The Garden of Letters (29 page)

Elodie straps the gun across her body. For years, she has carried her cello in her arms or across her back, but the rifle has a wholly different sort of weight. It carries the weight of danger.

Elodie walks toward the Piazza delle Poste now not like a
staffetta
riding her bicycle or wielding her bow, but like a full-blown partisan. Nothing seems real anymore. She can hear the sound of gunfire and explosions throughout the city. The advancing enemy feels like a tremor running underneath the pavement. She cannot believe the sight of her gentle mother, slender as a reed, walking in front of her in a black dress, carrying a bag full of grenades.

Lena is walking beside Brigitte with a rifle strapped across her chest. Her blonde hair is the color of gold in the autumn sunlight, and her face is fixed with determination. For Elodie, this sight of her friend is the only thing she can fix upon. It is the only constant.

When they arrive at the Piazza delle Poste, they hear that three German tanks have already crossed the Ponte Navi and will be storming through the Piazza delle Poste any minute. There are forty Resistance fighters coming into the piazza. Like ants out of crevices, Elodie has no idea where they’ve come from.

“Orsina!” Lena shouts. “Go back to the café. Start organizing the older women. We’re going to need to get food and water to the men. The fighting could last into the night.”

Orsina looks at Elodie, a short, silent glance to see if her daughter would come with her so they could stay together.

“Mamma, go! I will be there as soon as I can to help. But leave me the grenades!” Elodie can hardly believe the words she is speaking. Never in a thousand years would she have thought she would be in a position to instruct her mother what to do with a sack of grenades. As Elodie dips down, her thin body already strapped with a rifle on her back and another in her arm, Orsina touches her daughter’s cheek. “Don’t let anything happen to you. You’re all I have left.”

Elodie pulls her mother closer, a gun now between their skin. “Listen, Mamma, you need to get out of here, right now. It’s too dangerous. Get to the café!”

Her mother’s eyes send a desperate silent message. She doesn’t want to go.

“I’ll be there as soon as I get these weapons to the men.” She gives her mother a small push and turns to run as the sound of bullets fills the air. Her body is trembling from the weight of all the weaponry. Elodie runs for cover behind one of the small archways in the building across from the post office.

Lena has come out from one of the doorways and grabs Elodie by the sleeve. Brigitte is waving them to come behind the post office, and the girls run in her direction.

“Stand here!” she barks. “The men are coming. As soon as they come near, you give them your gun. Theirs will soon be empty, and ours are fully loaded.”

Elodie and Lena nod their heads.

For the first time in her life, Elodie hears the sounds of grenades exploding. From the top of buildings and through windows, handmade bombs, furniture, heavy books lit afire, whatever heavy things the people can find, these invisible fighters are throwing them down on the Germans.

In addition to the approaching tanks, trucks with German officers and Fascist military commanders drive through the streets. Armed German soldiers pile out of the back of trucks and begin shooting blindly at the Resistance snipers, hidden among the roofs.

The men have come down from Campofiore and are now shooting directly at the tanks storming into the city. Giuseppe Bettero, a veteran soldier who joined the fight, places his rifle with two other fighters at the entrance of the bridge and starts directly shooting at the tank, which they succeed in immobilizing. Ironically, the enemy’s bullet-riddled machine becomes an obstacle for others trying to pass through.

Within a few minutes, Elodie sees Luca and Beppe running toward the piazza.

“Get out of here.” Luca is running into the piazza, carrying his rifle close to his chest. His face is covered with gunpowder and his hair is wild.

He pushes Elodie into a wall.

“Get out of here, Elodie! Now!”

Her eyes are wide. “Where the hell am I going to go?” She pushes back at him. He turns and starts shooting at some Germans in the street.

“Just get out of here!” he yells again. “You’re going to get shot.” In his eyes, she sees not only terror, but a desperate concern for her safety.

Elodie is still standing across from him, immobilized. Luca, frantic to get her out of harm’s way, gives her a violent push, sending her in the opposite direction of the gunfire. Luca stands in the middle of the road, shooting into the oncoming tank, as Elodie runs toward Café Dante.

Portofino, Italy

O
CTOBER
1943

The small room that Angelo has given Elodie is so white it appears almost monastic. The plaster walls are smooth like marble. The blue and white coverlet shows no wear.

Alone in her room, she hears the telephone ring and Angelo answer it, telling a woman that he will come and check her son’s fever. In a soft, low voice, she hears him instructing the mother to keep a cool washcloth on the boy’s head.

When he speaks, she hears kindness. The same lilting she had heard in her father’s voice.

“I’ll be there in a few minutes. Try to keep him comfortable,” he says, hanging up the phone. He doesn’t tell Elodie he is leaving. She just hears him open and close the latch on his medical bag and then shut the door.

For a few minutes, Elodie considers staying inside her room, but the chance to learn more about the man who has given her temporary shelter overpowers her. Over the past few months, she has learned to harvest as much information as she can, especially when no one is looking. She unlocks her door and comes to the small living room, where he had read aloud to her a few days before.

She walks past the small kitchen. The bowl of persimmons. The ceramic plates with the painted flowers. Above an end table, there is a small painting of the Madonna and child tacked to the wall. Underneath it is a miniature carved lion in a dark, exotic wood that seems out of place among the novels and seashells.

