The soldier’s blanket - Eugenio Ruberto

Read and listen to the fairy tale “The Soldier’s Blanket” by Gianni Rodari

Let’s read together

The soldier Vincenzo Di Giacomo, at the end of all the wars, returned home with a torn uniform, a bad cough, and a military blanket. The cough and the blanket represented all his earnings from those long years of war.

– Now I will rest, – he told his family. But the cough gave him no rest, and in a few months, it led him to his grave. Only the blanket remained for his wife and children as a memory. The children were three, and the youngest, born between one war and another, was five years old. The soldier’s blanket went to him. When he wrapped himself in it to sleep, his mother would tell him a long fairy tale, and in the tale there was a fairy who wove a blanket large enough to cover all the children in the world who were cold.

But there was always some child left out, crying and asking in vain for a corner of the blanket to warm up. Then the fairy had to unmake the entire blanket and start weaving it again from the beginning, to make it a little bigger, because it had to be a blanket of a single piece, woven all at once, and additions could not be made.

The good fairy worked day and night making and unmaking, and she never got tired, and the little one always fell asleep before the fairy tale was finished, and he never knew how it ended. The little boy was called Gennaro, and that small family lived near Cassino. The winter was very harsh, there was no food, and Gennaro’s mother fell ill.

Gennaro was entrusted to some neighbors who were travelling performers, and they had a caravan, and they traveled through the towns, sometimes begging for alms, sometimes playing the accordion, sometimes selling wicker baskets that they made during their roadside stops.

They gave Gennaro a cage with a parrot which, with its beak, would pull a ticket with lottery numbers from a small box. Gennaro had to show the parrot to the people, and if they gave him some money, he would let the parrot draw a small ticket. The days were long and boring, they often ended up in villages where people were poor and had nothing to give as alms, and then Gennaro got a thinner slice of bread and a emptier bowl of soup.

But when night fell, Gennaro wrapped himself in his soldier father’s blanket, which was all his wealth, and in its fragrant warmth, he fell asleep dreaming of a parrot that told him a fairy tale. One of the travelling performers had been a soldier with Gennaro’s father, he grew fond of the child, he would explain the hundred things they encountered along the road and, for fun, he taught him to read the signs with the names of the villages and cities.

– See? That is A. That other very thin one, which looks like a stick without a handle, is I. That stick with the hump is P.

Gennaro learned quickly. The performer bought him a notebook and a pencil and taught him to copy the road signs. Gennaro filled pages and pages with the name of ANCONA, or with that of PESARO, and one day he managed to write his own name, letter by letter, without a mistake. What beautiful dreams he had that night, wrapped in his soldier father’s blanket.

And what a beautiful story this is, even if it doesn’t end and remains hanging in the air, like a question mark without an answer.