The Last Son’s Secret

by Rafel Nadal Farreras

  They had lit a campfire with the driftwood the storm had washed up on the beach and put the limpets in a pan with seawater to blanch them. Giovanna watched the three young men curiously: their tanned bodies were dusted white with dried salt from the water. She noticed that her brother had had a growth spurt over the last few months and that all his muscles were getting firmer. Then she looked at Salvatore, savouring him with her gaze. Skinny’s son put another pan on the fire and sautéed three garlic cloves and a chilli pepper. When they turned golden he tossed in four ripe tomatoes and half a cup of water to soften them up a little and then he let them simmer. After taking the pan off the flame he added finely chopped parsley. Giovanna came up behind him. ‘If you do all the housework this well, you’d make the perfect husband,’ she teased.

  Salvatore paid her no heed, caught up in his cooking. He strained the spaghetti his cousin had cooked separately, mixed in the sauce and the limpets, and put them over the fire again for just a few seconds. He stepped back a few paces, looked at the dish, tossed in a pinch of black pepper, then bowed and invited them to eat.

  ‘Will you have supper with us?’

  ‘No. We have to get going or we’ll be late for dinner and it’ll be hard to convince them to let us go out later,’ said Giovanna, stopping him in his tracks.

  She grabbed the fork, stabbed a limpet, curled some spaghetti strands around it and brought it all to her mouth. ‘Though we’d probably enjoy your meal more than the one waiting for us at home,’ she conceded as she left.

  As they started down the path, she suddenly stopped, asked Vitantonio to wait and turned back to the shelter. She walked straight over to Salvatore, who was just sticking his fork into his spaghetti. He looked up, surprised.

  Pouncing on him, she gave him a kiss on the mouth. ‘You’re still as ugly as your grandad’s dog, but all tanned like this, you’re worth a second look,’ she said. Then, laughing heartily, she left as quickly as she’d walked in.

  When she caught up with Vitantonio, she saw that he had filled up a jar with little land snails to use as bait when they went out fishing. The last storm clouds had disappeared. The sky was dazzling and there was no longer any trace of the morning cool. The heat was starting to bear down again, as if not a single drop of rain had fallen, and they hastened their pace.

  At the Cinema Comunale

  WHEN THE LIGHTS went out, Primo Carnera appeared at the doors to Madison Square Garden, amid the photographers’ popping flashes and surrounded by fans trying to leap over the journalists to touch him. The giant’s presence on the screen at the Cinema Comunale was greeted by a huge uproar. He wore a fedora, which floated above the other heads, because the Italian boxer was six foot six inches tall. The entire audience stood up and applauded the recently crowned heavyweight world champion.

  The titles for the newsreel suddenly came up, at the top of the screen, and scrolled downwards as a prelude to the change in scene. The new location thrilled the audience equally: the boxer reappeared on a Long Island beach, jabbing at a punchbag with his left fist. Every once in a while, when you least expected it, he switched arms for a right punch.

  ‘A right uppercut,’ explained Vitantonio to Giocavazzo, who was sitting beside him.

  Next, the boxer was skipping on the same beach, surrounded by girls in bathing suits, and the cinema crowd again erupted in cheers. They sat back down when the camera focused on his legs jumping to the rope’s rhythm before it made its way up to a close-up of his face, scarred by his matches and marked by very thick black eyebrows. Despite his rough air, he seemed like a good kid; Primo Carnera was the gentle giant.

  Soon the images showed him getting into the ring at Madison Square Garden, wearing a shiny silver silk robe. Vitantonio threw himself forward and exchanged a smile with Franco, who was sitting two seats away. Carnera was their idol and they howled like madmen when poor Jack Sharkey went down for the count in the sixth round and didn’t get back up again. The whole cinema was reliving 29 June 1933, the Feast of Sts Peter and Paul, when the hero of Mussolini’s Italy had won the gleaming belt that proclaimed him world champion.

