In the Wolf's Mouth (17 page)

10

Luisa hurried through the house and out onto the terrace to see what it was she was hearing, matching the glinting aircraft with the throbbing sound. She saw their wings flash as they banked, saw them sprinkle tiny bombs that fell all the way down and sprouted as grey cabbages of smoke. A few instants later the noises of the explosions arrived one by one. The sound was like someone bumping down the servants’ wooden stairs.

The war was getting closer. The servants were all terrified. Prince Adriano pretended not to be, striding back and forth with his hands behind his back and the wireless on, proud and useless, like a chicken in a peasant’s yard.

Luisa watched as much as she could. It thrilled her. It filled her body. She came in breathless, with her teeth chattering. At night she could see the pulses of red tracer fire, she could see fires in the darkness.

Retreating Germans gathered near the palace for a while. Luisa could see them from one window at the top of the house. The Prince was terrified that they would requisition the place but they never did. A few of them came to ask for some water. Afterwards, Graziana was hysterical. When she’d opened the door, she said, she thought that there were ghosts standing
there. Their hair was completely white. Their eyes were as pale as the sky, their skin cracked and falling off.

At dinner that night the fighting was very close. They sat down at the walnut table to the accompaniment of crackling guns. Luisa’s father’s fear was so great that he could not show any sign of it at all. If he once flinched or moaned, he would have crumpled to the floor and crawled away to the cellarage. As it was, he walked in like someone balancing a book on his head and sat with his eyes very wide and unseeing. Luisa found his face very funny. Graziana was also amusing her – her trembling, whimpering progress around the table with the soup tureen. When she started whispering prayers to herself as she ladled out stuttering quantities of soup, Luisa openly laughed.

‘I find it rather sinister,’ the Prince said once Graziana had withdrawn, ‘the way you seem to be enjoying this warfare so much.’

Luisa didn’t say anything.

‘Particularly,’ the Prince went on, ‘given how many friends you have among the Fascists.’

‘I have none. I know some Fascists. That’s a different thing. I’m pleased things are changing. I want the Germans gone.’

The Prince paused with his spoon halfway to his lips and closed his eyes at the sound of artillery shells. ‘But consider how they are changing. I’m not sure if you understand that this is quite real.’

‘That is precisely what I like about it.’

11

It had taken longer than expected but the British had taken the east of the island and were heading west. Cirò Albanese was with the Americans who were racing to get there first, led by General Patton. They did. In Palermo people came out and cheered. Children stood on piles of rubble shouting and waving. They ran up to the jeeps and trucks. Cirò smiled and waved at them. Like the others, he threw out cigarettes and coins and gum and the children dived for them.

12

Any fool would have realised that the Strait of Messina had to be cut off but no fool had and the Nazis simply poured north out of the top of the island and up into Italy. They’d be waiting for the next invasion coming after them.

So the fighting was done in Sicily. Ruins and corpses. An apparently grateful population in a state of chaos it was now Will’s duty to calm and clarify. The Allied Military Government was hastening into position and Will was with several others in the wrong place. Deploying the extraordinary powers of their identity cards, they got themselves transport to Palermo.

Having identified the headquarters, Will decided to delay a little longer and go for a stroll. He walked out among the American soldiers and the sunshine, the locals who were silent and stared and the beggars who approached. He looked around for the oriental beauty and the repellent pushing middle classes but he didn’t see them.

Palermo looked like a grand old opera set of a place. There were avenues interrupted with massive piles of rubble where bombs had fallen. Pigeons spluttered from one balcony to another. There was a huge bomb crater near the encrusted cathedral. Hundreds had died there apparently. People in Palermo were
used to crowding together. Backstage, so to speak, behind the tall façades, Will discovered a sordid network of streets infested with people watching him go by or calling out to him. Voices shouted from windows overhead. People beckoned and begged. He turned a corner and a small boy ran out to him, fleeing his raging father, a thin man in an undershirt with muscles jumping in his arms as he gesticulated and swore. The boy clung to Will, hiding behind him, pulling at his hand, squirming, while the man shouted. Others were watching. Embarrassed, Will tried to calm the man with an authoritatively raised voice and good Italian but he was too wild. He lunged forwards, bumping Will as he tried to grab hold of the boy who now ran. Will saw him escape, his light bare feet striking the dirty ground. The man, giving up, walked away with his hands in his pockets. It was only later, back in the AMGOT building, that Will discovered his wallet was missing and pieced together what had happened. He was furious and could do nothing.

