Between Enemies Read Free

the real stuff even if they dig up the whole garden.’ He heaved a sigh. ‘Luckily they’ll be leaving tomorrow.’
    ‘But then . . . our front line! Do you think it won’t even hold along the Piave?’
    ‘The war is lost, laddie.’
    Donna Maria didn’t get a wink of sleep. She told me so the next morning. It wasn’t fear, for in her mind there was simply no room for fear. She was afraid neither for herself nor for us. ‘These jackals have other things to keep them busy, but ifthey reach Venice there’ll be no end to the looting. And now they are here, in my garden, in my rooms, in my kitchen, and they’re digging the latrine in the soil which is the resting place of my mother and of yours.’ It wasn’t true. Teutonic efficiency had not yet envisaged drain fields, but my aunt had a meticulous imagination, thirsty for details, and especially the most disagreeable.
    In the dead of night she had heard a horse neighing. The sound came from the portico. The neighing of horses always gave her gooseflesh because she loved horses. She had seen them dragging the last of the rearguard’s carts; she had seen them refusing the bit, tossing their heads, digging in their hoofs when they passed by the corpses of mules with their thighs slashed open by the bayonets of hungry infantrymen. ‘They have a sense of foreboding at the death of one of their own kind, just as we do ourselves.’ It was so unjust that they were made to suffer. ‘It is men who make war; animals have nothing to do with it. And then…maybe they are closer to God…they are so simple…so
direct
.’
    At about three in the morning Donna Maria had got up, taking care not to wake Teresa who was sleeping at the foot of her bed. She went to the window. There were bonfires everywhere. The troops were unloading huge crates marked with the arms of the House of Savoy: the municipal warehouse had only partly burnt down. She saw the captain on horseback among the tents. The ground-floor windows were aglow with the yellow light of paraffin lamps. All of a sudden she felt she was being watched. She turned. Loretta was standing only a metre away, stock still, her long, long hair dangling and her eyes fixed on her. ‘What’s the matter?’
    The servant lowered her eyes.
    ‘They won’t harm us,’ said Donna Maria softly. ‘They’ll take it out on the Villa, and with the farmhands’ houses, but nothing will happen to us. Go back to bed.’ And back Loretta went to her palliasse, which emitted a crunch of dried leaves.
    Grandpa’s was a laughing face even when he was sad. Not even he slept a wink, but he pulled his sheet right up to his moustache and made a gentle pretence at snoring. I watched him in the darkness. Grandpa’s moustache was a bristly rake, the tips of which attempted a risky handlebar effect. It was a sign of his contrariness, his wish to poke fun at the conventions which his plump chin, carefully shaved, paid homage to. I was amused by his childish eccentricities, partly because they constantly irritated Grandma, who would retaliate by inviting the Third Paramour to dinner.
    The doors were no longer banging, the German voices sounded more sleepy, as did the noise of the boots, of the hoofs and even of the motorbikes.
    I listened to my thoughts buzzing around in the muddle of somnolence. Big thoughts, about faraway things, sufficiently intangible as to not make me feel responsible. I thought of the rout of our Second Army more than of the occupation of the Villa; I thought of the ceaseless stream of peasants and infantrymen, the carts of the poor and the motor cars of the generals, of the wounded men abandoned in the ditches. I had never seen so many eyes ravaged by terror. The eyes of women with bundles slung round their necks: lifeless bundles and whimpering bundles. I would never have believed that the pain of a whole people in flight, a people to whom until then I had not been aware of belonging, could have affected me so deeply as to