  The film sped up. The fights flickered over the screen so quickly that the spectators could barely follow the events: a title announced a match a year later with America’s Max Baer, but they weren’t shown the footage of Carnera’s defeat, which Mussolini himself had censored. Next up was a very equal exchange with the American Joe Louis in June 1935, but the report still omitted the Italian boxer’s fall to the canvas at the end of the sixth round. It had been only three months since Carnera’s latest defeat, which Italy’s fascist leaders were trying to downplay, and Vitantonio expressed his firm conviction to Giocavazzo: ‘When he gets another chance, he’ll win back the world title. He’s the strongest.’

  The end of the newsreel repeated the images of the Italian boxer’s glory days. The cinema again burst into applause and calm didn’t return until Vittorio De Sica appeared on the screen, pedalling along with a charming smile, and the film What Scoundrels Men Are! began. The first few frames acted to tame the savage beasts at Bellorotondo’s Cinema Comunale. Vitantonio again leaned forward to give Franco a sign of approval, but he found him halfway to his feet and staring to one side of the theatre. Scanning the hall to see what had caught his cousin’s eye, three rows further on he saw that Salvatore had just put his arm around Giovanna’s shoulder.

  As they were leaving the Comunale, Franco berated him. ‘If she was my sister, I wouldn’t stand for that. His father is a communist and he probably is too.’

  ‘Don’t start with that again,’ said Vitantonio, frustrated. ‘Skinny Vicino is a good man and a good worker. They’d be lucky to have more like him at the factory.’

  Giovanna and Vitantonio had been at secondary school in Bari for six years now, she at the Istituto Margherita and he at the Liceo Classico Quinto Orazio Flacco, but their boarding schools were two different worlds and their paths rarely crossed in the city. They saw each other only at Christmas, Easter and special family occasions at the palazzo in Bellorotondo. But every time they did manage to meet up, they hugged each other tighter than ever. During this summer’s holidays, Giovanna had often been seen at the Cinema Comunale with Salvatore’s gang, all of them five or six years older than Vitantonio’s friends. The first time he saw Giovanna and Salvatore together he felt a very unpleasant stab of jealousy, but he soon shrugged the feeling off. If it had been someone other than Skinny’s son, he might not have been able to stand it; but, in fact, it was Franco who couldn’t bear seeing her with Salvatore.

  The Beating

  ONE AFTERNOON SEVERAL months later, Vitantonio saw Salvatore on the other side of the street and was about to cross over to greet him, when two men intercepted Skinny’s son. A third grabbed him from behind without warning, and put him in an armlock. Once Vitantonio had recovered from his initial shock, he ran to help Salvatore, but a car came to an abrupt stop and blocked his path. The assailants pushed Salvatore into the back. Were they arresting him? Both of the men were dressed in normal clothes and the car, a Fiat model he’d never seen before, didn’t look like it belonged to the secret police. Two of the men sat in the back, one on either side of Salvatore. The third man shot a threatening look over the bonnet at Vitantonio, who had frozen in the middle of the street, then he too jumped in and the car sped off.

  Vitantonio stood there for a little while longer, dazed. He kept running the scene over in his mind, searching for an explanation, but the only things he could think of were very dark indeed. Then he thought he caught sight of Franco, who looked as if he had been watching the scene from behind a carob tree on the other side of the street. He ran over to him, but by the time he reached the middle of the square, his cousin had vanished.

  Inside the car, Salvatore watched in terror as they left town and took the Alberobello road. He was struggling to stay calm; he still had no idea what was going on. The car turned off towards the clearing where the town’s rubbish was burned and screeched
to a halt. All four men got out and made him get out as well. Salvatore didn’t know any of them – they must have all been from out of town, maybe from Bari. When he registered that they hadn’t bothered to cover their faces, he figured that meant they had no fear of being identified later. In other words, he was a dead man. He was overcome by panic. Just then a punch broke his nose and for a moment everything went black. Another fist was rammed into his liver and his knees folded under him as if they were made of rubber. When he fell to the ground, he felt a foot stamping on his face and he thought his head was coming off his body.

