The House on Via Gemito

by Domenico Starnone, Oonagh Stransky

Genres: General Fiction; Literary Fiction

Synopsis

This extraordinary Strega Prize-winning novel confirms Domenico Starnone’s reputation as one of Italy’s greatest living writers. Told against the backdrop of Naples in the 1960s, a city that itself becomes a vivid character in this lush, atmospheric novel, The House on Via Gemito is a masterpiece of Italian fiction, one that is steeped in Neapolitan lore.

A modest apartment in Via Gemito smelling of paint and turpentine. Its furniture pushed up against the wall to create a make-shift studio. Drying canvases moved from bed to floor each night. Federí, the father, a railway clerk, is convinced that he possesses great artistic promise. If it weren’t for the family he must feed and the jealousy of his fellow Neapolitan artists, nothing would stop him from becoming a world-famous painter. Ambitious and frustrated, genuinely talented but also arrogant and resentful, Federí is scarred by constant disappointment. He is a larger-than-life character, a liar, a fabulist, and his fantasies shape the lives of those around him, especially his young son, Mimi, short for Domenico, who will spend a lifetime trying to get out from under his father’s shadow.

Starnone, a finalist for the National Book Award with Trick, author of New York Times notable book of the year, Ties, and the critically acclaimed Trust, takes readers beyond the slim, novella-length works for which he is known by American readers to create a vast fresco of family, fatherhood, and modern Naples.

 

Read more

Release date: May 30, 2023

Publisher: Europa Editions

Print pages: 461

Sample

 

When my father told me he hit my mother only once in twenty-three years of marriage, I didn’t even bother replying. A long time had passed since I had challenged any of his stories, with their fabricated events, dates, and details. When I was a boy, I always saw him as a liar and his lies embarrassed me, as if they were my own. Now, as an adult, it didn’t even seem to me like he was lying. He truly believed his words could recreate facts according to his desires or regrets.

A few days later, though, his punctilious assertion resurfaced in my thoughts. Initially I felt unease, then growing anger, and finally the desire to pick up the phone and yell into it, “Really? Only once? And all those times I remember seeing you hit her, right up until she started dying, what were they? Love taps?”

Of course I didn’t call. Although I had been playing the role of devoted son for decades, I had also managed to hand him a fair number of disappointments. And besides, it was pointless to attack him directly. His jaw would’ve dropped the way it always did whenever something unexpected happened and, in that mild tone of voice he always used when he disagreed with us children, he’d start to list with great suffering—and via long-distance—all the irrefutable instances of cruelty that he had not inflicted on my mother but she on him. “What difference does it make if he continues to invent things?” I asked myself.

Actually I realized that it changed a lot. To begin with, I changed, and in a way I didn’t like. It felt, for example, like I was losing the ability to measure my words, an art that I had proudly mastered as a teenager. Even the question I had considered yelling at him (“And all those times I remember seeing you hit her, right up until she started dying, what were they? Love taps?”) was poorly calibrated. When I tried writing it out, I was struck by its crass and impudent style. I seemed to be making exaggerated claims not unlike those of my father. It was as if I wanted to reproach and shout at him for slapping and hitting my mother even as she lay on her death bed, punching her with the expertise of the gifted boxer he said he had been at the age of fifteen, over at the Belfiore gym on Corso Garibaldi.

This was a clear sign that all it took was the slightest hint of my age-old anger and fear to make me lose my poise and erase all the distance I had managed to put between us while growing up. If I actually spoke those impulsive words, it would be like allowing my worst dreams to blend with his lies. It’d be like giving him credence, agreeing to see him the way he chose to represent himself, as someone you don’t mess around with, which was what he learned as a kid from European champion Bruno Frattini, who egged him on in the ring, and encouraged him with a smile. “Go on and hit me, Federí! Hit me! Kick me!” What a champ. He had taught him that you dominate fear by striking first and striking hard, a principle he never forgot. And since that time, whenever the occasion arose and without the least preamble, he’d size up his victim and proceed to bash the bones of anyone who tried to boss him around.

To be good enough, he started training on Saturdays and Sundays at the Giulio Luzi sports club. “Giulio Luzi? Not the Belfiore?” I’d ask with a hint of spite. “Giulio Luzi, Belfiore, whatever, they’re all the same,” he’d reply gruffly. And then he went on: the person responsible for introducing him into the sports club for the first time was none other than Neapolitan featherweight champion Raffaele Sacco, who happened to be walking down the street while he was fighting tooth and nail with a gang from the neighborhood near the railroad station that used to regularly throw rocks at him and his brother Antonio. Sacco, who was eighteen at the time, stepped into the fray. He threw a couple of punches in those sonofabitches’ faces and then, after praising Federí for his courage, conducted him to the Giulio Luzi or the Belfiore or whatever the hell you want to call it.

