was littered with leaflets falling like summer snowflakes, urging all men and boys to join up, to enrol to fight for the RSI. They could join the Decima Mas, under Prince Valerio Borghese. Or there was the Muti Battalion of Blackshirts, or the Fascist Republican Militia. The important thing was to join, before it was too late.
Her father was spat upon in the street last week, for not supporting the new Fascist State. He had not supported the old one, but this was different. Men, workers who had tipped their caps to him, stalked past without greeting. Anna Maria gave in her notice and then, unsure how she would eat without the bit of food that came from Impruneta, baulked at the prospect and retracted it.
In households throughout the city, the quandary of whether to flock back to the known world of Il Duce, or run to the dubious protection of the King and the Allies, or throw in their lot with the partisans, divided fathers and brothers and cousins. In the streets, the sodden leaflets rotted underfoot into sludge, making the stones slippery and dangerous. Or more slippery and more dangerous. The war had been going on for nearly three years, but now the real war came calling, came right into their homes, and it wore the faces of foreign soldiers, both Allies and Germans. In every corner of the country people were forced to choose. Nazifascisti they said. Germans and Italians. Allies, Germans, Italians – they all killed you.
Further north, it was easier to choose between the Germans and the Allies, but the fascists made people choose between Italians or Italians. Betrayal was in the drinking water. When Annabelle looked at the lines on the map, drawn in red ink, she saw only blood.
Anna Maria could have been any one of the thousands of elderly women of the city – gaunt, stringy, malnourished, enduring. Her mouth had been full and soft once. Sesto loved to run his tongue around the ridged outline of her lips. It always seemed to make her pregnant. That was long ago. Now her mouth was as thin as the rest of her, no more than a pencil-line of anxiety. She liked this family well enough. They were not bad people on the whole, but she struggled to understand their ways. They did not go to Mass, but the nobility could do as they wished in that regard; they were not like her kind. They did not belong to the Party and that worried her, even more since the unbelievable events of recent months. However, a job was a job, and without one they would starve. There was food here and these people were kind.
The comings and goings of recent weeks worried her more than ever but she had long since learned not to know things. The house teemed with silent activity. The Signora was not herself lately and it was hard to follow her orders, but Anna Maria simply nodded and then did as she wanted because it was ages since Signora Eleanora bothered to follow up her instructions. Spoilt they were, these women. Anyway, Anna Maria was an honest person and could be trusted to do what was right. Signorina Annabelle was also behaving strangely, and Jesus, Mary and Joseph, let us not even think about the Signora Elsa! A sly one, that. Up to no good. Had them all fooled, if you asked her. Put on airs and graces, floated about like a deficiente, but she was not as dumb as she made out. And the boy was trouble, Enrico. Always a wild one, him. His mother’s fault. He would be up to no good in the mountains. She prayed for them all at night because if he got killed, Signora Eleanora would go mad. She loved him like her own son and she was not strong. She has never had to work. Not one of them has ever had to do a day’s work in their lives.
They worried about her too, she knew. She heard the Count telling his brother to be cautious, even in the house, but there was no need. She and Sesto had their own daughters to worry about and they both agreed that Gino, one of the sons-in-law who was missing, was probably in the mountains too, God help us. This was not like any other war. It was tearing families apart. How could you know what to think? Her mouth got thinner and straighter with each day.
Her stomach was the one rounded thing about her and that was only because her uterus had dropped. It gave her trouble, yes it did, but there was nothing to be done about that. Old age. She rubbed methylated spirits on her knees every night but they still creaked and gave her pain. Her breasts, once full, now hung low, loose flaps of skin beneath her enveloping floral apron and the endless layers of undergarments she wore to keep warm. She never seemed to be warm enough. Her wire-rimmed glasses were no longer the right prescription but there were no more to be had now, so she squinted through gimlet eyes to perform even the simplest of tasks. Sewing had become a purgatory. She probably did not clean corners as well as she used to but no-one cared, though the Count could get very gruff if there were stains in the coffee cups so she was careful there. Reading had never been part of her job so it did not matter that she could no longer read. She had never been able to read more than a few words anyway. No-one like her could. What do we need to read for? It’s all bad news anyhow. Her children had been to school and she was proud of that. See, that was Il Duce too. Four years of school, they had. One of them had nearly five.
Il Duce offered Anna Maria and Sesto a life they had never dreamed of. Her elderly parents embraced the Party with all their hearts and so did she and Sesto. They were wood-burners, Carbonai. Her parents were also wood-burners. They cut the timber from the forest, split it into large faggots, bundled it and hauled it down to their pits where they began the long process of carbonisation to turn the wood into fuel. Hard, hard work, it was. Made you old before your time. From early spring to late autumn they lived in a shack high in the valleys. While the men cut and hauled the timber and tended the fires that rendered it into fuel that filled their lungs with the smoke, the women hauled water and gave birth alone and tried to keep their families alive. Two dead babies and two live daughters, Anna Maria and Sesto had. Two little grassy mounds sprinkled with mountain flowers, on the high side of the valley where the sun would warm them each morning. Two little wooden crosses. Two little boys who seemed so perfect but did not breathe. Well, who could understand the ways of Il Signore. Our Lord. It was not for her to question these things. She just had to get on with looking after the ones she was given. Teach them their prayers and how to survive in this world. Some even tried to teach their children to read and write but few had time for such luxuries. No-one had ever told them they counted for anything.
‘Tell me,’ Annabelle said to her one day, perched on the edge of the kitchen table, ‘tell me what it was like in the mountains.’ She patted the old woman’s veiny hand.
Anna Maria enjoyed answering the girl’s questions about her life. She often came to the kitchen. She was lonely, poverina. So many people in this house, but they were all lonely. Anna Maria had never worked for the nobility before and their ways were certainly different. She clucked her tongue.
‘You couldn’t understand,’ she said. ‘We had nothing. No-one cared about us. Not the government, not the King, no-one. We had never been given anything in our lives. The socialists promised us everything but we never saw them. Maybe they helped the workers but not the contadini. Il Duce helped us. He gave us respect – and gifts: blankets in the winter and suchlike.’
Then there was the miracle of Sesto’s teeth. Even if he did complain all the time that they hurt and made him look like an asino, and even if he did take them out to eat and leave them grinning at her from the sink or the kitchen table, he could not manage without them and he would not have had dentures at all if not for Il Duce. She herself, now, she did not need them. She still had a few good teeth left in her head and they would see her out. Se Dio vuole, God willing! She crossed herself. And a sewing machine, he gave us, imagine that! He told us we were Italians. He gave us a schoolroom.
‘For years after that war killed my uncles and crippled my father, he looked after us. He loved us.’
It was the Blessed Virgin Mary that gave Sesto the accident that meant he was no good for this war, she thought. Her eyes misted. She said a rosary of thanks for that, once a week. ‘We lived in a baita up in the valley. In a cowshed. It took days to walk down to the town and the townspeople looked down on us and our children anyway.’
She
