Beneath a Scarlet Sky: A Novel Read online

  On June 23, Pino’s father sent Mimo to Casa Alpina in the rugged Alps north of Lake Como for the rest of the summer. He tried to send Pino as well, but his older son refused. As a boy and a young teenager, Pino had loved Father Re’s camp. He’d spent three months up at Casa Alpina every year since the age of six, two full months in the summer climbing in the mountains, and a cumulative month skiing in the winter. Being at Father Re’s was great fun. But the boys up there now would be so young. He wanted to be in Milan, out in the streets with Carletto, and looking for Anna.

  The bombing intensified. On July 9, the BBC described the Allied landing on the shores of Sicily and fierce fighting against the German and Fascist forces. Ten days later, Rome was bombed. News of that raid sent a shudder through Italy, and the Lella household.

  “If Rome can be bombed, then Mussolini and the Fascists are finished,” Pino’s father proclaimed. “The Allies are driving the Germans from Sicily. They’ll attack southern Italy, too. It will soon be over.”

  In late July, Pino’s parents put a record on the phonograph and danced in the middle of the day. King Vittorio Emanuele III had arrested Benito Mussolini and imprisoned him in a fortress on Gran Sasso Mountain north of Rome.

  By August, though, entire blocks of Milan lay in ruins. And the Germans were everywhere, installing antiaircraft guns, checkpoints, and machine gun nests. A block from La Scala, a garish Nazi flag fluttered over the Hotel Regina.

  Gestapo Colonel Walter Rauff established curfews. If you were caught out after hours, you were arrested. If you were caught breaking curfew without papers, you could be shot. Having a shortwave would also get you shot.

  Pino didn’t care. At night, he hid in his closet to listen to music and the news. And during the day, he began to adapt to the new order in Milan. The trolleys ran only intermittently. You walked, rode a bike, or hitched a ride.

  Pino chose the bike and went all over the city despite the heat, going through various checkpoints and learning what the Nazis looked for when they stopped him. Long sections of road had been reduced to craters, and he had to walk around them or find another route. Riding on, he passed families living under canvas tarps amid the brick ruins of their homes.

  He realized how lucky he was. He sensed for the first time how that could change in the blink of an eye, or the flash of a bomb. And he wondered if Anna had survived.

  In early August, Pino finally understood why the Allies were bombing Milan. A BBC announcer said that the Allies had all but destroyed the Nazi industrial base in the Ruhr Valley, where much of Hitler’s munitions had been built. Now they were attempting to blow up the machine tools of northern Italy before the Germans could use them to prolong the war.

  The nights of August 7 and 8, British Lancasters dropped thousands of bombs on Milan, targeting factories, industrial facilities, and military installations, but also hitting the neighborhoods around them.

  When bombs exploded close enough to make the Lellas’ building tremble, Porzia panicked and tried to get her husband to take them all to Rapallo on the west coast.

  “No,” Michele said. “They won’t bomb near the cathedral. It’s still safe here.”

  “All it takes is one,” Porzia said. “I’m taking Cicci, then.”

  Pino’s father was sad but determined. “I’ll stay and keep the business going, but I think it’s time for Pino to go to Casa Alpina.”

  Pino refused a second time.

  “It’s for little boys, Papa,” Pino said. “I’m not little anymore.”

  On August 12 and 13, more than five hundred Allied bombers attacked Milan. For the first time explosives struck close to the Duomo. One damaged the church of Santa Maria delle Grazie but miraculously did no harm to Leonardo da Vinci’s The Last Supper.

  La Scala was not as fortunate. A bomb blew through the roof of the opera house and exploded, setting the theater on fire. Another bomb struck the Galleria, which suffered extensive damage. That same detonation rocked the Lellas’ building. Pino waited out that horrible night in the basement.

  He saw Carletto the next day. The Beltraminis were heading to a train that would take them out into the countryside for the night to sleep and escape the bombardment. The following afternoon, Pino, his father, Aunt Greta and Uncle Albert, and Tullio Galimberti and his latest girlfriend all joined the Beltraminis in overnight exile.

