Chapter 7
It was a typical winter night in Turin; cold cut the dark remote alleys as well as the bright central streets. I walked homeward, returning from an evening with university students. We were a group of young Sicilians in a part of Italy that welcomed us with distrust because we were no longer Italian, but a people with an indefinite identity, that even us hardly understood. With the lost expression of freshmen in a foreign land, we observed the new generation of the future Italian medical class who, looking like experienced doctors, formulated unlikely differential diagnoses in front of meagre glasses of beer on tap, in a smoky pub, impenetrably closed in their entourage, inaccessible to us. They were the mirror of a new Italy, more and more closed and intolerant, busy building at all cost the pretension of a rising future. But reality was that of a country for which throwing the ballast in the sea hadn’t been enough to save it. The decline was far deeper, it crossed conscience, moral and civil sense, and recovering from that type of disarrangement was not only a financial issue. As for us ex – migrated to the north to guarantee ourselves an education, waiting to understand the direction to give to our history, as individuals and as a people, certain of our ambitions - we projected ourselves in the most brilliant of the possible futures, sure that we would meet again one day in some part of the world, at the peak of our careers, each of us in his selected branch of medicine. We sipped and we smoked, reading with serious expressions the case histories assigned to us by professor Minetti.
The diagnosis proposed by Roberto Falci still echoed in my mind when I walked along the road that lead me home from the bus stop. The rain patted insistently on my umbrella, heavy drops splashing everywhere around me. Head low, I moved quickly, breathing inside the damp scarf, badly wound around my neck. From the road I could see the light of the kitchen. My house was awake in the heat of the night.
The telephone had rung around midnight, interrupting the sleep of Antonio and Antonella, who in winter, after a long working day, went to bed early. It was our fourth year in Turin, but they still hadn’t been able to get used to the rigidity of winter, to the night-time freezing, to the ice on the windscreen of the car every morning. Dad went out early, Mom sat in front of her PC at an early hour. She had reprised making translations and the job was never scarce.
A telephone ringing at night is most likely heralding bad news, therefore that night the heart rate of my parents started to get faster at every insistent trill, until Dad, mustering his courage, lifted the receiver.
A dry voice, heavily marked by a Sicilian lilt, avoided preambles, cut short pleasantries and went straight to the point, «Antonio? Gino I am, I wanted to tell you that Enzo, the son of Pina, iccò... threw himself from the balcony».
A short pause to chase emotion back in throat, the same emotion that quickly hardened in the throat of my father. Enzo was the son of Mario Mancino, a general servant to which dad sometimes entrusted some maintenance job for the house or the chemist. He was a humble person, with few means and a family to sustain. With the arrival of the first child, the economic demands of the family had increased, and Dad tried to help as he could, calling Mario for some little extra jobs, sometimes not really necessary. Thankful for the help received, Mario had asked Dad to be Enzo’s godfather, and this had sealed among the two a bond to which Dad never escaped. So, when Mario lost his life because of a work accident, my father honoured his role of godfather helping his widow to take care of that son, only two years older than me.
«He’s in serious conditions. Physicians don't even know if he is ever going to wake up. He’s in a coma. His mother is completely broken, destroyed. She only has stu figghiu, mischinazza. I don't know if I did well to call at this time, but I thought that you wanted to know before...»
The room seemed suddenly penetrated by the same cold that was freezing the roads and the car windscreens. Mom tightened her night-gown around her, waiting to know. It was in this suspension that I found them when I entered the kitchen, that has been for a long time the meeting place of our family, the place where the most important decisions are taken and where joys and pains are shared.
From their faces I immediately understood. I didn't ask anything and I stood staring now at my father, now at my mother. I had already learned that ugly news can’t be stopped, therefore it is not necessary to hurry and ask, since the answers will come anyway.
«Uncle Gino phoned, one hour ago», Dad begun. I picked up these first words in patient wait for the succession.
Uncle Gino was his only brother and the only Manfredi who had remained firmly anchored to his land in spite of the intervened upheavals. Dad didn't hear from him often, and when he called, generally it was to adjourn us on some unpleasantness.
Dad’s eyes flew now on the clock hanging from the wall, now on the point of my wet shoes, carefully avoiding to reach mine. Feeling his weakness fed my dismay.
«A thing happened, Paolo. Enzuccio... we don’t know well what happened, but it seems that... in short... he tried to commit suicide.»
I finally met my father’s eyes in a stunned and fleeting look, that fell again to the black and grey marble scales of the floor.
