A Decent Family Read online

  Then there were the Cagachiesas, named because they defecated near the church: husband, wife, three sons, and three daughters. Their house was near the church of Buonconsiglio, right next to the ancient columns that the children soiled irreverently with pee and spit. The Cagachiesas worked all the time to support their large family. The children all seemed made from a mold, with disheveled black hair and blue eyes, the same as their father’s, who was a fisherman, like mine. All the men of the family had been fishermen, and out of pride Pinuccio Cagachiesa had kept the old red-and-blue boat belonging to a forebear, and moored it on the pebbly shore outside the washhouse. His children jumped in and out of the boat all day long, but when nature called and they needed to empty their bowels, they did it right near the church.

  Mangiavlen, or “poison eaters,” was Maddalena’s family. The name had been given to her paternal grandmother, who was a masciàra, a kind of witch and folk healer, and who lived in a crooked, blackened house on Via Vallisa in old Bari. When I was little and had a stomachache, my mother brought me to Maddalena the masciàra, who, it was said, was good at “cutting out the worms.” With her fingertips, she drew a lot of small crosses on my abdomen while she recited verses in a language that was neither dialect nor Italian. I don’t know if she really was a sorcerer or a witch, the fact is that the stomachache went away just as it had come. Everyone in the neighborhood admired and feared her. Those who had seen her in the intimacy of her home recounted that she had long silvery hair that came to her feet and that she combed carefully every night. During the day, however, she wore her hair in a very tight bun that was kept in place with large silver-plated hairpins. It was also said that she was able to pronounce tremendous curses with her poisoned tongue, and that it was best not to make her angry. That was why she was known to everyone as “poison eater.” Her granddaughter Maddalena was the prettiest girl in my class. There was no name better suited to that girl, who had very black hair that fell to her buttocks in soft waves, and the face of a Madonna. All the boys in the school became clumsy and stupid in her presence. They stumbled over their words and played nervously with their hands. It was then that I discovered the effect that beauty can have on people.

  In that period, Maddalena and I spent a lot of time together. Living on the same street, we often walked to school together. I knew that she had a crush on my brother Giuseppe, but he didn’t deign to pay her any attention because he was seven years older and had eyes for girls who were already women. We had only two little pink buttons that showed impertinently through the fabric of our shirts, and long, thin legs like gazelles’. Mine, in truth, weren’t even that long, since I didn’t get tall until later. For many years of my life, I was small and dark skinned. As a child, I felt ugly, and that feeling of ugliness was amplified when I was near Maddalena. For that reason, I hated her. It was also envy that made me hate her, because in school everyone noticed her and no one noticed me. I made an effort not to care. I certainly wouldn’t have known what to do with admirers who showed up every day on my street or stupid boys who tried to make an impression with some romantic phrase in mangled Italian. And yet I was annoyed by it. Maddalena already possessed that half-shy, half-frivolous manner of a woman destined to break many hearts in her life. One day, it would seem that she dreamed of our neighbor Rocco Cagachiesa’s handsome face; the next, it seemed that merely looking at him irritated her. One day, she gave the impression of having a crush on the teacher, Maestro Caggiano, whom everyone at school—students, colleagues, and even the principal—treated with absolute reverence, but the next day, she insulted him behind his back, displaying the same poisonous speech that had made her grandmother the witch she was. We all knew that Maestro Caggiano was especially nice to her. Maddalena’s beauty had instilled respect even in a cold, austere man like him. Or maybe it was the fear of offending her grandmother the masciàra that made him so kindly toward her. She took advantage of it and did her homework when she felt like it, and when she wasn’t prepared in this or that subject, she produced some well-rehearsed little tears that softened even the teacher’s hard countenance. What made her heart flutter one day, she laughed at the next. Maddalena had developed the virtue of a soul without appetites, along with a cutting humor that intensified anguish and made everyone terribly inept in her presence. The only person she seemed to be always yearning for was Giuseppe, maybe because he alone didn’t condescend to glance at her.