That was where my father started boxing, and not just with Raffaele Sacco and Bruno Frattini but also with the latter’s protégé, Michele Palermo, the massive Centobelli, and tiny Rojo, champions one and all. He made swift progress. A kid named Tammaro learned it the hard way when he harassed him as he was walking home from school with his brother Antonio. “You? A boxer? What a joke, Federí!” he taunted him. Without a word, my father knocked him flat with a left hook to the chin. Then he turned to a friend of Tammaro’s who stood there paralyzed with terror and said, “When he wakes up, tell the bastard that next time I’m going to kick his ass, not just his face.”

His ass. I was frightened by those stories. I was disturbed, too, because I had no idea how to protect my own brother from the kids who threw rocks at us, the way he had done for his brother. I was worried about heading out into the world without knowing how to land a punch. And I felt anxiety, even later on as an adult, when I saw how well my father could do the voices of violence, the posturing, the gestures, kicking and punching the air.

In the meantime, he seemed to derive enormous pleasure from his ferocity, from the way he knew how to deploy it. He used to tell me those stories to incite my admiration. Now and then he succeeded, but for the most part I felt a combination of distress and fear, which stayed with me longer. A case in point: the two shoe-shine boys on Via Milano, in Vasto, at 7 P.M. on a summer evening. My father, seventeen at the time, and his brother Antonio, fifteen, were on their way back from the gym on Corso Garibaldi. Suddenly it started to rain. The two boys—it was Saturday and they were wearing their fascist uniforms, something my father emphasized proudly, even decades later, in the belief that his outfit made him look sharp and terribly manly—ran for cover under the porticoes of the Teatro Apollo, where there was already a cluster of other people, including the two shoe-shine boys. There was clamoring, heavy rain, the smell of wet dust. When the shoe-shine boys caught sight of them, they sneered cruelly. “Those two ugly sonofabitches made it rain,” one of them said loudly to the other. Their brutish words offended the boys, their mother, their father, maybe even their ominous black shirts. Without thinking twice, my father reached over and, with his left hand, grabbed the collar of the shoe-shine boy who had spoken those words, even though he was big, tough, and around thirty, and planted an uppercut on that Neanderthal’s foul mouth—Neanderthal he called him, to show how primitive he was—knocking out his two front teeth. Thwack. He punched him so hard that one of the man’s broken teeth—and at this point in the story, he’d wave his index finger in front of me to show me a scar that I couldn’t actually see but to appease him I said yes, Papà, I see it—got wedged into the flesh of his finger. He had to flick his hand hard to make it fall out.

Whenever he told that story, he always flicked his hand hard, as if the fragment of tooth was still stuck in it. I’d stare at him in horrified devotion: lean and lanky, he had a long face, high forehead, and a slender, elegant nose with delicate nostrils, a nose that definitely didn’t look as if it belonged to a skilled boxer. He always came home from work furious, as if he had just knocked out Tammaro or the shoe-shine boy; always the victim of some urgent, dramatic situation; always ready, even if faced with a multitude of enemies and it was inevitable that he’d get beaten to a pulp, of courageously chasing back fear. Because he was a man who had been initiated into the world of boxing by none other than a European heavyweight champion. He was a man who wouldn’t let anyone kick him around, much less his wife. If anything, he’d be the one to kick her around. Toe kick—that’s what I was always afraid he would do to her when he came home—and heel stomp.

 

One September morning, in order to put my mind at rest, I decided to calmly map out all the times my father had definitely hit my mother.

At first the prospect seemed complex and loaded with details but when I subjected each of the recollected images—a slap, a dish of pasta hurled at the wall, a scream, a glare—to the rigors of prose and articulated them into an organized series of events, memory started to waver and with some alarm I realized that I was left with only two irrefutable episodes.

The first one dated back to 1955, at some point between the fourth and fifteenth of June, the period of time during which my father exhibited twenty-eight of his works of art, including paintings, watercolors, and drawings, at the San Carlo art gallery, located at number 7 in the Galleria Umberto I arcade.

