After Hannibal

  “We cannot contest this, so much is certain,” Mancini picked up the contract by one corner and held it before the Greens. “It has been signed by both parties and witnessed by a notary. It would not be legal in some countries, probably not in America—that is to say, it would not be valid without details of the work to be done—but it is legal and enforceable here in Italy.”

  Mr. Green turned toward his wife. “That is what he meant, that is what Blemish really meant when he talked about mediating between cultures, bridging the gap.”

  “Quite so,” Mancini said. “It is in these margins that people like Blemish operate. Wherever there is a boom in building, wherever foreigners are flocking to buy property, you will find the same thing. Today Umbria is such a place. Laws differ from one country to another. The differences may seem hazy but they can get very sharp. In the region of Perugia alone there are a number of these project managers, some British, some German, some American. Italians are there in strength also, it goes without saying. Often they combine the function with that of estate agent, which is a useful way of making first contact with their unfortunate clients.”

  Mancini paused and after a moment sighed and shrugged a little. “Yes,” he said, “they are all busy bridging the gap.” It was incredible, what lengths people would go to, what money they could be persuaded to part with, for the dream of a house. It was unlike any other dream of ownership—a way of life went with it. He sympathized with these two people more personally than usual. In general his clients represented interests which he saw it as his function to serve. But these two had lost more than money; they had been dispossessed of a vision. “I will do what I can for you,” he said. “We will have to bargain with them.”

  Mr. Green sat forward rather tensely. “How much will it cost? If this Esposito is going to ask for a large sum in compensation …”

  “He will ask for a large sum and then come down. Each time he comes down he will intensify his threats. The art of it lies in not forcing him so far down that he thinks he will be better off going to law. In short, it is the usual process of blackmail and bluff that goes under the name of negotiation, whether legal or political.”

  “And your fee?”

  “These days I like things to be interesting. I will ask you for five percent of what I save you. If he started by asking for fifty million and came down to ten my fee would be two million lire.” Mancini paused, smiling a little. “This will be an incentive for me.”

  “What line shall we take with Blemish and Esposito?”

  “Do not enter into discussion with them at all. If they appear, show them the door. But it is not likely that they will.” Mancini made fists of his hands and rested his large head on them. “Excuse me, I will think a moment,” he said.

  There was a brief period of silence which the Greens occupied by making faces of resignation one to the other. Then Mancini raised his head. “This is what we will do,” he said. “We will first of all obtain the services of a reliable geometra. I know of one who is ben introdotto here, in the courts. How do you say that, well introduced?”

  “You mean someone with pull.”

  “Exactly. We will ask him to make a full report on the state of the building. He will want money for doing this of course, but if he thinks you are going to take him on as your geometra for the rest of the building work he will not ask for so much.”

  “It is unlikely now that we can go on with the building work.”

  “I know that and you know that. But there is no need for the geometra to know it. I understand from you that the work has been badly done?”

  Mr. Green nodded. “Dangerously so.”

  “We will make a counterclaim for damages. The house is in a seismic zone; it is almost certain that this Esposito has not observed the precautions officially laid down. And there will probably be infringements of permesso for the volume of the space permitted. The authorities are going through a phase of strictness just at present; you need a friend in the right place before you can even have a pergola.” Mancini smiled again and placed his hands flat on the desk before him, his usual way of indicating that the interview was coming to an end. “I will keep you informed,” he said.

  The Greens began to get to their feet. “Well,” Mr. Green said, “we leave things in your hands, Mr. Mancini.”

  “Mr. Green, Mrs. Green, you could not, and I say this in all modesty, leave them in better.”

  It was at this moment, as the Greens were turning toward the door, that the world seemed to lurch for a moment or two, not long enough to make it necessary to clutch at anything or stagger. The whole building seemed to undergo that brief shudder that swallowing a bitter drink might produce in the human frame. Mrs. Green saw Mancini’s hat, a rather stagy-looking, broad-brimmed black affair, like that of an old-fashioned conjurer, swing on its peg on the hat stand as if in a sudden wind.

  Blemish and Milly did not notice the earth tremor, as they had taken a sort of holiday that afternoon, after a light lunch of medieval oat cakes and quince jam, and were dressed up in their medieval gear and scampering excitedly around their bedroom when it took place. The bedroom was of large proportions, having once been the monks’ refectory. There was still a stone pulpit there, with worn steps leading up to it, from which the designated monk had read works of a devotional nature to his brothers as they ate.

  Blemish and Milly had spent quite a lot of money—part of the proceeds of a previous piece of project management—on an antique four-poster, which they had set in the center of the room. Milly planned to make a medieval canopy for it but in the meantime its fluted mahogany posts stood bare and served as supports for her, keeping her on her frantic course as she ran squealing around the room in her tight bodice and voluminous petticoats, hotly pursued by Blemish in his doublet and codpiece and lovat-green hose.

  He was almost there, he was within an ace of grasping her amidships and heaving her onto the bed. That deep shudder of earth came and went without either of them having the faintest inkling of it.

