Third Generation

PREFACE

I have known the author of this book for many years. I am familiar with his background, and partially I am familiar with his family’s, as well. In a nutshell, the character of Elio depicts the author himself, Elio’s family depicts the author’s family.

I always thought it was a good idea that Ernesto/Elio would write this novel. Not only for psychoanalytic self- therapeutical reasons that, seemingly, would have worked as well as to justify such an operation. It was a good idea because the storyline is gripping, unsettling, mysterious. In one word, the story is interesting.

It is interesting because it is extremely different compared to other people’s backgrounds. It is a story that can be read by outsiders, as well as by foreigners, and it can still result thrilling, astonishing, surprising both for the facts therein told and the characters therein depicted. At the same time, in providing evidence of exemplary and extreme experiences, the story incredibly succeeds in illustrating a homeland, an era, a population.

That is. This book’s storyline is simply an exemplary narration. Folks say that in charity cases, examples are often unworkable, each event unique, every character a stand-alone character. But there exist soul inner movements and common circumstances not infrequently repeating themselves, even beyond deep diversities of time and space.

We can grasp subtle insights of what goes on in our very own lives, simply reading about ups and downs of figures belonging to different times, and different places.

I was telling about the friendship binding the Author and myself. My sincere hope is that our friendship does not befuddle my view in suggesting the audience to read this book. Or rather, if I may say so, this historical novel.

Salvatore Rossi

President - TIM

former Director General of the Bank of Italy

CHAPTER ONE

Background

On reflection, apparently his was a family like many others at the time. His father immigrated to the United States in 1955, eventually coming back to Italy in 1966. No one ever explained to Elio the reasons for his father’s migration.

It was always unclear why, back in 1955, his father, a barber, left his family for eleven years to keep on doing the same job; one that did not make him or his family rich. In the U.S., he joined his two sisters and brother who had immigrated there many years earlier. Then, once he was settled, his family was supposed to join him.

Someone told Elio, as an adult, that his father chose not to bring his family over because he once heard that in the U.S. marriages did not last more than six months, and he didn’t want his two daughters to go through that sort of experience. Another version, the one Elio believed more, is that when the time came to join her husband, his mother refused to go because her elder daughter, Margherita, had got married in the meantime and, since they were very close, she didn’t want to be separated from her.

A relationship that had an important impact on the family atmosphere – and a fair amount on Elio’s growth too – was the one between his two sisters. The elder, Margherita, was always considered the family pride, both by her parents and by Elio. Margherita was beautiful. She was fifteen years older than him.

The other sister, Ambra, couldn’t really be described as ‘full of grace’ and she unfailingly lost in any comparison with her older sister, permanently appearing inferior to Margherita. So it was, throughout her life.

But with hindsight, their mother may have had a responsibility in exacerbating her daughters’ differences as well. Indeed, albeit unconsciously, she might have encouraged the imbalance between them. In a family portrait of all family members except the father/husband, the two sisters appear to be exact opposites, to the eyes of an expert in physiognomy. Margherita is impeccably dressed - even wearing white gloves one of which she is holding in her hand - with long, flowing hair, a beige dress down to her ankles, an open and candid smile, and a regal posture. Ambra, at the opposite end, looks resigned, dressed in a dark and rather plain dress, with a hangdog expression. Looking rather like a delivery boy, she has short- cropped hair and a sad face.

Their mother, at the center, impassive and apparently holding back inner emotions, was nonetheless beautiful, a statuesque beauty of yesteryear. Elio would soon realize that, despite herself, she found it hard to be affectionate.

The portrait included male members of the family too. Elio’s brother, Dario, five years older than him, who has a frowning and certainly not well-intentioned expression on his face. And finally Elio, with his blond tuft. In the picture he is about three years old and resembles a frightened chicken. Shortly afterwards, he would realize what kind of a childhood was in store for him.

Sure enough, at that age, Elio already started perceiving – without realizing it – that things were not looking good for him, both with his family and with every single person floating around him during his entire lifetime.

As for the relationship between the brothers, Dario surely had his reasons for not thriving, but for heaven’s sake, why pick on a younger brother, who had his problems too? Elio was Dario’s favorite target. He did not have many toys, only one or two, and his brother systematically and inexorably destroyed them all.

When he was a child, Elio had protruding ears and suffered a lot because of it, and his brother Dario never lost the chance to make fun of him. At one point, Elio seriously considered contacting a French company that had apparently found a way to solve the problem: a device to be hung on the ears at night that, after a while, would have made them adhere better. But in the end, nothing doing. Elio decided to keep his ears as they were.

However, all this, including his brother’s outbursts, was in Elio’s memory an insignificant issue compared to everything else.

