Fifteen
Lucia had dated Giuseppe for almost a year before they made love for the first time. These days, when no one knew if they’d live another hour, and people grasped for every pleasure they could find, she often wondered why they’d waited so long. But that was their story, two twenty-year-old virgins falling in love, and she was proud of it.
They’d met by the purest accident (or, as her friend and coworker Rosalia liked to say, Thanks to the hand of God). Lucia had been walking through Piazza Cavour on her way to the university when she saw a young man stop and give a roll with what looked like salami and cheese in it to an old woman begging on the street. It wasn’t an unusual sight—there always seemed to be beggars, Neapolitans were famous for their generosity, and in those days, meat, cheese, and bread were still available. But the young man was nice-looking in an unusual way, with a shock of black hair parted on one side, a large, straight nose holding up a pair of eyeglasses, strong shoulders, and a wide forehead and wide mouth. Something in his movements, an unselfconscious tenderness, struck her as the mark of a gentleman. Unafraid—from girlhood, it seemed—to take the initiative with boys, she decided to stop and say a word to him.
It turned out that they were both heading to the building where music and language classes were taught, so they walked there together, making conversation about nothing for three or four minutes, then saying goodbye with a studied casualness. It was more than a month before their paths crossed again. She saw him at a café, sitting at an outdoor table beside a pretty young woman. A girlfriend, she supposed. Lucia nodded, risked a “buona giornata,” and he recognized her and said “good day” in return. Several more weeks and a third encounter: Giuseppe walking straight toward her across Piazza Dante, smiling sheepishly, stepping through the crowd near the Porta Alba archway, where the tables of people selling used books and posters were always set up. They talked for a bit; he asked her out for a meal—not too shyly, but not with great confidence, either. That meal began a long, slow courtship: concerts, dinners, Masses, kisses. Giuseppe taking her to the music room at the university and playing Bach or Chopin, his beautiful hands dancing over the keys, his handsome face set in calm concentration.
The arrival of the war complicated their courtship, too, as it had every other aspect of life. As did the fact that, when her father finally met Giuseppe, he disliked him from the start: a professional black-marketeer meeting a lover of books and music—how could it be otherwise?
Very slowly, their kissing moved them toward lovemaking, but finding a private space was a problem, and the need to avoid becoming pregnant was a problem, and their Catholicism was a problem, too. Then Giuseppe took the job at the Archives, and then he discovered the watchman’s closet. The watchman disappeared and, with him, their Catholic reticence.
Now she lay beneath him, their clothes stacked neatly on a chair, and let him—tender and generous as always—help her forget the war for a little while. They had to move slowly and gently, otherwise the cot’s old springs squeaked like the cries of outraged nuns, but Lucia discovered she enjoyed lovemaking even more that way. A slow building of pleasure, almost a torment, and then release.
Afterward, a patina of sweat on their bodies, and a supernatural calm.
She lay there with him in that calm, not wanting to speak and disturb it.
But it had to be disturbed; she knew that. Terror or ecstasy, nothing lasted. Time shifted the world out from under them, their bodies changed, the days passed. Even the shape of the war, it seemed, evolved by the hour. From British bombers above to American troops in Sicily; from Mussolini boasting of victory from his balcony at Palazzo Venezia to Radio London describing German losses in Russia; from Fascists strutting around as if they owned the world to soldiers fleeing their posts and hiding their uniforms and Blackshirts suddenly scarcer than flour and quieter than ants. Before the September 8th armistice, the Germans had been there, of course, a noxious presence, but no worse than Mussolini’s thugs. After the armistice, with Italy now officially aligned against them, their numbers swelled by the day and they turned into uniformed devils. They’d slaughtered Giuseppe’s mother and father in cold blood; she’d helped him wrap the mutilated bodies in blankets. Together with his uncle and a priest friend, they’d brought the bodies to the cemetery at Poggioreale and buried them there. You could not forget such things.
Lucia sighed quietly. Giuseppe was so still, one shoulder against her bare left breast, that she wondered if he’d slipped into sleep. She thought of telling him that the same German who’d wiped his boot on the desk had been following her for a week now, bothering her, that when she’d gone to meet her father near the port that morning, the man had taken hold of her dress and lifted it over her knees, that perhaps he had come to the Archives looking for her, not him. But she decided to hold the information inside. There would be time for those reports. “Two things I know from the office,” she said quietly, afraid she might wake him.
“What?”
“First, the Allies are very close. Another week and they might reach us.”
“A good thing . . . unless the fighting is so fierce that everyone is killed and what’s left of Naples totally destroyed. And the second?”
“A new German is coming to take over the city. Walter Scholl is his name. A colonel.”
“How do you know?”
“I see the teletype every morning. He sent a sort of manifesto, too, and wants it posted all across the city. The whole upstairs office is scurrying around trying to find a printer who’ll agree to make copies.”
“The Nazis are desperate to hold Italy now. Naples especially. They won’t send someone gentle.”
“A terrible man,” she told him. “Judging by the office gossip—as usual, Rosalia has all the inside information—a vicious man. Even the Fascist generals were overheard saying so.”
“With admiration, no doubt.”
“More or less.”
Giuseppe was quiet for a few seconds. She believed she could hear him thinking. At last he spoke. “We have each other. The Nazis can’t take that away.”
She knew, of course, just as he did, that it wasn’t true. The Nazis could take anything they wanted, ruin anything they cared to ruin. But she only reached for his wrist, and held on, and kept those thoughts to herself.
Sixteen
As he entered the building, Aldo was greeted in a surly manner by the only waiter the Ristorante Il Castello still employed, a man Aldo had always suspected of being a fanatical Blackshirt, one of Mussolini’s men. The waiter—tall, nose like a hawk’s beak, unsteady eyes—pointed him to a door at the back of the back room, half-hidden behind a curtain, and informed him that, instead of holding the meeting in the restaurant, as he’d done in the past, Signor Forni had decided to hold it underground. “For reasons of safety.” The waiter accompanied Aldo into the back room—too closely for Aldo’s comfort—pulled the curtain aside, unlocked and opened the door, and Aldo stepped into a shadowed, downward-sloping tunnel in which he had to crouch as he walked. At the end of it—forty steps—lay one small section of the vast Neapolitan underground, city beneath a city, hundreds of subterranean rooms, thousands of years old, linked by a honeycomb of tunnels. As he made his way along the dark slope, moving toward a faint light below, he thought: The perfect place to be killed.