The Girl on the Via Flaminia Read online

  He sucked mournfully on his pipe. He wondered if in Piccadilly Circus the night was as cold and as dark. Then he wondered if everywhere in the world it was as cold and as dark and as lonely as it was here.

  Robert heard the door in the hallway open, and then her voice, low, talking to Adele. When she came into the dining room she was flushed with the cold, and her hair was blown about. She did not look at him as she came into the dining room. Adele followed her.

  “Buona sera,” she said.

  “Is it cold out?” Ugo asked.

  “Brutto,” she said. “It is so dark one is almost afraid to walk alone.”

  “Our New Year’s,” Adele said.

  Robert held his voice down. “Where have you been?” he asked her.

  “A friend’s,” she said, not looking at him.

  “She kept you sort of late, didn’t she?” Robert said.

  She did not answer.

  “Yesterday, on the Lungotevere, they found a soldier,” Ugo said, “Stripped naked . . . but completely!”

  “Have some vino, ma’am,” the Englishman said.

  “No,” Lisa said, “grazie.”

  Robert looked at his watch. “It’s six o’clock in New York now. They’re probably dressing for dinner. It’s a big night.”

  “Bloody big night,” the English sergeant said.

  “While you are having such a dull night in Rome,” the girl said.

  “Just a night,” Robert said.

  Antonio, in the familiar raincoat, entered the room. He went to his mother and kissed her.

  “If only the war would end,” Ugo said.

  “And when it ends?” Adele said.

  “God pity Italy when it ends,” Antonio said.

  The Englishman looked into his wine glass. More than five years, and he hadn’t seen his missus. Egypt, North Africa, the desert and the mountains, and the billets, double-decked, in some old warehouse or factory.

  “Oh, you chaps are always complainin’,” the Englishman said.

  “Don’t we have the right to complain?” Antonio said.

  “You’re always fightin’ the bloody war,” the Englishman said. “Give it a rest.” Codfish roes, she hated them. And now the buzz bombs. A bloody mess, all of it.

  “Have the English,” Antonio said, “now forbidden us to speak?”

  “How about some cognac, Antonio?” Robert said.

  “Antonio . . .” Ugo said.

  “I was playing billiards tonight,” Antonio said, ignoring his father, “and an American came into the café. A lieutenant. He was with a girl.”

  “A signorina?” Adele said.

  “Also an American. A woman in a uniform. They had been celebrating. He was teaching her to play billiards. Do they permit women into your billiard rooms in America?” he asked Robert.

  “Well, there’s no law keeping them out,” Robert said.

  “But do they frequent billiard rooms?”

  “No.”

  “In Italy they feel free to,” Antonio said. “It is very convenient to leave their morals behind, isn’t it, signor? In her own country she would feel too much shame to enter a café and play billiards in a room where there were only men. But not in Italy. One does not feel shame before an inferior people. So it is nothing to come into a place like that, a little drunk, and lean over a table, and laugh very loudly, with her skirt up to here, and to have a good time. After all, who will object—those dirty Italians standing silently against the wall? She enjoyed herself . . .”

  “Eh,” Adele said, “it’s not that important.”

  “No?” Antonio said.

  “Of course,” Adele said, “I wouldn’t go. But if she wants to, and she doesn’t mind . . .”

  “They have already taken over our houses,” Antonio said. “Our hotels. Our stadiums. Our restaurants. And now, our billiard rooms.”

  He turned to the Englishman:

  “Shall we shut our mouths entirely?”

  On the walls of the small villages in the south, they had painted slogans during the other regime: to obey, to fight, to win. Obedience was done, fighting was over, there had been no victory. Agony was left, and a sense of suffocation.

  “Oh, shove off,” the Englishman said. “It’s a bloody party.”

  “Yes,” Antonio said. “It’s an army of parties.”

  The sergeant looked up wearily. Bloody arguments. Nothing but bloody arguments. “Look here,” he said, “there’s a lot of our chaps lyin’ out there dead from El Alamein to Tripoli. And it ain’t Jerries’ bullets in ’em.”