He became aware of this during the early signs of his long first crisis, which started when he was six and kept on until he was eight years old. He was bedridden on and off, without suffering from any specific condition, although his face was generally deathly pale. At school he fainted regularly and his teacher, Marino, had to hurry him home. In those days, his brother picked on him by calling him ’A morti supa a rangara. ‘Death on top of the orange tree’ was more or less the meaning; in Calabria it is a way of describing people who look very pale. Thus, it was not a compliment at all, nor a comforting thing to say. Dario called him that particularly when he was with his friends; it was his favorite pastime.

And this wasn’t even the worst of it. Among other things, Dario used to beat up his friends. Their mothers came round, carrying their bruised and bleeding children and complaining to the whole family.

Dario’s mother, faced with her elder son’s uncontrolled aggression, was totally helpless. Unfortunately, Dario’s skirmishes indirectly affected Elio as well. One of the families involved was the most feared of the city and Elio developed an overpowering terror of walking around alone in case he met a boy from the family who had been ‘roughed up’ or one of his brothers, who would surely take it out on Elio to avenge the harm done. He had that fear every single time he sneaked out of the house. However, luckily, nothing ever happened.

Concerning Elio’s relationship with his mother, she was neither nagging nor possessive. She did not tend to manipulate her children in order to make them do as she wished. She was not aggressive, and not mean at all. But she needed her sons in a way that was almost obsessive. This had been clear to Elio since he was a kid. His mother’s heart had always been closed for some untold, mysterious, and tragic reason. But Elio couldn’t know and didn’t have to know. His mother’s state of mind was immediately clear to him, especially after his elder sister Margherita’s wedding.

When Margherita got married in 1957, Elio’s mother lost the helpmeet to whom she had always clung.

Soon after the wedding, unable to find an ‘ally’ in Ambra or Dario – as neither of them was available for the role and both had already developed a form of introversion they would carry with them all their lives – she picked Elio. That choice, unavoidable for his mother, caused a number of problems that would later reveal themselves to be devastating for Elio’s personality, equilibrium, and character.

However, it is important to stress that, despite everything, Elio never held feelings of hatred or resentment towards his mother – except for short periods. He basically accepted everything that happened around him as inevitable. That was his life; he did not have another.

There was one specific occasion on which Elio had the feeling his mother was unintentionally manipulating him; it happened almost always on Sundays, when they went to the countryside to visit some relatives. The mother of the family was one of her cousins, through some complex blood connection that Elio never understood – nor cared about.

It was a forty-five minute walk to their relatives’ place, and Elio loved and hated it at the same time. He liked walking and relishing life in the green of the countryside. His relatives were strong, cheerful farmers, whom he enjoyed hanging out with, and the grandmother used to bake bread that they all ate together, hot out of the oven, with olive oil and tomatoes. Elio used to press down a little hole in his piece of bread, so that the seasoning didn’t drip.

However, his delight in roaming the country together with his cousins was strongly outweighed by the prospect of the walk there and back with his mother. Her gloom, the impenetrability of her malaise, the outbursts about all the things happening to her and the difficulty of handling her children’s problems, were all thrown at Elio as if it was the most natural thing in the world.

His mother was unaware of the catastrophic effect that her confessions, which she thought legitimate, had on the psyche of her son; at the time just five or six years old. But there was something mysterious in Elio’s mother’s attitude, something that caused her a deep and inexplicable anxiety.

When they came back home from the country, Elio used to talk with a bunch of men hanging around the tobacco shop next to his house about things that happened to him the previous Sunday. Elio’s family lived on the ground floor of the building, and when some member of the family was home the door was always kept open. The tobacco shop was next door and the men, regular customers, sat and made small talk outside the shop. There was a bank clerk, a short and stocky man, and an old man who had been a tailor. They all loved Elio, especially the old man, and often teased Elio in a friendly way, such as when he came back from the countryside and would screw up his verb tenses. Instead of saying ‘Yesterday I went to the countryside,’ he would say, ‘Yesterday I will go to the countryside.’

Those walks were the only chance for Elio’s mother to be alone with him, and she used the time to tell her youngest son about everything that upset her, at the same time undermining Elio’s state of mind. Those trips represented the first step of Elio’s mother’s partnership with her son. A partnership that gradually became essential for her.

Elio somehow learned to accept the role – she was his mother; he could not back out.

The customers at the tobacco shop often used to tell him ‘You think like a grown man,’ and they flattered him (it wasn’t clear why), saying ‘This kid will become President of the Republic.’

It was most likely his family situation – beyond his control and against his will – that indirectly made Elio assume behavior typical of an adult. Or rather, the burden his mother was unknowingly passing on to him, in order to alleviate her own, was causing Elio to lose the joy of his childhood.

Another family relationship – unreal but well rooted in Elio’s mind – was the one with his father, who migrated to the U.S. in 1955, when Elio was only two years old and his father forty-three. It