I sought out an image to begin. I envisioned him in bed, their big double bed. I had just brought him coffee and its aroma wafted through the house. He sipped it and read out loud to my mother, brothers, and me from the newspaper reviews that mentioned his name. Now those were the days . . . He always liked recalling those days. Waking up like that, the smell of sleep mixing with that of coffee, the first of an endless number of cigarettes, and the scent of fresh newsprint, anxiously scouring the pages and headlines and columns, and then finding his name—self-taught, no formal training, no art school, no pulling of strings—in print in the city papers or even the provincial ones, followed by a couple hundred of words about his work. See what he had managed to do, him, a man born on Barrettari alley, a man who had been forced by his father, a lathe worker with absolutely no understanding of art, to leave school and get a job. What a waste of youth. By the age of eighteen, in 1935, he was working for the railroad as an electrical repairman. Thanks only to his great intelligence and desire to improve his situation, by 1940 he was already second in charge. Now, as of a few years—it was 1951 at the time—he had become senior station master and train dispatcher for all moving cars on the lines in and around Naples. Now that’s satisfaction. An important job. And all because of merit, not thanks to seniority or favors. At the time he had been the youngest station master in all of Italy, word of honor, and much appreciated by his superiors, even if, it’s true, he did everything he could to get out of work and stay home and do his real job, the one he had been born to do: paint and draw, or as he said, pittare. Sure, a fair number of his colleagues couldn’t stand him; they called him a presumptuous shitty artist and accused him of being lazy, arrogant, and a blowhard. It’s true, he was lazy. He was arrogant. He was a blowhard. He was all those things, and the first to admit it. He felt he had the right to be lazy, arrogant, and a blowhard—to anyone who busted his balls. He was born to be a painter, not a railroader. But since he was the kind of person who did everything to the hilt, particularly if it offered him the chance to demonstrate that he could do it better than someone else, I believe that he did his job pretty well. Despite all the other ideas that floated around his head, one thing was for certain. When he was on duty—and he was on duty a lot, he had long hours, day shifts and night ones, and I remember because sometimes when I was older I’d stop by his office and watch him direct the traffic of convoy cars, chase them down, smack his ruler, triangle, and pencil on a huge drawing table in a way that was both petulant and extremely lucid—there were never any train wrecks or deaths.

Of course he took full advantage of his role. As senior station master he was authorized—he emphasized the fact that he held authority with great pleasure—to conduct random inspections of the stations in his jurisdiction four times a month. So, between 1954 and 1955, he inspected Cassino, Cancello, Ilva, and the Napoli Smistamento depot. He didn’t do it because he enjoyed inspecting: cocky fellow that he was, obsessed only with outshining everyone, the last thing on his mind was the actual inspection. Unless, of course, Federí went on to explain, he encountered an employee who was rude to him and led him to believe that he didn’t give a fuck about his role, his opinions, or his artistic endeavors, well then, he could just go straight to hell, and suddenly Federí became extremely meticulous. But otherwise, no. He took advantage of being able to inspect all those stations in order to catch the light and colors of real life in either pastels or tempera.

Because, although he was a railroader, he thought about nothing but the exhibition he was preparing. And indeed, when he was good and ready, he came home, shut himself in, told the station that he had rheumatic fever, gastritis, or any number of other ailments, and spent his time painting line signals, junctions, sidetracks, cattle cars, railyards, depots, and railheads. I remember each and every one of his paintings: my grandmother, brothers, and I slept in the same room where he painted, the dining room, where his monumental easel stood surrounded by his paintbox and canvases. I used to fall asleep staring at those visions, they seemed beautiful to me; I wish I could find them.

Between work and bouts of new illnesses, he completed a further series of paintings devoted to what he saw from the window: the surrounding countryside, but not the one that smelled of mint where I used to play as a kid with my brothers and friends, no; the one of felled trees and severed ancient roots, the flattened one, which by the end of 1954 was rapidly being transformed into a building site. He did studies of wastelands, pile drivers, cement mixers, bulldozers, hoists, storage silos for cement, a detailed rendering of the massacre of a hillside, and a painting crowded with scenes from a construction yard entitled Cantiere ’54.

Then he went on to still-lifes: he drew bowls we had at home and either a few dried herring or a couple of apples, a hatchet or a bunch of artichokes, a few mussels or some flowers, whatever he found lying around the house. He added two nudes to the group that he had done years earlier when he took classes at the Scuola libera del nudo, one done in sanguine and the other in charcoal. He even included a portrait of my brother when he had nephritis, which came out better, he said, than anything by Battistello Caracciolo. And that was it.

