Warburg in Rome (8 page)

“The poor girl,” Deane said.

Warburg turned from the window, facing the priest. “Maudlin,” he said.

“What?”

“In the airplane you spoke of Bedlam. The other insane asylum in London is called Maudlin. The one for women. Original name, St. Mary Magdalen. Maud. Maudlin.”

“How the hell do you know that?”

“English major.” In a different context, Warburg might have grinned, making a crack about Russian novels, quoting goddamn Dostoyevsky. Instead he let his eyes drift to the girl in the front seat. Mary Magdalen. But this child was no whore. How unfair his associations were.

Deane thought he saw a question in Warburg’s eyes, and answered it: “My surplice.”

“Your what?”

“A vestment for hearing confessions.” Deane might have laughed. But no. This was too sad.

In any case, though there were questions in Warburg’s mind, the garb cloaking the girl was not one of them.

Marguerite d’Erasmo was walking among the children at the Quirinal gardens. Dozens of children, perhaps hundreds, impossible to count—toddlers clinging to the hands of older siblings, adolescents, boys, girls, androgynous waifs. Empty-eyed and silent, except for the rattle of coughs and sniffles. The children wore the home-woven garments of peasants, tattered aprons, or the soiled plaids of school uniforms. Today the sun would burn, but the youngsters would remove none of their clothing for fear of losing it, because what they wore was all they owned. Mostly they were unshod, and many limped with pain from the sores on their bare feet. Some were sunburned, with flushed faces, and some were pale as toadstools. Some sat blank-faced and unmoving, others clustered around pits in which the nighttime coals smoldered. Boys in twos and threes threw their fingers in games of morra. Boys at play in every circumstance!

How the throng of young ones had come to congregate here was a mystery to Marguerite, but the rest of their stories she knew well—the flight of families from battle-ravaged towns to the south and bombed cities to the north, captured fathers, kidnapped mothers, the hidden children left behind in barns and cones of hay, from which finally they joined the snaking lines of desperate Italians on the march toward Rome. In wartime, children are invisible except to one another, and here their companionship had become a condition of survival. The gardens were a kind of no man’s land into which, until yesterday, adults were all but forbidden admission. Adults were dangerous.

Thoughts of Sisak came unbidden to Marguerite, the trucks roaring around their oval circuit, the dog, the devil priest cupping the heads of toddlers, selecting them. But she had tried to dispel the thoughts with her
Memorare
—a prayer no longer, but an incantation:
O Mother of the Word Incarnate, despise not my petitions
. . .

Now that the open-air kitchen had been established in the corner of the gardens nearest the former palace—stock pots sterilizing water for reconstituting the evaporated milk, onto which lumps of bread were being set afloat for ladling into tin cups—Marguerite was permitting herself actually to look at these little ones. Near the serving tables, a crush of youngsters pushed forward, but elsewhere the children seemed indifferent to the food. Awake and aware of the day, they had assembled themselves with apparent purposefulness, but their herding was unthinking. They seemed blind to Marguerite, for whom they made room like sheep dumbly ovaling a shepherdess. Her own senses were far more concentrated than usual, but were tethered, in truth, to the herd at Sisak.

Quirinal, she told herself, you are in Quirinal. When she came upon a girl who had curled her willowy body into a fist, beneath the canopy of a prostrate shrub, Marguerite stooped. The stench of urine rose from the child’s filthy frock, which unaccountably made Marguerite think she knew her. The girl’s hands were at her mouth, where she furiously gnawed at her fingernails. Marguerite gently took the girl’s fingers, thinking as she did of her own father, how it always reassured her to have him reach for her hand.

If Marguerite’s father came to mind now, wasn’t it because he was the one to whom she longed to tell the final story of Carlo, as if then she herself would understand?

Should she have known that such male fierceness, enough to draw her at last, could have been fueled only by the demonic? In Croatia, she thought she’d come to share equally in Carlo’s hatred for Ante Pavelic, the Fascist warlord. Wasn’t she like Carlo in despising the Ustashe crimes, centered on Jasenovac? If only half of what was said about the place was true, yes, it paired Pavelic with Hitler. To say nothing of Sisak. Nothing of the Franciscan.

