Tuscan Rose (40 page)

‘I hope it won’t come to that,’ Rosa said. She and Antonio spoke in hushed tones but she sensed the guards had long ceased to care what they said to each other. ‘It would be better for Italy to surrender than cause any more destruction.’

Rosa knew what had been meted out to Germany at the Treaty of Versailles, but this time Italy would have to bear the humiliation. Perhaps the Allies would consider that it was Mussolini who had foolishly led the Italian people into this war and punish him rather than the people themselves.

Despite his depressing predictions, Antonio was in good spirits. Rosa’s stories about the children amused him and his face lit up when he saw the diary Renata and Enzo had made. He was also pleased with the book Rosa had brought him.

‘I’ve always wanted to read
War and Peace
,’ he said, grinning. ‘But isn’t it ironic? How did you get this past the guard? I didn’t think Russian literature would be allowed.’

Rosa shrugged. ‘I only thought of it as a classic. The guard looked at it but let me through. I’ve also brought you a novel by George Eliot, who was British. Maybe they no longer care what we do and read.’

‘Something is in the air,’ observed Antonio. ‘Only a year ago you couldn’t sneeze without someone having to put a fascist slant on it.’

Rosa reopened the shop for two afternoons a week and saw customers by appointment. Despite the pessimistic atmosphere, the ever-dwindling rations and the ever-increasing shortages, there were still people with enough money to fill their homes with fine things. The war seemed to have little impact on the privileged unless they had family members serving overseas.

Rosa tried to fill her time with reading, as Antonio did, but she was restless. She was only allowed to visit him twice a week and, with the children away, her days were long and empty. The nights of weary silence were worse. Ylenia had no family to go to and would have difficulty finding employment elsewhere, so Rosa kept her on although she hardly produced enough work to justify a fulltime maid. Rosa needed something useful to do but didn’t want to return to the Dead, Wounded and Missing office now that Signora Corvetto was no longer working there. When she passed by the hospital one day, she saw a notice calling for volunteer nurses to take up the places of those who had been sent with the military overseas. I could do that, she thought.

‘What makes you believe you would be a good nurse?’ asked the matron, looking up from Rosa’s application form. ‘Do you have any experience?’

‘I have three children,’ Rosa offered.

‘You are married?’

‘My husband is…away.’

The matron ticked some boxes on Rosa’s form and passed it over to her to sign. Being inexperienced and married would have made her an unlikely candidate in peacetime, but the hospital was desperate for help. Nevertheless, she thought she had better explain the enemy of the state classification on her personal documents in case the matron checked.

‘I don’t want to know,’ said the matron, waving her hand dismissively. ‘I don’t care if my staff are fascists or not. I turned into an enemy of the state myself when they forced me to dismiss my Jewish nurses.’

Rosa couldn’t believe what she was hearing. She’d been discriminated against for being an orphan, she’d suffered after Maria’s death because of her supposed anti-fascist activities, and she’d been snubbed as an unwed mother. Suddenly, no-one cared what she was as long as she was useful to the war effort.

‘You have training lectures twice a week,’ the matron told her. ‘Otherwise you start at six o’clock each morning.’

‘When do I commence?’ Rosa asked.

The matron raised her eyebrows. ‘You start tomorrow.’

Rosa was puzzled. How could she help unless she went to lectures first? ‘But I haven’t been trained yet,’ she said.

The matron sucked in a breath. ‘Signora Parigi, someone will show you tomorrow how to sluice a bedpan.’

The work of a trainee nurse was arduous but Rosa was thankful for it because it kept her mind occupied. Many of the hospital’s nurses were serving overseas and most of the orderlies had been conscripted, so the remaining staff were harried and put Rosa to work without hesitation. Even before she’d had her uniform made, she was cleaning bottles, scrubbing bedpans and washing soiled sheets. She performed all these activities without complaint but her favourite task was making up beds. There was something meditative about the feel of linen between her fingers
as she stretched the sheets taut and mitred the corners. It reminded her of her time in the convent, where daily tasks were performed with reverence. It was a shield against her worries and distracted her from the danger looming from the outside world. But her menial tasks did not protect her from harsh realities for long.

‘Nurse, could you come here, please.’

