The Children's Train

by Viola Ardone

  By the time we get to the beach, the sun is high, and the air is hot. The sea is calm and smooth as if it’s been combed flat. There are lots of kids already there. Many of them were on the train with me. As soon as Tommasino sees me, he starts throwing sand balls at me.

  Mariuccia is nowhere to be seen. Tommasino says the couple who picked her out would like to keep her forever.

  “What about her cobbler father?” I ask.

  Tommasino rolls his pants up and takes his socks off. He looks at me, rolls his eyes, and says the cobbler father will see it as a favor if they take the girl off his hands. I look at Derna, Rosa, and Alcide. Who knows? Might they want to keep me forever, too?

  “My babbo here says I can come back whenever I want; the door is always open. He says they’ll take their summer vacation down south and carry on taking care of me. Even from far away, they’ll still be helping me.”

  I take my shorts off and stay in the blue-and-white-striped swimsuit Derna has given me. Tommasino takes one look and bursts out laughing.

  “What are you doing? Are you going to stand there in front of everyone in your underpants?”

  “It’s a bathing costume.”

  “I thought you said the sea had no purpose?”

  “Wanna bet?”

  I race across the beach and start paddling in the sea. The sand under my feet is cold and sticky. I feel my toes sinking down into the wet sand, but I keep walking until the water is up to my knees. It’s cold, but I don’t want to give Tommasino the satisfaction. I want him to see that I’m like one of the kids from up north.

  Derna used to be a good swimmer, and she has shown me what to do. I’m confident I’ll do just fine. Tommasino calls to me from the beach.

  “Amerì, where are you going?”

  I turn to look at him, but keep on going. I see Derna talking to some other ladies, sitting under a beach umbrella.

  “Derna, look at me!” I shout.

  As soon as she turns to look at me, I dive in. The freezing cold water covers my face and my head. I kick my legs and paddle with my arms as fast as I can, as Derna has explained, and manage to pull my head up out of the water. But then I taste the salty flavor of the sea as it fills my mouth and blocks my nose and I can’t breathe. I go back underwater, and I can’t open my eyes.

  I didn’t think seawater was like this. It looks light but then, when it covers your head, it’s really heavy, and it pushes you down to the bottom. As I sink further under, I remember Derna’s words and paddle even more desperately with my hands and feet, but they have gone weak. I barely manage to get my head out of the water, and open my eyes. I see Tommasino yelling, his hair wild and curly like it was before his babbo here greased his hair back. I see Derna running barefoot along the beach, her pretty dress hitched up around her legs. I can’t see her face, because I can’t touch the ground and because the water is starting to cover my eyes again. But I’m pretty sure it’s the same face she made that day after the meeting with the big shot. I’m sinking. I squeeze my eyes shut and feel the salt burning my throat. I can’t breathe.

  All of a sudden, I feel strong hands grabbing my wrists. They’re Derna’s hands. I feel her holding on to me and not letting me go, fighting against the water. The weight on my head feels less heavy, like the layers of darkness covering my eyes, and Derna’s arms, which are stronger than the force of the sea, bring me up to the surface again. Then I see black. Mamma Antonietta’s face and Zandragliona’s laugh, and then nothing.

  When I open my eyes, Derna’s hands are pressing down on my chest and, with every thrust, more salt water spouts out of my mouth and nose. Rosa wraps me up in a blanket she had brought to the beach for us to lie on, while Alcide sticks a bottle of vinegar under my nose. Rivo, Luzio, and all the other kids are standing around in stony silence. Tommasino is still bawling his eyes out and doesn’t seem to be calming down.

  Derna’s hair is wet and her lipstick has been washed off. I can see her eyes right up close. They are as gray as the sea.

  “Don’t leave me,” I say, gripping on to her.

  “I’m never going to leave you,” she answers. “I’ll always be there for you.”

  That was how, for the second time that day, we found ourselves with our arms around each other. But this time, we weren’t laughing.

  27

  THE FIELDS ARE YELLOW, THE WHEAT HAS grown high, but there’s no sun today. A light mist covers the street and it feels like we’ll never get there.

