The Last Son’s Secret

by Rafel Nadal Farreras

  That night, Giovanna was the last to fall asleep. She was tossing and turning in bed, imagining ways to kidnap little Michele and take him with her to Bellorotondo so he could study with Father Sinisi at the primary school.

  July flew by. On the twenty-first they celebrated Salvatore’s saint’s day with dancing on the threshing floor to the sounds of an accordion. Feeling that their time together was already running out, Giovanna and Salvatore didn’t leave each other’s side the entire evening. The others laughed and nudged each other at the couple’s most obvious displays of affection. Giovanna only left Salvatore once, to go over to Vitantonio, who was sitting on the steps of the trullo that was used as a shed; she took him by the hands and tried to pull him out on to the threshing floor to dance.

  ‘Brothers and sisters don’t dance together!’ He shook her off and went to play in a corner with Mastega the dog, far from the music, trying to banish thoughts of Giovanna’s hips as they moved to the rhythm of her contagious laugh.

  When the adults had already gone to bed, Salvatore took Giovanna behind the laundry and tried to kiss her. She rebuffed him and he was surprised by her curt response. Her frankness usually amused him, but this time he found it unnerving. ‘I dance with you because I like to hear you talk and I know you’re involved in an anti-fascist group. I like you, but I won’t let you kiss me, because you’re uglier even than your grandpa’s dog.’

  ‘That’s not what the girls in town say,’ he protested, aware of his popularity among them. ‘You won’t let me kiss you because you think like a girl from a rich family; if you were as revolutionary as you claim to be, you’d know how to make a man like me happy.’

  ‘Well, then it looks like you’re clear on what you have to do: find a girl who’s revolutionary enough,’ she retorted before leaving, laughing like crazy and keeping a tight rein on her desire to kiss him.

  The Altamura Market

  IN AUGUST, VITANTONIO and Giovanna settled into their nonna’s house in Savelletri on the coast, along with Franco and his family. There, they met up with their other cousins, who were staying in their own house. Donata was invited for a fortnight, but after that she left the twins in Savelletri with their grandmother and their aunt Carmelina and went back to Bellorotondo and the trulli with Concetta. The twins dreaded the moment their zia left, because their aunt Carmelina Ferrante, Angelo’s wife and Franco’s mother, was a nervous, anxious woman who wasn’t particularly easy to deal with.

  Their aunt worried about everything. She always saw the negative side of things and she usually predicted that they would only get worse. If someone had a cold, she diagnosed them with pneumonia. If someone was having trouble breathing, she was sure it was tuberculosis. If a friend got pregnant, she wondered if the baby would be deformed. And if a few of the Convertini cousins came down with the same illness, she would immediately suggest bringing a halt to the summer holiday by the coast as the only way to avoid the spread of the epidemic that threatened all the youngest members of the family.

  If they took a trip by car, Carmelina imagined all sorts of accidents. If they travelled by train, she feared a derailment. If they went out sailing, she didn’t let anyone move an inch, so they wouldn’t capsize the boat. If Angelo suggested having a coffee out in the garden in the summertime, she refused, because she found that time of the year exceedingly treacherous, and the weather could shift unexpectedly at any moment. If the temperature continued to climb and belied her prediction that it would cool down, she got nervous about the heat and obsessed over the possibility of sunstroke. In September, if she discovered a single cloud in the midst of a radiant blue sky, she would point to it and shout, ‘Good lord, here we go again!’

  ‘What’s wrong? What’s wrong?’ Angelo would shout, confused. He always seemed to be just waking up from a nap.

  ‘That cloud, over there. We’re going to have a terrible storm again!’

  ‘One cloud? My God, I’ve married a lunatic.’

  ‘Late-summer storms always creep up on you,’ she insisted before ordering the servants to collect the cushions from beneath the pergola. ‘Just in case.’

