Pino lay there in the dark, listening to the frenetic pace of the violin playing, and felt the wild mood swings of the piece as if they were his own. When it was over, he was wrung out and empty of thought. At long last, the boy slept.
Around one o’clock the next afternoon, Pino went to find Carletto. He rode the trams, seeing some neighborhoods in smoking ruins and others untouched. The randomness of what had been destroyed and what had survived bothered him nearly as much as the destruction itself.
He got off the trolley at Piazzale Loreto, a large traffic rotary with a city park at its center and thriving shops and businesses around its perimeter. He looked across the rotary at Via Andrea Costa, seeing war elephants in his mind. Hannibal had driven armored elephants over the Alps and down that road on his way to conquer Rome twenty-one centuries before. Pino’s father said that all conquering armies had come into Milan on that route ever since.
He passed an Esso petrol station with an iron girder system that rose three meters above the pumps and tanks. Diagonally across the rotary from the petrol station, he saw the white-and-green awning of Beltramini’s Fresh Fruits and Vegetables.
Beltramini’s was open for business. No damage that he could see.
Carletto’s father was outside, weighing fruit. Pino grinned and quickened his pace.
“Don’t worry. We have bomb-proof secret gardens out by the Po,” Mr. Beltramini was saying to an older woman as Pino approached. “And because of this, Beltramini’s will always have the best produce in Milan.”
“I don’t believe you, but I love that you make me laugh,” she said.
“Love and laughter,” Mr. Beltramini said. “They are always the best medicine, even on a day like today.”
The woman was still smiling as she walked away. A short, plump bear of a man, Carletto’s father noticed Pino and turned even more delighted.
“Pino Lella! Where have you been? Where is your mother?”
“At home,” Pino said, shaking his hand.
“Bless her.” Mr. Beltramini peered up at him. “You’re not going to grow any more, are you?”
Pino smiled and shrugged. “I don’t know.”
“You do, you’ll start walking into tree branches.” He pointed at the bandage on Pino’s cheek. “Oh, I see you already did.”
“I got bombed.”
Mr. Beltramini’s state of perpetual bemusement evaporated. “No. Is this true?”
Pino told him the whole story, from the time he climbed out his window, until he got back home and found everybody playing music and having a good time.
“I think they were smart,” Mr. Beltramini said. “If a bomb’s coming at you, it’s coming at you. You can’t go around worrying about it. Just go on doing what you love, and go on enjoying your life. Am I right?”
“I guess so. Is Carletto here?”
Mr. Beltramini gestured over his shoulder. “Working inside.”
Pino started toward the shop door.
“Pino,” Mr. Beltramini called after him.
He looked back, seeing concern on the fruit vendor’s face. “Yes?”
“You and Carletto, you take care of each other, right? Like brothers, right?”
“Always, Mr. B.”
The fruitmonger brightened. “You’re a good boy. A good friend.”
Pino went inside the shop and found Carletto lugging sacks of dates.
“You been out?” Pino said. “Seen what happened?”
Carletto shook his head. “I’ve been working. You’ve heard of that, right?”
“I’ve heard stories about it, so I came to see for myself.”
Carletto didn’t think that was funny. He hoisted another sack of dried fruit onto his shoulder and started down a wooden ladder and through a hole in the floor.
“She didn’t show up,” Pino said. “Anna.”
Carletto looked up from the dirt-floored basement. “You were out last night?”
Pino smiled. “I almost got blown up when the bombs hit the theater.”
“You’re full of it.”
“I am not,” Pino said. “Where do you think I got this?”
He peeled off the bandage, and Carletto’s lip rose in disgust. “That’s nasty.”
With Mr. Beltramini’s permission, they went to see the theater in the light of day. As they walked, Pino told the story all over again, watching his friend’s reaction and feeding off it, dancing around when he described Fred and Rita, and making booming noises as he related how he and Mimo ran through the city.
He was feeling pretty good until they reached the cinema. Smoke still curled from the ruins, and with it a harsh, foul stench that Pino would come to identify instantly as spent explosives. Some people in the streets around the theater seemed to wander aimlessly. Others still dug through the bricks and beams, hoping to find loved ones alive.
Shaken by the destruction, Carletto said, “I could never have done any of what you and Mimo did.”
“Sure you could. When you’re scared enough, you just do it.”
“Bombs falling on me? I would have hit the floor and curled up with my hands over my head.”
There was silence between them as they contemplated the theater’s charred and blown-out back wall. Fred and Rita had been right there, nine meters high, and then—
“Think the planes will come back tonight?” Carletto asked.
“We won’t know until we hear the hornets.”
Chapter Four
Allied planes came for Milan almost every night the rest of June and on into July of 1943. Building upon building crumpled and threw dust that billowed down the streets and lingered in the air long after the sun rose bloodred and cast down merciless heat to deepen the misery of those first few weeks of the bombardment.
Pino and Carletto wandered the streets of Milan almost every day, seeing the random carnage, witnessing the loss, and sensing the pain that seemed to be everywhere. After a while, it all made Pino feel numb and small. Sometimes he just wanted to follow Carletto’s instincts, to curl into a ball and hide from life.
Almost every day, however, he thought of Anna. He knew it was stupid, but he frequented the bakery where he’d seen her first, hoping to run into her again. He never saw her, and the baker’s wife had no idea whom he was talking about when he asked.
On June 23, Pino’s father sent Mimo to Casa Alpina in the rugged Alps north of Lake Como for the rest of the summer. He tried to send Pino as well, but his older son refused. As a boy and a young teenager, Pino had loved Father Re’s camp. He’d spent three months up at Casa Alpina every year since the age of six, two full months in the summer climbing in the mountains, and a cumulative month skiing in the winter. Being at Father Re’s was great fun. But the boys up there now would be so young. He wanted to be in Milan, out in the streets with Carletto, and looking for Anna.
The bombing intensified. On July 9, the BBC described the Allied landing on the shores of Sicily and fierce fighting against the German and Fascist forces. Ten days later, Rome was bombed. News of that raid sent a shudder through Italy, and the Lella household.
“If Rome can be bombed, then Mussolini and the Fascists are finished,” Pino’s father proclaimed. “The Allies are driving the Germans from Sicily. They’ll attack southern Italy, too. It will soon be over.”