The Only Daughter Read online

  Dedication

  For Sara

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  About the Author

  About the Translator

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  1

  The teacher doesn’t hear the knock on the door. The students, captivated by the story, ignore it. This is the last lesson before the Christmas holiday, and the last of the autumn leaves flutter past the big windows. The students in the upper grades, reluctant to part from one another, congregate in the schoolyard, alongside parents who have come to pick up younger pupils. But for the teacher Emilia Gironi this is the final lesson before retirement. She won’t dismiss class before further immersing the youngsters in the humanistic precepts of Edmondo De Amicis.

  Only Andrea, intrigued by the boy who cares in the hospital for a dying stranger instead of going home with his recovering father, hears the knocking and cuts the story short: Teacher Emilia, he says, someone’s at the door. With her copy of Cuore open in her hand, she walks to the door. Cicillo! She greets a graduating senior who has stepped in straight from the pages of the story to inform the teacher that the student Rachele Luzzatto should come to the principal’s office with her bookbag and coat.

  In the middle of the classroom a tall, pretty, curly-headed girl stands up, as if expecting urgent news. She stuffs her books and notebooks in her bag, and quietly makes her way to her coat. But the teacher, finding it hard to part from a beloved student, ties a silk ribbon around her thin wrist. Ask your father, she says, to get you a copy of Cuore, and finish reading this story on your own, and maybe other stories as well. But we read all of Heart in elementary school, grumbles Rachele, why read it again? Because you might forget, says the teacher, so you have to read and remember, and in the new year come tell me what you felt and what you thought, and if you were sad and even cried, whom did you cry over? The stranger who is ill? Or Cicillo, who refused to leave his bedside?

  But how can I tell you? You won’t be here anymore, you will no longer teach us. That’s true, smiles the teacher, not here, not at school, but at my home. Here, this silk ribbon will remind you of me. She carefully lays a hand on her curly head, and sends the girl and the boy into the dark corridor dappled by light seeping from empty classrooms.

  You don’t have to show me, I know the way. But the messenger isn’t ready to let go of the radiant beauty. The principal sent him to get her, and that’s what he will do. Rachele studies the fair-haired boy, three years her senior. Is he really called Cicillo? No way, he laughs. Then why didn’t you correct her? Because I know this teacher, I was her student, and I remember that she loves to nickname her students after characters in the stories she’s teaching. Then what’s your real name? Enrico. Enrico? smiles Rachele, that’s the protagonist of the entire book of stories Cuore. Maybe, I don’t remember, but even if that’s his name, so what? I’m Enrico too, and I’ll stay that way. We’re here.

  The principal is not in her office, and the devoted messenger is happy to lead Rachele to the Teachers’ Room, where faculty and staff have gathered around a huge panettone cake, crowned by a cupola studded with raisins, bits of dried fruit, and sugared citrus peel, to celebrate the coming New Year. So as not to lose the girl in the crowd, Enrico holds her delicate hand and clears a path to the principal. Here’s the student you asked me to bring to you, and if need be I can also take her to the rehearsal.

  But Rachele will not take part in the play, and won’t even sing in the choir, because her father will not allow it. Her father? Enrico is surprised. Why? The principal ignores his question, takes the girl into her office, and tells her that her grandfather’s secretary called to say that Rachele should not go home but to his office, because her father and mother are delayed at the hospital in Venice.

  Does the girl know the way to the office, or does she need an escort? No, she knows the way, and doesn’t need an escort. Be that as it may, where’s your grandfather’s office? Not far from the big cathedral. But this is not enough for the principal, who asks for the name of the street. Rachele doesn’t remember the name of the street but has walked there countless times. Nevertheless, the principal is wary of sending a young girl alone to the center of town, and asks for details of the route, which Rachele sketches in the air. Her right hand represents the cathedral, with three fingers raised to signify its three towers. Her left hand strolls down an alley past a pastry shop and bookstore, arriving at a square. Her grandfather’s office is on a street off the piazza. There’s a blue gate, which isn’t the one, and likewise a gray gate, but there’s a third gate, which the girl’s graceful fingers push open. In an interior courtyard, tucked behind a statue of a mournful-looking woman, is a tiny elevator that Rachele is forbidden to enter alone, so she takes the stairs to the third-floor office that is not only her grandfather’s but her father’s as well.

