I was told that after the war a patrol of soldiers found me lying unconscious in an abandoned building in a town I could not remember. The soldiers brought me to a hospital where I was gradually revived and given medication for some wounds I had received. These were not gunshot wounds. When I awoke, I could not recall who I was or where I had come from. That is, I did not know if I belonged to this town, or if I had been a soldier myself (I was wearing civilian clothing when they found me). The doctors said that cases of temporary amnesia were common and they had already treated many persons who had experienced it after receiving some kind of head wound. This puzzled me because, as far as I could see and feel, my wounds were on my legs and back. I felt no pain in my head, nor could I feel any bump or gash of any kind. After a few days, I began to feel better. My appetite returned and I enjoyed some meals although the food was very plain and sparse. One evening, a nurse came to me carrying what looked like a ledger book. She sat on a chair next to my bed and explained that this journal was found on my person when I was brought to the hospital on that first day. She wanted me to have it. I thanked her and explained that I still had no idea of who I was and therefore was even more puzzled to discover that I had carried this volume of writings (I assumed that the book had been used and that I was the one who had used it). The nurse explained that my memory would gradually reconstitute itself, that this would be a lengthy process. I thanked her and opened the book. There was indeed a series of writings inside but the words were arranged as a narrative of some kind. I suppose I had expected to see diary entries. Since my own mind was still a tabula rasa to me, I could make no judgment whatsoever about my abilities or tendencies as a writer. I wondered if this could be some kind of military journal. Was I a free-lance writer who had been commissioned to write short stories or political commentary about the war? I found a pen in the little table next to my bed and decided to test whether or not my handwriting matched the penmanship on the pages in front of me. As I copied what appeared to be the title of this work, Last Days of Ambrogino, I immediately noticed that my handwriting matched what had been previously written on the front page. I must be the author, I thought. To be certain, taking my time, I wrote out the first sentence without looking back after I memorized it, so I would not subconsciously imitate the writing. I wrote, It is possible to regard the following events in more than one way. Again, when I compared the sentence to the beginning of the story, I was convinced that I had written the same words previously. I decided to write out the entire work. I thought that a sequential reconstruction of the text might stimulate my memory. This whole set of circumstances was very puzzling and troubling to me. After all, I must have been someone. I must have done things and went places and, for all I knew, I could have grown up in this very town. No one who had spoken to me so far recognized me or knew who I was. I did not know this Ambrogino; why would I have written about him? I flipped the pages until I reached the end of the story, and found that the journal still had many unused pages. I decided to begin again, and rewrote the first sentence as before….
It is possible to regard the following events in more than one way. To deny that possibility would be the same as erroneously accepting that something, whatever it may be, is always truly and completely itself because that is the form in which we experience it. I do not wish to convert the nonbeliever into a disciple. A voice can give comfort only to those who listen. An image can be understood only by those who see it. Telling the story of Ambrogino is something that I am compelled to do. I do not understand the reason. The war brought misery to countless souls. Just as in centuries past, the war took the lives of men, women, and children, by the thousands if not the millions, just as it will in centuries to come. The selection of Ambrogino, in the aftermath of this war, and in this time and place, is as incidental as it is predetermined. It is the median value between these opposites that I wish to identify. That is the substance that lies at the heart of the story of Ambrogino.
blows where it likes, and you hear
but cannot tell where it comes from
is every one that is born of the Sp
Someone, probably one of the priests or vergers, had written these ancient words on a broken, rectangular blackboard that was hung lengthwise to the right of the church entrance. Bombs had blown away part of the roof and removed the sides of the blackboard, while the block of incomplete scripture remained. Inside, an altar boy was lighting candles. There was chalk dust on his hands. He may have transcribed Christ’s dictum, following the instructions of a superior, for the benefit of the faithful. The handwriting was elegant. There was a supply truck that had backed up to the church. The vehicle had a circular mirror that, in inverted form, partially reproduced the holy message. In its entirety the text read:
“The wind blows where it likes, and you hear the sound of it, but cannot tell where it comes from and where it goes. So is every one that is born of the Spirit.” Ambrogino and his dog were passing through the courtyard. Some laughing children were playing nearby.
