by Marco Rafalà
I had carved my place in a colorless world.
The next day, I hired a man who printed missing persons leaflets. All I had was a small, grainy portrait of my parents. Even this wasn’t mine. It belonged to Silvio. That Saturday, I took off from work and bought a bicycle. I pasted the leaflets on the walls of buildings all over the San Lorenzo district. On street corners, I shoved them into people’s hands like a mad beggar. Each weekend, I covered the walls of different districts and stood on busy corners. But always the reactions of the people were the same. The men with their evasive eyes and coarse temperaments shooed me away like a stray dog. The women left in a hurry, saying, “Sorry, I can’t help you.” Children took the leaflets and held them out to their mothers, crying, “Read it for me, Mamma.” But the mothers gathered their little ones and left without a word. They shied away from me, reluctant to take the paper I pushed at them, as if accepting it meant they accepted responsibility for the war and all the terrible things that happened because of it.
But in war as in peacetime, man committed terrible acts all the time. He could be a ferocious animal if he had to be, and sometimes he had to be. That was nature, nothing more. No more aberrant for a man than the duties of motherhood for a woman.
My search for my parents reminded them that we were a beaten people. It exposed their fears that perhaps this had been our fate from the beginning. But the blame, the blame was not ours. Our disasters in Sicily and Greece, and in other places, rested with our leaders. Their strategy and planning had been poor. Mussolini’s goals were vain goals, not glorious ones.
This was not to say that a man with honorable intentions always won out. Fortune played her part in a man’s life, too. She was the squall and the calm, the fickle mistress and the unrequited love. You could never stop chasing her, never bear parting ways with her.
The odds were against me ever finding my parents. My heart knew this. Every beat was a beat closer to accepting a life without answers. My dream of a Rome with my parents still in it was just that, a dream. I could never know the price for their troubles.
Yet my belief in my own infallibility kept me searching. Vincere, e vinceremo. To win, and we shall win! It was a fool’s marriage of force and passion. The notion that a man could bend the arc of destiny to his will by brute strength alone.
As it turned out, Fortune had other ideas for me.
9
If you could stand untouched by the passage of time around you on a balcony overlooking the walls of a playground in the San Lorenzo district, you would first see a fraternity of boys gathered in the sweet comfort of youth. You might even see me, shy at first and quiet, a mouse of a boy with no friends to call his own. In time, I’d push my shyness down the well of my heart and hide it from the world behind ramparts of false bravado. I’d rule that field with fear and violence until I was no longer allowed back. When I next returned, I would return in the uniform of the Balilla. You might not notice me at first among the camaraderie of uniformed children. We would march in fraternal lockstep, clutching rifles to swelled chests.
From your balcony outside of time, you would see Allied bombs hit the neighborhood in 1943. Afterward, on that damaged field, a mass of frantic civilians would congregate. Perhaps you would see my parents there, consoled by the Pope himself with trucks of food and water.
In another year, one hot July night, I pedaled past that empty playground near the café. I wonder if you would recognize the children from the playground in the men who rushed at me from the shadows. They knocked me down off my bicycle. My bad knee struck the cobblestones, then my shoulder, and then the bicycle fell on top of me.
“What do you want?” I shouted.
And they answered with the shoes on their feet.
I covered my face with my arms and begged, “Please, stop.”
One of the men held something long in his hands. He raised it against me. I heard the whoosh of air as the object came down and connected with my head. Then the world went black.
Sunlight glowed around the edges of a window shade, drawn and yellowed. My head throbbed. I tried sitting up, but the pounding in my head grew worse, and a sharp pain shot through my left side. It was sore to the touch. I took short, staggered breaths.
“You’re awake,” said a woman at the door. “Don’t try to move,” she said. Then she placed a cold, damp towel on my forehead.
In the dim light, I saw her curls falling around her face and shoulders and around the delicate lines of her mouth.
“Where am I?”
“You’re safe now,” she said. “Here, drink this.”
She tilted the smooth rim of a glass of water against my lips. I swallowed a sip, and then another, until it seemed like I’d drunk the ocean dry.
