The Last Son’s Secret

by Rafel Nadal Farreras

  ‘Are you still sick?’

  She went over to the bed and put her lips to his forehead, as she had seen Zia do. Then she kissed him on the cheek, just as he was turning his head. Their lips brushed together.

  ‘Yuck!’ complained Vitantonio, laughing nervously. ‘Sisters don’t kiss their brothers.’

  ‘I do,’ she said, very earnestly. And she left the room.

  PART THREE

  Cherry Earrings

  Sweet Sixteen

  HOW’S MY POORLY little brother?’

  Giovanna made Vitantonio jump. He looked up from his book and saw his twin sister in the doorway. She was a vision; he hadn’t seen her since Christmas. Since the winter holidays they hadn’t both been in Bellorotondo at the same time once, because she’d spent Easter on a school trip to Rome. She looked very different, beautiful. She wore a close-fitting dress emblazoned with blue and red flowers, and she was beginning to bloom as her sixteenth birthday approached. It had been nearly seven years since he last lay ill in this bed and saw his sister in the bedroom doorway.

  He looked her up and down curiously, unable to pinpoint what it was that was so different about her. She noticed him looking and let out a laugh, her mouth wide, revealing very white teeth and pink gums. Her long black hair was pulled back into a ponytail that hung past her waist; a couple of ringlets had escaped and danced playfully on her forehead. Giovanna teased him, striking poses like a fashion model. When she turned to one side, Vitantonio was surprised to see that his sister’s chest was starting to look like a woman’s. She wore two cherries hanging from her ear.

  ‘What do you think?’

  ‘You left here an ugly little sister and now you’re an ugly big sister.’

  Giovanna let out another loud laugh. Leaning one hand against the doorframe and lifting her skirt with the other, she revealed long legs in flesh-coloured silk stockings.

  ‘You can say what you like, but the boys all turn their heads.’

  Vitantonio found her very attractive, but he kept his mouth shut. She was his sister! When he looked at her that way, he felt very confused. She came over to the bed, put her lips to his forehead and declared, ‘You don’t have a temperature, you’re faking it.’

  She put a cherry in his mouth and ate the other one. She spat the stone into her hand and turned to go, leaving behind a trail of perfume, roses perhaps. As he watched her go, he was ashamed to feel a strange sensation in his groin.

  His aunt’s entrance surprised him.

  ‘Get up, I’ll make the bed.’

  Vitantonio loved her taking care of him as if he were still a little boy. He hadn’t had a single day of illness since the bout of tonsillitis just after his confirmation, seven years ago. For the last five years he’d been at boarding school in Bari, and he could scarcely remember the pleasure of drifting off to sleep while his zia bustled about the house. In early April he’d been diagnosed with double pneumonia and, since the nurse at school didn’t inspire much confidence, it had been decided that he should recover at home.

  Every time his aunt came in to air his room, and shake the bread crumbs out of his sheets and remake his bed, he congratulated himself on having convinced the priests to let him come back home from Bari to Bellorotondo. That morning, though, when he saw Donata come in, he got up and tried his best to hide the strange reaction Giovanna had provoked in him. Then he went back to bed, pleased to find the linen fresh and starched, and dozed off. He was woken up by the calls of Dr Ricciardi, who was coming up the stairs.

  ‘What is that boy reading today?’

  Without waiting for an answer he placed two books on his bedside table: The Charterhouse of Parma and The Gambler. The doctor liked to talk to Vitantonio about books the young man had never heard of and then he would often bring them to him from his own library, not least because in their far-flung corner of the world the doctor had little opportunity to find a protégé who might be interested in Stendhal and Dostoyevsky, his favourite authors. Vitantonio thanked him with a smile and Ricciardi pulled another surprise out of his satchel, a recently published issue of a literary magazine. ‘It’s the first part of The Red Carnation, by Elio Vittorini,’ the doctor announced dramatically, reading the title off the cover. He winked at Vitantonio and hid the magazine under a pillow.

  The word around town was that Gabriele Ricciardi was not a big supporter of the fascists and that any day now they might deport him. But that would never happen because the wealthy old families of Bellorotondo didn’t want to lose their doctor, so they encouraged the local authorities to turn a blind eye to his impertinent, but harmless, comments.

