The Paris Wife

FIFTEEN

On the train to Milan, I slept like the dead and woke to hear Ernest and Chink talking about Benito Mussolini. The new fascist leader was in town, and Ernest wanted to try to use his press card to arrange an interview. He thought Mussolini was the biggest bluff in Europe just then and was dying to meet him. Meanwhile, Chink had to get back to his post, and so he left us there with kisses and promises that we’d meet again soon.

Ernest was happy to be in Milan again. After we found me new shoes, our first stop was the gorgeous and imposing stone mansion in the Via Manzoni that had been converted into the Red Cross hospital where Ernest and Chink had both recovered. We stood at the gates and looked up at the balconies and terraces, the striped awnings and wicker furniture and fat potted palms.

“It looks like a fine hotel,” I said to Ernest.

“It was good living, all right. Too bad we had to get shot to get inside.”

“I’m sorry I can’t really know what it was like for you.”

“I’m glad you’re here to hold my hand for it just the same.”

“That I can do,” I said, and reached for him. We walked to the Duomo next and then to Biffi’s at the Galleria where we drank sparkling wine floating with fresh strawberries, and although Ernest didn’t often speak about his time at the front, talking and being with Chink had primed the pump, and he was full of it now. Stepping into Milan had completed the process. The whole trip had become a time machine, and he was back.

“It’s funny,” he said, “but sometimes what I remember most about the night I was shot is the mosquitoes. They got in your ears and into the corners of your eyes and you couldn’t sleep for them. Not that we were sleeping much anyway. Then the sky went up in flames. I was blasted right off my feet. We all were. I couldn’t feel anything at first, and then there was just a pressure in my chest like I couldn’t breathe and a jangling in my head.”

“Do you really want to say all this?” I asked gently. “You don’t need to.”

“I guess I do,” he said, and then fell quiet for a few minutes. “My hearing was all off, but someone was yelling for help. Somehow I got over there, and lifted him up and carried him to the command post. I don’t even know how. I hardly remember that part, just feeling my legs going to pieces under me. I heard the machine gun afterward, as if it had nothing to do with me. I went on running and put the bastard down and then I was down, too. Then nothing. I don’t know what else.”

“Then the field hospital,” I said. “And the train to Milan.”

“Yes,” he said. “Every time that train stopped, flies streamed through the open windows and covered my bloody bandages. I was two days on that train.”

I nodded. It wasn’t years behind him at all, but right there in his face and in his eyes, the way he’d come to Milan like a broken doll. Not a hero, but a boy who might never truly recover from what he’d felt and seen. It gave me a sharp kind of sadness to think that no matter how much I loved him and tried to put him back together again, he might stay broken forever.

“You must be thinking about Agnes today,” I said after a while.

“Only a little.” He covered my hand with his. “I’m glad we can do this together.”

“Me too.” I knew he was telling me the truth, but I also knew that if it were possible, he would have preferred to have me and Agnes both there-his past and his present, each of us loving him without question-and the strawberries, too. The wine and the sunshine and the warm stones under our feet. He wanted everything there was to have, and more than that.

I slept and read at our hotel the next afternoon while Ernest arranged for an interview with Mussolini. He’d recently been elected to the Italian Chamber of Deputies, and this fascinated Ernest. The man seemed to be a mass of contradictions. He was strongly nationalistic, and wanted to bring Italy back to its former glory by reaching into its Roman past. He seemed genuinely invested in the plight of the working class and of women, all of which he’d laid out in The Manifesto of the Fascist Struggle. And yet he also managed to endear himself to the aristocracy and the bourgeoisie, guaranteeing their continued existence. He seemed to want to be all things to all people, traditional and revolutionary, loved by the military, the business class, and the liberals. The National Fascist Party was gathering steam so quickly it all seemed terribly inevitable.

“Are you nervous?” I asked as he was organizing his notebooks and preparing to leave.

“Of what? He’s just a big bully, isn’t he?”

“I don’t know. Some say he’s a monster.”

“Maybe, but monsters don’t always look that way. They have clean fingernails and use a knife and fork and speak the King’s English.”

