The Italian Wife

  ‘And did you spy on me?’

  It was asked. The question fell into the silence and could not be taken back.

  Roberto turned his face to her, a rapid movement that left no room for lies. ‘Yes.’

  She nodded, letting the word sink into her mind.

  ‘Isabella, I promise you that I did nothing that would harm you. Grassi was convinced you were connected with Rosa’s father in some way. I did everything I could to convince him that he was a fool to believe such nonsense but he is not a man who listens. He wanted to arrest you at once after you went to see Rosa at the convent, but I persuaded him to wait. To let me coax the truth out of you, when all the time I was trying to keep you safe.’

  Slowly Isabella began to stroke the back of his neck, to soothe the hard muscles bunched there, drawing the anger out of him.

  ‘Roberto, you never did anything but help me. You saved me time and again. I know that. I’m not blind either.’

  She tipped her head forward and buried her face in his neck and the familiar masculine scent of him set her body aching with love for him. If Roberto had betrayed her, he had also saved her, just as he’d saved the Caldarone family and who knows how many others? He was good and decent inside, a fine honest man who was tearing himself apart.

  She lifted her head and gently kissed his lips, soothing, murmuring, whispering to him. His arms curled around her and he lovingly pressed his lips to hers. She longed to keep him like this, tight against her body, fused to her, safe from Mussolini’s savage world. She drew him back on to the bed cover, their limbs entwined. The scent of him and the heat of their bodies bound them together, skin to skin, as they peeled off their clothes and he took care not to jolt her damaged hand.

  Their loving was leisurely this time, as if they were trying to convince themselves they had all the time in the world to explore each other’s passions and desires. Their hands and lips caressed and lingered, until a moan broke free from his lips as they teased desire to breaking point. Isabella felt her bones grow soft and yearning under his kisses. For this one moment, the city of Rome vanished. Nothing existed outside this room with its bright bedcover in this precious sliver of time. There was just this. Just him and just her, together.

  35

  Giorgio Andretti was not what Isabella expected. He struck her as only a year or two older than Luigi would have been, probably in his mid-thirties now, but he looked much more. Grey streaked his brown hair and his eyes were sunk deep in a layer of fat as though trying to hide. But his smile was a girl’s smile, soft and uncertain, and Isabella wondered how this man had ever been a Blackshirt.

  ‘Good morning, Signora Berotti.’

  He rose from his red velvet chair in the Caffè Greco with a courtesy that sat awkwardly on his large fleshy figure, his belly as fat and loose as a sow’s.

  ‘Good morning, Signor Andretti. Thank you for taking the time to see me.’

  He chuckled, sending a ripple through his numerous chins, and waved her to the chair opposite him at the small oval marble table. ‘I don’t take the credit, signora. I was given no choice.’

  Isabella was startled by his honesty. It made a refreshing change in this maze of lies and deceit that Italians now had to hide behind for their own safety. This wasn’t a man who wanted to pretend that he was something he wasn’t. For the first time she began to believe that here in this elegant café, tucked away on the Via dei Condotti at the bottom of the Spanish steps, she might actually find answers.

  ‘Allora,’ he said, ‘you are Luigi’s pretty widow.’ The small eyes inspected her as she took a seat and he smiled, a genuine smile that made her respond with one of her own. ‘A black widow spider with a serious bite, I suspect,’ he laughed.

  ‘I can bite,’ she said lightly, ‘when I have to.’

  ‘And are you on the hunt for someone to bite today?’

  ‘Of course not. I’m here just to ask a few questions about the work that my husband did with you before he died.’

  ‘I didn’t think you had come because of my handsome good looks.’

  He ran a stubby hand over his lifeless brown hair and laughed at himself, but there was something achingly sad in the gesture.

  ‘Let’s order some cake and coffee,’ he added. ‘We can’t come to Greco’s and not do so, especially when Pietro Luciani is paying.’ He waved a hand at a waiter and ordered cake for them both, ignoring her ‘Just espresso for me’.

  The café was a warren of elegant rooms that flowed into each other through arches, frequented in the past by the likes of Goethe, Byron and Liszt. The walls were covered right up to the ceiling with old oil paintings in gilt frames that gave the place an amber sheen that was oddly relaxing. But Isabella could not afford to relax.

  They each waited for the other to make the first move. She kept her voice low, aware of other coffee drinkers around them, and asked politely, ‘What kind of work do you do now?’

  ‘I work in a factory. Not on the factory floor. I wouldn’t last ten minutes there. I work in the office, buried in ledgers. We make ball bearings.’

  ‘Useful.’

  For the first time his smile grew thin. ‘It doesn’t hurt anybody.’

  ‘Is that what you did before? With Luigi. Hurt people?’

  ‘Sometimes.’

  ‘Tell me about it, please. What was it that my husband did that I was too stupid to realise at the time?’

  Andretti leaned back in his chair, making it creak dangerously, and took his time lighting a cigarette. When he finally looked at her again, it was through a veil of smoke that turned his skin grey.

