Eight
Armando found the house without trouble—Vico Politi, number eighteen. He knocked twice on the door, and it opened immediately. A tall woman with red hair. He handed the package across the threshold; she took it in both hands, looked him up and down—from his ragged shoes to his matted hair—and closed the door in his face.
Feet still wet, stomach grumbling, he fingered the coins in his pocket and started down the sloping street toward Via Toledo. On the way, he passed one of the yellowish sheets of paper the police had pasted to walls everywhere in Naples:
RISPETTATE IL PANE:
ORGOGLIO DEL LAVORO,
POEMA DI SACRIFICIO
MUSSOLINI
If he hadn’t been so painfully hungry, the words would have made him laugh out loud. RESPECT BREAD! Pride of Work. Poem of Sacrifice.
As if, he thought, anyone would disrespect bread these days. And as if half the people he knew could even read! He sent up a silent prayer of thanks to the orphanage nuns who’d taught him, and walked on, imagining food, feeling it in his mouth, tasting, chewing, swallowing.
He was supposed to meet his friends in front of the Duomo. He’d lead them up the street, halfway to Via Foria, where a café there was open most days and where the two lire would get them something delicious: stale crackers and perhaps a little cheese, a bag of roasted chestnuts, or whatever the café owner had been able to find on the black market or buy with his ration coupons. They’d slip into an alley and eat their food in safety, and his friends would ask where he’d gotten the money, and maybe he’d tell them and maybe he wouldn’t. Zozo, the man’s name was. He’d remember it.
Stomach swirling in anticipation of his first meal in twenty hours, Armando had crossed Toledo, the wide main street, and was hurrying along Via Capitelli when he heard shouting just around the next corner. Two men yelling. German words, rough, angry. And then the horrible sound of a woman screaming, “No, no! Per favore, no!” He felt a prickling of fear run along the skin of his arms, but the woman sounded like she needed help. The building at the corner to his left had been reduced to a shell of stone walls surrounding rubble, the doors and windows gone, sky for a roof. Hoping to cut the corner and get to the woman more quickly, Armando climbed through what had been a ground-floor window, made his way across a landscape of stone and dust, and was about to exit through an open doorway when he saw the backs of two German soldiers on the other side of the street. Funny helmets, gray uniforms, rifles. They were forcing three people to stand against what was left of another ruined building there. An old man, an old woman, a girl who looked to be five or six. The woman, the girl’s nonna, Armando guessed, tried to grab the girl’s hand and run, but one of the soldiers clubbed her over the head with his rifle. She was lying against the base of the wall and the man and little girl were bending over her, reaching down, when the second soldier opened fire. Armando flinched and slipped behind one side of the doorway. It was over in seconds. Two quick at-at-at-at bursts, the three bodies twitching, a thin river of blood running into the gutter, and the Germans were in their motorcar and gone.
Armando peered around the edge of the doorframe, frozen, breathing in gasps. He saw a weeping woman go up to the bodies and make the sign of the cross, and he started in that direction but then saw the ruined face of the little girl, and he turned and sprinted, blindly, as if he might outrun the awful sight, keep it from being etched into his memory. He’d seen dead bodies before; everybody had. He would come out of the air-raid shelters to find buildings on fire, people lying facedown in the street, horses cut in half by the explosions. But the girl’s face had been turned into a mask of bloody flesh. He sprinted along the street but could not stop seeing it.
Nine
The climb from the bus stop in Ercolano to her brother’s monastery was long and steep, a paved road at first and then gravel, but, accustomed to walking, Rita managed it without trouble. Once past the buildings of the town, there were only old pine trees to either side, small vineyards and orchards, a few large cactus plants lifting their spiny arms toward the sun. The air here was as fresh as it had been in peacetime, but she wondered what it must have been like for the monks to watch the bombs falling on Naples. They would have had a clear view, seen the Allied planes in formation, then the bombs tumbling, the explosions and smoke and fires. How horrible that must have been for men of prayer and peace.
She could see the gray tops of the monastery buildings—the color of an old woman’s hair—and the stone bell tower standing proudly against the enormous dark-green pyramid of Vesuvius behind it. It sometimes seemed to her that the monastery’s founders had built their sacred, walled-in village there as a statement, proof that they weren’t afraid of the volcano, weren’t afraid of death. Their focus was on the world to come.
That morning, she’d eaten one small, partially rotten apple, so she wasn’t too hungry. A precious apple! Brought to her by Avvocato Cilento, once a powerful lawyer with a beautiful wife, now an old widower with no work. Cilento claimed to have been a faithful husband, and she believed him. His body no longer permitted him the pleasure of making love, but he came to her once a week in spite of that, took off his clothes, and lay with her all night in bed, skin to skin. “I cannot live without the touch of a woman,” he’d confessed to her once. In payment—irregular but generous—he brought portions of food or objects from his home: solid-brass candleholders, a small tapestry from his travels to Morocco, old coins, old stamps, china dishes and cups. He’d carry these objects through the streets in a worn alligator-skin carpetbag, little by little emptying the rooms of his glamorous two-story apartment in the Vomero. “When there is nothing left,” he told her, “I shall stop visiting you.”
But she’d never allow that.
On his most recent visit, he’d said something about helping a scientist friend interfere with the German radio communications, giving the man money and food to keep him healthy enough to perform his secret work. Rita wondered if it was true, or just an old man’s boasting.
She turned sharply right, onto the narrow walled street—Via Luigi Palmieri—and saw the monastery buildings directly in front of her, one thin metal cross, a meter tall, standing up from the tallest roof. Her brother—a half brother, really (but what was the difference? God had placed them in the same womb!)—would be expecting her.
To the north, beyond the buildings, was a paved road used by delivery trucks, another way to get from here to Naples, but not one that was part of any bus route. On this side, the dirt road had become only a path paved in pebbles and weeds. She followed it almost as far as the wall of the enclosure, pushed through the metal door of a windowless shed there, and sat, as always, on a wooden crate. She took out her rosary beads, set her purse aside, and waited for her brother to appear.
She hadn’t been there three minutes when she heard the tap of his sandals on dirt. Marco came through the door, carrying a worn leather satchel. They embraced without a word, and he sat on a crate opposite her. Behind him, workman’s tools—hoe, scythe, shovel—hung neatly from a row of rusty spikes. Marco’s face was drawn, sun-darkened, hair clipped very short, green eyes alert. Around him floated a sense of peace.
First the business of confession—her same sins, his same absolution. Then, from the satchel, he brought out their simple lunch: a thin bread made from chickpea flour, four roasted chestnuts from the monks’ own trees, and one piece, barely larger than a child’s fist, of mozzarella—made from the milk of water buffalos that lived in the marshland to the south. They ate slowly and with reverence, mouthful by mouthful, and drank from a single wine bottle filled with tepid water. In these terrible times, all of it was luxury. For centuries, the monks had been largely self-sufficient: living off their animals, their trees, their own gardens. Before the war, Rita had pitied them their meager life. Now, that life seemed like it belonged to a side room of Paradise. So far, at least, the Germans had left the monastery alone, and the Allied bombs had not fallen here.