  I remember that, on the first day of school, in first grade, Maestro Caggiano scrutinized each one of us, narrowing his eyes to our faces. He gave the impression of knowing thoroughly all of our secrets, and not only those which we had guarded up till that moment but also those we might have in the future. He was a tall, slender man, with bony knuckles and the long fingers of a pianist. All the lines of his body were vertical and ascending, from his legs to the angular, severe features of his face: the sharp nose, the eyebrows tracing a long arc that moved upward rather than down, and, finally, the high, smooth forehead. That explosion of verticality was assembled in his body with utter harmony, except for a small hump that had begun to emerge at the back of his neck, a result perhaps of long hours spent reading. He was passionate about classical literature, a passion that he dragged in whenever the occasion allowed, reciting verses of Catullus and Horace. In the neighborhood, Maestro Caggiano was held in great esteem.

  When it was my turn to be stared at by Maestro Caggiano, I felt for the first time in my life a fear very similar to what I’d felt only under my father’s gaze.

  “And who are you, little girl?” he asked, sniffing the air above my hair. He looked up and pulled out one of his Latin pearls of wisdom, and then, in such a way that everyone could understand, he said concisely: “You don’t fool me, little beast.” Cutting, sly words that I would never forget. Then he turned to the biggest and fattest child in the group: Michele Straziota. “You”—and he pointed his bony index finger at him—“come here.” Maestro Caggiano had the power to orchestrate words, to mix Latin and dialect with great mastery, so that even curses, uttered by his refined mouth, seemed like authentic literary wonders.

  Michele Straziota nodded repeatedly and, with his gaze lowered, came and sat next to me in the first row. He looked at me and, smiling, introduced himself: “Hi, at home they all call me Lino, Linuccio, or Chelino, but if you want, you can call me Michele.” I nodded, because his mass somewhat intimidated me. My first impression was of a shy, polite boy. No more than that. At the time, I had a real aversion toward overweight people, so I already knew that I would try to avoid my desk mate, the way you avoid a maddening insect.

  One morning some weeks later, though, the fat boy, whom by now everyone in the class had pelted with nasty insults, showed what he really was. And even if I still didn’t know him well, I felt confusedly that, in a way I couldn’t imagine, our fates would intersect. The teacher asked each of us what our father did.

  When my turn came, I answered without too much enthusiasm: “Fisherman,” as did the fourth child of Pinuccio Cagachiesa, also a fisherman, and another couple of kids I didn’t know.

  When it was Maddalena’s turn, she announced with emphasis: “He works at the Tubificio Meridionali, the pipe factory,” and you could see that, at home, they had done their utmost to get her to learn it by heart, without the slightest mistake. Michele, my desk mate, was among the last Maestro Caggiano turned to. There was something wily in the gaze of that devil of a teacher when he came to Straziota. Like a cat licking its whiskers before a succulent piece of fish.

  Michele kept his gaze lowered. He tried a couple of times to say something, but his first attempts failed miserably. The words died in his throat, and his voice returned to the vague point in the stomach from which all emotions start off. In the second row, Mimmiù and Pasquale, two boys with dark faces and crafty expressions, began to tease him in a low voice: “Talk, fatso. What, cat got your tongue? Or you ate that, too?” Maestro Caggiano heard but pretended not to hear. He was enjoying the nasty little p
lay he’d set in motion. His was a preestablished plan, and we kids played exactly the roles that he had imagined for us.

  2

  “Mamma’s a housewife,” Michele finally resolved to answer, “and Papa’s unemployed.” It wasn’t distressing information, because many fathers were without work, even if, in reality, behind the word “unemployed” countless truths could be hidden.

  “Do you know what the Straziota family’s nickname is?” the teacher added, drawing circles in the air with his index finger.

  I observed Michele, who seemed to be making a clumsy attempt to pull his head down between his large shoulders, to disappear behind the desk that was too small for his mass, to dematerialize before our eyes. We answered in chorus with a loud click of the tongue against the palate, and this time Maestro Caggiano did not object to a sound that he usually considered vulgar and inappropriate.

