The Liberation, Page 4

  He kissed her cheek, then loped off back to the piazza and the sunlight with a wave of his hand.

  ‘Do you think I am deaf, as well as blind, Caterina?’

  The old man was standing in the hallway, leaning heavily on a mahogany cane, and a dusty shaft of light had turned his thick white hair into polished silver. His voice boomed off the terracotta tiles as Caterina closed the door behind her.

  ‘Do you think, Caterina, that your grandfather is too old and foolish to know who you were with?’

  ‘No, Nonno. Of course not.’

  Giuseppe Lombardi was nearly eighty but he was still an impressive figure, forceful and straight-backed, in a spotless white shirt and crisply pressed trousers. He raised his cane and pointed it straight at Caterina.

  ‘You disobey me.’

  She shook her head. ‘You shouldn’t be eavesdropping.’

  ‘Don’t be impudent, young lady. Giuseppe Lombardi does not eavesdrop. I heard voices in the street but not the words. I would recognise the filthy tones of a Cavaleri voice even in the fires of hell itself.’

  ‘Is that where you intend to meet them all eventually, Nonno? All those Cavaleris you hate so fiercely?’ She grinned at him. ‘In hell?’

  He lowered his cane, sending dust motes spinning across the hallway. ‘Impudence!’ he snorted.

  But one side of his mouth tilted up into the slightest of curves that he couldn’t quite suppress and Caterina could sense relief in it, relief that she was safely home out of harm’s way in Naples. She wondered how long he’d been standing alone here behind the door, cane in hand, waiting for her.

  ‘I mean it, Caterina. I won’t have you consorting with that Cavaleri brat,’ he commanded.

  She sidestepped the cane and laid a hand on his arm. The muscles under his sleeve were still as hard as the wood he’d worked all his life, hard enough to knock down a man with his cane last week in Via Correale. She took no offence at his tone. Instead she felt an overwhelming warmth of affection for this proud man who was reduced to waiting in his dark world for his granddaughter. He had once owned a flourishing business. Giuseppe Lombardi had been head of the family business that was respected throughout Sorrento, a person of stature in the town, a man to whom the mayor, the lazy sindaco, hastened to doff his hat. But now it grieved her heart to look at her grandfather. His once-black eyes were as opaque as a turtle’s egg and the wood-inlay business bequeathed to him by his father and by his father’s father lay in ruins at his feet.

  Of course he was angry. He had every right to be, in Caterina’s opinion; angry at the men in uniform – the black ones of Fascism or the khaki ones of the Allied troops – who had brought her beloved country to its knees. So she held tight to his arm and kissed his cheek.

  ‘I have bought you wine,’ she said cheerfully. ‘And olives.’

  ‘How so?’

  ‘I sold all my boxes, every single one of them, and for good prices. To soldiers.’

  He scowled at her, his forehead a canyon of creases. ‘Caterina Lombardi, I ordered you to stay away from the soldiers.’

  ‘They are the only ones with money right now. Don’t worry, no one was rude or disrespectful to me.’

  Not quite true. An English sergeant with lonely eyes and a whisky-soaked mouth had placed his hand on her backside and squeezed hard, but he was the only one. She was surprised at how civil most of them were. Not like Italian soldiers who could make you feel dirty just by the way they looked at you.

  ‘Molto bene, little one. But you shouldn’t spend your money on wine for me.’

  ‘Our money, Nonno. Without you, I’d know nothing.’

  At that he smiled and allowed her to steer him into the living room. She seated him in his ancient armchair whose arms and feet he had carved himself when he was young. Its fine burgundy velvet was worn thin now and possessed a whitish bloom like his eyes. She poured them both a glass of wine and made for each of them a plate of fresh bread with a wafer-thin slice of salami, two olives and half a tomato. The wine tasted sour and the salami was all pig fat, but for Caterina and her grandfather it was a feast.

  She knew she should be in her workshop but she was reluctant to leave him alone again, so she sat sharing the moment and told him about her day. Except for the ride in the jeep. She didn’t mention that. She wasn’t stupid.

  Later in the quiet living room, which possessed only basic furniture because anything of value had been sold, Caterina knew she had to say more to her grandfather.

  ‘Nonno.’

