The Last Son’s Secret

by Rafel Nadal Farreras

  About the Book

  Puglia, Italy, 1918.

  Among the olive groves and vineyards of southern Italy, a boy and a girl are born, moments apart. Far away in the trenches of the First World War, their fathers have just died. Now all the men in Vitantonio’s family have been wiped out – all twenty-one. All except him.

  Growing up together, war seems far away for the two children. But Vitantonio’s mother will do anything to protect her son from the curse of death that seems to hang over the family – and so she tells a lie. It is a lie that will bind Vitantonio and Giovanna, the girl who shares his birthday, together over the years.

  But as the clouds of another war begin to gather on the horizon, it may ultimately drive them apart.

  A huge international bestseller, this sweeping and heartbreaking tale of a tiny Italian village during two world wars will stay with you forever.

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Book

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Map

  Prologue

  Part One: The Curse of the Palmisanos

  The Great War

  The Last Palmisano

  Part Two: The Garden Full of White Flowers

  The Widows’ House

  Zia

  The Funeral

  To the Notary’s

  Food for the Dead

  The Palazzo

  The Month of Flowers

  The Family Religion

  The Summer House

  The Confirmation

  Red Earth

  In Bed

  Part Three: Cherry Earrings

  Sweet Sixteen

  Father Felice

  Cockfight

  The Second Summer at the Farmstead

  The Altamura Market

  Summer’s End

  At the Cinema Comunale

  The Beating

  The Gentlemen’s Circle

  Southern Winds

  The Indiscretion

  A Letter from Spain

  At the French Border

  Rumours of War

  Part Four: Rain of Stars over Matera

  The Unwilling Conscript

  Bells for the Dead

  The Confession

  Roosevelt

  The Englishman

  The Announcement

  The Demonstration

  A Never-ending August

  A Disconcerting Ceremony

  The Landing of the British at Taranto

  The Reunion

  Beside the River

  Rain of Stars

  The Liberation of Matera

  The Trail of Terror

  The Hunt

  ‘Primo Carnera’

  In the Mountains

  Dr Saroni’s Weapons

  Part Five: The Bombing of Bari

  The Bar Mirror

  The Luftwaffe Raid

  A Glow at the Window

  A Fear-struck City

  The Secret of Bitonto

  The Stench of Garlic

  The Heart of a Palmisano

  The Biscuit Tin

  The Ducks in the Pond

  Shootout in the Piazza Garibaldi

  In the Crypt

  The Cherry Tree

  Epilogue

  Author’s Note

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  Copyright

  THE LAST SON’S SECRET

  Rafel Nadal Farreras

  English translation by Mara Faye Lethem

  To Anna. To Sílvia. To Raquel.

  Prologue

  24 August 2012. Midday.

  At first, the town seemed abandoned. The only sign of life was a couple of dogs sleeping on a dusty old mat, in the shade of some bins. But around the corner, the town square appeared, filled with large balcony-clad houses that opened on to the valley of vineyards and olive groves, granting a panoramic view over the Puglia countryside, stretching almost to the Adriatic. Three carob trees and two holm oaks presided over this small oasis, and in the shade of the large, leafy branches two monuments rose, each covered with floral offerings and adorned with bows and ribbons striped in the colours of the Italian flag.

  On a wooden bench with peeling paint sat an old man who had dozed off: his eyes were closed, his head tilted to one side and his mouth half open. He seemed to be having trouble breathing, or maybe he was already sleeping the sleep of the just and no one had realized; either way, it looked like he might never muster the strength to get up again. At his feet lay a dog, stretched out in that way only Mediterranean dogs can, in the paltry shade of the summer during the sunstroke hours. All around rang out the repetitive song of the cicadas scratching their bellies on some high branch of the carob trees in the windless air.

  One of the monuments in the middle of the square was a monolith dedicated to the fallen of the First World War. A stone pillar engraved with a list of the local victims showed forty-two names, but a careful reading revealed something more: half of those dead had the last name Palmisano. Twenty-one men from the same family.

