The Children's Train

by Viola Ardone

  “Really? The boy who used to steal apples from Capajanca’s cart at Piazza del Mercato and run away with his haul . . .”

  “Maybe that’s exactly why,” Maddalena says. “He works with kids. He works in the juvenile courts, with probations. He’s helped me out a few times. I was an elementary school teacher for years in a neighborhood where many of the kids’ parents were either in jail or at large . . . whenever I needed help, or advice, I would always ask him.”

  Maddalena pauses, makes an anguished face, leans over to check on the boy in the kitchen, takes another sip of the sweet yellow liqueur, and then starts again.

  “It was easier in the old days. There used to be the Party, there were the comrades, the men and women who were fellow cardholders. There’s nothing left now. If you want to do something good, you need to do it on your own, with no support from anyone else. There used to be Party cells, which organized activities for children, neighborhood by neighborhood, keeping them off the streets. Now only the church is helping . . . I’m not against it, the priests do no harm. In fact, they often do a lot of good. But it’s not politics. I don’t know whether I’m saying this right. What I mean is, it’s charity, and that’s different.”

  “History moves on; things change,” I say.

  “History moves on, but some things should stay the same. The idea of solidarity. Do you remember? Sol-i-dar-i-ty . . .”

  “What about the blond Communist? The one who was flirting with you.”

  “Who, Guido? Flirting with me? We were all comrades at the time. We were involved in so much stuff, we didn’t think about love at all. At least, I didn’t.”

  “Maybe you didn’t, but he did . . . I remember how he looked at you the day we left. When I saw him up at Party headquarters, he looked like a tortured soul. He was arguing with two or three other men, then, when he saw you, he was completely transformed . . .”

  “Poor Guido!” Maddalena sighed. “He was expelled from the Party in the end. A sad story. He went to live in another city and abandoned politics altogether. Then he became a college professor, but something inside him was broken. He was never the same again. With me, too. We were fond of each other, not like you mean, but we liked each other. Anyway, we had lost our connection.”

  Maddalena shakes her head, and a lock of silver-white hair falls over her eyes.

  “Well, it wasn’t all good, to be honest,” she continues. “It was great, because I was twenty years old and because I was in love with the idea. But there were bad things, too. There were some people who were in love with themselves and nothing else. Ideals took second place. Or came last.”

  Maddalena reaches out across the coffee table and takes my hand. There are brown liver spots on the back of hers and on her fingers.

  “You know about all this. You were helped, you studied, you became a revered musician, you had opportunities. You are a respectable gentleman now, and you appreciate that it is worth it, being active in society is worth it, even though it is never enough, and it is never completely right. Whatever we can do, we must do.”

  I take my hand out of her clasp and sit there in silence. A revered musician, a respectable gentleman. I’m not sure I recognize myself in Maddalena’s description.

  “Maddalena, I understand what you are saying, and I am flattered, believe me. But my life is what it is. I am what I am. I’m over fifty. You chose not to have kids of your own and to look after other people’s; I chose to devote my life to music. We all make our own choices. The kid has a father already. I had to go and find myself one.”

  Maddalena looks at me with a new face, one that is not inscribed in my memories.

  “You don’t get to choose everything. Some choices are forced on you by others . . .”

  “Why are you telling me this, Maddalena? You are talking to a boy who was put on a train at the age of seven . . . On one side, there was my mother. On the other, everything I ever wanted: a family, a home, a room of my own, warm food, my violin. A man willing to give me his name. I was helped. A great deal, it’s true. But I was also terribly ashamed. Hospitality, solidarity, as you say, leaves a bitter taste behind on both sides. Those who give, and those who receive. That’s why it’s so difficult. I dreamed of being like everyone else. I wanted them to forget where I came from and why. I gained a lot, but I paid the full price for it and I gave up a lot, too. Imagine, I’ve never told anyone my story.”

  “I haven’t told anyone my story, either. Who do you take me for?”