  Rosa has given me a paper bag full of sandwiches for the journey. In my suitcase, she has packed some homemade ravioli to take home, as well as jars of peach, plum, and apricot jam. Before leaving, I helped her pull the cheese-and-salami pie out of the oven behind the house. She wrapped it in greased paper, and then in a yellow-and-white-striped tea cloth.

  “This is for you,” she said. Then she took the other loaves she had baked for home. They’ll be eating them at lunchtime without me.

  Rivo and Luzio waited outside the animal pen to go and carve our names into the wooden shelter we had built together. We each wrote our own name and then Rivo grabbed the penknife and engraved in capitals the name BENVENUTI under all three.

  “This is our house,” he said. It was strange seeing my name linked to their family name but I was happy anyway.

  Alcide called out to me.

  “Come along, son, or we’ll miss the bus.”

  Rivo and Luzio came to say goodbye.

  “Wait here,” I said to them, and ran into the house. When I came back, I reached out and handed Luzio the marble he had given me on my first day.

  “You keep it,” he said. “I know you’ll bring it when you come back. You’re not a thief, right?” He smiled and wiped his eyes with the sleeve of his jacket.

  ON THE BUS, ALCIDE IS QUIET, AND SO IS DERNA. After the episode at the beach, Derna put her light-colored dress away and packed away her smile. For my departure today, she’s wearing that same white blouse and gray skirt. It’s gray outside, too. In the mist, all you can see are a few trees and dark shadows of houses. The rain splashes off the windows drop by drop, then flows in rivulets.

  “Finally, a little rain after all this heat,” Alcide says.

  He hadn’t said a word since we left.

  “We need rain for the crops. Sometimes things that feel bad are actually good. Right, Derna? Our Amerigo is going back to his mother. We should be happy for him!”

  Derna doesn’t answer. I hate it when she’s sad. I take my shoes off, like I did on my way here, and whisper in her ear, “Shall we sing the song about the women?”

  Derna gives a fake smile and starts singing. The song comes out real, not fake. Softly, to begin with, then, when we get off the bus, louder and louder. It’s Maddalena’s song about the women not being scared, because they love their children: “Sebben che siamo donne, paura non abbiamo, per amore dei nostri figli, per amor dei nostri figli . . .” and when she sings the word figli, she squeezes my hand like she did when she pulled me out of the sea. Alcide and I join in, too. The three of us are singing our heads off, in the middle of the street, and in the train station, one on each side of me, holding my hands all the way to the platform, and then up onto the train, without ever stopping.

  THE TRAIN IS FULL OF KIDS, BUT THERE ARE FEWER than when we came up. Some have stayed behind with their new northern parents, like Mariuccia, and others have already gone back, because they couldn’t deal with being homesick and angry, like Rossana. I see Tommasino in the middle of the crowd, his hair combed back with gel. His babbo’s mustache has grown even longer, and he has curled up the edges to make them look like handlebars. His northern mother, with the big bosom, hands Tommasino a bag full of food, like Rosa did for me. Alcide comes into the compartment with me and puts my suitcase and violin case on the rack. Derna holds my hand from outside the window. She doesn’t say a thing, and neither do I. We go on singing our song even as the train pulls away, and Derna’s fingers slip out of mine, and she gets smaller and
smaller till her blouse is just a tiny white dot. I’m all alone again, in the midst of all these kids.

  “What’s wrong?” Tommasino asks. “Are you homesick already?”

  I don’t answer. I turn my head the other way and pretend to go to sleep.

  “It’s normal,” he says. “We are split into two halves now.”

  I don’t feel like talking. Tommasino opens up his jacket and shows me some stitching his northern mother has put in. He says she has sewn money into the lining, so that if he misses them, he can go back up north again.

  “Night-night, Tommasì.”

  “Take care, Amerì.”

