by Bella Pollen
I had a godfather. Who didn’t? But neither he nor his wife looked remotely like Arthur Miller, and for my sixteenth birthday, instead of lessons in the art of seduction, I was presented with a five-pound book token from WHSmith, valid only in Glasgow.
My introduction to sex came via a godfather of a different kind. Our house on the island had a library of well-thumbed paperbacks, a selection of which invariably found its way to the loo during the course of the summer. When I spotted a copy of Mario Puzo’s crime masterpiece hidden between toilet bowl and flue, I was intrigued. The broken spine flopped open onto a torrid paragraph, which had Sonny, pants wrinkled around his ankles, pressing slutty maid of honour Lucy Mancini to the bedroom wall at his sister Connie’s wedding.
And, cheeks burning, I read it, over and over and again.
But if The Godfather was my portal to sex, I was already well versed in the ways of the Mafia. Our New York City apartment had been located in a predominantly Italian neighbourhood with a smattering of eclectic shops: the Old Brewery on Lexington, a place on Madison where you could buy delicate hand-painted kites, and right next door the narrowest space ever leased, in which an old Russian called Chernoff sold warm piroshki and cheap caviar. Children cannot live on kites and piroshki alone, so for everyday items there was always the corner store, a blessing for my siblings and me had it not been for the foul-mouthed owner, Mrs. Picardi, whose loathing of children put the Child Catcher to shame.
“Might I please have a Twinkie?” my brother would ask prettily.
“Jack of the harpsichord!” Mrs. Picardi muttered, slamming one on the counter.
“And some Cheez Doodles for me?” my sister might add.
“Mah! How even the lice cough loudly! Don’t you filthy donkeys have somewhere better to be?”
We hated and feared this she-devil, but every Thursday she would be cowed by a man in hat and overcoat, who entered the store and stood wordlessly at the till while Mrs. Picardi placed a brown envelope into his hand.
“Why does she act so scared?” I asked my father. “Who is he?”
“Mafia, I expect. She’s probably paying protection money.”
“What’s that?”
“He’ll hurt her if she doesn’t pay up.”
“Hurt like a smack?”
“No, no, more like toss her into the Hudson. Pull out her tongue perhaps.”
As a child I was troubled by nightmares. “Think happy thoughts,” was my mother’s sage advice, and the image that consistently worked for me was that of Mrs. Picardi roped to the shop’s countertop, wriggling helplessly while the man in the overcoat went to work in her mouth with a pair of pliers.
I can’t say for sure whether appreciation of organised crime was responsible for my marrying an Italian, but it surely helped. I was twenty-one by the time I met Giacomo, old enough to know better, too young to have a clue, and somehow running a small fashion company that I’d cobbled together with bits and pieces of borrowed know-how. Giacomo was an art dealer and a horse gambler, who’d been chased out of Italy by some bookies to whom he owed a frightening sum of money. He arrived in London, handle with care stamped all over him, and soon, the pale, tender bones of young girls were being spat out of his lair.
“Stay away,” warned those who thought they knew me, and after that it was only a question of time.
Giacomo burned intensity as though it were fuel. But if his smile was animal, his glower might have been developed in Sing Sing. He was the beautiful maths equation I couldn’t solve and the first boy who made me feel as though my romantic future was not to be an exercise in painting by numbers.
As a gambler he was not interested in the moneyed graveyard of the roulette table. I was proud that he backed spirit and courage and heart. My professional world was full of colour and texture, enticing scraps to touch and shape. The world he roamed was dirtier, edgier, and I found it exhilarating. With each new experience we shared, my own heart, formerly a neat contained thing, began to unfurl like a plant in the heat, and I dropped feverishly into love.
On a weekend visit home, my mother diagnosed the vomiting that accompanied this fever as morning sickness. A wedding was hastily pulled together. One setback, though: Giacomo was Catholic, raised Jewish, engaged to a knocked-up Protestant who was toying with atheism.
“Given your religious backgrounds,” the local priest advised, “the Catholic Church will require lengthy preparations before your union can be considered.”
“What you mean ‘lengthy’?” Giacomo challenged. There was no doubt that his delivery tended a little towards the aggressive.
“At least a year.”
I looked down at my burgeoning stomach and giggled.
