They continued down to the bottom of the ravine, holding hands, and followed the course of the water towards the south; every so often they looked at each other and laughed, as if they had only just met. They were walking among stinging nettles and brambles. Downriver, the vegetation was more diverse: thyme, rosemary and wild roses tumbled down the slope to the water’s edge and mixed with bindweed, mallows and lavender; mastic and jujube trees grew there as well as the more occasional tamarisk. The brambles were plump with blackberries and Vitantonio picked a handful. He put them in his mouth, one by one; they were ripe and very sweet. For more than an hour, they walked along the riverbed, towards Montescaglioso, and when they reached a pool they stretched out on the wild grasses, in the shadow of the rushes and reeds.
They lay there for hours, nestled in the fresh, lush grass that was nourished by the dampness of the natural grey-rock pools. It felt like a different world, far from the war and the miseries of men. The song of the cicadas mixed with the buzzing of bees and wasps, and there were locusts, ladybirds and an army of vivid dragonflies. Brightly coloured butterflies flew in zigzags, as if curious about everything, until finally landing delicately on the thistles, clover and thyme. Two swallowtail butterflies with black-and-white markings circled some fennel bushes and then flew off over Giovanna’s naked body. Vitantonio drank in her image as if he needed to memorize it. His left arm rested on the ground and supported his face. With his right hand he very slowly caressed her dark hair and breasts.
‘Ggiuànnin,’ he sighed.
‘Ggiuànnin? I haven’t been called that since that summer when Zia got mad at Nonna because she wouldn’t let you get confirmed.’
They looked at each other again, curious, and touched each other’s eyes, lips and neck, as if wanting to discover their feel, taste and scent, and store them away for when they were apart again. They made love for a second time, with unbridled, almost violent, passion.
Afterwards, when their breathing settled, he asked her, ‘Did you storm off because Mamma hadn’t told us the truth?’
She sat up to look him in the eye, leaning her cheek on one hand.
‘How could I be angry? Do you understand what she risked to save you?’
‘Then why did you leave?’
‘To keep the secret. I knew that if I stayed I wouldn’t be able to hide it from you. I left to protect Zia’s spell against the Palmisano curse.’
He kissed her full on the lips again and said, ‘We should go. That patrol we ran into this morning isn’t a good sign. The Germans have been jittery for the last couple of days.’
‘What was it you lot were talking about earlier, when I came to the cave? You’ve got weapons hidden away?’
‘The Allies are heading to Matera and we’re getting ready to help them out. We’ve been getting organized to fight and help liberate Italy for a while now.’
‘I thought you didn’t care about the war, that you only believed in yourself and the family,’ she said, with a hint of pride in her expression.
‘Just because I don’t agree with your friends in the Party or subscribe to any of the groups that fight against Mussolini, it doesn’t mean I don’t hate the fascists and the Germans as much or even more than you all do. They have both brought us misery and robbed us of our dignity.’
‘Be careful. I can’t lose you, not now,’ she said, a dark shadow in her eyes.
‘With Il Duce gone, Italy’s liberation will be a matter of three or four weeks.’
‘Wars are always only supposed to last a short time and in the end they go on and on, getting more and more bloody and merciless. I saw real hell in Catalonia when the Italian planes bombed the Republicans fleeing to the border; I thought I would never see anything worse, but then I saw the horror of the French camps. Then the Germans arrived and I learned of the SS’s depravity, their cruelty that’s like a habit to them, just another weapon. Who knows what’s next …’
They got dressed and he took her hand and helped her up. They walked along the gully, retracing the steps they’d taken that morning, with the undergrowth as high as their waists. Vitantonio grabbed a handful of brome grass and threw it at Giovanna’s back. Two strands got stuck in her blouse.
‘See, you have two suitors,’ he said with a laugh.
She played along, but soon grew serious. She grabbed him by the arm and stopped him.
‘What are we going to do now? What do I say to Salvatore?’ she asked, looking into his eyes.
