A year after my father died, I became obsessed with finding one of his old paintings, I Bevitori (The Drinkers). All that remained of the artwork was a black and white reproduction in an old catalog. Over time I had forgotten its original colors and even though I imagined a painting as big as a wall, I wasn’t sure if I was exaggerating or if it really had been that large. It occurred to me that I wanted to give it back its former luminosity and shadows, and know its actual length and width.

So, one morning in September I called general information and got the number for the municipality of Positano, whose offices, my father used to say, had purchased the painting in 1953 for 100,000 lire. He always made sure to mention that the painting hung in the council chambers, above the mayor’s seat, so when I phoned I told the staff member as much. “I’m calling for information. Would you be able to tell me if a large painting hangs in the city council chambers? I am not sure of its length or its width for that matter but it’s an extremely large painting. If it’s there, you will have seen it.”

The woman was helpful and wanted to know the subject of the painting. I described it to her briefly. “It’s of a construction site and it’s called The Drinkers. It shows four workers eating and drinking, a Neapolitan mastiff, and a boy pouring water from a demijohn.” The employee said no, she had never seen a large painting of construction workers, at least not there in the municipal hall. However, to be certain, she decided to transfer me to a colleague who was more proficient in such matters.

The woman’s colleague wanted more details. I told her about my father and said that the painting was important to me for personal reasons. She tried hard to be helpful. She put me on hold and went, I think, to have a look. When I was reconnected to her, she said, “It’s definitely not here. However, your father’s painting might have hung in the old town hall; when we moved they might have put it somewhere else.” She went on to explain to me that at one point in time the municipal hall was at a different location. “Have you ever been to Positano?” she asked in an aside. Now, however, their offices were situated in a beautiful villa. “Really? You’ve never been to Positano?” she asked again and then said, “Call back Monday.” In the meantime, she would talk to her uncle who was a painter, maybe he’d recall my father’s painting.

I said alright, thank you, I’ll call Monday.

 

There’s a story behind The Drinkers that I’ve never told anyone. It has to do with my father’s artistic vocation, my mother’s illness, an artless flow of water, and an arm that was at first too short and later too long. Even now as I begin to write about it, I feel unease come over me.

Almost up until the day he died, my father used to talk about that painting as if it were a major achievement, the memory of which brought him both pleasure and sadness. “Mimí,” he’d confide in me, “when I was painting it, I truly felt like I was in a state of grace.” And then he’d peer at me closely to see if I knew what a state of grace was. Whenever he thought I didn’t know—basically, always—he went on to explain it. A state of grace, he said, is feeling like an arrow headed directly toward its target. You travel straight and determined through the air, no one can stop you from getting where you have decided you’ll go. “Not even the biggest piece of shit in the world,” he’d say angrily, “not even someone who tries to humiliate you as hard as they can, purely out of spite and jealousy and disrespect.”

While he was talking, he’d move his index finger back and forth from left to right, illustrating the path of the arrow. Maybe it was the light in his eyes, but he made the line seem luminous. Then, as usual, he forgot all about the painting and started talking about all the obstacles he had to face. Back then—he said—between the end of the 1940s and beginning of the 1950s, after a long and tiring day of work on the railroad, he periodically went to gallery openings so that he could get a foot in the door of the art world and to exchange opinions with painters in galleries up in Vomero or on Via Chiaia or Via dei Mille.

He met lots of brilliant people that way: art critics from all the newspapers in the city, like Barbieri, Ricci, Schettini, Girace; artists such as Ciardo, Notte, Striccoli, Verdecchia, and Casciaro, who taught at the Accademia and at other art schools; there were young and pretty women painters like Tullia Matania, who was beautiful, elegant, and deeply enthusiastic about his art ever since they showed their work together at the Galleria Romanella in Vomero. In short, it was a lively and open setting. People talked, debated, Emilio Notte said one thing, Vincenzo Ciardo said another, the critic Carlo Barbieri told stories about the days when Via Cesare Rosaroll was something of a Latin quarter, how lots of artists used to live there and work there and all the late nights they had.

My father also had late nights but they were joyless ones because he was always skittish, on edge. He could never relax completely, he couldn’t revel in that life of pure aesthetics. Firstly, because he was dead tired after having worked on the railroad all day; secondly, because he was depressed by the thought that he’d have to go back and waste more time there the following day, and so on for the rest of his life; and thirdly, because it was hard for him to stay quiet: he wanted to be at the center of attention and hold court and never have to stop.

If he didn’t talk, if he restrained himself from speaking, he who rambled on and on so willingly, it was out of fear that something would happen the way it did one night at the Medea gallery (which was owned by Dr. Mario Mele), when the sculptor Giovanni Tizzano, an ex-policeman in the Guardia di Finanza, turned to him and asked, in front of everyone and out of pure spite, “Excuse me, Federí, but can you tell me if there’s a train for Rome between midday and one o’clock?”

People started to snicker and look over at him. “Can you imagine how deeply offensive that was?” he asked me, his eyes blazing as if it had happened only an hour earlier. Tizzano, behaving like some famous artist who needed to travel to the capital to see other important artists, had addressed him in public not as a talented painter but as an employee of the railroad; his question about the train schedule was like a slap in the face. And, to make things worse, it happened while he was sitting in a corner discussing art with Tullia Matania, who had been listening to him with her mouth open and staring at him with her beautiful eyes.

“Can you believe it?” Federí insisted. Could I believe, in other words, the extent to which he had been wronged? Tizzano had the advantage of being elderly. With his white hair, my father couldn’t lay a finger on him. He could only smile and reply, “Don Giuvà, if you need to go to Rome to ask about backpay from your policeman’s pension fund, wouldn’t it be better if you left in the morning?” A few people had laughed at that, including Tullia Matania. But Tizzano didn’t back down and drove his knife in even further. “Why are you all laughing? Didn’t you know that Federí is a hard-working railroad employee?”

 

In his early years he had to put up with things like that and far worse, my father would go on to say in a dark tone of voice. Rivalries, conspiracies, betrayals. His dream was to find a way to leave his job on the railroad and become a nationally and internationally renowned painter, to hell with all those Neapolitan detractors. He always hoped to meet an art dealer who’d say, “Federí, give me ten paintings a month and I’ll pay you so well that you and your family will be able to live on easy street. Agreed?” Agreed. Leave his job on the railroad. Get paid to paint day and night. Know that each brushstroke was money in the bank. That was his dream, his hope. Mornings when he didn’t have to rush off to work, he’d lie in bed smoking, staring at the ceiling and fantasizing for hours. He thought about the future. He looked silently at the shadows and imagined works of art that would make everyone sit up and say, “You truly are a great artist, Federí.”

I can see him now, his large head leaning back against the headboard. I hear him clearing his throat and spitting his smoker’s phlegm onto a piece of newspaper lying on the floor by the bed for that precise purpose. The room smells like sleep and night, even if it is midday. He calls out to Rusinè to bring him a coffee. His wife, who’s been pumping the treadle of her sewing machine since dawn (she used to make blouses for a Slavic woman with a keen business sense), stops what she’s doing, brings him a cup of coffee, and then goes back to her Singer. He sips his coffee and muses, muses and sips. “If an Istrian refugee, who doesn’t even know our Neapolitans customs and ways, can make money by sewing blouses, why can’t I do the same with my paintings?” he thinks. After all, art is nobler than blouses. And, in the best possible circumstances, art sells better. His wife’s relatives, those stinking pieces of shit, managed to buy themselves apartments and cars by selling mortadella and cream puffs. Why can’t he get rich with his art? In the past, princes and bankers used to take care of artists. Who would take care of him?

In order not to have to sigh in frustration all on his own, he called out to his wife to bring him more coffee. He could drink a whole Neapolitan moka by himself, coffee and cigarettes, cigarettes and coffee. He has an iron constitution and a strong heart. Rusinè comes in, sits down on the side of the bed, they confabulate for a bit and have a few laughs. He fantasizes about money, wants to hit the road with a portfolio of drawings under his arm, reiterates his desire to meet a dealer who’ll let him paint in peace and buy houses and cars.

After their tête-à-tête, he gets up in a better mood. He’s wearing a wool undershirt and large white briefs. His wife opens the window to let in some fresh air and picks up the phlegm-flecked piece of newspaper with a look of disgust. He puts on his trousers, singing to himself. Maybe he already envisions a better life for himself: going to galleries every single night if he wants, chatting with Tullia Matania without the danger of Tizzano interrupting and slinging mud on him by saying, “He’s not a painter, he’s a railroader.”

His good mood lasts for a while. Sometimes he even sits in the kitchen and plays his mandolin. But then something sets him off; no day passes without something bad happening. Troubles on the railroad or with his colleagues. Other artists conspiring against him. Money runs out too fast. And then, Attilio and Carmela, who own the salumeria, manage to buy an apartment in a new building on Via Carelli, next to the Cinema Stadio, just a few streets away from Via Gemito. It’s offensive. They already own a home and now they’re buying a second one. Flaunting their wealth in front of his eyes, the eyes of a great artist. This is yet another reason why he decides, in 1953, to stun everyone—critics, painters, and quite possibly, if he manages to sell it well or win an important prize, even his relatives—and conceives of a painting that he believes will be better than Manet’s Déjeuner sur l’herbe. A painting reminiscent of the great masters of the past, a sweeping and large-scale work—he says—the length and width of Los Borrachos by Velázquez. You know what I mean, Mimí? Los Borrachos by Velázquez at the Prado in Madrid?

When he talked about those days, he’d grip my arm tightly. “You know it, don’t you?” he’d ask.

 

The weekend passed, Monday came, but I didn’t call Positano. I decided to go in person but not right away, I had other things to do first. I thought about the painting as if it were a precious object, a treasure chest full of secrets. When, in October, my brother Geppe came to visit me in Rome, the first thing I said to him was, “Do you remember The Drinkers?” We talked about it at length and compared our memories. We talked and talked, and I ended up going back to Naples with him when the time came for him to leave.

My goal was to spend one night at his house and leave for Positano the next day. But the morning after, I woke up wanting to revisit a number of places in the city that were important to my father. It was hot, but even so I felt like taking a long walk. While I was walking down from Capodimonte along Santa Teresa degli Scalzi at an early hour, breathing in the already heavy air, I realized that my father and I never actually went for a walk together through Naples. There was no single place in the city where I could say this is where we stopped, this is where we said this or that to each other.

I often went out with my mother though, even as an adult. Until she fell ill. If I wanted to, I could rely on her figure as a kind of bookmark to indicate important areas and sections of roads, even. For example, at the end of the 1950s, we often walked up that exact street, Santa Teresa degli Scalzi, to see my father in a clinic not far from Ponte della Sanità. He had been operated on—I’m embarrassed to say—for hemorrhoids and was in great pain, and yet he still found the strength to tell everyone about the operation. He said the doctors had strung him upside down and, with him hanging there like that, they had worked on him, in an area that was exceedingly delicate, of course, using a scalpel and ice. He was extremely proud of how courageous he was, embellishing the experience and narrating the events in his usual manner. I just wanted him to be quiet. I couldn’t understand how my mother put up with all his talking. I was embarrassed that my father had been operated on for hemorrhoids. To my friends I either said nothing, or if I absolutely had to, I told them that he had undergone a complex procedure on his stomach, a part of the body that my Zio Attilio had been operated on some years earlier with far more dignity. In short, I wished he would’ve been more discreet. I preferred how Rusinè handled things; she never complained about her physical or mental ailments and always bounced back, even from miscarriages and childbirth, with surprising speed and without fanfare. Federí, on the other hand, saw the slightest malady as a straight path to death, and he had to talk and talk and talk about it to exorcise his fear that, if he died, he wouldn’t be able to complete the masterful works he had in mind. As I walked down Santa Teresa degli Scalzi, recognizing various corners along the way, I felt my mother’s presence through her silence and heard my father’s voice in the rising clamor of the city.

Once past the Museo—it was now decidedly hot—I was struck with sudden trepidation and slowed down. I could’ve turned onto Via Correra and headed up towards Cavone, where my father said he bought and sold things on the black market with Don Peppe the carpenter. Or else I could seek refuge in the Museo, cool down, and imagine how Federí admired Euridice’s arm reaching out to Orpheus or the feet of drunken Silenus or sleeping Bacchus’s bloated belly or Atlas holding up the globe and constellations. But I decided not to go in and went back to strolling at a normal pace. I walked along Via Pessina toward Piazza Dante and turned left on Via Conte di Ruvo.

That was the street my father had turned down together with the other day laborers after being assigned a job in Piazza Carità but before meeting Sergeant Leefe, before becoming the interpreter, set designer, and all the rest. There was the Teatro Bellini. That was where he had unloaded tools, pails, and cartons, constantly ranting about the bad luck he had, never any good luck.

When I was young, I always carefully avoided that street and tried not to look at the theater. As an adult, if I happened to read something that critiqued it—a grim place, reminiscent of a gilded funeral carriage, the kind that was all the rage in the late nineteenth century—I only found proof of my father’s tendency to exaggerate. On that particular day, however, I perceived the importance that he had attributed to the place. I tried to imagine him turning the corner, one of a horde of desperate souls. But I realized that I conserved few memories of his features that were not from period photographs: his wide forehead, his slightly oblique and small eyes, his mouth always slightly open. These features were enough to give me an impression of him, but not enough to see him on the streets of the city.

I stopped on the corner of Via Bellini with all its bars and restaurants, now cordoned off to traffic by several large stone vases. I stood there and took in the grey stone façade of the theater with its five entrances, the white globe lights hanging from black iron brackets, the narrow balcony and second floor railing, and finally the winged lions, cherubim with lyres, and a series of theatrical masks and musical instruments up top, all crowned with the writing: TEATRO BELLINI.

I crossed over and examined the photographs hanging in the display cases out front. There was a matinee performance of La Morte di Carnevale by Viviani, interpreted and directed by Renato Carpentieri. After some hesitation, I made my way into the foyer: it was painted pearl-white and lush green palm fronds reached up to the ceiling. “You can’t be here,” a girl told me straight away. “You have to leave, or else I’ll get in trouble.” I asked her to let me have a quick look inside, but nothing doing. She sent me around to the artists’ entrance, where there was a custodian.

I found him, an elderly man, and told him that I just wanted to have a quick look at the theater. I told him I was especially interested in the spaces upstairs, if there was a skylight, how light came in. “You need the owner’s permission,” he said. I tried to be charming and asked him about the theater in the years between 1944 and 45, if he recalled any of the performances put on by the English soldiers. “I’m not Methuselah or anything” he said, interrupting me. “All I need is a quick look,” I said, trying one last time. “I’m sorry, but you need permission,” he said, shaking his head. I thanked him and left.

I ended up spending quite a bit of time on Via Bellini, first at a bar where I had some mineral water, and then wandering around in front of the Accademia di Belle Arti, a roughly hewn stone building with two black lions at the entrance, where all the students were dressed like artists.

My father had always wished he could’ve spent his youth within those walls. He also would’ve liked it if, later on, when he was older, thanks to his reputation, they had asked him to teach art there: outsider art, insider art, whatever kind. But nothing of the sort ever happened. I looked at the yellowish façade and noticed the scant distance that separated the Bellini from the Accademia. Yes, it really was too bad that the only words I had to describe Federí were skinny, beady-eyed, wide forehead, open-mouthed. I wish I could’ve seen him as a young man, lively and anxious, with a fair number of years ahead of him and endless dreams.

