“Walking here today, I was thinking,” she said, “that my life of sin has given me a deep understanding of men.”
“Your ‘life of sin’ has more love and goodness in it, Rita, than the lives of a hundred so-called sinless women.”
She nodded, indulging him, and reached out for the bottle and drank, then went on. “When I think of men, I think of things with hard shells—chestnuts, clams, eggs. But always the inside is soft. Men have their strength, their titles—capitano, avvocato—”
“King, duce.”
“Sì, sì, exactly. Their fighting, their wars. But behind that is the soft boy, which they hide.”
“But not from you?”
“Not in my bed, no. Not always.”
“And women?”
“Women can be hard, too—like pasta, like grains of rice—but life cooks us, love cooks us, and we go soft. When you see a mother loving her child, there is always a softness.”
She watched her brother turn his eyes to one side, afraid perhaps to show pity for his childless half sister. She wondered if he missed a woman’s love (one of the other monks, made bitter by years of abstinence, had accused Marco of meeting her for sex! As if he would break his vows! As if he would sleep with his own flesh and blood!). She thought of what Avvocato Cilento had said about the need for a woman’s touch, and wondered if these weekly meetings weren’t only for her benefit.
Love, she was thinking. Love, men, their hard disguises. She drank from the bottle and said, “Aldo, the other man who—”
“I know, Rita. You’ve told me about him many times.”
She nodded, still half-ashamed. “Aldo speaks of his daughter the way you speak of Christ, the way I think of Mary and Santa Agata. But when I see him on the street, he has around him a wall like yours here.” She gestured out the door. “Lucia is her name, he says. A beautiful girl, he says. I hope one day to meet her.”
“He’s had a troubled life.”
Rita nodded. “A brutal life. A life hard enough to build a crust around any soul.”
From the monastery church, the first bells sounded, calling the monks to prayer. Her thirty minutes with her brother were over for another week. He stood, the brown robe swirling at his ankles like a woman’s dress.
Rita saw one surprising wrinkle of concern form on Marco’s unwrinkled face, then watched it pass away. He said, “I have a secret for you to hold. And something to ask you.”
“I hold so many, my brother. Ask me anything.”
Marco paused, the green eyes fixed on her intently, one cloud showing in the peaceful sky behind them. “We have someone new with us now, a soldier, an American, a brave man. A few nights ago, he slipped through the German lines and found us. We are keeping him safe. He said that the Allies are preparing to attack the city, and asked if we have information about the situation in Napoli. Where the Germans are, what armaments they have, where are the headquarters. Do you know?”
“I can find out,” Rita said. It seemed to her that she’d seen this moment in a dream or a vision. Strange as it was, coming from a man of prayer, she’d somehow expected it. “I can find out and come here next week and tell you.”
Her brother almost smiled. “Sooner, if you can,” he said. “If you don’t mind doing this, my sister. But please tell no one.”
Marco made the sign of the cross over her and then, outside, where anyone with evil thoughts could see, held her in a long embrace.
Ten
With great care, Giuseppe spread the handmade map across his desk in the Archives’ basement level and spent all morning painstakingly drawing in more of the streets and landmarks of the Vomero neighborhood—Via Ribera, Via Vincenzo Gemito, the Stadio Arturo Collana. Set up on a hill as it was, the Vomero seemed to him the most poorly guarded of all the city’s neighborhoods, at least as far as the Italian armories were concerned. According to his on-foot research and things Lucia had told him, some of those depots were just converted schools or warehouses, not surrounded by barbed-wire-topped walls, guarded by only two or three German soldiers now that so many Italian military men had been called away to foreign battles and so many others had deserted. As Giuseppe worked, the map pressed flat by his left hand, he thought about his boss, the superintendent of the Archives, Riccardo Filangieri. Days after Italy’s entrance into the war, Filangieri had had the foresight to move the most precious materials out of this building. Nearly nine hundred cases of documents and books—Giuseppe knew, because he’d spent four days loading them onto trucks and driving them the twenty-five kilometers to San Paolo Bel Sito—were housed now just outside the city proper, in the Montesano Villa, a beautiful box of a building surrounded by chestnut and eucalyptus trees. Foresight, yes, but were the irreplaceable treasures truly safe there? The bombs hadn’t damaged the villa, but if the Nazis found out about the documents, wouldn’t they burn the building to the ground, as Filangieri had told him they’d burned libraries all across Europe? Giuseppe shook his head at the thought and tried to concentrate on his work, but a film of disgust remained. Why burn a library or an archive, hardly threatening from a military standpoint, unless you were intent on eliminating all traces of goodness and knowledge in the world, creating a new history of blood and hatred? Why would any human being do such a thing, not to mention kill unarmed civilians in cold blood?
He’d just drawn and marked the schoolhouse where he’d seen the Nazi guards when he heard what sounded like boots on the stone stairs. He had time only to roll up the map and toss it onto the floor at his feet, push his glasses back against the bridge of his nose, then step away toward the stacks. He was looking down a narrow row formed by shelves of bound documents. A German officer appeared there, straight in front of him, backlit by a shaft of sun in the stairwell. Just as the officer started toward him—his gait awkward, as if one hip were locked and the other moving freely—Giuseppe saw Lucia appear there, too, halfway up the flight of steps, a silent apparition. She was holding her shoes, one in each hand, so as not to make any sound. She’d been coming to warn him and had arrived a few seconds too late.
The officer was in front of him. Three green bars with one set of green oak leaves, two stars on the epaulettes. A captain, Giuseppe realized. Part of his work now, part of the assignment he’d given himself, was to know the ranks. “Che fai qua?” What are you doing here? the Nazi captain demanded in his horrible accent, staring down into Giuseppe’s eyes. Taller. Not hungry. Not afraid. Using the tu form of address, as if the man were his boss. Altezzoso was the word that came to Giuseppe’s mind. Supercilious. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Lucia, a shoe in each hand and a bag over her shoulder, tiptoe down the last two steps and disappear behind one of the stacks.
“Look at me!” the officer commanded. “What are you doing here?”
It seemed to Giuseppe that the German had brought a stink into the room. Not a moral stink, a literal one. “I work here,” he said.
“Doing what?”
“Cataloging. Caring for documents. When scholars are doing research, I—”
“Not man’s work!”
Odd as the comment was, it sounded a familiar sour note in Giuseppe’s mind. At times, he’d had the same thought. He loved his work but, especially since the war had started, had felt vaguely ashamed doing it. With his small, straight, Aryan nose; strong, dimpled chin; and perfect posture, the German standing a meter in front of him seemed the embodiment of masculinity. A brutal, unforgiving masculinity but, all the same . . . Along with the smell, there was a gust of shame in the air between them. These people had murdered his parents, and he’d been unable to do anything about it.