The Star of Hope Still Rises

Every morning, during my winter’s holiday in the shattered Italian village of Castelmare, near Livorno, I would see old Maria Bendetti. 

Small, slight and shrunken, barefooted, clad in rusty black, a black scarf bound about her head, her frail shoulders bowed beneath the big wicker basket on her back, she typified the prevailing tragedy. Her thin brown face, so set and careworn, seemed molded by calamity into lines of irreparable sadness.

She sold fish, those odd and unappetizing Mediterranean fishes which, eked out by a scant ration of macaroni or spaghetti, formed the meagre diet of this broken little seaside community. I had known this village in its days of carefree, joyous peace. Now there was no music and laughter in the little square, where bombgutted buildings sprawled drunkenly amongst the dusty rubble, a scene of utter heartbreak, over which the scent of flowering oleanders lay poignantly, as upon a tomb. The place was dead, and because I had loved it so well, its final desolation aroused in me a rankling sense of bitterness and despair.

Most of the young men and women had moved away. But the children and older people remained, moving, it seemed to me, like specters amongst the ruins, wresting a handtomouth existence from the sea with their patched up boats and mended nets. And amongst these was Maria.

Occasionally she was accompanied by a small girl of ten, presumably her grandchild, a thin barelegged waif who trotted beside her and cried in a shrill insistent voice: “Pesci ... pesci freschi,” as though determined to establish beyond all doubt that their fish were of the freshest quality. I watched them gloomily because these two seemed somehow an exemplar of the senseless clinging to a past that was gone forever.

One morning, as they passed through the ruined square, I spoke to them. Yes, they had been through the bombardment; the war had been a sad affair, they agreed. They now lived, with the utmost frugality, in a dark little cave of a room in the Via Eustachia, a narrow street in what remained of the poorest quarter of the town.

In a culmination of that bitter mood which burned within me, which was, of course, the reflex of my own pessimism and discontent, I asked abruptly: “Why don’t you leave the village? Here there is no future ... all destroyed ... completely finished.” There was a pause. The old woman slowly shook her head. “This is our home. We do not think it is finished.” As the two moved away it appeared that they exchanged a secret, ardent glance.

That glance provoked my curiosity. During the next few days I found myself observing their movements with a queer, unwilling interest. In the early part of the day they had their fixed and visible routine, but in the afternoon, astonishingly, they were nowhere to be found. Several times after my picnic lunch I walked to the Via Eustachia only to discover that the little room was empty. Could it be that the two were less simple than I had supposed, that their absence every afternoon concealed some underhand affair, smuggling perhaps, or some devious working of the black market?

Prompted by this thought, I went earlier one day to the Via Eustachia, at an hour when I usually took a siesta on the beach, and stationed myself in a doorway near the old woman’s room. I had not long to wait. A few minutes after one o’clock Maria and her grandchild emerged. Each carried upon her back an empty wicker basket, and hand in hand, with an air of purpose, they set off briskly along the shattered street. Stealthily, almost, I followed them.

Through the piles of rubble went the old woman and the child. At the outskirts of the village they tooka sunbaked path which led down to the dry bed of the river.

Here, as I took up a vantage point on the high bank, I saw to my surprise that other figures were working with pick and spade in the flinty channel. Maria and the girl unslung their baskets and set to work. At first, I fancied they were digging some kind of bait, then I made out that the child was filling her small basket with white sand while Maria, stooping and making her selection with great care, was gathering a load of square white stones. When the panniers were full, the two shouldered their loads and slowly ascended the steep and narrow path.

They passed close to me, yet if they were conscious of my presence, they gave no sign. When they had gone a few paces ahead I followed.

The way led to the summit of the ruined town, a little plateau dominating the landscape, which, in my wanderings, I had not reached before, the one site in all the wasted terrain that had escaped destruction. There, amidst a grove of acacia trees, a larger group of the village people were at work.

Quietly, talking in low tones, with a restraint which gave to their actions a strange solemnity, they were mixing mortar, carving and facing the fine white stones, forming the walls of a large new structure.

For an instant I was puzzled, then, all at once, from the shape already risen, I realized what they were building. I caught my breath sharply. These people, who had barely a roof above their heads, upon whom lay the blight of overwhelming destruction, these women, children and old men whom I had seen merely as beaten and extinguished shadows, had chosen, as their first united act, to construct, solely by their own effort, a new and splendid church. Not a makeshift chapel, but a finer, larger place of worship than ever they had had before.

Maria and the child emptied out their loads. They stood for a moment to recover their breath, then turned to make a fresh descent. As the old woman passed me, with beads of perspiration still upon her brow, she gave me, unexpectedly, from her dark, wise eyes a quick, faint smile, a smile, impenetrable in its sweetness, which held, beneath its deep serenity, a touch of friendly malice, as though to say: “Are we finished, then, after all?”

All her life was written in that look, the past, the present and the future. Courage was there, and high endurance, with trust, patient and unshakable —the will to live from day to day, to accept, and above all, to believe.

Confused and humbled, I stood motionless as the old woman and the little girl passed out of sight together. And suddenly my chest heaved, a stab went through me, a stab of anguished self compunction at my own proneness to despair. What matter the rubble and the ruins? If the very young and the very old could show such faith there was hope for the world after all.

I stood there a long time and as I went down at last, consoled and lifted up, the first star was rising, pale yet luminous, in the eternal sky and in the soft mist that crept up from the waters, the ravaged village disappeared. There rose instead a shining city of the spirit.