Authors: Alex Preston
Dazed, he walks back to the church and lets himself in through the wicket gate. He is still gripping the revolver in his pocket, he realises, as he goes into the dark church and sits at a pew. He places the gun on the wooden seat beside him and slumps forward, his head in his hands. ‘Signora Rossi,’ he calls out. ‘Signora Rossi, they got them. You can come out, but they got them.’
They wait in the church until darkness has fallen and the street outside is empty before they make their way up to L’Ombrellino. A German patrol car comes past at one point, its searchlight shining into the surrounding gardens. Esmond forces Signora Rossi over a fence and down behind a laurel bush. They crouch against one another as the rumbling car with its sweeping beam stops. The sound of German voices, footsteps, a match being lit. The car begins to move again, its searchlight flickering against house-fronts further down. They wait for a few minutes, breathing the same air, then rise and continue the climb up the hill to Bellosguardo.
When they’re inside, Esmond rushes straight to the bedroom and the W/T.
‘Penna, come in Penna.’ It is several minutes before a reply.
‘Esmond, I’m so sorry, Esmond.’
‘You know?’
‘We know.’
‘What’s going to happen to them?’
‘Levy will be on the train with the rest of the Jews for Germany tomorrow. We’ll do our best to fish him out.’
‘But Ada?’
There is the crackle of static. Then, in a graveyard voice, ‘They’ve handed her over to Carità.’ Esmond staggers into his chair. ‘It’s not as bad as it might be,’ Pretini says. ‘If they knew she was Jewish, they’d have taken her to the camp by the station with Levy. It means her identity is holding up. Carità will interrogate her, knock her about a bit, no more.’
‘Where is she?’
‘At the Villa Triste. You sit tight and I imagine she’ll be out this time tomorrow. She’s a tough one, your Ada.’
He cannot sleep. He paces up and down the floor of the drawing room. Signora Rossi sits upright on a divan, watching him. He imagines going down to the Villa Triste with his gun and shooting his way in. He wonders if Alessandro would come with him. But the other members of the Resistance are planning their raid on the German train the following afternoon. If he does it, he’ll have to do it alone. Several times he shouts out, kicks at the furniture, sobs. He feels madness stammering at the edge of his mind, and all his mind can hold is the memory of Ada’s green eyes, stretched impossibly wide. Finally he slumps down in an armchair.
Signora Rossi makes him a cup of tea, pulls up a footstool beside him and sits. She takes his hand in hers and strokes it, not speaking. He can’t choke down the image of Carità’s pudgy face, his wide nostrils, his schoolboy’s shorts with their fat, hairless
knees. Tatters comes into the room and curls up in his lap, begins to snore. They are sitting like that, Signora Rossi holding his hand, Tatters grumbling quietly, Esmond hunched and hopeless, when the sun comes up.
He waits by the radio all day. He knows he mustn’t call Pretini or the partisans at Monte Morello. All efforts will be centred on the rescue attempt. There’s nothing he can do for Ada. Signora Rossi sits reading Chekhov in the drawing room. She makes a lunch of pasta and beans, but he can’t eat. As darkness falls, he’s standing in front of the triptych. He has tuned the wireless to Radio Moscow. The news in English at 7 p.m. speaks of the Anglo-American bombing raids on Berlin, thousands of tonnes dropped on the already blazing city, lines of refugees spidering out into the countryside. The Allies now hold most of Southern Italy. They have broken through the first of Kesselring’s defensive positions above Naples and are at Monte Cassino, approaching the Gustav Line, beyond which, Rome. They will not arrive, he reasons, in time for Ada.
It is very late when he finally hears Pretini’s voice over the W/T. He’d been dozing on the bed wrapped in George Keppel’s tweed jacket, not wanting to sleep but eventually sinking into a series of rapid nightmares. ‘This is Penna, come in Esmond.’
‘Esmond here.’ He waits, as if the world has stopped. Then he hears Pretini sigh and his heart sinks.
