What Hell Is Not Read online

  Hell is an insatiable hunger for bread and words.

  Hell is a child who has been scarred from the outside in, from its skin all the way to its heart.

  Hell is the lament of lambs surrounded by wolves.

  Hell is the silence of the lambs who have survived.

  Hell is Maria, a mother at age sixteen, a prostitute at twenty-two.

  Hell is Salvatore, who has scarcely enough bread for his children and who drinks his shame away.

  Hell is streets without trees and schools and benches where you can sit and chat.

  Hell is streets from which you can’t see the stars because no one has given you permission to lift your eyes.

  Hell is a family that decides who and what you will be.

  Hell is the cold feeling of knowing someone else’s desperation.

  Hell is making someone else pay the price so that they will taste the bitterness that we chew.

  Hell is when things don’t get done. Hell is every seed that doesn’t become a rose. Hell is when the rose becomes convinced that it doesn’t smell nice. Hell is a train crossing that opens up on to a wall.

  Hell is every form of beauty that’s been voluntarily interrupted.

  Hell is Caterina who jumped from a tenth-floor window holding an umbrella because she no longer wanted to live in hell and she hoped that an angel would grab her before she hit the pavement.

  Hell is potential love never acted upon.

  Hell is hating the truth because loving it would cost you your life.

  Hell is Michele with foam at the mouth and a blank stare from the umpteenth overdose.

  Hell is a nameless old man who dies in his house and goes undiscovered for days.

  Hell is no longer seeing hell. In this neighborhood of the city, men rule over two demons. They don’t have esoteric names. Astaroth? Malebranche? Gog and Magog? No. Misery. Ignorance. Those are their names. Just like the horsemen of the Apocalypse. Will mercy and the Word of God be enough to stop them?

  Hell exists. And it’s here. In these ferocious streets where wolves make their dens. And the bloodied lambs remain silent because their lives are dearer than any other thing. And blood is the mark of life because when words cannot save them, blood will have to do.

  Hell is a father who takes his children’s lives.

  Hell exists and it’s full to the brim.

  Not over there but over here, with maps and addresses. It’s all in the 1993 A to Z.

  Chapter 10

  A naked girl rubs a dry bar of soap on her thighs in an empty bathtub as if she were trying to wash away something invisible. The water isn’t running.

  ‘What’s for dinner, Mommy?’ Francesco shouts, standing outside the bathroom with his ear stuck to the door.

  Maria keeps on rubbing the bar of soap on her legs. She’s on her own, with a six-year-old boy and no wedding dress in the closet. She’s gorgeous, with dark eyes hidden by her long hair. Her beauty would fit right in in a fairytale. But it’s all wrong for reality.

  ‘Mommy? I’m hungry,’ the boy insists, just hoping for an answer at this point.

  ‘I’m coming. I’m coming, Francesco. I’m taking a bath right now. Go watch cartoons.’

  ‘Okay, but what are you making? I’m hungry.’

  ‘Swordfish.’

  ‘But I don’t like fish!’

  ‘Well then, I’ll give you the sword and I’ll keep the fish.’

  ‘Come on, Mommy! I don’t like it!’

  ‘That’s what’s for dinner.’

  ‘Well then, I’m not eating. And you’re mean.’

  Maria is silent. As she rubs the soap against her legs, she wonders if she’s more of a bad mother or a mean mother.

  Francesco kicks the door and starts sobbing.

  ‘I didn’t mean to kill the dog, Mommy. I didn’t mean to.’

  ‘What dog?’

  The boy sobs against the door.

  Maria opens the door and picks him up.

  ‘I don’t want to break everything. I want to fix things, not break them.’

  ‘I’ll help you, sweetheart, my darling boy.’

  She sits in the tub with him, turns on the water, and lets the water run over him just like that, still dressed. Francesco tries to get loose but his mother holds him tight and tickles him to the point where he can’t resist. He laughs and hugs her. He feels her warmth as he hugs her. That hug can fix anything. It’s the type of hug that only a mother can give. Even when she’s a mother despite herself.

  There are places hell can’t reach, even in hell.

  Chapter 11

  Alone and deep in thought, just like Petrarch, I walk along. He would steal away in order to conceal the signs of burning love so evident on his face. I don’t have anything to burn, nor do I have anything to hide. It’s myself that I hide for the very reason that I don’t have anyone to love. The thing that keeps me in a state of awe is words. As I write a few of them down on white pieces of paper, they sprout up in sequences that are anything but mathematical.

  I attempt to connect words that have a similar sound.

  I’m playing with the word ‘rise,’ which sounds like ‘rose.’ And I’m trying to capture their hidden kinship.

  Regardless of its thorns

  I prefer the rose

  Rather than the rise.

  But that’s not to mention that a small change can take you to a completely different place:

  Regardless the hour

  I prefer to rouse

  Rather than to raise.

  As I am trying to find another variation that involves a Russian who is rushing, my exercise is interrupted by my mother.

  ‘So should we go shopping for all the things you’ll need on your trip? If you’re going to be in England for a month and half, you’re going to need a lot more than paper and pens.’

