I knew it wasn’t exactly her area of study, but the next day I texted Anna to ask about the song, “Faccetta Nera,” that signora Elena had sung. I’d found videos of it on YouTube, jauntily playing over footage of men dressed in black marching by the thousands, but I wanted context, wanted her decisiveness, her expertise. I didn’t tell her about the photographs, out of selfish possessiveness, or because it seemed too hard to explain. Anna wrote back to me as an email within the afternoon, giving me some background on the song, some of the rumors that had swirled at the time as to its inspiration, a young Ethiopian girl. Anna went on to connect it to the painter, as if she knew what I was really after. It’s very ironic, she wrote. He was freed from the village because of this victory in Addis Ababa, that’s what allowed him to return home to write his book, that’s the year the song was the most popular, and it was a fascist song, the message is plainly colonialist. But it didn’t take long for a panic to start, for everyone to start fearing that Italy would soon be a country of mixed race. There were never more than twenty families, that is, Italian women, in the new colony, and all those young men singing about the beauty of that girl’s black face. So this fear of miscegenation, the alliance with Germany, led to the establishment of the Italian racial laws, which ended up, though it wasn’t really the inspiration, having a huge focus on the Jews, and a few years later resulted in the deportations, led ultimately to the painter’s death. It’s all connected, she ended the email. Stammi bene.
And so I began a period of great research. I tried to read about the Italian campaign in Ethiopia, the one in which the commander had said, simply, chillingly, that his dear duce would “have Ethiopia with or without the Ethiopians,” this man, Graziani, who ordered the massacre of thirty thousand civilians in response to a single assassination attempt, the precursor to what happened in the monastery. I read about the battles in the desert, looked up testimonies of Italian prisoners of war sent to England, the language was a suction pulling me under. In a letter sent home from Ethiopia a young man chided himself to his sister over some silly mistake, calling himself “qu’imbecillito io,” what a little imbecile I am, and I read the line in Andrea’s exact intonation, then immediately shut the book and left it abandoned in the dining room. Often I could only consume a page or two at a time, and then my attention would swerve entirely to focus on something else, a leaf pattern from the sycamore tree above my bench as a shadow on the pavement, a scab on my knee from a mosquito bite. I would think again of California’s stunted sycamores, and for the first time I would think it strange that it was California, with all its space, that didn’t allow them to grow. I would flinch when I remembered Settimia and her anger, my guilt spiral would lead me to memories of my ex-boyfriend and my shame at what I’d done to him, to wonder about Giancarlo and Laura, more comforting to me were thoughts of Giulia, back now in London, Andrea, whom I hadn’t told I’d lost my phone, hadn’t given the new number, but who I knew would be waiting. I would seat myself at a desk in the enormous room of a public library and open a volume overfilled with maps and panoramic photographs of alien-seeming desert landscapes rendered in watery, subdued aquamarines, stuffed throughout the pages as though they were the certificates of birth and death throughout a family Bible, and I would pull out a map slowly, but still, in its unfolding, it would split with a crack down the line of one of the folds, a split running halfway down the length, and I would look around furtively, ashamed I had destroyed something so old, then I would remember what I was unfolding was a book of fascist propaganda, the commander’s own version of the Ethiopian war published by Mondadori only seven months after its end, a book, it was clear, that no one but myself had opened in fifty years, and I would skim another page or two before giving up and resuming my wandering of the city. I would argue with myself as I walked, I was the one who wanted to know these things, there was no external reason I needed to keep going, and so I would sit down and read another page about the deployment of mustard gas against civilians in Libya, mustard gas, “the closest thing at the time to a weapon of mass destruction,” this, obviously, in a different volume, one published after the war, and after reading another half a page about the effects of mustard gas on these civilians, permission for their use asked of the beloved duce on the day after Christmas, I would read about the effects of this gas on Libyan limbs and eyes, the paths of their biologies taking a crooked turn, I would read the memoirs of a pilot who “undertook the war with passion, urgency, cheerfulness,” and I would read about the bombing of the sacred Libyan site of Cufra by which “the Italians sought to cancel any rival native history that contested their own.” I would read that the main export of Italian-occupied Libya, despite all the years they’d held it, despite the desire to make it once again the breadbasket of the Roman empire, for the greatness of the past they wanted was not the greatness of Garibaldi, of Risorgimento, was not even the Renaissance, it was Rome they wanted, and yet in all the years they held Libya the main export was not grain, or even oil, but salt. Salt! And I would close the book. I realized it was silly how I had left things with Settimia, I didn’t understand what could have possessed me to not want to go to lunch with her, did I really think I could face all of this alone? But of course it was one thing to realize this, and another to build up the courage to act. I thought I should call Andrea and ask what he and his friends were doing that night, I wanted to drink a never-ending glass of wine among a huge group of raucous people my own age in which I could laugh and only half follow conversations and never talk except to say perfectly that my Italian wasn’t very good and I preferred to listen while I let the waves of vowels pass over me. But it was 2011, there was a crisis, no one my age had any money, and anyway, Italians never got drunk. I would call Andrea soon, I knew, and in the meantime I decided to feed my solitude while I could, and so I walked the city accompanied only by my thoughts, returning eventually to Loredana’s, to my small quiet room, the room that was only mine and mine alone.
