A Merry Dance Around the World With Eric Newby (16 page)

I was paralysed by the thought of what would happen if he was stopped, if only for having the impertinence to pass part of a German Panzer Division on the move when all other civilian vehicles had been halted in order to allow it to monopolize the road; and I was temporarily hypnotized by the sheer proximity of the enemy in such strength and numbers. I had only to stretch out my right hand through the open window as we went sedately past them to touch their tanks, which were of a sort and size that I had not even seen in diagrams; their self-propelled guns which I recognized; their half-tracked vehicles with anti-aircraft guns at the ready which looked a little like great chariots; and the lorries full of tough-looking Panzer Grenadiers, all ready to peel out of them if the convoy was attacked from the air, who looked down at our tiny vehicle with the red crosses painted on the sides and on the roof, which were making this journey possible, with a complete lack of curiosity, just as our own soldiers would have done in similar circumstances, which I found extremely comforting. Less disinterested were a lot of grumpy-looking officers up in front in a large, open Mercedes, one of them wearing the red tabs of a general on the lapels of his leather coat, who all glared at us as they probably would have done if we had passed them in a Fiat 500, a Mercedes-load of important businessmen, on the autobahn between Ulm and Stuttgart in the years before the war, and, just as I would have then, I had an insane temptation to thumb my nose at them.

Soon, mercifully, we outdistanced the convoy, passed a castle among trees, crossed a wide river with more shingle than water in it by a long bridge, the approaches to which were flanked by allegorical statuary, and after crossing another, shorter bridge, entered the city of Parma, in the centre of which, or what looked like the centre to me, the doctor’s motor car broke down under the eyes of Garibaldi, a large statue of whom stood in the
piazza
.

Fortunately it was half past one in the afternoon, according to a large, elaborate clock on the face of a building in the square and the city was in the grip of the siesta. Apart from a couple of German
feldgendarmen
with metal plaques on their chests who were obviously there to direct the convoy on its way when it arrived, and whose presence in the
piazza
was probably enough to cause its depopulation, the place was deserted.

Quite soon the reinforcements for Sixteenth Panzer Division, or whatever they were, began to rumble through it and once again I felt myself the cynosure; while the doctor fiddled with the engine which was fuelled with methane gas, I pretended to help him with my head buried in the engine – as far as anyone can bury his head in the engine of a Fiat 500 – and an old man who was the other passenger sat in the back cackling with laughter as if he was enjoying some private and incommunicable joke. ‘Heh! Heh! Heh!’

Eventually the engine started and the rest of the journey to the mountains was without incident.

‘The Baruffas will look after you,’ the doctor said, ‘until we can find a place deeper in the mountains. This is a safe house, although it’s on the road, but stay away from the windows and don’t go outside. I’ll be back in a few days,’ he said, ‘and if you want me to I’ll bring Wanda.’ And he smiled one of his rare smiles.

‘I do want you to,’ I said.

We shook hands. I heard him reverse the Fiat out of the farmyard on to the road and drive off. Two days later the Fascists came for him while he was asleep in his bed.

Apart from the slow ticking of a longcase clock, it was very quiet in the kitchen now and sad after all the joking and drinking. The fire which had been stirred up when we arrived had died down.

‘You must go,’ Signor Baruffa said as soon as the doctor’s car was out of earshot. He was not smiling anymore. His wife was not smiling either. She began washing the glasses from which we had been drinking strong, dark wine.

I couldn’t believe him.

‘Why? You said …’

‘I’m afraid.
Ho paura.’
Literally what he said was, ‘I have fear.’ In the three weeks since Italy had collapsed it was an expression I had already heard many times.

‘Of what are you afraid?’

In the
pianura
, the great plain of the Po, which was alive with enemies of all sorts, everyone had
paura
and with good reason. Here, in the heart of the Apennines on the road to nowhere, it seemed absurd.

‘I am afraid of the Germans. I am afraid of the Fascists. I am afraid of spies. I am afraid of my neighbours, and I am afraid of having my house burned over my head and of being shot if you are found here. My wife is also afraid. Now go!’

‘But where shall I go?’

‘I cannot tell you where to go. Only go!’

‘You
must
tell me!’

‘Then go to Zanoni!’ It sounded like an imprecation. ‘Zanoni is poor. He has nothing to lose. His house is not like this, by the road. It is up the valley, above the mill. It will only take you an hour. Now go, and do not tell Zanoni that I sent you!’

I went. There was nothing else to do. Neither of them came to the door. As I crossed the threshold there was a long rumble of thunder immediately overhead, a blinding flash of lightning, an apocalyptic wind bent the trees in the yard, and it began to rain heavily. In all my life I had never felt so utterly abandoned and alone.

There was no difficulty in finding the way. The valley was narrow and a stream ran down through it and under a bridge on the road where the Baruffas’ farm was, and from the house a path climbed high along the right side of the valley past abandoned terrace fields with mounds of pale stones standing in them, paler still under the lightning, which the people who had cultivated the land had weeded from the earth by hand.

Soon, both the stream and the far side of the valley were invisible, blotted out by the rain which was clouting down, while the thunder boomed and rolled overhead and long barbs of lightning plunged earthwards. There was nowhere to shelter from them but mercifully after a while they ceased and were replaced by sheet lightning which I hoped was less dangerous.

The path was surfaced with long cobbles and the stones were spattered with the dung of sheep and cows and what was more likely to be the dung of mules than horses in such a mountainous place. Some of it was fresh, all of it was now being washed away by the torrents of water which had turned the steeper parts of the path, which were in steps, into a series of waterfalls in which I slipped and fell on all fours, swearing monotonously. Although I did not know it then, this path was the main road to two villages higher up the mountainside, and at any other time I would have almost certainly have met other people on it. I was, in fact, lucky without appreciating my luck. This was the last occasion while I was in Italy that I ever used such a public path. From now on, whenever I travelled anywhere, unguided, it was always by more unfrequented tracks or through the woods.