  “Do you want to say it, Michele?” He approached our desk in the first row, and his eyes shone so much at that moment that, for the first time, I realized how pale they were, of a crystalline blue.

  He has eyes like Papa’s, I thought, a terrible thing.

  “And then I’ll say it to your classmates,” he concluded, satisfied.

  He began to circle among the desks to give pathos to his revelation. We were all quiet and expectant, even Mimmiù and Pasquale, who could almost never contain themselves.

  “Have you ever heard of the Senzasagnes, ‘the bloodless ones’?” he asked at a certain point, leaning against his desk. An “oh” of dismay spread through the classroom, and unintentionally, we all looked at each other, from the front to the back desks; we looked at the teacher, who was looking at Michele and, arms crossed, waiting for a nod; we looked at the windows and looked at the walls, as if even the inanimate objects, hearing that name named, could awaken from the torpor of things and come alive. My head flew quickly to all the notions that during my young years I had absorbed about the Senzasagnes. But none of us knew that Michele belonged to that family. I discovered later that he was ashamed of his origins. Michele’s great-grandmother—this my father had told me, everyone in the neighborhood told the story—had been widowed during the war. Alone and without a lira, she lived in a decrepit house, the rooms smoke blackened and stinking, the plaster falling down, spiderwebs in every corner, furniture reduced to sawdust soaked with dirt and coffee. One day, getting discouraged in the search for masters to serve, floors to clean, and chicken excrement to scratch up with her nails, and though she had given no earlier sign of madness, she had grabbed by the neck the man she was then working for, a sausage maker of fifty who had also been widowed as a young man, and had killed him with one of the knives he used to slice prosciutto. A clean swipe that started at the center of his chest and descended to the navel. She had taken the money that he kept in the cookie jar and had bought the best cut of meat, the tenderest and tastiest, to make a stew for her children. Everyone said that she was very beautiful, with black, languid eyes, so caressing that not even the finest silk could equal them. Her lips were shapely, and, something rare at the time, her teeth were very white, straight, and healthy. Although her guilt was never proved, Marisa became known as Senzasagne, “without blood,” like the octopus, incapable of feeling human emotions. And even though she was a widow, and beautiful, no man dared to court her, to offer her his company to alleviate the emptiness of widowhood. If some foreigner approached, filling her with sweet talk and attentions, his eyes pasted to her figure like flies on an ox, she chased him away with a mild slap of the hand and immediately dampened his ardor. Her children, too, became Senzasagnes, three sons and a daughter, who was also beautiful, the one who would later bear Nicola Senzasagne, Michele’s father, a large, ungainly man with a square head and a helmet of reddish hair.

  In my house, an absolute ban was in effect for me, a girl, to go near him, look at him, speak a word to him. I remember that Papa had the habit of buying contraband cigarettes from him between Piazza del Ferrarese and Corso Vittorio Emanuele.

  “Hello, Don Nicola,” my father began. The other inclined his head and answered in a vacuous tone, monosyllabic, in a hoarse voice that he made no effort to force past his thin lips, which always held a cigarette. Occasionally, I seemed to feel his eyes on me, so I turned away or stared at the street anxiously, because the big red-haired man instilled real terror.

  Papa took the cigarettes, paid what he owed, and said goodbye in an obsequious way: “Salud’ a signor’.” The excessive use of such respectful terms toward a man we couldn’t even name disgusted me. “Don,” “signore” . . . they were words that in my family were used only in addressing the priest or the doctor. I followed Papa without looking at the seller of cigarettes, and I noticed that as soon as we returned to the road along the sea, he spit. Twice, three times, at the same time using his hands as if chasing away the heavy air right in front of his nose. He always did it, every time, before taking a cigarette and lighting it calmly.

  “I’m warning you, Marì, you must never speak to that man. Never, you understand? Neither you nor your brothers.”

  Once, however, it was the smuggler who spoke to me.

  “You, signorina,” he said, uttering the words clearly, “you have the same face as your grandmother.”