  When the world was still again, Ritter turned away from the stream and clambered up the slope of the bank. His mind was vacant; he had no sense of having made a decision. He began to walk along the track in the direction of the village, passing his house without a glance. As he came toward the point where the track began its long curve to the public road, he saw the figure of a woman descending the hillside. It was the Englishwoman, Mrs. Chapman. At the same moment that he recognized her she waved to him, sweeping her arm from side to side in a gesture that seemed too exuberant, out of character. He raised his arm in reply and smiled but she would have been too far away to make out any expression on his face.

  When he reached the village, obeying a sudden impulse—it seemed the first independent movement of his mind since setting out—he went into the small bar and asked for a grappa. His entrance caused a certain tension of awareness among the four men playing cards in there. He had never been in the bar before and it came to him now that he must cut an odd figure, bearded, disheveled, his clothes marked with the clay of the gulley. He wondered if these people had felt the tremor but a kind of shyness prevented him from asking; it seemed a question too eccentric for a stranger to ask. He finished his drink quickly, paid and went out.

  Adelio was alone in the small house near the church where he had a room—the house belonged to his daughter and son-in-law. Roberto was at work, the daughter was visiting friends in Badia. Adelio explained these matters as he led Ritter into the kitchen. He had been sitting there; a glass of wine was on the table and a bottle half empty. He had shown no surprise at the visit though it was the first Ritter had ever made. Moving with the deliberateness of the infirm, he reached down a glass from a cabinet above the sink and without asking poured out wine for his visitor. “Our own wine,” he said. It was intended as a recommendation. “Roberto has a small vineyard, eighty plants.”

  “Where is that?”

  “Here behind.” Adelio moved his head in the perfuncto
ry way of one who expected these things to be known.

  “It gives you enough?”

  “Four hundred liters it gave us last year.”

  Ritter widened his eyes and nodded, as politeness required, but he was impatient to come to his question. “There was something I wanted to ask you,” he said, and he began at once to tell Adelio about his clearing of the gully. “I knew,” he said, “from the time of uncovering the mouth of the cave, I knew this was something I must ask you about.” Perhaps not so much something that happened, he thought suddenly, in the pause before the old man’s answer, but something that needed to be covered over. “I thought it was strange,” he said. He had not mentioned the finding of the lighter.

  Age and pain had made Adelio’s face stiff and immobile; the wine he drank did not slacken it. The face, like the body, seemed guarded against suffering, so that the movements of the eyes and the mouth were alarming almost, as if they set the whole man at risk, somehow imperiled him. When he began to speak it was slowly, with long pauses clearly habitual; but he showed no reluctance, seemed in fact resigned to the telling. He might have been sitting here waiting for this visit, this question. It is because I am the proprietor now, Ritter thought. He had acquired the right to knowledge along with the land.

  “It goes back to the war,” Adelio said and he drank and refilled his glass. “You were hardly born then.”

  “I was a child.”

  “We knew Italy could not win. Some knew it from the beginning but most knew it by the summer of 1943, when the English and Americans landed in Sicily. No one wanted the war to go on, only the fascists …”

  Ritter nodded. The general circumstances of the time he knew already. The story was one that many Italians of Adelio’s age could have told. With loss of belief in victory resistance to the Mussolini regime had intensified. In a matter of weeks the Duce had been deposed and arrested. In September Italy signed an armistice on terms of unconditional surrender. When this was announced almost all the Italian units in the peninsula, as well as those in France and the Balkans, were either disbanded or transferred to the Germans. The country was thrown into confusion. The north was still under German occupation. Mussolini was rescued by German paratroopers and taken north. The Italian Social Republic came into being as an ally of Germany. The anti-fascist parties became active and the underground resistance movement grew stronger and bolder. In the areas still controlled by Germany large partisan formations began to emerge and there was effectively a state of civil war.

  “You did not know who was your friend and who your enemy,” Adelio said, with a thin smile that seemed illusory, difficult to believe in, in that immobile face. “I was not fascist or anti-fascist. I wanted to have my life again.” He made a light gesture, opening his hands before him. The life he had come back to claim had been one of toil and privation but it was the reward of survival, it came accompanied by hopes of peace. “You Germans were the enemy then,” he said. “Now we give you our houses to live in.”

  With the armistice he had done as many thousands of others, abandoned his unit, made his way back home. “They wanted us to take up arms again, join the fascist militia. It was dangerous to refuse; they would shoot you if they thought you had sympathy with the partisans. They would shoot you as a deserter in any case. They came looking for us. I couldn’t stay in the house, it was too dangerous.”

  So he had made a den for himself, down there in the side of the gully where there was already a natural cavity caused by the arching growth of the tree roots. His hands as he described it made the shapes of smoothing and leveling, indicated the depth with a slow vertical movement of the arm. The entrance was screened off by canes his father had planted a dozen years before. Impossible to see from above, the slope was too steep, virtually impossible from below, unless one stumbled upon it. A perfect hiding place. There, in that September of fifty years ago, with a blanket and provisions, he had been able to take refuge when they came looking for him. There was fighting in the hills around between the fascist troops and local partisans. Then one day, early in the morning, a clear morning, that clarity of light between summer and autumn when the elements conspire to make you feel regret at the prospect of loss, the shooting had come very close. He was woken by it, there in his cave. It came from just beyond, on the neighboring land beyond the gully, among the terraces and the rocky shrub.

