Birmingham Rose (28 page)

Suddenly they were all startled by Falcone’s voice, low, but full of conviction. ‘We have to do what is good for the children,’ he said. ‘What use are the laws of peace during a war? Our Lord tells us to feed the hungry, so that is what we must do, even if we have to take a little from the rich.’

‘You sound like another Lupo,’ Francesco teased, referring to the Robin Hood figure of Domenico Lupo who travelled in the south with a small gang of bandits, raiding the army and the black market to feed the poor of his people. ‘You’ll have us holding up trains next.’

Falcone said nothing, but sat staring at the ground between his knees.

Henry pressed Rose further. ‘We’ll have to be on the spot about times and meeting places. No hanging about. It’s a risky business. So – d’you think you’re up to it?’

Rose took in a deep, fearful breath. ‘I’ll have to find a way, won’t I?’ she said.

It was a night Rose would remember all her life. The sisters and Francesco gratefully accepted the chance of rest and soon all of them were fast asleep. She sat up watching the children with Falcone.

At first it looked like being a long, hard night. Rose was very unsure of this silent, scruffy man who sat leaning against one side of the doorframe smoking cheap cigarettes. For a while she busied herself by walking round the room with a candle to check on each of the sleeping children. As she turned at the far end of the long room and her huge shadow leapt up the wall behind her, she realized that he was watching her. When their eyes met he moved his solemn gaze to the wall opposite him.

When she had exhausted all the activity she could think of, Rose offered to make tea. She sat tensely on the floor at the other side of the door, drinking the watery brew, unsure whether to try to talk to him.

Eventually she said, ‘You are an old friend of Francesco and Margherita?’

He pulled the cigarette out from between his lips and said, not ungraciously, ‘Yes. We studied together.’ Then he added, ‘That seems a very long time ago.’

After another silence he said, ‘You are English. You do not look English. Why are you here?’

‘I wanted to help.’

Suddenly he turned his whole head to examine her fully. Shyly, she turned also and looked into his large brown eyes with a hint of challenge in her own. But in his she read sorrow and vulnerability. Francesco had hinted that Falcone was holding back a weight of feeling that he could not communicate and in that moment she knew it was so. That exchange of glances between them after such brief conversation seemed to carry an intimacy which went a great deal further than their words.

But they could not find any more to say, and Rose began to resign herself to the fact that the rest of the night would be like this.

After about half an hour they heard the sound of planes overhead, followed by a number of bangs. Rose saw Falcone jump, shocked out of his thoughts. Several of the children began to cry. Glad of some diversion to keep her mind off the bombing, Rose went round whispering comforting words to the little ones who, only half awake, were only too happy to sink back into sleep again.

There was another wave of explosions from outside, evidently from the port, as the Germans sought out Allied supply ships. As she sat holding her breath it brought back vividly to Rose the night she had spent watching over her mother while the blitz raged outside.

She heard another shrill voice calling ‘Rosa! Rosa!’ It was Emilio. She went to sit beside him. To lull him to sleep she sang ‘Golden Slumbers’ in English because she didn’t know any lullabies in Italian.

There was one more wave of bombing and then it seemed to go quiet. A brief raid, thank heaven. Rose stayed by Emilio, humming to him and rocking her slender body in time with the tune until she began to feel quite sleepy herself and closed her eyes.

A shadow moved in front of the candle. When she opened her eyes, Falcone was squatting down opposite her looking at Emilio. Curious, she watched him. As he gazed into the child’s face she saw in his expression an extraordinary sympathy and tenderness. Emilio, barely awake, smiled up at both of them and she saw Falcone smile for the first time, lighting up the dark eyes with a warm, mischievous light. Emotions she could barely identify stirred in her.

He said softly to her, ‘You must love children very much. You could be resting in comfort away from all this.’

As she looked up at him she too felt trusting as a child, and spoke without hesitation. ‘My own little son died when he was three weeks old. I never saw him at this age. If he was alive now he would be seven this year.’

Falcone looked a little puzzled. ‘You have a husband?’

She shook her head. ‘I was raped. By the man who employed me.’

How strange that she should make this confession to this stranger whom she had sat with for only a couple of hours. That she should feel able to trust him as much as anyone in her life before.

