Spatriati

When a cold-air front meets a warm-air mass on land, the warm air rises. Storms are generated.
Rain and lightning, water and fire. I never understood, of the two of us, which one was warm and which cold, but I consider myself lucky to have met my opposite front in Claudia Fanelli, the spatriata, the name people around here use for the uncertain, the odd, the unclassifiable and sometimes the shiftless or orphans, as well as unmarried men or women, vagrants and vagabonds, or even, in the case that concerns us, the emancipated. The first time I noticed her was in the school lobby, and I desired her red hair, her moon-white skin, her prominent nose. She seemed to have fallen from another world, a world more enlightened and evolved.
My name is Francesco Veleno. I am the only child of Elisa Fortuna and Vincenzo Veleno, two former amateur athletes who fell in love during an episode of Games without Frontiers, and for my entire childhood they raised me with the belief that I would redeem them from the mysterious accident of having brought me into the world. Many years would go by before I realized that many relationships carry on, as Claudia would have said, for “official reasons.” It is also thanks to her that I would realize that there are no official reasons so strict as to require three such different people to live under the same roof, unless they are serving a prison sentence. The court that had condemned Elisa and Vincenzo to remain together despite their obvious lack of love for each other complied with the cruel law of keeping up appearances, the harsh human code that demands rigor and absolute severity in even the smallest places.
Before Claudia, reality consisted of the things they told me rather than the things I saw. I belonged to the category of those who allow themselves to be driven by others, by events, by regulations, by prejudices. Signor and Signora Veleno drove me toward a life without upheaval, peaceful, the minimum necessary to avoid suffering. That is how things had worked out for them, in the end.
He was a phys ed teacher—he had also taken up fencing, briefly, with my mother—good-looking, open-minded and carrying around a legally registered Beretta M9 from which he would never be separated. I still hadn’t understood that pistol-packing middle-aged white men were compensating for the loss of their sexual swagger.
My mother was a nurse at the Martina Franca hospital. During a brief period in my childhood, she used to call me “Uva Nera,” black grape, because in Martina everyone cultivates the pale green grape, which is pungent, the one they use to make a dry wine that gets you tipsy after two sips. She, instead, had given birth to a boy with an olive complexion, dark haired, like the peasants in late summer or the Saracens of the ancient chronicles. The black grape is used to make Primitivo or Negroamaro wines. Wines that cloud your reason. This would prove good to remember later in life, when I made decisions on impulse.
No one in my family shared my features. No one was dark like me, no one had such a high hairline and broad forehead, or the burden of laziness that kept me flat on the sofa reading inane comic books. In the afternoon I was often alone, my mother practically lived in the hospital. Sometimes she would disappear for two or three days at a time. My father, after his day at school, would lose himself in the town bars, bragging about his exploits and reliving his athletic past, and come home with his clothes wrinkled and an allusive grin, like someone who’d had an adventure and couldn’t wait to tell it. But he never did. Maybe because I was afraid to ask. Or maybe because he thought I wouldn’t understand.
They were different, my mother and my father, and they were different even in the verb tenses they used to address me. Elisa was a woman of the present, often in the first-person plural: “We’re going out.” My father only knew the past tense, and the occasional future tense when he spoke about me. Holding on to his memories: a list of anecdotes that were glorious (to him); boring (to everyone else).
On one thing Vincenzo Veleno and Elisa Fortuna found themselves in miraculous convergence: they hadn’t spent a single day at the classical high school, but they had the kind of respect for it that one reserves for something you can never achieve. It had shaped the minds of their bosses, chief physicians, principals, superintendents: all of whom were brains that had come out of the Martina Franca high school. My parents said that Latin would open doors for me, and that in those classrooms I would meet the children of important families. They considered it the most advantageous option. People well acquainted with the truths of others, but not their own.

