The Star of Hope Still Rises

What matter the rubble and the ruins?

- A. J. Cronin

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 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.