ON THE SECOND Sunday of September, Vitantonio waited in vain all day long for Donata to appear for their usual meeting at the shepherd’s hut. He finally gave up at midnight, left Roosevelt’s cabin with an aching heart and took the road back to Matera, having made up his mind to remain in hiding in the Sassi caves, where he would wait for news of his mother. His arrival back at the cave woke everyone up. They still hadn’t gone back to sleep when another commotion had everyone on their guard.
‘The British have landed at Taranto!’ shouted Roosevelt from the stairs, coming in all wound up, forgetting the safety rules and risking a bullet. ‘It sounds like they met with no resistance and they’re heading east and north, towards Brindisi and Bari. They might even have already occupied them,’ he added as he climbed down into the hideout, in an unprecedented state of euphoria.
Vitantonio and the Englishman might have felt safe in their cave, but with each passing day they also felt more and more trapped and desperate to see action. Roosevelt, the only one of them who could move about freely, regularly went out in search of news. Giuseppe ‘the Professor’ only came by when he could get past the increased supervision that the mayor of Matera had imposed on those in internal exile. They had all been spending their waking hours dreaming that the war would come to Italy and they could finally take part, and the continuing tension had begun to have a dangerous effect on the group’s morale. Until the morning that Roosevelt had come running from Montescaglioso to bring them the good news of the landing.
‘The British are chasing the Germans towards the mountains. In less than a week they’ll be up here to liberate Matera,’ he explained. ‘They say that Australians, Canadians, South Africans and New Zealanders have landed too; everyone except the Americans, who they say will land at Naples. I’m really irritated by that,’ he added. And he laughed in that strange way he had of laughing at his own witticisms.
‘Americans? English? Who cares who comes to liberate this miserable country! The only thing we care about is seeing some action and finishing off that bunch of bastards once and for all,’ interjected Giuseppe. Before being exiled to Basilicata, the Professor had endured both Mussolini’s torture and prisons. ‘We need to get moving and warn everyone. Let’s meet this evening at the church.’
‘You might not care, but I would have liked to fight alongside the Americans,’ insisted Roosevelt.
He liked to imagine that in New York he had forged a secret bond with the many strangers that he had travelled to work with, and that the moment would come when they would recognize him as a real American citizen and fellow combatant.
‘Fighting shoulder to shoulder with the Yanks against the Germans would have given meaning to the ten years I suffered living in America.’
‘Stop daydreaming! With Mussolini out of the picture, this is going to happen fast,’ insisted the Professor. ‘The liberation of Italy is going to be a piece of cake and we’d better get moving if we don’t want to miss it!’
‘Don’t you have anything to say?’ asked the Englishman, surprised by Vitantonio’s silence.
‘Zia hasn’t missed one of our meetings in three years,’ was Vitantonio’s response. He still hadn’t found the right moment to reveal to his fellow cave dwellers that his aunt was actually his mother. ‘Today is the first time she hasn’t shown up. Something’s not right.’
‘If the British are making their way to Bari, the roads will be cut off by the fighting. When the front stabilizes, you’ll have news from your zia,’ said Roosevelt, trying to reassure him.
‘We need to collect up our weapons and hide out in the forest. When the Germans attack the British, we’ll attack their rearguard …’ the Englishman said, as he began to plan.
The imminence of action finally got Vitantonio’s attention.
‘We might be more useful here, in Matera. The British won’t have an easy time finding their way around the Sassi if the fighting turns into a house-to-house scrap.’