The Light in the Ruins

  Beatrice Rosati heard about the Allied invasion of Sicily from her husband, Antonio, who had heard the news from their overseer. Nunzio had learned of the attack from a villager who had been listening surreptitiously to the BBC while eating breakfast and understood perhaps a third of the words on the airwaves. Immediately Nunzio had raced back up the hill to the villa to tell Antonio that there was a battle of some sort in Gela. The marchese, in turn, had switched on the radio the family kept hidden behind a shelf of old leather books in the library, and now he and Beatrice and Nunzio were crowded around the mahogany box with the gold fabric across the speaker, listening as that impeccably proper British voice droned on about the waves of Brits and Americans who had already captured the Sicilian port city. Antonio translated what he was hearing for the overseer while Beatrice gazed out the window at the blue sky and the clouds whiter than goat cheese. Her heart hurt. Her chest hurt. Somewhere in the midst of that news, in the midst of all those bullets and bombs, was her older son. Marco. Any moment now Francesca would return from the walk she had taken with the children, and Beatrice knew that she would have to tell her that the invasion had started, and it had come to the very city on the very island where her husband was stationed. It had come, in fact, to the very beach.

  She found herself shivering, despite the July morning sun, and wrapped her arms around her sides. In her mind, she prayed for her son. She prayed that he would survive the day and come home safely to Monte Volta. Behind her, she listened to the sound of the men’s voices—the British one through the static of the radio, which she could understand all too well from her years at the university in Pisa, and her husband’s, which in her opinion made the English sound pedestrian—and saw in her mind the newsreel footage of battles in Africa and Russia that had been shown in the cinema. But those, of course, were only the sanitized versions the Fascists were willing to share. Handsome young men sitting atop tanks, sometimes with their shirts off, eating their rations with unbelievable ardor; the recoil of artillery pieces with cannons pitched higher than olive trees, the men with their hands pressed against their ears; the occasional image of a bombed city block in Italy or Germany, the purpose of which was to convey how demonic the Allies really were—though the footage never showed anything like the field of corpses she had seen with her own eyes back in May in Arezzo. The films never showed the lifeless bodies that were pulled from beneath hillocks of fallen stone, whole pockets of flesh gnawed away by rats.

  Nunzio murmured to her that Marco was smart and he was quite sure that he would be fine; she shouldn’t worry. Then he discreetly left her and Antonio alone.

  “Nunzio is right, you know,” Antonio told her, and his voice indeed sounded unencumbered by trouble. Still, the lines around his eyes looked a little deeper in this light, and for the first time she noticed that his cheeks, once so patrician and firm, had become a little jowly with age.

  “Nunzio is a fool,” she said.

  “You don’t mean that.”

  “No, of course I don’t. But he was just spewing forth platitudes. Yes, Marco is smart. But there is no reason in the world to believe he will be fine. I don’t think bombs distinguish between the smart and the dull.”

  “But it helps to be smart. Marco won’t take unnecessary risks. Not with two children and a wife waiting for him here. And he’s not about to sacrifice his life for Blackshirts and Nazis.”

  “No.”

  At the base of the hill, near the parapet for one of the lower gardens, she saw her grandson, Massimo, running with a stick for a saber. Francesca and Alessia couldn’t be far behind. And so she stood a little straighter and prepared to tell her daughter-in-law that the invasion had begun, and that it had begun on the very beach where Marco was assigned. The news might result in a thunderstorm of anguish and rage, but Francesca also might grow melancholic and quiet; you could never tell with her. The woman had always been moody, but she had grown even more caustic and mercurial since Marco had left for the war. Perhaps with her children nearby, Francesca might behave properly—behave like Antonio Rosati’s daughter-in-law and accept the news with stoicism and grace. Beatrice couldn’t decide. Just in case, she rehearsed in her head precisely what she would say and how she would remind her daughter-in-law that no matter what, this was the beginning of the end.

