Love and War in the Apennines (15 page)

‘It’s the priest (the
prete
),’ said Signor Zanoni. ‘You’ll be warm enough when he gets out of it.’ What he said sounded almost obscene on the lips of a man like this, but then his wife peeled back the sheet and blankets for a moment, long enough to remove from it a strange contrivance, something that I had never seen before, or even heard of – an iron pot full of hot coals from the fire on a wooden base with a framework of laths over it to stop the bedding coming in contact with the pot and catching fire. This was the priest, a dangerous apparatus which, in its time, they told me later, had burned down many houses.

Then they went away and I climbed up into the bed and
burrowed down into it between the rough, white sheets. It was the best bed I have ever slept in before or since. It was as warm and soft as a woman and almost equally alive. I was almost tempted to talk to it but instead I fell asleep laughing with sheer joy while the thunder rolled and the rain beat down on the roof overhead. At this moment, about seven o’clock on the night of the twenty-fifth of September, 1943, there could have been few people in the whole of Fortress Europe more contented or fortunate than I was.

The next morning when I woke the rain was still pelting down. The cows in the
stalla
were like a lot of fog-horns, the hens were making disgruntled noises in the yard and I could hear faint movements in the kitchen as if whoever was there was trying to make as little noise as possible. The shutters were closed and I got out of bed to open them and when I was back in it I found that by sitting up I could look down into a little orchard in which there were some battered old apple trees with their branches bowed down by the rain and the weight of fruit on them, and with a lot of windfalls from the storm at the foot of them.

There was nothing else to see. The valley up which I had climbed the previous afternoon, and the hills on either side of it, were still hidden in mist and cloud. Before coming to Italy I had never imagined that the countryside could ever be so dreary-looking. This sodden landscape reminded me of a wet Sunday morning on holiday as a child in Devonshire long before the war, when I had looked out of the window in despair, wondering what I should do all day, but then discovered a lot of old bound copies of the
Strand Magazine
, and spent the rest of the day lying on a brokendown horsehair sofa in the billiard room happily reading instalments of Sherlock Holmes.

This, too, was a Sunday and it was raining even harder than it
had been that day in Devonshire, but there the resemblance ended. Then my only worry had been that I might be bored. Now I knew that in an hour or two I would probably be out on the hillside again on my way to try to find somewhere to spend tonight, and it would be the same the next night and the night after that, but for the moment I had the pleasure of being in this marvellous, deep, warm old bed. The huge feather mattress was so soft that its edges curled up under my weight and enveloped me so that I looked rather like a hot dog, and under the bed there was a large chamberpot, a
vaso da notte.

Besides the bed the only other items of furniture were a chair and an old wooden chest with an iron lock on which stood the candlestick and snuffer with which I had been preceded up the stairs to bed. On one white-washed wall, hanging from a rail, carefully preserved from dust under layers of newspapers, were the family’s best clothes. Signor Zanoni’s black suit for weddings and funerals and days of
festa
and his best corduroy suit which was also beginning to show signs of wear, the signora’s best dress and coat and the children’s clothes – one of them had a velvet tam o’shanter as big as a soup plate. To one side of the bed there was a crucifix and above it there was a large, sombre framed photograph, taken long ago, of a heavily moustached young man and a solemn looking young woman who bore such a resemblance to the signora that she must have been either her grandmother or her great-grandmother.

I wondered where on earth everyone else could be sleeping in such a small house. After all there were six of them and the room I was in was obviously the one used by the signor and signora. I wondered where the old lady slept. It seemed impossible that she could be got up such a steep flight of stairs; and although I knew there must be other rooms, I felt guilty about all the discomfort and disturbance that I was causing them.

Above my head the roof was supported by the roughly shaped trunk of a chestnut tree a foot and a half thick, and smaller transverse beams of the same wood formed a framework of immense strength, all of them a uniform deep chocolate brown without a single wormhole to be seen. Whoever had made it had intended it to last forever.

I had scarcely got back into bed after emptying the
vaso da notte
out of the window, the sound of which I hoped was deadened by the rain and which seemed the best plan, when the door opened without warning and Signor Zanoni came in his socks to fetch the family’s Sunday clothes. He was a different man from the previous evening. He had shaved and his hair was sleeked down with water.