  He had stayed under cover, as far back as he could get into the interior of his cave, and prayed to escape notice. “I was afraid for my life,” he said. “Once I might not have admitted this so easily but now I am old I have less shame. There was a silence after the shooting and I waited for a while, then I came out to look.”

  There were things he would always remember about that morning and in his halting way he was eloquent enough to make Ritter see what these were. The radiance of the light, the clarity of outline. You could see every smallest indentation in the line of the mountains that bounded the horizon. The leaves of the canes were motionless and stiff—there was no wind. There had been rain some days previously and a shallow flow of water tinkled in the streambed. He had come crawling out of his cave, lain still among the canes for some time. There was no sound or movement anywhere. After a while he began to move cautiously along the slope. Then he saw the bodies, two of them, one at the side of the stream, the other high up on the farther bank, lying outstretched on the sagging net of the brambles, his face turned up toward the sky. He had fallen from the edge of the bank above and been caught there and held. The other was at the streamside, face down, as if he had died in the act of drinking. “I thought afterward that this one must have been shot somewhere higher up and made his way down there. He was looking for a hiding place, he was hoping not to die. Like me.”

  They were local men from Torricella, near the lake. One was in his twenties, the other—the one by the stream—was just eighteen. Their people had come for them the same day. There had been eight bodies altogether, scattered among the terraces and in the shrub country higher up. All but one of them were partisans; they had come down too far into country too open and been surprised at first light by a patrol of militia. “We could have waited,” Adelio said. “We could have settled the scores later, when you Germans had been pushed farther north. It was only some weeks to wait.”

  He had been shocked by the sight of these dead youths and, Ritter suspected, perhaps more by his own fear and sense of close escape. He had never wanted to set foot there again and he never had, not even to hide. The weed and the shrub had spread, covering everything over, clogging the canes and drowning the willows. The path that led down had been obliterated. “My father, he never went there either,” Adelio said. “It is an unlucky place. The earth is not good there and the slope is too steep.”

  This verdict, at once superstitious and pragmatic, was the one that Ritter carried away with him. The old man did not rise to see his guest out, but remained seated there at the table with his wine—a second bottle now. Ritter uttered his thanks and made his own way out of the house, back onto the street.

  All this was half a century ago, he thought, as he began the walk homeward. Time enough for resignation, for habitual reference to bad land and bad luck. The death Adelio had hidden from was close to him now again. But that remote September morning had still been clear to the old man’s mind, the peculiar horror of it vivid as ever. As clear, he thought suddenly, as that March afternoon not much later has always been to me, my uniformed father in the white room. For a while, as he walked, the two memories were fused, his own and the one borrowed: sound of water, sprawl of death, the scatter of almond petals on the desk, the moving mouth. There were more ways than one of covering things over but however it was done the result would always be a sepulchre.

  He had left the public road now and started along the strada virinale. As he did so a car passed him with an elderly couple in it—he recognized them for the Americans whose house lay between the Chapmans’ and his own. He waited some moments for the dust of their p
assage to settle. The surface of the road was dried out and hard, pale yellow in color, checkered with shade from the poplars that ran along one side of it. Huge flaring poppies grew here and there along the edges. A chaffinch was singing somewhere, the same brief refrain, loud and full-throated. Ritter moved forward again, very slowly. He had opened a sepulchre back there in the gully. It was as if he had gone back to his boyhood and been permitted to stand there at the Fosse Ardeatine and see the scattered bodies of the shot people before their executioners had blasted the earth to cover them …

  These thoughts brought him once more to a halt. As he stood there, head down, he heard from somewhere ahead of him a strange roaring sound like a sustained explosion. It was followed by an aftermath of slighter muffled crashes, as if some metallic beast had begun by roaring and ended with sobs.

  Monti heard the sound too, rather more distantly; but he was intent on his own purposes and did not think much about it. Some sort of decision he had come to already, though he had not been fully aware of it, as he stood there in the cellars of the Rocca Paolina, felt the place shudder around him, watched that descent of white dust.

  He had gone back to his car and driven home. Now as he moved restlessly back and forth between sitting room and bedroom, from inveterate habit he sought corridors of escape into the past, tried to wriggle free from the weight of deciding and acting through the contemplation of decisions and actions made by men long turned to dust. He thought again of the Pope’s great fortress, built on the ruins of his enemies’ houses, cemented with their blood. Paul had wanted, every day of his residence there, to celebrate the entombment of the Baglioni, stamp on their skulls, resurrect and kill them over again as he looked down from his terraces over the gardens that had been theirs. And all the time, very slowly, through obscure historical processes, the enemies were gathering who would one day demolish this vast monument and raze it to the ground.