The Tuscan Child Read online

  I had to concentrate really hard to understand this, not having learned the word for “rabbit,” but once she mentioned eating her vegetables in her garden, I managed to guess what she meant. “How do you make a rabbit ragu?”

  “Also not hard. You start with pancetta and onions and sage and rosemary, and tomatoes and garlic of course, and it cooks gently for a long while. I made it early this morning.”

  I decided the time was right to mention my father. “Signora Rossini, I told you I came here because my father had been in this place during the war.” I paused. “He was a British airman. His plane was shot down. Do you remember any of that? A British airman? A plane that crashed nearby?”

  She gave me an apologetic smile. “I was not here in the war,” she said. “My mother sent me to my aunt up in the hills, on account of the Germans. I was a young girl and the Germans . . . they thought it was their right to take any young girl they fancied. Just as they thought it was their right to kill whenever they wanted. They were animals. I cannot tell you how much we suffered.”

  I nodded with understanding. Then I asked, “Do you remember a woman called Sofia Bartoli from this village?”

  “Sofia Bartoli? Oh yes, of course I remember her. I remember when her husband Guido brought her home right before the war. She was not from here, you know, so the people of this town did not look upon her favourably. They do not like outsiders. And she was an orphan, I remember, with no family. I was only a little girl, but I thought she was very pretty, and kind, too. I heard she lost her husband in the North African conflict.”

  “And do you know what happened to her?”

  “When I returned to the village when the war was over, she was gone. Nobody said much about it, but it wasn’t good. She went away, leaving her baby son.”

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  HUGO

  December 1944

  Hugo had a cold and uncomfortable night. His leg throbbed and sent pain shooting through him every time he tried to move, and the blanket did little to shield him from the damp cold that rose up from the stone floor. He took a small sip of the grappa, and it spread like fire through his veins for a while. He felt in his breast pocket and retrieved his cigarettes and lighter, then lay back smoking one, conscious that the tiny circle of glowing tobacco did nothing to dispel the darkness around him. But at least the inhaled smoke calmed his nerves. He was glad to see the first streaks of daylight and to hear that distant rooster welcoming the dawn. He nibbled a little of the polenta and cheese, leaving the onion for later, then forced himself to go outside and find a place to heed the call of nature. It was a clear, crisp day with occasional white clouds racing across the sky from the west. He managed to hobble out to the rain barrel, wincing with every step, where he drank some water and washed his face and hands. He carried more water back in the tin mug. He also retrieved more stuffing from the pillow and found a spoon lying amid the rubble. That small victory cheered him up. When he felt a bit stronger, he would do more searching. Maybe there was a mattress under some of those fallen roof tiles.

  He managed to get the mug of water back to the chapel without spilling too much, then he took down his trousers and tore off some of Sofia’s sheet to clean the wound again. It still looked pretty repulsive, with oozing dark blood, but he dripped iodine on to his homemade rag and tried to wipe away as much of the blood as possible. It stung horribly and he cursed under his breath, conscious of the Virgin and a few damaged saints looking down at him. Then he bound up the wound and used Sofia’s piece of wood to make a splint. He wasn’t sure it was helping. It certainly didn’t support him enough for him to put weight on that leg. There was no way he could make his escape southward. I’ll just have to be patient, he told himself, and was ashamed to find that he felt a small bubble of happiness that he would be seeing Sofia again for at least a few more days.

  She came again that afternoon.

  “I am in luck,” she said, throwing off the shawl from her head as she stepped into the chapel. “Signora Gucci has told everyone that I brought her funghi di bosco yesterday and have promised to find more mushrooms for her. What a sweet and kind young lady I am. So now when they see me going up the hill to the woods, they say, ‘Ah, Sofia. She goes to hunt the mushrooms. What a good woman.’”

  “I hope you find some, or she will become suspicious.”

