The Last Son’s Secret

by Rafel Nadal Farreras

  Suddenly, the freezing north wind blew in through the windows shattered in the air raid, and light filtered through the room, making Donata’s biscuit tins glimmer. The gleam caught Vitantonio’s eye. He had sat down at the table without even realizing it. He pulled the lid off the tin: there were letters, medals, photos, newspaper clippings, ID cards and other kinds of documents. There was also the wallet that his father had on him, on the last day of the war when he was killed by an Austrian sniper.

  He took everything out and picked up the wallet; it was exactly as Skinny had handed it over on that day when he brought Vito Oronzo Palmisano and Antonio Convertini’s personal effects over to the Widows’ House. That wallet was the closest Vitantonio had ever come to touching something of his father’s and he opened it carefully. The first thing he saw was a photo of his mother, very young, wearing the calm gaze that had always made him feel at peace. As a boy he had taken refuge in those brown eyes and he imagined his father must have, as well. He imagined Vito Oronzo in a trench at the front, kissing that photo every night and letting her gaze lull him peacefully to sleep.

  The wallet also contained some of his father’s personal documents, including the permission for leave from 14 to 26 October 1918, and the last letter that Donata had written him, the very day after saying goodbye at Bellorotondo station. In fact, she had put it in the post while his father was still on his way back from leave, headed towards Vittorio Veneto, where he would meet up with his company, already engaged in the war’s last offensive.

  Vito Oronzo Palmisano, 94° Reggimento Fanteria

  Bellorotondo, Friday 25 October 1918

  My love,

  I am dictating this letter to Francesca, because this way I won’t be so embarrassed as when I dictate them to the local scribe and I’ll be able to tell you more things, our things.

  Yesterday – Thursday – when I came home I could still smell you and I missed you more than I ever have before. Since you’ve been gone, every time I look at the kitchen table I tingle all over and I yearn for you. Oh, how I wish I could cover you in kisses and caress the red heart you have engraved on your collarbone. Is that heart really all just for me? I wear mine on the inside, but it too beats like mad for you.

  How are things at the front? Do you still believe this damn war is coming to an end? Do you promise you’ll be home for Christmas? I like imagining that we’ll go to the Immacolata together for the next Midnight Mass, walking into the church arm in arm and sitting in the front pew, like the landowners. After almost four years of war you’ve earned the right to have everyone see you seated up front, with your head held high. Father Constanzo, the new priest, might even say a few words of welcome especially for you.

  Next week we’ll harvest all the olives. Today we gathered up the last two rows of rosse olives and next week I plan on finishing all the ñastre behind the house. Francesca, my sister-in-law Concetta, and my cousin Bruna, plus Vicino’s wife, all help me. Maybe you’ll be back in time to help me spread the olives out on the table to choose the best ones, and maybe afterwards I’ll let you lay me out on it and undo the buttons on my blouse, one by one.

  Take care, I need you home safe and sound. Honestly, I don’t know what I’d do without you. I’d die.

  Write and tell me about everything you’re doing and everything you’re thinking. I send you a thousand kisses and a very big hug. I love you like mad.

  Your Donata

  P. S.: Francesca is teaching me how to read and write. She says that soon I’ll be able to do it all on my own.

  Another big kiss.

  Donata

  Vitantonio felt a knot in his stomach and he started to cry quietly. He picked up two bunches of letters, which were tied delicately with a white ribbon, and held them in his hands for a while: they were the other letters that his parents had written while Vito Oronzo Palmisano was at the front. There were about thirty in each bundle: they had written to each other regularly for three years, at least once a month. He put the letters to one side, for later, and started to sort through his mother’s other small treasures, one by one.

  He pulled a gold locket, in the shape of a heart, out by its chain. He opened it and found the faces of his mother and father, and remembered that she had worn it at every special family occasion when he was a boy. It saddened him to recall that it had now been three and a half years since he’d left Bellorotondo and they hadn’t had a chance in all that time to celebrate anything. He pulled out two gold earrings with a pearl that Nonna had given his mother when she turned forty, and he laughed because Donata had thought they were too nice and was embarrassed to wear them.

