Roy’s mother liked to go to foreign films.
“They’re more realistic than American movies,” she said to him. “Maybe realistic isn’t the right word. Honest is probably better. Also, the actors and actresses seem more like real people, people you could meet on the street. Most of all, though, I like their faces because they’re not perfect.”
When Roy was nine years old, he went with his mother to see an Italian film at the Esquire theater called Innamorata. Sometimes he had difficulty reading fast enough to keep up with the subtitles, but he managed to get most of it. The story was about a girl of fifteen who loses everyone in her family during bombing raids on her town in Italy at the beginning of World War II. She wanders through the countryside trying to stay alive, to find food and shelter. Some of the people she meets are kind and generous, but others, especially men, treat her badly. She loses her virginity to a one-armed Italian soldier who deserted the army and is then maimed by a hand grenade thrown by a six-year-old boy. The girl helps nurse the wounded soldier until he regains his strength, at which point he rips off the girl’s clothes, rapes her and runs away.
The girl is saved from drowning in a river during a torrential storm by a farmer, who then takes her home to stay with him and his wife. The wife hates the girl because she is young and beautiful, and the wife is middle-aged and worn down from years of laboring on the land. The wife compares her gnarled, scarred hands to the girl’s lovely ones and is so upset that she attempts to chop off the girl’s fingers with a hatchet. The girl escapes and hides in a cave where she cries and asks God why He created people if all He wants them to do is to suffer and then die.
The war ends two years later, when the girl is seventeen. She is very thin and dressed in rags when an American soldier with a patch over one eye driving a Jeep sees her sleeping near the side of a dirt road. He stops and carries her to the Jeep. She is only half-conscious and weak and unable to resist. He takes her to a hospital and visits her every day for several weeks. She slowly recovers her health and he is beguiled by her beauty. One morning he brings her flowers and a nurse tells him that his innamorata is now strong enough to leave the hospital. He asks the girl what innamorata means. “It’s my name,” she tells him, and the movie ends.
Outside the theater, Roy’s mother said, “That one wasn’t so good.”
“I wish somebody had shot and killed the one-armed soldier,” said Roy.
“Oh, I’m sure something bad happened to him later,” said his mother. “But that’s what I like about these European movies, Roy, they don’t always tie the story up so neatly and explain everything. They leave you with something to think about.”
Roy was thinking about the girl’s naked breasts, which he’d gotten to see a lot. He also thought about the American soldier’s eye patch, which was over his left eye when he was driving the Jeep but over his right eye when he brought flowers to the girl in the hospital. Roy was in the car with his mother when he told her about the eye patch.
“Good, Roy,” she said. “I didn’t notice that.”
“And was her name really what they said at the end?” Roy asked.
“Innamorata,” said his mother. “It means beloved.”
“At the beginning,” said Roy, “everybody calls her Lucia.”
His mother drove for a few minutes without talking, then she said, “War changes everybody, Roy. Nobody is the same after a war as they were before the war started. Maybe that’s the point. I just hope you never have to be in one.”
“Have you ever asked God a question,” he said, “like the girl did when she was in the cave?”
“No, Roy, I haven’t.”
“How come?”
Roy’s mother laughed, and said, “Because I know I wouldn’t get an answer, either.”