Now, however, there was one particular grave she cared for and at which she prayed every week. Merchants selling cut flowers were as scarce as soap, but she’d sometimes find a flowering weed growing from a pile of rubble, and she’d bring that along and place it near the plain round stone—no name engraved—that marked the burial plot.
On her walk that morning, trudging along what had once been a street of elegant homes—Via Arenaccia—but was now a kind of cemetery of buildings with huge piles of stone and glass blocking the roadway every fifty meters, she thought about how strange it was that she’d met two of her beloved young people in air-raid shelters.
In the days when the bombs had been falling, Rita and everyone else in Naples headed for the shelters as soon as the sirens sounded. If she were home when the horrible wail screamed out over the city, she’d hurry down the stairs and rush to the shelter on Largo Concordia—the same place where she’d first met little Armando. But if she happened to be out and about, she simply followed the crowd to the nearest refuge and ended up in all kinds of different bunkers and tunnels with all kinds of different people. Most of the shelters were underground, in the city beneath a city that had been carved out there thousands of years before. Some, especially near the Stella and Ottocalli, were caves that, centuries earlier, had been cut deep into the limestone cliffs, incredible places. One had a ceiling that must have been twenty meters high. People had actually built houses there, several of them two stories tall! Children had been born there; grandmothers and grandfathers and the wounded and sick had died there. Some of the shelters were filthy; others were cleaned according to a rigorous schedule arranged by the people of the neighborhood.
Of them all, the worst she’d ever seen was a concrete-walled, aboveground shelter behind the Garibaldi station, a place she’d run to once, only a few months earlier, when she was caught out on the streets later than usual, returning from a visit to a friend in Nola. The shelter was filthy, rank with the stink of human waste, but some of the people she’d met there had no place else to go; their homes and the homes of their relatives had been obliterated.
Rita believed she possessed an almost bottomless tolerance for the sight of human misery. From a very early age, long before Italy’s involvement in the war, she’d seen and experienced things that would have sickened or destroyed most people. But her faith was strong, her belief in the existence of another dimension unshakable, and she’d found that helping and giving were the perfect antidotes to hopelessness.
That night in the fetid shelter, she’d come across a young girl named Anna who was trembling in fear as the bombs fell and the concussions rocked their concrete refuge. The bombs Rita could deal with—she’d had years of practice—but the sight of the girl’s trauma had been almost too much to bear: the terrified young creature reminded her so vividly of herself at that age, though their terror had different sources. The frantic eyes and trembling mouth, the no! stop! no! that seemed to shiver wordlessly from her skin. It was like looking in a mirror that showed her worst memories.
Rita clasped the girl against her bosom, rocked her there, talked to her, called on the saints and angels to give her peace and keep her safe. When the all clear finally sounded, she accompanied the girl to her wreck of an apartment on Via Venezia in the Vasto. Anna lived with her grandmother, who’d been too terrified to leave. The inside of their apartment was all unwashed dishes and clumps of dust. It was obvious that the girl and her grandmother were close to starving, so Rita had started going by there every few days, sharing some of her rations, doing what little she could to keep them alive.
On the fifth or sixth visit, she’d noticed a strange rash on Anna’s body, red spots that covered her midsection and legs but left her palms and the bottoms of her feet untouched. At first, Rita thought it might be the measles or chicken pox, but Anna had an extremely high fever and a cough, and seemed disoriented. Against the wishes of the elderly grandmother, who had no other company on this earth, Rita lifted the girl into her arms and carried her all the way to Palazzo Fuga, where the poorest of the poor were housed and treated. Half-starved as she was, Anna weighed less than a sack of potatoes, and her fever was so strong that Rita’s skin sweated where it came in contact with hers. In better days, the Fuga had enjoyed a reputation for excellent care, but its finest doctors were at the front now, conscripted into Mussolini’s army, and the place was staffed by volunteers, three doctors and a handful of nurses too old for military service. The emergency room was as crowded as some of the bomb shelters, with men, women, and children of all ages lying about in postures of exhaustion or agony. The smell, the cries and moans, the faces of the toddlers who’d been mutilated, blinded, or deafened by the bombs or whose arms or legs had been cut by flying glass or stone, the old women in ragged clothing and the old men without shoes—it might have been a scene from a painting of hell.
After the better part of two hours, when a nurse had finally arrived to examine little Anna, she couldn’t disguise the look of horror that crossed her face. The girl was brought into a back room, a closet really, and kept alone there, her clothes stripped off and her body washed as carefully as it could be washed given the shortage of soap. “Tifo,” the nurse had whispered to Rita in the hallway outside. Typhus. “Go home, destroy the clothes you’re wearing, wash yourself, and pray to God you won’t be infected.”
Rita did as she was told, confident that the saints would protect her, and she went back to visit Anna every day, watching and praying at the bedside as the girl burned up and trembled, and finally, after hours of agony, succumbed. They buried her in a simple grave in the poorest corner of the Poggioreale—Rita paid for the plot.
On this morning, after sending Aldo away with a last embrace, Rita set off to say prayers for Anna’s soul. The trip was long, but it soothed her tired soul. For the last part of the journey, instead of staying on the streets, which had been so thoroughly bombed in that part of the city that it was more like mountain climbing than walking, she cut through a corner of a field, following a narrow path at first and then losing herself momentarily in the grassy remains of a small orchard. Not long before she emerged, near the cemetery gates, she ducked under the branches of a tree and, to her astonishment, happened to see a single peach hanging there, hidden by the pointed leaves, perfectly ripe. The orchard owner and the starving vandals had somehow missed it. She plucked the peach, slipped it into the pocket of her dress, and went on to the grave site.
After her prayers there, after clearing a few weeds from the lump of dirt that marked Anna’s grave, Rita made her way back toward the Centro again, her stomach aching, the peach tapping against her thigh with every step. The temptation to take it out and eat it was almost overwhelming, but she knew there was food at home, and she suspected she would come across someone who needed the nourishment more than she did. As it happened, her route took her close to the old tire warehouse on Via Casanova. There was little use for tires now; the building had been abandoned, its large front windows covered with metal grates, its front doors locked. Armando had told her that he slept there sometimes in the warmer months, in a repair shed the mechanics had used. “It’s safe and quiet there, Nanella,” he told her. “No one knows about it.”