Miracle at St. Anna by James McBride
If this was the sign she was talking about, Ludovico thought glumly as he exited, followed by Stamps and the two others, it was not a good sign at all.
9
THE BLACK BUTTERFLY
In the hills of Tuscany today, you cannot find an Italian who likes to talk about World War II. The old men, the carpenters, plumbers, plasterers, and stonemasons who make their living repairing the homes of the rich foreigners who lounge in the lazy piazzas of the towns of Barga, Teglio, and Gallicano shrug when you ask them of the war. “Too many bad things,” they say, or, “Mussolini started the pension system,” and walk away. You can ask them all day if you want, fill them with wine, serve them pasta in olive oil draped with their mother’s best sauce, and still they will not tell you. You can wait till the evening, when it is cooler and the sun has set and the children are home and the piazza is empty, and still they will not tell you. You can give them boxes of chocolate wrapped in the finest che bella figura style, bring them a proclamation from the mayor, feed them rare scallops from the Tyrrhenian Sea, which they love, even promise college educations for their grandchildren in America, and still they will not tell you. For that war was a war of the heart, and the heart of an Italian man is strong, deep, and closed up tight, open to only a very few.
Only at night, when the grappa flows, when the women are asleep, while the rich Dutch tourists are safely tucked away in their charming Italian villas with CNN piped in and the lights are out all over town, can you learn about the war. And then it is not a discussion but rather a physical discovery, for you must stand in the middle of a village and look beyond the stone walls at the hills surrounding it. Look for a light twinkling in the distance and walk toward it. You will come to a path. The path will lead to a tiny road. The road will lead up the mountain to a tiny tavern. And if you haven’t fallen on the dark trail and broken your arm or been attacked by spooks or witches or goblins, you will enter a smelly, smoky tavern to find the same old men gathered around tables telling jokes, singing songs, playing cards, and sipping grappa; and if you are lucky, two of them sitting at a card table will have a disagreement, which will degenerate into an argument, then shouting, then threatened fisticuffs. And then, just as the two old codgers stand up with balled fists to tear each other apart, someone will yell over the din of the smoke-filled room, “How do you make a phone call in Italy during the war?” and the two old coots will laugh and sit down and drink again, because during the war, phones and shoes were the same. Shoes were made from leftover phone wire discarded by American soldiers. You sized the thick wire around your foot to make sure it would fit, then threaded it through a piece of rubber cut from an American airplane landing tarp—the landing strip—to create a sole. You placed a rag atop the whole business, stitched it together, and, presto, a pair of shoes. Then, if the Germans came and you needed help, you quickly sat in a chair, stretched your leg across your lap, grabbed your ankle, pulled your foot as close to your mouth as possible, and yelled, “Hello? Hello?” Because there was no one to call in Italy during the war. There were no phones, no shoes, no electricity, no food, no army, no government to speak of, no hope. Your life hung by a shoestring, dependent on the two raw goods of mankind: morality and courage, never a sure thing; food from a kind neighbor who might be a Fascist, or maybe not; a brave priest risked his life to feed you and your mother; or the partisans, whom no one dared mention, came to your aid. Phone calls? You called God because Mussolini with his fine speeches, his shiny boots, his impeccable uniform, his beautiful mistress, had been captured by the partisans and was last seen strung from a telephone pole at a gas station in Milan, his brains blown to bits, his mistress Claretta Petacci, for whom he had once built a whole train station and whose face had peeled off like onion skin when they’d shot her, strung upside down at his side. No, there were no phone calls to be made during the war. Italy was like America’s wild, wild West, except it was not romantic, it was not funny, it was not even tough. Living there was like watching your mother stand in the middle of the road and get hit by a two-ton truck, watching her body fly through the air like a rag doll’s, wanting with all your heart to race to the spot where she will land to catch her, knowing you cannot, so you stand there, frozen, knowing that the sound of her dead body striking the road will reverberate in your ears for the rest of your life. That’s what it was like: Watching her die, every single day, over and over again.