  Cristina spied her brother before Friedrich did, and the idea crossed her mind that this wouldn’t be happening if the Americans and the British had waited just one more day before invading. Vittore wouldn’t have been summoned back here if the fighting hadn’t begun last night in Sicily. But here he was, across the lobby of the hotel where he and Friedrich were billeted, carving his way through the throngs of officers and their women—did no officers sleep alone here? she wondered—using his hands and his elbows to part the crowd. The sun was brightening the curtains in the long windows and streaming in through the glass doors, but the lights—rows of globes that were reminiscent of streetlamps in the corners and above the concierge’s desk—were still lit. Initially she wasn’t sure what to say, but she could see by the way her brother’s brow was furrowed with anger and his eyes were wild with disbelief that the first thing she had to do was warn Friedrich. The lieutenant hadn’t yet noticed her brother. And so she squeezed his elbow and murmured, “Look, Vittore’s coming,” but almost instantly he was upon them, and then, without a word of preamble, he slammed his fist into the side of Friedrich’s face, separating her lover from her and sending him sprawling onto the lobby’s thick carpet. Vittore dropped to his knees to lift the dazed German up by the lapels of his tunic, and she heard herself shrieking for Vittore to stop, to let him go, when Friedrich, stupefied as he was, lashed back, grabbing her brother by his shoulders and wrestling him down to the floor. There they scuffled like hungry dogs on the street.

  “Get off him!” she was yelling at Vittore, but already Friedrich had regained his equilibrium and was wrestling from a position equal to Vittore’s. “Stop it!” she screamed at them both while grabbing uselessly at someone’s arm—her brother’s or Friedrich’s, she honestly wasn’t sure—as it jackhammered back and forth in the air. It was like trying to catch a seagull: each time it slipped away. Eventually the two men tumbled together into an end table, overturning it and shattering the art deco lamp, a porcelain black panther, that had been resting upon it. And while Cristina was game to try once more to separate the two men, a pair of burly Italian officers appeared and disentangled them, laughing as they pulled at tunics and arms and legs. One of the Italians was actually hauling her brother away by his ankles, tugging him in the direction of the bar. A whole group of officers and their girlfriends were surrounding them now, mostly chortling, though one, a German captain, looked a little dismissive of the brawlers.

  Finally she knelt on the floor beside Friedrich, absolutely furious with her brother. He wiped at the blood that was streaming from his nose and a cut on his lip with the back of his hand and then smiled a little darkly. “That must have been lovely to watch,” he observed. “Just lovely.”

  “It wasn’t your fault,” she reminded him, and she found a handkerchief in her purse that she could use to blot the blood on his face.

  “I should have a little talk with Vittore,” he told her. “Just the two of us. Alone.”

  “No, I should talk to him. Then he should apologize to you.”

  Over her shoulder the men were laughing, and a German with a severe mustache and a complexion as translucent as olive skin patted Friedrich on the back and said—clearly unaware of the fact that Friedrich had already lost a foot—“I don’t think they award much for a bloody lip. You’ll have to lose much more to get an Iron Cross.” Another lieutenant leered at Friedrich and said, “You’re supposed to pillage Sabine women, not Vittore’s sister, for God’s sake.”

  Cristina looked up at the fellow. Once that sort of remark would have made her feel dirty. Now? Strangely, not at all. She understood how these men were viewing her: Friedrich’s whore. But she felt a bit as she ha
d hours earlier, as she had stood in the window in his room, when she had watched the night sky and searched for the moon. She was merely one woman among many here, certainly younger than most (though not all), and while the men might say dismissive things about the girls on their arms, they desired them. And even now, as she pressed a handkerchief with a delicately embroidered lilac against her lover’s lip, she felt a distinct glamour. Nothing like this would ever happen in Monte Volta.

  Friedrich rested one of his hands on her fingers and pulled the cloth away from his mouth. “Fine. We’ll go talk to him together,” he said, and motioned with a small nod of his head toward her brother. “But he should know, I will not always be quite this forgiving.”