  Maddalena glares at me. For a second, I have no idea why, Zandragliona’s story flashes through my mind; the one where Teresinella was shooting from the terrace, her whole body shaking with every shot.

  “I had gotten pregnant when I was seventeen. The father was a kid like me and didn’t want to know. They took me to an aunt’s in the countryside for the whole pregnancy. My father was scared of being expelled from the Party if anyone found out. After the baby was born, they took her away. They took her away in secret, without telling me. I woke up one morning, bursting with milk, and she wasn’t there.”

  Teresinella’s body when she stops shooting and stops shaking; Maddalena’s eyes looking for her baby girl and not finding her. Her words register incredibly slowly, as if their function is to retrace her whole life, from the morning she woke up with her breasts engorged to this moment, and to stretch out time in order to close the gap of all the years that have gone by.

  Maddalena starts smiling again, as if it’s an old habit she can’t avoid, and I recognize her once again.

  “What I couldn’t do for her,” she declares, “I did for others.”

  45

  MADDALENA WALKS ME TO THE DOOR. THE boy follows her, clinging to her side, his hands behind his back. I try to avoid his eyes. Maddalena suddenly brings her hand to her forehead and rolls her eyes. She says she was about to forget something important. She leaves the boy and me alone in the narrow entrance for a few minutes. I’m tired and eager to get back to my hotel. I can’t stop thinking about the little body stolen from her mother.

  The boy and I exchange looks, listening to the sounds coming from the living room, without speaking. Then the boy pulls his hand out from behind his back and produces the two sheets of paper. On one, there’s his portrait of Maddalena as a young woman; on the other, there’s me. I take it and look at it. He has drawn a pink oval with two little blue circles in it, reddish hair, and a downward-curving red mouth. I look at it, puzzled.

  “It’s you,” he says. “I made you younger, too, is that okay?”

  I look at it close up, and then from a distance, pretending to observe it in great detail to appreciate all its features. I don’t know what the boy expects of me. I hazard a comment.

  “Why have I got a parrot on my shoulder?”

  “What parrot? That’s your violin; Nonna Antonietta said you’d had it since you were a kid.”

  The scene of me looking under the bed and finding nothing flashes before my eyes. The boy watches me closely. Maybe he wants me to tell him the story. Kids always want stories. But I don’t know how to tell this one. I fold the picture and put it in my pocket.

  “Thank you” is all I say.

  The boy shrugs and acts superior, as if he has given me a great gift and received nothing in exchange.

  “I know a lot about you,” the boy says slyly. “My nonna told me.”

  “Did Nonna talk to you about me?”

  “She kept all the newspaper cuttings about you.”

  “That’s not true. She’s never even heard me play.”

  “Once we saw you on TV. She bought the set specially so she could see you.” He looks at me, gauging the effect of his words. “You’re famous.”

  “Do you like that I’m famous?”

  The boy shrugs again, and curls up his mouth. I’m unable to decipher his answer.

  “Will you teach me one day?”

  “What do you want me to teach you?”

  “To be famous.”

  “
Okay . . . we’ll see . . .”

  “Then I can go on TV, too.”

  “Maddalena, I need to get going . . .”

  “Here we go!” Maddalena returns with a yellowing photograph and places it on the table. “Here it is! I was sure it was here. Yessir . . .!”

  The photo was taken in front of the Reclusorio, the hospice for the poor. Maddalena is in the center, with a few other young women her age. Next to her are the blond Communist and Comrade Maurizio, who later became mayor.

  Surrounding them is a group of children, some with their mothers, others without. Maddalena touches all the faces that time has meanwhile transformed, some of them unrecognizably. Her thin fingers, with their close-cut, clean nails, trace the rows of faces one by one, as if she were reading, until they finally pause on a face. A little boy with big eyes that look gray in the black-and-white photo, standing next to his mother, who is young and beautiful, with high cheekbones and long, raven-black hair, braided and pinned up. Her lips are fleshy but deadly serious; they do not part in a smile. You can see she didn’t know what to do with her hands, out of embarrassment at being photographed, so she had put one hand on the boy’s shoulder. In fact, the boy was turning to look at her, surprised by the unfamiliar gesture.

