It made no sense. There was something Zozo wasn’t telling him. A missing piece.
Twenty-Six
Armando didn’t like to sleep during the day—he always awoke sweating or shivering and tormented by the thought of missed opportunities—but sometimes it was unavoidable. Sometimes the nights were broken up by exploding bombs, or by the wails and screams from apartments; sometimes it was too cold, or too hot, or raining hard, or the only potential sleeping places were noisy with the squeals of rats. So he stayed up, walking and walking, or sitting with his friends by the port or in a piazza, waiting for their luck to change. After a night like that, if he found himself anywhere near the tire store on Via Casanova, he’d sneak into the deserted workshop and lie down for an hour or two, wooden floor for a bed, old tire for a pillow. No one bothered him in that place. He’d never seen a rat there, only a scampering mouse or two, and enough of the roof remained to block out the direct sunlight and most of the rain. For whatever reason, the dreams he had when he slept there were especially vivid, and on this day, he’d awakened from a long sleep speckled with visions of the nun who’d been so kind to him, Sister Marcellina. In one of the dream-moments, she was handing him a banana—he hadn’t seen a banana in many months—and asking him to pray with her. He agreed, and was even going to kneel down next to her in a church pew when something, some sound or movement, caused his eyes to open.
For a time, he lay there, wide awake but not moving, thinking about the dream for a while, then thinking about the little girl the Nazis had shot with her grandparents, then staring across the littered floor at a greasy red rag that lay discarded beneath a workbench. These days, he liked to look at objects, even simple things like the yarn Tomaso had used to tie the German’s ankle to a chair, and imagine ways they might be used. It came from his years on the streets, where a nail or stone or an abandoned belt buckle could become a weapon, where a coin might be discovered in the gutter. He was used to scavenging for food, but, important as that was, he enjoyed even more the hunt for materials. The greasy rag was useless, he decided, and then, remembering the German hat, he reached down to the shirt at his midsection and felt it, safely in place.
As he took his hand away, his fingers grazed something. He looked down. On the dusty floor, just in front of his navel, he thought he saw a peach. He closed his eyes and opened them, shook his head, afraid to reach out and touch what he was certain must be a mirage. He’d seen the crazy ones—men and women, old and not so old—who’d been driven over the edge of sanity by the war, and for a moment, he worried the months of hunger and the horrors of war were causing him to lose his mind. He stared at the peach, unmoving, and then at last reached out one finger and gingerly touched its skin. The peach tilted sideways, then righted itself when he took his hand away. It seemed real. He reached out again, propping himself up on one elbow, and touched it with two fingers and his thumb. Definitely real! He sat all the way up, still staring at it as if it might suddenly mutate into a hand grenade and explode in his face.
At last, he wrapped his fingers around it and lifted it to eye level. The fine dusting of fuzz, the mottled pink and orange and red and yellow skin, the stub of a stem and one small bruise on the side facing him. He brought it to his nose and smelled it. Ripe. Unbelievable. Instead of biting it, he licked it, once, the skin lightly scraping his tongue. He looked around again, opened his mouth, and took a small bite, the sweet flesh tugging back gently against his teeth. There was juice on his tongue and lips, an absolutely incredibly delicious taste in his mouth. He rolled the small bit of peach flesh around and around, sucking on it, still unsure that he was awake and sane, and then he squeezed it between his back teeth—more juice—and swallowed. Though he knew it was impossible, he looked up, through the hole in the roof, as if there might be a tree growing right above him in the tire company lot, or as if an angel might be hovering there, smiling down at him, nodding, waiting for a gesture of thanks. Nothing but sky, blue, with one fat, bubbly cloud sailing across it, but it seemed to him now that there might, in fact, be some spirit looking out for him. A mother spirit, perhaps. Or the spirit of that little girl. He spoke a word of thanks and took a second bite, then heard a muted noise from the direction of Corso Garibaldi. A small explosion, it sounded like. He decided to go out and investigate.
Twenty-Seven
At the close of the workday, his precious map stored safely in the watchman’s room, rolled up tight and squeezed between the wall and the bed where he and Lucia had made love, Giuseppe left the National Archives building and wandered, almost like an aimless man, in the general direction of the Duomo. He was, however, the furthest thing from aimless. According to what he now thought of as the most valuable book in the entire Archives, The Directory of the Public Structures of the City of Naples, there was a building not far from Piazza Cavour that, during World War I, had been used as an armory for the Italian military. He knew where the storage facilities were, and suspected that this one had fallen into disuse. But, upon waking that morning, he’d had the thought that the Germans might have resurrected it for that same purpose. While it might not be their main storage area, they could be keeping small arms there, or vehicles, or even a few of the thousands of men who had been stationed in the city since the retreat from Sicily and Mussolini’s mysterious departure from Rome. The Allies would want to know.
So he wandered, hands in his pockets, looking, to any casual observer, like nothing more than another hungry Neapolitan young man in his wrinkled brown pants and scuffed brown shoes, searching the city for a cheap bowl of soup or a pretty young woman. Up past the huge cathedral he went, dodging the piles of rubble and scavenging dogs and scaring flapping pigeons into the air. He heard a gull cawing above him and thought of the times his parents had taken him to the shore when he was small. Before the onset of war, he’d made this walk hundreds of times, varying his route home, and always the air had been filled with rich smells: tomato sauce simmering in an upstairs apartment, meat cooking, warm bread being taken out of an oven, small pizzas, calzones, and sfogliatelle just made and on display in glass cases on the sidewalks. The brisk scent of lemon, the rich fragrance of basil, the earthiness of just-harvested mushrooms sitting in boxes on a stand at the corner of Via Foria.
Now, only the smell of smoke and dust, perhaps a hint of the sea.
He saw a boy go past, dressed in the unofficial uniform of a scugnizzo—the dirty clothes and ragged shoes—his face triangular and smudged, one hand on his midsection, as if he were hiding something there beneath the T-shirt.
Giuseppe went left on Don Bosco, past a row of beggars, men and women to whom he had nothing to give. For some reason, the sight of them stimulated his own hunger, a clutching in his stomach, a radiating ache. It was like a companion to him now, and he knew that a million others shared the feeling. He turned right onto a side street—no sign, but he knew it must be Viale di Quaresima, the Alley of Lent. That word caused him to remember his boyhood Lenten fasts, his mother and father and he and his uncle forgoing meat and, for the forty days leading to Easter, each of them giving up something they loved, as a spiritual discipline—veal for his father, mushrooms and peppers for his mother, chocolate for him. It was almost impossible to recall being sated enough to voluntarily give up any food for a day, anything, for one day, never mind meat, never mind a favorite food for six weeks.