Love and War in the Apennines (26 page)

And every day I received a visit from one or other of the members of the families which were sheltering me. Sometimes very shy children came; but mostly they were black-garbed grandmothers who thoroughly enjoyed this cloak and dagger work and gave the password, ‘Brindisi’, with tremendous gusto.

Sometimes they brought me an egg or two, sometimes a sausage which I cooked over the fire which functioned marvellously with scarcely any smoke at all, and always they brought me bread and milk and very often some vegetable soup which, with some rice
added to it, made a substantial evening meal. Almost always they came when it was just growing light; but I was always awake. And when I heard the word ‘Brindisi’ uttered in conspiratorial tones, I used to get out of my sleeping bag and go to the entrance under the roots of the tree, crouching because the only place where I could stand fully upright was by the fireplace, and I used to lift the sacking and put my head out into the cool air which was so different from the frowsty air of the cave after I had spent a night in it. Then they would hand me the pot containing the soup or whatever else they had brought, and after I had handed back the pot which I had received the previous day and which I had washed, they would utter a few cheerful words of encouragement and usually, in answer to my question, say that there was
‘niente di nuovo’
, no news. This meant in the
comune
rather than in the world, although they sometimes said, dabbing their eyes, that there was still no news of the boys in Russia, whose grandmothers some of them were, and then they would go away down the hill, very black and respectable, with the pot concealed in a black bag made of American cloth of a sort which they all carried, even Agata when she shopped on Sundays in the village.

It was only on the last day of the month that one of them gave me the news that Genoa had been bombed. She also gave me a letter addressed to Signora Enrica, a very short letter:

Enrica Dear,

I hope to visit you one evening quite soon, although I am afraid that it will have to be a very short one, as I have very little free time from my work; but I shall let you know in advance when I am coming so please do not go away. You will be glad to know that your two old friends are now enjoying far better health.

Kisses

It ended with the same illegible signature that she had appended to her previous one.

I was very cheered by this letter, because of the good news it contained and because she had written ‘Enrica Dear’ instead of ‘Dear Enrica’ and ‘Kisses’ too, and I read it many times before reluctantly putting it in the fire and watching it burn.

The next days went very slowly until finally, on the morning of the sixth of November, I received a verbal message brought by Pierino who repeated it many times in case I got it wrong, that I was to be at the charcoal burner’s hut beyond the Colle del Santo on the following evening at half past six. To make sure that I got there on time he had brought me a pocket watch, the property of one of the members of the Board, and would I, he said, unwrapping it from a large pocket handkerchief, please take great care of it as it was a very old and good one.

As soon as I got the message I decided to give up going into the woods until I actually set off to meet Wanda. I had a premonition that if I continued to do so something would happen to prevent our meeting taking place. The next thirty-six hours or so until Sunday evening seemed endless. Having a watch made them pass even more slowly, although the one thing I did learn from having it was that I had been going to sleep at seven o’clock every evening. No wonder I woke early. Remaining for days inside the cave, except when I went to get water, I began to realise something of what it would be like to be immured in it for four months of winter, and I began to think about what I should do to pass the time when the snow came. The principal danger would be melancholy and lack of exercise. Somehow I had to get hold of some books to read, even if they were in Italian. I had been an idiot to jettison Boswell’s
Tour to the Hebrides
, which I had buried in the woods after I left the Pian del Sotto. A Bible would be good if only one’s eyes could stand the print, reading it in a cave; but how
was I to get hold of any literature in what appeared to be a book-less, Bibleless community (for neither of the houses I had been in had Bibles). Perhaps I ought to write a book; the trouble was I had no desire to do so. I was more interested in trying to write poetry. I already had a couple of pencils with which I had been writing down on a small piece of paper a skeleton outline of my movements, but not naming people or places. What I needed was more paper. Only
Barba-Nera
gave me any hint on how I should comfort myself during the month of November,
‘Mese dedicato al suffragio dei Defunti’
it said, which I couldn’t translate properly, not knowing the meaning of
suffragio
, which sounded like something to do with votes for women. ‘November is vinous and wintry’, it went on to say and under the heading
Lavori del Mese – Cantina:
‘The only thing to do in this season is to watch over
(vigilare)
the fermentation of the wine.’

