We talk in Italian, in low voices, both glad to be cocooned by our table in a dark, wooden booth. I find my heart softening when he relays the loneliness of a spy very much out in the cold, his only contact sometimes just a voice on the other end of a frequency, cracked and distant. There were often weeks when he went without meeting with a comrade, with only his faux life to maintain.
‘I hated those Nazi bastards,’ he says, in the first sign of deep disdain I’ve seen in him. ‘Not just Breugal and Klaus, but all the others teeming over our country and sucking it dry for all it was worth, treating us like second-class citizens. So many times I could have just walked out of that office and never come back.’
I don’t need to ask why he didn’t. It was the same reason I forced myself to walk in every day – to take back the Italy they stole from us. He left Venice not long after me, as the liberation forces gained momentum – there was always an escape route ready – but not before he took pleasure in seeing Breugal’s power wane and a furious scrabble towards his own getaway. He heard later that Klaus was shot by liberation forces near to the causeway.
He asks about my own flight from Venice, but my understanding gained during the days since the Savoy means I’m not surprised to learn the travel passes were his work; typed and organised by Cristian De Luca, thrust under the nose of the distracted general and given the golden stamp of his signature – my passage to freedom.
‘I tried to explain in those letters what I had done and why, and to warn you,’ he says, his brown eyes a bottomless well. ‘It was going against every order but I had to explain why I’d done it. I asked you to meet me that next day, but when you didn’t turn up and the second letter was returned, I knew you hadn’t read either of them, or that you simply couldn’t forgive me. So I had no choice but to present you with a way out.’
We sit for a moment in the bubble of our booth, consumed in its silence.
‘Which was it?’ he quizzes. ‘Did you read the first letter, or simply choose not to come?’
‘I burnt it,’ I say into the smooth grain of the table. ‘Before I opened it.’
‘Why?’ His voice is soft, not accusing.
Now I flash my own eyes at him. ‘Because I felt deceived by you, utterly and totally betrayed,’ I spit, with more venom than I’ve ever imagined was inside me. Simmering, clearly, all these years. As it hovers between us, we both realise the significance of my delivery. I was so hurt because he meant something. Cristian had stirred something in me I didn’t even know was there.
‘And I deserved it,’ he says. ‘In your shoes, I might have done the same.’
Silently, we draw a line under it and move on. I tell him I travelled out of the Veneto with the aid of the travel passes and then – helped by partisan brigades – across the German lines and south to a different Italy, battered but liberated, running with British and American soldiers and under siege of a different kind. There, I found work in Rome translating for British troops, and then the offer of transport to London.
‘It was the hardest decision I had to make, to leave Italy,’ I tell Gio, noting to myself that he’s becoming less Cristian and more Gio by the minute. ‘But even being in Italy I still had no access to my parents or my friends, and I was so, so tired of feeling like a guest in my own country. I wanted to be the guest for once.’
It was Jack, I tell him, who helped me when I arrived in London – the only thing I could remember was the name of his parents’ delicatessen in the East End. I was a virtual shell, physically and emotionally drained from the travel, the separation and the sheer isolation. He fed and held me, and then found me a position at the Ministry of Information, copywriting and scripting Allied propaganda until the war’s end. As a former Resistance soldier, they helped me form a new identity, in name at least.
‘But at least I was writing,’ I say. ‘It was the only thing – that and Jack – which held me together. Working with words.’
Gio nods and I know he understands entirely.
‘So why was it that you left Il Gazzettino all those years ago, if words were your passion, to become a secretary for the Reich? I always did wonder.’
I shouldn’t be surprised that he had access to my records back then – both official and unofficial.
I take a breath. ‘We all knew the newspaper owners were fascist sympathisers, that much was obvious, but it wasn’t so blatant until the war took hold – before that, you could still report on the majority of day-to-day news without a slant.’
‘So what happened to change that?’
‘My editor came to me with an assignment one day – a gang of boys badly beaten up by fascist bullies. He told me exactly how to angle it, that the boys were agitators and not victims.’