  “I hope so, too. But it has been wet recently. Good weather for mushrooms. And I think I saw more chestnuts. That is good, too. We use chestnut flour for baking in this region, especially when there is no more real flour.” She had her big basket on her arm today. “But see what I have brought you: it is fagioli al fiasco sotto la cenere.” She handed him a bowl of what looked like white paste.

  He didn’t understand the Italian words in her dialect, except that “fagioli” was beans, and this did not look like beans—more like oatmeal. He didn’t think he’d ever seen an oat when he was in Florence, and certainly nobody ate oatmeal for breakfast.

  “What is this?” he asked.

  “It is made of white beans cooked in water and then cooked again with olive oil, rosemary, sage, and garlic in the coals of the fire all night. We put it in a Chianti bottle and cook it slowly in the embers. Then we mash it. It is very good and nourishing. We eat it all the time these days when there is no meat or eggs to be had.” She reached into the basket again. “And some bread this time. Signora Gucci already baked us a loaf.”

  He took the crusty knob that she handed him and used it to scoop up the bean puree. The fagioli was good—so smooth he thought that milk or cream must have been added to it. She watched him eating, her face like that of a mother who knows she has provided the best nutrition for her child. When he was done she nodded in satisfaction. “That will keep you going for a while. And I brought you other things. Here—this is one of Guido’s shirts that he used to wear to work in the fields in winter. It is made of wool and will keep you warm.”

  “I couldn’t take Guido’s shirt,” he said, not wanting to accept it from her outstretched hand.

  “Take it, please. He is not here to wear it and, who knows, maybe the moths will get at it and then it will be useless. And if he returns to me, I will be happy to make him a new shirt from the best cloth at the market.”

  “Thank you.” He took it with reverence.

  “And also I think it must be hard to be here in darkness at night. So I’ve brought you a candle. Please try to make it last. I do not have many and we often lose electricity these days. Do you need matches?”

  “I have my cigarette lighter.” He patted his pocket.

  “You have cigarettes?”

  “Yes. Would you like one?” He fished for the packet.

  She shook her head. “I do not smoke, thank you. But it is a pity I cannot let anyone know about you. Cigarettes are the best things to barter with. The men around here would find me a pheasant or a rabbit for a pack of cigarettes.” She paused, then shook her head. “But alas, English cigarettes would not be a wise thing to show anybody.”

  “You should go and look for your mushrooms,” he said.

  She stood up. “You are right. I cannot stay away too long. My son was in tears this morning because he wanted to come with me to help find mushrooms. But I had to tell him it was too far for him to walk. He is afraid every time I leave, poor little one. He has seen men taken from our village. And he thinks about the father he has never seen.”

  “Please be careful, Sofia,” he said. He didn’t realise immediately that he had called her by her first name.

  Their eyes met. “Don’t worry about me. I am always careful.”

  “Are there Germans in your village now?”

  She shook her head. There was a long pause and then she said, “A German staff car came early this morning because someone had reported seeing an aeroplane crash. We told them we heard the noise of a crash but it was the middle of the night and we saw nothing. Then they went away again.”

  Hugo let out a sigh of relief. “Are they ofte
n in your village?”

  She shook her head. “They do not come much these days because they have taken most of what we have. And we are too far from a good road. But we never know. I pray every night to la Madonna that the Americans will come and make them flee north. Arrivederci, Ugo. May God be with you.”

  In the doorway she paused, adjusted the shawl around her head and shoulders, looked back at him, and smiled. He sat still as a statue, watching her go. She is still a child, he thought. If she had married at eighteen, then she was still in her early twenties, and yet she bore this worry and deprivation with such grace and fortitude. No blaming God or weeping about her lost husband. Just getting on with it, the way that Hugo had been brought up to do.

  “Just a child,” he reminded himself. Far too young to touch the heart of a man of thirty-five.

