“And then,” Mamma Antonietta says, “they have to give us some warm clothes, coats, and shoes, because up north it’s not like down here. They have real winters up there!”
“Brand-new shoes?” I ask.
“Brand-new, or used but new,” she says.
“Two points!” I yell.
Forgetting for a moment that I’m about to leave, I start jumping around and around until Mamma grabs me by the arm.
There’s a crowd forming in front of the long building. There are mothers with children of all ages: tiny, small, middle-sized, and big. I’m middle-sized. Standing in front of the gate, there’s a signorina, but it’s not Maddalena. It’s not even one of the rice dames. She tells us we need to stand in line, as they’re going to check us out and then, she says, they’re going to stitch a number on us, so they know who we are. If not, I reckon, when we come back, they’ll end up giving every mamma the wrong child. Mamma is the only thing I have, and I don’t want to be mistaken for another child, so I cling to her bag and tell her I really don’t need new shoes in the end and, if it’s for my own good, we can go home immediately. I feel sad in my tummy and I think that if I had carried on dribbling and stuttering, I wouldn’t have had to leave.
I turn around, because I don’t want her to see me crying, but then I almost burst out laughing. Two rows behind me there’s Tommasino.
“Hey, Tommasì,” I call out. “Are you waiting for the ferry to Ischia?”
He glares at me, his face as white as a sheet. He’s scared stiff, I can see it. In the end, even his mother had to ask for charity! Pachiochia told me Donna Armida was once rich, very rich. She lived in a fancy building on the Corso and had servants. She used to make clothes for the finest ladies in the city and knew all the people that counted. Her husband, Don Gioacchino Saporito, was nearly, nearly going to buy a car.
Zandragliona, on the other hand, said Donna Armida had gotten ahead, no disrespect, by licking the feet of the Fascists. Then, when fascism went away, she went back to being a rag trader, which was in her nature, and her husband, who had been a big shot under fascism, was arrested and interrogated. Everybody expected some kind of example to be made of him. I don’t know, something like a punishment, a conviction, prison. But nobody did anything. Zandragliona said there’d been an armistice, which is like, for example, when Mamma found out I’d broken the casserole dish we used for macaroni which her mamma, Filomena, bless her soul, had left her, she said: “Get out of my sight or I’ll beat the living daylights out of you.” And I ran away and stayed at Zandragliona’s, and didn’t show my face back home for two days. Donna Armida’s Fascist husband was released and went home, and nothing was ever said again. Now the two of them run their rag trade from a ground-floor tenement apartment in the alley right next to ours.
Tommasino, Donna Armida’s little boy, had brand-new shoes (a star-studded prize!) when his mamma was a seamstress. Then, when she went back to being a rag trader and moved to our neighborhood, he still had the same shoes as before, but by that time they were old and full of holes (one point).
When she sees Tommasino, Mamma squeezes my hand to remind me of my promise. I squeeze hers back and turn to Tommasino, winking at him. Sometimes, Tommasino would come to look for rags with me. Donna Armida was not happy because she said her son should be keeping company with his betters, not with people like me who are worse off than him. When Mamma found out, she made me promise not to be friends with Tommasino, because he was the son of ignorant peasants who had made money and then lost it again, and anyhow, they were Fascists, as Zandragliona had said. I promised Mamma and Tommasino promised his. So every afternoon we would meet, but in secret.
More and more children are pouring in, some on foot and others jumping off the free buses that a lady next to us says the bus company has brought in specially. There are even some kids arriving in police jeeps. The jeeps with no soldiers in them, and all those kids carrying colored banners and waving to us, look like carnival floats in the Piedigrotta Festival. I ask Mamma if I can join them in the jeeps. She grips my hand even tighter and tells me to stick right by her side or I’ll get lost. And if I really want to get lost, I should wait until they stitch a number on me. The crowd is getting thicker. The signorina tries to get us in line but the line moves all the time, like an eel in the fishmonger’s hand.
A little blond girl, who until today has been badgering her mother because she wanted to go on the train trip, is now crying her eyes out, saying she doesn’t want to go anymore. A boy, just a little older than me, in a brown hat, who came to see his brother off, is saying it’s not fair that he has to stay here when his brother is leaving for the good life, and he starts blubbering, too. There is scolding and tongue-lashing all around but the kids go on wailing, and the mammas don’t know which way to turn. In the end, one of the signorinas arrives with the lists and solves the problem. She crosses out the little blond girl’s name and puts the name of the boy in the brown hat down instead, making everyone happy. Except the little blond girl’s mamma, who storms off saying: “We’ll settle this when we get home.”
At one point, I hear a voice I know well. Striding in front of the group of ladies marching in a procession is Pachiochia. She’s swinging her arms and barking out commands with all the breath in her body. There’s a picture of King Umberto I pinned to her breast. The first time I had seen the photo I had said: “Who’s this handsome man with the mustache? Your fiancé?” Pachiochia had started kicking me, because I’d offended her dearly departed husband-to-be who’d died in the First World War and whom she’d never betrayed, even in her thoughts, God bless us! Then she’d crossed herself three times, the third time kissing the tips of her fingers and lobbing the kiss up to the sky. Pachiochia had said the handsome man with the mustache was our last king, Umberto, who was finished before he even started, because those people had gotten it into their heads to make our country a republic and cheated with the ballot sheets, so they would win. Pachiochia had said that she was a mon-ar-chist, and that the Communists had turned the world upside down and now nothing made any sense at all. Crooks and thugs, the whole lot of them. In fact, she’d said, my father was probably a red Commie crook and a thug himself, and that’s why he’d had to get away. America, ha-ha! I thought she could be right, because I have red hair and Mamma’s hair is black . . . so the carrot must be from my father. Since then, I don’t get upset when people call me “evil hair,” as they often do.
Pachiochia, with the portrait on her breast, leads the procession of ladies, who have no kids with them. These women start giving a piece of their mind to the mothers in the crowd with their kids.
“Don’t sell your children,” they shout. “They’ve turned your heads with their talk, but the truth is they’ll be taking your children to Siberia to put them to work, if they don’t die of cold first.”
The little ones don’t want to leave, and the older ones dig their heels in and say they want to leave. It’s like St. Gennaro’s feast day, but without the miracles. The more Pachiochia beats her breast, the more she pummels the mustached king who is pinned there. If Zandragliona were here, she would say something back, but she hasn’t arrived yet. Pachiochia goes on. “Don’t let your children leave! They won’t allow them back. Hold your children close, like when we were under the bombs, and you were all they needed to protect them. With Providence on your side.”