Lambrusco (16 page)

A shuffling, a few grunts. A spilling of astringent, soapy water onto the floor.

“I…am…
Li,
” said Lido Linari.

“Li? That's it? Just Li? Like an Oriental? I never heard of an Italian called Li. I'm not trying to give you a hard time. I'm just a soldier, trying to be friendly here.”

A big grin. Yes, just Li. Friendly, yes.

My God. The effort to withhold my amazement took a lot. The brightest, loveliest, liveliest of the waiters was standing there with a mop, staring at the handle as if it were golden, as if it enchanted him.

It was a shame there hadn't been music for his entrance. Something light. Something warm. Something wonderful. Strains of Puccini came into my head.
Bohème.
Nothing specific, just some background, vaguely. Puccini never composed a piece called “A Pleasant, Sunny Little Tune To Be Rescued By,” but that was what it sounded like.

Funny how everything changed when there was a song.

T
HERE WAS NO SIGN
of the Lido whose girlfriends called the restaurant so often, Beppi would answer the phone with, “This is Aldo's, but if you're looking for Lido Linari, you've got a wrong number.”

He was a thoroughly Puccini waiter.
La Bohème
was his favorite. He was always begging me to sing as much of it as one program allowed, but he'd settle now and then for the Rodolfo and Marcello in the opening scene, lamenting their stove in a grim Paris winter.

He'd imagine that France was as cold as the Arctic, and only Puccini knew how to warm it.
Love is like a fireplace that wastes too much, too quickly, where a man is the bundle of kindling, and a woman is the spark. One gets burned in an instant, but meanwhile, my friend, we're standing here freezing.
In honor of Lido, and to shut him up, I'd sing Puccini on non-Puccini evenings as a warm-up.

He was not allowed to handle tables where an attractive wife was with an unattractive husband, because everyone knew what would happen. A note slipped discreetly, a whispered word. “At least we'll make it hard for him,” Nizarro would say, putting Lido with patrons who were elderly, or Fascists, or tourist groups leaving Italy right after the meal, and also large families, where the wife would look too exhausted, or too fed up with men to notice him.

He had turned himself into an idiot. The perfect village idiot.

How had he managed that look on his face, all loose and slackened? His skin was like a sail that's been emptied of wind and just hangs there. He was messily grizzled with beard, which he picked at, as if looking absentmindedly for lice; his eyes were as darkly inanimate as two round pieces of charcoal. Drool was in a corner of his mouth, and his thick, curly hair, which hadn't been trimmed in quite a while, looked like it had never been washed, brushed, or attended to in any way.

Those curls in real life had a soft, corkscrew-like intensity. “If I could scalp him like an American Indian chief, without killing him, I would do it,” Beppi used to say, when he'd started balding.

“I'm going out for a smoke, but I'll be back in a couple of minutes, so make sure you do a good cleanup job, Li,” said Frank.

Lido bobbed his head energetically, with an odd scrunching up of one eye, as if he suffered from nervous tics. I wouldn't mention this to him, but he was overdoing it.

“Signora Fantini, when I come back, I'll be anticipating the sound of your voice, even though all you'll be doing with me is talking. We'll have a terrific conversation! As I'm sure I'll repeat to you later, I'd give a lot to hear you sing. Who knows? Maybe one day I will!”

Frank's big toothy smile was genuine. He did have a certain charm.

Into the bucket went Lido's mop. He was waiting until Frank was well out of earshot before he spoke to me. Into my head came a tune from not Puccini, but Mozart.

Bino. His nickname at the restaurant was Bino, for the lusty, exuberant, woman-besotted, unsoldierly soldier of
Figaro,
Cherubino.

I sang his famous
“Voi che sapete che cosa e' amor, donne, vedete s'io l'ho nel cor”
not only on Mozart nights but whenever I felt the need for something simple and lovely and clear, and so honestly moving it could melt a block of ice. “You, ladies, who know what love is, see if I have it in my heart.”

It fit Lido perfectly. He'd only started hating the nickname when he found out one night at the restaurant, probably from Beppi—no one ever owned up to it—that almost always the role is sung by a woman in a young man's clothes.

