Between Enemies (34 page)

‘What about you, Major? The time has come to look inside yourself and ask forgiveness. God loves us even when we don’t deserve it…He loves us because His image is inside each of us… We were born human beings and that’s enough for Him. Pride gives bad advice, Major Manca, and now your time has run out.’

‘I’m happy you’re not asking me.’ Grandpa laughed one of his laughs and pulled me close to him.

‘I really don’t know what to do with your God,’ said Renato ‘but I still have something to say to you…Let’s go over in that corner.’

Don Lorenzo pulled his stole out of the box and the major followed him into the dark corner, carrying two stools.

Grandpa and I turned to look out at the dark sky. Every so often he’d take a drag on my pipe, which I was passing to him. The voices of the priest and the major came to us, muffled. There was a star atop the dark trees.

‘Is there any wine left?’

I turned towards the table; the bottle was there. I picked it up and shook it. ‘Not even half a drop, Grandpa.’

‘Cognac?’

I pointed at the bottle lying on its side on the table: it had lost its cork.

‘Leaving condemned men without a drop of alcohol and in the company of a priest is a genuine cruelty.’

‘Sober as you are, Grandpa, you might even be tempted to confess your sins.’

‘What sins? I still haven’t murdered anyone.’

My face darkened.

‘Forgive me, laddie…you know, I wish I had…Look, you have nothing to blame yourself for, it was him or you, or are you feeling guilty about that peasant girl?’

‘Guilty? No. That’s not it. I’m afraid, Grandpa. Afraid of all that darkness out there, of the nothing that’s waiting for us.’

‘I know. So am I.’

The priest and Renato emerged from the dark corner. The parish priest had removed his hat. He’d marked his forehead with a red circle that seemed to flame in the dim half-light, for a moment.

‘Will you do what I’ve asked you, Don Lorenzo?’

The priest nodded gravely. ‘Yes…I’ll do what I can,’ he said, staring at the major.

Then the priest took the letter from Grandpa.

‘Signor Paolo, are you sure you don’t want to say confession? You’ll feel better afterwards.’

‘I don’t doubt it, but you see…I’m not sure I want to feel better. I’m just sorry to do you the discourtesy…’

‘You’ve become a cynic, just like your grandpa.’

He didn’t know he was paying me a compliment, or perhaps he knew it all too well.

Forty-Four

I’
D EVEN GOT A LITTLE SLEEP
.

Day hadn’t yet dawned when I opened my eyes, the flame of the lamp was rising and falling and Grandpa was hard at work on the table with a package. The twine refused to yield to his haste.

‘Donna Maria sent us these,’ said Renato, who was very pleased to see his major’s uniform again. ‘I haven’t worn it in more than a year…It was the innkeeper who kept it for me, for two gold sterlings…but I ought to leave it to our priest…Yesterday I asked him to replace me in certain of my duties…He even seemed to be moved.’

We stripped off our filthy clothing and took turns washing up at the pump which gave us water in drips and splatters. I had a white shirt and summer wool trousers, ironed with a crease; Grandpa was wearing his light-coloured frock coat. We had no mirror so we combed our hair, each asking the others for advice.

‘What remains to be done is fairly simple.’ Grandpa was making an effort to seem calm; he was doing it for me.

The sun hadn’t yet peeked over the hilltops when the door swung open.

Don Lorenzo was the first one through the door. He wore a round, broad-brimmed hat and had his breviary in his hands. Then came the corporal with his little red moustache. It seemed that his eyes were less round this time, less owlish.

It all happened in a hurry.

We walked out in a line, Grandpa first, me in the middle, Major Manca last. We were escorted by four men. Rifles slung over their shoulders, bayonets fixed, tattered caps.

The light that swept over me made me half-close my eyes. I took a deep breath and filled my lungs with the scent of wet grass. The whole village was lined up along the iron bars where they used to tie up the mules. There were even children with mud-daubed faces. When the men saw us go by, they doffed their caps; the woman had snarls on faces wrapped tight in dark scarves. The children were excited.

It didn’t take us long to reach the poles with the iron hooks. They’d added a third. I understood that after the bullets, a noose awaited us. I didn’t much care, in fact, it seemed like an honour to me, to swing, in plain sight, like the heroes in my books.

The air was clear, and it smelt of damp earth and rain-drenched grass.

