“I’m sure.” Elisabetta smiled, for she had heard this many times.
“Tell me, have you gotten the newspaper yet? What’s that thug up to now? Parades and marches? Guns and knives? Those idiots follow him like sheep! But he is the wolf!”
“Shh, Papa.” Elisabetta worried that passersby would hear, since their apartment was on the ground floor and the window was open.
“Is it a nice day? Perhaps I’ll paint al fresco.” Her father closed his eyes again. “I’ll paint something wonderful, I just know it. I feel the tingling in my fingers. How they itch for the brush.”
“You rest.” Elisabetta had heard this before, too. Sometimes she wondered if he said it for her benefit, or if he even knew that he hadn’t painted in years. She kissed his grizzled cheek, then rose with the empty wine bottle. “I have to go to school. Bye, now.”
“Of course, goodbye, my darling girl, my special light, I love you so much.”
“I love you, too, Papa.”
“Fetch me a bottle before you go, will you, my dear?”
CHAPTER SEVEN
Marco
June 1937
Marco watched dustmotes swirl in a shaft of sunlight, while his classmates were getting their essays from their backpacks. The classroom was stifling, small, and devoid of decoration other than the Italian flag, a large wooden crucifix, and portraits of King Vittorio Emanuele III and Il Duce. A sign bore the party credo, CREDERE, OBBEDIRE, COMBATTERE—Believe, Obey, Fight. There were thirty other students in his class, including Elisabetta and Sandro, all dressed in their uniforms.
Their teacher, Professoressa Longhi, was an older woman with thick glasses and gray hair in a bun, thick-waisted in her dark dress, which sported the tricolor emblem. She motioned for them to sing “Giovinezza,” the party anthem, and the class rose halfheartedly, weary of the routine this late in the school year. She didn’t reprimand them, and Marco suspected she had joined the party only to keep her job, as he had noticed her rolling her eyes at their textbooks from time to time. The standard joke was that some teachers joined the PNF, the Partito Nazionale Fascista, but others joined Per Necessità Famigliare, only to support their family. Secretly he felt the same way, a Fascist because of his father, and it was the only way he knew. At heart, he believed in love, not politics.
Marco began to sing with his classmates, loudly to make Elisabetta laugh:
“Your warriors’ valor,
Your pioneers’ virtue,
Alighieri’s vision,
Today shines in every heart.”
Marco turned around to see if Elisabetta was laughing, but instead she was looking at Sandro, whose desk was near the front. Her face bore a curious expression, one that Marco hadn’t seen before, and he had seen all of her expressions. She lifted her right eyebrow when she listened, she frowned when she read the newspaper, and she wrinkled the bridge of her nose when she laughed hard. She could even look dreamy-eyed, like when she watched the screen at the movies. Oddly, she was looking that way now, at Sandro.
Marco felt bewildered, remembering the afternoon that he had seen Sandro and Elisabetta standing close at the river. What if something had happened between them? Were they becoming more than friends? Neither of them had told him so, but then he hadn’t told either of them about his own feelings. Marco couldn’t imagine competing with Sandro for Elisabetta, and it was inconceivable that any girl, even she, would come between them.
“Class, please take your seats,” Professoressa Longhi said after the song ended. “Let’s get started. Take out your essays.”
Marco sat down, retrieved his essay from his backpack, and hid his paper so no one would see his handwriting. His letters were large and deformed, as if written by a much younger student. His teachers thought he was sloppy or careless, but the truth was worse. Writing and reading were a struggle for him, even at his age. His classmates could read with ease, even aloud, but every time he looked at a page, the words appeared to him as a collection of nonsensical squiggles and he had to figure out their meaning from the context, or from what the teachers said. He didn’t recognize any of the words except for the ones that reoccurred, like Mussolini, and Marco had begun to fear that he was simply born stupid, which shamed him. His grades were falling, and last year, one of his teachers had summoned his mother, telling her that he had to study harder. His mother had nagged him and prayed to Saint Thomas Aquinas and Saint Joseph of Cupertino, but Marco knew he would have been better off with Saint Jude, Patron Saint of Lost Causes.