  The pigeons startled him, fluttering to land on one of the fallen beams. A snare, he thought. I should try to build a snare. And he thought back to his childhood. In those days there had been poachers in the Langley woods. The gamekeeper played a never-ending game of cat and mouse with them. A waste of time, really, Hugo had thought, because mostly they were only after rabbits. But the squire’s pheasants had to be protected for the shoot. Hugo remembered going around the property with Ellison, the sour old gamekeeper, while the old man grumbled ceaselessly about the louts and layabouts and what he’d like to do to them, only stopping to destroy any traps he found. Some of them were vicious steel-toothed devices, strong enough to dig deep into an animal’s foot. Others, probably made by local lads, were simple snares—wire hoops that would pull tight when an animal triggered them. Hugo tried to remember what they looked like and how they worked. No point, really, as he had no wire, but it was something to occupy his mind. He thought how pleased Sofia would be if he presented her with a brace of pigeons.

  He got to his feet, which was harder to do now with the splint in place, retrieved his makeshift crutch, and hobbled to the door. The light clouds of morning had been replaced by heavy grey ones, and a thick bank of them was moving in from the west. The wind had picked up, too, buffeting him as he tried to walk. It would rain before long; that was certain. He drank again from the rain barrel and tried to do more foraging among the rubble, but he was unable to climb over the loose stones and bricks and couldn’t bend to lift any of the debris and see what lay beneath. He didn’t find any wire or string, but he did manage to extricate an old kitchen drawer. That might just work, he thought, and began to carry it back, just as the first raindrops pattered on to the rock.

  He was only halfway to his shelter when the storm broke with force. It was as if the heavens had opened. Raindrops bounced off his leather jacket. He tried to move more quickly and felt himself slipping. He grasped at one of the beams and stopped himself from falling, sweat mixing with the rain on his face. By the time he had lowered himself into his shelter and pulled the parachute over him, he was soaked through. He lay there shivering as the wind blew raindrops through the gaps between his planks. The parachute silk wasn’t as waterproof as he had hoped. It clung to him, sodden. Then came a great flash of lightning, followed almost instantly by a clap of thunder. His first thought was of Sofia. Had she reached the safety of the village? He lay there huddled under his parachute, worrying about her getting struck by lightning or at the very least catching a cold from a drenching. And he cursed his own impotence. He was the man. He should be saving her, taking her and her son to a safe place far from this conflict.

  “Damn and blast this leg,” he said out loud.

  The storm raged on for most of the day. By evening there were periods of calm between bouts of heavy rain. Hugo didn’t want to waste his candle. In the last of the daylight, he spread out his parachute to dry, draping it over the outside of his shelter. As he did so he remembered the parachute lines. “Idiot,” he told himself. “You have all the string that you want to make a snare.” Tomorrow he would rig up a perfect trap and catch a pigeon.

  He ate the last of his bread with the onion, which tasted surprisingly good, then settled himself for the long night ahead. The blanket was not too damp and he wrapped himself in it. Tomorrow I will get to work, he told himself.

  He had no idea how dramatically things would have changed by morning.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  JOANNA

  June 1973

  My heart beat faster. She’d left a baby son behind. The beautiful boy. He might still be here.

  I took a deep breath and formed the sentence in my head before I asked, “So this son of Sofia, is he still in the village?”

  Paola nodded, smiling. “Yes, of course. He was taken in by Cosimo and raised as his own son.”

  “Cosimo?”

  The smile faded from her face. “Cosimo di Georgio, the richest man in our community. He owns much land around here. He would like to buy my olive grove. His aim is to control all the olive trees, but I do not wish to sell. But here he is respected as well as feared. In the war he was a hero, a partisan fighter—the only one to survive a massacre by the Germans. He had to lie there among the bodies, pretending to be dead, while the soldiers went around with bayonets. Can you imagine that?”

  “So he adopted Sofia’s child?” I asked.

  She nodded. “Yes, and lucky for the boy that was. Guido and Sofia, they were poor like the rest of us, but now Renzo is the heir to Cosimo. He will be rich one day. Rich and powerful.”

  Again I phrased what I wanted to say very carefully. “If I wanted to meet this man, Renzo, how would I do so?”