A company of Honvéds, lined up in double file, waited with rifles resting at their feet close to the wooden fence, where the field hands were clustered for the show and were doing their best to quiet the children who were pointing, consumed by eager curiosity.

The firing squad consisted of twelve men, but they weren’t in Hungarian uniform. They were all veterans, and the baron had hand-picked them. For certain jobs, he didn’t trust youngsters.

I saw Grandma standing next to my aunt. Grandma was wearing her black veil, which dangled over her face from the brim of a grey hat, and Aunt Maria had her enamel seal clipped to the strip of lace at her neck.

A gust of cool air ruffled the skirts.

I saw the dawning sun gleaming on the iron hooks high atop
the poles. Then the four men escorting us brought each of us to stand next to a pole and ran a rope under our arms. The baron had been true to his word. As they were tying us up, Grandpa, who was on my right, looked at me with resignation in his eyes: ‘You know, after all these years I’ve even grown to love the vertical position.’

I turned to look at Renato, but he was ignoring me. His eyes stared straight ahead, and he refused the black blindfold, spitting on the ground as he did so.

I shook my head when the red-moustached corporal offered me one. ‘I’m sorry, son,’ he whispered.

Grandpa too refused the offer, shaking his head.

I looked up at the Villa. And on the second floor, at the corner window, behind the panes I glimpsed Teresa’s rocky silhouette.

The stench of the latrines began to make itself known as the day grew progressively warmer. Don Lorenzo went on muttering prayers with his breviary shut in his hand. When he came to my pole, he made the sign of the cross with his thumb on my forehead, but I jerked my head away in annoyance. In front of Grandpa he sketched a cross in the air, and salted it with a bit of Latin: ‘
Proficiscere
,
anima christiana
,
de hoc mundo
.’ Then he stood aside.

I looked at my aunt’s face, as she stood there holding Grandma by the arm. Her face was pale. A sparrow landed by my foot. I moved my foot so I could see it fly, but it just hopped a short distance away. Then I noticed the birds of the morning, a sound that had always been there, but which I’d never listened to.

The baron stood next to the soldiers with their rifles at rest position. He unsheathed his sabre. He issued an order. The first row of soldiers knelt. I looked towards the Villa and saw that Teresa had opened the window; a shaft of sunlight was glinting
off the glass pane. I turned towards the tenant farmers and field hands who were standing erect along the whole length of the wooden fence. Now even the children stood silent. And the women were lined up just as orderly as infantrymen. No one had summoned them, they weren’t there merely out of curiosity, or to show their respect for us, or because they hated us; they had all come to let the enemy know that nothing is forgotten, that everything is known, and that everything comes with a price. The baron spoke my language and those peasants didn’t, he gripped his fork and lifted his glass the way I did, and those peasants didn’t, he’d read many of the same books I’d read, and those peasants didn’t even know how to read, but at that moment I felt that that war, that damned filthy war, had put me and those peasants on one side, and the baron and his men on the other. And just then, if those miserable poverty-stricken men could have laid their hands on their pitchforks, they’d have cut the baron’s throat, not ours, even if the resentment they nurtured for us was far more justified, and dated back over the generations.

The rifles were pointed. I saw that the rifle barrels were swinging slightly. I didn’t think we could be such a hard target to aim at. I tried to look the soldiers in the eye. For a moment I lifted my head and I saw the sun gleaming off the hook awaiting me. Then the spark of light on the baron’s sabre moved. I saw it fall; I heard it swish, I believe.

Forty-Five

A
RING OF LIGHT, A BALL OF FIRE
. S
WINGING
. A
PENDULUM
that made me feel as if I was falling off a cliff every time it went past, as if there was air beneath me, an abyss of air and hot wind. The ball of fire went on swinging.

There was a voice, a woman’s voice.

The sky was white, the purest white.

The ball wouldn’t stop swinging.

‘Stop that ball, stop it!’

‘God be praised…He’s awake.’

I recognized my aunt’s voice. I opened my eyes. My eyelids were heavy, and I felt pain, a sharp stab of pain in my leg. There was a man with large black sideburns, and a smell that gave me a sense of nausea. Everything looked blurry, as if I was immersed in steam. The man was wearing a white coat, and it looked to me as if he had tubes running into his ears and he was using an icy tentacle to sting me in the chest.

‘It’s all okay…Paolo.’

