December 25, 1989

Christmas Day

       Tina was not the least bit concerned about her Christmas dinner: cappelletti in capon broth, followed by meatballs and boiled meat with chutneyed fruit, green sauce and homemade mayonnaise, Pandoro with mascarpone sauce for dessert. Christmas. All day yesterday her husband Fulco had been grumbling about having enough cappelletti to eat but Tina was sure there would be plenty. She closed her eyes and again and drifted back off to sleep. Tina was certain that everything would be fine. She was just so hungry.

       “Signora Bondi!”

       “Tina, Tina, your son is here!”

       Tina opened one eye and looked up at a man. He was standing there in his overcoat by her bed, smiling and holding a big basket filled with fruit and chocolates, rubbing his hands.

       “Merry Christmas, Mamma”

       Tina blinked.

       “Oh Fulco, Merry Christmas to you, too. Where’s Andrea?”

       Andrea winced and took off his coat. This was why he and Carla had decided Mamma needed to be moved into the old folks’ home. He sat down in the chair beside Tina’s bed and started to talk.

       “Mamma, it’s me Andrea. I know I look just like papa’, but it’s me, Andrea.”

       Tina paused a second, blinked and returned to 1989.

       “Well, Mamma, we had a nice big dinner with capelletti in broth and meatballs boiled meat and mascarpone cream with Pandoro for dessert. I spoke with Rinaldo and he said he was going to drop by afterwards to see you. So, how was your Christmas dinner?”

       “Dinner? I haven’t had any dinner. I’m still hungry. Where’s Rinaldo? I have a little envelope to put under his plate for Christmas.”

       “Oh, he’s out with his Veronica. They’ll drop by later.”

Andrea looked out the window at the gardens. A light fog was hanging in the pale December light. It would be dark soon, time to get back to his bar and play some cards. He sighed and sat there, listening to his Mother.

       “Where’s Carla? I certainly thought she could at least call me today. I’ve been waiting for her phone call all morning long.”

       “Mamma, she did call this morning it’s almost four o’clock.”

       “It can’t be. I haven’t had dinner yet. “

       The nurse walked up to her bedside.

       “Tina, don’t you remember how much you liked your cappelletti? You ate three bowls full.”

       “What are you talking about? I haven’t even cooked them yet. What am I doing in bed? Help me up.”

       Andrea sat down on the bed and pulled his mother up. She was not getting any lighter, that was for sure. The nurse retrieved Tina’s shawl from her locker and draped it around her shoulders.

“Don’t you want to sit out in the main room? There’ll be singers coming by later, and they’re going to perform all your old favorite arias.”

       Tina’s eyes sparkled. She had always liked music, especially the Verdi operas. She and Fulco had gone to see every show given in Bagnacavallo’s small but elegant theater. She always wore her best jewelry and had her hair twisted up just so and proper opera gloves. She wouldn’t have other people making comments about her behind her back.

       “Oh yes, I love music. Here, help me get up.”

       Tina padded out the door, forgetting to even acknowledge Andrea as she left the room. Andrea gave the nurse a long sad look and the nurse smiled bravely back.

       “Your mother’s fine, you do know that don’t you?”

       “Oh, well if you mean she’s in good health, I have to agree. She certainly hasn’t lost her appetite in the very least or any weight either, it would appear. I just wish we could have kept her at the house one more week and had Christmas dinner with her.”

       “Oh Signore, you know it wouldn’t have made her happy. She spent the whole morning talking about her husband and waiting for him to come. She wouldn’t budge from her bed.”

       Tina walked into to the main room, where they were setting up chairs all around the walls. She didn’t know any of the other people there, so she just kept to herself, found a nice easy chair to plop down in and took a load off her feet. There was a flier on the empty chair next to hers:

       “The Romagnol Canterini are proud to present:

       Christmas at the Opera – 

       Selections from 

       Puccini, Mozart, and Verdi. Christmas 

       Night, 

       Five O’Clock!

       Well, that should be all right. Tina looked around again and saw no one that she knew. Indeed, everyone in the room was doing the same thing. There were more than 40 seventy-, eighty-, and ninety-year olds, sitting down in the day room with the other people from the area that they had seen all their lives. No one was saying a word to anybody else. They hadn’t been introduced, and these were all people who did not play cards. Oh, the nuns tried playing bingo a couple of times, but someone was always making a mistake and their games ended up in fuming grimaces and the occasional extremely unpleasant spat. So the nuns just turned on the television set to RAI 1 and took the channel knob off so there would be no discussion.

       The residents would fight each other nastily if they felt like their dignity had been insulted and they wouldn’t bend over to pick up a handkerchief that someone had dropped. They hadn’t been introduced! No one wanted to seem forward. They sat and stared at the television set and dozed off.

