53.
WHEN I ARRIVED AT FRANCESCA’Sthe following Tuesday, she was at the stove, making malloreddus alla campidanese, which she described as a sausage ragù. “I just wanted to get this going,” she said apologetically, “before we start.”
“It smells great,” I said.
She had sautéed an onion and some sausage in olive oil and was adding chopped tomatoes and water to the pan. “This cooks for about an hour.”
While she stirred everything together and reduced the heat, I wandered around her living room. She had left a book in an armchair; I turned it over. On the cover was a photograph of a child, or at least someone I thought was a child. He was lying amid the wreckage of a bombed-out building, or maybe it was a pile of corpses, I couldn’t be sure which. Either way, the image was arresting.
“Who’s reading this?” I asked.
“Bernardo,” said Francesca as she joined me in the living room. “I just finished it.” She had told me a little bit about her husband, but I had yet to meet him.
“It’s a clever title for a book,” she said.“La Storia.”
“The story?” I asked.
“In Italian, the word means bothstoryandhistory. So, across Italy, readers are asking themselves if they’re reading truth or fiction.”
“Which is it?”
She shrugged. “For Italians who lived through the postwar years, it feels true. Which is probably all that matters.”
“Is it very good?”
She nodded. “And very depressing.”
“How so?”
She seemed to be considering her response. “It’s about a Jewish woman who survives the war but finds herself alone, in Rome, raising the child of aGerman soldier who raped her. It’s hard to read, and people in Italy, particularly on the left, say they don’t want to keep revisiting the past. That we’ll never move forward this way.”
“Can’t you do both?” I asked.
“That is the debate.”
I idly flipped through the pages, letting all the Italian words blur before my eyes.
“You’d like it, I think,” said Francesca. “But we have a little more work to do before you’re reading Elsa Morante.”
I went to put the book back where I’d found it, and as I did so, I noticed a framed photograph of three young people on a table beside the chair. “Oh my God,” I said, “I know that guy.” I picked the photograph up and stared at it.
“Who?” asked Francesca, looking over my shoulder.
I pointed at the young man in the middle of the photo. “I met him. A few weeks ago. At the cartoleria.”
Francesca laughed. “Teo?”
“Yes!” I said, more excited than I had a right to be. “That was his name.”
“This is the one I was telling you about. My nephew. The journalist who works forLa Spedizione. And those are my children he’s with. Andrea and Bianca.”
“They look like they could be siblings.”
“They’ve all got the Pino nose.”
“That’s so funny,” I said, studying Teo’s face. “He was nice. I liked him.”
“He’s very smart. And very charming. Did he tell you what he’s working on?”
