Naples continued as a war zone for six weeks and Kip was there with the unit for the whole period. After two weeks they discovered the citizens in the caves. Their skin dark with shit and typhus. The procession of them back into the city hospitals was one of ghosts.
Four days later the central post office blew up, and seventy-two were killed or wounded. The richest collection of mediaeval records in Europe had already burned in the city archives.
On the twentieth of October, three days before electricity was to be restored, a German turned himself in. He told authorities that there were thousands of bombs hidden in the harbour section of the city that were wired to the dormant electrical system. When power was turned on, the city would dissolve in flames. He was interrogated more than seven times, in differing stages of tact and violence—at the end of which the authorities were still uncertain about his confession. This time an entire area of the city was evacuated. Children and the old, those almost dead, those pregnant, those who had been brought out of the caves, animals, valuable jeeps, wounded soldiers out of the hospitals, mental patients, priests and monks and nuns out of the abbeys. By dusk on the evening of October 22, 1943, only twelve sappers remained behind.
The electricity was to be turned on at three p.m. the next day. None of the sappers had ever been in an empty city before, and these were to be the strangest and most disturbing hours of their lives.
During the evenings thunderstorms roll over Tuscany. Lightning drops towards any metal or spire that rises up out of the landscape. Kip always returns to the villa along the yellow path between the cypresses around seven in the evening, which is when the thunder, if there is going to be thunder, begins. The mediaeval experience.
He seems to like such temporal habits. She or Caravaggio will see his figure in the distance, pausing in his walk home to look back towards the valley to see how far away the rain is from him. Hana and Caravaggio return to the house. Kip continues his half-mile uphill walk on the path that curls slowly to the right and then slowly to the left. There is the noise of his boots on the gravel. The wind reaches him in bursts, hitting the cypresses broadside so they tilt, entering the sleeves of his shirt.
For the next ten minutes he walks, never sure if the rain will overtake him. He will hear the rain before he feels it, a clicking on the dry grass, on the olive leaves. But for now he is in the great refreshing wind of the hill, in the foreground of the storm.
If the rain reaches him before he gets to the villa, he continues walking at the same pace, snaps the rubber cape over his haversack and walks on within it.
In his tent he hears the pure thunder. Sharp cracks of it overhead, a coach-wheel sound as it disappears into the mountains. A sudden sunlight of lightning through the tent wall, always, it seems to him, brighter than sunlight, a flash of contained phosphorus, something machinelike, to do with the new word he has heard in the theory rooms and through his crystal set, which is “nuclear.” In the tent he unwinds the wet turban, dries his hair and weaves another around his head.
The storm rolls out of Piedmont to the south and to the east. Lightning falls upon the steeples of the small alpine chapels whose tableaux reenact the Stations of the Cross or the Mysteries of the Rosary. In the small towns of Varese and Varallo, larger-than-life terra-cotta figures carved in the 1600s are revealed briefly, depicting biblical scenes. The bound arms of the scourged Christ pulled back, the whip coming down, the baying dog, three soldiers in the next chapel tableau raising the crucifix higher towards the painted clouds.
The Villa San Girolamo, located where it is, also receives such moments of light—the dark halls, the room the Englishman lies in, the kitchen where Hana is laying a fire, the shelled chapel—all lit suddenly, without shadow. Kip will walk with no qualms under the trees in his patch of garden during such storms, the dangers of being killed by lightning pathetically minimal compared with the danger of his daily life. The naive Catholic images from those hillside shrines that he has seen are with him in the half-darkness, as he counts the seconds between lightning and thunder. Perhaps this villa is a similar tableau, the four of them in private movement, momentarily lit up, flung ironically against this war.
The twelve sappers who remained behind in Naples fanned out into the city. All through the night they have broken into sealed tunnels, descended into sewers, looking for fuze lines that might be linked with the central generators. They are to drive away at two p.m., an hour before the electricity is to be turned on.
A city of twelve. Each in separate parts of the town. One at the generator, one at the reservoir, still diving—the authorities most certain destruction will be caused by flooding. How to mine a city. It is unnerving mostly because of the silence. All they hear of the human world are barking dogs and bird songs that come from apartment windows above the streets. When the time comes, he will go into one of the rooms with a bird. Some human thing in this vacuum. He passes the Museo Archeologico Nazionale, where the remnants of Pompeii and Herculaneum are housed. He has seen the ancient dog frozen in white ash.
The scarlet sapper light strapped to his left arm is turned on as he walks, the only source of light on the Strada Carbonara. He is exhausted from the night search, and now there seems little to do. Each of them has a radiophone, but it is to be used only for an emergency discovery. It is the terrible silence in the empty courtyards and the dry fountains that makes him most tired.
At one p.m. he traces his way towards the damaged Church of San Giovanni a Carbonara, where he knows there is a chapel of the Rosary. He had been walking through the church a few evenings earlier when lightning filled the darkness, and he had seen large human figures in the tableau. An angel and a woman in a bedroom. Darkness replaced the brief scene and he sat in a pew waiting, but there was to be no more revelation.
He enters that corner of the church now, with the terra-cotta figures painted the colour of white humans. The scene depicts a bedroom where a woman is in conversation with an angel. The woman’s curly brown hair reveals itself under the loose blue cape, the fingers of her left hand touching her breastbone. When he steps forward into the room he realizes everything is larger than life. His own head is no higher than the shoulder of the woman. The angel’s raised arm reaches fifteen feet in height. Still, for Kip, they are company. It is an inhabited room, and he walks within the discussion of these creatures that represent some fable about mankind and heaven.
He slips his satchel from his shoulder and faces the bed. He wants to lie on it, hesitating only because of the presence of the angel. He has already walked around the ethereal body and noticed the dusty light bulbs attached to its back beneath the dark coloured wings, and he knows in spite of his desire that he could not sleep easily in the presence of such a thing. There are three pairs of stage slippers, a set designer’s subtlety, peeking out from under the bed. It is about one-forty.
He spreads his cape on the floor, flattens the satchel into a pillow and lies down on the stone. Most of his childhood in Lahore he slept on a mat on the floor of his bedroom. And in truth he has never gotten accustomed to the beds of the West. A pallet and an air pillow are all he uses in his tent, whereas in England when staying with Lord Suffolk he sank claustrophobically into the dough of a mattress, and lay there captive and awake until he crawled out to sleep on the carpet.
He stretches out beside the bed. The shoes too, he notices, are larger than life. The feet of Amazonians slip into them. Above his head the tentative right arm of the woman. Beyond his feet the angel. Soon one of the sappers will turn on the city’s electricity, and if he is going to explode he will do so in the company of these two. They will die or be secure. There is nothing more he can do, anyway. He has been up all night on a final search for caches of dynamite and time cartridges. Walls will crumble around him or he will walk through a city of light. At least he has
