Chapter 45
Stella had expected Domenico’s house to be in darkness but lights blazed from both downstairs rooms. Her uncle must be up and about, revitalised by the visit from his pal Goffredo.
She stepped into the hallway. The smell that greeted her reminded her of the mornings after Ricky had invited all his mates round.
Great rumbling snores rose from the living room.
She tiptoed in. Domenico lay in his chair, head back, mouth open, sleeping soundlessly.
Lying flat out on the couch, one cushion under his head, lay another fully clothed figure.
But this wasn’t Goffredo, this was the father of the man who ran the salumeria. What on earth was he doing here?
Now, Stella’s eyes swept the room. An empty bottle of Basanotto, two packs of cards strewn across the table and four empty glasses.
A snort came from the far corner. Stella whipped around.
So that’s where Goffredo was, zonked out, Violetta’s hat crammed on his head.
Mamma mia! What had they been doing? It looked as if only the fourth card player had managed to make it home.
Stella was not going to deal with this mess now. Quietly she crept upstairs to bed.
* * *
Domenico’s hand shook as he lifted the coffee cup to his lips.
‘Don’t look at me like that, Stella.’
‘Just wondering if you’d like a glass of water and a painkiller.’ She pursed her lips.
Domenico nodded, eyes closed. He hadn’t moved from his chair. ‘It feels like Leo’s taken his chisel to my skull.’
‘At least you haven’t got to face your wife like Goffredo has. The way that woman was hammering on the door was enough to waken the dead.’
‘I feel like the dead.’ Domenico groaned. ‘The water – please!’
‘Just coming up.’ He looked so pitiful she couldn’t help chuckling to herself as she fetched them both a glass and carried them back in.
‘Grazie mille! Sorry, Stella, and sorry about the hat. It’s definitely beyond repair.’
‘What were you doing with it? Is that stain red wine?’
‘We had a bit of an accident with Goffredo’s glass. And then we were doing forfeits. Whoever lost their hand of cards had to wear it and recite a limerick.’
‘A rude one, I bet.’ Stella tried to look stern.
‘There was a young lady from Puglia who came over all peculiar…’ he croaked.
Stella raised a hand. ‘I don’t think I’d better hear any more.’
Domenico took a huge swig of water. ‘Ah, how I needed that.’
Stella turned Violetta’s hat in her hands. ‘The state of you! And this! You’re right, this is beyond saving, even the lining is coming adrift.’ She stroked the silky material. ‘This is strange. It feels like there’s something tucked in here.’
‘It must be the way hats are made,’ Domenico said.
‘I don’t think so, it doesn’t feel right.’ Stella used her little fingernail to ease the loose stitching. ‘I can just see the edge of some paper, that’s odd.’
‘It probably replaced something Violetta couldn’t get hold of. People had to use all sorts during the war.’
‘I’m not so sure. Let me get some scissors.
’ She stood up and headed for the bathroom.
Retrieving a pair of nail scissors from the cabinet above the sink, she sat back down and put on her reading glasses.
She snipped at the stitching and gave the thread a sharp tug.
The lining came away, a piece of folded graph paper with it.
Stella unfolded the paper. It was crisscrossed with dotted lines and spotted with a series of dashes and crosses. ‘What on earth? This looks like some sort of little map.’
Domenico rubbed his eyes. ‘Let me see… Wait a moment, that dotted line there – it follows the shape of the path that leads through the hills, the one poor Pietro took when he tried to flee the village that day.’
‘Would that be Sant’ Agata’s?’ Stella pointed.
‘Not if that other line in the top left shows the mountain ridge. If this map is drawn to scale that cross wouldn’t indicate the centre of the village, it would mark the location of Fernanda and Violetta’s parents’ old rustico.
’ Domenico scratched his head. ‘But why would Violetta want to hide that in her hat? She must have known those paths like the back of her hand.’
‘An English POW on the run wouldn’t have.’
‘I know my brain isn’t as quick as it was, Stella. And with this hangover…’ Domenico winced.
‘That’s because you weren’t there last night when Fernanda showed us the two coin necklaces.’
