“No,” said Aldo, “I’d have known that. I can always tell.” He did not smoke. He sat with his arm along the seat behind me. “The spoils of victory,” he said, after a moment, “that’s what she felt herself to be. For a woman of her sort, basically conventional and submissive to her husband, it would act like an aphrodisiac. First the German Commandant, in her hometown, then the Yankee after the German myth exploded. Yes… yes… I see the pattern. Very interesting.”
I supposed it was, to him. Like reading history. Not if, like myself, one had been involved.
“Why Fabbio?” he asked.
“I was going to tell you. That was later, in Turin, when the Yankee brigadier left Frankfurt for the States. We met Enrico Fabbio in the train. He was polite and helpful with our baggage. In three months—he was a bank employee—she had married him. He couldn’t have been kinder. And it was all part of the break with the past that I should take his name. After all, he paid.”
“That’s right. He paid.”
I glanced at my brother. Did he resent the advent of our stepfather? The inflection in his voice was strange.
“I’m grateful to him still,” I said. “I continue to look him up if I’m in Turin.”
“And that’s as deep as it goes?”
“Why, yes. What else? He never took the place of father or of you. He was just a kind little man with a sense of family.”
Aldo laughed. I wondered why my description struck him as funny.
“Anyway,” I said, “we had nothing in common beyond sharing a roof and eating the same food, and after I took my degree at Turin I cut loose. I didn’t fancy a job in the bank, which he suggested, so with my languages I entered the tourist trade.”
“What as?”
“Junior clerk, clerk, guide, and finally courier.”
“Tout,” he said.
Well, yes… Put bluntly, I was a tout. A superior tout. One degree higher than the fellow in the piazza Maggiore who hawked his picture-postcards.
“What firm employs you?” he asked.
“Sunshine Tours, Genoa,” I replied.
“Good God!” he said.
He moved his arm from the back of the seat and started up the car. It was as though my admission had brought his interrogation to an end. No further questions needed. Case dismissed.
“They pay well,” I protested in self-defense, “and I meet all sorts of people. It’s experience, I’m traveling all the time…”
“Where to?” he asked.
I did not answer. Where to, indeed… He let in the clutch and the car roared ahead, climbing the surrounding heights, the road twisting and turning upon itself like a serpent’s coils. The country spread out below us, the soil a patchwork quilt of dun and olive, and away westward the city of Ruffano, poised on her two hills, gleamed a narrow circlet under the sun.
“And you?” I asked.
He smiled. Used as I was to Beppo’s handling of the coach in Tuscany and the Umbrian undulations, where speed, of necessity, was second choice to safety, my brother’s disrespect for his native Marches seemed to me profound. He courted death at every hairpin bend.
“You saw last night,” he said. “I’m a puppeteer. I pull the strings, the puppets dance. It requires great skill.”
“I believe you. But I don’t see why. All that training, and that propaganda, for one day in the year, for a students’ Festival?”
“Their day,” he said, “this Festival. It’s a world in miniature.”
He had not replied to my question, but I let it go. Then abruptly he put to me the inquiry for which I had no answer. “Why didn’t you come home before?”
Attack is the best method of defense. I forget who first coined the phrase. The German Commandant used to quote it.
“What was the use of my coming when I thought you were dead?” I said.
“Thank you, Beo,” he replied. He seemed surprised. “Anyway,” he added, “now you’ve come home I can make use of you.”
He might have put it differently, after two-and-twenty years. I wondered if this was the moment to tell him about Marta. I decided not.
“Hungry?” he asked.
“Yes.”
“Then we’ll go back. To my house, 2, via dei Sogni.”
“I know it. I called on you last night, but you were still out.”
“Probably.” He was not interested. He was thinking of something else.
“Aldo,” I asked, “what are we going to say? Do we tell everyone the truth?”
“What truth?”
“Why, that we’re brothers.”
“I haven’t yet decided,” he replied. “It might be better not. How long are you here for anyway? Did Sunshine Tours give you the sack?”
“No,” I said, “not the sack. I’ve taken a vacation.”
“That’s easy, then. We’ll think of something.”