  ‘We were Fascisti, Signora Berotti. We were passionate, Luigi and I. We believed.’ He exhaled a sigh and whispered, ‘We were fools.’

  ‘As Blackshirts, what did you do in Milan?’

  The coffee arrived and Isabella waited with impatience while Andretti scooped up a mouthful of apple cake on his fork. He paused with it hovering on the verge of his lips, looked at her face and reluctantly placed it back on the plate.

  ‘I eat,’ he said, ‘to bury the person I was back then.’

  ‘You won’t succeed,’ she said quietly.

  ‘I know.’

  They both sipped their coffee and his eyelids quivered. When he put down his cup, she could see he was ready. Her mouth was suddenly dry.

  ‘Very well, signora. These are the facts. We all believed in Mussolini. He was going to build a new Italy for us, tossing aside the old decadent ways, ridding us of poverty and corruption, driving out the chaos of nation states that refused to cooperate with each other. Italy would become great again. We were the laughing stock of Europe and he promised us a way to stand tall again.’

  Isabella nodded. ‘I know this is what Luigi believed.’

  ‘So we set about bringing Benito Mussolini to power.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘By force.’

  He looked longingly down at his cake but kept his fingers away from it. Around them the noise and laughter in the café seemed to fade.

  ‘Of course Mussolini held meetings to gather the faithful. He is a great orator. But the background work was done by us, the Blackshirts. We persuaded,’ he lingered on the word, ‘people to sign up to become members of the Fascist Party. We went into factories where Socialists and Communists – the scum of the earth – were stirring up strikes and we persuaded,’ again the emphasis on that word, ‘them to stop.’

  ‘How did you persuade them?’

  ‘How do you think?’ He jabbed his cigarette into the onyx ashtray, grinding the life out of it.

  ‘You used force?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Truncheons?’

  ‘Yes. And worse.’ His gaze rested on her bandage. ‘What happened to your hand?’

  ‘It had an argument with a gun butt.’

  A flush crept up his ivory white neck and spread from chin to chin. He continued quietly, ‘We went into people’s houses, into their shops. We beat anyone who stood against us t
ill they whimpered on the ground for mercy.’

  She shuddered. Thinking of Luigi in his fine black uniform that she had admired so blindly. Guilt swept over her, hot and liquid in her stomach, because she knew she had been complicit in her husband’s sins by not asking what she should have been asking. She hung her head, letting her hair sweep forward to hide her shame. Andretti took the opportunity to attack his cake.

  ‘If you were all “persuading” like that,’ she asked after a pool of silence had flowed across their table, ‘why was Luigi the one who was killed? Why was he singled out? And why attack me?’

  The apple cake vanished. Just crumbs on a plate.

  ‘May I?’ he asked, and pointed at her chocolate truffle torte which she hadn’t touched.

  She nodded.

  ‘I don’t know why he was killed,’ he said quickly, reaching for her plate.

  ‘You’re lying, Signor Andretti.’

  He shovelled torte into his mouth, its dark brown crumbs tumbling down the black waistcoat stretched to bursting point across his chest. He didn’t meet her eyes and Isabella knew there was more he was keeping from her.

  ‘Tell me, signore,’ she pushed him harder, ‘did you ever talk with Luigi about what you were both doing? About the savagery of it? The immorality of it?’

  Andretti laughed, a quick flash of unpleasant sound that turned Isabella’s stomach.

  ‘Of course we didn’t talk about it.’

  ‘Why not?’

  Abruptly he leaned as far forward as his belly would allow. ‘Because, Signora Berotti, your husband loved what he was doing. His eyes would light up when he swung that truncheon and he never wanted it to stop. It made him come alive.’ He blinked slowly, remembering. ‘To hurt someone.’

  Isabella remembered the blows. When the grappa got the better of him. The bolt of pain. The degradation. The kisses and apologies and promises the next morning. She remembered only too well, but never had she let a word of it pass her lips. She finished her coffee, a shot of something to drown the memory.

  ‘What is it that Luigi did?’ she asked.

  He stared at her. So lost. She could see it in his eyes. She stretched out her fingers and laid them on his hand where it lay on the table, soft and fleshy and impotent. She couldn’t imagine it wielding a truncheon, breaking bones or cracking skulls.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I’m sorry for you. And for Italy. And for all those people that my husband terrorised.’ A tear slipped down her cheek and she brushed it away angrily on the bandage, but it didn’t brush away the ache that scorched a path down her flesh. ‘I’m so sorry.’

  Andretti spread his bulky arms in a futile gesture of despair. ‘It is too late to be sorry.’

  ‘So please help me. It’s not too late for that. Tell me what Luigi did to get himself killed. Something that you and the other Blackshirts didn’t do. It can’t hurt him now, but it will help me. And maybe it will help you too.’

