[T]he Arcanum “The Sun” with which we are occupied is an Arcanum of children bathing in the light of the sun. Here it is not a matter of finding occult things, but rather of seeing ordinary and simple things in the light of day of the sun—and with the look of a child.
Every afternoon, Sabina sat in the green velvet armchair and pulled out of the straw basket a copy of her favorite magazine, La Donna. Soon afterward, Nicola would look into the living room, she would raise her head and beckon him to come in with a gesture of her chin, but he never sat with her. Gradually Sabina began to buy other magazines, news reports, weeklies, including Giornalino della Domenica. Seeing it, Nicola reacted with a smile and hurried to take it from her, so she understood it was his favorite.
They always had something new to read; to become mother and child, Sabina and Nicola used that silent appointment, and he began to sit at her feet, but always warily. He kept an eye on the balls of wool in the basket and the titles of the journals.
One afternoon, his curiosity about an article on the oldest, most unusual Piedmontese pastry shops was so great that Nicola came closer than usual, almost touching Sabina. She pretended indifference, but inside she was trembling, and observed the child’s interest. When she realized that it was fading, because he had read the whole article and stopped looking at the images, she quickly turned the page. A photo appeared of Vittorio Emanuele III, standing on a pile of ruins in Messina. The title said: “Sicilian-Calabrian Earthquake: Brothers, we have not forgotten you.” Sabina started, at last the space beside her was filled by a small warm body. Nicola had perched there, his eyes fixed on the page. The sovereign extended his arms over the city in a gesture that was intended to be protective, but he resembled a victor rather than a man stunned by disaster.
“I’m sorry,” Sabina apologized, afraid that the article would disturb the child and she could lose that contact, and she hugged Nicola tight against her.
He would have liked to extend the margins of the photo disproportionately, widen it to expand the view and see the city as it had become, as he had imagined it when he was about to step onto its streets and then had returned to the torpedo boat to protect the unknown girl.
“Did you go there often?” Sabina crept into that crack, Nicola’s past was a dense, dark place, defended by impenetrable barricades.
He thought of the August holiday when he had gone with Maria and Vincenzo to the procession of the Vara, of how his mother had elbowed her way in to get the holy ropes, rejoicing obscenely as she grabbed them. He thought of the ferry crossing, of Maria quivering with excitement to get home with the booty in her pocket, while Vincenzo, looking over the parapet, smoked.
“If you don’t feel like talking about it that doesn’t matter, did you see I also got you the latest Giornalino?” Sabina quickly changed the subject, but Nicola had stayed there, on the Strait.
He was in the devastated city glimpsed as he was disembarking from the Morgana, he had followed the Messinese woman with dark curly hair, blinded by thirst. How had her life continued, how did she spend her days? Sooner or later he would meet her again, and maybe Sabina and Giuseppe would adopt her, too.
“Would you like to go away, take a trip the three of us? I’ve thought of a very strange place, as far as possible from where you were born, exactly the opposite.”
The journey before Biella had been the one from Reggio to Messina and back, quick and terrible. And the last person he had spoken to was the sailor who had asked him for the silver. While Nicola observed the violence against the girl, everything inside him screamed, but not even a whisper had come out of him. Since then he’d had no voice.
“What do you say, shall we go?” Sabina insisted. Nicola nodded. A journey to the future was what he needed, a journey that would cancel those pasts, the grim trips on the ferry and the black recollection of memories deposited against his will. He grabbed the Giornalino della Domenica and became absorbed in a new serial story.
Before departing, the three Crestanis went to Turin to do some special shopping: jackets for snow, shoes and bathrobes, heavy pajamas, supplies of liqueurs and chocolates. Three fur-lined hats, the same but in different sizes and colors: blue for Giuseppe, white for Sabina, yellow for Nicola.
Nicola’s size and measurements increased, the flesh pulled on the sleeves of the jackets and the pant legs. His hair, kept short and neat, grew quickly, and he always needed a trim. As they were going to the shops under the porticoes, the parents noticed a sign, “Gentlemen’s Barber,” and decided to leave the child.
“When should we come and get him?” Giuseppe asked. Sabina meanwhile helped Nicola arrange the cape over his shoulders. It was the first time they’d been separated, but it would be a short separation, less than half an hour.
Nicola stared attentively at his reflection in the gold-framed mirror: his cheeks had filled out, his face lengthened. He had more chin, more ears. It was as if the wind of the North had smoothed out the tension of his nervous features. The stool he was sitting on was high, but Nicola touched the floor with his feet: either the barbers of Piedmont had different measurements from those of Reggio or he had grown.
While the scissors quickly grazed his neck, his nape, his ears, he reviewed the changes of the past weeks. At night he went to sleep with a mother, in the morning he woke with breakfast in bed brought by a father, and he spent the days with a teacher for literature, a teacher for mathematics, and a teacher for piano.
At first Sabina and Giuseppe had sent Nicola to school, but the children were mean to him: they called him “the mute Calabrese” and made fun of him. Nicola endured in silence. The teachers had talked to the Crestanis, and in the end they had decided to shelter that child who had suffered so much already.
“Have you ever been to Milan?” Sabina had asked him a few days earlier, and the answer was no.
“Or the Valle d’Aosta? And the mountains? Have you ever heard the sound that a glacier makes at night? Or slept in a mountain hut?”
No, no, no. Nicola had shaken his head. About the past, his answers didn’t vary. Until December 1908, Nicola had done nothing apart from endure.
“You’re sure you’d like to go to the mountains?” Sabina had repeated, to be sure she wasn’t doing something against his will, something that would make him feel uneasy. His new mother’s tone was the opposite of Maria’s: a tender and welcoming glide, where it was easy to agree and nod.
About the future the answer was always yes, yes, yes. The future knocked and insisted, carrying with it all the colors of the world.
While the barber dried his hair, Nicola reached for a magazine and, leafing through it, came upon another article about the earthquake, full of disputes about what had happened in the days following. Should it be called an earthquake or a tidal wave? Had the first ships to arrive been the Russians or the English? Which of the armed forces had been most kind and caring during the rescues? Was it true that Prime Minister Giolitti, learning in the early hours of the morning of the destruction of Messina and Reggio Calabria, had reacted with irritation at the southerners, who exaggerated everything? True that a woman had given birth amid the rubble, the labor pains accelerated by the shocks and fear? Was Queen Elena’s compassion sincere, or was her sorrow propaganda to cover the king’s insensitivity? The anonymous author commented on the same photo of Vittorio Emanuele III that Nicola had already seen, writing that the hands of the sovereign had been modified so that he would seem to be making a charitable gesture, but in reality he had had them in his pockets, which wasn’t surprising, since he was mainly interested in money. On the next page, in corroboration, you could see the original photo: even the king’s expression seemed harsher, indifferent. Nicola had never read anything like that: Could one speak of the king in such a manner? The article went on to question the heroism of the soldiers, of whatever nationality, and implying that rapes and thefts had been covered up by a patina of medals.
Disturbed, he closed the magazine quickly, with the sensation of having stuck his nose in something mistaken and forbidden. On the cover was the word “anarchy”: Nicola remembered that during a sermon, in Reggio Calabria, the priest had said anarchy was a manifestation of the Devil.
“How handsome you look with that new hair!” Sabina’s trilling voice and the sound of the glass door opening brought him back to reality.