  As the train left the central station and headed east, Pino, Carletto, and Tullio stood in the open door of a boxcar crammed with other Milanese fleeing for the night. The train accelerated. Pino looked at the sky, which was so perfectly blue he couldn’t imagine it black and filled with warplanes.

  They crossed the Po River, and long before dusk, while the countryside still lay blanketed in summer torpor, the train squealed and sighed to a stop amid gently rolling farmland. Pino carried a blanket over his shoulder and climbed after Carletto to a low grassy hill above an orchard that faced southwest toward the city.

  “Pino,” Mr. Beltramini said, “watch out, or there will be spiderwebs across your ears by morning.”

  Mrs. Beltramini, a pretty, frail woman who always seemed to be suffering some malady or another, scolded weakly, “Why did you say that? You know I hate spiders.”

  The fruit shop owner fought against a grin. “What are you talking about? I was just warning the boy about the dangers of sleeping with his head in the deep grass.”

  His wife looked like she wanted to argue, but then she just waved him away, as if he were some bothersome fly.

  Uncle Albert fished in a canvas bag for bread, wine, cheese, and dried salami. The Beltraminis broke out five ripe cantaloupes. Pino’s father sat in the grass next to his violin case, his arms wrapped around his knees and an enchanted look on his face.

  “Isn’t it magnificent?” Michele said.

  “What’s magnificent?” Uncle Albert said, looking around, puzzled.

  “This place. How clean the air is. And the smells. No burning. No bomb stench. It seems so . . . I don’t know. Innocent?”

  “Exactly,” Mrs. Beltramini said.

  “Exactly what?” Mr. Beltramini said. “You walk a little too far here and it’s not so innocent. Cow shit and spiders and snakes and—”

  Whop! Mrs. Beltramini backhand-slapped her husband’s arm. “You show no mercy, do you? Ever?”

  “Hey, that hurt,” Mr. Beltramini protested through a smile.

  “Good,” she said. “Now stop it, you. I didn’t get a wink of sleep with all that talk of spiders and snakes last night.”

  Appearing unaccountably angry, Carletto got up and walked downhill toward the orchard. Pino noticed some girls down by the rock wall that surrounded the fruit grove. Not one of them was as beautiful as Anna. But maybe it was time to move on. He jogged downhill to catch up with Carletto, told him his plan, and they tried to artfully intercept the girls. Another group of boys beat them to it.

  Pino looked at the sky and said, “I’m only asking for a little love.”

  “I think you’d settle for a kiss,” Carletto said.

  “I’d be happy with a smile.” Pino sighed.

  The boys climbed over the wall and walked down rows of trees heavy with fruit. The peaches were not quite ripe, but the figs were. Some had already dropped, and they picked them up from the dirt, brushed them off, peeled the skin, and ate them.

  Despite the rare treat of fresh fruit right off the tree in a time of rationing, Carletto seemed troubled. Pino said, “You okay?”

  His best friend shook his head.

  “What is it?” Pino asked.

  “Just a feeling.”

  “What?”

  Carletto shrugged. “Like life isn’t going to turn out the way we think, that it’s going to go badly for us.”

  “Why would you think that?”

  “You never paid much attention in history class, did you? When big armies go to war, everything gets destroyed by the conqueror.”

  “Not always. Saladin never sacked Jerusalem. See? I did pay at
tention in history class.”

  “I don’t care,” Carletto said, angrier still. “It’s just this feeling that I get, and it won’t stop. It’s everywhere and . . .”

  His friend choked up, and tears ran down his face while he fought for control.

  “What’s going on with you?” Pino said.

  Carletto cocked his head, as if peering at a painting he didn’t quite understand. His lips trembled as he said, “My mama’s really sick. It’s not good.”

  “What’s that mean?”

  “What do you think it means?” Carletto cried. “She’s gonna die.”

  “Jesus,” Pino said. “Are you sure?”

  “I heard my parents talking about how she’d like her funeral to be.”

  Pino thought of Mrs. Beltramini, and then Porzia. He thought about what it would be like to know his mother was going to die. A vast pit opened in his stomach.