  Franco grew up to be just as obsessive as his mother. Vitantonio and Giovanna, on the other hand, could never get used to the crazier side of their family. When the children were hot and sweaty, their aunt wouldn’t let them drink anything, because she had heard that a Spanish king had died from drinking cold water after playing a game of pelota. If they went to the beach, they had to wear a hat and a T-shirt, to protect them from sunburn. If there were any waves at all, they couldn’t go in the water. And they had to steer clear of the rocks because she claimed the whirlpools would suck them down, that they’d drown and their bodies would never be found. If they ate the smallest snack, they had to wait at least three hours before they could go in the water, because she would panic over stomach cramps. And they weren’t allowed to dive in, because they could break their neck or have a heart attack from the shock.

  If life ever corroborated her fears to the slightest extent and something actually happened, she would announce that they were on the brink of an irreversible catastrophe. Her pessimistic obsession earned her the nickname Auntie Calamity, which Giovanna came up with. When Zia and Nonna heard it for the first time they played it cool in front of the children, but when they were alone together they fell about laughing, impressed by the girl’s imagination, and decided to adopt the nickname for their own use.

  When things took a real downturn, Carmelina suffered attacks of religious fanaticism and wanted to confess her imagined sins all the time: she was convinced that was the only way she could appease God’s desire to punish the impiety of the summer holidaymakers. Father Felice avoided her, claiming that it didn’t seem prudent or proper for him to hear the confession of a family member, but the rector of Savelletri had no excuse. He was afraid of her in the confessional: if he judged her too harshly, she would go into hysterical shows of repentance; if he forgave her sins too quickly, she would get angry and demand more rigorous penance.

  ‘Sometimes she confesses, while sobbing, that she ate chocolate between meals or that she served herself the largest helping, and she wants me to give her a penance as severe as if she’d committed murder. If it were up to me, I’d condemn her to eternal hellfire for being so annoying and neurotic. May God forgive me,’ the rector complained to Father Felice, completely beside himself, one day when Carmelina’s insistence had nearly brought on in him a crisis of faith.

  For the Feast of the Assumption of the Virgin Mary in mid-August, family tradition dictated that they leave the house on the coast for a couple of days and drive inland to the scorched town of Altamura, where Aunt Carmelina’s family had a palazzo. They travelled there the day before Assumption, in Uncle Angelo and Nonna’s cars, and the children moaned the whole trip, because they were scared of Aunt Carmelina’s two Ferrante brothers, who lived in Naples most of the year and were even crazier than their sister. But as soon as they arrived, their worries dissipated and they were happily caught up in the flurry of activity around the big summer market.

  The fifteenth of August marked the end of the farming year and was the day all agricultural and rental contracts ended. Everyone from landowners to administrators, tenant farmers and temporary and permanent labourers gathered in the town on the day of the feast to buy, sell and negotiate. Offers of work were made – or not – and new rental contracts were signed for apartments, farmsteads and land, valid through to mid-August of the following year.

  All the deals were made in the market square in front of the cathedral: from the biggest businesses to the smallest concerns. But first everyone had to attend High Mass, which was the farmers’ chance to see the landowners in their stylish urban clothes up close. Walking from the palazzo to the cathedral, Vitantonio, who was accustomed to Itria valley farmers living in trulli right out in the fields, was surprised to see that in Altamura the farmers lived in the city itself; every day they had to get up at four in the morning to m
ake the long trip to the land they worked. On the day of the feast they left their carts lined up on the streets outside the city walls, in front of their three-storey homes: a half-basement with a pen for the mule; a kitchen and one bedroom on the ground floor; and a granary upstairs.

  When the cousins were little, the Altamura cathedral had frightened them because its façade was dominated by two stone lions just as fierce as the ones at Bellorotondo’s church of the Immacolata. But now they laughed at their childish fears and, as they left mass they’d stop and put their hands into the lions’ mouths. Giovanna always dragged this out, because she had realized – with a combination of annoyance and pride – that all the boys looked her up and down as she performed the ritual. Vitantonio, on the other hand, invariably tried to rush ahead, but he had to wait while his uncles greeted their fellow rural landowners gathered on the Corso Federico II. Only after the family had paid their respects to the regional aristocrats did they begin to make their way through the market. Uncle Angelo led the procession; he was the administrator of Carmelina’s family’s six hundred hectares because his Neapolitan brothers-in-law were both remarkably useless.

