4	THE UNTIED SHOELACE

I’ve lived through some tough times. I’ve heard bombs falling overhead. Air-raid sirens. When I was five I was already going to school, and I recall one day when we had to race for the bomb shelter. I had one shoelace undone, and I was in real trouble because we had to run and I couldn’t tie my shoes by myself. A little girl helped me.

Another night it was a miracle I didn’t get blown away along with my whole family. By chance we were in the shelter beside our own. Next morning we came out and our house had been razed to the ground. Completely destroyed. Like the whole neighborhood, for that matter.

I remember people digging away in search of the rarest and therefore most precious thing: mattresses. My aunt was digging, and my mother was helping her while keeping an eye on me and my sister, who was eight years older than me.

With the house gone, we were evacuated, first to my uncle’s at Bricherasio, in the countryside near here. Then to the south of Italy. Our relatives there wrote us that life was better, that there were chickens, a garden, in other words, enough to eat. We went to Cetraro, near the town of Paola; our quarter was called Citino. We left on a night train, traveled for two days. It was night again when we arrived, in utter terror because they were bombing the rail lines.

My memories of Calabria are still very intense and very beautiful.

We took the sheep and goats out to pasture.

My little cousin Rita and I made a pretend garden, a first try.

For a while we were all camped out together in one big room, and we ate on the threshing floor. Then we changed houses a couple of times, and finally we found a place to rent in Cetraro, part of a large villa, with a common kitchen on the top floor. It was owned by the Rossi sisters, Donna Rosina and Donna Teresina, who spent their time squabbling and claimed they had a brother at Rome who was Mussolini’s doctor.

I remember a political exile from Lombardy who used to visit us and played strange games. And the first person my sister fell in love with. He left for Argentina, and we lost track of him forever.

I went to church, and I was an altar boy, like everyone else. I was in love with a little girl named Filomena, whom everybody called Menella, and I tried to find a way to tell her.

I went to school, too. Some distance away. I used to set out on foot with my friend Delio down through the woods to the school. I was supposed to be in second grade, but I was far enough ahead that they put me in third. But I didn’t know enough for third, I couldn’t do division, and I used to get my fingers whacked hard. Eventually, though, I was top of the class. I wanted to be a writer, and I was already playing the intellectual.

I read books published in the Scala d’Oro collection, such as Il romanzo di Fanfulla (The Tale of Fanfulla).

We had a stupendous terrace from which you could see Stromboli. I used to write up there, I don’t remember what; I remember I set up an office of sorts.

We even used to stage plays, all my little friends and I. We got together in the cellar of the son of a sergeant in the Carabinieri, a rich family of local notables. The son, Tonino, was one of my best friends. He and I wrote a comedy, Senza cuore (Without a Heart).

At dusk I used to hang around with Alduccio, the doctor’s son, in front of the pharmacy where the local men gathered, sitting on wooden stools. I used to discuss the war and politics too.

But I also played football. I was playing with a ball made of cloth when the news came about the German surrender. We were anxious for the war to end so we could finally play with a real football, made of leather.

Then the shouting in the streets: peace, peace. A large procession formed, some people were even dragging themselves along on their knees. It was May.

In September they assembled all of us evacuees at Paola, in a species of internment camp inside a school. A week of waiting while they put together the special train to take us back up north.

We returned to Turin.

I spoke nothing but Calabrese dialect, and that made me a terrone (southerner) and earned me a few beatings from my schoolmates.