  “No,” Antonio said. “They are ours.”

  “Bloody well right yours,” the Englishman said.

  “And our dead?” Antonio said. “Whose bullets are in them in the desert? Whose wound did I carry from Bardia to Mersa Matruh?”

  “Antonio!” Adele said.

  “What do you want?” Antonio said. He wheeled quickly. The muscle worked in his dark jaw. “When they talk like that it is impossible for me to be silent!”

  “I don’t want you to quarrel in my house,” his mother said.

  He bit down upon his lip. He made a visible effort to restrain himself. At Mersa Matruh the bandage had been black with his own blood. “Va bene,” Antonio said. “Excuse me,” he said to the Englishman.

  “That’s all right,” the sergeant said. “Just hold your water and let’s have a party.”

  “Yes,” Ugo said, “it is the New Year.”

  “He loses his temper,” Adele said.

  “Mamma!” Antonio said. He was divided from all of them. There was nothing they understood about humiliation, and this sense of impotency and shame. “Please. It’s finished!”

  He made again one of those abrupt melodramatic movements of his. There was an uncomfortable silence. “Here,” the Englishman said, “let’s have another bottle of vino.” He called out: “Mimi! Vieni qua!”

  “Sì, sì!” Mimi cried. “Vengo!”

  Bloody young Eyetie. They were all a bloody lot, the sergeant thought, the young ones, hanging around the cafés, black-marketing, with their hair oil and their swimming hot eyes. Bloodier than Wogs, standing there on the sidewalks, looking at you as though you’d just robbed the poor box. Should have knocked off a few more of them coming up the coast road from El Alamein, the sergeant thought. Better off all around. Bloody beggars. Chap couldn’t have a party without one of them hissing at him.

  The girl said, suddenly, “But why shouldn’t Antonio lose his temper? We are all so careful! So afraid!”

  Is she going to pop off too? the sergeant thought.

  “There is nothing to be done,” Adele said. She was troubled. “Why should one be angry?” she said. “It’s necessary to be hard. To be angry is wasteful and stupid.”

  “If we had men!” Lisa said.

  “Men!” Adele snorted. “We have fifty political parties . . . full of men!”

  Robert looked at his watch again. “It’s almost midnight.”

  “I’m sorry you are not in New York,” Lisa said.

  “Stop it,” Robert said to her.

  “But you would have a wonderful time in New York,” the girl said.

  “I’m having a wonderful time here,” Robert said.

  Antonio looked at the girl. At least, there was one ally in the room. She was married to one of his unacknowledged enemies, but she was young, she would know the difference between victory and this kind of defeat. “It is different for you, signora,” he said to Lisa, politely. “You will go to America with your husband when the war ends. But us? We will stay here to be punished!”

  “Punished?” Robert said.

  “Yes, punished,” the boy said. “Because we made the war. Because of the regime. But how do you punish us? Tell me, signore . . . how? Do you go and pick the guilty one, and say, he’s guilty, him we shoot? This is the bad one, he is responsible, him we imprison? No! The ax on all our necks . . . !” He leaned forward, trembling. His face was flushed and dark. He looked intense
ly at Robert.

  “Don’t look at me,” Robert said. “I’m not responsible.”

  “Who is?” Antonio said.

  “Christopher Columbus,” Robert said. “How the hell do I know?”

  But Antonio knew. Yes: in his eyes, the uniform was the same. “When we go into the street,” he said, leaning forward, accusing them, because of the uniform, “what do we see? Your colonels, in their big cars, driving with women whose reputations were made in the bedrooms of fascist bureaucrats! With my country’s enemies! Or your soldiers, drunk in our gutters. Or your officers, pushing us off our own sidewalks! Oh, the magnificent promises the radio made us! Oh, the paradise we’d have! Wait, wait—there will be bread, peace, freedom when the allies come! But where is this paradise? Where is it, signori—?”

  “Antonio!” Adele said.

