I stand under the pipe and feel the first drops falling. I keep my eyes tightly shut as I’m scared of drowning, but then Maddalena comes up to me with a sponge and soap and covers me with sweet-smelling bubbles. She washes my hair, my arms, my legs, my feet. The soapy aroma reminds me of Carolina, who smelled of violets when we hid in the theater listening to music, and I get a tickly feeling in my belly. When I open my eyes, I see Tommasino next to me splashing, and Mariuccia stamping her feet in a gray puddle.
Maddalena lathers and rinses the other two and then she wraps us all in rough white sheets. After our shower, she takes us into another room where all the kids who have already been washed are sitting on wooden benches, every one of them wrapped in a rough white sheet. Then a Communist signorina does the rounds with a basket full of bread rolls on her arm, and hands us one roll each. She tells us the bread is from the doctor who is going to be giving us a checkup; the one in the room next door. I’ve never seen a doctor before, and I don’t want to start now. In the meantime, though, I eat my bread with my eyes shut, breathing in the strong smell of soap.
6
THE TRACKS AT THE PIAZZA GARIBALDI RAILWAY station are full of rubble, and the trains have been damaged by the bombing. A bit like the soldiers I once saw at a parade, who were waving flags, but who were all incomplete: some missing an arm, others a leg, others again an eye. The wrecked train cars looked like war veterans. They are wounded trains, but they are not dead.
The ones still working, though, are gigantic. You can see the head of the train but not the tail. Maddalena told us that our mammas would be coming to say goodbye when we leave, but I’m pretty sure they won’t recognize us when they see us. Luckily, we still have our numbers pinned onto our coats, otherwise they would mistake us for northern kids and they wouldn’t even be able to bless our journey with a little prayer, like “May the Virgin Mary be with you.”
Tommasino and all the other boys have had their hair cut, and they are dressed in shorts and thick socks, a woolen undershirt, a shirt, and a coat. They left my hair as it was, because my head had already been shorn to look like a melon. The girls have all had their hair braided and tied up with red and green ribbons, and they are wearing little dresses or skirts, with coats on top, too. Then there are the shoes. Every child has a new pair of shoes. I’ve counted so many star-studded prizes that I’ve won the championship. Only, when it was my turn, Maddalena told me they’d run out of my size. So they gave me a brand-new, shiny pair of brown shoes with laces. But they were one size too small.
“How do they fit? Are you comfortable?”
I tried walking in them, taking a few steps back and forth, and they were too tight. But I was so scared they would take them away again that I said, “Fine. Fine. They’re fine,” and so I kept them.
They lined us up in front of the train and they gave us instructions: don’t dirty anything, don’t shout, don’t open the windows, don’t exchange shoes or pants, don’t untie your braids. Then, since we were hungry again, after the bread rolls, they gave us two slices of cheese. But there was no more chocolate.
When I saw the train, I boasted a little and said that my father had taken a train when he went to America; if he had waited for me to be born, we could have set off together. Mariuccia said, “You can’t go to America on a train; you need a ship.” I said, “What do you know about America? Your father has never even been there,” and she said, “You moron, everyone knows that America is on the other side of the sea.” Mariuccia is older than me, and she says she went to school for a while before her mother had had the bad idea to die and leave her and her brothers alone with their cobbler father. If Zandragliona were here, I could ask her if America really was on the other side of the sea and whether it’s true you can only get there by ship. But Zandragliona’s not here and neither is Mamma Antonietta. Not that she would know, because knowing things is not her strong point. The person who is here is the blond Communist with the sad face. The one who was arguing with his comrades in the apartment in Via Medina. He helps Maddalena count the kids, and when he’s with her, he doesn’t look so sad after all. Maybe she managed to solve that “problem of the south” for him; the one that was making him so worked up and unhappy.
From far away, the train is the spitting image of a model train I once saw in a toy-store window on the Corso. As it comes closer, it gets bigger and bigger and then it’s suddenly ginormous. Tommasino hides behind me, he’s so scared. He doesn’t realize how scared I am, too.
The signorinas check the numbers pinned onto our coats, and read our names from a list. “Amerigo Speranza,” one of the signorinas calls out when it’s my turn. I climb up three iron steps and find myself inside the train. It’s damp and smells soggy, like Pachiochia’s ground-floor apartment. From the outside it looks big, but inside it’s narrow and cramped, with a long line of compartments, one after the other, each one with a door that you open and close with an iron handle. Now that I’m here, it feels like everything has gone so fast that, even if I wanted to, I wouldn’t be able to go back. Mamma must be home now in our tenement apartment, and I feel sad in my stomach. Mariuccia and Tommasino climb up after me. We look at one another, and I can see they’re unsure, too, as if they’re thinking, “What the heck are we doing here?” The signorinas go on calling names, and the train slowly fills up with kids. Some are sitting, others are standing, still others are running from one compartment to another; some are hungry, some are thirsty, and some others are crying. Comrade Maurizio appears, the one who wanted to cut our tongues off but then drew a picture of us, and walks from one compartment to the next saying, “Quiet, quiet now. Sit down, everybody. It’s a long journey.” But we keep misbehaving. He’s not laughing now. I think that he must be fed up, too, and that soon they’re going to take everything away from us. The train, the shoes, the coats. We don’t deserve them, Pachiochia’s right. We don’t deserve anything. I sit on the wooden train bench, rest my face against the stained wall of the compartment, and feel my eyes pricking with tears, because of the soggy smell, the wooden seat, the dirty wall, and because I’m thinking about Mamma.
Then I hear Tommasino and Mariuccia shouting: “Amerigo, Amerì! Get over here! Run! Look out there!”
I get up and race to the window. I push my way past the heads of all the other kids who are all reaching out of the carriage window, straining to touch their mothers’ hands. Tommasino moves over a little so that I can see Mamma Antonietta. She looks smaller, in the middle of all the other mothers. It feels like she’s far away, even though the train hasn’t moved yet. Zandragliona is standing next to her. She’s come to say goodbye to me, even though she had a memorial service for a relative today. Mamma comes right up to the window and puts something in my hand. It’s a small, red, round apple. An annurca apple. I stick it in my pocket to keep it safe. I think it’s so beautiful, I’ll never eat it. It looks to me like a red heart, like the one I once saw when I crept in and hid in the Sansevero Chapel. Zandragliona had told me there were two live skeletons, complete with bones, and veins, and hearts, and everything. So I ventured into the dark chapel. When I lit a candle, I saw two bright white statues that seemed to be walking out of the stone they were carved in. The closer I got with the candle, the more alive they looked. There was also a Jesus Christ made of marble, lying under a sheet that was also made of stone. It looked like he was breathing in his sleep, and as if the sheet covering him were so light that he might wake up at any moment. I started walking between the statues, my heart beating in my head, and that’s when I saw them. The two skeletons were standing there, alive as anything, as if they’d been flesh and bone a minute before. Their heads were shiny, with no hair. They were smiling, with no teeth. Their bones were tied together in a tangle of red and blue veins. In the middle was a red heart, as round and red as an annurca apple. I dropped the candle and found myself in the dark again. I groped around but I couldn’t find the way out, so I started screaming, but nobody came. I somehow managed to get to the door, and, once I was outside, I saw that night had fallen. But the dark was nothing compared to the blackness in the chapel. I still have nightmares about Prince Sangro’s skeletons, every now and again.