  Then he started to leaf through more keepsakes of his father’s: first of all, his membership card to the Confederazione Generale del Lavoro, which didn’t surprise him because Skinny had already told him about that at the factory that day when he had asked about his father, when he still believed he was Antonio Convertini’s son. He found another card and discovered – and this one was a surprise – that his father had been a member of the Partito Socialista; that explained some things that years earlier had baffled him.

  In the pile there was also an official document that was folded more carefully than the others, and when he opened it up he found that it was the death notice for his father; the document was just as the lieutenant colonel sent from the 94° Reggimento Fanteria had given it to the mayor of Bellorotondo, so he could officially inform the family of the last Palmisano’s death. Only twenty-five years had passed and Europe was again experiencing the savagery of war: Vitantonio thought that if his father hadn’t died on that last day of the Great War they might have called him up again and forced him to return to the front.

  He was still thinking about that when he realized he had a newspaper clipping in his hands, underlined in pencil. It was covered in enthusiastic annotations, which must have been by his mother because they were in the earnest handwriting of someone who had learned to write as an adult. He saw that it was a clipping from Il Seme, the socialist newspaper of Bellorotondo, from September 1914, and he started to read the article, by a certain Giovanni Gianfrate.

  O mothers of Italy!

  O mothers of Italy, these words go out to you!

  They’re inebriating your sons with tobacco, champagne and rhetoric and they’re leading them to war. Rush to help them, O mothers!

  They snatch them from your breasts and send them far away, to fields ravaged by shrapnel and fire. Mothers of Italy, hold them close!

  Hundreds, thousands, have been sent to the slaughter. They’ve robbed us of our sons, they’ve robbed us of our husbands. You nursed them to live, not to die … Mothers of Italy, stand up against this!

  Your sons are good and they vilify them; they are healthy and handsome and they deform them; they are docile and they teach them to kill …

  Donata had traced a thick line under a particularly fierce section of the journalist’s polemic but it looked as if it had already been underlined earlier, perhaps by Vito Oronzo himself. On one side of the page Vitantonio’s mother had written ‘Bravissimo!!!’ with three energetic exclamation marks, and beneath that a small note with a very large question mark: ‘Read to Vitantonio?’ He felt his stomach contract again and he couldn’t continue reading.

  My God, how his mother must have suffered, to have held on to those inflammatory words against the war as if they were a treasure! If she had given them to him to read, would they have changed his decision? He supposed not, but they would have certainly made his decision to take up arms and fight more painful. The words from Il Seme were as filled with passion as they were with common sense: that had been proven right by those last few months of war. But that was precisely why they now had to fight and defeat the Nazis and the fascists. He put those thoughts aside, wiped his eyes and continued reading.

  In the tin there were two more front pages from Il Seme, which were folded very neatly. One was a copy of the Italian Socialist Party manifesto defending Italy’s neutrality in t
he European conflict. The other opened with another anti-war editorial: ‘Abbasso la guerra!’ He was surprised that his mother had never told him about his father’s political involvement. Not even in these last few years. Her attempts to protect him from war had led her to try to hide all traces of it. And she had been particularly careful to distance him from any sort of political commitment.

  He put the clippings back in the biscuit tin and grabbed a pile of photos. In the first one he saw his father in profile, dressed in army garb, with his mother at his side, and bringing his lips to her cheek, about to kiss her. She was facing the camera and looking at him mischievously out of the corner of her eye. They were both laughing and looked happy, convinced that life promised them wonderful things and that nothing bad could happen. It must have been taken during that leave in the autumn of 1918. When he brought it close to the candle’s flame, he was shocked at how much he resembled his father; they had the same face, the same long neck and especially the same broad shoulders. He looked in the mirror over the sideboard and smiled.