Soon she finds herself at the end of the main hallway. There the arched door is closed, like a secret. A clenched fist. But she cannot help herself. She puts her hand to the doorknob and finds it unlocked. She pushes inside.

Elodie has no words for what she discovers. The room is papered in words. Letters that are now yellow and faded, their edges coffee brown.

She feels like she has stepped into a tomb of lost love letters. She looks up; she looks down. She look to every side and to every corner. In between patches of blue and white clouds, yellowing letters have been glued to the walls. Between the two twin beds, each still neatly made and covered in a quilt of pale blue flowers, rests a wedding portrait.

Elodie picks it up and stares at the picture, which she knows must be Angelo and his bride. The features, although clearly younger, are surely him. She sees the thick hair and the arch of his brow. And finally his mouth, which is not full like Luca’s was, but thin.

His bride is haunting in her beauty, especially her wide, doe-shaped eyes. She is wearing a dress that is sweet and innocent, lacking any sophistication. In her black hair, she has woven a garland of white blossoms.

Elodie places the photograph down gently and cranes her neck to the ceiling. There isn’t a single patch of white plaster exposed, as every inch is covered in either glimmering blue paint or paper. She looks at one of the letters that is closest to her and observes the perfect handwriting. She reads the rolling sentences that talk of the desert heat, the longing for his bride, and the excitement to see his son.

Just above it, nestled like a leaf to the vine, is a poem. Above that is another letter that speaks of a man named Tancredi, a boy named Nasai, and a heart that is longing to see his
limonina
.

Elodie’s heart is in her throat. She feels that she has now trespassed on something that was not meant for her eyes; a voyeur to a private dance that is meant for two people, not three.

She walks quickly to the arched door and passes through to the hallway, making sure to close it tightly behind her.

Even without Angelo at home, the house weeps in silence. She can hear the sadness, like a low moan sweeping through the hall.

She returns to her room and curls into her bed, trying to erase the thoughts of the room with the letters pasted to the walls. At the same time, she wishes she now had something written in Luca’s hands. His scent on his sweater is now fading. Even now she isn’t sure if it’s the smell of damp wool or of his perspiration that she has carried with her for weeks, inhaling it every time she needed to feel close to him.

She wants to erase all of the other tragic thoughts that fill her head. She doesn’t want to think about the notes crying out from the Wolf’s wife’s composition, or the woman who had gifted it to the man she loved. She doesn’t want to think of her mother alone without her, or the fate of her cello.

She is still so tired, she can’t think of escaping to another place just yet, or taking another boat to a place where she can try to become lost.

Instead, her hands begin mapping her body in private. She has missed her second cycle, and Elodie is now sure that a part of Luca grows inside her. She cups her breasts and feels their new fullness, the nipples so tender that even a graze from her blouse makes her flicker with discomfort. She has become used to the daily nausea in the morning, but the fatigue she feels is crushing. She has never felt so exhausted, even when she was running through the streets of Verona delivering weapons. Then her body felt strong and full of energy, not bone tired like it does now. All she wants to do is close her eyes, sleep, and awaken with everything from the past six months having been a bad dream.

Angelo returns home an hour later. Elodie can hear the sound of his medical bag dropping on the table, his footsteps walking toward the kitchen, and the strike of a match against the stove’s gas stream. The sounds of his return are strangely comforting to her. She interprets them as a man who has come to terms with how to survive on his own.

She slides her hand away from her abdomen and straightens her blouse. She gets up and readjusts the waistband of her skirt and tries to smooth down her hair.

She walks toward the living room. She does not want to appear ungrateful to her host. She needs his shelter, his quiet oasis of calm; it’s a place she’ll accept with gratitude before her pregnancy begins to show. But when her body can no longer hide this particular secret, Elodie wonders if he’ll ask her to leave.

The first week she stays with him, she refrains from asking too many questions. She is a guest in a house that contains stories, a history that she hasn’t yet deciphered. So she tries to find clues in what she can glean around her. She studies him, trying to make sense of what she sees in his features and expressions, or his rhythms around his home.

What she knows for sure is that he is gentle. He walks softly. He touches things lightly. Even the way he stirs the sauce on the burner, he does with a gentleness that is surprising to find in a man.

They have quickly established their way of filling the space between them. In the morning when she walks out of her room for breakfast, he has already anticipated her preference for nothing more than dry toast and a coffee with so much warm milk it looks white when he stirs it.

She also strikes him as less restless than the others he has taken in, though he is unsure if this is merely a mask she wears to cloak something deeper he cannot yet see.

Angelo can tell she loves books almost as much as he does. When she thinks he isn’t looking, he can see her out of the corner of his eye picking up the novels he has lying around the house. He has not read aloud to anyone since Dalia died, and the ability to now share a good book with someone gives his heart sustenance and breaks it at the same time. For years he has tried to lose himself in his books, to bury his pain by reading another person’s story. Now when he picks up the pages of a novel, he finds he is no longer reading just to become lost, but to connect to this strange, new woman who sits across from him. The words, the sentences, weaving together not just one story, but a new one. One between him and Elodie.