  ‘Giuseppe Oronzo Palmisano (one); Donato Fu Francesco Paolo Palmisano (two); Silvestro Palmisano (three); Gianbattista Di Martino Palmisano (four); Nicola Di Martino Palmisano (five); Giuseppe Fu Vito Palmisano (six) …’

  The other memorial was dedicated to those fallen on the fronts of the Second World War. There wasn’t a single Palmisano on this list; perhaps the family and the last bearer of its name hadn’t survived the losses of the first war. This time, half of the dead were Convertinis.

  ‘Ventuno … sono ventuno!’ The old man on the bench sat up, awake, and said it again to the empty square, ‘Ventuno … sono ventuno!’

  His face was grooved with wrinkles as he gazed at the monument. The dog had woken up as well, but he remained on the ground, his legs stretched out.

  ‘Twenty-one!’ he repeated quietly to himself. ‘All victims of the First War. La maledizione dei Palmisano!’

  PART ONE

  The Curse of the Palmisanos

  The Great War

  THE FIRST TO die was Giuseppe Oronzo Palmisano, the most belligerent of all the Palmisano men. He had long been preparing for the moment his homeland would call him to arms. He fell on 23 May 1915, the same day Italy declared war on Austria-Hungary and joined the Allied coalition in the First World War. Poor Giuseppe Oronzo always maintained that fighting on the front offered men a great opportunity: it taught discipline, strengthened character and allowed youngsters to channel appropriately their natural-born aggresion. He believed that the battlefield was the only place where brute force could be brought to bear in a natural, organized manner. Like a noble art, he used to say.

  Giuseppe Oronzo was loyal and reliable. His problem, though, was that he had always preferred to resolve differences with his fists. But despite this violent streak, he wasn’t an entirely bad sort: he was the first Palmisano to enlist, and was assigned to a volunteer corps, quite an honour for someone from a small town like Bellorotondo. Shortly after, he was the first to head to the Carso front, in north-east Italy, and the first to enter into combat. He was also the first of his detachment to go over the top to attack the Austrian positions. And he was the first to get a bullet to the chest, right in the sternum. When he felt the impact, accompanied by a sound like two pieces of metal colliding and a very unpleasant burning sensation, he assumed the bullet had just grazed the buttons of his uniform tunic and he tried to carry on. His legs refused to move, they folded under him and he collapsed. When the Austrians stormed the trench, a corporal with a curled moustache stepped over his body and rammed his bayonet into his heart, but poor Giuseppe Oronzo didn’t feel it: life had left him some time before. The first Palmisano
died with the banal honour of being one of the first Italians to lose his life, that very first day of war on the Austrian front. That summer he would have turned twenty-two.

  Donato Fu Francesco Paolo Palmisano (2) was the second to die. The most cowardly of the family, he would have done anything to avoid being called up, but alas, he wasn’t even afforded the chance to experience the full horrors of the trenches. He also died on the Carso front, towards the end of the first summer of the war, victim of a howitzer shell from the Austrian artillery that was defending the border city of Gorizia. And, a few days later, Silvestro (3) died, pumped full of bullets from the new Austrian machine guns, which, in October 1915, ravaged those troops assaulting the Santa Lucia hill on the north-eastern Italian frontier. Installed in lookout posts far from the line of fire, the Italian officers drank tea from porcelain cups served by gloved auxiliaries, and from their towers they ordered successive waves of troops to attack the mountain. Until, finally, the commander of the Italian armies, General Luigi Cadorna, realized it was a useless massacre and put paid to the offensive. That was the end of the third battle of the Isonzo, a river squeezed in between magnificent mountains, right by the border with the Austro-Hungarian Empire, a river that had never been heard of in Bellorotondo until that day.