Andrea walked into the room. It was hot and stuffy, but there was a smell of rubbing alcohol that gave the room its redolence of cleanliness. He walked over to his mother to say good-bye.

       “Andrea, how nice of you to come and see me on Christmas day! Here, pull up a seat and tell me all about dinner at home. How’s Carla?”

       Andrea repeated the conversation he had had earlier with her, and smiled weakly. Mamma had no short-term memory left. He turned and looked around the room. No one was talking. Two much olderr ladies walked in and sat down in front of the television set, chatting amiably to one another and chuckling. The silence in the room somehow became acute and the only thing you could hear were the ladies’ comments just under the roar of the television going full blast for the hard of hearing.

       The occupants of the room were not listening to the ladies; they were trying not to listen to them. Andrea did not know what was going on until one of the two ladies turned around to look at the door in his direction. It was Giulietta 100 Lire. She was speaking in a loud voice as she turned:

       “Lalla! Lalla! Why don’t we change the channel on the television set? This never-ending movie about Christmas is boring right down through my guts. There should be a good western on Channel 5.”

       At this, Lalla turned to the rest of the room and shouted: “Well, is anybody watching this?”

She was greeted with gelid silence and haughty faces. Even Tina wrinkled her nose and looked the other way while Lalla got up, walked to the television set, pulled the knob out of her pocket, plugged it into the TV, and turned it to Channel Five, which was indeed showing an old Bud Spencer and Terence Hill feature: God Forgives; I Don’t. Lalla settled back into her chair and the two ladies crossed their arms, cocked their heads, and started to watch the program. A couple of the men did too, but the women all stared at the floor.

       Andrea recognized Lalla too: La Mipizzica. He could not believe that the two of them were in the same retirement home as his mother: this was an absolute outrage and unquestionably unacceptable. Andrea turned to Tina and kissed her softly on the cheek. “Merry Christmas, Mamma. Enjoy your show this evening.” Tina turned and smiled and patted him on his arm: “Tell your father not to worry; his cappelletti will be ready by the time he gets back from the bar.”

       Andrea strode to the entrance and addressed the ancient nun at the reception. “Merry Christmas! I was wondering if it would be possible for me to speak with Don Uberto. I mean, I know it’s Christmas, but I do think this is important enough.”

       “Merry Christmas, and May the Lord be With You! Let me see; I know he hasn’t left to say vespers, so I think you can speak to him.” She picked up an enormous plastic receiver and slid it under her wimple while she dialed. "Yes, yes, it’s Andrea Bondi. Yes, he’s right here. Yes, I’ll tell him.”

       “Sister, how did you know I’m Andrea Bondi? I don’t believe I’ve ever seen you before.”

       “Oh Signor Bondi, you’re the very image of your father and I know Tina Bondi came to live with us just last week! Don Uberto will see you in five minutes; would you mind taking a seat over there? This month’s edition of The Christian Family is particularly good, especially the story of Gianna Beretta Molla. Such an example for all of us!”

       Andrea smiled blankly and went to sit. He figured it would probably be a good idea for Don Uberto to walk into the room and find Andrea absorbed in the story of Gianna Beretta Molla, so he opened the magazine and started to read. It was all predictable: sacraments and family and missionary work. Don Uberto interrupted him as he was turning the page.

       “Signor Bondi? Merry Christmas! I hope you have been enjoying yourself; it’s very kind of you to come and visit Signora Tina.”

       “Well, she hardly recognizes me and when she does, she thinks I’m my father.”

       “Well, there are worse things than resembling your father, I do think. What can I help you with today?”

       “I think we need to go to your office. This is a somewhat private matter.”

Don Uberto pointed to the open door and followed Andrea in. Don Uberto closed the door behind him.

       “Yes, now is there some special problem that your mother is having that’s not being addressed?”

       “No, Don Uberto, it’s not that at all. This isn’t a happy solution for us in general, but it’s the best one we can find here near us.”

       “I realize how difficult this family separation must be, but we’re doing our best to make Signora Tina as comfortable and happy as possible. What is it you want me to help you with?”

       “It’s not my place to judge, but did I just see Giulietta 100 Lire and La Mipizzica in the television room?”

       “Oh, do you mean la Signora Giulia Ghinassi and la Signorina Raffaella Mariani?”

       “Is that what their real names are?”

       “You mean their Christian names I think. Yes, that’s right. Did you want to speak to them?”

       “Oh no, no no no. Nothing like that. But surely Don Uberto, you know about their past?”

       “Oh I know just about everything since I’ve been their confessor for the last forty years. That of course is privileged information, you know about the secrecy of the confessional and all that.”

       “And you still let them stay here? Did Giulietta ever tell you where her nickname came from?

       “Signor Bondi, I do not understand what your point is.”

