“Mussolini? Was at the Villa Webber?”
“Under house arrest.”
“Why?”
“Half the country wanted him dead. The other half wanted him sainted. He was a liability, so the Carabinieri decided they’d hide him on the most remote island in all of Italy.”
“Did it work?”
“For about three weeks.” Marcello laughed. “One day il Duce is out on the patio at the Villa Webber, and a German plane flies so low overhead that he and the pilot wave to one another. It’s clear that a rescue attempt is imminent, so the Carabinieri move him to Gran Sasso, and of course, we all know what happens next.”
I hadnoearthly idea what happened next. But as was so often the case in my early twenties, I was mortified to admit it. It’d be years before I figured out that Mussolini had been sprung from Gran Sasso, an Italian ski resort in the Alps, by German special forces and that Hitler installed him in Milan as the leader of a Nazi-backed puppet state called the Italian Social Republic. That when the Allies arrived in Northern Italy and it becameclear that the republic would fall, Mussolini and his mistress tried to flee only to be discovered in a convoy of German soldiers near the shores of Lake Como. And that when they were executed two days later by Italian partisans, the Italian Communist Party claimed responsibility.
“Marcello,” I said, after a few minutes. “What happened to all the fascists? After the war?”
He laughed a little. “They’re all still here. They just put away their black shirts.”
57.
MARCELLO SLOWED THE CAR,and before I knew it, we were pulling up to a small duplex that sat close to the road. There was no real yard to speak of and not much in the way of a driveway, but someone had gotten creative and converted what little yard there was into a parking pad for a couple of cars, then buttressed the house with some nice landscaping—licorice plants and sour figs and pretty flowering bushes that reminded me of our azaleas back home but were actually myrtle-leaved milkwort.
I stared at the house through the windshield of the car, already a little in love with the place. It was totally unassuming but so quintessentially Italian that I could almost convince myself I’d dreamed it up. The exterior had been painted an almond white that had bleached in the sun, and the roof, which sloped gently in our direction, was surfaced with those barrel-shaped terra-cotta tiles that were ubiquitous on the island. “It’s cute,” I said, but Marcello didn’t hear me because he was already out of the car and making his way up the path.
“That tree there,” he said, pointing at a small tree with a broad canopy of leaves, “is an apricot tree. Next month, the fruit will be everywhere.”
“That sounds great,” I said, and he laughed.
“Tell me how you feel after you’ve cleaned up the rotten fruit for a year or two.”
I followed him up to a small uncovered porch where two doors with tempered glass windows stood side by side.
Marcello rapped on the second door, and a few moments later an old man, whom I could only assume was Giovanni, threw it wide open. I sayold manonly because I was twenty-three, and anyone over forty seemed ancient by comparison.
The two men greeted each other like old friends, and Marcello confirmed that I was indeed meeting my prospective landlord. “This isGiovanni Chirri,” he said, and then for Giovanni’s benefit rather than mine, he added, “Mi conosceva quando ero giovane e stupido.”
The only word I could puzzle out wasstupid, but I plowed ahead. “So nice to meet you,” I said as effusively as I knew how, and Marcello translated.
“È molto giovane, vero?” said Giovanni, and Marcello told me that he was pleased to meet me, too.
Giovanni beckoned us to follow him inside, where the tour was apparently going to begin in the living room, a small room that faced the street. He spoke quickly, and I couldn’t understand a word he was saying, so I just grinned at him like a fool, then spun around, taking in the whitewashed walls and terrazzo floors.
I didn’t think the place looked half bad. I mean, sure, there were cracks in the plaster, and I could hear a toilet running down the hall, but I was in no position to be choosy.
There were a couple of pieces of furniture in the living room—a lumpy-looking sofa and a vinyl-clad chair and a floor lamp with a missing shade. None of it was spectacular, but I knew what was wending its way to us from Charleston, so I asked Marcello if, by any chance, the furniture stayed. There was some back-and-forth, and Marcello said yes, it could—if Giovanni decided to rent the place to us. It sounded like the wordifwas doing a lot of work, so I tried to adjust my expectations accordingly.
Marcello was an unreliable translator. As we toured the apartment, I got the distinct impression he was withholding information I might not want to hear, but then there were times he paused to give me background that Giovanni probably assumed I understood. Marcello explained, for instance, that because the winters in La Maddalena were so mild, very few of the houses on the island had central heat.
“What do we do when it gets cold?” I asked.
“Put on a sweater,” he said, and I laughed a little nervously.
“A lot of people buy stufette. They’re small portable heaters. Don’t sleep with one on, but they can be good if you want to take the chill off.”
After that, I didn’t bother asking about air-conditioning.
The kitchen, which sat in the middle of the apartment, was nothinglike the one I’d grown up in. There was next to no cabinetry, which meant there were no real countertops. Everything in the room was freestanding: a teeny-tiny fridge, a stove, and a sink, which had a wall-mounted contraption above it that turned out to be a drainboard and cupboard in one. I thought of the Christmas china my mother had foisted on me and realized that if we got this place, it was never going to come out of the box.
Off the hall was a small bathroom that boasted a tub—with the same bendy nozzle I’d become so attached to at the hotel—and a bidet, which Paul and I still hadn’t figured out how to use. The walls were clad in a cornflower-blue tile that was badly cracked and missing in some places, and the caulk around the tub was discolored and peeling. I was pulling the toilet chain, trying to get the water in the tank to stop running, when Marcello popped his head into the room. “We can get him to fix that,” he said.
