The Wedding Officer

10

AFTER THE soldiers had shot Pupetta and sawn off her hind legs, the Pertinis had the problem of what to do with the rest of her. There was no market to sell meat at anymore, and even if the official food agency had been prepared to expend petrol on coming to pick up the carcass, the family would have been given only a few lire for it.

It was Livia who decided that they should hold a festa.

“But how will anyone pay us?” her father wanted to know. “No one has any money, these days. Not to buy meat.”

“We’ll let them pay whatever they can afford. After all, it’s better than letting good food go to waste. After the war, perhaps they’ll remember that they owe us a favor.”

“And who will we dance with?” Marisa said. “There are no men anymore.”

“There are a few. And they’ll all come if there’s going to be meat.”

They levered Pupetta’s carcass onto a huge spit made out of X-shaped pieces of wood that straddled a pile of oak kindling. The fire was lit at dawn, and by midday the unfamiliar smell of roasting beef was spreading through the village. Their neighbors helped them bring out tables and chairs, and there was no shortage of volunteers to stoke the fire or keep Pupetta turning on her spit so that she wouldn’t dry out.

Meanwhile Livia and Marisa prepared the other dishes—delicacies prepared from Pupetta’s heart, diced into cubes and served on skewers made from rosemary twigs; from her tongue, boiled and pressed under heavy stones in a saucepan; from her brain, cooked with tomatoes, pioppini mushrooms, and munnezzaglia, odds and ends of pasta; and from her liver, ground up and fried with shallots. No part of the buffalo was wasted. Vegetables were still in short supply after the hardships of the previous winter, but there were cannellini, served with a little of the beef fat, and whole bulbs of fennel baked in the cooler ashes at the fire’s edge. There was plenty of coccozza, a pumpkinlike vegetable, and tenerume, the tender spring shoots of the zucchini plant. And of course, there was fresh mozzarella, made with poor Priscilla’s milk—so miserable since Pupetta’s death that she was only producing half as much as before, but still alive at least. All in all, it was a feast such as none of them had eaten for many years, and although the circumstances were far from ideal, Livia felt that it marked a turning point. From now on, perhaps, things would start to get better.

All the men in the district came, just as Livia had predicted. There were precious few of them—only the maimed, the sickly, the very old, the very young, those in protected professions, and those with enough influence or cash to avoid the rastrellamenti. Alberto and his fellow camorristi were there, of course—Livia would have liked to have banned them, but she knew her father needed their money. Of more interest to most of the villagers were Cariso and Delfio, the Lacino brothers, who had escaped from a prisoner-of-war camp in the north and walked the two hundred miles home, right through the German and Allied lines. If they could make it back safely, how many more might eventually return?

The Neapolitans say that hunger is the best sauce, and it was not until all the food was eaten, and a respectful interval had elapsed to pay homage to its excellence, that the music began. Livia took off her apron, eager to dance, but to her surprise she found she had no partner. She looked around, hoping someone would try to catch her eye. But instead, all she caught were glances that shifted away from her, and a sudden furtive movement in the trouser pockets of the older men. Whenever she looked at them they were grabbing their testicles. It would have been funny if she had not known what it meant. It was a gesture even older than Christianity. They were warding off the malocchio, the evil eye.

“Who will dance with me?” she demanded, looking them straight in the face, one after another. “Felice,” she decided. “You were happy enough to eat my favorite cow. Will you be my partner?”

The man shuffled his feet, and did not reply. “Franco,” she demanded in exasperation of another of her neighbors. “What about you? You’ve danced with me a hundred times.”

“That was before Enzo went away,” Franco said quietly.

“What does that have to do with it?” She glared at him, but he, too, dropped his gaze. Continuing on around the men, she came to Alberto.

He was smirking. Suddenly she guessed that this was something to do with him.

“Alberto,” she said.

He nodded. “Sì?”

She let him think she was going to ask him, spinning out the moment. “Nothing,” she said, contemptuously. “Marisa, you’ll dance with me, won’t you?”

There was a low chuckle from the other men as they glanced at Alberto’s furious face. It was a sweet moment, and sweeter still when she and her sister danced the tammurriata, the sinuous, seductive dance of courtship, without any man at all. She saw the dark glitter of desire in the eyes of the men watching them, but they still grabbed their balls superstitiously through their trousers whenever she came near.

“We have Alberto to thank for this,” she muttered in her sister’s ear as they spun back and forth to the throb of the tammurro.

Then, as they were walking back to their seats, another explanation suddenly struck her. Enzo.

She ran to where the Lacino brothers were sitting with their family. “Please,” she begged them. “If you know anything at all, you must tell me.”

Cariso looked embarrassed, but Delfio spoke up. “We don’t know for sure,” he said. She noticed how his voice had changed since he went away to war—it was cracked and hoarse, as if he had been shouting too much. “In the camp, we naturally asked anyone we met for news of people from around here. There were a few there who’d been with Enzo in Russia.”

“And?” she cried.

“I’m sorry, Livia,” Delfio said. He held her gaze and she thought: He was a boy when he went from here, but now he has talked about death and seen it, and maybe dealt it out, many times. “He’s dead,” Delfio said simply. “He was in a position that came under fire from a British fighter pilot. None of them survived.”

She turned to Marisa. “Can this be true?”

Marisa was staring at her anxiously. “Livia, I’m so sorry,” she whispered.

“Poor Enzo,” she said numbly. So it had happened. What every woman dreaded, what so many women had been made to endure, had happened to her at last. She was a vedova, a widow. It seemed impossible. For the rest of her life she would wear black, and sit at the front of the church during Mass, like an old grandmother. And Enzo—poor Enzo—was dead. That beautiful body, the body she had kissed, made love to, slept alongside, laughed with—that young, virile body was already under the ground, his flesh decomposing, in a grave that was itself in some distant country she could not even picture.

Thoughts tumbled into her brain, one after the other. Why had no one told her earlier? Because of the feast, she supposed. No one had wanted to come and interrupt the preparations with this terrible news, in case they were the cause of the festa’s cancellation. And why hadn’t Quartilla written? As his mother, she would have been sent the official notification. For a moment she clung to the hope that Cariso and Delfio were wrong, that the reason Quartilla hadn’t been in touch was because there had been no letter, but looking at their somber faces she could tell that they weren’t.

She had seen the grief of women many times over the least few years. After the initial shock, the wife or mother usually collapsed, shrieking and howling, tearing at her own hair and clothes in a public display of pain and misery, shouting at God and the saints, cursing and weeping. It was accepted, and looking at the faces around her she could tell that it was even expected.

But she did not howl. Instead, a deep and murderous resentment filled her heart. This was the Allies’ doing. Allied bullets had killed Pupetta. Now an Allied pilot had, from the safety of the skies, shot her poor husband, while he fought in a war that was none of his making. And these people had the nerve to call themselves Italy’s liberators.

She turned and walked away from the fire, into the darkness, so she could be alone. It was only then that her legs gave way and she fell into Marisa’s waiting arms. She allowed her sister to help her into the house. Outside, the square slowly emptied as the villagers slipped away quietly one by one.

She did cry then—she howled and wailed and cursed. But it was not only Enzo she was crying for. Until that day, she had been able to hope that when the war was over, and Enzo returned, things would be better. Now she knew that life was going to get hard, harder than she had previously ever imagined it could be. She grieved for Enzo, but she was also crying for herself.