All that work took him eight months. The whole apartment on Via Vincenzo Gemito smelled of paint and turpentine. Every piece of furniture in the room we referred to as the dining room had been shoved up against the wall (how hard my mother had worked to obtain those pieces of furniture, and how carelessly he treated them) and at night there were always canvases drying on our beds. His wife complained, my grandmother grumbled. How could he let his children—meaning me and my three brothers—breathe that poison night and day? Had he forgotten that we slept in there? Padreterno, he’d holler, tell me what I’ve done to deserve a life of ball-busting by these two idiotic women. But then it was over: the task had been completed. I have no idea where he found the money to pay for the exhibition. The fact is that with a little help from Don Luigino Campanile, a shoemaker with a shop in Vomero but also an art-lover, who kindly offered to transport all the artwork in his delivery van, Federí went and hung his paintings on the walls of the San Carlo gallery.

 

He was thirty-eight years old and it must have felt like a turning point in his life. Even when he was elderly and ill, he’d clearly and proudly rattle off the names of all the important people who came to see the show: Ciardo, Notte, Striccoli and so on, rivers of first and last names, artists—he assured me—of major renown, sounds which have faded over time but which, back then, I heard him mention often, at times with respect but more often than not with bitterness and disdain for all the wrongs they did him, or which he believed they had. All it took was for a fellow painter to be grazed ever so slightly by fame, even at the most local level, and Federí would start spewing insults, both to his face and behind his back. Mostly he had it in for those of his own age or younger. He couldn’t stand the fact that they had been luckier than him, and he’d furiously enumerate their artistic shortcomings and petty ways. Now and then he even felt the need to insult and offend people who, underneath it all, he respected, just to let off steam. But on that specific occasion of his exhibit opening, everyone seemed praiseworthy because, even if their intentions might have been cruel, they had come to the event and signed the guest book. Eighty-four signatures, that’s not peanuts. And that’s not counting the famous people who appeared like the Virgin Mary but considered signing the guest book too much of a commitment: Giovanni Brancaccio, Carlo Verdecchia, and Guido Casciaro. He continued to grumble about that even decades later, deeply pained: what would a signature have cost them? Show a little generosity. Anyway, there was a huge crowd. Visitors and artists stayed on for lively discussions of art, painting, his style of painting until long after the San Carlo closed.

How hard was it for my mother to understand? Even on normal days, she was a pain. After dinner, as soon as he said, “I’m going out for a bit,” in order to make the rounds of galleries and discuss art, she’d drop everything and say, “I’ll come too.” My father would get angry, he didn’t know how to explain it to her. Why on earth should she come? What would she say to other artists? And especially on important occasions like that: didn’t she realize that she would just be in the way? Every night, after a long, hard day of work at the train depot, he came home exhausted, only to have to go out and do the rounds of the galleries and put in his hours as an artist. It wasn’t fun or anything; he had to deal with all those so-called friends, enemies, potential clients, people who wanted to talk prices, people who might be interested in negotiating despite the pit of venomous snakes who tried to distract buyers by suggesting other works, other paintings, more important painters, such as themselves, for example. It wasn’t fun; it was war. Cruelty, aggression, insinuations, calumny. Rusinè, please, just stay home.

But my mother didn’t want to stay at home, especially on such an occasion. She was thirty-four years old, had four children, and had been married for thirteen years. She grew up fatherless and had worked as a glovemaker ever since she was a child. (“You know how to make gloves? So, make gloves! What do you know about painting?”) At the age of five, her job was to pull out the cotton threads that the decorative rivets left inside the fingers of the gloves, and roll them into knots so the stitching didn’t come undone, a task that broke her nails and chafed her fingertips. Despite all the talk, things with him hadn’t changed that much. But it wasn’t all bad. Sure, he had some negative qualities, but there was also something about him that continued to appeal to her. Imaginative, playful, and completely nuts: she had liked him straight away when he had stopped her while she was walking down the street on that warm afternoon in 1938. Pardon me, signorina. He was different from other men, his gestures, his tone of voice. He didn’t look like her brother Peppino, her brother’s friends, or her mother’s sisters’ husbands; he didn’t look like anyone she knew.

He had seen her while he was chatting with a few of his friends, colleagues from the train depot. One look, that’s all it takes. He had seen her from up above, from the bridge that looks down over the switching yard. She was walking down the dusty street, the celestial blue of the Marina reverberating behind her. He couldn’t stop himself, he swooped down like a hawk; he, too, compared himself to that bird of prey when nostalgically recalling their encounter. She was beautiful, yes, but it was likely that she was less beautiful than she was now, at the age of thirty-four. She was seventeen at the time. She wore her long black hair loose, had the face of a china doll, and had on a pink, three-quarter length, pleated skirt that fluttered around her well-shaped calves and ankles, a light-colored shirt, and a bolero jacket.

