The Last Son’s Secret

by Rafel Nadal Farreras

  Cara Giovanna,

  Please write out this letter neatly and, if you finish it in time, take it in person to the post office. I have to go to the rectory at the Immacolata to arrange the masses for Father Felice’s soul and, while I’m out, I’ll also visit Maria, who has been laid up with pneumonia for a few days now. I’ll be home before seven for supper.

  Nonna Angela

  Giovanna sat in the office, turned on the desk lamp and began to copy the letter, which was addressed to the Bishop of Otranto, a personal friend of Father Felice since their youth, when they had studied together at the Padua seminary. And in the text of this letter was Nonna’s unforgivable slip:

  Bellorotondo, 18 January 1939

  Most Reverend Bishop of Otranto,

  Please forgive my delay in replying; under normal circumstances I never would have made you wait so long. I am writing to explain the details of the death of our beloved Father Felice (may he rest in peace), who as you know left us on Epiphany to find the peace of our Lord Jesus Christ, whom he always served with enthusiasm and loyalty. You yourself saw that over many years of friendship and collaboration. Before Christmas he had a relapse and was, unfortunately, unable to get out of bed, although he still maintained his mental clarity and memory, both of which stayed with him until his last breath. His body, however, had become a useless burden some time earlier.

  Father Felice died shortly after reading your letter, which was of great comfort to him and which he sincerely appreciated. I also want to thank you for your kind wishes at Christmas, which we were still able to spend together. I can assure you that up until his last day he remembered you very clearly and entrusted you to the Most High.

  Again, please excuse this delayed reply, but I’ve had my granddaughter and my adopted grandson here these last few days; a real pleasure that, since they began studying in Bari—

  Giovanna felt an enormous pressure on her chest, and struggled for breath. She went back to the text and again read ‘adopted grandson’. The two words hammered at her skull. The office began to spin, leaving her half faint. When she finally recovered a little, she continued reading the letter, in the hopes of finding some sort of an explanation.

  Again, please excuse this delayed reply, but I’ve had my granddaughter and my adopted grandson here these last few days; a real pleasure that, since they began studying in Bari, I am able to enjoy less often, so I have devoted myself fully to them. Please accept my apologies and my best wishes for this new year, 1939.

  Faithfully yours,

  Angela Convertini

  Giovanna remained glued to the armchair in the office, breathing with difficulty, unable to understand what was happening. Then she stood up and started running. She didn’t stop until she reached the door of her aunt’s house. She entered shouting, ‘What does “adopted grandson” mean? Why did Nonna write that Vitantonio is her adopted grandson?’

  She pounced on Zia and started to beat her chest with both fists, repeating louder and louder, ‘What does it mean that Vitantonio is her adopted grandson? What are you hiding from us?’

  Donata was alarmed. What in the world had Angela Convertini said? This couldn’t be happening. She hugged Giovanna tightly and led her over to the kitchen table, like she’d done when Giovanna was a little girl.

  They talked all night long, as Donata explained every last detail of their family history, and the Palmisano curse. Twelve hours later, when they finally got up from the table, the sun was beginning to peek out from behind the Cisternino olive groves.

  Giovanna let out a nervous giggle. ‘You know what? Sometimes when Vitantonio would look at me, I didn’t see him as a brother. I’ve always wondered why …’

  ‘He is your brother! Never forget that!’

  They stood there, face to face, staring at each other for a long while. Finally, Giovanna broke the silence.

  ‘I don’t know if I hate you for lying to me or if I love you more for everything you’ve been through. You’re like that mother who asked King Solomon to give her son to another woman, rather than see him cut in two … But how could you give up your son? How could you bear the pain?’

  ‘All the young men in the family were dead. Vitantonio was the only survivor and he was doomed.’

  ‘The curse of the Palmisanos … To think that the rumours around town were true—’

  ‘It’s no rumour. All twenty-one of them died, one after the other.’