‘It was a catastrophe. A fucking catastrophe from start to finish. They’d been warned of our plans. The train was preceded by a Krupp K5. It blasted the truck from the tracks then started shelling the hills. There were snipers, several heavy machine guns, at least a hundred soldiers with the carriages. We had no chance. We lost two Serbians. Elio took a bullet in the shoulder.’
‘And the train, it’s gone?’
‘Gone. I’ve had Rabbi Cassuto here all afternoon. Two hundred young men taken today. He fears another round-up later in the month.’
‘And Ada?’
‘No word, I’m afraid.’
On Tuesday morning Bruno arrives at the villa. He’s riding a red Moto Guzzi, goggles down around his neck when he comes to the door. He holds onto Esmond’s hand for a long time when he sees him. ‘We’ll go in and get her,’ he says. ‘I promise you, if she isn’t out by Friday, we’ll blast our way in there.’ Esmond nods. ‘She’ll be all right,’ Bruno says.
Signora Rossi hugs Esmond on the steps of the villa and then climbs up behind Bruno with her shopping bag on her lap. She puts her arms around him and he pulls up his goggles. Bruno waves as he drives through the gates and out into the road. Esmond stands on the gravel in front of the villa listening until he can no longer pick out the engine from the other sounds in the air. The house is silent and cold.
He can’t face waiting alone by the radio for another day and so goes out for a run. He and Tatters pound along the cypress-lined hillsides, past the Arcetri Observatory and the Torre del Gallo, along towards San Miniato. He feels if he can keep running, can keep up hammering his feet and heart and breath, then he might never have to face losing Ada. He realises, as he stands, exhausted, on a hilltop beside an abandoned shepherd’s hut and looks down into a valley where the first mist is gathering beneath the trees, that he was tested on the bridge and that he came up short. He should have saved Ada, should have held a gun to the SS
officer’s head until he let her go. He reaches down and flings a handful of shingle into the valley.
When he gets back to the villa it is almost three. He is drenched in sweat, already cooling on his brow. Tatters is panting at his feet and goes immediately to his bowl of water which he laps in rapid strokes. Esmond hears Pretini’s voice on the radio. He takes the stairs two at a time.
‘Hello.’
‘We have Ada.’
He looks up, up to the bright sky. ‘Where is she?’
‘At the Careggi Hospital, by the university. She’s officially still under arrest, but we have people near her. We’ll get her out.’
‘How is she?’
‘She’ll live. She’s conscious.’
‘When can I see her?’
‘That wouldn’t be wise, for you to be down there. My friend, the doctor, wants to keep her overnight. In the morning they’ll tell the guards that they’re taking her for surgery and bring her up to L’Ombrellino in an ambulance.’
‘Tomorrow, then.’
‘Yes, tomorrow.’
He clumps back downstairs, searches the shelves in the drawing room until he comes upon a book of Hopkins’s poems and sits reading all afternoon and well into the night. He hears nothing more on the radio but finds some consolation in the poems. ‘Not, I’ll not, carrion comfort, / Despair, not feast on thee,’ he repeats the lines to himself, remembering how Leavis’s voice would rise into the mad eaves as he read. He takes the book with him to bed and by the time he turns out he has all of the ‘Terrible Sonnets’, each hopeful-hopeless line, by heart (a phrase which gains sudden new truth). He drifts off to the echo of: ‘I can; / Can something, hope, wish day come, not choose not to be.’
The ambulance arrives just after eight next morning. Esmond has been up since before dawn. He realises he has been allowing plates to pile up in the sink, dirty clothes to fall across the room. He sweeps the floor of the drawing room, scrubs the sideboard in the kitchen, changes the sheets on their bed. He even dusts the triptych. By the time the doctor comes up the steps and rings the bell, the inside of the villa is gleaming.
‘I am Morandi,’ he says. ‘I have your friend.’ Esmond looks out towards the ambulance parked on the gravel. ‘She will need some care. Normally I would not have wanted her to leave so early, but these are special circumstances, no? She is still losing blood. Rather a lot of blood. Will you help me get her inside?’