‘Today is a holiday,’ he said, ‘but you, Enrico, must remain in the room until the evening. Usually on Sunday mornings we go down to the village and my wife goes to mass with the children, but to go with them and come back takes two hours and a half and the weather is too bad today. But people always visit the houses on their way back up the mountain after mass – it is the custom here – and who knows, one of them might like to have 1800 lire for denouncing you. And even if they didn’t everyone up there would know by this afternoon that you’re here and someone else might want the money, so don’t make a sound if we have visitors.’

Eighteen hundred lire was the price which the newly arisen Fascist Republic Party, known as the
Repubblichini
, had placed on the head of every escaped allied prisoner of war. Eighteen hundred lire was about twenty-five pounds, a lot of money in Italy in 1943. Sufficient to make a poor man think seriously about taking up prisoner-of-war hunting as a profession.

‘You know the song,’ Signor Zanoni said:

‘Se potessi avere mille lire al mese

Senza esagerare sarei certo di trovare tutta la felicità.’
¹

‘But at the moment you won’t find many people who will give you away,’ he said. ‘These mountains are full of our own deserters. Most of the Party members are too frightened of what will happen to them when the Allies arrive to bother about chasing prisoners of war. And some of them are hiding their own sons and grandsons, anyway. Everyone’s waiting to see what’s going to happen. If your people arrive soon, then all the Fascists will be waving your flags and telling them how much they helped prisoners of war. When it’s all over no one will be able to prove that they didn’t. If the Allies don’t come then we shall have the
milizia
up here. Then watch out. We shall all be
KAPUTT
!’ He ran the edge of his hand across his throat.

The Fascist Militia, a vile body if ever there was one, had been disbanded when Mussolini fell in July but it had been re-formed on the fifteenth of September. From what Wanda had told me it now had among its members even more odious elements of the population than it had previously.

‘The people I’m afraid of with you here,’ he went on, ‘are the
Guardie Forestali.
It’s not that they’re bad men, most of them are all right, but they work for the Government and anyone who works for the Government in Italy is afraid for his pension. I would be the same. If they’re told to look out for strangers, and you can be sure they have been, you can be sure they will. And they’re not like the
carabinieri
who are much too lazy to come up here unless someone orders them to. They like street corners best, the
carabinieri
and they don’t like to get their uniforms dirty. But
the
guardie
are another sort of thing. You never know where they are. They just appear. And they know how to move in the mountains.’

He took the clothes off the hooks, the signora’s dress, the little suits belonging to the three boys and his own best corduroys. It left nothing but his wife’s coat, his black suit and the velvet tam o’shanter. I thought of my own too ample wardrobe before the war, and that of my parents. I was a long way from home in every sense.

‘I must go now,’ he said. ‘If you have need of it, Enrico, there is a
vaso da notte
under the bed.’

A little later the signora brought me a bowl of milky coffee with some bread to dip in it. She was sorry that the bread was a bit stale, but the oven was outside in the yard and she hadn’t been able to bake because of the heavy rain. The coffee was made from roasted acorns but the milk was straight from the cow and with the dry bread in it, it was delicious.

During the morning I could hear the church bells ringing out in the valley. The people of Fontanellato would be going to mass in the
santuario
, and I wondered if Wanda would be among them. At midday the signora returned with some thick soup and some thinly sliced ham of which she was proud. ‘This ham was never smoked over a fire or cooked,’ she said. It was kept hanging high up in a loft where the fresh air could circulate around it. It was the air alone that matured it. This part of the Apennines was good for ripening hams, the
stagionatura
, she called it. She was a handsome woman, but very thin and drawn, and I knew that with three small children in the house and an aged aunt, for that was what the wrinkled lady with the pebble spectacles was, she could not afford to feed me, and that although I had been reprieved until the next morning, I would have to go away then to some
more remote place where I could at least work for my keep, which would be impossible here. After what Signor Zanoni had told me the
paura
of the Baruffas seemed more reasonable, although it was difficult to understand why they had waited until the doctor had left to tell me that they didn’t want to help me. Perhaps they were afraid of him. I knew that I was, and of the
maestro
, too.

