in their cradle of sea, which fills their lungs. Now I cannot watch over them. I can barely see, even with my thousand feelers, through the naughty knotted trees covering this island. But have I stopped being their Mamma? Of course not!
I still be close to them, though they be unaware.
Twice I have killed boogiemen to protect my bambini. Twice the boogiemen came from the far stars and found us, as I knew they would, and I killed them—my firearms flexing and crunching their boogievessels of metal, sending the lucertuomini inside spinning out toward the far stars. They are still spinning. They will never reach their home.
Maybe the word has gotten back to the Capo of the boogiemen. Maybe I am known to them now as the Malmamma, killer of lizards, serpents and demons archetypical. Maybe no more lizard-men will come to find us.
After all, the last boogiemen came over two hundred normanni ago. I didn’t even give them a chance to land. Is that not proof enough? To Mamma, it is!
I am Mamma, and my bambini are out there!
I am Mamma, Who is Trinity. Mamma is Gianna; Mamma is gargantuan computer; and Mamma is beautiful metal hip with a thousand feelers—call them Ears, Eyes, Nose and Throat, EENT! So She is God of Children.
But still I be humble. Love makes a god humble, and Mamma loves her bambini more than that-other-god-I-know-about loved the world.
Exteriorly I be Mamma. She is great silver Easter Egg. Once she was a big egg of a moon circling her babies’ watery world—and they must have seen her circling and glowing da notte. Now this Easter Egg is hidden on an island, secret for 30,000 moons.
Interiorly I be Mamma too. I possess two thousand empty wombungaloes which once held my bambini, before they left me for one continent of Prime. Hah! They left me only to discover that the gemini suns were unstablistic a little. They left me only to mewtate, to mute-hate, to mutedebilitate. Hah!
Maybe the suns’ craziness got to me too. Sometimes I believe it, even though my hip is thickly strong, and nothing can get through it. Maybe the suns’ craziness changed me too. Think about it.
Certainly they changed my bambini. The gemini suns first turned them into a carnival of different shapes, and then finally into seamen—to trick me! But I recognized them—didn’t lose them. Mermaids and merlads peppering the ocean with their sachet tails and mute conversations.
My wombungaloes are empty, quiet now, but I possess a bigger womb now, yes I do. Great wet womb where thousands of bambini swim, never born, never leaving me. That is Mamma’s dream, and I should know.
The secret legend of how this God of Children, Trinity of Mamma, Mama of Manna was born is ancient history. I am the one to know: I am Mamma, and Mamma made Light. Inside me there is Gianna, gentle little girl and wise old fat woman. Sometimes I be only Gianna—but other times,
I’m sorry, she can only be one bit of me, because Mamma is All.
Once upon a time Gianna lived in a land of planets, stars, monorails, spacelocks, human beings, the Leaning Tower of Pisa (all encased in supportive plastic), the evil lizards called Cromanths, and other mytho-historical things.
Once upon a day in that once-upon-a-time, Gianna Sarnoli—who had fifty years and had been spouseless for one long year—was in her trattoria, in the village of Cinque Terre, a little north of La Spezia, far south of Genova, in Italy, on Earth. On this day she was not saddening herself with thoughts of the bone cancer which had taken her spouse Massimo: not long ago she had stopped all sad feelings about the subject, that all the sciences in the world still could do little about the cancers. Instead she was serving cold beer and new phosphorescent Cinzano to her many touristic customers—who were dressed like all tourists dress, like uncomfortable birds, very colorful—and she was thinking about her eight bambini....
Yes, each of her eight bambini would be a Cristoforo Colombo. Columbus had been an explorer, and Colombo—his native name—is a bird, and bird means wings, which fly to new places and tell of rainbows and new Gardens.
Gianna was woman of the peasant tradition, because peasants always lived in romance of finding new places, of making homesteads and colonies. So now she was thinking of how her children would be wings; of how they would soon be going to the Procolonial Corporganization training programme in Genova—
“Oh yes,” she remembered, “they have already gone to the programme. Have been there already, in Genova smoggy, for one month. Already they have begun their wings!”
The trattoria—Massimo’s and her little eating and drinking place—had made it all possible. Their savings had grown as slow as stalagmites, but just as surely, for twenty years; and even after Massimo passed away, the trattoria had continued being lucrative, all because suddenly one day there was a monorail zooming through Cinque Terre, bringing all kinds of tourists. That same monorail was the one which took her bambini finally to the programme in Genova.
As she picked up the empty glasses and filled them again or poured new glasses, she had a feeling that her children would be coming to visit her this day. Why? Maybe because their first step in becoming wings, in becoming doves, was finished today; the first “phase” of their special education was complete, and now was a good time for them to come home and visit Gianna, to discuss their new feelings.
She was correct—partially. Giuseppe, Carla, Carlo, Antonio, Pietro, Gianni, Livia and Alba were seated on the monorail, coming to see her. But not for the reason she imagined.
Tomorrow would be her birthday, and she had forgotten it. Her bambini had remembered, and besides, they wanted a good reason for returning home before the second step in their training began.
But the reason her bambini were on the monorail didn’t matter when Gianna found out that the monorail had killed them.
The monorail—installed too quickly, for quick political reasons, on the cliffs overlooking the Ligurian Sea—had taken her children, taken a leap off the cliffs, and mashed her children’s heads so that not even the doctors with scientific methods could reconstruct her bambini.
Franco Nardi, a middle-aged gray-jacketed carabiniere whom Gianna knew quite well, brought the news to the trattoria. At first Gianna did not believe it. And when she believed it, she slapped Franco on the face. Once, twice, and she missed with the third slap because she bent over the bar and could not see through her blurred eyes well enough to aim.
But Franco understood. He had almost married Gianna once, and he understood that she had slapped him because something in the sick world needed slapping and Franco Nardi happened to be the closest thing.
Franco understood, and he left. And when their glasses had sat empty for too long—because Gianna would not lift her head from the bar—the touristic customers left too.
Gianna Sarnoli, who was fat because she was a mother, had a sister named Penna, who was thin—because she wanted to be a woman, not a mother. Penna Sarnoli had married an aristocrat from Pisa, a man who was important in the Fiat Triad of all Europe. Penna had left Cinque Terre—she had always said she would—and gone to live an aristocratic life in a Pisan eight-room “modapt” which overlooked the Leaning Tower.
Penna Sarnoli Delievo had no children, and sometimes—though it was for no more than a day—she felt the desire to be good to her sister Gianna, back in the peasant village of Cinque Terre.
When Penna heard that all eight bambini, from Antonio to Alba, had been killed, her desire to be good to her sister
