And I have caught the train
He could not feel his legs anymore. He remembered to have felt an atrocious pain when something had hit them, but now even that had disappeared. He remembered the darkness and the oppression due to the pound pressing on his chest, when death had touched him with his cold and skeletal fingers.
It seemed that his legs had completely disappeared, vanished in thin air, because even the familiar sensation of heaviness given by the fact of having a body capable of imprinting its shape on the bed or on the armchair was lost. He feared to have become an half man, but after he managed to lift his head to peered at his lower chest, he was reassured: the sheets still presented the swelling of knees, thighs and calves.
"You woke up! Thank goodness!"
Suddenly a cheerful girl face entered his visual field, interrupting the semi catatonic contact he had been keeping with the grey ceiling. She must have been a nurse, as suggested by the white bonnet on her short blond hair; she was young, she had vivid green eyes and her face was like the one of a cat. Her voice reached him in a undefined manner, like he was immersed in the sea depths and she was speaking while sitting on the seashore.
His youngest sister used to doing so, back to the times when he still lived in Italy and war, hunger, poverty were only ghosts. She put her feet in the waves and sang, as he fished sea chestnuts on the sandy marine floor.
Lovino was overcome with the fear of having become deaf.
"How do you feel?"
"It's a fucking pain!"
Even speaking was hard; however he had lied. He did not feel pain now, no more. The suffering had sublimated in the simple, scary nothingness. Who knows, maybe if he have still felt pain, he would have been calmer than it actually was. The girl touched lightly his forehead to check that he had not fever; her touching was fresh. After some moment a man with a white overall opened the door; he had a case file under his arm and the tired look of a person who had not slept for days, saving less lives than he expected.
He came nearer to the bedside; he exchanged opinions in French with the nurse and, without any compliment, he pulled back the sheets.
Lovino blurted out a moan, meant to be a curse for pulling down all the honorable saints from their seats in Heaven. Where once there were his beautiful tanned legs, now only flesh and bones remained, something bloody and smashed; they could not be saved.
"Can you move your arms?"
The Italian guy wished they left him in peace, alone with his demons, with the idea that he could no longer walk, but those two seemed ready to question and interrogate him. Probably doctors wanted to assure that he was not completely paralyzed, that in his body something sane still remained. Could he move his arms? Was he not fully paralyzed? Yes, he could still felt them, so he bended the fingers of both hands, with such an effort that his brow covered in sweat. They were so heavy! His head started buzzing, like he had put it in a beehive in the middle of the silent and sunny countryside.
When was the last time he had seen a truly bright sun? Seven years before he had closed his suitcase, he had caught a third class train, he had left destiny to guide him till that village, cold and black. He, a farmer inside, who would have harvested fields of red tomatoes, eventually had found himself hitting the ingrates viscera of the Earth. Those viscera were ready to swallow reckless lovers, veins that gave much and asked much.
He used to remaining bent for hours under rotten scaffolding that seemed always on the verge of collapsing. He went up and down on an unsafe elevator, ruining his lungs for the unhealthy air.
He had confused memories of that afternoon, neither he knew how much time had passed. A day? A week? How many had died, how many had survived? How long had he remained under the ruins, while his body was blocked and his face burned by that huge firing? Being anxious for his legs, he had momentarily forgotten the burnt, but now the skin started to feel terrible hot again, so hot that he wished he could tear it up from his cheekbones. He swore between his teeth. The wet cloth on his face was a relief.
"Thank you. Damn it!"
An itch made him wink his eyes, bringing the illusion of being inside the mine, working with a helmet bigger than his head, rubbing irritated eyelids due to the dust. They were only tears of anger, which slid silently on his cheeks.
"You must not cry!" the nurse scolded him and smiled widely, beating her hand like she wanted to break a bubble. She bended towards the bed and read the tag.
"Your name is Lovino, right? I'm Bella. Can I be on first term with you?"
Lovino shrugged. Why should have he been bothered by that, while usually he had been treated like a dog? In a different life he would have appreciated the beauty of the woman, but not now. How would he have managed to swim in summer, to spend hours in the fields picking up lemons, to work without his legs? Damn it, he had survived that terrible day of May with its suffocating Ginesta scent, only to spit blood on the coal. He escaped sulfur mines only for finding death in a new dark womb. When he opened his mouth again, he did not know if he was speaking to himself or to Bella, neither if he used Italian, his dialect or a poor French. He only wished to tell his story.