 

After the Teatro Bellini, after forever closing the door on the atelier with its skylight, where, for the first time in his life, he had felt—or so he said—like a truly brilliant painter, his desire to be an artist grew even more pronounced, which led to a perennial restlessness. Over the years, his sense of disquiet grew into a never-ending torrent of nervous energy, which, by 1953, mutated into a desire to accomplish great things and the expectation that he would be acknowledged for them.

In order to tackle The Drinkers and all the challenges that particular painting presented, he turned our entire house, as well as the sentiments of everyone living inside it, upside down. The minor incident that caused the major earthquake was a short walk (although sometimes he said it was a meeting) with Armando De Stefano, the painter. My father nurtured a sincere admiration for this artist, who was a few years younger than he. His respect for him was constant, it lasted through thick and thin, and when De Stefano gave him a gift of one of his paintings, my father always kept it hanging next to his own; whenever they moved house, he’d always bring the painting with him and never chucked it into a corner in disgust, the way he did with other people’s work. Every chance he got, even after emitting a long series of insults, he’d always say, “Armando is the real thing, a true painter, and one of the best to come out of Naples in the post-war period.”

Today I can’t say where that meeting took place. Maybe on Via Caracciolo at winter’s end, when you can stroll down the street with your overcoat draped over a shoulder, certain that warm days are on the way. Perhaps it took place on Via dei Mille, after having a coffee together. Unquestionably, they talked about paintings and exhibitions they’d seen—the big show in Rome at the Palazzo delle Esposizioni, for example—and they shared their displeasure, what a let-down it was, and for my father in particular. At one point, De Stefano interrupted their conversation. “Federí, we should do a show, just you and me. And not just of older paintings, but new, large-scale work.” My father’s jaw dropped. He immediately and enthusiastically agreed.

He came home in a great mood that day. It meant a lot to him that a young painter, someone connected to the Accademia as well as a professor at the Liceo artistico, had extended such an invitation to him. De Stefano, he said, wasn’t a shithead like those other painters, even if they were locally, nationally, or internationally famous; he was a reputable man and mentally free. With De Stefano he didn’t have to worry about his job, that he worked for the railroad and wasn’t a full-time artist. He didn’t feel the slightest bit awkward for not having studied at the art academy or gone to special schools. It didn’t matter if he could never be a teacher of drawing at the art school. De Stefano had asked him because he admired him, pure and simple. “Federí, let’s do a show together of new, large-scale work.” Of course he had replied without thinking twice. “What a fantastic idea, Armà. I’ll get straight to work.”

 

That evening I went back to the theater and saw La morte di Carnevale. In the intermission between the first and second act, I left my seat and snuck upstairs to the top floor. The theater was clean and had been renovated with care. I looked out over the stage: the ceiling, painted with clouds and cherubim, seemed within touch, winged horses with frenzied looks on their faces galloped from one side to the other, their haunches illuminated.

I tried to imagine Rusinè sitting in the royal box, as my father said she had when Bebe and Douglas Fairbanks Jr. were performing. But it was pointless. My mother existed more in my memories than she did in those of her husband. Even in the memoir he later wrote, he always nullified her with one of two short phrases: that’s how Rusinè was, or, she just couldn’t control herself. So I walked back down to the orchestra pit. The lights had dimmed and the stage had the warm glow of a fireplace in a dark, shadowy room. If Federí, there or anyplace else, had ever acted the part of a young man with an artist’s sensitivity, his wife—I imagined—had simply tried to seem like an acceptable life companion. Nothing more. But he wouldn’t have any of it. His wife, he said, embarrassed him. Afterward, late at night, he fought with her and let out all his anger. “You’re not coming with me to the theater ever again. You’re just not good enough for it.”

In his eyes, my mother was never good enough for anything, the theater or any other public place. And yet she tried. She liked women who knew how to stand up for themselves, who spoke frankly and were at ease with men, whose casual manners were both striking and scandalous. She was interested, for example, in the women artists who stayed at the galleries until late at night. She was attracted to people like Tullia Matania, who knew about art, had their own ideas, spoke their minds, and didn’t worry about showing a little leg. On the rare public occasions that Federí allowed her to go with him, she always tried to copy Tullia. But that only made him angry, as he wanted her to be herself.

And what was that exactly? I will never know. When she got dressed to go out with my father, she had the staggering beauty of a movie star. Then, it was Federí who didn’t seem good enough. An angry glower came over his face, everyone bothered him, he was far less entertaining than she was, and maybe he even realized it. I watched the two of them with apprehension: they were an unsteady couple—sometimes allies and sometimes rivals according to their own agendas that I knew little about. Now, in the dark theater, they seemed like flickering flames, like actors performing the death of Carnevale. Eventually, I let myself relax and enjoy the show, laughing along with the audience. What pleasures exist for those who make art. Federí knew them all: how to be at the center of attention, how to make someone laugh, how to make them cry, how to make their heart race.

 

With regards to The Drinkers, I especially recall the consistency of the bare canvas. I must’ve touched it several times before it was painted because I can still feel its texture in my fingertips. When my father talked about the project in that grandiloquent way of his, he used to spread his arms open wide to show me just how big it was. He had needed, he said, one whole double bedsheet for the painting, and we owned only one that was in good condition: it was a rough cloth, somewhat yellowed with age, made of hemp, coarse to sleep on. According to him, Rusinè was slow to comprehend the needs of an artist and initially she refused to give it to him. “Over my dead body,” she said. He exploded with rage and she gave in.

I really can’t imagine how my mother might have felt. I imagine her standing in the doorway, her ugly bathrobe wrapped tightly around her, a grimace of impotent unhappiness on her peaked face. The image I conserve of her is so worn out and yet so mobile in my memory that she seems transparent. She looks feeble, as if she has stopped believing in her own power of reasoning, as if she has resigned herself to giving him everything he demands: the bedsheet, her energy, the ironic twinkle in her eyes.

But then, my father used to say, she started to help him, laughing nervously as she did. That’s just how she was: first she reared up and then she worked with him. She helped him by soaking the sheet in a copper basin and then wringing it out, but not too much, as he instructed her. Water splashing across the floor, they laid the sheet over the stretcher, she pulled it ably from one side, he tugged on it unhappily from the other. Maybe there was laughter in the air, it’s possible: for me, bedsheets always meant playtime. When Rusinè and my grandmother folded them, standing at a fair distance from one another and pulling them taut in opposite directions, my brother Geppe and I leapt in the middle, got in the way, waited for them to flap the sheet over us, reveling in the gusts of air and the smell of clean laundry. But it’s also possible that on that particular occasion anxiety dominated the room. We kids were called on to run to the closet to get various things: the hammer, the nails, not those nails, “the little nails; they have to be there, Mimí,” my father would holler. “I bought them less than a month ago, now where the hell did you put them?” In other words, it was not fun. There was commotion, a flurry of emotions, the sheet continued to drip water. Never wrung out enough, never taut enough. My parents laid it over the stretcher, took it down, laid it out again, the house was a fen. The frame (was it constructed at home, too? Yes, no, maybe), with its four vertical wooden beams and a fifth horizontal one, took up most of the tiled floor, which had been liberated of all the furniture.

 

That much I remember for sure: all the furniture had been moved out. I clearly recall the ruckus of shifting everything out so that the frame and canvas for The Drinkers could be brought in. There goes my father down the hall with one green armchair stacked on top of the other, the floral upholstery already in bad condition. Once he puts them down in a corner of their already crowded bedroom under my mother’s watchful eye, he joyfully heads back to the dining room, now intent on relocating the table. And he does it without preamble, in a dismissive frenzy. And while Rusinè and my grandmother assist, one of them picking up a hobnail glass vase of a greenish hue and the other a pair of majolica ashtrays they considered precious, he, uncombed, unshaven, in an old pair of pants caked with dry paint from crotch to knee that he wears for painting, grunts and shoves the table up against a wall, wedging it between a vitrine that we call our silver cabinet even if we don’t own any silver, and a settee that, less than six years earlier, was brand new but which is now ruined beyond repair thanks to me, my two brothers, and the wet paintings he sets there to dry.

What a racket. “The feet,” my mother complains and even if she didn’t actually do it then, she definitely did on another occasion. By “feet” she means the legs of the table. She says it more with an anguished sigh of surrender than as an exclamation of concern. Now, when she complains about something, she does it to point out her husband’s bombastic manner; she has already lost, in a matter of years, all the love she had for those mistreated pieces of furniture, mere encumbrances in their small home, which he treats as if it was a room in the Royal Alcazar made available to the great painter, Velázquez.

Such foolish fantasies: the actual facts of their domestic life are completely different. The table, the rare times we use it for eating all together, wobbles and emits a loud groan. It’s been moved around too many times, the cheap wood softens like butter, sawdust spills out of each juncture and piles up in a mound on the floor in a depressing sign of disintegration. A pane of glass in the silver cabinet is broken. The settee is rickety and stained. The upholstered chairs are torn and losing their stuffing. It’s a mess.

Does Federí care? Not in the slightest. He regularly shows aristocratic disdain for their household belongings. And on occasions like that, he struts around with a superciliousness that declares that no terrestrial belongings will ever come between him and his needs as an artist. What are the table, the hobnail glass vase, or the majolica ashtrays to him? What purpose do the armchairs, the settee, the silver cabinet, or the chairs have? None, when compared with his urgent need for space around his easel and crate of colors. The more my mother protests, the more he vaunts his disdain for material objects, as if trying to show her just how unimportant they are. And then, possibly to prove just how deeply the creative urge runs through him, how it takes over his body, he shuts down all pathways of communication with her, and if she tries to talk to him, he doesn’t respond, he merely looks off absently into the distance like someone who doesn’t know their own name or address. This goes on until my mother has to grab his arm and shake him to get him to speak again. “Huh?” he says.

 

My days in Naples flew by. At night I scribbled down a mess of notes and kept saying to myself, tomorrow I’ll go look for The Drinkers. But then the following morning I’d wake up and change my mind: today I want to go back to Via Gemito, to see that railroad-owned building where we lived, and the window that my father looked out of while he painted.

The metro station was less than a hundred meters from my brother’s house. It was easy: all I had to do was descend into the abyss, with its pleasant grey walls and yellow handrails, its red bricks and the smooth black rubber pavement that smelled new, like everything down there, get on the first train, and get off at Piazza Medaglie d’Oro. From there, one morning, I strolled idly to Piazza Antignano, and observed the dilapidated old buildings, loitered around the market, no different after all these years, and slowly made my way to Via Gemito.

I stopped to look at the number plate on the building. It was the same one and there were the same two digits on it. But Via Gemito itself, in that precise spot across from the sports field, had been given the name of Piazza Quattro Giornate. And in the center of the piazza, surrounded by a metal enclosure, was some scaffolding with the word METROSUD on it, a sign of work in progress for a new metro station. There was no trace of the countryside or that wide open space between our building and sports field where, when the weather was good, neighborhood children played football, rode their bikes, or formed armies and threw rocks at each other. Luckily, the urban landscape changes, just like everything else; it becomes a shadow that provides a background for other shadows. Heavy traffic, cars and motorbikes, careened around the Metrosud enclosure.

I glanced up at the building. The color didn’t look the same. Now it was white and grey, but I remembered it as being painted in warmer, brighter colors, though I can’t say which exactly. Nobody appeared on the balconies. The ground floor windows had thick bars on them. The cornice that ran all the way around the building, just above the basement windows, which we kids used to climb on to look into our friends’ houses and call them out to play, had been removed, maybe for security.

I walked through the gate and asked the young porter if I could have a look at the courtyard. I was hunting for changes but found few. The garden with its elegant stone border was still there. The only notable difference as far as I could see was a fountain with a statue of a woman set amid four thriving palm trees, and the pale green of the hortensia, which I recall as being somewhat lusher. In the summer, Don Ciro the caretaker used to water them every day with a hose. I’d stand by his side watching the spray—I spent a lot of time between the ages of six and eight doing that—in the hopes that he’d either say, “Here, you water them,” or playfully turn the hose on me. But Don Ciro never let me spray the flowers, nor did he ever spray me. Like so many other figures in my memory, he was always in a position to do good but never did.

I counted the floors and windows on the façade. When the door to Staircase C opened suddenly and a middle-aged man came out, I gestured to him to leave it open, and walked in. I had lived on the third floor of that building from the age of four to fourteen. I take a deep breath. There’s now an elevator in the stairwell, but the wooden handrail, the one I used to climb onto when I was small and slide down fast from one floor to the next, pretending not to be afraid, seemed to be the same.

I walked up the stairs slowly. The apartment where my friends once lived was now a radiology lab. The staircase was cool and dark, there were no sounds of voices or traffic outside, it was as if the apartments were empty. We, all those years ago, had been a terribly noisy family. Sometimes my parents’ arguments used to break through the barrier of our apartment door and make their way out onto the landing. This happened whenever Federí threatened to leave us forever and he’d rush down the staircase yelling and swearing. On one occasion, Nannina, who never did such things, decided to take our family drama beyond our four walls. While my father was busy screaming and ranting about something pointless, she went into the bathroom or bedroom and came out wearing the dark dress that she saved for holidays and gripping her old handbag. She walked down the hall, eyes straight ahead, opened the front door, turned to her daughter, and said, “Rusinè, I’m going to live with Peppino.” Something had offended her in an irremediable way. Maybe my father had said something ugly about her son. Rusinè stopped arguing with her husband and ran after her mother in tears. We grandchildren suddenly grew scared, too, and ran out onto the landing. Nonna, Nonna, we called. She walked down the steps without looking back. Her daughter hurried after her, grabbed her arm, and sobbed, “He didn’t mean it, Mamma. You know how Federico is, it’s all talk.” We kids rushed ahead and tried to form a barrier so she couldn’t get by and would have to come back upstairs. Even my father seemed a little worried. “Mother-in-law!” he started hollering from the front door of the apartment. “Can you tell me what the fuck I said that was so awful? Tell me!” And seeing that his mother-in-law didn’t answer him and continued on her way in silence, making every effort to push aside her grandchildren, he went on to issue a few sarcastic remarks, got even angrier, and started cussing at the heavens above. “Since when can’t I say what I want in my own home? Who the fuck runs the show here, you or me? Leave, if you want to! Leave! What the fuck do I care if you go?”

Eventually, my grandmother calmed down and decided to stay. The stairwell grew quiet again and the front door was closed. The very same door in front of which I now stood for no apparent reason. Our nameplate used to be blue with our last name painted in red by Federí. Now it was shiny brass.

 

Back out on the street, I stopped to lean against the back of a bench, and looked up at the main door and the gate. Each and every day, my father had rushed out that portal on his way to work at the railroad. And because he was always late and in a rush, he never entirely managed to remove the smell of paint from his skin and clothes.

He left the house swearing, carrying The Drinkers with him in his head. He painted the canvas as he walked down the road, rode the tram, and at work, the colors unfurling like fog down Via Gemito all the way to Piazza Garibaldi. He’d sit quietly on the tram or do his job well only if nothing or no one interfered with his thought process. If they did, he grew argumentative, deriving pleasure from the altercation, using it as a release.