  The principal is duly impressed by Rachele’s charming sketch, but urges her nonetheless to call home and ask the cook to come and accompany her.

  “The cook?”

  “The woman who cooks your meals and sometimes comes here to pick you up.”

  “The one who sometimes comes isn’t the cook, it’s Tersilla, the housekeeper.”

  “So let’s call Tersilla.”

  “But Tersilla’s not there, my father let her go yesterday to spend the holiday with her children and grandchildren.”

  “In that case, let’s call the cook. What’s her name?”

  “Martina. But Papà sent her off too, to take the dog to the village, because at our hotel in the Dolomites, where we’ll go skiing over Christmas, they won’t let us bring the dog, she’s a hunting dog and a bit wild.”

  “You keep a wild hunting dog at home?”

  “Yes, and she’s got a younger brother in the village.”

  The girl’s big eyes are damp with tears as the principal listens to her, bewildered. She has no choice but to send her on her way. The sky has darkened. Do you have an umbrella or at least a hat? Rachele hates umbrellas, and didn’t take her hat because Papà promised her it wouldn’t rain today. The principal goes to the metal file cabinet containing student records and takes out a large, faded khaki beret, shakes off the dust and places it on Rachele’s head. At least this way your curls won’t get wet if your father doesn’t stop the rain. Then she lifts the girl’s backpack to be sure it isn’t too heavy, and they say goodbye.

  By now most of the teachers have dispersed, except for the music and drama teacher, who waits for Emilia Gironi to dismiss the students participating in the play. Enrico, picking at the remains of the cake, wants to know why Rachele’s father won’t let her be in the play. Because Rachele, the principal explains, is not Catholic like us, so her father doesn’t want her to perform in a church.

  “But it’s not praying, it’s only a play.”

  “That’s right, a play, and we’ve explained this to him, but Signor Luzzatto was not convinced. ‘You already destroyed enough of us Jews, so don’t try to steal one of the few left over.’”

  “We destroyed them?” Enrico is shocked. “Why us?”

  “He meant the World War,” explains the principal, regretting that she hadn’t asked him to escort Rachele.

  “But it wasn’t us, it was the Germans,” says the young man.

  “We tried to explain that too,” interjects the music teacher, “but he insisted that the Italians helped the Germans hunt down the Jews.”

  “And we must admit he’s partly right,” says the principal. “Our Fascists helped the Germans.”

  “What do you mean?” persists the messenger, smitten by the girl who had walked so gently beside him. “Her father’s not Italian like us?”

  “Like us, but also a little different.”

  “How so? What does he do?”

  “Nothing special. He’s a lawyer like his father, and often appears in court. All in all, it’s a well-to-do family.”

  The principal turns to the teachers with a smile. “Can you imagine? This Jew keeps several women servants at home, not to mention a hunting dog.”

  “A hunting dog?” smirks the music teacher. “To hunt whom?”

  “And I wanted,” interrupts the drama teacher, who had been a nun in her youth but renounced her vows, “I wanted our Rachele to play the part of the Mother of God, and stand beside the altar with her infant child. The Messiah wasn’t born here in Italy, but in the Holy Land. It’s as if her curls, and olive skin, have been sent to us from there.”