  He lay on the ground and gasped desperately for breath, inhaling smoke from the burning rubbish deep into his lungs. He gagged and then shook violently. He took another series of kicks to the head and stomach and lost consciousness.

  When he came to, one of the men was peeing on his face and the others were laughing. It took him a while to grasp that he was still at the dump, but he fixed his gaze on the black, rotting teeth of one of the perpetrators, the biggest one. His teeth looked like the dark caves in the Sassi di Matera he’d seen the day he’d been to visit Giovanna and Vitantonio’s zia’s father. He swallowed piss and started to retch. When he tried to sit up so he could vomit, he found that neither his arms nor his legs were responding. The man whose mouth was filled with dark caves kicked him in the face and he lost consciousness again.

  The rubbish men found him the next morning. When Skinny and Vitantonio arrived, his hands were tied and his mouth was still filled with filth. The rubbish men hadn’t touched him because they were afraid he was dead. Skinny and Vitantonio took him home and called for Dr Ricciardi.

  Months later, the doctor would confess, ‘When I got to your father’s house and saw how badly you were breathing, I thought that your broken ribs had punctured your lungs. I didn’t think you’d last more than twenty-four hours.’

  ‘The role of all-powerful god suits you, Doctor. I like you better than the real one!’ laughed Salvatore.

  ‘God?’ he asked, confused.

  ‘Yeah. You’re God because you brought me back to life. And, by saving me, you’re taking life away from that bastard with the rotten teeth. Because I swear that when I find him, he’s a dead man.’

  That autumn of 1936, Franco went off to Rome to university and a year later surprised everyone when he left to fight for General Franco in Spain. The evening they all bade him farewell, Nonna confessed to Giovanna, ‘Wars are never good, not even for your poor cousin. He’s a coward and everyone knows it, but he’s trying to make a man of himself so he can be like Vitantonio; that’s why he wanted to go to Rome to study, and now he’s heading off to fight in Spain. I don’t know what he’ll do there, with the volunteers; I suppose he’ll cling to some captain and end up as his batman. Just so he doesn’t have to go anywhere near the front. I still don’t understand how Vitantonio stands him: your brother might be the only one who gets angry with him, but he always forgives him in the end.’

  The Gentlemen’s Circle

  THE GENTLEMEN’S CULTURAL Circle was a prestigious institution that, oblivious to the pompous adjective affixed to the building’s façade, promoted card playing and long talks over after-dinner coffee instead of ‘culture’. Its members were rural landowners and merchants; the card games were legendary, as were the discussions, which focused on the local economic situation and the difficulties the circle’s members had in finding amenable and loyal workers. On the other hand, its aficionados tended to avoid politics except to consider international conflicts, which naturally made them feel more cosmopolitan. The gentlemen were divided: some supported the Anti-Comintern Pact that Mussolini had recently signed with Nazi Germany, and others would have preferred to repair relations with England, but they all agreed on Il Duce’s expansionist plans for the south of France, the Mediterranean and, of course, east Africa.

  The conversations went on simultaneously in the salon and the library, which was used for reading only the newspapers. If a member ever approached the shelves to pull out a book it was to check a fact that could help him win an argument at stalemate. After lunch, the gentlemen separated off into two or three card games, which were played in closed rooms prepared especially for that purpose, particularly since the level of betting had been raised a notch when an old landowner had once thrown his farm into the pot.

  When the games were over, the men gathered again in the salon to discuss them with a glass of cognac in one hand and a large cigar in the other. Finally, some of them would slip off discreetly to the garden, which was very pleasant, particularly in the summertime. Two lime trees and an enormous laurel afforded wonderful shade, but it wasn’t so much the coolness that the members appreciated as the back gate that unobtrusively connected the courtyard with the neighbouring property. The other garden was smaller, more feminine, with miniature roses in pots and hydrangeas in the window boxes. The walls were covered in Virginia Creeper and in one corner there was a fountain where water gushed from a mermaid’s mouth into a pool filled with red and black fish.