  They crossed the square diagonally, following Angelo, who wanted to say hello to the administrator and the head of the tenant farmers, who had been closing livestock deals all morning. Giovanna was surprised to see, on the other side of the square, Signor Galasso – Aunt Concetta and Skinny Vicino’s neighbour – talking to the capo of the farmers. He had little Michele, who was crying inconsolably, by the hand. In fact, it was only his sobbing that had caught Giovanna’s eye, because his father had dressed Michele in a hat, jacket and tie, and she wouldn’t have recognized him in a million years.

  ‘Michele! What are you doing here?’ she called out, taken aback.

  The little boy ran into Giovanna’s arms. She met his father’s eyes with a questioning gaze.

  ‘I brought him here to rent him out as a hired hand. We got lucky – the capo thinks he’s clever and has taken him on as a shepherd.’

  ‘For God’s sake, he’s only six years old!’

  ‘I have six more mouths at home and I can’t feed them all! At the Ferrante farm they’ll at least give him enough to eat.’

  When Giovanna heard the name Ferrante, she was devastated: that was Aunt Carmelina’s brothers’ farm. On her one visit there she’d seen enough to make her ashamed of how they treated their workers: they made them sleep in haylofts that were less inviting than the stables. She imagined Michele in one of those unbearable haylofts, away from his family, more than a day’s walk from his home, surrounded by strangers who were just trying to survive in subhuman conditions, and she felt faint. The boy clung to her legs and she didn’t know how to console him. All she could do was cry.

  When they left the market, Giovanna approached her uncle Angelo and begged him to order the men at the farm to treat little Michele well.

  ‘It’s best if you don’t get involved. There are sometimes more than a hundred labourers at one time there, and if we want the farm to do well we can’t waste time on any special treatment.’

  ‘He’s just a boy – he’s only six!’

  ‘And you’re not doing him any favours by spoiling him. They wanted a job for the boy and now they have one. They should be thanking God for their luck.’

  Giovanna turned her back on her uncle, refusing to speak to anyone for the rest of the day. Nor did she say a word the next morning on the way back to the coast. She broke her silence only to vent her fury to Vitantonio. ‘Salvatore is right. The farm owners in Alta Murgia are soulless bastards—’

  Her grandmother cut her off. ‘Such language! I don’t want to hear you speak like that again. Lately, your rebellious streak has been making me very uncomfortable, but your rudeness is simply unforgivable.’

  Then, as if she were talking to herself, Nonna continued, ‘Actually, that presumptuous bunch in Alta Murgia have proved themselves utterly useless, completely incapable of turning over the land to olive groves and vineyards. They’ll still be planting wheat there in a hundred years’ time, waiting for divine providence to send them rain or for the government to offer some compensation for their barren land.’

  Summer’s End

  THE SUMMER FELT like it was stretching on for ever, and Giovanna realized that she missed Salvatore. Vitantonio, Franco and the gang at the beach seemed like children to her and she couldn’t stand her aunt Carmelina. Nonna was the only one whose company she sought. She accompanied her every time Grandmother took the car out to visit her female friends from Bari and Naples who’d had casini built in which to spend their summers at the coast; Lady Angela Convertini got on best with the wives of the more modern landowners, the ones who had replaced their traditional wheat and oat fields with large olive groves and vineyards, making their farms flourish. And when Nonna received visitors on the terrace of the house in Savelletri, Giovanna would spend all afternoon in a deck chair, pretending to read, while she listened to them gossip.

  Whenever hot winds blew in from the south, Aunt Carmelina would begin to predict new calamities. She’d say that, if they were so reckless as to swim, the abominable wind would blow them out to sea and they’d only be found days later on the Dalmatian coast. The first of September was one of those windy days when Aunt Carmelina wouldn’t let them anywhere near the water, and so Vitantonio went looking for the usual gang. Giovanna decided to go with him because, if she couldn’t swim, she might as well kill some time with the gang rather than sitting around at home waiting for the sirocco to bring the temperature up to forty degrees. When Vitantonio and Giovanna headed out that day they found Salvatore waiting for them on the corner.

  ‘What are you doing here?’ she asked, as surprised as she was concerned to hide her excitement.

