Deep and Silent Waters

Carlo had told Vittoria that Venice was a city of water and reflections, of canals instead of roads, of ancient houses and churches, a magic city, she would love it – but how could she have imagined what she saw that first time? Silvery herring skies, slate-blue roofs, crumbling, fading pink brick, a watery sun mirrored in the winding canals, the forest of black poles at which gondolas were tied up, bobbing on the water. Vittoria remembered the fairy story her mother had often read her: she felt like the little girl who was flung into a well and came out in another country down below the water, a country so beautiful she wanted to stay there for ever.

While Rosa bought onions, cheese and oranges, Vittoria wandered around the square in which the market had sprung up overnight: green-canvas-topped stalls with green baize under the fruit and

vegetables. She paused to stare at heaps of nuts on one stall and tears came into her eyes. To her nuts meant Christmas, and Christmas meant home – and Mamma.

Sobbing, she turned away, only to freeze in shock at the sight of grey German uniforms. Two soldiers in peaked caps, guns on their hips, were strolling across the square, pausing now and then to eye the market produce. They bought lemons and oranges, a bottle of wine, and walked off laughing, their German voices making everyone turn to stare.

Vittoria ran back to Rosa, tugged at her skirt, pointing. ‘Rosa, look! German soldiers!’

Rosa was calm. ‘Don’t be scared. They come here for a holiday. We aren’t at war with them, you know. And they have lots of money. Now that the English and the Americans can’t come we need German money more than ever.’

Aunt Maria was a quiet, gentle old woman, with thin, fine white hair, plaited on top of her head; her eyes were pale and dreamy, her brown skin wrinkled, weatherbeaten. ‘You will be safe here, child,’ she promised. ‘We had a bad time in the First World War – we were bombed then, and they sent the horses away to Rome—’

‘The horses?’

‘The four bronze horses of St Mark – you’ll see them above the central doorway of the cathedral but they’re not the originals. Those are safely hidden away inside.’

‘We stole them,’ said Rosa gleefully.

Vittoria stared at her. ‘What do you mean?’

Her aunt intervened. ‘Rosa means we seized them from Constantinople, centuries ago. That wasn’t stealing, the horses were prizes of war. But in this war I’m sure we’ll be safe. They’ve put up air-raid shelters everywhere, just in case …’

‘They look like little hats, all over St Mark’s Square,’ Rosa said.

‘But they will never be needed,’ Aunt Maria insisted. ‘After all, we aren’t a military target. Venice is too precious to be attacked.’

Vittoria’s life soon settled down into a busy, comfortable routine. Every morning Rosa got her up, gave her breakfast, of whatever they had, then walked her to the convent school a few streets away. Later, and for the first couple of months Rosa met her and walked her home but after that Vittoria was allowed to make her own way back.

They lived in a dark, narrow little street off the Frezzeria, a street that took its name from the freccie, the arrows, that had once been sold there in the Middle Ages.

Vittoria loved to wander at her leisure on her way home, gazing into the shops, breathing in the smell of herbs and spices from one, salty fish from another, new-baked bread from the next. Even in Venice, food was rationed, but people here seemed to eat better than they had in Milan since the war began. There was always plenty of sea-food: crabs and clams, squid, prawns, mussels, as well as every type of fish that swam in the sea beyond the lagoon. They ate plenty of game, too: hare, rabbit and wild birds from the marshes. Aunt Maria had taught Rosa to cook and expected Vittoria to eat whatever was put before her.

‘Hunger is the best sauce,’ she said, if Vittoria tried to refuse anything. ‘Think of our soldiers, dying for you. They would give anything for a plate of this squid in tomato and clam sauce.’

But Vittoria could not force down the squid. It tasted like scraps of the boots she wore on rainy days when the tide sloshed over from the canal and ran through the streets.

She quickly made friends at school – Gina, the daughter of a grocer who lived a few houses away, and Olivia, whose family lived in a great house on the Grand Canal to which Vittoria and Gina were never invited.

The girls dawdled on their way home, sometimes visited Gina’s family in their dark little apartment above the shop. Gina was two years older than Vittoria, and far more sophisticated. She was already a beauty, having inherited red hair and fine, pale skin from her mother, a Florentine who had once been head parlour-maid in a big, aristocratic house.

Signora Cavani doted on her only child and spent hours curling Gina’s hair, making her pretty clothes, showing her how to walk and sit down gracefully, sew neat, straight stitches and, most important of all, she said, how to speak Italian with the right accent. ‘We are not peasants!’ Signora Cavani would say. ‘We’re not like these shop-keepers, even if we live among them. You must keep up your standards, Gina. Act like a lady and people will treat you like one.’

Vittoria observed that Signora Cavani lived by the standards she preached: she treated Olivia with flattering warmth because Olivia came from an old-established Venetian family, but towards Vittoria she was coldly offhand, hostile. All that changed when she discovered that Vittoria’s family, although undoubtedly in trade, was also very wealthy.

Sometimes the girls went back to Aunt Maria’s house, where Rosa fed them dried figs and hot rolls, with some of their precious home-made black cherry jam, and told them ghost stories or sang them the latest songs.

At first, Vittoria thought the tall, thin terraced house was poky and gloomy: the rooms were much smaller than those in her own home, the furniture old and shabby. The ancient wooden stairs creaked, as did the floorboards, even when nobody walked across them.

At night, lying in bed, she felt as if she was in a very old ship: even if there was no wind the house lurched and cracked around her. And mice lived under the floorboards and the eaves, their pattering feet seeming very loud: they stole crumbs from the kitchen and ate into vegetables in the wooden rack. The noise made her nervous – perhaps they would climb on to her bed and run over her face while she was asleep – but she didn’t tell Rosa or Aunt Maria in case they set one of the traps kept in the kitchen, fearsome-looking objects that would cut a little mouse in half with a sharp snap, Rosa said.

Bats flapped about in the roof space making a noise like a wet fish in the bottom of one of the fishing-boats she watched unloading, down on the fish harbour. On summer nights they streamed out of the eaves like black smoke, and vanished into Venice to feed on the insects swarming above the oily waters of the canals. Olivia was scared that one would get caught in her hair, or bite her and suck her blood, like one of the vampire stories Rosa had told her. Rosa knew a thousand folk-tales, and believed implicitly in ghosts, vampires and goblins. On dark winter nights, Vittoria found it easy to believe in them, too.

At first, Vittoria expected every day to hear from her parents, and letters did get through now and then from her mother, with news of the family. That was how, in 1943, she heard that Filippo had run away to join the partisans, who had begun to gather in the mountains, refusing to fight for Mussolini, occasionally making sorties to attack convoys driving through the valleys. ‘Communists!’ everyone at school said. ‘If they’re caught they’re shot without a trial.’ The nuns were fiercely opposed to Communism, and were always talking about the horrors inflicted on priests and nuns during the Spanish Civil War by Communist forces. Nuns had been raped, priests tortured, then killed, their churches burned to the ground.

Vittoria hated the thought of Filippo being shot: she was fond of him, he could be fun – although Nico was her favourite brother, the one closest to her in age. It didn’t seem real, though. She couldn’t believe it could happen – people of her age didn’t get killed.

Her mother’s letter was hard to read, it was so scrawled and blotchy, as if she had cried as she wrote it. Vittoria had to work it out line by line before she understood it all.