The car turned from the hills to the valley below, and sped like an arrow towards Ruffano. We entered the city from the south, and climbed steeply to the via dell’8 Settembre, past the students’ hostel, and then right. He drew up before the double entrance to his house.
“Out,” he said.
I glanced about me, half hoping we might be seen, but the street was empty. Everyone was withindoors having lunch.
“I saw Jacopo last night,” I said as we entered the doorway together, “but he didn’t recognize me.”
“Why should he?” asked Aldo.
He turned the key and pushed me through into the hall. I went back twenty years. The furnishing, the decor, even the pictures on the wall, were those we had had at home. This was what I had sought for and had not found at Number 8. I looked up at Aldo, smiling.
“Yes,” he said, “it’s all here. What was left of it.”
He stooped to pick up an envelope that was lying on the floor. The envelope that Carla Raspa must have pushed through the slit the night before. He glanced at the handwriting and threw the envelope on a table, unopened.
“Go on in,” he said. “I’ll call Jacopo.”
I passed through to what must be his living room. The chairs, the desk, the stiff-backed divan on which my mother used to sit, I recognized them all. Our father’s portrait hung upon the wall, next to the bookcase. He seemed to have grown younger, to have shrunk in stature, but his air of benign authority was still there to humble me. I sat down and looked about me, my hands on my knees. The only concessions to a later age were pictures of aircraft on another wall. Aircraft in battle. Climbing, diving, smoke pouring from the tail.
“Jacopo will bring lunch directly,” said Aldo, coming into the room. “It will be a few minutes. Have a drink.”
He went to a table in the corner—I recognized that also—and poured out two Campari into glasses that were ours as well.
“I never knew, Aldo,” I said, gesturing to the room, “that all this meant so much to you?”
He downed his Campari in a draft. “More, evidently,” he replied, “than the surroundings of Signor Fabbio meant to you.”
Cryptic, but what of it? It did not worry me. Nothing worried me. I was realizing to the full the warmth of Eastertide. Our own.
“I’ve told Jacopo who you are,” said Aldo. “I think it’s best.”
“Just as you like,” I answered.
“Where are you lodging?”
“In the via San Michele. No. 24, with Signora Silvani. She has a houseful of students, but not, I’m afraid, of your persuasion. All Commerce and Economics, very bigoted.”
He smiled. “That’s good,” he said, “in fact, it’s very good.”
I shrugged. The rivalry between the two factions was still beyond me.
“You can be a go-between,” he added.
I considered this, staring into my glass of Campari. I seemed to remember similar errands in the past, not always successful, when he was a scholar at the Ruffano liceo. Messages smuggled into schoolmates’ pockets that sometimes went astray. The role had disadvantages.
“I do
n’t know about that,” I said.
“I do,” said Aldo.
Jacopo came in to set the lunch. I called “Hullo,” and he put down his tray and stood to attention like an orderly.
“I apologize for not having recognized you yesterday, Signor Armino,” he said. “I am very glad to see you.”
“Don’t be pompous,” said my brother. “Beo is only five foot five. Still small enough to put across your knee.”
Which he had done, in ’43. Egged on by Aldo. I had forgotten that. Marta had protested, and shut the kitchen door. Marta…
Jacopo produced our meal, and a large carafe of wine made from the local grapes. Later I asked my brother if Jacopo did everything for him.
“He manages,” said Aldo. “A woman comes to clean. I employed Marta until she took to drink. Then it was hopeless. I had to send her packing.”
The time had come. I had finished. Aldo was busy eating.
“I’ve something to tell you,” I said. “I’d better tell you now because I’m involved. I believe Marta’s dead. I believe she was murdered.”
He put down his fork and stared at me across the table. “What the hell do you mean by that?” he said harshly.
His eyes, accusing, never left my face. I wiped my mouth, pushed back my chair and began walking up and down the room.
“I could still be wrong,” I said, “but I think not. I’m afraid not. And if it’s true, then it’s my fault. It’s because of what I did.”