Falcone said sadly, ‘That is a terrible thing. And to suffer the death of your child as well. Now I understand why you long to be with children.’

‘I don’t usually tell people,’ she said. ‘I felt you wouldn’t judge me.’

He let out a sharp rush of breath as if she had said something outrageous. ‘I am not fit to judge anyone.’

Suddenly he sat down facing her and scanned her face. ‘You do not look English,’ he said again. ‘Perhaps your face does not look quite Italian, but your colouring, the clothes – one could almost think . . . You are very beautiful.’

Rose smiled, looking away from him to deflect the compliment. ‘Your name – does it mean, like the bird? Is it the same?’ she asked.

‘Yes,
falcone
, the bird with the sharp, vicious beak. I hoped that I wasn’t like this bird but I’m not sure what my nature is any more.’ His face took on the sad, troubled expression it had worn for most of the evening.

‘Why are you here?’ she asked gently.

He replied slowly, as if he had not spoken the words before but had been thinking for a long time how to say them. ‘I’m here to wait for the end of the war. Until it’s finished I have to be like someone without a real home. A wandering soul.’ Seeing Rose frown at this rather abstract notion he went on, ‘As soon as the war’s over I shall enter the seminary of San Domenico Maggiore. I’m going to be a priest.’

‘A priest?’ Rose cried, then lowered her voice again, looking round to see if she had disturbed any of the children. ‘But you can’t do that. You’re a doctor.’

‘I was a doctor.’ His voice was bitter. ‘Actually I only practised for a short time after I qualified. I don’t have a lot of experience.’

‘But being a doctor is one of the most important things you could do,’ Rose argued. ‘Honestly, you people with an education don’t know you’re born. All that work to become a doctor and you want to give it up and be a priest? You must be mad.’

Falcone didn’t rise to her anger. ‘You didn’t have an education?’

‘Not much, no. It was what I wanted, badly. To be a teacher. But . . .’ She shrugged. ‘Dreams.’

‘I would’ve thought you were educated. You’re a very intelligent woman. And you speak my language well.’

‘Thanks.’

‘You’re right though. It’s a great privilege to have an education. But you see, to be a doctor – a doctor is supposed to have reverence for life, to cherish and preserve life.’ Falcone cupped his hands as if holding up a large and delicate egg shell. ‘And I’m tainted. This war has given me a feeling of guilt, of loathing. Whatever I try to do for the best, I’m pursued by death, by destruction. You see?’

He saw that Rose’s eyes were full of sympathy and interest. He knew she would not condemn him, that he could lay on her the weight that was pulling his mind down, sometimes it seemed, towards madness.

Rose indicated that they should move back to the door so as not to disturb the children. She fetched them each half a cup of water, and they sat each side of the door again, surrounded by their shadows and the sleeping children.

‘When Italy became involved in the war I was still finishing my studies,’ he began. ‘I felt it right to stay because I was doing something dedicated to giving life instead of working to destroy it.’

‘Didn’t you have to join up?’ Rose asked. She had wondered the same thing about Francesco.

Falcone smiled wryly. ‘The Italian army does not even have enough socks to go round. We steal them from the dead when they have finished with them. No – not everyone joined the army.

‘When I finished it was 1941. By then we were occupied by Germany. Things were very hard. Naples was growing hungrier by the day. I went home to my family in Cellina, north of Caivano and Acerra, not all that far from Caserta. My father was the town’s doctor. Perhaps I would’ve simply taken over his role. Who knows? For about eighteen months I helped him in the practice. It wasn’t difficult work. I enjoyed it, using the skills I had been trained in. Even under occupation a job like that brings a lot of satisfaction.

‘Then everything changed. It was December forty-two. I had been out on a late call and I was still in bed. That was why my father was the one to open the door. The body of a German soldier had been found in a side street off the main square. He’d been stabbed in the night and bled to death there. Naturally no one would admit to such a crime. When the Germans found out they had to have their revenge. To teach us Italians a lesson. They are a people who carry out vengeance with mathematical precision. For each German, the life of ten Italians. The ten most prominent men in the town. The mayor, Signor Pacelli, the postmaster – and of course they came to the house of the doctor. They took my father.

