The Girl on the Via Flaminia Read online

  “Be good to her,” Nina said. “She has wonderful shoulders. Come, help me, Adele.” She picked up her valise. “Addio,” she said once more, and she went out of the dining room, and they could hear her voice, talking incessantly to Adele until the front door slammed.

  “Florence,” Ugo said, after a little pause. “How far is it? A hundred and fifty kilometers. But now it’s a tremendous journey.”

  Robert took a pack of cigarettes out of his shirt pocket. He held the pack toward the old man. “Cigarette?”

  “Ah, grazie.” Ugo broke the cigarette carefully into two parts. “Half for now, half for later,” he said. He put the second half into the pocket of his vest.

  Robert extended the pack now toward Antonio.

  “Smoke?”

  The boy, belted so dramatically into his bleached raincoat, his smooth black hair combed to a peak on the nape of his neck, drew a blue and crumpled pack from his own pocket. “I prefer our own,” he said deliberately.

  “Nazionali?” Robert said. “They’re pretty bad, aren’t they?”

  “But they are ours,” the boy said.

  Robert glanced up into the tense and dark face. He drew his own pack of cigarettes back. He allowed himself to smile a little. The old man drew luxuriously on the half of the cigarette between his lips.

  “What a day it was,” he said, “the day you took Rome. What a celebration. Were you here, Signor Roberto, then?”

  “Yes,” Robert said. “I was here.”

  “What a festa!” Ugo said, shaking his head. “Do you remember, Antonio, how at three o’clock in the morning the people were dancing in the streets? Nobody could sleep.”

  “Perhaps we celebrated too soon,” Antonio said.

  But the old man was remembering; six months had gone by, and now, in the streets, the vivas painted on the outer walls of the Vatican were fading, the names of the martyrs were fading, the proclamations and the posters with the clenched fists and the squadrons of planes in the painted sky were torn and shredded by the cold wind; and the cabinet was falling, and eggs were thirty lire an egg. “I remember,” the old man said, “at midnight on the third of June . . . all day the Germans going by, out of the city—and a truck burning . . . and a militiaman painting out the big M on his motorcycle and putting in its place a white star. Soldiers and machines, all going north . . . Then in the morning the guns again, closer . . . and then at night nobody sleeping, nobody could rest . . . And that evening—do you remember, Antonio?—in our doorway fell a wounded German. Ich will wasser, hilf mir, hilf mir! . . . All blood up here in the shoulder, and Antonio would not go out of the house to give him water . . .”

  “I’d spit in his mouth,” the boy said. “That’s the water I’d give a German.”

  “But I took a rag, and wet it, and squeezed the water between his lips,” Ugo said. “Why?” He shrugged. “I did not like him dying in the doorway. Then in the evening, dark, I’m in the house, and it’s one o’clock . . . I slept, dreaming, and then there’s a noise outside the window. I stuck my head out. Outside, on the street, an armored car. I thought—a German? Or perhaps . . . perhaps! And I ran out into the street. What is it? I shouted: English? And somebody shouted: No, no, Americano! And the men are from Chicago! A thousand things ran through my head . . . to call Adele . . . to lock the door . . . and I shouted, because I could think of nothing else to shout: Viva la Chicago!”

  The stub of the cigarette had burned down between his fingers, and now, forgetting he was to save the other, he took the broken half from his vest pocket. “What a celebration! What a festa it was that day!” He put the small stub gently and carefully between his lips, nodding at the great memory, the unforgettable experience.

  But the boy stood there, in the belted almost white raincoat. “Yes,” he said. “We are liberated.” He drew on the Nazionale. “We are liberated, aren’t we, Signor?” he said to Robert.

  “Sure,” Robert said.

