The Notebook Thief

"We still didn't know what we were heading toward, we didn't know what we were running from; we were only certain of our young bodies. My life began with that leap."

In Tora and Piccilli everything has always been the same; the world begins and ends there. Davide is a swineherd: he understands animals better than people, yet he steals notebooks from the village market. Teresa, instead, went to school; she longs to escape and has the audacity of someone who knows what she wants. But one day thirty-six Jews arrive from Naples, sent into internal exile right there. The Duce has said they must be kept away, and yet Davide goes looking for them. Above all for Nicolas, who gazes at the moon through a telescope and speaks of "the deep breast of the ocean." It is the war that brings them together and sets them against one another, then tears them apart-until their destinies are exchanged.

Tora and Piccilli (north of Caserta), September 1942. Davide spends his days, sometimes even his nights, with the pigs, whom he knows so well that he calls them by name. He has limped since birth, and for this he is mocked by his peers and mistreated by his father. Only Teresa, who works in her family's ropeworks and spends all her free time reading, has the courage to defend him. Davide cannot imagine any life other than the one in Tora. Teresa, on the other hand, never stops repeating that one day she will go far away, and Davide knows she is telling the truth. The arrival of thirty-six Jews from Naples, sent to the small town by the Fascist authorities, will change their lives forever. Nicolas, with his unsettling beauty, carries with him an unknown world and upends their days. Davide begins secretly attending the lessons of Nicolas's father, who has set up a clandestine school. And so the illiterate son of a Fascist learns to read and write thanks to a Jew. Davide, Teresa, and Nicolas explore together the countryside around the village, all the way to the Ciampate del Diavolo (popular belief holds that on the slope of the extinct volcano the Devil's footprints are impressed), as well as the unspoken world of their feelings. The ghost of Nicolas will accompany Davide in the years to come: in Naples after the war, when he works hard in a factory, when he happens to begin frequenting a theater troupe, when-by then a man, another man-he steps onto the stage as an acclaimed actor. It will be Nicolas himself, alive and yet so like a ghost, who leads him back to Tora, to the place where it all began.