by Bella Pollen
“Why you tell him that?” Giacomo snarled. “Are you stupid?”
“Me stupid?! Are you stupid?”
And they’d be off.
I once saw two crocodiles getting pretty snappy with each other at the Central Park Zoo. This was nothing compared to Algranti father and son. They shared a skill for pulling a grievance out of the ether, spinning it into a rage, and flinging it in any direction they chose. But if Nonno was egotistical, Giacomo was unpredictable. Even on our honeymoon—after a disagreement about the rules of backgammon—he’d packed his bags and left for the airport, the pink flower I’d given him still tucked incongruously behind one ear. Grand passions were all I’d ever wanted; nevertheless, I’d cried most of that night, clutching the hard swell of my stomach and working through every literary heroine trying to recall one for whom being pregnant and abandoned had turned out well. When Giacomo reappeared in time for breakfast, he dropped his suitcase on the floor and, grinning, presented me with a sprig of honeysuckle, as though he’d stepped out only minutes earlier to cut it.
I told myself that rage was mostly theatre, but I had no frame of reference for mild irritation delivered as a metaphorical sock to the jaw. Giacomo’s anger was chemical, irrational and it scared me. Even the lightest of skirmishes was presented as an epic confrontation. I come from a long line of sulkers. Our anger burns like dry ice, feels like cold war. We like to hover for months with our finger over the red button. We don’t want to destroy the world—just make it a dark and miserable place for everyone else to inhabit.
The Algrantis were all about detonation, a blast impossible to contain in time or space. Even when it was not directed at me, there was fallout—a cloud of poison, absorbed like secondary smoke, that seeped into the hollow spaces of my bones and remained there, generating a crop of soft, slow-growing tumours.
I tried not to blame Giacomo. To be sucked into lies, to be torn between protecting himself or his father was not what he wanted. But Nonno commanded obedience. There was always an enemy to be punished or a business contact to be impressed.
“Mah, don’t you see?” Giacomo would round on me should I risk taking his side against Nonno. His father’s entire power structure might crumble should this conversation about barracuda fishing not take place.
And so, in the end, dutiful son enters the room where Signore Federico sits, perspiring in his ill-fitting clothes, his cigar a smouldering thumb of ash on the table beside him. A weary smile is raised. A hand beckons. “Eccolo! Venga, figlio. Your father has told me! What a fish! What a fisherman!” And poor Giacomo, once again written into the small print of his family’s invisible contract, broods and fumes and broods some more.
“See why my father is not Mafioso?” he’d shout, pacing the bedroom at midnight. “If he were Mafioso, he would be dead by now with all his tricks and lies!”
Nonno’s driver was called Fabio the Ox. Outside a car he was a leaden draught animal, all hoofs and square head—a man born for pushing boulders up hills. Inside the car he was grace itself. His wheels never screamed, he had no need of a horn, he rarely touched the brakes. Occasionally, aware of doleful milky eyes watching me through the rearview mirror, I’d attempt to engage him in conversation. I fell back on English staples. Wasn’t the tempo bello? What were his thoughts about a little rain later that afternoon? There was never an answer, only the soft tap-tapping of perforated leather gloves on walnut, as though he were driving by Braille. The silence made me self-conscious. With my sneakers and careless ponytail, had he taken me for a poor example of a woman, compared with my Italian counterparts? Was I not good enough for the firstborn son of Nonno, the Godfather Grandfather?
“Nonno,” I asked one day. “Why won’t Fabio speak to me?”
“Ah, Fabio . . .” Of late Nonno’s voice had become so deep, it was as though he’d accidentally swallowed the ashes of his own fireplace. “Fabio has no tongue.”
“I’m sorry,” I whispered. “Repeat, please?”
“No tongue.” Nonno made a slicing motion across his mouth.
I felt something inside me disintegrate. “Why? Why in God’s name, Nonno, do you have a driver with no tongue?”
Nonno twisted my cheek with great affection. “He very loyal, cara, very loyal.”
Later I mulled over the no-tongue thing. Was Fabio loyal because the state of tonguelessness afforded less opportunity for betrayal? Had Nonno specifically advertised for a driver with no tongue—as in, say, “no computer skills necessary”?