Signorina, pardon me, signorina. He laughed, strutted about, and gesticulated wildly. She didn’t say a thing and kept walking, eyes straight ahead, casting only ironic glances at him, sizing this stranger up. He was dressed all in black, his forehead was too big, he had a moustache, and he seemed old. At a certain point, she even tried to discourage his advances by saying as much. “You’re too old for me.” A little offended, a little peeved, he went on to clarify that he was only twenty-one, that it was the suit that made him look old, maybe the hard work, maybe his moustache.

That’s when she realized that she liked him. Who knows why he appealed to her; these things are mysterious and can’t be explained. Maybe because he behaved as if he were the son of a king who had dressed up as an electrical repairman for some mysterious reason known only to him. Maybe because he pulled out a piece of paper and pencil and drew her right then and there, her mouth open in surprise. Whatever the reason, she was soon officially engaged to him and pleased to have been so lucky to meet a man who knew how to keep her happy, who talked and talked, and was never silent. And let’s not forget that he also had a steady income. Objectively speaking, what more could she hope for?

But here it was, June 1955, and he was set to finally become everything he had promised her fifteen years ago, a well-known artist, and she didn’t want to miss her chance of being seen in public, especially as the wife of such a famous artist. And so, while my father continued to swear high and low to all the saints and virgins, she took off the clothes she wore at home and pulled out a selection of dresses from her wardrobe that she had sewn either for some cousin’s wedding or for the confirmation of a friend’s child or for any number of other occasions. She chose one without hesitation. In a flash, with only a thin layer of Nivea cream (which she pronounced Nivèa) and some lipstick, she turned into a woman of breathtaking beauty.

He cussed even louder. Now, when I think about it, I suspect that he detested his wife’s unique beauty; the power that her manner and form had over him (and which he knew so well) made him anxious. There was an indefinable quality about her physique, it was a secret of secrets, the kind that can never be explained and as such is bewitching. Only she knew the secret formula and she used it at her discretion. Rusinè could turn gloomy for months on end and then suddenly dart out again. On that particular occasion, a pair of hair combs, elegantly crafted with decorative swirls and given to her by my father as a gift, added the final touch to her beauty. “Federí, I’m ready,” she then announced in dialect. We always spoke in dialect among ourselves.

Ready for what? What’s going on? Did someone die, Rusinè? Her husband initially humiliated her by declaring that she was too impernacchiata, a word he used to describe my grandmother’s nouveau riche relatives when they got decked out in feathered hats, too much rouge, too much gold jewelry: vulgar and gaudy women, I think he meant, women who were about as elegant as the sound of blowing a raspberry. But since she resisted and didn’t change her clothes, by way of revenge he wanted my brother and me to come along, too, so that we could enjoy his artistic triumphs. He would’ve brought along the other two children if one of them hadn’t been so vivacious and the other one still an infant. Hell, why not bring them? And grandmother, too. Let’s bring everyone, a family outing, so that she wouldn’t forget her role as mother of his children and not some chanteuse, which was how she wanted to appear just to make him look like shit in front of all those people who already considered him an intruder and who were trying, night after night, to knock him down. What the hell had he done to deserve a woman like that?

I remember almost nothing from our visit to the exhibition. We probably took the funicular down, crossed Via Toledo, and then walked the rest of the way under the porticoes of Galleria Umberto, my father five steps ahead of my mother, truculent, and us three steps behind.

Rusinè never mentioned the event and Federí, when recalling that era, only talked about all the wrongs he had suffered, the paintings he had nonetheless sold, the reviews of the show, both good and bad. His wife had been neatly expulsed from his memories of those June days. Us kids, too.

But La Padula, the building developer, was there. He strode into the San Carlo elegantly dressed and surrounded by an obsequious and lively entourage, and immediately fell so in love with the painting entitled Cantiere ’54 that he decided to buy it for his son, who would soon graduate with a degree in architecture. And just like that, he wrote out a check for 120,000 lire: two and a half months of a railroad employee’s salary. He wrote it out right in front of everyone, including the communist art critic, Paolo Ricci. I never found out if my father exaggerated the amount or if, instead, some backroom deal took place and it was paid for with cash that flowed in rivers thanks to hard labor, money that had been made to the sound of pile-drivers and hoists and silos of cement being poured right outside our windows, and then used to purchase, with great largesse, a painting that would hang like a trophy in an architect’s office. Whatever the details, he, the railman-artist or artist-railman or just simply the artist, pocketed the check with the pride of someone who was glad to show that they could make money better and more nobly than those butchers, pastry chefs, salami-makers, and other people who were starting to get rich under his anxious gaze. And yet, there he was making his way over to Engineer Isabella, the building councilman, who was both less powerful than the developer and less sensitive to the cement mixers and concrete molds despite his political role, or maybe precisely because of it. Engineer Isabella was captivated by his painting Natura morta con pesci and wanted to buy it and bring it home, but not for its asking price of 50,000 lire (one month of a railroad employee’s salary). He wanted it for 40,000 lire (slightly less than one month of a railroad employee’s salary). And so the negotiations began. “Fifty,” my father said. “Forty,” said the engineer. They were just about to come to an agreement, “Fine, forty,” when my father turned and saw Rusinè standing in the center of the room.

