The little girl remained still against the door.
Then the silence broke.
And the terrorizing sounds of the bullets hit her ears.
They stopped their lethal run against the heavy metal frame that reinforced the wooden door of the villa.
Later on that day her uncle would have counted them: seven holes, seven bullets, seven chances to get killed right there, against that door, in the entry hall of the family villa that had been built centuries before and still stood up, proud, at the center of the piazza in that small village where, up to those seven bullets, she thought she was spending just another summer vacation..
Those seven bullets stopped a few inches from her head.
She was seven years old.
And that was not an ordinary summer vacation.
The little girl was just one of the thousands and thousands of Italians rushed out of the cities to find refugee in the country side when the Nazi Army started their ignominious retreat to Germany.
The little girl has never forgotten that eerie silence and that sound.
Then she grew up and she told that story to her children and to the children of her children.
To me. And to my daughter.
“Guarda. Guarda. Ecco la casa” (Look. Look. That’s the house)” she is now telling to us.
We are at my brother’s house. It’s after dinner and we are scattered on couches and chairs.....we talk aloud and laugh a lot ...the balcony’s windows are open....mosquitoes are sucking our blood mercilessly.....we jokingly slap each other pretending to kill them. My daughter laughs at any slap.
My brother is showing for the first time to me, my daughter and our mother the film he taped last winter when he went to visit that same old town where those seven deadly bullets traced their trajectory in the air.
My mother had never returned there in 30 years.
This is the first time she sees again the town, the streets, the hills and the villa.
In that same villa she is pointing at us I too have spent some of my summers, since I was 10 years old.
Then our family had to stop going there. The villa went on sale following the direction of my grandmother’s brother.
Our country dream was over.
My daughter is fascinated by what she has seen on the tape so now that is over and we go back to our chattering and our ice cream she approaches my mother.
“Nonna, I want to hear the story of the Nazi again”.
My mother smiles and takes her outside on the balcony. They seat there, despite the mosquitoes, and they watch the sea shining under the moon in the distance.
And my mom begins her story.
They arrived on their jeeps out of the blue, like they were the owners of the town.
It was late morning. She was downstairs playing with a little friend, the daughter of our villa’s housekeeper. The three jeeps arrived from the side of the “vigneto” (vineyard).
The Nazi soldiers were holding their guns, ready to shoot.
The night before a group of Partigiani (Italian Resistance Army} had killed one of them, in a place one hour away.
The Nazi’s rules were crude and simple: for each Nazi killed, 10 Italians would have been killed or made prisoners.
So they arrived and were looking for revenge.
My mother knew anything of this. She put all these information together only later on from the people who witnessed the episode.
The Nazi had started shooting from the beginning of the street, they had been already ravaging another nearby village and made prisoners and killed one man.
They were releasing the last adrenaline burst still flowing in their sick blood when they stopped in the middle of the piazza, right in front of our villa.
They stopped and, not even getting down of the jeeps, started the fire spreading bullets in circle, randomly.
That’s when the seven bullets hit the door.
Then they left, with the speediness of death.
My grandmother was upstairs when all of this insanity was having place.
She told us that when she heard that terrible loud noise from the street she went running down the stairs looking for my mom.
Just when the Nazi started the fire she had arrived in the middle of the long marble stair. If she wouldn’t have stopped mid way and continued to run outside she could have been hit by one of those seven bullets.
But, as she was running down, she saw my mom.
The little girl was standing flat against the door, still. Like frozen.
And so she reached her and hugged her.
As soon as the Nazi left, all the village’s women started to run in and out of the house, to comfort, to check. There were only few men in town, mostly the oldest one, because during the day the ones still in the ripe of their ages and able to work were in the fields, working hard to break the soil, taking care of their farms in those difficult conditions and hiding at any suspicious noise.
The youngest men had already left at the beginning of the war. Some were in Russia, others in Africa, but others had fled the military and were trying to come back home, others had joined the Partigiani in their brave fight against the Nazi and the Fascisti (the Italian Government Army and the police) and in doing so preparing the way for the Alleys troops.
But the little girl didn’t know anything of this.
Until those seven bullets, she had spent that summer playing nascondino (hide and seek) with the other kids in the piazza or along the vineyards, running under the olive trees or the cherry trees, or helping her mom in the vegetable garden, pulling out weeds that, cruelly, would show up again.
She used to trot along our housekeeper while she was fetching the water at the fountain nearby, or going down to the lavatoio (lavatory) with the pile of dirty laundry in balance over her head.
Many of my mother’s memories are also mine.
