The Last Son’s Secret

by Rafel Nadal Farreras

  The two gangs fought at the slightest provocation and soon no one even remembered what had started it. Not that it mattered, seeing as it was really just a means of burning off excess energy, which was stifled by the priests’ overly rigorous discipline.

  Vitantonio and Giocavazzo had learned to hate each other from a distance. Their rivalry went back to their earlier school days, at the Bellorotondo primary school and at the middle school in Martina Franca. In their previous institutions, they’d at least both always acknowledged the other’s strengths and avoided any run-ins; at the boarding school in Bari, on the other hand, some contact was inevitable and, during that summer term of 1935, it seemed that conflict was imminent.

  They almost came to blows one day when a group of boys went after poor Argese, who was trying to run away, dragging his bad leg. Vitantonio stood up for him and broke up the gang. Just when he had tripped up the last two of the pursuers and had them on the ground, Giocavazzo showed up, looking defiant.

  ‘I see you think you’re pretty tough dealing with these small fry. But now let’s see if you’ve got the guts to take me on.’

  ‘Just tell me if you want a proper fight and we’ll meet up on the football pitch, but tell your gang to leave Argese alone. He walks with a limp because he had polio when he was little, but he’s smarter than the lot of you. By exam time you’ll probably all be begging for his help.’

  His rival stared into his eyes, but didn’t say a word. The two gangs gathered, waiting for the punches to start flying any second, but Giocavazzo surprised everyone. He turned on his heel and shouted, ‘Let’s go. Nothing to see here.’

  It had always been the same: the two leaders might fight with three or four other rivals at once, but no one had ever seen them fight each other directly. So, the afternoon they finally squared up to one another, the news spread like wildfire and half of the boarding school showed up to form a circle around the two contenders.

  It was the day after Vitantonio had come back from Bellorotondo, having recovered from pneumonia and from seeing Father Felice lying half-dead from his stroke. He was feeling more sensitive than usual. Smoking on the sly in the toilets, he heard Giocavazzo making fun of his aunt’s husband’s family.

  ‘The Palmisanos were cowards. Otherwise, how would everyone in the family have ended up dead? No doubt about it, there’s only one explanation: in wartime, death sniffs out cowardice straight off.’

  Vitantonio opened the cubicle door and pounced on him. He had the advantage of surprise and slammed his rival against the wall. Stunned, Giocavazzo took two punches to the face and fell to the ground. Vitantonio leapt on him again and they rolled on the floor towards the door to the corridor.

  ‘Convertini and Giocavazzo are killing each other in the second-floor toilets!’ The news spread through the whole school and pupils from every year started to gather.

  Vitantonio was more agile and had an effective technique for pinning down his rivals. But Giocavazzo was stronger and threw a good punch. They were pretty evenly matched. When they had been going at it for quite some time, they could both taste blood in their mouths and were gasping for breath. Rolling around on the floor, Vitantonio managed to trap his rival’s arm, twist it behind his back and immobilize him, face down. For the first time in the whole fight he had him where he wanted him. Just then he heard Franco cheering him on.

  ‘Kill him! You’ve got him now. Finish him off!’

  Vitantonio was disturbed to see Franco’s eyes gleaming with rage. His cousin was his best friend and he hated that he always seemed to get caught up in violence; and right now he couldn’t stand seeing him shouting like that, out of control. Suddenly, he could sense the bloodlust the fight had roused in boys from all the years; half of the boarding school was watching and urging them to beat the hell out of each other. He was unpleasantly surprised by their excitement. Seeing that they were all hoping to see one of them humiliated, to reaffirm their own pride, he lost all desire to go on. None of those boys deserved such a spectacle. If they wanted to experience strong emotions, they’d have to fight themselves.

  He leaned over Giocavazzo’s back and brought his lips close to his ear.

  ‘Should we leave it as a draw? Pretend we’ve had enough and call it quits?’

  The other boy didn’t answer, but he stopped struggling to get free.

  ‘Turn around and throw me to the ground,’ insisted Vitantonio.