  I look at myself in the photo. Then I look at you. We are both standing there, both looking unsettled, just before we are separated.

  “Remember to go and say ‘hi’ to Tommasino before you leave,” Maddalena says at the door when I finally manage to get out onto the stairs. I don’t answer her, but I do turn around one last time because I know I’ll never see her again and I am overtaken by a feeling of anticipation of nostalgia. The boy’s head appears from behind her. He doesn’t say anything; he just looks at me with a disappointed expression on his face, as if I’m an imposter; someone who has failed to keep their side of the bargain. What was this boy expecting from me? And what could I do for him, in any case? Money, gifts, a letter every now and again? I remember all the times I hadn’t kept my side of the bargain and had found it easier to run away, rather than live up to the promise.

  46

  I WALK BACK DOWN THE SAME STREET THE THREE of us came up on. The market sellers have taken down their makeshift stalls, and the street looks twice as wide as before. It is also less sweltering. A cool breeze, carrying the scent of the sea, is picking up, a reminder that the sea is close by even when it is out of sight.

  I don’t feel like going back to my hotel. I’m not hungry, either. I can’t tell whether I miss you and I haven’t yet worked out what form missing you will take. We have gotten used to missing each other; all these years have been a series of missed appointments. As if, from the moment you put me on that train, we had traveled along two different tracks, which never crossed again. But now what is missing is irretrievable, and I know I will never meet you again. I worry that our whole life has been a mix-up, a miscommunication between you and me. A love made up of misunderstandings.

  There’s not a soul left on the street; an unnatural silence has fallen. All I can hear are the out-of-tune blasts of a stadium horn in the distance and a few firecrackers going off. The storekeepers on Via Toledo are hastily rolling down their shutters, so that they can rush home and watch the match. I take one of the narrow streets back up into the Spanish Quarter. Halfway up, on the right, there’s a cobbler’s workshop. He’s not closing, and he’s in no hurry. He sits in the small, dark cavern, piled high with shoes that need repairing or resoling. I peer inside and realize I could ask the old man behind the counter whether he might be able to help me, given that my shoes are still hurting. The old man tells me to sit down on a stool and take my shoes off. I do as he says, sitting in my socks and looking around. The cobbler picks my shoes up one at a time, inspects them from every possible angle, and then looks at my feet. I wiggle my toes inside my socks, as if they’re wild animals in a cage. Without saying a word, signaling to me to wait, he disappears into a back room. He returns with an object in his hand in the shape of a wooden foot attached to a handle with a big black screw. I watch the old man with bated breath, as if he were about to cast a magic spell. He slips the stretcher into my right shoe and cranks the handle once, twice, three times. Then he pulls it out and repeats the same operation with the left shoe. Last, he dips his brush in shoe wax, polishes the shoes to a mirror shine, and puts them down in front of me. I look at him as if to say, “Is that it?” The old man stands there, waiting for me to put my shoes back on. When I stand up, the shoes are no longer rubbing against my heels. I take a step, and then another. It’s unbelievable. The old man, who hasn’t said a word all this time, finally speaks.

  “All feet are different, every single one has its own shape. You need to indulge your feet, otherwise all of life is suffering.”

  I thank him and ask how much it is.

  “Nothing, it was a cinch,” the cobbler answers, waving his hand in the air and disappearing back into his cavern. I start walking back to my hotel, my step springier, my head higher. Anyone who saw me walk by right now would think I was a man without a care in the world.

  47

  WHEN I OPEN MY EYES, IT IS STILL DARK. I toss and turn in my bed, but I am unable to get back to sleep. So I get up and go out onto the balcony. I look out at the horizon and see the first hint of light in the sky. I never liked dawn. Dawn makes me think of restless nights, unsettling dreams, emergencies, early morning flights to foreign cities. For me, every city is foreign.

