Dead and Alive

CHAPTER SIX

At three o’clock the next day I met Pietro in the Galleria. He had traced the Gallianis up to a point. Their flat in the Via Santa Cecilia was no longer there. It had been in a big block just behind the Metropole on the sea front. The whole block had been destroyed in one of the big raids before the Salerno landing.

‘But I find their cook,’ Pietro said. ‘I speak her about them and she say they are in the ricovero and not kilt.’ I told him to speak Italian. I was in no mood to have him try his English out on me.

They had apparently moved into rooms in the Vico Tiratoio, one of the squalid little streets on the north side of the Via Roma. Pietro had got the address and had seen the owner of the place just before meeting me. From his description of it, Galliani must have been in a pretty bad way financially. The entrance was up a dark staircase next to a trattoria that sold cheap vino from Ischia. On the first floor had been a tailor’s shop, the Gallianis had had the second, the third floor had belonged to a journalist on Il Mattino and the top floor had been a bordello. ‘The girl was with them?’ I asked.

He nodded. ‘Si, signore, the girl was with them. They were there three months.’

‘And then?’

‘They could not pay so they went to the farm of his cousin which is at Itri.’

‘What was the name of the cousin?’ I asked.

‘This is his address.’ He handed me a slip of paper. On it was written, ‘Furigo Ciprio, Santa Brigida, Itri.’

From where I sat I looked down the finely-paved expanse of the Galleria across the traffic of the Via Roma to the narrow entrance of a street of tall, dirty buildings, that ran straight up the hill to the Corso Vittorio Emanuele. In one of these streets up there Mrs Dupont’s daughter had lived for three months. It wasn’t difficult to picture the circumstances of this family as Pietro told me the gossip he had gleaned. Galliani had been a dapper little man, the manager of a small shipping firm. The business had died. A shop that he acquired as a side-line had been looted during the raid in which he had lost his flat. When he came to the Vico Tiratoio he had begun to drink. But he clung to Naples because he thought he could get a job. His wife took in washing and the girl, besides helping with this, did embroidery work. Three months of that and then they had given up and gone to his cousin’s farm.

I thanked Pietro for his help. ‘I’ll go up to the farm tomorrow,’ I said. ‘Will you arrange for a car to pick me up at the docks at nine o’clock.’ I paid him off then.

I wandered slowly down the Galleria with its cafe tables full of dark-haired girls and men in open-necked shirts and suits of fantastically brilliant colours. It was very hot and the Via Roma thrust itself upon me with a dull roar of traffic. I crossed the hot soft-tarred thoroughfare and forced my way through the crowds into the Via Buoncompagni.

The tall houses closed in on me — cool, quiet and squalid. The sound of traffic was dulled and its place taken by individual sounds of children’s voices and people calling to each other. The streets were cleaner than when I had seen them. The squatters from the bombed-out area of the docks were gone. There was no sign of garbage or outdoor cooking on improvised wood or charcoal fires. New shops were open and some of the houses had been repainted. I noticed these things automatically for my mind was engrossed in the picture of the life of a half-English, half-French girl in an Italian family who were in difficulties at the time when the Germans still occupied Naples.

I found the house without difficulty. It was No. 29, just on the corner where the Vico Tiratoio meets the Via Sergente Maggiore. It was just as Pietro had described it. There was the little trattoria. The sour smell of vino seeped out into the street. As I stood there the bead curtains parted and a seaman staggered out. He stood for a moment blinking in the sunlight and swaying slightly back on his heels. He gazed round and then lurched into the doorway next to the trattoria. His boots sounded hesitantly as he climbed the dark, bare-boarded stairs that Monique must have used. Over the entranceway was a gaudily-painted image of the Virgin set in a weatherworn wooden frame with two tinsel-covered electric light bulbs and a posy of artificial white flowers. I took out the photograph of Monique that Pietro had returned to me. The innocence of the girl in that faded picture was appealing when considered against the background of her life. I was determined to find out what had happened to her.