‘The same morning, they made them stand—’ Falcone made a slow pointing gesture with his finger. ‘A line of them against the wall of the post office. They made sure there was a big crowd to watch the spectacle. They didn’t even blindfold them. I stood there in the piazza as they shot my father. One moment he stood, looking so old suddenly, so frail. He was looking for me, I could tell. But his eyes did not find me among the crowd before the guns went off. And then they were all on the ground. The wall of the post office is broken open with holes. We were allowed to take them for burial.’

Falcone paused for a moment to light another cigarette. Rose sat very still, not wanting to interrupt now that his story had begun to flow out of him.

‘For a time I stayed at home alone. My mother died when I was a small boy, and my sisters and brother are all married and live elsewhere. I tried to keep the practice going, and for some time I succeeded. But all the time I was corrupted inside by anger and guilt. If it had been me who opened the door that morning my father wouldn’t have died. It would have been me. For the first time in my life I experienced the power of real hatred. I’d felt it touch me when our country was invaded. I’d known disgust and loathing against the Fascists. But nothing which approached this bitter need for action, as if I was possessed. It lay inside my intestines like a poisonous snake. I wanted to join the resistance, to fight back, but there was no organized resistance in the south. Nothing that I could find.

‘It was when they threw out Mussolini in July last year. The army was taken over by General Badoglio. All through the winter before there had been signs that Fascism was collapsing. There were even strikes, up in the north – Milano, FIAT at Torino, many other factories. This was unheard of under Mussolini – people like that speaking with their own voice. Such signs gave me hope that it was possible to achieve changes by direct, personal action. So I left Cellina and went to Rome.

‘At first I suppose I was filled with an enormous kind of joy, of euphoria at being able to join the resistance at last. I made contact with the Gappisti – GAP is Gruppi di Azione Patriottica. The groups work in many cities to subvert German and Fascist operations. They – we – planted bombs. We attacked columns of soldiers on the move. Assassinated prominent German officers. We attacked the prison, Regina Coeli, the opera house when it was full of German soldiers . . . One of the first actions I was involved in was to plant a bomb in a petrol depot for German trucks. Everything went up – the drums on the trucks, the storage depot itself. What a feeling that was! We destroyed more than two thousand gallons of their gasoline that afternoon.

‘The life we lived was very hard. For those of us without many contacts there was nowhere to sleep except in stone cellars with their cold, hard floors. Often we shared them with prisoners who were trying to escape, English, Canadians, Poles. And we became sick living like this. But the extraordinary thing was that the atmosphere among the people was such as I had never met before. The unity of feeling against the Germans. I was brought up in my faith to believe that people are unified by the love of God. But I discovered there how strongly people are brought together by hatred.

‘I lived this life of destruction for eight months. Then, only a few weeks ago, I was ordered to be involved in an ambush against a column of German forces. They weren’t just an arbitrary collection of soldiers. We’d heard they were training on the streets of Rome specifically to search out and destroy partisan cells both in and around the city. Our attack was to show that we were not prepared to be intimidated. It was really just a statement, of course. Already they had executed more than half the partisans in Rome.

‘The plan was to ambush the column as they passed down the Via Rasella. It’s a narrow street with a tunnel at the end. It would be hard for them to turn back or escape. I wasn’t one of the key operators. There were members of GAP with much greater nerve and skill. But I was involved as surely as one brick holds up the others in a wall. My job was to watch the column approaching along the route and to signal to Pietro, the next in the chain along the way. In the Via Rasella, one of our women was waiting to give the signal to a man called Bentivegna who was disguised as a rubbish collector. His cart was loaded with explosives. Others were ready to throw mortar bombs.

‘We all waited. How can I tell you how it felt that day? It was as if my body was pumped full of electricity. One touch and I would explode. The Germans were over an hour late. We were wondering whether to give up the attempt, all terrified that the police would search Bentivegna’s cart. Then they came at last, marching perfectly – beautifully, though it is horrible to say it – the way German soldiers do. The attack went according to plan. The mortar bombs went off, Bentivegna lit the fuse, and we all began to run towards the Via Nazionale.’