The villa at the center of these stories was a two story building with an elegant allure built in the middle of ‘800. It had belonged to our family from my nonna’s side. Her ancestors were the aristocratic and noble family of Oddo degli Oddi, in Umbria.
Yes, this means I have some drops of blue blood in my veins.
My daughter too, naturally. Her children still might have some.
Do noble blood dilute with the passing of the time?
The villa had a marble stair leading to a small, dark hall with a wooden floor that opened to a large kitchen with a huge brink oven and iron pans hanging from some racks. From the ceiling were hanging several raids of garlic and peppers, and bunches of dried herbs and sausages hang to dry and be sliced on the bread.
But my mom’s memories are a lot bittersweet than mime: she told me that during the war she was often hungry and the house didn’t have any abundance of food.
My mother likes to tell me that many times for dinner they would slice a loaf of bread and simply spread on top of each slice some precious piece of ham or sausage. That’s it....... only the spreading, just to give the bread a hint of the flavor.
I remember a big, wooden dark table in the middle of the kitchen and a narrow balcony facing the green valley underneath. There was a large cassapanca (chest) and a storage drawer only to keep for the bread. From the kitchen you could go to the large salone (ball room) with a dining room and 3 tall and wide windows facing the piazza.
There was a piano there. My uncle used to play it sometimes.
Then from the salone you could take another narrow hall that was leading to the sleeping quarter. There were 4 rooms opening on the hall, two on the right, two on the left, and a fifth one at the end of the hall. That one was where I used to sleep. .
One of these rooms was the so called stanza delle patate (potatoes room). This was the room where were stored the potatoes along with apples and castagne (chestnuts) and mushroom too. This room was always left in the dark.
I was scared of that room.
At night I used to keep a pitale (potty) underneath my bed to avoid going to the bathroom. It was a white ceramic potty.
My bedroom was small but lovely, with lots of light during the day, an iron framed twin bed with a huge, dark colored painting of the Saint Mary with baby Jesus in her arms hanging on top of the bed. La Madonna had such a sad and fixed expression...not a smile......I didn’t like it ...
My balcony was facing the same view of the kitchen.
All the floors were covered with dark hardwood and they were creaking and making noises in the silence of the night.
Underneath this first floor of the villa there were the big cellar and the storage room for tools of any kind. The cellar was half empty and full of spider webs but it wasn’t difficult to imagine it full of bottles pulled out from their wooden cell to be brought upstairs during many of the banchetti (social dinners) that in the years my family was used to organize in the villa.
But this happened before the war destroyed the life like it had always been and known.
But after the war another rhythm had taken over and the house kept being filled with daily activities.
It was mostly a house of women, who were working hard, keeping themselves company in the solitary days of the war and then in the solitary days after the war finally was over.
That war had ripped away so many of their loved ones. Our cook got her husband killed in Abissinia.
Our farmer’s son was kept prisoner in Russia. Nobody had been left untouched by the war.
But I was a kid. How could I have known at that time about all of this?
One of the most waited chores for me was the preparation of the dough.
I remember how much I loved to go with my mother to the nearby bakery when my nonna, my mom and our cook, Severina, would had finished to work the dough for the week’s pastry or for the bread. That was the tradition: each woman would prepare her own dough at home but would bring it to the bakery to be cooked.
Each of them could be seen walking in the streets holding - perfectly balanced on their heads - a flat and large tavola (usually a square cherry wood board) on top of which they had put the round shapes of the breads or the dough for ciambelle, maritozzi, biscotti all’anice or al finocchio or uva passa.
Their boards would slightly dance up and down, to the right and to the left, on top of their heads and in this way they would go, lined up like black dressed, fat and crazy odalisques, one hand holding the board and the other one firm on their hips. They would talk to each other, telling jokes and sharing gossip.
Weaving the usual life threads of any community.
The smell in the bakery was unbelievable.....Heaven would smell like this, I used to think.
But life was a lot like heaven, after all, during those summers.....
.............................................
Now my mom had finished to tell my daughter the story she wanted to hear.
“Tempo di andare a dormire, bimba bella” (Time to go to sleep, beautiful baby) she says to her.
And the three of us say goodnight and we go, lined up, one after the other one, down the stairs and out in the street.
Time is an illusion, that’s what the poets say, isn’t?
How, otherwise, would be possible for me, even now that I am writing, to smell clearly for a brief, a very brief moment, the same subtle, but dense smell of that bread?
But I am not Marcel Proust.....that wasn’t the smell of a madeleine...we were not in Paris...I am not a great writer.
This was just a story told by a nonna to her grandchild during a summer night in Italy.
While the moon in the distance was shining over the sea.
