the students' table.
"Horses very fast," said Sandor, his head cocked.
"Piedmont deserters," hazarded Laffranchi reluctantly. "Looking for food…or worse."
The rhythmic thundering came closer and closer, like a wave rising against the house. Then what seemed like an imminent avalanche subsided into a clomping noise that passed from one wall to the other, encircling the inn.
Wordlessly, a thin man pulled open the door.
"NO!" shrieked the inn-mistress. "It's bandits, then! Close it," she ordered.
Wordlessly, the thin man stepped outside.
Those inside listened, stunned, to the next galloping circle round the building. Then the red-haired man stepped outside as well.
A moment later, Laffranchi followed.
Thinking of their rifles, Sandor and Goffredo went, too.
There was a half moon in the sky and the men in a row by the wall watched the strange race of four chestnut horses fully saddled but riderless. They had escaped from the battlefield. Their bridles bounced and whipped against their manes and their saddle horns; there were no commanding hands for them. Their stirrups flopped and twisted against their sides; there were no booted feet for them.
"The men on them died for a stupid king," said the thin man.
Laffranchi drew a breath. "We've lost, but they are lost."
Finally, when the lead stallion had swerved to the right and conducted the others back into the woods, the men went back inside. With pursed lips, the inn-mistress shut and bolted the door. The inn-keeper offered a round of grappa on the house, for, he claimed, they all had peculiar looks on their faces.
"Here," he said as he poured, "put the man back into you."
Put the man back into you.
Put the man back into you.
The most fervent believers went to bed.
The next morning Goffredo and Sandor set off with the others towards the Scrivia, to pick up the trail for Genoa. The students had insisted that this was the only feasible route to Rome. From Genoa they would find passage on some steamboat or clipper and make their way to Civitavecchia, then walk inland to Rome. If they walked directly to Rome from here, they would have to go up and down the countless hills and mountains of the Apennines, they argued. They were not used to that. They were from flat river villages, or at most from a university town like Pavia. They calculated it would only take them a week or at most ten days to reach Garibaldi, doing things in the sensible way.
As things turned out, they had to make a detour. A huge detour. This derailment all began with the students' whinging about food. After three days along the river and sleeping under trees, they had had enough. Arriving in the town of Busalla, they declared they would go no further without scrounging up something decent to eat first. Goffredo offered them his last sarass but they wouldn't hear of it. "Enough of your damn cheese," Laffranchi said.
Sandor exchanged low words with Goffredo. These students could use a year or two of experience in a military barrack at the edge of the Empire. He was tired of their easy fatigue, whining, refined political distinctions, and railings against the last pope. Sometimes he felt they didn't grasp the significance of these days, these months. It was their chance! When Kossuth had tried to give Hungarians a country last year, he Sandor had been thousands of miles away doing mindless patrol duty.
A farmer to let them sleep in his stable and to give them some hot rice and a jug of his wine. After they'd filled their stomachs, the students sprawled spread-eagle on their backs in the warm hay. When evening came, they started to sing a song about Garibaldi's two loves, but Sandor hushed them.
The following morning brought worrisome news. A mule caravan of four traders with a load of salt and salted fish to sell in Busalla, gave them news of another revolt of citizens, this time in Genova, against the Piedmontese Guard who they were certain would surrender to the Austrians.
"The citizens are armed. Guns were distributed at the Arsenal yesterday," recounted the one with grey in his beard.
"Without a fight?" Laffranchi asked.
"That's right. By direct order of General Avazzana, head of the Militia. We can't just wait and let Austria crush us."
Goffredo imagined them: men, women, and children, all with guns to the barricades. Priests with rifles on their shoulders and a cross swinging around their neck. But when the younger trader added that Victor Emanuel II was sending the bersaglieri to put down the revolt, his heart sank. Another colossal mistake by the Royal House of Savoy. What was the new King thinking?
"I say no to Genoa," the red-haired man from Switzerland declared. "I say we follow the overland route, the Via Francigena, to Rome."
They put it to a vote, and while the Swiss man's proposal prevailed, the division between them seemed truly permanent now. On the one hand, there were the students, with their cocky, young-man feeling of being more radical and courageous, and their comments in Latin or Greek to the exclusion of the others; on the other hand, there were Morelli, Kemenj, the Swiss man and the Pole. "I am afraid for them," Sandor murmured to Goffredo. "There'll be blood in Rome, lots of blood."
When they climbed their first hill up from the river in the morning, the sea came into sight.
"Bello!"
"Bello!"
"Madonna, che bello!"
None of them had ever seen it before.
Its blueness. Its horizon. It did not care how much they had studied or how radically they believed. It whetted their sense of curiosity; it offered them its calm.
It took them close to a month to walk to their war in Rome.
Washington DC - July 10, 2008
Angie sat waiting on a hard plastic chair in the hall outside Father Giovanni Martini's office in New North Hall at Georgetown. The rest of the corridor was deserted, and she supposed that at 11am the students attending summer-school courses were in class. The doors, including Father Giovanni's, emitted a tomb-like silence. She knew it was important to talk with him but hoped it wasn't going to take long. Under the bandage her arm wound was beginning to itch and she just hoped that changing the dressing today would stop that. After that, she had some grocery-shopping to do for her mom, and then Stan, who didn't want her appearing on camera during the police investigation into her shooting, had asked her to let some print journalists interview her. At length she heard the metallic jolt of the bar on the fire-door to the stairwell, and three men in black appeared, deep in conversation and carrying lecture folders.
She knew this was a Jesuit university, the oldest in the world actually, and that Jesuits were a progressive and open-minded intellectual order, but that didn't stop her from thinking as they approached that her family had never liked priests. It went back for generations, on both sides of the family, and was still a strongly felt thing. No priest had officiated at the service for her father at the funeral home. The undertaker had been surprised by this. Weren't they Italians? They had to be Catholic. Astonishment had been written all over the man's face. But her family from northern Italy failed to fit the clichés about Italian Americans in other ways as well. No phoning-each-other-every-other-day sort of family ties; no cannoli or lasagne or five-fishes dinner for Christmas Eve; no dark almond-shaped eyes; no loud talking with a lot of gesticulation.
"Hello," said the priest with the short grey crew-cut.
She recognized the authority-conveying baritone voice from their phone conversation.
"Good morning, Father Giovanni."
His brown eyes looked like large floating corks behind the magnifying lens of his glasses. He shook her hand heartily—which did make her warm to him a tiny bit—and introduced his colleagues, who couldn't have been more physically different from him. Father Kevin looked to be younger, perhaps in his early forties, a pale red-haired Irishman with eczema