On the Sunday there was heavy rain and it blew a gale. At midday I ate my evening meal, partly to relieve the tedium and partly because by now I was beginning to have a horrible feeling that the meeting with Wanda might turn out to be a carefully planned ambush, and I wanted to have a full stomach to travel on if I had to make a run for it. To cook it I had to disregard the injunction I had been given not to light a fire during the day, and I suffered for it. The fire which had worked perfectly during the fine weather was much more difficult to control when the wind was strong; and it was very strong now. It moaned in the chimney and the cave was filled with dense smoke.

By five o’clock it was beginning to get dark and I set off. I had calculated it would take me just under an hour to reach the Colle, but I had to allow for the possibility of going off course and it seemed better to be early than late, especially for an ambush. I might even arrive in time to see it being set up, although it was no night for standing around in the open. I took all my
possessions with me in the rucksack, because the feeling I had that there was something wrong was very strong now. Suppose Wanda herself was a prisoner and had written under duress to suggest the meeting place – the threat to shoot her father and the doctor would be enough – and that Signor Zanoni had been put under similar pressure? (He had to be involved, even if the meeting was genuine, because he alone knew that the charcoal-burner’s hut was a place that I had already been to.) It required a tortuous imagination to think this; but by this time a lot of my imaginings were beginning to be unnaturally vivid.

I left the watch behind. It was too dark in the open to tell the time by, and if I was going to be ambushed at least the owner stood some chance of getting it back. The cave seemed safe enough. If the
segretario
knew where it was he would have already arranged for me to be collected from it long ago.

Travelling through the forest at night was much more difficult than I had imagined it would be. Daylight travel had made me over confident, although I had planned the route carefully in my mind’s eye – north until I picked up one of the main tunnels through the forest which I now knew well, then down it on to the Pian del Sotto, over the cliff, bear left along the base of it, then climb up to the bramble hedgerows where the track ran uphill from the Colle del Santo to Luigi’s place, over the crossroads and into the wood where the hut was.

First of all I couldn’t find the tunnel, or any other, and I went so far along the side of the mountain on one of the lesser tracks that I was afraid that I had missed them, though how I could manage to do this when they all led up through the wood to the open mountain I couldn’t imagine. It was difficult to think at all in the wood. Visibility was nil and the pouring rain and the swirling and clashing of the branches in the wind made it practically impossible to know whether I was on a path at all. It was like being in
Chaos and when, at last, I did manage to pick up one of the tunnels I was afraid that it might be one that came out of the wood to the north of the Pian del Sotto; but I had to take a chance, there was nothing else I could do, and fortunately it was the right one.

At the bottom I crossed the plateau with the house invisible somewhere to my left, and began to descend one of the narrow gullies in the face of the cliff, but when I was about half way down I slipped and roared down the remaining fifty feet or so on my back ending up among my rocks at the bottom. I was saved from breaking my back by my rucksack which was wedged underneath me and which acted as a sort of toboggan. I was horribly shaken and incredibly dirty and wet but otherwise I was all right, and all I could think of was being in time for my appointment, even if it was an ambush, and I pushed on along the base of the cliff, past the place where the
gabinetto
, in which Dolores had come to grief, stood near the edge of it, until I judged that I should begin to climb the long easy slope which led up to the bramble hedge above the Colle.

The Colle, when I finally reached it, was no place to linger. It was utterly exposed and the wind was gusting so strongly over it that I could hardly stand. As soon as I was safely in the wood on the other side of it I left the track which led directly to the hut and made a detour so that when I got to the clearing in which it stood I would be to the right of it, instead of being directly in front of the entrance which would not be a good place to be if there was an ambush. I made a terrible lot of noise forcing my way through the undergrowth but there was not much danger of being heard on such a night.