‘Two necklaces? Now you really have lost me.’
‘Why don’t I make us some more coffee and I’ll tell you everything,’ Stella said. She hurried off to the kitchen, as keen to get back and share her discovery as Domenico was to hear it.
Her uncle stared in astonishment as Stella recounted her tale.
‘Don’t you see?’ Stella said. ‘Two pendants forming a heart, the message on the postcard and now this map showing the paths leading from the old rustico – it all proves Violetta and Amy’s grandfather Lance were in love and she was helping him. And maybe other prisoners on the run.’
‘But Violetta was a fascist – that German boyfriend, those parties in Sanremo. Everyone knows that woman betrayed the village.’ A vein was jumping in Domenico’s forehead.
‘Maybe all that was a front. Don’t you see? What if Violetta wasn’t passing information to the Germans, what if she was spying on them?’ Stella’s voice came out all in a rush. ‘What if Violetta was working for the partisans?’
The cup dropped from Domenico’s hand; dark coffee spread across the table.
‘My dear, dear friend Fernanda! How I have wronged her.’ Tears sprang to the old man’s eyes.
‘It’s okay, Domenico.’ Stella dabbed at the coffee with a tissue. ‘You can’t blame yourself. The whole village had it the wrong way round, Violetta kept up the pretence so well. And you and Papà weren’t the only ones to disapprove of the way Fernanda refused to disown her sister.’
‘No, no, it is all my fault.’ Domenico wrenched at his hair, his eyes wild. ‘I shouldn’t have tried to conceal the truth. I shouldn’t have kept quiet all these years.’
‘What do you mean?’ Stella asked, trying to play down her concern at her uncle’s near hysteria.
Domenico’s shoulders sank. He turned his grey face to hers. ‘I had an argument with your papà on the morning of the day he died. I told him I’d discovered something about your nonno. Something you should know.’
Stella swallowed. She had a strong suspicion she wasn’t going to like what she was about to hear.
‘Arturo was so angry that day,’ Domenico began.
‘Well, that was my fault,’ Stella interrupted. If she closed her eyes she could still see Papà grabbing at the bedhead, his face contorted with pain.
‘He wasn’t pleased with you defying him, of course he wasn’t.
But it was me he was angry with, and our father and himself.
The shop was quiet that morning. I was serving; Arturo decided to go down and check on some stock.
The wife of the original owner of the bar came in.
I remember my heart sinking, knowing I would be subjected to all the village gossip whether I wanted to hear or not.
She had such a loud voice too; she’d set my eardrums ringing. ’
‘You could hear her over the church bells,’ Stella remembered.
‘But now I’d happily listen to her twenty-four hours a day if it would turn back the clock.
I nodded and smiled as she was talking, not taking much notice, like I always did.
And then she dropped her bombshell. She said she’d seen you and Gino on a red moped hightailing it out of the village.
Arturo could not help but overhear, he came thudding up the stairs.
The look on his face sent her scurrying out of the door so fast she left half her purchases behind.
‘Your papà started to rant and rave about Gino and Fernanda, calling them every name under the sun. I told him you were a teenager in love and to keep you and Gino apart would only drive you away. He wouldn’t listen, just said he would never have a boy from Violetta’s family under his roof.
So I told him something… something I will always regret. ’ Domenico’s voice cracked.
Stella sat quietly, hands in her lap, waiting for him to gather himself.
‘I told your papà that our family was no better than Gino’s.
He banged his fist on the shop counter, demanding to know what I meant.
Immediately I regretted opening my mouth.
I tried to pretend it was a throwaway remark but Arturo wasn’t having it.
His face was scarlet, the look in his eyes frightened me half to death.
I bolted the shop door and tried to calm him down.
But there was no going back. I had to tell him the truth. ’
Domenico took a swig of water. ‘Would you fetch the small wooden box on top of the chest in your room? There’s a brass key taped behind the back of the bookshelf on the landing.’
Stella climbed the stairs. Her feet felt heavy, her sense of foreboding increasing with every tread. She found both the box and the key easily enough. She forced herself to resist the impulse to peek inside. This was her uncle’s tale to tell. She had to let it unfold.
