“I don’t know. The only thing I have ever preferred is my mother.”
The lady strokes my hand. Her fingers are cold and chapped. She hardly ever smiles, but she did take me home with her.
“I thought I was the only one left because nobody wanted me.”
“No, son. Everything was organized. We worked on it for weeks. Every child had a family to go to.”
“You mean they didn’t choose the ones they wanted?”
“Of course not. It’s not like a fruit-and-vegetable market!”
I’m embarrassed because that’s exactly what I’d thought it was.
“Now we need to get to sleep, though. I’m working tomorrow. You know what I’ll do?” she says. “I’ll lie here right beside you. Here we go. Is that okay?” The lady lies down beside me. I don’t know whether it’s okay or not, but I scoot over and make room for her on my pillow.
“Shall I sing you a lullaby? Would you like that, eh?”
Lullabies make me feel sad in my belly but I don’t tell the lady, so that she doesn’t get angry with me again.
“Yes,” I say, with my eyes closed and a foot touching her leg. I really hope it’s not going to be the one about the bogeyman, though. The one where he keeps the child for a whole year. Because if it is, I’m pretty sure I’ll start crying, and tomorrow they’ll put me straight back onto the train and send me home. The lady thinks for a while, and then she starts singing the song we heard when we arrived at the station. The one where they sing “bella ciao ciao ciao” every other line.
When the song comes to an end, I don’t say a word for a while, and then I ask, “Signò, do you mind my cold feet on your leg?”
“Not at all, son. Not at all.”
I slowly drift off to sleep. Finally.
14
“AMERÌ,” A VOICE CALLS, “AMERIGO, WAKE UP! Your brother Luigi’s coming back. Hurry, hurry! Get out of bed. This is his place!”
My eyes tight shut, I say, “What about me? Where am I supposed to go?”
“You?” Mamma Antonietta answers. “You’re up there now, with the lady . . .”
When I open my eyes, it’s morning. Through the window opposite the bed I can see brown fields and frozen trees, with skeleton branches and a few dry leaves left hanging there. There are no other houses. Nobody walks by, and I can’t hear a single voice outside.
The lady is in the kitchen at the end of the corridor. I watch her from the door as she makes breakfast and listens to the radio. I’d only ever seen radios in rich people’s houses when they gave me rags to take away. On the table there’s a big cup of milk, a thick chunk of bread, a jar of red jam, a slab of butter, and a big hunk of cheese. I wonder whether Tommasino woke up to all these good things in the house of the man with the salt-and-pepper mustache. The lady has also set the table with a knife, a fork, a teaspoon, and cups and saucers in a set, all the same color.
She’s wearing the gray skirt and white blouse again. She still hasn’t spotted me. I’d like to call out, but I’m embarrassed. She looks different than last night. On the radio, a man’s voice is speaking fast. I catch the words children, hospitality, disease, Communist Party, south, poverty. The man is talking about me. The lady stops cutting slices of bread to listen and sighs, puffing out all the air she has kept inside her at once, like Capa ’e Fierro, except without the smoke rings. Then she starts slicing again.
After a while, she turns around and looks surprised to see me.
“Ah, here you are. I didn’t hear you. I’ve got something ready. I don’t know whether you like it or not.”
“I like everything.”
We eat together in silence. The lady only really talks at night; during the day she doesn’t say much. Anyway, I’m used to it. Chatting isn’t Mamma Antonietta’s strong point, either. Especially first thing in the morning.
When we’ve finished our breakfast, the lady tells me she has to go to work, but she says she’s not leaving me on my own. She’s taking me to her cousin Rosa’s house, the one with the three children, and then she’ll pick me up when she’s done. I’m thinking that I’ve just arrived and I’m already being moved on, and my belly is churning again. Mamma Antonietta handed me over to Maddalena, Maddalena handed me over to Signora Derna, and now Signora Derna is handing me over to her cousin Rosa. Who knows who this Rosa lady is going to hand me over to? It’s just like the lullaby about the bogeyman.
I go with the lady into the room where I slept. You can’t see the sky or the fields or the trees anymore. I try to wipe the window with my hand, but nothing changes. It’s not the glass that’s dirty. It’s the air. There’s a pall of smoke covering everything. I sit on the edge of the bed.
“Do you want me to help you get dressed?” the lady asks.
I can’t see the clothes I arrived in anywhere. There’s the apple Mamma gave me, that I had in my pocket, sitting on the desk, though.
“I can get dressed on my own, thank you,” I answer.
She takes some clothes out of a brown wooden wardrobe. Woolen sweaters, shirts, pants. They belonged to her cousin Rosa’s oldest boy, and now they’re going to be mine. I tell her they look new. On the desk, there are some notebooks and a pen. She says I’ll soon be going to school.
“Again?” I say. “I’ve already been there once!”
“That’s why you need to go. Every day. You couldn’t have learned everything, right?”
“No one is born knowing everything!” I say, and, for the first time since we’ve been together, we burst out laughing.
I look at myself in the mirror in my new clothes and see a boy who looks like me, but isn’t me. The lady buttons up my coat and puts a hat on my head.
“Wait,” she says, going into the other room.
She comes back with a little badge in her hand. It’s red with a yellow half-circle in the middle and a picture of a hammer, just like hers. She sits down next to me and pins it on the lapel of my coat. The image is the same as the flags I saw in the Communist headquarters in Via Medina. That must mean they’ve made me into a Communist. I have a sudden flash of the sad, blond young man and wonder whether he ever solved that terrible “problem of the south.”
“Are we ready?” the lady asks as she puts her hat on.
“Sì, Signò . . . no, sorry, I mean . . . yes, Derna.”
The lady makes a face as if she’s just won a straight five-in-a-row at the lottery.
We step out and walk hand in hand. Her steps are not as fast as Mamma Antonietta’s. She doesn’t leave me one step behind. Or maybe it’s me walking faster, because I’m scared of being left on my own in the smoky gray air.
15
“THEY SMOKE A LOT UP HERE, DON’T THEY? YOU can’t even see the street.”
“It’s not smoke; it’s fog. Are you scared?”
“No. I like it when things are hiding and then they come out all of a sudden, like a surprise.”
“This is my cousin Rosa’s house. When the weather is nice, you can see it from our window, but the fog makes it disappear.”