For that reason, the old-timers in Tuscany don’t discuss World War II. The teachers don’t like to teach it in the schools, either. History lessons become embarrassing right after World War I, because after that it becomes personal: My father was a partisan; yours was not. What did you do? What did your father do? It’s easy to claim victory now. Everyone wants to be a winner, everyone claims to be with the partisans who fought with the Allies. But during the war, among forty-four million people and two nations, not everyone was a partisan; it was impossible for every single man, woman, and child to summon the raw courage to wander into the dark mountains, starve in the cold, sleep in holes in the earth, and take on the mighty German army with toothpicks. No. It was every man for himself, because Mother Italy was raped and cut in half: the puppet Republic of Salò lay to the north, the real Italy lay to the south, and in between the two, there you sat as the ragtag assortment of the world’s armies played footsie in the mountains, with the entrenched Germans delivering roundhouse rights and uppercuts that sent them collectively to the canvas, the Brazilians, the American Negroes, the South Africans, the New Zealanders, the British, the Gurkhas, the partisans, the Alpini, the remnants of the Italian army, all were frantically fighting to push the Germans back, stomping over you and your family and your friends, crushing and killing everything you loved and would ever love under their collective boots while the tankless Germans, who were running out of ammo and food, fought them with flamethrowers, eighty-eights, potato mashers, rusty barbed wire, and cannons manned by gray-haired Austrians and starving German boys. It was all foolishness. Better to keep quiet.
But if you stand around the old tavern long enough and pour grappa long enough; if you catch the old men in the middle of a veglia, a kind of story time when they sing songs and tell tales about the old days to one another; when they are weak with love, their hearts no longer closed up tight as a drum but filled with the joy of friendship, flush with the happiness of camaraderie—then, only then, will you hear the story of the war. But it is not the story you expect to hear, for the old men do not speak of war. Instead they speak of Mussolini.
He was not so bad, they say. His speeches were funny. He made you laugh. He swam ten kilometers a day. He danced like the wind. He started the pension system. Before that, old people worked fifty years for a landowner, then starved in retirement. Under Il Duce, no one starved. The trains ran on time. He built roads and bridges and libraries. He had sex with his mistresses right in his office, standing up, no small feat, but truly Italian, you know? The cities were clean. If an old woman tripped over a pipe in the road and wrote him a letter, he would always respond. He alone stood up to Hitler in 1934, sending Italian troops to the Brenner Pass when Hitler threatened Austria, while France and England fretted in uncertainty and America stuck her head in the sand. And only later, when Hitler got too strong, did the Old Man get into bed with him, and by then he knew Hitler was a madman but it was too late, for he had descended into madness himself, not for any physical reason, but because he had betrayed Mother Italy and her gallant sons, including his socialist opponent Giacomo Matteotti, whom he’d never confessed to having murdered, but whose blood was all over his black shirt and shiny boots just the same. And so the Old Man suffered and was executed, and that was fine. He deserved it. But there were others who didn’t deserve to die and were executed for nothing, and still others who deserved to be executed and were not. And some . . . some who were just plain . . . And then the old men fall silent and don’t touch the grappa anymore, and their eyes lose their sparkle and turn dull as they remember the scarr
I saw him, they say. I saw him with my own eyes. He was a teenager. I was a boy myself. He came to my village on the night the sun set twice. That was the night the Germans lost the war here in Tuscany. The night he came.
The night who came?
Peppi. The Black Butterfly.
Who is he? you ask.
He was the greatest of all partisans, they will say, the kindest, the most courageous, a philosopher, a poet, a man made of truth. If he loved you, there was nothing he would not do for you. But if he did not, God help you, for there was no gun big enough, no army large enough, no force great enough to stop him.
And then the toughest old galoot in the room, the one with the two teeth, whose glass is always full and whose table is always empty, will shudder and say, My father loved Italy because of him. Because he was afraid of him. We all were afraid of him. We were afraid of his love. It was his greatest weapon. It was the greatest force you can imagine.
Why? you ask.
Because he could kill you with it.