  The old man raised his head. He was sanding a piece of boxwood that he had carved into the shape of a running deer. Caterina loved to watch his hands. The way they spoke to the wood he was holding, the way they flowed over its surface. His fingers were his eyes.

  ‘What is the matter, cara mia? Tell me.’

  His ears were sharp. In her one word, he had heard the turmoil she tried to hide.

  ‘Nonno, when I was in Naples I met a woman.’

  ‘What woman?’

  ‘Her name is Maria. She said that years ago she knew Lucia Lombardi.’

  Lucia Lombardi. Not my mother. The words mia mamma scourged her tongue.

  ‘No! No, Caterina, no!’ Her grandfather lifted the heavy cane that rested at his side and slammed it down hard on a small wicker table in front of him. One of its legs buckled. ‘Do not speak that woman’s name in this house,’ he bellowed. ‘Never! Do you hear me?’

  ‘Yes, Nonno. I hear.’

  In silence she returned to stitching a new sole on to her brother’s shoe while the sound of her grandfather’s laboured breathing stalked through the room.

  ‘Nonno.’ She didn’t look up.

  ‘What now?’

  ‘I am frightened. I am forgetting what she looked like. It’s been eleven years.’

  He released a short sharp hiss. ‘That is no bad thing.’

  ‘Papà burned all the photographs.’

  ‘It was for the best. To rid our home of her.’ He added angrily, ‘Why keep any trace of a woman who brought shame and disgrace on the Lombardi name?’

  He jabbed at the floor tiles with the ebony tip of his cane, as if he could prod out the offending woman’s heart. But Caterina hadn’t finished. Not yet.

  ‘The woman in Naples,’ she muttered.

  ‘What about her?’

  ‘She told me I look just like . . .’

  She heard her grandfather’s quick hiss of breath.

  ‘Is it true?’ she asked. ‘Do I look like her?’

  ‘Yes.’

  She waited for more, and was aware of a painful ticking at the base of her throat.

  ‘Yes,’ he said again, ‘you have her high forehead and her fine cheekbones. Your mouth is all your own but you have the same oval shape to your face and, worst of all, the same sapphire-blue eyes with that look of . . .’ He halted.

  ‘That look of what?’

  ‘That look of sadness.’

  Caterina forced herself to swallow. The ticking stopped.

  ‘But you cannot see me, Nonno. How can you say my eyes are sad?’

  ‘I am blind, not deaf. I can hear it, little one. In your voice I hear it.’

  She bowed her head and rubbed the heels of her hands into her eyes, as if she could scrub the sadness out of them.

  ‘You are wrong,’ she told him. ‘I am not sad at all. I am glad she is gone. She did me a favour when she left.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘If she had stayed, I would never have been allowed to work with you and Papà all these years.’

  A low rusty chuckle escaped the old man’s chest.

  ‘Then she did me a favour, too.’ He pushed his cane out in front of him as far as it would go, until it nudged the cap of Caterina’s knee, a quick little stab. ‘Because, my granddaughter, without you and your boxes the boy and I would starve.’

  It was early evening when Caterina heard the front door open and soft footfalls creep across the hall floor, heading for the stairs.
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br />   ‘Luca!’ Giuseppe Lombardi roared.

  The skinny figure of a boy slunk into the doorway of the living room and remained there, approaching no closer. He was barefoot. Luca was a bright and energetic boy of eleven with the sunny nature of his father and the nose for an opportunity of his mother. He looked at his repaired shoes that sat by the door. He said nothing but one hand hung behind his back and he was chewing gum.

  ‘Boy,’ his grandfather demanded, ‘where have you been all day? I told you to go down to the fishing boats, to make yourself useful, mending nets to earn a few lire. Maybe get a fish-head or two. I smell no fish on you, boy, no scent of the sea on your shirt.’ The old man sniffed the air. ‘I smell cigarettes,’ he announced. ‘And beer.’ He reached for his cane. ‘So where have you been, boy?’

  Luca didn’t move but his jaw stopped chewing and his thin shoulders sank. His usual smile that had been lurking on his lips crumpled and his expression grew cautious. He flicked a quick glance at his sister.

  ‘Luca, answer Nonno.’

  ‘I’ve been running errands for the soldiers.’

  ‘Come over here at once,’ Giuseppe Lombardi ordered.

