Books & Rough Business

III

11 Tullio Pironti III Papa began go back down the hillside to the bookstore, though he knew all too well no one was buying books. He made the journey whatever way he could, often on foot, and he did keep us up to date on friends and family, Naples and the war. Now and again he took my two older brothers with him; the city proper still held the best opportunities for what a family needs. But none of them ever brought the rest of us a thing to eat. Eating decently, for my family, soon enough turned into the merest dream, unbearably sweet. At last came a morning when Mama gathered up me and the other younger ones, those still in the farmhouse. She led us to a dirt road through open countryside. It was coming on autumn, harvest time, and out in the fields she hoped we’d find a way to scavenge a bit of fallen fruit. Everyone in the family understood such foraging wasn’t allowed. We risked a worse penalty than the back of farmer’s rough hand, too. By that time, with the Allied armies poised to storm the Italian mainland (they landed nearby, it turned out, at Salerno), the Nazis had imposed strict martial law. Any extra food was to be kept available for the Wehrmacht. If a Neapolitan family hoarded more than their allotment—if they made the local commandant angry enough—they would disappear into trains bound for the north. Everyone had heard stories of labor camps—the names unpronounceable, the conditions unspeakable. The upshot for my family, though, was that we were going whole days with nothing in our bellies besides a scrap of bread. Indeed, were knew precisely how much bread might be down there, under wartime rationing: 150 grams per person per day. Small wonder Amadeo and Ugo tried their luck along Via Foria and in Piazza Dante. 12 Books and Rough Business That morning, after we’d tramped some distance from the house, my mother caught her breath and pointed across a farm’s bordering hedge. Without a word our small group took in a sumptuous orchard grove, the trees full of apples. And when we searched elsewhere around us, the only company we found was the long-familiar gnawing of our hunger. My brother Guglielmo and I were the first in under the trees. We scampered around gathering apples and tossing them to Mama, who stuffed them into her purse. But then rang out an angry bellow, freezing us in our tracks. The man seemed to have erupted out of the earth—in fact, he could’ve been down in an irrigation ditch—and he broke into a run, still howling as he came our way. “What are you doing? Bastards! Crooks! You’re taking the food from my family’s mouths!” And he closed in on my mother, his face twisted. He roared that farmers like him had nothing but the crops they could grow, the animals they could feed. As for Mama, she’d gone red with worry, with shame, and wordlessly she motioned me and the other kids to her. The man raised still worse warnings, promising to drag us before the Nazi high command over in the palace at Capodimonte. Much as he must’ve terrified my mother, she understood as well that the same terror goaded him. She must’ve kept that in mind, and in that way seized precisely the right moment to raise her face to his. “Please,” she offered, quietly. “You can see that we’ve taken only a few. Boys like mine won’t pick you clean.” At least the farmer quit his screaming. But abruptly, scowling, he grabbed her bag and turned it over. Our precious late-summer spoils tumbled across the ground. “Get out of here,” barked the orchard’s owner. “Get out of here before I break your heads myself.” Mama may have begun crying, then—though as I think back on the moment now, weighed down by so many strains of tragedy, she could’ve been crying the entire time. In any case the farmer stiffened and turned, scooping up the apples. It didn’t take him long to pull them into a small pile, at the foot of a tree. Still he couldn’t look our way, as he began to growl: “Get out, go back wherever you came from. Never let me see your faces around here again.” My mother, gathering...