“I know you,” I said. “How do I know you?”
“My name is Maria,” she said. Then she pulled up a chair beside the bed and sat down. “What do you remember?”
I told her about the house, and that was when I remembered how I knew her. “You were right,” I said. “The city, it is still dangerous.” Then I let her know how my parents went missing, my search for them, and the strangers who attacked me.
Maria crossed the room to where my jacket hung from a hook on the back of the door. She pulled the folded map of Sicily from the pocket. “You were stationed here,” she said. Then she flattened out the map and handed it to me. “I lost my husband in the war. I didn’t want to believe it at first, but I knew it had happened even with him so far away in Africa, I knew. It sounds crazy, but I felt the bullet that took him from me.” Maria held her hands over her stomach and said, “This is where they shot him. I felt it here like a piece of darkness slipping into my blood.”
“It’s not crazy,” I said. “I envy you, Maria. I learned the hard way.”
She pulled her hands away from her belly. “I think I have some eggs left. It’s almost noon. You must be hungry.”
“Thank you,” I said. “But I should be getting back to the café. Silvio must be worried sick.”
“Stay,” she said. “Rest until you are better. It’s no trouble.”
When Maria returned, she propped my head up with pillows and set a tray on my lap. She brought me two hard-boiled eggs and a cup of black coffee. “I hope you don’t mind,” she said. “Milk is hard to come by these days.”
“I don’t know if I even remember the taste,” I said with a half smile. But a smile like that was no smile at all. A smile was only true in the whole face, in the eyes. A person became a lighthouse that way.
She took my hand in hers and said, “Eat. Life will get better. You’ll see. Soon we will be swimming in milk.”
“We can only go up from here,” I said. And for a moment, our faces lit up and pierced a hole in the blackness brought on by the howling gale of war. For a moment, she was a beacon on that dark coast and I, I was her keeper.
Maria left to find Silvio at the café and tell him what had happened. Alone, I spread the map out on the tray in front of me-the map I had taken from the young German’s pack, the one I had killed. I traced its creases with my fingers, felt the way the paper curled as if it were trying to find the curve of the land. A water stain darkened the mountains around Palermo. My faded bloody thumbprint smudged the topography of one of Sicily’s smaller island neighbors. Penciled lines guessed the routes of armies. This map, it was my skin.
My hands tremored in regret like the land in the aftershock of an earthquake. I reached for a pen in the drawer of the bedside table. On the reverse side of the map, I wrote the names of my parents: Carlo Giordano and Anna Giordano. They had wanted nothing more for their son than for him to desert the army, to live. But he stayed when he should’ve run, ran when he should’ve stayed. He was a coward, two times. In Rome. In Melilli. And that cowardice had a cost.
The room spun like I’d just returned home from a night of heavy drinking. I placed one foot on the floor to keep me anchored, keep me from spinning into sickness. Then I added the German names: Krause
and his two men, Lang and Vogel. And I pressed on with even more names, the names of the Italian men at Noto and Adrano, the men who stayed and fought.
All those names, each one, it seemed had settled in the bones and around the damaged cartilage of my knee. All those names, each one a fracture, a crack, a torn ligament. I had the knee of an old man now. It ached, a bottomless pain, an old man’s weather-forecasting knee. It sensed a change in temperature, a cold front moving in.
All those names, and this pain, they were the terms of a debt I now owed.
10
That afternoon, Silvio closed the café for an hour and paid me a visit. He had a board for dama Italiana-Italian checkers-tucked under his arm, and he carried the red and black pieces in a brown paper bag. He set up the game on the mattress and said, “You gave me a scare this morning. At first, I thought you overslept, but when I checked your room . . .” His voice trailed off.
Maria set down two coffee cups on the bedside table. When she left, Silvio shook a limp hand in the air and whistled. “You have a nice view in here,” he said. “Better than the hospital.”
“They’re not coming back,” I said. “My parents.”
Silvio patted my hand. “At least you’re okay,” he said. “That’s what counts. That’s what they would’ve wanted.” Then he pulled on his hairy earlobe and said, “Well, let’s play.”
