Free Pushing Past the Night by Mario Calabresi Page B

Anthology
by Edgar Lee Masters. While she was handing it to me, she told me that Pinelli had given it to my father one Christmas. He and Papà were not exactly friends and they did ascribe to different political philosophies, but in the house where I grew up, Giuseppe Pinelli was never considered an enemy.

7.
capsized
    R HETORIC AND FORM are triumphant at times when all else is collapsing. Imposing funerals, uniformed authorities, the presidential honor guard, the Minister of the Interior paying housecalls, and an indignant political class issuing admonitions and promises: all that’s left in their wake are a few small things. The image that comes to mind is a person combing the beach in search of personal effects after a hurricane, bending down to find the things that still belong to him. All that remains is a reality consisting of a slow reconstruction, an exhausting recovery of memories, a journey that for many people turns into a suffering so great that they try to either flee or repress the memory.
    Reality is three children sitting on the floor in the evening around a Geloso magnetic tape player listening to the voice of their father reading a fairy tale. We would listen to it in our bedroom, after putting on our pajamas, while Mama stayed in the kitchen. The tape was always breaking, and we fixed it over and over again, until we lost it forever.
    Mama with her head on the kitchen table, crying inconsolably.
    I remember the afternoons we spent at the cemetery, in Musocco, in the northern suburbs of Milan. We used to follow a ritual: we would buy flowers—we loved white daisies—go fill up the watering can at the fountain, and take turns climbing an eight-rung ladder on wheels to clean the picture of Papà Gigi smiling on his wedding day. We would give him a kiss and then go off to play, leaving Mama by herself. In winter we would race under the porticoes. It was so cold that the water in the fountain would freeze. In summer it was cool and we would hide behind the gravestones in the garden. I once asked my mother why she hadn’t wanted him to be buried in the ground, like in the American cemeteries, such as Arlington, where the fallen from many wars are laid to rest beneath the lawn. Her answer was simple. “Because I didn’t want him to get caught in the rain. I would find no peace imagining him in the ground on stormy nights.”
    When we got to the gates, we used to stay silent for a long time. There were small compensations, however. In the fall, there were chestnuts, making everything a little nicer. And there was always our friend who had died as a child. His parents used to place toy cars over his grave. We would play with them and after a while we started to trade: we would bring one from home and in exchange we would take one of his. One day we took two, but at the gates Luigi said, “We can’t do it, poor kid.” My mother didn’t know what we were talking about, but we hurried back to return the car.
    Everyday life had its anomalies. Some nights for dinner we would have milk and cookies or scrambled eggs. When we ask her today, “Mama, do you remember? It was so nice to have breakfast twice,” she groans, “How dreadful, I feel so embarrassed.” She wanted to manage on her own and was too proud to ask for money from her parents, and she confesses that sometimes she could barely make it to the end of the month. But on payday she would buy calves’ liver, and for us it was a royal feast.
    In the two years following my father’s death, we all lived at the home of our grandparents, who showered us with attention and care. Then Mama decided that the time had come for her to manage on her own, taking full responsibility for the three of us. She wanted to hold together through her own strength and resources what remained of the family she had dreamed of having. She rented a house, found a job as an elementary school religion teacher, and made a go