Calliope: Voice of the Writers

 

 

The Great Novel Race 2008:

Last Train to the Sun

by Luigi Marchini

------------------------------

Chapter 3

(return to Last Train to the Sun chapter listings) 

Since starting this novel I have come to know, and Jamie does not yet know, that one 14-year-old Italian girl got up late at night, crept out of her room, down the wooden stairs of the ramshackle farmhouse, out of the front door, through the chicken, cat and dog shit, waking up the chickens, and opened the front gate. There she greeted her 18-year-old boyfriend who followed her back through the squawking chickens into her bedroom and took her virginity. Her parents, who were woken not just by the noise of the chickens but also by the unusual sounds her daughter was making, sat up in bed almost paralysed. When the girl gave one particularly loud cry, her father reached for his hunting rifle, stormed into the room and, confronted by the sight of his naked daughter on all fours being mounted by an equally naked boy, turned the rifle on himself, placing it in his mouth. The blast had varying effects on the house’s remaining live occupants: the boy started screaming and ran naked out of the house, never to be seen again; the girl was literally left speechless with shock; the mother ran into the room, passing the boy on the way, glanced at her daughter-who was now holding a white, blood smeared sheet over herself as she sat up tight against the headboard, as if she were trying to burrow through it backwards, all the time staring at her father - and then she bent down to the body of her husband and kissed him, only there were no lips left, just a mess of blood, bone and sweat. She stood and picked up a white towel that was lying beside her daughter’s wash bucket, went back to the husband and tried to staunch the blood oozing from the hole where his mouth and lower face had been. Realising it was a useless effort and that the towel (it was her daughters after all) was now red, she stopped and looked at his closed eyes, noticing the tears. As she took off her nightdress to dry them, she knew he must have been crying when he pulled the trigger.

 The mother subsequently took refuge in her religion and walked each day to the nearest village where she would spend hours in the church, in front of the statue of the Holy Mother, her rosary beads clenched tight. Gaia, that was the girl’s name, was taken out of school (not that there was much of a school in any case) as she was now handicapped and her mother felt she would no longer be able to study. More importantly, her mother felt her daughter had no right to learn as this dumbness was surely a sign from God, proof of her daughter’s wickedness. Gaia took on her father’s work and spent all day everyday on the farm; that is until one morning when she was about to wring a chicken’s neck and she bent over and retched over said chicken. Her mother then confined her to her room for the further six months of her pregnancy where, at the age of 15, Gaia gave birth. Before she could even hold her daughter, her mother (who had delivered the baby) took the girl from her, and followed the dirt track halfway up the mountain, a mountain which sustains not only the farm and the area around but all the villages on route to the towns of Nello to the east and Baro to the west, and left the baby the convent. On her return the next day Gaia was gone, but the mother did not look for her, did not notify the authorities, was not worried about her teenage daughter who had just given birth and was obviously weak; instead she breathed a deep sigh, looked at the photograph of her husband in between Gaia and herself, his arms round them both, and cried.

 From then on the mother (let’s call her Grazia though I have never learned her name) waited for Gaia to return, each day expecting to hear the gate open, or news that she had been spotted. She did not venture from her home, nor did she ask anyone if they had seen her, but that does not mean that she did not love her daughter, it was merely that she knew Gaia was in God’s hands now, and no amount of grieving would change that. As the days melted into months, she gradually learned to forget that her husband was also a sinner (suicide) and, whereas before she used to divide her prayers between him and Gaia at church (and at home), she thought less and less about her daughter, and more about Gemmo (I do not know his name either). She missed him physically, not just between her legs but on the farm taking care of the manual work and, though she had never loved him passionately or in the way she had believed she ought to love a husband, he had been her support, her point of reference. She knew it was Gaia’s fault he was dead and consequently she began to slowly pull down the blinds in her mind until Gaia was no longer even a memory. As for her granddaughter, Grazia had not thought about her for more than a second since the moment she had handed her over.

  To the nuns at the Convent of Santa Caterina it was not unusual to receive newly born unwanted babies, although it was normally the mothers who left them. The Second World War had drilled a hole into the nation’s psyche and the acrid stench that the Fascist government left behind still lingered; therefore it was a cautious, conservative time where premarital sex (especially underage) and underage pregnancies were akin to the ‘crimes’ committed by ‘witches’ in England from the mid 16th century onwards. That is to say that the deeply Catholic Italian peasant (for that is what many of them were-the war had deleted many jobs and education had only been systemised in 1946) would associate a misdemeanour of this sort as a kind of pact with the devil. All this is an assumption in Grazia’s case of course; no one knows what she really felt-all we can go by is her actions. The convent, and the farmhouse obviously, was situated in the South, the poorer half, where life moved at a pace slower even than in a Resnais film, and where religious establishments had to act hypocritically (though historically the Catholic Church and religious orders have always been perceived to be corrupt) to survive by accepting ‘gifts’ from rich ‘families’.

 Maria grew up not knowing her mother or grandmother, receiving only the odd letter from the former and experiencing no contact at all with the latter. She did not know their histories, the words that have gone before on these pages: all she knew was that she had no father and a mother who was living somewhere in the United States-Milwaukee, a place she had never heard of (what happened to Gaia when she left the farmhouse is known to me and I may tell you later if I feel it is interesting enough-something that you will help me decide please). The convent and the nuns were her family and her school. The nuns had named her, rather obviously, after the Holy Mother, though she always felt it was an unsuitable name-she felt more like a Giulietta or a Claudia, a name a little less safe. At night she would often go to the open window of the dormitory and gaze out, not at the stars as you would expect, but down to the foot of the mountain where she felt a future lay, only she could never decide if it would be an abstract or a concrete one, and each time she would return to bed with an unease that seemed to be lodged inside.

  ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

(return to Last Train to the Sun chapter listings)

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Note: Copyright for any published piece within Calliope remains with the author of the piece, unless otherwise noted. Please do not reproduce or distribute any of the content of the site without the author's permission.