Rosa was folding linen and placing it in a cupboard. She looked up to see a doctor standing in the doorway of the ward where critical patients were nursed. The bombing of Milan and Genoa had left many of the hospitals in those cities inoperable—either as a result of being directly hit or because of the loss of gas, electricity and water supplies. Patients considered able to be moved were sent to Rome and Florence. The ward was full after the last bombing raid on Genoa.

Rosa was unused to being referred to as ‘Nurse’ and didn’t realise that the doctor was addressing her.

‘Nurse, this is urgent! Please hurry!’ he said.

She closed the linen cupboard and followed the doctor into the ward. ‘Excuse me, dottore, but I’m only a trainee…’ Her voice caught in her throat when she saw the patient lying on the bed before her. It was a boy of about twelve years of age. He was missing part of one arm and both legs. The boy’s head was bandaged but his eyes were open. Rosa could barely bring herself to look at his torso, which was a mass of black tissue oozing with fluid. Until then, her main contact with patients had been to help the nurses feed the elderly and the children. She hadn’t witnessed an operation yet. The sight of the boy’s wounds was a shock. It took all her strength to remain upright. The smell of charred and rotting flesh brought bile to her throat.

‘You’re only a trainee?’ said the doctor, slipping on gloves and picking up a pair of scissors. ‘Well, you’d better get up to speed fast. We are going to see more of this before the day is out. This boy is the only survivor of an entire street. Everyone and everything else was blown to smithereens.’

The doctor was young, in his thirties. He had a trim moustache and fine hands. Rosa saw from his tag that his name was Dottor Greco. He wasn’t being arrogant with her, only matter-of-fact. When she realised that he intended to cut away at the dead flesh, she offered to administer the morphine.

‘I have been trained to give injections,’ she said.

Dottor Greco pursed his lips. ‘That won’t be necessary,’ he said.

Rosa stared at him in horror. ‘No morphine? Are we that short?’ she asked.

He shook his head. ‘Dealing with the dressings is going to be a daily matter. We can’t give this patient morphine every time.’

Rosa’s hands trembled when she passed the instruments to Dottor Greco as he called for them. The matron had said that the nurses should see things from a medical perspective, but Rosa could not forget that it was a young boy lying there in the bed, in dreadful pain, able to hear but unable to speak. She did her best to comfort him although she could see in the boy’s eyes that every incision the doctor made caused him agony. Even the one arm left to him was so badly burnt that he couldn’t move it. He was immobile, shut in a living hell.

When the ordeal was over, Dottor Greco rebandaged the boy’s torso. Rosa was bathed in sweat. Dottor Greco looked directly at her for the first time when he had finished dressing the boy’s wounds. His grim face showed the anguish he felt too, although his voice was steady. ‘I’ll get the sister to show you how to clean his eyes,’ he said. ‘I need someone diligent.’

At Dottor Greco’s request, Rosa was transferred from auxiliary duties to working in the most difficult ward of all. But when the matron asked Rosa if she would prefer to be replaced with someone more experienced, she declined. In the weeks that followed, she gradually moved from being horrified by the lipless faces, fingerless hands and twisted flesh of the bomb victims to seeing the people beneath the wounds. With all the hell these disfigured patients had suffered, and would suffer for the rest of their lives, she made it her mission that at least none of them
would lose their sight due to neglect. She cleaned the area around the patients’ eyes every four hours with a saline solution, and impressed upon the night volunteer the importance of doing the same.

There were two senior nurses who worked with Rosa in the ward: Nurse Mazzetti, an extroverted woman in her late twenties; and Nurse Tommaselli, who was petite with a wide forehead, minute nose and a pointed chin. She looked like a mouse and twitched like one too.

One day when Rosa was helping Nurse Mazzetti remove stitches from a man’s arm, the patient turned to them and said, ‘Why aren’t you two married?’

‘Nurse Parigi is married,’ Nurse Mazzetti told him, winking at Rosa. ‘It’s me who’s looking for a husband.’

‘Why is she here then?’ the patient asked.

‘My husband and children are away,’ Rosa explained. ‘I wanted to put myself to good use.’

‘Well, no-one can change the sheets like you can,’ the patient said to Rosa. ‘You’re the only one who doesn’t make it feel like my skin is being ripped off again.’

‘Changing sheets with the patient still in the bed is my speciality,’ said Rosa with a laugh. ‘I was awarded ten out of ten for my bed-making exam.’

Nurse Mazzetti glanced at Rosa and smiled. ‘And Matron doesn’t give perfect scores often,’ she said in a tongue-in-cheek tone. ‘In fact, until Nurse Parigi arrived it was unheard of.’

