A Harvest of Secrets(40)

As they bumped along the road, Carlo watched the man’s profile and couldn’t tell if he thought the German retreat was a good or a bad thing, so he remained silent.

“You fought,” the man said.

Carlo nodded. “Sì, certo.”

“And deserted?”

Carlo shook his head and pointed to the patch over his eye. “By the time I healed, the war was far behind me.”

The man grunted. “You didn’t desert then?”

“I wouldn’t,” Carlo said.

Another grunt. An odd tension swelled into the air of the car, and Carlo didn’t know how to break it. Italians were fighting against Italians now, that was clear enough. People had chosen sides, rooting for Mussolini and his German friends, or for the Allies—the Americani. Loyal warriors or deserters. Italy the way it had been, or the way it might be.

The mysterious man took Carlo as far as Ercolano, near the base of the volcanic mountain at the southern edge of the metropolis of Naples, and dropped him there at the side of the road, nodding once, tersely, to Carlo’s grazie.

Naples was a vision of devastation. For a few minutes, as he walked the rest of the way into the city, Carlo thought Vesuvius must have erupted at some point in the recent past because half the buildings had been reduced to rubble. The streets were choked with piles of debris, whole five-story palazzi looked as though they’d lost the will to keep standing and had broken apart and slipped—an avalanche of brick and mortar and stone and clothes and toys and furnishings—down across the sidewalks and into the alleys and narrow streets. A volcanic lava of ruin. One wall of a house was completely gone, exposing a large, untouched piano.

Everywhere, it seemed, there were American army vehicles and American soldiers. Some drunk and wobbling, roaring, grabbing at any woman they passed; others involved in spraying people with a white powder—against typhus, he heard someone say—or trying to maintain order in the endless lines that snaked along sidewalks and disappeared into doorways from which people emerged carrying tins of food and clutching loaves of bread to their chests as if they were children who’d just been given a precious gift at Christmas. Other soldiers, and other Italians—mostly older men—were working to repair the sewage pipes, the ruined piers of the port, the electrical lines. The faces of the people he passed looked more ravaged even than the faces he’d seen in the countryside. At least there, whatever the terrors from marauding soldiers, exploding shells, mines, and bombs, there were gardens and orchards and animals that might provide a little food. The family in Sicily had been eating three times a day, small meals, yes, but the shrunken faces and flimsy bodies he saw in line at the Naples food depots belonged to starvation, not hunger. Here and there street kids sauntered along, looking, it seemed to him, for something to steal. Some of them were shirtless in the cool afternoon, every rib showing.

His own hunger gnawed at him and seemed reflected in the faces of the people he passed. It must have shown in his face because an elderly woman going in the other direction stopped him, reached into a sack she was carrying, and handed him a quarter of a loaf of bread, part of her rations, he was sure. Ordinarily he would have refused—the woman didn’t seem well—but it was as if his stomach were overruling mind, heart, and soul. “What happened here?” he asked, and for a moment the woman only looked up at him, confused. She offered a sorrowful smile, and Carlo noticed that one of her front teeth was chipped at an angle, and with a stab of pain he remembered Ariana’s face—above him when he first awoke from his coma, and then streaked with tears as he bade her goodbye. “What happened to the city?” he asked again, though, of course, he knew what had happened. Somehow, he needed to hear the report from another human being, so it would be something less than utterly unbelievable. That people could do this to each other. That the God of Goodness could allow it.

“I bombardamenti,” she said.

“The Germans?”

She shook her head. “Gli Americani. Gli Inglesi. E poi . . .” The Americans, the English, and then . . .

“And then what?”

“And then the Germans came. They raped women, young and old. They made people stand in a group on the steps of the Ministry of Health and shot them, killed them. Children. Women. Men. Now the brave people here have chased them away, and the Americani have come to us.” She gestured with her chin toward a passing jeep with a white star on its door. “Now, the war is gone. To Rome, to the north. But all our sins must still be paid for.”

He and the woman were standing facing each other, surrounded by the wreckage of a city Carlo had seen once before, on a delivery of wine for the wedding of some important member of some important family. He’d been a boy, traveling in the truck with Gennaro Asolutto, but he remembered Napoli as being a glorious metropolis, filled with churches, palaces, and government buildings that looked as if they’d been constructed by angels in some heavenly stonemason’s workshop and lowered gently to earth.

“I’m looking for the Recupero family.”

“There are many Recuperos. It’s not an unusual name.”

“Near the Piazza Bellini, they live. I had a friend, from the war. He was killed. I want to find his parents.”

The woman shifted the sack to her left arm. “Piazza Bellini is there,” she said, pointing. “Very close. Ask there.”