A Decent Family Read online

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

  Text copyright © 2018 by Newton Compton Editori

  Translation copyright © 2020 by Ann Goldstein

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

  Previously published as Storia di una famiglia perbene by Newton Compton Editori in Italy in 2018. This edition is published in agreement with the Proprietor through MalaTesta Literary Agency, Milan. Translated from Italian by Ann Goldstein. First published in English by Amazon Crossing in 2020.

  Published by Amazon Crossing, Seattle

  www.apub.com

  Amazon, the Amazon logo, and Amazon Crossing are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc., or its affiliates.

  ISBN-13: 9781542004435 (hardcover)

  ISBN-10: 1542004438 (hardcover)

  ISBN-13: 9781542004442 (paperback)

  ISBN-10: 1542004446 (paperback)

  Cover design by Kathleen Lynch, Black Kat Design

  First edition

  To the two most important women in my life, my daughter and my mother

  CONTENTS

  START READING

  BY WAY OF A PROLOGUE

  THE SMALL WORLD

  1

  2

  3

  4

  SECRET WORDS

  5

  6

  7

  THE SHORT SEASONS

  8

  9

  THE AGE OF MEMORIES

  10

  11

  12

  LANDS TO SEE

  13

  14

  15

  LANDS OF NO RETURN

  16

  17

  18

  19

  PARADISE ISN’T FOR EVERYONE

  20

  21

  22

  A SEASON OF FAREWELLS

  23

  24

  25

  26

  TODAY, THE FIRST STEPS

  27

  28

  29

  30

  LIKE ROCKS IN THE SEA

  31

  32

  33

  SAND IN YOUR EYES

  34

  35

  36

  37

  BAD SEED

  38

  39

  40

  41

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  ABOUT THE TRANSLATOR

  When homesickness catches me by surprise, I see my father again on a May evening years ago. His round, sunburned face, short of breath and sorrowful. Mustache the color of chewed tobacco, mouth that over time had become thin as a knife blade, on his head a sailor’s cap. Bent over the prow of his boat, busy adjusting the trammel net so he could head out to sea. He was silent. Now and then, he turned to look at me. His small mouth was curved into that fold of resignation and awareness that sometimes marks the lips of men and women of a certain age. He had never been very talkative. He’d spit out cruel words and then swallow them again. The boat smelled of fresh paint, and the name, in a beautiful bright blue, stood out even more. The boat was called Ciao Charlie, like the film with Tony Curtis, whom everyone said my father resembled. It was just a few days after the feast of San Nicola, and all the boats anchored in the port were still decked with cockades and blue and red festoons; paper balls adorned the prows, along with effigies of the saint. I looked at him mutely, with the eyes of disillusionment. One hand held the net, untangling it with painstaking gestures, the other a cigarette. The ash fell from the tip, whirled and rose repeatedly, driven by the wind off the sea, before ending up at his feet. I no longer heard the cackle of the women sitting in a row on the pier eating lupini, or the vulgar cries of the polparo, selling octopus and beer from a three-wheeled cart. I saw only the wrinkles on his hands, the frozen expression of his pale-blue eyes, and sensed the weight of what I felt for him. Because you can hate a man like Antonio De Santis and forget him countless times, but in the end you find him inside you.

  BY WAY OF A PROLOGUE

  I will never forget the day my grandmother, Nonna Antonietta, pinned the nickname Malacarne—“bad seed”—on me. It had been raining savagely. One of those rains you see only rarely during the year. When it comes, you feel the wind howling from the sea, freezing the blood and making everything shudder. The road along the sea was an endless puddle. The abandoned fields and the bare vegetation around Torre Quetta were soggy and flattened, as if ravaged by the pounding water. It was the month of April. One of the rainiest springs of the past thirty years, so some of the old people in my neighborhood remarked a few days later.

  Despite the warnings of Mamma and my grandmother, who knew how to interpret the voice of the wind, I insisted on going out.