  The twins had the most horrific death of them all. As boys, Gianbattista Di Martino (4) and Nicola Di Martino (5) couldn’t stand being made to dress identically. They hated when the women in town would stop them on the street to pinch their cheeks and coo over them, ‘So cute, like two peas in a pod.’

  Growing tired of such maternal effusiveness, one fine day they decided to never wear the same outfits again. They stopped walking to school together. They refused to leave the house at the same time. They wouldn’t go anywhere near each other in the school playground. If, during some local festival, the family went for a stroll along the Via Cavour, in the centre of Bellorotondo, they found a way to walk separately, one on either side of the road. And when they were teenagers they did everything possible to differentiate themselves physically: Gianbattista grew a moustache and Nicola opted for a small beard; one parted his hair on the right side and the other on the left. When they began to court girls, Gianbattista went after the exuberant, extrovert ones who laughed a lot. Nicola, on the other hand, eyed the more discreet homebodies.

  When they had finally managed to forget that they were twins and the old women in town finally stopped cooing over them, they were called up. They both received the conscription letter on the same day, 1 February 1915, and from the same postman. They were also sent to the same barracks, and once the army had shaved both of their heads and put them in the same uniform, they were once again so alike that it was impossible to tell them apart. From that day on they trained together and slept in bunk beds, one on top of the other. Six months later, they travelled north together, in the same company, and they were also side by side when they received word that they were headed to the front and were to prepare for immediate combat.

  The twins had just turned nineteen and once again were like two peas in a pod, but it no longer bothered them. Instead, they grew inseparable: they slept next to each other, they hunkered down together in the muddy trench and they advanced together when they attacked the Austrian positions. No one in the company could tell the brothers apart. Captain Di Luca gave them orders as if they were a single person: ‘Palmisano, get behind those trees and shut that damn machine gun up, once and for all!’

  Gianbattista and Nicola didn’t ask for whom the order was meant. They both crawled out of the trench and crept along, stuck together as if they were just one man, to the rocks. Then they ran to the pine forest and half an hour later the enemy machine gun exploded and their fellow soldiers shouted, ‘Long live Palmisano!’, figuring they would both feel included in the cheer.

  In November, the Austrians dropped chlorine gas, right on the front where the twins had just earned a medal for bravery. When the lethal fog lifted, a horrifying carpet of cadavers was discovered in both sets of trenches: the wind had changed midway through the attack and, after annihilating the Italians, the gas had wreaked havoc on the Austrians themselves. Both armies had their work cut out in recovering the corpses of the victims of that piece of military insanity. Captain Di Luca’s men found the twins hugging, their bodies so entwined that they couldn’t manage to separate them. Their faces were blue from the poison, and contorted from the horror they had seen coming. Thick foam filled their mouths. Their jackets still smelled of gas.

  The captain was resolute. ‘Stop what you’re doing and bury the Palmisano body. I can’t bear another minute of this horror!’

  The soldiers stared at each other, disconcerted.

  ‘Which Palmisano, Captain? We can’t get them apart.’

  ‘For the love of God, can’t you see there’s no need? Bury them just as we found them. They are one man.’

  And they buried Gianbattista Di Martino Palmisano and Nicola Di Martino Palmisano, clinging to each other in their final embrace, in a clearing in the pine forest, together for all eternity.

  When the townspeople of Bellorotondo found out that the twins had died in each other’s arms, they were deeply moved and commemorated them in a huge, well-attended mass in the church of the Immaculate Conception. They all remembered the twins as little boys, when they still dressed identically, and they left the mass pleased that, before dying, the two brothers had decided to be twins again.

  After that tragedy, the Palmisano women wore mourning clothes for the rest of the war. Days later, on Christmas Eve of 1915, they received the news of the death of Giuseppe Fu Vito (6) in Libya, an almost exotic location, far from the various fronts of the war and which, on the face of it, had seemed less dangerous. The boy was slight and he’d endured every sort of illness going as a child. In Tripoli, an infection saw his temperature rocket to forty-two degrees Celsius and after fifteen delirious days he could no longer stand the fever and died.

