by Rita Siligato
Dear Nella,
I am always glad to receive a letter from you. Please remember not to tell mama you write to me privately. I am the one who greets the postman and I always collect the letters before she sees them. It is not that we receive many letters these days, aside from yours.
Life here is the same: but you have great news! A new baby! Stop at three, please.
And give them proper names: Rachel is easy for us, we will call her Rachele when we meet her. In the picture you send us she is a doll. It’s a pity pictures don’t come in colors. I suppose her hair is fair. But her eyes? Does she have blue eyes like Harry’s or black like yours?
And Duncan, your eldest? How will we call him? Duncano, Duncane… Duncane sounds rude to me. Fiol d’un can, mama will call him.
And the baby? Jasper? You wrote to me you call him Jas. Ias? This is not a proper name for a child. Why didn’t you try and persuade Harry to give the boys nice Italian names?
The boys look beautiful, anyway, in the other picture. Ias is a chubby little fellow, and Duncane looks like a man besides him.
And in the picture, I can see your home, your small garden in the background and the toilet outside! I’m proud of you, Nella, so young and a mother of three, but please stop here.
As for the things happening here: I always see Dario, but mama does not want me to be properly engaged to him. She says he is too young for me: four years younger! If I was the youngest, she would not object. But I can’t make him older, don’t you think?
She made me swear (in a solemn oath) that I will not marry him while she is still alive. And you know that I love mama, I wish that she lives to be a hundred. But I will be over seventy then! And Dario would be seventy, and we will be too old to marry.
Anyways: as Dario lives next door, we always meet in the morning before work, and we meet again in the evening after work for a stroll by the Molo Audace. At that time mama is busy cooking, and she never sees us walking arm in arm as if we were engaged.
And Ondina is married to a baker, Rudy the Red: I am sure you recall the carrot top skinny boy that went dancing with you both sometimes. I can tell she is not happy: they never see each other because he leaves home after dinner (that is lunch for him) and is back home in the late morning, and has a bite and goes to bed and sleeps all day long in order to be ready to go to the bakery at eight in the evening. They will never have children this way!
But you keep the average number of children in the family right. I will never marry and I will never have children.
Marina is engaged to a very handsome good-for-nothing boy. Maybe you remember him, Guerrino: he was a child back then. He is one year older than her. Now he is tall and has wavy hair! Do you remember when you spent a Sunday putting rags into my hair to make them curly? With sugared water? And on Monday I looked like a sheep and I was afraid that a wasp could make its nest on my head?
Oh, Nella, I miss you so. It’s been seven years since you left Trieste, and you never came back home. I would love to see you and your children. You have always been my favorite sister. I know I can tell you everything. And I will tell you a secret!
Come May, the choir will have a performance in Wales! Maybe you could come!
We will perform in Llangollen! We will sing a chorale! And I will travel with Dario (and the choir) and we will have the chance to be together for fifteen days in a row!
Enough with exclamation marks. Please, come. I had a look at my old tattered atlas and I noticed that Liverpool is not very far from Wales. Harry and his mother could babysit the children for a few days, and we could be together for some time, and chat properly.
Let me know if you can make it. I will let you know the exact date in a few days.
I look forward to your letter,
Redenta
Che dolce questa Redenta!