  He had a steady gaze, the eyes narrowed so that it was difficult to make out the color. I froze with fear. What should I do? Answer him? Nod? I turned to Papa, but he smiled, one of his false, polite smiles. I was sure that if I answered, I would crumble under his mass, which was like the ogre in a fairy tale, I would become the same immaterial substance as air, evaporated before my father’s defenseless eyes. But if I was silent, Don Nicola would take me for a disrespectful and impolite person.

  “My nonna Antonietta or my nonna Assunta?” I tried to reply, and closed my eyes, waiting for the worst.

  “Antonietta, of course. Of the other you don’t have even a hair.”

  I reopened my eyes, terrified, and to my great astonishment, none of the terrible things I had imagined took place. I went away unhappy and worried, because I would never have wanted to address a word to him. Thus, on the street, I was angry with Papa.

  “Why do you take me with you to buy the cigarettes?” I asked in a voice that shook because I felt like crying, even though I wouldn’t.

  He stopped. He bent over to ruffle my hair, then he said: “Because, Marì, you have to know evil first in order to avoid it.”

  And now the son of evil, produced by its malevolent and infected seed, was my desk mate.

  Two things happened after Maestro Caggiano’s revelation. The first was that no one in the class, not even Mimmiù and Pasquale, any longer had the courage to make fun of Michele. In the imaginary hierarchy of nicknames, “Senzasagne” beat all the others by far in evocative power and malice. From that day, Michele was to everyone only “Michele” or at most “Straziota.” Never again “fatso” or “fatty.” The second concerned me alone and in certain ways was terrible, because I began to have nightmares in which Michele’s body underwent macabre metamorphoses, lost its normal outlines to become a liquid and pasty substance, the color of blood and pitch mixed together, and was finally recomposed, piece by piece, vein by vein, into the horrendous figure of his father. I woke up agitated and sweaty and repeated obsessively to myself that I would have to ask the teacher as soon as possible to give me another desk mate. I turned my eyes in every direction to be sure I was really in my house, in the bedroom that belonged to Giuseppe and then had also become mine and Vincenzo’s, except that they, my brothers, slept in a single bed, head to toe.

  Giuseppe was strong, he seemed carved out of the trunk of an olive tree. In appearance, he was very similar to our father, with a smooth, handsome face, almost like a woman’s, and very pale-blue eyes. Vincenzo, on the other hand, had always been long and angular, skinny as a rail, with a jutting chest. I recall how, as a child, I was irritated by the sight of the long, bony line of his spine that was visible through his sweat-soaked shir
ts. His narrow feet also bothered me, the second and third toes the same length, thin and dark skinned, because Vincenzo had the same olive complexion that I did. I discovered later that, more than his appearance, he annoyed me as a person, as a brother, as a boy and then an adolescent who thought he was smarter than everybody else. Smarter than me, and even than Giuseppe, who was two years older, and sometimes even smarter than Papa.

  I was upset when he sat on the bed in the morning, on waking, with his legs spread and his hands digging into his bulging underpants. I pretended to sleep, but more than once, I thought he knew that I was awake and touched himself purposely right there, as if he were proclaiming first of all to me and then to all other women: “I am Vincenzo De Santis, son of Antonio De Santis, and even if I dream of one day bashing his face in, I’m a man like him. Don’t you forget it.”

  Only on the nights when I woke up agitated because of those nightmares about Michele Straziota was I glad to find myself near both my brothers. The calm breath of their sleep soothed me. I sat up and held on to the pillow with my hands. I glanced at their sleeping faces. Their different ways of yielding to sleep. Giuseppe always on his side, curled up, with his head often resting right on Vincenzo’s feet, and the other always face to the ceiling, hand sometimes crossed over his stomach, as if he were lying in a coffin, so long and thin it was almost frightening. There, I thought, Vincenzo wants to challenge even death. He’ll be ready, so when the lady with the scythe comes to get him, he’ll spit in her face and tell her to come back later, he’s busy.