  The boy’s head turned fiercely. “I must speak! It’s choking me!”

  “Go to your room,” Adele said.

  “The liberatori!” Antonio said. He laughed, a short hard quick laugh. There was no humor in it.

  “Go to your room,” Adele said.

  She took his arm. “Antonio! Do you hear me?” He allowed her to draw him away. “Yes,” he said, “I’ll spoil the party. The Alleati must have their parties.”

  “Basta,” Adele said. “Enough now.”

  She drew him out of the room.

  Ugo looked at them. “Excuse my son,” he said. There was a painful silence. “When the Germans were here,” he said, “I hid him—in the cellar. It was because of the arrests, they were arresting all the young who had deserted . . . and sending them north to the factories in Austria, and to the labor camps . . . He was two months in that cellar and I would bring him food.” He looked at them, as though possibly they would understand this: the two months in the cellar. “To live with fear, and with hatred, is bad . . . one changes because of it, and yet, when one has only one son, what else can one do? He’s so changed . . . Always,” he said, “when I went to the cellar, Antonio would ask me: where are the Americans, are they close, why do they stay so long at Anzio? It was difficult for him—a soldier, young, and part of a defeated army—and then, to live like that, for two months, in a cellar . . .”

  He did not finish. He means, Robert thought, to emerge into this, to come out of the cellar finally into this.

  Outside, in the dark, there was a sudden sound of bells. Of bells, and of guns firing.

  They looked up sharply hearing the bells and the guns.

  “Midnight,” the Englishman said. “Happy New Year’s.”

  “But the guns,” the old man said, hearing them. “I hear guns.”

  “It’s the American Army,” Robert said, “celebrating.”

  The Englishman stood up. “Come on,” he said. “Let’s go out into the garden and see the fireworks. Listen to them.”

  Pistols, bells, and then the sound of a machine gun.

  “It’s a bloody mutiny,” the sergeant said. “It sounds like a bloody mutiny.”

  6.

  From Porto Bardia to Tripoli. Between Barce and Derna the cliffs dropping to the sea. At El Aden the tanks burning.

  The highway, and on one side of the highway, the desert, and on the other the mountains, and behind them, the English.

  Is it bad, tenente?

  Yes, bad.

  Does it hurt much?

  There was so much blood, and the blood had turned black, there on the edges of the bandage.

  And they were on the truck, lying on the beds and the equipment evacuated from the field hospital, he and Volpini, and Volpini said jump jump when at Bir El Acroma the English had strafed the column, coming over, low, and you could see the flashes, intermittent, in the sunlight, short and fiery, and he jumped, limping grotesquely into the ditch as though the ditch would help. From December fourth to the twenty-third of December. See how he remembered the dates. How the dates clung. How the time was fixed. From December fourth to the twenty-third of December. The Retreat. And then it was Christmas Eve in Tripoli.

  Again, again, again. Would it never stop? He had, he thought, firmly clinched himself on the present, denying it, denying those nineteen days, and yet it would not go away. The wound suppurated. The pus was there. The bandage black with blood. The memory did not heal.

  No, he thought, lying in the darkness in his room, on the bed, turning his face to the wall, feeling the flush and the heat as though he were in fever, hearing the sounds of the celebrant bells and the guns firing, no, he thought, it was over, it was all part of the defeat, when his world fell to pieces, and nothing, nothing could possibly come of remembering any of it, Bardia or the burning tanks at El Aden, or the planes coming down again in the afternoon with their guns streaking and Volpini saying jump jump there at Bir El Acroma when he had jumped and the plane coming over and Volpini had jumped too late. Jumped, and the truck, in the disorderly column, veering off the highway, had gone over the twitching body there on the cement, Volpini, and he lay in the ditch. That was nothing to remember now for none of it was real except in his memory, and only this was real now: the dark streets, the Americans shooting drunkenly in the holiday night, the lire down, all the whores, and the indigestible bread.

