Chapter Thirty
Watching Anna’s body twitch while a bloom of blood unfolded across her bosom, Pino felt his heart breach and flush out all love, all joy, all music.
The crowd around him bellowed and jeered its approval while he just stood there, hunch shouldered, whimpering at the agony that possessed him, so powerful it almost made him think it couldn’t be real, that his beloved was not lying there in a pool of blood, that he’d not watched her take the bullet, that he’d not watched life flee her in a blink, that he’d not heard her begging him to save her.
The crowd around him started pushing the other way, leaving now that the show was over. Pino stayed where he was, gazing over at Anna’s corpse sprawled against the bottom of the wall and seeing her dull stare like an accusation of betrayal.
“Move away now,” the partisan said to him. “It’s over.”
“No,” Pino said. “I—”
“Move, if you know what’s good for you,” the soldier said.
With one long last shuddering look at Anna, Pino turned and trudged off with the last of the crowd. He went through the gate and across the drawbridge, unable to grasp what had just happened. It felt like he had been shot in the chest, and only now was he beginning to sense the true pain to come. But then a realization came battering down upon his shoulders and threatened to destroy him. He hadn’t stood up for Anna. He had not died for her love the way great and tragic men did in lasting stories and librettos.
Pino’s brain burned with failure. His heart soured with self-loathing.
I’m a coward, he thought in darkest despair, and wondered why he’d been sentenced to such hell. In the roundabout in front of the castle, it all became too much. Pino felt dizzy, and then sick. He stumbled to the dry
fountain. He retched and retched again, knowing that he was weeping as well, and that people were watching him.
When Pino finally stood, coughing, spitting, and wiping his eyes, a guy on the other side of the fountain said, “You knew one of them, didn’t you?”
Pino saw suspicion and the threat of violence in the man’s expression.
Part of Pino wanted to admit his love for Anna and have a noble end to it all. But then the man started to walk toward him, quickening his pace, and
then jabbing his finger at Pino.
“Someone grab that guy!” he shouted.
The primitive instinct to survive took over, and Pino took off, sprinting diagonally away from the fountain toward Via Beltrami. Shouts went up.
One man tried to tackle Pino, but Pino threw a fist that drove the man to the pavement. Running pell-mell, knowing people were chasing him, he noticed men trying to cut in at him from the side.
Pino threw an elbow into one man’s face, kneed another in the groin, and dodged through cars onto Via Giuseppe Pozzone. He jumped up on and over the hood of one before cutting off onto Via Rovello, where he leaped across a water-filled bomb crater and put distance between him and his pursuers. When he glanced back at the corner of Via San Tomaso, he saw six men still chasing him and still yelling, “He’s a traitor! Collaborator!
Stop him!”
But those streets were Pino’s backyard. He sped into a higher gear, taking a right on Via Broletto and a left on Via Del Bossi. There was a knot of people ahead in Piazza Della Scala. Pino feared getting past them and through the Galleria before the calls of “traitor” caught up to him.
Diagonally across the street, in the wall of the great opera house, a door was open. He ran over and through it into a hallway, moving beyond the shadows into a wedge of blackness. Pino stopped there, sure he couldn’t be seen from outside, watching and waiting until the six men sprinted past, heading toward the piazza. Gasping for breath in the darkness, he stayed there, wanting to make sure he’d lost them.
Deeper inside La Scala, a tenor began to sing, running scales.
Pino turned and accidentally kicked something metal. It clattered enough that he looked to the doorway and saw the man from the fountain, who was peering in from the sidewalk.
He stepped inside, dusting off his hands. “You’re in here, aren’t you, traitor?”
Pino said nothing and held his position in the darkest shadow, almost sure the man could not see him pivot toward him and crouch ever so slowly.
The man kept coming even as Pino’s fingers groped on the floor and found a piece of discarded steel reinforcement rod, probably left over from the repair job on the opera house after the bomb hit it. It was as thick as Pino’s thumb, as long as his forearm, and heavy. When the man from the fountain was just a couple of meters from him and squinting to see better, Pino whipped the rod backhand, aiming at his shins. But his aim was high, and he hit the man in the kneecap.
