Alessio nodded into her palms and relinquished some of his worry and fear. A dead end to this point, but he had been looking in the wrong places. It was just that with what he knew now about the family she’d been born into, he wondered if he would stumble on a history perhaps Nonna Immacolata had wished no one to find.
‘Thank you. I needed that.’ He returned his attention to the shelves of bound documents. ‘Because we don’t have her definitive birth date, should we just start looking for an Immacolata Martino in the immigration records? Wouldn’t that capture all those personal details anyway?’
Francesca’s eyes rolled over the bookcases of ledgers and folders. ‘We can only try.’
Alessio rubbed his hands over his face, then shook out his limbs. ‘Ok, let’s do this.’
This was why he had come to Impastino. This was the reason everything else that had happened had fallen into place. Because of Immacolata.
Nonna, wherever you are, let me find you. Help me make sense of you. I just know there’s more to your story. Please.
Alessio accepted the pair of white gloves Francesca passed him, and together they returned to the stretch of shelves labelled Immigrazioni and then the subsections grouped by year. The dates ranged from the late nineteenth century, through the First World War period, the twenties and thirties, and eventually, the post–World War Two era.
‘And she definitely emigrated in 1946?’ Francesca ran her gloved hand across the yellowing date stickers.
‘That’s what we think. Dad says she married Nonno in 1946 when she arrived in Melbourne. Nonno emigrated first.’
One by one they withdrew each of the document catalogues, setting them on the table between them as they took a seat. With great care they scanned each of the binders which were divided into months, flipping to the ‘M’ section.
Gennaio, 1945 . . . Martino, Paolo.
Marzo, 1945 . . . Martino, Arcangelo. Martino, Orazio.
For the most part, the Martino immigrants in 1945 had been men.
By the time they reached the end of the 1945 records, Alessio’s nerve was beginning to fray. He grunted, slipping the final Dicembre, 1945 binder back into its original place on the shelf.
‘Tranquillo,’ Francesca murmured with a placating hand on his back. ‘We look to 1946. You said it yourself, that’s when you believe she left.’
Alessio pulled the Gennaio, 1946 binder from the shelf, and with a heavy sigh, carefully opened it to the first name. Together they gently turned each page until they found the Martino entries – of which there were two, Adelina and Elisabetta. In Febbraio, 1946, there were another two, and again in Marzo. Another one in Aprile. They too were all women.
In fact, looking across all the names of immigrants whose names were printed in the 1946 binders to that point, nearly all were women.
They reached Settembre, 1946 and opened to ‘M’.
MAN . . . MAP . . . MAR . . .
Eventually arriving at Martino, they found Giuseppina and Rosa. And there, nestled between the two women’s pages, was a roughly torn edge where an entry must have been removed from the tight paper binding.
Alessio’s breath caught. ‘A Martino is missing.’ He flicked between Giuseppina and Rosa, both Martino and in alphabetical order per the rest of the catalogues. ‘Immacolata. I. That would fit the alphabetical order. Could she have been removed?’
‘It’s possible.’
Alessio traced his finger down the roughly torn paper edge. ‘I can’t believe this. Fuck.’
‘Stop.’ Francesca pulled the binder from him. ‘We put this aside and keep going. Don’t just assume the worst. We check the rest of the year, and 1947 to be sure. And we go back to 1944, and check there too.’
‘She is in death as she was in life. Stubborn!’
He hadn’t intended the comment to be humorous, but it drew a kind laugh from Francesca. ‘She is probably looking down on us and laughing at our misfortune.’
With his head in his hands, he said, ‘That would have been like her.’
‘Allora . . .’ Francesca sighed, as if that were explanation enough. ‘We carry on.’
And so they did, binder after binder, catching the years and months, checking them all, drawing only the same conclusion. No sign of Immacolata Martino.
The pair eventually slumped in unison over the desk, having returned all the binders and catalogues to the shelves. Alessio reached across to take Francesca’s gloved hand in thanks, but saw that she was peering at something on a shelf across the little room. Alessio turned and looked in the same direction. ‘What have you seen?’ he asked.
