The Children's Train by Viola Ardone

Author:Viola Ardone
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperVia
Published: 2020-11-29T00:00:00+00:00

24

THE CHRISTMAS VACATION HAS STARTED. WE never saw Rossana again. On New Year’s Day, we went to see the band playing in the town hall, and the mayor told us her father had come a few days before Christmas to pick her up. Rossana was right. She’s not like me at all. She had left a greeting card for the three of us, but Luzio hadn’t wanted even to read it. Bad luck, I think. She’s missing the Epiphany Partisan Festival that Derna has organized.

The big square with the tall, tall bell tower is crisscrossed with strings of lights and bunting. The Communist ladies are dressed up as Befana witches with torn shoes and big noses. Rivo and Luzio laugh. I don’t, because I used to have shoes with holes in them. They hurt, and there’s nothing to laugh about. The witches hand out bags of candy and a wooden puppet to all the kids, whether they were from the north or from the south. Alcide and Rosa are drinking red wine and dancing, while Rivo, Luzio, and I play with our school friends. Nario is lying in his stroller sleeping, even though there is music playing and people shouting, because he’s already eaten. When the games begin, we three brothers are put on the same team, and we win a rosette and an orange. I’ve never won anything before, not even the raffle Pachiochia used to organize on the last day of the year, because Mamma didn’t have the money to buy a ticket.

When they line us up to form a choir, I find myself right next to a kid with jet-black curls combed back with gel. I almost don’t recognize him.

“Amerì, is that you? You look like a movie star!”

“Stop teasing, Tommasì. How much salami have you eaten? You’re as fat as Pachiochia.”

On the other side of the piazza I spot the man with the mustache, who had picked him out, and his wife, who has muscled arms and big breasts. There were two older brothers there, too, who also had mustaches and looked just like their father. Tommasino’s babbo waved at him as we were singing, and for a moment I thought Tommasino was beginning to look like his new father, too.

Luzio is two rows in front of me in the choir, and he turns around and looks back every now and again out of curiosity. Usually he’s the one who knows everyone, and I don’t know a living soul. But now it’s the opposite. I see the short boy with black hair, the blond one with gaps in his mouth, whose teeth have now grown in, and lots of other kids who were on the train with me. Except that now they are all well dressed and healthy-looking, and it’s hard to tell who comes from down south and who was born up north.

Tommasino and I reckon Mariuccia must be in the crowd, too, so we go off to look for her. We’re looking for a thin little blond girl with hair as short as a hatchling’s, but she isn’t there.

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