What is good about newspapers is that the next day, when the news is “old”, they can always be used to make a paper hat. Pippo’s hands had become expert at transforming a page into a boxy work hat. He would take a sheet of newspaper, put it on the table and fold it in half and then after folding and creasing the paper in the right places, swiftly turn it into a hat. A paper hat could last days in the dust and sweat. Of course, there was no relation between the news randomly picked out for the hat and the hat’s sturdiness. Ever since he was a child, Mimmo had seen his father wear a paper hat crammed with words that interwove geometrically, so losing their original meaning to become a form of protection, and he had felt at home. Just as when his mother Adalgisa made him help her to make tomato sauce during the summer holidays in Calabria. What a lot of tomatoes he had had handled and what fragrance! An aroma that smelled like home, like the dry, sharp smell of the sawmill in Taggia, which also smelled like home. He was so proud of his father at school. How many children could say that their father was a wood-cutter, like in fairy tales? When the teacher asked them to bring material to lessons to create objects, while the others brought plasticine, play dough, or at most flour paste, he would bring a piece of briar...read more