Gio’s eyes widen with interest.
‘One of them was my cousin,’ I continue. ‘And so that was the end of my dream job.’
‘But now, you’re back, working with words?’ he says, allowing a smile to creep into his face.
‘Yes, and very happy with it. I love my job.’
‘And still writing? I mean more?’ He’s playful now, and it’s my turn to raise eyebrows. ‘Well, once I knew your name I was able to find this …’ and he pulls out a book from his leather satchel and holds it up. ‘I’ve only had a chance to read a little, but it’s good. It’s very good, Stella Hawthorn – novelist.’
I purse my lips at his levity. ‘It’s hardly high literature, Gio,’ I say, although secretly pleased he has sought out my one and only publication to date: The Women of Milan, a family drama of love and female lust for independence in nineteenth-century Italy.
‘The language, though, it’s so you – rich, like you’ve embroidered our country,’ he says. ‘I can picture you writing every sentence. But why Milan, why not Venice?’
‘Because it’s not Venice,’ I say, and he understands my drift.
‘Speaking of which,’ I add. I haven’t brought the bulky manuscript of The Hidden Typewriter with me, but he smiles at the inference. ‘You’ve also been busy, Gio Benetto.’
‘I’m no writer – it was mainly a way to find you,’ he explains. ‘And yet once I began, I found I couldn’t stop. The story was compelling – as if you couldn’t make it up. I found I had to finish it.’
He takes a sip of his wine. ‘But I have left room for an epilogue.’
39
Completion
Venice, November 2018
The sun looks almost identical as she emerges from the airport, a dazzling white light bouncing off the water again. It’s almost a full year since Luisa made her solo trip to Venice and she’s hungry once again to reach the waterbus, traverse the wide lagoon and reach the city beyond. She glances back and sees Jamie staring at the scene as he walks slowly, his small suitcase bobbling on the slabs behind. It’s only his second trip and he’s still in that bewilderment of imagining a solid city on water and trying to comprehend how a fairy tale can exist for so long. She knows Jamie, with his innate practicality, will soon be wondering how the buildings haven’t yet succumbed to the silt. Luisa still has moments of disbelief, principally when she arrives and sees this virtual Atlantis with her own eyes, but the more she researches and reads, the more she digs beneath the layers of history, the more she feels Venice is perhaps the way we should all live, never taking for granted the shifting sands around us. That its foundations are more solid than those of a good many cities rising from the earth’s crust.
Now, on this trip, Luisa is on a different mission. And although she allows Jamie his moment of wonder, she’s willing him to hurry up. Unlike when she arrived a year before, when there was a need to seal the gaping void left by her mother’s death, Luisa has a concrete purpose. And just as children can rarely hold onto the secret of a parent’s present, she can barely wait to fulfil it. There is something burning a hole in her suitcase that needs dispatching.
Thanks to the first flight of the day falling at some ungodly hour, it’s still early when she and Jamie reach the
ir rented apartment between the Zattere and the Accademia – central but alongside a small canal and far enough from San Marco to be blinkered to outright tourism. They park their cases, Luisa pulls out her dog-eared map from the previous trip and steps out into the sunshine – and immediately feels at home. The map stays largely in her pocket as, hand in hand with Jamie, she follows her nose through the winding streets and over the solid wooden gateway of the Accademia – still her favourite of bridges – and into the echoey beauty of Campo Santo Stefano. There’s a thin stream of walkers and tourists but it’s not too busy, and they find a table at the café where she previously met Giulio, opposite the doors of the church.
‘You can’t wait, can you?’ Jamie teases.
‘I just can’t believe that of all the cafés and bars in Venice, I was sat here almost a year ago, staring through those doors, and yet I didn’t know,’ she replies. Her voice is high with excitement. They drink a swift and good coffee – Luisa’s Italian having improved by necessity over past months – and then step inside the church doors.