After I had been climbing for about three-quarters of an hour, the path descended the side of the valley to the place where the mill was. The stream was in full spate. It came boiling down over the rocks and under a little hump-backed bridge and surged against the draw-gate which shut off the water from the leat. The mill-house was a tall, narrow building with a steep-pitched roof and it had rusty iron shutters clamped tight over the windows as if for ever, and a rusty iron door. Looking at this sinister building it was difficult to know on such an evening whether it was inhabited or not; but no smoke came from the chimney and no dog barked. The only sounds that could be heard above the thunder, the howling of the wind and the roar of the water, were the furious rattling of a loose paddle on the mill-wheel and the clanking and groaning of the wheel itself as it moved a little, backwards and forwards on its bearings.

By now, although it was only five o’clock it was almost dark. To the right of the bridge a steep track led away uphill towards a clump of trees beyond which I could just make out some low buildings. This I thought must be
casa
Zanoni and I squelched up the track towards it.

The house itself was more like an Irish dun than a house, a stone fort built against a rock on the hillside. It was so small that the cowshed, which had a hay loft over it, seemed bigger than the house itself and the cowshed was not large. Every few seconds the house and its outbuildings were illuminated by the lightning so that they looked as if they were coated with silver.

They were roofed with stone slabs and down towards the eaves these great tiles had rocks on top of them, rocks to stop the wind ripping them off. Smoke and sparks were streaming from the chimney of the house which had a cowl on it made from four little piles of stones with a flat piece laid on top of them, so that it looked like a shrine on a mountain with an offering burning in it. Apart from the smoke and sparks the house was as shut up and uninhabited-looking as the mill, but when I got closer I could hear, deep inside it, the sound of a dog barking.

The door of the cowshed was closed but through cracks and holes in it, faint pinpricks of light shone out into the yard in which the mire was boiling under the weight of the rain. I stood on the threshold and said,
‘Permesso, non c’è nessuno?’
– ‘Excuse me, is there not no one?’ – using one of the useful, colloquial, ungrammatical phrases which Wanda had taught me, the sort that everyone used in this part of Italy, and which were so important to me now, and a voice said,
‘Avanti!’

I pushed open the door and went in. There was a sweet warm smell of fodder and cows and the light of a lantern was casting huge, distorted shadows of the animals, which I could not yet see, on the whitewashed wall in front of me. It was like Plato’s Myth of the Cave. There was the sound of milk spurting into a pail; and now that the door had closed behind me, much more faintly, there was the noise of the storm.

Then the milking stopped and I heard a stool being pulled back over the stone floor and a small man appeared from behind one of the great, looming beasts which were to the left of the doorway. He had a small, dark moustache, wispy hair all over the place, a week’s bristle on his face and although, as he told me later, he was only thirty-two, to me, ten years younger, he looked almost old enough to be my father.

He was wearing a suit of what had originally been thick brown corduroy, but it had been repaired so many times with so many different sorts of stuff, old pieces of woollen and cotton cloth in faded reds and blues and greens, and bits of ancient printed material, the kind of thing you see in museums, that it was more like a patchwork quilt with a little bit of corduroy sewn on to it here and there. But how I envied him his suit at this moment. It might be decayed but at least it was warm and dry. In the Sunday best black and white striped trousers, a cotton shirt and the thin black jacket that Wanda’s father had given me, all soaked through, I felt as if I had just been fished out of an icy river.

‘Signor Zanoni?’ I said.

‘Yes, I am Zanoni. Who are you?’

‘My name is Enrico.’ This was the nearest anyone in the country had so far been able to get to my Christian name. My surname was beyond them. Nevertheless, I gave it and then spelt it out phonetically in Italian. ‘Newby –
ENNE A DOPPIO
v
BER IPSILON.’

‘NEVBU,’
he said,
‘Che norm strano!’
He raised the lantern above his head and shone the light into my face. ‘And what are you, Signor Nevbu, a
Tedesco

He took me for a German deserter from the Wehrmacht of whom there were now said to be a considerable number who had prematurely left their units at the Armistice under the mistaken impression that the war was practically over. What an appropriate word for a German
Tedesco
was. It made me think of some great creature with an armoured shell, a sort of semi-human tank of which the carapace was a living part, the sort of machine that Hieronymus Bosch might have produced if he had been asked to design a fighting vehicle. What I was probably thinking of was a
testudo
.

I told him what I was and where I had come from.

‘Now tell me who sent you here,’ he said, as soon as I had finished.

I told him this, too. I didn’t feel that I owed the Baruffas anything; but I didn’t tell him why they had sent me to him. There was no need.

‘I know why,’ he said. ‘It’s because old Baruffa has
paura
; but that’s all very well, I
have paura
, too.’

I wanted to make an end of it one way or the other.

‘Signor Zanoni,’ I said, using one of my small store of stock phrases,
‘Posso dormire nel vostro fienile
‘Can I sleep in your hayloft?’

‘Did anyone see you on the road coming here?’ he said.

I told him that I had seen no one and that I was as sure as I could be that no one had seen me.

There was a long pause before he answered, which seemed an age.

‘No,’ he said, finally, ‘you can’t.’

I knew now that I was done for. I had no food and very little money to buy any, about 100 lire which, at that time, was something like thirty shillings, and I was in no position to go shopping. The only clothes I had, apart from a pullover in the sack which I was carrying, were the ones I stood up in and everything in the sack, including my sleeping-bag was sopping wet, too. Even if I could find another house in the darkness it would be dangerous to knock on the door without knowing who the occupants were. Yet a night on the mountainside in this sort of weather would probably finish me off.