  His visit lasted only two minutes. Just enough time for him to give Vitantonio the books and ask him to cough a couple of times. The young man heard him walk downstairs and he wondered if he was headed to the kitchen to talk to Zia. At first she had been alarmed by the rattling in his chest when he breathed, reminding her of Francesca’s illness, but the doctor had convinced her that pneumonia was nothing like tuberculosis, and Vitantonio just needed warm compresses, a lot of eucalyptus-oil inhalations, fluids and plenty of rest. Hearing his motorcycle start off down the Via Cavour, Vitantonio knew that Ricciardi had left. He was sorry that it had been such a short visit; he was convinced that on the days when the doctor stayed to chat for a while in the kitchen, Zia was always in a better mood.

  No one knew how Dr Ricciardi had got his bike to Bellorotondo. He was popular among the children in town, who liked to admire his motorcycle and his clothes: a leather jacket, and an airman’s goggles and cap from the time of the Great War. When the sound of the doctor’s bike faded as he left town, Vitantonio closed his eyes and listened to the silence, which was only occasionally broken by the children playing in the square. He heard a dog barking in the distance, perhaps on the avenue that led to the cemetery, and donkeys braying in gardens in the lower part of town. Then he heard the neighbours’ water wheel being set in motion to draw water from their cistern. He took the Elio Vittorini story out from under his pillow and tried to read it, but the memory of Giovanna in the doorway in her red and blue flowery dress with cherries hanging from her ear was too distracting. He put the magazine in the drawer of his bedside table and dozed off, trying to figure out what it was that was so different now about his sister.

  During the summer holidays, Vitantonio liked to work at the family factory. The Convertinis called it the ‘factory’ or the ‘warehouse’, but in town it was referred to as the ‘sawmill’ or, simply, the ‘mill’. Vitantonio was used to stopping by to say hello to his nonna in the office. He also liked to see Skinny Vicino, the thin, wiry worker who used to deliver oil and vegetables to their house on the Piazza Sant’Anna; since that summer at the Palmisano farmstead he’d thought of him as an uncle.

  As a boy, if they’d let him wander around, he would run to the back of the warehouse and climb up the piles of planks. The adults let him do it, trying not to think about how in Signor Antonio’s time a poorly stacked pile had collapsed and killed two men. In the factory, Vitantonio also hunted for bits of wood to make swords with; Skinny would cut some long pieces to a point to make the blades, and some shorter ones that he then stuck together in the shape of a cross, for the hilts. The first time he brought a wooden sword to the palazzo, Franco wanted one too and from that day on his cousin always went with him to the factory.

  When he was strong enough to wield a shovel, Vitantonio would help load the sacks of sawdust, which had to be kept wide open to get the entire shovelful inside. It wasn’t a difficult job because the sawdust didn’t weigh much and he could easily lift huge amounts. And as he grew older, he would go to the factory to help do the inventory of the increasingly large fir shipments they imported from the Volga sawmills by boat, which they unloaded at the port of Taranto then to share with other timber importers throughout southern Italy.

  Vitantonio wasn’t afraid of hard work, such as loading trucks with wood chips or manoeuvring the tree trunks through the saws. Hauling plan
ks, however, was not his cup of tea. He could never find the right balance on his shoulder as he walked, and the planks scraped his skin raw, causing a very painful wound. Skinny, on the other hand, lanky as he was, could carry four or five planks at once, holding them in place with just one finger as he walked.

  By the last week of May, Vitantonio was over his pneumonia, and he showed up at the factory ready to work until his return to Bari for his end-of-term exams. On his last day at the factory, as he was unloading chestnut from the Gargano groves off a truck and piling it up in a shed, Vitantonio surprised Skinny with a question. ‘What was my father like? Was he brave?’

  ‘He was certainly brave,’ Skinny said after a pause during which he collected himself. ‘And bold. Everyone in the company admired his courage. And we respected him too because with Lady Angela’s money he could have got out of going to war and he didn’t. Of course, he was my bosses’ son and I was careful to keep a respectful distance, and because of that there isn’t much more I can tell you.’

