Books & Rough Business

IV

14 Books and Rough Business IV That day the same as any other, my father reached our hilltop rental around nightfall. Naturally we were eager to tell him what had happened, the miracle of food enough for once—but as soon as we saw him, we could tell he’d brought us very different news. Slowly, between tormented looks at the floor, he revealed that Amadeo and Ugo had been seized by the Nazis. My mother was the first to cry out: “But where were you?” She got him by an arm. “How could you have—?” “I wasn’t with them! You don’t know what it’s like down there, everyone has to scavenge, every man for himself. Just, all of sudden a friend came running into the shop, he could hardly breathe . . .” In fact, Mama had seen such things happen. My older brothers had committed no crime, according to my father’s friend; they hadn’t so much as snitched an unaccounted-for apple. But the Wehrmacht had been rounding up all the able-bodied men that they could get. They needed the pick-and-shovel work, the hard labor of throwing up fortifications and planting mines—though of course they’d never trust a Neapolitan with a gun. So out of nowhere a truck with a swastika on the door had pulled up beside Amadeo and Ugo. The boys had faced the business end of Mauser 98, then gotten thrown into the back with others their age. The days that followed were all but smothered by melancholy. Certainly my mother could barely breathe, or hardly speak, interrupting her silence only for the occasional deep sigh. I was too young then to understand how those days felt, and I’m too old and full of feeling now to understand how 15 Tullio Pironti they ever passed, but eventually days ran into weeks and longer. It was after about a year up at Marianella that my father came home with better news. He went first to mother, using a pet name. “Rusiné,” he said. “The war . . . in Naples the war’s over.” He gave the news a moment to sink in, then went on gently. “Let’s go home, Rusiné. Soon our sons will be returning.” Did he know this for a fact, then? Was he only passing on one of the happier rumors of that day? All I can say is that when my father turned from Mama to the rest of us, he revealed that, for us too, he carried a special treat: a newspaper. Only Il Risorgimento had continued to publish over the last year, and it sporadically. Yet that issue seemed like Gospel to us, as the evening deepened, as our plans to return downtown came together. My father had us practice our reading on the most sobering statistics, in those pages. More than 20,000 had died, in the war south of Rome; my city and its surroundings had suffered some 400 bombing runs. But this was past, down in print and done with, and a few days later all the family’s things were back up on the same cart as before. We’d lashed it all into place the same as when we’d headed up the mountain. Or almost the same—for this time I was one of the big boys who’d helped run the rope round the cart and tie our goods down. Afterwards, I scampered to the top of the heap and arranged a place to sit. Below me, meantime, Papa was urging everyone on, himself as much as the others. Come on, it’s all downhill from here . . . And just as before, when we looked over the long descent from Capodimonte to the Museum, it appeared full of carts and bikes, families and stragglers, even the occasional wheezing and squeaking auto. Nevertheless, we moved more freely now, my father soon switching from the back of the cart to the front. He seemed full of fresh energy, a better sort of general, guiding his troops in a bloodless war. Eventually we made it all the way to Tribunali and our home. The old ducal palace, we discovered, had been lucky enough to escape the kind of devastation we’d seen from time to time along the way. We only faced windows broken—all the windows—and dust on every surface, plus plaster walls webbed with overlapping thread-thin cracks. Still, we had at least a couple of miracle...