I told Stuart this when I got back to the ship and he was quite agreeable. He said it would take him two more days to complete the purchase of our cargo. I arranged to take Boyd with me for company.

Itri is a little town beyond the Garigliano on the coast road from Naples to Rome. This road is Highway Seven, the route the American Fifth Army took. We came down to it by way of Caserta. Boyd wanted to see the palace, not because it was the second largest and quite the ugliest in Europe, but because he wanted to take ‘a decco at the Brass ‘Ats’ Palis’ — it had been the Headquarters of the Allied Armies in Italy all through the bitter fighting of the winter of 1943-44. The great square red-brick structure, with the railway line which had been built to pass within a hundred yards of the windows for the amusement of the Royal Family, looked useless. The gardens were still as unkempt as they had been when they were a park for Army trucks. Only the long artificial lake, where Field-Marshal Alexander had kept his own wizzer seaplanes, seemed pleasant, and that was violently unreal against the natural setting of the hills.

Beyond Capua we forked left, away from Highway Six, the road to Cassino. We had crossed the Volturno by a Bailey bridge that had been built by our own engineers to replace the blown Roman bridge. It was the same at the Garigliano. The temporary Bailey structure still spanned the road that crossed the river. ‘Sono bravi ingegneri, gli Inglesi,’ was our driver’s comment. At Formia the buildings shattered by the naval bombardment had been cleared so that there was a good view of Gaeta across the blue of the bay. But the town was still bedraggled with the marks of war in the side streets. All sorts of temporary buildings had been erected on the shattered foundations of the original houses. And Itri, set on a hill beneath the sprawling bulk of the Monti Aurunci, was even worse. It was a little town of flies and dust and rubble pulsing lazily in the midday heat. At the post office they told us how to find the farm. ‘But Signor Furigo does not live there now,’ they said. It was burned and he was killed. Of the Gallianis they knew nothing.

‘This is getting to be like a bleedin’ treasure hunt,’ Boyd said as we got into the car again.

The farm was at the end of a dusty track. The wreck of a burned-out building stood among the olive trees and the ground shimmered in the sun’s heat trapped in the bowl of the hills. The remains of a barn had been made into a shack and nearby on a patch of brick-hard earth two women with kerchiefs tied around their heads were beating at a pile of wheat stalks. They were threshing in the old way. It was from them that I learned what had happened when the Germans were in Itri and the Fifth Army was across the river where the bridge had been blown.

It had been late in May. A German 88 mm. battery had established itself among the olive groves of — Santa Brigida. They were tired and desperate. The Garigliano had been crossed by the Americans little more than a week ago and there were reports of rapid progress by the Eighth beyond Cassino. They had lost two guns and over thirty men. The Commandant ordered Furigo to hand over all livestock, wine and grain. He took over the farmhouse as his headquarters. The barn and outhouses were occupied by his men. Furigo and his wife with their two daughters, the Gallianis with the ‘French’ girl, and these two women who were born in Itri and had worked on the farm since their husbands had been killed in the desert, were forced to sleep in the open.

The Germans fired their 88’s steadily until the following afternoon in an attempt to stem the crossing of the fosse. The two women described the scene volubly with many gesticulations. Repeatedly they pointed to the ruined bulk of Itri, the thick fortress walls of which towered above the valley farm, cracked and broken.

It had been blasted by bombers and ground to rubble by the artillery. From the shelter of a stone wall they had watched their little town gradually disintegrate and wilt away in great spouting billows of dust and debris. Then the roar of the guns had slackened and the chatter of machine guns and thud of mortars had taken up the symphony of death. The German battery brought their guns out of action, hitched up and began to move off. But before they went two soldiers began to throw petrol on to the straw in the barn and on to the door posts of the outhouses, and even the farmhouse itself. They set fire to the barn first and then one by one the outhouses.

