“It’s a good place to work: cool in summer, and in winter the thick walls protect you against the cold, and there are stoves everywhere. Naturally, when I was a child, an evacuee, we lived only in two side rooms at the end of the main corridor. Now I’ve taken possession of my uncle and aunt’s wing. I work here, in Uncle Carlo’s study.” There was a secretaire with little space for a sheet of paper but plenty of small drawers, both visible and concealed. “I couldn’t put Abulafia here,” Belbo said. “But the rare times I come, I like to write by hand, as I did then.” He showed us a majestic cupboard. “When I’m dead, remember this contains all my juvenilia, the poems I wrote when I was sixteen, the sketches for sagas in six volumes made at eighteen, and so on….”
“Let’s see! Let’s see!” Lorenza cried, clapping her hands and advancing with exaggerated feline tread toward the cupboard.
“Stop right where you are,” Belbo said. “There’s nothing to see. I don’t even look at it myself anymore. And, in any case, when I’m dead, I’ll come back and burn everything.”
“This place has ghosts, I hope,” Lorenza said.
“It does now. In Uncle Carlo’s day, no; it was lots of fun then. Georgic. That’s why I come. It’s wonderful working at night while the dogs bark in the valley.”
He showed us the rooms where we would be sleeping: mine, Diotallevi’s, Lorenza’s. Lorenza looked at her room, touched the old bed and its great white counterpane, sniffed the sheets, said it was like being in one of her grandmother’s stories, because everything smelled of lavender. Belbo said it wasn’t lavender, it was mildew. Lorenza said it didn’t matter, and then, leaning against the wall, her hips thrust forward as if she were at the pinball machine, she asked, “Am I sleeping here by myself?”
Belbo looked away, then at us, then away again. He made as if to leave and said: “We’ll talk about it later. In any case, if you want it, you have a refuge all your own.” Diotallevi and I moved off, but we heard Lorenza ask Belbo if he was ashamed of her. He said that if he hadn’t offered her the room, she would have asked him where she was supposed to sleep. “I made the first move, so you have a choice,” he said. “The wily Turk,” she said. “In that case, I’ll sleep here in my darling little room.” “Sleep where you want,” Belbo said, irritated. “But the others are here to work. Let’s go out on the terrace.”
So we set to work on the broad terrace, where a pergola stood, supplied with cold drinks and plenty of coffee. Alcohol forbidden till evening.
From the terrace we could see the Bricco, and below it a large plain building with a yard and a soccer field—all inhabited by multicolored little figures, children, it seemed to me. “It’s the Salesian parish hall,” Belbo explained. “That’s where Don Tico taught me to play. In the band.”
I remembered the trumpet Belbo had denied himself after the dream. I asked: “Trumpet or clarinet?”
He had a moment’s panic. “How did you … Ah, yes, I told you about the dream, the trumpet. Don Tico taught me the trumpet, but in the band I played the bombardon.”
“What’s a bombardon?”
“Oh, that’s all kid stuff. Back to work now.”
But as we worked, I noticed that he often glanced at that hall. I had the impression that he talked about other things as an excuse to look at it. For example, he would interrupt our discussion and say:
“Just down there was some of the heaviest shooting at the end of the war. Here in *** there was a kind of tacit agreement between the Fascists and the partisans. Two years in a row the partisans came down from the hills in spring and occupied the town, and the Fascists kept their distance and didn’t make trouble. The Fascists weren’t from around here; the partisans were all local boys. In the event of a fight, they could move easily; they knew every cornfield and the woods and hedgerows. The Fascists mostly stayed holed up in the town and ventured out only for raids.
In winter it was harder for the partisans to stay down in the plain: there was no place to hide, and in the snow they could be seen from a distance and picked off by a machine gun even a kilometer away. So they climbed up into the higher hills. There, too, they knew the passes, the caves, the shelters. The Fascists returned to control the plain. But that spring we were on the eve of liberation, the Fascists were still here, and they were dubious about going back to the city, sensing that the final blow would be delivered there, as it in fact was, around April 25.
I believe there was communication between the Fascists and the partisans. The latter held off, wanting to avoid a clash, sure that something would happen soon. At night Radio London gave more and more reassuring news, the special messages for the Franchi brigade became more frequent: Tomorrow it will rain again; Uncle Pietro has brought the bread—that sort of thing. Maybe you heard them, Diotallevi … Anyway, there must have been a misunderstanding, because the partisans came down and the Fascists hadn’t left.
“One day my sister was here on the terrace, and she came inside and told us there were two men playing tag with guns. We weren’t surprised: they were kids, on both sides, whiling away the time with their weapons. Once—it was only in fun—two of them really did shoot, and a bullet hit the trunk of a tree in the driveway.
My sister was leaning on the tree; she didn’t even notice, but the neighbors did, and after that she was told that when she saw men playing with guns, she must go inside. ‘They’re playing again,’ she said, coming in, to show how obedient she was. And at that point we heard the first volley. Then a second, a third, and then the rounds came thick and fast. You could hear the bark of the shotguns, the ratatat of the automatic rifles, and a duller sound, maybe hand grenades. Finally, the machine guns.
We realized they weren’t playing any longer, but we didn’t have time to discuss it, because by then we couldn’t hear our own voices. Bang, wham, ratatat! We crouched under the sink—me, my sister, and Mama. Then Uncle Carlo arrived, along the corridor, on all fours, to tell us that we were too exposed, we should come over to their wing. We did, and Aunt Caterina was crying because Grandmother was out….”
“Is that when your grandmother found herself facedown in a field, in the cross fire?”
“How did you know about that?”
“You told me in ’73, after the demonstration that day.”
“My God, what a memory! A man has to be careful what he says around you…. Yes. But my father was also out. As we learned later, he had taken shelter in a doorway in town, and couldn’t leave it because of all the shooting back and forth in the street, and from the tower of the town hall a Black Brigade squad was raking the square with a machine gun. The former mayor of the city, a Fascist, was standing in the same doorway. At a certain point, he said he was going to run for it: to get home, all he had to do was reach the corner. He waited for a quiet moment, then flung himself out of the doorway, reached the corner, and was mowed down. But the instinctive reaction of my father, who had also gone through the First World War, was: Stay in the doorway.”
“This is a place full of sweet memories,” Diotallevi remarked.
“You won’t believe it,” Belbo said, “but they are sweet. They’re the only real things I remember.”
The others didn’t understand, and I was only beginning to. Now I know for sure. In those months especially, when he was navigating the sea of falsehoods of the Diabolicals, and after years of wrapping his disillusion in the falsehoods of fiction, Belbo remembered his days in *** as a time of clarity: a bullet was a bullet, you ducked or got it, and the two opposing sides were distinct, marked by their colors, red or black, without ambiguities—or at least it had seemed that way to him. A corpse was a corpse was a corpse was a corpse.
Not like Colonel Ardenti, with his slippery disappearance. I thought that perhaps I should tell Belbo about synarchy, which in those years was already making inroads. Hadn’t the encounter between Uncle Carlo and Mongo been synarchic, really, since both men, on opposing sides, were inspired by the same ideal of chivalry? But why should I deprive Belbo of his Combray? The memories were sweet because they spoke to him of the one truth he had known; doubt would begin only afterward. Though, as he had hinted to me, even in the days of truth he had been a spectator, watching the birth of other men’s memories, the birth of History, or of many histories: all stories that he would not be the one to write.
Or had there been, for him, too, a moment of glory and of choice? Because now he said, “And also, that day I performed the one heroic deed of my life.”
“My John Wayne,” Lorenza