  “Of course not,” she agreed. “He ambushed you!”

  Vittore was staring at them from a plush sunken chair near the bellman’s station, as two Italian soldiers stood behind him like bodyguards, their hands pressing down firmly on his shoulders. They were both, it appeared, struggling mightily to keep a straight face. Slowly Friedrich climbed to his feet, a little wobbly from the fight and because he had a prosthetic foot, and together they marched across the lobby to her brother.

  Francesca gently patted her little boy on the small of his back and watched as he raced up the villa’s front stairway to his bedroom. Her daughter was on the terrace, just outside the window, apparently in the midst of a staring contest with a lizard: Alessia was on her tummy on the sun-warmed slate, facing the creature, and neither was moving.

  Francesca’s eye caught a framed photograph on the side table, of Marco and her on their wedding day. She and her mother had wanted them to be married in the Duomo in Pisa, where her family was from, but there was no way a Rosati would be wed anywhere but the church in Monte Volta. And so that was where they were, on the steps just outside the north portal, when that photograph was taken. There was Marco in his black suit, and there she was in a dress more the color of bone than white. It fell an inch below her knees, and it was as elegant as it was simple. The neck scooped low on her chest, but her mother thought there was just enough lace in just the right places for her to defend her daughter’s decision. There had been some discussion between her mother and Beatrice over whether she should wear a more formal wedding gown—one that swept the floor as she entered the church—but Francesca had seen what American actresses were wearing in Hollywood, and she desired a dress that was reminiscent of the pictures she had clipped from the magazines.

  She shuddered ever so slightly when she tried to imagine what her husband was enduring right now in Sicily. She thought of the beach near Gela and the great coils of barbed wire he had described to her. In her mind, she saw battleships with guns the size of Corinthian columns.

  Behind her, she heard her mother-in-law approaching. “No matter what,” Beatrice was saying once again, “this is the beginning of the end.”

  “Have we learned anything more?” she asked. Her father-in-law had been trying to get more information on the radio from the BBC, fiddling with the dial, but a few moments ago, when she had been in the kitchen, the government had begun jamming the signal.

  “No. All we’re getting now is the Saturday morning opera and the Fascist news station.”

  “What are they saying?”

  “The Fascists? There was a story about the way some unpatriotic women were trying to commandeer extra rations of bread in the cities by pretending they were pregnant.”

  Francesca nodded. She was a little nauseous with worry. She had known an invasion was coming, but she had hoped desperately it would come anywhere but Sicily.

  “Before we know it, the war will be over,” her mother-in-law continued. “No one wants us to be fighting in Naples and Rome. No one wants to experience again on our soil what we endured in Caporetto. No one would allow it.”

  “So we will just surrender?” she snapped, aware as she spoke of how angry she sounded. She took a breath to calm herself. Then, more quietly, she said, “Even a fat man like Il Duce won’t roll over just like that. And even if he wanted to, Hitler wouldn’t let him.”

  “I don’t know, Francesca. But it makes no sense to continue. Someone will see reason and we will negotiate a treaty. Isn’t that what’s done in war?”

  “Blackshirts and Nazis don’t negotiate.”

  “I said I don’t know. But—”

  “But this will get worse before it gets better. And right now there are people shooting at my husband—”

  “And my son,” Beatrice reminded her.

  For a long moment the two women stared at each other. Francesca wished that her father-in-law would just give up on the radio. She didn’t know which she found more annoying, the static, the Fascists, or the opera. It was the marchesa who looked away first, turning her attention to the wedding photo on the side table. She picked up the frame and said, speaking more toward the image of her son and her daughter-in-law than to Francesca herself, “I am telling you, no matter what happens, this is the beginning of the end.”

  Vittore’s gaze was not precisely forbidding, but he was scowling. He was exasperated, his patience gone. His skin, flushed from the fight, looked sunburned and raw, and his hair had fallen over his forehead.

  “What are you doing?” Cristina asked him. “Have you completely lost your mind?”