But when they went to the house Furigo, who had built it with his own hands, rushed up to them, pleading. Galliani was with him. The soldiers thrust him aside and went to the little wooden porch of the house, one carrying a tin of petrol and the other a torch made of petrol-soaked rag tied to the end of a stick.

As the soldier with the can splashed petrol on to the wood of the porch Furigo seized his arm. He was crying, pleading, on his knees. The soldier brought his boot up sharply, catching the farmer on the chin. And as he fell back he tipped the rest of the petrol on to him. Without hesitation the other thrust the flaming brand against the wretched man’s clothing. Furigo rose with a terrible shriek — he was a sheet of flame. The women said that for a moment they saw him, running, lit up by the flames, his eyes wide, his mouth open, shrieking terribly. Then his flesh blackened and suddenly he had seemed to shrivel and collapse.

At the same time a shot rang out. Galliani, who had been struggling to prevent the soldier from setting fire to the wretched man, staggered and fell with blood oozing from a throat wound. Furigo’s wife, who had followed her husband, watched him burn alive and then with a shriek turned on the Germans and attacked them with her bare hands. They shot her too — in the face. Then they threw her body and Galliani’s into the porch and set light to it.

‘The smell of burned flesh was in the valley for days,’ one of the women said. Her eyes were dilated. She was reliving the ghastly scene as she told it to us.

‘And Signora Galliani and the girl?’ I asked.

There had been no work, no food but what they could beg from the Americans passing through. The Signora knew of a man who owned a farm at Percile up in the Abruzzi to the east of Roma. Early in July she and the girl had left Itri, walking north along the dusty road towards Rome.

I looked round the olive groves, so serene and quiet in the hot sun. It seemed incredible that these silvery-leaved trees had once been dumb witnesses to the horrible scene that these two women had described. I thanked them and gave them some money, and we went back down the track leaving a swirling cloud of dust rolling in our tyre tracks.

‘Fertile?’ Boyd asked as we reached the road.

I nodded.

The driver turned left and went down the valley to Fondi and Terracino. Round the towering quarry-scarred headland we launched out on the arrow-straight road that runs through the Pontine Marshes to the Alban Hills and the Appian Way into Rome. We stopped once near Terracino to get the dust out of our throats with cocomero, the red country melon of Italy that is full of pips and water, and again at Genzano where we had good vino bianco in a little trattoria perched high above a small lake clutched in the bowl of what had once been a crater.

The map which we had brought with us showed Percile to the east of Tivoli. ‘We’d better stay the night in Rome,’ I suggested to Boyd.

The Eternal City seemed strange without the mass of khaki that had filled its wide pavements to overflowing when last I had seen it. We came into the city by way of the Colosseum and that monstrous wedding cake of a monument that dominates the Piazza Venezia. The Via del Tritone, once the Broadway of Rome with more GI pick-ups to its credit than Shaftesbury Avenue before D-Day, looked comparatively deserted. There were fewer bicycles and fewer tarts.

I went straight to the Hotel de la Ville where I had stayed a night when it was crowded with British and American war correspondents just after the Fifth Army had entered the city. The Fascist name, Albergo Citta, had been dropped.

After booking a room on the seventh floor with a terrace, I fixed Boyd and the Italian driver up at a Swiss pensione opposite. Back in my room I was suddenly conscious of a sense of loneliness. I went out to the terrace and looked across the mellow brickwork of the ancient city to the great crouching bulk of St. Peter’s dome beyond the Tiber. Back in the dim past of the war I had stood on one of these terraces and looked across to the Gianicolo, and I had the same feeling now as then — of a city that was outside the reality of life.

Rome is a city, founded on religion, that has degenerated to a point where its people pay lip-service only to its five hundred churches and to the great sprawling palaces of the Vatican, living a life of pleasure in which any sense of responsibility to the world at large is totally lacking. That was what the war correspondents had told me that first night in the hotel bar. Whilst the guns were thundering at Trasimene and there was starvation in the refugee-crowded back streets, Rome society had talked mostly of parties and how nice it had been the year before when they could go out in their cars to villas at Frascati and Tivoli and Ostia for the hot summer months.