“You!” Giacomo stabbed his finger at the priest. “Fuck off and quickly,” although naturally he said this in Italian. “We find another way.”
“There is only one other way.” The priest flatlined his mouth into a condescending smile. “Permission from the Pope himself.”
Giacomo rose slowly. “The Pope, you say?” His eyes drilled into the oily sheen of the man’s head. “In that case, my father will speak with him this afternoon.”
This much I knew about my prospective father-in-law. Gilberto Algranti was shaved near to bald and drove a duck-egg-blue Rolls-Royce. As a boy, having already lost his parents to the camps, he’d been dragged out of hiding and put on a train with fifty other children bound for Dachau. In a pre-arranged sting, an Italian guard unhooked their carriage and re-attached it to the rear of another train heading back into Rome, where the children were rescued and sheltered by volunteers all over the city. For the duration of the war, Gilberto was hidden deep in the basement of the Plaza Hotel, the very hotel in which we were now anxiously waiting to meet him.
The minute he swept through the lobby in his cashmere coat, I felt it—a magnetic charge so strong I could have sworn the chandelier crystals tinkled uneasily. Had I imagined it? No! Everything about Gilberto radiated power. As he approached, the now-ancient bellboy and bartender, formerly his protectors, began weeping openly. Gilberto embraced them, before finally turning to me.
“Eccola,” he rasped, sounding like an emphysemic prescribed a thousand cigarettes as a cure for laryngitis. He kissed me twice. “Ma che bella figura.”
I shifted from foot to foot like a pelican.
“No.” Gilberto pinched my cheek, a mark of affection that was to become a painful and oft-repeated habit. “The compliment is something every woman must learn to accept.”
Oh, how I wanted to be accepted by my father-in-law. It was as though every story I’d ever read had been in preparation for this relationship. I resolved to be the daughter he had never had, conveniently forgetting he already had three. I would be his consigliera, his trusted tenente. I alone understood the horrors he’d been subjected to—the murder of his parents, the destruction of his faith, the transcendental draft into the Israeli secret service. If anybody had struggled to find humanity in a godless world, it was Gilberto. As he released my cheek, his eyes dropped to my T-shirt.
“Nice titties,” he said, giving my right breast a generous squeeze.
Being felt up by their prospective father-in-law might make some girls a little tight-jawed, but I accepted that, as his son’s fidanzata, by extension I belonged to him too. In the same way he felt compelled to interrogate a chef as to the cut and quality of his veal chop, the size and firmness of my breasts was the gauge of how good a wife I’d make his son. In retrospect, a little feminist grit might have served me better, but I had developed a thing about belonging. The yo-yo geography of my early years had invoked feelings of confusion and displacement not entirely dispelled by my parents’ recent remarriage—back to each other. Who cared what world Gilberto belonged to as long as I could be part of it too? Cosa Nostra and all that.
“My father is not Catholic, he’s Jew,” Giacomo said later as we dressed for dinner.
“A Jew with a hotline to the Vatican?”
“That�
�s his thing.”
“But isn’t that what Cosa Nostra means?” I had taken to leafing through an Italian-English dictionary for just these kinds of prenuptial spats.
“Why you say stupido things?” He scowled.
Giacomo was my love, my amore, but over the year we’d been together, I’d noticed anger flaring in him like bright red ribbons. So, soon after that, I stopped saying stupid things and only thought them instead.
My parents issued an invitation to Gilberto on stiff Smythson writing paper: “Come and stay before the wedding!”
I paled to think of the proposed itinerary. The brisk country walks, Bloody Marys, and a dinner of pie of the cottage, as Giacomo called it, after which would begin, I supposed, a protracted negotiation about my dowry or maybe my breasts, now arguably one and the same thing. Thank Dio, then, that from Gilberto there was no reply.
Two hours before the wedding, a limousine with blackened windows swooshed up over the gravel.
“Christ, what now!” muttered my father, suffering a rare lapse in humour. On this special day, with his up-the-duff daughter marrying a foreigner—and a horse gambler whom he’d once taken for the local garage mechanic—he needed no further surprises.
“Your new father-in-law looks Middle Eastern,” my mother said, peering out the window. “And is that an Uzi he’s holding?”