As these were stupido thoughts, I did not share them with Giacomo, but it was hard not to dwell. What did I really know of Nonno, Godfather Grandfather? Who was he outside the family circle? What complex system of chiccy chac did he employ to keep people quiet, to keep himself out of jail? So what if Nonno was Jewish and not Catholic? Kosher Nostra. That’s still the way it rolls.
Close-up, stripped of the warm tones of the cinematographer’s palette, without Nino Rota’s haunting music to distract from the moral ambiguities, this Godfather thing wasn’t quite like the movies. I thought of Mrs. Picardi, inert on the counter while the man in the homburg hat went to work with his pliers. I thought of the woman’s severed tongue, gasping on the floor like a dying fish. Poor Mrs. Picardi, poor Fabio, and poor Luca Brasi, who literally sleeps with the fishes.
Of course there was something of the big fish about Nonno himself. Who knew which of his stories were true, his paintings stolen, his children legitimate? All the murkiness, so toxic and intoxicating at the same time. What did it say about my own warped values that I was able to spin gold out of such grubby straw? But this was not a question I dared answer. It was not a question I wanted to answer. I loved Nonno and you could have pliered out my own tongue, and every one of my teeth too, before I lost faith in him.
It wasn’t just the Algranti men I’d fallen for—it was all of Italy. Rome, that citadel of crumbling ochre and verdigris—an entire city of ravishing decay. All the hand kissing and burbling and wolf whistling and finger stabbing. How I loved the morning smell of coffee and bread, the winking medallions around the necks of Praetorian youths. I loved the tousled fawns on scooters, cheeks resting against their boyfriends’ warm backs. I even loved the teak-coloured old men leering and preening on street corners, enjoying their gelato in a way they must have once enjoyed women.
It seemed to me that Rome was a giant Shakespearean playground, as though the Montagues and Capulets had decided that Verona was too small a stage for their reconciled families and had stormed the capital instead.
Under Nonno’s protection we were all honorary Romans. Cue the soundtrack, observe the scene! as he breezes through the city, dispensing his ubiquitous munificence. Witness him inviting every barista, newspaper vendor and carabiniere to admire his family. See my son, my successor! Brave slayer of the monstrous barracuda, his proud expression demanded. Behold my daughter-in-law with the nice titties, mother of the firstborn male, masculine grandson. In Nonno’s chosen restaurant, it is genuine charm he bestows upon the proprietor. How are the man’s ailing parents? And his brother, “Hemorrhoids” Pornello, currently residing in Turin? Waiters dance attendance. Chef hurries from the kitchen. Washer-uppers nudge each other at the sink. Signore Algranti is here. No matter that there are other customers—well-heeled patrons all of them, waiting on their branzino with capers—for Signore Algranti, all work stops.
Nonno absorbed the crowd’s adulation with a shrug—but you see, la storia was not about him, he’d say, whisking out little Jesse Gilberto as though unveiling a hitherto undiscovered Tintoretto before an assembly of museum curators. And because bambino equals miracle—no matter that thousands are born every second—because bambino is the center of Italian life, faces would crease into smiles. È un tesoro! Che bello, che intelligente! A sly litany of compliments aimed at the grandfather directed through the conduit of the grandson.
I loved those lunches too, but sometimes, walking by the tables of magistrates and bankers, with their drifting sm
oke and dragon breath, I felt it—ruthlessness. Alongside the smell of garlic and rosemary was the whiff of corruption, of Tangentopoli. There were times though—no use pretending there weren’t—when a black car would glide to a stop outside the entrance, and ever-watchful Fabio, driver with no tongue, would tense, his hand moving to his pocket for the dense, comforting weight he knew to be there. And I wondered—were I to snatch up little Jesse, dive for the gabinetto, would I return to find Fabio garroted and Nonno face down in his spaghetti alle vongole? I prayed not. I prayed like crazy for the long life of my Nonno, my Jewish-Italian, Mafioso, Mossad, Kosher Nostra papà-in-law, because his circle had finally closed around me, and in it I wanted to stay.