I told him the whole story. From start to finish. The English tourists, the lone barbarian and his ten thousand lire tip, my nightmare in the small hours and its connection with the altarpiece in San Cipriano. The newspaper item the following day, the visit to the police, my recognition, as I thought, of the body, and the impulse that drove me to Ruffano. Finally, the sight of the cobbler Ghigi and his sister Maria disappearing yesterday in the custody of the local police.
Aldo heard me through to the end without a single interruption. I did not look at him as I told my tale. I just walked up and down the room, speaking much too fast. I could hear myself stammering as I might stammer to a judge, and I kept correcting myself in small particulars that did not matter.
When I had finished I sat down again in the chair. I thought his accusing eyes must be upon me still. But he was peeling an orange, unperturbed.
“You see?” I said, exhausted. “You understand?”
He put a large segment of the orange into his mouth and swallowed it. “Yes, I see,” he said. “It’s easy enough to check. I’m on very good terms with the Ruffano police. All I have to do is to lift the telephone and ask them if it’s true that the dead woman is Marta.”
“And if it is?”
“Well, it’s just too bad,” he said, reaching for another segment. “She’d have died anyway, in the state she was in. The Ghigis couldn’t control her. Nobody could. You ask Jacopo. She was a drunk.”
He had not understood. He had not seen that, if it was Marta who had been murdered, she had been murdered because I had put ten thousand lire into her hand. I explained this to him for the second time. He finished his orange. He dipped his fingers in the bowl of water beside the plate. “So what?” he said.
“Isn’t it something I ought to have told the police in Rome? Wouldn’t it explain the motive for murder?” I repeated.
Aldo stood up. He went to the door and shouted to Jacopo to bring coffee. After it had been brought and the door was closed, he poured out coffee for us both and began stirring his slowly, thoughtfully.
“A motive for murder,” he said. “It’s something we all have, at some time or other. You as much as anyone else. Run along to the police if you like, and tell them what you’ve just told me. You saw an old woman lying on the doorstep of a church, and it reminded you of an altarpiece that was your peculiar horror as a child. Fine. So what do you do? You bend over the woman and she lifts her head. She recognizes you, the child who fled with the German army twenty years before. You recognize her, and something cracks in your brain. You kill her, a blind impulse to kill a nightmare memory that haunts you, and then, to stifle conscience, you put a note for ten thousand lire in her hand.”
He swallowed his coffee and went across the room. He picked up the telephone. “I’ll get on to the Commissioner,” he said. “He’ll be at home on a Sunday, very probably. At least he’ll be able to give me the latest news.”
“No, wait, Aldo… wait,” I burst out, in sudden panic.
“What for? You want to know, don’t you? So do I.” He asked for a number. It was out of my hands. It was no longer my secret, my inner turmoil. Aldo now shared it, but in sharing it he made my confusion worse. I could have committed the murder as he described it. I had no witnesses to prove an alibi. The very motive he suggested made a desperate sense. Protestations of innocence would be in vain. The police would not believe me—why should they? I might never be able to prove that I was guiltless.
“You’re not going to involve me, are you?” I asked.
He raised his eyes to heaven in mock despair, and spoke into the mouthpiece. “Is it you, Commissioner?” he said. “I hope I haven’t dragged you from your lunch. It’s Donati here, Aldo Donati. Very well, thank you. Commissioner, I’ve been very disturbed by a rumor going round Ruffano, brought me by my servant Jacopo, that my old family nurse Marta Zampini, who has apparently been missing for some days, may turn out to be this woman who was murdered in Rome… Yes… yes… No, I’m a very busy man, as you know. I rarely read a newspaper, and in any event I saw nothing about it… The Ghigis, yes. She had lodged with them for some months… I see… Yes…” He looked across at me, nodding his head. My heart sank. It was going to be true, and I was still further enmeshed. “So there’s no doubt about it, then? I’m very sorry. She had completely gone to pieces, you know. I used to employ her until it became impossible. The Ghigis can’t tell you anything, I suppose? Why Rome? Yes, some impulse, perhaps… And you hope to make an arrest soon. Good. Good. Thank you, Commissioner. Yes, I shall be extremely obliged if you would contact me as soon as you have more news. Meanwhile, confidential, naturally. Thank you… thank you.”