“Why your mother say stupid things?” grumbled Giacomo. “That’s the chauffeur from Claridge’s hotel.”
The Claridge’s chauffeur opened the door of the limousine and out streamed Gilberto’s six other children like so many purple butterflies in their chiffon and frills. Out spilled Rosanna, Gilberto’s second wife, fragrant in lavender. Finally Gilberto himself emerged, hunched into his overcoat despite an energetic June sun. Again I felt the electro pulse in the air. The turtledoves hiccupped and the petals of the rose bush threw themselves one by one from their thorny stems.
As the two families faced off across the sitting room, even the air felt awkward. The Algranti brood, aged thirty down to five, stepped up in turn to receive glasses of Robinsons Barley Water while Gilberto coiled around my mother like a python, squeezing compliments into her ear. It was soon apparent that he had timed his arrival for an imagined pre-wedding feast. He kept surreptitiously glancing out to the hall as though expecting to see great dishes of gamberoni and marinated hearts of carciofi being carried by in the arms of comely peasant women.
“Do stay for lunch,” my mother offered gamely. “We’re having beans on toast.”
Gilberto clicked his fingers. The family rose as one. Out on the drive, the chauffeur sparked the engine.
Chipping Campden is one of those dozy Cotswold towns built from nostalgia, thatch and honey, in whose quaint dwellings, or so tourists are inclined to believe, hobbits still live, eating soup from a cauldron suspended over an open fire. A wedding is a big deal in the shires, and a couple of hours later the streets to the church were dotted with well-wishers. Of Gilberto there was no sign. Mindful of a hot and restless congregation, my mother urged the organist to play another round of Bach’s “Sheep May Safely Graze,” though looking back I find it hard to imagine that sheep would ever again feel safe to graze, traumatised as they must have been by the limo streaking through their country lanes, the poor chauffeur feverishly scanning the horizon for a church spire, while Gilberto harangued him from the back. “Sock filled with the dung of a rat! Are you stupid?”
“Cara,” Gilberto purred, late by a full hour. “I am honoured you will marry my son.” He nuzzled his shoe-brush moustache against my neck and poked at my cleavage.
“So big and swollen,” he murmured. “Brava, bellissima. And may my firstborn grandson be both a male and masculine one.”
Part 2
Like his father, Giacomo was an art dealer by trade. Vermeer’s dimpled milkmaid or the humdrum life of a city vividly realised by Canaletto was not for the Algrantis. Their tastes ran bloodier—a nice Crucifixion, or John the Baptist’s dripping head in the triumphant grip of Salome. After the wedding, we moved into Giacomo’s tiny London flat in Mayfair, which doubled as his gallery. Every morning as I prepared to stumble off to my office, my biblical morning sickness came face to face with Romanelli’s Massacre of the Innocents. In the background a curly-mopped infant, head hanging by a sinew; in the foreground the sweetest of babes, intestines spewing onto marble. I begged Giacomo to turn it to the wall, like a portrait of an ex-girlfriend, but God knows we needed the sale. My fashion business looked good on paper, but it was not the sort of paper that bore the queen’s head and a pound sign. Giacomo was cavalier about money. When his horse romped home first, he’d turn up for supper with an expensive gem from a Bond Street jeweller. When he lost, we lived on dust.
It was kind of cool.
The first few summers after the baby was born were spent in Gilberto’s house in a tangled scrub of hills off the west coast of Italy. It was a low, whitewashed 1970s building with tall windows, guarded by sentinels of poplar and surrounded by juniper and prickly pear. Outside, a terracotta pool overlooked the sea. Inside, heated by a ferocious sun, the house was always oven-ready and had something of the feel of a compound, not helped by a large number of guard dogs, chained, thank God, whose psychotic chorus of snarling and slavering woke us every dawn without fail.
In the mornings there was a beach outing, Gilberto parting the crowds in elegantly patterned Speedos. Lunch was produced back home by a local woman, Paola, who wore a perpetually bewildered expression, which, after a number of days, I found myself unwittingly adopting.
