Pushing Past the Night Read Online Free Page B

conferred. The medals that send your mind back thirty years, that make you relive sudden pains for which you are never prepared, pains that never bother with formalities such as announcing their arrival. They just show up and tear you away from the present. And they drag you down to almost forgotten lands, lands that don’t seem to belong in Italy. Lands that have been left untilled and hidden from view.
    If you were to go to the trouble of turning the picture around, of trying to look back at Via De Amicis through the eyes of the young men aiming P38 pistols, you would see other young men in uniform. Young southerners standing in the middle of the street. Then you would see a bullet strike a twenty-two-year-old boy from Naples who has just arrived in the city. You would see him crumple and die. The next day, the newspapers carry his picture, the only picture of him on file. His name was Custrà, Sergeant Antonino Custrà.
    You would have to keep looking, sift through the files, blow away the dust, and see past the bureaucratic rhetoric that designates the policeman as victim number 14 of the Years of Lead. And then you might see something else, something that might make you feel uncomfortable or ill at ease: you would see a youngwidow fleeing the city, following the coffin of her husband, taking him home. She is not alone. Her belly is swollen. She is expecting a baby girl who will never know her father. But no one has ever looked that deeply. No one has bothered to take the journey from that day on Via De Amicis to the present decade, to the baby girl who became the girl wearing combat boots.
    We are having breakfast. For my mother, it’s the second time this morning. She got up at 5:30 a.m. so that she could make it to Piazza del Popolo on time. She did everything in silence, letting us sleep in, and she went out by herself. They were rehearsing for Policemen’s Day in Rome. Together with the other widows, daughters and sisters, she walked in front of the honor guard. She stopped at the spot marked on the cobblestones with masking tape. She pretended she was receiving the medal from the hands of the president. She allowed it to be pinned to her chest. Then, to her dismay, she had to remove her jacket and give it to an official, who would not return it until the next morning, the day of the ceremony. A group of seamstresses at the presidential palace had to sew a piece of Velcro onto it for the decoration.
    That is when they met, thanks to alphabetical order: Calabresi, Custrà. When my mother turned around, she saw the girl’s eyes fill up with tears. It was her turn to pretend to receive the medal. But maybe she had been pretending for too long. She started to sob uncontrollably. “I looked around for a second, then broke protocol and before the eyes of an invisible president, of the deserted tribunal of honor, of the piazza that was not yet awake, I held her close and began to stroke her hair. Her name was Antonia Custrà. Her father was killed not far from yours. Via Cherubini and Via De Amicis are not that far apart. But they are separated by five years, from 1972 to 1977, by which time the city was no longer new to blood on the streets.”
    Something clicks in my mind. All I can think about is that girl. I want to speak with her. She broke the bureaucratic spell. She brought memory back to life. And what she didn’t do would be accomplished the next morning by the President of the Republic, Carlo Azeglio Ciampi, and his wife, Franca. Ciampi was the grandfatherly figure who did more than any of his predecessors to restore trust in the Italian state. Because of the broken collarbone, he would not be able to attend the ceremony in the Piazza. But while the protocol men were busy designating a substitute to pin on the medals, the disappointed women who had gathered for the sunrise rehearsal were informed of a spontaneous decision. Forget about protocol. Two busloads of wives who had lost