Prologue & Chapter 1 of Novella 1
PROLOGUE
Kindness in Women
“Our good depends on the quality and breadth of our emotions.”
― George Eliot, Middlemarch ―
The woman lay in bed because what else could she do? She couldn’t go anywhere—she lacked the energy to do so if she could. At least she was alone, and her Bologna hospital room was quiet, enabling her to pray in solitude. Beige curtains covered the large main windows, but not the transom windows above them, so morning sunlight poured into the room, striking the far wall, making the room appear as if it was in two parts: three dull pistachio walls framing one shimmering mint wall and its wooden door.
The double knock on the doorframe roused her from her solitude, and she looked up to see Loredana standing there, holding several journals. “I brought them. Is now good? I have the day free—if you can tolerate me.”
The bedridden woman smiled and nodded at Loredana. She’d been looking forward to this visit since last Saturday, when she’d pressed Loredana to share her life story. She’d assumed Loredana might spend an hour or so speaking from memory, but Loredana had instead said, “I’d love to. I’ll need my journals for the good stuff, ovviamente, but let me tell you a bit about my childhood today.”
Loredana’s childhood was noteworthy, if only for its normalcy, no different from many other rural Italians coming of age between the two wars. She’d been born on a farm outside of Bologna and her parents soon left the farm with her, buying an apartment in the city. Loredana had described relationships with her parents and siblings not unlike those of the bedridden woman. But unlike her own story, Loredana’s were entertaining—or was it Loredana who was entertaining? She had a unique speaking style that was at the same time both self-confident and self-effacing. Either way, the stories and the narrator were a welcome diversion. After an hour, Loredana had reached her teenage years and stopped, saying, “I’ll be back on Monday with my journals, and we’ll pick up where I left off. With the good stuff—prometto.”
Now, here it was Monday morning, and as she watched Loredana take a seat next to the bed and open a journal, she assumed Loredana would read from it. Instead, Loredana said she’d use the journals as a chronological frame of reference that refreshed and stimulated her memories. She added, “Without these, I’d start rambling and you’d never be able to make sense of it.”
Loredana chuckled, and the woman smiled from the bed—what passed for a smile—for she felt happy. Happy because she knew today was going to be a good day, and not just because, in her life now, any day was a good day. The bad days may have won the battle for her body, but they hadn’t won the battle for her soul. And Loredana spoke to her soul.
CHAPTER ONE
A Man Can Die But Once
“But what we call our despair is often only the painful eagerness of unfed hope.”
― George Eliot, Middlemarch ―
How are you feeling? Why would I ask that? Forgive me. Sometimes I just go through the motions with my brain on idle. Let’s see—we left off with me describing my childhood. That was all from memory. Now I’ll have these journals to help me. If nothing else, they will make sure I keep my thoughts in some semblance of order!
***
January 1939
Much had happened since I’d left school last June at fifteen. In school, I’d kissed a few boys, even allowed some groping. But I never let them reach under my school smock—never! They’d had to content themselves with what they felt through the thick, faded white wool. White, because we were all pure following our confirmation, ovviamente—at least for a while. Some of us, even before. Not all of us, but I was. Even then.
Ah, did I mention France and Great Britain appeased Hitler at the Munich conference in September and then, in November, the appeased Nazis burned synagogues, destroyed Jewish shops, and killed Jews at random on what they called Kristallnacht—the night of the broken glass? If only France and Great Britain had known what to expect. Mamma told me often, “Wishing won’t make it true.” If only they’d listened to her. Merda, if only she’d told them, not me.
Allora, Hitler and Mamma aside, during the past seven months, more kissing. A lot. And more groping, but still the same rules. I’m tall, unlike you. Taller than half the boys my age. I looked older, so the gropers had more hope, and as a result, more disappointment, but I’m also strong, so they got the message—one way or another. Niente tette, niente vagina, niente di niente—no sex. God, no, assolutamente! Sex was for my husband. My eventual husband. So my parents told me. So the priests and nuns told us all, though their admonitions fell on the deaf ears of some of my classmates.