  “I’m sorry,” Pino said. “I really am. Your mama’s a great lady. She puts up with your papa, so she’s like a saint, and they say saints get their reward in heaven.”

  Carletto laughed despite his sadness and wiped at his tears. “She is the only one who can put him in his place. But he should stop, you know? She’s sick, and he’s teasing her like that about snakes and spiders. It’s cruel. Like he doesn’t love her.”

  “He loves your mama.”

  “He doesn’t show it. It’s like he’s afraid to.”

  They started to walk back. At the rock wall, they heard the strains of a violin.

  Pino looked up the hill and saw his father tuning his violin and Mr. Beltramini standing there, sheet music in his hand. The golden light of sunset radiated off both men and the crowd around them.

  “Oh no,” Carletto moaned. “Mother of God, no.”

  Pino felt equal dismay. At times, Michele Lella could play brilliantly, but more often than not, Pino’s father would stutter his rhythm or squall through a section that demanded a smooth touch. And poor Mr. Beltramini had a voice that usually broke or went flat. It was excruciating to listen to either man because you could never relax. You knew some odd note was coming, and it could be so sour at times, it was, well, embarrassing.

  Up on the hill, Pino’s father adjusted the position of his violin, a beautiful central Italian petite from the eighteenth century that Porzia had given him for Christmas ten years before. The instrument was Michele’s most treasured possession, and he held it lovingly as he brought it under his chin and jawbone and raised his bow.

  Mr. Beltramini firmed his posture, arms held loosely at his side.

  “There’s a train wreck about to happen,” Carletto said.

  “I see it coming,” Pino said.

  Pino’s father played the opening strains of the melody of “Nessun Dorma,” or “None Shall Sleep,” a soaring aria for tenor in the third act of Giacomo Puccini’s opera Turandot. Because it was one of his father’s favorite pieces, Pino had listened to a recording performed by Toscanini and the full La Scala orchestra behind the powerful tenor Miguel Fleta, who sang the aria the night the opera debuted in the 1920s.

  Fleta played Prince Calaf, a wealthy royal traveling anonymously in China, who falls in love with the beautiful but cold and bitchy Princess Turandot. The king has decreed that anyone who wishes to have the princess’s hand must first solve three riddles. Get one wrong, and the suitor dies a terrible death.

  By the end of act 2, Calaf has answered all the riddles, but the princess still refuses to marry him. Calaf says that if she can figure out his real name before dawn he will leave, but if she can’t, she must willingly marry him.

  The princess takes the game to a higher level, tells Calaf that if she finds his name before dawn, she’ll have his head. He agrees to the deal, and the princess decrees, “Nessun dorma, none shall sleep, until the suitor’s name is found.”

  In the opera, Calaf’s aria comes with dawn approaching and the princess down on her luck. “Nessun Dorma” is a towering piece that builds and builds, demanding that the singer grow stronger, reveling in his love for the princess and surer of victory with every moment that ticks toward dawn.

  Pino had thought it would take a full orchestra and a famous tenor like Fleta to create the aria’s emotional triumph. But his father and Mr. Beltramini’s version, stripped down to its tremulous melody and verse, was more powerful than he could have ever imagined.

  When Michele played that night, a thick, honeyed voice called from his violin. And Mr. Beltramini had never been better. The rising notes and phrases all sounded to Pino like two improbable angels singing, one high through his father’s fingers, and one low in Mr. Beltramini’s throat, both more heavenly inspiration than skill.

  “How are they doing this?” Carletto asked in wonder.

  Pino had no idea of the source of his father’s virtuoso performance, but then he noticed that Mr. Beltramini was singing not to the crowd but to someone in the crowd, and he understood the source of the fruitman’s beautiful tone and loving key.

  “Look at your papa,” Pino said.

  Carletto strained up on his toes and saw that his father was singing the aria not to the crowd but to his dying wife, as if there were no one else but them in the world.

  When the two men finished, the crowd on the hillside stood and clapped and whistled. Pino had tears in his eyes, too, because for the first time, he’d seen his father as heroic. Carletto had tears in his eyes for other, deeper reasons.