By a few afternoons later my decision had gathered sufficient strength and I texted Settimia a message of apology and warmth and it was arranged that I would come to dinner, I would get to meet Dida’s baby, she was now back in Rome. I brought Loredana, escorting her slowly by the arm into the apartment Dida and her fiancé had rented near the Piazza Bologna. Dida had turned into a sharp-faced, blunt-haircutted woman whose severe features frequently exploded into laughter. She was so joyful, cheerfully declaring she was too young to have a baby, casually pulling aside her wrap dress to feed him, leaning into her fiancé, a Frenchman, while she did so, happily directing her mother and Giulia, in town for the weekend, around her apartment, which, while neither as large nor as old as our grandfather’s, had something that jogged at my memory, or maybe it was just these people, this specific combination of voices. Dida’s sister, Clea, was there, as was their father, my grandmother’s brother Bipo. Bipo was the only other sibling from their side who had come to Rome, and he sat with his wife, my aunt Eta, and Andrea’s father, Giacomo, kindly in the corner. Bipo was almost a decade younger than my grandmother, had been born after the war, and was treated by everyone, even his daughters, as the harmless baby brother that he was. He asked me how my parents were doing and I told him they were well, caught Clea looking at her mother out of the corner of my eye. Loredana had settled comfortably on the couch next to Settimia, and she was easy around them, but stayed close to me. I was mildly surprised that my not residing with some member of the family had not been a source of contention, but it seemed everyone considered the connection with Loredana enough, everyone of the previous generation, I realized, remembered Benedetta well. The whole family acted as if I’d just returned to Rome, no one brought up my presence in the city before this evening, not even Andrea, in the kitchen with Fahad, at work on a South Asian dessert involving rose petals.
Dida’s fiancé, Jean-Luc, insisted on bringing Loredana and me to the rooftop to see the sunset, and we watched as the shadows increased across the buildings, the river and postcarded landmarks invisible from our angle, so that it could have been any European city of terra-cotta rooftops and occasional wide avenues, hills framing the distance. He and Dida had met in Paris, where she’d gone for a year of postgraduate study. The baby’s name was Henri. They were planning a wedding, but maybe in a few years when they could afford a big one. We chatted in Italian, it had been so long since I’d spoken French, I imagined it would be gluey on my tongue, and I didn’t want to exclude Loredana. He worked for some kind of IT company. The baby was neither exactly planned nor exactly unplanned. He liked Rome. We went back inside and I sat next to Dida and she smiled at me and asked if I wanted to hold the baby, but he began to fuss and she took him to another room and put him to bed, returning half an hour later with a look of content exhaustion.
I took Loredana home in a taxi and helped her into the apartment. When we’d said our goodbyes at the door to Dida’s apartment, I understood that I was back in the family fold, they all had my cell phone number now, I would be absorbed. Somehow, the thought did not spark the panic I thought it would.