Uncle Felix used to torture me with long notes, the most tedious, painful, boring exercise known to violinists all over the world. One note, sustained endlessly. No volume change, no variance, no vibrato. Babbo hated long notes almost as much as I did. The music room was on the other side of his library at the villa. One day I heard him heave a book at the wall after I’d been playing long notes for more than an hour. It ruined my concentration, and I stopped, falling just short of my record.
Uncle Felix shouted, “You will never master this instrument if you do not master the long note, Batsheva!” I was so frustrated I yelled back, “And you will never master Italian if you only speak in German!” Babbo heard that too. And I was grounded for a week for my impertinence.
I play my long notes when I’m alone in my room at the convent, and for the first time in my life, I’m comforted by them. I’m comforted by my ability to master that one continuous sound, though my arm aches and my spirit longs for music.
Life is like a long note; it persists without variance, without wavering. There is no cessation in sound or pause in tempo. It continues on, and we must master it or it will master us. It mastered Uncle Felix, though one could argue that he simply laid down his bow.
I wonder what the nuns think of this exercise, the long note that wails from my room, night after night. I would think if anyone understood the power of constancy, it would be the nuns of Santa Cecilia.
Eva Rosselli
CHAPTER 12
VIA TASSO
Two days after the raid, looters, realizing the city’s Jews had been forced to leave their belongings behind when they were arrested, had moved into the ghetto and started taking anything and everything of value. In the darkness before dawn of the third day, Mario Sonnino and his little family walked the dark streets to the Church of Santa Cecilia and rang the bell on the gate.
“Father Angelo told us to come here,” Mario said when Mother Francesca peered at him through the iron bars.
“And Eva,” the little girl chirped up. “Is Eva here?”
Mother Francesca took one look at the tired mother, an infant in her arms, and the two children holding their father’s hands and ushered them through the gates and up the stairs to the room next to Eva’s.
Eva came awake to the sounds of a baby crying and the padding of nuns’ feet scurrying down the corridor, trying to make accommodations for the new arrivals. She jumped out of bed and dressed in the dark.
Another bed was brought into the little room, and a crib was fashioned out of a large crate. Mario and Lorenzo would stay on the lower floor where two other Jewish males were boarding. The nuns had rules about these things, but Mario could only nod gratefully. He’d had a plan in place, but it was too late to implement it.
“The escape routes have closed. The Germans have shut down the port of Genoa, and the Swiss border is too dangerous. Giulia and the children would not be able to make it, even if it weren’t. It’s too grueling a trip. I don’t know where to go, Eva. We have the false passes but nowhere to live. And my pass won’t be sufficient to hide me.”
“I was worried about you. I should have come to check on you myself! Angelo wouldn’t hear of it. He said the ghetto was too dangerous,” Eva said as she helped Giulia unpack their small suitcases.
“It was. But don’t worry. Father Angelo came himself. And he told us to come here before the sun rose. It is the safest time to be on the streets. There was a family who offered to hide us, another doctor and former colleague of mine. But it is getting too dangerous. It’s not just the Germans we have to look out for.”
Eva knew what he meant. The Blackshirt Brigades, OVRA—the Organization for Vigilance and Repression of Anti-Fascism—and the Fascist House, all Italians—were reporting to the Gestapo. They were actively hunting Jews and spying on other Italians.
“I didn’t want to endanger his family.” Mario stopped suddenly and looked at the ground as if he were ashamed. “Yet we are here, endangering these women,” he whispered brokenly.
“You will be safe here. And so will the nuns,” Eva replied firmly. “It was the right choice.”
In the days that followed, Angelo brought two young sisters, one fifteen and one sixteen, who had escaped the razzia when their older brother had forced them out an upstairs window and told them to flee across the rooftops, promising them that he wouldn’t be far behind. He’d been shot instead. An older couple and another young family with two little boys, not much older than Lorenzo, followed shortly thereafter. A pair of brothers in their early twenties and a man and his young daughter rounded out their numbers. The small convent was starting to burst at the seams with new “boarders.”
It was illegal to take in boarders without legal documents, and only Eva and the Sonninos had papers that wouldn’t get them immediately arrested. It was also illegal not to list all boarders on an official register. But then again, at this point it was illegal to be a Jew in Rome. Mother Francesca had fretted about their growing numbers and the official register that she had to produce if the police asked. Angelo had pulled her aside and reminded her how the mother Mary herself had been turned away time and time again and ended up giving birth to the Savior of the World in a stable.
“We can’t turn them away, Mother. They have nowhere else to go.”
Angelo also had letters from cardinals asking all religious institutions to open their doors to refugees and do what they could to shelter them, and he used the letters without remorse or restraint. He’d told Eva that the pastors throughout the countryside around Rome had reminded their parishioners that Jesus was a Jew in order to coax them into opening their doors. Catholic guilt was a powerful tool, and Angelo and his brothers showed no qualms at wielding it.
In the days that followed, Angelo and the abbess gave instruction in catechism and liturgy and taught lessons in paters and aves to the refugees, a crash course in Catholicism on which they were continually grilled. The refugees who had false papers and whose accents or appearance would not give them away went with Eva to the municipio to obtain food coupons and proper residence permits. Aldo was able to get forged documents to Mario Sonnino consisting of release papers from the Italian army and a doctor’s labor permit. He shouldn’t flaunt it, but it would give him a measure of cover if he were discovered or detained.
Even with some of the boarders able to register for ration cards, the numbers at the convent—the numbers at every convent and monastery throughout Rome—were far greater than the rations allotted. Mario knew where Levi had gone to buy items on the black market, and he and Angelo braved a few clandestine meetings to secure butter and milk, two things Giulia Sonnino desperately needed. She wasn’t well, and she wasn’t producing enough milk for her new baby.
But Angelo was resourceful. Two weeks after the raid on Rome’s Jews, a woman in his old parish lost her baby in a house fire. Somehow Angelo got wind of it and brought the poor mother to the nuns of Santa Cecilia, giving the woman a roof over her head and providing little Isaaco Sonnino with a wet nurse. If there was a need, he found a way, his abilities as a goalie translating beautifully to his abilities as a wartime priest. Scramble, protect, defend.
Angelo inspired the same ingenuity and respect among everyone he served, and he never stopped moving. He’d drawn some attention from the local Italian police, who had questioned him on more than one occasion, but he’d just blessed and genuflected his way out of trouble every time, doing as much business as he could from inside Vatican City, where the law of Rome could not touch him. But he was adamant where Eva was concerned. She would not risk herself. It was his one stipulation, until it was taken completely out of his hands.