Page 14 of Escape to Tuscany

Richenda smiles. ‘Good. Now, go and enjoy Florence, you lucky thing. I’ll update you as soon as I have news.’

6

Stella

Berta’s murder, the public display of her mutilated body – all this was meant as a deterrent. It was supposed to cow the people of Romituzzo into withdrawing all support for the partisans, but it didn’t work. If anything, our movement gained more supporters. If they weren’t fit enough or bold enough to join up and fight, then they helped in other ways. They gave food and medicine, clothes, whatever they could spare. Above all, they stayed silent. If the Germans expected us all to inform on our neighbours in the hope of saving our own skins, then they were sorely disappointed.

Their vile actions didn’t intimidate our community. I’d be lying, though, if I said they didn’t scare me. I suppose I was always aware that my work was dangerous, but somehow that danger always seemed theoretical. Now it was very real and it took a little while before I felt strong on my feet again. During that time, I had a near miss I never forgot.

It was a Saturday morning and I had to cycle out to one of the partisan encampments near San Damiano, a pretty medieval hill town about forty minutes’ ride away. I remember that my bicycle basket was full of woollen vests and pairs of socks, which some of the women in Romituzzo had knitted to be distributed among the partisans. They had been clever about it – rolled it all up into little bundles to look like baby clothes, and tied them tightly with any scraps of ribbon or lace they could find in their sewing boxes. One of them had even found and repaired an old, chewed-up knitted rabbit belonging to her son, who was now a partisan himself. If anyone asked, I would say that I was going to visit a cousin who had a new baby. But under my winter cloak I had the really valuable stuff: two bags slung cross-wise across my body, one filled with handguns, the other with ammunition.

To get there in good time, the best way was to take the main road south: the via Senese. There was a small checkpoint there, just a hundred metres or so beyond St Christopher’s church and its cemetery, and it was usually manned by a couple of German soldiers. Romituzzo wasn’t important – it wasn’t a heritage site like San Damiano, or a local hub like Castelmedici – but the Resistance was active all over the valley, so the Germans wanted to know who was entering and leaving. In the early days I made a point of going through often, to visit a friend or go mushroom-hunting or some such harmless errand. They stopped me a few times to look at my papers, and then after a while they didn’t any more. But that day was different.

I was coming up to the checkpoint when I realised that the soldiers weren’t wearing Wehrmacht field grey. These were two men with red insignia and red tabs on their collars: volunteer members of the Waffen-SS. These weren’t foreigners posted on guard duty in an unfamiliar backwater. They were Italians, perhaps even Tuscans. They knew our landscape; and if they didn’t already know us, they had ways to find out.

I don’t know what was stronger, my revulsion or my fear. For just a moment I had the urge to turn back, but of course I didn’t. That would have been as good as an admission of guilt and, besides, the partisans needed those guns I was carrying. There was a shortage of weapons everywhere. So I cycled steadily on and, when one of the SS men raised a hand to stop me, I showed him the bundles and explained all about my supposed cousin. I was unusually nervous, so I talked too much and even invented names for the baby and its siblings, which I immediately forgot again. And all the time I could feel his eyes boring into me. I didn’t dare look at him in case I knew his face.

He clearly wasn’t convinced by my story, and no wonder. He frowned and started picking through the tight little bundles of wool, turning them over in his hands. Perhaps he thought I had hidden something in them. I began to feel sick now, and I was praying that he wouldn’t start untying the ribbons because, if he did, he would see that this was clothing for full-grown men rather than anything fit for a child. I could feel the straps of those two bags cutting into my shoulders and the handle of one of the guns poking into my side, and all I could think about was what had happened to Berta and how that could now easily, so easily, happen to me.

And then there was the ‘ding’ of a bicycle bell, and I looked up and saw our parish priest approaching the other way, from the direction of Siena. He was little and old and round, and his name was don Anselmo. I didn’t like him one bit. From the way he preached, you’d think that communism was a bigger threat to Italy than the Nazi occupation; and if I was not a communist, I knew where my loyalty lay. I’d heard plenty of his homilies because my mother insisted I go with her to Mass every Sunday. That wasn’t a problem for me since – unlike Achille – I believed in God. But I didn’t want to go to St Christopher’s, to don Anselmo’s church. I wanted to go to St Catherine’s, where the dynamic young priest, don Mauro, preached about God’s boundless love and our duty to care for the widow, the orphan and the alien.

