The curfew was on, but mother didn’t trouble to consider that if she had been seen by a German patrol she could have been shot on the spot. She had almost made it back home when she fell into a ditch, holding the oil securely aloft. In that position, she was unable to climb out, and Papi had fallen asleep so deeply, he didn’t even realize she hadn’t come back. She was rescued at dawn, when the early-rising neighboring farmer saw her and helped her out, the oil still intact.
In the third year of the war I completed my studies at the liceo and looked to enroll in a university. The closest one was in Milan, the most heavily bombed Italian city. There was round-trip train service to Milan, little more than eighty miles away, but there was no schedule to go by. The train stopped so often and unpredictably that one could never be sure when it departed and when it arrived. Moreover, it was often bombed or strafed by Allied planes. My parents’ desire to see me going to the university was great, but not great enough to risk train travel. There was a truck that left for Milan in the morning and returned in the evening. The driver lived on property that was part of the farm Papi managed, inspiring enough confidence in my parents that they overcame fear and reluctance to allow me to travel with him for at least the first few times.
I had decided to work toward a degree in natural sciences. Bombs had fallen on the university, and amid the rubble and smoke from recently extinguished fires, I found the office of the professor whom I was told to consult about my course of study. He informed me that lectures were given sporadically and never scheduled sufficiently in advance to allow me, who had so far to travel, to plan to attend them. My best option was to study at home, following a curriculum that he would give me, and to show up for the exams, which would be given orally. I chose to make human anatomy my first course. He generously supplied me with the texts I needed to study, but he also pointed out that the osteological part of the exam would be conducted with actual bones and that I would have to prepare for it using a full skeleton. The very kind truck driver with whom I had traveled to Milan came for me as we had arranged. I rode back home with him that evening, giving no thought to the dangers of the road or to how I would procure a human skeleton for my studies. I had enrolled in the university, I had signed up for my first course, and after the confining years on the farm, life was about to open up for me.
Reality broke into that life the following morning. How was I to find a skeleton? There seemed to be no hope of finding one in the town we lived in, but then I remembered seeing one in the study of my former science teacher from the liceo. I asked him very sweetly if I could borrow it, and he very sweetly said, “Of course, my dear, you can have all of it, except for the skull. It is very delicate and some of its parts are extremely fragile.” I was devastated: “No skull? How can I prepare for my exam without it? It’s the most complicated part of the whole skeleton!” “Don’t be so negative,” he replied. “You can easily get one at the cemetery.” I was stunned. “Really? At the cemetery? Are you serious?” “Of course,” he said, “it won’t be a problem; go ask, and you’ll see.”
When I got back home with my bag of bones, I thought about my old teacher’s suggestion. I had no other solution, so I followed his advice and went to the cemetery. It was an active place in those days. I was directed to the chief gravedigger, who was doing just that. I explained why I needed a skull and asked him if he had one to spare. I was overcome with misgivings, but he responded as nonchalantly as though I had asked him the time of day. “Sure, I can give you one if you bring an authorization from the medical examiner at the hospital.” Feeling more confident of success now, I found the medical examiner at the hospital and asked him if I could please have an authorization to obtain a skull at the cemetery. “Why do you need a skull and who told you I could give you such an authorization?” I once more gave my reasons and explained that the gravedigger had assured me that with the doctor’s authorization he could give me as many skulls as I needed. He hesitated briefly, but I was so young and guileless that he couldn’t think of any objection, and he wrote out an authorization on his official stationery. It emerged later that he had assumed that post only two days earlier and had no clue as to what was or was not permissible. I returned to the cemetery waving the splendid document I had been given, feeling unimpeachably authoritative. The gravedigger pocketed the letter, saying, “Hai avuto fortuna. (“You are lucky.”) There is a fine skull here for you, which I have just dug up.”
I grabbed the eagerly sought object of my pursuit, but, never having held a newly dug-up skull before, I was dismayed to find that every opening was packed solid with dirt. It certainly did not look like the polished skull in my teacher’s study, and I had no idea what I could do with it. I queried the gravedigger, who said, “Try boiling it and then brushing all the dirt away.” I brought my skull home to my mother, who, I had hoped, would help me. To my surprise, she was horrified, crying, “Portalo via subito!” (“Get that thing out of the house immediately!”)