  “You were fantastic,” Pino said to Michele later in the dark. “And ‘Nessun Dorma’ was the perfect choice.”

  “For such a magnificent place, it was the only one we could think of,” his father said, seeming in awe of what he’d done. “And then we were swept up, just like the La Scala performers say, playing con smania, with passion.”

  “I heard it, Papa. We all did.”

  Michele nodded, and sighed happily. “Now, get some sleep.”

  Pino had kicked out a place for his hips and heels, and then taken off his shirt for a pillow and wrapped himself in the sheet he’d brought from home. Now he snuggled down, smelling the sweet grass, already drowsy.

  He closed his eyes, thinking about his father’s performance, and Mrs. Beltramini’s mysterious illness, and the way her joking husband had sung. He drifted off to sleep, wondering if he’d witnessed a miracle.

  Several hours later, deep in his dreams, Pino was chasing Anna down the street when he heard distant thunder. He stopped, and she kept on, disappearing into the crowd. He wasn’t upset, but he wondered when the rain would fall, and what it would taste like on his tongue.

  Carletto shook him awake. The moon was high overhead, casting a gunmetal-blue light on the hillside, and everyone on their feet looking to the west. Allied bombers were attacking Milan in waves, but there were no sightings of the planes or of the city from that distance, only flares and flashes on the horizon and the distant rumor of war.

  As the train rolled back into Milan shortly after dawn the next day, black scrolls of smoke unraveled, twisted, and curled above the city. When they left the train and went out into the streets, Pino saw the physical differences between those who had fled the city and those who had endured the onslaught. Explosive terror had bowed the survivors’ shoulders, emptied their eyes, and broken the set of their jaws. Men, women, and children shuffled timidly about, as if at any second the very ground they trod might rupture and give way into some unfathomable and fiery sinkhole. There was a smoky haze almost everywhere. Soot, some of it fine white and some a volcanic gray, coated almost everything. Torn and twisted cars. Ripped and crushed buildings. Trees stripped bare by the blasts.

  For several weeks, Pino and his father kept on in this pattern, working by day, leaving the city by train in the late afternoon, and returning at dawn to find Milan’s newest gaping wounds.

  On September 8, 1943, the Italian government, having signed an unconditional armistice on September 3, made public the country’s formal surrender to the Allies. The following day, British a
nd American forces landed at Salerno above the instep of the country’s boot. The Germans offered mild to fierce resistance. Most Fascist soldiers simply threw up the white flag upon seeing Lieutenant General Mark Clark’s US Fifth Army coming ashore. When news of the American invasion reached Milan, Pino, his father, aunt, and uncle all started cheering. They thought the war would be over in days.

  The Nazis seized control of Rome less than twenty-four hours later, arrested the king, and surrounded the Vatican with troops and tanks aimed at the golden dome of Saint Peter’s Basilica. On September 12, Nazi commandos used gliders to attack the fortress on Gran Sasso Mountain where Mussolini was being held. The commandos fought their way into the prison and rescued Il Duce. He was flown to Vienna and then to Berlin, where he met with Hitler.

  Pino heard the two dictators on the shortwave a few nights later, both of them vowing to fight the Allies to the last drop of German and Italian blood. Pino felt like the world had gone mad, and he grew depressed that he hadn’t seen Anna in three months.

  A week passed. More bombs fell. Pino’s school stayed closed. The Germans began a full-scale invasion of Italy from the north, through Austria and Switzerland, and installed Mussolini in a puppet government called the “Italian Socialist Republic,” with its capital the tiny town of Salò on Lake Garda, northeast of Milan.

  It was all Pino’s father talked about early on the morning of September 20, 1943, as they trudged back to San Babila from the train station after another night spent sleeping in farm fields. Michele was so fixated on the Nazis’ seizing control of northern Italy that he did not see one of those black smoke scrolls unraveling above the fashion district and Via Monte Napoleone. Pino did and started to run. As he was weaving through the narrow streets a few moments later, the road curved, and he could see well ahead to the Lellas’ building.