The Light in the Ruins
“What are you suggesting?”
“Honestly? I don’t know. I’m puzzled. Cristina Rosati’s Romeo—her desperate first love—might very well be dead. In fact, he probably is dead.”
“But …”
“But I don’t believe he was ever in Budapest in 1945.”
1943
CRISTINA REACHED THE barn on the estate and dismounted. She rubbed Arabella’s long nose, savoring the aroma of the field grasses that clung like perfume to the animal, and then walked the horse into the shade. It was early September. She stretched her back and gazed toward the fields, where she saw Ilario and another, much older field hand repairing one of the irrigation channels in the distance. They were working with their shirts off. Ilario looked up and saw that she had noticed them, and so she smiled and waved. Then she bent over to unstrap the saddle. As she was lifting it off, she saw that Ilario was jogging toward her.
“You don’t need to stop what you’re doing,” she said when he reached her, assuming he wanted to help her hoist the saddle onto its shoulder-high prongs in the barn and sponge down Arabella. “I can do this.”
He paused and looked a little confused. Apparently this wasn’t why he had come over at all. “No, I …”
“Go on.”
“I didn’t know if you’d heard. I just learned myself.”
“What?”
“The British have landed! Americans, too, I think. They’re in Salerno. Right this minute, they’re fighting in Salerno. Maybe tomorrow they’ll be in Naples.”
She tried to focus. Everything was happening so fast. “And you know this for a fact? It’s not rumor?”
“No rumor. The BBC.”
She said nothing, wondering where Marco was. He had been among the soldiers who had been ferried across the Strait of Messina to the toe of the boot in mid-August, an evacuation of over one hundred thousand Germans and Italians, but they hadn’t heard another word from him or about him in the three weeks since.
“I thought you’d be happy,” Ilario said, his tone rippling between disappointment and disgust.
She had recurring visions of what it must have been like for Marco when the battleships had started shelling the island, based on the little—very little, actually—Friedrich had told her of his experiences in France and Russia.
“But you’re not happy,” Ilario was saying. “You’re thinking of that Nazi you’re in love with, aren’t you?”
She looked at him. Why in the world had she ever thought there was something attractive about him? “No,” she answered, correcting the farmhand. “I was thinking about my brother. But of course now I am thinking of Friedrich, too.”
“Soon the Allies will be here, and he’ll be gone.”
She didn’t understand why he would say that—why he would be so cruel. So hurtful. She couldn’t see why he wanted to make her suffer. Her instinct was to lash out, perhaps remind him caustically that yes, Friedrich might soon be gone, but Ilario would be here forever, caring for sheep and propping up the sides of irrigation channels. But she kept her composure, telling herself that she was a marchese’s daughter and there was no need to lodge a dagger in this … boy’s heart.
“I need to cool down and brush Arabella,” she said evenly. “The Allies may be in Salerno, but that doesn’t mean all work here has to stop.”
Vittore was kneeling before a statue of Giovanni dalle Bande Nere in a badly lit storage room in the Uffizi basement, trying to read the inscription that had been carved four hundred years earlier into the base. He was grateful to be working down here in the cool dampness this morning. The outside air was heavy, and he had found himself sweating as he had walked along the Arno on his way to the museum. When he heard someone running down the stairs and then racing along the corridor, he sat back on his heels. In a second he heard Lorenzetti’s voice behind him and turned around.
“We’ve made peace with the Allies!” Lorenzetti told him breathlessly.
Slowly Vittore stood and brushed the dust from the floor off his pants.
“Aren’t you listening to me?” Lorenzetti asked, his eyes giddy. “The war’s over!”
“No, it’s not.”
“It is! We’ve surrendered!”
The Allies had taken Sicily and were fighting south of Naples. Clearly they had no plans to leave Italy. But, Vittore knew, neither did the Germans. “All that means is we’re going to have to fight a different war,” he said, rubbing at his temples. He wondered what this meant for Marco, and worried.
“What in God’s name are you talking about?” Lorenzetti asked.
