The sense of loneliness was inevitable.
Dinner was in the tiled courtyard of the second floor. I had a table to myself and a bottle of Spumante. And then I strolled up to the gardens of the Villa Borghese and watched the sun set behind the dome of St Peter’s in a gold and purple sky.
Back in my room at the hotel the first thing I noticed was the faded photograph of Monique Dupont lying on the table by my bed. I could not remember taking it out of my suitcase. But there it was — the picture of a girl of fifteen. Now she would be twenty-two, and if all went well I should meet her tomorrow.
I lay awake till the moonlight flooded the room and the tiles of Rome gleamed white between the bars of the balustrade — thinking about the girl. Though it was more than a month ago that I had read it, her mother’s letter was still fresh in my mind. I had read it on the sands of Plymouth Sound. Now I was in Rome on my way to meet this girl whom I only knew through an old and faded photograph. It was a strange quest. But now that I had undertaken it and come so far in my search it had become almost a personal thing.
Just over two years ago she had been working on a farm in Itri. She had then travelled to a place near Rome after the fall of the city. Presuming that she was an attractive girl, what would be the effect of a nature half-English, half-French, exiled in war-torn Italy for six years? Clearly she would have seen more of life than most girls of her own class at that age. She had been in Naples during the bombing. She had lived in the disease-ridden, garbage-cluttered streets beyond the Via Roma for three months. She had worked as a farm girl and seen the farm and its owners destroyed by the Germans. She had trekked north to another farm.
If she were still at that farm, she would have been there for over two years. Allowing that she was a normal, passionate girl, with as much of the animal as there should be in a human being, what would have become of her? Would she have married a local farmer’s boy? Or would she still be with her aunt, a young woman working on a farm with half the village lads sniffing round the house? Or — far more likely — would I have to seek her in Rome itself, a typist, the wife of some shopkeeper or the mistress of a business man?
In view of the thoughts that kept me awake so long, it is not surprising that I started out for Percile in the morning with a sense of excitement not unmixed with foreboding.
The sulphur springs on the way to Tivoli were open. And in Tivoli itself there were tourist buses in the square outside the Villa d’Este, the great house where the Borgias once lived. One wing had been destroyed by bombs. The rest remained, a monument to man’s fascination for the sound of falling water. The gardens of the villa fall steeply to the gorge that contains the water of the falls and every path ends in a fountain or is arched with water.
We took the Arsoli road east as far as Vicovaro, and then turned left up into the hills past the Villa d’Orazio, where the poet Horace wrote his odes, sublimely oblivious over his rich red Tuscan wine that they would become the bane of children studying the classics through the ages.
Percile was another of these mountain villages perched precariously on top of a hill. It was almost like being back in Sicily, for a naval officer does not get far inland and this was my first sight of the Abruzzi Mountains. We were already more than 2,000 feet up. All around us were peaks rising to 5,000 feet. They hemmed us in, so that there was no air and it was hotter than it was down in the campagna. We passed the rusting remains of a burnt-out tank and the brown twisted carcases of two lorries that had clearly been stripped by the local inhabitants of all useful parts in the same way that vultures strip the flesh from a dead animal. The grass was still lush here in the valley. The road ended abruptly at a blown bridge that had still not been repaired and we dipped sharply to the bed of the stream on a diversion that had originally been bulldozed by Eighth Army engineers. The broken arches of the bridge that had once spanned the fosse strode across the floor of the little valley like petrified giants raising their gaunt mortar arms to heaven in impotent fury.
Though time had weathered the destructive effect of high explosive, it was still clear that for a brief moment war had filled this little valley, now lying lazy and pleasant in the heat, with the thunder of guns and bombs and the chatter of small arms fire. There were bullet scars on the stone work of the viaduct and the roof of the little church on the other side of the stream showed the brighter colouring of new tiles as though they were battle scars.
Beside the empty stream ran a small stone aqueduct. And though it was the dry season, it was still feeding water into big concrete storage tanks. These tanks held the water that kept the grinding wheels of a mill half-hidden among the trees at the end of a short track turning all the year round.
And high above the valley and the little church and the broken arches and the mill towered the village of Fertile. The windows of its houses looked out above our heads to the mountains and there was no sign of life.
A bullock cart was coming down the track on the other side of the ford. A woman walked beside two great lumbering beasts. A man, walking up the track, shouted and waved a short cane. He quickened his pace. The bullocks stopped. The woman cringed away from him as he approached the stationary cart. He towered above her, a big man in riding breeches and gaiters. He pointed to the yoke. The cane flashed twice in the sun. The woman flung her arms up, her back against the side of the cart.
And then the scene was suddenly normal again. The bullocks were plodding on down the track. The woman was walking beside the cart, having adjusted the yoke. And the man with the cane was walking on up the track to the main road. As we splashed through the ford I was wondering whether he had really struck her or whether I had just day-dreamed it.
The bullock cart pulled in to let us pass. It was piled with dung and the flies buzzed incessantly. The driver was not a woman — it was a girl. She was tall and fair-haired, which is unusual in the peasants of the Tuscan hills. Her face was pale and strained. It was not beautiful, but had a quality that made me look at her closely. She wore a plain black dress. It hung on her loosely, for it had no belt. Her feet were bare and grey with dust, her hair hung damply on her head. But she had a certain pride of body — her breasts thrust tautly at the sack-like dress and she walked erect and easily. Her eyes met mine as we drove slowly past the cart. They were grey unhappy eyes.
We rejoined the interrupted road and turned up the hill to Percile. I looked closely at the man with the cane as we passed. He was big and thick-set with heavy brutal features. Somehow he seemed to fit the primitive surroundings. He walked with the air of a man who was cock of his own particular walk. He was like a prize bull — a powerful animal of a man with a passionate nature and a hasty temper. I felt sorry for the girl with the grey eyes. Clearly he regarded her as a serf.