Aggiustare l’universo

October 1945. The school year starts late. It is the first in liberated Italy and it is not easy to start again from the rubble. Teacher Gilla looks with anguish at those walls that until a few weeks before housed Nazis. She arrived in Borgo di Dentro to escape the bombs that marred her Genoa, and like so many young people she fought and risked her life, betting on building a better future that other comrades will not see. But now she does not want to think about what the war has taken from her, and the twenty-three fifth-grade students in front of her are reason enough to keep the sadness at bay. When the bell rings, there is an empty seat left, in the front row. The girl for whom it is intended reaches the classroom shortly afterwards, accompanied by the caretaker and a note from the headmaster. Her name is Francesca and she comes from the nearby orphanage. She is prepared, diligent, but does not speak and Gilla in her eyes immediately recognises the sadness of someone who is alone in a world where she does not belong. For both there was a before and there was an after. But if Gilla would like to get rid of the past, for Francesca it is the only place she wants to return to. Because there is her family, the one for whom her name was Ester and with whom she lived in Casale Monferrato, before the ‘measures for the defence of the race’ prevented her father from teaching, her grandfather from selling cloth, and her and her mother from leading a life worthy of the name. Ester’s last happy memory is a trip to the Po. After that, only the guilt of being Jewish. Now she knows nothing of her parents, and the hope that they will come back for her, as they promised, abandons her a little every day. Gilla has guessed what the child’s stubborn silence hides, and knows that repairing what is broken requires calm and patience. The same she uses with an old mechanical planetarium that she fixes at night on the kitchen table, formulating imaginary lessons for her pupils. With the grace of one who knows how to handle fragile and precious existences and the rigour of meticulous research, Raffaella Romagnolo writes a novel of pain and rebirth about a historical moment from which it is still impossible to look away.