To Find a Mountain (17 page)

C
HAPTER THIRTY-THREE

T
he darkness remained, for how long I’m not sure, but Casalvieri never seemed to be such a dark, evil place as the days after the public execution of Lauretta Fandella. The body was removed, but the stench that hung over our small town would remain forever; the image of my best friend hanging in tribute to the authority of the Germans would never leave my mind. I knew from the minute I made my way through the crowd that what I would see would change my life forever.

Life at the house returned to the routine. Baking what little bread we could muster from the scant supplies. Laundry, cleaning, caring for Iole and Emidio went on. It always would, no matter what happened.

Fatigue grew rapidly on Zizi Checcone. It had been a long time since she’d cared for small children, and the daily hassles that Iole, Emidio, and sometimes even I created were draining her of energy. I tried to take over more responsibility for the cooking and especially the cleaning, but she was a tough old woman and wanted no help from any of us.

It was a midafternoon on a cold day when Colonel Wolff returned from the front. It had been almost a week since the murder of Lauretta, and several weeks since he’d left Casalvieri. The trucks pulled up to the front of the house, and the men entered wearily; some of them were injured and wore makeshift bandages. Their uniforms were filthy and most of them were covered in mud and smelled like rotten meat.

They assembled at the big table, where Zizi Checcone and I served them menestra and bread, which they ate with abandon, raising the bowls up and drinking any remaining soup. There was a small hunk of cheese that we placed on a cutting board at the center of the table. A small flask of wine managed to produce enough for each of the men to have a small glass.

Wolff came in the door walking slowly, his boots shuffling across the floor. His uniform was covered in dust and dirt, his face was ashen, and dark bags hung underneath his eyes. His shoulders were even more stooped than when I’d last seen him.

“Benedetta.”

I stood in front of him and said nothing.

“Would you help me get my boots off?” he said as he wearily sat down.

He put his foot up on the chair next to him and I tugged them off, then set them on the floor next to him.

“How are you?” he asked.

“If you don’t need me for something else, I’ll get more soup for your men,” I said, ice in my voice.

“Do that, then come back here and talk to me.”

Zizi Checcone put out two more bowls of soup and I took them to the table. Wolff gestured for me to sit. As the men began finishing their meals, they went to their room to sleep.

“What is wrong with you?” he asked. “What are those marks on your face?”

“Your men take great joy in beating up children. Even killing them.”

He looked at me tiredly.

“I’m not as used to death as you,” I continued. “That is the problem.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Your men hanged my best friend. One even stabbed her in the stomach after she was dead.”

He slurped the soup loudly.

“I heard of this happening,” he said. “I am sorry.”

“I can tell.”

Wolff looked like he was going to respond, but then said nothing. One by one, the last two men finished their soup and finally got up from the table.

“Believe me. If I had been here, it would not have happened. But understand, the girl’s father was caught killing Germans,” Wolff said. “You remember what I told your father when I first came here?”

I nodded, but he continued anyway.

“For every German that dies, ten of you die. Luckily, many of the
ribellí
with her father’s band were killed. But Becher felt that an example needed to be set. Truly, I am sorry.”

There was nothing left for me to say. These
Germanesí
, even the ones who maybe once had feelings, who maybe once knew the value of a life, had lost it by now. There was no hope, no chance that sympathy and compassion could be learned. If you had it, you had it. If you lost it, it was gone. It was that simple. I would remember this lesson. It was the kind of lesson you instantly know you will use for the rest of your life, no matter what the situation or the predicament. It gives you the kind of knowledge and perspective that will always be a part of your thinking.

“She was so innocent,” I started to stay, but stopped. It wasn’t something I wanted to talk about, but there it was.

“No one is innocent when his or her country is at war,” Wolff said, mopping up the rest of his soup with a hunk of bread. “Once the leaders of a country say it’s time to fight, everyone they govern is a participant.”

I thought of Lauretta hanging from her neck. She was innocent. She would always be innocent as long as my memory and I survived. I would remember the Lauretta I knew all along. The one who dreamed of a man who would love her. The Lauretta created by the Germans had been hanged to death, gone forever.

