Mourning

Signor Hoffman

The sea, visible from the train window, was an infinite blue. I was still exhausted, bleary-eyed from the overnight transatlantic flight to Rome, but just looking out to sea, the Mediterranean Sea, so infinite and so blue, made me forget it all, made me forget even myself. I don’t know why. I don’t like going to the sea, or swimming in the sea, or walking along the seashore, much less going out in a boat. I like the sea as an image. As an idea. As a thought. As a parable for something that is both mysterious and obvious; something that promises to save us, and at the same time threatens to kill us. The sea, in short, like the woman next door, naked and dazzling in her nighttime window: from a distance.

The old train was chugging slowly down the Mediterranean coast, past Naples, past Salerno, past villages ever smaller and poorer, finally reaching Calabria. The southernmost point of the Italian peninsula. A region that is so bucolic, so mountainous, and still under the domination of one of the most powerful Mafias in the country: the ’Ndràngheta. The car was almost empty. An old lady leafed through fashion magazines. At one end a soldier or policeman was asleep. In the row in front of mine, two teenagers, perhaps a couple, were flirting and kissing and bickering loudly in Italian. She straightened up a little in her seat and turned in profile and asked him if he would please look at her nose (I couldn’t see it from behind; I imagined it long and aquiline, pale and beautiful). But the boy just kissed it without a word, and then the two of them dissolved back into laughter and caresses. It took me a while to understand that on that very night they were having a big party, with all their friends, because the girl had decided to have it operated on the following day. A farewell party for her nose, I understood in Italian. The boy’s kisses, I understood in Italian, were good-bye kisses.

I got off the train at Paola, a small tourist town on the coast. I was standing on the station platform, wrapping myself up against the winter cold, and trying to decide what to do, which direction to walk, when I felt someone behind me grab my arm. Signor Halfon? I gave a disconcerted smile when I saw his mane of blond hair, his tangled beard, his crazy eyes, but crazy like a benign sort of lunatic, the kind who’s escaped from a circus and nobody minds. I’m Fausto, he said. Benvenuto in Calabria, and he shook my hand. How was your trip? His Spanish sounded perfect, though too singsong. Everything about him reminded me of an actor from the opera buffa. He must have been about my age. It was good, I told him, but long. I’m glad, he said, scratching his beard. I was still trying to place him, to no avail. All of a sudden and without asking, he picked up my suitcase. Bene, he said. Andiamo, he said, let’s go quickly, it’s late, and he dragged off my suitcase, leading me by the elbow as though I were a blind man. I’ve got the car parked out front, he said. To take you there at once, Signor Halfon, to the concentration camp.

FAUSTO’S CAR WAS AN OLD REDDISH FIAT that only barely complied with the most minimal traffic requirements. The trunk needed a piece of rope to keep it closed. My seat belt was broken. There was no rearview mirror (there had been one in the past, perhaps, because a rubber trace of it remained). The brakes smelled permanently of burning. I didn’t understand whether it was because of some malfunction in the turn signals or in the electrical system, but each time Fausto wanted to turn, he had to stick his left hand out the window—a window that was jammed halfway: it no longer opened completely, nor closed completely. Once in a while, the engine made a strange noise, as though it were drowning, as though it were about to die, but Fausto would just give the dashboard a firm whack and the engine would jump back to life, though only barely.

This, said Fausto with a gesture at a huge church or cathedral, is the Santuario di San Francesco di Paola. Bellissimo, he said. Very famous. Many pilgrims from all over Calabria. And muttering something else, he crossed himself. I asked him whether we were going to the hotel first, to drop off my things, for me to freshen up and have a little rest. Dopo, dopo, he replied. Later. Now straight to the concentration camp, he said, where our director’s waiting for you. And I thought I’d heard him say Herr Direktor, and that he might perhaps have said it with a slight German accent, and I was ready to yell at him that, while driving to a concentration camp, that’s not something you ever say to a Jew.

I felt like a cigarette. I asked Fausto if he had one, if he smoked. But he ignored me, or perhaps he didn’t hear me.