“The Germans.”
“The Allies will be here any moment. We wouldn’t have surrendered if there weren’t a … a deal.”
“What kind of deal? The Hermann Göring Division is going to part for the British and the Americans like the Red Sea? The Germans have been streaming south for months. All we are now is an occupied nation.”
Lorenzetti leaned back against the cold wall. “You’re wrong. You have to be,” he said.
Vittore felt the pockets of his uniform pants, wishing he had even a stub of a cigarette. He didn’t. “Have you seen Decher this morning?” he asked.
“No. Should we go find him?”
“He’ll find us.”
“If you’re right, Vittore—and I’m not saying you are—where do you think that leaves us?”
He honestly didn’t know, and so he said nothing. He tried to outline his options in his mind and didn’t really like any of them.
Erhard Decher felt an exhilarating rush of adrenaline when he read the order. This wasn’t combat, but at least it was confrontational. It was work that actually mattered. He was being sent a dozen men from the Florence garrison to round up and disarm the Italians in his group. Then they would have a choice: they could either pledge an oath to the new Italian government the Germans were propping up or become—and Decher rather liked this term, because it meant the Italians were not prisoners of war, precisely, and thus lacked protection under the Geneva Convention—military internees. Decher speculated that a gutless recreant like Giancarlo Lorenzetti would vow allegiance even to Hitler if it meant he’d be spared, but Vittore Rosati? He was less sure what Vittore would do—and he was less sure what he wanted Vittore to do. If the fellow knuckled under, he’d lose respect for him, and the truth was, Vittore was among the few Italians for whom he had any admiration. It would also mean that his adjutant would continue to sleep with the fellow’s slatternly younger sister, and no good was ever going to come from that relationship. On the other hand, if Vittore showed a little spine, he would have to arrest him, and that, in turn, might result in Decher’s having to forgo the pleasures of the Villa Chimera. And the colonel was fast growing accustomed to the charm of Antonio Rosati’s estate. Besides, he liked taking people there; he knew it helped his career.
He looked out his office window and gathered himself. Then he barked out his door for Strekker to join him. When he didn’t hear the lieutenant slide his chair back from his desk or the fellow’s annoying limp, he shouted for him again. Irritated, he strode to the doorway to demand the young man’s attention and was surprised to see that he wasn’t at his desk. He shook his head, trying to recall what errand he or Voss must have sent the lad on.
But the Allies were stalled at Salerno. Penned in for weeks.
Every day that September, Francesca studied an antique map of Italy that hung behind glass in the villa library, waiting for news of Marco or news that Naples had fallen or news that the British and the Americans were on the road to Rome. She waited, unlike Cristina, for news that the Germans were leaving Italy.
But that news never came that autumn. Naples was officially liberated on October 1, but it was clear that the Nazis were going to stand firm along the river Sangro, well south of Rome. The western edge of their defense would be particularly formidable: a chain of mountains anchored by a place Francesca was told was called Monte Cassino. Erhard Decher did not know or would not share all
the details, but one night when he was dining in Monte Volta, she overheard him and an SS colonel—SS, she thought, galled, in the dining room of the Villa Chimera—boasting that the Germans had fifteen divisions along the line.
Meanwhile, Cristina continued to see Friedrich in Florence and here in the country, basking in the idea that she had a lover and in the particulars of the young man who had placed an emerald along the small of her neck. The children continued to romp in the swimming pool until it grew too cold, and then they took their dolls and toy soldiers to the quiescent grass along the hillsides above the Etruscan tombs. And Antonio and Beatrice watched the estate shrink—the harvests were smaller to begin with, and the Germans quickly absconded with whatever was grown or butchered—but still they entertained what was now an occupying army whenever the Nazis in Florence wanted a night in the country.
And while the Allied planes flew overhead with increasing impunity, no one took seriously the talk that the Germans were going to bring an antiaircraft battery to Monte Volta and set up the guns atop the medieval granary towers.
