WATTYS WINNER 2020
Two interconnected murders, 64 years apart. One woman's search for truth and identity.
Readers' comments: 'a masterpiece', 'impeccably written', 'amazing', 'superbly crafted page-turner', 'hauntingly beautiful', 'tremendous plot a...
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Image: an Italian soldier during World War Two
Plot reminder: Mary has traced her father, a man who has lived not under his real name of Vincenzo D'Ambra but that of his former best friend, Ettore Lo Bianco. He is now poised to recount to Mary and Lucio his story.
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Who was the prettiest girl in Punto San Giacomo?
It was a subject of no little debate amongst we boys of the village, at times even heated. Though other girls may occasionally have received a passing mention, a brief word of merit, the truth was that this was one of those sorts of races in which there were only ever two horses: Carmela Russo or Ada Pucci.
I was very much in the former camp. Whilst true that Ada Pucci was blessed by the more womanly physique, for the overall picture comprising grace, elegance and blessed alignment of facial contours, you would have been hard pushed to find a finer example of blossoming womanhood than Carmela Russo in the whole of the Province of Lecce, let alone Punto San Giacomo.
The spell cast by even the most ephemeral of glances in my direction was so powerful that I made and posted her a St Valentine's card. Though as tradition dictates the message was left unsigned, the fact that inside the card I had folded a lovingly crafted sketch of her own wondrous visage rather gave things away. I was the only boy in the village who drew.
By the time February had thawed into March, and without having received the merest hint of acknowledgement of my gesture, let alone a single word of gratitude for it, it was fair to say that for the first time in my life I had a deep and personal understanding of the concept of unrequited love.
It was a Sunday afternoon of the following April that my story truly begins. I was perched on the wall above the harbour, pencil seeking to capture the gentle bob of the trawlers there beneath, when Ada Pucci swayed suddenly across my line of vision. Would I care to do a sketch of her?The smile which accompanied the request was a strange and mischievous one, the sort which can provoke a disorientating fizz of fireworks inside both mind and stomach of a seventeen-year-old boy.
There was little I could do but oblige. And so there she sat, face tilted towards the spring sunshine, the Adriatic a sparkling crystalline frame behind her. "Magnificent," was her verdict after I showed her the fruits of my labour. "You're such a talented young man you know Vincenzo D'Ambra." That smile again. Oh, by now there was no mistaking it: I was being flirted with. "You should go to one of those fancy art schools up there in Rome or Milan," she continued. This one of those idle references to some grand but unachievable ambition which people in Punto San Giacomo often came out with. For us, the provincial capital of Lecce represented a vast and exotic metropolis. I'd never even been as far as the regional capital of Bari, and in truth had no great desire to, believing as I did that its sheer urban sprawl would be too dizzying, that I would only go and get myself lost, wind up in some dark alley of the kind it was advisable not to. As for Rome and Milan, these were cities of an entirely different planet. The idea of fisherman's son from Punto San Giacomo attending a fancy art school, meanwhile, belonged to some utopian parallel universe. My future was there right behind her shoulders - the languid swell of the Adriatic. On an afternoon such as that one, it seemed so benign, as harmless as an inland lake. At three a.m on a tempestuous November night, the darkness slapping diagonal jets of rain at your face, each incoming wave as looming as an alpine mountain top, it wasn't nearly as inviting. I'd served as junior hand on my father's trawler since finishing middle school at the age of fourteen. The following year, 1941, would see my eighteenth birthday and thus the start of my requisite two years of military service. I planned to save as much of my stipend as I could, upon my return see about making a down payment on my own trawler. This was my plan, the only one available to me.