       “The point is that they’re both old whores: Giulietta would screw a man for 100 lire. That’s where her name came from. And La Mipizzica,…”

       “Is what Signorina Mariani used to say? ‘I’ve got an itch down there?’ to attract her clientele. No, they never told me, but other people did. Signora Ghinassi and Signorina Mariani just confessed their sins to me and repented. So I do know who some of the real sinners are in this town: adulterous husbands and lecherous teenagers.”

       “Giulietta never went with teenagers. She always refused anyone under sixteen.”

       “I’m not talking about that. I do happen to know that for 50 lire, she would show ‘it’ to a small number of young ‘men.’”

       Andrea felt sure he was blushing a bright deep red.

       “But you see, Signor Bondi those two ladies have always been very generous.”

       Andrea remembered seeing Lalla as little boy. She always offered him and all the other children a little piece of candy that he was dying to take, but his mother would not acknowledge her simple act of kindness. Tina would pull her overcoat tighter around her and carry her bag over her breast, looking forward and completely ignoring the pretty lady with the candy. Andrea couldn’t have his mother staying in a retirement home with women Tina so clearly disdained.

       “Really Don Uberto, I don’t understand you. You’ve spent millions of lire buying up the dirty movie house around the corner from your church and turning it into a restaurant, and then you let those two old jades sleep in your nursing home, under the same roof with my mother?”

Don Uberto raised his eyebrows, took a deep breath, and calmly placed his hands squarely on the table before him.

       “Signor Bondi, to begin with, I must ask you not to refer to my Aunt Giulia in those terms.” (Andrea looked at the ground, but he wasn’t ashamed of what he had said and he would say it again and tell everyone once he had gotten out the door). “You obviously don’t know much about Aunt Giulia beyond her rates, or about her father who was inadvertently killed by the partisans during the last war, on the Bridge of the Idiots.  You also obviously do not realize that she and Signorina Raffaella have basically funded this nursing home over the last twenty years. You see, no one was willing to sell them a home for themselves: the bankers did not want them coming in to their banks and told them so, though I imagine the directors told them different things behind the trees in the avenues around the public gardens. But if I knew that, it would certainly be a secret of the confessional which it would be unethical to violate. So they came to me, and asked me to take care of their old age for them. What Communist or Republican pension scheme could they have bought into? How could they have declared their income?”

       “So, I had them buy this old hotel in Porto Garibaldi; it was crumbliing to pieces thirty years ago when the bottom of the real estate market fell out. Year by year, we have been investing money in it, in structural repairs, furniture, even studies on retirement homes and a gerontologist. This has been their home for the last twenty years, and quite frankly, Signor Bondi, if your mother does not like being their guest, then perhaps, we should find another solution for Signora Bondi. Why don’t we take her to your Party’s Old Folk’s Home.”

       “There’s no such thing!”

       “Oh really? I thought the politicians were going to take care of everyone, birth to dirt. I guess I was wrong. Since I see you are unhappy with the situation, I will speak to Sister Clotilde out at the reception desk, and have her arrange for your mother’s effects to be collected tomorrow morning, have her bathed, and ready for you to pick up about twelve; that way she can have lunch with you, in what used to be her home in Bagnacavallo. Would that suit you? I can call up the Sirilli family this evening and have them bring in their old uncle, who has been on the waiting list to get in here for at least a year. That would be a wonderful Christmas present for them, today.”

       Andrea started to sweat. Carla would leave him if he brought his mother back to the house. Carla had already changed Tina’s tiny bedroom into a four-season, walk-in closet and would not relinquish it. Andrea looked at the ground again.

       “Don Uberto,” Andrea spoke without looking him in the eye, “At least, you should limit their contact with the other people in the nursing home.”

       “Signor Bondi, I fear I have confused you. This is not my property, I merely manage it. This house belongs to Signora Ghinassi and Signorina Mariani. So perhaps you should tell them what they can and cannot do in their own home. But be prepared for a fierce blast of the whole truth from them, because they really do know everything that has gone on in the province for the last fifty years, far more than I know. And they have no secret of confession to which they must hew.”

Don Uberto looked at his watch. “Oh my, I’ve got to fly. I’m substituting Don Gerardo at Vespers in Marina in a half hour. Do excuse me if I run. Shall I tell Sister Clotilde to wrap up your mother’s things for you for by noon tomorrow?”

       Andrea continued to look at the ground. “No, no, that won’t be necessary.”

       “Then if you don’t mind, I will take my leave of you,” said Don Uberto helping Andrea towards the door by the elbow. “Have a Merry Christmas, and do tell Signora Bondi I will be glad to bless your beach house before Easter this year. Even the toilet and bidet, as she requested last year. Good Evening!”

       Don Uberto shut the door behind him.