Now, the November air damp and the twilight falling early, Francesca once more turned from the map in the library and pulled tight a shawl around her shoulders. This was, she realized, neither heaven nor hell, and she recalled a canto from Dante. My family, she thought with disgust, is commingling with the cowardly angels. We will pay. We will all pay. It was only a matter of time.
I PRESUMED I WOULD first execute the police officer. The guard.
But I rather hoped I wouldn’t have to. I took chloroform with me on the off chance that I could merely incapacitate him. Since I had not killed Francesca’s lover the night when I pulled her heart from her chest, it had become an odd point of honor for me. No one should die, if I could help it, other than the survivors of Antonio and Beatrice’s ugly little brood. This was not a hard-and-fast rule, mind you, and I was fully prepared to slaughter the guard if necessary. But in the interest of a certain moral tidiness, I was going to strive to spare him.
In any case, I packed my tools into my valise and drove south to Rome. I presumed I would need two nights, the first to study the Rosatis’ apartment and see where the guard had positioned himself and the second to exact my revenge.
When I arrived, it was midday, and the sun was searing the city as I stood on a bridge overlooking the Tiber River. An American family saw me alone, smoking a cigarette, and asked me to photograph them as they posed with the Castel Sant’Angelo in the background. There were six of them: a father, a mother, and four teenaged children. A pair of boys and a pair of girls. I guessed the oldest child might have been attending university. They were all very blond, and it was the father who asked me in heavily accented but enthusiastic Italian to please “capture” their picture. The camera was German and I knew the factory where it had been manufactured.
I put my cigarette down on the railing, snapped two pictures, and then returned the camera. The American thanked me as I retrieved my cigarette. He pointed at my valise.
“Are you a tourist, too?” he asked.
“I am,” I said.
He motioned toward the Via della Conciliazione, the wide concourse that links the Castel Sant’Angelo with the Piazza San Pietro and the Vatican. “Any idea how many more blocks to St. Peter’s? We’ve been on our feet since breakfast.”
“Once you’re a block from the bridge,” I answered, “look to your left. You’ll be able to see it.”
“So it’s close?”
“It is.”
“Tell me, if you don’t mind, what are you here to see? I always like to be sure I’ve done my homework.”
I spread wide my arms in agreement. “Me, too!”
“Okay, then: What’s most important? Obviously the Pantheon and the Colosseum and the Vatican. What else?”
“I am after the heart of this city,” I said, entertaining myself instead of really answering his question. I pointed in the general direction of Vittore Rosati’s apartment. “And I think I will find it just a few blocks from here.”
“So for you it’s St. Peter’s?”
I shrugged, smiled, and sent them on their way. Already in my mind I saw myself subduing the guard protecting Giulia Rosati and her two little girls and then mining their still-warm hearts.
1944
VITTORE’S KNEES WERE sore and his back ached. For five hours he had been kneeling on a wooden platform before a wall of five-hundred-year-old frescoes behind the altar of a Florentine church, swaddling the images in tinfoil and glass wool—protection from the bombing and fires that loomed. He had been at it since dawn and he had barely made a dent in the stories. He was still protecting the Old Testament prophets. John the Baptist and Mary and Jesus remained a long, long way away. He was working by the light of an Italian army flashlight and already he had run through half a dozen batteries. He didn’t know how many he had left, but not enough to finish this project. If the sun would come out, there might be enough light for him to turn the flashlight off for a while, but it was an overcast summer day, the sky an endless sheet of pale gray.
When Vittore paused, craning his neck and stretching his back, he noticed Lorenzetti standing in the shadow of the scaffolding ten feet below him.
“Be sure to leave space between the painting and your covering. You don’t want there to be any mold,” he said to Vittore.
Frescoes were Lorenzetti’s specialty, and so Vittore was able to restrain his urge to snap at him. “I’m trying,” he said simply.
“After it rains, it can be very damp in here,” Lorenzetti went on. Then he added, “And be careful not to mar the patina.”
“I know.”