I cleared the table and heard Wolff rise and make his way to his room. He moved slowly and loudly. I tried to picture him as a young boy in a German army, the first time he fired a rifle, the first time he watched someone die. His big blue eyes wide, watching blood pour onto the ground. He would have cried, I suspected. He was that kind of person.

There was a little bit of weak coffee left in the pot and I poured myself a cup, then sat at the big table. I ran my hand over the countless nicks and gouges in the wood, the wood my mother used to oil from time to time. She and my father must have had thousands of conversations right over this table.

I just wanted it all to be over. I wanted the Germans to pack up and leave, scared off by the Americans and British. I wanted Papa to come back, the men to go back to the fields, Lauretta to be alive again. I wanted my mother to come back to me, the baby to be all right, and for all of us to be one big happy family again.

The image of my father’s face the way he looked in the mountains came back to me. There was no way to slow down his aging. One day, he would pass, too, and like now, there would be nothing I could do about it. If only I could raise my hand, shout “Stop!” and have the world put on hold while I went about making adjustments. A little push here, a little help there, and things would be different; things would be right.

I emptied the rest of the coffee into the sink. It didn’t taste good; there was a sour taste in my mouth.

C
HAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

T
he weeks dragged on, several months passed, and then spring came. The flowers along the edge of town began to show the tips of their white blossoms, throwing off a false, hypocritical light of gaiety.

Dominic’s letters arrived in the same place every week. The first few were short and to the point, not straying far from the expected—“How are you?” “I miss you,” “It’s lonely up here”—to clichéd descriptions of the weather. But with each letter, he seemed to become more confident, more willing to express his feelings, as if writing about his emotions seemed to simultaneously make him more aware of them.

It was hard for me to believe that the young, shy boy I’d first met walking up the mountain had managed to transform himself into something of a poet, but it was true. I felt that his words, his willingness to stray beyond the first traditional proclamations of affection for me, were symbolic of how he was reaching out to me. Yes, sometimes he did fall into cliché, maybe he was even a bit sappy at times, but behind the words themselves the meaning was genuine, and I felt that honesty; I responded mentally and physically to the beauty of his truth.

I knew my father would not approve of the letter writing—he had told me, after all, to stop—but I did not care. No one was being harmed. Besides, I could tell Papa that we were just friends, even though I hoped it wasn’t true.

I believed in following my heart, and my heart was leading me to Dominic. I answered his letters, his assertions of love, with my own.

Still, my father and mother always said I had a strong head on my shoulders and it was my head, not my heart, that began to suggest there was something wrong with the letters. Something about the way Dominic began with simple sentences and then switched to more flowery words. Even though I knew the sentiments being expressed were his own, I began to wonder if the actual words used to express them were.

I went to my father’s room and looked at his bookcase. Not sure of what I was looking for, I scanned the titles on the shelf. There were some textbooks from his schooling so long ago. Father had only made it to the fifth grade before Nonna pulled him out and sent him to work in the fields. There were also a few picture books and a volume of poetry. Nothing seemed to stir my memory.

It was then that I remembered Luigi Iacobelli.

Without stopping to consider what I was doing, I walked out of the house and struck out for Luigi’s house.

Signor Iacobelli had once wanted to be a priest, and had attended a prestigious seminary in Rome, but he had grown tired of the priesthood. There were rumors that he had left the church with abandon, living a decadent lifestyle for several years before returning to Casalvieri. He had the largest book collection in town, and people who needed to know something often went to his house to look something up on his bookshelves; in essence, he was the town’s library.

I also knew that many young men went to his house; there was rumored to be a secret bookshelf that even Signora Iacobelli did not know about. There were supposed to be books that had things in them, scandalous things, things that would get a young boy like Luigi kicked out of the seminary.

I reached the Iacobelli house and knocked upon the front door. The house was a small, lopsided structure made of stone with a long grapevine winding its way around the walls, like a green snake bringing fresh fruit to its next victim.

The door opened and Signora Iacobelli smiled at me.

“Benedetta! Come in; come in. How are you?”

“Good, Signora. And you?”