  Luca edged forward. His feet were filthy.

  ‘When I was your age,’ the old man said angrily, ‘I was working twelve hours a day in my father’s workshop and breathing the grain of the wood into my soul. Stay away from those damn soldiers, I’ve told you that before.’

  ‘Why?’ Luca retorted. ‘They are kind to me. They give me . . .’

  The cane lashed out, aimed low. It caught the boy across his calf, raising a scarlet welt, but he uttered no sound.

  ‘No, Nonno,’ Caterina cried out, ‘don’t . . .’

  But Luca drew his hand from behind his back and tossed what was in it onto his grandfather’s lap.

  ‘I kept this for you.’

  He ran from the room. Caterina stared at the small rectangular object wrapped in brown paper and aluminium foil that now lay between her grandfather’s fingers. On it were printed the words U.S. Army Field Ration D. He tore off the paper. It was an American chocolate bar.

  ‘Don’t be hard on him, Luca.’ Caterina was perched on a low stool in her brother’s bedroom.

  The boy was sitting hunched on his bed, knees tucked under his chin, his dirty feet on the white sheet. When had his spindly legs sprouted so long?

  ‘Why not?’ he demanded. ‘He’s hard on me.’

  ‘It’s because he loves you. He sits here and worries. You know he does.’

  ‘I know.’ Her brother stuck out his chin stubbornly and picked at a scab on his ankle, making it bleed. He possessed their father’s face, the same broad forehead and large nose, with deep-set dark eyes that regarded the world as something to be moulded to fit his needs. Right now it seemed that Luca’s needs included the Fifth Army. He was still chewing gum. Caterina wanted to snatch it from his young mouth.

  ‘So you went down to the Hotel Vittoria?’

  He nodded, then shot her a sudden bright-eyed glance. ‘I saw General Clark. He marched past me in the hotel gardens.’

  ‘How exciting for you.’

  He nodded vigorously. General Clark was the head of the American Fifth Army, as close to God as you could get.

  ‘You got your hair cut too, I see.’

  He ran a hand over his tightly cropped black hair. No childish curls left for her to stroke.

  ‘A G.I. haircut,’ he boasted.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And I rode in a jeep.’

  Her heart slowed. ‘A jeep?’

  ‘Yes.’ He was grinning now.

  Who was she to say a ride in a jeep was wrong?

  ‘That must have been fun.’

  He giggled at the images in his head. ‘Look. They gave me this.’ He dragged a comic from under his shirt. ‘Captain America,’ he announced proudly.

  He touched it the way a priest would touch a Bible. Caterina stared at its garish colours. On the well-thumbed cover posed a hero-figure with a star on his chest, an A on his head and a shield of red, white and blue. He looked ready to take over the world.

  ‘Lucky you.’

  ‘I didn’t steal it,’ he insisted.

  ‘Of course you didn’t.’

  ‘I helped them,’ he laughed.

  ‘What kind of help?’ she asked.

  ‘Like I told Nonno, I ran errands.’

  But a flicker of guilt was blinked away.

  Caterina smiled and kept her tongue clamped between her teeth. I am not his mother, she told herself, I am his sister. Their mother had abandoned him when he was only five months old, and ten-year-old Caterina had been the one to raise him while her father and grandfather laboured in the workshop. She’d made mistakes, she knew that. Lots of them.

  She stood and moved over to stand beside his bed. ‘What kind of errands?’

  ‘Just boring errands,’ he muttered and threw himself on his back on the bed, holding the comic above his face, blocking out her questions. ‘Have you ever been in the Hotel Vittoria?’

  He was changing the subject.

  She shook her head.

  ‘It’s like a huge palace. I wasn’t allowed in but I peered through the windows. It was all gold and big rooms and . . .’ He rolled his eyes in ecstasy. ‘If I were Captain America I’d live in a house like that.’ He lowered the comic and looked at her over its edge, suddenly worried. ‘Do you think Nonno will let me have some of the chocolate?’

  She smiled. ‘Yes, if you’re good.’

  ‘I’m always good.’

  ‘Hah!’

  They both laughed. She sat herself down on the edge of the bed.

  ‘What kind of errands, Luca?’

  The comic shot back over his face but she firmly lowered it again. ‘I’m waiting, Luca.’