But that’s another thing that changed. I’m not sure when I decided Paolo was the man for me. That’s not quite true. I decided Paolo was the boy for me. Oh, certo, he was nineteen. Il Duce said he was a man, but Paolo was a boy in most all ways. Yet, he was tall, taller than me, and that felt right, and when we hugged and kissed, very right. Two-and-a-half years older than me, it meant I was more mature than him; still, the more time he spent with me, the more mature he became. I couldn’t tell if he was truly growing up, or he’d just mimicked the behavior he knew I liked. But if so, isn’t that a step toward maturity? I think so.
“Act it, and you become it,” as my mother told me ahead of my wedding. “If you don’t enjoy it, act like you do. If you act that way long enough, you’ll start to enjoy it.” Of course, then she scolded me. “What am I telling you for? You’re already pregnant, like it or not.” Right, my wedding. Getting to that.
Sì, Paolo and I had gone against the wishes of Pope Pius XI, the priests, the nuns, and our parents; we had sex. It wasn’t because I’d tired of waiting for it—I could take care of myself—but the Royal Italian Army had conscripted my nineteen-year-old Paolo, and I didn’t want him to slip away. Allora, I’d hatched a plan that was much more likely to land me in hell than a little premarital sex.
One Sunday afternoon, I asked Paolo to get a condom. When he asked why, I said, “Why do you think?”
I knew the boy was fast, but I didn’t think I’d ever seen him faster than when he took off to find one of his friends. At least until our first time later that afternoon, in the storage building near my home. I removed my dress. He’d never seen me naked from the waist down, and he stood mesmerized, until I lay back across a stack of wool bales. At that moment, I realized it was the first time he’d ever seen any woman’s genitalia. Which meant, ovviamente, it was his first time, as well as mine, for better or for worse. Mostly worse. I hadn’t even shifted my hips yet to get comfortable when he asked, “Did you like it, too?” Talk about fast. I just smiled and nodded, happy to have completed step one, and strangely touched that I’d been his first. That he’d been my first was a given, yet I still assured him he was, and told him how wonderful it had felt, would that it were true—the first of several lies. If a lie falls in the forest but doesn’t hurt anyone, is it still a sin? I pray not.
Step two was easier. After he used a condom our next time, then complained about having to use one, I told him I now knew when I could have sex yet not make a baby. I really did know, having asked a woman with three older children how she hadn’t had any more. Honestly, I couldn’t very well ask my mother, could I? I told Paolo, who now beamed a grin not well-suited to his face, that we must only have sex two weeks of every four. I certainly wouldn’t miss it the other weeks, and thanks to my hands, he didn’t miss much.
May 1939
Now on to step three—and another lie. Three weeks before Paolo was to leave for army training, I told him I must have miscounted. I hadn’t, certo. When he’d asked what I meant, I told him I was pregnant—though I wasn’t. I can count. He, as I’d expected, said he’d marry me. We told my parents, and then his, with wildly differing reactions.
Hoping our neighbors might forget the wedding date when the baby arrived next winter, Mamma began planning the wedding before I’d finished saying, “Mi dispiace, Mamma.” Papà had just returned from fighting in Spain as a Royal Italian Army “volunteer.” The Regio Esercito Italiano supplied support to the Spanish Nationalists under Franco as the Corps of Volunteer Troops, volunteer in name only, according to Papà. He told me Paolo seemed like a fine fellow, but we should have waited. Mamma also scolded me, but not for jumping the gun. “You should’ve asked me when it was safe to have sex, Figlia! You can fare sesso two weeks each month, just like the Church says, senza fare bambini. That should be enough for anyone.”
I’d taken her advice with a grain of salt; I mean, I had four younger siblings. Maybe Mamma was just bad at math, but her words had also offered a grain of truth, at least for me then. Two weeks a month was enough, certamente.
