The Girl on the Via Flaminia

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THE GIRL ON THE VIA FLAMINIA

By

ALFRED HAYES

The Girl on the Via Flaminia was originally published in 1949 by Harper & Brothers Publishers, New York.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Contents

TABLE OF CONTENTS 4

1. 5

2. 14

3. 21

4. 35

5. 52

6. 61

7. 64

8. 70

9. 73

10. 78

11. 85

12. 91

13. 103

14. 114

REQUEST FROM THE PUBLISHER 115

1.

The wind blew through Europe. It was a cold wind, and there were no lights in the city. It was said the cabinet was about to fall. Nobody knew for sure whether the cabinet which was in power at this time would fall and another coalition government would be formed. There was nothing that was very sure, and all one knew was that, if the cabinet did fall, the government which would be formed from the ruins would be another coalition one, and that the wind was cold. It did not look at this time as though the war would end, although actually the war was coming to an end. Nobody knew at this time that the war would end in a few months. There were children in the city who had never known a time in which there had not been a war. The fighting was going on in the north. Sometimes in the afternoon in the city one could see girls and young men standing in the main piazzas wearing red armbands and rough uniforms. Those were the partisans. The men were usually handsomer than the girls were pretty. Everybody looked at them very respectfully. They were part of the real and important fighting that was going on. In the city itself there were many soldiers. The soldiers were of different kinds. The kinds of fighting they did among themselves and the way they got drunk distinguished the soldiers. The English were very fond of fighting with the big steel buckles of their military belts, and the Americans with bottles, and some of the other troops preferred knives. The drunkenness was everywhere. The most conspicuous of the military drunks were the Americans. The Canadians had discovered that vermouth and banana oil made a kind of cocktail but hardly any of the other troops thought so. The Canadians hated the English and envied the Americans. The English envied the Americans and despised the Canadians. The French wore American uniforms and drove in American vehicles and despised the English and shrugged their shoulders at the Canadians and shook their heads in disbelief at the Americans. The lonesomest troops were the Poles and the Palestinian brigadiers.

The cold was really bad. It was December, and almost Christmas, and the war had been going on for over five years. Sometimes men would escape from the prison camps near the Austrian border. They would come home to their wives so terribly changed the women would shriek. There were some husbands, too, who came home to find their wives with other men or with soldiers. That kind of shrieking in the neighborhoods was also bad.

On this December night, the Via Flaminia was very dark, with the wind blowing down its length, and the night was cold with the kind of coldness that in another country would have meant snow. But here in this country there was no snow except on the mountains. There was rain, and fog, and the damp cold.

In this section of the city the people before the war had not been too rich or too poor. Now, of course, after more than five years of war, they were all more or less poor. The poverty was not of money. In this section of the city there were apartment houses with enormous windows and visible roof gardens. The trolley line went down to the end of the street which was the Via Flaminia and then crossed the Ponte Milvio which was a very old and very much-used bridge and from there the road went up north. During the day there were always accidents on the streets. Pedestrians were killed or hurt with a deadly regularity coming across the bridge or across the Via Flaminia, and they were usually killed or hurt by large fast six-or eight-wheeled military vehicles. The citizens, when there was such an accident, always cursed the fate which had brought the military vehicles to the city, and the dead or dying man would lie in the gutter covered with a blanket or an overcoat until an ambulance and a carabiniere would arrive to take him away to a hospital. Since there were no medicines in the hospitals, the man would often be considered lucky if he died en route. The blood would remain in a thick pool in the gutter.

In one of the apartment houses in that section of the city where the Via Flaminia crossed the Milvio bridge there was a flat in which a family known as the Pulcinis lived. It was a flat of six rooms, and the dining room which was large had been converted by the Signora Adele Pulcini into a place where the soldiers came at night for wine and eggs. There was a big mahogany table in the center of the dining room, a radio which the soldiers liked to have playing music as they drank, and on the wall, of course, there was a lithograph of a Sacred Heart. A French door led out of the dining room into a small shabby garden and to a back gate. The soldiers called the Signora Adele Pulcini Mamma. And one night, toward the end of December, as the war unknowingly was coming to its hoped-for end, two soldiers were sitting at the big mahogany table in the Pulcini’s apartment, drinking wine. One of the soldiers was a short, wiry, middle-aged English sergeant, and the other was an American, a young American, who was not a sergeant, but who was very flushed with wine, and who walked with a very slight limp.

