Miracolino had brought Zia Mina a fish as a gift to thank her for her kindness. As my aunt was not home, he left it on her kitchen windowsill, where it spent several hours maturing in the sun. Although Zia Mina was touched by his gratitude, the fish was so rank that she had picked it up with her spade. She had tried to feed it to the cat, but it had backed away in disgust.
Nevertheless, I was not comfortable with Miracolino’s appearances. I did not like being stared at and I could not help but start scratching just at the sight of him.
Miracolino was not the only new face at Paradiso. Home was not the same as when I had left and it was not just Ernesto’s absence which made things different.
The German troops had gone, and instead, ranks of de-mobbed Italians had taken their place. Pieve Santa Clara was full of dazed strangers. Weary, hollow-faced young men, still dressed in the remnants of their uniforms, gathered in clusters in the piazza, clouds of smoke from pipes and cigarettes floating above them. Some were bandaged; some hobbled on crutches; others walked with obvious injuries. Even those who appeared undamaged had an air of hopelessness and destitution about them.
Many turned up at our house. They were not local men, but men from other regions who were in transit and waiting to be transported home. Some begged for paid work, others demanded it. Most simply required a few kind words and a little charity.
Zia Mina let them sleep in her barn if they asked for lodgings and gave them vegetable broth every evening into which they dipped their bread rations. They would gather around the gate or sit around the yard slurping the thin soup from tin cups and talking about the war.
My mother forbade me from being in the yard when they congregated to eat, saying that their language and the stories they told were unsuitable. For years I believed that ‘atrocity’ was a swear word.
Rita’s father had not yet returned, so she quizzed every new soldier who turned up or who passed along the road.
‘Do you know my Papá?’ she would ask. There was always desperate hope in her voice.
‘What’s his name?’
‘Luigi Pozzetti.’
‘I don’t know. What does he look like?’
‘He’s got a moustache.’
This was the only information that Rita could give. She had not seen her father for almost four years and couldn’t remember anything else about him.
Some of the soldiers would ask a few more questions. What regiment was he in? Where was he fighting? Rita didn’t know. Eventually the soldiers would shrug and say, ‘Sorry, no.’ Rita would hang her head and wait for the next new face to come along.
The soldiers’ clothing was a patchwork of miscellaneous military salvage. Much of the Italian army had been woefully equipped. American boots, English breeches and German jackets had been appropriated to replace the worn-out Italian uniforms. It did not matter whether the item came from friend or foe. Clothing was clothing.
Italian officers had benefited from good quality uniforms made from hard-wearing woollen cloth, but the soldiers who congregated in our yard were ordinary troops, a collection of disparate conscripts and formerly optimistic volunteers. Their uniforms were made of cheap mixed fabrics which were uncomfortable to wear and did not weather well.
Their jackets had only three buttons as a further form of military saving, but most had broken or been sheared off. My mother, who was a hoarder of buttons, scraps of thread and anything else useful for sewing, did what she could, sewing mismatched buttons onto their jackets so that they could do them up and not be cold. When she ran out of real buttons, she fashioned substitutes from pieces of wood, bottle tops and anything else of a vaguely appropriate size. She made thread holes by driving a nail through them. When she ran out of thread, she made her own by unpicking rags.
Word soon spread and it seemed that no soldier could pass through Pieve Santa Clara without visiting my aunt for soup and lodgings and my mother for clothing repairs.
One such man was Salvatore Scognamiglio from Naples. His right hand had been damaged during the war and he could not use it to pick anything up. He would clasp it in his left hand, massaging the fingers and straightening them out, but as soon as he released it, the fingers would curl back into a claw.
Nevertheless, Salvatore busied himself however he could at Paradiso. Whilst other soldiers lazed in the shade, killing time and waiting for their transport connections, Salvatore would rake the yard, collect and wash tin cups and pull weeds from the garden with his good hand.
Salvatore Scognamiglio seemed very foreign to me. He had a broad, leathery face, a complexion the colour of linseed oil and a head of tight corkscrew curls. His eyes were so dark they were almost black. At first I found his thick Neapolitan dialect incomprehensible. He did not refer to my aunt and my mother as Signora, but as Donna. He called me criatura, which meant ‘child’.