  ‘The whole of Bellorotondo is here. There are people scattered all over the beaches, from Savelletri to Torre Canne. The whole town has come to the seaside, and I’ve come to see you. Don’t you know what day it is today?’

  That morning they’d been woken by the rattle of the first carts and horses arriving from the Itria valley, along the Fasano road. The first of September was the day the valley’s farmers all came down to the coast to bid farewell to the summer. They did so every year, on horseback, by bicycle, by cart or on foot, and they spent the whole day on the beach. It was the only day in the entire summer that they even got close to the sand. The children splashed in the water while the adults stretched out on the beach to relax. After lunch, the women drank mineral water and watched the children take another dip, while the men snoozed. Come mid-afternoon they leisurely started to make their way home.

  Giovanna and Vitantonio had always enjoyed the day when their neighbours from Bellorotondo came down to the coast and they had always run from beach to beach until they found their friends. But this year, enraged by Aunt Carmelina’s swimming ban, they had completely forgotten about the end-of-summer celebration. Until they ran into Salvatore.

  Skinny’s son had come down on his motorcycle the evening before and spent the night with some cousins who were fishermen in Torre Canne. Salvatore had friends and cousins throughout the entire region, and Giovanna never knew whether they were actually relatives or if that was just his way of referring to his comrades in the Party.

  The three of them left Savelletri’s small fishing dock and walked along the seafront, beyond the last houses in town. Heading south, they followed a sandy path that wound through thistles and balsam plants blooming with white and pink flowers. The first storm of the summer had broken the evening before and it was still relatively cool that morning. The rain had left the scent of fennel hanging in the air, the plants’ stalks laden with hundreds of small snails. At a certain point, the path climbed up behind the rocks, through a thicket of mastic and tamarisk trees, which the wind was tossing to and fro. It also lifted little eddies of sand that got in their eyes. Then the path split into three or four trails that twisted through the scrub and met up again further on.

>   ‘Where are we going?’ asked Giovanna.

  ‘To the shelter,’ answered Salvatore, pointing at the rock pools just past the sand dunes, where a tarpaulin held up by four sticks was flapping in the wind.

  Vitantonio often rowed out to the rock pools, and he would also put up wood and canvas shelters to store his tools in the shade as he fished for octopus. Using a catgut line tied with a white rag, he would lure the octopus in, which was drawn to the white colour, and then trap it. He would yank it from the pool with a hand-held net, grab it by the head and bite down hard right between its eyes to kill it in one go.

  Giovanna preferred the dark, calm nights when Nonna let them row out to sea to fish by gas lamp, as long as they promised not to stray too far from the port. They had named the boat Principessa at Zia’s suggestion, and they always shared the rowing; while one of them held the oars, the other used a mirror to look over the side down to the sea bottom, spearing any fish that were blinded by the reflected gaslight. This primitive technique allowed them to catch cuttlefish, scorpionfish, gilt-head bream and sea urchins with a rudimentary weapon made by splitting a pole at one end.

  When they reached the awning, Salvatore’s cousin was already there. Once introductions had been made, both the Vicino young men took off their shirts and rolled up their trousers, tied a bag to their waists and went down to the rocks. They each carried a screwdriver and when they reached the water’s edge, they bent over the rocks and started scraping. Vitantonio imitated them, finding an old scrap of iron among the tools under the canvas and leaping from rock to rock until he reached the sea.

  The three boys’ bodies were tanned dark brown by the Puglia sun. After half an hour they came back up with bags full of limpets and spread them out on the wooden crate they used as a table. Salvatore’s cousin grabbed a shell, put it in his mouth and pulled out the snail with his teeth. Vitantonio followed suit. Taking another that was bright orange, Salvatore squeezed a few drops of lemon on to it and, when the snail shrank into its shell, he pulled it out with a knife, held it up on the steel blade with his thumb and brought it to Giovanna’s lips. She chewed it slowly, letting the intense flavour of the sea spread throughout her whole mouth. Vitantonio didn’t know anyone who was fonder of limpets than Giovanna, and Salvatore found that out when he saw the satisfied look on her face. She never ceased to surprise him. He smiled and prepared another for her.