  His thin cheeks flushed scarlet, but whether it was annoyance or guilt, she couldn’t tell.

  ‘Just taking things to people, that kind of thing.’ He said it casually. ‘Nothing else.’ But he wasn’t yet good at lying.

  ‘What kind of things?’ She rested a hand on his bare knee, pinning the question on him.

  ‘Oh, you know, army stuff.’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘Blankets. Boots. Spanners. Electric lamps. Nothing much.’

  ‘Luca, selling things on the black market is illegal.’

  Luca abandoned his comic. ‘They gave me money. And it’s not illegal if the troops do it. They make the rules now.’

  Caterina rose quickly and opened the window wide to rid her brother’s room of the stink of corruption.

  ‘What is it, Caterina? What’s wrong?’

  ‘No more black market,’ she said sharply. ‘Tomorrow you work on the fishing nets, you hear me? We need bread as well as chocolate. School on Monday.’

  She walked out of his room, her footsteps on the bare boards sounding loud in the silence, and she closed the door behind her. To keep him safe.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Morning came to Sorrento, and dispersed the clouds that had built up overnight, clouds that would have eased the heat of the day. Caterina left her bed early, restless and on edge after yesterday. The first thing she did was check the pouch under her mattress. Yes, it was there. A bundle of Am-lire notes nestled in her fingers. She counted them. This week they would eat. There were bills to pay, overdue bills that marched through her head at night when she couldn’t sleep.

  She made herself a drink of hot water spiked with a slice of lemon and headed out into the fresh dawn air just at the moment when the sky was balanced on the tipping point between night and day. She pulled a scarf around her shoulders and set off for work, but took a detour through Piazza Vittoria and halted at the parapet on the edge of the cliff, breathing deeply. The wide panorama of the horseshoe Bay of Naples far below spread out before her. To her left the Sorrentine peninsula hunched black against black, still belonging to the night, but to her right the dawn light spilled like fine silk over the surface of the sea. The t
win-peaked cone of Vesuvius was draped in a lilac haze and she could almost smell the volcano’s sulphurous breath drifting across the water.

  She stood there thinking about the two soldiers of yesterday, the polite Englishman with the charm and the smile, and the curt American major with the hole in his chest. She loathed their well-polished boots, the way they marched over the rich earth of Campania with such arrogance. She hated their full petrol tanks while most Neapolitans were forced to go about on foot, and she could not rid her mind of the image of the extravagant glass of champagne or of their smooth steak-fed cheeks.

  Yet Luca was right to hang around with the soldiers instead of the old fishermen. The military broke down barriers, they made things happen, they opened doors for change. The soldiers smelled intoxicatingly of the future. And Italy needed a future.

  Caterina turned her back on the fuchsia-tipped waves and faced the ancient walls of Sorrento, steeped in tradition and old family ways. A sea breeze fingered her neck and lifted the drowsy leaves of the palm trees. It was time to wake up.

  The Lombardi workshop was a smallish space in an old stone outbuilding, though its high vaulted ceiling had at first made it feel too big for her, but she had grown into it now after more than two years on her own. She liked its high windows. She kept it neat. Everything in order. The long sheets of veneer were stacked in racks, each wood accessible at a glance, and around the walls was a hook or slot or shelf for every tool – the numerous handsaws, spiral and cog-wheel drills, rifflers, files, chisels, calipers, cutters, clamps – and many more, each an old familiar friend. Every morning Caterina’s sharp eyes skimmed over them, automatically checking their position and condition, and when she was satisfied, she set to work.

  Today she was to decorate a jewellery box. She had constructed it out of a length of exquisite burr walnut, part of the stockpile her father had had the foresight to squirrel away in his workshop before the war.

  ‘We will have nothing, Caterina,’ he had warned her. ‘When the guns start, they will blow our business to hell.’

  It was her idea to hide the wood. When Mussolini took Italy into the war in June 1940, hand in glove with Hitler and Nazi Germany, Caterina and her father had bundled their stock of veneers, along with a crate of music box mechanisms and many of their tools, under tarpaulins in their house instead of keeping them in the workshop. In case the Germans came scavenging. Oh, they came all right, in their jackboots and their Kubelwagens, but they missed the stash in the house.