A Child Al Confino: The True Story of a Jewish Boy and His Mother in Mussolini's Italy (21 page)

Building with balconies where Eric and his mother lived, Ospedaletto.

In contrast, Filomena had little formal education, was provincial, and reveled in local gossip. She was a bit taller than Mamma, and her oval face had well-balanced features. Pretty and neat in her appearance, she was always clad entirely in black. Thinking she may have had a death in her family, my mother offered her condolences a few days after we moved in.

Filomena looked baffled. Then, realizing what my mother meant, she responded with a big smile. “Oh, the black dress. I just wear it. You know, with a large family, there is always someone dying.”

Besides a kitchen, our new apartment consisted of two large rooms. Each one had its own balcony overlooking the main road — a mixed blessing, we would soon discover, depending on the time of year. In September the air was still warm. Leaving the balcony doors open offered an invitation to all the mosquitoes in the neighborhood. As the weather turned colder, we found the larger doors also had wider gaps around their frames, which let the wind blow more freely through our rooms.

The large kitchen, with its traditional cast-iron stove, was halfway down the corridor. It had a table, four chairs, and half of a wooden barrel to hold our water supply. From the same corridor we accessed our apartment: the living room, where I slept next to Mother's room. At last I had my own room and could sleep without a cross over my bed.

Each floor had a communal toilet or, more precisely, a dark cubicle, hanging from the back of the building, with the poor imitation of a toilet seat over an unobstructed hole that discharged into the ground. Thin, non-uniform wood planks formed the outer walls, which were intended to shield the user from curious eyes and the outside air. But because of poor construction, only privacy was achieved, while the outside air easily flowed inside, creating a problem in every season. During summer, hot air helped ferment the putrefied waste into foul-smelling fumes, in the cold winter, it required exceptional courage to undress. Thus, unless faced with a dire emergency, rather than brave the stench during the warm months, I made use of the surrounding woods, while in winter I learned to rush the process in order to shorten the exposure of my private parts and protect them from freezing. Though we had to share this deplorable toilet with the other five people on our floor, the chances of finding it occupied were almost nil. No one stayed inside the hanging stall any longer than was absolutely essential.

When forced to use the toilet and to protect myself from inhaling the putrid fumes, I had, in short time, learned to be a contortionist. In order to be able to urinate standing erect, I had to twist my upper torso to one side and at the same time struggle to aim my stream into the hole rather than on my feet. But owing to a number of misses, no matter what my needs, I began to sit, letting my buttocks take the brunt of the obnoxious fumes. The outhouse was so archaic that in comparison, our toilet paper, a batch of torn newspaper squares that hung from a nail, represented a step into modern times.

Mother had returned from reporting to the police station when she exclaimed, “Guess what I got us? A chamber pot.”

Watching my mother gleefully waving that white enameled metal container in the air made me realize how low we had sunk. Then, in a lighter mood, I suggested that we had reached our zenith and had finally become an integral part of Ospedaletto d'Alpinolo. We owned our very own pot. “You're a genius,
Mammina
. “Are we going to empty it from the balcony?”

“No! Of course not! Don't forget where we come from, because one of these days we're going to leave this place and go to live among civilized people. No, we will not empty it from the window. We'll pour it down the toilet.” She really seemed furious at my remark.

“Did you think I meant it?” I asked.

“With you I never know if you're serious or acting stupid.” She had calmed down and put her arms around me and together we enjoyed a hearty laugh.

I was never called upon to do the unpleasant task of emptying the pot. As my mother had done throughout my life, she always relieved me of the most unpleasant chores.

Since I was not able to carry forty liters of water on my untrained head, we had to pay a young woman twice and occasionally three times a week to do so. With a copper cauldron brimming with water and precariously balanced on her head, a barefooted thirteen- or fourteen-year-old would climb the two flights to our floor and, carefully turning on the landing, walk into our kitchen. With very little effort, she would hoist that heavy vessel from her head and pour the water into our wooden half-barrel. All this for fifty
centesimi
, a little more than the cost of mailing a letter. The strength of these young women never ceased to amaze me. Once, when Mother and I tried to move the barrel, we were unable to lift it and could only drag it across the floor.

The water served for drinking, cooking, and washing. Now, for the first time, it would also serve for our weekly bath. For three months, while living at Antonietta's, we'd had to share the kitchen with the landlady and her girls and had not been able to take a bath.

Bathing, even in our own apartment, presented a challenge. The new landlady had provided us with a basin to wash our laundry, which was just large enough to hold an infant. Mother pronounced this to be our new bathtub.

“How am I going to take a bath in this?” I asked.

“What we'll do is take two half baths.”

Never really doubting my mother's wisdom, I asked what she meant by a half bath.

She explained her novel solution: “First we'll wash the top half of the body, then the bottom half. Clever, no?”

But bathing in two stages had a few drawbacks. Since we did not have a sufficiently large pot, we had to heat one pot of water at the time.

“By the time we take the first half-bath and heat up the rest of the water, our bodies will get dirty again,” I said. Mamma's laugh told me she took my logic in good humor.

The floor below ours was the landlord's residence, except for one small room, which was rented to a family of seven: Vincenzo, his wife Annunziata, and their five children.

Small of stature, plump, and loud, Annunziata was a woman of limited skills and even less education. Her major functions were to cook pasta and bear children. Her hair, not washed in years and snarled from months of begging for a comb, created the perfect habitat for lice. Her splotched dress, one of three I saw her wear during our twenty-five months stay, displayed samples of tomato sauces weeks or perhaps months old.

