Chapter 53
WHEN I ARRIVED AT FRANCESCA’S the following Tuesday, she was at the stove, making malloreddus alla campidanese, which she described as a sausage ragù. “I just wanted to get this going,” she said apologetically, “before we start.”
“It smells great,” I said.
She had sautéed an onion and some sausage in olive oil and was adding chopped tomatoes and water to the pan. “This cooks for about an hour.”
While she stirred everything together and reduced the heat, I wandered around her living room.
She had left a book in an armchair; I turned it over.
On the cover was a photograph of a child, or at least someone I thought was a child.
He was lying amid the wreckage of a bombed-out building, or maybe it was a pile of corpses, I couldn’t be sure which. Either way, the image was arresting.
“Who’s reading this?” I asked.
“Bernardo,” said Francesca as she joined me in the living room. “I just finished it.” She had told me a little bit about her husband, but I had yet to meet him.
“It’s a clever title for a book,” she said. “La Storia.”
“The story?” I asked.
“In Italian, the word means both story and history. So, across Italy, readers are asking themselves if they’re reading truth or fiction.”
“Which is it?”
She shrugged. “For Italians who lived through the postwar years, it feels true. Which is probably all that matters.”
“Is it very good?”
She nodded. “And very depressing.”
“How so?”
She seemed to be considering her response.
“It’s about a Jewish woman who survives the war but finds herself alone, in Rome, raising the child of a German soldier who raped her.
It’s hard to read, and people in Italy, particularly on the left, say they don’t want to keep revisiting the past. That we’ll never move forward this way. ”
“Can’t you do both?” I asked.
“That is the debate.”
I idly flipped through the pages, letting all the Italian words blur before my eyes.
“You’d like it, I think,” said Francesca. “But we have a little more work to do before you’re reading Elsa Morante.”
I went to put the book back where I’d found it, and as I did so, I noticed a framed photograph of three young people on a table beside the chair. “Oh my God,” I said, “I know that guy.” I picked the photograph up and stared at it.
“Who?” asked Francesca, looking over my shoulder.
I pointed at the young man in the middle of the photo. “I met him. A few weeks ago. At the cartoleria.”
Francesca laughed. “Teo?”
“Yes!” I said, more excited than I had a right to be. “That was his name.”
“This is the one I was telling you about. My nephew. The journalist who works for La Spedizione. And those are my children he’s with. Andrea and Bianca.”
“They look like they could be siblings.”
“They’ve all got the Pino nose.”
“That’s so funny,” I said, studying Teo’s face. “He was nice. I liked him.”
“He’s very smart. And very charming. Did he tell you what he’s working on?”
“No,” I said.
“He’s in the middle of doing this big story on how the U.S. Navy ended up in La Maddalena. A lot of very secret negotiations, apparently.”
“We didn’t get that far. I helped him pick out a marionette for his niece.”
“Violetta?”
“Is she five?”
“Yes,” said Francesca with a smile. “She’s Teo’s brother Arturo’s child. Arturo’s the oldest. Then there’s Enrique. And Teo is the baby. They all live in Rome. Well, except for Teo.”
“Is that where he grew up?”
“More or less. My sister’s husband is from Rome. They have a place here. In this building, actually.” She pointed upstairs. “When my father was alive, my sister would come for most of the summer. But now that he’s gone and the boys are grown, she comes less often.”
“That’s too bad.”
Francesca shrugged. “It works out, though, because Teo can use the apartment when he’s here working.”
“So, wait,” I said. “Where does Teo live?”
“He’s in Sassari. Which is about two hours away from Palau, by car. It’s where La Spedizione’s offices are.”
“Oh,” I said, a little disappointed, although I couldn’t have told you why.
“He’s all over Sardinia,” she added. “But he’s been in La Maddalena a lot lately.”
“Because of this story he’s working on?”
“With you Americans here, there is no shortage of stories.”
This felt like a dig, but I tried to put a positive spin on it. “I guess it’s nice you get to see so much of him.”
Francesca looked the tiniest bit annoyed, and I suspected she was about to tell me off, except that just then the pot on the stove began to boil over. “The ragù,” she said as she hurried back to the kitchen to lower the heat.