Down below in the kitchen the children played games which sometimes ended in tears and their getting the rough edge of the signora’s tongue. Several times during the day the dog barked, and I heard the door open and the bandying about of lots of
permessos
and
avantis
and then the long rumble of voices speaking the dialect. All day it rained and rained. It was like being in the Ark. Only towards evening it finally stopped and shafts of sombre light broke through the leaden clouds that were moving away towards the west.

All day I thought about what it had been like to be a prisoner, and I thought about the most incredible thing of all, something that I had no right to do in the circumstances, that in the course of the last fifteen days of freedom which had already began to have a dreamlike, insubstantial quality about them, I had managed to fall in love.

Standing under the apple trees in the orchard next morning with Signor Zanoni and looking down the valley, it was difficult to believe that the last two days of wind, rain, thunder and lightning had ever been. The sun was a huge orb of melted butter shining out of a cloudless sky on to a world that seemed reborn after having recently surfaced from the deluge. Everything was dripping wet, every blade of grass and every leaf sparkled with drops of moisture, the air was filled with the sweet smell of damp vegetation and little shining rivulets of water were purling down through the terraced fields to join the river below.

And there were more birds than I had seen in Italy before: blackbirds, bands of chaffinches and jays were the only sorts I could put a name to, but there were many others and the air was filled with their songs and chattering, and from the deep woods on the other side of the valley came the call of a solitary cuckoo. It was spring after winter with nothing to remind one that autumn was already here.

Out beyond the end of our valley to the south-east, a series of long outlying ridges, dark against the sun, ran up towards the main ridge of the Apennines which was somewhere out of sight to the right. Although it was only a couple of hours after sunrise
it was already hot, and from the invisible valleys between them mist was rising like steam from a series of giant baths. And beyond the furthest of these ridges there was the outline of a fantastic mountain that was like the profile of a whale rising from the sea, its head a huge, vertical cliff.

‘Bismantova,’ said Signor Zanoni. ‘Dante wrote about it in the
Purgatorio.
’

‘I never read the
Purgatorio
,’ I said, apologetically. ‘Not even in English.’

‘Neither did I,’ he said. ‘I was told about it at school. How he climbed it. He was a poet so they told me. I never got far enough at school to read the
Purgatorio.
I only got to grade two. It’s time to go, Enrico,’ he said. ‘Are you still sure you want to?’

‘I’m sure,’ I said. ‘It’s for the best, really.’

I had said goodbye to the rest of the family in the house; to the signora who had cried into her apron; to the children who were no longer at all afraid of me and with whom I had played games the previous evening and who had ended up by pinching and pummelling me until they had been told to
‘Stai bravo!’
and
‘Stai zitto!’
– be good! and be quiet! – and allow me to talk about England which was what their parents enjoyed most; and I had said goodbye to the old aunt sitting in her niche by the fire, which at this hour of the morning was nothing but a heap of warm ashes, and had received her silent farewell which could also have been a benediction.

It was that previous evening, when the last visitor had gone home and I went downstairs, that Signor Zanoni told me that they wanted me to stay with them, and it was then that I told them what I thought was the best thing to do.

I said that someone might come for me during the next few days but that I wasn’t sure and I didn’t know when it would be. I didn’t mention the doctor or the
maestro.
I said that I couldn’t
just sit all day indoors and do nothing, and that I couldn’t go on expecting help and give nothing in return, and I told them that I had no money, which to all intents was true. What I wanted to find was a place where I could work in exchange for my keep. I could help with sheep, cut wood, look after pigs or do any other kind of farm work, providing that it was unskilled; but wherever I worked the place would have to be lonely, which was why I couldn’t stay with them. Here, it would never be possible to work out of doors close to a path which was filled with traffic at all times of day.

It took me a long time to say all this in Italian but eventually I succeeded in making them understand.

