Just as the boy disappeared around the corner, Aldo saw Lucia appear there, thinner than she’d been in the days when people ate more than once or twice in twenty-four hours, but still as beautiful as her mother had been. Long legs, long black hair, a finely chiseled face, and a certain joyfulness to her walk, even now. He had a few small gifts for her, and his generosity (he avoided the word love) gave him a momentary feeling of peace. For two days, if they survived two more days, his daughter would have enough to eat.
But the peace was short-lived: behind Lucia, he saw another figure come into view, a German officer. Mostly hidden by the pile of rubble, Aldo watched with a deadly calm, already committing the man to memory—narrow shoulders, long, thin arms with a sharp bend at the elbows, and an awkward gait, the gait of a goat whose leg had been broken and hadn’t properly healed. Aldo couldn’t hear clearly from this distance, but the man must have called to Lucia, because she stopped, paused, turned to face him. The officer limped up and stood too close, spoke to her with his chin lifted in a gesture of superiority, almost of ownership, and with a touch of craziness to it, also. Lucia angrily shook her head, hair swinging. With one of his thin arms, the officer reached out, pinched the material at the front of her long skirt, and lifted it so that her calves showed, then her knees.
Lucia—fearless girl—slapped at the German’s hand to make him let go. She stepped back, spoke words Aldo couldn’t make out, then turned and hurried away—not toward her father, but around the corner of the hotel and up along the street that bore her name.
Aldo put his feet to the sidewalk, hands on the wall, ready to stand. The knife in his jacket pocket seemed to have a pulse. The German officer shouted something—“Ricordami!” was the only word Aldo heard. Remember me!
Lucia went half a block, then turned purposefully into a courtyard. She didn’t live there, but the German wouldn’t know that, wouldn’t know who might be waiting for her: a father with a knife, a trio of fearless street punks, a Camorra boyfriend with brass knuckles and murderous friends. They were being harassed now, the Nazi occupiers: yelled at in shops, stolen from, even, people said, shot at with stolen guns—rumors were everywhere. The officer watched Lucia disappear through the archway, waited a moment as if deciding whether or not to follow, then limped off in the direction from which he’d come.
“You will live, then,” Aldo muttered to himself, watching the man turn the corner and disappear. You will live another day.
Five
Lucia waited in the courtyard, mostly hidden behind a stone column, watching for the German to appear. On the chipped stucco of the column, just at eye level, the remains of a propaganda poster fluttered in a breath of sea air: Fascist Youth—a boy and a girl working the fields, their eyes alight with joy and confidence. The lower half of their faces had been torn away, a small Neapolitan rebellion. Despite two decades of Fascist songs, school indoctrination, propaganda on the radio, and posters like this everywhere they looked, the people of her city still mostly resisted the Fascist impulse.
Above her, two pigeons cooed on a concrete ledge. A rat scuttled across the courtyard tiles, so close that she could hear the tick tick tick of its nails. Paper flaps of the torn poster settled back against the stone, her heart leaped and slammed against her ribs, but, for several minutes, no man in uniform walked in through the arched entranceway.
Just as her heartbeat was settling, Lucia heard the sound of footsteps and shifted sideways, deeper into the shadows, pressing her back against the column. The footsteps moved closer. Shoes, it sounded like, not military boots. She risked a peek around the edge of the column and saw a woman of late middle age with her hair wrapped in a kerchief. She was carrying a cloth bag in one hand, and her long skirt was wet as far up as the knees. A small forest of greens burst out of the top of the bag as if growing there. Dente di leone. Dandelions. In normal times, in the days before the war, before the bombings, before the Germans came in such numbers, those greens would have been a pleasantly bitter addition to the evening salad; now, fetched from the city’s weedy outskirts, boiled and served without bread, salt, or olive oil, they’d make one meal for a whole family.
When Lucia stepped out from behind the column, the woman turned away, her body curling over the bag.
We’ve become like animals, Lucia thought, protecting our food. She tried to make herself as unthreatening as possible, approached the woman slowly, asked in a soft voice, “Did you see a German soldier there, on the sidewalk?”
The woman narrowed her eyes, squeezed the middle of her lips upward in an expression of disdain, shook her head angrily. By the time she stepped through the archway onto the sidewalk—all clear—Lucia realized that the woman had thought she was asking about a German lover.
Standing there, looking across the boulevard at the seawall, she needed a few seconds before she spotted her father. He was half sitting, half leaning on the wall, still as the mound of stone in front of him, mostly hidden behind it and the ruined wooden stalls where fishermen had sold their catch in the days when this part of the port was alive with commerce. She remembered the smells, the cries of Polpo! Polpo! Octopus, octopus! Housewives planning the evening meal, studying the sea life packed in ice: glistening sardines, mackerel, swordfish, squid, bream, sometimes a whole magnificent tuna, the sight of which had always made her inexplicably sad, as if a great creature had been subdued and murdered by lesser souls. Now the stalls and display boxes stood in a broken line, empty and unattended, the street cratered months before by an errant bomb, the sidewalks silent.
Short and powerfully built, dark-eyed, dark-haired, wearing, even in the September warmth, the tattered black leather jacket that signaled his alliances, her father was watching her intently. He did not so much as raise a hand in greeting. There seemed to be no feeling in his face. Had she not wanted so badly, in a nation of large families, to have one relative she could love, just one, Lucia might have walked away. But she crossed Via Partenope and went up to him. He offered a nod, no kiss, the intense gaze.
“Walk with me,” he said, standing, and they started off, north, along the port, past the windowless buildings there, the piles of concrete and glass and iron-reinforcing rods, the droppings of a horse.
“How are you, Father?” she asked, when he’d led her back across the oceanside avenue and down a narrow alley. “Still coughing?”
He lit a cigarette, blew out the smoke, said, “Sono perfetto”—I’m perfect—the words soaked in irony, the cigarette a boast in these hard times. “You?”
“I’m worried Giuseppe will be taken to the work camps. More and more men are being picked up.”
A grunt. Her father turned away from her and spat on the stones. She thought she saw the stain of blood in his mucus.
“And there’s someone new coming,” she said, “a new Nazi. A colonel. I saw it on the teletype before I left work last night. Rosalia, who hears every rumor in the city, says he’s supposed to be truly evil.”
Her father sucked on the cigarette. “You should spy for the Allies. You work in the right place for it.”
She said nothing. Above them on small balconies, a few shirts and pieces of underwear hung drying, shifting back and forth in the breeze like the flags of besieged nations. No potted flowers there now, no women exchanging gossip, no caged canaries singing in the sun. A small band of barefoot scugnizzi sprinted past them up the street, the urchins’ laughter echoing against the facades of the houses.