The House on the Hill by Cesare Pavese

Author:Cesare Pavese [Pavese, Cesare]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780241370537
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2021-02-23T00:00:00+00:00

XII

Once again I just shrugged. I did a lot of shrugging in those days. The catastrophe so long expected was upon us. It was obvious that the solitude of the woods and orchards, with Turin quiet down there in the distance, was meaningless now. Yet it all went on. The sun rose, dusk fell, the fruit ripened. I was assailed by a hope, a feverish curiosity: to survive the collapse and be in time to see something of the world that must come after.

I shrugged, but drank in news. If I stuffed my ears sometimes, it was because I knew all too well what was going on and lacked the courage to face it. Salvation seemed a question of days, perhaps hours, and people clung to the radio, stared at the sky, woke in the morning with a rush of hope.

No salvation came. What came was the first whispered news of bloodshed. I remembered that tavern in Pino one July day when for the last time I’d heard someone lower their voice, and I went back to the place, cautiously, constantly looking behind me. These days, arriving somewhere, especially somewhere where people lived, you looked behind you and listened hard. There were no roadblocks yet, but menace and surprise were everywhere. The roads and fields swarmed with people on the run, soldiers bundled in raincoats, rags, jackets, fleeing from the towns and barracks where the Germans and revamped Fascists were on the rampage. Turin had been occupied without a fight, the way water submerges a village; bony Germans, green as lizards, guarded the station, the barracks; people came and went amazed that nothing was happening, nothing changed; no uprisings, no blood on the streets; only this incessant, silent, subterranean flood of refugees and troops, pouring along the streets, into the churches, the suburbs, onto trains. Other strange things happened. I picked them up from Cate, from Dino, from their whispers and the glances they sent each other. Fonso and the others were buying up all the arms they could find, looting warehouses and storerooms; some of the things were hidden at Le Fontane. In the suburbs, civilian clothes rained down from windows on the soldiers in flight. Once they’d escaped the Germans, where did these people go? Some, of course, made it home; but where did those far from home spend their days and nights, the Sicilians, Calabrians, men caught up in the war, where did they stop and settle? ‘If the war doesn’t end soon,’ I told Egle and Elvira, ‘we’ll all turn bandits.’ I said it to wind them up. And added: ‘Serves the rich folk and the generals right for siding with the Germans.’ But then talking to Cate she told me to leave off. I heard from Dino, who was always out on the road, that a lot of people were stopping by at Le Fontane. I saw some of them myself, arriving at ungodly hours, bearded, dishevelled, hungry. Giulia was always around, or Nando’s wife, and the refugees talked, plotted, munched bread.

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