Dacia Maraini - Train to Budapest

On one occasion Uncle Anacleto, in the photograph next to grandfather Anacleto Sironi of the thick upturned moustaches, had been stopped when going into the shop by a group of fascists who asked him why he had not raised his arm in salute and cried ‘ eia eia alalà ’ when a car passed carrying a Party leader in uniform. Terrified, Anacleto had mumbled something. The gang grabbed him by the arms and kneed him in the back, forcing open his mouth to thrust in the neck of a bottle of castor oil. When he had swallowed the lot they left him, laughing as he ran to the toilet clasping his stomach. In fact he was lucky because often, always ten against one, they would beat people with sticks or iron knuckle-dusters, kicking their unfortunate victim till he fell gasping to the ground.

There was another reason why Amintore Sironi was worried by this friendship between the rich son of a Jewish family and a humble shoemaker’s daughter. It wasn’t just the class difference; he believed on principle that mixtures of rank never led to anything good. What could the rich know about love and marriage? Even when they seemed kind and friendly, deep down they were still arrogant and self-satisfied. They believed their cursed money made them superior. He knew them, and he knew their shoes. And it wasn’t just a matter of money, but of religion too. The Sironis weren’t practising Catholics, but that was their cultural background. The Orensteins seemed not to be especially religious, but their outlook on life was certainly Jewish. What would they have done if Amara had had a son, would they have circumcised him? The very idea was more than he could take. Which was why he grumbled when she disappeared for days on end with her Emanuele.

That day Amara and Emanuele had headed on their bicycles for Monte Morello, despite Babbo Amintore’s misgivings. They passed a yelling lorry-load of fascists returning from some nearby demonstration. The hotheads took no notice of the two children on bicycles. Perhaps they had already let off steam in some workingmen’s club by attacking workers peacefully playing bowls, or youngsters heading for work without the compulsory fascist badge on their jackets. They knew there was an atmosphere of resistance among the factories of Rifredi. It was said that was where you’d find those treacherous communists who were planning to take over everyone’s house and allotment and even the women’s buckles and the men’s best clothes in order to nationalise them and this was not acceptable, which was why people had to be beaten up or dosed with castor oil. Fascism would bring a glorious imperial future, everybody must be clear about that. And anyone who wasn’t had to be spineless, or a dangerous Jew or homosexual pervert or still worse, a Bolshevik. So the fascists threw themselves on such people in the name of their country and of the great Leader of the nation who spoke to them once a week on the radio in his fierce masculine voice from the balcony in Piazza Venezia in Rome.

Many young women were attracted to these young men with their flags and raised arms who leapt with such agility onto their lorries shouting ‘ eia eia alalà ’ and winking at the pretty girls they met on their way and as they sang in resonant voices ‘To arms! To arms! The vanguard to arms! The fascists’ revenge!’ They were always ready for a fight, laughing at everything and shouting ‘What the hell do I care!’ whenever anyone accused them of being domineering and unjust.

Amara had a cousin called Gigliola, also a shoemaker’s daughter, who was so in love with one of these thugs that she was always begging him to let her join his gang on their ‘punitive expeditions’. But they would tease her: ‘A woman coming with us? We’re not ladies’ men off to the drawing room, you know!’ And when she insisted, they yelled in her face, ‘Let’s see your balls then!’ and since Gigliola Sironi obviously couldn’t produce any balls to order she was always left behind. She would run furiously after the lorry shouting ‘Damn you, you’ll be sorry for this!’ No one knew whether they were supposed to be sorry they’d left her behind, or whether she was warning them that one day they would have to appear before God to account for what they had done with their clubs and their handcuffs, their flags with skulls on and their bottles of castor oil.

Gigliola often went to see Amara and battered her ears with the praises of Cosimo and his gang. To her they were a company of young gods with tanned faces and shining eyes full of hatred for the enemy, ready to punish sinners: does not the Archangel Michael use his sword to kill a dragon? And does not the Archangel Gabriel send fire and snow to strike down his enemies? Amara did not share this exalted view of these thugs her eighteen-year-old cousin Gigliola admired as avengers from heaven. To Amara they seemed nothing more than penniless boys who had learned no trade and whose way of venting their resentment on the world lay in trampling on the weakest. ‘They pick fights and justify it politically,’ said her father Amintore, angrily hammering nails into shoes. In the family, cousin Gigliola was dismissed as an unfortunate woman who used love to justify the violent behaviour of ruffians. Whenever she could she would go dancing with them, or to bathe with them in the Arno taking panini for everyone, or accompany them to church to ask for a blessing after some particularly ferocious action, or march with them while they sang the praises of the Duce, or motorcycle up and down the avenues with her arms clasped round the waist of her beloved Cosimo and her cheek pressed against his back. One evening when they had drunk more than usual the whole gang nearly raped her; they had been teasing her because she ‘was afraid of nothing and wanted to help beat up the workers herself as if she had balls.’ Luckily for her, Cosimo as their leader stopped them, not out of consideration for her but because she belonged to him so no one else could touch her.

That warm September day, Amara and Emanuele had pedalled laboriously up the Montorsoli road as far as Ceppetto church and then along the Scollini side-road until they reached the de’ Seppi spring. There they tied their bicycles to the trunk of a maple with reddening pointed leaves. They walked along a path among the limes and pines, which widened at a certain point into a small but very green secluded patch of grass. There they had taken their omelette sandwiches from their rucksacks and had eaten them greedily in the shade of those pointed leaves oscillating in the sun. Mamma Thelma had been so thoughtful as to slip into her son’s pack at the last minute two peeled cucumbers and a little paper twist of salt. They had devoured these too, and drunk some water from their bottles. Then they had stretched out in the sun with their heads in the shade of the dancing leaves. They did not speak or put their arms round each other. They did not even look at each other. But during those few glorious minutes they felt themselves a single being, indivisible. Their hands touched by accident and stayed clasped together while their eyes closed in bliss. Amara remembered it as a moment of absolute happiness.

Now in bed in a Viennese pension during the cold war Amara asks herself whether sex excludes love. Whether the union of two bodies brings something peremptory and immediate that tends to invade the delicate realm of feeling and brutally blast everything sky-high. How can continuity, constancy and understanding be reconciled with the lazy immediacy of sex? Why had she felt so content and happy with a deliciously full amorous happiness precisely at that moment when she and Emanuele had lain head to head on a meadow rich with new grass, under the dancing leaves of a maple fluttering in the wind of a Florentine summer? Was this the ecstasy of chaste love, as taught by the church? The kind of love St Clare and St Francis may have experienced long ago in thirteenth-century Assisi? Can it be that sexual love breeds something violent that corrupts every long-term project? Something self-satisfied that tends to use habit to destroy any exaltation of what is new? The very habit that lies at the heart of a shared life: the joy of doing the same things together, of planning the future, of feeling permanently and continuously united at every moment, day after day, hour after hour; how can that be reconciled with the satiety, with the nausea of repetition, with the need for novelty erotic love demands? Not easy to answer such questions. Also because desire had already been there, knocking impatiently for admittance to her childish belly.