Every morning he’d disappear down Via Luca Giordano and would reappear there each evening. Sometimes, mainly in the spring and summer, my mother would do her makeup, dress the three of us boys decently—me, my brother Geppe, and my brother Toni—and after the sun went down, the four of us would go wait for Federí at the tram stop opposite San Gennaro in Antignano, with its sculpture of the saint on the architrave flanked by two kneeling angels, which I liked a lot. When his tram arrived, he’d jump off the running board like a warrior home from battle. He was happy to see us all and would kiss my mother and us, too. But along the way home, he’d start to disappear; it was as if he hadn’t entirely returned. “I’ve got too many worries, Rusinè,” he’d say defensively when my mother said something like, “We should have stayed at home.” Too many worries, indeed. Worries about the painting. All the interruptions. The room he was forced to paint in. It was impossible to get any work done in there, there wasn’t enough light, not enough room. My father was embarrassed to have his painter friends come over to the house—he said it clearly, as if it was our fault. Did Velázquez have to work in such conditions? Did Courbet have to work in such conditions? Did any of those dabbling assholes who filled the art galleries of Naples until late at night have to work in those conditions? No, they all had a room, an attic, a space of their own. “I, on the other hand,” he said even as recently as last year, “was forced to paint in a corner between the window and the dining-room table.” Could I imagine what life was like for him? Did I remember the apartment on Via Gemito? As soon as it got dark, we kids had to go to bed, we slept in there, he had to put a cork in his inspiration and keep everything in his head, in his chest, until he could start up again. How could he possibly get anything done?

When he thought back to the past, my father would turn sullen. Not only was he not allowed to live the carefree life of an artist, he didn’t have a proper space to work in. When old Vincenzo Ciardo talked about how well he had painted while living on Via Cesare Rosaroll, the Latin Quarter of Naples, or when Alfredo Schettini, who was now an art critic but had been a painter when he was younger and also lived on Via Rosaroll, said the same, my father doubled over in envy and exploded with anger. “How did I get stuck painting here, in a building on Via Gemito, owned by the railroad?”

He wanted to walk away from all of it, he wanted new horizons, fresh artistic experiences. Sometimes he climbed aboard a train and went to see exhibitions in Rome, Florence, or Milan, taking advantage of the fact that railroad employees traveled for free. He used to tell the story about how once, in 1948, he had even gone to the Biennale di Venezia, to hell with his job at the Ferrovie dello Stato. He wanted to see and learn. If he didn’t see or learn, how would he ever be able put chaos in order on his canvases and be the god that brings structure to the general shitshow of natural events? Rusinè didn’t want him to go. “Oh shut up, it’s important,” he said, and off he went to Venice with his gang of critics and artists.

At first, he talked about that trip with great enthusiasm. He had gone with Striccoli and Verdecchia, the painters, and Barbieri and Ricci, the critics (he didn’t bother mentioning any of the others because they weren’t important to him). In terms of artistic growth, he said, the trip was worth less than zero: room after room he either saw things that he’d been doing since forever or so ugly that he’d never, ever be caught dead doing them. But he did manage to have a bit of fun with Striccoli at the expense of Carlo Barbieri in the rooms dedicated to Juan Miró.

The art critic, he told me, lowering his voice in a confidential manner, stopped dead in front of a triptych by the Spanish artist that portrayed a grey bull on a light background, first with a flaccid cock in flat red cadmium, then with a long and erect cock, and finally with the cock shooting sperm everywhere. Clearly, Barbieri’s attention to the painting had nothing to do with art criticism. “Mimí,” my father explained, leaning in toward me, “despite having a vast culture and artistic sensitivity, Carlo Barbieri was a fag. That’s why he spent so much time looking at the Miró.”

When I was a boy, this kind of information disturbed me but I hid it; when I was older, it made me angry, and I still hid it. In the past few years, though, each time this story comes up, I get angry at myself. “Why am I still listening to this stupidity?” I ask myself. “Why does he find it so funny? What the hell am I doing here with him? I don’t even know if he really went to the Biennale di Venezia, or if there really was a room dedicated to Miró. Maybe he invented the whole thing.” So I acted bored by it. “Yeah, and so?” I would say sometimes. But it was pointless, he kept talking and, as usual, he ignored me, just like he did with all his interlocutors. All he wanted to do was talk. In fact, after having a hearty laugh, he continued with the story. So, we snuck up on the critic from behind and yelled, “Caught you with your pants down, Don Carlè!” But the man didn’t blink. He just sighed and said, “My dear friends, have you seen this Miró? Such a huge talent!” There followed much elbowing, joking, and guffawing. Barbieri tried to defend his aesthetic point of view, waving them away. “Leave me alone, would you? Let me admire the Miró.” When he finally realized that my father and Striccoli wouldn’t stop teasing him, he snapped. “The truth is that you’re both mediocre in comparison. That’s why you can’t appreciate Miró. You feel ashamed of your own mediocrity,” he said.

I think that’s when the fun and games at the Biennale came to an end. “Now that’s enough, Don Carlè. Miró is only at the apex because you critics put him there. He wouldn’t have gotten anywhere on his own,” Striccoli commented in so many words, deeply offended. “Don’t you dare touch my Miró! He’s a rare one,” Barbieri replied. “He sure is. Like some kind of stamp.” And so on it went, thrust and parry.

My father said nothing. But each time he told the story, from that point forward he grew taciturn, and the tone of the narrative changed. He couldn’t accept that someone had called him mediocre. Was old Barbieri offended because neither he nor Striccoli appreciated the childish cartoons that Miró, that shithead, had done? What did they have worth appreciating? Was it possible that those images possessed truth and beauty and that he couldn’t see it?

Slowly, he distanced himself from Striccoli and Barbieri, who continued to argue. Walking through the hall with his hands in his pockets, a supercilious look on his face but feeling full of doubts, he forced himself to observe Miró’s works more carefully. Was his own work really mediocre? Wasn’t the work he did brilliant, the way he felt it was? Should he change? For a bit he toyed with the idea of creating colorful, infantile drawings like the ones in that room. Or else, the kinds of paintings that were easy to create: dab a blob of paint on a canvas and spread it with a spatula and it’s done, ready to be signed. Or else, splatter different colored paints onto a canvas, as if pissing on piss, dribbles of color: do you know what I mean, Mimí? He considered all the options for a long time. I can still see him looking around the room, frowning with worry, frowning with anger, always frowning. However, caring about others and their artwork was not his forte. Soon he had forgotten the Mirós on the wall and was lost in his own projects again.

I remember how all expression faded suddenly from his face. It looked like he had some kind of inward-facing retina that saw images only he could envision, and nothing of the people or things in the world around him. During his, shall we say, irrepressibly furious and creative phase that led to the realization of The Drinkers, he always wore that expression. He ignored the house, his job at the railroad, his wife, all of us. He even snubbed food. He worked for hours and hours on the painting and thought of nothing else.

It wasn’t that he didn’t eat, but that Rusinè had a hard time getting him to come and sit down at the table. “Federí! Dinner’s ready,” she’d yell and then send me to tell him to come. “Papà, it’s dinner time, come on, it’s getting cold,” I’d say in dialect. Yes, yes, he’d say and continue to dab at the canvas. I’d wait a minute or two and then tiptoe out. “He said he’s coming,” I’d tell my mother so she wouldn’t yell again and risk getting him upset. Then I’d go sit back down at the kitchen table and we’d all continue to toy with the food on our plates: me, my brother Geppe, my brother Toni, my mother, and my grandmother.

Finally he’d arrive: the scent of his paint thinner mixing with the smell of the sauces. He’d sit down and start in on how we had waited for him and shouldn’t have. Of course he was lying: if we had started without him, he would’ve been furious. In the meantime, his expression had changed to disgust. He said that he couldn’t taste anything, that he only needed food for nutrition, that he had other things to think about. And to prove that it wasn’t just an artist’s pose, he ate in silence and with excruciating lassitude.

One course lasted an eternity. He’d stop with his spoon suspended in mid-air, his mouth half-open, and sit there with his eyes glazed over, staring off into space. He only snapped out of it when my mother addressed him. “Eat up,” she’d say kindly but impatiently, “we’re waiting for you.” Startled, it was as if her words had disturbed his innermost thoughts and he reacted caustically, like someone who thought that normal people could never understand him. Actually, if he was in a good mood, he’d start to devour his food as fast as he could. “Eat up, eat up, we’re waiting for you,” he’d say in a monstrously cruel voice, just to irritate Rusinè. And he’d proceed to eat everything in sight, then get up from the kitchen table, go back to the dining room, and sit down at his easel to paint, correct, fix, alter, and even sing. That’s right. Sometimes he even sang while he painted.

 

I turned right and then right again down the road known as Andrea da Salerno. I wanted to see the façade of the apartment building where I had lived from a distance, and especially our three windows. They were still there, of course, and yet somehow they were different. The window frames were now made of metal whereas before they had been made of wood and not well caulked, with cold air always managing to get in. The two small windows that had once been those of the kitchen and bathroom, next door to each other but divided by a light wall, now looked, from the outside, like one single big window of a large room, not two. Maybe it had been renovated. If so, this meant that a child would never again be able to undergo the test of courage I invented with my brother: risking our lives, we challenged each other to crawl out the bathroom window, along the sill, and in through the kitchen. At least there was that.

I stopped and tried to remember the view from up there: the countryside with its smell of mint; later, the work site that flattened it; then the building with the porticoes that grew in its place, the same one beneath which I now stood, looking up. Back then it had seemed like an elegant building, and I thought the people who lived in it were lucky. One day, some kids my age moved into an apartment on the fifth floor. We talked about building a rope and pulley system to transport things from our window to their balcony, comic books and so on. We never did, though. It was too complicated. Not even my brother Geppe, who had that kind of intelligence, managed to figure out how to do it.

Those years had a certain kind of instability to them. As quickly as faces came into focus, they lost whatever made them unique; there was always something else going on. Friends came and went. The pulley kids disappeared in a matter of months. A little girl moved into an apartment on the second floor of the new building. She played under a loggia that we envied. Our balcony was always in the shade, while hers looked cheerful and always bright white with sun. Then summer came and the little girl went to the beach, where somehow she drowned and died. It was an ugly surprise. First there was life and then it was gone. An actual person suddenly became a daydream. Even the loggia: what was it really? Empty, shuttered. I took a few steps forward and then turned around to look up at it: just another squalid balcony. The whole building had lost all traces of innovation. It stood vulnerable and fragile, the metal security gates on the shops below pulled shut and covered with graffiti. I went back to looking up at our old windows.

I hesitated on the third from the left, next to a balcony that was not ours. Behind that window—closed in the winter and open wide in the summer—my father sat at his easel and painted, year in and year out. Looking and painting. Painting and looking. I wished I could conjure him up, just for a moment, behind that metal frame, behind the glass. Instead, the kitchen window suddenly opens and my mother leans out. “Come inside, dinner’s ready,” she calls out in dialect. She always had that ability. After she died, for a long time I saw her everywhere. Once I even saw her walking along a rooftop cornice in her green housecoat, grimacing with pain. I squeezed my eyes shut, opened them, and turned down Via Paisiello.

 

I’m now going to ponder the mystery that is Rusinè. “I don’t know anything about her and yet she’s everywhere,” I find myself thinking. I must’ve followed her with my eyes wherever she went when I was small, and somehow I stole her away from herself and glued her to the streets without even realizing it. At each junction, she left her image on things, the way a printer releases ink onto the blank page, forming letters and words of a text. Like the day I saw her in the park in Piazza degli Artisti, around Antignano, on Via Annella di Massimo. She wore the same hairstyle and manner of dress as always, and in the background I even saw the craftsmen’s workshops and their old-fashioned tools: the shoemaker, the haberdasher, and the old chianca with his butcher block and green laurel wreathes adorning vats of red soffritto, the hanging quarters of beef and bladders of lard, followed by the friggitoria, where they sold hot graffe sprinkled with sugar.

After leaving her standing at the kitchen window of the apartment on Via Gemito, I now see her in the shop window on Via Carelli, the one run by the Slavic lady, for whom she cut and sewed blouses. It was a kind of haberdasher’s, and it was situated next door to the Cinema Stadio, where my grandmother brought us children every single afternoon to get us out of the too-small house so we wouldn’t bother my father while he painted or my mother while she sewed. It was there, in the mid-1950s that Rusinè and the Slavic woman tried to open a boutique. The lady put up the shop, my mother her ability as a seamstress. They were imaginative and encouraged each other. Moreover, they were both beautiful, or at least I thought so, and they were quite a vision in that hole in the wall. “This is going to be a ladies’ paradise,” they claimed. “We’ll create outfits for special occasions. It’ll be the start of a major fashion house.”

Then, obviously, my father had to stick his nose in the middle of it. I don’t recall him being entirely convinced at the outset, he was too worried about cheats and cons. But he let himself be enticed by the thought that his wife could make money in the fashion business and his imagination was especially fired up by what his role might be. To begin with, he suggested rebaptizing the Slavic woman’s shop to “Lady’s Fashion” (originally it was called “Tip Top”) because—he said to the two women—we have to think big, sophisticated, international. In the meantime, he did drawings and watercolors of women modeling clothes for Rusinè so that, in case the drawings got picked up by some major fashion magazines, the experts would notice his work. “Sure, the clothes are pretty,” they might say, “But who drew these elegant figures? Who’s the talented artist?” And then he’d step out of the shadows and say, “Me! I am!”

It was possible; life is full of opportunities. For a while, Federí even believed in it. He hoped that his wife’s sewing would be a conduit for both money and fame, that it would lead him to meet an art dealer capable of influencing the critics (shitheads, one and all, each with their own price tag) and thereby transform him into a renowned artist. And to that end—this may have all taken place the same year that he started in on The Drinkers—he went to great lengths. He decorated the entire shop with images of fish and jellyfish and other underwater creatures without sparing himself, indefatigable as usual when it had to do with art.

Bar Stadio on Via Carelli was gone, and so was Cinema Stadio. There was no more “Tip Top” shop, which never became “Lady’s Fashion” because the law at the time made it costly to use a foreign name, and the shop never amounted to much anyway. When Federí realized that things weren’t progressing as he had imagined they would, he started to hassle Rusinè about all the time she was wasting there when she ought to have been with her family. And then there was the fact, he discovered, that to keep the commercial activity alive, his wife had to do business not just with women but with men of every kind—representatives, wholesalers, traffickers, and everyone knew they just wanted to screw around—and this did not please him in the slightest. She was beautiful and a little vain; he was worried that friends and acquaintances would end up singing vulgar ditties behind his back like the one that goes, “’on Nicò, ’on Nicò, tu sí piécher’e nuje no.” (Don Nico, Don Nico, you have to hit her but we, no.) As a result, he stopped supporting her and hounded her until she gave up on it, too, and came home and shut herself in.

The failure of their business was also due, and in no small part, to objective facts. For example, as the days went by, their clientele didn’t increase but decreased; people didn’t want couture but preferred ready-to-wear clothes, which were more comfortable and often nicer. But more significantly, neither of my parents ever managed to accept business for what it was; they weren’t happy accumulating wealth lira by lira, unlike my much-detested relatives. They both tended to dignify their work with the desire to stand out, and in this they were perfectly aligned. My mother sat in the shop with its subaquatic décor painted by her husband, with its seagrass and marine creatures and fish, like an undine emerging from the ocean depths. She’s still there. Not him, though. I see her waving to me the same way she did when I stopped by the shop on my way home after school.