I buttoned his coat and brushed the fabric over his shoulders with my hands.

“You’re fussing, wife. Take a nap, and don’t worry.”

He was gone for two hours, and when he came back to the hotel to type up his notes, he seemed all too pleased to tell me he’d been right. “The man’s up to here with bluff,” he said, gesturing to his neck, “and nothing on top.”

“Was he wearing his black shirt?” I asked, very much relieved.

“He was, they all were.” He sat down at the desk and put fresh paper in his Corona. “He’s bigger than you’d guess, too, with a wide brown face and very pretty hands. A woman’s hands, really.”

“I wouldn’t write that if I were you.”

He laughed and began to type rapid fire in his usual way, his fingers stabbing quickly with very little breaking or breathing. “I’ll tell you what else,” he said without looking up, “there was a beautiful wolfhound pup with him in the room.”

“So the fascist monster is a dog lover.”

“Maybe he planned to eat it later,” he said, grinning.

“You’re terrible.”

“Yes,” he said, his index fingers poised for another violent attack on his machine. “That was a fine dog.”

The next day we boarded a bus to Schio, where Ernest wanted to show me the mill and the wisteria and every part of the town that had managed to stay so fine in his memory, no matter what else had happened around it. But on the way, the sky dimmed and grew gray. It began to rain and didn’t stop. When we finally arrived at the town, Ernest seemed surprised. “It’s so much smaller,” he said.

“Maybe it’s shrunk in the rain,” I said, trying to lighten the mood, but quickly realizing that it wasn’t going to be possible. For the whole visit, Ernest wrestled with memory. Everything had changed and grown dingy in the four years since he’d last been here. The wool factory-closed down during the war-spewed black muck into the swimming hole where Ernest and Chink had bathed on so many hot afternoons. We walked up and down the winding streets in the rain, but everything looked dull and lonely, the shopwindows full of cheap dishes and tablecloths and postcards. The taverns were empty. We went into a wine shop where a girl sat carding wool.

“I can barely recognize the town,” Ernest said to her in English. “So much is new.”

She nodded and continued with her work, drawing the paddles back and forth, the white fibers becoming long and smooth.

“Do you think she understands you?” I said to Ernest quietly.

“She understands me.”

“My husband was here during the war,” I said.

“The war is over,” she answered without looking up.

Deflated, we gave up on sightseeing and went to check in at the Two Spades, but it had changed, too. The bed creaked, the linens were worn and sad looking, and the lightbulbs were filmed over with dust.

In the middle of a tasteless dinner, Ernest said, “Maybe none of it happened.”

“Of course it did,” I said. “I wish Chink were here. He’d find a way to cheer us up.”

“No. He wouldn’t be able to take it either.”

We slept badly that night, and when morning came the rain went on and on. Ernest was still determined to show me Fossalta, where he’d been wounded, and so we found a driver who would take us as far as Verona and then boarded a train to Mestre, where we had to find another car and driver. On and on, all day, and for the whole of the trip, Ernest studied maps and tried to match up what he saw in the countryside to what he remembered seeing years before. But nothing was the same. Fossalta, when we finally arrived, was worse than Schio because there wasn’t a single sign of ravage. The trenches and dugouts had vanished. The bombed houses and buildings had been changed out for new. When Ernest found the slope where he’d been wounded, it was green and unscarred and completely lovely. Nothing felt honest. Thousands of men had died here just a few years earlier, Ernest himself had bled here, shot full of shrapnel, and yet everything was clean and shiny, as if the land itself had forgotten everything.

Before we left, Ernest combed the hedgerows, and finally came away with a single rusted shell fragment, not much larger than a button.

“Chasing your past is a lousy, rotten game, isn’t it?” He looked at me. “Why did I come?”

“You know why,” I said.

He turned the fragment over in his hand a few times and I guessed he was thinking about our talk with Chink, and how the war in his head couldn’t be counted on any longer. Memory couldn’t be counted on. Time was unreliable and everything dissolved and died-even or especially when it looked like life. Like spring. All around us, the grass grew. Birds made a living racket in the trees. The sun beat down with promise. From that moment forward, Ernest would always hate the spring.