Uncle Mauro

Uncle Mauro is Fabrizio Collini’s maternal uncle, the family’s only living relation, and the person who takes responsibility for Fabrizio after German violence shatters the household. His response moves from urgent protection to a search for the imprisoned father and, finally, an intimate act of adoption: he bends over the sleeping boy and declares him his son.

Identity and Family Position

Mauro is his mother’s elder brother. The narration describes him as a hard man with no children; in the crisis that overtakes Fabrizio’s family, those facts make him both their sole surviving relative and the adult on whom the boy can depend. His farm lies almost ten kilometres from Fabrizio’s. The distance is significant in the immediate aftermath: after fleeing the farmhouse, Fabrizio runs across the countryside until he reaches Mauro’s home.

Mauro’s connection to the family is expressed not through explanation but through what he does when Fabrizio arrives. The boy stammers out what has happened; Mauro comes with two farm labourers, listens until he understands, takes a shotgun from a cupboard, and drives away. The sequence is abrupt and practical. Faced with the danger to his sister’s children and the seizure of their father, he leaves no uncertainty about whose crisis this is: he acts on it himself.

Protection After the Attack

Fabrizio has reached Mauro after witnessing his sister’s killing at the family farmhouse. He had first hidden in an empty dog kennel when a German soldier arrived, then fled when he heard his sister scream. Injured after slipping on the farmyard’s wet paving stones, he ran through the pine forest, across a narrow bridge, and along a woodland path to his uncle’s house. Mauro’s farm becomes the place where the child can arrive, breathless and unable at first to explain, and be met by an adult who can take over.

Mauro’s first response is armed action: he takes his shotgun and drives out. The narrative does not spell out what he does on that journey. When he returns after nightfall, however, Fabrizio joins him on the steps outside the house. Mauro opens his huge woollen coat so the boy can sit on its lining and puts an arm around him. His face and hands are sooty; in the yellow light from the kitchen window, Fabrizio sees wet tracks on his cheeks. The hard man is grieving, but his grief does not displace the child. He makes room for Fabrizio beside him and shelters him physically beneath the same coat.

Search for Fabrizio’s Father

The next morning Mauro sets out for Genoa in his best suit. Aunt Giulia has packed four trays of eggs for relations in the city, while Fabrizio and she stand on the steps to wave goodbye. Mauro stays in the city for four days. During his absence, the family’s farm is left to the labourers’ care: one tends the work there, while another reports what happened to the local police. The chickens return to the burned-out walls, and a farm labourer finds one of the pigs in the forest. These details place Mauro’s search amid the practical wreckage of the home he has left behind.

Mauro returns looking worn down. His shoes pinch, his suit hangs crooked and is stained, and he smooths out a piece of paper as the household gathers around the dining table. He has not been allowed to see Fabrizio’s father, but he has learned where he is being held. The thin official paper bears two rubber stamps with swastikas and the words Security Service. It identifies the prison in the Marassi district of Genoa and says that the arrest was ordered by the security service detachment posted in Milan. It also names the German in charge of the prisoners: SS-Sturmbannführer Hans Meyer. Mauro reads the father’s name slowly, tracing the words with his fingers; after each sentence, everyone talks at once, trying to understand what the document means.

The paper offers information but no reunion. Mauro has gone to the city and returned with the place of imprisonment and the identity of the authority responsible, yet he has not been permitted to see the prisoner. The official stamps and carefully pronounced German name make the family’s helplessness concrete: the boy’s father is held inside a system that has reduced him to an entry on a sheet. Mauro cannot make that barrier disappear, but he brings the news back and reads it aloud to the people waiting for it.

Adoption and Narrative Significance

Mauro’s answer to the question of why the Germans took Fabrizio’s father is that the man did nothing wrong: he says that the father did what was right. The statement is brief, but its certainty contrasts with the family’s inability to reach or question the prisoner. Mauro gives Fabrizio a moral answer where the official document gives only an arrest order, a prison, and a chain of command.

Four days after the interpreter’s account of the execution reaches the village, Mauro bends over Fabrizio while the boy is asleep and kisses him on the eyes. He tells him that from then on he is his son. The timing makes the declaration more than consolation for a single night: with Fabrizio’s father gone and his sister dead, Mauro assumes the family bond that remains possible. Earlier, he had received the boy at his door, put an arm around him, and gone to search for his father; now he names the relationship that will carry forward after that search has failed to save him.

Mauro’s role is defined by this progression from kinship to chosen responsibility. He is introduced as a hard, childless man living nearly ten kilometres away, but the decisive facts are his departures and returns: he drives out with a shotgun, goes to Genoa in search of the imprisoned father, comes back bearing the stamped record, and finally claims the orphaned boy as his son. Against the machinery of arrest and execution, the story sets acts of care that are modest in scale but irreversible in meaning: a coat opened against the cold, a hand around a child’s shoulders, and a promise spoken over him as he sleeps.