Anna led me back under the eaves of the limonaia and watched as I turned the key in the latch and yanked at the handle. “La tira su, signora,” she said, pushing up at the air with her palm. I pulled the handle up and the door opened.
Inside she showed me the small kitchen, demonstrated how to turn on the gas stove, opened the refrigerator to reveal an unlabeled bottle of wine and a triangle of hard cheese wrapped in a towel. She gestured to a loaf of bread covered with a cloth on a sideboard. I repeated the word grazie with several degrees of sincerity, delight, appreciation, and helplessness. Each time she nodded and replied softly, indulgently, “Prego.” Then she brushed her palms together, as if at the completion of a job well done, nodded at me with an expression of finality, and slipped out the door. I followed, taking the key from the lock and closing the door behind her. I stood watching as she crossed the drive and briskly disappeared under the arbor. I was on my own.
I had signed a month’s lease with Signora Doyle and paid the last installment before I left the States. In her final letter, which included directions to the villa and instructions about the key, she had advised me that she would be arriving on the second week of my stay. She knew I was a professor at a small college and that I had published a few mildly successful works of historical fiction. She concluded her message lightly: “I look forward to meeting you and reading your work. If you are looking for old stories, of course, you know you are coming to the right place.”
* * *
In my first week at the Villa Chiara, I spent the mornings in the apartment, drinking tea, eating fruit and bread, reading simple Italian stories, and struggling with grammar exercises in an Italian text until noon. Then I drove out to the various hill towns for long meals on the terraces of restaurants with views that lifted my spirits like angels’ wings. After this I toured the local museums, churches, and—those favorite haunts of the historical novelist—graveyards. Some of these included discreet monuments in fenced areas listing the names of those who had died on the battlefield in the last war. In a general way, I knew the story.
Italy didn’t enter World War II until June 10, 1940, when Mussolini stepped out on his balcony at the Palazzo Venezia and declared hostilities against “the reactionary democracies of the West.” By that time, France, Belgium, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, and Norway had surrendered to Hitler’s armies and were occupied by German forces. The next day Britain responded by bombing Turin, Genoa, Naples, Milan, and Taranto, all centers of industry and transportation. Francisco Franco sent Mussolini a congratulatory message from Spain. Mussolini believed the war would be over in a few months.
By this time many Italian antifascists had fled to the hills, often to avoid conscription into the army. They lived in forests and caves, scavenging for food from local farmers. These were the partisans, comrades who lived and fought by stealth, much admired by the local villagers for their courage and their fraternal spirit. As is often the case in wars, when the fighting was over, a majority of survivors claimed to have secretly supported the winners. Once it was clear that the Germans would be defeated and Mussolini’s fascist government would fall, minor functionaries all over the country changed their stripes and their allegiance and joined the partisan forces. Italian soldiers abandoned their units; they too sought refuge with the partisans.
Mussolini’s fall from power was swift and then slow. After twenty years of calling all the shots, he was removed by a vote of the council he had himself created and arrested by the king, who appointed a new prime minister. This new government spirited the Duce away to an alpine resort-prison and immediately surrendered to the Allied forces already swarming up the peninsula from Sicily. Overnight these invaders were transformed from enemies into liberators. Italian troops were disbanded. Whole units were taken prisoner by the occupying German forces and sent to “work camps” in Germany. Those who escaped joined the antifascists in the hills, where they resolved to do whatever they could to make the German retreat from the south difficult and, if possible, fatal.
Hitler wasn’t ready to give up on Mussolini, his friend and mentor in the maniacal business of total despotism. He rescued the Duce from the mountaintop and installed him in luxurious lodgings on Lago di Garda, creating a protofascist state called the Republic of Salò, where diehard Italian fascists now flocked to support their obviously lost cause. Italy had effectively no government or two governments, depending on how you looked at it. The country devolved into a state of civil war. Major cities—Rome, Florence, Milan—were occupied by Germans intent on a scorched-earth policy as they retreated from the Allies. Everyone on every side knew what the end would be, and that it would be brutal.
Nowhere was the moral confusion attendant upon the defeat of the Axis powers as thoroughgoing as it was in Italy. In the final days of that horrific war, few could call themselves heroes, but all were called upon to muster whatever courage they could find just to stay alive.
The end had plunged the country into despair. Was that why I found so few memorials to the glorious fallen in Tuscan graveyards? Italy hadn’t just surrendered; she changed sides entirely. These days no one talks about it, but those who can remember know perfectly well that the American forces landing in Sicily weren’t charged with liberating innocent citizens of a besieged democracy. They were coming to kill Italian fascists.
* * *
One evening in the second week of my stay, as I turned in at the gate in my rented Fiat Panda, a reliable machine I had come to think of as a friend and which I addressed as Signor Panda, I discovered a battered Fiat Cinquecento parked close to the staircase of the villa. My landlady had arrived. Doubtless she had just made a long transatlantic journey and being, as she must be, a woman in her fifties, she surely looked forward to a quiet evening and an early bedtime. The sun was setting; it stayed light until well past the dinner hour, and I had my own plan in place: a dish of pasta, a bottle of local red wine, and a notebook in which each evening I organized impressions, facts, and details of the day’s excursion. I also looked forward to an activity now sadly lost to the civilized world, writing a long letter to a friend. From the table where I worked I could see the villa staircase, and as I finished my meal I watched Anna Falco come out of the cousin’s door carrying her big basket. She held the handles close to her chest in the crook of her arm and ascended the staircase, letting herself in at the door, which was evidently unlocked. Dinner for the padrona, no doubt. How pleasant it must be to return to your villa and have a fine meal delivered to you, your bed already made and the sheets turned back, the palatial rooms clean and welcoming, all comfort and quiet in your sweet world of privilege.
But then it occurred to me that Signora Doyle wasn’t alone; she lived with her mother. Her ancient mother, as my colleague Ruggiero had described her. I had spotted this wizened lady a few times in the past week, dressed all in black, carefully descending the stone steps, one hand gripping the rail, the other wrapped around the curved handle of a black cane with a rubber tip. With slow but surprisingly sure steps, she crossed the drive and went in under the arbor. Presumably she dined with the cousin. But now that her daughter was home, dinner came to them. The reunion of mother and daughter must be an occasion much anticipated by both.