  Donata’s eyes were again filled with tears and again she begged Giovanna, ‘Swear that you won’t say a word of this to Vitantonio. He can never know. He has to be a Convertini for ever. His life depends on our secret.’

  A Letter from Spain

  Signora Angela Convertini

  Palazzo Convertini

  Bellorotondo – Puglia

  Italy

  Girona, 5 February 1939

  Dear Grandmother,

  It won’t be long now. Today we liberated the city of Girona, the last Spanish provincial capital before the French border. The Republican revolutionaries and bandits are fleeing as fast as they can and there is scarcely any resistance to the advance of the glorious Francoist troops we are fighting with as part of the Corps of Volunteer Troops. Today we will witness a memorable victory for fascism, which will be admired throughout Europe.

  I think of you all often. We entered Girona following a wall along a path used to depict the stations of the cross. We walked the stations in the wrong direction and then found ourselves in a city of narrow, steep streets, which often end in impossibly steep steps. The city centre has a group of very old churches, none as lovely as ours in Lecce or Trani or Barletta, but taken together it is very impressive. It feels as if time stopped in the era of the Crusades, awaiting liberation by us. When we ousted the last Reds from the city, we discovered on the outskirts a small chapel surrounded by tree trunks and planks. It was dedicated to our St Nicholas and when we went inside there were … saws!

  They belong to a family that imports wood like us, but their business had been collectivized by the revolutionaries and they barely had anything left in the warehouse, which is in the garden. I decided to settle in the house, which is as big as the palazzo but a bit more run-down. Fabrizio, the unit’s doctor, came with me. The soldiers, exhausted by the march from Barcelona, are sleeping in the sheds; some have buried themselves deep in sawdust, because it is very cold and they say that tonight it will freeze over again. The commander took lodgings in a neighbouring house, with the other officers and the cook, who had dinner brought to us. We shared it with these good people, who had never tasted spaghetti with garlic, oil and chilli. I don’t know if they enjoyed it, but they were half starved and gulped it down.

  In the evening, by which time we had liberated the whole city, we strolled through the streets of the old town, and they were covered in the bodies of boys that couldn’t have been more than seventeen or eighteen years old. Is Giovanna with you? Tell her that that’s what the revolutionaries do: send children to war, burn down churches and steal factories from their owners. And Vitantonio? If you’re there, you should know I’ve missed you; if you’d joined us, you’d be our leader by now.

  I pray every day for you all, and for Il Duce. Now we are marching towards Figueres, further north, and they say that we’ll reach the French border in less than a month and then it will all be over. God willing.

  Until then, I love you and entrust you to God in all my prayers.

  Your grandson,

  Franco

  P. S. This morning, when we said goodbye to the owners of the house, the warehouse supervisor came in shouting that the saw belts were missing. It seems the soldiers steal any rubber they can find and use it to make soles for their boots. I ordered a sergeant to find out who had done it and make them return the belts. As deputy commander I couldn’t allow low-ranking soldiers to steal from people who are almost like us.

  At the French Border

  NO, GIOVANNA WASN’T around in the palazzo to read Franco’s invec
tives; she too was mired in the same Spanish hell, more than seventeen hundred kilometres from Bellorotondo. While Franco and the Italian volunteers were heading north from Girona, following General Franco’s elite Navarra division, she was hastily leaving the city of Figueres and beginning an arduous journey towards the French border, amid heavy aerial bombardments. On 6 February 1939, only forty kilometres separated the two cousins, but they had never been further apart. Giovanna had always thought little of her cousin Franco, but now they were divided by a huge, gaping rift. He was advancing with the fascist volunteers; she was retreating with the International Brigades. He would have killed to make himself a man; she would kill only to save a life. He would have given anything to gain his cousin’s affection; she found consolation only in her hatred of those responsible for the cruel wave of fascism that was washing over Europe.