“We’re just fine, just fine. What can I do for you, girl?”

“Actually, I’m here to see Signor Iacobelli.”

“Ah, you need to look something up, no?” Without waiting for a reply, she yelled toward the back of the house. “Gigi! You have a visitor.”

Excusing herself to return to the kitchen, Signora Iacobelli left me standing there, silent in the front entryway before a small oil painting hanging crookedly on the wall. It was a picture of a young girl and a young man standing back-to-back beneath a tree.

“You like it? I bought it in Rome.”

I turned to see Signor Iacobelli watching me from the hallway. He was in a wheelchair, a stump where his left leg should have been.

“It’s nice.”

“What can I do for you?” he asked.

“I’m looking for a book . . .”

“You have come to the right place. Follow me.”

We went back down the hallway, passed the main room of the house, then turned left and went into a small room that was crowded with books from floor to ceiling. The bookshelves covered every wall and they were overflowing. Stacks of books were piled in corners and on tables. It was a mess.

“Now, what kind of book were you looking for?”

“A book of letters. Love letters.” I felt myself blush.

Signor Iacobelli seemed to ponder that for a moment, and eyed me closely.

“I don’t think I can help you with that one, Benedetta.”

There was an awkward silence.

“Do you not have it, or can you not help me?”

I watched him closely and he dropped his gaze. “I may have had a book like that at one time . . .”

“Did a young man borrow it?”

He shrugged and held his hands out. “So many people borrow books from me, it is hard to keep things straight—as you can see.”

My heart sank. He was not going to help me. I started to thank him for his time, but then a thought came to me.

“My brother will be so disappointed,” I said.

“Your brother?”

“Yes, Emidio has a crush on a little girl, and he asked me to write her a love letter. I had heard that you might have a book of these things.”

“But Emidio is so young!” the old man said.

“A young romantic,” I corrected.

He laughed heartily and clapped his hands together.

“Ah, yes, I was young myself once, and in love. I was in love so many, many, many times.” He chuckled and seemed lost in delicious thought for a moment, a small smile on his face.

At last, he faced me. “Now, what I said, Benedetta, was that I might have had such a book. That is true. But the men in the mountains, they need to write letters home to their girls, and some of them came and got it from me.”

I knew then that I had my answer, but I could not stop now.

“However,” he said quietly, looking over my shoulder to make sure Signora Iacobelli was not listening, “for some of my more, how shall we say, provocative works of literature, I do have copies, just in case the original gets . . . appropriated. Wait here.”

He pushed himself into a small closet in the corner of the room and lifted something. I heard wood scraping; Signor Iacobelli grunted as he lifted a heavy object, then rummaged around. After much effort, he replaced the object, then closed the closet door.

When he came out, there were beads of perspiration on his forehead.

“Here we are. But be careful with it; it is my last copy.”

I glanced down quickly.
Letters of Love
.

“Thank you. Emidio will be so happy.”

I raced home and went directly to my room. I read the first few pages and nothing struck me, but on the fourth page I recognized this passage:

nightingales whisper your name, and the chambers of my heart resonate with their song

As I read on, more and more of the words were the same words Dominic had used in his letters. While I was not seized by an insane fury—after all, I still felt that the emotion he was expressing was genuine, and it was not uncommon for men to look for help in writing flowery letters—still, I started to get warm, as a slow anger rose within me. I thought of Lauretta, so much wiser in the ways of young men than I. She probably would have not been surprised by something like this. She probably would shrug and say, “That’s what men do.”

But I was different. I had not expected something like this, as obvious as it now seemed to me.

I got out a piece of paper and a pen, scribbled a short note, and walked out to the rock wall. I lifted the stone, hesitated, then opened my letter again to read it.

Dominic,

Your last letter was so warm and heartfelt, I know you love me so much to say these words straight from your heart. You have no idea how it makes me feel to know that a man of your honesty and integrity loves me.

I get weak at the knees thinking about it.

In fact, I don’t think I can go on writing, so instead of trying to put anything down, why don’t you turn to page 46 of your book for the rest of my letter.

Love,

Benedetta

I slipped the note under the rock and pushed it back into the wall.