For many years, all I had of my grandfather was a box. Inside were postcards with stamps that belonged to no country, a typewritten letter from a man I never met, and a notebook packed with capital letters, the way people write when they want to be sure of being read even after they are gone. My father kept it at the bottom of a drawer. When I asked him about the notebook, he would only say: “It’s my father’s diary.” Then he would shut the drawer, and for years I pictured that word, diary, as a notebook of dates and facts. It took me a while to discover that it was written in rhyme.
Bruno had written in verse. Inside the camp, his fingers swollen with cold, he had counted syllables and hunted for rhymes through a hundred and fifty stanzas. He was not trying to write poetry. He was trying not to die before his time. And the first thing he saved, before the hunger and before the bombs, was a September afternoon in Cuneo, and a basket of peaches. I begin there, where he begins.
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In that September of 1943, the Alpini barracks in Cuneo were full of men who two weeks earlier had been an army and were now nothing at all. The armistice had been signed on the eighth, and within a few days the Italian soldiers had found themselves without orders, without commanders, with the Germans on top of them. They had been herded inside and locked in, the way you lock away something you have not yet decided what to do with.
Chiusi là dentro come carcerati,fummo per due lunghissime giornatecol desiderio d'esser liquidati.
Shut in there like convicts,we stayed for two endless dayslonging to be discharged.
Bruno’s body was in pieces from the journey and from the night spent on his feet, and a comrade massaged his aching bones. Outside the barracks, meanwhile, Cuneo did what it could. It passed food, blankets and words to the men locked inside, none of whom anyone knew. Bruno remembered it for the rest of his life. Later, in the poem, he thanked the people of the Cuneo countryside by name, the way you thank those who treat you as a man when everyone else has stopped.
A rumour went round between the bunks: they were going to be moved. Where, nobody knew. Some said a concentration camp, and the words passed from mouth to mouth without anyone knowing what they really held.
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Agnese heard that Bruno was in Cuneo and set off from Tenda with the boy. She brought what a woman can bring when she does not know if it is the last time: a little money sewn inside a pocket, and some peaches. She had her four-year-old son with her, and she was not weeping only for her husband. They had taken her brothers too: three brothers, carried off like Bruno in those same weeks when Italy was falling apart. She reached the barracks carrying all that grief and held it still, so the child would not feel it.
They saw each other through a fence. Bruno looked at his son and learned his face by heart, because at that age a child changes quickly and he did not know when he would see him again. Giorgio was four. Nothing of that day would stay with him. He was old enough to be there, too young to hold on to it. All his life this is exactly what he would miss: being unable to remember his father, even once. He would become my father, and his greatest inheritance would be an absence. But that afternoon he was there, in his mother’s arms, under the fine Piedmont rain.
On the seventeenth, the order came without warning. A young lieutenant gathered them and said they were leaving for Turin. The specialists stayed in the barracks. Among those leaving was Carluccio, Bruno’s brother-in-law, one of Agnese’s brothers, caught in the same net. They were marched to the station.
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On the platform Agnese clung to him and would not let go. She held him, kissed him, and after every kiss she asked for another. Bruno wrote it down without dressing it up, and it is best to let him speak.
L'ultimo abbraccio mai potrò scordarech'ebbi dalla mia moglie in quell'istante:la commozion la fece lacrimare,ed attaccata a me, tutta tremante,mi dava tanti baci e mi stringevae tra un bacetto e l'altro, mi diceva:
I shall never forget the last embracemy wife gave me in that moment:the emotion brought her to tears,and clinging to me, trembling all over,she gave me many kisses and held me closeand between one little kiss and the next, she said:
She told him to be brave. She told him to come home soon. And she asked him the only thing a wife can ask of a man boarding a train whose destination no one knows.
«Ciao Brunetto caro, su, coraggio,e torna presto a casa ch'io t'aspetto;ti auguro, per ora, un buon viaggio,ma dammi ancora un bacio per Giorgetto,e scrivi, te ne prego, tutti i giorni,sino al felice giorno che ritorni!»
“Goodbye, dear Brunetto, come, be brave,and come home soon, for I am waiting for you;for now, I wish you a good journey,but give me one more kiss for Giorgetto,and write, I beg you, every day,until the happy day you come back!”
A kiss for Giorgetto. Agnese asked for it on behalf of the son who could not say goodbye, and she would give it to him every day in Bruno’s place, until he came back. My father carried that kiss all his life without knowing it, because his father was never able to give him another.
Then Agnese, in tears, put a basket into his hands. That was the moment everything broke.
A German officer did not like the scene, those two hands that would not let go. He turned to Agnese with a sneer and, without a word, without pity, pressed his revolver against her chest. Bruno went red. The blood rushed to his head like an electric shock. He saw his wife turn pale, the child in her arms, under the barrel of a pistol, and in that instant he learned the only law of the place he was about to enter: you could die for an embrace, and the only way to protect the people you loved was to stop showing it.
Mi morsicai le mani dalla rabbia,che mi sentivo come uccello in gabbia.
I bit my hands in rage,for I felt like a bird in a cage.
He bit his hands so as not to shout. He forced himself to be careful, because shouting meant a bullet, and the bullet might hit her. Then came the signal to leave.
Fischiando, il lungo treno alfin si mosseed iniziò la marcia del dolore,con moto ondulatorio e molte scosse.Mia moglie, poverina, con ardore,mi salutava ancor dalla stazione,ed io, gli rispondevo dal vagone.
Whistling, the long train at last moved offand began the march of sorrow,swaying and jolting all the way.My wife, poor thing, with all her heart,was still waving to me from the station,and I was waving back from the wagon.
They tore him out of her arms and shoved him into the wagon with the others. He found a place where he could see her. His brother-in-law, beside him, told him to resign himself. Agnese, on the platform, with Giorgio in her arms, kept waving even when the train was far away and there was nothing left to wave at.
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When the wagon went dark and the wheels began to beat out their rhythm towards the Brenner, Bruno found the peaches at the bottom of the basket. Agnese had put them there without telling him. He held them for a long time before eating them, the way you hold something that is no longer just a thing. They were the last piece of home. The last September. The last summer of a man who would see two more, each one further away, and not one more.
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My father used to shut the drawer at this point, when I was a child. Now I am the one who keeps it open. I have the stamps that belonged to no country. They came from the Germany of the camps. I have the letter from the man I did not know, Aurelio Minoli, who was with Bruno at the end and who wrote to Agnese a few months later to tell her that the diary existed and that it was worth bringing home. And I have the diary.
I begin it again here, with the peaches, because this is where he began it again himself. Not with the horror. With a basket of fruit that a woman had put in a suitcase so that her husband, wherever he was going, would have the taste of home for one more day. If I manage to make you love him as I do, this man I never met, it will be because he was the first to choose to begin with the peaches instead of the barbed wire.