The man screamed. Pino came up fast, took two big steps, and drove a fist into the side of the man’s face. He went down. But behind him, two of the others who’d been chasing Pino appeared. He spun and took off, deeper into the darkness, hands out, groping and navigating toward the tenor who’d started to sing. Pino stumbled twice and caught his pants on wire while also trying to listen for pursuers behind him, so he did not recognize the aria the tenor was practicing at first.
But then he did. “Vesti la Giubba,” “Put on the Costume,” from the opera Pagliacci, The Clowns. The aria reeked of grief and loss, and Pino’s thoughts of escape were slashed by images of the bullet’s impact and Anna falling. He tripped, hit his head against something, saw stars, and almost went down.
When he roused himself, the aria was into its second verse. Canio, the heartbroken clown, was telling himself to go on, to put on a mask and shield his inner pain. Pino had heard recordings of the aria dozens of times and felt prodded to action by it, and by the sound of footsteps pounding in the passages behind him.
He pushed on, still groping until he felt air on his cheek, then turned and saw a slant of light ahead. Running now, he pushed open a door and found himself backstage in the great opera house. He’d been there several times watching Licia, his cousin, practice. A young tenor stood center of La
Scala’s stage. Pino caught glimpses of him out there under the low lights as he launched into the third verse.
“Ridi, Pagliaccio, sul tuo amore infranto.” (“Laugh, clown, at your broken love.”)
Pino went through a curtain and down stairs that led to the side aisle for loge seating. He started up the aisle toward the exit even as the tenor sang, “Ridi del duol, che t’avvelena il cor!” (“Laugh at the grief that poisons your heart.”) The words seemed to hit Pino like arrows that weakened him until the tenor stopped and cried out in alarm, “Who are you? What do you want?”
Pino glanced back and saw he was addressing Pino’s three pursuers, who’d joined the tenor on the stage.
“We’re after a traitor,” one of the men said.
Pino pushed through the door, and it made an ear-splitting squeak. He took off again, across a landing, down the stairs, and into the lobby. The doors were open. He jogged out, tearing off his shirt, which left him in a sleeveless white T-shirt.
He glanced to his left. Home was only five or six blocks away. But he couldn’t go there and risk jeopardizing his family. Instead, he went straight across the trolley tracks and into a knot of people celebrating the end of the war around the statue of Leonardo da Vinci. He tried to stay focused, but in his head he kept hearing the clown’s devastated aria, kept seeing Anna crying for help, hunching up at the bullet’s strike, and then crumpling.
It took everything he had not to lie down and dissolve into sobs. It took everything he had to put on a smiling face, as if he, too, were overjoyed by the Nazis’ retreat. He kept it up through the Galleria, smiling and moving, not quite sure where he was going.
Then he stepped free of the shopping mall and knew. A huge crowd was celebrating on Piazza Duomo, eating, drinking, playing music, and dancing. Pino melted into them, slowing, smiling, and trying to look normal as he moved toward the trickle of people heading into the cathedral to pray.
To Pino, the Duomo meant sanctuary. They could chase him inside the cathedral, but they couldn’t bring him out.
He was almost to the front doors when he heard a man shouting behind him. “There he is! Stop him! He’s a traitor! A collaborator!”
Pino looked back and saw them coming across the piazza. Following several women old enough to be his mother, he slipped into the basilica.
With the stained-glass windows boarded over, the only light in the Duomo came from votive candles flickering in the various alcoves and chapels to either side of the cathedral’s central aisle, and more burning at the far end around the altar.
Even with the candles, the inner cathedral was a charcoal-shadowed place that day, and Pino acted swiftly to take advantage of it. He moved away from the chapels on the Duomo’s left side, heading toward the right aisle and the confessionals: bleak affairs offering no privacy to the penitent, who knelt outside a tall wooden box and whispered their sins to the priest inside.