But now Marguerite understood that what she had felt, even that deadly morning after seeing the children in the gas trucks, was cool compared to the furnace that burned in her red-bearded pirate. Having attached herself to his guerrilla band in the rough borderlands between Yugoslavia and Italy, she saw now that she had been merely a child at play, not knowing it was play for her alone. Until Trieste.

The brigade numbered fifty men. In its boldest strike yet, they had slyly come down out of the hills in pairs or threesomes. A third of them set up ambushes on the roads leading into the seaport city, while the rest lost themselves in its plazas and courtyards, like stevedores or sailors on leave. Carlo had left Marguerite behind in Vranjak, to stay with the other women.

As was typical, he had said nothing of the unit’s project, but a terrible premonition after he’d gone convinced her that disaster awaited them. She had followed, moving through the night along the simple road, understanding that all she had to do was keep going downhill. She arrived in Trieste at dawn, just after the trap was sprung, and Carlo’s contingent of thirty Partisans had captured the entire militia barracks while its fighters were still asleep. Marguerite came upon the scene at the great piazza on the water’s edge just as the gunfire began. The shots echoed off the proud neoclassical palaces that lined three sides of the square, a vestige of the city’s Habsburg grandeur, though by now many of the buildings were in ruins. Assuming a battle, she crouched, moving forward slowly toward the noise.

But she was wrong. There was no battle. As she stepped out of the shadowy arcades, it was readily apparent who was who, because the men of Carlo’s brigade were dressed, as always, in dark peasant gear and the red kerchiefs that were the sole gesture of a uniform, donned just before action commenced so they could recognize one another. Their prisoners, though, were as they had been when asleep—men mostly in their underwear, sleeveless shirts, tattered white drawers, bare feet. Those who were clothed wore the black shirts of the Ustashe—that red-and-white-checkered crest for a shoulder patch. Dozens of prisoners, unresisting, were surrounded by rifle brandishers. They lay face-down on the cobblestones or knelt with their hands clasped above their heads.

Marguerite did not understand what she was seeing, and at first could take in only the sound. The Partisans, her comrades, were firing their weapons unopposed, short machine-gun bursts, single gunshots in quick succession. Red-kerchiefed brigade members were dragging bodies to the water’s edge and throwing them into the harbor. Then Marguerite saw the familiar figure with rampant red hair and beard. Carlo was moving slowly through the knot of prisoners, placing the snout of his pistol at one head after another and firing. Carlo was the group commander. This was his operation. His victims were, to him, the villains of Sisak. “I
am
stopping it,” he had said to her on the hill above the racecourse. “That is what I am doing.” A massacre.

The Quirinal girl refused to open her eyes. Marguerite coaxed her with soft words, to no avail. Sweat poured off the girl’s face, and Marguerite recognized the fever. “Come, my sweet,” she said, and scooped the child up. She was perhaps eleven or twelve, weighed next to nothing. She mounted no resistance, was conscious, but was wholly indifferent to her own condition. Marguerite carried her to the medical tent, where equipment, pristine white cloths, gray woolen blankets, and bottles of various fluids were just being unboxed. A nursing sister was in charge, and she welcomed Marguerite. The sister took the girl into her arms, saying, “Now we begin. One child at a time.”

Carlo looked up from the man he had just executed, turned, and saw her. Their eyes locked for the briefest moment. Oddly, he lifted his pistol and aimed it at her. Then he threw his head back and laughed. She turned and ran into the alley from which she’d come.

I fly unto Thee
—the verse she’d habitually prayed while running within the walled garden of her childhood home in privileged Parioli. But the Trieste air was wet and murky, this was a quayside slum, and she was no girl at play. She tripped and fell. She got up, running. The alley narrowed. At a fork, she went right. She saw her father’s face, then the wreckage of his automobile, which she had never seen and never stopped seeing.
Papà! Papà!

Marguerite’s task in life had been to draw her treasonous parents back from the fires of hell by being good. And so she was. Essential to being good was the recitation of her prayer:
I fly unto Thee . . . in Thy mercy hear and answer me
. As she fled now, recitation was automatic, yet she knew the prayer was as useless as the magic word of her dreams.

When Carlo caught up to her, he seized her arm, and for the first time hurt her. He threw her against a wall. “
Tesoro mio, Tesoro mio
,” he began, but she covered his mouth with her hand. In his right fist he held the pistol.

“Treasure? What treasure?” she demanded. “How could I not know this about you? How could I think you are good?”