I hunted around the various farmyards for a large enough container, and finally I came across a large tin. I rinsed it out, put in the skull, set it over some broken bricks, and filled it with water. I gathered branches, kindling, and newspapers, stuffed them under the tin, and lit them. I was unable to get much of a fire going, and after a couple of hours the water had not even begun to simmer and the skull was caked as hard with dirt as ever. Once again, I felt I would never be able to prepare for my exam, when one of the neighbors, a retired doctor who had from time to time given my mother helpful advice, passed by and rescued me. Informed of my predicament, he said, “Why don’t you launder it the old-fashioned way?” “Which is?” I asked. “It’s how our folks used to launder and bleach sheets and other linen in the old days. Bring me a pot of boiling water and ashes from your kitchen stove and I’ll show you how it is done.” When I came back with what he had asked for, I found he had dug a hole in the ground for the skull. He spread some of the ashes on the bottom of the hole, placed the skull over them, covered it with the remaining ashes, and then poured the hot water over it. “We’ll wait a few minutes,” he said. When he decided that sufficient time had passed, he pulled out the skull and rinsed it under the water that ran into the trough where cows and other farm animals came to drink. The skull came out a clean bone-white, except for a shadow under where the nose used to be. “Look, Doctor, he has a gray mustache!” I cried. “Sciocchina” (“Silly girl”), he said, laughing. “Those are his capillaries. Go back into the house and bring me an old toothbrush.” With it he brushed away the “mustache” and a few remaining specks. My skull was magnificent, and even though some of its teeth were missing, I thought it smiled at me.
I had been corresponding with one of my former liceo classmates who had been drafted and assigned to an antiaircraft brigade in Verona, a city close to Lake Garda. He knew about the bones I needed to prepare for my human anatomy exam, and I followed up with a letter in a humorous vein, describing the skull I had acquired and how I had managed to clean it and even erase its “mustache.” I called it by the name I had given it, Giobatta, a character from a comic strip we both read. One morning, ten days later, two policemen came looking for me, asking me to go with them immediately to the police station. My fear was that someone had died and I was going to be asked to identify a body. I had the sick feeling that something had happened to Papi.
At the station, the chief gave me a very black look. He showed me a letter, asking me if I recognized it. It was the letter I had written to my classmate in Verona. There were the censor’s yellow lines all over it. I was so relieved that I laughed as I answered, “Certamente! ” (“Certainly!”) It was not a well-chosen moment to laugh. He looked at me even more menacingly, saying, “You stand accused of profaning a tomb and of boiling a human skull, for which you may get a sentence of forty years. But that is not all. Whose skull was it you took? Was its real name Giobatta? Did it in fact have a mustache?” His look and his words reawakened my fear, except that now I was afraid for mys
elf. I tried to explain about the course in human anatomy I was studying for, but he wasn’t listening. He kept shouting questions at me: “Who instructed you to boil the skull of a German colonel? What did they give you for doing it?” With barely the breath to get the words out, I said that I didn’t know anything about a German colonel, that I had gotten the skull with proper authorization from the medical examiner. At that, one of the officers standing by said, “Let us check the girl’s story and find out if she really did have an authorization.” He escorted me to the hospital, where the medical examiner acknowledged having issued such a permit. “And what did you do with it?” the officer asked me. “I gave it to a gravedigger at the cemetery.” “Let us go to the cemetery, then,” he said. There, the gravedigger produced the document that I had given him, and with that, the questions about a German colonel stopped. It turned out that a colonel with a mustache and a name sounding vaguely like Giobatta had indeed disappeared, probably killed by partisans. In the interim, my mother had taken the bicycle and gone to the police station to find out what had happened to me. There they told her that I had gone to the hospital. When she got to the hospital, they told her I was at the cemetery, where, after pedaling furiously, she found me. We thought it was very funny, but not just then; later, much, much later.
I was still in trouble, however, charged with profanation of a tomb and the boiling of a skull. I had my hearing before a judge, an aristocratic old gentleman with a mane of beautiful, thick, white hair and the slurred, guttural “R” that you often hear in the speech of the Italian upper class. He had before him the police report, my letter, and the skull. He looked at me with a shadow of a smile that helped me stop the trembling of my legs. “Signorina,” he asked, “do you know you could go to jail for forty years for what you have done?” “Yes, your honor.” “And do you know,” he continued, “that in my lifetime as a judge I have never before had to judge someone accused of boiling a skull? We have much more serious work to attend to here. Do us a favor, take the corpus delicti”—the evidence—“and go home.”