«How did it happen? Is he alive? But for what reason...»
«He’s in serious conditions. They operated him urgently at Civico, but he didn’t wake up yet. His aunt Pina is always there, close to him, mischinazza. She doesn't want to leave him for a second. She speaks to him, calls him, but nothing, he just vegetates.»
My mother’s word mixed in my mind, becoming indistinct and distant. They mixed to the chatters of the smoky pub where, up to half a hour earlier, my laughter and those of my colleagues, friends and rivals, had resounded, while Vicè – that was how I called him – was falling in the dark like a bird too heavy to fly. In my memory, the film of the first part of my life passed quickly. That part in which I didn't need to wonder who I was and where I was coming from. That part in which I played without worries, lived, and nothing else, away from the stage of the so many questions without answers. And in that kitchen in faint light, illuminated only by the light under the cowl and by a neon light in the street, the face of Enzo inscribed in the air. A little boy with curly and raven-black hair, legs always full of bruises, whom I considered a cousin although there was no kinship between us. A cousin whom my father had taken care of almost like a son, to honour a promise. I remembered the regret of Vicè when my father told him that we were leaving. He was strongly rooted to his land and couldn’t understand how I might want to live elsewhere. To him it was inconceivable. He loved all of Torre, to him the world began and ended within those borders that fed all of his certainties.
Dad repeated to him the same sentences he had told me a thousand times.
«It’s a land without a future, this one. You can’t think about making a living here, because there is nothing. Torre was a very beautiful place once, and it could still be, but there is no will to make it grow. It is a slow and subterranean agony that is taking away this town as well as the whole Sicily. Leave, my son, if you want to do something with your life.»
But Enzo was himself a root of this country, one of those that, if eradicated, are doomed to die, because they don’t root in any other place.
And in fact Enzo died, after a few days from the jump. My father was at his bedside, one hand holding his, one holding his aunt Pina’s, who was lost in her personal ocean of tears. Uncle Gino, at the feet of the bed, shook his head, cursing Italy that had betrayed that child of his, that had delivered him to a destiny he could not accept, being exiled in his own country. He cursed Siqillya, this Arab land where they could no longer find the panelle fried in the cans of black oil of the itinerant lambrette, where they could no longer live in the spontaneity of the past, and where nothing, not even cannoli, had the same taste of veracious Sicily any more.
At that bedside there were also my mother, Vito and many other faces of my past. I was in Turin, filing another thirty in my model-student card.
Wh
en I get back to the Torre Saracena it’s already half past six. Teresa has fallen asleep on the beach chair already. I hear her deep, regular breath. She is laying on her side, hands joined under her cheek like a thoughtless child. Her face is reddened by the sun and her features are relaxed. She seems pervaded by an aura of comfort. She strongly wanted this trip with us. With me. Seeing her like this now makes me think about all of the sunny days we missed, the happy laughter we didn’t share, the being together that always seems to be last in the list of our everyday lives. Of mine, to say the truth. She is always silently wishing for it. I wonder how she could accept our so fragmented life as a couple in all these years? I sit down next to her to look at her. I brush her hair, perfumed of apple-scented shampoo.
We married about twenty years ago, when we were both thirty-year-old and ambitious, both determined to climb our own peak, to reset the finishing line. However fatiguing, my rise was a long straight line, without alternative paths. Hers instead led to a fork, and taking one road irremediably prevented her to access the other. She chose family, giving up the chance of following the profession of travelling reporter, to save our children from the absence of their mother in addition to that of their father.
Distant laughter of playing children echoes from the beach. Giuliana didn’t waste time to make friends. She is sitting among a group of peers telling them who knows what. Her brother is walking alone along the water’s edge. Sometimes he stops and sinks a foot in the wet sand, then pulls it out, shakes away the sand glued to it, then starts again his slow advance.
The rustle of the heavy cloth of the reclining chair announces me the awakening of Teresa. She turned to me and she’s looking at me. She is relaxed and beautiful. She doesn't seem to be close to the fifty-years thresholds. She is my eternal high school fiancée.
«So, tell me everything.»
She sits, straightens the back of the chair, huddles up her legs against her chest, hugged in her arms. She questions me with her eyes.
«We made a tour. The town is really unrecognizable, and to think that once I knew every corner of this place by heart, while now I hardly recognized many streets, houses that I used to frequent, people's faces.»
«Your house?» she hazards.
«It’s still there. It changed too, but it’s recognizable. In the terrace there was a woman. For an instant it seemed to me to see my mother.»
