They remained an hour longer, but the days were growing shorter and a new curfew had been announced with the arrival of the Germans. Mario Sonnino followed Angelo and Eva to the door and walked with them to the street, chatting amiably, but when they moved to leave he touched Angelo’s arm, halting him.
“I want documents,” he whispered. “For my family. As soon as the baby is born we are leaving Rome. Can you help me?”
Eva and Angelo both nodded, and Eva gripped his hand. “It may take a few weeks. And if Angelo can’t help you, I will.”
Angelo shot Eva a cautionary glare, but he didn’t argue with her. Not there.
Mario nodded gratefully. “Thank you. Thank you both.” He scribbled his number and his address on a scrap of paper and handed it to Angelo.
“Eva?” Mario stopped her as she turned away.
“Yes?”
“Don’t come back here,” he murmured. “The padre is right.”
The distance to the Church of Santa Cecilia was relatively short, and within fifteen minutes, Angelo was leading Eva toward a stately, gated edifice tucked at the far end of a cobbled piazza. There were hundreds of churches in Rome, big and small, ornate and old, famous and obscure, but the arched entrance of the Santa Cecilia was quietly welcoming as Angelo led Eva beyond the tall gate into a courtyard lined with roses and benches.
A rectangular pool with a large vase at the center encouraged quiet conversation and meditation, though the space was completely empty. Rows of windows overlooked the courtyard on each side, several stories that made up the convent on one side and an ancient bathhouse on the other. Angelo said the church was named for Cecilia, a noblewoman who was locked in her bathhouse for three days—a murder attempt—only to come out unscathed and singing. The bathhouse had been turned into a chapel, and Cecilia had since become a patron saint of music. Eva tried to imagine what a bathhouse chapel looked like, and determined that she would sneak inside at some point if the nuns refused to show her.
They walked into the nave, looking for the abbess, and found it as empty and silent as the courtyard. The nave was rather gray and depressing, the arch of the ceiling too low for transcendence, but the statue of a woman beneath the altar made up for it. The sculpture was unlike any Eva had ever seen before. It was lifelike and lovely, yet so forlorn. The woman appeared as if she were sleeping, but her face was turned into the ground, strands of hair obscuring her profile, and the gash on her neck told a different story.
“Is this Saint Cecilia? What happened to her?” Eva asked, her eyes clinging to the slim white column of the woman’s throat.
“After failing to kill her in the bathhouse, they attempted again. They tried to behead her.”
“Tried?”
“The legend is that three blows with an ax did not accomplish the task. She died slowly, converting many in the process,” Angelo answered.
“What was her crime?” Eva asked, unable to look away from the statue.
“It was politics. She was an outspoken woman,” Angelo said wryly, as if he thought Eva could relate. There was a smile in his voice, but Eva couldn’t smile. She could only stare at the martyred saint.
“Oh, Father Bianco! We expected you much sooner,” a woman called out in surprise, distracting Angelo from his response. Eva turned toward the voice and watched as a diminutive woman with sagging jowls and sharp eyes approached them at a speed that belied her age. She’d entered the nave through a door to the left of the apse.
“Mother Francesca, this is Eva,” Angelo said simply, as if he’d already told the ancient nun all about her.
“You’d best be off, Father,” the abbess directed. “There is trouble with the Holy Sisters of Adoration. A pilgrim has died, and there is some disagreement about what should be done.”
“I will check on you tomorrow, Eva,” Angelo said, and with a quick bow toward the abbess, he was striding back toward the entrance, cane tapping, his small suitcase swinging. Eva could only stare after him, wondering again why she’d agreed to come to Rome.
“Come,” Mother Francesca commanded, and without waiting to see if Eva was coming, followed Angelo out of the nave and through the courtyard. Eva grabbed the large suitcase Angelo had carried all day, and juggling her valise and violin in her other hand, struggled to catch up. The nun led her through a small door to the left of the entrance wall. As they ascended a narrow staircase, the nun offered some information.
“The convent is shared between the Benedictine nuns and the Franciscan Missionary Sisters of the Immaculate Heart of Mary. But we are smaller in numbers than we once were, and the convent is past its prime.”
Eva wondered how long it had been past its prime. Two hundred years? Three?
“These rooms were used for lay staff, but we have no use for a large staff anymore. We have both a cloistered community as well as nuns who serve in an active apostolate beyond these walls. We use these rooms for boarders. The little bit of income is much needed. Especially now.”
