The Girl on the Via Flaminia Read online

  “You are nothing.”

  “Practically nothing,” Robert said.

  Then she said: “Will you go out for a moment?”

  “Out of the room?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why?”

  “Please.”

  “All right,” he said. He stood up. “I’ll go smoke a cigarette.” He went out of the room. Ugo was sitting in the dining room, reading. “Ah, Signor Roberto.”

  “What’s the signor for?” Robert said.

  “Va bene,” Ugo said. “Roberto.”

  “What are you reading?”

  “Il Tempo.”

  He sat down at the table, and shook out two cigarettes. “I haven’t read a real newspaper in two years. What’s Il Tempo have to say?”

  “The usual. The war will end soon: the war will not end soon. One has a choice.”

  “Oh, it’ll end. Two things are always sure about a war: they begin and they end.”

  “Yes,” Ugo said. “It’s the time in between that nobody understands. How is your signora?”

  “Fine.’’

  “She’s a fine girl,” Ugo said. “I like her very much. She is the only girl who has been in this house my son Antonio has liked.”

  “That’s a compliment,” Robert said. “Antonio must be hard to please.”

  “I’m afraid he is.”

  “Well,” Robert said, “what Antonio ought to do is fall in love. He’s old enough.”

  “There was a girl once,” Ugo said. “My son never talks of her now. You know, after the peace was signed, he deserted from the army—so as not to have to fight for the Germans. And I hid him.”

  “Hid him?”

  “Yes,” Ugo said. “It was necessary. For two months he was hidden in the cellar in this house . . .”

  “And the girl?”

  “She fell in love with a German.” The old man paused: “She worked in the telephone exchange and when the Germans retreated she went north with them. So you see—there was the desertion, and then the girl—and now, well, what one has now. It has happened to all our sons . . . sometimes I think that whatever happens to us after the war, whatever happens to Italy, what we become, will all be because of the things that are happening to our young now . . . and they are not good things, Roberto: they are very bad. To have no work, to have no faith, to have nothing they can take pride in, to have nothing they really love . . . If the seedling is twisted, the whole tree grows crooked . . . and then, I myself don’t understand things too well. Nothing has turned out like we expected . . . We thought that if the fascists were gone—well, the fascisti are gone, and now? Our own lives are small, and perhaps not too important. We thought that prison was one of the worst indignities one could suffer—now how simple the going to prison looks! I used to play cards in the cell . . .”

  “What are you, Ugo?”

  “A kind of socialist who is more of an old man than he is a socialist. You see, in Italy, we’re always a kind of something. Not the exact thing, like the Germans or the English. But only a kind of, with many shades.”

  “Oh,” Robert said, “it’s only because of the war. Afterward, you’ll be all right.”

  “Well,” the old man said, “we live in hope.”

  “Yes,” Robert said. “What else is there to live in?” He stood up.

  “Good night.”

  “Buonanotte, Roberto.”

  He went out of the dining room.

  The bedroom was dark. He closed the door, and groped his way in the darkness until he touched the side of the bed. “Lisa?” he said.

  “Sì.”

  “Where are you?”

  “Here.”

  “I can’t see a thing,” he said. He moved away from the bed in what he thought was the direction of the closet. When his hands touched it, he opened the closet door and took his jacket off, and reached into the darkness of the closet for a hanger, and as he did so he touched the dresses. Two dresses, he could feel, were hanging in the closet. Her dresses. Finally. He found a hanger, and hung his jacket away, in the closet, beside the dresses and the two raincoats.

  “Lisa,” he said, in the icy and clean feel of the bed linen.

  “Yes.”

  “We’ll go Sunday to Lake Bracciano. All right?”

  “Va bene.”

  “What are you thinking about?”

  “Niente.”

  “You’re so quiet you must be thinking about something.”

  “About God,” she said.

  “God?”

  “Yes,” she said, in the darkness. “That He has a lot to forgive me, and I have as much to forgive Him.”