Before the war, Salvatore had owned a restaurant in Naples with his brother, but it had been bombed. Subsequently his brother had been killed in Africa. He had no other family, except for some very distant cousins, but he could not be sure whether they were still alive. In any case, he said they were not good people and it was best that he kept away from them.
Initially Salvatore slept in the barn with the other soldiers, but one day he moved out and assembled a makeshift shelter by the gate to my aunt’s vegetable garden.
‘What are you doing?’ asked my aunt.
‘Guarding your tomatoes, Donna Mina,’ he replied.
‘The war is over, Salvatore. You don’t have to be a soldier any more. And I don’t believe my tomatoes are in any danger.’
‘Oh but they are, Donna Mina. I heard some of the men say they would fill their haversacks with them before they left. They would leave you with nothing! You are an uncommonly kind woman and I could not bear to think of you going hungry due to their greed.’
My aunt considered this for a moment. There was a heaviness about her, as though even the most fleeting thought or simple decision exhausted her.
‘Well,’ she said finally, ‘that’s very thoughtful of you, Salvatore, but I wouldn’t mind if they did take a few. It’s been a good crop this year - the kind of crop I would have been delighted with a few years ago. But I don’t have enough jars to keep much conserva and I can’t really afford to light the stove to make it anyway. The tomatoes won’t keep long. They should be eaten.’
‘But you can dry them, Donna Mina.’
‘Dry them?’
‘Of course! All you need is sunshine and a little salt. That’s what everybody does in the south. Have you never tasted dried tomatoes, Donna Mina?’
My aunt said that she had not. She was not familiar with any foods which were not typically Lombard and rather wary of anything she considered foreign.
‘I don’t know,’ she said wearily.
As the summer receded, the last of the soldiers left, but Salvatore showed no inclination to go back home. Finally my aunt asked, ‘Should you not be heading back to Naples now, Salvatore?’
Salvatore, who was raking the yard, shook his head.
‘I have no home to go back to, Donna Mina. And no family. My brother was all the family I had. I have no hope of finding work in a restaurant now that my hand is incapacitated, so I don’t know what I would do there. I was hoping that I might stay here for a while. You know I make myself as useful as possible, and I would work even harder if I knew I could stay. Surely you could do with an extra pair of hands?’ He paused for a moment. ‘And even if I can’t offer you a pair of hands, I can offer you one which will do the work of two. What’s more, I would be happy to give you my ration card to use as your own as long as I could be assured of a modest meal in the evening, and perhaps a little bread for breakfast.’
The decision pained my aunt. Even with the promise of a ration card the prospect of feeding an extra mouth through the forthcoming winter made her uneasy.
‘I don’t know, Salvatore,’ she said.
‘Let me prove myself to you, Donna Mina. Let m
e start by picking and drying those tomatoes for you. I promise you they will be so delicious you will wonder why you never considered drying them before.’
Reluctantly, my aunt conceded.
‘Come, criatura. Come and help me. I need you to be my right hand,’ said Salvatore, beckoning me over with his claw. ‘First of all we need a cotton sheet and some nails. Do you think you could find those for me?’
We improvised a drying stand in the middle of the yard by stretching an old tablecloth between two posts and two chairs. Nailing the cloth to its supports was not an easy job. A one-handed man and an eight-year-old child did not make the most efficient of partnerships, but somehow we managed. Salvatore held the nails and I hammered them in. He muttered a prayer to the Madonna del Carmine before each blow of the hammer, and it seemed that She was listening because it was nothing short of a miracle that I did not strike his good hand even once.
That summer, my aunt’s tomato plants had grown so vigorously that they had pulled their supporting canes clean out of the ground. Enormous orange-red fruits burst from each branch in tight clusters and some had grown so heavy that they had snapped off their stalks. Their pungent aroma filled the garden and beyond. Salvatore said you could smell them from down the road if the wind was right. He twisted a particularly large tomato from its stalk and contemplated it.