Lido had been so shocked he froze, then started trembling. On his next trip to the kitchen, where he was supposed to get
antipasti
for one of his tables, he inadvertently picked up an enormous tray of boiled crabs. Back in the dining room, realizing his mistake, he went to pieces completely and the tray flew out of his hands.

The crabs soared off in all directions. Someone was hit on the shoulder, someone else caught one in the air, refused to give it back, and started breaking it apart to eat it, even though he hadn't ordered it and wouldn't pay for it, and Nizarro started yelling, and Beppi yelled louder, and the waiters fumbled about and didn't know what to do, while trying their best not to look like they were enjoying it. The cooks came out to see what had happened, and people jumped up as if the things were alive, were crawling all over their feet, were trying to bite them. To top it off, a well-known Fascist, an officer, a real, high-ranked bastard, was sitting at a table close to Lido. A crab landed on his thigh, in his lap, almost, and he was getting the feeling it might have been done on purpose.

It was a madhouse, with sinister overtones. I wasn't supposed to go on for another half hour, but I decided not to wait. It was a Verdi night, so everyone settled down quickly.

“You saved me,” Lido said to me later. “I was worried that Beppi or that Fascist might rip me apart. If anyone calls me that horrible nickname again, I'll take the biggest crab that ever came out of a net, and I will jam it, alive and kicking, down his throat.”

No one ever called him Bino again, to his face.

And here he was, mopping the floor around my cot. “Lucia,
ciao,
” he whispered. “You're smiling at me. That's a good sign. How am I doing?”

“You could be on the stage.”

“Thanks. There's going to be a diversion. I'm getting you out of here. The American golfer is outside with some friends of hers. She's got a car. Did they drug you?”

“I think it was only aspirin, although they called it a fancy name. They told me I'm bleeding in the brain.”

“Brains don't bleed unless you're dead or dying, which you're not. Can you walk?”

“I can do anything.”

“There hasn't been news of Beppi. No one knows anything, but as Nizarro said, he's got to be somewhere, and when we find him we'll know exactly where he is, and that's all we should say about it or we'll go crazy. Nizarro went and looked at your house. No one bombed it.”

“Are Germans there?”

“He didn't say.”

“You're fibbing.”

“All right. A few. Let's not talk about that. Did you figure out that this guy who's been talking to you is no ordinary soldier, and he's up to no good, or should I explain a few things about his tricks, about the type of information he wants to get from you?”

“I'm going to pretend,” I said, “that the only reason you asked me that question is that you're still very young.”

“I apologize. I just wanted to make sure you know he doesn't like partisans.”

“I know that, Lido. Where's Marcellina?”

“I don't know.”

“What about Etto Renzetti of San Guarino?”

“I don't know where anyone else is except Nizarro, who's looking for Beppi along the coast, in case he's hiding in a fisherman's shack—which Nizarro can manage, because he knows where the mines are—and also Geppo and Roncuzzi. I slept in a hayloft with them last night. It just occurred to me, this is the first time I ever did anything with a mop that didn't belong to the restaurant.”

“Lido, listen to me. These soldiers think Beppi blew up half the German Army. They think he's the new Garibaldi. They're worried. They want to control him. Now he'll have to hide from the Americans, too.”

“I know. Rumors, gossip, you know how it is. Nizarro says this always happens in a war. Let's hope no one else invades us. Beppi's got enough people after him as it is.”

“Are we waiting for the diversion?”

“We are.”

“What is it?”

“A surprise. How are you feeling?”

“I don't feel like I'm bleeding anywhere, but how do I look? I haven't seen myself in a mirror.”

“You look a little pale. They didn't tell me you're dressed like an American soldier. I never saw you in trousers before. I think they call what you're wearing
fatigues.
”

“They belong to a horse racer. What's going on at the Pattuellis' village? The church was bombed.”

“I heard about it, but I don't know any other news.”

“What about Carmen and Mauro's children?”

“I don't know anything about them, but they're probably making trouble somewhere.”