The thieves had better spend the money quickly. When the new temporary currency was issued, it wouldn’t be worth anything. A couple of Americans lent Will some cash. They went out together to drink and found a hot, wood-panelled place with sour red wine and, annoyingly, an accordionist. Afterwards, the two Americans, who had been in Palermo for a few days, led Will to a kind of courtyard which might partly have been a gap created by a bomb; certainly there was a heap of rubble on one side. The place was gloomy. Light came from the late evening sky and a few candles in glass jars. Little groups of glowing
cigarettes hovered and circled together like flies. Women were standing by small piles of tinned foods. The smokers were soldiers. The atmosphere was quiet and serious, disrupted now and again by outbreaks of laughter or grunts and sighs. The Americans Will was with watched his face as he decoded the scene and noticed the figures on the ground. The soldiers were bringing food in exchange for sex. Some had the sex standing up, the soldiers crumpling into the women as though blown helplessly by a gale or bending the women over and shagging them from behind, some even swigging from bottles at the same time as they thrust back and forth. Some lay on the ground and struggled. There was a particularly large group waiting for one woman who proved to be an astonishingly beautiful girl of about eighteen, improbably beautiful, a freak of nature, rich hair around her shoulders, large, soft lips, long-lashed, suffering eyes. ‘Well, her family will be all right,’ Will commented as another soldier put a can on her pile and she wiped her mouth with her wrist then lifted her skirt. The Americans said nothing. They just watched.

No one was stopping this. Will felt himself alone among these animals, alone with his intellect and bitter thoughts. The drink in him made his inner monologue loud and polemical. He was excoriating this depravity to some senior ranking figure, and arrogating the responsibility for dealing with it. Meanwhile, he remembered for some reason the shipload of prosthetic limbs, pilfered from, in the wrong place. Battle was the same. No rules, no limits. Just acting. Just animals. And this was the whole thing. You killed people with
guns and machines, smashed homes to bits, and in the ruins you fucked hungry survivors in exchange for tins of meat. Will’s anger and disgust made him drunk. Everything was floating, everything was sliding apart. Then, catching his breath, he dwindled back into himself and felt very bleak. Order would have to be imposed. He would have to do it.

‘I’m going,’ he announced suddenly and walked away. The night air sobered him, as did the concentration required to find his way back. He thought he saw rats running in the darkness. He felt a mawkish solidarity with a starved-looking cat he saw stepping carefully over rubbish.

Back in his room, his bedside table presented him with a choice between
De Rerum Natura
and
The Wind in the Willows
. Will had had enough of random collisions and thoughtless matter. He stretched the sheet over his knees and tucked it under his waist and as high up his chest as he could manage so that he was tightly cinched to the bed. He’d done this as a child. It made him feel neat and prepared. His copy of
The Wind in the Willows
was nice to handle, a humble edition with covers of stiff blue board that were rounded at the corners with use. The paper was soft, golden, mothy. The book smelled of wood. Will lit a cigarette and looked around for a section to read.

Late in the evening, tired and happy and miles from home, they drew up on a remote common far from habitations, turned the horse loose to graze, and ate their simple supper sitting on the grass by the side of the cart. Toad talked big about all he was going to do in the days to come, while stars grew fuller and larger around them, and a yellow moon, appearing suddenly and silently from nowhere in particular, came to keep them company and listen to their talk. At last they turned into their little bunks in the cart; and Toad, kicking out his legs, sleepily said, ‘Well, good night, you fellows! This is the real life for a gentleman! Talk about your old river!’

Will’s eyes were heavy. The book was wilting towards him. He righted it again. The words began to slide and repeat
tired and happy and miles from home suddenly and silently Talk about your old river!