Ada is trying to step from the back of the ambulance, her face lifting towards the light. Her cheeks are heavily bruised and one ear is bandaged. Her left hand is wrapped in plaster. Esmond rushes towards her. ‘Ada!’
‘You shouldn’t be walking,’ Dr Morandi says.
They sling her between them and carry her up to the bedroom, where she lies down in obstinate obedience, burrows beneath blankets, and pulls the sheet up over her head. They go back downstairs and stand by the ambulance.
‘She needs to stay in bed indefinitely. Plenty of water to drink and change the dressings every day. Here’s a bag with bandages, some pills to help with the pain. You mustn’t be surprised by the amount of blood. It’s normal. She’s given birth, you know. In all but name.’
‘But–– the baby?’
‘I’m sorry. At twenty weeks, there was no chance. We didn’t even try.’
The doctor gets back into the ambulance and pulls away. Esmond stands in the driveway for a few moments, overcome by a heaviness so complete it almost crushes him. He goes up and sits beside the bed, watching the slight rise and fall of the covers, sending all his love and pity towards the hidden, sleeping figure, so as not to think of himself.
When he pulls back her clothes that first night, he cannot believe that a body that looks like this can live on. There is barely a patch of skin that is not broken or bruised. The bruises are like clouds at sunset: billowing purple, magenta and yellow. One on the inside of her thigh is exactly the colour of the water in the pool – spring-green. The fingernails of her left hand are missing and the wrist is broken. When he changes the dressing on her ear, he sees that the lobe has been ripped away from the skin. He bathes it in iodine and she winces. Her stomach is soft, the skin there like a balloon as it begins to deflate. They look down at her body together, and there is fascination alongside the horror.
She first speaks to him on the second day, when he and Tatters come up the stairs with a bowl of soup. The dog lies looking up at her as Esmond spoons it between burst lips. When it is finished, she says ‘Thank you,’ very softly. He is amazed that she hasn’t cried. While she is sleeping, he sits at the table in the kitchen with his head on his arms, or throws himself on the divan in the drawing room and sobs and howls, Tatters pressing a rough tongue against his cheeks.
On the third day, she sits up and fixes him with her green eyes. Her voice when it comes, is unchanged, surprising him. ‘After they got rid of the baby––’
‘Was it––? Did you––?’ He looks at her and is silent.
‘After they got rid of the baby, they had to clear other stuff out of me, a hurried operation before they got me out of the
hospital. I remember Morandi saying,
This is going to hurt.
But it didn’t, not at all, and I’d be surprised if anything does again.’
‘Because of what Carità had done to you.’
‘That? Nothing. Do you understand nothing?’ She burrows beneath the covers again and he resumes his helpless bedside vigil.
The days pass and the bruises lose their brilliance. The blood which had flowed so thick and red between her legs that he’d quickly used up the bandages and had resorted to tearing up George Keppel’s Turnbull & Asser shirts for dressings, slowly abates. He brings the gramophone up to the room and they sit in darkness, her head in his lap, listening to Rachmaninoff’s Vespers, the Goldberg Variations, Liszt’s Hungarian Rhapsodies. Still, she doesn’t cry. After dinner, which he carries up from the kitchen, his powers of culinary invention increasingly tested as the garden turns in on itself for winter, they sit on the bed and stare at the triptych.
With a choir singing Rachmaninoff’s Alleluias in the background, he tells her the story of the triptych, of Filippino Lippi’s life, of the painter’s dissipated father. With the covers pulled up, her head in his lap, he speaks for hours, thinking back to his father’s gallery in the chapel at Aston and the stories Sir Lionel had told him about Filippino. He calls to mind lines from Browning’s ‘Fra Lippo Lippi’, from Vasari and Cellini. That which he cannot remember, he invents, hoping that a story, even one as melancholy as this, might reach her in a way he cannot.
*
He tells her of the vagabond priest, Fra Lippo, the greatest painter of his day, a rogue, a libertine. He’d made a teenaged nun pose as the Madonna, had locked the doors of the cathedral. Nine months later our hero, Filippino, was born.