 

Suddenly, Rusinè lost her youthful blitheness. I associate The Drinkers, and all the upset it brought into our home, with this first, slow yielding of her body.

She always looked alarmed, as if life was disintegrating beneath her feet. And there were other things. To my mind, I think she started to quietly ask herself what that man wanted from her. On the one hand she felt love for him, he continued to amaze her, and she admired him. On the other hand, she was scared that one day Federí would lose his mind running after art the way he did, and in the throes of some creative frenzy, without even realizing it, might kill all of us, the whole family—her, Nonna Nannina, us kids—and then run off, as he so often threatened to do, and play the part of the misunderstood genius, just not on Via Gemito, but somewhere in the South Seas.

And so she came to look at him with the same regard she had for Vesuvius, majestic and stunning but deadly, capable of creating earthquakes and spreading lava and ash, with no logic except his own thoughts on life and destiny. He needed a bedsheet? He wanted to build a stretcher as big as the room? He required four dining chairs, which would quickly get splattered with paint, to hold up that mausoleum? But had he taken into account the cost of paint? At times she was amused by it all and spoke to him ironically, in a tone of mock consent that I keep tucked away somewhere; more often than not, however, she smiled just to keep the peace.

Like now, for example. She watches him skeptically as he stirs a dense liquid in an old tin can. It’s an extremely sticky, greyish mixture of his own invention that he carefully spreads onto the canvas to prepare it for the color. The stuff stinks like a henhouse, like something feral, like something rotting, and when he mixes all the ingredients together and cooks them on the stove, the stench sticks to the walls for days on end. With this, my father explains to us chattily as he smears the gluey paste across the canvas, the hemp sheet will contract and the brush will glide better than an expert skier, and the color won’t fade but will remain brilliant in perpetuity.

He wants us to think of him as some kind of scientist, or expert in all sorts of techniques, like the nobleman and wizard-inventor Raimondo di Sangro, whom he often mentions. He began his study of the tools of the trade casually when the war ended and now every occasion is good for showing off how well he knows the world of brushes and pigments. He goes through periods when he toys with the idea of making everything himself in order to save money. Brushes, for example. What would it take to tie together a handful of boar bristles or ox hair, wrap some strips of aluminum around them, and then attach them to a wooden stick? As for colors, he throws around even more complex words: poisonous oxides and sulfurs and chlorides and antimonies, which he blends with his colorful, everyday language.

When he was an elderly man, he said that he had invented everything, that he was always ahead of his times. Resins and pigments really pissed him off; he was already using them with success long before that shithead Yves Klein (whom he swore he met in Nice in 1943, just like he swore he met so many other extremely famous painters) had the silly idea of covering his whores in Klein blue and rolling them around on his canvases. Then there were the tools and instruments: he knew how to use them all, from A to Z, from acquaforte to xylography and serigraphy. “Mimí,” he instructed me, “this is what you need to say to yourself: if some jackass can do it, you—if you want—can definitely do it better.” And that’s why he, himself, in first person, got straight down to it: chiseling, engraving, fiddling with zinc plates and nitric acid. “You remember the movie projectors? You remember the movie camera I bought in instalments in 1955?”

I remembered. But we’re still in 1953. April, I think it was. And right now he’s spreading a paste made of rabbit skin and fermented gesso and minced muck and ammonia and I don’t know what else onto the now-dry hemp sheet which they had stretched taut on the frame, continuing to talk and talk, issuing commands and orders for us to execute instantaneously.

He needs so many things urgently and never gets up to get them himself. The rare times that he does, he stumbles around the room, adding chaos to the general disorder. “It’s impossible to find anything in this house,” he grumbles, and since he needs whatever he’s looking for immediately, it practically requires a straightjacket to calm him down. Until my mother steps in. She leads him by the hand to the object he’s looking for, speaking to him in the way you would a crazy person. “Here it is, here where you left it, where it always was. No one ever touched it.”

 

I know next to nothing about how or when he started working on The Drinkers. He might have started the large-scale painting with the mastiff, but I wouldn’t swear on it. I definitely recall him walking around the room, rustling through his papers, examining sketches of figures or landscapes, touching old objects, always disgruntled. Then suddenly that dog appears, with its vigilant eyes, alert and threatening. But I can’t exclude the fact that I’m now giving that image more importance than it’s due merely because it had a powerful impression on me and my imagination.

Federí used to talk about how hard he worked on the mastiff. He traveled all around the countryside near Vomero, did endless preparatory sketches, even risked getting bitten by a few angry dogs. I remember the drawings, some of them still exist. But for me, the dog in the painting had a different source. It was made of marble and there was a photograph of it in a book with a bright blue cover that my father generally kept in a crate next to his easel. The book had once belonged to Zio Peppino di Firenze, whose house my parents stayed at during their honeymoon. When he died, that book and several other objects—as well as his ghost, the second most important ghost of my life after Modesta—ended up at our house. Federí was deeply attached to those heirlooms. He leafed endlessly through the old book, looking at the illustrations. He used some of the silver bowls, chinoiserie, statuettes, and the violin as part of the compositions for his still-lifes, or simply for inspiration. To him, they weren’t just objects, they were imbued with an aura of affection. They had been bequeathed to him, a man who argued with absolutely everyone, by someone with whom he had gotten along miraculously well.

I went to Zio Peppino’s house in Florence on Via dei Pilastri, building number 18 once, too. I must have been seven or eight years old and was amazed at how cluttered it was with both large and small antiques. I remember seeing a jade Buddha, a delicate fan painted with Japanese ladies, an enormous shell that held the sound of a stormy sea, and paper lanterns on which ugly and malevolent faces were painted.

I was not the only one to be enchanted by those objects; my father was, too. It must have seemed to him that Zio Peppino di Firenze shared a particular sensitivity. The point is this: he always spoke well of the man. He was an amazing person, he’d say, a heavyweight, sure, tall and fat, but always playful and cheerful, a friend to friends and enemies alike. During the fascist period, he had been a member of the political police; after the war, he seamlessly became part of the normal police. Federí interpreted this as a sign that Zio Peppino di Firenze had always done the right thing and never hurt anyone, that he’d even been willing, when needed, to hide fellow policemen, anti-fascists, and Jews alike, whom he was supposed to have been locking up. He worked as a marshal of public safety until the day he died but never carried a gun; he wanted to avoid saving his own life by taking another’s. When he found himself in danger, he’d intimidate the bad guys by yelling at them in his blend of Tuscan and Neapolitan, deck them with formidable punches, and slap a pair of cuffs on them.

In spite of his scant policeman’s pay, Zio Peppino di Firenze managed to make a little money by teaming up with a junkyard dealer-friend who worked throughout the war and who, after the Liberation, discovered he was rich. The scrap-metal dealer used to pass Zio Peppino time-consuming jobs which he did after his public marshaling, like extracting as much iron that could possibly be extracted from old electrical meters. He paid him by letting him keep the copper wire bobbins and the remaining bit of silver or platinum in the meters. The money Zio Peppino made from that allowed him to start a small antiques business and build up his own collection, which was on show in his home. He had some extraordinary things. There were no less than one thousand antique objects in that apartment, including statuettes, old books, postcards, photographs from the early nineteen hundreds, a wooden cylinder that you peered into and turned a crank and saw vistas of Florence, and paintings by Fattori, Giacino Gigante, and Pitloo.

All this brought Federí great pleasure and he went to Florence whenever he could. Zio Peppino recognized his acquired nephew’s genius, and the acquired nephew recognized that his uncle may indeed have had the developing taste of an artist. Together they shared many a laugh. Zio Peppino, for example, loved to break wind as he walked down the street, in the stairwells of buildings, everywhere. And he liked to do it loudly. My father liked to indulge his humor and constantly encouraged him to fart, especially when they came home late at night. “Zio Peppí, announce your arrival,” he egged him on. And, on command, Zio Peppino would disturb his sleeping neighbors by tooting loudly as they climbed the staircase, pressing his broad derriere up against the doors of each and every apartment and releasing a phenomenal fusillade. What laughs they had. Jokes of all kinds.

To be entirely honest, I didn’t feel entirely comfortable sharing in their revelry. Despite the great sympathy that my father felt for him, or perhaps precisely because of it, I remember, on the rare occasions we went to stay with Zio Peppino and his wife Nenella in their house in Florence, being scared of him. I didn’t like his florid skin. I didn’t like how he was always sweaty. I was scared by the fact that he was a policeman. And I found it both amusing and disgusting that, at his age, he could fart the way we kids could.

Even his house made me feel uneasy. I didn’t like those dark and shadowy corners, I didn’t like the musty smell in the air, I was bothered by the fact that it was there, in Zio Peppino and Zia Nenella’s bed, that my father had to go to such efforts with my mother so that I would one day be born, which he told absolutely everyone. At the same time, I was also attracted by all the lovely things in the house. That book with the bright blue cover, for example; I looked at the pictures over and over. All the statuettes. And the two Flobert rifles that my uncle kept in a glass case near the front door. My brother Geppe and I admired them all day long. When Zio Peppino went out in the morning to do his policing, we always accompanied him to the door and politely said goodbye, and he always said, “What well brought-up children, they really do adore me.” In truth, we couldn’t wait until he was out of the house. To get us to behave, Zia Nenella would open the glass case for us and let us have the experience of touching the rifles.

And yet, I was never entirely at ease. I was always scared that Zio Peppino di Firenze would suddenly come back, get angry, and toss us behind bars. As a matter of fact, he expressly forbade us to touch those rifles. Only he was allowed to do so. When he got home from work in the evening (always a little tipsy given that he either stopped at a bar and then in an osteria, my father said, and couldn’t say no to a little drink, or he visited his lover, a widow with a generous body with whom he drank, cavorted, and farted in complete freedom, and all before dinner), he’d pick out one of the rifles and call my father and us kids out onto the terrace. “Let’s scare the Jews a little,” he’d say and start shooting at the dome of the synagogue, which echoed loudly when he hit it. And then he’d laugh and shower us all with his good cheer and abundant physical presence. Don’t worry, he said, he was friends with all the Jews and especially the custodian of the synagogue, who got scared but never angry.

I stood there and listened. I watched as my uncle reloaded and fired again. I saw how happy my father was in his company. But the long, sorrowful tolling of the dome made me apprehensive and that fact wasn’t lost on Zio Peppino. “The kid doesn’t know how to have fun,” he said to my father, as if it were his fault. So, to avoid being scolded by my father, I pretended that I enjoyed it a great deal.

I always felt awkward around him. Once, I couldn’t have been more than seven years old, I recall getting so anxious about being in his house and exposed to so many strange novelties that I suddenly had to pee very badly but didn’t manage to get to the john in time, and so I wet my pants. I tried hiding it by telling my mother that water had splashed on me while I was drinking from the tap and she fell for it. But not Zio Peppino di Firenze. “Water? Water splashed on you? From the tap?” he hooted and hollered. His laughter was so contagious that soon everyone was laughing: my brother, my mother, my father, Zia Nenella, and in the end, even me.

When we got back to Naples, I decided to exact my revenge by writing him a letter. I used to write all kinds of letters and notes when I was young, and then I’d stick them in the mailbox in secret. Mailboxes always fascinated me, the old kinds, but even the kinds they have today. And so I wrote him a letter and drew some pictures with the intention of secretly putting it in the mailbox, and maybe even drawing a stamp on the envelope. I wrote about how disgustingly fat Zio Peppino di Firenze was and how much his farts stunk. But then my father found the piece of paper and scolded me. “Mimí, never joke about people’s physical defects,” he said. This coming from a man who constantly joked about people’s physical defects.

Evidently their relationship meant a lot to him and he didn’t want to ruin it. When my father was in Naples, he was obsessed with all those shitheads and their conspiracies against him, but in that house on Via dei Pilastri he managed to relax. When we went to Florence at the end of the 1940s for a few days as their guests, while Zia Nenella and Rusinè prattled among themselves, first laughing and then crying, he and Zio Peppino spent all their time poring over his antiques, especially the paintings on wood by Gigante, Palizzi, and Pitloo. My father finally felt like he had met someone who appreciated him, without drama or artifice. “Zi’ Peppí,” he confessed, “in Naples no one understands me. Your wife’s relatives are all pieces of shit, other painters are jealous, and the critics don’t understand a thing.” And then, unable to contain himself, he showed the police marshal the clippings from the newspaper where his name was mentioned. “See how well known I am?” he said, going on to relay his various successes. “They even gave me a prize at the first regional competition in Campania.” He flaunted how much collectors spent to buy his paintings. “I’m pretty bankable now.” Every so often he called over to his wife. “Isn’t that right, Rusinè, that I won a prize?” Whether true or not, my mother always said yes, as if by tacit agreement.

Zio Peppino read the reviews and listened carefully as Federí told him about the awards and prices of his paintings. “Damn!” he exclaimed now and then, rediscovering his Neapolitan accent that life in Florence had caused to fade somewhat. He genuinely admired Federí. What an intelligent man, Federí would recollect fondly: he understood straightaway that his acquired nephew was a superior being and that he deserved all manners of respect. Never in his life had my father felt so at ease, so loved. Sometimes, the two men wandered around Florence with Zio Peppino’s paint box—he, too, had a propensity for the brushes—and they painted side by side. They chatted and painted, painted and chatted. Even though Zio Peppino wasn’t a true artist, something my father didn’t hesitate to point out to him every chance he got and which Zio Peppino accepted without offense, he could still paint small countryside landscapes that resembled those done in the late 1800s. What wonderful times they spent together. Uncle and nephew agreed on all sorts of topics, from politics—which they saw as pure shit—to art, the only exciting thing in life besides fucking. Now and then they’d stop to compare their work: Zio Peppino was enthusiastic about everything his nephew did, while my father consistently offered his uncle some minor corrections.

“Nineteenth-century art,” Federí explained to his uncle, “is complex stuff. You need to know how it is done.” He then showed him the right brushstroke, the magic touch. Once, to show him, he reproduced Lega’s La scellerata on an antique plate with excellent results. Zio Peppino was amazed and showed the plate to an art expert named Nocentini who took it for an authentic Lega. The expert adored the piece and handed Zio Peppino the beauty of 100,000 lire for it. He, in turn, gave my father fifty percent. You understand what kind of man he was?

I listened to that happy story and others but never felt entirely happy myself. Everything having to do with Zio Peppino di Firenze filled me with an uneasy mix of joy and fear. That feeling only grew in intensity when my father had to rush off one morning because the news had reached us that Zio had died during the night from a heart attack. He was only forty-eight years old. He had woken up suddenly at four o’clock in the morning. Initially, the deadly contractions made him laugh nervously, but then he got so angry that he threw one of his heavy punches at the wall. Luckily (or unluckily, according to Federí), he didn’t hit his wife by mistake and kill her.

My father came home with a fair number of objects from Via dei Pilastri that we had often admired (definitely the blue cloth-covered book with its many reproductions, including the mastiff; definitely the Stradivarius violin; and definitely a statuette of a drunkard), further cluttering the tight space in our apartment. “That’s all we need: more junk,” Rusinè protested. And that’s when, to my mind, the shade of Zio Peppino came to live with us in the apartment on Via Gemito. For a long time I considered him a secret protector of all the knickknacks and dusty books, as well as a dangerous phantasm. From that point on, whenever something frightening happened or appeared in the house, I felt it came directly from his meaty hands, bringing with it both a bit of warm joy and a graveyard chill.

