TWENTY-FIVE
Lucia
January 22, 1944
Matteo coughed while he walked, his old leather shoes slowing on the cobblestones, cheeks brightening in the cold morning air. His hands balled into fists as he struggled for a clean breath. “Mamma?” he sputtered in the wake of the spasm. “I still want to go to the park. I’m not sick. I promise, Mamma.”
Lucia hesitated, studying his face, pale as a shell under an old cap that sat crooked on his head. A few dark curls escaped around his ears. He swiveled to stare toward the grounds of the Villa Borghese, just across the piazza, emphatically repeating, “I promise.”
She crouched and placed a hand on his forehead, feeling yet again for heat, her heart constricting with worry. Nothing. The cough had developed over the last week, starting as a tickle and building into something deeper, something that filled her with dread. But he didn’t seem sick otherwise, and Francesca had weighed in this morning after bending to inspect Matteo where he waited in the kitchen, begging to go out.
“Fresh air might be good for him,” she’d said, giving him a smile as she stood. “It’s terrible to be cooped up when you’re little. Take him to the park and let him stretch his legs.”
Now Lucia reached for his hand, hoping Francesca was right, and they set off toward the promise of paths and trees. She smiled at the thought of the girl. Francesca had slept in the guest room for a month now, recovering from her injuries, and despite having to stretch her nearly empty cupboards, Lucia liked having her around. Francesca taught Matteo to play checkers, and she talked with Lucia in her serious, straightforward way about all kinds of things. And, though Lucia wasn’t ready to admit that she welcomed it, Francesca gave Carlo an excuse to stop by. He popped in often, on his way to wherever he was hiding in Rome’s cellars and attics. He’d started when she was first recovering, bringing ointments and making her giggle until her solemn face transformed, as lovely as a swan. But even as Francesca got better, Carlo kept coming. Just three nights ago he’d brought them meat, bought on the black market, for dinner.
“What is it?” Lucia had asked as she unwrapped the limp chunk of flesh, mouth already watering. He’d come just in time for the gas to turn on, and her hands shook at the sight of the meat, red and raw—she didn’t actually care what it was. But she was still guarded around Carlo, still terse.
“Who knows?” He flashed a grin, and Matteo giggled across the room, eager to please his tall, new friend.
“Matteo,” Carlo said, pivoting. “Want to play checkers? Except I know you’ll beat me—you’re far too clever.” Lucia glanced up to see him move across the room and settle on the floor, long legs crossed beside his little son. Matteo grinned, hugging his knees with enthusiasm, and Carlo hummed a tune as he set up the board. It occurred to Lucia—he was happy. They both were. She’d turned away and bent to light the stove, hiding her warring heart. She was still angry. Perhaps she always would be. But watching her son with his father made it hard to keep the other feelings at bay. There was joy, seeing them together. And fear, because she already knew she’d never keep them apart again. If Carlo wanted to be a father, she would let him, for Matteo’s sake. When the war was over, they could tell Matteo the truth and find a way to share their son.
Now, she and Matteo arrived at the terrace flanking the Villa Borghese grounds, and she let go of his hand. He skipped ahead, another cough rattling his little body, his hands stretched out as if he might lift off into the January sky. A bird dove before him. He chased it, spinning to watch it rise.
“Lucia!”
Her heart nearly stopped at the voice. She instinctively touched the scarf on her head, her mind racing. She always feared running into Bergmann with Matteo, so much that she’d taken to wrapping her hair in kerchiefs, shopping far from Via Veneto, and devising stories to explain her son if she had to: he was a neighbor’s child, a nephew, a friend. She told Matteo to say nothing, not a contradictory word, if they were stopped. But surely, Bergmann wasn’t at the park?
“Lucia!”
She turned, her pulse slowing slightly as understanding caught up with her reflexes. It was a voice she knew well, and she spotted the figure who matched it, silhouetted against the backdrop of Rome spreading beyond the Pincio Terrace. Carlo hurried across the terrace toward her, his hands stuffed in his pockets and shoulders hunched against the cold. A wild grin lit his face.
“What are you doing here?” she whispered as he drew close. She glanced around the empty grounds, spotting Matteo where he crouched in the gravel, his hand stretched toward a hesitant squirrel. “How did you find us?”
“Francesca said you’d be here. You’d just left when I stopped by your place.” His eyes danced with something, as if he could barely contain laughter. “I had to track you down to tell you. It’s happening.”
“What’s happening?”
“The invasion.” Carlo’s grin was like punctuation. He seemed unable to contain himself. He stepped close, took Lucia’s hands, and tugged her from her stunned stance. He whirled her into a little jig across the gravel before she could protest. “It’s happening!” he laughed, lifting her from her feet.
When Lucia’s shoes hit the gravel, she found herself laughing as well, bewildered. She sought the right questions, her mind darting. “The Allies? Where?”
He grinned gallantly. “The Allies landed in Anzio. I heard it this morning through our contacts on the coast. I’m sure it’ll be all over the city in no time.”
“Anzio,” Lucia echoed, trying to take it in. “Over the Alban Hills—it can’t be more than sixty kilometers away, can it?”