The atmosphere of his youth was rich with the scent of gesso
and tempera, with the sound of apprentices grinding pigments, stretching
cartone
, hammering gold leaf. Sandro Botticelli, Lippo’s most gifted pupil, was often there, helping the older Lippi, schooling the younger. When Fra Lippo was poisoned by his brother-in-law, dying on the floor of Spoleto cathedral, Filippino went to live with Botticelli in Florence.
Botticelli introduced Filippino to Lorenzo de Medici and very soon the young man with the famous name was commissioned by Florentine bankers to decorate family chapels, wedding chests, tondo portraits of wives and mistresses. As he turned eighteen, he was able to call upon the city’s greatest artists, Verrocchio, Perugino, Ghirlandaio.
Filippino was certain he’d eclipse even his father, whose name trailed like a ghost behind him. He was, after all, Filippino – Little Filippo. In 1483 he completed the frescoing of the Brancacci Chapel that had been halted sixty years earlier, when his father’s master, Masaccio, was struck down by the plague. At twenty-five he was painting himself into history, onto the walls of all of the city’s most magnificent churches.
But life was chaotic. He’d inherited his father’s love of wine and women. The days began to darken. Botticelli’s great love, Simonetta Vespucci, died of tuberculosis and he fled to Rome. Filippino was passed over for a number of major commissions, left others unfinished, drowning himself in the city’s fleshpits. There were love affairs that ended in rows. His closest friend, Betto Pialla, was arrested for sodomy and hung on the
strappado
at the Murate prison. Filippino spent a night in debtor’s gaol before Verrocchio bailed him out. His work became obvious, slapdash, cynical. There were new painters appearing whose work made Filippino’s seem stale and outmoded – Michelangelo and Leonardo in Florence, Bosch and Dürer abroad.
Botticelli returned to Florence, Esmond continues, and
painted three masterpieces:
Primavera, The Birth of Venus
and
Diana and Actaeon
. Each of them used as the principal character the face and body of Simonetta, whom Botticelli said he saw in his mind clearer than any living person. Filippino’s old master was a mournful, bitter figure now, caught up in his memories of his dead lover, his increasing religiosity, his professional rivalries.
He reaches out for Ada and takes her hand. The world grew darker still, he says. The priest Savonarola came to the city, preaching from the Book of Revelation about the horrors to come. He was followed by keening, dead-eyed acolytes, the Weepers. Black-coated Officials of the Night rounded up prostitutes, cutting their noses off to mark them; homosexuals were beaten and dragged through the streets. Women were no longer encouraged out; when they did leave their homes, the new city frowned upon colour, decoration. The world of twill and lawn and damask and brocade became dull overnight, all prompted by this flat-faced monk in his Fra Angelico-frescoed cell in San Marco.
I’m not an artist, just a humble craftsman,
Filippino would say when people asked him what he did.
Then King Charles VIII of France crossed the Alps and, picking up Swiss mercenaries along the way, pitched siege outside the walls of Florence. There was an outbreak of the plague, some of the city’s walls were burning. Penitents whipped themselves on the steps of the Duomo. Food ran out and people starved. The flames of hell seemed close to them then. A pyre was built in the centre of the Piazza della Signoria. The city brought its armfuls of pagan texts, graven images which formerly, encouraged by Poliziano, by Pico della Mirandola, they’d hoped to smuggle into their Christian faith. The Bonfire of the Vanities.
Picture, Esmond says, Filippino arguing with Botticelli, desperate to stop him carrying out all three of his Simonetta-inspired
masterpieces. Finally his old master leaves with
Diana and Actaeon
, sobbing, saying that he must make his peace with God. That only in the kind cruelty of Savonarola’s words can he escape from the despair that has hunkered over him since Simonetta, coughing blood, left the world. Filippino watches from the window as the painting burns. That evening, he begins the triptych. He doesn’t sleep until the three paintings are finished.