  I look up and check that my violin is still on the rack. In my mind, I run through the exercises Maestro Serafini has taught me, so I’ll still be able to do them when I go back up north. Carolina will be able to teach me a few more. Maybe Mamma will let me go to the Conservatory when she sees how good I am. That way, when I go back to Modena, Alcide will invite Serafini to see my progress. In the meantime, my little calf Amerigo will have become a bullock, I’ll be able to help Rivo water the animals, Nario will have learned to walk, and we’ll all go to our secret hideout and carve his name next to ours.

  Then I pat the lining of my jacket and find there’s no hidden pocket sewn in there. Derna hasn’t given me the money to come back. And in a few weeks the calf probably won’t even remember me. Neither will they. They’ll chat about this and that, sitting around the kitchen table. About the new kids that will have arrived, maybe. Or about a cow that is expecting. The next calf will get the name of another kid.

  All the things I had have already gone: my birthday cake, top grades in math from Mr. Ferrari, our light signals in the window, the smell of pianos, the taste of freshly baked bread, Derna’s white blouse. I get my violin down from the rack and open the case. I brush my fingers along the strings and read my name on the label: Amerigo Speranza. Then I think about Carolina’s face when I show it to her. With this thought, the sadness in my belly is a little less painful, and, as I gradually move farther away from my life now, and closer to my life before, I feel a little happiness taking its place. Derna’s, Rosa’s, and Alcide’s faces begin to transform into those of Mamma Antonietta, Pachiochia, and Zandragliona.

  Tommasino is right. We are split into two halves now.

  Part Three

  28

  THE TRAIN PULLS INTO THE STATION. I STICK my head out the window to see if I can spot Mamma Antonietta, but she isn’t there. The stench of the crowd catches in my nose. It’s like Rosa’s animal pen, without the cows.

  As we get off the train, Tommasino finds his family almost immediately. Until yesterday, I saw him arm-in-arm with his mustached babbo and northern mother, but now here he is, hand in hand with his older brothers and Donna Armida, his southern mamma. I think the same might be true for me; that as soon as I lay eyes on Mamma Antonietta, everything that has happened over these months will vanish into thin air. Which makes me want to jump right back on the train and go up north again.

  But then, behind a fat man carrying two brown suitcases, I see my mamma. She has her good dress on, the flowery one, and her hair is hanging loose over her shoulders. She hasn’t spotted me yet, but I’ve seen her. She’s looking around, her eyes filled with fear, like when she used to tell me the story about the bombing that killed Grandma Filomena.

  I run as fast as I can and clasp her from behind, my face on her back, my hands on her belly, and my arms tight around her hips. Mamma Antonietta must think I’m a thief. She shoves me away with her elbow. Then, when she turns around, she says, “You’ll be the death of me, you will!” She crouches down, touching my face, my arms, my legs, checking that everything is in place. Our eyes are at the same level. Finally, she puts a hand on my cheek and says, “My, how you’ve grown. They say weeds grow the fastest!”

  The whole way home, I’m the only one talking. Mamma walks in silence, looking straight ahead, without asking me anything.

  “When the calf was born, they called it Amerigo like me,” I tell her, showing off a little.

  “Sure,” she says, giving me a soft cuff on the ear. “One animal wasn’t enough for them, they needed two with the same name.” I try to detect whether she’s smiling underneath. I decide she probably is.

  I go on chatting about the house, the food, the school, but I don’t know whether she’s really listening. It feels like when you have a dream and the next morning you tell everyone about it, but nobody cares at all and so you slowly realize the whole thing was just in your mind, and that by lunchtime you will have forgotten everything. Except that this isn’t a dream. My suitcase is packed full of stuff I’ve been given, I have Alcide’s violin in its case, I have new clothes and shoes on. All these things are for real.

  We finally reach our street. It’s quite hot. All the women are outside their front doors, fanning themselves. Mamma opens the door and puts my suitcase down. I clutch my violin case because I don’t know where to put it. I don’t have a room of my own. I don’t even have my own bed. I look under Mamma’s bed, where Capa ’e Fierro’s things used to be stashed, and see that it’s empty under there.

  “Capa ’e Fierro’s gone,” Mamma says.

  “Did the police take him away again?” I ask.