  He was Antonio, he thought: the African lieutenant was dead, in the desert, with Volpini, dead with the smoking overturned tanks and the German motorcyclists racing through the disorderly column, attempting order. What was it Volpini had said of the campaign? The temptation in the desert. But he had meant the empire. The invisible impossible bloody empire. An empire of sand and death and illusion. If Graziani had driven through to Suez it might have been different. If they had mounted the double attack, northern and southern. But the whole campaign, from the first, had been a scandal. It had all been sand and death and illusion and the fiery streaks out of the sky.

  Perhaps it had been doomed from the very beginning. Doomed long ago, fixed in some historical destiny, fixed in some ill-fated star of Graziani’s, fixed so that the fuel should fail when fuel was needed, fixed so that the shells should lie on the piers in Naples when there were no shells at Mersa Matruh for the guns of the bersaglieri. All of it fixed. Determined far in advance. Reckoned and destined, all of it, before he, Antonio, had been born, or had gone, in his neat-booted ignorance, into the hold of the transport sailing from Augusta.

  Now it was over. A campaign. A retreat. A defeat suffered. The truth of all of it, when the documents would be finally revealed, possibly different from what he thought of as the truth. Only the wound, that was to be his truth, the undeniable one, the one documents had nothing to do with, as another’s would be his blindness or his handless arm. From Bardia to Tripoli. Between Barce and Derna the cliffs dropping to the sea.

  Does it hurt much, tenente?

  He could hear the guns and the bells.

  And then one had waited so long there in the cellar, and there was always the half-shame that one had deserted, even though the Army was no longer one worth fighting for, and in the battalions the Germans had spread false and misleading rumors, and regiments, full of conflicting stories, had surrendered their arms, and the news of the peace was deliberately kept from the troops. Even though it had been that kind of an army there was the half-shame always because of the desertion. And more difficult because one was young and an officer. Then, lying there, on the blankets, in the cellar, waiting for one’s father to come down into the darkness and to feed one. Thinking there in the darkness always about it. Remembering how Volpini had liked to hunt. How they had planned when it was over to have a great deal of hunting and the rabbit stew that Volpini had sworn would taste like no other, and then, the retreat, like rabbits themselves, and the others doing the hunting. Perhaps it would have been better not to have hidden, not to have stayed there, in the cellar, in the darkness, but to have gone north, to have gone into the hills, they were organizing then in the hills, and the combat groups were being formed there. Many had gone off, and it would have been better he knew now, in his room
, hearing the guns, to have gone off, to have fought there, in the marshes, in the forests, and even to have died there under those conditions of unequal warfare. For now there was nothing left at all but the corruption, and this house, and the soldiers of those armies he had thought were to be armies that would welcome him, but which did not welcome him, which perhaps despised him as he despised them, coming here to have his mother serve them food and wine, to sit drunken in the dining room.

  There was a ripping sound in the night, and he recognized a machine gun.

  They could afford to celebrate with ammunition.

  In the darkness he got up, moved toward the table, switched on the small lamp, and took out again his bullet. He held it under the light of the lamp, smooth, a little flattened, and he imagined he could still see the slight indentation the forceps made, and still see the Bavarian doctor extending it toward him, held between the clamps of the forceps, saying, “Here, you might want this, a souvenir,” on that Christmas Eve in Tripoli.

  And afterward he had had such a high fever.

  Outside, now, while he turned the bullet carefully and slowly in the lamplight, they were celebrating: the bells all rang, and guns in the hands of those who were involved in his defeat, and now in the continuing humiliation of his country, fired in short happy bursts.

  7.

  In the bedroom, the sound of bells could still be heard, bronze and heavy. Robert had brought the bottle of cognac with him into the room. The lamp was lit.

  She lay on the red bedspread. She had covered herself with the raincoat. She looked quite small and tired.

  “Would you like some cognac?” Robert said. “Ugo thinks I was overcharged for it.”

  “No,” Lisa said.

  “It’ll warm you. Besides, you ought to celebrate the New Year’s.”

  “You celebrate it,” the girl said.