‘Pummarola,’ he said. ‘That’s what we call this beautiful thing in Naples.’ He rolled it in his hand, polished it against his shirt and repeated: ‘Pummarola.’
We harvested seven buckets of tomatoes and set about washing and quartering them. My aunt hovered around us.
‘Make sure you save some seeds,’ she said.
‘Don’t you worry, Donna Mina. You will have more seeds than you will know what to do with.’
Once we had prepared them, we laid the tomatoes out on the sheet, flesh side up, and scattered salt over them.
‘The salt draws the water out,’ explained Salvatore. ‘And once the water is gone, the essence of the flavour remains.’
My aunt had been worried about using so much of her salt ration, but Salvatore had assured her that most of it would be recoverable once the tomatoes were dry, and that it could be re-used. In fact, it would be the most delicious salt she had ever tasted as it would be imbued with the flavour of the tomatoes.
‘How long will they take?’ she wanted to know.
Salvatore looked up at the sky. ‘A week or so. In Naples at the height of summer they can be done in a day or two. But it’s late in the season and the sun is not so hot up here.’
The tomatoes were nursed with meticulous attention. Salvatore checked them continuously and shooed away any birds or insects. He would bring them in every night at dusk and put them back out at dawn.
Shortly after we had laid the tomatoes out, I spotted Miracolino loitering close by, his gaze fixed on them. A long thread of spit hung from his mouth. Not wishing to approach him myself, I alerted Salvatore. I hoped that Miracolino would run away as soon as Salvatore came out from the barn, but he did not. He remained immobile.
I watched as Salvatore made his way over to the boy, spoke to him and made gestures with his good hand. Moments later Miracolino was standing like a sentry by the tomatoes.
‘He’ll eat them,’ I warned.
‘He won’t,’ replied Salvatore. ‘I’ve told him that if he keeps an eye on them and scares away the birds he can have some when they’re ready and he can have some bread and cheese today.’
‘But he doesn’t understand anything.’
‘Oh, but he does! Miracolino understands everything you say to him. He just doesn’t know how to reply very well. He’s never been spoken to much. His poor Mamma has trouble speaking herself, so it’s only to be expected. Children learn from their parents, criatura.’
I was not convinced. I wanted to go and check that Miracolino was not eating the tomatoes, but the fear of fleas and lice made me stay away. Rita shared my wariness. We played with our dolls at a safe distance.
The tomatoes shrank and wizened day by day with Miracolino standing guard. Salvatore would often stand with him, talking and gesticulating. The boy seemed fascinated by his clawed hand and would mimic Salvatore’s actions, curling his own filthy little hand into a hook shape.
It was not the only gesture which Miracolino copied. Salvatore had a habit of touching his testicles for good luck, which he insisted was an acceptable practice amongst Neapolitan men. He claimed that it not only brought good luck but also warded off evil spirits. However, it was not a practice of which my aunt approved and she scolded him very sternly for it.
‘I’ll thank you to leave yourself alone, Salvatore,’ she said. ‘And I don’t want to see that lad fiddling with himself either.’
Admittedly Miracolino had adopted the habit with a little too much gusto. Whilst Salvatore would touch himself for a split second, the boy found it to be an altogether more absorbing experience. Rita and I watched in disgust as he stood by the drying table rubbing at his crotch enthusiastically.
‘I think you’ve warded off enough evil, Miracolino,’ said Salvatore with a wink. ‘It’s just the birds and the flies we have to be concerned with now.’ The boy winked back and did as he was told.
It was not just the prospect of food which kept Miracolino in the garden, but the fact that Salvatore would talk to him. When he was not on guard duty he ran errands and picked up the wide variety of things which Salvatore dropped. Salvatore said that quite literally, Miracolino was his right-hand boy.
It was not long before Miracolino began to make himself better understood, at least to Salvatore, using a smattering of basic words and a peculiar hotchpotch of Italian, Cremonese and Neapolitan dialects.
‘What are these called?’ asked Salvatore, pointing at the tomatoes.