  “No, he left with his wife and children. From now on, it’s just you and me. We need to get on with things on our own. . . . Do you want to eat something? Are you hungry after your journey?” she asks.

  She puts a cup of milk on the table and some stale bread from yesterday. It was what I used to eat every day, but now it feels scant. My whole life has shrunk again. I open my suitcase and take out the jams, the soft cheese, the hard cheese, the sausage, the mortadella, the cheese-and-salami pie, wrapped up in the yellow-and-white-striped tea cloth, which still smells of Rosa’s kitchen, the fresh pasta that Rosa made yesterday morning that I’d broken the egg into and helped her mix, covered in white flour up to my elbows. It feels like a year has gone by, not a day.

  I take all these things and lay them out on the table, as if we were having a party. They hardly fit on our kitchen table. Mamma starts touching and smelling everything, like she does at the vegetable market to check things are fresh.

  “Look what the world has come to . . . now it’s the kids bringing food home for the mothers.”

  I dip the old bread into the milk and then I spread a little of Rosa’s jam on the top, just a teaspoon.

  “Try it. It’s made with fruit from their trees.”

  Mamma shakes her head.

  “You have it. I’m not hungry.”

  She unpacks my clothes, notebooks and school textbooks, pens and pencils.

  “You were already Nobèl before you left. Don’t tell me they’ve turned you into a musician up there, too?” she says, pointing at the violin.

  I open the violin case, and the smell of wood and glue in Alcide’s workshop hits me.

  “My babbo up north made this specially for me, with his own hands. He wrote my name in it, see?”

  “I can’t read,” she says.

  “Do you want to hear what it sounds like?”

  Mamma looks up at the ceiling.

  “Listen to me, boy. You only have one father, and he left to go seek his fortune. When he comes back with bags of gold, you can take some presents up to that family, and we won’t need to ask any more favors of anyone.”

  She takes the violin out of my hands and looks at it as if it were a strange critter that might bite her from one moment to the next.

  “In the meantime, though, we need to get on with things on our own. I spoke to the cobbler, and he said he’d take you on to help with the shoe repairs. First, you’ll work for nothing, to learn the trade. Then, after a while, when you get better at it, he’ll pay you something, and who knows where it could go from there . . . ?”

  I rub my eyes, as if the dream wasn’t my life up north, but this one down here, and when I wake up, I will find myself on Derna’s big bed, the light shi
ning through the window, making stripes on the sheet. That would be reality.

  “Mr. Ferrari says I’m good at math.”

  “And does this Mr. Ferrari say he’ll send you money every month to keep us going?” she yells. “Did you tell your teacher that your mother is not a common thief? That there are honest, hardworking people here, too?”

  She goes around the room picking up everything I brought with me: the clothes, the notebooks, the food. I don’t know what she’s going to do with it.

  “Put that thing down now. You won’t be needing it,” Mamma says. The violin and its case with my name in it are shoved under the bed. I don’t say a thing. I put my hand in my pocket and twizzle Luzio’s marble around in my fingers. It’s all I have left.

  29

  “DONNA ANTONIETTA, GOOD MORNING!” ZANDRAGLIONA says, sweeping through the door with a big, fat smile on her face. “Can I borrow this little urchin for a while and take him home? I want to see whether he still remembers how we make onion frittata down here, or whether he’s forgotten everything while he was up there.”

  “You’re quite right. He’s even forgotten who his mother is up there. He hasn’t given me a smile since he set foot in this house. All he’s interested in now is the violin and adding up and taking away.”

  “What are you talking about, Donna Antonietta? You know kids. They’re just whims. Then they go away,” Zandragliona says, winking at me.

  “Come over to my place for a while. I’ll refresh your memory with a little fizzy water made with a sachet of Idrolitina . . .”

  Her ground-floor apartment hasn’t changed a bit.

  “Is my tin of treasures still there?” I ask, pointing at the tile under which I’d hidden it.

  “Nobody’s touched it,” Zandragliona says, pouring the sachet of bicarbonate into the water to make it go fizzy.

  We sit there in silence, but it’s nice anyway.