  He made a sudden, almost convulsive movement, pulling the cigarette from his mouth. He crushed it into an ashtray. “You’re quite right,” he said. “Our cigarettes, they stink.” He looked at his father. “What a festa we’re having now,” he said. “Excuse me . . .” and Robert watched him, with high hunched shoulders and the bitter angry young face under the meticulous haircomb, go abruptly out of the room; and then the old man, troubled, followed the boy out. What was incredible, Robert thought, in the small silence, was that it was only six months ago that Ugo had shouted “Viva la Chicago”; six months, it was only six months. The difference, he thought, was that now you came on a cold extinguished night to a house like this, and there was a girl there, waiting, and an arrangement of a kind. Yes: the difference was that now it was all deals and arrangements, and he had made one, too, for his own reasons. “Six months,” he said aloud. “You wouldn’t think it was that short a time.”

  “What?” he heard the girl at the table ask.

  “The liberation,” he said. “It’s only six months. We’re coming to the first Christmas we’ve had since it.”

  “Have you been in Italy long?” she said.

  “Long enough,” he answered. And then realized they had been talking; and that he still knew nothing about her, nothing at all, and he did not actually know whether she had accepted, and how he was to proceed if she had, and why she did not do something to make it easier, or to get out of that chair there, or what kind of a house this house was, and who the people were in it. “Doesn’t it ever snow in Rome?” he said.

  “No,” the girl said.

  “Never?”

  “If you like snow,” she said, “you should go to Switzerland.”

  “I might at that,” he said. “One thing about a war, you travel. Switzerland and snow. Have you been in Switzerland?”

  “Before the war.”

  “I meant before the war,” he said. “Nobody travels now but the armies. And that’s no way to travel.” Then, very carefully, he said: “What did Nina tell the Pulcinis? That I was your husband?”

  “Yes.”

  “When were we married?”

  “A year ago,” she said. “In Naples.”

  “Oh.” He paused. He was being funny. “Was it a nice wedding?”

  “I don’t know,” the girl said. “I wasn’t there.”

  He put the musette bag on the table. He would have preferred going into whatever room it was she had arranged in this house. He supposed there was a room; Nina had said there would be a room. But the girl did not move away from the table. “Do you have a family?” he asked then.

  “My father.”

  “In Rome?”

  “No; in Genoa,” she said. He had, then, briefly a feeling of being glad that there was nobody. There being nobody seemed to make it simpler, although he did not know why he should want it simple. “You bombed Genoa,” she said, “and my father thought I would be safer in Rome.”

  “Me?” he said. “I didn’t bomb Genoa.”

  “Your countrymen.”

  “Oh.” He looked at her, but he did not want to accept what looked like antagonism and trouble. She was so much prettier than he had expected. Her prettiness excited him. He did not want any trouble at all. It was to be very simple: a musette bag, and the room arranged for, and whatever money would be required.

  “Genoa’s in the north, isn’t it?” he said. “Where Columbus came from.”

  “Yes.”

  “He used to sit on the dock and look out at the sea.” He remembered that from a history book. “I haven’t been in Europe before,” he said. “I haven’t been any place before. I grew up when Americans didn’t think it was patriotic to travel to Europe. Europe was degenerate. A good American stayed home and discovered the beauties of Buffalo.”

  “Buffalo?” she said. “But that is an American animal.”

  “It was,” he said. “Now it’s just an American city.”

  “America is so rich,” she said.

  “The country is,” he said.

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nbsp; “Are you?”

  “Am I what?”

  “Rich.”

  “No, I’m one of the poor ones.” He smiled. “Are you disappointed?”

  “I? No. Why should I be?”

  “I thought Nina might have said I was one of the rich ones.” Perhaps he should have boasted he was. The boys always said they were. The idea was to make them think you were even if you weren’t. That made it easier, too, when they thought you were rich. And, of course, the point was to make it as easy as possible, and not to waste too much time talking. Just talk to them enough to make it easy.

  She said: “Do you like Italy?”

  It was the second time since he had entered the house he had been asked that. They obviously wanted you to like it.

  “There’s a lot of churches,” he said.

  “America has many churches too, hasn’t it?”

  “Yes,” he said, “but we scatter them more.”