  So on Sunday, he took her for a drive to Lake Bracciano, thinking she would like it. The lake was to the north of the city and the Germans had retreated along this road. He had gotten the jeep, after a good deal of persuasion, out of the motor pool. It was a clear day, and he was proud of the fact that he had secured a jeep. He thought that taking her in the jeep was a way of showing her that she was really his girl and that he was taking her for a drive on a Sunday as he would if he were home and had a girl.

  She sat on the hard canvas cushion of the jeep, and she must have felt exposed. The jeep had not been winterized. He didn’t realize at first that she felt exposed.

  They drove out of the city and down the road that went to Lake Bracciano. Now and then they passed an armored car or a tank, broken and stripped, lying in the fields, rust eating the guns and the axles. Because it was Sunday people were walking on the road. When the jeep went through the small towns the people moved reluctantly out of the roadway, and if they were young people they moved very reluctantly out of the way of the jeep, and everybody out strolling looked at her sitting in the car. If they were young they shouted. But he did not understand what they had shouted.

  She turned quickly.

  “Go back,” she said.

  “What?”

  “I want to go back,” she said. “Please.”

  “But we’re halfway there. What’s the matter?” he said. He looked at her. “What did they shout at you?”

  “Nothing.”

  “They shouted something. What did they shout?”

  “Nothing.”

  She did not speak again until they came to Lake Bracciano. There was an enormous castle dominating the little town above the lake. The town itself was built on the saddle of a hill and the main street climbed steeply up to the castle, and it was difficult getting the jeep through the narrow streets, and in the central piazza the men in their Sunday black and their old black hats, smoking their thin strong cigars, turned and looked at her sitting in the jeep, and they muttered something to themselves, too, about her. That was when he began to realize how exposed she must feel. But he drove down to the lake, and it lay, very blue and circular and beautiful, at the foot of the mountains. There were small docks with rowboats tied up at them. In the summer it would be even lovelier here. They sat for a while, looking at the lake, and then, seeing a pensione, he wanted to go into the pensione and get something to eat. She did not want to go, but he insisted. It was a small hotel at which people lived in the summertime. They sat down at a table. A waiter came up to the table.

  There was a sign on the wall that said BIRRA.

  “Would you like something to eat?” he said to the girl. “Maybe they have some spaghetti. Do you have any spaghetti?” he asked the waiter.

  “No,” the waiter said.

  “Then how about some eggs? Do you have any eggs?”

  “No,” the waiter said.

  He looked at the BIRRA sign.

  “It says beer,” he said to the waiter. “From Naples. Do you have any beer?”

  “That’s a sign from before the war,” the waiter said.

  “Well, what can we have? Don’t you have any food?”

  “You have the food,” the waiter said.

  “What?”

  “Please,” the girl said, “I don’t want anything.”

  They got up and
went out of the hotel. They drove back through the town, through the piazza, where the short square men in black smoked their cigars, and past the castle, and down the hill again to the road which went back to the city. Going back, the fields and the small towns, with their painted stone houses, were not as pretty as he had thought them, and then, as they were driving, they passed an old lumbering truck on the road in the back of which there was a family. There was a small boy and a young girl and a woman in the back of the truck, and up front there was an old man and a middle-aged man was driving. The truck had no tires on the two rear wheels, and they were driving it on the bare rims, and the whole truck shook and wheezed, and the small boy was leaning over the side of the truck, shaking with it, as they drove past. When they were only a little way past the truck something hit him in the back of the head, and a bitten apple fell into his lap, and he put the brakes on, stopping the jeep abruptly. He got out and stood in the middle of the road and stopped the lumbering truck with its tormented rear wheels. He went back to where the family was, and he said, “Who threw that apple?”

  The husband got down and came back to where he was standing. The husband looked at the jack he had carried with him out of the jeep.

  “What is it?” the husband said.

  “One of you threw an apple at me,” he said. “I want to know who threw the apple.”

  The husband looked at him again, and turned to the boy and the young girl and the woman in the back of the truck. “Did you throw an apple?” he asked.

  “I threw it,” the small boy said.

  “He did not mean to hit anything,” the mother said. “He was throwing the apple away.”