‘
Dunque
,’ Signor Zanoni said after a long while in which he said nothing but was thinking.
‘Dunque.
There’s Giovanni. No! … There’s Pasquale. No! … There’s Andrea. No! He won’t do …’

He was enumerating them on his fingers, and one by one rejecting them. He was like another of Belloc’s characters in the
Cautionary Tales
, The Lord High Chamberlain, ‘the Kindest and the Best of Men’, selecting somebody to be attendant on His Majesty; but finding no one suitable – ‘… and William Coutts has got the flu … and Billy Higgs would never do,’ and so on.

Finally, the signora said, ‘What about Luigi?’

Like most men he didn’t like his wife to come up with ideas he felt he ought to have had himself.

‘Luigi!’ he said grumpily. ‘Why Luigi?’ And then, after a bit, ‘Well, he might do. Old Luigi, he might. It’s solitary enough, the Pian del Sotto, and Luigi always liked getting something for nothing, or next to nothing, and he’s very honest. A good man. Yes, Luigi might do.’

‘He’s a hard man though, Luigi is,’ he said to me. ‘He has to be to get a living from that land, but he’s done well. His place is on the Pian del Sotto. It’s very high and the land’s very poor, more
stones than earth, and he never has enough help, or didn’t have. I haven’t seen him since … I don’t know when. It must be a couple of years now. He never comes down this way. He goes down the other valley. If you really want to we can go and see him tomorrow; but if he takes you on he’ll work you hard for what you get and that won’t be much.’

I told him that I enjoyed hard work and that as long as I had a roof over my head that was enough for me. This was the kind of thing I had said at interviews for jobs before the war and later when being interviewed by senior officers in the army. I had a fatal aptitude for being good at interviews, the results of which I inevitably regretted subsequently, as much as the interviewers. I was doing the same thing again now. I never seemed to learn anything by experience.

I picked up my pack, the contents of which were now dry, having been by the fire for two nights, and followed Signor Zanoni out of the orchard and down to the left bank of the stream by a path that was so overgrown and overhung by bushes that it would have been invisible to me, where we crossed it by four big stepping stones. Then we scrambled up the bank through the undergrowth, and after he had made sure that there was no one about we crossed the track which led up from the hump-backed bridge and entered the wood, the one from which the cuckoo had called but which was now silent.

I asked him if anyone lived in the mill.

‘Not any more,’ he said. ‘The man who owns it uses it sometimes. I don’t know much about him though. He lives somewhere down in the main valley. All I know is he grinds flour well; but whenever you come back here keep clear of it. It’s on the way up to … (he named a village but I didn’t catch it), and that’s the track to it, as well as to the Pian del Sotto and like the road past
my house a lot of people use it. That’s why we’re going up now by a way that no one ever uses. Try and remember it. You may find it useful one day.’

He was wearing his old patchwork suit and from a metal clip on the belt under his jacket he took a billhook and began to cut a way up through the brambles between the trees. They were mostly oaks and some sort of thorn-bearing tree which I had never seen before. The oaks were not like English oaks. The trunks were mostly small enough to encircle with two hands and few of them were more than twenty feet high. Perhaps if they had been thinned they would have done better, or perhaps they were just small by nature.

‘This was a path once,’ he said, ‘but now it’s all grown in.’

There was no doubt about this. I followed close behind him as he hacked away, getting very wet. Although this side of the valley faced north the sun was still low enough at this time of day to shine into it, but as we climbed further round the hill it shone only on the upper branches and finally it disappeared completely, leaving us in shadow. There were no birds, no signs of animal life at all. The forest, it was too big to be called a wood, was a cold, damp place, and I longed to get out of it into the sunlight again but at least we were leaving a path behind us where there had not been one for years.

After what must have been half an hour of steady climbing we reached what seemed to be the top where there were trees that looked like small beeches and at last we came out in a clearing in which a dilapidated hut stood, a primitive construction made of turf and branches. Here, the trees had been cut down over a wide area and the place was a waste land filled with sharp stumps, nettles and weeds except in some places where there were big black circles on the ground.

