Blood Curse

IX

The stage, the dust, the lights. This is what I want to feel, this is what I want to breathe. When I was small, I was poor, cold, and hungry; but I already knew they would cheer for me, that I would bowl them over, move them to tears. I’ve always been good-looking, I’ve always known how to tell a story, how to charm people with words. There’s no one else like me; that’s what my mother’s always told me.

How she slaved away, my mother, to make sure that my enthusiasm never flagged, that I was always up for the challenge. I sang and I danced, at parties, at weddings. Surrounded by oafs and bumpkins incapable of appreciating what they were seeing. The magic of words, the magic of movements: those were my passions. The voice is an instrument. I know that I’m handsome. I’ve always been handsome. My mother was the first one to say so, and I’ve had plenty of confirmation since.

My beauty has also been my downfall, what’s held me back. Women like me, and men seethe with jealousy. Mamma says that life is a theater; in her way, she’s an actress herself. Son, she says to me, you can’t even begin to imagine how many times I’ve pretended. But every time, I provide my own applause; I applaud the money that ends up in my pocket. Do as I do. Money: that’s all the applause you’ll need.

That’s what Mamma says, but I have to disagree. The way I see it, if you’re really good, then everyone should applaud for you; there can’t be just one conceited wretch standing between you and the success you deserve. So I’m going to find a way to buy a theater troupe and, if necessary, even an entire theater.

And then we’ll see.

Concetta Iodice stood peering out the small window that overlooked the vicolo. It was late, and Tonino should have been home an hour ago. The pizzeria had been closed for quite a while now. He had told her to go ahead and head home, because he had an errand to run. She would never have thought to question her husband’s orders, but it had caused her some anxiety, some concern.

Precisely because of his cheerful nature, the pizzaiolo was an easy man to read. When something was off, Concetta and her elderly mother-in-law Assunta immediately became aware of it and exchanged a knowing look; for several days now, they’d both been detecting that same discordant note. They knew business wasn’t as good as they’d hoped it would be, and that the loan that had been taken out in order to open the restaurant was sizable; maybe that’s what was stirring trouble in the man’s soul. Tonino no longer sang while he shaved, he trudged rather than walked up the stairs, he greeted his family as if he had something else on his mind, and the day before he’d smacked their eldest boy for calling his name aloud. Nothing like that had ever happened before.

Assunta joined Concetta at the window.

“The children are asleep. No sign of him?”

Without turning around, the woman screwed up her mouth and tossed her head. Anxiety gripped her chest, growing stronger by the second. Her mother-in-law placed a hand on her shoulder and she reached up and squeezed it gently. A shared love; a shared fear.

When she saw him turn the corner, she felt a surge of relief rise up inside her-but only for an instant. His dragging step, his slumped shoulders. He looked like an old man. She ran to the door and pulled it open; behind her, in the shadows, Assunta stood wringing her hands. His slow steps coming up the stairs, in the silence of the dark old building. The last flight of steps. Concetta searched the darkness for Tonino’s eyes, both yearning and dreading to look into them.

Ashen, sweaty, his hair plastered to his forehead underneath his cap, Tonino was staring blankly ahead. He walked past his wife, gently squeezing her arm. The woman felt the warmth of his hand on her wrist.

“I don’t feel well. A slight fever, maybe. I’m going to bed.”

Concetta looked at the stretch of floor that her husband had just walked over. He’d left a footprint, as if his shoes were wet.

To look at them, you’d think they were two perfectly ordinary children. Like the children you’d see in the Spanish Quarter or on the streets down by the port, who moved in flocks, like birds, noisy and boisterous, the girls indistinguishable from the boys and all of them equally filthy, dressed in clothes that were equally tattered; not like the city’s other children, insipid, dressed in sailor suits or junior fascist uniforms, marching military-style across Piazza Plebiscito. In contrast, these children had their heads shorn bald to fight lice and went barefoot, a rind tougher than leather on the soles of their feet, purplish and chilblained in winter, bound up crudely with threadbare rags.

Gaetano and Rituccia had grown up together. Even though their bodies were still years from the full bloom of adolescence-he was almost thirteen, she was twelve-it was enough to look into their eyes to guess their ages. Old. They were old because of what they remembered, because of what they had seen and continued to see.

They both had vague memories of a happier time, when his father and her mother were still alive, and they were just two more little birds in the flock that burst into flight every morning among the city vicoli that they called home. But that was a long time ago, when they used to sit absorbed in conversation on the steps of the church of Santa Maria delle Grazie, occasionally begging coins from the old women hurrying in for the midday Mass. Now, ever since Gaetano had begun his apprenticeship as a bricklayer, they were only rarely able to speak; they didn’t need words, though, having mastered the ability to read new developments in each other’s faces, detecting news from the crease in his furrowed brow or the angles of her downturned mouth. They conducted themselves like those old couples who know each other so well as to communicate only through gestures.

In the evening, before returning home, they sat together on the ground, under the porticoes of the Galleria Umberto Primo, just as they were doing right now. In silence, they tried to summon the courage to go home for the night.

Concetta Iodice had sat there, watching her husband sleep, without being able to get a wink of sleep herself. She was afraid that his fever might spike, that he might be really sick without her realizing it. That was something that had always terrified her; her father had gone that way, during the night, while she and her mother and her siblings were sleeping peacefully. That night he was there and the next morning he wasn’t; he’d left behind that pitiful worn-out dressing gown with one eye half-open and the other shut, his blackish tongue lolling out of his open mouth. Sprawled out on the floor next to the bed; maybe he’d called for help and no one had heard him.

So Concetta sat there on the chair by the bed, watching Tonino Iodice, owner of the pizzeria and restaurant that bore his name, as he laboriously carried on the business of his troubled night’s sleep. He tossed and turned, he moaned, he pulled up the bedclothes and threw them off again. His leaden face, the hair plastered to his sweaty brow, his lips twisted in a grimace. Perhaps he was dreaming. Concetta did her best to make out words, but all she could hear were moans and laments. She sighed and rose to her feet, doing her best not to make a sound. She took Tonino’s jacket to put it away in the clothes cupboard. She smiled unconsciously, thinking of her husband’s habitual messiness, of how often she’d had to pick up the articles of clothing he scattered around the house. A sheet of paper dropped out of one of his pockets. Concetta bent down and picked it up.

She couldn’t read, but she understood that this was a promissory note, signed by Tonino. Standing out boldly, like an inky stamp from the post office, was a large red fingerprint. She snapped her head around toward her sleeping husband and looked with horror at his big hand, the hand of an honest laborer, the fingers dirty with caked blood.