  “If you go up to the village around six or seven, you will find most of the men sitting together in the piazza. They meet in the evenings while their wives prepare their meals. I am sure they will know where to find Cosimo and Renzo. Cosimo had a stroke a few years ago, I’m afraid.”

  “A stroke?” This Italian word meant nothing to me.

  “When the blood is blocked and the left side no longer works well,” she explained. “Now he walks with a cane and Renzo stays by his father’s side to help him.”

  She reached for a towel and covered the bowl, wiping her hands on her apron.

  “Are we finished with the pici?” I asked. “Do you need more help?”

  “Until we cook it. Go and enjoy yourself, young lady.”

  I smiled and nodded. “So maybe I should go for a walk and explore the town. I’d like to see Sofia Bartoli’s house.”

  “You can see it for yourself. As you walk up the street, you turn into the last little alley on the right. Sofia’s house is at the end.”

  “Does her family still live in it?”

  “Oh no. Her husband did not return from the war in Africa, you know. There was only an old grandmother, and she died soon after I returned to San Salvatore.”

  I nodded, understanding this. “And I also want to see if I can talk to the men in the piazza,” I said. “I don’t know if they can tell me anything, but perhaps they met my father.”

  “Perhaps.” She didn’t sound too hopeful.

  “And then, if I may, I’ll come back to join you for dinner. I’m really looking forward to trying the pici and the rabbit.”

  “Good.” She nodded approval. “Of course you are welcome to join us. It will be nice for Angelina to have a young person to talk to. She is bored with just her old mother. She would like to know about English fashions, I am sure. And music. She is still a teenager at heart!” She chuckled.

  “How old is she?” I asked.

  “Almost twenty now,” Paola said. “Time to settle down and be serious as a mother and wife, not listening to popular music and wanting to dance.”

  Almost twenty, I thought. And here I am at twenty-five still thinking I am young and have plenty of time to decide what to do with my life.

  I went back to my room and collected my camera and purse. I also put on a hat as the late-afternoon sun was fierce. Then I set off back up the path to the little town. The tunnel and the alleyway were pleasantly cool after the walk uphill with the su
n on my back. I stood in the tunnel, looking out through the opening at the landscape beyond. Everywhere I looked there were olive trees. If this Cosimo owned them all, he must be a rich man indeed. And that old ruin I could see beyond the trees—was that a castle, perhaps? I thought it might be worth exploring if I didn’t mind the trek up through the olive groves. This made me stop and think: How long was I planning to stay here? If nobody in the town knew anything of my father, what would be the point of staying on? But I thought of Paola and her bright, warm kitchen, and it struck me that this was a place where I might be able to begin to heal.

  The piazza was deserted at this time of the afternoon, the sun beating down on the cobblestones and reflecting off the faded yellow stucco of the municipal buildings. The sycamore trees looked dusty and drooped in the heat. I went up the steps and into the church. The smell of incense hung heavy in the air, and dust motes danced in the shafts of sunlight that came in through high, narrow windows. Around the walls were old paintings and statues of saints. I recoiled as I came upon an altar and beneath it a glass-fronted case containing a skeleton clothed in bishop’s robes and with a crown on its skull. Was this a local saint? As one raised with only the minimum of Anglican exposure, I always found Catholic churches to be frightening places—one step away from black magic. When a priest appeared from behind the high altar, I made a hasty exit.

  I followed the one road up from the piazza. There were a few more shops and a jumble of houses clinging to one another against the hillside. Here and there an alley led off, some of them so small that I could stretch out my arms and touch both sides. Shutters were closed against the afternoon heat. Some houses had wooden balconies decorated with more geraniums. Others had big clay pots and jars like the one outside Paola’s house, all with flowers and herbs spilling over the sides. An occasional cat basked in the sun. Other than that the street was deserted. From inside the houses came the sounds of pots and pans clanging as the evening meal was being prepared, babies crying, a radio blaring out a plaintive song.