Aldo hesitated. “I have a woman.”
“You, Mr. Shy Guy?” Marco burst into astonished laughter. “Bravo, Aldo! You’ve been lonely too long, brother!”
Aldo didn’t brighten. “She’s married.”
“Married?” Marco repeated, worried. Aldo had had his heart broken before, as he was too reserved a fellow to press his suit, and his only loves had gone unrequited. As a result, he could be naïve when it came to the opposite sex, and there were plenty of husbands with jealous hearts.
“Don’t tell. It would kill Mamma and Papa.”
“Agreed.” Marco nodded, knowing their mother. There weren’t enough novenas in the world.
“How long have you been seeing her?”
“About six months. I met her by chance, on the street. Her husband works the night shift, so this is the only time she can see me.”
“You love her?”
“Deeply. It pains me not to be with her all the time, but I can’t not love her.”
Marco felt the same way about Elisabetta. She had been a part of his life for all of his life, and if he had to pinpoint the moment he had fallen in love with her, it had been when he was only eleven. She had tumbled into his arms while they were playing soccer, and the unexpected warmth of her touch had raced through his body like an electrical charge.
Aldo shifted onto his bicycle seat. “I’m going to see her. Meet me at the bridge at ten thirty. We’ll ride home together, with no one the wiser. Goodbye.”
“Goodbye.” Marco felt a mixture of pride and concern, watching Aldo until he lost sight of his white jersey.
CHAPTER FIVE
Aldo
May 1937
Aldo left Marco and raced down Via dei Cerchi, surprised that he had convinced his younger brother of the story. He was a bad liar because he had never had anything to lie about, until now. He had known that Marco would accept the story because romantic love motivated his younger brother. But Aldo was his own man, and though he had been unlucky with women, he believed that love came in many forms. Love of God, love of country. There was more to him than anyone in his family knew. He was charting his own course in life, and the stakes were getting higher for him, in ways he could never have imagined. He was past the point of no return.
He lowered his shoulders and pedaled southward, toward the quiet outskirts of the city. Traffic diminished, and trees and grass appeared, then became abundant. The night grew darker, since there were no streetlights and little ambient light, and sweat cooled on his forehead. He breathed in a deep lungful of air, and it smelled like grass, hay, and manure. He sailed past the Circo Massimo, deserted at this hour, and maintained his speed past the ruins of Terme di Caracalla, hulking shadows in the dark.
He reached the Via Appia Antica, the most ancient route of this ancient city. There was less traffic, but nevertheless it was perilous to cycle here, for he had to keep his tires from wedging between the cobblestones and the road was narrow, made for pedestrians, horses, and even chariots. Tree limbs grew overhead, and he struggled to see in the darkness. In time there were no lights at all, and no houses or buildings. If it hadn’t been for the moonlight, Aldo wouldn’t have been able to see where he was going.
His jersey was soaked, his thighs burned, and his heart pumped hard. He kept his pace even though the wind blew stronger here, and the elevation was higher. He reached a vast, open pasture near a quarry for pozzolana, volcanic rock, and raced across a dirt road in a pasture. He spied an overgrown ravine marked by a lone tree, which was the appointed spot.
He pedaled there, jumped off his bicycle, and slid the flashlight from the pack under his seat, then turned it on. He moved the vines aside and exposed the other bicycles that lay camouflaged on the ground. He left his bicycle with them and covered it with underbrush, an excessive precaution in this rural area, but he could take no chances. He walked thirty paces south, lighting the way to a spot where more vines had been used as a cover. He moved them aside, revealing a tunnel barely big enough to accommodate him.
He crouched into a racer’s tuck and scrambled into the tunnel, then covered the entrance behind him. He used his flashlight to light the way, and the tunnel was earthen on all sides, connecting to the ancient catacombs of the early Christians, an underground cemetery containing hundreds of thousands of graves, a veritable necropolis, city of the dead. Some of the entrances were known, but some weren’t, which made the catacombs the perfect meeting place.
Aldo scrambled downward in the tunnel, descending lower and lower. He reached the bottom of the crypt and found himself in a narrow hallway with a packed floor. The air was coldest here, chilling his skin in the damp jersey, and he made the Sign of the Cross on his chest, out of respect for this sacred place. The walls on both sides contained loculi, rectangular niches in tiers excavated into the tufo, a grayish-red volcanic rock. They were stacked from floor to ceiling, a hallway lined with the remains of the early Christians, which had been wrapped in sheets, closed behind the loculus, and then sealed inside the tomb with lime. Here and there he spotted the shorter graves of children.
Aldo hurried ahead through a bone-cold maze. He was taking his life in his hands, coming here. At nineteen, he was old enough to follow his heart, even if it led him down a dark tunnel. He had joined a cell of fervent anti-Fascists opposing the regime, and as such, had become an enemy of the state. Informers abounded, and Mussolini’s secret police, OVRA, were known to arrest, torture, and kill anti-Fascists with impunity.
Aldo had tried to be the son his father wanted, a cyclist and a Fascist, but he had doubts about the party from its earliest days. When he was younger, walking with his father on an errand, they had seen a cobbler beaten in the street for making a joke about a Blackshirt. His father had said the man was one of the “thuggish element” in the party, but the crime had made Aldo wonder whether thugs were the exception, or the rule.
He had noticed that the textbooks changed in school, publishing only propaganda, and Mussolini had made radios inexpensive so that his speeches could be heard everywhere. The party exalted ultra-patriotic pride in Rome, Romanità, and in Italy, Italianità, but that troubled Aldo, too. He didn’t believe that one race was superior to others, but rather that all men were children of God, beloved in His eyes. Aldo shared his mother’s deep faith, so he was appalled to see the Fascists follow Mussolini as if he were Christ himself, calling him Il Duce and replacing the Ten Commandments with the ten Decalogues. No mortal could erase God from Aldo’s heart, and soul. He had witnessed Mussolini’s rise, feeling daily more oppressed, his heart had grown heavy, and he felt as if he was living life with his head down, until he realized he had to stand up and fight for the country he loved.
He kept going, and as he got closer to the others, he heard their voices echoing, inflected with a mixture of dialects, for they came from all over Rome and its outskirts. They had been meeting for about six months, but they changed their meeting places in case they were being surveilled.