"It was him as plain as day. That big head and that nose and those jowls. But nobody believed me. They laughed! They insisted that the Pope wouldn't dress like a common priest, the Pope wouldn't escape like that. Except for Freeman, they called me stupid and crazy, but in the end they had to admit it was him. And he was lucky to have a carriage. If he'd had to flee on foot, it would have been like this." She hitches her skirt and waddles a few steps in double time.
"Like…a goose!" laughs Sandor.
"Like a pppp-pig!" explodes Goffredo.
When Eleonora's imitation of the portly pope ends, the three of them are left gasping for breath. That returns them to the present. To the oncoming darkness. To the imminent fighting.
"Sorry, my friends, I didn't find any food in the monks' cellar."
"I can do something about that," Goffredo replies.
With his flint stone Sandor lights the candle end he always carries in his pocket, and holds it up as Goffredo opens the knotted corner of his handkerchief. It is the last—the true last—hard bit of his cheese from home. It glistens like a lobe-shaped pearl in his open palm as he offers it to her.
Eleonora smiles at Goffredo but shakes her head. Her eyes go to Sandor's. They have exchanged glances—a moment here and a moment there—all afternoon. Now, however, their gazes lock. When it isn't a threat, a held gaze is always a promise. She can't quite understand his promise, but it has only been an afternoon. She intuits that it is far-reaching, the way she intuits that he is a man with courage—perhaps a man with …over-reaching courage.
With his candle Sandor goes into the shadows by the church wall and comes back with a wild flower for her—a wand of fragrant yellow bells.
Eleonora smiles at length, wrapping her fingers round the stem.
Goffredo takes measure of this smile, his stomach tightening. This is strange, he thinks, considering that she asked for food and not a flower. Perhaps she doesn't like cheese. But no, the truth is that Sandor has something that he doesn't have….and how to elaborate this truth?
This something isn't cheese.
Rome, Italy - April 30, 1849
It is sunny and hot today; it is the day to bar the way of the French army. Goffredo, Sandor, and the others are setting up barricades. The tactic is the same across the city: against a line of carts they amass mattresses, chests, wardrobes, chairs, barrels, loose pavement slabs, rope spools, and the lacquered confessionals carried out of churches. By noon it is done, and the volunteers under Garibaldi retreat with their canons and animals across the Tiber. In a wayward formation, they begin to climb the sparsely inhabited hillock of Monteverde with its cowpaths and vineyards and pass through the lower gateway of the Janiculum Walls.
Along the stone ramparts of these old defense walls, the lookouts and sharp-shooters loyal to Garibaldi are already in position. Leaning on the tops of their tall rifles, they call out greetings to the arriving lines. The smell within the lines as Goffredo and Sandor go by is a mix of gunpowder, dirt, vegetation, animals, and unwashed men. A fellow with long, swinging side-locks and a sketch pad tucked under one arm passes the two on the left. They are already familiar with him: he is Gerolamo Induno, the painter from Milan who accompanies Garibaldi everywhere. In all honesty, his presence bothers Goffredo considerably. How can a man stay calm enough to draw a picture in the middle of a battle? Goffredo can't fathom it. In his town an old painter passes through every so often to paint Madonnas in courtyards and roadside chapels…Madonnas are one thing, but soldiers? Nothing could be more absurd.
Goffredo wonders when they will finally see Garibaldi. None of them—not he nor Sandor nor Laffranchi nor Swissman—have had a glimpse of the general yet. Once they've exited through Porta San Pancrazio, their regiment captain—with long hair and a long beard, like Garibaldi—tells them to disperse into the open countryside around Villa Pamphili. No general in sight here either. Their orders are to take cover in the hollows, in the blind spots in the winding paths through the grass and vineyards, or behind the farm cottages with their fringe of umbrella pines. They are told to throw themselves on their bellies in a sort of ditch and do so without understanding why. Or at least Goffredo doesn't know why. On his left Sandor lies completely still and on the alert; the last one to drop into position on his right is Swissman, who has just exchanged words with an officer and learned that the French are headed towards the Vatican walls below them.
Although nothing has happened yet, Goffredo's stomach is squeezed tight. What does he know about being a soldier? Nothing. The shock that Sandor is right. And that those perfect, interweaving formations in Campo di Marte in Alessandria, the county seat, during his boyhood were made up of real men who had learned to do things he had no idea about. Could he have really believed otherwise? Today is his lesson for having finished off his boyhood as an idiot.
"The Bluebacks think they have an easy job," Swissman says.
No one answers him. What does it matter what the French believe if Garibaldi is going to outsmart them? You'll see, today's arrivals have been told. There'll be no relying on artillery. Just surprise attacks. And man-to-man fighting.
Their officer passes over their heads, growling at them to be quiet. Goffredo's throat is parched, and there's no getting any water for who knows how long to come. The dust is rising, and with it, a dull pounding noise in the distance. He and the others lift their heads from the ditch for a look. Three or four hundred meters from them, there is a black funnel of smoke. The fire from their sharpshooters and cannons from up on the Janiculum walls is stunning the French in their orderly lines.
But of course the French have plenty of other soldiers, and these are marching up Monteverde for a headlong fight. Goffredo and his comrades wait in suspense, Goffredo with his cheek pressed against the dirt. When the first bullets pelt the grass by their hollow, he is sorely tempted to put his hands protectively over his head and curse his red shirt, but refrains. His eyes smart with the sting of sweat and he rubs them. The familiar smell of his hands momentarily eases the anxious knot in his gut... He is halfway into the strangely-calm thought that leaving this ditch could mean never seeing that beautiful girl, Eleonora, again—when suddenly, on their officer's shout, Sandor's hand grips his shoulder, and a force of will that is more than that of Sandor, or even of Sandor and him together, sends him up the dirt incline and into the gunfire.
He turns broadside to shield himself and lives despite the odds—the long moment of bullets passing without contact to either side of him. He coughs from the smoke. He sees sooty, incredulous, close French faces, their hands jabbing the loading rods down their muskets, their captains' indecision—consulting with each other on their rearing horses-- as to whether to defend their line from the left, from where Goffredo's comrades are pouring down from the wall.
He feels Sandor's arm round his shoulder. His legs accelerate in time to Sandor's. He begins trotting— Now they'll see how this army in rags knows how to fight!, trotting alongside Sandor, running on and into the heels of others. Smoke blinds him and he loses Sandor. He runs in the same direction. Thirsty. He's damn thirsty. He hears the horse before he sees it. A white stallion.
"The General's Marsala," someone calls out from a black cloud.
The good smell of gun powder. The orders from the mouths of bugles. The smoke that opens and lifts like fog. In one clear swatch, Garibaldi on Marsala—in a broad-brimmed black hat and his sword drawn —criss-crosses back and forth through their lines. Goffredo fires his musket, stumbles over a blue-clad body, reloads the musket in time with the thumping of his heart, and fires again, keeping track when he can of Sandor's position. A battle is not the clear-cut match between winners and losers but a blur of short skirmishes…and this tripping over the dead. A cannon booms at close range and he wonders, is it ours? Where are the drums? He hears some more barked words—in Italian—from another officer, not theirs. Sandor has disappeared. When Goffredo sees a fellow soldier mounting his bayonet, he does the same. And he grasps his musket like a spear now—a spear that slashes a hole in whatever or whoever rushes at him.
Twice he feels a splat of something on his hands: he presumes it must be blood but