By Graham Mort

You’re in Italy in July. Walking to the next village. The one you can see from the apartment you rented. It has a church with a green copper dome. There’s something Byzantine about the ornate design. Your knees are feeling it, the camera jogging on your hip. Your father’s old rangefinder, a list of exposures pasted on the back. It’s loaded with black and white film. Six shots used. You’re planning to develop it in the college darkroom with Anna’s help.

Pigeons rise underfoot, pecking at bread that someone has thrown down. Air spurts from their wings, powerful enough to lift them above wooded hills, wood smoke, the bronze cupola of the church, those huddles of pink and yellow houses, a donkey grazing in olive trees.

That old woman, dressed in black, carrying plastic to the recycling bins. They’re lined up below the war memorial. Thirty-two names etched into granite. She tells you how they died, pointing a finger to her neck. Because of the partisans. Her sister, her brother, her mother. Dead. Though the inscription promises a future. The April sun will continue to rise, to shine its brilliance…Her grief fresh as blood starring the paving stones. She was a child when it happened. Una bambina.   

The German soldiers called out, hunted them through streets and alleyways. Dragging them from their work. The butcher, the baker, the cobbler. The cook, the maids, the manager who worked at the hotel. Then the priest led from his altar. The old woman mimes a crucifix glittering. The sun has suddenly grown old with shadows. It is 1944. “Do you understand?” she asks. Capisci?

The old men in white caps sit on benches. They shuffle and turn to each other as you talk to her. You leave, somehow, touching the old woman on the arm, her ruched skin. Then turn to take a photograph, through the awkward viewfinder. Seven shots now. Latent images. They’ll rise up in the developing fluid with the others not yet taken. A part of the past.

Now the path sneaks past a little shrine. A plastic Christ, electric candles, a sacred heart. There’s a cafe where you order acqua frizzante, stumbling over the Italian. A young woman in harem trousers and pink hair serves you, too busy to smile, laying tables. Sweat on her upper lip as she chalks the menu in her neat writing. Then the pigeons again, picking grass seeds from the path. Sweet peas blooming on a hot wall. Unripe hazelnuts folded into shadows. The pigeons as you approach, that updraught of wings, like angels. 

You think of Anna in the cool flat up the flight of crooked steps. She volunteered to stay at home today, to meet Sylvia who manages your rented apartment for a Dutch couple. She seems mad as a clutch of hens. The gas cylinder has run out, and neither of you knows how to change it. Sylvia will come with her husband, who’ll bring a spare. It’s ok, darlings, she shrieked on your mobile, we’ll get it fix!

So, they’ll be there now with Anna, lingering over coffee as you roam home in the heat. When you arrived from Ventimiglia, Sylvia met you from the train in her old Fiat. She took the hairpin road at crazy speed, talking non-stop. The market gardens growing flowers beside the road were covered in black netting. There was a wary look in her eye, a glint of something you didn’t really understand. Now you do. Maybe.

You reach the ruined church with its green door and crumbling stucco. English, French, Italian graffiti scrawled across the walls. The remains of a fire blackening the altar. The steps to the bell tower covered in fallen plaster. You take a shot of the staircase rising to the light. Eight. Below that, another of the road falling into the valley. Then the spa hotel. A stark fascist salute in glass and concrete, its blue pool glimmering. Ten. 

You wonder about the young German couples on their BMW motorcycles, taking off their helmets, shaking out their hair. What they think. The old guys cycling up the coast from France to the gelateria on carbon frames. All Lycra and eyeshades and varicose veins. Sipping espresso, eying up the Polish girl with the piercings who serves them cakes.

A hawk shimmers above the treeline, neatly crucified. Gas lurches from your stomach, tasting of soda as you reach the village and climb the hill. You think how cruel it must be for the old folk whose families have left. Walking to the shops, struggling to the church with its gold saints. They sit in the shade by day. At night, they lie awake, listening to bullfrogs in the well where there is a fingernail of moon on the water’s meniscus. Their children are in Rome, Patagonia, New York. 

Anna’s having a lazy day after Sylvia’s visit. Shopping for bread, the local wine, torta verde. You enter the hallway, hang up the camera, call her name. There she is, still a little shy. Hovering in a pale blue blouse. You’ll shower first, feeling the sting of hot water on sunburn. Then you’ll kiss her on the throat, leaving a faint red stain like the one swallows wear, perched on telephone wires, thinking about leaving.

Then lunch. The balcony has a bloom of green algae, the faint odor of a septic tank. You’ll talk about your morning, its sudden heft of memory. The old woman and her tears. The way she plucked at your collar. The April sun in that poem, carved into granite. The way time never really passes there. 

But there’s Anna, in the moment, despite everything. Swifts screaming by in gangs. Dark eyelashes, dark hair falling over her eyes. Skin freckled. Shoulders round and warm and alive. Spearing an olive. Slicing a tomato. Tearing basil. Her lips parted, waiting to get a word in. Her teeth just a little crooked where they overlap. Your hand. Her touch. Now.