She paused in the doorway of the living room. Domenico’s eyes were closed. For a moment she thought he’d nodded off but then she noticed his clasped hands and the way his mouth moved silently. He was praying. How bad could this be?
The contents of the box rattled as she set it down. His head jerked up.
‘Would you open it, Stella, please?’
She fumbled with the lock, the hinge opened with a squeak. Old coins, buttons and even a radiator bleeding key. But amongst the bits and bobs lay a folded sheet of lined paper. She looked at Domenico; he gave her the smallest of nods.
Stella smoothed out the paper. It was a list of names written in a spidery hand. She read the first of them: ‘Signor e Signora Pedemonte.’
‘They were the couple who concealed the little Jewish boy.’
Stella already knew what she was looking at but she didn’t want to believe it. She read the next name: ‘Eduardo Pastorino.’
‘A quiet fellow, walked with a stick. He’d been a communist agitator in the Fiat factory in Turin.’
‘These people were killed in the rastrellamento…’ Stella looked to Domenico for confirmation.
‘Those and others. And this was our papà’s handwriting.’
‘Are you telling me that my nonno was responsible for what happened here?’
Domenico rubbed his forehead. ‘I found this a few months before Arturo died, tucked inside an old book, and I vowed to myself I would not tell a soul. Oh, how I wished I had kept that promise. When I showed it to Arturo he insisted it was a forgery. But he knew, Stella, he knew. I believe I broke his heart that day.’
‘But he was so angry when Fernanda found me with Gino and marched me home.’
‘He still blamed Fernanda’s family for everything.
I think he was trying to make excuses for our papà by convincing himself that Violetta used her feminine wiles to suck him into her scheme.
Of course, he was angry with you for sneaking off with Gino but that was just a small part of why he worked himself into a frenzy.
I think perhaps he was scared that Fernanda knew your nonno had played a part and that one day she might let that slip. ’
Stella couldn’t speak. One sheet of paper and her whole world had changed. The nonno she’d never known wasn’t a tragic victim of the war but a secret fascist who had died in the atrocity he’d unleashed upon the village.
‘But you told me they shot Nonno. You told me Papà watched his father die. You told me about the blood on his zoccoli.’
Her uncle sighed. He ran his hand through his sparse, white hair.
‘Whenever I thought about that day, there was one thing that always struck me as odd. It was how calm your nonno was. He told me and Arturo to run and hide, he obviously did not want us to see what he knew would unfold that day, but for himself and Mamma he showed no fear. I was proud of him for being so brave. But now I realise it was because he believed he was safe. But something went wrong, a trigger-happy soldier perhaps or a case of mistaken identity.’
‘Why didn’t he cry out and save himself?’
‘I’ve wondered about that for many years.
He could have raised his arm in a fascist salute, shouted political slogans, given the name of his contact – that might have saved him.
But saved for him for what fate? The villagers would have meted their own form of justice on him and perhaps our family.
Everyone realised that when the war was over there would be a day of reckoning. ’
Domenico coughed. He shifted awkwardly in his chair. ‘I believe our father turned to face the wall in order to protect us. He sacrificed himself to save our mamma from shame and me and Arturo from being scorned and shunned. It was the only decent thing he ever did.’
‘But what about Fernanda and Gino? For all these years you’ve let their family take the blame.
’ If the truth had come out, the schism between their families might have healed; the decades-old feud set aside in time.
Perhaps she and Gino… But what was the use in thinking of those wasted years?
Maybe with the tables turned, Fernanda would have been determined to keep her son away from the granddaughter of a traitor.
‘Until you told me about Violetta and Lance, I believed Violetta and my father conspired together. I asked myself what good would come from revealing my papà’s part, of opening up old wounds again?
Your poor widowed mamma needed the support of neighbours rallying around.
You and your brother and sister had lost your father.
You needed love and friendship, not people turning their backs on you.
My revelations had helped cause my brother’s heart attack.
The least I could do was protect his family.
But now, everything we knew about Violetta has been turned inside out.
I must go to see Fernanda, to tell the truth to her face. ’