A Merry Dance Around the World With Eric Newby (20 page)

‘Kiss me,’ she said.

I thought I had been doing so.

With all these thoughts whirling through my mind, and out again, I really kissed Dolores.

‘More,’ she said.

She turned over until she was more or less lying on top of me which, unless I had had something like seven feet of hay under me would probably have done me an injury. Now I was drowning in long auburn hair. She smelled delicious, better than the girls in Alexandria I used to take out with their seemingly inexhaustible supply of expensive scent, a compound of herself, honest out-door sweat, which was nothing like the awful body odours of urban civilization, wood smoke, creamy milk and clean byres, and over everything hung the sweet smell of hay and I didn’t even have hay fever. The season was over. Somewhere, far off, I could hear Nero howling. What an escape I had had. Out of the frying pan into the fire.

‘More,’ she said again. She was a great girl. In another age, when big girls were appreciated as they deserved to be, she would have been plucked from the fields to be the mistress of a king. This was the kind of girl in search of whom Saracenic pirates had put landing parties ashore and, having taken her, would have stowed her away under hatches in their galleys intact and undamaged, or more or less, to be auctioned in a Near Eastern market place and to become the principal ornament in a harem of a pasha, or even a sultan who recognized quantity and quality when he set eyes on it.

‘Touch me,’ she said. It seemed superfluous. To me we appeared to be touching at all the points at which human beings could possibly be in contact with one another. What marvellous, strong legs she had.

‘Let’s go into the barn,’ she said, after a while. It seemed unnecessary when we were invisible to every other living thing, except for a few spiders and the doves which had come back under the eaves of the lean-to from which they had scattered in alarm and where they were now cooing sensuously, providing a sort of background music for us, where none was necessary, sunk in a couch of hay as ample and probably much more comfortable than the Great Bed of Ware.

I was spared the necessity of deciding where the next round would take place, although there was little doubt what the outcome would be, by the gong, as it were, which saved us both – in this case Agata, who had returned to the house together with Rita, burdened with washing, to find that Nero was on the loose. She, I was glad to hear, was as frightened as I had been and was now announcing the fact from within the safety of its four walls:

‘AHMAANDO! EEENRICCO! DOLLORESSS! E SCAPPATO NERO!’

Although what she expected me to do about it, except take to the trees, was not clear. Even Dolores dared not turn a deaf ear to Agata. She gave me one more kiss and then sat up, hitching her vest, which had got a bit disarranged, up on her shoulders. ‘Never mind,’ she said, throwing her magnificent hair back in a way which could only be described as pert, and looking like something in
La Vie Parisienne
, ‘you can bring me home tomorrow night, after the
ballo
. Rita
will
be angry.’ And she went down over the edge of the hay like a commando scrambling on the side of an assault ship and into a landing craft, leaving me to follow and compose whatever sort of alibi I pleased.

The
ballo
, a country dance, took place at the Pian del Sotto. It was rudely interrupted by a mixed band of Fascists and Germans who descended on the village, and I was lucky to escape. This meant that I could no longer continue to work at the farm and no longer had a roof over my head. And it was at this moment that I received a summons to meet the village elders and hear what they proposed.

There were a number of wine bottles on the table and each man had a charged glass in front of him. I was motioned to take a seat and a glass of wine was poured for me. There was no small talk. The Chairman of the Board, for that was obviously what he was, said carefully and very slowly so that I could understand, ‘We have been talking about you among ourselves for some days. Many of the people in this village and in the farms round about have sons and relatives who are being hunted by the Germans. Three of them were taken the other day. Some of them have sons in Russia of whom, so far, there is no news and who may never return. They feel that you are in a similar condition to that of their sons who, they hope, are being given help wherever they are, and they think that it is their duty to help you through the coming winter, which otherwise you will not survive. I speak for them because my father was born here, and they have asked me to do so. And as it has now become too dangerous to shelter you in their houses, they have decided to build you a hiding place which no one except the people assembled in this room, our families and one other person, and he is a kinsman, will ever hear about. The work will begin at dawn tomorrow.’

We left the house singly at half past four the following morning, after drinking acorn coffee with
grappa
in it. I had a terrible hang-over. After a marvellous dinner prepared by the elegant wife of the mysterious chairman, during which I had complimented her on the excellent mud she had produced, confusing the word for mushroom fungo with
fango
, which had put everyone in high good humour, the five of them had settled down to a carouse, in which I had been invited to join, as a result of which I had slept soundly in a
stalla
.

We met at the foot of the scree where I was sick and then felt better. Each of us was carrying one or more of the implements that would be needed, picks, spades, a saw, a felling axe. A mule carried the rest of the heavy gear lashed on either side of a pack saddle; crowbars, a sledgehammer, provisions, and the most impossible thing of all for human beings to carry through a forest, two pieces of corrugated iron which had been specially bought in one of the bigger villages down in the valley.

The mule made light of the weight it was carrying, perhaps because it was a small load for a mule. Full of energy at this awful hour, it went up the screes and slabs at a good three miles an hour. Reluctantly, the Chairman of the Board had remained behind. It was obvious that he was not a fit man and would have to content himself with spinning the webs in which we were all enmeshed and contemplating the results of having spun them, just like a real chairman, behind an uncluttered desk.

By the time we reached the ridge the cocks in the village were beginning to crow and soon first light began to seep through the trees. It was a melancholy morning with a soft, penetrating rain falling. The route we followed was more or less the same one that the small boy, Pierino, had used when he had brought me down the mountain from the bothy in which I had been sheltering with a shepherd called Abramo the previous evening, but in reverse: except that these men knew it better than he did and avoided some of the more difficult obstacles; and quite soon we reached the place where there were some small cliffs, and here we halted and I was left alone with the mule while the others went off in various directions to look for a suitable site.