IT WAS FINALLY OVER; Germany had surrendered, and Allied tanks were in the town square. But it wasn’t quite over for everyone. The partisans came down from their hideouts in the mountains to round up those they knew or suspected to be fascists or sympathizers. Some they shot immediately. Others they locked up. There was hardly any food for those in prison, and some of them began to starve to death. We had friends among them, and my mother baked bread that I loaded on my bicycle and brought to the prison.
That didn’t sit well with the partisans. One evening, three armed, bearded young men stormed into the house. One of them was holding a pot of pitch, which he put on our stove’s hot top. Another had shears and a straight razor. We understood immediately what they intended because we had seen newspaper photos of women whose heads had been shaved and covered with hot pitch to keep them bald forever. There was nowhere to run. I jumped up on the dining table and my mother and father threw themselves screaming
Walking my bicycle in Desenzano, 1944, the worst year of the war
against the men, desperate to keep them from grabbing me.
When the son of our neighboring farmer had earlier seen the partisans approaching our compound, he bicycled at top speed to get Zio Tonino, who, breathing hard, came instantly. He ordered the men to leave the house immediately, and to our amazement, they obeyed. Our amazement increased when we learned that during the war, Tonino had been a double agent. With his German wife, Zia Ernie, he entertained German officers, but he would pass information about German troop movements to the partisans. We never discovered whether Ernie knew it. At a later date, when he was decorated for it, we also learned that he had harbored two American secret agents in his attic who radioed intelligence back to their base.
I was safe. Those who wanted to disfigure and humiliate me had gone, and we owed it to a Tonino we never suspected existed. The panic and bewilderment that I experienced that evening left a deeply buried trace in my consciousness—a trace, however, that can still surface and briefly throb whenever I see a woman who covers an implicitly bald head with a turban or skullcap.
My son has asked—and so has my husband; neither one of them experienced it—how it felt to be in the war. It was a life that I now remember as having felt truncated at both ends. The past seemed too remote to have really existed, and the future had no face; there was only the present.
During the war years, it had been almost impossible to summon a steady image of the past. What had peacetime been like, when there were no bombs falling, no machine guns cutting people down from the air, when the possible loss of those close to us did not enter our thoughts, when we slept a whole night through, when eating was prompted by the pleasure of it rather than by the fierce, competitive struggle to survive, when the shops were filled with goods that we could buy, when we lived without fear? When I tried to recall my life before the war, the image wavered, and went out of focus.
And the future? What future? I had nothing to compare it with. It was like thinking about Paradise; it was beyond imagination. Only the present was real. Death was close to me and around me, but I was a young girl, and I wanted to feel alive. I sang, which I was unfit to do, I danced, I was noisy, I laughed, I played pranks. The present was unnaturally cruel, uncomfortable, mortifying, dangerous, but it was life, and I threw myself around it because I could not think past it.
Home Again
1945
MAY 1945: The German army in Italy had surrendered; our lodgers, Zio Fagotto, Albina, and Albina’s daughters, had gone; and my mother, my grandmothers, and I prepared to quit the Lake Garda farmhouse. We collected the few belongings that we could carry with us on the bus that would take us home, while the rest, along with what little furniture was worth keeping, was made ready for shipment to Cesenatico. Papi went ahead to get the house ready for us, as he had done when we moved north at the beginning of the war. It is a good thing that he did. He found our house nearly uninhabitable, damaged equally by the retreat of the German army and by the advance of those who replaced it. The Wehrmacht had dynamited the bridge over the canal on whose banks our house stood. When the bridge blew up, part of the house went with it. In the interval between the Germans’ retreat and the arrival of Allied forces, looters moved in, carting away furniture and ripping out the boilers, the radiators, and all the piping that could come loose to sell for scrap. They were followed by a unit of General Mark Clark’s Fifth Army that bivouacked in the house, where they broke up what had remained of its furniture into firewood for the campfires they lit on our tiled floors.