Now we see him, ten years later, dying in the airy bedroom of a house overlooking the Piazza della Signoria. Only forty-eight. The triptych is at the end of the bed – Esmond points towards it – hanging there, watching over him just as it watches over us. Out of his window he can see the massive form of
David
moving by. One of the last things he did was to vote on where Florence should house its new masterpiece, sculpted by the man who would go on to be the true inheritor of Lippo’s title, the greatest painter in Florence – Michelangelo. The triptych is his own monument, a relic of those sinister days when it seemed as though Florence would fall.
As he dies, he feels himself being soaked into the triptych. These paintings, he realises, are enough. They may not have the surface beauty of
Primavera
or the grace of his father’s work, but they tell the truth, and that is what matters. To an echo of applause as
David
is set down outside the Palazzo Vecchio, Filippino drifts deeper into the paintings, feeling the tendons and sinews of his own body coil around those of St John. He begins to disappear. Now his wife is here, mopping his brow with a damp cloth, his son, another Filippo, mouthing words he cannot hear, grasping his hand. As if lifted on a cloud he looks down on himself, on his family. He dies with the triptych before him and tendrils of love pouring out from his beatless heart into the still, soft world.
*
He tells the story of Filippino over and over, becoming more inventive with each iteration, knowing that the brighter the images he offers Ada, the more she is able to leave her own suffering. It’s not a happy story, but it begins to gather a life, and helps to heal her mind, just as his careful ministrations heal her body. After a fortnight, she rises from the bed. The scar on her ear has become infected, an indignant red; her wrist remains in its cast, the nails do not grow back; otherwise she is as recovered as she’ll ever be. In silence, Esmond helps her to dress, pulling the old tunic with its scent of lavender over her head, lacing her shoes. When they are finished, they stand facing each other, and she takes his hands and leans forward to kiss him.
*
Esmond puts in a call to Pretini on the W/T that afternoon. It is the twenty-third of November. ‘Ada is up and about,’ he says. ‘We’re ready to help again. To do whatever we can.’
A little after nine that evening, there is a ring at the front door. Pretini is with them, and the Professor and Elio, his arm in a sling. As Esmond and Ada are greeting their guests, a motorbike pulls into the driveway with its front light off. Bruno and Alessandro skip up the steps to the door and soon they are all in the drawing room, a fire roaring in the grate. The Professor has brought brandy and a lasagne made by his wife, which they heat in the kitchen. Ada is distant but composed. The men are careful with her, take care to let her know that she is included in their plans but not unthinkingly. After they have eaten, Bruno passes around a box of Toscanos. Pretini looks first at Esmond, then at Ada.
‘A second wave of round-ups this weekend. They’re trying to grab every Jew in the city, this
Judenfrei
dream of Mangianello’s. We’ve been attempting to get as many as possible out, but the Germans are breathing down our necks. The convent at Prato
was raided last night. Six nuns arrested for harbouring Jews, although Cardinal della Costa marched down to the
Stadtskom-mandatur
immediately in full sacerdotal dress and had them released. We’re going to send two families from the Oltrarno up to you tomorrow. They’re holed up at the back of the salon at the moment, but there simply isn’t room for them.’
‘There are too many who need our help, too few of us to give it,’ the Professor says. ‘The best we can do is warn them and hope they get away. I have spoken to Rabbi Cassuto. He’s aware of the dangers. He’s tough, for such a young man.’
Esmond nods. The fire has died down and he adds another vine branch to it.
‘We need to take the fight to the enemy,’ Bruno says, slapping his hand on his thigh and making Ada start. ‘It’s not enough to simply react. As the Allies approach – and they will, soon, Monte Cassino is only a temporary hold-up – we need to make the Fascists feel like they’re under attack from within and without.’ He throws his cigarillo into the fire and puts a matchstick in his mouth, which he moves from side to side as he thinks.
‘So what do we do?’ Esmond asks.
‘We attack. Our first target is Gino Gobbi. A Colonel in the MVSN. He’s in charge of the Blackshirt squads rounding up conscription shirkers in the hills. We have information that he’s planning to lead a more serious attempt on Monte Morello just before Christmas.’ He knocks back his glass of brandy. ‘We’re going to get him before he does.’