“We’ll need a saw,” one of the men said to Nino. He mimed a sawing gesture. “A saw, capeesh?”
“You bastards,” Livia sobbed, shaking her fist as she ran forward to kneel by Pupetta.
“Livia, go back inside,” her father said. But it was too late. One of the soldiers had already grabbed her, laughing as he lifted her off her feet. She hadn’t realized before how strong he would be—when she hit him with her fists, it was like hitting a tree. Then another pair of arms had grabbed her too—two men now, whooping as they casually tossed her into the back of the truck along with all their stolen food. She yelled angrily, and the other men cheered. One of the pair who had tossed her in the truck climbed up after her and pulled her arms behind her back, pinning both her wrists in one of his hands.
“Let me go,” she screamed. But the soldiers only cheered more. For the first time she began to feel afraid.
“OK, boys, that’s enough,” the officer said casually. “Throw her out.”
“I’ll only be five minutes,” the one holding her said.
“I doubt you’d be five seconds, but that’s not the point. You want a girl, there are plenty in Naples. We’ve got work to do.”
Reluctantly the soldier released her, though not before he had pushed his hand up her skirt. One of the other men was already sawing off Pupetta’s hind legs.
When the legs had been thrown in the back of the truck along with everything else, the officer pulled out a pocketbook and peeled off some notes, which he handed to Nino without a word. It was a hundred lire—not remotely a fair price for everything they had taken.
The officer’s hand hesitated over the pocketbook. “How much for the girl?” he asked in a low voice.
“She’s not for sale,” Nino said.
After a moment the man shrugged and put the pocketbook away. Saluting ironically, he climbed into the front of the truck. As it drove away, one of the chickens, unsettled by the movement, jumped out over the tailgate with a flurry of wings. The truck didn’t stop. Soon the only sound was Livia’s sobbing as she cradled Pupetta’s great head, still warm but completely lifeless.
“We were lucky,” Nino said heavily when the truck had disappeared from view.
“You call that lucky?” Livia cried. “They’ve taken everything we have.”
“Not everything.” Nino crouched down next to her and stroked her hair gently. “Don’t you understand? It could have been so much worse.”
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.