  Later in the evening, after dinner, some of the gentlemen would quickly cross the two gardens and slip into the house of ‘La Bella’ Antonella, the attractive widow of a bankrupt fabric merchant, who ran the most famous brothel in the city. The main entrance was on a side street, but no one used it until the night was deepest black and the neighbours were fast asleep. If the girls only had the customers who came in through the street entrance, the widowed madam would have had to shut her establishment down; luckily, the Circle’s garden gave La Bella Antonella the best clientele in all of Puglia.

  Most of Vitantonio’s classmates at the boarding school in Bari had all their lessons at the Liceo Orazio Flacco. They slept, ate and studied at the religious institution, under the stern regime of the priests, but a number of them also took classes at the secondary school on the main road of Bari’s seafront, the Lungomare. There they were seated in alphabetical order, so Aurelio Cavalli shared a desk with Vitantonio.

  Cavalli was from Bari; in fact, his mother’s house was right next door to La Bella Antonella’s premises. His mother was a seamstress and from the house’s work room there was a wonderful view of the Circle’s garden and the smaller, secret one belonging to the brothel. The boy had good business instincts and soon saw that, when his mother went out to take clients’ measurements, he could make some money by charging his friends to spy on the whores from the window of his house.

  On their way from the boarding school to the school on the Lungomare, Vitantonio and his fellow pupils had no choice but to walk past Cavalli’s house, and they soon became his best customers. They would spy on the girls, who took their breaks in the garden, wearing only petticoats, and they would laugh watching them untangle and brush each other’s hair. When the lights behind the windows were turned on, the boys would all become tense, trying to glimpse the moment when the girls took off their clothes. The results were usually very meagre, but their imaginations made up for that and they became as aroused as if they were in the room with the whores, and might just reach out and touch them or gaze directly upon their nudity. Especially when it was Isabella Dardicce changing; she was the youngest of them all, and so sweet that she seemed to the boys a tasty fruit ripe for the plucking.

  The most active members of the sewing-room club soon discovered a new source of entertainment: from the same window they could keep track of the comings and goings and then they would laugh about their schoolmates whose fathers were among the brothel’s regular clients. One day, as they were surveying the customers, Vitantonio was surprised to see his uncle Angelo emerge from the Circle, walk through the garden gate and greet the girls very familiarly.

  ‘Bloody hell, my uncle Angelo!’ slipped out of his mouth.

  Pasquale Raguseo was beside him, watching the scene. He was the son of one of the few farming families in the Itria valley whose vineyards had prospered. Pasquale quickly stuck his head out of the sewing-room window and shouted, ‘Uncle Angelo! Vitantonio’s
uncle Angelo!’

  Vitantonio crouched down, horribly embarrassed.

  ‘How could you! Now he’ll know I was spying on him.’

  The incident had immediate consequences, the very first of which occurred the next day when Cavalli’s mother received a visit from the president of the Gentlemen’s Circle, who urged her to be discreet if she wished to maintain her reputation and job.

  ‘A seamstress who is invited into all the city’s best homes must never look or listen. And in any case she’s sworn to professional secrecy, like a priest,’ he threatened the poor woman, who cried and promised, over and over, that it wouldn’t happen again.

  That same day, her son, much to his dismay, had to close up his business.

  The second consequence revealed itself the following Sunday at the palazzo. After lunch Uncle Angelo got up from the table, put his arm around Vitantonio’s shoulder and invited him to smoke a cigar with him in his office.

  Vitantonio thought he was dead. He had never been fond of his uncle and he imagined the feeling was mutual. They sat down, face to face, and Angelo lit his cigar. The boy started sweating profusely, wondering how long this display of friendliness would last, and at what point it would give way to angry recriminations. But these never came. Instead, his uncle offered him a glass of the cognac that had been a gift from his French timber suppliers. Then he began to speak to Vitantonio in a persuasive tone.