  “When the sea mimics the devil, the earth revolts,” Nonna Antonietta said to me as I insolently went out the door. I looked at both, mother and daughter. The one busy grating pecorino, as she did every day before lunch, the other slicing a large hunk of bread. I merely shrugged and went out, disobeying every warning. I wanted to see the stormy sea close up and, above all, find out if it scared me.

  I ran across the white stone slabs of the Muraglia, waving at some neighbor women standing in their doorways examining the sky like the soothsayers of long ago. I felt the wind lashing my hair, slapping my face, but I had no intention of turning back. In just two leaps, I bounded down the paved steps that led from the Muraglia to the road along the sea, and I quickly skirted the Margherita Theater so that I could cross the pier and the area of the breakwater. I wanted to see the sea in all its arrogance.

  When I reached the shore near Torre Quetta, I heard for a few seconds a small inner voice whispering to me to go home. Again, I saw my mother’s face as she begged me not to go out. The eyes that warned me sweetly and the head that rocked right and left before she ended her speech with the usual words: “More stubborn than your father.” And again I saw my grandmother, who, in spite of the harsh reproaches with which she hoped to tame me, was as gentle as her daughter. Soft, even in appearance. A short woman with a large pudding-like bosom that molded itself on her stomach.

  I shook my head because I didn’t want their images to discourage me from what I intended to do. Holding tight to my dress, which came to my calves, as if it were a lifeline, I approached the cliffs. The gigantic waves foamed, they crashed down the spurs of rock along the shore and then dissolved into shreds of liquid. The horizon blurred into the sea, which looked like a large ink stain. Enthralled by that majestic vision, I didn’t realize how threatening the sky had become, so that it seemed like night though it was only noon. When the rain began to pelt down, there wasn’t time to get home. Soon the outlines of the houses of old Bari grew indistinct, wrapped in the dark sky. A strong wind tossed the surface of the sea, and a kind of fog arose and broke up into tiny white drops.

  “Now what?” I asked myself over and over, looking around.

  Behind me stood the ruin of Torre Quetta, an abandoned tower that during the war had been used by soldiers for sighting the enemy approaching by sea. The walls were grayish and the vegetation all around sparse and inert. I went over to the door, which was held closed by a rusty wire, while the drops beat on my head like lead shot. I had no choice. In there, I would be safe.

  I pushed open the door, which protested with a sinister sound, and took a step inside. I was in a circular
room with two open windows from which you could keep an eye on the coast. On the ground lay an old mattress and, farther on, an enameled aluminum basin with a blue edge, chipped in many places. I was only nine and couldn’t know that prostitutes entertained their clients in Torre Quetta.

  So I sat down, hoping that the owner of the mattress wouldn’t come home too soon. Soaked from head to foot, I was beginning to shiver and drew up my shoulders. I looked at my feet in their wooden clogs. My toes were black with mud, but the skin was shiny from the rain and had an even darker olive color. My heart was pounding hard, and I was afraid, but I would never admit it.

  I can’t say what time it was when I got home. The sky had cleared, the wind had died down. From the sea rose a strong odor of putrid seaweed, but as I crossed the Muraglia, the smell of rot was replaced by the good smell of sauces with basil, of roasted meat. In the distance, on the horizon, you could still see some shreds of fringed clouds that looked like fluff hanging in the air. My satisfaction at having braved the adventure of Torre Quetta was soon replaced by fear of my father’s reaction. What would he say about this bold deed? How much would he yell this time? The vision of his pale eyes inflamed with rage and the clenched jaw that transformed his handsome face terrified me more than the storm that had just passed.

  Suddenly, my legs felt heavy, my feet had trouble moving. Even my head was an unbearable weight for my slender child’s body, like an egg balanced on a twig.

  Comare Angelina—all the neighbor women were called comare, or “godmother”—cried to me as she shook her tablecloth out the window onto the street.

  “Marì, what happened to you? Marì? Did you fall in the sea?” she asked in great agitation. I shook my head no, I didn’t feel like answering. A little farther on, my mother and grandmother stood waiting in the doorway, the former pale and disheveled, like a rag put in the wash, the latter folded in two over her short, stocky mass. She didn’t know what to say: I had been a big thorn in her heart since I was an infant. She would never have expected a female grandchild to be so rude and so bad.

