The Villa Triste by Lucretia Grindle Read Free Book Online

clarification. ‘But the Fascistoni, too. We’re going to have to fight them both.’
    ‘We?’
    She nodded too eagerly. ‘Yes. That’s what the Partisans are doing. They’re forming units, brigades, in the mountains.’
    ‘Don’t you think,’ I said, ‘that it would be a good idea to leave “the fight” to the Allies?’
    I looked at her. My sister was all of nineteen. Not much more than a child. ‘Who do you think you are, Issa?’ I asked. ‘What role are you playing? Nemesis? This may come as a shock,’ I added unpleasantly, ‘but General Eisenhower just might know more about this than you do.’
    Even if I hadn’t already been angry with her, this refusal to grow up, this readiness to treat everything as a jolly version of yet another game or outing with the mountaineering club, infuriated me. Enrico was one thing. He and Carlo were soldiers, after all. They at least knew what they were doing. Issa and her silly friends, on the other hand, had no idea what they were talking about. I doubted Massimo had ever shot anything other than a rabbit, probably with his father’s fancy shotgun.
    ‘So,’ I said, ‘let me get this straight. These gaps, made up of you and your friends, you’re going to do what?’
    ‘I told you.’ Issa spoke too cheerfully, as if she was encouraging a stubborn child. ‘We’re going to fight.’
    ‘We’. That word again. Fear throbbed through me. I laughed as nastily as I could.
    ‘A bunch of students?’ I said. ‘With pitchforks and rabbit guns? What are you going to do?’ I asked. ‘Line up against the Third Reich? Take on Hitler’s army?’
    Issa looked at me. Then she stood up. The animation had gone from her face. Been replaced by something harder, and much more frightening.
    ‘Yes,’ she said, and walked back into the house.
    By noon, a high scrim of clouds had made things dull. It was still warm, but I no longer felt the heat of the day. A clammy feeling washed over me. I started another picture, this one of Papa, on the terrace, wearing his old white hat and making notes at his table, but gave up when I got to the background. I didn’t want to paint the mountains. Instead, I sat staring at them. I was still staring at them when the first bombs fell.

    The Allies always insisted afterwards that they had been trying to hit the train station at Campo di Marte. It was, one would have thought, rather a large target to have been missed so completely, and in the days that followed a sort of sick joke went around to the effect that they must be hard up in America and Britain if their pilots couldn’t even afford glasses. Because, although they did hit a couple of the factories at Refredi, the station was untouched. Most of the bombs they dropped that afternoon fell in piazzas and streets. Where they hit houses. And the children’s hospital.
    Of course, I did not know that at the time, while I watched it happen. All I knew was that there was a strange sound, and then, in the east of the city, a flowering of fire.
    I rose to my feet, almost hypnotized as petals of smoke blossomed and turned rapidly black, washing the sky like the sky in my painting. This is it, I thought. This is our Turin, our Cagliari, our Grossetto. There, they had bombed the carousel at Easter. And killed the priest while he was giving absolution. And four little girls who were herding geese in a field.
    Isabella came running out onto the terrace.
    ‘Bombs,’ I said stupidly, without looking at her.
    It occurred to me that neither of us had actually seen a bomb explode before. Not that it mattered. I knew exactly what this was. I recognized it the way you recognize things in dreams. ‘They’re bombing us.’
    Issa gripped my shoulder, her fingers digging into me. I put my hand over hers. From the terrace, we could see black specks of planes. Several explosions came, very close together. And there must have been sound, but the strange thing is, apart from the first droning, I don’t remember