Part 3
Until I didn’t.
In London the rest of the year, away from the opposing force of his father, the needle of Giacomo’s rage increasingly shifted my way. I tried to deflect it but lacked the skill. We had another baby now, Samuel Peregrino, and the stakes of marriage had grown higher. I worked late hours in a world that held no intrinsic or cultural interest for Giacomo. He took no pride in the things I created. My black-market love, once so prohibited and desirable, was now too bitter to be sweet. It was my managing director, Gerry, who held my hair when I threw up with nerves before shows; Gerry who zipped up my dress before award ceremonies, at which I looked at Giacomo’s empty seat beside me and wondered what transgression would be most likely to set him off on my return home. I no longer felt centred in the spotlight of love. I felt like a prison escapee, trapped in the warden’s searchlight. Move in any direction and risk a bullet.
Stick your foot into the snare of bad-boy love, and it’s going to hurt pulling it out, but the pain of my failing marriage wasn’t bloody and raw in the way I might have imagined. After three years, it was the gradual dulling of every nerve ending. After five, it was the agony of numb.
Sometimes, when I was sad, I’d watch all three Godfather films back to back, hoping to find the thread of whatever I’d lost. Through the thick glass of the television, I’d try to extract the smell of juniper from the air. If I could only reconstruct my reality out of the doomed romance of the Corleone saga. But there’s little romance in wrong choices. I was immersed in this story the way I’d always wanted to be, except it was a different story. My body was not in danger but my heart was in dire trouble. I’d always heard it took two to dump a relationship at sea, but what did it matter who was to blame? I was an English scruff who had no idea how to be a wife, married to a man who needed to destroy the things he loved.
One evening I escaped to the movies with my dad.
“Tell me something, Froggins,” said the father who never asked personal questions to the daughter who never invited them. “Are you having any fun in this marriage of yours?”
Whatever it cost him to pry, it cost what was left of my pride to say no.
Dad took my hand. “Then get out,” he said gently, “right now.”
Giacomo was not happy I wanted out. And because he was unhappy, he said stupido things. “I will call my father to come,” he said, and Nonno would take his first- and second-born male, masculine grandchildren back to Italy, where they would be hidden in the hills. “And you will never find them and you will never see them again.”
“But I thought your father wasn’t Mafia,” I wept.
“Of course my father is Mafia!” Then he made the sign of the fingers close to my nose.
Things got bad. Within the confines of our marriage we took to pacing separate enclosures, spitting and snarling. One of us needed to be shot with a tranquilizer dart and relocated somewhere far away, but who knew how that kind of thing worked? Some nights I heard him talking to his father on the telephone.
“Papà, I need your help,” he said. He spoke in thick, fast-flowing Italian. It no longer sounded exotic, merely lonely and foreign. “My father is coming for you,” he’d say each time he hung up. Soon . . . in a month . . . sometime next week . . . any day now. Nonno was coming to get me and I would be sorry.
I was already sorry. Mio Nonno, beloved papà of my ex-amore! I knew Gilberto loved me, but I had lost my right to belong, and in his world there were no second chances. So I was both sorry and scared, but I was no longer stupida. I alerted the police and customs, hid my children’s passports in a place I wasn’t revealing, and made sure the au pair knew how to dial 999. By day, the air between Giacomo and me grew dense with the spores of fresh grievance. At night I held my bambini under the covers and inhaled their damp, comforting smell. But as time ran on I forgot to eat and I forgot to breathe.
One morning I woke up trembling in the aftermath of a violent power surge. It was as if the earth had sneezed and the trees were shuddering inside their hoary barks. Outside, on London’s blackened sills, the pigeons ceased their grumbling and shitting. A shadow was approaching our front door, and even distorted through the etched-glass panel he was recognizable. Behind me in the hallway, I heard footsteps.
“It is my father,” Giacomo said. “He has come.”
Upstairs the children were sleeping. I had a flash of the au pair throttled and the children carried off, one under each of Nonno’s arms, like two paper parcels stamped “Fragile.” But if one side of me was cold war, the other was claws and sabre teeth. I would kill before I let them be taken.