  As Rachele exits the schoolyard gate, she is quick to remove the beret, but a constant drizzle compels her to put it back on. Yes, indeed—she recalls with a smile what the principal said—Papà can’t stop the rain today, or maybe in watery Venice a drizzle doesn’t count as rain. She’s curious to know how she looks in this weird beret, but if she goes back inside, to check the mirror by the Teachers’ Room, the principal might have second thoughts and insist she be escorted. She hopes to find another mirror elsewhere, and before turning onto Garibaldi Street she heads for the municipal cemetery where her mothe
r’s grandmother is buried, having died unaware that her granddaughter would turn out to be Jewish. With a bowed head and serious demeanor she joins a group of mourners marching solemnly among rows of crosses to a small chapel. She slips away to the ladies’ room, in hopes of finding in a Christian cemetery a mirror that enables a living person to look at herself.

  The curls are tucked under the weird beret, but her face is sweetly mischievous. Sure, she could wear it all the way to Grandpa. She returns to Garibaldi Street and enters a pastry shop with a Christmas tree in its window. The saleswoman, who knows Rachele by name, slices her a piece of holiday cake—a smaller sibling of the panettone from the Teachers’ Room. After the golden slice is adorned, at Rachele’s request, with a wreath of mascarpone, she retreats to a counter in the corner and relieves her anxiety with a pastry. Out the window she can see the towers of the cathedral in the distance, the beacon that will guide her to Grandpa. And as she winks at the mischievous reflection in the windowpane, she hears the voice of the teacher Emilia Gironi, who has come to the pasticceria, on this last day of her career, to compensate for her colleagues’ failure to leave her even a crumb of the holiday cake in the Teachers’ Room.

  The student quickly ducks so the teacher won’t notice her. She has neither the strength nor the time to cry over some character in a book, because she might soon be crying over a man who won’t be in any book. She hurriedly licks the cream from her lips and walks down a corridor toward the lavatory, hoping to find a rear exit from the shop. But when she pushes open the last door she finds herself in the large kitchen of the small pasticceria. Facing the ovens are tables with trays of rolls in various shapes and sizes, waiting to be baked, and the warm, fragrant ambience arouses a yen for something beyond the cake she just consumed.

  “What are you doing here, girl?” From behind a stove darts a short man, a dwarf almost, whose baker’s toque resembles the white headgear of the hazzan who walks through the synagogue with the Torah scroll in his arms.

  “Nothing, sir, I only thought you might have a bread roll to spare.” The baker, his hair and mustache white with flour, studies the girl, whose coat and boots indicate she comes from an affluent family and has no need of a spare roll. No, there are no spare rolls here, he smiles, but maybe, young lady, we can find you one that’s not a spare. He opens an oven door and deftly scoops a mound of browned dough, sticks it in a paper bag and warns, let it cool down.

  Gripping the hot bag, and trusting the generous man, scarcely taller than she is, but as humane as any of De Amicis’s characters, Rachele asks if there happens to be an exit from the kitchen to the outside. She fears that her old teacher, sitting near the front door, will try to detain her.

  “Why? You escaped from her class?”

  “I didn’t escape, I left. The principal told me to go to my Grandpa’s office, because my parents are stuck at a hospital in Venice.”

  The baker gently takes hold of her hand and leads her among stoves, sacks of flour, and egg trays, to a flour-dusted flight of stairs, and from there, in a creaky freight elevator, they descend to a rear exit facing the ruins of the ancient city wall. No teacher will be lurking here—but do you know the way to your Grandpa?

  She is, in fact, confused by the sharp transition from an elegant city street to the remnants of an ancient wall, yet certain that she’ll find her way, if she can just spot the three towers. So she asks the baker to point her in the direction of the big cathedral.

  “Which one?”

  Rachele is surprised to learn that there are a number of big cathedrals in her city, and when the baker names them and she only knows that hers has three towers, the baker realizes she means the Basilica of Saint Anthony. In that case, he says, there’s no need to return to Corso Garibaldi, just keep going along the Roman wall, and about 300 meters down, next to the convent of Saint Mary, if you lift your eyes to the sky, the towers will be there. All three? she smiles. Yes, all three, because the towers don’t like being apart. The baker’s heart goes out to the young girl wearing an army beret, resembling a lost soldier. And before they part, he recommends she eat the bread roll, to give her energy, and she pulls it from the paper bag and takes a bite, and though it tastes raw and hot, not fully baked, she says it’s delicious. And because the drizzle has stopped, she takes off the beret and wraps it around the remains of the roll, shakes out her curls, and asks the baker, as he bids her farewell, to put the beret in her backpack.