In the evening, Maria insisted on sleeping on the sofa in the other room. I felt too tired to disagree but made a half-hearted protest in a show of good manners. She wouldn’t hear of it-“It’s no trouble,” she kept repeating-so I gave in after a few minutes, satisfied that I’d made the proper effort, and expressed my gratitude for her kindness.
Her bedroom was long and narrow with one east-facing window, offering warm bright light in the mornings. Dust fell from cracks in the gray plaster walls when the occasional truck rumbled down the street. A menagerie of elegant wood carvings of giraffes, lions, donkeys, and gazelles with long curved horns stood on her dresser.
Maria doted on me the entire week I spent recuperating at her apartment. She sat with me for coffee in the mornings before leaving for her secretarial job at the local Catholic school, came home for the lunch hour, prepared our meal, and ate beside the bed. She even helped me to the bathroom down the hall like someone’s invalid grandfather. And in that week, the loss connecting us grew. It united us like two flies trapped on flypaper. She confided in me about Arnaldo, her barrel-chested husband, her clumsy giant-a carpenter’s apprentice by trade-who carved those little wooden animals as gifts for her birthday. I told her about my skinny father, always reading a book when he wasn’t working at the brewery, and my round little mother’s love of cooking. And I spoke about Sicily, about Raphael and the cave, the statue and the customs that gave them strength. Even with nothing, lives carved by the agency of outside powers, they were stronger than us.
Our common loss bound us up in shared nightmares confessed to the cracks in the plaster walls in the middle of the night. I slept light in this strange bed without my pack stowed underneath. So when Maria woke in the other room from a bad dream, I woke, too. I heard the startled cry caught in her throat and pictured her bolting upright on the sofa, clutching her pounding chest. I heard the sighing, the pillow fluffing, and the stifled sobbing. Sometimes she came to the bedroom door and put her ear to the wood, listening for my breath, for the assurances my breathing gave her.
The following week, when I got back on my feet, back to work at the café and the little room I rented from Silvio, I began seeing Maria. It started that first night after work. She walked through the door as I prepared the café for closing. I looked up from my broom at her smile and shapely form, worn down by war and poverty. Dark bags hung under her eyes, and worry lines creased her forehead. She reminded me of an ancient Roman statue, her sober beauty disfigured by time and the elements but still breathtaking like those marble women from antiquity.
“I wanted to check in,” she said. “See how you were doing.”
“Are you hungry?” I leaned the broom against the corner. Then I poured a glass of wine Silvio bought from the priest down the street and set the bottle and the glass on a nearby table. “Here,” I said. “Sit, sit.” I pulled the chair out for her.
From the cupboard, I took the dandelion greens Silvio had found growing in a bombed-out lot on his way to the café that morning. I soaked them in a bowl of water, fished them out, and sautéed them in olive oil in a skillet on the hot plate, adding garlic and the leftover spaghetti from my dinner.
“You didn’t have to go to all this trouble,” Maria said.
“It’s no trouble,” I said. I lit a candle on the table and poured myself a glass of wine. We sat in the café for hours with the night swirling around us, and it was like it had been those days in her room while I was getting better. We were together and that was enough.
Maria stayed with me that night. I hadn’t been with a woman since just before I left Rome for the war. She reminded me how nature made bodies for more than just pain.
I woke in a sweat in the middle of the night, confused. I tore the covers away from me, reached under the bed, fumbled for my pack. But then I heard Maria’s voice, shushing me. “You had a bad dream,” she said. She took me into her arms and we slept until the sun pushed through the slats in the shutters.
11
News of the liberation of Florence that August and of the heavy fighting along the Apennines in the north gave Maria hope that soon our country would be whole again. Whole and at peace.
Women sought the lie of peace to build their nests. But it was men who struggled to make those nests possible. For a man, life was war. Even if all the nations of the world no longer fought against each other, you could not rid life of conflict. Men existed cut off from the promises of a world at peace. Sicilian women understood this lie, and that made them as dangerous as a man with a gun and the passion to fire it. Their hearts were just as guarded as their men’s, bound in tradition and fixed in soil. And that is who they would always be, no matter who won this war or the next to come.
