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A MOTHER'S WAR
by
Lorenzo Carcaterra

AUGUST 6, 2002

My mother cradled her dead infant in her arms, too young, too beaten, too weary to shed any more tears. She was barely 22 years old and had already lost a younger brother to an unforgiving war that would eventually strip her of a husband as well. She looked around, at the hillsides of Salerno, Italy, where she and her neighbors would often set out late afternoon picnics in happier times. There was nothing left now beyond mounds of charred dirt and crushed stone of what had once been a family's home. My mother stared out at all that, at the black smoke rising up toward a cloudless sky, at the screams of pain and the shouts of anguish that surrounded her, at the bodies that lay fallen and at her dead son resting peacefully against her chest. She closed her eyes and whispered a silent prayer.

My mother never recovered from that day. She left Italy in 1954, newly married and pregnant, and headed to America, to begin what she hoped would be a better life. That dream too was not meant to be and her 35 years living in a string of tenement apartments with an abusive husband and a mountain of debts helped to seal her torment. There wasn't much laughter in our home, mainly tears and worry over how to keep a step ahead of the bill collectors and the loan sharks hunting my father for their weekly pay-off. It was a sad existence, one that she shared with thousands of others inside those cold water flats spread throughout the poor neighborhoods of Manhattan. And many were the nights my mother cursed the fact that she had survived the brutality of World War II for the hell of life in a country not her own.

For many years, I was my mother's only friend. There were no baby-sitters or pre-school programs for people in our financial condition. On summer days, when I was old enough to walk, she would take me to De Witt Clinton Park and under the shade of an old tree we would sit and have our lunch. In the early evenings, inside the stifling heat of our airless apartment, she would sit me in a tub that rested alongside the kitchen, the water cool against my warm skin, slide a thick wooden plank across its base and place my dinner on it. As I ate, my mother would tell me stories and all of them were about the war she had survived.

I learned about my Uncle John, killed inside an Italian submarine by the depth charges of an English destroyer. He was not yet 21 years old when the fatal bombs hit and crushed out his life. She told me how my Grandpa Gabriel's tall, impressive body shrank the day Italian authorities came to tell him about his son's death. My mother told me how my Grandma Maria would have to make her way to the dark streets of Naples every night, moving by boat from the island of Ischia where the family lived, to scour for black market goods in order to feed the family. And how, on one night, a young German officer, his rifle at her chest, asked my Grandma to show him what she had hidden in her bag. Grandma Maria looked into his young eyes and smiled. "I have children your age," she said to him. "And you have a mother mine." The soldier rested his rifle at his side and allowed Grandma Maria to pass, carrying her counterband haul of three-day old bread and hard cheese.

My mother told me of the hardship of living for five years without lights and of the fear that grips a child's body when the nightly air raid alarms sound. She told me about men who overnight saw their hair turn white and women who walked the streets lost and adrift, their faces washed with warm tears. "There are no survivors in a war," my mother would tell me. "Only victims." And my mother would tell me about Il Quattro Giornate di Napoli, the Four Days of Naples, when Italian street boys, known as scugnizzi, took on an advancing Nazi panzer division and beat it back. They fought with a minimum of weapons and a maximum amount of courage. And they won.

Each time my mother told me that story, those boys, whose families were stripped from them, whose homes were destroyed, whose lands were ravaged, always won their battle. Through the years and the changing seasons, my mother told me that story hundreds of times. With every telling, there would be an element added, a new character brought into play. My mother is a great storyteller and she would relay each moment, each battle and each sequence of events with the relish Neapolitans often bring to their tales. I don't know how much of what she told me was true, but I believed every word of it and I still do.

She would tell her story with a great deal of pride. She had watched too many American war movies to know in what little regard Italians were held by Hollywood filmmakers. In those movies, Italians were either quick to surrender or even quicker to betray, even their own. My mother made it a point that as I grew older I was made aware of the films of Vittorio De Sica (my favorite director), Roberto Rossellini, Frederico Fellini and the great Neapolitan comic Toto. In those films, sometimes shown through a harsh lens, other times with a sly smile, the reality of World War II was brought to grainy life. She always cried at those movies, as did many of the people sitting around us in the small theater that played Italian films each week. But they always went, never missing a week, never missing a movie. As bitter as that taste might be, it was a still a taste of home.

My mother is 80 years old now and has lived by herself on the island of Ischia, off the coast of Naples, since 1988. She sees her sisters almost every day, goes to Mass in the early evening, says the rosary daily and heads out on long walks when the sun goes down. I visit her as often as I can and write and call every week. She is as happy as she can ever be. I'll never know what my mother was really like, the war and, to a degree, my father, stripped me of that. I've heard as a teenager she had a sharp sense of humor, was a gifted practical joker and was the first one to know the latest joke making the rounds among her friends. I have never seen any of that. I have only known the woman who lost a child, a husband and a brother by her mid-20's. A woman who saw the land she lived on turned into a killing field and people she loved nearly starve from lack of food and water. A woman who saw the streets she played on as a child overrun with conquering soldiers from three different countries. A woman who knew more people that were dead than alive.

I have only known and loved a woman who, as a young boy, gave me the gift of a great story. I wrote Street Boys with my mother's words still fresh in my mind. They were as clear as they once were on those brutal summer nights in those stagnant apartments, a bowl of pasta in red sauce in front of me, looking up at her, listening as she spoke in a cracked voice and eyes moist with tears. This novel is now my gift to her. There is no one I know who will appreciate it more.

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