  Deeply unsettled by her zia’s revelations, she had bid a cold farewell to her nonna and left Bellorotondo almost immediately. It had taken her four days to travel through Italy and southern France by train and then four more to cross the Spanish border and reach Barcelona. Only two weeks earlier she had met up with Salvatore and, since then, she’d been on the run. They were taking the route in reverse now, to the north, in the midst of a heart-rending procession of starving, freezing men and women trying to reach the Pyrenees. They walked mechanically, in columns that only broke when enemy planes started bombing.

  ‘Maledetti sparvieri!’ shouted Giovanna when she identified Savoia-Marchetti SM.79s, the Italian Sparrowhawks, among the attacking planes.

  The refugees carried all sorts of things with them, such as mattresses and kitchen utensils. Giovanna walked behind an old woman with a hollow gaze who was holding on to an empty cage: her instinctive compassion had led her to free the birds when she saw that the war was lost. Those poor lost souls walked with their few remaining possessions, which preserved in them the hope of a fresh start.

  Salvatore and Giovanna had only been fleeing for two weeks, but each day felt like an entire year and those fourteen together were an eternity. The past had become completely unreal. They’d dissociated themselves from normality so quickly. What had Europe been doing these last three years, while in Spain they were killing each other? Where were the authors of those banned books that she had read wrapped in coloured paper so that her grandmother would be none the wiser? Where were the students she had met up with secretly at university? Where was she? Three weeks ago she was writing letters from the palazzo and now she was in another time, another place, and her worries were no longer her own. She was living in a mirage of extreme cruelty. And she barely recognized herself.

  After meeting up with Salvatore, they had left Barcelona behind on the first day; on the next, Mataró; then Arenys, Blanes, Tossa, Girona … Now they were fleeing Figueres and Giovanna wondered how many of the refugees around her would die before reaching the border. She went from one column to the next, trying to dress wounds, helping the exhausted elderly, giving a last caress to the dying. One day, someone called to her, ‘Nurse!’, and she assumed the role quite naturally. That was how, without even realizing it, she became someone who tended to the desperate; she became a nurse.

  It was only in the evenings that she was able to spend a few hours with Salvatore. She still hadn’t found the right moment to tell him what she had read about her brother in her nonna’s letter to the Bishop of Otranto. They embraced and it felt good to be in his arms, but she fell asleep thinking of Vitantonio. She wanted to tell him that they weren’t siblings, that she missed him terribly. But she had sworn to Zia that she would keep the secret to protect Vitantonio. That was why she had run away to Spain.

  Rumours of War

  VITANTONIO WASN’T IN Bellorotondo either, so he too missed the chance to read Franco’s letter. He would have liked to have news of his cousin, even though he hadn’t forgiven him for volunteering for the fascists, and how that had led to Giovanna running away as well. He assumed his sister had joined the International Brigades to make up for Franco fighting against the Spanish Republic. But what the hell was wrong with them? What business did Giovanna, Salvatore and Franco have fighting amongst themselves, in a country far from home? What could they possibly hope to find there in Spain, a place even poorer than their own country? Vitantonio was no fascist, but nor was he an anti-fascist. Not even an anti-fascist in the style of many of his friends, who had no fondness for the regime but considered the dissidents a pain in the arse. All he knew was that he supported the small farmers of Puglia against the large landowners, but he found the whole larger political struggle exasperating.

  At university in Bari, far from Bellorotondo, he had become a man. He had very southern looks, dark skin and black hair, with a curl that fell over his forehead, and a strong jaw. Yet his gaze was deep and tender, and drew you in. His warm smile softened his hard face. His back was broad. He was both strong and sweet at once. That was his appeal: he turned heads, but the young women didn’t just label him ‘handsome’, they called him ‘adorable’.

  He had just returned to Bari, to his law course, not wanting to miss a single day in his mission to defend the interests of the trulli peasants. He had spent the last few days of January at the Palmisano farmstead, helping the Vicinos and Concetta with the olives; they had come in very late that year and ever since Salvatore had gone off to Spain, Skinny and Concetta were overwhelmed. He had also gone hunting for a few days and rediscovered the pleasure of knowing he could take care of himself in the mountains. Something told him that it would soon come in handy.