“Open the door,” Giacomo ordered.
People say everything happens quickly in situations like these, and people are right. Nonno came straight at me. There was the softest brush of wool against my cheek as he passed. I steadied myself. Turned in a daze. Behind me in the narrow corridor he had his son pinned against the wall with his forearm. Their faces locked.
“You!” Nonno snarled, and I saw the flecks of spit in his breath. “You pack your bag and get out.” Then he stepped towards me, eyes black as onyx. “And you . . .” He raised a gloved hand and I resolved not to wince. “You, cara,” he stroked my cheek with his finger, “you come with me.”
In the street, a car was purring. I wondered about rapping on the driver’s window, but the angle of parking was fractionally off so I knew it could never be Fabio.
“Where are we going, Nonno?”
I looked back at the window of the boys’ room. Nonno was ferocious but never callous. I knew that the children would be safe, that they would not be taken from me—and yet I shivered. It was a cold winter that year, and unhappiness made it colder still. In a gesture that felt achingly familiar, Nonno took my hand and placed it into the warm pocket of his coat.
“It’s OK, cara,” he said.
I understood something in that moment—that the father was some kind of metaphor for the son. I understood too that the romance of their world worked only within the context of its own mythology. In the here and now was another matter. I might belong to Nonno from afar, but I could never live with his son up close.
We ate lunch in Scott’s Restaurant in Mayfair, where everything is expensive, especially the fish. Nonno ordered two Dover soles, but I had to cut mine with a fork, because he still had hold of my hand.
I cried then, just a little.
“It’s OK, cara.”
“I’m so sorry.”
“Why you sorry? I love my son very much, but I always know.”
I blew my nose on the starched napkin. “Know what?”
“It was impossible.”
“Why are you here, Nonno?” I asked after a while. “I mean, why are you here with me?”
“You?” he said softly. “With you?” And I think by then he was crying a little bit too. “Because you tried, cara, you tried.”
Time passed. Just when Giacomo and I thought we’d been clever enough to avoid litigation, Nonno offered me an Old Master painting for my share of the London house which turned out to be mortgaged to one of his businesses. The firm I went to for advice demanded the provenance of the painting.
“Show me the paperwork,” the lawyer said.
“Listen to me, carissima.” Maybe Nonno’s throat was esp
ecially sore, maybe the line was bad from Italy. “This paperwork . . . is question of trust. You are still family, and there must be trust and honour within families. Capito? I come to London. I see this lawyer, and we will sign everything together, yes?”
“Yes,” I said. Because the code for our relationship had always been written around trust and honour.
“Don’t even think about taking the painting without papers,” my lawyer snorted. “And don’t meet with him either. The old man could get nasty. Put the screws on you.”
Here’s the lesson about trust and honour I was to learn. Later, when Giacomo had stopped spitting and snarling, he too found himself in a legal office. “Great news,” his lawyer told him. “Stroke of luck. Your wife’s legal team has screwed up. Forgot to file some form. Know what that means?”
“No,” Giacomo said.
“Means you are not legally bound to come up with a penny. Not for her, not for the mortgage, not even for the kids!”
Even now when I tell this story, I like to picture my ex-amore rising slowly, making the reverse OK sign with his fingers, and sticking it up the lawyer’s nostrils.
“Anchovy brain! Are you stupido? How you dare say I cheat my wife? How you dare say I don’t look after my children! Now fuck off and quickly!”
I, too, should have told my lawyer to fuck off and quickly. Instead, I shut my eyes and wondered where on earth my babies would sleep inside an Old Master painting.
“Protect your interests,” said my lawyer. “Go. Leave now before he arrives.”
I went, but I felt my heart, the heart I’d once been so proud of, wither to the size of a dried seed in my chest. As I scuttled through the glass and chrome maze to the exit, I caught a glimpse of Nonno, motionless in his dark glasses and camel coat, rising on the escalator, staring straight ahead.
It was to be seven years before I saw Nonno again. He refused to take my calls. Never answered my letters. I got it, I supposed. We all destroy the things we love, and after all, where he was concerned, I’d been the one to pull the trigger first.