       The singers arrived in the television room bringing with them cold air and fresh eau de cologne. The nurses and orderlies were helping the last people get seated in the rows of sofas and wheelchairs and chairs that had been borrowed from the rooms for the occasion. Tina never had to move and she watched as La Mipizzica and Giulietta Cento Lire (for those were their names, everyone knew) walked up to the director and welcomed him and thanked him for coming. There were smiles all around the room as the pianist lifted up the piano cover and ran scales and arpeggios to warm up. Sister Clotilde left her station at the front door, stood before the assembled doddering audience and spoke:

       “Merry Christmas! We are so pleased to have the Romganolo Canterini here tonight, well not all of them, but a quartet of their lead singers to give us all a special Christmas concert. Now I want you all to give them a nice big hand of applause before they begin.”

       There was a weak clapping of hands as Lalla and Giulietta took their seats in the back of the room since not only could they enjoy the arias without hearing aids, but they knew the acoustics were better in the back. No one turned to look at them, and they were not surprised.

       The pianist plucked the bright notes of the opening of the second scene of La Boheme and the singers piped up with the different parts of the street hawkers singing “Oranges, Dates, Hot Chestnuts! Nougat! Whipped Cream! Candies! Flowers for the beautiful ladies!” and the crowd smiled in unison. This was Christmas the way they remembered it. After an enormous midday meal, they would go to the theatre or the café chantant to see a reduced version of an opera or a selection just like they were hearing tonight. If their husbands and wives had been there, the elderly inmates would have reached their hands over and held their hands, but the audience without exception, comprised widows, widowers, spinsters and bachelors.

       The singers ended the Parisian hawkers’ cantata and the pianist, segued into Musetta’s lilting, unforgettable waltz

       When I walk alone in the street
          Men stop and stare at me
          And everyone looks at my beauty,
          Staring at me,
          From head to foot...
          And then I savor the sly yearning
          Which slips from their eyes
          Yearning because they are imagining
          My most hidden beauties.
          Thus the scent of desire is all around me,
          and it makes me happy, makes me happy!
          And you who know, you who remember and yearn
          You shrink from me?
          I know you very well:
          You don’t want to show your anguish,
          I know so well that you don’t want to show it
          But you feel like you’re dying

       The audience loved it. To tell the truth, the singer had more dramatic art and youthful beauty than voice though that was certainly adequate. But the widows, widowers, spinsters, and bachelors didn’t really hear her. Their brains automatically produced the voices they had heard in the past in the warm darkness of a horseshoe theater or looking past the limelight onto the stage of a music hall. No one had paid any attention to the words, except for Lalla and Giulietta.

       “She makes it seem glamorous.”

       “Oh no, she doesn’t make it seem glamorous. Puccini did and we both know he was an old whoremonger.”

       “It just makes me glad we’re here. Working on Christmas Night, well it used to be cold, even if the tips were better, but it was a long long evening.”

       “You were always too greedy! Once I‘d made my thousand lire, I called it quits, went home and drew a nice hot bath and soaked for an hour. I used to go to bed early, but that was when it took less time to scrape up those thousand lire!”

       “Giulietta, oh we were all younger once!”

       “And good riddance!”

       They both chuckled.

       Andrea was fuming behind the wheel of his car as he drove back to Bagnacavallo. The very nerve of that priest in his gloomy soutane! Don Uberto thought he ruled the coast! Mamma, interned there with those two old whores for the rest of her days. And it was expensive to boot! Don Uberto knew he had Andrea and everyone else with demented relatives over a barrel. Don Uberto was bound to be making money, and for what? A priest? What was he going to do with the money he took in? Andrea really had no viable alternative to Don Uberto’s retirement home,  however. He could either keep Mamma with him at home or put her away in some musty villa an hour away in the hills where no one wanted to live, the help was cheap, and the drive there and back was long. By the time he added the gas into the equation and worrying about the care Mamma would be getting, it hardly made sense.

       Andrea obviously had to keep his mouth shut. He had seen Giulietta’s  “chubby sparrow” oh so many years ago. He and four friends scraped together 50 lire, ten apiece when they were twelve years old and one of them mustered up the nerve to ask her to show it to them. Giulietta remembered him, he was sure of that, and she would give Andrea a sordid little piece of her filthy mind if he made any allusions. Andrea had no one to confide in, not his wife, nor the men at the bar. Giulietta, Don Uberto and his four friends were probably the only ones who remembered.

*  *  *

       Tina was happy. She missed her husband. She missed her home. But at least this evening, she would not miss the music.

       The pianist started up a rumbling of chords and the tenor and baritone stepped forth. The crowd recognized the notes from Rigoletto and the baritone soon launched into a fiery version of Verdi’s Cortigiani Vil Razza Dannata.


       Courtiers, vile, damnable rabble,
       How much were you paid for my treasure?
       There's nothing you won't do for money,
       But my daughter is priceless.
       Give her back … or this hand, though unarmed,
       Will prove a dread weapon indeed.
       A man fears nothing on earth
       When defending his children's honor.
       Murderers, open that door!