‘
Carbonari
,’ Signor Zanoni said. ‘This year they’re burning
charcoal much further in towards the main ridge. With things as they are they won’t be anxious to go down into Tuscany before they have to. That’s where this lot come from – the Maremma. They’ll probably work very late. Some of them may stay up here and sit out the winter if they can find a place to live in.’

‘What are they like, the
carbonari
?’

‘Very strange people, some of them,’ he said. ‘Especially those from the Maremma. They live their own lives and they speak their own language. Hardly anyone on this side of the mountains can understand them.’

By now the miraculous promise of the early morning had passed. There were clouds coming in from the south-west and the sun was not yet high enough to reach into the clearing. It was a cold, sad place.

Once again we entered the forest and after a short while came out on the edge of it.

‘Colle del Santo,’
Signor Zanoni said. ‘It’s not far now, only about twenty minutes from here if you use the track. It’ll take us a bit longer.’

We were on a little pass, the meeting place of two tracks which crossed one another diagonally and we were between the two lower arms of the crossing. The track on the right was the one from the mill which we had by-passed by coming up through the forest. It continued over the pass and downhill into the head of another valley on our left and then through meadows to a small village of stone houses, larger versions of Signor Zanoni’s, huddled together on the mountainside below a wooded ridge from which long, bare screes poured down towards it. Along this track a man was urging two heavily laden pack-mules towards the village under a sky that was now cold and threatening.

The other track wound up around the edge of the wood to our
left and continued straight up the mountain beyond the crossing between two long hedgerows of bramble, and this was the one we took. In spite of being near a village this windswept pass with a splintered, dying chestnut tree on one side of it and a little shrine with a worn carving of some saint on the other, from which it took its name, had a very remote feeling about it.

We went up the outside of one of the hedges which was high enough and thick enough to hide us from anyone who might be using the path itself and after forcing our way up through another wood we came out on the edge of it, in a little promontory of trees, the only part of it which had been able to raise itself above the relative shelter of the slope on which it grew. We were on the edge of an inclined plateau about half a mile long and between three and four hundred yards wide, in which the fields swept down at a crazy angle to a cliff formed by an enormous landslide which appeared to be still going on. Apart from some root crops there was nothing growing. The harvest had already taken place and the rest of the fields were nothing but expanses of stubble and stones, although some of the less rocky ones had been ploughed. Some looked as if they had never been cultivated at all. Towards the northern end of the plateau, which was completely exposed to all the winds of heaven, except those from the west from which it was sheltered by the bulk of the mountain which was covered with forest and which soared above it, stood a great, bleak farmhouse, faced with grey cement and with so many storeys under its red-tiled roof that it looked like some rural skyscraper.

‘Pian del Sotto,’ Signor Zanoni said. ‘We’re nearly a thousand metres here.’

If this was Pian del Sotto I wondered what the upper one was like. I asked him.

‘There isn’t one,’ he said. ‘This is the highest anything will grow.
Higher up there’s nothing but sheep, and then only part of the year. Wait here, I’ll go and see old Luigi,’ he said.

He went on alone towards the house, where I heard him being welcomed by a furious dog, while I stood at the edge of the wood with the wind moaning through the trees, waiting for whatever was going to happen next. It was certainly a lonely place. Far below, beyond the end of the landslip, were the fields full of grass and clover that I had seen from the Colle del Santo and I could just see the stone roofs of the houses in the village. Here, we were almost as high as the ridge under which it stood and now, for the first time, I could see part of the main ridge of the Apennines running down along the borders of Tuscany, with long slanting lines of rain in the sky above it as if someone had been scribbling with a black pencil on a sheet of grey paper.

I was becoming cold now and I was more tired than I had expected to be after such a comparatively short journey. I was not as fit as my occasional bursts of activity in the
orfanotrofio
had led me to believe but my ankle seemed completely mended. At least I could run if necessary.

I heard a window open somewhere in the house and then an awful scream as if someone was being murdered, ‘ARMAAAHNDOOOO!’ was what it sounded like, sufficient in a place such as this to make my blood, already chilled by the keening wind, turn to ice. What on earth was going on inside this forbidding-looking building? Had the occupants done away with Signor Zanoni? Perhaps they were all in-bred and mad as hatters.