  “St. Paul’s is very beautiful,” she said. “People come from all over the world to see the cloisters at St. Paul’s.”

  “Well, St. Paul’s . . .”

  “Don’t you like St. Paul’s?”

  “Oh, I like it,” he said. “But nothing happens to me when I see it. I mean I look at it and there it is: a church. How old are you?”

  “Why?”

  “I’ve been standing here trying to guess. Are you twenty-three?”

  “It doesn’t matter, does it?”

  “No, it doesn’t matter.” He fumbled with the straps of the musette bag. “Two things surprised me,” he said. “You’re blonde and you’re pretty.”

  “Should I have been dark and ugly?” she said.

  “No,” he said, “but I just didn’t think you’d be that pretty.” Then, pretending that he was interested in the musette bag, and not looking at her, he said: “Do you know many soldiers?”

  She did not answer for a while, and when she did, her voice had changed. “What do you mean?”

  “Nothing,” he said, “but there are so many soldiers in Rome.”

  “Are there?” she said.

  “A lot of the girls,” he said, “like the soldiers.”

  “How fortunate,” she said, “for the soldiers.”

  “Well,” he said, “a lot of them do.”

  It was, of course, he realized, the wrong thing to have said, or at least it had been said much too soon, it was not something to have said at that particular moment or place, and he should have waited. He could feel that the hostility was back again in the room, and he was glad when the Signora Adele came back, smiling at them, and somewhat surprised to see them still there in the dining room.

  “Oh,” she said, “I forgot. Nina did not show you the room.”

  He realized, not knowing why, that the mention of the room only increased the look of aversion in her face, and yet, because she was here and because she was supposedly his wife there was hardly anything else she could do now except to get out of the chair finally and to follow Adele out of the dining room and into the hallway. He hefted the musette bag again, its bulky weight swinging against his hip, and went out, too, knowing something was wrong and not knowing what was wrong, or why it should be wrong. He carried the musette bag with him into the room at the end of the hallway. This was the room that had been arranged for. He could see that it was a rather large room, larger than he was accustomed to, with a high ceiling, and not too badly furnished, with a closet, a table, a fringed lamp on a small end table, and in the center of the room a big bed covered with a red smooth spread, and with red pillows propped against the headboard. It was unmistakably a room for two people, and one of them had to be a woman. And it was cold. It seemed much colder to him, as he stood there, easing the musette bag off his shoulder and on to the table, than the dining room had been. He wondered if Nina’s captain had visited here, and what he had said about the coldness, and then what jokes were made about the best way to keep warm. Adele punched the pillows, and bustled around the room for a moment straightening things, and then she went out, closing the door. He was glad the musette bag was off his shoulder, because he had felt somewhat foolish carrying it about so constantly and, he imagined, so obviously.

  Lisa stood in the center of the room, on the small rug, with her hands in her pockets, and looking at her he could not be certain he knew what she was thinking. He decided the thing for him to do was to ignore the hostility. He went and sat down now on the bed, thinking it was funny the spread should be that color. They could have chosen some other color. He blew on his hands. “It’s cold,” he said. “I’m shivering.”

  “Are your barracks warm?” she asked. She was being polite.

  “Sure.”

  “Yes, the Americans manage to keep themselves warm.”

  He was supposed to apologize and feel guilty, too, about his warm barracks. They really weren’t so goddam warm at that. “There’s a big villa at Anzio,” he said. “In the pine wood. Do you know it? I guess it belongs to some duke. The duke has quite a library. Or he had. He probably doesn’t have it anymore.”

  “No? Why?”

  “Oh, when I was there, there was a lieutenant in the library. The lieutenant was cold. He was feeding the duke’s nice Latin manuscripts into a cozy fire.”

  “Yes?”

  “Nothing. He was feeding them into the fire. He was cold.”

  “It must be wonderful,” she said, standing there.

  “What?”

  “To be an American,” she said, “and to be the conqueror of Europe.”