  Soon they were both sitting up and brushing down their uniforms. When Vitantonio broke the silence, they were still looking at each other warily.

  ‘You must have a guardian angel, I really had you there. Next time, you’re a dead man!’ he said, keeping up appearances.

  ‘Next time, I’ll hand you your own head on a plate. You just caught me off guard today,’ retorted Giocavazzo, just to say something. He still didn’t understand what had happened.

  The other students didn’t understand what was going on either. It was the second time in recent weeks that they’d been about to see a proper fight and were left wanting more.

  ‘Why didn’t you finish him off when you had him? If you’d broken his arm, he wouldn’t have been able to carry on!’ shouted Franco, who was the most disappointed of them all.

  Vitantonio didn’t answer. The other students looked at the two rivals, still expecting them to lay into each other again. Just then Father Pius, the master in charge of discipline, showed up.

  ‘Who started it?’

  The two rivals challenged Father Pius with proud gazes, making it clear that they wouldn’t stoop so low as to accuse each other. They were surprised by Franco’s voice: ‘It was all Giocavazzo’s fault.’

  Vitantonio glared at him but felt forced to admit that it had really been him. ‘That’s not true, Father. I was the one who started it.’

  They both ended up in the master’s office, which had been named after Pope Leo XIII but was known as ‘the torture chamber’ among the boys. As punishment, you could be made to stand there for hours with some weighty tome in your hands, preferably the lives of the saints or some sacred history, without being allowed a break or to go to the toilet. The record was held by one boy who’d stood there for twenty-four hours straight. Father Pius didn’t care so much about the content of the books he forced them to read as he did about their weight, and the heavier they were, the more memorable the punishment.

  ‘Convertini, you really are a nutter!’ shouted Giocavazzo from the other end of the room when the master had left them standing with two hefty books in their hands.

  When they’d been in the torture chamber for four hours, Giocavazzo said to Vitantonio, ‘Tell me if anyone’s coming.’

  He slipped out into the hallway that led to the classrooms, which were empty at that time of day. He went into the first one and wrote on the blackboard: ‘Father Pius is doing it with Sister Lucia.’

  Just hours later, the entire boarding school was abuzz with the slander. One pupil claimed that he had gone into Father Pius’ room one morning to sweep it out, and found the nun in the master’s arms. Others said that they had seen them in the garden ‘doing stuff’, and there were even those who swore they had caught them feeling each other up in a classroom and kissing in the priest’s office.

  The next day, Vitantonio questioned Giocavazzo in their dormitory. ‘And how did you know about the father and Sister Lucia?’

  ‘I didn’t, I made it up. But you see, it turns out everyone’s seen them kissing …’

  Vitantonio made a disapproving face. ‘Father Pius is a bastard, but not even he deserves to have a lie like that made up about him. Our reputations are the most sacred thing we have.’

  ‘It’s his fault. Father Pius himself gave me the idea. Do you know who Prior Giovanni Montero was?’

  Vitantonio didn’t know what on earth he was talking about. He shrugged his shoulders and listened.

  ‘Monsignor Giovanni Montero was the prior of the San Nicola basilica in Bari. In 1662 they accused him of having it of
f with a nun, and the viceroy sent the Archbishop of Brindisi to Bari to find out the truth behind the rumour that had been spreading through the city for months. When the process was made public, the list of sins supposedly committed by the prior got much longer; halfway through the investigation he was said to have fathered two children – it wasn’t clear if it was with a married woman, a single woman or a servant – and towards the end they accused him of raping a coachman’s wife and even buggering the coachman in the same incident. The investigation concluded that it had all been invented by the wicked wagging tongues of a society hell-bent on destroying people’s reputations. But the damage had been done. In the eyes of the population of Bari, the prior of San Nicola was guilty. Just like our Father Pius.’

  Vitantonio was staring at him, increasingly incredulous. Everyone thought that Giocavazzo was one of the dimmest students in the whole boarding school.

  ‘And how the hell do you know all that?’

