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actually happened, or if the man I saw in it was really my father or merely a man I had imagined as him; but on one cheek, barely visible, my mother bore a tiny scar, a faint lightening of skin in the shape of a small disjointed cross.
    My new mattress had replaced an old straw one, a remnant of my mother’s childhood, bug-infested and smelling of mould, on a crooked wooden frame that held up planks of splintered wood for support in lieu of springs; but the frame was too big for the mattress and stuck out a foot on either side of it, making my sheets and blankets seem to stick out like wings. Apart from the bed the room held only a wicker chair I could drape my clothes over and a night table to set a candle or lamp on. Spider webs my mother had missed in her cleaning stretched silver and taut in the upper corners. No one had used this room in years, perhaps since the house had been built fifty years or so before, with money my great-grandfather had sent back from America—my grandfather’s family had never grown large enough to fill it, my grandmother having lost her first two children to sickness before losing her own life giving birth to her third, my mother. It was a room without a history, and my first night there, lying stiff and awkward and alone in my new bed, its air of abandonment seemed to hang over me like a pall.
    My mother’s room, with its big metal-framed bed and tall armoire, its pictures on the wall, one of my mother in her first communion dress, yellowed now with age, one of her and her classmates in front of the media school in Rocca Secca, had been warm and reassuring, rich with my mother’s smells, the body smells that lingered on the bed sheets, the perfume my mother sometimes dabbed on her wrists and neck on Sundays or when she went to market, and rich with the memory of the years I had slept there with her, the hundred times I had felt her slip into bed beside me as I lay half-asleep.
    But there were ghosts in my mother’s room, too—during the war, two German soldiers had once spent the night there. My grandfather had shown me the chip in the bedroom wall where one of them had fired his rifle at a spider.
    ‘You could hear the shot from here to Capracotta,’ he said. ‘But when I came up to see what had happened the two of them were rolling on the bed laughing like madmen. “I’ve just killed a spider!” one of them said, as if he’d just done the greatest thing in the world. After that, I made your mother lock herself in the stable.’ Though later my mother had told me she’d had a nice walk with the soldiers in the pasture, when they’d come down behind the stable to pee.
    Lying in bed at night in my mother’s room, I had sometimes seen the ghosts of the soldiers through the gauze curtains of the balcony doors, cigarettes dangling from their lips, heard the wind nudging the muzzles of their rifles against the balcony rails, metal against metal. Now, shifting uncomfortably in my strange bed, trying to avoid my unlucky left side, I heard my mother’s sandals slap on the stairs, heard her door open and close, the springs of her bed creak; and as I drifted into sleep I made out again the familiar scrape of metal against metal, fated to me this night because I had left my mother alone, prey to shadows. The wind nudged against my own balcony doors, slipped inside to sit in the chair beside my bed—‘
Poveretto,
’ it whispered, ‘
poveretto
’; but still the murmurs of the soldiers reached me as they conferred on my mother’s balcony, as they slung their rifles over their shoulders finally, blue eyes glowing like flames in the darkness, and went into my mother’s room.
    ‘It’s time to go,’ they said, and my mother opened her eyes and gently set aside her covers. She was fully dressed: she had been waiting for them. Soundlessly she followed them out of her room and down the stairs. At the front door they stopped for a moment while one of the soldiers lit up a cigarette; then