The Children's Train

by Viola Ardone

  “Sorry, sir. What was that?” he says, peering out at me.

  “An annurca apple,” I say, a little embarrassed.

  The host signals I should wait, his hand up, palm out, fingers wide. He goes down to the cellar and comes out two minutes later with a little red apple, like a compact heart.

  “How much do I owe you?” I ask.

  “What can I say, sir? I can’t sell these. Nobody appreciates annurca apples anymore. They all want those big, tasteless ones. I keep these for people who know the difference.”

  “Well, thanks, then,” I say, putting the apple in my pocket.

  “Take care, sir,” the host says, disappearing back into the trattoria.

  As I walk back toward the hotel, the apple swells in my pocket, keeping me company, like the one you gave me that day as the train was leaving for Bologna, when I was surrounded by all those other children. You entrusted me to Maddalena Criscuolo’s care. I wonder where Maddalena has got to. She was a fine young woman, and now she must be getting old. The same thing that has happened to me.

  I left your apple to shrivel up and dry on my desk at Derna’s house. I didn’t want to eat it, because I wanted to keep your memory alive. But then, one day, it wasn’t there any longer. Now I’ve done it again. I’ve let time go by, and now it’s too late.

  42

  THE LIGHT OUTSIDE IS SO STRONG THAT THE dark inside feels even thicker. When I step inside, it is just beginning to rain, despite the sun, and the air in the church is hot and humid. You are there at the front, between the two naves, in the center. The wooden coffin is resting on a folding metal stand with wheels, as if you are a piece of furniture waiting to be moved.

  There’s a stench of damp mixed in with incense. A boy in a white tunic swings the golden censer, which emits puffs of gray smoke. When the priest appears, everyone stands, and the heat, stench, and dark make me feel faint. I don’t know. It may be because you are there inside the coffin.

  I get down on the kneeler; people may think I’m praying. The priest starts talking, but I don’t hear a word. You never took me to church. God, Virgin Mary, and saints were never your strong point. Alcide never had anything to do with priests, either. My eyes slowly get used to the dark and I try to make out people’s faces. In the front row, there are women dressed in black with their hair tied up tight. One of them has a white braid pinned in a coil around her head like a crown. She looks like a girl who has become very old. In the second row, on his own, there’s a man with lanky gray hair stuck inside the collar of his shirt. He opens and shuts his eyes compulsively; at first, I think he is winking at me. His intermittent blinking forces me to observe him for a few seconds. In the interval between one blink and the next, I notice his eyes are dark blue. They have preserved a little of his youth. He looks tired, like everybody else here. Their faces are all pallid and strained, as if they’d been bleached. You didn’t have any relatives. You only had me. And Agostino. I look all around the church, but I can’t see him. So many years have gone by that I may not recognize him. There are not many of us here. Hardly two rows on each side of the nave. Few, but with good shoes on. A little worn out, but good. One and a half points.

  The priest talks about you as if he knew you, and maybe he did. Perhaps in your old age you started going to church; maybe you went to mass on Sunday, made confessions, took communion from the priest’s hand, and recited the rosary with the other women on your street. He may know you better than I do. I may be the person who knows you the least. The priest says you were a good woman, and that now God, in all his glory, has taken you to heaven together with all the angels and saints. Even though I am the outsider here, I still think you don’t give a shit about angels or saints or paradise, because you were happy here in these alleyways, in your apartment, surrounded by people chanting. That’s why you made pasta alla genovese and set it aside for the next day. Not so you could go away in glory with a host of saints. But then, death is a sneaky, high-handed thing. It smokes people out in the midst of their daily life, with all their little certainties and faults. Every person perfects their own strategy for escaping death, but they are mistaken. They are mistaken when they believe they can cheat death by making pasta alla genovese for the next day. They are mistaken when they run away to another city, seeking a different destiny. They are mistaken when they think music will keep them out of harm’s way. There is no safe harbor. Laughing through its teeth, death will ferret them out anyway, one by one, without distinction. And perhaps I, too, have come here to die of fear, of heat, of melancholy.

