The Last Son’s Secret

by Rafel Nadal Farreras

  ‘You’ve grown up, Vitantonio, and you must miss having a father figure. There are things he probably would have talked to you about and perhaps the time has come for someone else in the family to discuss them with you. How’s your luck with girls?’

  Vitantonio couldn’t hide his shock. He didn’t know whether he should confess that he’d visited a bordello on the outskirts of Bellorotondo a few times with Salvatore. He stammered, hoping to buy himself some time in which to work out where his uncle was headed; he decided it was more prudent to act the innocent.

  ‘Well, Uncle … You see …’

  ‘I see that you’ve never been with a woman. Perhaps it’s time I introduced you to someone; I’ll give you an address and you can tell them I sent you. But don’t mention it to your cousin; there are some things better not shared between father and son.’

  Was his uncle inviting him to a brothel? He couldn’t believe it. His mind was spinning and he had a sudden flash of inspiration.

  ‘I really appreciate it, Uncle, but I could never do that in Bellorotondo. I wouldn’t want my zia to find out – she wouldn’t like it at all.’

  ‘Well, you have to start somewhere … Is there some place you would feel more comfortable?’

  ‘Maybe in Bari. There is a place behind the Corso Vittorio Emmanuele that seems to be very discreet, especially if you enter through the Gentlemen’s Cultural Circle garden …’

  If he was surprised, Angelo didn’t let it show. He just nodded and two days later Vitantonio went with his uncle to the Gentlemen’s Cultural Circle.

  ‘This boy is a good student and he’s earned this show of confidence. I’ve made him a member of the Circle and advised him to come occasionally and study here in the library,’ announced Angelo to his card-playing companions. ‘That way he can listen in to our conversations and complete his education.’

  Vitantonio had a look around the library shelves and after a little while he went discreetly out into the garden. When he went through the small gate that joined the two courtyards, on his way to a rendezvous with Isabella Dardicce at his uncle’s expense, he turned towards the second floor of the neighbouring house and waved to the seamstress’s son who was spying on him from the work-room window.

  The next day the whole school had heard about it. When Vitantonio went out into the schoolyard, after his first two morning classes, he was received with applause and many envious looks.

  When Uncle Angelo said that he was going to the city, no one knew if he meant Bari, Brindisi or Taranto. He would have business lunches, or spend some time at the Circle or attend a political meeting, but no one ever asked about it or went with him, so they didn’t really know what he did there – until Vitantonio saw him walking through the garden of the Circle. That day marked the start of his uncle’s unexpected interest in him, as he desperately searched for a good influence on his son Franco, who had inexplicably first gone off to Rome to university and then had ended up in the civil war in Spain. Franco would be sure to come back to Bellorotondo at some point.

  Since the incident, whenever he went to Bari on business, Angelo would take Vitantonio with him and they’d go to the best restaurants. The priests were happy for Angelo to take Vitantonio out, because they considered that strong relationships between different generations of men in a family were most advantageous for the future heads of the region’s industry. Sometimes, Angelo also took his nephew with him to visit clients and representatives from foreign timber companies.

  Vitantonio, on the other hand, was wary. They had never got on particularly well. At the offices of Convertini Timber, Uncle Angelo knew how to maintain the discipline that Nonna had introduced, but he was capricious and fickle in his decision-making. And he was particularly arbitrary in his treatment of the workers, unlike Lady Angela, who may have kept them at a distance but took good care of them, considering them the factory’s most valuable asset.

  On their trips to the city over several months, Angelo got so used to Vitantonio’s presence that one day he asked him to accompany him to the doctor. As they left, he seemed confused: the nurse had given him a packet of powder to dissolve in water and take before going to the radiologist for a stomach X-ray. Despite playing the role of the demanding despot at the sawmill, Angelo was useless at making decisions outside the office, no matter how small. His uncle didn’t know how to take the powder and he said to Vitantonio, ‘Let’s go to the Albergo delle Nazioni.’