  “Scusi,” the husband said.

  He walked back to the jeep, carrying the jack. Like hell he didn’t mean to hit anything. He went through all the small towns fast on the way back to the city, and he didn’t much care how pretty the countryside was. Or how lovely Lake Bracciano.

  But that, and the other things, helped make it no good.

  5.

  New Year’s Eve came. On New Year’s Eve, the English sergeant was sitting again in the dining room, listening to the music on the radio. Because the music libraries of the army radio station were limited, they were still playing Christmas carols and alternating the Christmas carols with patriotic songs. The fact that it was New Year’s Eve made the Englishman feel sadder than he had at any other time during the year. He had been six years in the army now, and it was a long time. Six years could make a man feel that he had never been in anything else than an army. He looked now at little Mimi, the Pulcini’s maid, who was clearing up in the dining room, and he said, “How old are you, Mimi?”

  “Sedici,” the girl said.

  “I’ve a gel in England most your age,” the English sergeant said. “Want a piece of chawklit?”

  “Sì.”

  “Like chawklit, do you?” She nodded her head. “Well, then, come along and give us a kiss for it.”

  “No, no,” Mimi said. “Proibito.”

  “Who says a bit of a kiss is proibito?”

  “Sì,” Mimi said. “Alla signora dispiace.”

  “You tell the old hag to mind her business,” the sergeant said. “Now, come on, give a chap one.”

  She giggled a little. She wore a holiday ribbon in her hair. She gave the sergeant a quick and birdlike kiss.

  “There, that’s better,” the sergeant said, nodding his cropped head. “Here’s your chawklit. Mind, you don’t eat it all at once now.”

  “Molte grazie,” Mimi said.

  “Well,” the sergeant said, watching her devour the chocolate quickly, “it’s tonight being New Year’s Eve made me feel like havin’ somebody kiss me.”

  “Sì, comincia domani il nuovo anno,” Mimi said.

  “Ay, it’s a new year tomorrow all right,” the sergeant said, “and they must be havin’ a proper time for themselves tonight in Piccadilly Circus.”

  Ugo Pulcini came into the dining room. His spectacles sat up on his high forehead. “Buona sera,” he said to the sergeant. The sergeant looked up at the old man. He thought Ugo a queer bloke. But decent enough. Always reading something, too. Bloke could go blind reading them Eyetie newspapers with their bad print. “’Ullo,” the sergeant said. He gestured toward the wine bottle.

  “Have a bit of vino?”

  Little Mimi ducked out of the room. She worried briefly that the chocolate had stained her mouth. The signora did not like her accepting gifts from the soldiers.

  “No, grazie,” Ugo said, refusing the wine.

  “Funny,” the sergeant said, “how you blokes never drink the vino you sell us.”

  “But this,” Ugo said, “is a vino dei castelli.”

  “Is it?”

  “A good wine,” Ugo said.

  “Oh, vino’s vino,” the Englishman said. “Pop it into you, puke it out.”

  “Before the war,” Ugo said, “you should have gone to Frascati. There was wonderful wine—famous!”

  The Englishman poured wine into his own glass. He considered it, and possibly his own predicament. “You know,” he said, “you’re not such bad chaps, considerin’, you Eyeties. Bunch of excitable johns, though. Always full of the bellyache. Always cheerin’ a bloke or shootin’ him.”

  Ugo smiled.

  “There are many,” he said, “we would like to shoot we will not have the pleasure of shooting.” Which was, of course, regrettable. Even with the war, there had not been enough shooting of the right kind. The windowpanes rattled. The Englishman sighed. He had small blue eyes, with a certain pleasant dullness about them, the flesh about the corners of the eyes deeply wrinkled. The desert sun might have done that. Ugo, glancing up now, saw Robert in the door. Robert came into the room. He was carrying a bottle of cognac.

  “Did Lisa call?” he asked Ugo.

  “No.”

  He is worried, Ugo thought. They were all worried. Except the Englishman, perhaps. The English did not worry.

  “Where did she go?” Robert said. “It’s almost midnight. She always waits for me to come from camp.”