  “Look at him,” he said, referring to Friedrich. “Look at you. You’re …”

  “Yes?”

  Vittore glanced up at the soldiers on either side of him in the hotel lobby and put his hands out before him, palms up, in a gesture of capitulation. “Are you finished?” one of the men asked him, grinning, and Vittore nodded that he was. The pair smiled at each other and took their hands off his shoulders, allowing him to rise from the chair in which they had confined him. It seemed to Cristina that Friedrich was about to say something to her brother—she didn’t like the way his eyes were still smoldering—and so she asked Friedrich to wait where he was.

  “Is that really what you want?” he demanded, glaring at Vittore.

  “Yes. That’s really what I want,” she said. “I want to talk to my brother alone.” Then she drew Vittore to a corner of the lobby where they could speak without every soldier and guest in the hotel reception area eavesdropping. Already crowds had begun milling about in search of news of the invasion, trying to separate the rumors, such as the notion that Allied paratroopers were already in Rome, from reality.

  “I’m serious. Have you gone crazy?” Cristina inquired once more. “Why in the name of heaven would you attack a German lieutenant in the middle of Florence?”

  He paused, and she could see that he was grinding his teeth, the sockets at the edge of his jaw ballooning the sides of his face. “Why in the name of heaven would you sleep with one?”

  “It’s not like that.”

  “No?”

  “No. What we do is—”

  “I just found my sister in a hotel with a Nazi,” he hissed, cutting her off. “I think my reaction was perfectly sane.”

  She considered this, restraining the urge to slap him hard on the face because her family had already made a scene. And so instead she turned brusquely on her heels and started toward Friedrich, but Vittore caught her by the elbow and spun her back around so she was facing him.

  “Cristina, don’t you see what the Germans are? They are even worse than our Fascists!” he said, his voice low but intense. “They are taking over the country, they’re stealing our art. They hate us—they hate everyone who isn’t one of them! Who knows what they’re really doing to the Jews, who knows what—”

  “Friedrich isn’t responsible for any of that. He—”

  “They are loathsome. There is a reason the world is against them—and against us for losing our minds and siding with them. And now, you of all people—”

  “You work with them! How dare you criticize me?”

  “I work with them because I haven’t a choice. I work with them because I have a gun to my head.”

  “You don’t. Whi
le our brother is right now fighting for his life in Sicily, you’re here in Florence dusting off pottery chips.” She spoke without thinking, and only when she had finished did she realize how deeply the remark might have hurt him. But he didn’t seem wounded. He lowered his eyes for just a moment and smirked, shaking his head.

  “You are such a child,” he said, his voice softening with bemusement. “First of all, Marco is as much under the Germans’ thumb as I am. And he is every bit as disgusted by that reality, if not more. Why? Precisely because he is fighting for his life right now. But he hadn’t a choice either. Second, you have no idea what I do. None. I spend my life trying to prevent your boyfriend and his fellow Nazis from sending all of Florence or Arezzo to Berlin, or to some swaggering Prussian’s estate on the Baltic. Or even to the Gestapo in Rome. But fine. Fine. Really, why should I care if my little sister has become a Nazi’s whore?”

  This time she didn’t worry that people were watching: she took her right hand and swung it, palm open, as hard as she could into her older brother’s cheek.

  1955

  ON SUNDAY, GIULIA Rosati kissed her children good night in the bedroom the siblings shared. The family’s home was on the second floor of an apartment building in the shadow of Rome’s Castel Sant’Angelo. Then she turned off the lamp and left the door open just enough to allow a sliver of light from the hallway to help them feel safe. She still had not told them that their grandmother was dead and that was why their father had suddenly rushed off to Florence. Nearly a week ago now, when she and Vittore had first learned that Francesca had been murdered, they’d both presumed that her death had resulted directly from her lifestyle. Giulia wasn’t as judgmental as Vittore, but she agreed that most likely it had been an angry or jealous lover who had killed the woman.