  He pulled out a second photo. In front of an exotic backdrop of Dutch windmills painted by some keen artist, his parents appeared arm in arm, next to Antonio and Francesca Convertini, and he was even more shocked: it was hard to believe that the young woman in the photo wasn’t Giovanna. My God, that long black hair, that brown skin and those green eyes on Francesca were the same ones that hypnotized him when he looked at Giovanna. Both mother and daughter had such a fierce, wild beauty that sometimes it hurt to look at them. But their laughter, like Francesca’s in the photo, was so good-natured that it softened them.

  He put the photos to one side and picked up the letters again. Untying a ribbon, he read them all one by one, hoping to find something in them that would help him imagine what his parents were like and what they talked about in the little time they were able to spend together. But the letters were nearly all the same, filled with repetitive declarations of love in the same conventional formulas, and he remembered that they’d both had to use a scribe, who always wrote the same banalities.

  When he was just about to put the letters back into the tin, he saw that there was one by itself, in a different hand. It had been written that very year, just a month earlier.

  Bari, 2 November 1943

  Dear Donata,

  The day when we will have to say goodbye for ever is rapidly approaching and I wanted to write to you a few words of acknowledgement and respect. These last few weeks at the hospital have confirmed what I already knew: that you have a special gift for comforting people. Have you suffered so much that you can recognize pain at first glance? Have you been so afraid that you are able to identify it in others, before they even ask for help? Have you sacrificed so much that you don’t mind sharing the little you have left? The more I see you devote yourself to comforting others, the closer I feel to you and the more I curse this country that has failed either to make the most of its finest sons and daughters, or to grant them any opportunities.

  We are living through terrible times, in which only your company at work has kept me going and helped me to keep looking towards the future. It’s so painful to see men come from the front with wounds that will never heal completely. The terror etched into their faces! How they suffer, even in their dreams! And yet you are able to calm them with loving words from your heart. You care for them just as you would for Vitantonio and Giovanna, if they were the ones who had been wounded.

  I have always admired your courage, but now I know that over time my admiration has turned to love. I would have done anything to make up for everything that has happened to you, to give you back a little bit of what you’ve given others. Perhaps far from this thankless land we could have built a paradise for our old age. But now that you have recovered your son, you’ll never be able to leave him again. I am sorry to lose you, but I’m happy to see you near Vitantonio and Giovanna, finally without secrets or lies. I have always considered them a little bit mine too, since that night you and Francesca involved me in your secret. Watching them grow up, I’ve always felt proud of them and had the opportunity to see how valuable your sacrifice was.

  When this horrible nightmare ends I will go far, far away. They say that miracles happen in the Promised Land. You know that I don’t believe in gods and miracles, but I can’t help but acknowledge the miracle of a town that history has treated with such cruelty but that remains standing despite it all. You decided long ago that the Palmisanos were your only homeland. Now I know that the Jewish people are my family.

  I will always carry you in my heart. With deepest affection,

  Gabriele Ricciardi

  Vitantonio heard Giovanna stirring awake again. He tied up all the papers and things he hadn’t looked at yet and put the tin in the sideboard. Lying down by her side, he put his arm around her and leaned back against the wall. He looked out towards the balcony: the dawn was just breaking and he was surprised by the calm of the freezing December night. The only reminder of the tragedy was the stench of burning still emanating from the port. Vitantonio looked at Donata’s lifeless body and it all seemed unreal. He placed a pillow at Giovanna’s back and put his other hand on her belly. Suddenly he noticed that he still had Dr Ricciardi’s letter and he said, ‘You have to read this. It’s from Ricciardi to my mother.’

  His revelation didn’t achieve the desired effect. Her expression was amused and all she said was, ‘There is nothing in that letter that I haven’t read a thousand times in Ricciardi’s eyes. I’ve seen the love in his gaze, all these years, whenever he looked at her.’