A girl came out on to the terrace of the neighbouring room and shot me a quick glance beneath a mop of dark hair. She wore a white evening gown cut low to disclose the swell of full sun-tanned breasts. She leaned upon the balustrade and looked down on to the roof garden across the street where people were sitting at ease in the evening sun watching two children playing hide-and-seek with shrill voices in and out of the green shrubs.

A thick-set man with an almost bald head came out and joined her on the terrace. They held hands for a minute or two looking out across the warm bricks of the ancient city to that monstrosity of white marble in the Piazza Venezia, that looks more like a monument to the fallen pretensions of fascism than a memorial to the dead of the First World War. Then they went back into their room.

That is Rome — old men, rich in corruption, and smart attractive women with no souls, offering their bodies in fee for security with side-kicks on the quiet for pleasure.

I turned back into my room, the sense of loneliness strong in me. It was a feeling that not even the exotic warmth of a bath could dispel. But as I lay relaxed in the soapy water with the sunlight slanting in through the open french windows, I understood the reason for it. For three months now I had been married to a ship. For three months I had been fully occupied, mentally and physically. I had been living with men who were alive and interested in doing a job. Now I was alone for the first time since my arrival in Trevedra — and I was alone in this pleasure city where people went to bed together too often and loved too seldom. When I had been here before the essential rottenness of its way of life had been half-hidden beneath the purposeful khaki figures of men who knew where they were going and intended to get there. Now Rome had been handed back to the Romans. The little men with bad teeth and a penchant for fish and chips and their big slouching, gum-chewing, hunker-squatting allies were gone. And I was in civvies instead of a naval uniform.

The sense of loneliness was inevitable.

Dinner was in the tiled courtyard of the second floor. I had a table to myself and a bottle of Spumante. And then I strolled up to the gardens of the Villa Borghese and watched the sun set behind the dome of St Peter’s in a gold and purple sky.

Back in my room at the hotel the first thing I noticed was the faded photograph of Monique Dupont lying on the table by my bed. I could not remember taking it out of my suitcase. But there it was — the picture of a girl of fifteen. Now she would be twenty-two, and if all went well I should meet her tomorrow.

I lay awake till the moonlight flooded the room and the tiles of Rome gleamed white between the bars of the balustrade — thinking about the girl. Though it was more than a month ago that I had read it, her mother’s letter was still fresh in my mind. I had read it on the sands of Plymouth Sound. Now I was in Rome on my way to meet this girl whom I only knew through an old and faded photograph. It was a strange quest. But now that I had undertaken it and come so far in my search it had become almost a personal thing.

Just over two years ago she had been working on a farm in Itri. She had then travelled to a place near Rome after the fall of the city. Presuming that she was an attractive girl, what would be the effect of a nature half-English, half-French, exiled in war-torn Italy for six years? Clearly she would have seen more of life than most girls of her own class at that age. She had been in Naples during the bombing. She had lived in the disease-ridden, garbage-cluttered streets beyond the Via Roma for three months. She had worked as a farm girl and seen the farm and its owners destroyed by the Germans. She had trekked north to another farm.

If she were still at that farm, she would have been there for over two years. Allowing that she was a normal, passionate girl, with as much of the animal as there should be in a human being, what would have become of her? Would she have married a local farmer’s boy? Or would she still be with her aunt, a young woman working on a farm with half the village lads sniffing round the house? Or — far more likely — would I have to seek her in Rome itself, a typist, the wife of some shopkeeper or the mistress of a business man?

In view of the thoughts that kept me awake so long, it is not surprising that I started out for Percile in the morning with a sense of excitement not unmixed with foreboding.