And then you know you have gone too far, for the old coot turns away and the rest of the room returns to its business, and the innkeeper takes you by the arm and escorts you to the door. You want to know about the war? he asks. Go back to town. Tomorrow morning, stand in the piazza and ask about the night of two setting suns. Ask anyone. They will tell you all you need to know.
But why? Why will they tell me?
Because, the old codger says, as he shoves you out the door into the cold night, they know what we know. They feel what we feel. They will not be able to resist.
There is no mention of the night of the two setting suns in the histories of the Serchio Valley, nor are there any references to butterflies. The two are intertwined, and like so many things in Italy, unexplainable, unbearable in their truth, and at times unbearable in their paucity. The proud, polite guide-books of the area cannot touch the subject. They gloss over the war and its sloppiness with the slickness of a used-car salesman. There are no structures erected in honor of the Black Butterfly anywhere in Tuscany, no national proclamation bearing his name, no scientific studies on the setting sun, no statues or murals bearing the likeness of butterflies, caterpillars, setting suns or even setting moons. In a region known for its art, its history, its glorious beacons from the past, children in school are not taught of either element, unless taught by their parents, and the elderly rarely speak of it. But if you mention the night of the two setting suns and the Black Butterfly, you will get a response. Everyone seems to know of it—and of him.
Very little seems to be known about the Butterfly’s origins, for he was born in a corner of Tuscany from which few of distinction have emerged. His true name was Peppi Grotta, and he was a humble, quiet, frail poetry student from nearby Castelnuovo di Stazzema, a town of no great distinction, save for a black butterfly known to frequent its olive groves and pastures. When the war began, the young poet joined up with one of the many innocuous bands of partisans that roamed the Serchio Valley and the Apuane Alps of Garfagnana and Massa. Like most partisans, he gave himself a nickname, because the SS were ruthless in their retaliation against families. He named himself for the butterfly from his region, and distinguished himself among the partisan groups that would later form Group Valenga, a small but tough band that emerged out of the Barga region. Initially a group of twenty peasant boys, they stole arms from the carabinieri, derailed trains, and caused rockslides that stalled German troop movements. They were largely ineffective until the death of Gabriella Tornatti of the tiny town of Bertacchi, near Mt. Forato, a woman whose name is often mentioned in the context of the Black Butterfly, for it was after her death that the great Black Butterfly spread his wings for the very first time.
Gabriella, a lean, pretty war widow with long, curly black hair, joined a man’s war in 1943 while pregnant and raising two young daughters. She hid partisans in her home, blew up bridges, shot at SS soldiers, and even launched an illegal press from her home. She was revealed to the Germans by an unknown Italian spy in her town and was arrested by a German SS commander who hog-tied her to a tree in the center of her village’s piazza and demanded the names of her fellow partisans. She refused to tell. The commander tortured her to death. Her breasts were pulled off with a strange tool. Her eyes were pulled out with dental pliers. Yet despite this torture, young Gabriella Tornatti of Bertacchi never revealed the identity of her fellow partisans. She was hanged by the neck and left in the piazza.
The news of Gabriella’s heroic death spread through the Apuane Alps and Tuscan valleys like lightning. It was then that the great Black Butterfly struck.
For several weeks, the Black Butterfly spread rumors in the valley around Bertacchi that on a certain date, at a certain time, he would show up with an entire army to revenge Gabriella’s death. As expected, an Italian spy alerted the German authorities and the SS arrived in force on the appointed date, surrounding the village. But the Black Butterfly did not appear. He watched, hidden in the mountain forest, with his binoculars, and marked the SS commander who perpetrated the torture on poor Gabriella. The Germans departed after a few days, thinking the threat was empty. But Peppi had other plans. He secretly followed the officer’s squad, which moved on to terrorize other villages in the Tuscan valleys. He waited and waited, waited a full six weeks, until the officer was relieved and rotated out. He and a small group of his men followed the officer to Viareggio, where, posing as mule skinners, they caught him along with a squad of eight German troopers who were also heading out for a relief rotation. The eight German soldiers, Peppi freed. The SS commander, though, he did not.