  She wasn’t at a loss for words, because, when she wanted, she talked a lot and continuously about the countless things she did during the day and those she would do the next day. About my grandfather, may he rest in peace, who had married her an inexperienced, innocent girl and watched her grow to be capable of managing the household.

  Now, in front of the door, she was like the Madonna Addolorata, Our Lady of Sorrows, waiting only for a sign from her daughter to start talking. A sign that didn’t arrive, because Mamma knew that every other word would kindle my father’s rage like wood thrown on the fire.

  When I reached them, I had the clear sensation that my heart was a beating drum and that they, too, could hear it. Just for that reason, I pretended indifference. I was ashamed, looking like that, with my dress—at least two sizes too big, because that was how my mother sewed them, so they’d last several seasons—still sticking to my body, and my feet smacking in the wet clogs. My stomach hurt, and a feeling of nausea and vertigo weighed down every step and clouded my sight. The buzzing of innumerable bees echoed in my head.

  I stopped only an instant to look at them, first at Mamma, then at Nonna.

  My mother didn’t say a word—she barely breathed.

  Nonna Antonietta leaned toward me as if she were going to slap me, but her stubby hand remained suspended in midair.

  It was then—she explained to me later—that she noticed the strange light in my pitch-black eyes.

  “You have the cold blood of a lizard,” she started to say. She spoke in a faint, scratchy voice. “No, you have no blood, like an octopus. You’re a mala carne, yes, a bad seed,” she felt duty bound to utter twice, the second time more directly to herself.

  Mamma nodded as if she, too, had that idea but lacked the courage to say it aloud.

  “Malacarne,” she merely whispered when I passed through the opening that their arms had left.

  I thought my heart would burst. I could feel it pounding in many places at once. Even the space of the kitchen had changed, had shrunk before my eyes, and was ready to crush me completely. Papa and my two brothers, Giuseppe and Vincenzo, were eating ziti and beans generously sprinkled with pecorino. Only Giuseppe turned toward me. “Hey,” he said, “you’re back.”

  I still think that Giuseppe was always the best of us. At that time, he was sixteen and had suddenly become an adult, like those children in the fairy tales who grow up overnight.

  Just then, Papa turned toward me, his eyes like specks and his mouth twisted. I stopped in the center of the room. Vincenzo paused, too, and his mouth stopped chewing. Giuseppe had already stopped. Maybe even time had stopped. Comare Angelina’s sauce was no longer sizzling in the pan, the birds were no longer chirping. The world was waiting.

  Now he’ll explode, now he’ll explode, I kept repeating to myself.

  Papa didn’t get up from the chair, he merely shifted it slightly, one hand on his thigh while with the other he grabbed the glass of Primitivo, the dense wine sticking to the opaque glass. He raised it as if he wished to make a toast. I closed my eyes and breathed deeply.

  Anyway, then it’ll be over, I said to myself to give myself courage.

  “To Malacarne,” Papa exclaimed, raising the glass, then he looked at the boys and waited for them to do the same.

  When I reopened my eyes, they were all three looking at me, Vincenzo with the sly smile of the delinquent that he was, and Giuseppe with the sincere smile that made all the girls in the neighborhood fall in love with him.

  My father was also looking at me. He was laughing, and this, in the moment, had for me the innocent taste of a miracle.