A pause helps me to keep emotion in check.
«It’s unbelievable how much she resembled her; same hair colour, same kind of hair-style, even her eyes.»
«See, in some strange way you always succeed in finding the way home.»
«Yeah.»
Teresa defended the theory according to which my mother had gotten sick for the pain of not having returned to Torre anymore, although she always wanted to, deep down.
«How does being here affect you?»
«I don't know.»
It’s the truth, I don't know how I feel. Extraneousness and belonging fight inside me; now the former prevails, now the latter. I am just confused.
«And you?»
«I am fine, doctor, I’m fine.»
And she lays down again on the chair.
I have a refreshing shower. The walk under the warm sun of this advance of summer glued my clothes to my skin. I feel the need to wash away all of the sweat and to smell of aftershave. Luckily Teresa thought about everything; a change of clothes for all will spare us a return to the hotel.
She too prepares for the evening. She still has today’s sun on her body and her relaxed face. She’s wearing a beautiful yellow dress with large orange flowers and a neckline crisscrossing on her shoulders. A foulard matching the flowers on the dress lightly falls on her, around her arms. My wife is very Mediterranean tonight, different from the woman often dressed in grey or black suits of our Parisian winters. I look at her pleased, then I offer her my right arm to lead her out of the room. She smiles in turn and accepts it. This way, arm in arm like two carefree children, we start toward the beach to summon up our children.
Teresa goes to meet the new friends of Giuliana, and while she goes away she pushes me to spend some time with Marco. I reach him in his solitary place. He removed is shirt and laid it down on the sand to sit on it. He is reading a book. When I approach, he closes it and places it to his left with a sudden gesture, as if to prevent me from seeing what it is about. I pretend I didn’t notice.
«At your age, I liked a lot to sit on the beach and look at the sea too. It really relaxed me and helped me to think about my teenager problems.»
«You had any?» He seems amazed.
«Like every boy. Does it seem strange?»
«It’s just that I can't imagine you. I mean, you are always so confident, you always have the solution for everything.»
«A hateful "Mr. Know-It-All"», I interrupt him.
He looks at me, smiles together with me and nods.
«Will you make room for me?» I ask him, bending to sit next to him. He moves aside, leaving me some room on the shirt.
«And which were your problems?»
«School, for instance.»
«School? But you always said that you were very good, that you always had good marks.»
«Indeed, but at times it seemed to me that it wasn’t enough for my parents, and this made me suffer. I always tried to do my best, but I was under the impression that something was still amiss. Being an only child had its advantages, but there were too much attentions and expectations on me.»
Now Marco is looking at me with a resentful expression. He has a sentence on the tip of his tongue and he seems undecided whether to let it go or not. Then he sets it free.
«It’s what you do with us.»
I asked for it, and it’s true.
«Often adults forget they have been young, and repeat with their children the same mistake of their parents.»
«I will keep it in mind for when I will be a father. I don't want to make my children hate me.»
Is this what my son feels for me? I am afraid to ask, I am not ready to know the answer.
«What did you do with your friend?» he asks me without looking at me.
«A tour in the town. He had so many things to show me and so much to tell.»
«I see.»
«And you?»
«So...»
«So what?»
«So, that’s it. I have been here on the beach. Nothing special.»
«What did you want to do?»
«Maybe a tour of the town.»
«Why didn’t you tell me?»
«Why didn’t you ask?»
«Are you reproaching me of anything, Marco? What of, this time?»
«This time? Why, when did I ever do it?»
«Every time. Every time you look at me with the expression of a boy neglected by a selfish father who finds time for everyone except him. This attitude makes me go crazy.»
«I’m sorry if my looking at you makes you so uneasy.»
This time it is me to change subject.
«Is it a good reading?» I ask him, pointing at the book half-hidden under his left leg.
He picks it up and shows me its cover.
"Waiting for his return", I read.
«I don't know it. Is it a nice story?»
«I just bought it. I liked the title.»
He stands up and the reaches out with his hand to help me do the same. I would like to talk more, silence fell too soon. But he’s already several steps ahead of me.
«Look, Mom and Giuliana are calling us», and he points at the two who are waving their hands as they advance towards us.
A canoe advances slowly along the shore. A man is rowing; in front of him a boy is talking to him. In the silent twilight of Torre, we can hear their laughter. The father points at something in the water, the son looks in the same direction and gesticulates in turn. I watch them for some time. They could have been Marco and I, in a different life.