FIFTH COLUMN

She and her husband were married very young, Istrian, he had died fighting in Africa, leaving her an early widow with one child. In his memory, a grandson, later became famous, False growth, he was called by his unusual name. She shows me the photo of the tombstone where her husband is buried; it's written lieutenant, but he was made captain, he wants to say. She had found a job at the Municipality. In the 1945 they came to pick her up from home the communist partisans, on the charge of having refused to falsify the identity cards and ration cards of the Gappists. She had not refused for political reasons, he says, staring at me with his heavenly eyes, but because she had been raised to respect the law. When the partisans took her away, she feigned happiness so as not to impress her child who was just over eight years old. He left laughing, as if he were going on a picnic.
She was locked in a house along with his sister and other girls, accused of being the girlfriends of some Republican soldiers. on, they were handsome young men in uniform, he whispers to me, what fascism has to do with it. The boys were detained downstairs. In the evening he heard screams from the torture, he tells me as his hands shake and his cappuccino overflows from the cup. Her roommates were also subjected to abuse: they burned their nipples with the candle and things… In those days they also arrested his father and they had decided to execute him: on, he was an entrepreneur. Her little boy on a bicycle brought food to his mother, your zia, to his grandfather in prison. Not even nine years old and a dependent family... But not a hair of her hair was harmed and her father was spared his life. It went well because the partisan leader had fallen in love with her. “I was cute that time, on?”. I am struck by the expression he uses and the sudden look of youth that accompanies it. That time, as if he were talking about a mythical time, of another existence, or of an interminable day taken away from the fury of the days. And she calls herself cute, not beautiful, with a grimace of modesty and vanity; bella, that would be too presumptuous. I was cute that time, as if to limit beauty to only one event, to a situation. Instead I find the surviving signs of true beauty in her face. “Flirting with him, I saved my father's life.". And to herself: in fact the other girls did not return home. He gives me a copy of the release order, signed with the five-pointed star, a slogan and the commander's autograph, his admirer. With the purge they lost everything, their home, their properties, their land. They left their country. Years later they returned to their land and found it inhabited by Slovenians. They had built eight buildings in their garden but had left some trees. There was still a lotus tree that she and her sister had planted, by girls. She tried to pluck an apple from the tree. It was discovered and harshly removed by the new owners. The tree of adolescence now had forbidden fruits. Sometimes you become a thieves in your own home, for the sake of lost time.
His story ends with his cappuccino. The last traces of foam on the edges remain of both. After all, he had no documents to give me, no big story to reveal. He just wanted to tell his life story, the beauty of days gone by, the pain of lives taken away, labor and exodus, a persimmon tree's sunny memory of its lost paradise. He meant, I was there too, I too lived on the edges of history; he wanted to leave someone a discreet trace of his distant days, before the evening comes. But he begged me not to publish his name, I don't want to appear, I don't want to cause problems and embarrassment for my grandchildren... No, Lady, there is no need for a name.
You told the story of an Italian, like many, like many. Stories that no director, no narrator will ever tell, also because they lived on the wrong side. Yet he softened the horror with the little story of one holy coquetry, which made humanity rediscover itself even in the midst of fury. What to the gappista probably appeared to be a failure to be ashamed of, it had perhaps been his best action. She held no hatred; at most it was noticeable in the eyes, a residual thread of fear in his voice and trembling hands. But there's no use crying over spilled milk, he seemed to say in front of his cup floating in the saucer; pity and tenderness and the desire to confide in a stranger the flavor of his twenties prevailed. He wanted to tell a story that ended well, a life spent unscathed among atrocities for a thread of love, or maybe just about sex. From these breaks, sometimes, the story is sweetened.
And yes, beauty will save the world: maybe that's not true, maybe not this world. But beauty saved a girl and her father, stirring up a foam of love in the midst of civil war.
MV, and The traveler's secret, Mondadori, 2003
Source – https://www.adhocnews.it/una-ragazza-istriana/