  He looked into the boy’s eyes and saw in them a need to know more. He was fond of him and regretted not being able to satisfy his curiosity.

  ‘I spent more time with Palmisano, your father’s friend, since we came from a similar background. Shortly before the war we both joined the Confederazione Generale del Lavoro, and whenever we read union pamphlets your father would poke fun at us, saying, “You changed your church when you became socialists, but you keep reading the catechism like all the women in town.”’

  They laughed as Skinny recalled the silly things that Antonio Convertini and Vito Oronzo Palmisano had shared before dying, one right next to the other on the front, on the last day of the Great War. It was sticky and hot and Vitantonio undid a couple of buttons on his shirt, revealing a birthmark. It was heart-shaped and dark red, between his collarbone and his left shoulder. Skinny’s expression suddenly changed.

  ‘What’s wrong?’ the boy asked.

  ‘Nothing, I’m fine,’ he said, brushing it off. And he headed towards the factory exit, remembering the day Vito Oronzo Palmisano died in his arms after a night of feverish delusions.

  He had lied to Donata: the last Palmisano’s death hadn’t been quick and painless; he was still alive when he was rescued and died in agony. Skinny relived that night, 4 November 1918, remembering how his fellow soldiers were celebrating the ceasefire while he was cleaning Vito’s wound. And in his mind’s eye he again saw that perfect heart on Vito Oronzo Palmisano’s left clavicle, as his friend begged him, ‘If I don’t make it, tell Donata that I died instantly.’

  Franco, however, was jealous of Skinny’s skill at his job and was always looking for a way to provoke him. One day, when they had loaded an army truck with wood chips, Vitantonio caught his cousin screaming at Skinny, who couldn’t understand what he had done to deserve such a rude dressing-down from his boss’s son. On a break, while resting on a pile of wood, Skinny had lit a cigarette and explained to one of his co-workers why he didn’t share Mussolini’s imperialist vision: he’d had enough with the disastrous Great War, which he’d seen from the front line. Overhearing him, Franco decided to use it against him.

  He went into the office, upset, and he demanded of his father Angelo, ‘You have to fire Skinny Vicino!’

  ‘Leave him be!’ interjected Vitantonio, who had tried in vain to calm his cousin down. ‘Skinny hasn’t done anything wrong.’

  ‘He’s a unionist!’

  ‘He’s a worker! Probably the best one we have.’

  ‘Vitantonio is right,’ said Angelo, refusing to side with his son. ‘He’s the best worker at the factory and he’s devoted to the Convertini family. He would give his life for your grandmother.’

  Then he looked at Vitantonio and, with a jeer, proceeded to contradict his nephew as well.

  ‘But Franco is right – we can’t let anything compromise our loyalty to Mussolini, so Skinny will have to leave the factory until we send for him again. A couple of months without pay should make him rethink things, as well as setting an example to the others. Anyway, we don’t have much work right now; when we need to unload a shipment of fir at Taranto, we’ll have him back.’

  ‘He can’t be out of work for two months. What will he live on?’

  ‘He should have thought of that,’ interjected Franco.

  ‘Franco’s right about that, too,’ Angelo said to his nephew Vitantonio, making it abundantly clear that it was the end of the discussion.

  Father Felice

  ON THE FEAST of Corpus Christi at the end of May, Nonna summoned Donata and the children to the palazzo. The cook opened the door for them and quickly explained to them what was going on: Father Felice, Lady Angela’s brother, had suffered a stroke. They found the family gathered in the sitting room, with the lights very low. They looked for their grandmother, but she wasn’t there. The rector of the Immacolata, Father Constanzo, was leading the rosary. He nodded discreetly to them and continued reciting.

  ‘Stella matutina.’

  ‘Ora pro nobis.’

  ‘Salus infirmorum.’

  ‘Ora pro nobis.’

  ‘Refugium peccatorum.’

  ‘Ora pro nobis.’

