Her one sin—and she sometimes wondered if sin was the right word—came from the way she’d made her living for twenty-two of her thirty-eight years, first as a teenage orphan who’d been violated in the most horrible way, and then as a single, childless woman: she allowed men to share her bed in exchange for gifts of various kinds. It had made her, by the standards of her poor neighborhood, quite well off. But even in the depths of her sin, as she’d often said to her brother, she endeavored to keep one hand clasped around the ankle of the Blessed Mother. She refused to sleep with married men. And though she’d been asked a thousand times and offered tempting sums, she refused to venture into what she thought of as the more perverse sexual practices. This personal code limited her clientele, but she had always wanted it limited. One man, sometimes two, was enough. For years now, since before the war, Aldo Pastone and the elderly Avvocato Cilento were her only sources of support. These days, there was no shortage of girls and women in Naples who sold their love—for money, to keep their children from starving, to curry favor with the German overlords or the Fascist secret police, Mussolini’s OVRA. Rita didn’t judge them. But neither did she consider herself one of them.
She would, for the hundredth time, discuss this complicated moral situation with her half brother and listen to his advice.
That morning, there were puddles in the gutters—it had rained the night before, thunder booming and echoing in the Spagnoli’s narrow streets—and in places, the stone pavement was steaming in the sun. Through the bus window, she saw a pair of starving dogs drinking from one of the larger puddles. She turned her head to watch them, praying for them, and just then saw a German jeep go racing along Via Vespucci in the opposite direction, crashing through a puddle, soaking the dogs and sending them scrambling away. The jeep was headed toward the train station, she guessed, because there were two soldiers in front and a woman about her own age squeezed between them. All over the city, the Nazis were arresting Jews, taking them to the station, carting them off. Rita sent her prayers in the direction of the terrified woman and watched until the jeep was out of sight.
Four
Aldo Pastone saw it this way: when he’d been a boy, the Camorra had controlled Naples, killing just enough people to make everyone fear them, and taking more than their share of the proceeds of others’ work.
When he’d been a young man, Mussolini and the Fascists had controlled Naples, killing just enough people to make everyone fear them, and taking more than their share of the proceeds of others’ work.
Now he was in the middle of life—forty-three next week—and, thanks to the cowardice of the Italian Fascist generals and the foolishness of Il Duce, the German military had taken control of the city. They killed more people than they had to, and took too much pleasure in it. And they were greedier even than the Camorristi and the Fascisti, leaving no room for him and others like him to make a living.
He himself had never been, nor ever wanted to be, a member of the Camorra—though he had friends and business associates who were.
He himself had never been, nor ever wanted to be, a Fascist—though he knew a number of people who were.
And he himself never wanted to see another German uniform for as long as he lived.
Early in the morning on this warm September day—the air still humid from the previous night’s rain—Aldo found himself sitting on the concrete wall at the Port of Naples, or what remained of the port after three years of British and American bombing raids: broken piers, a pocked street, the rubble of ruined storage sheds, and the rusting hulls of sunken ships. Hanging from the roof of a bombed-out building across the way was the chassis of a small car, thrown there, thirty meters up, by one of the thousands of explosions that had torn the city to pieces. He was hungry, nothing unusual there. To stanch the hunger, he was smoking the last of a cigarette—stolen, naturally—while watching for his daughter to appear at the corner near the hotel. Grand Hotel Santa Lucia, it was called, in honor of both the street that ran along its northern edge and the neighborhood behind it. But, in secret, Aldo liked to pretend it had been named for his only child, Lucia.
The Santa Lucia hotel was undamaged but closed. One block away, a sister hotel, the elegant Vesuvio, had months ago been reduced to rubble.
With his back to the water, Aldo could run his eyes over part of his enormous city. Its hills were carpeted with apartment buildings, old palazzi standing shoulder to shoulder, four and five and six stories of stucco walls, flat roofs, tall, narrow windows, and balconies protected by wrought-iron railings and supported by curved concrete gargoyles. He guessed that almost half the city’s structures had been damaged or demolished in the raids, tens of thousands of Neapolitans killed. Here and there, the pointed tops of surviving churches showed above the roofs, and here and there, he could see gaps where the Allied bombs had obliterated an entire residential block. Since the recent armistice—a surprise to almost everyone: Italy was now no longer aligned with Nazi Germany—the bombing raids had abruptly ceased. He blamed the Allies for the destruction, and didn’t blame them. Like most inhabitants of the city, he wanted the Americans to make an assault on Naples, and didn’t want it. There would be more bloodshed, more ruin. But maybe there would be food again, and freedom, and an end to the reprisal killings—executions in cold blood, ten or twenty or a hundred Italians for every German soldier’s death. The Nazis were more ruthless even than the Camorra. Their slaughtering of the innocent was worse even than the Allied bombs. Once every few days, it seemed now, the occupiers would find some reason to line up a group of men, women, and children, cut them to bloody shreds with machine-gun fire, and leave their corpses lying in hideous poses on the street. Lucia’s boyfriend’s mother and father had been among the recent victims. She’d told Aldo that she’d helped Giuseppe wrap and bury the bodies. It had left a mark on her. No father could fail to see it.
It occurred to him, as he waited for Lucia to appear, that in his time on earth, he’d spent exactly one night outside this city. He and Vittoria, Lucia’s late mother, had gone to Caserta for a night of love. One night, most likely the night on which their only child had been conceived. The memory, a rare tender place in his thoughts, didn’t fit the atmosphere of war, so he turned his mind away from it.
There was the clank and whir of a truck engine changing gears. He saw a German lorry, its bed crowded with shackled Italian men—Jews, perhaps—speed through the square and head off toward the Garibaldi station.
By reflex, he slid sideways so he was half-hidden behind a pile of stones and what was left of the fishermen’s display boxes. Once General Badoglio and the king had announced the armistice—a little over two weeks ago—Hitler realized that most Italians would no longer fight for the German cause, so, in addition to the Jewish families, Christian men were being rounded up and shipped north to work for the mustachioed maniac, to build his tanks and airplanes, to die in his cold land. Another reason to wish for the Allies to make their assault as quickly as possible.
Aldo drew the last bit of pleasure from the cigarette and flicked it over his shoulder into the sea. He saw a skinny little street boy trotting along on the opposite sidewalk with a wrapped package under one arm. If it was food, he’d be chased and beaten for it.