“Less than that.” Carlo seemed to vibrate. “The Allies will be here before we know it. Rome will be free within a week.”
Lucia was dumbstruck. She glanced again at Matteo, who was still focused on the squirrel down the path. She’d been to Anzio, many times. She pictured its sandy beaches and found herself laughing.
“Mamma?” Matteo rose, noticing their visitor. He cocked his head in surprise and called out, “Giancarlo!” as he started to run.
Carlo loped over and picked the little boy up, twirling him until he shrieked with laughter. “It’s a lovely day, Matteo!” he said, grinning. “Un bellissimo giorno!”
Matteo giggled when his feet hit the ground, and then he doubled over coughing. Lucia put her hand on his back, feeling his little lungs spasm and fill, until they calmed.
She frowned. “We should walk farther into the park.” She glanced around the exposed, empty terrace. “Run ahead, Matteo.”
When their son was safely out of earshot, Lucia whispered the questions multiplying in her mind. “What happens next, Carlo?”
“The partisans need to plan for Rome’s liberation. I have a meeting in a couple of hours to organize our next steps.”
Her gaze flashed to him. “Will you be in danger?”
He shrugged but met her question with his warm, brown stare. “I don’t know.”
“When will the Allies reach Rome? Will it really take a week?” They were only sixty kilometers away, after all. “Will the Germans put up a strong fight in the Alban Hills?”
“Too early to tell. An American contact confirmed that the Allies landed without much difficulty early this morning, but that’s all I know. We think they could be here as early as tomorrow, or as late as the end of the week.”
Rome would be free. In mere days. It was breathtaking news. Everything would change. Countless people who’d been forced into hiding would be liberated. All across Rome, disbanded soldiers and Jews waited in attics and cellars and convents, avoiding deportation. Partisans hid from the SS, always fearful, always moving. Young men, having dodged the draft, hid from deportation or execution for refusing to fight any more Fascist wars. Lidia and her family would be free now, too. She was still at the Fatebenefratelli Hospital, protected by the fictional Syndrome K disease. Lucia had only seen her once since the razzia in the ghetto. Was there any chance Lidia’s husband, parents, and father-in-law, whom Lucia had never found, hid somewhere, too?
Lucia watched Matteo run toward a tree. A flap of newspaper stuck out from under his trouser leg. Matteo hated the feel of paper under his clothes, but it was all she had to warm him. Rome was out of textiles. If the Allies arrived within the week, would cloth and food and gas return soon after?
“Carlo,” she ventured, her thoughts turning. “I’m supposed to go to the salon tomorrow, to see Fabrizio. Should I stay home?”
“If we’re still waiting for the Allies tomorrow, you should keep your appointment.” He nodded, decisive. “You might hear something about how the Germans are reacting to the news.”
They slowed on the path while Matteo warmed to whatever game he was playing, bending to collect pine cones. Lucia tensed, watching. His little hands must be freezing. A more immediate question rose. “Is it safe for us to be out here?” She pivoted, searching the quiet paths, suddenly afraid. Rome was on the verge of liberation. What would happen next?
But Carlo shook his head. “No need to worry, not today. The Germans have far more to fear than a young family out for a walk.”
She glanced at him, and for a second everything within her stilled. Carlo gazed toward Matteo, thoughtful, something like joy lighting his eyes. His hair fell over his forehead, the same color as his son’s, and the curl of his smile was calm. She remembered that confidence, so innate in Carlo’s soul, and how it had once made her believe everything would always be all right. As long as they were together. She looked away, trying to clear herself of troublesome feelings.
“You still love him,” Francesca had said a week before, her eyes on Lucia while Carlo disappeared out the front door. She’d flinched, suddenly aware of the way she watched her estranged husband’s broad back. With longing. Was it that obvious?
“I could never love him again,” she’d insisted, turning back to her mending. She pushed a needle through Matteo’s sock, sealing a hole. Francesca had studied her, in that open way of hers, but she’d said nothing more.
Lucia sighed, tightening her coat against a cold breeze that swept down the path.
“I’m surprised by how much he looks like you,” Carlo said, breaking into her thoughts.
“He looks like Piero.” Her breath hung in the air. She didn’t mention that he had Carlo’s lighter coloring, his lively eyes. Matteo knelt, wobbling as he reached for more pine cones, making a pile while a squirrel chattered from a branch.
“I can’t imagine not knowing him now.” Carlo glanced at her, hesitant. “I wish I could tell him the truth. About me. I know we can’t, but someday I want him to know that he has a father. A father who loves him.”
She softened. “It doesn’t have to be someday, Carlo. I’ve been thinking about it, too, and I think we should tell him soon. When Rome is liberated, and all this secrecy can finally end.” Her voice cracked. “I will let you be his father, Carlo. I don’t know what you and I can be, but Matteo deserves to have you in his life.”
Carlo lifted his eyes to the sky, wiping at their corners. He cleared the sudden emotion from his voice before looking at her again. “Thank you.”
“Mamma!” Matteo called. “Come see!”
Lucia closed her eyes and inhaled. When she opened them, she’d contained the explosions in her soul. “Coming, piccolo!” she called, forcing the tremor from her voice. They turned in sync toward their son, and Carlo followed her across the grass.
