Before he was allowed to approach the bodies, Giuseppe was made to show his papers. Made to show his papers! He found his mother and father lying together and knelt and wept, and what followed were the very worst hours of Lucia’s life. She’d hurried back to Giuseppe’s house for blankets and to summon Uncle Donato. Giuseppe had borrowed a wheelbarrow. They had wrapped the bodies, loaded them into the wheelbarrow, and taken turns walking them, with a helpful priest, in broiling heat, all the way to the cemetery, a three hours’ march.
After the burial, after that hideous day and the hideous night that followed, a change had come over the man she loved. How could it not? Giuseppe started to spend his days in the Archives’ basement, working obsessively on his secret map. And a change had come over her, as well: she began taking risks she never would have taken before the murders. When Bruni was out on one of his three-hour lunch breaks (lunches that, in a lustful irony, reportedly included a tryst with a Jewish lover), she’d slip into his office on the pretext of dusting and organizing and would peek at his notes and recent correspondence. She’d go through the files, and if she found a soldier or an arrested citizen who was Jewish—or even who might be suspected of being Jewish—she’d remove the file, tear the papers into tiny pieces, hide the pieces in the cups of her bra, and, at home, burn them with a candle flame in what had become a ritual for her, a religious rite. It was, of course, impossible to remove every file or even spy in his office every day, but she did what she could.
It was on one of those clandestine errands that she’d seen the telegram announcing the imminent arrival of Colonel Walter Scholl. He was coming, the telegram said, “to restore order to the city of Naples and its environs.”
Lucia’s closest friend in the building was a single woman named Rosalia DeLamentalla, who came from a large family that lived together in the Vasto section, just southeast of the Centro, and that included one sister who’d become a nun. Rosalia’s only annoying habit was that she continually commented on Lucia’s attractiveness. “I’ll never find a husband, never ever,” she would say, “and you’re besieged by admirers!” or “It’s fitting that you’ve found your Giuseppe, a prize, a prince, the most handsome man in Mezzogiorno! And you, like a princess, like a queen!”
Rosalia was, in her own right, a queen. The queen of news. Lucia could never understand where she got her information—perhaps from one of her many siblings—but it was unfailingly accurate. Before anyone else heard the reports, Rosalia whispered to Lucia that the Allies had landed on Sicily and Italian soldiers were surrendering by the thousands. Then another burst of whispering just inside the bathroom door: that Mussolini had been taken from office, kidnapped, and couldn’t be found. Then that an armistice had been signed. Then that the Germans were pouring men and supplies over the northern border. Then that there were reprisal killings. Then that the Jews—who, despite his vituperative “racial laws,” Mussolini had never sent north—were being taken by train to Germany to be worked to death. Then, an hour after Lucia saw the telegram, Rosalia told her that she’d already known about this colonel and that he was reported to be a beast, a sadist. She said that, angry at the Neapolitans for their failure to be suitably welcoming to the new German troops, Hitler had hand-chosen one of the most vicious men at his disposal and assigned him to take charge of Naples.
When Bruni returned from lunch that day—Lucia could smell the perfume on him—he handed her a long sheet of paper of a texture she wasn’t used to seeing and told her to roll it up very carefully, take it to the printer, and have posters made, “like the circus uses,” he said. “The kind you can stick up on buildings and light poles. Two thousand copies. And tell no one.”
Lucia rolled up the paper, collected her purse, walked down the four flights and out into her ravaged city. Although she’d been seeing this same view for years now, every morning and every afternoon, it still caught her and made her stop and stare. Across the street, where a tabaccheria had once stood, an elegant palazzo rising above it, there was nothing but a pile of debris, as if a tooth had been ripped out of a mouth by an amateur dentist, leaving only remnants of porcelain and gum: stones and great chunks of concrete, electric wires, shards of glass twinkling in the sunlight, a girl’s white shoe, and what appeared to be part of a wheel, bent almost in two, that had once belonged to a bicycle. The buildings to either side remained standing, window shutters closed, one tiny pot of flowers on one fourth-floor balcony, a woman there, her fleshy arms crossed on the wrought iron. She was staring across the street and down at Lucia. As their eyes met, she lifted the second finger of her left hand in a feeble greeting. Lucia waved back and walked on, the rolled paper held under her left arm, the purse on her right shoulder, some new dark cloud sinking low over her thoughts.
A pair of German soldiers passed her going in the opposite direction. She cast her eyes down and pretended not to understand when one of them said, “Schöne Brüste.” Beautiful breasts.
Why she’d decided to study German at university, Lucia would never quite understand. The complex grammar had interested her, and the sound—which, even before the war, so many of her friends had mocked—had reminded her, in a positive way, of a sad hymn in a minor key, all mournful notes and jagged changes. Her abilities with the language had landed her, not so much the job she’d originally been hired to do—the Germans weren’t in control then—but the promotion from that job to Bruni’s office. She could read the telexes and telegrams and file them properly, and even though some of them contained information she perhaps should not have seen, Bruni didn’t seem to mind. And his recently arrived “associates” didn’t seem to have thought to bring secretaries with them when they traveled from Vienna or Berlin.
As she went along, carrying the rolled-up poster now in both hands, she passed a restaurant that had remained open, a place called da Carmela on Via Tribunali. Sitting at one of three outdoor tables was the black-haired, blue-eyed German officer she sometimes noticed around the office. When she looked up and saw him, she realized he’d been staring at her, watching her walk along the curving, narrow street. He had a plate of food in front of him, which made her realize how hungry she was. He lifted a hand in greeting, a small, friendly wave. And then, “Join me?” The voice was kind, the invitation seemed harmless, the crooked smile sincere.
She nodded once, curtly, as if she hadn’t understood, moved her eyes in front of her, and went on her way. If they knew what we were doing, she thought. What we were thinking. If only they knew.
Twenty-Four
One day a week—usually the day after Aldo visited—Rita made a trip to the Poggioreale Cemetery. The war had made everything more complicated, including the cemetery visit. More than a year earlier, the buses that used to go in that direction had stopped running, either because so many streets were no longer passable or because so many buses had been damaged or destroyed in the bombings. So, unless she was able to catch a ride with one of the wagons carrying caskets, she was required to walk: two hours each way.
She had no relatives buried at Poggioreale—none that she knew of, in any case. In the old days, she’d make the journey simply as a religious pilgrimage, to pray for the dead and to keep the gift of her own life in perspective. She’d bring flowers and place them next to graves that looked as though no one had tended them in years.