Читать книгу Mistress - The Italian way - Delilah Jay - Страница 11

Of course, every Saturday his sisters also sit around the traditional lunchtime table in Ferrara. Brunilda is divorced, one son. Brunilda and Petunia - the two sisters from Cinderella. When Brunilda’s son was eleven, Dot-tore went to visit him in England - the kid needs to learn English. So he sends him off to a summer camp, where all the Italian kids go who have parents and uncles with no gift for languages. Naturally, they speak Italian there, learn hardly any English. I’m waiting for Dottore in a small café - at long last, I’m allowed to smoke! As Brunilda can’t very well raise her son on her own, Dot-tore has assumed the male role and control in this game. Power and control. He accuses his sister and her son of separation anxiety - an inability to step back from each other, that’s what his inner amateur psychologist says. Years later, he’ll repeat that diagnosis. They are all called Franco: Franchino, Francesco, Frank - or similar. Even the dog, a Yorkshire terrier who peers out of Petunia’s tiny Gucci handbag. Has to be pure-bred. And small

- big and snappy they already were themselves. Big from Amos’ money and power. Dottore, my God of Love, carried the poor creature back with him on the plane, from England. Presumably they both travelled business class.

“Coffee, tea, me?” he heard the stewardess ask, in his randy fantasies.

Today, the dog was replaced by Matto, the crazy one. Another Yorkshire terrier. Meanwhile, they are all well fed: Mamma, Brunilda, Petunia, Petunia’s husband, Franco & Francesco in Ferrara underneath the socialist haze of Emilia Romagna, thanks to Dottore and of course Bellarosa. Today, Brunilda wears Moschino and Versace

- always a little on the cheap side. It was their mother who named them, after Cinderella’s evil sisters who wanted him, Amos, the prince. These days, Amos reminds me only of Lord Farquaad from the movie Shrek. Mean, small, with an ego larger than the sum total of all the crisis-stricken Southern European countries. Lifted up onto the high horse by Bellarosa and the Gransignore. His legs are too short to get up by himself. Brunilda has a penchant for Southern Italian island dwellers who have problems keeping their virility under control. She brings one of them back to Ferrara, as a souvenir. Of course he doesn’t do any work; Amos gets to bankroll his sister’s pussy-mates as well, now that she’s able to hold on to one of them for a short while, thanks to Amos’ life of luxury. Dottore believes that his older sister Brunilda is hot and up for anything in bed.

“I am certain she needs it,” he presumes.

I wonder on what exactly he has based those thoughts about his sister... Confirming his instinct by her choice of men: hairy super-Latinos from the South, who proceed to conduct their lives at Amos’ expense. They only speak one language: Neapolitan. Not Italian. That’s also how they act. A woman in and around Naples - as a matter of fact, in the entire South of Italy - has basically only one justification for leaving the house: to go shopping. That’s where that sentence comes from:

“I’m going out to get some bread.”

Generally speaking, she’ll call out this sentence to her family, her husband, the neighbours. So that everybody knows that she’s not being unfaithful. She’s just going out to get some BREAD. Even nowadays, there’s a lot of that going on in Naples. It’s surprising to us Northern or Central Europeans, how often some women go out to buy bread. A left-over from the olden days, when women were only allowed to go out for shopping purposes, “fare la spesa”. In some regions, things haven’t changed to this day.

None of them wants to remember the days when there wasn’t enough money for bread. Friends who had to lend money to keep the hunger at bay. They had no bath, no toilet. Not enough to eat. Not in Molise. Not in Ferrara. They borrowed money to be able to buy bread. And most especially, to ensure that none of the children or his wife would go without the father’s love. Amos’ mother saw her husband’s whores come and go, as did Amos, for whom this became normal, and she spent long nights crying about the unfaithful husband until at long last, fate stepped in and he - thank God - having tormented his family to the last, finally died, of prostate cancer followed by lung cancer caused by all those years of smoking. At long last!

“My mother blackmailed me all my life with her crying and whining about my father,” that’s how Amos always accused his mother of emotionally pressurizing him with her tears and her grief and her emotions.

Entirely misunderstood!

“In reality, my father was the innocent, my mother was the one responsible, she drove him to it,” he kept wailing, always and all the time, poor rich Amos, the God of Love.

The truly guilty party, in actual fact, was his mother -poor Franco, he couldn’t help being unfaithful, could he?

No sooner does he come home with the money, than he spends it all on other women, instead of handing it to his family. Really! It requires the brain of a philosopher or a complete idiot to comprehend that kind of logic. Guilt reversal, that’s what it’s called. Learned at an early age, practised to perfection. Very Italian! That’s what he is like - to this day.

Amos never described the hunger, but he did describe not having a loo.

“We didn’t even have a bath, a toilet. But we were so happy,” my Amos retrospects.

I listen. Listen well. That’s another thing I excel at. The world is small and people are bad, especially when it concerns another’s discomfort.

Today I know that the hunger must have been terrible. I now have friends in Ferrara - nothing happens by coincidence. By the most bizarre route possible, I learn that my friend’s cousin was a schoolmate of Amos’ sister, who constantly talked about how hungry they were and how they had to borrow money to be able to buy food. How incredible is that, with a father who moved his family from Molise to Ferrara, leaving all their relatives behind, under the pretence of finding better work for more money? Or, whose appetite for sexual diversion was greater than his sense of responsibility towards his family? The little wretch that nobody noticed! Poor of physique, intelligence and even economics. Maybe Amos’ mother made too much of what she didn’t have?

Dottore didn’t know his father, not really. By his own admission, at least. At his father’s deathbed he thought he understood that his Mamma had blackmailed his Papa with her tears. No - she is not the victim - his father was! So what else was he to do except screw around, spend money on cigarettes, while his family went hungry? He had every right, didn’t he? And his Mamma blackmailing this “buono”, this good man, which is what he is. Blackmailing him with her tears? The trauma of an early Italian childhood that gives him the right, today, to live, judge, act as he sees fit. Added to by the Catholic Church.

“I am unable to masturbate,” he tells me with deepest sorrow.

Expecting pity.

“It always gives me a headache.”

Don’t we usually hear this from women, in bad comedy shows?

“Too many female hormones, Amos dearest?” I ask ironically.

“Could well be - what with your tears and all that feeling sorry for yourself,” I add.

And of course there is Adonis the beautiful - his good friend, best friend - as he calls him.

“I thought you didn’t have any friends?”

I have always listened carefully when Amos was talking... And now they start, the contradictions in his truth.

They are terrific, all of them together on Ponza. What’s to happen now with those building permits for the swimming pools up in the hills that, according to the press, were handed out as favours? At least someone was arrested here, and the ones involved are HE and the Gransignore in Carozza, the one with those fast red cars.