  Rumours of war were spreading throughout Europe, and Vitantonio had started to wonder whether Italy would get involved. During Easter Week, Mussolini had given the government in Tirana an ultimatum and was preparing to invade Albania. Vitantonio shared his fears with his zia, who urged him to make his escape.

  ‘If we go to war you have to hide in the mountains. You can’t fight on the side of the Germans, who killed your father, but you can’t stand against your homeland, either!’

  PART FOUR

  Rain of Stars over Matera

  The Unwilling Conscript

  GUARNERI, MARINOSCI, RAFFAELE, Carmelo Pizzigallo, Giocavazzo, Sante Miccoli, Cavalli … entire former classes of the schools in Martina Franca and Bari had gone off to the war. Even Argese had managed to conceal his limp and get himself sent to the Greek island of Cephalonia, in the same battalion as Pasquale Raguseo. That list was missing only one student: ‘Vitantonio Convertini, figlio di Antonio e di Francesca, della classe di 1919, del comune di Bellorotondo, distretto di Taranto, provincia di Bari.’ To avoid conscription, since June 1940 Vitantonio had been hiding in a cave in Matera.

  It had been a huge surprise to others. His friends had always supposed that he would be the one best prepared to survive at the front and, as the rumours of an imminent declaration of war intensified, they all predicted that he would be the first to enlist. Not only had he become the best hunter in the county, but whenever a fight broke out he was also the first to jump in, especially to protect others, so everyone in town was convinced he would rush to the defence of their homeland. His refusal to enlist came as a real shock. What had happened? What had turned the bravest young man in town into a coward? Did it have something to do with Giovanna’s disappearance? Had he become a Marxist like Salvatore Vicino?

  No one thought to look for the explanation in Donata’s extreme fear of war. They didn’t realize the terror that had been struck into her heart by Italy’s entrance into a conflict that threatened to turn Europe once again into a vast cemetery. Panicked that the war would awaken the curse of the Palmisanos, Zia begged her son to flee to the mountains. His nonna agreed. All her other grandsons were at war: the ones in Bari, the ones in Otranto and the ones in Venice; twelve in total. Vitantonio’s uncles Marco, Luca and Giovanni had also been called up. Only Angelo, because of his age, and Matteo, who walked with a limp, had been spared. Franco, since his return from Spain, was rapidly rising through the ranks
of Mussolini’s secret police. The homeland couldn’t complain about the Convertini family’s sacrifice; the army could make do without Vitantonio.

  In June of 1940, Mussolini simultaneously declared war on France and the United Kingdom, and the Italian army began to call up those born in 1919. That was when Vitantonio heeded the two women’s pleas and went into hiding; he was a few weeks away from turning twenty-one. He had never liked Mussolini’s blackshirts and he liked the Germans even less: in fact, they’d been on the same side as the Austrians who had killed his father and his aunt’s husband, somewhere north of Trento, on the last day of the last war. Why the hell should I help them, he asked himself when he received the conscription notice. And he fled to Matera.

  With close to fifty thousand inhabitants, Matera was a good place to disappear: a city the world had forgotten, with homes dug out of the rock and occupied by generations of the same families since the Bronze Age. Two adjacent natural amphitheatres, perched over a rocky ravine – the Gravina di Matera – held the Sasso Caveoso and the Sasso Barisano, the two largest cave networks in the world, which formed Matera’s old town. More than twenty thousand people, most of them peasant farmers and shepherds, lived in primitive conditions in the caves, alongside animals and all sorts of diseases. In the cities of the south, and certainly in Rome, they had forgotten all about Matera; Vitantonio was safe.

  He took refuge in the home of Grandpa ’Nzìgnalèt, Donata’s father, in a dwelling hewn from the rock, at one end of the Sasso Caveoso, the more southern of the two cave networks. Vitantonio didn’t know it, but he had returned to his roots: he was in the very same cave that, over twenty years earlier, had been Donata’s haven during the months of her clandestine pregnancy.