She was not alone. Nor was she tending to her children, who wandered awkwardly around the gallery. Surrounding her was a dense swarm of second-rate painters, illiterate poets, and incompetent art critics, with one man saying one thing and the other saying something else, while she replied in a bubbly voice or burst into laughter, showing her white teeth and flashing her almond-shaped eyes, which, right in that moment, La Padula the developer seemed to notice and appreciate deeply, as did a middle-aged poet who was busy complimenting her in cadenced phrases, each one almost a perfect hendecasyllable, promising her the gift of a book of his poems with a personalized dedication. “I will come to your house in person tomorrow, and present you with the gift myself, dear lady,” he concluded. “Thank you,” my mother replied, sighing with pleasure. She was so beautiful that even Engineer Isabella felt obliged to tell my father what an attractive lady she was. But my father didn’t have time to reply: walking straight toward them was none other than Chiancone, a painter and professor at the Istituto d’arte, an absolute lunatic, his face ruddy and flustered, keen on adding his two cents to the negotiations. “Chiancone,” Engineer Isabella felt obliged to ask, “in your opinion is this Natura morta con pesci worth 50,000 lire?” And can you guess what the bastard replied? “Engineer Isabella, taste is a personal matter and a person is entitled to spend his money however he wants on something that he likes, but let me just say that what a person likes is not always a work of art.” The man was saying that Natura morta con pesci wasn’t a work of art. Not a work of art? For fuck’s sake. And Chiancone’s shitty paintings were works of art? That man needed to have the shit pumped out of him, he was nothing more than a raging sewer full of shit, he needed to puke up all the bile and vomit out all the foul things and get fucked up the ass, both him and Engineer Isabella.

My father, furious, interrupted the negotiations.

Then there’s a gap. It all starts up again when I’m at home in bed. My brother and I share a bed head to toe, and he’s sleeping, or pretending to sleep. Lying in a bed next to me is my grandmother and the third-born son, who is seven. The youngest one still sleeps with my parents, who aren’t sleeping. I hear my father yelling, my mother sobbing her replies, there’s the sound of running, things fall and break. I say the prayers that my grandmother taught me when I was young, the Ave Maria, for starters. I say it to myself but really loudly so that the voice in my head drowns out my father’s yelling. A futile stratagem. Then it dawns on me that it doesn’t matter if I pray or not because the Virgin Mary exists and, if she has any powers at all, she’ll do everything she can to stop him from killing my mother. So I whisper softly, in dialect, which is the only language I know well, “Mother Mary, please make him stop.” I say it over and over, concentrating as hard as I can, as if repeating it makes the words even more convincing. But the Virgin Mary does nothing. I try to overcome my terror and get up slowly from bed, I walk toward the bedroom door, and open it a crack. I don’t know what to do. I’m twelve years old but I’m scared of my father. It’s not a physical fear, or rather the physical aspect of my fear is what I notice and remember least. It’s another kind of fear. I’m afraid of appearing before him empty-handed, without possessing any logical reasons that he would consider worthy opposition, an echo chamber for all the insults he’s screaming, for all his swearing. As a result, I fear that he will force me to admit that he has the sacrosanct right to kill my mother. I fear that I will agree with him. And consequently, my fear is intolerable.

That’s when I see him. I also see her. She’s crying and is trying to get away from him and moves toward the kitchen. I see bottles and pots and glasses falling to the floor. I understand perfectly what he is yelling at her. “Vain!” he screams, that enigmatic word that will remain forever imprinted in my mind with its injurious sound, a word that’s not part of our everyday dialect, his voice strident as he spews other words, obscenities, and insults. No one in our house knows what that word means, not my mother, not even me, and I just completed sixth grade. Only he knows the meaning. He screams it again, Vain! He slaps her repeatedly, both with his open palm and with the back of his hand, ruining her olive skin, her mouth, her hairdo, causing her elegant hair combs to go flying.