It’s mid-morning and almost empty, aside from one Venetian woman in the front pew, eyes tightly shut and absorbed in her rosary. A door shuts somewhere and the sound bounces off the high vaulted ceiling, but the woman remains entranced. Hand in hand, the two of them walk towards the altar, and Luisa looks at Jamie.
‘This is it, this is where they were married,’ she whispers. Jamie looks at her full ruby lips and thinks if they weren’t already married he would do it all over again, instantly. Here, now. He squeezes her hand.
‘Perhaps on this very spot,’ he says, fully engaged in her world now. It has taken some time, but he knows now what fuels his Luisa, what has kept her moving through loss, and what now creates the light she has in her eyes, her skin, her very being. She’s glowing with the knowledge of who she is.
For Luisa, standing in the church, breathing even an atom of the air that her grandparents once did, the journey has been worth every late night of research and enquiring emails, foraging amid the dusty boxes, and countless trips to the British Library to squint at the microfiche print of old newspapers. Looking around her, she would freely give every donated hour again, each piece of heart and soul sunk into this quest.
It has taken her and Giulio months and miles of Italian red tape to track down the wedding certificate. But she has it, in one of several boxes of research back home, to prove her own line of history. That a part of her belongs here in Venice and that, in some small measure, is why it remains a free city – the willingness of so many like her grandmother to put their lives on the line.
Luisa draws in the silence of the church and muses silently on what the last year has brought – the search for Stella on Venetian soil, but an added discovery much closer to home too. The family solicitor unearthed a safety deposit box belonging to Luisa’s mother several months after her death. There were no riches inside, only insight – though intensely valuable to Luisa. A second box of secrets.
The wad of letters contained bitter exchanges between Stella and Luisa’s mother – they went some way to explaining their lengthy, strained relationship, and perhaps the way Luisa’s mother behaved within her own family. The rift involved a boy … and a baby. Both secret, both forbidden. It was long before she met Luisa’s father, but Luisa sensed from the tart sentences that her mother clearly absorbed the bitterness of a forced separation deep into her heart. With the result that it turned almost to stone, never to be softened fully again. Perhaps as a parent, Stella was harsh in her actions, but it was the 1960s and teenage single motherhood still a taboo, and she was clearly thinking of her own daughter’s future. There were faults on both sides, but the result for Luisa was a mother who seemed unable to show fun, joy or even an essence of love at times, even with another child of her own. Yet rather than feeling bitter herself, Luisa simply finds it sad.
Today, though, is about celebration, and she resolves to indulge fully against the stunning backdrop of Venice. She and Jamie forsake lunch for huge cones of gelato at the age-old Café Paolin on the campo, and she wonders then if her grandparents did the same. It’s not often Luisa would willingly swap the romantic nostalgia of old black and white prints for the whirlwind social media of the twenty-first century, but if her grandparents had taken selfies and posted on Facebook, who knows how much easier her search would have been. But as fulfilling? Probably not.
The coffee and sugar wave away the tiredness of their early start, and they make their way towards the San Marco water’s edge, Luisa buying the vaporetto tickets with ease in Italian. She’s unaware of squeezing Jamie’s hand quite so tightly as the boat stops at San Giorgio and then travels on to Giudecca.
Giulio is waiting for them at the entrance to Villa Heriot, with the customary cheer she remembers from their first ever meeting, and the trip in between, where they had gotten to know each other much better, working side by side in a long but productive week. He greets Jamie as if he’s known him for an age, and leads them out into the grounds and the Institute’s office. Melodie is in residence, purring from the warmth of the photocopier.
‘So, have you got it?’ Giulio is that child at Christmas; his hands go out to receive it, smoothing the pads of his fingers over the cover as if it were Melodie’s silken fur. It’s exactly what Luisa had done when she received her box of proof copies from the publisher – fifteen in English, five in Giulio’s Italian translation. In private, she had smelt the pages, laughed hysterically in the silence of her own house. And never once felt mad for doing it.