Paolo’s parents, well… Paolo also had four siblings, all older—much older. He’d been a late surprise for his older parents, certamente for his mother, who would soon turn sixty. His father, then in his early sixties, still practiced family medicine in southeast Bologna. He’d sent Paolo to university to become a doctor like his two older brothers, and that’s how I’d met him. No, I didn’t attend university! But my friends and I would hang out at the nearby cafes. College boys are so much more interesting, ovviamente. Did I mention I look older?
Comunque—I know, I know, I say “anyhow” a lot—his mother’s parents had left her a sizeable inheritance when they’d died. I didn’t know this, ovviamente; Paolo had spoken little of his family, and I’d spoken less of mine. We aren’t interested in each other’s parents. I’m interested in a husband, and Paolo is interested in a girl who’ll have sex with him. But his mother? His mother believed I wanted his money! I mean, not that money isn’t important, but like I said, it hadn’t factored into my plan. I just wanted Paolo as my husband before he went away.
Allora, we married in May, two months before my seventeenth birthday, having received an exemption because of my presumed condition. When Papà presented me to Paolo at the altar, you might think it warmed me, maybe brought a tear to my eye, vero?
Diavolo, no! Instead, I’d thought, Why are girls like property, to be traded from one man to another? But why am I asking you? You know this better than anyone. People tell me that such thoughts mean I’m not well-grounded, but I think it means just the opposite, no?
Allora, following the ceremony, my parents welcomed the new owner of their daughter into our family. Then they welcomed Paolo into our house, for his father had announced following our marriage that Paolo was dead to him, having failed in his efforts to have it annulled.
Paolo spent a week with me before heading to basic training. It was one of those weeks, but I didn’t mind. Guarda, the boy was going to war. I needed to remind him to come back. Caspita, did I remind him a lot!
In June, my parents and Paolo took the invented loss of my fabricated first baby in stride. “These things happen,” Mamma said. I saw no reason to trouble them with the truth. Paolo returned at the end of September for three weeks’ leave before shipping out with his unit to Yugoslavia to put down the communist resistance. I had stopped calculating my say-no weeks. I had no reason while he was away, and sort of lost track when he returned. We must have used our time together well, for just before Christmas, I realized, Merda, I’m pregnant. Actually pregnant. It wasn’t step four of my plan; I hadn’t planned it at all—but I found I liked the idea. I was going to have a baby!
July 1940
Our daughter, Mariangela Novella Torre, arrived in early July—the eleventh, to be precise. Paolo’s parents were still missing in action, so I felt no compulsion to name her after Paolo’s mother. Besides, the woman’s name was Fulvia—uffa! Mariangela is my mother’s name, and I just thought Mariangela Novella to be the most perfect appellation for my new angel. Seeing her face, I knew my place in the world for the first time. I was a mother!
Papà saw his first grandchild before the army recalled him and shipped him to Tunisia or Tripoli or some such place in the Italian colonies of North Africa that Il Duce considered part of his great new empire. We received word that the Australians had wounded, then captured Papà after the battle for Tobruk. I never learned if he’d started in Libya, but we learned in February that his life had ended there, in a POW hospital just outside Tobruk. But at least he’d seen his granddaughter.
Unfortunately, the great military minds of the REI sent my Paolo to Albania before he could come home to see his daughter. I looked forward to his next furlough, with no idea when that might be. Each time I received one of his rare letters, it raised hopes he’d written of his return, but each time, he simply wrote that he missed us, thanking us for the last letter and photograph, and hoped he’d see us soon. Except the one time in the spring of 1941, when he mentioned his unit was moving to Croatia, a region in Yugoslavia. At least he felt closer.
