Free The Italians at Cleat's Corner Store by Jo Riccioni Page A

Primo? Eh, Pri?’ the vanquished would call as they walked home from school. Vittorio would raise his hand lazily to them without glancing back, but the collection of treasures increased. The other boys were drawn to him as they were to matches or firecrackers: the potential to be burned part of the attraction.
    When the anthem ended, the soldiers filed onto the stage, and Padre Ruggiero blessed them. Lucio scanned the crowd for Urso, but he hadn’t come. He felt his chest ache with guilt. He had not seen the butcher since the hunt, not at the osteria and not at the shop, where Fabrizia tended the counter alone, as if her husband had already left. But at night, in the alley behind the butcher’s house, Lucio saw the great bulk of his silhouette in the window, could hear the lowing of his voice within. He wanted to call out as Fabrizia pulled the shutters, call so that Urso’s face appeared at the glass. But he flattened himself against the wall, nursing his regret alone in the dark.
    â€˜Are you worried?’ his mother asked him.
    He shook his head, looking not at her but at his father, full of assurance in his neat uniform. ‘Are you?’
    She didn’t answer at first. Instead she unpinned her hair from its combs. The curls sprang about her shoulders like unspooled twine, so thick that they dwarfed her face and made her seem a mere girl. She leaned into him. ‘You’re here. Why would I be worried?’
    He pulled up his knees and cupped his chin in a fist. They were both lying and they both knew it. But that was their habit; that was how they protected each other.
    On the stage, Professore Centini had wound up his gramophone. Predictably, Faccetta Nera played asthe soldiers marched off . Wait and hope … the hour is near , Carlo Buti sang in his unmistakeable tenorino. We will give you another law, another king. The words of the song, which Lucio had heard so many times, seemed suspended in the night above the piazza. He stood next to his mother and sensed her eyes swooping to the hills, skittish and restless as a bird’s. She turned to him before she climbed down from the battlements, but her face did not show the apprehension or worry he had expected. It held something more alive and vital, something he could only compare with that thrill of release he saw in her after a seizure, that joy of being given another chance. He followed her progress down from the lookouts until he lost her in the shadows of Vicolo Giotto.
    The Balilla boys and the recalled soldiers were dispersing among the people. As Vittorio jumped down, their father caught him by the hair and gave him a blow to the ear, sending him sprawling towards the fountain. But Vittorio merely brushed himself off and turned his back on him, striding into the crowd, where a huddle of boys received him at their centre, laughing and slapping him on the shoulders.
    Lucio stared down at the fountain’s cupola, decorated with garlands of wound vines. Its cascading pool of water was tinged red and orange and green in the light of the lanterns. The bronze figure at its centre seemed to sulk in the dimness. Something was different about the boy Cupid. Peering down, he saw that the god of love was sporting a cummerbund, and on his head, the tassel swinging jauntily over one eye, someone had cocked a Balilla fez.
    It was past midnight by the time the piazza had emptied of people. Lucio heard the scratch of Fagiolo’s broom on the cobbles, saw cigarette ends being brushed into the drain. He lowered himself from the battlement wall, hanging by his fingertips before landing on the pergola of the Osteria Nettuno.
    â€˜Porca miseria!’ Fagiolo cried. ‘Can’t you use the street like everyone else?’ The innkeeper jutted his chin towards the open doors of the osteria. ‘Take him home, Gufo, will you? The Raimondi Gold turned to lead hours ago.’
    Inside, Nonno Raimondi was on the floor, slumped