Even the mastiff had something of that ambiguous nature. When it started to peek out from the hemp canvas of The Drinkers, I immediately recognized it. What a long, tiring journey it had made from Via dei Pilastri to Via Gemito. Then it got mixed up with the dogs that my father sketched while walking around the countryside and later, thanks to art, it started to become the mastiff in The Drinkers.

 

I shut my eyes and envision the painting: it was so tall that it barely fit through the door and so long that it filled three quarters of the room. It diminished the space available to us in such a way that, to prepare the beds that we slept on each night and to put away the plants on their iron stands and the side tables, my grandmother had to double over and move with great agility. She’d mutter to herself angrily in dialect. Sometimes, when her son-in-law was out at his job on the railroad, she’d call Rusinè over. “Would you look at this mess,” she’d complain in frustration. I know, I know, my mother would listlessly say. “You know how he is, Mamma; when he’s got to paint, he’s got to paint.”

I have often reflected on those words. Today is an ugly autumn day and I just wrote them out reluctantly, as if they should be read with a tone of resignation. But maybe tomorrow, when I re-read them, I’ll change my mind and instead, in her words, I’ll see a desire to defend her husband, an attempt to explain to her mother that her son-in-law had serious motivations which ought to be respected. But right now I’m certain that Rusinè had already begun to give up, on both her rebellion against those preposterous living conditions and her hope of changing the man she’d been allotted. Or worse: maybe all she thought about was smoothing over friction and avoiding troubles that would make her life, or our own, any stormier than it already was.

That was probably the direction her anxious thoughts took each time she set foot in the dining room and saw her bedsheet ready to be covered with colors. She was afraid of the living situation getting worse than it was. “If no one buys it, where are we going to put such a huge painting?” she probably thought to herself. But she never expressed her anguish in actual words or sentences. She’d just lean against the doorway and peep in, check how the painting was coming along, and either frown or look sad. To me it was clear what was going through her head because I was thinking the same thing. I wondered what would happen if we had to keep the painting, what problems it would create at home: my father wouldn’t be able to paint anything else for lack of space, my grandmother would never be able to clean properly and give the apartment a semblance of order, we would forever have to sleep in a corner of the room, head to toe, me, my brother Geppe, my brother Toni, and Nonna Nannina. And that’s why I always had a hard time getting to sleep at night.

A beam of light from the kitchen, where my mother worked until late on her Singer, shone into the room through the slightly open door. The noise of the sewing machine sounded like metal marbles rolling across the floor. If my father wasn’t on a night shift at the station, every so often there’d be the sound of him clearing his throat, which burned from all his smoking. From ten o’clock on, his sleepy children took over the studio and he smoked to calm his nerves, frustrated at not being able to paint through the night. He wandered around the house, spat loudly into the sink, tried to encourage sleep by reading and learning about any number of topics: ancient and modern languages, science, literature, art. He wanted to accumulate as many notions and ideas as he could to prove that he knew more than the painters who didn’t know shit, even though they taught in schools. But sleep never came, he could only think about his painting, his head was crowded with all sorts of possible compositions, an infinite number of variations. Something would come to him, he’d discard it, then go back to it. He’d start to sketch, quickly scribbling, then ask my mother something (for a coffee, for example). She’d stop the clatter of the Singer and get up to serve him. Federí would say a few words, but never thank you. Rusinè would reply, he’d snap back, and soon they’d be squabbling.

From the end of the bed where I lay, the painting was a dark theater set. The soft glow from the kitchen fell on the large muzzle of the Neapolitan mastiff that he had started to draw. It felt like it was looking in my direction. I shut my eyes so as not to see the mastiff’s ugly mug, the apoplectic stare of Zio Peppino’s ghost. But then I reopened them. The unfinished outline of that dog, with one alert ear, one alarmed eye, a well-developed neck and chest but no legs, seemed to mirror the fragments of words I heard coming from the kitchen: syllables, partial signs, things spoken and unspoken. Meanings that struggled to emerge, shapes left hanging.

My mother’s words were especially this way. By then she had stopped confronting him directly, the way she had in earlier years, and even though she was more cautious, she still managed to insinuate herself into the conversation by latching onto his words and expressing her criticism of his boastful and blusterous ways. In one particular instance, she was taking him to task for his behavior in public, and I didn’t quite understand why. She told him—I think—that she didn’t like the way he talked to Armando De Stefano and other painters and critics like Paolo Ricci, Barbieri, and Piero Girace. “Oh really? And how exactly do I talk?” he said to her, annoyed. “Too softly,” she replied quickly, pointing out how Armando often interrupted him and said, pardon me, Federí, I didn’t quite hear you. How was it that when he talked to Armando De Stefano he whispered as if at confession, while he always yelled at other people? And with her comment she meant, although she didn’t come out and say it but I understood it anyway, that he always raised his voice with people who didn’t matter to him. With her, for example, or her mother and brother and all her relatives. Meanwhile, with people like Armando De Stefano, it was almost as if he was afraid of being heard. “You should speak up, say what you think,” she said in a slightly mocking way, whispering because she was afraid of making a mistake. After all, Armando was a professor, a figure of authority, and if he told Federí to make a large-scale painting, he’d do it, and without thinking of the consequences, taking away her one good bedsheet, making life intolerable for everyone, wouldn’t he?

Late-night questions, sounds that fell in the dark somewhere between me and the mastiff. My father grew enraged and yelled loudly at her. “I speak softly because people with manners speak softly!” Rusinè didn’t have manners and that was why she always screamed. He, however, had manners and spoke in a soft voice with polite people and yelled at fucking idiots. Was that clear? Why should he listen to what she had to say about how he spoke with Armando De Stefano? What did she want from him? Did she even realize how far he had come, in just a matter of years? Did she remember what things were like for him when he started out? Did she realize that he used to be a nobody? And now Armando De Stefano came up to him and said, “Let’s do an exhibit together of large-scale works”? For Chrissakes, Rusinè, you’re always busting my balls. As if he hadn’t learned from experience how he should speak and how he shouldn’t. He’d raise his voice when and where he felt like it, depending on the situation, depending on how the fuck he felt, depending on the need.

 

It took nothing for him to fly into a rage. Those late-night conversations quickly grew into arguments that would end only when it seemed to him that Rusinè had eaten her words. He simply couldn’t tolerate her sticking her nose into his business, not even indirectly. Even more importantly, he couldn’t accept the hypothesis subtly put forth by his wife through her comment about his timid voice, that he suffered from an inferiority complex. He had never felt inferior to anyone in his whole life, not even when people did everything they could to make him feel it. And to prove it to her, he told the story about the early days of his artistic career, before he had even shown a single one of his works, when he still was chomping at the bit. “My time will come!” he used to say.

And his time indeed came one day in the spring of 1945, when he read in the Risorgimento that Galleria Forti, on Via dei Mille across from the Cinema Corona, was organizing the first postwar group art show, and that it was open to all young Neapolitan artists of the new Italy, regardless of education or political party or union affiliation. Perfect. “I’m a young Neapolitan artist, aren’t I?” he asked himself. Yes, he replied emphatically, and ran straight away to see Don Peppe the carpenter, so that he’d cut him some simple but elegant strips of wood that he would use to frame his stunning Piazza Dante (as he had seen in Les Anges, at the house of his teacher, Rose Fleury), a painting which had been greatly admired by both Sergeant Leefe and Bebe Daniels, as well as his portrait of a junk dealer, Vecchio Rigattiere, painted from real life on Via San Gregorio Armeno. Once framed, he admired his work at length; they looked exceptional and he brought them in person to Galleria Forti.

For days on end he reveled in his debut as if it were a major triumph. Ever since he was young, he knew it could be no other way. He even imagined that he’d be awarded first prize. Instead he got something of a punch in the face. He learned that Piazza Dante and the Rigattiere had been turned down by the jury. Thrown out, essentially. He took it badly and almost started to cry. “Who do they think I am? Some fucking loser?” Rusinè didn’t know how to calm him down, and he felt a pain growing inside that grew sharper with every passing minute.

The night of the opening he went to the gallery spitting venom. “Federí, don’t act crazy,” his wife pleaded. He didn’t reply. He had reacquired much of his energy and wanted to see the paintings that had been chosen, to compare them with his, to see if they really were better. He walked into the gallery, looked around, examined the paintings one by one, and concluded that the whole thing was a chiavica, a steaming pile of shit. He started complaining about it loudly, how offended he was, the angry feeling in his chest was coming back. He started talking to one fellow, argued with another, and finally figured out what was really going on. Not coincidentally, he told me, a member of the jury was related to two of the artists whose work was on show. Not coincidentally, the exhibition had purportedly been organized to show the work of the art-school students, whose professors had held their posts under the fascist dictatorship and who, while wanting to exhibit the bravura of their students, also wanted to prove their own, and were eager to carry on as if nothing had happened. In an effort to calm him down, one fellow told him that a number of artworks had been turned down simply because the gallery didn’t have space to show them all. Oh, is that so? Turned down for that? And who the hell decided that the space ought to be filled with those revolting pieces of shit, and not his Piazza Dante or his Rigattiere?

He stormed out of the gallery cussing and swearing and headed straight toward Via Medina, where the offices of the communist newspaper La Voce del Mezzogiorno were located. Naturally, he grew up believing that communists were chiavicóni maísti, enormous pools of shit, as well as rotten, dangerous people. Over the course of his life he often used that term to describe them to me, especially at the end of the 1960s and throughout the 1970s. Communists, socialists, no difference at all, he said. All chiavicóni. His father, Don Mimí, had always considered himself a socialist and that explains a lot about Socialism, Federí said. In any case, with regards to the situation in which my father found himself, he urgently needed to find someone who’d listen to him, he wanted the entire left-wing press to know what he had discovered, that the country was turning to shit, yet again. But when he turned down Via Medina, he hesitated. Should I or shouldn’t I? Should I go upstairs to their offices or not? He did. He climbed the stairs resolutely.

Once he got to the newsroom, they sent him to talk to Paolo Ricci, also known as Paolone, a painter and art critic. In all my father’s stories, whatever the season and whatever the occasion, Paolone always wore a red silk kerchief and carried a dangerous looking walking stick. And that is exactly how he found him on that occasion. Ricci listened to him carefully while twiddling his walking stick. “You’re right, Federí,” he eventually said. “There has been no changeover whatsoever in the art schools. The teachers are still the same sissy scurnacchiati eunuchs who ruined the young artists of Italy with all their empty rhetoric about fascist art.” Then, after discussing one of the goals of democracy—to free young and promising painters of preconceived notions of painting and drawing, and to give them a broader critical vision—he gave him some advice. “Federí, write a letter for our editorial page and denounce this horrible thing that happened to you.”

My father agreed enthusiastically, but the meeting didn’t end there. Ricci took his arm and asked him if he had ever heard about the Salon des Refusés. My father nodded uncertainly because he wasn’t sure if he had heard about it or not. Even with me, when he told me this story, he was ambiguous. His version changed depending on his mood. “Rose Fleury mentioned it but, at the time, I was so smitten with her that I didn’t pay too much attention,” he sometimes said. “Whatever I knew about the Salon des Refusés was little or nothing,” he said on other occasions. In any case, Ricci started explaining how, about eighty years earlier, the Salon de Paris had turned away some extremely talented painters—people who went on to become famous, like the great Edouard Manet, with his scandalouse Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe—simply because they considered them unworthy. Those artists, however, didn’t give up and went on to organize a counter-salon. “And that was the Salon des Refusés, Federí. An exhibition of cast-offs,” he concluded, tapping Federí meaningfully on his broad forehead with his walking stick.

My father walked out of the newsroom, his thoughts blazing like a match on fire. I imagined him flying through the night, a blindingly bright rebel angel windmilling light down Via Medina, already planning a Neapolitan counter-salon in opposition to the filth on show at Galleria Forti. He got home, climbed into bed, and woke up my mother to tell her the news. “Tomorrow morning, with the support of La Voce del Mezzogiorno and Paolo Ricci, the communist art critic, I’m going to organize an exhibition of everyone who was rejected to protest those assholes at Galleria Forti.” The show would be identical, he went on to explain to her, to the exhibition organized by a number of important French painters who had been turned away by the Salon de Paris some eighty years earlier. He wanted to keep going and tell her the whole story because he couldn’t fall asleep. But Rusinè was exhausted after a long, tense, and tiring day. “Calm down, Federí, now sleep a little.”

To hell with sleep. He wanted to stay awake and catch up on all the time he had wasted, and continued to waste, at his job on the railroad. It became clear to him that since he was born in Naples, and since the city of Naples had become his geographical destiny, then Naples could become what Paris was for those people rejected by the Salon. Yes. Destiny was definitely paving certain roads for him.

One road in particular, Via Bisignano, seemed to have a particularly strong impression on him, because he never, ever forgot its name and, in particular, building number 20. It was located only a few steps away from Via dei Mille. If you walked out of the enemy gallery, where they were busy awarding the Premio Forti, all you had to do was walk down Via Filangieri and into Piazza Rodinò, and there, on the right, was Via Bisignano; it led straight to the back entrance of the municipal hall and Via Caracciolo. On that road was a small shop owned by a certain Signor Improta, a true gentleman, who embraced my father’s cause and wanted to help him and the other rejected painters. In fact, Improta shared Federí’s belief that art, just like everything else, had remained in the hands of fascists. “Don Federí, I am on your side. Take my shop and use it for your counter-salon.”

And so it was that there in that venue, thanks to a true gentleman, and with no strings attached (No strings! he often repeated, for it was rare that someone did him a favor without expecting anything in return: he never took it for granted and was forever grateful, especially as the relationship with the man was too brief for him to suffer any wrongs by him), there in that shop space, as I was saying, he swiftly set up a Paris-style counter-exhibition of the cast-offs baptized the “Mostra degli scartati.”

It was a deeply gratifying event. When an article came out in La Voce del Mezzogiorno by Paolo Ricci that discussed the protest behind that initiative, Federí felt that he was, to all intents and purposes, an artist. And from then on, he began to collect clippings from newspapers as if they were the only true witnesses of his presence in that world, sacred reliquaries of his existence. I remember them well: some were even minuscule. As a child first, and later as a boy, I felt the same sense of pride and satisfaction for those pieces of printed paper with his first and last name on them as he did. The words that spoke of him were not valuable for what they said (whether good or bad), but for the dignity that they, to his eyes and consequently to mine, brought him. When he said, “Look, Mimí, look what they wrote about your father,” in that proud tone, I deduced that if a person wanted to live a memorable life, their name needed to appear in the newspaper. The painters in that counter-salon enjoyed that glory. But not all of them. Thanks to Ricci, those with talent saw their names mentioned in black and white—“Look, Mimí!”—for all perpetuity, including: Salvatore Esposito, also known as Cocco Bagnoli, who was an Ilva steelworker, student of architecture, and expert draftsman, and who later disappeared and did nothing further in the world of art; Mario Colucci, who went on to become a tenured professor at the Liceo artistico (an elegant man, he later suggested my father read the correspondence between Vincent Van Gogh and his brother Theo, launching him into the world of art theory); and my father, there was his name, who for now had painted only a vivid landscape of Piazza Dante but who surely had a strong future ahead of him with large-scale works that promised to be even better than those of Delacriox and Courbet, better than Los Borrachos by Velázquez, and even better than anything by the scurrilous Manet.