  2

  Now, as she advances along the wall, the river on her right, she thinks about a similar wall, not as high, with colorful posters pasted randomly, not far from the home of her other grandfather, Nonno Ernesto. Thousands of years ago, he once told her, the entire city was surrounded by a wall, which the Romans built to protect themselves. The Romans? The same ones who destroyed the Temple in Jerusalem? Yes, said her grandfather, sticking to historical truth. In Jerusalem they destroyed, in Italy they built. Where’d they disappear to? Nowhere, smiled the grandfather, a devout Catholic who had worked on the railroad as a locomotive driver. They didn’t disappear, they just changed, and today in every Italian—he placed his hand on his heart—there are traces of Rome. Also in me? Rachele is shocked. There’s a little bit of the Roman who destroyed Jerusalem in me too? Yes, even you are a little bit Roman, which you inherited from your mother, but don’t worry, dear, the Roman in you is as nice as you are, and didn’t destroy anything, he just built a wall to protect you.

  She sees the strings of colored lights hanging from the wall, but no sign yet of the three towers that will show her the way. Rachele torments herself: was dodging a meeting with the elderly teacher worth giving up a lovely safe street, to inch her way alone along an ancient city wall? Except that here she’s no longer alone. Cheerful girls in gray uniforms, escorted by nuns in black robes, exit the Sacred Heart school, carrying branches with colorful bells attached, and here and there, the sparkle of tin helmets signifies the Romans who ruled in Bethlehem when the Messiah was born. A tall monk in a brown robe holds high a baby’s cradle, and a white dress peeks from under one girl’s coat, and Rachele’s heart beats faster: Is this the Mother of God? But where will the play take place and where’s the altar?

  She is shocked to find, among the marching girls in gray, Sabrina, her friend from the Hebrew class taught by a rabbi sent from Israel. Which means, Rachele bitterly thinks, that Sabrina’s father doesn’t mind if his daughter performs in a church, because he understands something her own father does not, that this is a play, not a church service.

  The nuns steer the students to a stone building, large but plain, without a dome or bell tower, merging with the Roman wall. Rachele remembers what the baker told her, lifts her eyes to the sky, and there they are, the three towers of the cathedral, a little cloud trapped between them. Now that the towers have been located, they’ll wait for her, so why not tag along with the girls, to have a peek at the forbidden play?

  She hesitantly walks through the convent gate and enters a wide courtyard with a large Christmas tree in the middle. A young nun kneels before it and tries to free a furry dog, whose leash is tangled between the tree’s trunk and branches. She pulls on the leash so hard she might strangle the dog. As Rachele draws closer it becomes clear that this is not a dog but a lamb—a lamb with a part in the play. In the play? Yes, it will be a horse in the stable where the Messiah was born, explains the nun, her brother brought it from the village and tied it to a tree, and the rope got tangled. If you keep pulling, the Jewish girl warns her, you’ll choke him and there’ll be no horse in your play. Let me help you carry the lamb and not pull it.

  But the nun is afraid the lamb will bite her. Bite? Why would it want to bite you? Look, it won’t want to bite me. With nimble fingers Rachele unties the rope and gathers the lamb to her chest, planting a kiss between its big ears to inspire trust. But the lamb is heavy, so she asks the nun to support the hind legs. Together they carefully descend the rough stone stairs leading to the underground hall of the convent. There are no statues or paintings in the hall, only giant candles blazing by an altar, beside which stands the student who has shed her coat to reveal the white dress as she prepares to give birth to a baby boy who will save the world from torment.