Patiently, and to the nth degree, the Black Butterfly exacted the same torture upon the SS commander that the commander had exacted on Gabriella of Bertacchi. He hog-tied him to a tree. He taped his mouth. He pulled off his breasts with a strange tool. He waited a day, then pulled out his eyes with dental pliers. He let him bleed. When he was done, he pulled off the commander’s testicles and stuck them in his mouth, then carried the SS commander’s body seventy-eight kilometers back to the same square where Gabriella of Bertacchi had been savagely killed, and waited.
Once a year, the sun sets twice a day in the Serchio Valley of Tuscany. It hits the eye of the Mountain of the Sleeping Man, and disappears behind the top oval of the encirclement of rock. It hides there for a few minutes and reappears again right through the center of the eye before disappearing down the mountain again. It was during this moment that the Black Butterfly sent a message to the people of Tuscany that would never be forgotten.
The German commanders who were running Bertacchi did not know the sun set twice, so when darkness came, they were safely settled in their headquarters near the village gates. The villagers, however, as was their custom, stood outdoors in the town square to watch the yearly phenomenon.
The sun disappeared, and darkness came. When the sun appeared again, minutes later, there, in the center of the village, was a ghastly sight. Hanged from the same tree as Gabriella was the SS commander, his decomposed body wracked and sliced, his breasts pulled off, his eyes gouged out, his testicles shoved in his mouth. A sign strung across his neck read: “Viva Italia. Love, the Black Butterfly.” Then the sun disappeared again, and night came for good.
The sight of the German commander had the opposite effect on the villagers than that one would expect, for they had no doubt that reprisals would be swift and merciless. The SS promised to kill sixteen civilians for every SS trooper killed, and this corpse they were staring at was no trooper’s. This was an officer. Many turned and fled into the woods and forests and never came back. But the few who stayed were witness to a remarkable turn of events, for the village
The Germans knocked on doors and demanded of the villagers, “Who has done this?” but to a man and woman, the villagers denied it, for even knowledge of a rebellious act could bring terrible reprisals against their sons and daughters. It was the cleverest of clever moves, for, as the villagers later explained, there was no body in the piazza and therefore no one would be punished, and, secretly, Gabriella’s death had been revenged. No, we saw no body, they told the Germans. Nothing happened here. This piazza is as it always has been, as it was before night fell. There is a curfew, is there not? We saw nothing.
The German commander ordered the spy to be jailed for lying. He was sent to prison in Castelnuovo di Garfagnana, where news of his dastardly betrayal of Gabriella had long preceded his arrival. He was jailed with several socialists, communists, bandits, and true partisans. By the time the Germans sorted out the truth about the missing SS commander and hastily sent word to free him, he was, as they say in Sicily, calling the fishes—long dead. He did not last six hours in prison.
Meanwhile, in the town of Bertacchi, the few villagers who remained awakened in the following weeks to find at their doorsteps bread, wine, baskets of chestnuts, even jars of olive oil, which was so scarce it was almost priceless. The caretaker of Gabriella’s two toddler daughters found two small sacks of pure gold bullion in a basket underneath the children’s bed and two gold necklaces with the word “Love” etched into them. The two became rich women after the war—one became a provincial governor. The Black Butterfly, however, the young poet from Castelnuovo di Stazzema also known as Peppi, was never seen by anyone in Bertacchi during or after that event. He was a rumor, a wisp, a thought, his exploits bragged about by those who admired him, loathed by those who feared he had only prolonged the agony of losing to the Germans. As the war dragged on and his feats grew, the Germans placed a price on his head, though it was senseless. How can you catch a person who does not exist? Even the Italians were not sure. He was rumored to have joined the ranks of the Buffalo Soldiers from America, who were said to be marching up from the south and fighting like the sons of black Hannibal and were so taken with him that they carried him back with them to America, where he was rumored to own a nightclub in Harlem named after him, which was filled with black butterflies that flew along the walls and ceilings as the Negroes jitterbugged to jazz music.