For Claudia I didn’t exist in the early days. She was the tallest girl in school, her red hair resplendent on her neck—the same shade as the cherries my grandparents used to harvest in the summer and transform into jars of purple and amaranth preserves. Her eyes were of two different colors, light brown and blue green, the kind of eyes that around here are called “di bosco,” of the forest. She had a prominent bone structure, with sharp cheekbones and a long, narrow face.
During recess the lobby of Tito Livio would empty, the students racing to congregate against the wall and soak in some shade. The only person in the sun was her. If anyone had observed the quadrant of the playground from the sky, they would have seen an asphalt desert with a red dot in the middle. She had some of my same antisocial habits: she picked her nose and twisted a lock of hair around her index finger. Prominent among her books was the bright-colored cover of her Rumiko Takahashi manga. She came to school listening to music with her headphones on, unconcerned about what anyone thought. Between classes I would sharpen my pencil near her, making small talk to dull classmates with square faces and tobacco breath. One day I overheard the nasty interrogation she was subjected to by guys who wanted to command her attention. “Why are you over there by yourself?” “Why are you like you and not like us?” they insisted with a smarmy attitude, breathing down her neck. Claudia replied, “It’s hard enough living up to my own standards, much less other people’s.” Unrequited love is an easy refuge for lonely and insecure adolescents, the ones who don’t know who they are yet, and I knew almost nothing about myself. Everything that I’d been until that point I’d kept hidden, terrified that I might be considered a misfit. Mine was a childhood of the playground at the country church and ragtag soccer teams on the edge of town, with coaches who were too free with their hands and priests with wooden legs who wanted you to rub the stub in the sacristy, while in the empty church the most mischievous kids played soccer, using the altar as the goalpost.
The Velenos didn’t seem to care about the red marks drawn on my legs, they didn’t care whether I prayed or sinned, not even when I came back from the playground covered with dirt, humiliation, and the stench of manure.
The school year had just ended, and the summer unfolded before me in fields of poppy and wheat. When I got home, no one was there. I yielded to the silence, and then to the twilight that darkened the rooms, and sank into depression. All I had to eat was bread dipped in water with tomato and salt, my supper when my mother had the night shift and my father disappeared on his ambiguous errands. I fell asleep on the sofa. In the morning the house was still quiet, none of the commotion that usually woke me up when my mother came home from the hospital and my father filled the sink to shave and talked to himself in the mirror. Empty. With my eyes filled with gunk and my throat parched, I wandered about in a fog, until I came across on the Formica desk—a classroom desk my father had swiped from his technical institute so I would have a place to write—a white envelope. “To my uva nera.” I had the feeling my mother had written it more for herself than for me.

I had to leave but you weren’t home. I want to talk to you about the days to come. I will be waiting for you at the hospital.

She was using the future tense, which was not reassuring.
I set foot in the hospital for the first time, and my nostrils filled with an odor like gasoline, the mostly empty corridors echoed with the squeaking of my footsteps on the floor, the huge plate glass windows slanted downward and inside the rooms with doors ajar motionless shadows kept vigil over bodies enveloped in white. My mother appeared with her shoulders erect, in uniform, a pair of clogs, and sheer socks. Her face luminous, her eyes bright and fiery, her hair confined in a blond bun on the top of her head. She hugged me tighter than usual, her embrace of my back was like an energetic massage, the transfer of a code from her to me, animals of the same species who recognize each other. She smelled of Sunday morning and held my hand, pushing me into the doctors’ room, where we would have more privacy. She was whistling a melody from the song “Vacanze Romane” by Matia Bazar. She was happy, while I struggled to steady my nerves: What was there to be happy about in a place like this? She said various things that my brain elaborated and immediately repressed, the smile with which she had greeted me gradually turning into a more mechanical expression, severe.
“We will be apart, but only for a little while, we need some space.” She got to the point: she had left my father.
“Later on you will understand,” she concluded.
I went back home feeling gutted, focusing on the sound that rubber soles make on asphalt.
“Anyway, she’ll come back, they all do,” proclaimed the blowhard, my direct ancestor, seeing me at the door brimming with unshed tears and muted cries.
Our daily routine changed, he brought home plates of pasta wrapped in a warm rag prepared by my grandmother, or reheated canned soups, burning them every time and hurling insults at pans, gas flames, and soup manufacturers. It was never his fault, always someone else’s, but I still didn’t recognize scapegoat seekers and I didn’t know how to deal with them. I harbored burning rage under the ashes of my mild appearance, not because my parents had separated, but because I hadn’t realized it sooner.