‘I don’t know, this is all very new,’ he answered. The question had caught him by surprise. ‘We were brought up together; can we just, all of a sudden, stop being brother and sister?’
Giovanna looked at the ground and took two steps back. She turned to face him again and answered with the determination she always had in the most difficult moments.
‘Let’s give it some time. You’re preparing to go off to war, and Salvatore is waiting for me to join him in the mountains with a group of communists that have just got out of prison. There’s still a long struggle ahead of us – neither the king nor Badoglio is going to do anything to free Italy. In fact, in Bari I got a clear idea of what they consider freedom: they just want to replace one fascist leader with another. When this is all over things will be less confused.’
They approached a rocky pile that emerged from the ravine and led to the path to the Lucignano forest. Giovanna plucked the petals off a bunch of poppies, the last of the season, and left a trail of red along the ground.
‘Like a trail of love,’ said Vitantonio in jest.
‘Like a trail of blood,’ replied Giovanna, deadly serious.
Could he be in love with Giovanna? They weren’t related, but they had been raised as twins since the day they were born. Wasn’t that as good as being blood siblings? Was their attraction natural? It didn’t make sense. But the taste of Giovanna lingered happily on his lips.
He walked her to the other side of the Bosco di Lucignano and then he doubled back part of the way to find the Comune forest, following the animal tracks, which led him to a clearing carved out by boars; they had scratched desperately at the earth there in search of some damp dirt to wallow in. Later he went down to the gully so he could return to Matera by following the riverbed, along the same path he’d walked with Giovanna that morning. He passed a woman gathering capers and snails, but he didn’t stop – something told him he had to get back to the town quickly.
As he approached the first few Sassi homes, he saw two old men sitting on a rock smoking herbs. The old men of Matera liked to smoke jimson weed to open their throats: it helped them climb the steep stairs to the city. He knew the two men because they were friends of his tatònn, but he also greeted them without stopping. He quickened his step. At the Cappuccino Vecchio church he headed straight for the rocks, planning to enter the town from the back, along the Potenza road. When he got close to the Via dei Cappuccini he found a line of trucks and tanks parked in front of the fascist Milizia headquarters. The Germans had recently begun holding Italian civilians and soldiers there as hostages. He turned back and hid among the bushes of the wasteland that rose in terraces above the official building, knowing it was foolish: he could be seen from there. But he was anxious to get back to the cave and find out what was going on.
Just as he moved out into the open he heard a huge explosion that threw him to the ground. A column of fire rose up to the heavens: the Palazzo della Milizia had been blown sky-high. He couldn’t see what was going on but, taking advantage of the dust cloud, he set off running and a few minutes later entered the Sassi labyrinth.
Rain of Stars
THE PEASANT FARMERS had erected barricades at the entrances to the Sasso Caveoso using wagons and furniture. Later, Vitantonio learned that they’d also blocked the streets in the Sasso Barisano to keep out the German troops, but the fighting itself was concentrated in Matera’s city centre. He found only his grandfather in the cave, gathering items for the barricades; the others had gone out to defend the ci
ty’s strategic buildings, which the Germans wanted to destroy before retreating. He grabbed what weapons he could find and rushed out. When he reached the cathedral, he saw the first signs of the battle that had broken out unexpectedly just an hour earlier. With a machine gun in his hand, he ran towards the shooting.
By the time he reached the centre, clashes had broken out at two official buildings, the Palazzo del Governo and the Prefettura, in the Piazza Vittorio Veneto. It was six in the evening. In the square, Vitantonio found Roosevelt and the Professor shooting as part of a group of poorly armed civilians and was shocked to realize that the popular revolt was prevailing.
‘We’ve got things under control here, but the radio says that it’s not going so well in the area around the station. We’ll have to go up there and give them a hand.’
