‘Yes, Mama, the worst horrors are over, at least for us here in Italy. But later on I’ll tell you about the things I’ve seen among these Allies! I couldn’t wait to come back here and discuss them with all of you. There is no Marxist thinking among their intellectuals, and I’m talking about intellectuals, students like me: peculiar students, who specialize in only one field. Of course, Roosevelt is a great man, but similar to our old Antonio, a rose-water libertarian socialist. But the things I’ve seen among the young people! Inhibitions, discrimination, racial hatred. Just think: there was a certain Bob, whom I came to like — he was in the hospital with me — I didn’t find out until later that at night, despite his poor condition, he would go out with a group of guys to beat up any fellow soldier who was black. The first one they came across, he told me afterwards with an innocent, disarming air: ‘The first black mug we run into’… But that part of my past is over now, and though we shouldn’t be pessimistic, neither should we think — as most people unfortunately do — that with the end of Fascism, all will be well. In the year I spent in that hospital, Mama, I felt like I had gone from a real cell to a somewhat more spacious one, with enough food and a newspaper or two: a slightly more permissive cell, as Joyce once described Italy in comparison with Hitler’s Germany.’
* * *
‘… Twenty years, only to start all over again. The revolution did not happen. And it will be all we can do to get rid of the Savoia. There’s a price to pay for twenty years of ignorance and the regime. On my trip back, all through Italy I heard talk that would make you shudder. I’ve become convinced that we’ll pay for these years, all of them, day by day, hour by hour.’
‘If it weren’t for how happy I am to see you alive, Jacopo, I swear to God I’d start arguing with you again! But I don’t want to spoil my joy and Mama’s. Look at her, Mattia. She looks like a different person; she seems ten years younger! Come here, Jacopo, hug your brother Prando. Welcome back.’
As they clutch one another, motionless, there in the sun, a joy-filled silence emanates from their embrace. That silence must have a certain pull, because one by one, all the residents of Carmelo pause at the door, almost on tiptoe: Pietro, old Antonio, who takes off his glasses and concentrates on wiping them with a freshly laundered handkerchief, Argentovivo with little Beatrice in her arms, Crispina holding hands with Olimpia, pointing out her hero to her little friend, and other faces new to me, the faces of carusi who work in the fields with Mattia; among them is an elderly man with big blue eyes set among deep creases, holding little Carlo by the hand. The beauty of that old man’s face captures my gaze. Or maybe I’m looking for an unknown face so I won’t be overwhelmed by emotion? Even Bambolina clings to me tightly, like when she was a little girl and we would walk side by side on the sand, facing the sun and then wading through the morning’s silent waves. With water up to her chin she’d whisper: ‘Oh, Zia, I’m still too small. I can’t wait to grow up so I can get close to the sun like you.’
She isn’t talking about the sun now, and even though her arm encircles my waist as it did then, I don’t have to stoop to hear her.
‘Oh, Zia, in our joy we forgot about ’Ntoni. He’s disappeared! Let’s go look for him right away!’
Without a word we go looking for him, searching through the immense rooms, the vast corridors, up and down those endless stairs that, given the anxiety that comes over me, suddenly assume the fearful quality they had when I wandered through that intimidating house as a girl.
‘I knew it! He’s locked the door. Quick, Zia! Good thing I realized…’
‘Realized what, Bambù?’
‘That’s why I had him sleep in Uncle Jacopo’s room … Come on! I know a way to get into the room. Here, behind this painting there’s a passageway that leads to the big tapestry in there. Come on, help me take it down.’
Going from the darkness of the passage to the room’s dazzling light, all I can make out is a silhouette framed against the open window: one arm raised as if to greet someone down in the garden. I barely have time to turn to Bambolina and see her rush toward that arm. A shot makes me instinctively bring my hands to my ears and close my eyes.
‘Put down the gun, ’Ntoni! Give it to me; it’s over now! You could have shot me, did you know that? Shot your Bambù!’
Your Bambù must be a magical expression between the two of them since it has the effect of turning the laboured panting of that cornered animal into convulsive weeping, as ’Ntoni falls to his knees crying, ‘Oh no, no, Bambù! You? Never, I would never want to hurt you, never! I’m insane, a lunatic! A lunatic and a coward! I even left the door unlocked!’
‘You locked it, ’Ntoni, unfortunately you locked it. But your Bambù is cunning, sly as a fox. Remember how you used to call me your sly fox?’
‘Oh, yes, yes … How did you get in?’
‘There’s a secret door.’
‘I’m so ashamed, Bambù! Don’t tell anyone: I’m a coward! I want to die! You’re so beautiful, a good person like Mama. I don’t want to hurt you like I hurt her. She died because inside me I had rejected her … I had judged her, put her out of my life. I’m like my father. Mama was right: like my father, I destroy what I love most.’
‘’Ntoni, ’Ntoni…’
For a second I’m tempted to take a step toward him and tell him the truth: that he’s not to blame. But my knowledge is theoretical, and those young people must discover their lives on their own, through their own senses, their own language. Indeed, like blind men trying to see, they hug each other now, touching one another in silence.
Quietly, so they won’t hear me, I leave the room.
87
On the long journey back through the endless corridors, stairs and more stairs, the anxiety that I might lose Jacopo too in that other struggle he has withstood for years — against a gentle face framed by graceful curls — makes me tremble; he hasn’t mentioned Inès, hasn’t asked about her. Only when I return to the parlour, now rustling like a crowded theatre — the same murmuring, the same occasional voices interspersed with a few silvery notes of an instrument as someone tunes a guitar, a mandolin — only when I see Jacopo where I left him, no longer hugging Prando but Nina, does my anxiety subside. And my surprise at how little time has passed between the peace his return brought us and the war that erupted in ’Ntoni — and which perhaps lies invisibly coiled in Jacopo’s serene smile as well — gives way to the first mandolin player’s melody. It charms Prando, who throws his head back as he listens. At every event, big or small, Prando always demands music and his gaze becomes tender, distant. My scar throbs under my hair at the sight of the beauty of that absorbed head, the large head of an adult man. I can’t sit still; I’m better off going back to ’Ntoni. But as soon as I turn to leave, Prando grabs me by the waist.
‘Where is my mamma bambina running off to? Always running away, always full of mysteries! Or is it just that, however you may do your duty as a mother, you really can’t stand me, can you?’
He forces me to turn around. When I meet his gaze, now bold and scathing again, I realize that he can’t help it. He will always be that way: he loves me just as I love him. Could it be otherwise? The love between a mother and a son is the ultimate romantic melodrama, simply because it cannot be consummated.