I had walked in lockstep with Rome. I had carried a plague of men with tanks and guns to foreign shores. And for what? It was only a matter of time now. Soon this disastrous war would come to an end and Maria would inhale the opium of peace. What then? If I stayed, I became just another small man fighting for a nest to come home to. For the comfort of a woman’s lie.
As summer passed into autumn, and autumn into winter, I saw my parents at every turn. Each face I passed on the street, I searched, wondering, Was it you who my parents protected? You they tried saving because I had refused? The ghosts of the city haunted me in the daylight hours and in the long hours of sleepless nights, imagining the ways the Fascists tortured my parents. The images wouldn’t stop. Even in my dreams the pictures found me, flickering in grainy black-and-white newsreel fashion. My mother’s voice begging for mercy. My father’s begging for my mother’s life. And always the dream ended on the dirty face of Raphael’s boy with his pants down around his ankles, defecating behind the prickly pears. He was the face of yet another path I had not taken. Not even Maria beside me, not the touch of her skin or the melody of her voice or the strength of her words, could stop these shadows.
Spring bloomed in Rome. Sheets of white linen fluttered high above narrow streets on ropes strung between buildings. Flower sellers pushed their carts of mimosas and sweet-scented violets through the cobblestone maze. We heard rumors that the war for Italy would be over soon. Any day now. Perhaps, even tomorrow.
Word finally came on the breath of our black-market delivery boy. It was near the end of April when he burst into the café shouting the news of Mussolini’s capture and execution by partisans in the north. The café erupted with cheers. Men and women jumped up from their stools, shouting and crying and hugging one another. Silvio dusted off a bottle of red wine from behind the counter. “It will be over soon,” he said, as he pulled the cork out and held it, wet, up to h
is nose.
As sure as Maria was thinking of me when she heard the news, my thoughts turned to Raphael and his family in Melilli, those simple people who had stayed with me so long. I bore their memory like a tree bore fruit. Did they celebrate the death of this man the way these people in Rome celebrated? I imagined the people of Melilli treated today with more reverence. Today, in Melilli, the feast day for their saint came early. In my mind, Raphael carried the statue with the other bearers. They carried it out of the church to the fevered cries of the men and women and their children who crowded the piazza with hands thrown in the air, crying and asking Saint Sebastian to pray for them so that some small fortune might one day bless their families. The bearers carried the statue down dusty streets by all the little houses and down into the lower parts of the village around the old cemetery and back again to the piazza where they had started. The dust they raised-like a little storm cloud-following those men wherever they went.
The delivery boy tapped my arm for a sip of wine. He held my cup with both hands and drank from it and gave it back empty and ran outside.
“Your shoe,” I said, standing at the door. “Tie up your laces.”
He knelt down and tied his shoe. He smiled up at me through the legs of men and women spilling out from their homes, crying and talking about the death of Il Duce. Then the boy darted off, disappearing into the crowd of children playing in the street. But still I heard him, and the news, for good or ill I could not say, carried by his boyish, squeaky voice.
When you finish the game, the king and the pawn end up in the same box. This was something my father told me often growing up, and it stuck in the back of my mind now as I waited for the end.
12
That night, Maria and I stumbled up to my room and fell into each other’s arms. She was drunk on wine and possibility. Some men cried under the influence but not me, not this man. He was always a happy drunk, content to forget himself. My tears were a vestige of lees at the bottom of a bottle. When the smell of brewed espresso woke me in the morning, my mouth felt dry and my head thick from the wine the night before. Maria was up, sitting at her favorite table in the back by the bar. I sat down across from her, sipped the steaming cup of coffee, and watched her read the paper. She held a finger under the words and her lips moved while she read. Her eyes narrowed and her brow creased as if she’d just found the keys to the secrets of the world buried somewhere in the newsprint. I opened the rolling shutters and squinted against the thin morning light. The streets were still, like the quiet after a storm.