"I'm the eldest of four brothers. My father and mother both died during the war, we were luckier than them. My little sister Alice was the first to go away, many years ago. I wasn't there, it was Chiara to tell me all when I came back from the woods. I found her with a three years brat, the son of one of those Americans who imprinted their footprints on our shores. My brother Feliciano, that crybaby, lost his way somewhere in the Alps. Someone says to have seen him in Germany.
It was the Labor Day when I decided to come to work in Belgium. It was meant to be a day of happiness, all the people gathered together, bringing food and wine; and then from the shadow someone started to shoot. I grabbed Chiara's arm and pulled her against the grass. We could nearly breath, but a miracle saved us. That same night I counted the money for a train ticket."
Lovino gulped and nailed the bed down, regretting to have left his home, cursing the owners of the mines, who made workers suffering from hunger, the back broken for a piece of bread, the brigands who killed innocent people, the war that destroyed his family.
With slow movements he touched his cheek, where flesh had met the flame, as soon as the doctor re-entered and communicated that his legs were meant to be amputate.
It was Bella, the sweet nurse from a little village near Bruxells, the one who every afternoon pushed his wheelchairs in the open space in front of the hospital, during the long days of illness, because she seemed to be the only person to which Lovino would opened up, without insulting her or swearing in dialect. The girl, thank to her vivacity and her chocolate scented hands, managed to break the resentful silence of the Italian, especially when she put him on the car and drive till the fields, full of flowers in blooming, far away from all the piles of coal. Bella always smiled. After all, if she had not stop doing so during the years of German occupation, with an orphanage as the only horizon left for her and her older brother, she surely would not have stop anymore. She was twenty-four years old and her heart was full of hope.
In those slow days, Lovino had found a new roommate, an extrovert and cheerful Spanish man, whose smile never faded from his lips. He was called Antonio (plus one of those long Iberian surnames) and he had become deaf due to an explosion in the civil war. Another accident had destroyed his eyes. Lovino wondered how he could be so happy, how he could talks so much when he had not have any contact with the external world for years. Since Antonio could not hear if someone told him to stop chatting, he used to keeping on and on until he became tired of tapping his tongue against the teeth. He spoke about everything and nothing.
He narrated every little anecdote from his troubled, passionate life, starting from a black cock he had trained for special fights held in his hometown, where he had worked as the milkman's boy assistant. He told tales about his adolescence raids along with his inseparable and not very recommended best friend, who he had met at university.
The first time that, probably under Bella's advice, Antonio made his way till the wheelchair of the Italian and took him in his arms, than on his back, Lovino cursed and agitated his own arms, screaming that the damn Spaniard would have surely made him fall.
"Turn right, turn right! You bastard" he cried, forgetting about the other's deafness; when he finally noticed it (the stairs were already very close), he grabbed his ears and pulled them without compliment in order to guide him. They formed a strange couple, a pair of legs without eyes and a pair of eyes without legs, two halves that together composed a unicum. The Italian man swore every single time they went on a walk like that, with his hands in Antonio's wavy brown hair; but even though he would never have admitted it, he had lot of fun.
Maybe that was the reason why after he received his crutches and fake legs of celluloid, he did not try them immediately and still preferred to go down to the tobacco shop with his Spanish friend. Neither he would have used them often in the future, complaining they caused him terrible irritations. And it would only made his terrible attitude even worse. Therefore, after all, nobody worried if they lied forgotten in a wardrobe and became a children toy.
When years later Antonio, who had become a famous opera singer (despite being deaf, he still remember how to sing and had a beautiful voice), dropped in for a visit in Italy, Lovino had retired in a little house where he spent his days admiring little shiny red tomatoes which can open heart and writing; as first thing the Italian man insisted to be brought on the seashore and there, breathing the marine air, described with his wrinkled hands the lullaby sound of the waves when crashed on the sand, the very same where American left their traces, the one which colored his nephew's hair, and the profound color of the sea.
Notes time!
I don't like to write note, but they are necessary. I write in the Italian fandom, but I have decided to try to translate a fanfiction I wrote in April. It is part of a AU serie (Chronicles of a family) on the Vargas's family during the WW2, but you can understand this chapter even if you have not read the other two. Each story is a one-shot.
The mine disaster I took inspiration from is the one happened in Marcinella (1956). Since Marcinelle is in Belgium, I have chosen to add Belgium (Bella) as a character.
Finally, I usually write under the inspiration given by some songs, but they are in Italian so I doubt that you could appreciate them.
I am quite sure about the grammar, but this story is not betated so if you see any errors, make sure to tell me as soon as possible.