The hut looked empty. I settled down to wait. If there was anyone inside it then whoever it was would have to give some outward sign that they were friendly. I had no intention of going in through the doorway to find out for myself. I waited for what
seemed half an hour or more, but was probably not more than ten minutes, and became very cold. I found that having been without a watch for so long had destroyed my sense of time. While I waited the rain suddenly ceased, the clouds broke and a half-moon shone down into the clearing, at first partly obscured as some last ragged remnants tore across its path, and then brilliantly in a sky in which the stars were dimmed by it, a wild and wonderful night suddenly, with the wind, which was if anything stronger than ever, frenziedly tossing the branches of trees so that, in the moonlight, they looked like the manes of wild horses milling together in a round-up.

While I was taking all this in I had failed to keep an eye on the hut, and when I did look at it again I saw two figures standing outside it. The taller of the two, who was wearing a white raincoat, was undoubtedly Wanda; the shorter one looked like Signor Zanoni. And forgetting all my previous caution and precautions at the sight of them, I went towards it.

By the time I reached the hut they were already inside it. Signor Zanoni had just lit a candle lantern and was hanging it up, and Wanda was standing with her face to the entrance. Her eyes were bright, and her hair hung down to her shoulders in wet, shining coils. With her long, straight nose and regular features she looked like the Medusa. Her raincoat was soaked through and both she and Signor Zanoni were as wet as I was.

When they first saw me they looked alarmed, as they had reason to. My face was all scratched and bleeding and I was wearing Luigi’s remarkable velveteen suit which was always on the point of disintegration but never actually disintegrated, and was now plastered with wet clay after my ride down the cliffside. By now I was probably rather strange-looking even when I was clean. But I had no way of knowing. I had no mirror and the pool at the spring into which I gazed, hopefully, each day while I was shaving,
was too disturbed by the water welling up into it to produce any kind of steady image.

But then when she recognised me she came towards me and gave me both hands and I kissed her formally which I knew was the right thing to do with Signor Zanoni looking on, and then I did the same to him which I also knew was the right thing to do in Italy, but was something for which I always felt a certain repugnance, and still do.

‘You were on time,’ he said taking out his watch. ‘It’s just half past six. You haven’t got long I’m sorry to say. Only half an hour. I’m going to leave you for a bit and go to the village. I’m expected there; but first let’s have a drink. I think we’ve all earned one, especially the signorina. It was a really hard climb for her in this weather, from the road to my place and then up here through the wood.’ And he opened the big pack he had with him and produced a small bottle filled with
grappa
, which he uncorked and offered to her.

‘Uurrgh, it’s strong!’ she said. ‘I’m not used to this stuff, but it’s good.’

‘It’s meant to be strong,’ he said. ‘Otherwise there wouldn’t be any reason for making it, or any reason for drinking it.’

Then he went away. And after an interval during which no words were spoken, because there was no need for words, Wanda began to tell me all the things that had happened since we had last been together.

‘I’ll speak in Italian,’ she said. ‘There’s so little time. I have to start back to Parma tonight. There’s a special bus. I had to get a permit to come on it. You have to now, especially to the mountains. The bus has to stop on the way because of the curfew, so I shan’t get back to Fontanellato until tomorrow morning.’

As I thought, I had read her first letter as she meant it to be read. Her father and the doctor had both been taken by the
Gestapo; but the doctor had managed to simulate appendicitis which one didn’t even have to be a medical man to do, but it helped him to be taken seriously by his captors and he had been removed from the prison to a hospital on the outskirts of the city where one of his colleagues had allegedly performed an operation on him and he had subsequently disappeared. I wondered why he hadn’t done the job properly and died like Paul Pennyfeather in
Decline and Fall.
He could even have signed his own death certificate.