He replaced the receiver. He took an unopened packet of cigarettes from a box and threw them across to me.
“Calm down,” he said, “you’ll soon be out of the red. They expect to make an arrest within twenty-four hours.”
His assumption that fear for my own skin was at the root of my distress was so reminiscent of his attitude to me of old that it was not worth denying. Guilty, yes. Guilty of putting the money into her hands and not turning back. Guilty of passing by on the other side.
Conscience, tortured, drove me to attack. “Why did she drink?” I asked. “Didn’t you look after her?”
His passionate reply startled me. “I fed her, clothed her, cherished her, and she collapsed within,” he said. “Why? Don’t ask me why. A reversion to type, to her drunken peasant ancestry. When someone is bent on suicide you can’t prevent them.” Once again he shouted for Jacopo. The man entered and removed the coffee-tray. “I’m in to nobody,” Aldo said. “Beo and I are missing twenty-two years. It will take more than a few hours to wipe them out.”
He looked at me, then smiled. The room, familiar now and personal because of its possessions, closed in upon me. Responsibility for the world and all its ills was mine no longer. Aldo would take charge.
11
We sat there talking, letting the day go by. Sometimes Jacopo entered with a fresh brew of coffee, and went out again without a word. The room filled with the smoke from my cigarettes, mine, not Aldo’s. He had given it up, he said, he had long ago lost the urge. I drew him, indirectly, sparked off by questions fired at random, the story of his immediate postwar years. How, after the Armistice, he joined the partisans. Even then he knew nothing of the fateful telegram that had told us of his death, and he assumed that we believed him to be a prisoner of war. It was not until he found his way back to Ruffano, some months after we ourselves had
fled from it with the Commandant, that he learned the truth from Marta. They, in their turn, heard the rumor that while traveling north to the Austrian border our convoy had been bombed, and our mother and I killed. So, in our separate ways, our worlds had disintegrated.
He a young man of twenty, I a child of twelve, each had to face a new existence. Mine was to look, week after week, upon a woman without roots who daily, nightly became more superficial, more lacking in discrimination, faded, stale; his to remember her as she had bidden him good-bye when last he came on leave, warmhearted, loving, full of plans for future meetings—and then to have his image crack when not only Marta but all who knew her in Ruffano told him of her end. The gossip there had been, the shame, the scandal. One or two had even seen her drive away, laughing, beside her Commandant, while I waved a swastika flag from the window of the car.
“That was the final thrust,” said Aldo, “you, with your flag.”
I began to live it once again, and through his eyes her shame became my shame and I suffered for her. I made excuses. He would have none of them.
“No use, Beo,” he said, “I don’t want to listen. Whatever she did in Frankfurt or Turin, what life she made for the man Fabbio whom you call your stepfather, whether she was ill or unhappy or in pain, does not count. She died for me the day she left Ruffano.”
I asked him if he had seen our father’s grave. He had. He had been to the prison camp where he lay buried. Once. Never again. He did not want to discuss that either.
“He hangs there on the wall,” said Aldo, gesturing towards the portrait, “that’s all I needed of him. That and his possessions, here in this room. Besides the legacy of all he had achieved at the ducal palace. I made it my business to carry on where he left off, but, as you see, with more authority that he ever had. That was my goal.”
He spoke with a strange bitterness throughout as though, despite his standing in Ruffano and his swift rise to his present position, the years were wasted. Something eluded him still. Not the satisfaction of personal ambition, nor money, nor fame. He spoke of himself continually in the past tense. “I wanted this. I wanted that. I determined to carry out such-and-such an undertaking.” Never once did he talk in the present, or in the future. Later, in one of the pauses in conversation, I said to him, “Don’t you plan one day to marry? To start a family? So that you too will leave something behind you when you go?” He laughed. He was standing by the window at the time, looking out on the distant hills. From the window one could see Monte Cappello, beneath which we had driven in the morning. Now, with the approach of evening, it stood humped and clear against the sky, blue like a mandarin’s coat.