  Twenty minutes later they were seated in the dining room of Bari’s finest restaurant, which was completely empty at that time of day. A waiter wearing white gloves brought over a silver pitcher of water and dissolved in it the contents of the packet Angelo gave him. Then he served him the liquid in a glass, which he refilled three times, until Angelo had finished the entire dose prescribed by the specialist.

  The X-ray didn’t reveal anything serious and to celebrate, a few days later, Uncle Angelo took Vitantonio back to the Albergo delle Nazioni. This time they went at lunchtime and, halfway through the meal, he opened up to his nephew. Worried that Angelo was going to ask him again about his love life, Vitantonio was surprised when he began talking about Franco and the factory.

  ‘I want you to stop studying and start working at the factory. It’s the only way I’ve come up with to get Franco to want to work there. It’s high time he packed in running around with soldiers – he’s been in Spain for months. He should take his rightful place as the heir to Convertini Timber. You two get along and he feels safe with you. One day he’ll be the boss and then you’ll be his right-hand man, and with a good salary too.’

  His uncle picked up his cutlery with all the delicacy of the scion of a good family and turned his attention to his mouth-watering dish of partridge and cabbage. But when he put the fork in his mouth the table manners of the palazzo lunches vanished: he ate so quickly that he didn’t have time to lift his elbows from the table, all the while chewing ferociously. Vitantonio found him unpleasant. He plucked up his courage and replied, ‘But … I want to study law. I want to defend the farmers of Puglia.’

  ‘Law? Defend the farmers? Are you crazy? What kind of a job is that?’

  ‘The kind I want to have. I’d like to help the small farmers achieve better conditions and defend themselves from the abuses of absentee landlords who just wash their hands of any problems.’

  ‘I won’t hear of it! You are a Convertini and you can’t turn your back on the family business, or work for some poor wretch who’ll never amount to anything.’

  ‘I’ve made up my mind, I’m not giving up my studies. Franco is old enough to run the mill himself and he’s more capable than you think. If you’d paid more attention to him, and showed him that you were proud of him, he wouldn’t have felt he had to volunteer in Spain.’

  Since Salvatore had been attacked, Vitantonio had become more sure of himself; he’d lost his innocence but even he was surprised at his own words. He lifted his head and openly challenged his uncle with a glare. In his anger, his uncle had puffed himself up like a boar: his cheeks were round and pink, and his double chin hung down so far that it looked as if he had no neck; his eyes and mouth were ridiculously small in the middle of his bloated face.

  ‘You will make a lot of money at the factory—’ Angelo huffed, trying to redirect the course of the conversation.

  ‘You can keep it!’ replied Vitantonio, cutting him off.

  Uncle Angelo seemed daunted. He made a strange face and his right eye began to twitch. He had never been spoken to with such insolence. And much less from a nineteen-year-old kid. But he needed to convince Vitantonio, so he pretended he wasn’t offended.

  ‘Being the right-hand man to the owner of Convertini Timber is no joke. In time you can make your own investments and you will build up your own fortune. One day you’ll have family obligations of your own and you’ll have to be up to the job. You have to learn the business quickly and when Franco comes back from the war in Spain you’ll train him and teach him everything you�
�ve learned.’

  ‘Nonna and Zia want me to finish my studies, too. I’ve made up my mind to become a lawyer.’

  ‘They will do as I say. And you will too! Members of this family have to have more pride than that.’

  ‘And wouldn’t that same pride keep me from wanting to be just my cousin’s employee?’

  Southern Winds

  FOR TWO YEARS, a drought had plagued the land, and hot southern winds blew in from North Africa. Every morning, the Itria valley’s olive groves turned their leaves towards the ground, to conserve what little dampness they still had, and at dusk they looked back up towards the stars, begging for a few drops of dew. From the large terrace in Bellorotondo, it was an extraordinary sight: in the midday sun, the leaves appeared to be almost silvered, glimmering like the Adriatic Sea. Yet, up close, they were a leaden green. The olive trees were shedding their flowers from lack of water and the farmers knew that the harvest would be meagre for the second year running. Their nerves were frayed, fully aware that any stray spark could set off a tragedy.