Rosa was glad for the camaraderie she felt with Nurse Mazzetti. It was a comfort because, despite the dedication of the nurses in the ward and Dottor Greco, they lost a patient a day. Some days they lost many more.

‘It’s septicaemia,’ Nurse Mazzetti explained to Rosa one day when they were washing down a bed with carbolic acid. ‘Despite all the care we take, infection in burns injuries is difficult to avoid.’

She flicked her head in the direction of the boy Rosa had seen on her first day on the ward. He couldn’t speak to tell them who
he was, so the nurses had named him ‘Niccolò’, after the patron saint of children. ‘How’s he progressing?’ Nurse Mazzetti asked.

‘His vital organs are intact,’ Rosa said. ‘He should be able to eat on his own soon.’

‘Well, he’s in good hands with you looking after him. Everyone admires your dedication. Even Dottor Greco commented on it.’

Rosa didn’t tell Nurse Mazzetti, who scoffed at religion, that she prayed for Niccolò every day. Rosa intended that when the boy was better he would come and live with her. She couldn’t bear to think that after all he had suffered, he’d be sent to an orphanage.

‘The worst pain for the bomb victims,’ the matron had told the volunteer nurses in one lecture, ‘is not the horrific physical injuries they’ve suffered but the psychological ones.’

When Rosa arrived for work a few days later, she knew from Dottor Greco’s averted eyes and the pained expression on Nurse Mazzetti’s face that another patient had died overnight.

‘Who?’ she asked.

Nurse Mazzetti squeezed Rosa’s shoulder. ‘You know it’s for the best.’

‘Niccolò?’

Nurse Mazzetti nodded, and Rosa felt something inside her grow cold. The boy’s death was for the best, she knew. Despite all the love and care Rosa and her family would have lavished on him, his injuries would have left him with a miserable life. But it wasn’t fair that he should have suffered in the first place. What sort of army dropped bombs on civilians? Rosa looked around the ward. Most of these pitiful, mutilated people were doomed. What was Italy at war for? What was all this suffering accomplishing?

Rosa turned back to Nurse Mazzetti, fighting her tears. ‘Has he been laid out?’

Nurse Mazzetti shook her head. ‘We waited for you.’

Rosa’s legs were leaden as she made her way to Niccolò’s bed. The curtains around it had been drawn. She remembered the many mornings when she had approached the bed apprehensively, fearful that the boy had died overnight. She’d always been elated
when she’d discovered him breathing. Now the day she had dreaded had come. Niccolò was covered with a sheet. Rosa gently lifted it and looked at his ashen face.

‘You’re with your Mamma and Babbo again now,’ she whispered through her tears. ‘With your brothers and sisters, aunts and uncles, your neighbours and friends, and your pets. They will be happy to see you again.’

Nurse Tommaselli appeared. ‘I’ll take him to the mortuary,’ she said to Rosa. ‘It might be hard for you. I know you were fond of him.’

Rosa was grateful for Nurse Tommaselli’s kindness. Most of the time they were all so rushed off their feet there was no time to stop and support each other. The three nurses lifted the boy onto the trolley and Nurse Tommaselli wheeled him away. Rosa stripped the bed. It was her way of dealing with grief when a patient died. Only this time her emotions got the better of her and tears spilled from her eyes.

‘When we finish our shift, we’ll have a cigarette together,’ Nurse Mazzetti said to her.

‘I’ll come with you to the canteen but I don’t smoke,’ Rosa replied.

‘Lucky you!’ said Nurse Mazzetti. ‘When I worked with tuberculosis patients, the ward sister told me to have a cigarette after each shift to kill germs. Now I’m hooked. It’s killing me because I can barely get a cigarette a day because of this confounded war. My mother has been drying oak leaves for me. Can you imagine? The smell is disgusting.’

Rosa could imagine. She didn’t like Antonio smoking even normal cigarettes in the house or shop.

‘Seriously,’ said Nurse Mazzetti, ‘you need to talk about this, Nurse Parigi. It’s been a tough morning.’

When Rosa arrived at the canteen after reporting Niccolò’s death to the matron, Nurse Mazzetti was already there with Nurse Tommaselli.

‘None of this formal stuff,’ Nurse Mazzetti said. ‘We’ll save that for the ward. I’m Gina and this is Fiamma.’