Dressed in a string vest, clumps of wiry chest hair tufting through its holes, ending one phone conversation with “Ciao!” while simultaneously embarking on another with “Dimmi!” (“tell me”), Gilberto sat at the table moodily forking up spaghetti. Food for the rest of the family arrived strictly à la carte from a menu that didn’t exist. Gnocchi for one of Gilberto’s small sons, ossobuco for his eldest daughter, a feminine slither or two of bresaola for Rosanna, my stepmother-in-law, slave to her dieta.
There was no conversation. Entertainment was either Chew! (physical theatre created from the everyday noises made by the eating and banging of cutlery) or Grumble! (an unstructured free-for-all, during which all family members would loudly empty themselves of a medley of grievances). When the volume became overpowering, Gilberto, or Nonno (grandfather), as I was now required to call him, would lean forwards and deliver a powerful slap to whichever of his children happened to be nearest. Chiccy chac, he called it. Chiccy chac was a counterproductive discipline setting off an even noisier chain reaction. Rosanna screeched. The abused child wailed. Giacomo swore. Paola the cook rattled her pans in disapproval. And finally Jesse, or rather Jesse Gilberto—for that was what we had cunningly named our firstborn male and masculine son—would start weeping.
Rosanna was a thoroughly decent human being. A doctor before retiring to marry Gilberto, she’d suffered an aneurysm during the birth of their youngest son and had fallen into a prolonged coma, during which she claimed to have struck up a friendship with God, eventually settling on a deal with him. If he permitted her to live, she would adopt a “retarded” child. When Rosanna awoke to find herself semi-paralysed, instead of negotiating with God for a rain check, as any lesser person might have done, she adopted a seven-year-old, whom, unsurprisingly, the entire family addressed as Il Stupido.
Jesse’s puckered-up mouth was the prompt for Rosanna’s latent doctoring skills to kick in. Her own chiccy chacced child might be suffering a brainstem bleed from Nonno’s left hook, but it would be little Jesse who she’d evaluate with shrewd professional eyes.
“Ah, poverino. He is sick?”
“I think he’s just scared.”
“No, è malato! I am sure of it!” She’d hunt down a thermometer from somewhere and mime sticking it up his butt. I’d mime back that it should go under his armpit, as in every other civilized country, but nothing short of up the butt would do.
Belonging to th
is world, even part-time, was harder than I’d imagined. Instead of thriving on the energy and tumult, I felt jolted by each cultural variance, as though it charged an electrical wire running through my body. I figured this would pass. My Italian had not yet progressed beyond the names of market produce, plus I was exhausted—from a bottleneck of work, from the heat, from the red-eye feeds of the baby, during which I’d invariably bump into my father-in-law, a raging insomniac prowling the house in his underpants, one phone in each hand, hoarsely shouting his ciaos and dimmis over the rabid barking of the mastiffs.
“Why the dogs?” I asked Giacomo. “Are they for protection?”
“Protection? What use would protection be?” Giacomo retorted. “Why you say stupid things? The only people who want to kill my father are already in this house.”
And thus the days passed.
Every afternoon, siesta time for the rest of the family, Nonno would hold court behind closed doors, granting audience to a stream of cigar-smoking petitioners. During these protracted visits, the sitting room was declared a no-entry zone, until quite suddenly Nonno would loom in its doorway, cloaked in a fog bank of smoke and yelling for his son.
“Ball-breaking old Jew, go and fetch mice!” Giacomo muttered, rolling off me. It was never easy finding time for spontaneous lovemaking, with a new baby, an autumn/winter collection to design, Giacomo’s six half-siblings, four dogs, two roosters, and one father-in-law bursting randomly into our bedroom—no knocking deemed necessary.
“Ciao, carissima.” Nonno stroked my ankle under the sheet before turning to his son.
“You!” he thundered. “Go speak with Signore Federico.”
“Mah, sei pazzo! Why I must talk to this Signore Federico?”
“Why? Why, you ask? Because I tell him you catch a fifty-kilo barracuda, and now he want to know which rod you use.”
No one in the world has ever caught a fifty-kilo barracuda. Giacomo did not fish. His hand-eye coordination was such that he was incapable of removing a guppy from its bowl, even with the aid of a net. His thumb and forefinger would meet to form a circle, a sign that, before I’d witnessed it being thrust up another person’s nostrils, I’d taken to mean “everything’s OK.”
