Between Enemies Read Online Free PDF Page B

over the hills. He got them out before their parents and siblings could see them. ‘Better not to rub salt into the wounds,’ he said to Donna Maria as he climbed onto the driving seat. My aunt saw the girls off with the ghost of a wave. They did not reply, or say a word, or do anything at all except keep their staring, bewildered eyes fixed on the back of the priest’s hat. When the gig passed through the gate the sentries sprang to attention. I followed the whole scene from up above, glued to the window along with Grandpa, who was stroking his moustache to give it some semblance of shape. Neither of us had slept a wink. A silence more stolid than that of the mules had fallen upon the garden, the streets, the Villa, the entire village.
    It took three days to recover all the medallions of the Madonna, because two of the dogs had ended up at Pieve di Soligo, and were only found by a company of Bosnian pontoon-bridge builders returning, decimated, from Segusino.
    All that had taken place in the church had to be erased from the memory of the village. The medallions were collected up by the priest’s housekeeper, a woman of sixty or so about the height of a tub of cheese and with a face carved out of boxwood, who hung them all round the neck of the Virgin, a blue and white wooden statue standing beside the altar in the left-hand nave. In this way the little housemaid-like face of the Queen of Heavenwas suffused with the light of reflected gold. But it didn’t last long, because Aunt Maria was furious: ‘A hen has more sense than you,’ said she, towering over the housekeeper. ‘Take away those foul baubles. Give them to the blacksmith and have him melt them down, at once! Don Lorenzo will find a good use for the metal.’ My aunt then spent half an hour in church telling her beads. She thought it a point of honour, a personal matter, to mollify the affront suffered by the Virgin Mother. Poor Aunt, she really did believe in the Church. She thought of it as a relic of the Roman Empire, and the only political institution worthy of respect out of all that have set up house in this martyred peninsula of ours. Besides, after the Battle of Caporetto it was not easy for anyone to put their trust in a dwarf king and his pack of imbeciles.
    ‘It’s odd,’ I had heard Grandpa say more than once, ‘that such a tough customer as your aunt is such a God-botherer.’ Grandma, on the other hand, had her own ideas about it: ‘Ever since she was little Maria has relied only on herself, on what one can see and touch, not on the twaddle of the black beetles.’ She had studied with intention to become a schoolteacher, but then – the war in Libya had begun just two days after her thirtieth birthday – she joined up in the Red Cross. I was very fond of her, because she was different, as if there were something masculine in her, and then because our parents, hers and mine, had all died together in that shipwreck. I don’t think I ever met anyone more conscious than she of her rank in society. She knew in her innermost being that privileges are paid for by responsibilities, and these were two things to be borne with grace. But, ‘Grace,’ she would make a point of saying, ‘is a gift from God, not something to be come by on request.’ In the melancholy of her features I could discern a barely concealed trace ofdespondency which ill fitted the generosity of her nature.
    Donna Maria had left the house in Venice a month after the Great Disaster and had taken me with her to Refrontolo. Grandma had immediately entrusted her with the running of Villa Spada. Partly to distract her thoughts, of course, but also because this came in very handy, as she herself was rather devoid of practical sense. Since then Aunt Maria had administered the Villa and the farm with a firm hand, thrift, and a touch of daring, managing even to make a success of the miserable patch of vineyard that stretched from the little temple as far as the ditch that marked