When the film ran out, it revolved heavily on the take-up reel, the bright light of the projector suddenly dazzling on the canvas “screen” as the last of the film went through the projector gate. Gino was asleep and so was the old man. It was a quarter to ten; the clock tower had just struck the quarter hour. Gino’s cigarette was out between his lips, his saliva having soaked brown up to the hot ash. There was a sip of whiskey left in his glass. I pulled the plug of the projector, afraid to risk hitting the reverse button as Gino had done one night, sending what seemed like thousands of feet of shoelace-thin, tangled film spurting into a floor-sized plate of cinematic spaghetti. The hot white light slowly cooled to a glowing orange dot deep in the lens of the projector, and the ping, ping, ping of the lazily turning reel slowed, then stopped. The old man, remembering some past grievance, stirred and muttered angrily in his sleep.

I slipped out, ran down the steps, avoiding the thin cats clustered, unhealthy and persecuted, on the lower step. Then I raced back to the square, worried that because I was late I’d be in trouble. But no one had noticed.

Chapter 7

DISPLEASED WITH MY FAMILY, I adopted another one. My new family was large and Italian. A vast clan of cousins, brothers, sisters, friends, two grandmothers and a mother and father. The oldest daughter had three tiny children, each dressed in adult clothes scaled down to fit the toddlers. Her children were about the same age as her mothers latest offspring. All of them played together on the beach under the watchful gaze of the younger grandmother, who was still ambulatory. The older one, confined to her deck chair, sat in the shade of the umbrella, wearing a heavy wool shawl, black, with tassels, over her head and shoulders. Her one concession to the sweltering beach was that by noon each day she would have laboriously removed her thick brown stockings, rolling them down one at a time exposing her ivory-colored legs, while one of her grandchildren stood guard in front of her, discreetly holding a towel to protect her grandmother’s modesty.

During our vacation I blended in with this euphoric tribe as if I too were somehow related to them. When lunch was served or drinks handed out, when ice cream was purchased from the man who would walk up the beach shouting “Gelati!" and dispensing vanilla ice cream on sticks covered with a paper-thin layer of chocolate from his ice cream box, then I got my share along with the rest of the pack. I have no doubt I could have stayed with them forever, perhaps returning to Torino or Bologna with the grandmother on the train while Papa followed in the Fiat with a Mama or two and the bambinos.