seemed to Ritter strangely silent within this enclave, among the burdened stems and the tuberous roots that showed here and there, pale and swollen, monstrous-looking, like the knuckles of some buried titan. In the very heart of it, through the debris of leaf mold and dead vegetation, new shoots of cane were thrusting up, a fresh and vivid green. The root system of canes was like the industry of spiders, about which he had been reading: aspects both of the terrible tenacity of nature. He thought for a while of this blind, silent struggle of plants. The struggle of animals was not a silent one, for the most part; but only man had the language to clothe his in abstractions.

His father’s face followed close upon this thought—these days, since he had started on his work of clearance, it lay in wait of him at every turn. He saw again that thin, sensitive mouth moving with words and the white petals on the desk and the white patches on the
collar of the uniform. The fate of the hostages had been an abstract matter for his father. The essential truth of it did not lie in the killing by shooting of a randomly collected group of human beings and covering the bodies over with an explosion of dynamite. It lay in the Nordic Spirit combining with the tradition of Latin Christendom to make a New European Order.

The mouth moving, the words coming, his face … What was the expression of his face? Ritter could remember only two faces for his father: the one he had known in childhood, calm, close-shaven, vaguely kind; and the other, the face of the nursing home in Ulm, gaunt and staring. But the shape of the mouth was always the same, and the shape of the words. He had known, even at ten, that the shape was wrong, that his father’s words could not be the right ones, not because he detected flaws of fact or logic but because they bore no relation at all to Giuseppe’s tears or to the beginnings of hate in the lines of his friend’s face.

He crouched among the canes and began to reach into the ancient ramifications of bramble and blackthorn so as to cut them away at the base of the stems. It was his intention, before he stopped work that day, to clear all this undergrowth, free the canes, let air and light to them. Those that had rotted or been dragged out of shape by the creepers—some were bent almost into hoops—he would cut out, so allowing the new ones to grow straight. It was hot there in the hollow and the shade of the canes was too thin to give much protection from the afternoon sun. Ritter sweated heavily and his back ached from the squatting and reaching; but the discomfort was a fuel to his resolve, creating a steady rage against the obstinacy of life opposed to him, creating at the same time a vacancy of mind
in which what he had learned and what he had already known, the things that proved the wrongness of the words, were repeated again, in dogged and familiar sequence.

The afternoon of March 23, 1944, the anniversary of the founding of the fascist movement. Rome was under German occupation. Badoglio had made a separate peace. The Allies had landed in Sicily. I was ten years old and a pupil at the German School and I had a great friend called Giuseppe, who lived in the basement with his mother, the concierge. Giuseppe and his mother were sent away because of me.

On that afternoon a detachment of German security police was marching as usual toward the Viminale along the Via Rasella, a street lying between the Via delle Quattro Fontane and the Via del Traforo, in the heart of the city. SS troops of the Bozen Battalion. The Via Rasella has a steepish slope to it. Someone in the guise of a street cleaner waited halfway up with the kind of covered handcart used for collecting rubbish. In the handcart was a steel box containing twelve kilos of explosive and a package with another six kilos, attached to a short fuse. As the troops began the ascent someone below made a signal. The man waiting above lit the fuse and walked away. The timing was perfect: the cart blew up just as the troops drew level with it. Total deaths—from the explosion itself and from the grenades thrown down from windows at the fleeing survivors—thirty-three.

What happened then had very little to do with the founding of a New European Order. The Germans were frightened by the scale and boldness of the attack. There had already been some assassinations of fascist officials and on the first of that same month several
hundred thousand Italian workers downed tools in Turin and Milan, bringing production to a standstill for a week. There was fear of a general uprising. The authorities decided upon reprisals. The only question was how many to kill. Settlement of this question involved most of the key German military and diplomatic officials in Italy. My father among them. My father knew, before he spoke to me that afternoon, he knew about the panic, he knew that Marshal Kesselring’s headquarters had informed Hitler, who had wanted at first to have fifty Italians shot for each German policeman killed. He knew that in subsequent phone calls this had been toned down to a ratio of ten to one.

Ritter paused in his work, and the silence of the place, which had been held off by his own small movements, descended on him. Somewhere below, near the stream, a bird sang briefly. My father knew all the time, he thought, with the same naive surprise he had felt when this had first come home to him, in the years after the war, when it had become possible to learn about such things. My father knew that Kesselring had been told by the SS chief in Rome, Kappler, that there were enough people already under sentence of death to make up the required number. He knew that this was a lie, that people were taken at random, that in the haste of rounding up the victims the quota of three hundred and thirty had been exceeded by five. My father knew this because his Italian colleague, the police official Pietro Caruso, with whom he was on close terms, had been responsible for selecting the victims …

This knowledge on his father’s part, unsuspected at the time, never referred to since, struck Ritter in retrospect as the most monstrous thing of all and a pervasive sense of treachery had gathered
around and within it, deepened over the years by his sense of there being a pattern in the business, a pattern that was neat, symmetrical, universal. He repeated it to himself now:
I betrayed Giuseppe and his mother by knowing something my father did not; my father added this knowledge of mine to his own much greater stock and betrayed me with it
.

As his own knowledge of the killings at the Fosse Ardeatine had increased, so had this shape of treachery filled out, a development that had its own strong coloring of irony to his mind and one that during his career as an interpreter, seeing the power of words to conceal and distort, he had come to regard as a fact of life: whatever knowledge we achieve, it is always at the expense of faith.