  Such sticky heat also affected everyone’s mood at the palazzo. Every morning Nonna went out on the terrace and surveyed the horizon, searching for a change in the weather that failed to materialize. The water in the tanks had come out murky all spring long and finally, one day in June, it dried up altogether. Lady Angela considered it a disgrace and, from then on, she had the garden and the square swept continuously, in the hope that when the storms finally arrived, not a single drop of water would be lost. Every morning she went up to the terrace, clutching the balustrade with tense hands, and from her privileged position, directed the maids and made sure that the channels were well cleaned. When she retired to her room, the terrace floor was scattered with dried flowers that Lady Angela had compulsively, unthinkingly, pulled off the wisteria; they too were suffering from lack of water.

  At midday, she went out into the garden, through the kitchen door, looking for even the faintest of breezes to ease the oppressive heat. On one of the hotter mornings they had emptied the fish pond to save water. The next day, when Lady Angela found it filled with dry leaves and instinctively pumped the iron handle, the tap emitted a hoarse metallic sound, like an animal’s cry. Frightened, Nonna beat a hasty retreat to the terrace.

  When she reached the azaleas she let out a shriek that echoed through the narrow, twisting streets of the old quarter: the ‘Queen of Bellorotondo’ had begun to lose its flowers and even its leaves were turning yellow. Her most prized azalea had a withered, sickly look and she allowed herself a few private moments of worrying that this damn drought would be the death of it, before the servants responded to her cry. The cook and the maid ran out of the house in a terrible state, and found their mistress standing stock-still in front of the azaleas. With her arms in the air and her fists tightly clenched, the Lady of Bellorotondo looked up towards the heavens and defied her creator. ‘What have I done to deserve this? What is my crime?’ she cried. ‘Am I guilty of circumventing every obstacle in order to grow the freshest flowers for Your churches? Was it a sin of pride to refuse to accept the fate of this miserable region? Was it vanity to create a paradise here in the midst of this parched land? Must I give up like all those farmers You’ve left resigned and dispirited?’

  Seeing her trembling, the maids rushed to her side to make sure she didn’t collapse. She pushed them away and ordered, ‘Have them prepare the car. I’m going to the factory.’

  A few minutes later, she burst into Angelo’s office and demanded that he have the palazzo’s water tanks filled.

  ‘Bring water from the Bradano river or the spring in Torre Canne. If that’s not enough, have some brought from Abruzzo. Have the cisterns filled with water from the Po, if necessary, or from the very heart of the Alps. I don’t care how you do it, but I want them brimming. Tomorrow! Before my entire garden dies of thirst!’

  While the Lady of Bellorotondo argued with God and recriminated with Him for sentencing her azaleas to death, the farmers in the trulli were growing desperate as they watched their olive trees start to turn yellow and their flowers drop to the ground. They too anticipated a weak harvest, but they lacked a direct line to their creator, or enough familiarity to reproach him for their unfair punishment. Nor did they trust intermediaries such as Father Constanzo: for weeks, the rector of the Immacolata had been celebrating masses with the other priests in the valley and praying for rain, invoking every saint on the calendar. The men of Puglia just looked up at the sky in resignation and cursed their bad luck to be born in that parched part of the world.

  The next morning, when the water from the Bradano river reached the palazzo, Nonna drenched the garden. Meanwhile, on the other side of town, Donata and Giovanna were shelling fava beans in the kitchen of their house on the Piazza Sant’Anna. As they were pricking one side of the pods with a knife and dividing them in half to dry them, Dr Ricciardi came in wearing a serious expression, unable to conceal that he was the bearer of bad news.

  ‘Little Michele has killed himself.’

  The women cried out in distress. Donata brought her hands to her face. Giovanna dropped the knife, which fell on its point and stuck in the table. When she stood up, her face was distorted in agony.

  ‘What do you mean, he killed himself?’ she cried out. ‘You mean he’s dead? Little Michele? My Michele?’