The sulphur springs on the way to Tivoli were open. And in Tivoli itself there were tourist buses in the square outside the Villa d’Este, the great house where the Borgias once lived. One wing had been destroyed by bombs. The rest remained, a monument to man’s fascination for the sound of falling water. The gardens of the villa fall steeply to the gorge that contains the water of the falls and every path ends in a fountain or is arched with water.

We took the Arsoli road east as far as Vicovaro, and then turned left up into the hills past the Villa d’Orazio, where the poet Horace wrote his odes, sublimely oblivious over his rich red Tuscan wine that they would become the bane of children studying the classics through the ages.

Percile was another of these mountain villages perched precariously on top of a hill. It was almost like being back in Sicily, for a naval officer does not get far inland and this was my first sight of the Abruzzi Mountains. We were already more than 2,000 feet up. All around us were peaks rising to 5,000 feet. They hemmed us in, so that there was no air and it was hotter than it was down in the campagna. We passed the rusting remains of a burnt-out tank and the brown twisted carcases of two lorries that had clearly been stripped by the local inhabitants of all useful parts in the same way that vultures strip the flesh from a dead animal. The grass was still lush here in the valley. The road ended abruptly at a blown bridge that had still not been repaired and we dipped sharply to the bed of the stream on a diversion that had originally been bulldozed by Eighth Army engineers. The broken arches of the bridge that had once spanned the fosse strode across the floor of the little valley like petrified giants raising their gaunt mortar arms to heaven in impotent fury.

Though time had weathered the destructive effect of high explosive, it was still clear that for a brief moment war had filled this little valley, now lying lazy and pleasant in the heat, with the thunder of guns and bombs and the chatter of small arms fire. There were bullet scars on the stone work of the viaduct and the roof of the little church on the other side of the stream showed the brighter colouring of new tiles as though they were battle scars.

Beside the empty stream ran a small stone aqueduct. And though it was the dry season, it was still feeding water into big concrete storage tanks. These tanks held the water that kept the grinding wheels of a mill half-hidden among the trees at the end of a short track turning all the year round.

And high above the valley and the little church and the broken arches and the mill towered the village of Fertile. The windows of its houses looked out above our heads to the mountains and there was no sign of life.

A bullock cart was coming down the track on the other side of the ford. A woman walked beside two great lumbering beasts. A man, walking up the track, shouted and waved a short cane. He quickened his pace. The bullocks stopped. The woman cringed away from him as he approached the stationary cart. He towered above her, a big man in riding breeches and gaiters. He pointed to the yoke. The cane flashed twice in the sun. The woman flung her arms up, her back against the side of the cart.

And then the scene was suddenly normal again. The bullocks were plodding on down the track. The woman was walking beside the cart, having adjusted the yoke. And the man with the cane was walking on up the track to the main road. As we splashed through the ford I was wondering whether he had really struck her or whether I had just day-dreamed it.

The bullock cart pulled in to let us pass. It was piled with dung and the flies buzzed incessantly. The driver was not a woman — it was a girl. She was tall and fair-haired, which is unusual in the peasants of the Tuscan hills. Her face was pale and strained. It was not beautiful, but had a quality that made me look at her closely. She wore a plain black dress. It hung on her loosely, for it had no belt. Her feet were bare and grey with dust, her hair hung damply on her head. But she had a certain pride of body — her breasts thrust tautly at the sack-like dress and she walked erect and easily. Her eyes met mine as we drove slowly past the cart. They were grey unhappy eyes.

We rejoined the interrupted road and turned up the hill to Percile. I looked closely at the man with the cane as we passed. He was big and thick-set with heavy brutal features. Somehow he seemed to fit the primitive surroundings. He walked with the air of a man who was cock of his own particular walk. He was like a prize bull — a powerful animal of a man with a passionate nature and a hasty temper. I felt sorry for the girl with the grey eyes. Clearly he regarded her as a serf.

