The Price of Children: Stolen Lives in a Land Without Choice by Maria Laurino

Author:Maria Laurino [Laurino, Maria]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, Europe, Italy, True Crime, Abductions; Kidnappings & Missing Persons, Religion, Christianity, Catholic, Social Science, Women's Studies, United States, 20th Century, Political Science, Religion; Politics & State
ISBN: 9781504099189
Google: 0skWEQAAQBAJ
Amazon: B0D7S1F9JL
Publisher: Open Road Media
Published: 2024-10-14T22:00:00+00:00

Rosalba imagines that Tonia went to the professor in desperation over the bureaucratic mistake that had turned her passing test into a failing one. That she went naïvely but also with an inkling that some type of exchange would be expected. Rosalba, unlike her aunt, describes what took place at the professor’s home—whether it was after the group tutoring lesson where Tonia had been sent by her mother or on another occasion—in the language of today, not of all our yesterdays: Tonia, forced into nonconsensual sex, was “a victim of rape.”

“I use the words for what they mean. She told me these things. I don’t know when it happened or how. He was a professor of the concorso, she told me this, he was part of the board.”

Rosalba, like Adriana, said that her mother was in love with the naval officer and was awaiting to resume their courtship upon his impending return. But she was so horribly ashamed of herself that she left town without ever saying goodbye to the young man who came back looking for her. Tonia clung to this faded memory, a totem of the life she lost the day she stepped into the professor’s home. When Rosalba once jokingly replied to her mother’s repeated stories about her former boyfriend, “But there is a sailor in every port,” her mother snapped, “No, he loved me, he loved me so much, we were really in love.”

Unlike her Aunt Adriana, who was a teenager at the time, Rosalba believes that Tonia’s mother and some older siblings were aware of Tonia’s situation, as well as the professor’s reputation, but they blamed her, not him, pushing Tonia to leave the family home, privileging the professor’s stature over the daughter’s well-being. Rosalba said that her mother told her the story of surrendering Sara in a very tragic way.

“That she had to abandon her, that it was certainly not her will, but she had to abandon her. So, she let herself be overwhelmed by the events that happened, she couldn’t make choices, she couldn’t resist. In fact, she fell ill then. I was ten when she had her first illness. She died when I was thirty-two, imagine! Twenty-two years of hospitals, diseases, one after another.”

Tonia became one more in this long trail of twentieth-century women traveling to the country’s copious brefotrofi, stuffing into suitcases their belongings and the last remaining traces of childhood, young women poised to embark on adult life but stumbling at their first steps. Forbidden the sweet fruit of privilege accorded to the men who forced them on this journey, men who chose what they wanted and chose to walk away, their early bargain with life was to accept diminished happiness and denied dreams, to blame themselves for their degradation, and ultimately to lose the agency to escape their compromised lives—a condition otherwise known as being a woman throughout most of human history.

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