When they neared, Matteo blinked up with his lovely eyes, grinning. “I’m making a home,” he announced. “For the squirrels. See this pine cone? It’s a tiny door.”
She bent to appreciate his pine cone house and tousled his hair. “Santo cielo, Matteo. You’re so kind and clever.” She wanted to gather him up, to never let go.
Carlo looked at the branches spreading over their heads. “This is a perfect climbing tree. See those low limbs? What do you say?”
Matteo’s face brightened. He was as thin as a newly hatched chick but had always been startlingly brave. Lucia pinched back a smile. If he got regular meals, he’d be swift and strong someday, able to climb the highest trees.
“I say . . . I say yes,” he declared. “But I don’t know how.”
“Don’t know how? Prego—I’ll teach you right now. I climbed trees every day as a boy.”
“In Rome?” Matteo asked, and Carlo laughed.
“Not in Rome.”
He put his big hands on Matteo’s waist and hoisted him up, waiting for him to cling to the lowest branch. Then he followed, swinging onto a higher limb and reaching for his boy’s outstretched fingers. “I grew up in the hills,” Carlo said, pulling Matteo up again. Lucia wandered across the grass, her fingers pressed against her lips. She settled onto a bench and watched them in a crook of the trunk, propped in the branches. Carlo talked on, and Matteo giggled through a wet-sounding cough. Then they were laughing, clinging to the bark side by side, and a trio of birds dipped into the branches over their heads. Carlo laughed like he might have as a child, before war, before regret.
“Mamma, look at me!” Matteo called out, and Lucia waved.
Could she ever laugh like that again?
The next day, after a lunch of wormy kidney beans and black bread, Lucia headed to her appointment at the salon, leaving Matteo with Francesca. When she stepped inside, the Salon Borghese was all but empty. Lucia’s mother looked up from a chair, hair already in curlers. Her blue eyes were wide, and she held her head unnaturally still. Lucia batted down the nerves spreading in her chest. Soon Romans would rise up, united, forcing the Germans out while the Allies rolled in. But, until that moment, she had a part to play.
“You heard the news?” her mother whispered.
Lucia nodded. The Fascist papers had printed only a vague report of the Allied invasion, but rumors seeped from the coast into Rome, spread by partisan couriers. Gossip streamed from neighborhood to neighborhood, preparing the population for the coming insurrection.
“I don’t know what will become of us,” Nonna Colombo murmured as Fabrizio sauntered over. She shook her blond head, at a loss. “I suppose we can move north, to Bavaria . . .”
Lucia had an unexpected pang of sympathy for her mother. “One thing at a time, Mamma,” she said, patting her shoulder as she walked by. Was her mother worried that she’d finally be held accountable for aligning with the enemy? Lucia, at least, had the partisans to vouch for her. They would tell her neighbors and acquaintances, when the time came, that she was not what she seemed.
She followed Fabrizio to her customary chair, though there was no reason to sit in the back today. The salon was empty, aside from them. But her mother seemed to be in enough of a daze that she wouldn’t question it, and Lucia longed to whisper to Fabrizio. She wanted to hear his take on what was playing out in Rome and the beaches beyond the Alban Hills.
He leaned close, and in the mirror his gaze darted like a raven’s black eyes.
“Many Germans are leaving Rome,” he whispered, combing her curls. “But you should still meet with Bergmann as soon as you’re able. Try to get information from him. We need it now, desperately.”
“Desperately?” Confused, she turned to look at his face, inches from hers.
Fabrizio nodded, grave. “My friends in the Alban Hills report the arrival of many German divisions. Several farmers in the area have reported the same thing—Germans are blocking the roads to Rome. They’re counting unprecedented numbers, but of course they’re farmers, not—”
Fabrizio ceased whispering abruptly as a shape drifted into the mirror behind their joined heads. They glanced up in unison, the trance of their meeting broken, and stared into the startled eyes of Nonna Colombo.
“What have I just interrupted?” she asked, looking between them. Lucia’s heart beat hard in her chest. Would her mother connect the dots? Would she realize that Lucia, and Fabrizio, had been working against the Germans all along?
Thinking fast, she reached for Fabrizio’s hand, squeezed, and let her fingers drop back to her lap, brushing his thigh along the way. Her cheeks heated, and she used the blush to her advantage, looking down to her hands in her lap.
“Fabrizio and I . . .” she murmured, and he caught on. He stepped away, as if sheepish, and stumbled over himself leaving the alcove.
“Please, Mamma, don’t tell Hans.”
Would her mother believe this? The suggestion that they’d struck up a romance in this alcove seemed absurd, but Nonna Colombo blinked at Lucia for a long moment before shaking her head.
“You have such strange taste in men,” she whispered, glancing away, embarrassed. “Forget him and focus on Bergmann, my dear. You want to win the affections of an officer, not a hairdresser.”
Lucia bit back her response, stung by her mother’s judgment. It was always there, simmering. And yet, deep down, satisfaction flamed in her heart, because Nonna Colombo had forgotten one thing: Bergmann would soon be gone.