I don’t know what to do. I add up all the punches that already took place but which I didn’t see with the ones that I am seeing; I add up the ones I heard from bed with the ones I am hearing now—I’m still adding them up now as I write—when smacks and words echo endlessly, saying she’s no longer allowed to leave the house, never, ever again; because of her my father lost at least 300,000 lire this evening. Engineer Isabella wanted to buy two paintings, they had been negotiating, and what did she do? She started busting his balls with all that smiling, flirting, showing her leg. You don’t get it Rusinè, your giggling, your laugh, Rusinè, you don’t understand. You have no idea who those people are. They’re shit! Poet, my ass. Sculptor, my ass. Engineer, my ass! Right now they’re standing around outside the Galleria, laughing, and you know what they’re saying? I bet that I bang her before you do, they’re saying; that fellow from the railroad only sells his paintings thanks to his wifey, they’re saying; without her he’d be zilch, he doesn’t even know how to paint; and you, you brought it all on with your vanity, your vanity! You’re so vain! And more words followed, all in dialect, all accompanied by the sound of him slapping her, with many colorful, unspeakable offenses.

I was so horrified that I retreated. Or maybe I never actually got up out of bed. Maybe my grandmother stopped me. She was lying there awake and looking at the ceiling, saying things like ciunkllochemmommò, black magic incantations that mean stop, freeze, stay in bed, as if you’ve suddenly been paralyzed, it’s all your mamma’s fault, she shouldn’t talk back to him, I told her a thousand times that she shouldn’t talk back to him but she never listens, she’s too headstrong, Madonna mia, Madonna mia, ciunkllochemmommò, it doesn’t concern you, it doesn’t concern any of us, it’s between husband and wife: tomorrow they’ll love each other more than yesterday and less than the day after tomorrow.

She says it in a whisper, but maybe it’s enough to stop me. Or maybe what stopped me was the sudden weakness I felt, just like a thousand other times: that absence of energy that my father’s angry voice released in me; the horrible way he managed, with one utterance from his throat, to make my body feel both heavy and empty, empty of thoughts and reason, and filled with lead from my head to my toes; a heaviness that always made me cry, though I tried hard not to. And the tears broke me, in the sense that they flattened me and weakened me and humiliated me for what was an indefinite amount of time, maybe my whole life.

The point is that while I see him slapping her, while I see Federí hitting her, and she trying to protect herself, I see her hair combs go flying—and yet somehow even sight is not certain, we see with so many possible eyes, there’s no single word or syllable or groan or smack that doesn’t get transformed immediately into one image, two, a hundred—while I see all that, I don’t see anything else, I only hear him yelling, threatening that if even just one of those dogshit bastards ever comes around, he’ll throw them down the stairs, ’st’uommenemmèrd, those pieces of shit, because they still don’t understand what kind of man he is. He’s not like Nicola in the fable his grandmother Funzella used to tell him as a child in order to prepare him for life; he’s no sheep, he’s no piécoro, becco,curnuto, he’s not some foolish cuckold like Nicola, all because of that slut of his wife Lillina; no one’s going to taunt him with ’a Lillina ’e Don Nicò, fa l’ammore con Totò, ’on Nico, ’on Nico, tu sì piécher’e nuje no; he’d rather beat his wife to death, strangle her with his hands, oh padreterno, what have I done to deserve this? Enough! Give those hair combs to me! You’re never going to wear them again! Never, ever again! You’re too vain, Rusinè. Such vanity!

Empty. My mother’s core is emptied out. Like me, she has no thoughts. She’s mere kindling for a fire. When she speaks, her words fan the flames of vanity. Or else she exhales smoke, and it spreads through the house. And then there’s that smell. It’s the heavy smell of a heat-resistant object releasing a dark, volatile substance and slowly burning in the fireplace grate. My mother wails, my grandmother starts in on a rosary and pleads for revenge, my brother cries in his pretend sleep, and the hair-combs burst into flame—at least, I think they do, that’s how I imagine them—on that June night. Their acrid odor makes me nauseous, I feel pain deep in my stomach and in my nose, it’s the smell of agony. I will always remember this moment in great detail. It goes on to become indissoluble with my mother’s body, as if Federí had not only burned her hair combs in the fire, but her nails or hair or the thick dark eyelashes that shielded her eyes.

