The Wedding Officer

8

IN JUST four years, everything had changed completely.

When Mussolini first declared war, some of the women said that he was just like any other Italian man who was feeling a bit cocky: He was starting a fight to show off. But you couldn’t say that to the men, most of whom believed Il Duce had rescued the country from collapse. Alliance with Hitler was simply yet more evidence that Mussolini knew on which side his country’s bread was buttered.

Enzo had left with a kiss and a wave, confident that he would be back within a couple of months. Then came the first reports of setbacks. From Africa, from Greece, and then from Russia, the news came back. Esteemed Signore and Signora, it is with the deepest regret that the government has the honor of informing you of the heroic sacrifice of your son…. Even worse, in some ways, was the not knowing: when the letters from your loved one simply stopped arriving, as they did in Enzo’s case. Marisa wrote to Livia that sometimes in Fiscino the villagers begged her to use her gifts to tell them whether their husband or son was still alive. She always refused, saying that her sight would not reach so far, though she sometimes confided in Livia that such and such a person would never be coming back.

There were German soldiers in the garrison at Torre del Greco, the first blue-eyed men Livia had ever seen. They seemed friendly at first, despite their uniforms and their guns—after all, they were all on the winning side together. But young men who failed to join up voluntarily were taken anyway in huge rastrellamenti, labor roundups. The Germans searched from house to house in the small hours of the morning, opening cupboards and knocking on walls for secret hiding places, kicking in doors with their jackboots, their dogs barking dementedly and waking the whole neighborhood.

The white bread produced by local bakers before the war disappeared. Your ration coupons got you only a hard black loaf, the iron crust disguising the fact that the inside was mostly air mixed with a stringy dough that provided no sustenance at all. There were just four of them in Enzo’s parents’ apartment, once the men had gone, but all their coupons combined only got them one loaf a week, together with some pasta and a few beans.

One night Livia had been woken by a strange light coming through the window, along with a deafening growl. Getting up from the bed she now shared with Concetta, Enzo’s younger sister, she went to see what was happening. She gasped. Under a black cloud of airplanes the sky was full of beautiful light—a ghostly, silvery, sparkling luminescence that fizzed from hundreds of tumbling flares.

She knew what she was meant to do: get to the safety of the big road tunnel that ran through the hillside below Naples. She quickly pulled on a dress and shook Concetta awake, but the pathfinder flares had done their job and the first bombs were already falling as they ran up the hill to the tunnel. Buildings were spitting out mouthfuls of stone and timber, the sky was full of the whistle of falling objects, and down by the harbor the silvery light of the flares had been replaced by the yolky orange of a dozen fires. Yet the streets were crowded with people, running in all directions, just as if it were daytime. As Livia ran past a gap in some buildings, the hot gust of a nearby explosion almost knocked her off her feet. She heard metal ping against the wall behind her. It was like a storm—a storm of steel and high explosive, through which you had to force yourself, bent double, as if you were running against a high wind.

When they reached the tunnel they found it crammed with people. A few had brought blankets, but most simply stood there in the dark, dripping gloom, waiting for dawn—even after the planes had gone it was too dangerous to venture back out.

In the morning they found a city transformed. It was as if Naples had been pulverized by giant fists. Even streets that had not suffered damage were covered in thick red dust. In some places the road itself had caught fire, and the blackened cobbles now smoked gently in the sunshine. Glass crunched underfoot. They passed a shop where a display of four tins in the window had melted into one solid block. Two women were trying to loot it, wrapping their hands in their dresses because it was still too hot to touch. A little farther on, a dog was licking the pavement. Some German soldiers were loading bodies into a truck.

