They left Merlo on his knees, his face against the brick floor, trying to vomit, but his nose had been held shut long enough for the potion to make its way into the lower reaches of his stomach.
That evening, on his return, my dear grandfather was more radiant than Amalia had ever seen him before. And it seems that Merlo was so shaken up that even after September 8-when the king asked for an armistice and fled to Brindisi, Il Duce was liberated by the Germans, and the Fascists returned-he did not go to Sal to join Mussolinis new Italian Social Republic, but stayed home instead and worked in his garden. He too must be dead by now, the wretched man, Amalia said, and she thought that even had he wanted to avenge himself by telling the Fascists, he had likely been so terrified that night that he would have been unable to recall the faces of those men who had entered his house-and who knows how many others he had made drink oil? "Some of them folks must have kept an eye on him all them years, too, and I reckon he gulped down more than one little bottle, Im telling you and you can believe it, and thats the sort of business that can make a man lose his taste for politics."
That, then, is who my grandfather was, and it explained those underlined newspapers and Radio London. He was waiting for the turn.
I found a copy, dated July 21, of a paper in which the end of the regime was hailed, in a single exultant message, by the Democratic Christian Party, the Action Party, the Communist Party, the Socialist Party, and the Liberal Party. If I saw that, and surely I did, I must have instantly understood that for those parties to come out of the woodwork overnight meant they had existed before, underground, somewhere. Perhaps that was how I began to understand what democracy was.
My grandfather also kept broadsheets from the Republic of Sal, and one of them, Il Popolo di Alessandria (what a surprise! there was Ezra Pounds byline!), contained vicious cartoons against the king, whom the Fascists hated not only for having had Mussolini arrested but also for having asked for an armistice before fleeing South to join the hated Anglo-Americans. The cartoons were also furious with his son, Umberto, who had followed him. They depicted the two in perpetual flight, kicking up little clouds of dust, the king short, nearly a dwarf, and the prince tall as a beanpole, the one nicknamed Stumpy Quickfoot and the other the Fairy Heir. Paola told me I had always favored republics, and it seems I received my first lesson from the very people who had made the king emperor of Ethiopia. The ways of providence, as they say.
I asked Amalia if my grandfather had told me the story of the oil. "Why of course! First thing the next day. He was tickled pink! He sat on the edge of your bed as soon as you woke up, told you all of it and showed you the bottle."
"And what did I do?"
"And you, Signorino Yambo, I remember it like it was yesterday, clapped your hands and yelled Hooray, Grandpa, youre better than gudn."
"Than gudn? What was that?"
"How should I know? But thats what you was yelling, like it was yesterday."
It was not gudn, but Gordon. I was celebrating in my grandfathers act the revolt of Gordon against Ming, tyrant of Mongo.
13. The Pallid Little Maiden
____________________
I had followed my grandfathers adventure with all the enthusiasm of a reader of comic books. But in my chapel collections there was nothing between the middle of 1943 and the end of the war. Only, from 1945, the strips I had collected from the liberators. Maybe comics were no longer published during those years or never made it to Solara. Or maybe after September 8 of 43 I witnessed real events that were so fantastic-what with the partisans, the Black Brigades coming to our house, the arrival of clandestine broadsheets-that they outstripped anything I could have read in comics. Or maybe I felt too old for comics by then, and those were the very years I moved on to spicier fare, such as The Count of Monte Cristo and The Three Musketeers.
In any case, up until that point, Solara had not given me back anything that was truly and uniquely mine. What I had rediscovered were the things I had read, which countless others had also read. All my archaeology boiled down to this: except for the story of the unbreakable glass and a charming anecdote about my grandfather (but not about me), I had not relived my own childhood so much as that of a generation.
Up until that point, the songs had made the clearest statements. I went into the study to turn the radio back on, selecting songs at random. The first song the radio offered me was another of those lighthearted farces that accompanied the bombardments:
Last night it happened, as I was walking by,
that a crazy young guy
suddenly asked me if I
would join him for a drink, so off we went,
and with a strange accent
he began to tell his tale:
"I know a little lady,
her hair as blond as gold,
and yet my love for her cannot be told
My grandma used to say
that way back in her day
young lovers talked this way:
I would love to kiss
your hair so long and black,
your rosy lips,
your eyes that all deception lack
But with my sweet beloved
I can never be so bold,
because her hairs as blond as gold!"
The second song was definitely older, and more of a tear-jerker-it must have made my mother cry:
Oh pallid little maiden, who lived across the hall on the fifth floor, no night goes by that I dont dream of Naples, and I left twenty years ago or more.
My little son
in a yellowed Latin book of mine discovered-can you guess?-a pansy Why did a teardrop tremble in my eye? Oh who knows, who knows why
And myself? The comic books in the chapel told me that I had been exposed to revelations of sex-but what about love? Had Paola been the first woman in my life?
It was strange that nothing in the chapel dated from the period between my thirteenth and eighteenth years, for during those five years-that was before the disaster-I still went to the house regularly.
I suddenly recalled having glimpsed three boxes that had not been on the shelves, but up against the altar. I had paid them little mind, caught up as I was in the multihued allure of my collections, but perhaps they were worth a look.
The first box was full of photographs of my childhood. I expected some great revelation, but no. I felt only a powerful, religious emotion. Having seen the photos of my parents in the hospital and the one of my grandfather in his study, I was able to identify them, even at different ages, by their clothes, recognizing them as younger or older depending on the length of my mothers skirt. That child in the sun hat poking the snail on the rock must have been me; that toddler solemnly holding my hand was Ada; Ada and I were the creatures in white outfits, almost a tailcoat for me, almost a bridal gown for her, on the occasion of a first communion or confirmation; I was the second Balilla Boy on the right, standing in line with my little musket clasped to my chest, one foot forward; and there I was, a little older, standing next to a black American soldier who had a sixty-four-tooth smile, perhaps the first liberator I had met and had myself immortalized with after April 25.
Only one of the photos truly moved me: a snapshot (which had been enlarged, you could tell by the blurriness) showing a little boy leaning slightly forward, embarrassed, as a tiny girl tipped up on little white shoes, put her arms around his neck, and kissed him on the cheek. Mamma or Pap must have caught us unawares, as Ada, tired of posing, spontaneously rewarded me with sisterly affection.