In the Santuario di San Francesco di Paola, he said, as we were already on our way out of the city, there is still one unexploded bomb. I wanted to open the window to get some ventilation, to air out some of the smell of dust, of vaseline, of cheap cologne, but the window, naturally, did not work. It was dropped in 1943, he said, during the bombardments from the Allied air force, but it never exploded. Fausto accelerated down a long, straight avenue, flanked by olive trees. And there it stayed, that bomb, intact, he said, letting go of the stick shift and raising his right hand. His long index finger slammed into the Fiat’s roof. A real miracolo, he said, as though speaking from someplace else. Or perhaps I was the one who was someplace else, thinking about other bombs, thinking about Hiroshima, dreaming about Hiroshima, remembering that not long ago, on a trip to Hiroshima, a Japanese girl named Aiko had taken me to see the Fukuromachi primary school, located less than half a kilometer from the exact spot where on August 6, 1945, at eight-fifteen in the morning, the atomic bomb was dropped. She and I were standing at a black wall that ran up along the side of a flight of stairs. It looked like an old blackboard, covered in white markings. Aiko, whose own grandfather had survived the bomb (he never spoke to her of this, nor of the radiation burns on his back), told me in English that there had been 160 teachers and students inside the school at the moment of impact, just starting class, and that they all died instantly. All that was left of the original school, she told me, was the space in which we were standing: the only part of the school that had been built in reinforced concrete. And in the days that immediately followed the impact, Aiko told me, this same wall we had in front of us, already blackened by the smoke and soot from the bomb, began to be transformed spontaneously into a community wall, where a few survivors from the city, using little pieces of white chalk from the school, wrote messages for their relatives. Just in case any of their relatives also happened to have survived the bomb, she told me, and came to read them. Aiko fell silent, and climbed a couple of steps, and it occurred to me that dressed like she was, in a skimpy plaid skirt and white socks that were loose and bunched around her ankles, she actually looked like a schoolgirl herself, perhaps a schoolgirl from right there, from that very school. But then I saw her put her hand under her skirt and scratch her firm bare thigh, and I remembered that she was absolutely not a schoolgirl. I looked back at the black wall. And I just stared at all those Japanese characters in front of me, all the white words on that black wall, all that writing in chalk from the survivors of Hiroshima, still alive and palpable after so many years. We both stood in silence, as if out of respect for something. We could hear the sounds of children playing outside. Hundreds of colored paper cranes, hanging by a window, turned in the breeze. I didn’t want to leave or couldn’t leave the school until Aiko had finished reading me, in Japanese and English, each of the short white stories on that smoke black wall.

FERRAMONTI DI TARSIA, READ A SMALL YELLOW SIGN. Ex Campo di Concentramento. Fondazione. Museo Internazionale della Memoria. And above it all, like an emblem or logo of everything in the yellow sign, an elegant spiral of barbed wire.

A white-haired gentleman was standing and smoking at the entrance gate. He just watched as I got out of the old Fiat and Fausto and I walked over toward him. He looked desperate. Almost annoyed or troubled by something. All of a sudden he flung his cigarette butt toward me, perhaps at me. Herr Direktor, I presumed.

Fausto introduced us. His last name was Panebianco. That’s what everyone called him: Panebianco. He was dressed as though in mourning, in a black coat over a white shirt and a black tie. He had a cap on, which was also black, Sicilian-style, called a coppola. I said pleased to meet you, and held out my hand, but Panebianco, saying something to Fausto I didn’t understand, seemed not to notice it right in front of him, and just went on talking. I didn’t know what to do. My hand was still out there, in midair between us, forgotten. Suddenly a girl walked over, with very short black hair, and big black eyes, and black boots, and black stockings, and a black coat, and she stopped right behind the director. His daughter, perhaps. Also in mourning, perhaps. Finally Panebianco fell silent and looked down and gave me the weakest handshake of my life. The director says you’re late, Fausto told me, as though it was my fault. He also says the people are arriving right now. Panebianco said something else to Fausto that I didn’t understand, and I gathered then that he must have been speaking in dialect. I knew a little about the various dialects still used in Calabria, dozens of dialects, some of which, in fact, were barely comprehensible to speakers of the others. The director says we can wait a few more minutes, Fausto told me, so that you can see a bit of the concentration camp, Signor Halfon, before getting started. I said yes, thank you, that sounds good, and at once Panebianco just turned around and disappeared through the main entrance, limping, almost in a hurry. I thought the old man was crazy. Then I thought he wanted me to follow him in, and I was about to do so when his daughter held out her hand, offering me a silvery pack of Marlboros. Her