It was humiliating, and Pino hated going to confession there. But from his times kneeling at the Duomo confessionals as a young boy, he knew there was a space between the booth and the wall, thirty centimeters, fifty at best. He hoped it would be enough as he eased behind the third confessional booth, farthest from the candle stands.
He stood there, shaking, hunched down so he’d be fully hidden, and was glad that no priests seemed to be taking confessions on liberation day.
The aria started again in his head, and with it the horror of Anna’s death, until he shook it off and forced himself to listen. The clicking and murmurs of women praying the Holy Rosary came to him. A cough. The squeak of the main doors. Men talking. Pino fought the urge to peek out and waited, hearing loud footsteps coming. Men moving fast.
“Where did he go?” one said.
“He’s in here somewhere,” said another, sounding like he was right in front of the confessional booth.
“I’m coming,” a male voice said, amid other footsteps approaching.
“No, Father,” one man said. “Not today. We’re, uh, going to one of the chapels to pray.”
“If you sin on the way there, I’ll be waiting,” the priest said, and the door to the confessional booth opened.
Pino felt the box settle under the priest’s weight. He heard the two men move off deeper into the cathedral. He waited, hardly breathing, giving it time. Once more the clown sang in his head. Once more he tried to will it away, but the aria would not leave his head.
He had to move for fear he’d burst out crying again. Pino tried to step gingerly out from behind the confessional, but his shoe caught the kneeler.
“Ahh,” the priest said. “A customer at last.”
The screen slid back, but all Pino could see in there was blackness. He did the only thing he could think of and knelt.
“Bless me, Father, for I have sinned,” Pino choked.
“Yes?”
“I said nothing,” Pino sobbed in lament. “I did nothing.”
“What are you talking about?” the priest said.
Feeling like he might collapse if he confessed more, Pino lurched to his feet and charged deeper into the cathedral. He crossed beneath the transept and found a door he remembered. He went through it and was outside again, facing Via dell’Arcivescovado.
There were more happy people walking toward the piazza. He went against the grain and looped around the back of the Duomo. He was considering going home or to Uncle Albert’s, when he noticed a priest and a workman come out a door on the far side of the Duomo near Corso Vittorio.
There was a staircase behind them that he remembered going up as a boy with a school class.
Another workman exited. Pino caught the door before it closed and started up a steep and narrow staircase that climbed thirty stories to a walkway that ran the long side of the basilica, up there among the gargoyles, spires, and Gothic arches. He kept glancing up at the pristine, polychrome statue of the Madonna atop the Duomo’s highest tower, wondering how she’d survived the war, and how much destruction she’d seen.
Drenched with cold sweat, shivering despite the baking heat as he moved between and under the flying buttresses that supported the roof, Pino
stopped at last when he reached a balcony high above the cathedral’s front doors. He looked out over his bombarded city, his bombarded life, splayed out around him like some tattered and bullet-riddled skirt.
Pino lifted his head to the sky and from an anguish that knew no bottom, whispered, “I said nothing to save her, God. I did nothing.”
Those confessions transfixed him right back into the tragedy, and he choked back sobs. “After everything . . . After everything, now I have nothing.”
Pino heard laughter, music, and singing float up to him from the piazza. He stepped out onto the balcony and looked over the railing. Ninety meters below, down where he’d seen the workmen erecting the spotlights nearly two years before, violins played, and accordions, and guitars. He could see bottles of wine being passed around, and couples were beginning to kiss and dance and love on the back side of war.
Pain and grief sawed through Pino. This torment was his punishment, he decided. He bowed his head, understanding that this was between God and . . . The aria of the heartbroken clown echoed in his ears and Anna crumpled and fell again, and again, and . . . in a matter of seconds, his faith in God, in life, in love, and in a better tomorrow drained away to empty.
Pino held on to a marble post and climbed up onto the balcony rail, a betrayer, abandoned and alone. He gazed at the puffy clouds scudding across the azure sky and decided that clouds and sky were good enough to look at while dying.
“You saw all that I did, Lord,” Pino said, letting go of the post to take the worst step of all. “Have mercy on my soul.”