But I didn’t stop. To explain to a man that women should not be beaten to ensure that they do what they are told was clearly a waste of time up here in the hills — and dangerous. The law does not mean all that much up in the mountain villages where the feudal system still exists in fact, though not in theory.

Dark stone houses, buzzing with flies, closed in on us as we climbed the road to the village. Faces appeared as though by magic at every window. And women, fat and slovenly and work-worn, crowded to their doorways to see us pass, a thousand brats clinging to their black din-stained skirts. Young girls, olive-skinned, dark-eyed and sexually uninhibited, smiled and giggled at us, as we went by.

Clearly our arrival was an event in the village.

We reached a little square with the inevitable fountain in the centre. Here old men sat smoking in the sun and women were doing the washing in the cold mountain water. The first tomato crop had been gathered in and on every ledge and roof and even in the street in front of the houses the red fruit, halved, lay drying in the sun, the pips showing yellow. We stopped and children crowded around the car. They did not speak. They just stared, wide-eyed.

I asked for the village priest, and we were directed across the square to a narrow little street that was barely wide enough for the car. It had once been stepped. But the stones were worn and time and the villagers had filled it with so much dirt that it was possible to use it as a road.

The sound of the old Lancia as it stormed the hill was shatteringly loud. The road was so narrow that we seemed to be thrusting the grey houses and the crowding faces of the villagers back on either side. Children ran behind us, clinging to the bumpers and the spare wheel.

So we reached the very summit of the village. And here, in a little square, was the priest’s house. It was not really a square. It was just that the road widened out where it stopped at a grey stone wall. There were houses on one side. But on the other, a wall topped with drying tomatoes guarded a sheer drop to the valley floor. We stopped the car and found ourselves looking down upon the road by which we had come, all flanked by mountains, towards Rome and the sea.

‘Blimey!’ said Boyd, as he got out and saw the silent gaping crowd of children, ‘we might be the Pied Piper like.’

The word ‘Inglese’ was whispered through the clutter of small faces. A ragged urchin with dark eager eyes came up to Boyd and said, ‘Sigaretta, Johnnie?’ The old cries burst forth then in a clamour of small voices. ‘Cioccolata! Sigaretta! Hey, Johnnie, gamma!’ ‘Silenzio!’

The babel of voices froze. The door of one of the houses had opened and a dark-haired man with a thin face and deep-socketed eyes stood in the doorway, his hands white against the folds of his black gown.

His dark eyes stared at me unwinking as I told him who I was looking for. Not a muscle of his face moved, but at the name Galliani I had a feeling of tension.

‘Galliani!’ he said. ‘Maria Galliani. She worked for Guido Mancini down in the valley. She is dead now.’ He said it with a disinterested bluntness that was either callousness or the familiarity with death that is perhaps inevitable in a man of his profession.

‘When did she die?’ I asked.

‘Just over a year ago. It must have been shortly after she came to the village. She had suffered and it was too much for her.’

‘And what about the girl?’

‘The girl,’ he repeated. And I had the impression he was playing for time. Or perhaps it was my imagination. There seemed no vestige of humanity in him. His voice was cold, unhelpful, as though he resented being questioned about a member of his flock.

‘The French girl,’ I said. ‘Her name was Monique Dupont.’

‘I know of no girl of that name in the village.’

‘But surely,’ I said, ‘Signora Galliani brought with her a girl when she came to live in the village. She would have been about twenty.’

He seemed to hesitate. Then he said, ‘Ah yes, it is possible that she has some French blood. She is fair — not like our mountain people. She was Maria Galliani’s niece. Her name is Monica. Why are you interested?’

I told him about Monique’s mother in England and how I had followed the trail of the girl from Naples to Itri and on to Percile.

He said nothing when I had finished. He stood there quite silent for a moment. He might have been praying for guidance. Or he might have been thinking out his line of action. At any rate he suddenly said, ‘Scusate’ and disappeared into the house.