Vincenzo was lanky and prone to outbursts of temper. The twenty-first born in his family, he carried on him the dirt he had accumulated during the thirty-two years since his birth. He led a simple life. Six days a week, he sat cross-legged on the side of the dusty road that skirted the village and led to Montevergine, crushing rocks into small pebbles. He would place a rock on a large flat stone resting on his lap and smash it with a stone in his hand.

One day I found him there, alone on the mountain road. Staring at the holes left by three or four of his missing teeth, I asked, “What are these stones used for?”

He shrugged his shoulders. “Bah! I'm glad I'm working.” He said more but I had trouble understanding his heavy dialect.

Vincenzo's main meal consisted of a loaf of bread and a tomato. Some days, though, he could afford only half a loaf. For Vincenzo, each work day started at sunrise and ended at sunset. As he did not own a watch, he relied on the sun to tell time, thus working more hours in summer and fewer in winter.

It was easy to tell when Vincenzo came home at the end of the day, for his homecoming was marked by either an argument with his wife or the beating of one of his children. Judging from my own upbringing, I accepted that the children needed a heavy hand, but this man would slap the children even before knowing if punishment was warranted.

Like most women in the village, Annunziata had been busy producing children and had given birth every eleven months. Only the two older boys were more than two years apart, for three children born in between had died in infancy.

During our first three months in Ospedaletto, I thought I had seen as much filth as any person could ever accumulate, but Vincenzo's children seemed to be competing to see who could win first prize. Perhaps it was their way to make up for their lack of clothing, hoping the grime would cover those parts of their small bodies where clothes should have been. None of the children had shoes, not even the simple
zoccoli,
and the bottoms of their feet, from the youngest to the oldest, had toughened into a hardened leathery condition that made them insensitive. Once the oldest boy removed a tack imbedded in his calloused foot. The nail had left a small, bloodless hole and I could tell the boy didn't feel pain.

While the older children ran around all day, the eleven-month baby was carried by the mother. One day I watched as Annunziata wrapped the infant using a stained and well-worn strip of cloth around the little girl's buttock. She pulled the bandage so tight that the poor child was unable to bend or move from the waist down. Later that day I told Mamma about it.

“That's barbaric,” she commented.

With cold weather approaching, the only difference between summer and winter was marked by how much snot ran from the children's noses and was then smeared across their cheeks each time the mother, in her vain attempt at stopping the constant trickle, wiped her open hand over their faces. I don't think those children ever felt water cleanse their skin, for I could detect the various layers of mucous Annunziata had spread on their cheeks.

Whenever someone called out Vincenzo's name, my ears perked up. “Why do they call him Bicenz?” I asked Filomena, our landlady.

“In dialect a
V
is pronounced like a
B.
”

Later I learned that
bacio,
the word for “kiss,” was pronounced “vazo,” for
B'
s were pronounced as
V'
s. I concluded that these people were backward.

One day my insatiable curiosity led me inside Vincenzo's family's vacant tiny quarters smaller than either one of our rooms, it housed all seven of them. It was obvious from the number of beds that at least two of the children had to share their parents' bed. That's all I was able to observe, for the foul smell forced me to make a rapid retreat.

I ran upstairs to tell my mother. “Mamma, I was in Annunziata's room. It's terrible how these people live. You wouldn't believe the stench.”

“Stay away from there! Do you want lice again?” she asked. Remembering those crawling pests brought on a shiver.

The Dello Russos, our next-door neighbors, were a delightful contrast. The family lived in a four-room apartment. Their two children shared their own room and even Ida, the fourteen-year-old live-in help, had a small cubicle for herself.

Antonio and Dora Dello Russo soon became Mamma's close friends. Alba and Gino, their children, although younger than me, were good companions within the confines of the house.

While my mother was an extraordinary cook and an admired baker, she could create real chaos in the kitchen. Dora, in contrast, was a spotless housekeeper. Every day she was up before the rest of her family, started the fire and prepared breakfast — a bowl of
caffê
-
latte
with chunks of homemade bread — then got her children ready for school.

During the week, Dora found little or no time for her own grooming. Her attractive dark hair, sprinkled with a bit of gray, was drawn into a bun. Precariously held by a number of poorly placed hair pins, it received Dora's attention only on Sunday before going to mass. Despite her untidy appearance, however, she was clean about her person and meticulous about her home. Each room was tastefully furnished. Crystal and porcelain were displayed in the china cabinet. On a table in the living room, a wedding picture in a silver frame showed her slim attractiveness of eight years earlier, contrasting with her present chunkiness at twenty-eight.

Antonio Dello Russo
il commerciante
— so known to distinguish him from the other Dello Russo, the ex-mayor with the coal-filled bathtub — was a good provider, a caring husband and a doting father. Freshly shaven each morning, he looked neat in his black suit, white shirt, and black tie. Dora made sure his clothes were clean and pressed, even washing his suit from time to time.

The Dello Russos were steps ahead of most townspeople and led, much to Mother's relief, a more modern and hygienic lifestyle.

Sunday was a special day in Italy, and even more so in this small mountain village. It was when families sat together at the table to enjoy their best meal of the week, a feast prepared with particular care by the women of the house. Even Annunziata boiled a hefty dish of pasta and once in a while added a tiny cut of meat hardly big enough to feed half her lot.

In the Dello Russo home, however, Sunday was marked by more than just food. Hand-embroidered table linens were placed on the dining room table, graced by crystal glassware, porcelain dishes, and silverware — all part of Dora's considerable dowry. Served with the meal was local wine and freshly home-baked bread, a luxury in those days when so many grocery items were strictly rationed. But Dora used her bread coupons to buy flour that, combined with whatever Antonio was able to buy on the black market, enabled her to bake enough bread even to be generous with us.