  He got up from the bed and went to the table where he had placed the musette bag. He began to unbuckle the straps. “It’s all right,” he said.

  “Wherever you go,” she said, “flowers, and the people cheering. You are the liberatori. And drinking wine. And then the girls, every place.”

  He opened the bag.

  “I missed a couple of places,” he said.

  “Did you know girls in Africa?” she said.

  “Yes, I knew girls in Africa.”

  “In Naples?”

  “Yes, in Naples.”

  “Where else?”

  “Caserta.”

  He took a can of milk out of the musette bag, and then some chocolate bars. He had talked the mess sergeant out of the can of milk, and the chocolate bars had been accumulated from his weekly rations. He had had no use for them before, except for some kids who used to come down and stand behind the barbed-wire fence, looking in, and then there were so many kids it was easier to give them the hard candy which hadn’t much of a trading value anyway. He heard her, behind him, as he took the things out of the musette bag, say: “I think the Americans are liars.”

  He put the chocolate and the milk on the table.

  “Why do you say they’re liars?” he said.

  “They make many promises. But they don’t keep them.”

  “Depends on the promise.”

  “I think they are stupid, too,” she said.

  “Oh,” he said, “we’re a little bit of everything.” He had taken a fruit cake, wrapped in its transoceanic cellophane, out of the bag. He held the cake up. “Do you like fruit cake?” he said. “My mother keeps sending me fruit cake and I hate it.”

  “What does your fiancée send you?”

  She was ignoring the cake.

  “My what?” he said.

  “Your fiancée.”

  “She neglects me,” he said.

  “Does she?”

  “Well,” he said, “if I had one, she’d neglect me.”

  But she was refusing to look at the cake. She did not, obviously, think he was funny. He thought he was being funny, and he thought too that what he was doing was, as near as he could make it, kind. She stood there, in the raincoat, on the rug, not looking at the bed or the color of it or at anything in the room.

  “I think the people despise you,” she said.

  “Do they?”

  “You are arrogant and loud and stupid, and they despise you.”
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  He put the cake down slowly. He had had great hopes about the influence of the cake.

  “It’s pretty hard despising a Sherman tank,” he said.

  “The conquistatori!” she said.

  “Baby,” he said, “it’s better than being defeated.”

  “Italy is not defeated,” she said.

  “No? She’s giving a pretty good imitation of it.” Then he tried once more with the cake. He had really depended a great deal upon the cake. He held it up again, in its cellophane wraper. “Wouldn’t you like to try my mother’s fruit cake?” he said.

  “Italy has been invaded by barbarians before,” she said.

  So it was hopeless, even with the cake.

  “By what?” he said.

  “Barbarians!”

  “Now I’m a barbarian.” The barbarian thing annoyed him. There was no reason it should have, more than the being stupid or arrogant or untrustworthy, but it did. “Look,” he said, “you may have Leonardo da Vinci, but we’ve got U.S. Steel . . .”

  “And it rusts,” she said.

  “And Da Vinci peels . . .”

  “It lasts longer than metal!”

  “But it ain’t so hot on a tank,” he said. He was almost angry now. He hadn’t come here through the cold and the dark to have a political quarrel. But perhaps she could still be placated. He tried again. “How about some chocolate?” he said. “Wouldn’t you like some chocolate?”

  “Why do the Americans boast so much?” she said.

  “Why do the Italians complain so much?” he answered.

  “We’ve suffered!”

  “We didn’t cause it,” he said.

  “You bombed our cities.”

  “The Germans were in them,” he said.

  “And now you,” she said.

  He looked at her. He had become an enemy. And yet, he was no enemy, certainly not hers, certainly not anyone’s in this house, not now, after having come this distance and through this cold. And yet she accused him, or seemed to accuse him. He had packed a bag and he had brought food and he had walked across the bridge. “Be grateful,” he said, trying not to be angry. Not now, at least. “If we hadn’t walked up here from Salerno,” he said, “you’d still be doing the tedeschi’s laundry . . .”