Miracolino rolled his tongue between his lips with a look of intense concentration, then said ‘P-P-Pummarola!’ in a broad Neapolitan accent.
‘Bravo!’ cheered Salvatore, clapping his good hand against his thigh.
Miracolino also slapped his hand against his thigh. ‘P-Pummarola!’ he said again.
It was four days before Salvatore declared the tomatoes to be ready. The anticipation had become overwhelming. We gathered around the sheet. Salvatore was obviously excited.
‘Donna Mina!’ he called. ‘Come and be the first to taste.’
My aunt came to inspect. Salvatore took a tomato, knocked the excess salt from it and presented it to her with a grand gesture.
‘For Donna Mina, the lady of Paradiso,’ he announced.
At first, Zia Mina was reticent. She bit into the tomato cautiously and chewed for a long time.
‘What do you think?’ There was tension in Salvatore’s voice.
‘That is incredibly delicious,’ said my aunt finally.
Salvatore gave a jubilant shout and clapped his good hand against his thigh again. ‘Have I proved myself, Donna Mina? Will you let me stay?’
My aunt nodded. ‘Of course you can, Salvatore. It would please me if you stayed. And I would have let you stay even if you hadn’t dried my tomatoes.’
It is difficult to say whether we adopted Salvatore, or Salvatore adopted us. Whichever way round it was, Salvatore Scognamiglio from Naples became part of our family at Paradiso.
There was a warmth about him and an infectious, cheerful kind-heartedness. He was always helpful, busy and purposeful. He never complained about his injured hand, which was often the butt of his own jokes. There was no doubt that he was good for my aunt. Salvatore provided a welcome reprieve from her grief.
Zia Mina was concerned that people would think it improper if she were to let a young man live in her house. She did not want tongues to wag, so it was agreed that although Salvatore was welcome to eat in her kitchen, he would retain his lodgings in the barn. He had given her his ration card, as promised, and my aunt made sure that he was as well fed as was possible.
Salvatore worked hard in the garden, improvising ways ar
ound his injury by strapping and tethering tools to his arm, or looping them around his neck. He made himself a harness which he attached to the handles of the wheelbarrow and hooked over his head. He used his good hand for steering.
He loved to sing and was endowed with a rich baritone voice. His melancholic Neapolitan songs resounded across the garden. There was one song in particular which he sang over and over again. It was called ‘Carmela Mia’ and was about a soldier leaving his love.
‘Carmé, Carmé! T’aggi a lassá, Nun c’é che ffá! Carmé, Carmé! Luntano a te. Chi ‘nce pó
stá . . .’ Carmela, Carmela! I have to leave, there is nothing I can do. Carmela, Carmela! I cannot stay far from you . . .
Salvatore’s lodgings in my aunt’s barn were basic. He had a mattress, a table and a shelf made from a vegetable crate nailed to the wall on which he kept his sparse belongings. He had lost everything when his restaurant had been bombed and his only worldly possessions were what he had carried with him when he had gone to war - a shaving brush, half a comb, a little tin for coins and a book about the lives of saints, which he read repeatedly.
He had two photographs, one of his dead brother and one of a pretty, plump girl.
‘Who’s that?’ I asked as I looked at the picture of the girl.
Salvatore sighed. ‘That’s Carmela,’ he said. ‘She was my sweetheart.’
‘Is that who you sing about?’
‘Yes. It’s an old song, but it’s strange how the words fit. It could have been written especially for us.’
‘Is Carmela dead too?’
‘I hope not. I hope she’s living happily in Naples and that she’s found a good husband.’
‘But why isn’t she your sweetheart any more?’
‘Ah. It’s a long story. Naples is a complicated city where feuds are never forgotten. Our families had differences in the past. Hers didn’t approve of me. Her parents thought she could do better. They were right and I hope she has. She’s my bookmark now,’ he said, kissing the photograph and slipping it between the pages of his book of saints.
Paradiso: Utterly gripping and emotional historical fiction (The Paradiso Novels Book 1) Page 7