‘That light…Why is it moving?’

The man with the white coat reached up his hand and stopped the light bulb that was dangling over my face. With his thumb, he lowered first one of my eyelids, then the other. ‘You have a couple of bulletholes in your right lung, one on the left thigh, and a flesh wound on the temple…I’d say you had the
devil on your side, I’ve never seen such luck.’

‘What are you talking about…? Where am I?’

‘Mezzavilla. The hospital. My name is Bresci, Aldo Bresci, from Ferrara. Lieutenant physician, taken prisoner on the Kolovrat, nearly a year ago, now…’ He was smiling, he had a mouthful of teeth – so many teeth, and all gleaming white. ‘I’ve been helping out here since the battle in June. I was almost done with my shift when they brought in an Italian boy on a stretcher. He’d been shot by a firing squad but apparently they’d spared his life: no bullet to the head, as regulations would normally demand.’

The doctor’s voice was deep and gentle. I felt a burning sensation in my thigh, but nothing in my chest, even though I could barely move because I was bandaged all the way down to my crotch. My aunt looked at me with glowing, incredulous eyes. There were two other iron hospital beds next to mine, both empty. It took me a full half an hour to come to, to understand what had actually happened.

The doctor had started speaking German to a woman who had the insignia of the Red Cross on her blouse, while my aunt went on telling her story. Her excitement and joy at the sight of me, alive, had pushed Grandpa’s death out of her mind.

She told me everything, down to the last detail. And I had to make her repeat it to be sure that it was really true.

When the baron had walked over to me to deliver the coup de grâce, he’d noticed that I was moving my head. At that point, my aunt had run headlong across the few metres that separated her from the baron, and thrown herself between me and that levelled pistol. The baron ordered a corporal to shove the intrusive woman aside, but he simply uttered the words ‘
Xé un segno del Signor
’ – ‘It’s a sign from God’ – and planted his feet
by Donna Maria’s side, as Grandma hurried to support them.

‘You should have seen the faces of the baron, the two ladies, and his corporal…’

She told me that after that they’d hoisted Grandpa and Renato up onto the hooks. She said nothing about Grandpa. ‘The major…you know’ – her green eyes filmed over – ‘the major had his left foot closer to the ground, as if death had decided to make up for the wrong that life had done him, by lengthening his shorter leg.’

Forty-Six

T
HE WAKE WAS HELD IN THE SACRISTY
. G
RANDMA
N
ANCY
, Teresa, and my aunt stayed up all night, and early the next morning the whole town filed through, one by one, like the beads of a rosary, passing before Grandma, who held her head high, without her veil, dry-eyed, and said to each one: ‘They’re more afraid than we are.’

In the afternoon, Renato’s coffin was placed on a lorry headed for the river and Grandpa’s was taken to the church for mass. A short mass; everyone was there, the innkeeper and the innkeeper’s wife, Attilio and Adriano. With a masterful touch, Don Lorenzo reduced the sermon to a few measured sentences, concluding with ‘public evils always come to everyone’s front door…but so does the mercy of Our Lord.’

The parish priest accompanied the corpse to our little cemetery, next to the camp latrines. Four peasants lowered the casket into the grave. Then they crossed themselves and struck a sorrowful pose, while Don Lorenzo sprinkled a little holy water and a handful of Latin onto the deal planks sunk deep into the earth.

The event was less widely discussed than the baron had expected, and when Italy’s armed resurgence finally came, groups of armed men aided the advance of the sharpshooters who were pushing the imperial army back towards Vittorio, where it would soon be annihilated.

The Villa was reached by the troops led by General Clerici on 30 October, after a brief but intense barrage of artillery fire on Refrontolo. That same day, Teresa captured a large rat. Her culinary skills transformed it into a hare: a roast that delighted both my palate and her mistresses’ palates. It earned her great praise and even a small, but still entirely welcome, tip.

The Hapsburg eagle, a shadow and relic of the eagle of the legions, had lost itself in the sky blue of the House of Savoy. I didn’t take part in the celebrations of liberation that for nearly a year crisscrossed the country, on one Sunday after another: ‘Victories have little to say, it’s defeat that teaches a lesson,’ said Grandpa. And what could all those big-bellied gentlemen with their black top hats and tricolour cockards know about it, as they clambered onto the stage making promises of pie in the sky in the sweet bye and bye to one and all?