Domenico “Mimo” Lella was cited for courage fighting for the resistance, most notably for his actions on the first day of the general insurrection. Mimo worked in the family business before founding his own manufacturing company, Lella Sport, which catered to the weekend athlete and outdoor enthusiast. A short, pugnacious, and successful businessman, Mimo married a beautiful fashion model, Valeria, who stood a foot taller than him. They had three children. He built a cabin at Motta beside Casa Alpina that was said to be his favorite place on earth. In 1974, at age forty-seven, Mimo died of skin cancer.
Carletto Beltramini and Pino Lella were lifelong friends. Carletto became a successful salesman for Alfa Romeo and lived all over Europe. He never married and did not talk about the war for fifty-three years. But in 1998, as he lay ill in the hospital, Pino and an American named Robert Dehlendorf paid him a visit. Carletto recounted the last days of the war almost as a confession. He remembered the wild party at the Hotel Diana and the vengeful look on Pino’s face when he learned they were taking General Leyers to Austria. Carletto remained convinced that Leyers carried gold in his suitcase. He also admitted shooting the highwaymen as they tried to get away, broke down sobbing, and asked God’s forgiveness for the insanity of his acts.
Carletto died a few days later with Pino at his side.
After watching General Leyers drive away into Austria, Pino made it back to Milan and became Major Knebel’s guide in Italy for two weeks. The major refused to discuss Leyers, saying that those matters were top secret and the war was over.
But it wasn’t over for Pino. He was ravaged by grief and memory, his faith in constant peril, and dogged by questions no one could answer. Had General Leyers known Pino was a spy all along? Had everything he’d seen and heard while in Leyers’s company been deliberately shown to him so he could report to Uncle Albert and to the Allies through Baka’s radio?
Uncle Albert claimed to have been as surprised as Pino that Leyers had known his code name. His uncle and his parents were more concerned that Pino was still a target for reprisal. Their fears were justified. By the end of May 1945, thousands of Fascists and Nazi collaborators lost their lives in executions and vendetta killings across northern Italy.
At his family’s urging, Pino left Milan for Rapallo. He worked at odd jobs in the coastal town until late in the fall of that year. Then he returned to Madesimo, where he taught skiing and tried to come to terms with his tragedy in long discussions with Father Re. They talked of love. They talked of faith. They spoke of the crushing weight of their loss.
Pino prayed for help in the mountains, for relief from the constant grief and confusion and sadness. But Anna would not leave him. She was the memory of the best moments of his life—her smile, her smell, and the music of her laughter that kept playing in his ears. She was a damning force that swirled around him in the dark of night, accusatory, bitter, and demanding.
Someone tell them I’m just a maid.
Pino lived for more than two years in the dull haze of guilt and grief, blind to any kind of future, deaf to any words of hope. He walked for kilometers along the beaches in the summers, and he climbed in the Alps in the autumns before the snow fell in the cathedrals of God, and begged daily for forgiveness that never came. With every day that passed, though, Pino still believed that someone would come and ask him about General Leyers.
But no one did. Returning to Rapallo for a third summer in 1947, Pino was still trying to come to grips with his war experience, and still trying to deal with Anna’s ghost. He grieved the fact that she never told him her surname, or her married name, for that matter. He couldn’t even try to find her mother to tell her that her daughter had died.
It was as if Anna had never existed for anyone but him. She’d loved him, but he’d failed her. He’d been put in an impossible situation, and through his silence, he had denied knowing her, denied loving her. He’d had faith and been selfless in the Alps guiding the Jewish refugees and in his life as a spy, but he had been faithless and self-serving when faced with the firing squad.
The mental torture went on and on until, on one of those long beach walks where Anna still lived in his mind, Pino remembered her telling him that she didn’t believe much in the future, that she tried to live moment by moment, looking for reasons to be grateful, trying to create her own happiness and grace, and to use them as a means to a good life in the present and not a goal to be achieved some other day.
Anna’s words rang in Pino’s head, and for some reason, after all that time, they clicked and unlocked him somehow, made him admit he wanted more than to pine for her and to feel gutted for not trying to save her.
On that deserted beach, he ached for Anna one last time. But in his mind, his memories were not of her death, nor of her lifeless body on the colonnade floor, nor of the clown’s aria that taunted him in his faithless hours.
Instead, he heard Prince Calaf’s aria, “Nessun Dorma,” “None Shall Sleep,” playing in his head, and recalled snapshots of their strange falling in love: Anna outside the bakery the first day of the bombardment; Anna disappearing behind the trolley; Anna opening Dolly’s front door a year and a half later; Anna catching him in Dolly’s room with the general’s key; Anna taking his picture in the park by Lake Como; Anna acting drunk in front of the sentries on Christmas Eve; Anna naked and wanting him.
Hearing “None Shall Sleep” swell toward its crescendo, Pino looked out at the Ligurian Sea, and he thanked God for having had Anna in his life, even for so short and tragic a time.
“I still love her,” he told the wind and the sea where she’d been happiest. “I’m grateful for her. She was a gift that I’ll always treasure in my heart.”
Over the course of several hours, Pino felt the iron grip her spirit had on him ease, slip, and float away. When he left the beach, Pino vowed to put the war behind him, to never think again about Anna, General Leyers, Dolly, or the things he’d seen.
He would pursue happiness above all, and he would do so con smania.
Pino returned to Milan and for a time tried to find that happiness and passion by working for his parents. His gregarious personality returned, and he was a fine salesman. But Pino was restless in the city and happiest in the cathedrals of God, on foot and on skis. His alpine talents brought him in a roundabout way to become a coach and interpreter with the Italian National Ski Team that went to Aspen, Colorado, in 1950 for the first postwar world championships.
Pino went to New York first, and listened to jazz in a smoky nightclub and saw Licia Albanese, his cousin, sing soprano in Madama Butterfly under Toscanini’s direction at the New York Metropolitan Opera.
His first night in Aspen found him striking up a conversation and drinking with two men he met by chance in a bar. Gary was from Montana, and an avid skier. Hem had skied in Italy at Val Gardena, one of Pino’s favorite mountains.