  I go into the shower and stay under the spray for a long time. Then I get dressed in light pants and a white shirt, with no jacket. I put my socks and shoes on, taking the Band-Aids from my bedside table, and then putting them back again. I go back into the bathroom and look at myself in the mirror. I stand there staring at my reflection, as if I’m seeing it for the first time. The eyes are the same. They have never changed. That deep blue, which came from who knows where? Maybe from that mysterious father, enamored of America, who left me nothing but my name, and then promptly ran away. Your eyes were black, like your hair and your eyebrows, which were delicate and distinct, almost as if they had been drawn with charcoal. I was just a child, but I knew you were beautiful. Not beautiful in a way a boy would see his mother. I had a feeling that men liked you. I could feel their eyes on you as you walked by, and I could hear their words loaded with innuendo. When I was born, you were so young. You had lost both your parents: your father in action and your mother under an air raid. You survived, and were left all on your own. You started taking in sewing in order to get by; a little mending here, a little repairing there. You never wanted to ask anybody for help. The men in your life left you nothing but children. What have you left me? What do I have left of you? Perhaps your way of looking askance at life, always a little suspicious of the hidden catch. And that taciturn air. I was such a chatterbox as a child, but now, in my maturity, now that I am twice the age you were then, I have ended up resembling you. Talking is no longer my strong point. The childhood ingenuousness has turned into a mask of cynicism, and the frankness has become an ease with lying.

  The hotel breakfast is not being served yet, so I decide to go to the café. There’s time. It is still early. I walk along the seafront to Piazza del Plebiscito. I feel less like a tourist today, but not yet a native of the city. Maybe this is my fate: always to be someone who has returned.

  I stop at a cake shop on Via Toledo that hasn’t changed since my day. It is exactly as I remember it, with shelves the color of sugar paper in the windows, the steady stream of sfogliatella pastries coming out of the ovens in the back room, filling the sidewalk with the fragrance of vanilla and wildflowers. The man behind the counter is old, his eyes an indefinite color, as if they had faded over the years; the little gray hair he has left combed back with pomade. I desperately try to tether that face, those eyes, that way of talking, to my memories. It was here that Tommasino and I used to come with the few lire we could get from Pachiochia and share one pastry, as if it was the most extraordinary thing
in the world. Before I left, so many things seemed exceptional.

  I sit at a table, lapped by a single ray of sun, and enjoy my pastry. I could be another person right now: an accountant, an office worker, a shoe repairer, a doctor. I pay the bill and set off on foot.

  The juvenile court is a squat red building with a gray fence around it up in the hilly area of the city. I ask the doorman, who is short, and with a single strand of hair combed over his pate, where Justice Saporino’s office is.

  “Justice Saporino . . .” the doorman repeats, stroking his almost bald head. “He receives only by appointment. Do you have an appointment?”

  “I don’t need an appointment,” I say, unexpectedly recovering some of the bravado of my youth. “Just tell him my name: Amerigo Speranza.”

  The small man is dubious. He would like to send me away, but suspects I may be someone important he hasn’t recognized. Unwilling to be held responsible, he picks up the phone and dials the required number, just in case. The phone rings a few times before a voice answers. The doorman says my name and holds on for a few seconds. Long enough for the judge’s memory on the other end of the phone to conjure up an image of me and him, when we were at least two feet shorter and our hair was a different color.

  “You can go up, third floor,” the short man with the comb-over says, sincerely incredulous.

  I walk quickly over to the elevator, while the doorman leans out of his glass booth, trying to work out who he was dealing with.

  When Tommasino opens the door and finds me standing there in front of him, we can read the time that has gone by in our eyes. There is no need to synchronize the past with the present. It is as though the years that have stood between my escape on the train and his opening this door had simply never existed, as if they were a momentary hiatus between two contiguous or extremely close events. A parenthesis filled with things for both of us, good and bad; a lifetime’s parenthesis that is irrelevant in the story of our friendship.