“Is Annmarie all right?”

“She's
jolly well bloody good.
One of her friends is English, and he says that about everything. You know how we thought these Americans were so organized? They're not. The left hand doesn't know what the right one's doing. I think some of them became just like Italian politicians as soon as they got here.”

“You seem to be enjoying yourself, Lido.”

“I'm just doing my job!”

“I don't know who we can trust.”

“I do,” said Lido confidently. “Annmarie's commander has different ideas from these guys in the unit that captured you, not that anyone knew at the time that it was a capture. They must have been feeling that, if this were a chess game, they'd got the queen. Look at this floor! Now that I'm cleaning up the mess here, the mosaics are showing. Romagnan Roman! These tiles should be in a museum, if we've got some that haven't been bombed. I think I'll mention this to Beppi and Nizarro. Wouldn't they look
topping
in the restaurant? That's the other word I just picked up. I'll have to remember where this place is.”

“Never mind all that, Lido. Tell me about the plan for getting out of here.”

“I already did.”

“You didn't, not in detail.”

“Well, for one thing, we'll make our escape out that window just over there. The one that's got a blanket covering it. We're on the ground floor, so there won't be any jumping—the sill's not very high. You'll see a row of olive trees to the right, as you're facing them. Behind them is an old stone farmhouse, not bombed, just decrepit. Behind that is the car. Oh, I almost forgot to tell you about Nomad. I
do
know where more of us are. Being an idiot must have affected me. Nomad's gone to help the American Army liberate Ravenna. It's packed with Nazis. They needed a translator. He took the Batarra brothers with him, because Nizarro said, after what Beppi did, he's putting an end to individual action. He said no one except himself can do anything alone, and the Batarras know the city. Remember, the two of them used to live in Ravenna? They had side-by-side shops, tobacco and a pharmacy, just like what they ended up with in Mengo. The Americans in Ravenna are
good guys.
Annmarie said so. One of them is her
fidanzato
! He sent her a message. She didn't know he was here. He's Italo-American. Tomasino? Is that his name? I wasn't clear about it. He's an officer, a genuine army big shot. They don't all want us unarmed like babies. The proof of that is the fact that he's arranging to get us guns called
Brownings.
They're rifles. I think your smuggling days may be over. What's the matter? Why are you getting upset? Am I doing badly with the floor? Are you scared of going out the window?”

“I'm not upset.”

Suddenly there was an immensely loud pop just outside the front of the building. It wasn't anything like the booming of thunder-like bombs out of airplanes—but something sharper and crackly, like a firecracker. Gunshots. In rapid succession there were more of them, then a chaotic jumble of what could only be explosions.

It was like listening to an orchestra in which the only musicians who'd shown up to play were the percussionists. The room filled with shouting, with a frenzy of commotion, and Lido threw down the mop to lean toward me, grabbing my arms, tugging at me. A look of pure naked terror was on his face.

“That's not the diversion,” he whispered hoarsely, breathing hard. “I think it sounds like Germans. Come
on.
”

I felt strangely unafraid. Perhaps I was beginning to consider myself an old hand at attacks, even though this was only my second one. And I was furious—
furious
—not at the attackers, whoever they were, but at that officer big shot, a stranger to me, heard of and never seen but looming largely, unexpectedly, in my mind: Tullio Tomasini. What was he doing in Italy? Had he come to be married to his
fidanzata
and spoil my hopes? Why was he involving himself with guns and partisans? Did he imagine himself a hero in a Hollywood movie, an Italo-American Spencer Tracy?

I had spotted a pair of boots below the end of the cot, on the other side of the room, where the jockey soldier Peewee lay absolutely still, covered to his chin by a blanket.

That shape was like a small teenage boy's. I wondered if his compatriots had made fun of him. Maybe, somewhere in the state of Kentucky, his mother walked around in her American life trying hard to not imagine that he was in the situation he was in. Maybe she kept staying close to horses in his honor. Was it night in America? Was everyone sleeping? Maybe Peewee had a wife or a girlfriend, dreaming of him.