  Donata sat in an armchair, beneath the two paintings of white and red flowers that presided over the room. Vitantonio looked at his uncles and cousins, who were reciting by rote but seemed far away from the sitting room, and he remained standing, with his hands on the back of his zia’s chair. The litanies were the part of the rosary he had the most patience for; he found their musical rhythm calming. He recited them with conviction, in the hope that the prayers would help his godfather recover.

  ‘Regina Angelorum.’

  ‘Ora pro nobis.’

  ‘Regina Patriarcharum.’

  ‘Ora pro nobis.’

  ‘Regina Prophetarum.’

  ‘Ora pro nobis …’

  Nonna entered the sitting room and whispered something to Zia, who got up from her chair and gestured for the twins to follow her upstairs. They went straight to Father Felice’s bedroom. Seated at the door was a nun, who was also reciting the rosary and who didn’t look up at them. Dr Ricciardi was inside with another doctor, whom they didn’t know because he’d come up from Bari.

  When they approached the bed, Father Felice didn’t move. His eyes were open, but he wasn’t looking at them. He didn’t say a word.

  ‘Give him a kiss,’ requested their grandmother.

  Giovanna moved closer and kissed him on the forehead. Then Vitantonio kissed him on the cheek; the priest hadn’t shaved and his cheek was scratchy. Before moving away from the bedside Vitantonio whispered, ‘Get well. When you’re better we’ll go up to the Maggio festival in Accettura,’ even though he knew he couldn’t hear him.

  ‘Pray for him,’ insisted Nonna as they were leaving the room.

  That morning, as Father Felice had been heading to the San Sabino cathedral in Bari to celebrate the twelve o’clock mass with the bishop and assist him with the confirmation ceremonies, he had collapsed, and the stroke had left one side of his body paralysed. When the seminary had called to let Angela know, she had gone straight to Bari and insisted she wanted to take him home with her.

  Father Felice didn’t recover in time to go up to Accettura for the Maggio festival, which he’d been promising to take the children to for years. Nor was he ever again able to make a trip like that, nor resume his music lessons. It was six months before he could even walk again, and in the months after the stroke he spent much more time in Bellorotondo than in the seminary in Bari.

  Father Felice was a simple man, who lived in his own world. Had he been a peasant farmer they would have said he was a poor man, but since he was the Lady’s brother they all called him a good man. He was such an innocent soul that everyone assumed he couldn’t be happier, and that if anyone mentioned the poverty in Puglia or the horrors of fascism, he wouldn’t have had any knowledge of them. In truth, he would have been unable to distinguish which of his p
arishioners were in his social class and which were dirt poor. He definitely was not of this world.

  He had moved to Puglia from his native Venice, following in his sister’s footsteps, and he had adapted without difficulty, despite all his relatives’ pessimistic murmurings. At the Bari seminary, they entrusted him with the music classes and he also taught private piano lessons. Whenever he could, he liked to take his students up to the mountains hiking, and during the holidays he would make himself at home at the Convertini palazzo.

  Angela adored him and refused to let anyone make fun of him. Not even when he burped at the dinner table and apologized with a smile. The children were also very fond of him; he would teach them songs, take them on long walks and he never scolded them. Angelo and the four evangelists, on the other hand, would laugh openly at him, as they had learned to do from their father, Signor Antonio, who had never missed a chance to mock his brother-in-law. Signor Antonio was a rural landowner with a hard heart, who simply found Father Felice too much of a nice chap.

  Cockfight

  AT THE BOYS’ boarding school in Bari there were two cocks ruling the farmyard: Vitantonio and Giocavazzo. They were the strongest, bravest and most independent, and they competed for the other students’ admiration. The other pupils were chicks and hens, who divided themselves into two opposing groups according to the staunchly adversarial plans of their two leaders.

  Very few students didn’t fall into one of the two factions, just the loners, who did their own thing: Argese, whom no one wanted on their side because he had a limp, and Sante Miccoli, who was horribly homesick and wandered around like a lost soul. Such loners made up a very small, peculiar group who had a terrible time of it, because, naturally, those who didn’t belong to either gang were always picked on. Especially Miccoli, who was considered a sissy and awakened the others’ bullying instincts. Vitantonio protected him from a distance and couldn’t stand it when the others took advantage of him. The boy’s green eyes reminded him of Giovanna’s.