News that was spread by word of mouth from house to house, from one end of the city to the other, was called ‘the radio’. It was the fastest way to communicate and it never failed them. So they could only assume the information was good and they ran over to the Via Cappelluti. As soon as they arrived there, they saw a fierce battle going on in the station plaza and also fighting in the nearby block of apartments that housed civil servants. On the roof, there were four or five snipers in civilian clothes; they had obviously had army training. This group was led by the unmistakable figure of the Englishman, who was also holding at bay a German detachment that was trying to get close enough to blow up the building. The fresh arrivals, including Vitantonio, started shooting from the other side of the street, together with a group of Italian non-commissioned officers who had armed themselves at the barracks of the Guardia di Finanza. Caught in the crossfire, the Germans retreated.
The Englishman came down to street level: he wanted to capture a German prisoner to be interrogated by the British Eighth Army when it entered the city. Right on his heels, another sniper came down from the roof. He also seemed English or American, and he waved at them with the hand that held his machine gun and vanished in the direction of the Via Roma. Behind him appeared a very young handsome air-force officer.
‘Vincenzo Bilardi,’ the young man introduced himself.
The group went through the streets, helping the civilians get organized. On the Rione San Biagio, where the fighting had begun, they found Italian soldiers shooting at the Germans. The Professor discovered that the reserve officer who had armed all those men was none other than his close friend, Francesco Paolo Nitti. They hugged; their conversations were what had kept up his link with the world over his years in exile in Matera. Nitti informed them that in various clashes two men they knew had been killed, and that a group of the electricity company’s employees had been shot at its headquarters. The Professor boosted Nitti’s morale by telling him that the Germans had suffered many losses in the city centre and that they’d been forced to retreat from the Piazza Vittorio Veneto and the station. It seemed that the insurrection was gaining ground throughout the city.
Narrowly evading an enemy faction on the Via Rosario, they turned back towards the Duomo, to check on the situation in the two Sassi from above. As they neared the cathedral square, a shell exploded right by them and they had to throw themselves to the ground: the Germans had set up a 75-millimetre anti-tank gun in front of the Civilian Hospital and were shooting at the houses around the cathedral, over the roofs of the Sasso Barisano. Up on a roof of the hospital, two blackshirts signalled with their hands to direct the shooting, choosing their targets from among the best-known dissidents in the city. Neighbours watched in silence from their windows, trying to figure out who were these two men in black now in charge of the local fascists. One of them was a huge, hulking giant and the other a young man, but no one could identify them: seemingly they had come up from Puglia, fleeing the advance of the Allied troops.
A second shell exploded even closer to Vitantonio and his comrades. They ran for shelter in a house carved out of the rock. In the deepest part of the cave about twenty people were huddled, but one girl stood at the entrance, watching the German artillery firing. From the depths of the cave, her mother screamed desperately for her to take cover in the safer part of the dwelling.
‘What’s your name?’ Vitantonio asked her.
‘Lucia.’
‘Your mother is right, Lucia. It’s dangerous here by the door.’
Still the girl didn’t move. The glow of the tracer bullets fascinated her. She couldn’t take her eyes off them.
‘It’s raining stars,’ she said, spellbound. She closed her eyes and made a wish.
‘Very dangerous stars,’ explained Vitantonio when a third shell blew up just metres from the house.
He offered her his hand and led her to the back of the cave, to join the others. As he did so, there was another explosion right in front of the cave and the force of the impact blew the door to pieces.
Lucia wasn’t as young as she seemed – she’d turned fifteen and was mulling over her wish. The emotions of the day had shaken her: that morning she’d seen a German soldier on a motorbike taking two captured Italian soldiers sitting in the sidecar to the military barracks. They were two young men from Matera she recognized, Pietro Tataranni and Natale Farina. They had abandoned their units on 9 September, the day after the armistice, and they had been caught when they were just about to enter town, after more than ten days of walking. Fate would have it that the motorcycle with the prisoners paused at the door of Pietro Tataranni’s girlfriend’s house. The girlfriend, who hadn’t seen her lover since the start of the war, had walked over to the window when she heard the bike, and when she opened the shutters she couldn’t believe her eyes: the young man who had just stood up in the sidecar and was waving his arms at her was her boyfriend.