13

Ray had said that he didn’t want to go looking for a girl. He didn’t want the feeling afterwards. A sweet girl to hold him and kiss: that was one thought, a persistent fantasy, astonishing and delighting, that flooded his chest until he wanted to cry. He remembered his story about the office girl on the bench, her wide hopeful eyes, the small turn of her head. That buzzing, swarming feeling. But that was not what he would find. Instead, the girls were sick and poor and hungry. Talking to some of the locals, he learned that their parents sent out these girls. They needed the money or gifts to survive.

Instead, Ray sat on his bed and looked at his old movie magazine. He looked at the face of Claire Trevor, the pale smooth skin of her cheek, and imagined the cool soapy smell of it. Or perhaps she wore perfume. You would get close and inhale flowers. Her face was perfectly still. Bam, just that one instant. Her hair and make-up and her face in that precise expression. Her small breasts pushed out the white fabric of her jersey. Ray looked closer, bringing the page to his face. Her breasts were defined by gradations in colour, the white turning to blue underneath and between them. The colours were made by the tiniest dots of ink. The white dots turned blue.
Up higher, the dots were pink and yellow to make her neck, red for her lips. Tiny white dots were separated by narrow channels of blue and black dots and they made her teeth. Ray panicked suddenly. Claire Trevor wasn’t there any more. She was sinking away from him like water into sand, the way men died, just pouring away.

Ray crushed his eyes shut. He shook his head. This wasn’t good. His mind kept doing this. It was like missing a stair. He kept falling. He reached out for George. He said his name out loud, ‘George. George, if you’re alive or dead.’

14

Everything was the same and different. The streets were the same but the scale was wrong or more right than Cirò could remember. There was a slow, strenuous reconciling of his memories with the real world of Sant’Attilio that felt almost physical, his mind compressed here, released there. As soon as they had arrived, Cirò wanted to be rid of his Americans so as to concentrate on this process of arriving. He looked for people he recognised but the young boys on the streets were of a generation that would have heard of him, probably, but would never have seen him. They didn’t see him. He’d left in a coffin and come back invisible, a ghost returned to haunt them.

Finally he saw a familiar face, Jaconi Battista standing in the doorway of his little shop. It was definitely him although the intervening years had done what they could to disguise him, blurring his face, tearing his hair in handfuls from his head. And Cirò saw Jaconi seeing him. He saw him straighten up and step back a little. Cirò shouted to the driver to let him down. ‘I need to speak to someone.’

Major Kelly said to him, ‘You know where this town hall is?’

‘Sure I do. I’ll see you there.’

He stepped with his own feet onto the ground of Sant’Attilio.

Jaconi was gone. Cirò went after him through the door of the shop. Still the same. Sacks of rice and lentils, a few tins of food, some flaking dry vegetables. No meat. The trays were empty. Cirò couldn’t smell the cold metallic smell of puddled blood and flesh that he remembered. Jaconi stood behind the counter, biting a fingernail. Cirò asked him, ‘What’s the matter, no meat?’

‘Nothing. I have nothing.’

‘How can that be true? No animals on the hills? What’s going on here? Anyway, don’t worry. That’s going to change now.’

Jaconi laughed. ‘Sicilians won’t be poor any more? You forget what it’s like here when you were in America?’

Cirò stared at him until the laughter had drained out of Jaconi’s face completely. He decided to play with him, demanding from him what he already knew. ‘Where’s Teresa?’ he asked.

‘Cirò, it’s been so many years.’

‘I know how many years it’s been. I counted every day.’

‘We all thought you were dead.’

‘Where is she?’

‘So much changed. It was so long.’

‘Where is she?’

Jaconi covered his face with both hands then dropped them, sighing. ‘You remember Silvio who lives up from the church?’

Cirò didn’t respond. He himself stood very still.
He’d meant to frighten Jaconi, to torture him, but he was having trouble standing upright. Cirò hadn’t thought that hearing these words from someone who had been in Sant’Attilio all the time he was away would actually wound him so much. Jaconi couldn’t look at him. He hung his head and said at the floor, ‘After four years she …’