35

 35

AT FIRST, even Gemma had felt hopeful about it. Later that evening, she could have slapped herself for being so stupid.

She’d tried to keep herself busy while Luisa and Anselmo were out, turning the mattresses and beating the rugs until Corrado emerged from his cabin made out of two chairs and a quilt. They’d told him Silvia was traveling and now he wanted to know where, exactly, and if she’d gone to see the kangaroos and koalas again. To keep him calm, Gemma told him one of the war stories he liked, with a happy ending.

“The Italian army was defeated at Caporetto, remember?”

Corrado nodded uncertainly.

“It was dangerous to remain here, so we escaped. We had to cross the bridge over the Tagliamento, but they blew it up to stop the enemy. My mother, my siblings, and I got across but my father was left on the other side because he had the caleche and cows and was going slowly.”

The Bridge of Delights, they called it, and a crowd of soldiers and refugees were passing over it along with lorries and wagons, donkeys and mules. Gemma heard the explosion behind her, sensed the air quivering with heat. Then came ear-piercing screams that could be heard over the roar of the raging river. She saw red, granular splotches of sludge on the soft mud. A child said, “Look! It’s like jam,” and his mother slapped the back of his head to shut him up and then immediately held him tight.

In Ferrara, where they were evacuated, Gemma came down with Spanish flu. She was one of the few to survive among the many sick people crushed together in rooms shared by different families. But her hair came out in clumps and the skin on her hands and feet peeled off. To console her they told her she was molting like snakes and cicadas and she would surely survive because plants, too, lose their leaves in the autumn, only to be reborn in the spring. A string of more or less inspired reassurances. Fourteen-year-old Gemma, though, was horrified by her half-bald head. She felt the sparse strands and despaired, retorting that snakes and cicadas were disgusting: she preferred horses with manes and dogs with thick, curly fur. She peeled off layers of dead skin and threw them in the brazier to annoy everyone with the nauseating stench of grilled fly.

She didn’t tell Corrado that bit, but she told him about walking down the road weeks later, a handkerchief around her neck, and recognizing her father, who’d managed to make it to the city and was asking for information in a latteria. The sight of his red mustache through a filthy window haloed by the sun was still, for her, the picture of happiness. When he entered, the bell on the door rang like the blast of a trumpet. She threw herself at him, into his first embrace: the two of them, alone, without any claims from her siblings or her mother. She took him all the way to the overcrowded apartment and that evening she let him shave off the rest of her hair and call her “my little boy.”

The story over, Gemma began to regret her optimism, because that’s how life was and you had to accept it: there was a time when she ran into her father during the debacle of world war, and there was a time when Luisa and Anselmo failed to find Silvia in the village of Santhià.