It was about seven-thirty in the evening.

The middle-aged English sergeant had been listening for some time to the complaints of the young American who was not a sergeant. The Englishman did not think that anyone in the American army had a thing to complain about. The Englishman loved his country but not his country’s rations. The Englishman often said, when he was thoroughly disgusted with the slice of bread and the slice of spam served in the sergeants’ mess where, as an English sergeant, he had the luxury of being able to sit down at a long rough board table with seven other sergeants, that more than once he thought of going absent up into the hills to live with the bloody partigianos. Now, in the dining room, with a glass of wine in his hand, he said to the young American, What’re you blokes got to grouse about? Gawd, the Englishman said, you ought t’ be in His Majesty’s fightin’ forces for a bloody month, and chew our bully, and wash it down with a cup o’ stinking tea, and be happy when they puts a bit o’ marmalade on the bread, and then you’d have something to write home about.

Beef to the brass, the American said.

Ay, the Englishman said. Scum o’ the earth, her ladyship called us. Stood up she did, in the House o’ Commons, and said it: scum o’ the earth. An’ bloody right she was.

The American limped slightly as he went toward the door. The door opened into a hallway, and the other rooms in the flat were off the hallway.

Hey, Mamma! the American called. Mamma Pulcini! How about a bottle of vino? Subito!

Si, si, a woman’s voice replied from the kitchen. Un momento.

Everything in this country’s un momento, the American said. He limped back toward the table. He wore a wristwatch and a ring made of an Arabian coin and an identification bracelet. It looked like a great deal of jewelry. How did I wind up in Italy? he said to the English sergeant. I wanted to go to France. My old man was in France in the last one. You ever go with a French broad, sarge?

No, the Englishman said.

I met a sailor was in Marseilles, the American said. He had a girl named Marie. He says when he was in Marseilles he used to sleep in her house, and in the morning her mother used to serve him breakfast in bed. They weren’t even married, and she was only eighteen years old. How do you like that?

Eighteen, the English sergeant said. Me missus is twice eighteen.

France, that would have been for me, the American said.

Oh, the sergeant said, Rome ain’t bad.

Rome’s a city, the American said. Cities are different. But you take the rest of the country. Mountains!

Well, it’s a pretty country, except for the flies.

Listen, sarge, the American said. Know what they can do with Europe? All of it? Fold it three ways and ram it. Listen. I walked up here from Anzio. Then at Velletri I fell off a cliff. In the dark! Fell off a cliff and bust my ankle.

He pulled up the leg of his trousers.

Feel that, he said to the Englishman, feel that ankle.

Solicitously, the Englishman touched the stockinged bone.

Here? he asked.

Right there, the soldier said. Feel it?

Bit o’ somethin’ stickin’ out, the Englishman said.

That’s where it’s bust, the soldier said. Off a goddam cliff in Velletri in the dark. But nobody believes me. Everybody thinks I’m trying to goof off from my outfit. Could I go back to my outfit with an ankle bust like that?

He looked at the sergeant unhappily. The sergeant poured a glass of wine.

I saw a chap once had his whole foot smashed, the sergeant said. Bloody gun fell on him.

The Signora Adele Pulcini came into the dining room. She was a tall woman, with gray hair, in her fifties, and her face was sharp and dark. She was dressed in black, and a cigarette was in the corner of her mouth. At night she lay in bed, with the electric light on, smoking cigarettes and coughing. She looked at the two soldiers in the room, and she said to the American, Imbecille! How many times have I told you not to shout? Twice last week the carabinieri came in...

Come here, Mamma, the American said to the Signora Pulcini. Feel this ankle.

Ankle? the tall hard-faced woman said. What ankle?

Feel it, the American said.

The Signora Pulcini accommodatingly felt his ankle.

So? she said.

Busted, the soldier said. Off a cliff in Velletri. That’s what I got liberating your goddam city.

Peccato, the woman said.

Could I march with an ankle like that, busted? the soldier said. Could I, Mamma?

Of course not, the Signora Pulcini said, knowing that one must always agree with the soldiers who came to drink in her dining room on those nights when the city was dark and cold and lonely. You are a very brave soldier.

I’d have gone back to my outfit, the American said. It wasn’t I didn’t want to. I came up with them from Oran. I went through Venafro with them. We hit the beach together. But the medics reassigned me. They could see I couldn’t do the walking any more.

Of course, Adele Pulcini said, seeing how agitated he was, and how