When your husband finds out he'll be furious but so far we've escaped detection. We're a pair of littermates and when we're together we're alert and quiet. "Tell the bishops I'm not doing this for the Church, I'm doing it for Italy," said the printer Luigi Brizi in 1943 when he finally agreed (after deep deliberation) to the priest's request to print hundreds of fake identity cards for the Jews hiding in the San Quilico covent in Assisi. As for us, we're not doing it for ourselves but for the world, it's our civic duty to be together, to contribute all we can to the world's dwindling supplies of felicity. For love makes heroes of us all but love is the true hero. It finds us and brings us sweetly to life. I fantasize that under the most unspeakable tortures I would steadfastly refuse to reveal your identity. And if we're caught and hanged we'll die smiling like that famous photo we were talking about an hour before it appeared on the TV screen. Two Polish kids who'd been taking pot shots at the Germans. The girl had been hanged, you could see her smiling, dead. The boy, looking at her, smiling, the noose being placed over his head. Better world to come. At thirty-two Gino Battaglia was already called Il Vecchio ("The Old Bozo") because he'd lost his title as champion of all Italy to someone ten years younger. It was Il Vecchio who stuffed the photos and papers down the frame of his bicycle and rode again and again between San Quilico and Luigi's shop in San Damiano, and each time he did he passed a series of German checkpoints. The Germans laughed as he rode by, east with the photos, west with the cards, they thought he was in training, desperate to win his title back. And he was too, and he did win it back after the war. In fact he went on to win the Tour de France.

I know you'll forgive my disdain for poetic subtlety if I state that I am those fake identity cards, you are that Italian racing bike, your husband is one of those German sentries, the tall one with the grim smile, anxious to know your racial origin, and Il Vecchio is our love.
 

After Alexander Ramanti's The Assisi Underground.