He came home jumpier than ever, but jumpy from happiness. He showed my mother, his brother-in-law, his brother, and probably even me, who could still barely speak, and maybe even my grandmother, who had forgotten how to read, what Ricci had written about him. Few but important words. His first name and last name came right after those of Salvatore Esposito and Mario Colucci. Paolo Ricci had named him third. Third place among the rejects, whom—I imagined, whenever I heard that heroic word—must have all been just like him: unhappy, anxious, their hair slicked back to seem receptive and consequently more aggressive. So aggressive that when I lay in bed and couldn’t fall asleep, back when we still lived on Via Gemito, I would imagine all the rejects running down the street in a gang like a screaming pack of animals all the way to Via dei Mille and on to the Galleria Forti, where they’d make obscene gestures and yell epithets at their rivals, spitting or pissing on them or throwing cazzimbocchi, the phallus-shaped paving stones, and then run off into the empty night, shouting and swearing.

 

When he was less in the mood for fibbing and more inclined towards self-soothing fantasies, Federí said that in the seven-year period between 1945 and 1952 he took part in more than forty shows nationally and that his work had been exhibited in Paris, France and later in Miami, Florida thanks to Rose Fleury initially and Douglas Fairbanks Jr. and Bebe after. When he got a little depressed, though, he forgot all about his international expositions and the forty (a randomly invented number) shows and spoke in a warmer, somewhat more tender voice to complain about the many obstacles that he had to overcome. This included the enormous fatigue it had cost him and particularly at the beginning. It was a physical fatigue, he emphasized: his muscles were tired, his heart worked overtime, his bones ached, he was always on his feet, running here and there, his nerves wore against each other like stone and flint, or were as tautly strung as Ulysses’ bow when he shot the first arrow that led to the massacre of all those shitheads who wanted to take his place in Ithaca.

To begin with, after having the opportunity of showing with the other rejects and thanks to Paolo Ricci’s willingness, he discovered the communists. So, in addition to holding down his job on the railroad, after work he started going to the offices of both L’Unità and La Voce del Mezzogiorno, where he’d say good evening comrades, and go on to show that he knew how to draw well, with both good taste and a sense of humor.

Now that I’m working on his stories, I can see him making his rounds of the smoky newsrooms, walking between the desks of click-clacking typewriters, stopping to chew the ear off first one fellow and then another, always yammering about himself in a setting he knew nothing about, not least what kind of language to use to avoid saying the wrong thing.

How nerve-wracking. This is how—he told me on various occasions and at different periods in his life, adding and subtracting elements at will—he spent his days: first off, he had to put in his hours at the station, which guaranteed him a salary of 48,000 lire a month; after that he had to hurry to L’Unità and La Voce del Mezzogiorno, where he earned a monthly stipend of 8,000 lire for his drawings and vignettes. Political vignettes, of course, he pointed out with the usual cockiness, and illustrations. He came home briefly between the two, just to give his wife and children a kiss hello; sometimes he found the time to wash, change, and eat a bite (but just a bite: he had little interest in food, as I already mentioned); then he’d rush back out, slamming the door behind him, to go—and here he never skipped a detail—to Angiporto, a gallery in Piazzetta Matilde Serao, the same square where the newsroom was located.

I imagined him with his mussed-up hair, wide forehead and lanky body, hurrying from Via Gemito to Via Luca Giordano, leaping onto the running board of a tram, and off he went. He’d walk into the newsroom and immediately out again in the company of Aldo De Jaco, the journalist, to go and visit various factories where he’d sketch portraits of the workers while De Jaco would gather information for his articles. The two were inseparable. Federí illustrated the world inside the factories and Aldo described the workers’ lives, and the stories the pair published together were phenomenal.

As a boy, I listened to him enrapt. I didn’t know how to be cruelly skeptical, the way I would eventually become. I imagined my father driving off in a Topolino with De Jaco or in a motorcycle sidecar or truck, in the rain or icy wind that blew off the sea, all the way to—let’s say—the Ilva steelworks, through lightning and fires and reddish smoke, sketching in pencil while De Jaco scribbled his notes in pen. Sketching and scribbling, what a partnership. Although I can still see him today, I don’t believe him the way I used to, unfortunately. Had The Drinkers, with its depiction of workers on their lunch break, grown out of his experiences as militant-painter, as a member of the PCI? And when exactly did he become a card-carrying member? When was it that he started working at L’Unità and La Voce del Mezzogiorno?

He replied to questions like that without skipping a beat, as usual. “Of course I painted workers because I was a communist. I enrolled in the party in August of 1944 and was hired with a steady salary by L’Unità and La Voce del Mezzogiorno at the end of March, 1948.” Month and year, always. Had I asked, he would’ve probably told me the exact date and time of day. So did that mean, I wondered, that he was already a communist when he worked with the English at the Teatro Bellini? Did that mean that he was already a communist—I asked him once, but cautiously—when Cacciapuoti’s relative stood in front of him at the ticket booth at Napoli Centrale and showed him his chest full of scars like a true patriot and called him a fascist? Was he already a communist when, according to the story he often told us and especially over meals, while taking part in a strike, he found himself surrounded by members of the mob screaming, “Barricade the city, comrades, and burn everything!” so he jumped up onto a tram that had been knocked over onto its side, the electrical cable darting about this way and that, and had shouted, “Idiots, fellow comrades di questo cazzo, how the hell are we going to get to work tomorrow if you burn the trams?”

 

I headed up Via Carelli and then turned right on Via Luca Giordano. I was in no hurry and didn’t glance at my watch once. I walked past my old elementary school, stopping for a couple of minutes in front of D’Avino’s flower shop. To celebrate Rusinè’s saint day, my father always sent me out early in the morning to buy her flowers. It was one kindness he enjoyed doing and never hesitated to spend lavishly, even if it was the last bit of money in his wallet. We kids gave her yellow roses, he nothing less than an orchid. He put on a grand show as her cavalier servente, took her in his arms, and kissed her like a movie star would. It was fun to watch. “Oh, Federí, you always exaggerate,” my mother would say, cooing artificially while she removed the orchid from its box. Then she’d devote herself to the roses we held out to her and put them in water in the green hobnail vase.

It occurred to me that maybe I should dedicate more space to his attribute of affectionate husband who doesn’t skimp on things out of love. But it’s hard for me to do so: it happened rarely and never lasted long. He went straight from being kind, almost playful, to aggressive. For example, the story of Via Pitloo. When I turned down that street, I recalled how Rusinè used to pronounce it “Via Pitlòn.” It’s pronounced “Via Pitlò,” Federí would correct her with amusement. She’d laugh shyly and blush with confusion, but went right back to saying “Pitlòn.” And then, all of a sudden, he’d get fed up. “It’s Pitlò. Is it too hard for you to say Pitlò? You always make me look like shit.”

She was a little slow, he’d say, and he told her as much. Once he instructed her how she should vote; he was worried she’d choose the wrong symbol. He was irascibly pedantic with both her and my grandmother, even quizzing them on the spot. Rusinè would always try to get out of it and say she understood, that she wasn’t some idiot, but he insisted just to be sure. And then he’d indicate me, I was small at the time, and say, “How much do you want to bet that Mimí understood, but not you?”

On another occasion, she came back from Mass and told him in a normal voice that, in his homily, the priest at St. Gennaro church in Antignano had said that communists and socialists would all end up in hell, and in the confessional, he had instructed her to “Tell God everything you do with your husband.” Now, it could be that my mother underestimated her husband’s eventual reaction, but I highly doubt that. It’s more probable that, as always, she didn’t want to hide something serious from him, which would only make him angrier. The result was that all hell broke loose. First, my father blew up at her, as if she was in cahoots with the priest. Then he yelled that he’d go straight over there and beat that stinking piece of shit to a pulp. “I want to bust open his face,” he shouted, finding the threat of hell for communists and socialists less intolerable than the intimacies the priest demanded Rusinè entrust to God. I remember him running to the front door and yanking it open. He wanted to rush out in his pants and undershirt, with no shirt on, not even a jacket. He would’ve done it, too, I think, if my mother hadn’t stood in his way. “No, Federí, don’t do it!” she screamed in fear.

He often saw her as being in cahoots with all the people who did everything they could to get him angry. Once he came home furious because, as he explained it to us, although he had been (“unanimously”) elected district secretary of the railroad union, the head of the Communist party federation had asked him to step down so that the seats could be fairly divvied up and the position given to Antonio Santoro, a socialist. That’s when my mother made a mistake. “Better that way! All we need now is the union,” she said, or something to that effect. Federí lashed out at her so hard, it was as if she were the head of the Communist party federation or even Santoro himself. An artist, he screamed furiously, needs experience, Rusinè: connections, people, politics, the union, everything. If not, no one ever finds out who he is or what he’s worth, no one will ever say: Let’s get Federí to do the poster for the CGIL railroad workers union or the commemorative painting about the Quattro Giornate.

 

I returned to Via Gemito the long way, stopping next to the sports field, in front of the small building that houses the police station. On its façade I noticed the stone plaque that had had a strong impact on me as a kid. I took out a notebook and copied down the words that were engraved on it. “This building was used as a fort by young patriots during their final brutal struggle for freedom, holding off the vile and ferocious German forces . . .”

My father never explained to me why the stone plaque was there, what it had to do with the vile and ferocious German forces, why there had been a brutal struggle, and what the young patriots were seeking. And yet, since 1947, it had been affixed to the exterior of that building that sat directly opposite the one where we lived, 50 meters away, at most. I read it on my own and by chance one day, somewhere between the ages of eight and nine, while I was playing, I think: running, playing chase, tumbling around the ticket turnstiles. I used to read everything back then, even though I didn’t understand it all. I remember being struck by the word fort, a word we often used back then in our games of cowboys and Indians, as well as by some capital letters—HERE 7 SOLDIERS FELL, DIED UNKNOWN—words that evoked images of men who got so hurt they couldn’t even bring themselves to say my name is so-and-so.

I stood there writing it down when an elegantly dressed, distinguished-looking gentleman with white hair walked by. He noticed that I was transcribing the words on the plaque and stopped. He stood off to one side and glanced at me, my notebook, and the plaque. Then, certain that a person who copies down the words on a plaque must be connected to the municipality, he said, “Someone should tell the mayor that they should call the new station ‘Quattro Giornate’ and not ‘Cilea.’ That way, people would say, ‘I got off the metro at Quattro Giornate,’ or, ‘I got on at Quattro Giornate,’ and then people would remember it.” I nodded in agreement and he kept talking. “They buried the dead not far away from here, on Via Rossini. But when they built the swimming pool they had to disinter them. Who knows where they put them afterward,” he said. “Probably the cemetery,” I said. “Or else they just dumped them,” he commented skeptically. “Don’t forget,” he said when we said goodbye, “If you get the chance, tell the mayor to call the station ‘Quattro Giornate.’” Alright, I said to him, if I get the chance.

I went back to strolling around. I walked down Via Cile to Belvedere, and on to Via Aniello Falcone, then turned around and came back. I kind of wish my father had been like that man. Measured and calm, not someone who always exaggerated. Or maybe not. Whenever Federí mentioned the uprising of Naples against the Nazi-fascist forces, it was always as if he was annoyed by it; he didn’t believe that the city of Naples had insurrected. For him “the city” or “the people” were abstractions of propaganda. In actual fact—he would point out even as late as the 1970s, when every opportunity was good for revealing just how antithetical our outlooks were—the so-called insurrection took place thanks to the efforts of a very few pure of heart, an expression he often used, and a ton of Camorra thugs who couldn’t stomach the German steely discipline because it interfered with their usual criminal trafficking.

“You don’t believe me?” he’d ask me in dialect when he realized I was skeptical about his theory. “All of a sudden, when it was all over, there were thousands of patriots.” Sometimes he even mentioned Gigino Campo, and how he had given him the chance to sign that document full of lies that said they had fought side by side to defend the Ponte della Sanità. Other times he just got angry. “The pure of heart end up dead, and the stinking pieces of shit end up with careers.”

The career he aspired to was that of artist. All of his tirades leaned in that direction. If someone had commissioned a painting from him about the Quattro Giornate uprising, I believe he would’ve immediately re-evaluated his stance. But since that never happened, he said the Quattro Giornate had been invented so his rival painters could do ugly, commemorative drawings and paintings, which the communist press went on to call masterpieces. “Four heroic days,” the people in the party used to say. Heroes di questo cazzo. “Back then, Mimí,” he’d whine, “the communists would’ve gladly executed followers of Trotsky or Bordiga, or even just decent folk who risked their lives on the street every single day.”

 

My mother always listened to her husband’s political harangues without saying a word. Had they both been communists, him and her? When did they stop? What were their politics? I don’t think she ever really knew for sure. She had so many other problems, and politics were the least of her worries. He, meanwhile, did nothing but confuse the matter. Even when he showed her which symbol to tick on the ballot, he expressed his displeasure with the party and griped about its leaders. It wasn’t that he complained about domestic or international policies; he never even mentioned those topics. He complained about trifling matters that he considered extremely important. For example, he often used to tell the story of how he, Aldo De Jaco, Luisella Viviani, and the Hon. Mario Palermo went to Salerno for an assembly. (For some strange reason, in his political-party anecdotes, he was always in the company of well-known journalists, bureaucrats, and members of Parliament). After the speeches, the singing of Bandiera Rossa, and the applause, a delegation of factory workers accompanied the four of them to the station with great fanfare. Hon. Palermo reached out of his first-class train compartment window and shook hands with each and every member of his devoted electorate. Then, however, as soon as the train pulled out of the station, he ran to the john to wash his hands of all traces of the working class. My father couldn’t stand that he did that. “Can you believe it? Do you realize what that means?” he inquired, staring straight at either my mother or me depending on the occasion, to make sure that we truly understood the implication.

I always nodded my head, as usual. My mother, however, seemed more skeptical. “And what was Palermo supposed to do? Never wash his hands again?” she may have asked. Come to think of it, it must have been in 1966, right when I was about to become a card-carrying communist myself, one evening, after him telling that story, that I decided to put her exact question to him. “What was Palermo supposed to do? Never wash his hands again?” I asked, essentially in homage to Rusinè, who had recently died.

Federí got upset. “It’s no laughing matter,” he said brusquely and then started mumbling. “Never mind, kid, maybe I wasn’t clear. But don’t forget that I started working on the railroad as an electrical repairman back when I was eighteen.” He knew what the working class was all about. Even in his art, workers were always the subject of his paintings, like in The Drinkers. Don’t you get it? How could Mario Palermo have possibly gone and washed his hands? Communists took advantage of the working class and then showed disgust for them; they didn’t understand them, they didn’t comprehend their language or morals, etcetera.

Sometimes he’d start to denigrate them and it seemed like he’d never stop. He’d begin with Palermo’s squeaky clean hands and go on until he was talking about their sexual proclivities, a subject that piqued my mother’s interest. “Really!” she’d exclaim, suddenly attentive. It wasn’t a shocked “Really?” but more of an amazed “Really!” However, my father thought her question stemmed from curiosity or awe, and this made him nervous and consequently angrier, which led him to become even more vulgar and reveal all sorts of details. For example, he talked about how, over at the party headquarters, in the newsroom, or in the union offices, this fellow’s wife was screwing another woman’s husband, how everyone was screwing someone, and so on and so on, naming names; basically it was a jungle of cheating wives and curnuti, cuckolds, who knew what was going on and curnuti who didn’t know what was going on and ball-less scurnacchiati of all kinds, with their so-called special friendships and intimacies and all sorts of other bogus crap that he divulged to Rusinè in order to reach his conclusion: “See what kind of place it is? Don’t you ever think about setting foot in there.”