  Shopping with my mother is always one of the most bittersweet experiences in my life. It’s sweet because it allows me to become a little boy again for a while. And however much I protest like a seventeen-year-old male, I actually enjoy it.

  It’s bitter because my mother always likes to haggle, even though she has plenty of money. And it embarrasses me, as if I were a thief. It must be something that she learned at home when she was little. It’s a conditioned reflex common among the generation that lived through World War II with rationing and substitute products. She was born in the 1940s and I was born in the 1970s. The discount is the abyss that divides our generations.

  ‘You’re going to need a windbreaker. You know how much it rains there.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘You’re going to need a pair of comfortable rain boots.’

  ‘I’m sorry?’

  ‘That’s right. So that you’ll be comfortable when it rains.’

  ‘Mom, I’m not going to India during monsoon season. I wear tennis shoes no matter what the climate, and that’s what I’m taking with me. Come to think of it: Look! I’m already wearing them! Problem solved.’

  ‘Federico, London is not Palermo! Let’s see if we can’t find a pair like the ones I had in mind.’

  ‘That’s not how it is. Let’s forget the rain boots.’

  ‘And you’re also going to need some long johns.’

  ‘What are those?’

  Sicilian mothers are convinced that to leave Sicily is to dive into unexplored lands, like you were a new Cortés or Shackleton. They predict every possible natural calamity and outfit you with all the equipment you need for the highly probable grasshopper invasion.

  It’s really just their way of showing you how much they love you.

  Chapter 12

  Don Pino looks at his misshapen shoes and they remind him of the ones his father used to wear back when new shoes were a luxury. The afternoon light hugs the streets less ferociously than usual and lots of people are out enjoying the milder weather. They chat outside their houses, sitting in armchairs that aren’t really suited for the outdoors, but they are comfortable nonetheless.
r />   Dust. Basil and mint. Laundry hanging. The kids begin their ritual: They stroll back and forth along the piazza and the main streets to see and be seen. You could say they shuffle up and down the street but it’s more like rubbing up against each other with their eyes than with their bodies. They move the way farmers used to plow the land in another era, up and down, down and up, planting words and every type of gossip, news and commands and stares that reinforce the status quo.

  Everything can be done and undone in this city with words and stares. The rest is silence.

  Don Pino treads across that same piazza and those same streets as he tries to make eye contact with the boys and girls. Some look away, others make fun of him, and yet others smile at him. A boy sidles up beside him and pulls on his pant leg, asking when they will go out for pizza and French fries again.

  He looks into the eyes of the grownups and then back at his misshapen shoes. What kind of shoes are best for walking in hell? No one really knows. Maybe he knows since his father was a cobbler and he passed down his trade with his hands and his sweat. He repaired more pairs of shoes than he could count. And Don Pino carefully stores his father’s work tools the way rich people lock away their silverware and jewelry.

  Maybe there are no good shoes for walking in hell. All he knows is that you need to do as God does: He wears their shoes and dust as he walks up and down the streets of men. ‘Before you judge a man,’ goes the proverb, ‘you need to walk a mile in his shoes.’ And this is what God did for thirty-three years, thirty of which he spent crafting tables with the hands and sweat of a man. And this is what Don Pino has been doing in Brancaccio since October 6, 1990, the day on which he returned to the neighborhood where he grew up. He was born on September 15, 1937 and he cried just like all babies cry when they are born, as if they know that they will have to atone for nine months of warm darkness with years of painful light. He wanted to see, to touch, and to sweat on the streets of the men in his neighborhood. And they needed to see him on those streets, a familiar presence with his shoes encrusted with that same dust.

  He knows that in this city, there is one of the five senses that you need more than the others: Your sight. In any port city, everyone watches everyone else. In a vast port city, they do it vastly. And there are not enough adjectives in the world to describe the various ways in which people watch other people.

  Someone once said that Sicilians could impregnate even a balcony with their penetrating stare. And whoever said that was right. If a stranger watches you closely, you say, ‘What are you looking at?’ You need to define the nature of the hierarchy between two interlocutors. An ingenuous stranger doesn’t watch. He stares.

  People who are born in Sicily know how to watch. They all watch and they see everything. But the art of living is that of seeing and pretending not to have seen. And knowing how to remain silent when you have seen too much. Seeing too much can often be fatal.

  He knows that he has to do the exact opposite: Watch, see, be watched, be seen. Openly, with his head held high. And he mustn’t pretend when he sees something that needs to be changed. The beginning of hell is when you lower your head and close your eyes, when you turn away and reinforce the only spontaneous form of faith that Sicily knows. The easy-to-come-by, fatalist faith that says ‘no matter what you do, nothing will change.’ His peace is fed by this war on things that never change, on the status quo. And he keeps his eyes wide open. How many times has he told his children the same thing? Heads held high. Walk with your head held high. When someone walks by on those streets, people lower their heads. Visual submission is one of life’s cardinal rules. If you look up at people, you are provoking them. And he looks everyone in the face and in the eye.

