The Power of Five Oblivion

dripping on the wooden floor, aware that the rest of the family was still watching him. The man was angry, frustrated, but Giovanni held his ground, explaining what he had done. Eventually the man turned to Pedro.
    “You speak Spanish?” he asked. He was speaking fluent Spanish himself.
    “Yes.” Pedro nodded.
    “Are you from Spain?”
    “No. Peru.”
    The man was astonished by this. “I also speak your language,” he said. “A long time ago I used to be a professor of languages here at the university. That was before they closed it down. It is now used for housing. My name is Francesco Amati. You need to dry yourself.”
    He snapped at one of the women, who hurried into the next room, returning with a blanket which she draped over Pedro’s shoulders. Pedro folded it around himself. Meanwhile, Giovanni had stripped off his own shirt and was drying himself energetically with a tea towel.
    “I expect you are hungry,” Francesco said. “Giovanni tells me that you have been a prisoner for a long time. You can join us. Please, sit down.”
    It seemed that Giovanni had won the argument and now that the man had acknowledged it, the whole family was prepared to accept him. They shuffled aside to make space for Pedro at the table and he found himself being served warm soup and bread, which he wolfed down immediately. The soup was thin and the bread hard but after a month of prison rations, they tasted delicious.
    “We will tell you about ourselves,” Francesco said. “But first there are some things I must know about you. Your name is Pedro. Is that right? Why are you here in Naples?”
    “I didn’t mean to come here,” Pedro said between mouthfuls. He wasn’t sure how much to tell these people. It wasn’t just a question of whether he could trust them or not. It was simply that he wasn’t sure how much of his story they would believe. “I was taken prisoner in a church, or maybe a monastery, about thirty minutes away. They brought me here in a helicopter.”
    “Why?”
    “Because they think I can hurt them.”
    Giovanni said something in Italian and the older man muttered a few words in reply. “Can you hurt them?” he asked.
    “If I can find my friends. There are five of us…”
    A much older man on the other side of the table leant forward and spoke rapidly, in a low voice. Pedro heard the word “cinque” repeated several times. The Italian for five. He looked at the other people around the table: two women, two younger men, the children. They all looked similar and he guessed they were part of the same family but that wasn’t what united them. They were all survivors. There was nothing left for them in the outside world. Everything, for them, boiled down to these three rooms.
    The old man finished talking. Francesco turned back to Pedro. “I am Giovanni’s uncle,” he said. “His father was my brother but he is dead. This man –” he glanced at the man he had just been speaking to –”is my father. That is my wife, her sister and the two girls are her children. We are lucky because we still have this place to live in. My older brother, Angelo, works in the harbour, where he has a boat. He used to be a fisherman, but of course there are no longer any fish. And Giovanni is a kitchen boy at the Castel Nuovo, which is where they were keeping you. They treat him badly but he is able to bring home food and they also pay him, and it is only thanks to him that we can live.
    “At first I was angry that he brought you here. The police will be looking for you now. If they find you here, it will be the end of us all. But Giovanni tells me that he heard them talking about you. He said that they were afraid of you, that you were their enemy – and that is why he brought you to this place.”
    “Why are there so many people in this city?” Pedro asked. “What are they all doing in the streets…?”
    “They are refugees.” Francesco muttered to his wife and she rose from the table, returning with the pot that held the soup. She ladled out another bowl for Pedro. The children looked at the food longingly and Pedro felt a twang of guilt, knowing that they were being refused. “Naples is overrun by refugees,” Francesco went on. “They have come from the south of Italy, to avoid the floods, and from the far north because of the food shortages. There is fighting all over Eastern Europe and so they have escaped from Romania, Slovenia, Croatia – bringing everything they have with them in the