  ‘Father Pius dug his own grave when he punished us. You know which book he gave me to hold in the torture chamber? The History of the Church of Bari through the Centuries: in it there’s a whole chapter devoted to the life of Monsignor Montero.’ He looked at him with a malicious gleam in his eye and added, ‘Every lie I spread about the father came straight from the book he gave me.’

  And he let out a laugh, giving the other pupils in the room a fright. They couldn’t understand why, instead of pummelling each other, these two were now sharing secrets.

  And from that day on, they were inseparable. One morning, as they were leaving class, Giocavazzo came over to Vitantonio. ‘I have a brother who also had polio: my little brother Raffaele.’ He swallowed hard and added, ‘My parents are ashamed of him and won’t let him go to school. He lives with my grandparents.’

  They walked alongside each other for a while, without speaking. Giocavazzo looked at the ground. Suddenly, he asked, ‘Will you get cross if I teach that bastard Franco a lesson for grassing on me?’

  ‘All right, but don’t hurt him. He’s my cousin and I’d have to stick up for him.’

  The next day, two masked boys surprised Franco in the bathroom, held him down and stripped him. He spent the whole afternoon naked, huddled up sobbing in one corner of the room, with his face buried between his knees and his arms wrapped around them. Before dinner, a priest heard him crying, found him in that pathetic position and took him away wrapped in a blanket.

  On Sunday, at home in the palazzo, he described a less humiliating version of the events and said a couple of masked boys had beaten him to a pulp.

  ‘Tell me their names and I’ll have them expelled!’ was his father’s furious response.

  But Franco didn’t know what to say. It could have been anyone. Despite being under Vitantonio’s protection, he wasn’t very popular at school. The priests promised to investigate it thoroughly and make an example of those responsible. But with only two weeks to go until the summer holidays, the incident was never properly resolved.

  The Second Summer at the Farmstead

  THAT JULY THE twins would turn sixteen and Giovanna surprised everyone by insisting that they spend the summer at the old Palmisano house in the countryside. Nonna tried to dissuade her, saying that in the country they’d be too hot and bored, but Giovanna insisted, repeating over and over that she hadn’t seen her aunt Concetta in a long time.

  ‘Or the Vicinos,’ said Donata, interrupting her with a teasing smile. She had noticed the girl’s interest in Salvatore Vicino, Skinny’s son, some time back.

  Giovanna ignored her and tried to involve her brother in her unusual request. ‘Vitantonio’s always saying he misses going out hunting with Salvatore …’

  Finally they reached a compromise: they would spend July in the countryside and at the end of the month they would go to the coast, to meet up with their nonna and the Convertini cousins at the house in Savelletri.

  In late June they went to the farmstead. They no longer bathed in the laundry trough, that was for children, but even if they’d wanted to cool off that way they wouldn’t have been able to: for months now not one drop of water had fallen and the usual sludge on the bottom was as dry and hard as stone; instead of pond-skaters and tadpoles, there were now lizards. There hadn’t been a single day of rain that spring and for weeks the families there had endured sweltering temperatures brought on by a sirocco that came at all the wrong times. Usually the southerly winds didn’t arrive before July, but that year they’d had weeks of desert sand blowing through all of Puglia, sending the farmers mad. The only ones who didn’t seem bothered by the heatwave were Giovanna and Salvatore Vicino.

  That July, Vitantonio found that Skinny’s son didn’t have as much energy as before, plus he was easily distracted. He no longer put out traps for the birds or invited him to go hunting. Salvatore only seemed to want to stroll through the olive groves with Giovanna, and looked for any excuse to go on even longer walks with her. He seemed to have a lot to talk about with Giovanna, and she encouraged him at every opportunity.

  Whenever they went out in the cart, the adults sat in the back; Salvatore and Giovanna sat on the bench up front, with Vitantonio, who held the reins. He liked to be lulled by the cart’s slow rhythm and the steady swaying of the mare’s hindquarters. If a wheel came out of the rut in the track, the cart wobbled madly from side to side until the wheel found its way back; Giovanna and Salvatore took advantage of this to grab on to each other and laugh like fools, under Vitantonio’s scornful scrutiny.