       Ah! You're all against me!
       (The baritone starts to weep)
       All against me!
       Then I'll weep. Marullo, my lord,
       You whose soul is as gentle as your heart,
       Tell me, where have they hidden her?
       She’s in there …isn't she? You don't answer…
       Alas! My lords, forgive me, have pity!
       Give an old man back his daughter!
       To give her back can cost you nothing now,
       But my daughter is everything to me.
       My Lords, forgive me …
       Give me my daughter back,
       to me my daughter is everything.
       Lords, forgive me.

       This filled the audience with fire, for while not the most handsome man on the block and a good forty pounds overweight, the baritone had a voice that shook the room, which the crowd then shook with applause.

       Lalla turned to Giulietta:

       “I always did like this aria, don’t you?”

       “Well, I’d give anything to hear Tito Gobbi sing it again, that’s for sure.”

       Don Uberto had wrapped his cape high around his shoulders before he pedaled his black bike towards the ferry. It was cold; he could have driven his little Fiat 500 but to tell the truth, he needed some air after spending the afternoon at the nursing home. It was so hot and dry with that powdery smell of the clean old people who lived there. He ran over the homily he was going to give for vespers but his mind kept straying to Andrea Bondi. Don Uberto should have known this was going to happen sooner rather than later, and with great tact and aplomb he managed to keep Lalla and Giulietta from the eyes of the men who came to visit. It was actually easy, since most of the visitors were women. Not that his aunt and her friend were the least bit interested in men either, he knew that, but their region was a small one and their experience with the male population had been extensive.

     They had both always confessed everything to him, every man, every boy, every encounter they had been paid for. It seared Don Uberto deep in his soul. At first it had burned him with rage, then with indignity, and finally simmered with the fateful dull pain of the injustice of life itself. He had always absolved both Giulia and Lalla, he had never judged them. Don Uberto was hardly in a position to judge: his aunt Giulietta’s wages had paid for his boarding school and then seminary. She had never asked anything of him, and when they all three lived in the same town years ago both she and Lalla had always scrupulously avoided any place where they might have bumped into Don Uberto. The last thing Giulia wanted was for Uberto’s reputation to be ruined. They even convinced him to go and sit in the confessional of the all but abandoned church of Saint Euphemia on a side street right smack downtown to hear their confessions. They knew the owner of the building behind it and since the church had been built over the ruins of a Roman villa, there was a secret passage they could use to gain entry to the nave. As much as they needed to “show off” for professional reasons sometimes, Giulietta and Lalla knew also how to pass unobserved and to observe without being seen.

       “Forgive me father, for I have sinned.”

       Don Uberto had to listen to every sin, for they told him every sin. They did not descend into details, unless of course, there were emotional details: weeping, injury, threats. They told him they were penitent but they had no alternative and he believed them. He absolved them: he knew the only pleasure they received  in their work, was the money. Only occasionally did their clients, a quarter of which were members of his parish, ever confess to “adultery or fornication.” And after speaking with the few who did confess, and the even fewer who were truly contrite, he absolved the men and boys.        After Uberto’s speech and lecture most of the men and boys he absolved never went back to his aunt or Lalla.

       The pianist and singers ran through several more songs: “La Donna e’ mobile Women are fickle” from Rigoletto, “Vissi d’Arte – I lived for Art” from Tosca, and “La ci darem la mano – There we will join hands” from Don Giovanni. Their final number was sung as a quartet and when it began, the nuns turned the lights off and the audience fell into a reverent hush.

       “Fly, thought, on wings of gold;
       Go settle upon the slopes and the hills,
       Where, soft and mild, the sweet airs
       Of our native land smell fragrant!

       Greet the banks of the Jordan
       And Zion's toppled towers...
       Oh, my country so lovely and lost!
       Oh, remembrance so dear and so fraught with despair!

       Golden harp of the prophetic seers,
       Why dost thou hang mute upon the willow?
       Rekindle our bosom's memories,
       And speak of times gone by!

       Mindful of the fate of Jerusalem,
       Either give forth an air of sad lamentation,
       Or else let the Lord imbue us
       With fortitude to bear our sufferings!”

