Chapter 118
FRANCESCA HAD TAKEN CARMELA and Antonio Balzano flowers back in April, after they’d lost their infant son, and in the intervening months, she had stayed in touch with Carmela, who was grieving but also desperate for answers as to why her child had been born without a skull.
After the Bombagi baby died, Carmela began hosting meetings at her apartment.
She invited the other two couples to come and share their experiences, and soon the families had grown so close that they began to talk of forming an advocacy group through which they could work to protect the island’s unborn children. Francesca, naturally, offered to help.
She made reprints of the articles Teo had written for La Spedizione.
There was the smaller article, which read more like a birth announcement, that had appeared after the Balzano baby was born, and then there was a bigger article, which the paper had published with the birth of the Bombagis’ baby girl.
That last article was particularly compelling.
Teo had had time to talk to more researchers and to gather more studies, but he also quoted Orazio Bombagi, who described in plain and devastating terms holding his daughter for the first and last time.
The group printed fact sheets about cranioschisis and its likely causes and distributed them around town.
The flyers started showing up in the windows of bars and shops, and I was reminded of the PCI flyers we’d encountered when we first arrived on the island.
Let Italian ports be ports of peace. Get atomic bases out of Italy.
For all I knew, Francesca had had a hand in those, too.
Teo advised the group on how to get their story in front of journalists on the continent.
He gave them the names and phone numbers of science writers at some of the bigger papers and instructed them on what to say when they called with their pitch.
Carmela was a good spokesperson, so she and Francesca would go down to Bar Sanna armed with notes and place calls to newsrooms across Italy, confident that if they could just get some of the bigger outlets to pay attention to them, the Italian government would, too.
In early November, I arrived at Francesca’s apartment for my regular lesson to find Carmela sitting at the kitchen table.
The two women had put together a petition, which had already been signed by several hundred residents, asking City Council to advocate for the swift removal of the U.S. Navy and its nuclear submarines.
While Francesca got up to pour me a cup of coffee, I reached for the document. At the top, in Italian, it read: HOW MANY MORE BABIES HAVE TO DIE?
“That’ll definitely get their attention,” I said.
“We have to be loud,” said Francesca.
“Yes, I know,” I said. “But you know City Council doesn’t have the authority to kick the navy out of the archipelago.”
Neither of them liked that, but it was to Francesca I pleaded my case. “I thought you were focusing on press outreach?”
“We have to do more,” she said.
“No, I know.”
“It would make a difference if some Americans signed the petition,” said Carmela.
“Huh?” I said.
“To have an American advocating for the removal of the Americans. That would send a powerful signal, don’t you think?”
I glanced at Francesca. If this was a test, I was not going to pass it.
“I can’t sign anything like this,” I said quietly, then pushed the petition away.
I waited for Francesca to defend my decision to Carmela, to argue that I’d stuck my neck out plenty over the year and a half I’d been on the island.
But if anything, I felt like she was waiting for me to explain myself.
Finally, I did. “I’d ruin my husband’s career. And probably my marriage.”
“Yes,” Francesca agreed, which was different than letting me off the hook.