  “There is nothing to worry about,” Ugo said.

  “In this city?” Robert said. He was restless. He put the bottle of cognac down on the table. Outside, it was New Year’s Eve, the last fading night of a vanishing sequence of nights, and as dark as all the other nights in that sequence had been. The streets were dangerous as well as dark and cold. He looked at the old man sitting comfortably at the table.

  “She’ll be home soon,” Ugo said.

  Yes, Robert thought, she’ll be home. The Englishman had red hair on the backs of his short thick fingers. Home. That was what he had wanted, hadn’t he? An imitation of home.

  “Take your king,” the Englishman said. “Why kick up such a bloody fuss about the old boy? It ain’t bad, having a king.”

  “The House of Savoy has not been exactly a blessing for us,” Ugo said.

  “Well, we like having one,” the Englishman said.

  “Perhaps you can afford to,” Ugo said.

  Robert opened the bottle of cognac.

  “Why,” the Englishman said, “I’ve seen His Majesty, in the cinema, right in bombed Coventry, and there he was, talkin’ to the poor duffers in their own homes. Cheerin’ ’em up, and comfortin’ ’em. Face to face.”

  “Yes?” Ugo said, politely.

  “Gives ’em something to look up to,” the sergeant said.

  “Yes?” Ugo said. “I will tell you a story. There was once a woman who had three children. They were named Benito, Victor Emmanuel, and Italia. When she was asked why she had named them so, the woman answered: Because Benito eats all the time, Victor Emmanuel sleeps all the time . . . and Italia . . .”

  Ugo paused.

  “Italia,” he said, “weeps all the time.”

  “Oh, mind you,” the Englishman said, “I ain’t saying I don’t like you Eyeties.”

  “Of course not,” Ugo said.

  “It’s a pretty count
ry. ’Course, it’s a bit dirty, and unmodern, and it ain’t like being in England where a bloke knows what’s what. But it’s a bloody sight better’n Africa.”

  “Were you in Africa?” Ugo asked.

  “Three damn bloody years,” the sergeant said.

  Robert drew a cigarette from his pack and gave it to the old man. He was trying not to think of her being in the streets, if she was in the streets. He did not know where she was. He realized that while he was in camp during the day he did not ever know where she was or what she did. And he did not know if he had a right to ask her, or how much right of any kind he had. The old man had taken the cigarette.

  “In ’43,” Ugo said, “we smoked cigarettes made of roasted acorns.”

  “Acorns?” Robert said.

  “Yes; truly. Acorns.”

  “How were they?”

  “Impossible.” The old man smiled. He paused.

  “When ends the war, Roberto?”

  Robert shrugged. “When the war ends.”

  “It is such a long one this time,” the old man said. He thought of its length, and of its sadness. “In ’14 it was a different war.”

  “Men died, didn’t they?” Robert said.

  “Of course.”

  “Then it isn’t much different.” He poured the cognac into a small glass beside Ugo’s arm. He liked the old man. “Have some cognac, Ugo. I bought it to celebrate New Year’s.”

  “Grazie,” Ugo said.

  “How about you, England?”

  “No. Vino’s fine for me, Yank.”

  Robert lifted his glass. “If you can still see out of one eye after you drink this, it’s good cognac . . .”

  Ugo tasted the liquor. His face puckered. “And you paid for it?” he said.

  “Eight hundred lire . . .”

  “The bottle?”

  “What did you expect, the gallon?”

  The old man shook his head. “This isn’t cognac like we once had.”

  “They ain’t lire like you once had either . . .”

  Nothing was like what one once had had. The Englishman sucked on his pipe. “They must be havin’ themselves a proper time tonight in Piccadilly Circus . . .”

  “Do you wish to be home?” Ugo asked.

  “Ay. I’d like to have a go at the missus again.” He put the glass of wine down carefully. “She writes, the missus. Had a letter. She says: I don’t know what you’re eatin’ tonight—ay, what I’m eatin’!—but what we’re sittin’ down to is codfish roes and potatoes. Codfish roes! She hates codfish roes, me missus.”