       Everyone knew what they were listening to: Verdi’s Va’  Pensiero. The forgotten guests all knew the music by heart and mouthed the words. Tina knew it was a chorus and from Nabucco, some sort of lament of the Jews about the promised land. Sister Clotilde recognized its allusion to Psalm 137 with the cruelty excised. Giulietta was touched once again by the words themselves. Giulietta had arranged the whole concert, selecting the songs and intermezzos along with the directorf of the chorus. Until now each aria and duet had been a vindication of extramarital love or lust, cloaked in luscious arrangements by musical geniuses. The arias and duets reprised the romantic ideal of how she had spent her life and earned her living. It was the only way the other people in the nursing home, the home that she and Lalla had established, could accept the fatal facts of life. Wives were not always generous to their husbands. Husbands were not always faithful to their wives – with or without reason. Most women were literally seated on their fortunes. Apart from marriage itself which was rather an undertaking, men would do just about anything, and had done just about anything, to penetrate a woman’s body. Men would rape women, they would buy them fur muffs and jewels, they would pretend to be poor students, they would plan elaborate evenings of entertainment and then blackmail them by condemning their lovers to death, and of course the most cowardly ruse of all: men would promise to marry them, and then not marry them. In the worst-case scenarios, the men simply abandoned the pregnant women to give birth to their bastards. In the best-case scenarios, the male of the species would arrange for the pregnant woman to marry someone else who would rear his bastard.

       Even the Lord God himself had entered the body of Mary when she was betrothed to another. He did not ask her, he did not even tell her himself what he was going to do; He sent someone else to inform her and then possessed her through the Holy Ghost, not even himself. The Lord God stood by while Mary wept and watched invading soldiers crucify their son between thieves. If that was the example the divinity provided, how could anyone expect men to behave any better than they did?

     Those were the facts and Giulietta had read them, printed in black and white in the Bible. Giulietta knew what the Evangelists said, she knew that if you are going to listen to a song and really appreciate it, you have to listen to the words and not just the melody. Giulietta had learned long ago not to trust what people said or thought or felt. You had to trust the facts. There was nothing like the facts.  Words, written in black and white on a contract, in a law, on a coin. Or in the Bible.

       Giulietta knew that what she had suffered was nothing compared to what Mary had suffered, and Giulietta also knew that Mary would intercede for her when the time came, because the point of all our suffering was the reward that we put away for ourselves, be it in heaven with the heavenly host, or in Porto  Garibaldi in an old folk’s home.

*  *  *

       
       Tina looked around but she didn’t see Fulco. She was cold and tired of waiting in this spartan room. Why couldn’t they just pick up the baby and take it back to Lausanne? Their escape to Switzerland was lucky; the rabble had caught Mussolini and his hussy and strung them up in Milan the week before Fulco and she left Bagnacavallo. They deserved it! Tina was lucky. Fulco had sensed that the Fascists were losing and there was going to be wave of reprisal , and that all of his sharecroppers would be revolting against him. Tina was terrified by the stories of murders in the countryside, old scores being settled. Fulco insisted they travel incognito and that she not make any contact with anyone back in Bagnacavallo. She half expected him to do something strange, but they stayed at a pension, clean but inexpensive in Lausanne a good two months after the war ended in Asia. Fulco received regular letters addressed to “Luigi Bianchi” and then one day he looked up from coffee they were taking on the balcony.

       “Tina, would you like to have a child?”

       Tina teared up.

       “Tina, I don’t mean bear one, I mean get one. I’ve just received a letter about war orphans in a home outside of Castel Bolognese. If we leave tomorrow, we can have our pick of age and sex. The roads should be passable and we can get there in two days.”

       Tina had always wanted a baby and was heartbroken when she discovered she was barren.

       “Yes! I’ll pack now.”

       So, there was Tina sitting and waiting in the cold visitor’s room at the orphanage. Where was Fulco?

       Fulco walked back into the room holding an infant no more than four weeks old and a toddler trailing behind him, holding Fulco’s coattails.

       “Well, here. Take your pick. There’s the baby here in my arms, or Uberto here behind me.”

       Tina looked at both of them. “What do you say, Fulco?”

Fulco smiled. I say this: “The little boy’s homely; let’s take the newborn, go back to Switzerland and I’ll rent a small cabin on the hillside outside a little village. Then I’ll come get you with the child. I’ll stock the cabin for a good three months and we’ll wait until it snows. After they clear the pass, I’ll run down to the village and get the midwife to come and check on you and verify that the baby you have born, is healthy. We’ll get him listed on our passport and no one will know this little orphan is not really your child.”

       Her husband was so smart!  Tina raised her head and smiled. Fulco handed her the baby and Tina fell in love. Fulco walked the toddler back to the door to the room, opened it, and handed him off to a young nun, with a 100-lira note.

       “This is for the baby and the midwife and all the other costs. You can write Giulietta and tell her I’m not interested in Uberto but don’t tell her I’ve taken someone else’s baby. And Sister, you know if a word of this gets out, I will make sure that this is the end of little Uberto’s prospects for the future.”

Clotilde bowed her head, called the little boy, took the money, and placed it in the pocket over her own womb.

       “Very well, sir. We certainly are lucky to have finalized arrangements for one of your sons. Do have a safe trip back to Switzerland.”

       Tina gazed deep into the baby’s eyes. “What are we going to call you?”

       Fulco had returned. “Call him whatever you want. I’ll let you pick out the name.”