Finally, one of them beckoned to the others who joined him and they stood together for some time pointing and talking until, at last, they summoned me to join them too.

‘This is the place where it will be,’ the man who had chosen it said. He was a tall, lean, handsome man with long white hair, a nose like an eagle’s beak and quick, unstudied movements, very much like those of the small boy, Pierino. It was obvious that he was the one who was in overall command of the operations in the field. His name was Francesco.

The place which had been agreed on was in one of the clefts between the cliffs and it was a good one for the purpose. No one in their senses would try to force a way through it, and if they did they would get nowhere. It was a cul-de-sac filled with trees. The only thing I could see against it was that once the leaves were gone any sort of hut standing in it would be conspicuous; but I had not taken into consideration the ingenuity of these mountain men.

First they dug out a number of trees by the roots from the bottom of the ditch. When I say ‘they’ I have to include myself in a minor way because I, too, was allowed to work under supervision. Then they dug a trench, piling up the spoil about ten feet away from the innermost cliff and parallel to it, except at the ends where it curved in to meet it. This took much longer than they thought because while they were digging it they uncovered a perfectly enormous rock, much bigger than anything I had ever met with on the Pian del Sotto. They had a long discussion about this rock, whether or not they should abandon the site and start again somewhere else, but they decided to continue as it would be impossible to cover up the traces of their work. So they dug around it until it was almost free and then the most vigorous of them hit it with a sledgehammer many times without any result, and then they had a
merenda
, during which we ate bread and sausage and drank wine with the soft, very wetting rain falling on us. Listening to them I gathered that they had more or less decided to light a fire over it and try to split it with cold water; but they seemed to be waiting for someone else to arrive whose opinion they respected.

Then, as if he had been waiting for his cue, an old man appeared on the cliff above us and looked down rather critically on the party assembled below. He carried a long-barrelled hammer-gun, similar to Abramo’s, although it was now strictly forbidden to possess any kind of firearms, and he held a green umbrella over his head. He was accompanied by a long, lean, good-looking dog which had a coat which looked like tortoise-shell, and after he had drunk some wine they showed him the rock. His name was Bartolomeo.

He went over it with his hands, very slowly, almost lovingly. It must have weighed half a ton. Then, when he had finished caressing it, he called for a sledgehammer and hit it deliberately but not particularly hard and it broke into two almost equal halves. It was like magic and I would not have been surprised if a toad had emerged from it and turned into a beautiful princess who had been asleep for a million years. Even the others were impressed. There was no need to ask what this old man’s profession had been. Although he looked like a man of the woods he must have spent some part of his life either working in a quarry, or as a stone-mason.

The rest was easy. He gave the two immense halves a few more light taps and they broke into movable pieces. Then he produced a smaller hammer from a bag and for the remainder of the time he was with us, except when he was making a chimney for the hut which he did by cutting a deep groove in the face of the cliff, he knapped these pieces into small blocks which he used to build a dry-stone wall on the inner side of the earthwork which had been made with the spoil from the trench.

While he was working away the rest of the party got on with their own tasks. Using the trunks of the trees which they had cut down, two of them made an immensely strong framework to support the roof. To me it seemed unnecessarily robust; but at this stage I still thought that they were building a conventional hut. Then, before they put it on, they waited for the other two to finish their jobs. One was making a couple of beds inside the hut, the other was stacking a big mule-load of firewood inside it. When the beds were finished and the fuel was in they put the framework of the roof on: the upper end was embedded in the cliff, the lower end rested on the wall Bartolomeo had made on the inner side of the rampart and when this was done they wired the corrugated iron on to it and covered the whole thing with a thick layer of earth and stones and moss all the way down from the cliff to the ground so that, when it was finished, it looked from any angle like an old overgrown rock fall and it was so well-covered that when we jumped down on to it from the top of the cliff it gave off a solid sound and was completely immovable. The entrance was hidden under the roots of a beech tree which grew out of the side of the cliff, and when a piece of old sacking was draped over it, because of the angle of the wall it was completely invisible.

Late in the afternoon, when the work was almost finished, the wives of three of the men who had been building the hut arrived. On their backs they carried pack-baskets of plaited willow loaded with rice, which was priceless and had been bought on the black market, salt, cheese, bread, acorn coffee and cooking and eating utensils, enough for two persons.

‘In case you want to get married, that’s why they’ve made two beds,’ one of them said, and the three of them had a good laugh at this.

When all this stuff had been stowed away inside the hut the men lit a fire in the new fireplace and when he saw that it drew well and didn’t smoke Bartolomeo went off with his dog without saying a word to anyone.

Then they showed me how to work the fire so that it wouldn’t smoke me out, and they told me that I shouldn’t light it in the daylight until the weather got really cold, except to make coffee in the early morning. They showed me how to conceal the hole at the top of the chimney with a special stone when the fire wasn’t alight and they showed me where I could get water, by going through the labyrinth and then down over the cliff edge a hundred and fifty feet or so, to a place where a little spring issued from the rocks, which, they said, no one used anymore. And they told me how important it was to cover my tracks when returning to the hut – the last thing that they themselves did was to pick up every chip of wood – every small piece of wire that had been left over from the building operations, and all the match sticks they had dropped. No one threw away cigarette ends at this stage of the war.

Then we all went into the cave, for that is what I had decided to call it, and they blew up the fire and we drank some wine together. And then they told me that only they themselves or their parents or their children would visit me with supplies, and that so that I would know that they were members of one or other of these two families, they would give us a password and this would be
Brindisi
. In this way, Francesco, the man with the eagle nose, said they hoped to prevent the news that I was still in the neighbourhood from spreading.
‘Ma!’
someone said doubtfully.
‘Speriamo,’
they all said and the women crossed themselves.