  THE SMALL WORLD

  1

  My name is Maria. Maria De Santis. I was born small and dark, like a ripe plum. As I grew up, my fierce features became more pronounced and, over the years, for better or for worse, distinguished me from the other girls of the neighborhood. A wide mouth and almond eyes that shone like pinpoints. Long, clumsy hands that I inherited from my paternal grandfather and a spiteful, insolent manner, inherited directly from Antonio, my father. He was a fisherman. He was a cold, rude man who alternated moments in which his thoughts were distant from us, eyes fixed on his plate or the wall, with moments in which violence seemed the only way to manifest the pain he felt in life. His brutality reverberated onto us as powerfully as the silence of the neighborhood, in the hottest hours of summer, disproportionately amplified the countermelody of the cicadas. Summers in old Bari were spent in the narrow streets with their white paving stones, the children chasing one another around the corners of a babel of alleys where the scent of sheets hanging on lines mingled with the smell of flavorful sauces in which bits of meat boiled for hours. Those paving stones framed my childhood and youth. I don’t remember that I ever thought those years were ugly or unhappy. Ugliness and sorrow were everywhere around me. I could find them in the warnings of the neighbor women: “Don’t go near the sea when it’s rising or it will swallow you,” “Eat vegetables or you’ll get scurvy and die”; of Nonna Antonietta: “Say your prayers at night or you’ll go to hell,” “Don’t tell lies or you’ll remain a dwarf”; and of my mother: “If you think bad thoughts, Jesus knows it, and he’ll cut out your tongue before you can say filthy things.”

  But ugliness was also in the faces of certain women in my neighborhood, like Comare Nannina, whom everyone called “the horse,” because she had a long face and a wide mouth, something equine about her that almost crippled her. Her expressionless eyes gave off no light; they were cold and lifeless, like dusty marbles. She was our next-door neighbor, and I encountered her unpleasant horsey face every day when I went out, because she spent whole hours on a straw-seated chair in the doorway, heedless of the heat or cold. Ugliness was in the cockroaches that in their shiny livery circled the floor of the cellar and sometimes even the kitchen, in the squealing of the mice that scurried happily over the crumbling terraces. What was worse, thoug
h, was that the ugliness was also mine; I felt it sewed like a second skin onto my original skin. It was in the coldness of my father’s eyes when he was seized by rage and his handsome face was transfigured. In the evenings when, hot soup in front of him, he was vexed by something, he’d spasmodically rake up the crumbs on the table into little piles, a prelude to an explosion that could strike blindly whoever happened to be within reach. Then the handsome Tony Curtis look-alike became a demon, and the only thing missing was fire spitting from his tongue.

  His rage, however, was rarely unleashed against me. With me, the demon disguised as a movie star was stripped of every frill of ugliness. At night after dinner, sitting at the head of the table, he’d take my hand and hold it tight for several minutes without saying a word, without looking at me: a mute docility that I acquiesced in, reserved and almost fearful. Maybe I loved him at those moments. Or maybe I hated him even more because he inserted himself between me and hatred, blended into my mean nature like sediment in early-harvest oil. My grandmother had understood it all. I was a bad seed. I didn’t mind it, because almost everyone in my neighborhood had a nickname handed down from father to son. Those who didn’t didn’t boast about it because, in the eyes of others, it could only mean that the elements of that family were not distinguished either in good or in evil, and, as my father always said, it was better to be despised than not to be known at all.

  No balls, limp dick, stupid, fatty, half girl. These and others were the names that were pinned to those who had left no trace in the course of their own lives. In my family, my father was known as Tony Curtis, and he was proud of it. Mamma’s family, on the other hand, was known to everyone as Popizz, or “pancakes,” because my great-grandmother, a first-rate housewife and fantastic cook, supplemented her husband’s salary by frying pancakes at her kitchen window. From then on, Nonna Antonietta; my mother, Teresa; and even her brothers who had immigrated to Venezuela were called by the same name.

  On my street at the time lived Minuicchie, Cagachiesa, and Mangiavlen. Minuicchie—the name of a type of pasta—was a small, silent man with sparse, perennially greasy hair, which the poor man wore combed with a long center part. In that family, they were all small, the father, the grandfather, and the brothers. His wife, Cesira, was from Rome, a fat matron who railed against her husband from morning till night. Minuicchie roused pity in the other men of the neighborhood. Papa always said that, in his place, he would have cut the throat of that bossy wife, and everyone would have said he was right. Instead, the puny little man absorbed the woman’s tirades in silence. You always saw him at the window, blankly observing the street with a face like parchment that already seemed an old man’s.