After that, the four women had taken their mattresses to the tunnel every night and slept there. It was pitch-black, dank, and it smelled—a mixture of feces, bodies and God knew what else—but it was safe. Up to a thousand other people did the same thing, while even more crowded into the old aqueducts and catacombs that were carved out of the tufa rock underneath the city. Livia grew accustomed to the incessant noise—the snores, the fights, the couples making love, the cries of infants, even the occasional baby being born. She grew used to the way the ground moved under her as she slept, and the intermittent trickle of mortar from between the bricks above her head whenever a bomb fell particularly close. Far more irritating were the lice: big, fat white creatures that infested every blanket, every mattress and every stitch of clothing, and were spread—or so people believed—by the rats that ran around in the darkness, biting babies’ toes off in their hunger. And night after night still the Allied planes came back, the throb of their engines penetrating deep into the tunnel, followed by thuds and bangs and waves of pressure as their bombs gradually reduced the city to ruins.

As the war continued, relations with the Germans soured. They shot people on a pretext, or for the tiniest infringement of martial law. There were no men around to stop them, apart from a few fascists and officials who had been excused conscription, but the scugnizzi, the street urchins, formed a sort of unofficial resistance. They attacked German tanks in swarms, pushing bottles full of burning petrol into the slits below the gun turrets. The Germans, for their part, opened up on them with machine guns, and left their bodies where they fell.

Quartilla’s nerves had been stretched to breaking point by the constant bombardments, and after a body was found on her own doorstep she told Livia that she should go home, back to Fiscino, where she would be safer. Livia suggested that she should bring her family and come with her, but Quartilla wouldn’t hear of it. “I was born in Naples,” she said firmly, “and I’ll die in Naples, if that’s what God demands of me.”

The railway tracks had been bombed, and traveling was slow. But in the countryside it seemed they had not suffered as much as the Neapolitans had done. Dishes had to be cobbled together from poor ingredients, though, and Livia often found herself serving meals she was frankly ashamed of. Even Garibaldi the pig looked emaciated now that the supply of scraps and leftovers had dwindled to almost nothing. There was nothing for it but to turn him into sausages, but even those only lasted a few weeks.

The worry over Enzo was ever-present. She begged her sister to tell her whether he was alive or not: Marisa always shrugged and said, “It’s like a radio signal from a distant station. Sometimes I just know, sometimes I’m not sure, more often there’s a sort of echoing fuzziness. Enzo’s one of those. Wherever he is, it’s a long way away.”

The German soldiers who were the restaurant’s main customers now were usually polite. But one night they heard drunken shouting in German coming from somewhere in the village, and then a fusillade of shots. Next morning the widow Esmeralda was lying in the road outside her house, quite dead. That night Marisa took some engine oil that had dripped into the dust of the piazza and cast a spell on it, mixing it with the blood from a cockscomb and the smashed shell of an egg. Whether it was coincidence or not Livia was never quite sure, but when the Germans’ tanks drove through the village one of them suddenly spluttered and broke down in a paroxysm of foul-smelling smoke.

At last the day came that everyone had been waiting for. A mass of warships had appeared in the bay, the bangs and flashes from their guns like a thunderstorm, making Priscilla and Pupetta bellow and stamp their feet. The next day there had been more explosions—from the direction of Naples this time, as the Germans blew up what they could not keep. At long last, the Allies had invaded.

For a while the atmosphere had been almost like a carnival. People said the Nazis were surrendering in the thousands, that the Allies were landing all along the coast, that Rome itself had fallen. None of these rumors turned out to be remotely true. Instead, the British and Americans had to fight for every inch of ground. Earlier in the year there had at least been some food, but as autumn gave way to winter, people starved. The osteria stayed open only because of the patronage of a few well-connected men of business like Alberto, who often sent along beforehand the ingredients they wanted cooked. For the other customers, the menu was limited to whatever the Pertinis could lay their hands on. Sometimes there might be a soup made from the water in which yesterday’s pasta had been boiled, flavored with herbs, or a salad made from crusts of stale bread soaked in milk. It took all Livia’s skills to make these meager dishes palatable, but by Christmas even pasta was hard to get hold of, and a bag of flour cost more than a week’s wages.

Even before the Allied soldiers came to take away the Pertinis’remaining stocks of food it was clear that liberation was going to be no better, and in many ways far worse, than occupation by the Germans had been. Now Italy was a battleground in which neither side was Italian, and for both sides, the needs of the civilian population came a poor second to the importance of winning the war.