Eva nodded, wondering how long the stack of banknotes she’d brought with her would last. The value kept falling. Before long, they would be more useful as toilet paper. The jewelry she brought would get her a little further.
The abbess opened a door and stepped aside. The room contained a narrow mattress on a metal frame, a wooden cross nailed to the wall above it. A simple chair, a chest of drawers, and a small closet lined the opposite wall. Mother Francesca flipped on the desk lamp, indicating this was home.
“This is your room. Washroom at the end of the hall. It is for shared use, but you are the only boarder here at the moment. A luxury. Vespers at six. You are expected to attend.”
“But . . . I am not Catholic,” Eva protested.
“You are now.”
18 September, 1943
Confession: I don’t like nuns.
I am tired, but sleep is as elusive as Angelo has always been. The convent is too quiet and it smells old. Why is it that all of Rome smells so old? Or maybe it is just me, and I can’t get the scent of loss from my skin. I feel as ancient and crumbling as the walls of the old temple the bus trundled past today. But at least the temple doesn’t have to hide. I’ve been here less than twelve hours, and I miss Florence so desperately I want to start walking. Florence smells like flowers. It smells like jasmine and Fabia and my father’s pipe. After all these years, I can still smell him in the rooms of the villa, and I am both comforted and tortured by the scent.
I’m lying in a little bed in a strange room, listening to the walls say nothing. I tried to play my violin, but the echo in the room made my skin crawl, like I was the Pied Piper of dead nuns. I didn’t want to summon ghosts or rats, so I put my violin away.
I went to Vespers as instructed and watched the nuns sing and an old priest conduct the service. There were more nuns behind a little opening on the other side of the apse. They never come out, apparently. I wonder if that’s what Angelo wants for me. Maybe he thinks I can just hide in this little convent until the war is over, and then he’ll pat himself on the back because he saved me.
What am I being saved for? I look ahead at my life, even a life where there is no fear or worry that the Gestapo will swoop me up and send me away, and I can’t find the will to be hopeful.
Eva Rosselli
CHAPTER 10
THE JEWISH GHETTO
The “pilgrim” who had passed was an old Jewish woman who had been left behind when her son and his family fled to Genoa. The nuns of the Holy Sisters of Adoration had taken her in, and she’d passed peacefully in her sleep, sitting in front of a window in a white wimple and a borrowed black veil looking like one of the nuns who hid her.
Angelo promised the abbess to pay a visit to the rabbi at the main synagogue first thing in the morning to see if clandestine funeral arrangements could be made. Otherwise, they would be burying her among nuns with a cross on her grave. It was all they could do. She’d died among them; she would be buried among them too. Maybe when the war was over they could remove the cross and put a Star of David in its place. And maybe they could restore her name. Maybe someday her family would return and lay stones on her grave, the way Eva used to do for ancestors she never even knew. But the odds were that Regina Ravenna would be hidden in the ground under a false name and a meaningless cross, and no one but the Holy Sisters of Adoration and Angelo would ever be the wiser.
The knowledge and responsibility weighed on Angelo. He wanted to keep records but didn’t dare. He wanted to keep ledgers and lists of names and family members so that he could account for every person he felt responsible for. But records and lists were incriminating. So he’d devised a method to keep it as straight as he could, kept any necessary papers in the Vatican, and prayed that God would preserve his memory so no one would be lost to forgetfulness.
He made his way home long after the curfew, but was not stopped, fortunately. He had a pass that allowed him to be out when his duties demanded it, but if he were challenged, he would have to lie about the old woman he’d attended to. And the old woman was a paperless Jew.
The last year or two had been one lie after another. Sometimes he missed the simple little village where he’d spent the first six months of his life as a priest. Eat, pray, sleep, serve. That was all he did. Plus, the streets were so narrow and the road to the village so winding and steep, it was unlikely the Germans could send in their tanks without getting them lodged between buildings. Then he was called to Rome, and he’d gotten a crash course in service and survival on the streets of the Eternal City.
Then Monsignor Luciano, his sponsor of sorts, the man who had kept an eye on him for so many years, brought him in to assist him at the Curia. A totally different kind of experience. At the Curia he’d met Monsignor O’Flaherty, an Irish priest at the Vatican who was deeply involved in refugee work. And Angelo’s double life had begun. He’d begun traveling from one end of the city to the next, every church, every monastery, every convent, and every college. And he’d made note of numbers, rooms, availability, and access.