  I feel like shouting, but my voice is locked in, and if I were to unlock it, tears would leak out with it. The priest says “sit,” and we all sit. The priest says “stand,” and we all stand. I feel like that trained monkey with the old man on the Corso. The priest invites us to take communion, and everyone files out of the benches to stand in line. The old man with long hair and a tic in his eyes stays in place. I stare at the painting of the saint on her deathbed: her face pale, her lips a vivid red. She doesn’t look like she’s about to die; rather, she looks like an attractive young woman getting ready to go to a party. I try to imagine that you are the saint in the painting and that you are lying there, nice and calm, with red lipstick on, ready for a party. Then, while everyone is still in line to take communion, I get up and walk toward the altar. I stop in the corner opposite the pulpit, take my violin out of its case, and start playing. The bow on the strings produces the sweetest, saddest music, which fills the church, which rises and falls, which in some passages sounds joyous and festive, rather than the lament of a mother for the absence of her son. It is an aria from Pergolesi’s Stabat Mater, but there is no way you will recognize it. You never heard me play.

  I go on playing for a few minutes, my left hand on the strings, my right hand on the bow. When the music comes to an end, the only sound is the rain outside. Everybody goes back to their places. The priest doesn’t speak. I try not to look at the brown wooden coffin between the two naves, where you are floating motionless, but my eyes are drawn there, nonetheless. I would like to walk out of the church and leave immediately, this instant, without even going back to the hotel to pick up my things. As if I had never come back. As if you were still there, where I left you that very first day, on the other side of the train window, waiting.

  The priest tells us the mass has come to an end, and we can go in peace, back to our homes. What peace? What homes? I feel like I have never had a home. A woman with silver-white hair in a man’s cut goes up to your coffin, just before the four men, including the one with the tic, pick it up and put it on their shoulders to take out. The woman with the silver-white hair kneels down in silence for a few seconds, then closes her fist and raises it in the air. When she looks up at me, she smiles. So I, too, get up and walk to you and stroke the wood. It is hard and rough. I pull my hand away and put it in my pocket. Behind us, everybody files out. One by one, they bow to the altar and leave.

  It has stopped raining, but the street is still wet and smells of earth and rotten vegetables. The woman with the silver-white hair walks toward me, her arms wide open. Behind her, the black-haired altar boy without his cassock and censer.

  “Don’t be embarrassed, Carmine,” she says. “His last name is Speranza, just like yours.”

  I don’t understand. I want to cut it short. I’m desperate to get away as fast as possible.

  “You’re mistaken, ma’am. My surname is Benvenuti,” I say, and I start walking toward the main road. She calls me by my name and reaches up to place her hands on my shoulders. The boy looks at me without smiling, his eyes narrow, and all of a sudden, I realize he’s the child with the gang of boys that was looking up at my balcony from the street.

  The boy stares at me, his eyes screwed up small, as if the church, the damp, and your brown coffin being carried away by four strangers were all my fault. Or maybe I’m the one thinking it, not him. He’s just a sad boy in front of a middle-aged man he has never seen before.


  “You came by train,” the old woman says, as if we were carrying on a conversation from before. Her voice gives her away more than anything else, but I don’t answer her. Not even to tell her I never take the train, because that relentless clickety-clack of the wheels on the tracks, like a tongue persistently returning to a painful tooth, reminds me of a boy running away.

  “It’s been a long time,” she continues, without expecting an answer. “But what can you do? You will always be my boys. Many of you still come to see me. The ones who stayed up north and the ones who came back here.”

  My mind slowly filters the information, like an image reacting to chemical agents and gradually developing on the satin-finish paper of a photograph. Mouth, hair, eyes, the outline of her cheekbones. But, above all, her voice. The voice that sang through a megaphone as the train pulled out of the station, the voice that rebuked me for not picking up Derna’s letters.

  It has started raining again, but it is a mere sprinkle, so feeble it hardly lands on the ground before it evaporates in the heat. The three of us are the only ones left standing in front of the church.