He continued to tell me this story up until a few years ago. “That’s why I never let your mother come with me.” Sure, she would’ve liked to, no doubt about it. She wished she could’ve always been by his side and seen the world. She wanted to learn more about the women who were involved in politics, the ones who debated issues openly with men, how they dressed, gesticulated, spoke, laughed, and even crossed their legs. “But I never wanted her to,” he said to me over and over. It was hard enough for him to spend time with those people. It was absurd—he said suddenly, shifting the focus of his complaints—how the communists fucked wildly among themselves in secret, but would rap your knuckles in public if you used foul language or made vulgar comments.

For example, once, he lowered his voice in a confidential manner, he had said to comrade D’Avenio, who was comrade De Jaco’s wife, that comrade Tina De Angelis, who was comrade Obici’s partner, had beautiful legs. “That’s all I said,” he emphasized, “beautiful legs.” Harmless words said in a friendly tone, just to make conversation. But what did comrade D’Avenio do? Did she smile? Did she giggle and give him a playful shove and say, “Federí, how dare you!” No. She scolded him acrimoniously. She curtly took him to task. She said that his way of talking was both indecent and offensive. He just stood there speechless and stunned. Eventually, with some embarrassment, he said that he had only wanted to pay her a compliment. He then went on to say allusively to me that, actually, he had often admired Tina’s legs, at length, back when they had been setting up the Festival dell’Unità in Castellamare together, and he often wished that he could sketch or paint her, that his was just a compliment coming from an artist and fellow member of the working class. That D’Avenio woman, meanwhile, walked off, nose in the air, like someone who thinks, “Would you look at the degenerate people you meet in the newsroom.”

 

I then headed up Vico Acitillo which, if I’m not mistaken, used to be a simple country road back when I was a boy, a place young couples went to make out. Now it was a busy thoroughfare that ran parallel to Via Gemito, and evidently a place favored by dogs, judging by the mounds of feces that littered the sidewalk. I had to make my way cautiously down the street, being careful where I stepped. It occurred to me that maybe my father was angry with the communists less for political reasons and more because they barely even took notice of him, despite the fact that he dedicated a great deal of time to representing the life of the working class between the end of the 1940s and the early 1950s. Deep down, he seethed, they preferred Juan Miró; they thought an employee of the railroad could only ever be an employee of the railroad, and never a great artist, even though they preached proletarian art. “Kid,” he said, squinting his eyes at me, “Never, ever did the commies truly believe in equality. Actually, they wanted me to genuflect when they walked by.” Take Mario Alicata, for example. He’d walk into the newsroom haughtily, without greeting anyone, no good morning or good afternoon, as if he descended straight from Abraham’s nuts. When people saw him come in, they’d jump to their feet and bow their heads ever so slightly, but it was still a bow. My father, no. “Your father,” he exclaimed, “never got to his feet and never bowed his head.” Who the hell did that bastard think he was.

One day, Alicata came in and, instead of heading straight to his own desk, stopped in front of Federí’s. “You’re not in the habit of greeting people, are you, Federí?” he asked. “Comrade Alicata, who should I greet if I already greeted everyone when I came in? You’re the one who just got here; you should be the one to greet us, not me. Me, I choose to follow the example of Giorgione, who used to greet his assistants when he walked in his studio so as not to appear superior to them in any way. And that’s exactly what you should do, too.” More or less, that’s what he said. “I was born an artist, not a sheep,” he used to say. “I hate herds.”

When I was a kid, I’d sit and listen to him and then repeat back exactly the same things to my buddies. I was scared I wouldn’t distinguish myself the way he had. Maybe that’s another reason I was struck by the plaque on Via Gemito that said HERE 7 SOLDIERS FELL, DIED UNKNOWN. I was worried about dying unknown. My father, it occurred to me, would never die unknown. Whenever something happened, he did everything possible to make sure people knew and remembered exactly who he was. If there was no way of getting them to remember him, he’d get angry, and say that the events simply weren’t important enough. He hated all situations where he was not a main actor, all the occasions where either for one reason or another he did not manage to shine. When he couldn’t create an important role for himself, he defended himself by spitting on it. The Quattro Giornate uprising? Patooey. The Resistance? Patooey. Communist press? Patooey. The union? Patooey. I grew up surrounded by spit and phlegm. As soon as he’d start talking about some important event, I hoped he’d had an important role in it just to avoid those bitter tirades.

Even Rusinè didn’t like his tendency to constantly denigrate people. She grew dejected as she listened to him. “He makes people hate him,” she said. She, meanwhile, liked being on good terms with everyone. She greeted acquaintances warmly. Everyone liked her, especially other women, and particularly Signora Pagnano, who was nothing less than the wife of a general and whose daughter, Signorina Pagnano, came to Rusinè to have her dresses made for balls and parties. Rusinè was also treated with great respect by men, including: Luigi, the roving fruit and vegetable vendor, who was extremely shy and always polite with her; Don Ciro the porter, who considered her a princess; and even by all the painters who came to our house over the years. She wished she had married a man who hadn’t made her congeniality shrivel up inside, a man who had allowed her to share it with the rest of the world. But no. He kept the world to himself or would wave it like a fan in front of her with his stories. But the minute she said, “Let me come with you,” he’d quickly snap that fan shut.

They argued about this often, but never overtly. While I stood by the entrance to the swimming pool on Via Rossini, I remembered how once she said to him, “You’re always so crabby.” She wanted him to understand that his bitterness made him less likeable and this upset her.

Federí immediately tensed up. “Me? I’m not crabby. I look at the facts and act accordingly,” he replied. “No, actually you just get angry; you’re always so testy,” she said. What she meant was that his unpleasant character not only led him to spend his life arguing and complaining, but forced her to live hers without any great expressions of joy. The only thing my father heard was that she accused him of being too aggressive—he never really listened to her, or anyone, for more than thirty seconds—and so he started to crow about how sincere and frank he was and how his thoughts were not subjected to any form of conditioning, but really and truly free, the spontaneous efflorescence of his intellect.

Federí had the mind-boggling certainty that he needed nothing more than his intelligence to pass judgement. He didn’t read the papers or listen to the radio; he overheard names and events and used those to form and express his opinion. “It’s just how you are,” his wife said to him that time. “Oh, just shut up,” he screamed at her. He knew everything he could possibly need to know, he said. He knew it via his own sources. Either he had met people directly at certain junctures of his life, whether they were politicians, cultural figures, scientists, or artists, and could thereby pronounce directly on their deficiencies; or he was in contact with people he trusted who told him how things actually stood; or he reduced the information he overheard to other information that he knew a little something about, like something that had happened to him or to his relatives, which clarified the events that were being discussed in the newspaper or on the radio or, in later years, on TV. That’s how my father was. And so Rusinè shut up that day. And gradually she gave up trying to say anything at all.

 

“Luckily, you didn’t turn out like him,” my grandmother used to say to me. And once, although I can’t remember exactly when, my mother agreed with her and said, “No, you’re not like him at all.” However, in other circumstances, she used to lovingly say the exact opposite: “You’re dumber than your father.”

I still didn’t even know exactly who “I” was. Let’s just say I tended to be quiet rather than talkative, even on my own. I warded off any and all similarities with Federí through detachment. As a teenager I started consciously detesting every single word he said. I would’ve gladly traded him with a father who had died fighting the Nazis; or one who’d been tortured to death rather than speak; or one who’d fought and spilled blood on street after street to protect Naples from the vile and ferocious Germans. Until I was almost twenty years old, I hid my thoughts from him and tried to shield myself from his. And even later, in the second half of the 1960s, our disputes were always contained and never personal. We discussed—though surely that’s an exaggerated term to describe it—politics. At the time, I had accumulated a lot of information; at first, trying not to hurt him too much, I agreed with him (in particular about the Stalinist communists; I admired Trotsky and so it was easy to agree with him on Stalin’s crimes), but then I started systematically disagreeing with him. At a certain point, he’d get angry and say that all the books I was reading were pointless. “Who gives a fuck about all that shit,” he’d exclaim. Then he went on to explain that the important books were not about politics, history, or economics, but about art, literature, and even science. “All the rest is propaganda, Mimí,” he’d conclude. “Forget about politics: real history is made by artists. Think about art and literature. Think about the things that really matter.”

In time, I calmed down, but he never did. Up until three years ago, he continued to grumble about the same things over the phone. “Everything passes, kid. The value of the lira changes and soon it won’t even be called ‘lira’ any more. No one remembers the symbols of the old political parties. As for all the politicians’ names, those scurnacchiati, they’re nobodies. If you remember them, it’s because of the wrongs they did you. So let’s think about ourselves. At the very least, let’s try and keep our name alive.”

I kept my reply to myself: “Papà, a name is nothing more than the sound of someone clearing their throat, a smear of ink.” But he never gave up. He wanted me to agree with him and say, it’s true, everything passes, but you will last, the paintings you created will last forever, your signature there at the bottom right, in red, it will last. But because I didn’t say that, he’d flare up into a rage and force me to engage in endless long-distance phone calls. “Do you remember The Drinkers, Mimí?” he’d ask. And then he’d start in complaining about the terrible conditions in which he had to work, about all the wrongs he had been done by his relatives and others, even by people he didn’t know, all the obstacles that had been set in his path. I’d listen and soon enough, with a growing sense of unease, I became a child again. I heard the drama and urgency in his voice. At a certain point I stopped hearing his voice and only saw him: he was standing on the tram that had been tipped over at whatever protest it was in whichever piazza, the electric cable darting this way and that, a crowd of protesters around him, while he yelled, “Hey idiots, comrades di questo cazzo, how the hell are we going to get to work tomorrow if we burn the trams?” I could even see both his real and imaginary enemies in the crowd, even Mario Alicata, tall and hunchbacked, who stared at him in amazement, shook his head, and walked off.

 

Whether real or imagined, one of my father’s principal enemies was the painter, Raffaele Lippi. He didn’t like Raffaele Lippi at all. He thought his art was overpraised by the communist party federation. Lippi also worked at La Voce del Mezzogiorno but since he wasn’t capable of drawing from life in the factories in tandem with a journalist, he focused on political vignettes and, Federí said with growing enmity, he’d walk into the newsroom and show off his lousy, two-bit drawings. He’d come prancing in and wave them under everyone’s noses as if those ugly stains, those fouled pieces of paper were true works of art. He’d show them to Giorgio Amendola, Mario Alicata, Abdon Alinovi, Aldo De Jaco, and Nino Sansone and say, “Get it? Good one, right? You like it? Go on, tell the truth.”

The truth, in my father’s opinion, was the following: master Raffaele Lippi, while gifted with determination, barely had basic drawing skills. He had dedicated himself to painting in a social realist style, but it had been a rash decision, and the results were terrible, because to draw in a social realistic style you needed basic skills. While an artist like Vespignani had made a fortune embracing the style, and while it had allowed a visionary the likes of Guttuso to set out on his deeply personal path, it had also ruined a painter like Pizzinato. You can well imagine what it did to someone like Lippi, who cried out, “I’m a social realist!” from the rooftops.

“Lippi?” my father would ask. “Forget about him.” The only thing Lippi knew how to do was show his vignettes to people and say, “Get it? Good one, right? You like it? Go on, tell the truth.” Or else calumny other people and spread rumors around the newsroom in a whisper. “What’s Federico doing here? I know him: he’s a fascist.”

 

Back at my brother’s house, even though I was exhausted from my day of roaming around, I had a hard time falling asleep. I tossed and turned, switched the light on and off, got up and lay down. Fascist was a bad word, and particularly in a communist milieu. If Lippi had spoken about my father like that, it meant that he considered him an occasional visitor, someone who stopped in now and then whom people didn’t know well, not a real party member, not a salaried employee of La Voce del Mezzogiorno.

There were discrepancies in Federí’s stories. One day something was true, another it was a lie. Communist, fascist. My father definitely didn’t feel like a fascist. He felt like a person who cared only about making art, he was a person with a phenomenal brain: free, bold, full of important ideas. In other words, he frequently said with audacity, he didn’t give a flying fuck about fascism or communism, about monarchists or Christian democrats. When he engaged with those kind of people, it was only to see if they were truly capable of appreciating his art. The fact that he was five years old when the March on Rome took place and twenty-five when the Fascist Grand Council voted to remove the Duce from office was a minor detail, background information, like the shadow cast by a tree on the façade of a building. He had spent his childhood, adolescence, and youth standing next to that tree, in its shade, and what of it? He was himself and himself alone, he declaimed arrogantly. His words were his own, his beliefs were his own, the ideas that came to him were his own, his painting skills were his own. He refused to accept that fascism may have left its slag within him. He had never been—he screamed—one of those goose-stepping, fasces-toting lictors who had dodged a bullet by taking part in the Lictorial games and were now back in positions of power as if nothing had ever happened, even within the Communist Federation, and even at L’Unità. He wasn’t like Raffaele Lippi. Now that Lippi, he was a fascist. Ten years ago he would’ve done anything to paint Mussolini’s portrait; now he was doing whatever he could to paint Stalin’s.

 

He found out about it one day when he went to the newsroom. He found Lippi in the hallway standing next to a slender crate, the kind used for shipping paintings. On it were the words, COMRADE JOSEPH STALIN, MOSCOW USSR. “What’s in there, Rafè? Are you exporting paintings?” he asked without hesitating. “Inside that crate is a portrait of Stalin,” Lippi replied. “Did you do it?” my father asked. “Yes, for the head of the Soviet Union’s 70th birthday,” Lippi said. “Who commissioned it, Rafè?” my father asked. “The Federation,” Lippi said. “All hush-hush?” my father asked. “Actually, in the bright light of day,” Lippi said. “I’m sure Stalin will be thrilled,” my father said. “Actually, he has already said that he’s going to hang it in the Pushkin Museum,” Lippi said. “Damn! The Pushkin Museum?” my father asked. “Yes, Guttuso and I are the only Italian artists who have the honor of being exhibited in the Pushkin Museum,” Lippi said.

From that day on, whenever Lippi brought his vignettes to the newsroom, not only did he turn to this or that person and say “Get it? Good one, right? You like it? Go on, tell the truth,” he also added, “And don’t forget: I’m the second artist after Guttuso to have the honor of being exhibited in the Pushkin Museum.” My father had such a hard time holding back and not screaming out what the newspaper factotum had confided in him. “Poor Joseph Stalin,” the man had said, “You have no idea how ugly Comrade Lippi painted him! All the comrades are worried that when Stalin sees how Lippi depicted him, he’ll blow a fuse. Mamma mia, what a terrible impression we Neapolitan communists are going to make with that painting! The Federation ought to have assigned you the job of doing a portrait of Comrade Stalin, Federí.”

That’s exactly what my father thought, too, and he secretly tormented himself with the belief that, “Yes, there’s no doubt: if the Federation had commissioned me, my painting would’ve been much better.”