July 1941
Just after Mari’s first birthday, Mamma discussed moving out to the country. The occasional aerial bombardment of Bologna gave her pause, for sure, and she worried for my siblings, but I think it had more to do with memories of Papà. Before the war, he’d often described his dream of moving back from the city and becoming a farmer like our grandparents. I think Mamma wanted to make the dream real in his memory. But I liked the city. Bologna had so much to offer. Sure, airplanes bombed it, but they pretty much bombed everywhere, or so it sounded.
A month later, in August, Mamma told me her mother had offered the farm to her, saying she couldn’t manage it by herself since Nonno Fratelli had died last winter. “You and Mari come with us, Lore. We’ll have room.”
“I’d rather stay in the city, Mamma. Can I buy the apartment?”
“With what? You have no money. Never mind, it doesn’t matter. No one is buying in the city; everyone is moving or wants to. It’s yours.” And just like that, I had a three-bedroom apartment, all for just Mari and me. After years of the seven of us bumping elbows and waiting to use the bathroom, I looked forward to a little space.
“Grazie mille, Mamma. How—”
“Yours until your husband returns. Then we’ll discuss a proper transfer fee. Until then, just make sure you make any needed repairs.”
Suddenly, the airplanes seemed more threatening to me than a moment before. I guess property ownership does that to you. But Mamma was wrong; I’d saved some money. Not much, but I’d received ninety percent of Paolo’s military paycheck each month and watched what I spent. As long as the check kept coming, I knew I’d be fine.
June 1942
At the end of June, I received one of those letters that I’d heard other women mention. My Paolo, my daughter’s papà, had died in Croatia earlier in the month. The letter gave no details, just that they’d positively identified him and buried him in that strange land. Suddenly, he didn’t seem closer at all. Poor Mariangela, just a few weeks shy of her third birthday, she’d never seen her papà—and now she never would. That night, I showed piccola Mari our latest photograph of her father, and told her he was in heaven now, watching over us. I knew she couldn’t understand the finality of death, even before she asked, “When will he come back, Mamma?”
What could I say? I told her one day she’d see him again. Isn’t that what we say? What we’d like to believe, at least. Allora, if wishing made it so. Or praying. I don’t need to tell you praying doesn’t seem capable of reducing the suffering of even a single individual; it clearly had no ability to stop the horrors men had inflicted on this world. And when I say, “Men,” I do not mean humanity. I mean men. Ah, certo, there have been evil women in history, maybe a dozen. Merda, just in Europe alone, you can find a dozen evil men just by shaking a tree until they fall out. Allora, I could be wrong, but there must be tens of millions of people praying to end that godforsaken war, yet prayer alone hasn’t seemed sufficient. Perhaps we weren’t doing it right. Caspita, I ramble so. And for what it’s worth, I still pray, I might add. I mean, we touch iron, “just in case,” vero?
That was also the night I became not just my daughter’s mother, but her surrogate father. Someone had to, and the men were all gone—not just the evil ones. That set me to praying, certamente. Other women told me that being the mother and the father was not so difficult, but I noticed they acted as the father no differently than as the mother, and I knew that to be both insufficient and unacceptable, ovviamente.
As the oldest child of a man who’d hoped his firstborn had been a son, and sometimes had still wished it, I’d spent much time with Papà doing “father things.” It was that or not spend much time with the man, and I liked him. He was kind and supportive, and other than wishing I were a boy, he was a loving father who enjoyed teaching me about life and the world. You can laugh, but I bet there were many sons whose fathers never showed them the attention and love my father gave me. And the most valuable thing he gave me was his living role model for how to be a father to my daughter.
I don’t want you to get the wrong idea about Mamma. She gave me all the love and support a daughter could hope for from her mother. I felt fortunate I had Mamma’s template for being a mother, just like Papà’s for being a father. Most fortunate of all, of course, was la mia piccola Mariangela. Well, other than her papà was dead, ovviamente. Together, the two of us set the overturned apple cart which had become our life back upon its wheels and settled into our life in Bologna, just as the Germans began arriving in the province.
