Luisa meets Giulio off the vaporetto at the far end of San Marco just after four p.m. He doesn’t need any great powers to sense her eagerness, and they walk past the Arsenale and towards the Via Garibaldi, the strong winter sun tracking them up the wide avenue. Giulio has an address, and Luisa her detailed map, but his hasty walking pace makes her appear less like a sightseer. The street is populated by tourist cafés, with photographs of drinks and generic spaghetti bolognese outside, as if anyone these days might not recognise such worldwide language. The further they walk, though, the tourist attractions thin out and it becomes a place where Venetian women and children talk and congregate around the entrance to the park, perhaps after school finishes. The vegetable barge stationed on the canal near the Ana Ponte is packing up for the day, brushing up oddments of the purple, octopus-stem Treviso lettuce scattered on the ground.
‘I think it’s in here.’ Giulio signals to a small side street and they both stop to consult the map. The street feeds into Corte del Bianco, a tiny square of houses with nothing but a small well in its centre, one lone cat sitting sentry-like on its concrete cap. Giulio almost holds his breath as he knocks at the door of a small, two-storey house, and Luisa thinks his sense of anticipation might equal hers.
‘Just, please, don’t be too disappointed if we don’t—’ he says.
‘I know,’ she cuts in, as the door opens.
Signora Pessari is the same generation as Luisa’s mother would be, perhaps a few years older, in her mid-sixties. She’s thick-set with dark, almost ebony, eyes and jet black hair lightly peppered with grey. Underneath the weight of middle age, however, Luisa can still see the beauty that she must once have been, one of those fashionable women in pixie-style dresses and voluminous hair photographed smoking in cafés in the late sixties, a swinging life epitomising the style of both Italy and yesteryear.
The woman ushers them into a small parlour and evicts a cat from one of the seats.
‘Coffee?’ she says in Italian, after the introductions. Giulio nods yes, without even thinking about it.
Signora Pessari – Rina – apologises for her lack of English and it’s evident Luisa will need to play ping-pong with the language. She picks up a few words here and there, thankful of how much the Italians give away in their effusive body language, but is largely forced to rely on Giulio’s translations, which he makes with patience.
He pulls out his archive photographs, and Luisa follows suit with her own clutch. Rina dons her glasses, but she does not leave them in suspense. Her smile is enough to say the trip is not wasted.
‘Do you recognise this one?’ Giulio points to Mimi Brusato.
‘Yes! Yes, that’s Aunt Mimi,’ she says. ‘My mother’s younger sister. I’m sure of it.’ This, however, confirms what they already know. It’s the next question which has Luisa’s heart pulled tight.
‘And this woman?’ Giulio says, pointing at Stella. Rina peers closer, and her forehead ripples with thought and, finally, some recognition.
‘Yes, I think, let me see, her name was …’
Luisa is almost on the edge of her seat, her grandmother’s name ready to spill from her lips, but she can also feel Giulio holding her back with his will. The identity will be all the more valuable if there’s no prompting behind it.
‘I’m sure that’s Aunt Mimi’s best friend … What was her name? Oh, her family lived just a few streets away.’
Luisa feels as if she’s a child about to burst.
‘Stella! That’s it. Stella Jilani,’ Rina says at last. She sits back, pleased to have teased it from her memory.
Luisa’s breath is released, with a whinny of relief she hears deep inside herself. ‘That’s my grandmother!’ she can’t help letting go, and Rina needs only a little translation to appreciate Luisa’s joy.
‘I didn’t know she had any children,’ Rina adds. ‘I wasn’t sure if she even survived the war. My own mama said Stella and Mimi were inseparable when they were younger – we have some pictures of them together as children. They went to the Liceo together, always getting up to something. I heard Stella became a reporter after school, but we were living outside of Venice by then.’
Rina’s mother and her husband, it transpires, moved to Turin as war broke out, also under Nazi occupation after 1943. Travel between the cities was almost impossible, and letters scarce. They had their own war to fight – like her sister Mimi, Rina’s mother became a Staffetta, in the same circle as the celebrated partisan Ada Gobetti.
‘Mama told me after that we would hear a few snippets about the fight in Venice,’ she says. ‘Sometimes copies of the partisan newspaper would make it out as far as us. She always wondered if Stella was behind the words. After the war, we found out it was her – she worked for the Resistance. But then nothing. She disappeared, but so many did after the war. It was chaos for a while.’
With little expectation, Giulio poses the next obvious question: ‘And Mimi?’
If, by some miracle, she is alive, Mimi will be very elderly. But there’s a chance.
‘Poor Mimi,’ Rina says with a shake of her head. ‘She had a bad war. She died in a convent, oh as far back as 1965. She never recovered.’
Her cheeks puff out at the sorrow. Recovery from what is not revealed, and Giulio clearly feels he cannot pry. Instead, he asks if there are other families who might know of Stella, in any of the streets of the Via Garibaldi?
‘So many families have moved out since then,’ Rina says, fussing at the cat snaking around her legs as she thinks. Luisa wills another thread to worm its way from Rina’s memory.
‘I remember Mama saying there was a café they both used to go to,’ she says. ‘I’ve no idea if it’s still there, but it was run by a big Venetian family. Over by the Fondamenta Nuove. I couldn’t tell you exactly where, but I think they would visit a friend called Paolo.’
Both faces opposite Rina must reflect disappointment. How many Paolos in Venice, past and present? This Paolo would be in his nineties and more likely resident in San Michele island cemetery. How on earth would they track down his relatives?
‘Oh,’ Rina says. ‘He wasn’t a visitor to the bar. It was his family’s café. If it’s still there, there’s a good chance the owners would remember him.’
Luisa and Giulio leave, with Rina promising she will venture into her own box of photographs and contact them with any news. As a parting shot Giulio asks if she recognises the name Giovanni Benetto as familiar. A suitor, or fellow partisan?
No, she says, shaking her head. There was no Giovanni in Mimi’s few letters.
Giulio is upbeat as they walk back towards the glitter of the lagoon, a glorious sunset tiptoeing on the water. Clearly he’s pleased with their progress.
‘It’s a start,’ he says with a smile, although Luisa is thinking only of the end of her trip and how fast it’s approaching. Her flight home is the next afternoon. Perhaps her mother’s inheritance will lend itself to another fact-finding mission, but what will Jamie say about that? She thinks about spending her last half-day pounding the streets of Venice to look for this mystery bar but then what? The thought of rehearsing her questions in Italian to seek out Paolo is less appealing. And what if they do understand her and answer in a volley of speedy dialect? She can imagine the headache it would create. It feels as if she has squeezed herself into one of Venice’s tightest alleyways and come to a dead end.
Giulio guides Luisa to sit on a bench near the water’s edge, and they both take in the dimming sun replaced by new lights drifting across the water.
‘I can take tomorrow to help you,’ Giulio says at last. ‘It is research, after all. We’ll just go into every bar around the Fondamenta and be – what is it the English say? – very nosy.’
Luisa turns her head, and her face brightens in the gloom. A smile of relief and gratitude spreads across her features. ‘Do you understand why I need to find her? Or is it just a silly obsession?’ she says into the air.
Giulio looks at her, clearly perplexed. ‘Of course you have to find her,’ he says, as if it’s the most natural quest in the world. ‘Whether or not they are dead and gone, history defines us. It makes us what we are. Right now.’
At that moment, in his academic’s jacket and tortoiseshell glasses, he doesn’t look much like it, but Luisa could kiss Giulio Volpe as her knight in shining armour.