  He left the neighborhood during the war. The walls and rooftops still show the signs of wounds that were never sutured properly. But ever since he came back, he has walked down every last alley hoping to rekindle the memory of strolls with his parents, when they would swing him between them as they pretended to launch him into the air.

  And he knows the men of these streets the same way Mafiosi know their territory. In the end, he’s a ‘don’ like them.

  The Hunter is among those men. Don Pino watches him like he watches everyone else. And the Hunter returns the favor with his steely looks. Don Pino is attracted to those eyes. He searches them out. He stares at him and he smiles. The Hunter turns the other way. He has nothing to say to that smile and his air is indifferent, as if he hadn’t realized that the stare was intended for him.

  When people watch the Hunter, they need to make a slight bow or keep their heads down.

  Don Pino is a don without power, a don without strength. His strength is unarmed. It’s not greater than violence because violence transforms the flesh. But it goes beyond violence because his strength transforms the heart.

  It trumps violence, not in space but in time. Only time can vanquish space. There are men who master space and there are men who are masters of time. It all depends on which god they believe in.

  Chapter 13

  One of the other events you can’t miss before summer vacation is the posting of our grades. It’s a way for us all to see each other after school is out. We all go in together and we look up our names among the hundreds of rows and boxes posted on the wall. This jumble of numbers quantifies not only your grades but also your relationship with your pride, with your sofa, and with your television . . . and with every other form of mass distraction you can think of. That’s all grades are: The margin of pride among the prideful kids or the confirmation of laziness among the lazy kids.

  We meet up with Gianni, Marcello, Marco, Margherita, Giulia, and Agnese. I’ve mentioned Agnese last not because she’s the least important. In fact, I mentioned her last because, at different times in my life, she becomes the most important. I share my nothings and thoughs with her and she manages to keep them to herself. I share my enthusiasm and my rage with Gianni because he’s a boy and boys can’t share feelings of subtraction. They can only share feelings of overabundance.

  The first box that we probe is the very last one. It’s the one that lets you know whether you’ll have to retake your exams in September. Smooth. Everyone is smooth, just like drug traffickers who cross the border without being noticed. There’s nothing like school to make you feel like a juvenile delinquent. We all yell in unison to let the world know that our summer is safe. I had no doubt that I would pass. My parents would never send me to England if I had to redo my exams in September. School comes first at our house. Everything else revolves around this cause. And by no means can it be neglected.

  I’ve never had problems at school. I’ve always been intelligent enough to do well in the subjects that I like and to arm myself with well-honed strategies in the subjects that I don’t feel as comfortable with. It’s all thanks to Latin, which taught me to distinguish between strategies and tactics when we had to translate passages from The Gallic Wars by Julius Caesar.

  I had the good old Castiglioni–Mariotti Latin–Italian dictionary by my side, the only true veteran of a greater war and a uniter of generations. It was my mother’s and she gave it to Manfredi and he gave it to me. The cover had been reduced to a sieve and its pages were densely filled with declensions and cryptographed exceptions that had been masterfully dislodged, especially in the Italian-to-Latin part, which we would have never used. Julius Caesar served me well when he taught me how to get an A–.

  According to my Italian dictionary, strategy is defined as follows:

  In the military arts, a technique used to identify the general and final objectives of a war or to project and direct the larger military movements and operations of a campaign by readying the means necessary to achieve victory (or desired results) with as little sacrifice as possible.

  It’s the perfect definition for my strategy at succeeding in school. The final objective is the grade board. Based on my yearly plan, it’s always best to ready everything I need to achieve the desired numeric result with as
little afternoon, weekend, long weekend, and vacation-sacrifice as possible.

  And that brings us to my tactics:

  Techniques, principles, and methods for deploying military or naval forces in order of battle or combat with the enemy.

  Here’s where the whole difference lies: The object of strategy is the general execution of the war or the deployment of large units that cover ample ground; but when you come into contact with the enemy, tactics come into play.

  I love Julius Caesar as much as I love Petrarch. It takes a great general like him to balance the bigger picture and the details.

  High school is divided into three parts just like Gaul. But contact with the enemy has names and last names, subjects, class schedules, fellow soldiers, and fortified hills. It’s one thing to have to deal with math. It’s another thing to have to deal with your math teacher. Your ability with the latter doesn’t necessarily make your ability with the former necessary.

  We were victorious. Our yells of joy wiped away any doubt of that. Then everyone rushed to see each box to find out the actual scores in the art of succeeding at school. Mine were beyond what I had expected.

  I had a bunch of A–s (even in physics, though I don’t know how that happened), three As (Italian, Greek, and philosophy), and a B+ in math. It was a report card worthy of a double backward somersault. And it was all thanks to Julius Caesar. And to my brother Manfredi who helped me with math.

  ‘You’re a nerd,’ says Gianni. ‘And a bit of a brownnoser. You and your Petrarch and your Ariosto, your Tasso and your Machiavelli . . .’

  ‘What are you trying to say?’

  ‘Is it really possible for someone to get three As without kissing someone’s ass?’

  ‘My good grades have nothing to do with that. And you know that, too. I just happen to like those subjects. They’re fun.’

  ‘You’re just making things worse, you idiot.’