‘I don’t like don Anselmo either,’ Mamma said when I told her this. ‘But don Mauro’s too subversive, and he’s bound to run into trouble. St Christopher’s is the far safer choice.’

I hated my mother’s logic, but I understood it. More than anything, I knew that obeying her would win me a little more freedom to do my work. So I listened to don Anselmo inveigh against communism every Sunday, and every Sunday I disliked him more. When I saw him approaching that checkpoint with his silly round-brimmed hat and his cassock flapping around, I suppose I hoped that my mother was right and my attendance at St Christopher’s would protect me even a little now. I had no idea.

The SS men must have seen don Anselmo already on his way out of town. Perhaps they knew him, or even simply trusted him because he was a priest. At any rate, one of them waved him on, but he simply waved back with a smile and halted his bicycle right next to mine.

‘Why, it’s Stella Infuriati,’ he exclaimed, just as if we’d bumped into one another in the market square. ‘And where are you off to in this nasty cold weather?’

‘I’m taking some presents to my cousin who’s just had a baby,’ I said automatically, and then I regretted it because don Anselmo knew everything about everyone. He would know that I was lying.

Don Anselmo stretched his hand out to touch one of the little bundles. ‘How lovely. Please give her my best wishes. It’s Teresa, isn’t it, who was expecting the baby? Your cousin Teresa?’

‘That’s right,’ I said. ‘My cousin Teresa.’

‘I remember when she came to visit. Charming girl. Well, Godspeed, my child.’ He smiled up at the SS man, who glowered at him and motioned for me to pass through.

I didn’t hesitate. I pedalled off and kept going smartly all the way to San Damiano, but the whole time I was wondering why don Anselmo had gone along with my lie and, more than that, had actually compounded it. He’d lied so easily, too. But if he was a good Christian, if he was any kind of human being at all, then surely he wouldn’t want to let me die like Berta did. That was the best explanation I could come up with, and it satisfied me for the moment.

*

When I came back to town, I saw don Anselmo pottering around at the gates of St Christopher’s cemetery. I waved to him and kept pedalling, but he called out to me.

‘Stella! There you are. You have kept me waiting, haven’t you?’

I didn’t really want to stop. I was hungry and tired and I still didn’t like don Anselmo very much, even if he had helped me this once. But I could sense the SS men at my back, watching me, and I knew how much better it would look if I really did show myself to be on good terms with him. So I got off my bike and propped it up in the church porch, next to his own rather elderly machine.

Don Anselmo opened the door of the church and ushered me in. I barely had time to dip my fingers in the holy water before he was ushering me up one of the side aisles and into the sacristy.

‘We shall have some coffee,’ he was saying as he hurried me along. ‘Real coffee – none of that foul barley or chicory stuff. I had a birthday recently, and some dear friends in Turin managed to find me a little packet of good coffee and get it to me, although by rather an elaborate route. Of course, I’m assuming you like coffee, too. Do you?’

‘Yes,’ I said. I couldn’t understand why we were in the sacristy if we were going to drink coffee together. Surely we should be across the road in the parochial house.

Don Anselmo was rooting around in a cupboard. ‘Ah!’ he said, and pulled out a torch. It was a big metal torch of the kind the Germans carried, and I wondered where he had got it. He switched it on and threw open another cupboard, revealing a heavy wooden door built into the wall behind.

‘I thought we could take this route to the house,’ he said. ‘I should like you to see it.’ Fishing a key from somewhere in the breast of his cassock, he unlocked the door and beckoned me forward. He shone the torch through the doorway and I saw a narrow landing with a flight of stone steps leading off it. After a few metres, they vanished into pitch darkness.

Don Anselmo gave me the torch. ‘You take this,’ he said, ‘and I shall go ahead of you.’

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