       Tina looked up at Fulco and saw the calendar. November 30 – Sant’ Andrea. He was a gift from God.

       “We shall call him Andrea and his birthday shall the same as his saint’s day. “

       It was settled.

       Tina’s neck suddenly jerked. She was holding her breasts and everyone was clapping. She looked up, and saw the singers taking their bows, and making the pianist stand up as well. Tina clapped; that’s what everyone else was doing. She didn’t want to look odd.

       Andrea walked into his bar, ordered a shot of grappa, and sat down to play a round of sweep. This hadn’t been such a bad Christmas after all. His mother was warm and healthy and taken care of, his wife was calm, and his son was glad to get his first moped. Let the whores stay at the old folks’ home anyway. It was Christmas for them, too.

       Lalla sat in silence, a tear rolling down her cheek, and not the only tear in the room after the chorus ended. Her life: she had done her best. The Lord had imbued her with strength to bear her sufferings. Her biggest regret was her baby, her son. Poor Giulietta and her sister Vittoria! They had all three been undone by Fulco: he had promised them everything and left each of them with child and the address of the home for unwed mothers and orphanage in the hills. Vittoria had died in childbirth, bringing Don Uberto to life; Giulietta’s little girl had been a stillbirth but at least Giulietta had her nephew Ubertino, whom she had reared from afar. The money Giulietta earned was spent to have Uberto educated at the Academy in Modena and lodged there year round. Giulietta had also had that great satisfaction when Uberto wrote to her that he felt the calling to become a priest. Giulietta’s wages paid the cost of the seminary and when Uberto graduated from divinity school, she had had to tell him how his education had been paid for. It had been hard on Uberto at the beginning, and then he decided to answer the request to go to Bagnacavallo and become the parish priest there, there where she and Lalla lived (although they did all their “business” in nearby towns). No one would have rented two prostitutes an apartment back then, and they did not want to work in one of the state owned whorehouses. They were actually interested in living out in the country but that would have been too dangerous to consider for more than five minutes.

       Lalla and Giulietta had saved up their money, and their kindness to Don Uberto had been repaid with his savvy plan of the old folks’ home in Porto Garibaldi. Comfort in their old age was assured, and their investment was far more remunerative than living off a husband’s pension, but then again, getting married was out of the question after they had been ruined.

       No, Lalla’s suffering had been for something, it had had a purpose. But her child, she had not even been allowed to give him a name. She would never know what happened to him: Sister Clotilde had stipulated total secrecy as the price of his adoption and her puerperal care. Her poor little boy, taken away from her at that orphanage in the hills outside Castelbolognese on November 30.

        Sister Clotilde walked up to Lalla and Giulietta with a big smile. “Well, no matter how old I get, music never loses its beauty. That was such a wonderful idea. Thank you both so much.”

       The pianist was putting away his sheet music and the singers were putting on their overcoats. The old people were shuffling away to their rooms. Giulietta and Lalla stood up to go and thank the singers.

       “That was perfectly lovely. I cannot thank you enough. The perfect end for a perfect Christmas: a warm room with a big tureen filled with cappelletti in broth. I know Don Uberto there put the thumbscrews on you to come and perform for free.”

       “Signora Mariani, please don’t worry about that ! Don Uberto never charges us to use the Parish Hall when we need it and that alone more than covers what this could possibly cost. And anyway, we have another engagement and they’re paying us through the nose at that one! But we do have to rush.”

       Giulietta reached into the pocket of her dress and when she grabbed the impresario’s hands, she palmed him a 100,000-lira note.  “Well, in that case, why don’t you take this and see if you can’t find a nice bar open somewhere after your next concert and treat everybody to a nice drink of whatever they please! I can’t imagine you’re hungry on Christmas Day. No one in Romagna gets up from the table until they’ve had a gracious plenty of cappelletti in broth.”

       “We all did that, you can be sure” Musetta responded.  “and we thank you all the same. I’m sure we can find someone, somewhere who will open us up a nice cold bottle of champagne! Or three!” She grabbed Giulietta around the shoulders and pecked both her cheeks, as did Tosca, following suit. Then they did the same to Lalla, wishing her a Merry Christmas. Rigoletto, the pianist, the director and the Duke of Mantua formed a small sort of receiving line, clicked their heels, and bent over to kiss the backs of Lalla and Giulietta’s hands.

       “Those hussies will never change,” echoed unseen from the armchair in front of the television, said too loud on purpose.

       Lalla and Giulietta hardly took note. They had heard so much worse. Sister Clotilde looked to the ceiling and asked the Lord to forgive the person who had spoken “for she knoweth not what she sayeth.” Sister Clotilde ushered the musicians out to the front hall and saw them to the door.