  ‘It seems for weeks now they’d been hearing him cry all night long,’ Dr Ricciardi tried to explain. ‘Yesterday morning, when he went out with the sheep, he ran away and flung himself into the ravine. When they found him at the bottom, he was crushed against the dry riverbed, and there was nothing they could do to save him.’

  Giovanna felt a sudden stabbing pain and grabbed her belly with her hands; all at once, a thousand blades jabbed at her stomach, one after the other. She twisted in agony, and brought one hand up to her mouth as she began to vomit. Donata got up to support her forehead; Ricciardi wetted a rag and ran it over her face. They hugged her. She cried inconsolably and they cried with her.

  ‘I don’t understand how he managed to last over a year there. Didn’t they see that he was just a child and needed his mother? He was only six when they took him away, he didn’t even make it to eight. We should have stopped them!’

  Ricciardi acknowledged that she was right. ‘They treated him no better than a dog.’

  When they reached the Galassos’ trullo to give their condolences, the women were sobbing and shrieking over the body that had just been brought from Altamura. Giovanna didn’t dare go in; she stayed in one corner of the threshing floor, far from the local men, who sat looking at the ground in silence. Salvatore, standing in the centre of the group, addressed those shamefaced men with harsh words. He blamed them for the tragedy and condemned their fatalism, which had them all bowing their heads.

  The Galasso father seemed the most resigned of all. ‘We couldn’t do anything about it: poor Michele was born so tiny; he was always clinging to his mother’s skirt.’

  Inside the women screamed, more and more hysterically. Convinced their cries would end up scaring poor Michele’s soul, Giovanna decided to go inside. She stood over the little boy’s lifeless body and asked for his forgiveness. ‘I promised you that you would go far and you didn’t even make it to the age of eight.’

  She walked out to the threshing floor, grabbed Salvatore by the arm, pulled him away from the group and said to him, ‘I want to join the Party. Take me to a meeting. I’ll do whatever it takes, but from now on I want to devote myself to fighting the bastards who are destroying this land.’

  The Indiscretion

  DURING THE FIRST days of December 1938, Father Felice fell ill again, with one side of his body succumbing to paralysis once more. That Christmas, Donata and the twins moved in to the palazzo to help Nonna, who insisted on taking care of her brother in person. After the holiday, Zia returned home and Vitantonio went back to university in Bari; it was his first year studying law there. Giovanna, on the other hand, stayed on in Bell
orotondo a few more days to keep her grandmother company and help her out with her uncle, who was rapidly fading away. It seemed the end was near.

  Giovanna and her grandmother took pleasure in the closeness they’d always cultivated. After breakfast, Giovanna would settle into the conservatory and read, basking in the January sun that warmed the garden, which had been cleverly designed to face south. She covered the books in coloured paper to conceal the titles of the banned literature she’d brought from Bari. She wanted to put off the moment when her grandmother would discover that she was no longer reading D’Annunzio, but rather Baudelaire, Pavese and other authors that could land her in trouble. At midday, she would head out for a walk and go over to the house in the Piazza Sant’Anna for lunch with her zia. She was back at the palazzo soon after, reading again while her nonna visited friends.

  When it started to grow dark, they both retired to the office and dealt with the letters that had come for Father Felice; since the news of his relapse had spread, he received many. Giovanna would read the longer ones out loud to him, because her grandmother’s sight was failing. And then Nonna would dictate the answers to her granddaughter, because her own hand was too shaky to write as elegantly as she felt was proper.

  On the Feast of Epiphany, 6 January, Father Felice died. The two women were swamped by messages of condolence: there were parishioners from his former churches who wrote only a few lines in a card, but family friends sent very long letters, as did his old students from the seminary, and it took them two weeks to answer them all.

  Seated in the palazzo’s office, Giovanna and Nonna shared those intense but gratifying hours of work. Until the afternoon, when they had finished replying to almost all of the letters, that an oversight on the part of her grandmother threw Giovanna’s whole world off balance. That day, when Giovanna returned from lunch with her zia, she found that Lady Angela had gone to the parish church. In the entryway she had left her a letter to copy out neatly, along with a note: