The Last Son’s Secret

by Rafel Nadal Farreras

  For three years, no one heard anything from the young man. He lived between the cave and some shepherds’ huts in the Alta Murgia, the region of Mediterranean evergreens and thickets that gave him shelter when he took the animals out to graze with his neighbours in the Sassi. It was his way of thanking them for their hospitality and for the pact of silence they had taken on to protect him from prying eyes. In three long years, Vitantonio only went against prudence the once, when he slipped down in secret to visit Bellorotondo.

  Bells for the Dead

  ONE EVENING AS the sun was setting, Skinny appeared at the cave with the news that Vitantonio’s nonna was fading fast and that, according to Dr Ricciardi, it was only a matter of hours before she died. They left immediately and walked all night long and through the next day, keeping to forest trails that were frequented only by boars and the most experienced woodcutters. By mid-afternoon, just as they were reaching Bellorotondo, the news of her passing found them in a patch of holm oaks where they stopped to rest; Signora Galasso, Michele’s mother, was waiting there to confirm that the Lady had died earlier that day. Later, while Vitantonio lingered by the holm oaks until nightfall before entering the town, he heard the bells ringing out for her death and he knew that his nonna was gone for ever.

  Six months earlier, the Lady of Bellorotondo had fallen ill with rheumatic fever that affected her badly and left her with a weak heart. She grew tired just walking through the rooms of the palazzo. The slightest effort left her short of breath and when she took to her bed her breathing only worsened and she had to sit up to recover. Her condition deteriorated further as time went on. Her ankles swelled up and she grew worryingly thin, but she wouldn’t allow the heart and lung specialist from the regional capital to treat her. To everyone’s surprise, she called instead for Dr Ricciardi, whose political ideas she had always been wary of, and asked him for a diagnosis.

  ‘My doctor wants to send me to Bari for a bloodletting he says will revive me, but I refuse to be pressured in any way. I won’t put myself in the hands of some inept medical students practising on the poor patients at the local hospital. I won’t leave my home. You agree, don’t you, doctor?’

  Ricciardi held Lady Angela in high regard, but he had never been scared of her. In fact, he had enjoyed some of the particularly intense arguments over Italian politics they’d engaged in in the past, where they’d aired their diametrically opposed views.

  ‘It’s not a question of whether you are better off being treated here or there, Lady Angela, but your illness requires an urgent intervention. I would never order you to have bloodletting, but maybe you should order it yourself.’

  Without any further complaints, Angela placed herself entirely in the doctor’s hands and followed the treatment he prescribed to the letter. He didn’t force anything on her, he merely reminded her that it was the same treatment followed by patients in the best families of the great European capitals. Unwilling to be felled by some common disease, the Lady of Bellorotondo patiently allowed her doctor in Bari to perform the bloodlettings, always with Dr Ricciardi overseeing the procedure from a distance, and she began to improve rapidly.

  She spent her daytime hours in the conservatory, from the first light of dawn to sunset, and sometimes she even stayed there once it was dark, because when she was lying in bed, she felt she couldn’t breathe. Sitting in an armchair, facing the garden, she found comfort in the quiet contemplation of the small changes in the plants, and in Donata’s visits each afternoon. When Angela was alone, she talked to herself and conducted long discussions with God, accusing him of having abandoned her in that palazzo that was falling to pieces around her and filled her with such nostalgia. She missed Giovanna, her favourite granddaughter, who was still far from Italy and gave no sign of wanting to return, and she also missed Vitantonio, whom she had ended up loving more than her own grandsons.

  Her spirits revived slowly, but still she never left the house. She continued to spend her days warming herself in the sun in the conservatory. Sitting in that armchair, facing the bare autumn trees, she received the news of her sons Marco and Giovanni’s deaths on the Russian front, in the siege of Stalingrad, and she couldn’t bear it: suddenly tired of living, she stopped her treatment. She had always judged her sons harshly; she found them pretentious and lacking in personality, but she wasn’t sure that it was entirely their fault. The Convertini family had been too demanding of its young, who were never able to meet their elders’ expectations. As children, their father barely listened to them; he let them speak but, preoccupied with business matters, paid them little attention. Eventually they grew used to his indifference and accepted their insignificant role: they could have been prepared better for expanding the family empire, but it was enough for them to marry well and exploit the poor peasant farmers on the lands they’d inherited in their own right or later acquired through their brother Antonio’s death. None of them showed any remorse for having accepted those assets in exchange for agreeing to Francesca’s whim of leaving Vitantonio and Giovanna in the charge of a poor peasant woman from Matera. They’d found her decision eccentric, but it had suited them just fine.

  For Angela, Antonio had been different. The eldest Convertini boy had always grown up in her shadow, and as a mother she was very demanding, but she also favoured him from a very young age – until Antonio decided to volunteer for the war and she stopped speaking to him. Angela Convertini regretted it for the rest of her days; she was sorry she’d wasted the last four years of her eldest son’s life, the only one of her children who’d really mattered to her. That had been more than twenty years ago but she hadn’t recovered and now she didn’t have the strength to face her other sons’ deaths. Perhaps she hadn’t loved them as much as Antonio, but they were hers and she couldn’t bear the thought of them freezing to death at the other end of Europe. It brought her immense pain.

  She also couldn’t get over the deaths of her grandsons. In just the first two years of war five had died: one in the invasion of the French Alps; another in the siege of the port of Tobruk, in North Africa; two more near Ioannina, in northern Greece; and the last one aboard the Bartolomeo Colleoni, a warship sunk by an Australian cruiser and British destroyers as it was providing cover for the German landing on north-eastern Crete. The incompetence of the top brass played a part in all these disasters. Princes, counts and marquises with no military merit shared command of the troops with the fascist leaders, promoted thanks to their lack of scruples. Most of them had as much personal ambition as they had disdain for the lives of their men: they had been promised an easy victory and now fronts were collapsing and filling up with dead bodies.

  When in late 1942 she received word of her sons Marco and Giovanni’s deaths in Russia, Angela decided that she had lived through enough. She allowed herself a few weeks to implore divine providence to grant her the opportunity to say goodbye to Giovanna and ask for her forgiveness, but her favourite granddaughter was nowhere to be found; when she convinced herself that no miracle was forthcoming, she stopped fighting. Her breathing grew weaker and her face grew pale. The Lady began to fade like a lantern on its last few drops of oil. Two months later, on 23 February 1943, she died.

  Approaching Bellorotondo from the south, the cemetery is at the far end of town. A whitewashed stone wall encircles the whole graveyard and also divides off the rows of more modest graves from the monumental mausoleums of the county’s important families. From a distance, amid the wild shrub oak, all that can be seen is the main gate and the dome of the funeral chapel, surrounded by a group of cypress trees as tall as the ones on the avenue that leads to town. Vitantonio jumped over the wall and searched for a hiding place with a good view of the Convertini mausoleum. He waited for the burial, kneeling on the ground of the Raguseo crypt, convinced that that family’s ancestors would forgive his intrusion, because he was a good friend of their grandson Pasquale.

  When the time came, he was surprised to see a huge procession, with so many women, accompanying t
he coffin. Everyone who wasn’t away at the war had atttended the funeral at the Immacolata and now they filed into the cemetery to bid the Lady of Bellorotondo farewell. From his hiding place, between the Curri and Pentasuglia family graves, Vitantonio saw the upright figures and serious faces of the mourners slowly making their way over the ground sown with crosses of every size. He wondered if any of those present actually loved his grandmother, and the only answer he came up with was that surely some of them respected her, but that most feared her, even in death. That was why they were at the burial. Angelo and Matteo, the two uncles who had avoided being called up, presided over the mourning, and Cousin Franco was also there, strutting proudly with the unmistakable demeanour of a member of the secret police.

  Vitantonio couldn’t help but shed a tear when he saw his zia enter the graveyard, walking behind the coffin, beside his aunts from Bari and Otranto. He could also make out Aunt Margherita, who had come down from Venice with her eldest daughter. He was surprised not to see Aunt Margherita’s other daughter there and he searched for her in vain: no one had told him that his little cousin had just buried her husband, who had been killed on the island of Cephalonia in an ambush by Greek guerrilla fighters, and she hadn’t had it in her to make the trip for yet another funeral. Among the few men in the procession he recognized Dr Ricciardi as well as Fini and his son, who was now the head of the lawyer’s office and had been exempted from the call-up because he claimed he was asthmatic, although no doctor had ever confirmed that. At the end of the funeral retinue he saw Skinny Vicino, accompanied by the other senior workers from the sawmill.

  He followed the burial as if he were watching a film, the live action intercut with distant memories: he relived his earliest holidays and all the flower wars with Giovanna; he recalled the Sunday lunches, the solemn masses at the Immacolata and the summers on the coast at Savelletri; he pictured his nonna writing in her office at the palazzo and he could again see her walking tall and proud through the streets of Bellorotondo on her way to the factory. He saw the characters that moved in the background, by the Convertini crypt, and he imagined them years earlier on the streets of the town, lowering their heads in deference whenever the Lady of Bellorotondo passed.

  He watched the crowd filing past his two surviving uncles to offer their condolences and he waited a little while longer, to make sure they had all left. Hidden among the remains of the Raguseos, he could hear snatches of the mourners’ conversations, and he desperately wanted to show himself and greet everyone, but he couldn’t take the risk. His world and the world of his former neighbours ran parallel, but could never meet; it felt like when, as a boy, he was ill and stuck at home and could hear the other children playing in the Piazza Sant’Anna. It had always been a strange feeling for him.

  The mourners started to head off down the avenue and Vitantonio passed the time by counting the cypress trees in his head. When they had all left, he took one last look at the Convertini mausoleum and he found it was right where imaginary lines projecting from the wings of the angel presiding over the Curri family met those emerging from the cherub’s trumpet on the tomb of the Pentasuglias. The entrance to the mausoleum was now almost buried under flowers, because the bouquets for his nonna had been added to the dried wreaths still remaining from his uncles Marco and Giovanni’s funerals. He concentrated and prayed for his father, Antonio, and mother, Francesca, as his zia had taught him when they had used to visit their graves on All Saints’ Day.

  When he was quite sure that there was no one left in the cemetery, he slipped out of the mausoleum and went over to the Palmisano tombs. He plucked a red winter rose from a lone bush and placed it by Vito Oronzo’s gravestone. As he was heading back to his hiding place to wait for night to fall, he ran into Ricciardi.

  ‘I knew I’d find you here.’

  With Lady Angela dead, the doctor was the only one left who knew Donata’s secret. Not a day had passed without him thinking of those dramatic hours at the Widows’ House; especially when he visited Vitantonio as a boy and saw that he had the same heart-shaped birthmark he’d also seen on Vito Oronzo Palmisano’s left collarbone, many years earlier, when he had just finished medical school and was beginning to practise in Bellorotondo.

  The first time he’d seen the red heart on Vitantonio’s collarbone, Ricciardi couldn’t believe his eyes. ‘I don’t understand … Birthmarks aren’t hereditary.’

  ‘Maybe it’s the mark of the curse,’ said Donata, crossing herself.

  As he now extended his hand to the young man, Ricciardi smiled to himself as he remembered Donata’s words.

  ‘I can’t give you any more books; I’m being sent away to Lipari,’ he said in greeting to Vitantonio. ‘Tomorrow they’ll drive me to Taranto and from there on to Reggio, Messina, Milazzo and the islands … If I were younger, I’d treat it as a sightseeing tour.’

  ‘I’m sorry to hear that, but I suppose it’s better to be sent into internal exile than to prison.’

  ‘I suppose I’ve also learned to look at it that way. Do you need anything? I can get it to you before I leave: books, medicine? They’re letting me take barely anything with me.’

  ‘Quinine?’ asked Vitantonio.

  When he returned to Matera, the quinine made him very popular for a few months, to the point that when he took the flocks out to graze on the Murgia plateau he had to change his hiding place often. In those days, in the mountains of Basilicata, whoever had quinine was god and became the object of pilgrimages that could end up attracting the attention of the military police.

  The Confession

  WHEN HE SAW his zia enter the shepherd’s hut, exhausted by the long walk, he hugged her, brought her a glass of water and waited for her to catch her breath. For days he had been rehearsing how to confess to her that he had decided to fight on the side of the Allies, against Mussolini. But seeing her so tired, he hesitated and asked instead about Giovanna.

  ‘Have you heard anything from Uannin?’

  Since hiding out in the caves, he had started to call his sister Ggiuànnin, in the dialect of the people of Matera, and he sometimes used the short form, Uannin. He’d now grown accustomed to speaking the language he’d heard growing up. In Bellorotondo, Zia used it only when she’d got angry with them as children or when she’d wanted to mark her territory in the face of one of Nonna’s attacks.

  ‘She’s still a nurse in the refugee camps in southern France, but she wrote a few days ago to tell us that she’s planning to return to Italy,’ answered Donata, with that hint of uneasiness she felt every time she spoke about Giovanna. ‘She says that very soon Italy will stand up to the fascists and that when that moment comes her place is here, with us, like Salvatore. Her letter arrived on Monday, but it was dated over a month ago, because what with the war the post is a disaster. Who knows, she may already be on her way and I’ll find her waiting for me when I get back to Bellorotondo.’

  Giovanna was coming home: that was the best news that Vitantonio could hope for; he had never liked the idea of his sister risking her life in German-occupied territory. She was protected by her Italian passport, but he knew that Giovanna was unable to control her hatred for the Nazis. Hiding his concern, he asked after Skinny’s son.

  ‘Salvatore is back in Italy?’

  ‘We just found out that he came back six months ago, but he was arrested as soon as he landed in Bari. No one has seen him since. We think he’s most likely being held somewhere in Puglia, in a jail under the control of the fascist party.’

  Standing there with Vitantonio, Donata wavered between contradictory emotions. She was worried about Giovanna, because she feared that she might meet the same fate as Salvatore. But at the same time she was very pleased to see that Vitantonio was becoming more rooted in his origins with each passing day. He had even started speaking the dialect, on his own initiative.

  Seeing her smile, Vitantonio decided that the time for his confession had come. He had been hiding in the Matera caves for three years now. Thre
e long years that had convinced him that his original choice to turn his back on the fascists had been the right one, and three long years that now convinced him he had to take sides: the misery suffered by the peasants of that region had made his decision clear. It was the summer of 1943 and the time had come to take up arms and show that he was not a coward. He had waited for that third Sunday in July impatiently, his mind made up to reveal his intentions to his zia. Despite his worries, his need to make a stand on the side of justice and freedom could be fulfilled without betraying his country. He was determined to fight with the Allies for an Italy free of Nazis and fascists.

  ‘Zia, I’ll be going to war soon,’ he said suddenly, taking the bull by the horns. ‘The Allies are about to land on the peninsula. In Matera we’re preparing a group of anti-fascists and internal exiles to help them when they arrive.’

  Donata didn’t say a word.

  She covered her face with her hands and began to sob. Vitantonio tried to console her, hugging her and trying to wipe away her tears.

  ‘You can’t—’ she finally managed to get out.

  ‘Nothing’s going to happen to me. We will fight against the fascists and the Germans that killed my father; we’ll soon drive them out of Italy. Hitler and Mussolini will be disgraced, the war will end, Ggiuànnin will come back home and before Christmas everything will be the way it once was.’

  ‘You can’t—’ Donata tried to reply, but again she didn’t finish her sentence. She was horrified to realize that the promise Vitantonio was making her was the same one her husband had made twenty-five years earlier. She began to tremble, her eyes unfocused, as she repeated, ‘No, no, no,’ and shook her head. Vitantonio calmed her, clicking his tongue softly by her ear, as if trying to lull her to sleep, but she only grew more agitated. Knowing that she wouldn’t be able to talk her son out of it, she started to tremble more violently.