  43

  THE FRUIT AND VEGETABLE STALLS AT THE Pignasecca market seem to be talking on their own. It is as if the shouts are coming directly from the food, from the piled-up baskets and wooden crates that are as colorfully displayed as works of art, rather than from the vendors. Maddalena walks in front of me, holding the boy’s hand, while I lag behind, just as I used to do with you. You would always yell at me, but it wasn’t my fault. It’s not my fault, even now. It’s the shoes that are hurting me. Every step I take rubs the blisters on my heel, until they burst again. As we cross the narrow street, crammed with produce and people, Maddalena turns to speak to me, then to the boy, then back to me. It’s as if she always knows where to take us; me, the boy with the black hair, all the kids on the train. So we simply follow her.

  Passersby push and shove their way through the crowds, and I no longer try to avoid them. Maddalena still wears pants, as she always did. In the darkness of the church, she looked as tall and strong to me as she did when I was a child. Now, however, in the complex grid of this neighborhood, age seems to have made her smaller and more fragile. The crowd is noisy, the air heavy. I instinctively plug my ears with my fingers in order to shut out the cacophony and attempt to isolate Maddalena’s voice.

  “The boy is called Carmine,” she tells me. “He’s your brother Agostino’s son.”

  WHEN I WAS ABOUT TO TURN TEN, YOU WROTE TO US to say you were coming to Modena to give me a present, a surprise I would never have been able to imagine. It was the first time you had ever said you would come to see me, and we were all excited, including Rosa and Alcide. Instead, that morning you called, Derna answered the phone. You wished me a happy birthday and said that you were not coming anymore. The doctor had advised you to rest and not to travel. At the end of the phone call, you said, “Will you come to see your baby brother when he is born?” I didn’t answer. Tears were burning my eyes, as if I was running a high fever.

  A few months later, the news arrived. You had had another boy and had called him Agostino, like your father, bless his soul. His last name was Speranza, like all your children, who were so full of hope. I decided there and then I would never come to your house again.

  Not long after, I asked Alcide if I could try for the Conservatory. He paid for my train ticket and for a new jacket, but I was the one that had to earn the place at the music school. One morning that fall, my teacher, Maestro Serafini, accompanied me all the way to Pesaro. I stared through the window as a thick layer of fog buried the Po Valley under a shroud. “Here I am again,” I thought to myself. The regular cadence of train wheels clacking on tracks was taking me far away from my home.

  We walked into a room with dark wooden floors and red velvet armchairs, where other kids my age were sitting. Maestro Serafini left me there to wait for my audition. When my turn came, I took my violin out of its case and started playing: my left hand on the strings, my right hand on the bow. It was my first ever audition; I had chosen an aria from Pergolesi’s Stabat Mater. I was accepted, with a scholarship that included my room and board.

  44

  MADDALENA STOPS AND WHISPERS IN MY EAR that the boy’s mother and father have had a run-in with the law.

  “What do you mean?” I ask her.

  “They’re in jail,” she says, still whispering, so the boy doesn’t hear.

  I stop in the middle of the street, as kids riding three-up on a white scooter brush past my elbow. Maddalena and the boy vanish in the throng, and I start running. I finally reach them, just as Maddalena is unlocking her front door.

  “Here we go,” she says.

  We walk up two floors until we reach an apartment with “Criscuolo” written beside the doorbell. Maddalena’s house is tiny and extremely tidy. It looks like a temporary residence; somewhere she stays a few months before moving on. And yet she has lived here for more than thirty years, she tells me. She doesn’t like having too many things around, only what she really needs. Hardly anything, I think.

  Maddalena sits us down in her kitchen and pours two glasses of iced water.

  “Would you like some Idrolitina in there? I can do it right away.”

  Idrolitina! From the bottomless well of long-lost memories, out pops Idrolitina. Sitting at another kitchen table, a glass bottle filled with water from the faucet, the yellow sachet of sodium salts held between my thumb and index finger. I would shake the sachet, rip the corner off, and it was my special treat to pour the magic soda powder into the bottle, put the top on, and shake the bottle hard.

