that was all a grand success?’ Riley asked, when they came home, sunburnt, lugging bags of polenta.
‘Did you miss us?’ cried Kitty, embracing his middle.
‘Hello darling,’ said Nadine, shining at him, removing Kitty, and hugging him, her arms inside his jacket, as if they were still nineteen. Tom grinned at him from across the room.
‘Rose is coming to dinner,’ Riley said. ‘I knew you wouldn’t mind.’
Within days, it was as if they had never been away. Only of course it wasn’t.
South of Rome, 1928
Aldo, on a train rattling south the day after the English left, considered the cousins from London, and their visit. Inviting them had been an experiment, of course. He half expected individuals from perfidious Albion to be as perfidious as their rulers, those arrogant old men who had denied Italy justice at Versailles, keeping from her territories which had been promised and for which he, Aldo, had shed his blood and got slight frostbite of the toes. But he was a modern man. He knew well enough that you do not judge somebody by where they come from. That kind of campanilismo, that loyalty to your own town’s belltower, is what keeps the world in the dark ages. My bell rings wide and clear across the world, he thought with a little smile, and the thought pleased him. In fact he was pleased overall. The warmth and beauty of the English cousins pleased him; their willingness to come was itself an honour and a declaration of their faith in him and in Italy, but more than that – he liked them, and they liked him and his family.
Did Nadine look at all like his mother? No. To be honest, no. The hair, of course … He smiled. English family! Her husband must be very fair indeed, though. Those children are not in the least like her. They’re as blond as the ones St Agostino saw when he first went to England and declared them non Anglii, sed angeli; not Anglos, but angels.
He had been thinking, since his darling mother had died, about something she said to him once. He had expressed, years ago, an interest in synagogue and shul; other children went, other families, why not them? And she had explained: ‘To your grandmother, and her generation, religion holds you together; to your father, religion holds you back.’
Well, Aldo wasn’t interested in religion, but he was interested in holding together. And in religion as a cultural thing. He was now in a position, as a free and prospering Italian in the twentieth century, to reconsider on his own terms some aspects of it that his father had had to throw off in the interests of leaving the ghetto. For example, he could invite his relatives from another country. He had beds for them to sleep in, food to feed them. He had the freedom to treat them properly, as a man should, a cousin and a host. They don’t know so many things, he thought. He had watched their ignorance with some fascination. Food, for example. They were so surprised to see Aldo cooking, and knew nothing of ordinary food.
‘We don’t have nice food at home,’ Kitty had said, but when Nenna had asked why not it elicited a look from the boy to the little girl meaning ‘Stop’. The little girl had stopped. She looked as if she always did.
‘English food is less of a fuss than Italian,’ Tom had said, and so Aldo had put it down to English pride, and watched amused as they encountered pasta and fried artichokes and tiny fried fish and creamy melting mozzarella. Tom liked to stand by Aldo, Susanna, and Ilaria, the family’s servant, learning. He was, he said, going to make lasagne and cannelloni and polenta, for his father. Nenna told Aldo that the boy planned to fill his suitcase with pecorino romano and mozzarella and tomato seeds to grow at home in a greenhouse. Susanna offered to write down for him the recipe for the little fried cakes they called ears, crunchy and sweet and delicious. Well, all children like them, Aldo thought, and instructed Ilaria to make them every day during the visit. The boy didn’t seem to think his father would want them though, and declined the recipe.
And then, today, on their last day, there had been a bit of a fuss. It turned out the boy had bought mozzarella to take home, and when Nadine had said that it wouldn’t travel, Tom had gone off to Campo dei Fiori and found a man who would sell him a buffalo calf. He was halfway to making a deal for it when Aldo caught up with him and was able, laughing and teasing, to talk him out of it.
How sweet, youngsters, with their unexpected wisdom and then their complete ignorance! Though to be honest how could a child be expected to know that you can’t take a calf on a train in England?
Sweet cousins, sweet extension of family, the coming together.
It was not that Aldo had forgotten his father’s stories, and his grandparents’. Far from it. The past dwelt constantly in the low foothills of his consciousness, and occasionally wandered into active consideration. Even sixty years after it had come about, he was delighted, every day, by the unification of the various states of the peninsula into one Italy. He had a trunkful of suffering and chaos, like any man. He remembered perfectly well what the ghetto had been like before the handsome yellow apartment blocks and the noble new synagogue were built on the site; and those memories were why he was now an engineer and not just a musician, as what he thought of as the Lesser Aldo would have preferred. The new Italy did not need guitar players. It needed roads and irrigation systems, railways and sturdy housing. He remembered perfectly families in rags eight to a room, when babies died regularly and mothers died at forty-five. The smell of people trying to live decently with practically nothing. The sound made by a grown man who has fought over a fishbone and failed to win it. The ghetto’s gates had been opened before he was born, but by no means all its inhabitants had found their way out through them. Many never would. His father’s flight meant Aldo had been born to freedom. Others of his father’s generation and of his own were still stuck. To them freedom meant danger, and only the ghetto was safe. He pitied them. And he despised them, a little, for not taking hold of the opportunity they’d been offered, for not stepping out into the sunlight.
Blessings on you all, he thought. My parents, my grandparents, all of you, for what you have suffered and what you have feared. Thank you, Garibaldi and all the great souls of the Risorgimento, for uniting Italy as a country, and for opening the ghetto just in time for me to be born free.
It wasn’t so long ago, only twelve years, that he, aged twenty-one, had been walking up a frozen river, struggling and cold in a struggling and cold troop, heading to the pass, he didn’t know which pass. 1916. It was a pass many had used before them, the previous winter, but this winter was harder. His lingering memory was of staring down as he trudged and scrambled, his gloves worn and his boots not originally his, the underfoot so irregular he could not look ahead. Thinking about food and his mother. Unlikely to see much of either in the near future. And noticing, gradually, disbelievingly, under his trudging feet, under the dishevelled ice at which he stared, something familiar in the shapes and colours within the twist and darknesses. And then a man somewhere ahead slipped, and there was a moment of pause and breathcatching, and Aldo saw, quite clearly, what it was. Beneath his feet, deep in the ice, a man lay sleeping. His position was uncomfortable, Aldo could see that, but he could see too that he hadn’t moved for a while. He knew, of course, that he was dead; he must be dead, he wasn’t under the ice, he was inside it. He thought: Oh! he is ancient: a tattooed mountain wanderer, a caveman, an iron-age vagabond tricked by the severity of a three-thousand-year-old winter – But iron-age men did not wear military tunics, and between the clear and milky streaks of the ice the tunic was present – an arm within a sleeve, a shoulder out of kilter. The feet were naked; socks and boots reclaimed by those who could use them. His own feet, which he could scarcely feel in any case, shrivelled a little. But he couldn’t take his young eyes from the face. The dead man was in profile. He could – well he could – have been sleeping, but that he was pressed, distorted, only a little but enough, God yes, to haunt Aldo’s dreams that night and for several years: the man from the severity of last winter, or the winter before. And then, once Aldo had recognised the pattern and shape of the frozen human body, so it began to reappear, as the order came to trudge on,