and bakeries and butcheries and grocery shops, the butcher, the baker, the candlestick maker all knew for certain that … The sludge of rumour clogged the arteries of the whole country. Mussolini had gone mad. Hitler was dead. No, Mussolini was dead and Hitler had gone mad. The German presence increased and the talk was constantly of what Hitler might do: Hitler intended to kill the King. Hitler was going to kidnap the Pope. Hitler had kidnapped Mussolini. Where was Mussolini? He had not been seen since the afternoon of the twenty-fifth when he left an audience with the King. Life centred on the wireless news broadcasts but nothing was ever clear.
Annabelle drifted through each day, shoulders hunched, awaiting the news that increasingly came from Enrico. A subtle shift had occurred within the family. They seemed to have agreed to appoint him their minister of information and he was absent all day and much of the night. The people he spent his time with, such as Professor La Pira from the university and other opponents of the Regime, began to meet openly and talk about a new order. Suddenly Enrico was one of the grown-ups and Annabelle was the only child left. She had given up even the pretence of study and Enrico had not opened a book, she knew, for months. What was the point of it all? They would probably all be dead soon anyway. Hitler would kill them all. Mussolini was missing and she wondered what had become of Claretta? Her throat hurt and she cried herself to sleep at night, fat tears dribbling slowly down her cheeks onto the damp patches from the night before. She never allowed anyone to see tears in the daytime – Enrico would think she was a baby. No-one noticed.
CHAPTER 4
Florence 1943
Into thin air
Most people listened to Radio Londra. The real news, however, came with Enrico every evening. Pavolini had escaped ahead of a mob intent on hanging him. Senator Morgagni had shot himself, leaving a note saying: ‘The Duce has resigned. My life is finished. Long live Mussolini.’ Few were the men who took that recourse. Many were those who might never have been fascists. Where was Mussolini? The answer was different every day: he was at home in Rocca delle Caminate; no, he was on the island of Ponza; no, he was on La Maddalena. After more than two weeks, Enrico learned from a spy in the Carabinieri that Il Duce was a prisoner at Gran Sasso, high on a peak in the Apennines. A prisoner of the Italians.
‘We think they will use him to bargain with the Allies. There are negotiations going on to end the war,’ he said.
But where was Claretta, Annabelle wondered. There was no news of her whereabouts, only scurrilous newspaper stories of her excesses and voracious appetites. The day after Mussolini’s arrest, crowds converged on the Petacci villa, scrawling obscenities across the walls, but there had been graffiti every day for years now and apart from an increase in the insults, they had come to no harm. The family too had disappeared. Though she harped on it to Enrico, he had no interest in the fate of Claretta or her family.
Then one evening he arrived with news. ‘It looks like Badoglio has had them arrested. The whole family.’ He was not sympathetic. ‘Serves them right. She is nothing but a puttana and the family has profited from that.’
‘How can you!’ They were all used to Enrico’s swearing and brutal language, but how could he call Claretta a whore when he himself would sleep with any girl he could? Men! Could he not see that it was all for love? There was no use protesting though – he treated her as a silly child. She could not flounce from the room, for fear of missing something.
‘There are more important things to consider than the fate of that troia,’ he said. ‘We are being bombed off the face of the earth. And no-one is in charge here.’
It was true. Not a day passed without news of bombs pelting down upon the cities. Naples obliterated. Genoa in ruins. One of the constant bombing raids on Milan nearly destroyed Leonardo’s Last Supper. Il Cenacolo barely survived and three of the surrounding walls were destroyed. Fascist rhetoric was at a crescendo. The Allies are destroying our cities! LUCE newsreels shouted about the effects of the barbarous English aggressors. Ezra Pound’s radio broadcasts spewed hysterical anti-Semitic and anti-American propaganda. ‘Radio Londra knew of the bombing,’ Pound raged, ‘was involved in it, make no mistake, the English want to wipe you from the face of the earth.’
Lies, lies and more lies from the British radio and the Anglo-Americans. The newspapers screamed it in gigantic headlines, lamenting the philistine approach of the Anglosphere to the art treasures of Italy. Look what they have done to La Scala, seat of more than a century of glorious music. But art was not then at the top of the Allies’ concerns. It was industry and communication that had to be demolished. Turin and Milan and their factories were being bombed out of existence as refugees fled the north in terror. Not far from Florence in the Val d’Orcia, her mother’s friend, the Marchesa Origo, had taken in hordes of children whose parents sent them away, to save them. Food was scarce because the south was devastated and crops were destroyed. In Palermo people were starving. Thousands were dead and there was no sign of a let-up in the Allied ferocity. Everywhere was bombed except, it seemed so far, Florence. Because Hitler loved Florence, said Florentines. Hitler loves our art, they said.
To Annabelle it was all news from afar. She had shifted a small table nearer to the French doors to the garden, in a vain attempt to get more of the syrupy air. Although the sun was long since set, the sultry August night brought no relief. Thunder rolled about the hills but no storm came to save them. The heavy rugs and tapestries of her father’s study oppressed her in the summer, mouldering in the humid Florence basin. The thought of all those children sent far away from their homes, to complete strangers, gave Annabelle a squirmy feeling in her stomach. It was better than being bombed, but then, how did being bombed feel anyhow? She had lived her whole life between Impruneta and the palazzo in Borgo Pinti – summer trips to the seaside at Riccione did not count. There had been trips to London, and once to Paris, but that was another world and so long ago, she was too small to remember it – a world when people travelled for pleasure.
Annabelle had no interest in her geometry homework. The problem with not going to school was that there were no school holiday and no school friends. The geometry of her world was as remote to her as the flat Mollweide Projection in its giant frame, on the wall to the left of the doors. Her world and her sky grew smaller and flatter by the day.
She sat back in her chair and stuck both feet straight out in front of her, flapping them back and forth. Childish, they looked in the brown buckled sandals. The exposed summer skin between the straps was bronzed, her tidily clipped toenails perfectly suited the sensible sandals. Her mother’s toenails used to be painted scarlet. She would bet Claretta’s were too. Poor Claretta. Annabelle no longer envied her, but she was still anxious to know what had become of her – was she even alive? She blew damp wisps of hair from her forehead. Her parents were out for the evening and the house lay stunned in the heat. The only sounds were the drifting voices and footfalls from the narrow medieval streets where heels struck flint from the stone and voices racketed from wall to wall, but the outside world was muted by heavy doors and metre-thick walls.
Annabelle followed the thought of scarlet nail polish upstairs to her parents’ bedroom, where the door was ajar. She rarely entered their room; her heartbeat accelerated a little and her breath fluttered as she pushed the door a sliver further and edged in. The expanse of pale blue silk – coverlet and cushions, upholstery and rugs – was more her mother’s domain than her father’s. He often slept in the dressing-room, to the side. Annabelle had never seen her parents in bed together. Did they do that, she wondered? Do that. Do what? Her hazy ideas of what that might be were formed from books and from Enrico’s offhand tales of his conquests.
On a high shelf of her father’s library was a leather-bound volume of the Kama Sutra of Vatsyayana by Sir Richard Burton. Rainy afternoons during their parents’ rest-times, it used to provide the perfect pastime for two adolescents. But many of the illustrations, while fascinating to Enrico, were terrifying to Annabelle. Surely real people could not do that? Beside it stood a very old book called Justine or The Misfortunes of Virtue by the Marquis de Sade, but, said Enrico, it was better if she did not see that. There was another, a Latin text by Marcantonio Raimondi, with sixteen sonnets by Aretino.