During the following two decades, the final ones of his life, Papi would steadily lose momentum until, in his last years, he spent his days sitting by the window observing the passage of people, or perhaps simply of time. At that moment, however, his energy was still at full strength, and in a few weeks, moving sure-footedly on his native sod, he performed miracles. He found bricklayer friends to rebuild what had crumbled, and he went from farm to farm looking for furniture and household necessities to supplement what would be coming down from the Lake Garda house. He bought, for as little as he could because his pockets were bare, what the contadini—peasant farmers—were willing to dispose of or planning to discard. He could not afford to replace the vanished central heating system, which he supplanted with a terra-cotta stove in the dining-living room and a cucina economica—a wood-fired stove—in the kitchen. Living without central heating no longer seemed too great a hardship; we had grown used to it, and moreover, we even had something of a luxury, a little scaldabagno—a small and parsimonious electric heater that doled out hot water in the bathroom.
On Christmas week, we waited for Bajòn, the faithful contadino who worked Papi’s small farm. “Bajòn” was a nickname that, through constant usage, had erased everyone’s recollection of his real name. In Romagnolo, the dialect spoken in Cesenatico, the word means “easygoing,” “good-natured,” and it fit him perfectly. Bajòn would be bri
nging the traditional year-end presents that were part of the ancient crop-sharing covenant governing the relationship between a contadino and the farm’s owner.
The mule that, with no discernible enthusiasm, drew Bajòn’s cart also had a nickname: Moto Guzzi. It had been named, mockingly, after the Italian racing motorcycle because of the animal’s disinclination toward any form of guided locomotion, although sometimes, in sporadic and misguided attempts to live up to its sobriquet, it would tear off in brief, untimely, and aberrant trots. We heard Bajòn’s whoops, urging Moto Guzzi on, coming up the path to the house, and presently the mule’s forlorn shuffle brought him into view.
When Bajòn pulled up in the yard with the two-wheeled cart that Moto Guzzi had so reluctantly drawn, it seemed to me that our own gift-bearing magus had come. He unloaded a sack of flour milled from our own wheat, the soft variety known as doppio zero—00—that is used throughout Emilia-Romagna for handmade pasta; two dozen freshly laid eggs with wisps of straw from the chicken coop still stuck to their shells; a long, knobby salami; a couple of yards of sausages, and my favorite, two thick cotechini, the boiling sausages made largely with coteca, the sweet, tender rind from a pig’s snout; and an earthenware crock of strutto, the rendered pork fat that is unequaled for making pastry crust and for producing crisp, light, fragrant fried foods.
There was a basket of sauce tomatoes, small, round, slightly puckered, and still attached to part of their vine. Bajòn had been keeping them hanging in the farmhouse, and we strung them up from beams in the kitchen ceiling, alongside bunches of golden Albana grapes. In a cold room, they can last an entire winter, with flavor more concentrated than fresh tomatoes and a lot fresher than that of canned tomatoes. He handed over several cardoons of the variety grown in Romagna called gobbi, “hunchbacks.” As they grow, earth is piled over them to keep them white, and in the struggle to push through the mound of soil toward the light, their stalks hunch over, even to the point of cracking. They look deceptively like large celeries, but they are in the thistle family, like artichokes. Conventional cardoons can be bitter, but Romagna’s gobbi can be as sweet as artichoke bottoms. The stalks have to be thoroughly stripped of tough strings, my papi’s job. Gobbi can be braised or baked, but our favorite way to have them was to boil them in milk and water until tender—it could take more than an hour—and eat them while still warm, sprinkled with salt and bathed in the dense, fruity olive oil of our hills. Bajòn also had a bushel of apples for us, a small type known as renetta, their skin a dull rose-red, the flesh juicy and sweet. Lastly, we had a couple of shallow baskets lined with orange-red persimmons, the fall fruit that in Italy we call by its Japanese name, kaki. The persimmons grown in Romagna are plumper and more globelike in shape than other varieties, their taut, thin skin marked by a web of fine, dark lines. Half a lifetime later, I would hear them touted in Venice’s Rialto market, the stall-keepers calling out, “Gavemo kaki co’ ragno!”—“We have persimmons with the spider [web].” When ripe, the silken, honeyed flesh is succulent like that of no other fruit.
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