  When Vitantonio grew weary of their laughter, he put down the reins and jumped into the back with the adults. Stretched out on a bed of sacks and horse blankets, he put his hands behind his neck and let himself be carried off by all sorts of dreams, as he watched the slow motion of the clouds and the whimsical shapes they made.

  Giovanna and Salvatore’s walks were too leisurely for Vitantonio, and he got bored. So instead he’d go up to the olive groves with Skinny’s father and the other local men. Or he’d walk up the mountain with Mastega, the Vicino grandfather’s dog, who was ugly and stout, but the best hunter in the house. Vitantonio liked to spend the day out in the open and not come home until the evening, exhausted, just in time to eat a big plate of grilled aubergine. Or green peppers, which Concetta made just for him, fried over a low flame with oil and Regina di Torre Canne tomatoes.

  After dinner they would go out on to the threshing floor to wait for the cool of the night, which hardly ever came that year, and there they would listen to the stories of the Great War that Skinny told them when he returned from his day’s work in the sawmill. Sitting among the men, Giovanna would place little Michele Galasso on her lap. He was the youngest of the now seven Galasso children, and he followed her around all day. He had just turned six and she was intent on teaching him to read and write.

  Every morning, when the men went off to work, Michele turned up at the farmhouse and, from the doorway, watched Giovanna washing the breakfast dishes, while she pretended not to have seen him. When she’d finished, she turned her back to the sink and dramatically opened her arms to him, and scooped him up in a big hug. With the boy in her arms, she ran a rag over the red oilcloth on the kitchen table and went over to the sideboard to grab the notebook and pencil she stored inside a biscuit tin. Then she sat Michele down on the bench, took a knife from the cutlery drawer, sharpened the pencil, opened the notebook, drew some vowels with all sorts of flourishes and asked him to copy them over the whole page. As he filled up the notebook, Giovanna finished tidying up the kitchen. Then she opened up the bread bin and pulled out a loaf, which Concetta always marked with an enormous ‘P’ on the crust to distinguish her breads from the other local families’, since they were all baked together in the same oven. Giovanna made the traditional Catholic ‘X’ in that huge loaf with a serrated knife, cut off a slice and put it in front of the boy, because she knew that breakfast was meagre in the Galasso home. Michele pounced on the bread and devoured it, his gaze distracted by the flies stuck
to the sticky tape hanging from the kitchen’s light bulb.

  After he’d had breakfast, he knelt on the bench, leaned forward, stuck out his tongue in concentration and started to fill another page with letters. Giovanna would occasionally look over his shoulder and correct the position of his hand or teach him to hold the pencil less awkwardly. After just a few days, the little boy was already able to identify his vowels. Giovanna was thrilled.

  ‘If he had the chance to study, Michele could go far,’ she said solemnly one evening as they were telling stories on the threshing floor.

  The heat was even more suffocating than on the previous nights. The air smelled of hay and was filled with husks that scratched at your throat and made it hard to breathe.

  ‘You said it yourself: if he had the chance. But he doesn’t …’ said the father of the Galasso family, cutting her off brusquely.

  The man avoided Giovanna’s angry glare. He fixed his eyes on the ground and then everyone began to wander off, knowing that they wouldn’t be able to sleep in this heat.

  They had barely slept in several nights: when they stretched out in bed, the cicadas were still scratching their bellies noisily, confused by temperatures that defied all logic. Sometimes a cricket would get inside the trulli, searching for some cool, and then the crickets’ concert met with the cicadas’ reply, taking on symphonic dimensions. It was impossible to get a wink of sleep the whole night, and in the morning, when it would miraculously grow silent, both the men and women would have to get up, because they needed those first hours of the cool dawn to work in the olive groves. By mid-morning the temperatures would reach forty degrees and staying out in the fields would have been suicidal, so they would go back home and stretch out in the shade, careful not to waste the little energy they had.