Their laughter was sarcastic and shrill. Surrounded by the high stone walls of multiple dwellings, the sounds the children produced reverberated with a slight echo. Behind the windows were people of various ages. Incomplete families, missing a deceased or absent father or son; a raped mother or daughter; a disoriented uncle or grandmother, driven mad by the war. Functional behavior, such as ironing a garment or watering a plant, occurred alongside irrational behavior. In one of the apartments was the grandfather of two brothers killed in the war. He sat on the edge of his bed while his wife washed him with a warm, damp cloth. He spent most of his time counting his footprints made in the dust of the rooms as he walked back and forth at random and mumbled unintelligible curses at God. In the floor below was a young woman who had been recently informed of her husband’s death. She accepted this fact with a strange insouciance that she could not understand and to compensate for what she feared was callousness she refused to remove the man’s boots from their place beside the front door, as though they would be needed before he left on some neighborhood errand. It is not uncommon for the living to cling to physical reminders of the dead. The young wife was disturbed by ordinary sounds and the memory of her husband’s voice. The dog’s footprints were small but they were visible in the dirt. The animal’s owner left footprints, too. One child threw a stone. From one of the open windows in the wall someone yelled “Stop that!” or “Show respect!”
I paused here to consider why I chose both phrases to express the displeasure of the person in the window who was yelling at the children. Could it be that, if I was in fact a witness to these events, and I had written this account sometime afterwards, my memory had failed me, and I simply could not be sure which phrase had been used? It could very well be that several persons observed this mistreatment of the unfortunate Ambrogino and so two different things may have been said, more or less simultaneously, by two different people. So far, in reading the story, I still had no recollection of this Ambrogino, or his dog, yet there was something familiar about him; as if he was a mist that, very slowly, was beginning to assume more corporeal dimensions. Yet the time and place and circumstances of his existence remained a mystery to me. I continued writing…
It was a poor district. A large pot filled with boiling water stood on the stove in one of the shabby apartments. There was no meat or fish or fowl. The meal that had to be cooked would consist of a few vegetables. Their color was unhealthy. On the kitchen table was a knife with a broken handle. In the corner was a pile of glass shards that had been swept into a heap that resembled a little cone of quartz, the remains of a kitchen window that had shattered during artillery fire. The sun shone through the empty frame upon the glass and made it appear to be incandescent, as though embers burned at the bottom of the shape. A man with an extremely swollen, bandaged foot was lying on a bed across from the window. Flour dust covered some of the black tiles in front of the stove. Chewing rodents had left little openings at the bottom of the large burlap sack that contained the fine white powder. All of this could be seen through what may have been the window from which the man or the woman had just shouted. Or the reprimand to the child who threw the stone at Ambrogino may have come from another window leading into another apartment.
More uncertainty. More ambiguity. Still puzzled by the possibility of more than one version of events, I strove to determine what motivated my decision to write these lines. Could it be that my impressions of this tenement were so subjective, that in my mind there was a swirl or a matrix of information, so that emotion and imagination governed the selection of detail, rather than the limited realities of physical perspective and the logic of identity? Did my sense of Ambrogino affect the depiction of reality, even the nature of reality; was Ambrogino a kind of zeitgeist, rather than a person, that characterized everything around him? I began to remember little pieces of activity in my life. Nothing conclusive, but more and more flashes of scenes, of things that must have happened before. I knew that I had studied modern painting. Suddenly I had an image of Mystery and Melancholy of a Street by de Chirico. Were the repeating archways and windows, descending in perspective, and the silhouette of the little girl with her hoop, visual triggers in my mind?
Did these triggers allow the uncertainty of which apartment window, which reprimanding adult, to remain unresolved on the page I had written? Did the very act of writing become a way for me to question what was or was not possible?
*Excerpt from a longer work.
—About the Author—
Peter J. Dellolio was born in NYC 1956. He graduated from New York University in 1978. He has had a variety of work published in over 120 literary magazines, journals, and anthologies, in print and online. Since 2018, four of his poetry collections, a novel, and a novella have also been published. Poetry: A Box Of Crazy Toys (Xenos Books); Bloodstream Is An Illusion Of Rubies Counting Fireplaces and Roller Coasters Made Of Dream Space (cyberwit.net). Novel & Novella: The Confession (cyberwit.net); The Vigil (Type Eighteen Books). The newest poetry collection, Cul de Sac Diaries [Lost Telegram Press] was released in Dec 2025. A collection of his one-act plays was published in 1983 by Dramatika Press. A fifth poetry collection will be released shortly by New Meridian Arts Press, Catch Of The Day. Peter has taught language skills through art projects for LEAP in the NYC public school system. He is an artist himself: his work is featured on the Saatchi website. He lives in Brooklyn.