‘Pietro!’ she shouted like mad.
‘They’re taking me to the Milizia, but I’ll be back soon. The war’s over for us,’ he answered excitedly. ‘I love you!’
Lucia had watched the scene from the pavement that morning, and had been daydreaming ever since that, one day, a handsome boy would walk across all of Italy for ten days and ten nights to find her and declare his love.
‘You should have seen how they looked at each other,’ she sighed to all those huddled in the back of the cave. ‘I’d like to be there when Pietro Tataranni comes back from the Milizia. They’ve not seen each other for more than three years because of the war! I want to see the moment they’re finally back in each other’s arms.’
Outside the cave, the Germans had stopped shooting. Vitantonio signalled to Roosevelt and the Professor that they should take advantage of the lull. They ran out into the streets in time to see that the insurrection was winning. An hour later, when it was already growing dark, the German column was climbing the Potenza road and leaving the city for good.
The uprising of 21 September had come to an end, but the city of Matera had paid a very high price: twenty-six dead.
When the insurgents regrouped, Vitantonio, Roosevelt and the Professor met up with the Englishman, who had managed to capture a wounded German; he had left him under guard at the hospital. The four friends celebrated their victory with a quick embrace, then pulled apart. The Englishman was euphoric; he wanted to leave the city in search of the British Eighth Army, which was approaching from Montescaglioso.
The radio was spreading the news of the explosion at the Milizia headquarters that Vitantonio had seen with his own eyes when he was coming up from the gravina.
‘The sixteen hostages the Germans were holding there are dead.’
The violence of the explosion had made it impossible to identify five of the victims, but soon word spread of the names of the others: Pietro De Vito, Antonio Nocera, Mario Greco, Raimondo Semeraro, Tommaso Speciale, Francesco Lecce, Natale Farina, Francesco Farina, Vincenzo Luisi …
Young Lucia had just left the safety of the cave and was asking her mother to accompany her to the house of Tataranni’s girlfriend; she wanted more than anything to witness the couple’s reunion. What she didn’t yet k
now was that her wish would never come true: the last corpse they’d identified from the rubble of the Milizia building was Pietro Tataranni’s.
The Liberation of Matera
WHEN THE ENGLISHMAN returned to Matera at dawn he was driving an armoured car belonging to the Eighth Army, which was rapidly approaching along the road from Montescaglioso, and he was wearing the uniform of a British Army lieutenant. Vitantonio barely recognized him: he hadn’t seen him in military dress for more than a year, since the day he’d saved him from the carabinieri patrol at the entrance to the Sasso Caveoso. In the car with him was the Italian pilot – young Bilardi – and the foreigner they’d seen come down from the roof of the apartment building in the square by the station. Two British motorcycles flanked the armoured car, creating a tiny procession that moved very slowly into the heart of the city.
Hundreds of Matera’s residents were gathered in the open to celebrate their liberation from the Germans. When the British armoured car entered the Piazza Vittorio Veneto, the locals started shouting, ‘Long live America!’ Vitantonio and the Professor exchanged a puzzled look. Only Roosevelt seemed amused by the mistake.
‘It looks like in the end we did fight side by side with the Americans,’ he said, pleased as punch.
Then he let out one of his booming laughs, lifted his thumb in the Englishman’s direction as he was getting out of the car, and shouted, ‘Long live President Roosevelt!’
The Trail of Terror
OVERNIGHT, THE ENGLISHMAN had become Lieutenant Donovan. Vitantonio, Roosevelt and the Professor were his troops. The next morning they left Matera, still in the grip of the euphoria brought on by finally entering the fray. They hadn’t been permitted to join the ranks of the regular troops, but the British Army had allowed them to act as observers, under the command of their new lieutenant. Donovan spoke perfect Italian and could be very useful to the liberating troops, as both an informant and as liaison officer with the local insurgents.
The Last Son’s Secret Page 18