  I follow the same routine now, fifty years later, as if it’s a piece of music I know by heart, and then I take the top off and pour the sparkling water into three cups.

  “Carmine,” Maddalena says. “Do you like crayons?”

  The boy doesn’t answer. Maddalena hands him a blank sheet of paper and a few colored crayons.

  “Draw me a nice picture, will you? A portrait. But make me look nice, okay? Draw me nice and young, like when I first met your uncle Amerigo. Here, take a look.”

  She places an old black-and-white photo in front of the boy, and I catch a glimpse of her as I once knew her.

  A little perplexed, he starts drawing. Maddalena and I go into the other room, a living room with two armchairs, and a coffee table between them. There’s no TV; just a radio. We sit facing each other: two people with the main part of their lives behind them and, to varying degrees, only the margins to look forward to.

  “I’ve seen lots of the kids who went north on those trains, like you did. They wanted me to write letters for them, and their parents asked me to send a note to those people they didn’t even know, who had taken care of their kids for six months, a year, or more. Many stayed in touch. The families took their summer or winter vacations together. They went on helping, even from afar.”

  I gaze at the photos on the wall. In one, boys in shorts and girls in little dresses are waving diminutive Italian flags. The photo is black and white, veering toward sepia, but the flags stand out against the gray faces in bright red, white, and green. In another, the kids are at the station in Bologna after a night on the train. Their clothes are crumpled, their faces gaunt. But some of them are laughing in the midst of all the chaos. Two women are holding up a banner, which says, “We are the Mezzogiorno kids. Emilian solidarity and love show there is no north or south in this country, there is just Italy.” The sentiment shows its age, I think. What outdated, unfashionable words they are.

  “We helped so many kids, but it’s a never-ending task,” Maddalena goes on. “Your nephew, Carmine, was staying with his grandmother; Don Salvatore, the priest, helped out a little, too. Now he’s on his own.”

  “I didn’t know anything about Agostino. When did this happen?”

  “A few months ago, but don’t ask me anything else. I kept in touch with Antonietta, but she never told me anything about your brother’s affairs. Sh
e said he was innocent, and that he would prove that he and his wife had done nothing wrong. They’d been framed. I’d heard he was in with the wrong people, and he’d made a lot of money. The charge must be serious, as they didn’t even let him attend his mother’s funeral. Carmine was always on his own, even before the arrest. If it hadn’t been for his grandmother . . . Now the social services will start meddling.”

  I look at the boy through the living room door, kneeling on the chair, his elbows leaning on the table. I look for a resemblance to you, or to his father, Agostino, the good son, the one who stayed close by. His hair is black and straight, just like yours.

  “He’s a good kid, though he goes off the rails every now and again,” Maddalena says. “What about you? Are you married? Kids?”

  The boy in the kitchen picks up another sheet of paper and turns to look at me. Our gazes meet for a few seconds, then I look away, focusing again on the photographs on the wall.

  “Yes, I’m married,” I lie, again. She nods and smiles, encouraging me to invent an alternative life for myself with two grown-up kids who study music. Then I change the subject, because lying to her is hard.

  “Do you remember Tommasino?”

  She hands me a glass of homemade limoncello.

  The curly dark-haired boy suddenly appears on the wall of my memory, like one of the black-and-white pictures in this room.

  “Are you still in touch?”

  “I’m not in touch with anybody,” I tell her. “I didn’t even know what Agostino was up to, how old his son was, that he had ended up in jail, that my mother had a bad heart . . .” I realize I’m raising my voice, so I stop talking and avoid her eyes. Then I shrug, with a sigh. For Maddalena the past doesn’t matter. Even though she’s old now, all she cares about is what she can still do. In this respect, she hasn’t changed.

  “Tommasino has had a great career. With the help of his babbo up north he was able to go to law school, even though he came back here to live with his family. He went on to become a judge.”