  Fate was laughing cruelly at those peasant farmers punished by the war: the news of Giuseppe Fu Vito’s feverish end reached them just as the temperature in town dropped to three degrees below freezing. When the Palmisano women went out on the street to cry, breaking the crisp silence of Christmas Eve, they were met by the coldest temperatures yet that century.

  Martino Palmisano (7) died the following March from a bullet wound to the head, in the fifth battle of the Isonzo, a river which by then everyone in the town had learned to place on a map. Most of them had assumed it was a very lovely but very small river in a corner of Italy so far from Bellorotondo that they doubted it was actually part of the same country.

  In the autumn of 1916, Stefano (8), Giuseppe Fu Piet (9) and Donato Fu Francesco (10) fell within a matter of a few days. The first was killed by shrapnel from a grenade; the second, by complications from gangrene in one leg; and the third as a result of a heart attack in the midst of battle. All three of them had girlfriends and all three were thinking of getting married as soon as the conflict – quickly becoming a collective insanity that threatened the survival of families across half of Europe – ended. From the day they received the news of this triple tragedy, the three young women in question walked through the streets of Bellorotondo crying over their misfortune. And from that moment on, the town no longer had any doubt that the Palmisanos were cursed by a terrible maledizione. No one could say exactly whether the death of the three cousins in the foothills of the Colline dell’Hermada, the last obstacle to an Italian advance before Trieste, had happened during the seventh, eighth or ninth battle of the Isonzo; they followed one another at a dizzying pace and the line of the front changed position every week. But, after the coincidence of three deaths in a matter of days, the fate of that poor farming family achieved legendary status in Bellorotondo.

  Were any more evidence needed that the Palmisanos were plagued by a monstrous curse, it came two months later, at Christmas of 1916. For the second year in a row, tragedy knocked at the family’s door on the mo
st important festival night of the year: as they headed out for Midnight Mass, the news of Giuseppe Di Giovanni’s death (11) reached the town. In late September, the eldest of the Palmisanos had miraculously saved himself from an explosion in a tunnel dug by the Austrians beneath the Italian positions on Monte Cimone, but three months later he had fallen in a skirmish near Stelvio. Giuseppe had been sent to the Alps, to the high-mountain troops, because he was a specialist in digging mine shafts, an essential skill for the strange war that was going on at the Alpine front: instead of attacking on the surface, the Italians and Austrians dug tunnels and placed explosives beneath the enemy positions. Underground, in the bowels of the mountains, Giuseppe was the most skilled of them all, but patrolling outside the tunnels was different – he never felt comfortable marching along snowy paths that were sometimes at more than two thousand metres of altitude, and where he was finally greeted by a stray bullet in a skirmish.

  During what remained of that winter and all of the spring of 1917, no more telegrams arrived and the lack of news seemed to contradict the worst portents. But really, the lull was due to the freezing weather that gripped the entire European continent. When the weather improved, the curse reared its head once again. At Pentecost, they learned of the death of Cataldo (12) in Albania, just as it had become an Italian protectorate and hostilities there had officially ceased.

  And in the autumn came the disaster at Caporetto: the Isonzo front collapsed, the Italian army retreated across the entire line of the front from the Adriatic to Valsugana, almost at Trento, and more than three hundred men were killed, wounded or taken prisoner by the Austrians. In just one day, 25 October 1917, and just a few kilometres away from each other, Vito (13), Giulio (14) and Angelo Giorgio (15) were killed – all from rifle shots at point-blank range when they were out of ammunition and their officers had fled en masse hours earlier without even giving the order to retreat. All three of them had just been called up, having only turned eighteen the previous spring. When the news of the latest triple tragedy reached Bellorotondo, the town was convinced that not a single Palmisano man would survive the merciless war, or the family curse.