Page 12 of Daughter of Genoa (Escape to Tuscany)

Vittorio

If he sleeps on his side, it’s all right.

If he sleeps on his side, and doesn’t walk too fast, and sits down just as often as he can, then he can manage perfectly well.

The cough doesn’t even bother him too much, so long as he does all those things and drinks plenty of water.

So what’s the point in going to the infirmary, really?

Why interrupt his work, why cause trouble, why abandon all the people who depend on him when he’s certainly not getting worse, and may even be getting better?

That’s how he reasons, and on the whole it makes sense.

He has his moments of weakness, of course.

Like earlier this morning, when he rolled over in his sleep and woke up gasping for breath, as if some malign force were trying to crush the air out of him.

As he lay there with his heart pounding and strange patterns shimmering before his eyes, he was horribly afraid that something was wrong after all.

But once he’d washed, shaved and dressed, and settled down to his morning meditation, the fear had subsided and his breathing was beginning to slow.

He could see the episode for what it was: a passing panic, a nervous fit, a shameful slackening of resolve.

And he can’t give in to that, he knows, or else he won’t be much use to anyone.

By the time he reports to don Francesco, he’s feeling quite as usual and has even managed some breakfast. He finds the young priest seated at his desk in the frescoed antechamber of Cardinal Boetto’s office, deep in discussion with Mr X. They both look up as Vittorio enters.

‘Am I interrupting?’ he asks. ‘Shall I come back?’

‘No, no,’ don Francesco says, and waves him into the chair next to Mr X. ‘You’re just the man we want to see. How do you feel about doing some forgery?’

‘Forgery? You mean making cards again?’

‘That’s right,’ Mr X says, turning to Vittorio as he takes his seat. ‘I haven’t forgotten how much you helped me before, and now I thought you might help Marta for a while. I’m glad you alerted me to her, I must say.’

His tone is polite, friendly but detached as it always is.

Vittorio doesn’t actually know very much about Mr X.

He knows that he’s a layman, of course, and that he’s Jewish; that he’s a friend of DELASEM’s previous leader, a lawyer called Valobra, who had to flee to Switzerland when the Germans invaded.

Beyond the extraordinary fact of Mr X having chosen to stay, the rest is a mystery.

And that’s as it should be. The less he knows, the less there is to give away should the worst happen.

‘I thought it might be a good idea, too,’ don Francesco adds. ‘A nice quiet task while you get over that lingering cold of yours. Give you a break from running here and there all over the city.’

‘So what do you think?’ Mr X asks. ‘Will you help me – or, rather, Marta?’

It’s a genuine question, Vittorio can tell.

Because what Mr X doesn’t understand, being a layman, is that there’s no point in asking.

It doesn’t matter that Vittorio likes ‘running here and there’, shepherding people from point to point, delivering ration cards and money and moral support.

It doesn’t matter that he dearly wants to keep watch over every soul that’s been entrusted to him; that he resents the idea of giving them over to someone else, someone who won’t know them like he does.

Cardinal Boetto has endowed don Francesco with the power of decision.

Don Francesco has decided, and Vittorio must obey.

‘Of course I will,’ he says.

Mr X breaks into a broad smile. ‘Good man!’ he exclaims, and gives Vittorio a clap on the shoulder, startling him so that he narrowly avoids a coughing fit. ‘Thank you, Father Vittorio. I really do appreciate it. And thank you, don Francesco, for sparing him.’

‘It’s no trouble,’ don Francesco says, and gets to his feet. ‘Then I shall brief Father Vittorio, and you can get on. Good day for now.’

He shakes Mr X’s hand; Mr X shakes Vittorio’s, gathers up his hat and coat and goes out. Don Francesco sits back down, and Vittorio sits too, feeling gloomier and gloomier.

‘Remind me,’ don Francesco says. ‘The Tipografia Guichard is somewhere off via Assarotti, isn’t it? Via…’

‘Via degli Armeni,’ Vittorio supplies.

‘Right.’ Don Francesco rifles around in one of the desk drawers and brings out a map of Genoa, which he unfolds and spreads out between them.

His finger follows the long curve of via degli Armeni.

‘Yes, here, I see. Now, if I recall, you’ve placed one family in that empty flat in via Durazzo, haven’t you?

Then you have a couple just off piazza Manin, another near Corvetto…

I think that if you could continue to keep an eye on those, plus any new arrivals – let’s say as far as Brignole – rather hilly territory, of course, but at least it’s all close by…

What?’ he asks as he looks up and catches Vittorio’s eye.

‘You didn’t think I was going to take away all your duties?

Send you away to make identity cards for Mr X and wash my hands of you entirely? ’

Vittorio looks down. He’s too embarrassed to admit that this is exactly what he thought. ‘Well…’

‘Father Vittorio, really,’ don Francesco says, and the lack of reproach in his voice is somehow worse than any reproach could be.

‘Even if I could do that, I wouldn’t – and let us be honest here, I can’t.

I rely on you, and so does His Eminence.

But you aren’t well. I know you aren’t well, not yet, and so I want to lighten the strain until you’re back on form again. Do you understand now?’

‘Yes,’ Vittorio says. ‘Thank you.’ He feels irrationally as if he’s been reprieved.

‘So you’ll keep on looking after your charges in this area here.

’ Don Francesco traces an invisible triangle: Corvetto-Manin-Brignole.

‘And for the rest, I think don Giuseppe and Sister Assunta should be able to manage between them. We shall set up a proper handover, of course. But if you could just remind me for now roughly how many there are, and whereabouts they’re currently living, that would be a great help. ’

He turns the map around so that it faces Vittorio.

And there is Genoa, spread out before him: that thin, staggered strip of a city wedged in between the mountains and the sea.

The line of the seafront is changed now, fretted and eroded by repeated bombing.

Churches, palaces, theatres and monuments lie in ruins, but here on the map they survive as neat little symbols.

And scattered around this now-imagined city are the people he looks after – the people he loves, with that fierce but dispassionate love that surpasses all sentimental attachment.

Here’s the orphaned boy who now lives with a big, chaotic family just off piazza del Carmine.

Here’s the mother sheltering with her two grown daughters in a flat in via di Vallechiara.

In via Balbi, near the university, is the doctor’s widow from Vienna who talks to him about Spinoza; not far from her, in vico della Pace, the young Czech couple with the toddler he keeps supplied with scrap paper and pencil stubs.

He’s taken to collecting those wherever he can find them, assembling a stash for his next visit – except that there won’t be a next visit, and his throat is irrationally tight.

‘May I have a pencil?’ he asks don Francesco now. ‘It’s probably easier if I mark the locations. We can erase them afterwards.’

‘Help yourself.’ Don Francesco pushes a tin towards him, and he takes one: a brand-new pencil, shiny and beautiful. If Vittorio must give up visiting the Czechs, he resolves, he’ll ask don Francesco to set aside a whole tin of pencils just for them.

Vittorio looks again at the city as it was: still beautiful, still intact. He says a silent prayer for everyone he loves, and then he squares his shoulders and gets to work.