* * * * * * *

       Don Uberto walked up to the pulpit and delivered his Christmas Homily:

       “Christmas! Natale! Our greatest celebration of birth. The celebration of giving. And at bottom, the celebration of forgiving. For Jesus came to atone for our sins, he came so that we might be forgiven for our wrongs. And that, is the greatest gift of all, even greater than his willingness to die on the cross for us. Because that gift gives us eternal life, eternal life in the bosom of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost. “

       Don Uberto looked out at his “branch” parishioners, mostly old women, three families and a knot of youngsters who would be staying after the service to help put the church in order and play one round of bingo. They were all wearing something new: earrings, a cashmere sweater, a pair of dazzlingly modern sports shoes.

       “I know you have all been the recipients of generous gifts, and the donors of heartfelt desires, one way or another. But tonight when you leave, I want you to think about the next important gift you can give. Its cost: not a single red lira, that’s certain. No, its cost is far weightier than that. It will cost you that slice of resentment that you have been keeping cool in the refrigerator of your heart, hoping for the day when you can eat it, with a nice cold sauce of tangy revenge. But you know what?            Though that revenge may be as delicious as mascarpone sauce on a slice of Pandoro, it will never, I repeat never, heal the wounds which that slice of resentment has carved into your heart. Those wounds will continue to bleed, and in time, they might clot like old milk. You won’t feel the pain anymore, you’ll remember the luscious taste of revenge, but what you don’t realize is that you have given a little cutlet of your heart to the Devil himself, and you’ll never get it back. You’ll love a little less and exult a little less and enjoy what you have a little less, because it takes a complete heart to live a complete life.

       “So why not take that resentment out of your heart, and put it on a brittle plate of forgiveness? No matter how weak, no matter how unfair, no matter how foolish that forgiveness seems, you’ll feel the resentment fade away, you will feel your heart grow in its place, and when you give the person your forgiveness, you’ll see the Lord smiles at you more. You’ll be illuminated: the pain that had been caused you will suddenly appear in the feeble light that created it: ignorance. For people who are cruel, people who hate, people who do bad things, only do them because they know no better. Or because they are motivated by the devil, but that too, is pretty stupid thing to do since in the long run, you lose everlasting life, if you stick with the devil.

       “So make this a real Christmas, a real celebration of birth. Forgive those who trespass against you since you know, your trespasses will be forgiven. Become a new person, a baby like the Christ child, ready to live and laugh and love and praise the Lord with all your heart and all your might and all your soul. That’s why Jesus came, that’s why God gave us this unimaginably rich gift of his only begotten son. Forgiveness. For us to receive and return.

       “Let us pray”

       “Dear Lord, Jesus, the Holy Ghost, Mary Mother of God and all the Saints: we come to you today to thank you for Christmas, for the Love of God and Jesus, for the intercession of the Madonna, and the examples of all the saints. Help us now, in our daily lives to give you back all the forgiveness you have bestowed upon us, show us the way to forgive our trespassers, so that it may bring us that much closer to you. In Jesus’s name we pray, Amen.”

       Sister Clotilde finished reading Don Uberto’s sermon behind the front desk at the old folk’s home in Porto Garibaldi, just as he finished saying it in the cold chapel in Marina. Its thoughts were good ones, but Don Uberto just did not know how to make his points well. He tried, but he really wasn’t good at preaching. That was why he had never been assigned a wealthy parish. Clotilde knew wealthy parishioners; they wanted someone cultured who spoke well and looked good and Don Uberto, Lord bless his big hearted soul, had been given neither of these gifts. Instead, Don Uberto did know how to do good, and he did good. That was far more important than a satisfying homily on Christmas night. Especially if your parishioners were not well-to-do.  

       The Lord had given Clotilde a good life; she entered the cloister early and she had always been fed and sheltered and warm, and she had always been able to feed the hungry, clothe the naked, and help girls in out of the cold. Sister Clotilde had seen so much suffering though, and it never got easier for her to watch another person suffer. She knew that her Compassion was a pale reflection of the Passion of Christ. In all these years, Clotilde had finally come to the conclusion that most of the suffering in the world was just due, as Don Uberto put it, to ignorance, people who did not want to see they caused suffering, or gratuitious cruelty that was a result of people not really examining why they acted the way they did. Ignorance was not a crime, it was not a sin, but it certainly led to both.

       Dwelling on ignorance was not going to make the world a better place. Andrea Bondi did prove that some good could come from the worst cruelty. Born out of wedlock to poor Lalla, Clotilde had literally taken Andrea Bondi from his mother’s breast that cold November day. He had grown up to be a good man. Clotilde could see that Andrea was devoted to Tina Bondi; the poor woman was losing her mind and Andrea really believed she was his mother. Clotilde had been right not to let Lalla know what she had done with her baby boy. It would have soured every thing. Tonight Clotilde would pray for Andrea and Tina and Lalla, and give thanks to the Lord, that every once in a while, things turned out all right, even if they weren’t perfect.