He holstered the gun and pulled her hand away from his mouth. “I
am
good. Here.” He pushed his face against hers. The stench of alcohol hit her. She had seen Carlo drunk once, twice, but from a distance, in gatherings in the larger building in Vranjak—a raucous intoxicated stranger. She twisted her head but he clamped her face between his hands, pushing his tongue at her lips. One hand fell away from her face to pull at her clothing.

“Carlo! Stop!”

He replied by drawing back to throw a fist at her face, a blow that failed to land. He straightened up.

“Who are you?” she demanded.

Instead of answering, he looked one way and then another. The lane was deserted. He took her hand and began to pull her toward a nearby alcove, the doorway of a blighted building. Again she resisted. Once more he swung at her, and the blow landed, a fist at her jaw. By the time her head cleared, he had pushed her into a dark corner and her skirt and pants were at her ankles. One of his hands was inside her shirt, pulling at her breast; the other was between her legs.

His lips at hers, she opened her mouth, an instinctive trap. She bit him, hard.

“
Cazzo!
” he cursed, and punched her again. She fell back. He pushed her down on the alcove stoop. The smell of urine, there it was. Sailors and roustabouts relieving themselves here. He unfastened his belt and trousers and then was on her.
How could I have crossed borders with him?
Her question was no longer about Carlo or Croatia, but about herself.

She closed her eyes and an old instinct took over—detached escape, as if hers were the mystical body. She simply left her body, there in that filthy corner, removing herself from all physical sensation. Numbness. Nothing. Null. No. She let her eyes drift to the blue sky at the roofline.
I fly unto Thee
.

All at once she was unresponsive, cut off from everything, including him. Marguerite felt only the sigh of wind in the air above, where she was floating now. She felt the pulse of breath from the fluttering of birds’ wings. She saw the small white flakes of ash from freshly stoked fires, carried in faintly gray currents of smoke.
I fly unto Thee
. Eyes shut, Marguerite soared past the risen sun to the far corner of the cosmos, meeting
Papà, Mamma
, kneeling with them at daybreak and saying the words of the
Ave Maria
.

He was pushing into her when she sensed a change in him, his realization that she was gone, utterly gone. She was an unmoving sack of wheat, a soft mannequin, a corpse. Yes, detached from physical sensation. But also she was supremely attuned to the mechanisms of his body. She had not known it, but his erotic charge required the negative pole of her resistance. Now that her fight was gone, so was the electricity of his assault. A woman with no history of erotic love, yet she understood that his erection was failing. His eyes searched for hers, found them, and she saw the shock of his recognition—her vacancy.

She sensed his defeat. Now he was really dangerous. He fell on her again and pushed into her with what was left of his stiffness. That he was nearly limp made him pump more furiously, grunting like a goat. Yes, she had imagined the moment of intercourse, but never like this. His erection failed fully. He was out. He began blindly to strike her with both fists, landing blows on her head, face, and shoulders. Then, with both hands around her throat, he began to choke her. His mighty fingers and thumbs closed together, sealing off her air. Now I die, she thought.

In the Quirinal gardens, having finally faced her anguish, she bolted. Flight again, but this time with a purpose.

A few minutes later, after a fraught ride at the wheel of the Red Cross truck, cutting through narrow streets and congested squares, she was on her knees in the chapel of the Casa dello Spirito Santo. Here, at the Cistercian convent on the Via Sicilia, she had studied as a child, and then, after her parents’ death, and moving in, she had come modestly to womanhood. Here, the girls had condemned her parents, and here, she had learned, above all, to be good. Neither playfulness nor laughter had come with her to this place, but the place had saved her.

The ancient chapel, with its stone tower and arched portico, was attached by a pair of classical colonnades to the school on one side and the cloister on the other. The monastic enclosure included freestanding structures as well—a stable, a laundry shed, a chicken coop, privies, and the priest’s small house. The sprawling complex of buildings all faced a central courtyard, a configuration that walled off the bustle of the street, where a nondescript multistory façade revealed nothing of its hidden inner world. Out there, only a copper-green plaque on the weary wooden door gave an indication of what was inside: “This building,” its inscription read in the precise formulation of the Lateran Treaty of 1929, “serves religious objectives, and is an extraterritorial dependency of Vatican City. All searches and requisitions are prohibited.”