  ‘It wasn’t his fault,’ he insisted suddenly. ‘Don’t think badly of him. He didn’t mean to…’ He hesitated.

  ‘To what?’

  Andretti gripped her hand. ‘One night we had a purge on known Communists. A large unit of us marched from house to house, knocking on doors, dragging people out into the street so that others could see what would happen to anyone who stood against the Fascisti.’

  He tried to light another cigarette but his hand was shaking so badly that Isabella had to hold his lighter steady for him, and whatever horrors he had taken part in in the past, she couldn’t find it in her heart to hate a man so wracked with guilt for the wrongs he’d committed. But atonement was beyond her power to grant him. She waited until he had smoked half the cigarette and then asked again.

  ‘What did Luigi do that no one else did?’

  ‘Signora, you are a lovely lady. You are free of him. Don’t ask for more.’

  ‘I am not free of him. I can’t forget…’

  She stopped. Their eyes held each other and gently this man who was trying to hide himself inside his layers of fat breathed out a soft sugary breath.

  ‘Very well.’ A sad smile tugged at his full lips. ‘I tell you because you were his wife and you, of all people, deserve to know, but I warn you that you are your own worst enemy.’

  ‘I very much doubt that, Signor Andretti.’

  He lowered his voice to a whisper. ‘Luigi was all fired up after our purge of the Communists. He was like a rat catcher who couldn’t get enough rats to satisfy his thirst for their blood, eyes wild with it. So when one of the poor bastards screamed that he would betray a whole nest of the Communists if Luigi would leave him alone, your husband listened.’

  There was sweat on Andretti’s brow, though the café was not hot, and he wiped his palms jerkily on his knees, at the same time signalling for a waiter.

  ‘Two cognacs, per favore,’ he barked.

  ‘Si, signore.’

  Neither spoke. They sat in silence until the glasses were placed in front of them, the amber liquid gleaming under the lights. Andretti drank his straight down and wiped his mouth on the back of his hand with a grunt of satisfaction.

  ‘Go on,’ Isabella murmured.

  ‘There was a nest of them. Of Communist scum gathered in a meeting house to escape our purge. Your Luigi went over there and set fire to it. Most of them fled under cover of the smoke, but two were burned to death.’

  Isabella picked up her drink, swallowed a slug of cognac and felt it hit her stomach with a punch that deadened the sickness that threatened to erupt.

  ‘That’s not all,’ he told her.

  She let her breath out in a thin fragile thread. ‘What happened?’

  ‘Afterwards. When the building was nothing but ash and stone, that was when we learned that upstairs in the attic were hiding twelve wives and four children.’

  A cry tore from Isabella. Heads turned but she didn’t see them. ‘Did they live?’

  ‘What do you think?’

  ‘Did none survive? Not one?’

  ‘None.’

  She seized her cognac and drank it down. To burn away the screams she could hear in her head.

  ‘But he was never charged, was he?’

  ‘No. It was called an accident. A fallen candle. Communists proving to be their own destroyers. No one can trust a Communist, that’s what we said to each other.’

  ‘But it was Luigi.’

  ‘Yes.’

  She lowered her head in her hand so that he would not see her face and her shoulders trembled violently.

  He put a hand on her bowed head and kindly stroked her hair. ‘From that moment on, the men who escaped the smoke that night formed a tight group that became fanatical about the need to destroy Mussolini’s regime. They fought violence with violence and their leader became a man to be feared. He stood out because of his blond hair and so should have been easy to capture. But he wasn’t. He was quick and cunning and melted through our fingers. Like trying to catch a ghost. He eluded us every time.’

  Isabella lifted her head from her hand. ‘What was his name?’

  For a second the words could not push past Andretti’s lips but finally they trickled on to the table between them.

  ‘Carlo Olivera.’

  36

  She looked ill. When Isabella walked out of the Caffè Greco into the Rome morning sunlight, it was as if she had a fever. Her wide blue eyes were too bright. Her skin was flushed except for the patch around her mouth where it was a dull leaden grey that reminded Roberto of the colour of the sea when readying itself for a storm.

  He felt a pulse of anger. At the man inside the café who had done this to her. And at the husband, the brash black-shirted husband who had dragged her into this nightmare that she was fighting so hard to break out of.

  Immediately Roberto went to her side. Her hand had fallen from the makeshift sling, so he gently retied it and drew her other arm through his. As they walked, she told him the information that Giorgio Andretti had given her
and it was hard, appallingly hard, not to heap his rage and disgust on Luigi Berotti’s name. But he was her husband. And he was dead. He had paid the final price for his sins. Evil attracts evil to itself as surely as the moon draws the tide each day, and it was stalking the streets of Italy every day as long as Mussolini held power in his fist.

  On the train Roberto sat Isabella beside a window, giving her room to breathe. To think. To find in her head the man she thought her husband to be and to fit him into the skin of this murdering bastard whose blood pumped faster when he was brutalising others. Roberto could see the rise and fall of her chest, as laboured as if she were running.