In another section of the church, Emilio was swaddling a mosaic in burlap to keep the small pieces in place. Outside, Moretti was piling sandbags around a Pazzi sculpture in the courtyard. The Allies were moving north quickly now that the Nazis had given them Rome. The Germans were fighting a rearguard action as they retreated up the Italian boot, and no one could say for sure when the fighting would reach Florence. But everyone did know this: the Nazis were going to make their last stand at what they were calling the Gothic Line, a string of entrenchments and defenses along the peaks of the Apennines a good twenty to twenty-five kilometers north of the city.
“They’re outside mining the bridges right now,” Lorenzetti said, referring to the Germans, his voice tired and disgusted. “I couldn’t watch anymore. Here we are trying to save as much as we can, and they’re planning to blow up the bridges across the Arno. Even the Bridge of Santa Trinità. Nearly four hundred years old. Francavilla’s magnificent statue of spring. And those philistines are going to dynamite it.”
Vittore swung his legs over the platform and sat there. That morning Decher had told him that he didn’t expect the British or Americans to reach Monte Volta for at least a week, and he didn’t believe the Germans would make much of a stand there. He presumed Oskar Muller, the captain in charge of the artillery unit billeted at the Villa Chimera, would pull up stakes and retreat toward Arezzo. There, he expected, they might make a brief fight. But Monte Volta? Not likely, Decher said. He had laughed cryptically and told Vittore that soon his family would have their little place back.
“And you?” Vittore had asked him. “Do you think you’ll miss Florence?” Decher had gotten what he wanted: he had been pressed into real service. Tomorrow he was leaving the Uffizi and a world of art historians and academics and going to join the fight. He had been ordered to Arezzo that evening and he was taking Friedrich with him, despite the fact that the lieutenant was crippled. Apparently Friedrich had demanded that he be allowed to accompany the colonel.
“I doubt it,” Decher had answered. “I really won’t miss this city. I’m sorry to admit that, but that’s how it is. But you know something, Vittore? I will miss Monte Volta. You people are not meant for this sort of war or even this sort of world, but sometimes you build something special. And your family’s estate? It’s special.” Then Decher had turned and left
. It wasn’t good-bye—not quite yet—but somehow it felt like it. Vittore had even expected him to extend his hand, and he honestly wasn’t sure if he would have accepted it; he didn’t like Decher, and he didn’t approve of the way his father had opened up the estate to the Germans over the past year and allowed Cristina to spend so much time with Friedrich. He presumed his father regretted that hospitality now; he had been thanked for his kindness and generosity by having a Wehrmacht company take over the villa and grounds and force the entire family to live in the nursery. And Cristina, the marchese Antonio Rosati’s only daughter? The whole world knew what she was doing with the Nazi lieutenant. No good could come from that once the Germans had retreated north of Florence. Still, at least the fellow would be out of his sister’s life now. Friedrich would no longer be dancing in the villa and sunbathing beside the swimming pool. No doubt sleeping with Cristina when they were ostensibly picnicking in the high grass near the tombs.
Below him Vittore heard Lorenzetti saying something, and so he looked down at the major. “Did you hear me?” Lorenzetti was asking him. “Those bastards are going to blow up the bridges! This is not going to be like Rome. They’re not just going to sneak away in the night with their tails between their legs.”
“But at least they’re going to leave,” Vittore said.
“Not without a fight. And mark my words, any minute now they are going to take away your glass wool and tinfoil and give you a rifle. Me, too. You and I are about to be forced into becoming honest-to-God soldiers.”
The grounds of the Villa Chimera had long been chewed up by the soldiers’ jackboots and tent pegs and the deep ruts from the wheels on their lorries and jeeps, and now the estate was awash in dust and grime as the Germans packed up their gear and the four massive howitzers and prepared to retreat toward Arezzo. Some of the drivers were trying to camouflage their vehicles, using rope and twine to attach scrub from the vineyard to truck roofs and half-tracks, since they were going to have to travel by daylight, but even Cristina knew that the Allied planes would spot them when the convoy tried to blend in by the side of the road. After all, she’d been watching the airplanes for years.