  She leaned forward and kissed her zia’s forehead and cried.

  The Ducks in the Pond

  THEY WERE STARTLED by a knock at the door. They looked at each other, wondering who it could be that early and Vitantonio shouted, ‘Ricciardi!’

  They’d forgotten about him. The doctor had spent the night at the Policlinico, on duty with patients who were getting sicker by the hour, with no apparent cause. Opening the door, Vitantonio was hit by another wave of grief: the white-haired man waiting in the doorway looked defeated. Dr Gabriele Ricciardi had aged all of a sudden; he was thinner than ever, he hadn’t shaved in days, he had dark circles under his eyes and his clothing still smelled of mustard gas. It was the first time Vitantonio had noticed the passing of time in his doctor’s exhausted face. Ever since he was a boy, Vitantonio had thought that Ricciardi, with his neatly trimmed crop of white hair and moustache, had an elegant, mature air. And over the years the doctor maintained his tidy, ageless appearance. He was quick to laugh, passionate, upstanding, educated, polite; ‘charming’ was the word his mother always used. Now he seemed shrunken and ill.

  ‘How is she?’ Ricciardi asked as soon as he walked in, hoping to find Donata feeling better.

  Vitantonio pushed open the door to the dining room and moved aside. The doctor saw Giovanna stretched out on the floor, crying and hugging Donata, and he understood that he was too late. A grimace of pain contorted his face and his legs wobbled. Stepping forward, Vitantonio held the doctor to stop him from collapsing. Ricciardi leaned one arm against the door and tried to stand up straight, but he seemed disoriented, as if he were hesitating between entering the room or leaving it. Vitantonio turned his back to him: he had just read his love letter and felt he had violated his privacy quite enough for one day.

  Giovanna got up and hugged the doctor. He had often been like a father to her and she’d always noticed how happy her zia was when he was around the house. She and Vitantonio exchanged a look, discreetly communicating they should leave the doctor alone with Donata’s body. When they left, the doctor dropped to Donata’s side and broke down in sobs. He still had so many things to tell her, and he began speaking to her lifeless corpse.

  After leaving him there alone for more than an hour, they finally went back in to the dining room. Ricciardi’s eyes were red and he was wiping his face on his sleeve. He looked up from the floor and addressed Vitantonio. ‘She wanted to trick fate
the day she handed you over to Francesca, but the gods made her pay dearly for it. Every time she thought happiness was within reach, life played another trick on her. But she never gave up. I don’t know where she got the strength to start again and I don’t know how I will do it now. I don’t know if it’s worth fighting on without her.’

  ‘The war will go on for much longer than we thought and in the end we’ll all pay a much higher price,’ agreed Vitantonio. ‘I turned my back on my family to defend freedom beside the Allies and fate has repaid me with the worst betrayal: American bombs have robbed me of my mother, just when I had found her again. But we can’t stop fighting. You said it yourself: she never would have given up.’

  ‘I don’t know what more could happen to us,’ said Giovanna. She was staring down at the floor, aware that she wasn’t really asking a question she expected Ricciardi to answer.

  ‘If God were just, nothing more could possibly happen to us,’ declared the doctor. ‘Or to this city. No one can pay such a high price or be so unfairly punished. The authorities refuse to reveal the number of dead to cover up the gas disaster, but today they made an official tally of the damage to materiel and admitted that the bombing was the worst catastrophe suffered by the Allied troops since Pearl Harbor: the German planes sunk seventeen of the thirty-one ships that were in the Bari port that night. Thirty-one easy targets in an enclosed area, caged like helpless animals, because now we know that the radars that should have alerted the anti-aircraft defences were out of order. When they make public the final death toll we’ll see the full extent of this brutal attack—’

  ‘One second, say that again,’ said Vitantonio, cutting him off. His face was tense and his eyes were wide.

  ‘Say what again?’

  ‘That part about the boats in the port being like helpless animals. How many did you say there were?’