This all took place one summer night in long-ago 1955. But whenever I mentioned it later to my father, he referred to it as a passing argument, nothing more. What slapping? What hitting? As for the hair combs, well, he’d gladly share some other, far more important details than those insignificant hair combs. Things related to that era: people, wrongs to which he had been subjected. Cucurra, for example (he changed the names as he wished, like Cucurra for Chiancone), that professor at the Istituto dell’arte, a presumptuous bastard full of vitriol. Had he ever told me how that man had interfered with and ruined the sale of one of his still-lifes? And what about Paolo Ricci, whom everyone called Paolone, the art critic from L’Unità: had he ever told me that story? He was a disagreeable man who masked his presumptuousness with his elegant ways: he always wore a red kerchief around his neck and relied on a heavy walking stick, a weapon more than a tool. On June 13, 1955, in a cruel review of Federí’s work on show at the San Carlo, that conniving man wrote, “There’s still something of a hesitant tone in his art, something superficial, something belabored.” What total shit. Hesitant tone? Superficial and belabored tone? With my university degree in literature, I would no doubt agree with him that “a belabored tone” was not even proper grammar! Clearly, comrade Ricci had it in for him, and that was the point. With his own two eyes, comrade Ricci had seen La Padula, the capitalist builder, write out a check for Cantiere ’54 for 120,000 lire. Get it? He took out his jealousies by pretending to defend the proletariat. Proletariat, my ass.

And on he went, freewheeling, first laughing complacently, then bitterly, piling on the details, replacing my own vague reconstructions of the events with his vivid fantasies, while also injecting new venomous thoughts into my memory. But then, all of a sudden, he’d recall how he had beat her and burnt the hair combs and to erase those memories he’d declare in a visibly heartfelt tone his usual phrase: “Oh, how I loved your mother.” And then he’d go on to say—as if he wanted to prove it to me—how, out of love for his wife, out of love for his children, he had to give up so many opportunities, chances that you either grab in the moment or lose forever. No, the idea of sacrificing his family for the sake of his art was simply not an option, although he had often thought of going out for a pack of cigarettes and never coming back. Things like that happened; you read about it in the papers. But did he ever do that? No. And why not? Because underneath it all he was a good man, even if he had been wronged and treated unfairly every single step of the way, ever since he was born, beginning with his parents, beginning with his father. Yes, his father. And then he’d start talking about his childhood and youth and himself with such pleasure, reviving memories that had been stored away after each retelling, and enhancing them with a new, energetic cascade of words.

 

That morning it seemed to me that I had done the right thing. It was pointless to try and contradict my father and end up in the spiraling gyre of his endless chatter. Better off moving forward with the work I had originally set out to do.

So I concentrated on a different episode. But that turned out to be a mistake; I should’ve been content and left well enough alone. I ended up spending the whole afternoon trying to remember dates, identify places, and apply structure to fluid images. The results were confounding.

Space and time, for example. The window I recalled seemed to be from the dining room of the apartment on Via Gemito, number 64, in Vomero, where we lived until 1956, and yet the bathroom was definitely the one from the apartment on Corso Arnaldo Lucci, number 149, where we moved in 1957. The first time my mother was hit and slapped was in a building located between Napoli Centrale and the entrance to the Napoli–Pompei highway, the kitchen of which looked out over the freight car depot and its tracks, maybe in 1958. Then I saw her running away from my father—her face puffy and swollen with tears, her bathrobe fluttering open behind her like a cape, her light blue slip with white lace trim torn here and there—and out of the dining room of the house on Via Gemito in 1956. Then I saw her opening a window and trying to throw herself out of it. Someone tried to hold her back (my grandmother, my father, maybe we frightened children? All I see are shadows) but she wriggled out of our grasp with surprising strength and leapt across two years of time, ran down the hall of the apartment on Corso Arnaldo Lucci, reached the bathroom, hurried over to the shelf opposite the mirror, felt around, knocking things over, clawing at objects, and then slit her wrist with a razor blade. Or maybe it was the palm of her hand. Maybe it was with a shard of glass from something she had accidentally broken. First it was a blade, then a piece of glass, they fell into the sink, they fell onto the floor. I saw them both and couldn’t make up my mind. She stood still, watching the dripping blood. So did my brothers, so did I. Only my father panicked. He covered his eyes, turned away, and screamed, “Mamma mia bella, mamma mia bella,” with all the theatrical horror and alarm he showed any time there was the least bit of blood, at any scrape and scratch, his or ours. My grandmother yelled something at him and shook him. He ran out of the room calling to the padreterno for help and came back with an orange tie, grabbed my mother’s wrist, cried out to all the saints and virgins, and wrapped that ludicrous thing around it, the blood immediately soaking it red and wetting his hands. My mother, who had since grown calm, gently pushed him away and knotted the tie slightly higher up her arm with the help of her white teeth. “Take me to the hospital,” she said.

That’s all. Not much. Memories I could’ve enriched with additional stories my father told about why we moved from Via Gemito to Corso Arnaldo Lucci, about his work as a railroader, and how there was never enough money while my mother’s relatives flaunted the money they’d made as shop owners. ...