“She was, but she was surprised I hadn’t told her I was being considered.”
“I am, too. Why didn’t you tell us?” Elisabetta meant her and Marco.
“I didn’t want you to know if I failed.”
“Oh, Sandro.” Elisabetta felt a rush of affection for him. “You never fail, and Levi-Civita is lucky to have you. You’ll be a famous mathematician someday.”
Sandro grinned. “And you’ll be a famous journalist.”
“Ha!” Elisabetta didn’t know what Marco would become, but dismissed the thought.
“How can you read in the sunlight?” Sandro squinted at her newspaper. “It’s so bright.”
“It is, I know.”
“Allow me.” Sandro slid the newspaper page from her hand and stood up.
“No, give me that back.” Elisabetta rose, reaching, but Sandro turned away, doing something with the newspaper.
“It’s only the obituaries.”
“I like the obituaries.” Elisabetta always read the obituaries, as each one was a wonderful life story, except for the endings.
“Ecco.” Sandro held out a hat of folded newspaper, then popped it on her head. “This will keep the sun from your eyes.”
“Grazie.” Elisabetta smiled, delighted, and all of a sudden, Sandro kissed her. She found herself kissing him back, tasting warm tomato sauce on his lips until he pulled away, smiling down at her, with a new shine in his eyes that confused her. She had just decided that Marco would be her first kiss.
“Sandro, why did you do that?” Elisabetta glanced around, wondering if the others had seen. Her classmates were bent over their homework, and though Marco was approaching with Angela on his handlebars, he was too far away.
Sandro grinned. “Isn’t it obvious why?”
“But you never kissed me before.”
“I never kissed anybody before.”
Elisabetta felt touched. “So why me? Why now?”
Sandro laughed. “Who asks such questions? Only you!”
“But I thought we were just friends.”
“Are we? I—” Sandro started to say, but Marco interrupted them, shouting from a distance.
“Ciao, Sandro!”
“Ciao, Marco!” Sandro called back, waving.
Elisabetta blinked, and the moment between her and Sandro vanished, so quickly that she wondered if it had happened at all.
CHAPTER TWO
Marco
May 1937
Marco pedaled home from the river on the Lungotevere dei Pierleoni, the wide boulevard that ran along its east side. The sun had dipped behind the trees, shooting burnished rays through the city, which had come to boisterous life as the workday ended. Cars honked, drivers cursed, and exhaust fogged the air. The sidewalks thronged with people, and businessmen hustled to catch trams.
Marco accelerated, preoccupied with Elisabetta. He was in love with her, but she treated him as a pal, the way she always did. She hadn’t even cared when he had taken Angela on his bike. He felt stumped, which never happened to him with girls. He could have his pick, but he wanted Elisabetta. She was beautiful, which was reason enough alone, but he loved her passion, her strength, her fire. She had thoughts about everything, and though her intelligence was superior, she treated him as if he were equally intelligent. Marco would stop at nothing to win her over. He was love’s captive.
He flashed on seeing Sandro by the river today, standing oddly close to her, as if they had been having a great discussion or even sharing a secret. Anxiety gnawed at Marco, and he experienced a flicker of envy at the bond that Sandro and Elisabetta shared, for they were always talking about books or the like. But Marco knew that Sandro and Elisabetta were only friends, and Sandro had no female experience whatsoever.
Marco turned onto the Ponte Fabricio, his tires bobbling on the worn travertine. The footbridge was the oldest in Rome, walled on both sides—and since it connected to Tiber Island, it was essentially the street on which he lived. He dodged businessmen and veered smoothly around a cat that darted in front of him. He reached the top of the gentle span and saw that his father, Beppe, wasn’t standing outside his family’s bar, Bar GiroSport, as he usually did. It meant that Marco was late to dinner.
He sped to the foot of the bridge, passed the bar, and steered around to its side entrance on Piazza San Bartolomeo all’Isola. He jumped off his bicycle, slid it into the rack, then flew inside the crowded bar. He scooted upstairs, dropped his backpack, and entered a kitchen so small that one pot of boiling water could fill it with steam. On the wall hung framed photos of his father in the Giro d’Italia and a calendar featuring Learco Guerra, the great Italian bicycle racer. A small shelf held a framed photo of Pope Pius XI, a crucifix of dried palm, and a plaster statue of the Virgin. Marco’s mother worshipped Christ; his father worshipped cycling.
“Ciao, everyone!” Marco kissed his two older brothers, Emedio and Aldo, then his father, as they were sitting down at the table.
“Marco!” Emedio smiled, looking like a younger version of their father. Both had curly, dark brown hair, a prominent forehead, and thick brows over coal-dark eyes, wide-set above broad noses and flat mouths. Marco’s father still had the muscular build of a professional cyclist, his skin perennially tanned and his upper lip scarred from a wolf attack in the mountainous farming region of Abruzzo, where he had grown up. The story was that Marco’s father, only ten years old at the time, had been watching the family’s sheep when the wolf had struck, but the boy had wrestled the animal to the ground, then chased it away. No one who knew Beppe Terrizzi doubted the veracity of the story.
“Ehi, fratello.” Aldo smiled in his tight-lipped way, self-conscious due to his teeth, which were crooked in front. He took after the Castelicchi side, with a quieter temperament, eyes set close together, and a characteristic cleft in the chin. Aldo was the shortest of the Terrizzi sons, but he loved cycling and still had on his sweaty white jersey and bike shorts. If their mother wished he would change for dinner, she would never say so. Everyone knew who ran the household, and it wasn’t her.
“Mamma, that looks delicious. Brava.” Marco kissed her as she was ladling pomodoro sauce with whitish chunks of crabmeat onto a platter of spaghetti for the first course. Bright orangey claws stuck through the reddish pulp, their pincers jagged, and the uniquely fishy tomato aroma made him salivate.
“Ciao.” His mother smiled up at him, her small, light brown eyes warm. Steam billowed from the sink, curling the dark tendrils that had escaped her long braid, and she had a flat nose, a broad smile, and the honest, open face of a country girl. Marco’s parents were contadini, of peasant families, and they had grown up in houses shared with goats and chickens. They had married and moved to Rome, where his father had parlayed his cycling celebrity into Bar GiroSport. The café was frequented by hospital employees, locals, and cycling fans, called tifosi, for they were as crazy as those afflicted with typhus.