‘La Macchina da Scrivere Nascosta – Una Storia di Resistenza nella Venezia Occupata’, Giulio reads. The English version Luisa also has in her bag: The Hidden Typewriter – a Story of Resistance in Occupied Venice. By Luisa Belmont. Translated by Giulio Volpe. Below the title on both covers is, of course, a photograph of the machine – the real thing – in all her faded glory.
‘Luisa, it’s wonderful,’ he says, in his equally beautiful Italian eloquence, despite the slight crack in his voice. It wasn’t a hard title for them to agree on, and seemed only right and fitting, since the book is based entirely on her grandfather’s own account of the same name. Getting the manuscript from Paolo senior was the final impetus they’d needed to move from a personal pursuit to something that could become part of Venice’s rich wartime tapestry.
Between them, she and Giulio have spent months picking apart fact from the fiction; Grandpa Gio had used aliases in his writing, but they were a thin screen; the manuscript was undoubtedly his and Stella’s story. Luisa and Giulio researched the path that led agent Giovanni Benetto to seek out his secret love, his incredible dual life as Cristian De Luca, and the SOE operations in Venice and around the Veneto. In turn, there was Stella and her life schooled from childhood into anti-fascism, her decision to become an active part of the partisan movement, and her own two faces as a Reich secretary and Resistance activist. It’s not a novel, but Luisa’s text is peppered with rich description, and several of the early reviews have suggested – in a complimentary way – that it’s difficult to separate the reality from such a fantastical tale. It reads, as she’s always thought, like a fairy story.
‘Do you like it?’ Giulio poses to Luisa.
‘I adore it,’ she says. ‘And I can’t thank you enough.’ She’s written the sentiment in many emails, expressed her gratitude to Giulio tenfold in helping to make her dream come true – not only a first book, the one she felt certain was always in there, but a journey into print that has healed her, had the effect of darning the holes of her own, scant relationship with her mother, to forging something tangible with the next generation above. Even she as a writer finds it hard to describe how it has made her whole again.
‘Well, we need to go out and celebrate, at least have some good Prosecco,’ Giulio beams in his excitement. ‘I know just the place.’
This time, Jamie steps forward and folds one arm around Luisa’s waist.
‘Well I’m up for it,’ he says,
‘but we might have to look out some of the non-alcoholic variety as well.’ With the other hand, he proudly peels back one side of Luisa’s jacket, revealing a pert yet defined little bulb, hidden under her jumper but easily recognised once it’s on show.
Luisa palms at the roundness of her belly as Giulio’s face can hardly contain his own pleasure. Yes, she thinks: complete. Completare.
40
The Typewriter
London, 1955
In time, we two scribes rewrite the ending of a near fairy tale and become the epilogue. Stella and Cristian that never was develops gradually into Stella and Gio. We take it slow at my request, tossing the Cristian persona away – though much like Jack, I find it sometimes difficult to separate the two names – and getting to know each other all over again – this time, building on trust and respect. We agree from the outset that subterfuge and secrets have no part in our new lives. We are Italians in London, refugees perhaps, but we are not homeless. He takes me in those early days to his office at the University of London, where he is happily a fellow of European literature, and I stare goggle-eyed at his wallpaper of books and feast on the shelves with my eyes. It’s like manna from heaven. I discover in his desk drawer a small, covered box, and in it a shining medal – embarrassed, he admits it was given to him by the British government ‘for services rendered’, though any undercover work was never mentioned in public dispatches, for reasons of security. And I find, more and more, that I can no longer doubt Gio Benetto.
We eat authentic gelato while lying on the grass near the Serpentine in Hyde Park, joking we might easily pretend to be in Venice as the sunshine beats down, and we take endless boat trips on the Thames and listen out for that pin-prick moment of sound when the rushing of the water against the bow takes us back there and we are once again in the jewelled city that hovers on water.
Sometimes, we talk of the war, as if it’s a different universe we lived in – which it was, in a way.
The Secret Messenger Page 29