He also believed he was a far better satirical cartoonist than Lippi. He captured politicians just the way they were with only a few slightly exaggerated traits. I remember him drawing some right in front of my mother and me, just like that, while we were sitting and waiting in a fabric shop in Antignano: an image of De Gasperi with a crown on his head and one of Scelba with a helmet. The shopkeeper insisted on saving the piece of paper as a keepsake. “How talented you are, Don Federí,” the man had said.

No doubt about it. He could’ve become famous, if it hadn’t been for Lippi. Because Lippi did whatever he could to set obstacles in his path and scowled when my father discreetly offered to do the cartoons. This went on until November 1951, when there was a major natural disaster and a state of emergency was declared. It had rained so hard that the Po River burst its banks and flooded the entire surrounding plains, all the way to Polesine. An appropriate cartoon was needed but Lippi had already handed his in for the day, and naturally it had nothing to do with the recent catastrophe. What should we do? Where’s Raffaèle? “Call Lippi, find him, get him to draw something about the evacuees,” people were shouting in the newsroom. But no one could find Lippi; he was nowhere to be found. My father, who was there at the time, and as high-strung as ever, started yelling, “Padreterno, there are other people who know how to draw besides Lippi!” Time was ticking, they needed to find a solution. “Here’s our solution,” Nino Sansone suddenly said to De Jaco, pointing at my father.

There was a long pause. “Fine, but how do we tell Lippi?” De Jaco said, furrowing his brow. “Screw Lippi,” Sansone replied. “We tried looking for him, didn’t we? Enough is enough. We can’t waste any more time. Federí, get to work.”

His heart leapt, he heard his blood pumping in his eardrums, his brain was on fire. He imagined the dark sky and heavy clouds overhead, he saw the rising gray waters of the Po, he felt the rain beating down on him the way it had fallen on the people in the area for days on end; he then envisioned Amintore Fanfani saying to them in a steady voice, “We will do whatever it takes to help the flood victims, at whatever the cost.” And then he began to draw.

In a matter of seconds, he drew a likeness of Fanfani standing on the street outside Palazzo Montecitorio and confabulating with an umbrella vendor. “I’ll take them all,” he wrote for a caption. Then he added some finishing touches and rushed it over to Sansone. “Perfect,” Sansone said. “Perfect,” Aldo De Jaco said.

But just then, Raffaele Lippi came running in with Rubens Capaldo. “What’s going on?” Lippi asked in alarm and out of breath, but the vignette was already safe in the hands of Giorgio Amendola, who approved of it, with Mario Alicata also giving it a thumb’s up.

“Ciao, Rafè,” De Jaco said and pulled Lippi aside to explain the situation to him: “You weren’t around, so . . .” In the meantime, the vignette, which my father was eyeing nervously, his heart beating fast, had been passed to the messenger who would take it to be electrotyped. Lippi was arguing with De Jaco. “Well, you could have waited . . .” he said. “I have to go, it’s already late,” the messenger said, starting to leave, when Rubens Capaldo stopped him in his tracks so he could see the cartoon. “My what a fine drawing, what a likeness!” he said, looking at Alicata. “Well done, Federí,” he continued, and then called Lippi over. “Rafè, come see how good the cartoon is that Federico did.”

Annoyed, Lippi was flustered, then left De Jaco’s side and went to examine the drawing. “You actually like this?” he said in a disgusted voice to Rubens Capaldo, waving it around. “Did you even look at it? Don’t tell me, Rubbè, that you actually like this.”

My father’s heart was beating so hard it felt like it was going to explode out of his chest and into Lippi’s face. Capaldo took the piece of paper out of his friend’s hands and handed it to the messenger. “Hurry up, kid,” he said, “Calm down, Rafè. It’s great.” As the messenger ran off, my father heaved a sigh of relief and then turned to Lippi with some advice. “Maybe you need glasses.”

 

The following day—he went on to tell me but without much enthusiasm, as if the story contained more bad omens than good ones—La Voce del Mezzogiorno flew off the newsstands: his vignette was plastered to every wall of every piazza in Italy. Lippi never forgot it and, from that moment on, he spent all his energy slandering Federí, saying he was evil, a member of the Camorra, out to get his job, dangerous. One day, Lippi even said to his face, “Thank Polesine and your lucky stars that I wasn’t around. What are you trying to do? Compete with me? Remember that I’m one of only two Italian artists, together with Guttuso, whose work hangs in the Pushkin Museum.”

This only made my father’s blood boil and frayed his nerves even more. He was so on edge that whenever Rusinè decided to surprise him with a visit to the newsroom—fixing herself up so prettily that she looked like Jennifer Jones, cleaning up me and my brother Geppe, fighting the anxiety that he’d make a scene, and making her way down from Vomero all the way to Piazzetta Matilde Serao where the newsroom was located—he always said that he was happy, but we knew that he wasn’t, and that actually he had to bite his tongue in order not to scream at her to get out and go home.

Did his wife have the slightest inkling of what she did to him? All of a sudden, there she was with their two sons, embarrassing him in front of all those scumbags, distracting him while he tried to get work done in a situation of extreme tension, leaving him angry and bothered when he sent her home, making him worry they made it back safely, and that nothing happened to them on the way.

For Chrissakes, it was awful. He hadn’t signed up for that. “Mimí,” he solemnly concluded, “I became a member of the communist party firstly to contribute to the cause of the working class, having been a worker myself since 1935, and secondly because I wanted a quiet life, to live under a governing force that I thought espoused order and discipline.” A governing force that would recognize his talents, despite being an employee of the railroad, and take advantage of them. “And instead,” he exclaimed bluntly, “see how shittily they treated me?”

 

The next morning, seeing that I was in Naples, I decided to go to the Biblioteca Nazionale and look for that satirical drawing of Amintore Fanfani. I left the house feeling rather chipper. I hoped that a flash of truth would soon cast its light on all my father’s fantasies, and all the falsities he had invented would be meaningless, unimportant. “I’ll go to Positano tomorrow,” I said to myself, “in the right frame of mind and clear-headed.”

But my mood quickly soured. It was hot and sticky outside, and my feet and ankles hurt from all the walking I had done. Crossing the heavily trafficked streets seemed harder than usual, and I felt a growing sense of unease and instability. What’s worse, the main entrance to the library was closed and I had to walk all the way around Teatro San Carlo and down Piazza Trieste e Trento. I stumbled around a pretty but dry and dirty park that was filled with disheveled students until I found the entrance. I left my belongings in a locker in the lobby and headed up a staircase. I had lost all desire to sift through newspapers and scroll through microfiches.

The library was apparently under construction and it looked like it had been hit by an earthquake. Although I had spent a lot of afternoons there as a kid, I suddenly realized that the time I remembered most clearly had to do with Rusinè, even if she never actually set foot inside. I went there one day in July 1965 to read about her illness. By then she’d already been in the hospital for a month, and she went on to die only a few months later, in October. I remember asking for the book that I needed, then waiting, and finally choosing a table where I could peruse it.

Of that morning in 1965, I have several clear memories: the beautiful light shining off the sea and through the window, the gilded ceiling, a fire extinguisher in one corner, the wooden bookshelves. I sat and read for a long time, learning everything I could about my mother’s illness and its three phases. The most painful aspect was learning the duration of the first phase: anywhere from three to twelve years. Exhuming her old aches and pains, I did the math and realized instantly that the illness started back in 1953. I tried to remember what made that year different. I recalled The Drinkers. While my mother may have been getting sick, that painting had taken over our life and seemed like the most important thing in the world.

My suspicion stayed with me for years and spread like mildew over my recollection of the painting. Later it occurred to me that perhaps I was exaggerating. Why choose the maximum incubation period of twelve years? The pathogen, the book said, could have first appeared in the spleen via her blood in 1953, 1954, 1955, 1956, 1957, all the way to 1962. For a long time I chose 1953. Over time, however, I realized that telling the story of a body that falls ill is the hardest one to tell, and so I gave up. But back in 1965, while Rusinè was living the last months of her life, I felt as though I finally possessed the truth. I read about the symptoms: weakness, physical debilitation, sluggishness, anorexia, vomiting, nosebleeds. I recalled how my mother often had nosebleeds. I came to believe that her anxious giddiness, lack of appetite, palpitations, shortness of breath while climbing the stairs, ashen skin tone, purplish gums, and above all her sudden bouts of nausea (twice or three times while walking down the road she’d grip my arm, struck by violent nausea, and say, “Please, I need to stop, everything is turning yellow, maybe a lemonade will help”) may well have been symptoms that we hadn’t taken seriously enough. I felt, for the first time, more than a sense of guilt, a need to confess my crimes.

I walked out of the reading room feeling like I had witnessed a heinous act and not intervened. At the same time, I said to myself, how could I have known? Rusinè was beautiful, she looked youthful, and it always seemed like she could tolerate all sorts of pain. One day she wasn’t well and the next she was invulnerable. Sure, every so often she said to her husband, “Maybe we should call the doctor.” But she always said it half-heartedly, she knew her husband didn’t like hearing things like that. They made him lose his patience. Federí always hated doctors, he never wanted to talk about illness. Even more, he hated the thought of his wife undressing in front of a man who would use the excuse of examining her to touch her all over. This was yet another reason why he minimized any symptoms she might have felt. He considered the ailments she complained about as female things, and he encouraged his sons to think the same. Just look at her, he said expertly. One minute our mother was crying and said she felt sick and had to vomit, and the next, she felt great. This was the proof that there was nothing wrong with her. He screamed at her to calm her down and to calm himself down. When she started in with, “I feel something heavy inside me here,” he’d look up from where he was sitting in front of the easel with his brush in the air and an expression of alarm mixed with disgust on his face. Then he’d grumble and mumble and get back to work. “You’re obsessed, you’re fine, now quit busting my balls,” he’d yell. His words made Rusinè feel significatively better and off she went, back to the kitchen.

“Call the doctor, don’t listen to your husband,” her mother, Nannina, said to her. Her aunts (Zia Carmela, Zia Maria, Zia Assunta, Zia Nenella) all said, “Call the doctor, and the sooner the better.” Back when they still used to spend time together, even the Slavic woman said, “Rosa, get it checked out.” But she put up with it (she was embarrassed to go to the doctor), and when she stopped complaining, we stopped noticing. It seemed impossible that she’d actually get sick. Besides, we had our own things to worry about.

In any case, at some point between 1954 and 1955, my father got annoyed with all her complaining and talked about it with Dr. Papa, the general practitioner we called when one of us had a high fever and none of the usual remedies worked. He did it principally so that his wife would stop her complaining and quit ruining his life. Dr. Papa wanted to hear all her symptoms, then he smiled, and issued an advanced diagnosis for the times. “It’s a nervous breakdown,” he said. In other words, it’s your nerves—my father explained to Rusinè with the air of someone who says, See? I told you there’s nothing to worry about—they’re all tense because of everything you have going on, because of those recent miscarriages, because of the responsibility of raising four children, and now they’re sending you signals, that’s why you can’t stop sobbing and crying.

My mother let out a sigh of relief and went back to working on her Singer, to being tormented by her husband, to putting up with us four boys. When the sick feeling came back, she learned how to pretend it was nothing. But then, in 1957, when she fainted out on the street and Dr. Papa was called back in, he just smiled and shrugged. “Don Federí,” he said, “It’s time to get to work. There’s just one thing your wife needs, and that’s another baby.”

The following year, my sister Nuccia was born. Rusinè was thrilled to finally have a baby girl. Not long after giving birth—I remember it well—my mother fixed herself up and braided her hair prettily. She was thirty-seven-years-old but looked twenty-seven. It really is true—my father, who was also happy, said—women are broodmares. It’s part of their nature. They’re only happy when they’re foaling.

While climbing the stairs of the library, I shook my head to chase away those words and the image of a happy woman with a secretly ill body. The desire to hunt down my father’s political cartoon about the flooding of the Po River had vanished.

 

I went to the main card catalog and looked up La Voce del Mezzogiorno and saw that the call number had been struck through in red. At the bottom of the card someone had written the words passata a giornale.

I cautiously approached a young librarian who was studying for some kind of exam. “What does this mean? Do I have to go to the periodicals room?” I asked her. The girl stopped highlighting her book in pencil and explained that “passata a giornale” actually meant that La Voce del Mezzogiorno had been put away in boxes. What kind of boxes? I asked. Storage boxes? Were they accessible? The librarian looked at me skeptically and merely repeated the word: boxes. “Go to the periodicals room, maybe you’ll find it there. You never know.”

I headed toward the periodicals room. I walked down hallways under renovation, through dusty rooms where furniture sat under clear plastic drop cloths, past areas that were blocked off by thick wires and cables that tumbled out of holes in the ceiling and dropped down to floors below. At a certain point, I even had to walk out onto a long balcony, down it some distance, and re-enter the building through another door. Finally, I reached my destination.

“No, I’m sorry, we don’t have La Voce del Mezzogiorno,” a considerate librarian told me. “If they told you it’s been boxed up, that means it’s in boxes. What we can do is find out if another library in Naples has copies.” She thumbed through a dog-eared volume and then announced her findings with some regret. “Unfortunately, it looks like we’re the only ones to have them. If you really need to see them, you’ll have to go look in some other city. Let’s go put the question to the computer; come with me.”

She went over to a colleague who immediately typed the query into the search engine. I sat down in a dusty chair next to the window and looked outside and waited. As the computer was taking its time to reply, I pulled out my notebook and started making some notes. My handwriting was uncontrolled, messy, anxious. An old obsession was coming back: identify symptoms of the encroaching illness behind the appearance of youth and gaiety; imagine the poisons circulating through her system, making her body weaker day by day. I was already calculating the weight of my mother’s spleen. How much did she weigh in 1953? And in 1955? And in 1958? After she died, I thought a lot about things like that, and now all those ideas were coming back to me. Rusinè’s body—while she wore herself out dipping and dunking that bedsheet for The Drinkers into the copper basin of water, while she wasted precious energy wringing it out and stretching over the frame according to each and every peevish order issued by that other body known as Federí—was busy circulating toxins through her splenic vein that would go on to cause liver damage. “All he had to do,” I thought to myself, the same way I thought it in 1965, “was pay more attention to her and less to The Drinkers.” If only, I scribbled down in my notes, he had spent less time talking about Mario Palermo’s hand-washing, Mario Alicata’s rude manners, Tina De Angelis’s legs, and Raffaele Lippi. The medical volume that I read as a boy said, “A removal of the spleen leads to complete recovery.” The key thing was to get it out quickly.

Just then I heard the voice of the librarian at the computer. “Excuse me, sir,” he said. When he saw that he had my attention, he went on. “Apparently a lot of people are online: you’re better off trying later on.”

I thanked him and left.

 

I looked for a bench in the shade. I found one that looked out at Molosiglio harbor, which was teeming with masts: I needed to calm down. A little bit of green, the boats, the red and grey buildings, a lot of police, the park with its palm trees, the pale blue sky. On my right was the sea, glaring in the sunlight, and a ship that seemed as though it was flying. The distant shadow of the Amalfi coast. Beyond Monte Faito and the Monti Lattari, Positano.

I daydreamed. “How lovely it would be to have a place here, on Via Acton, or in one of the grand buildings on the waterfront.” With blue tiles and waves of sunlight in the morning. To be born into a life of ease, to be well off. No need to prove yourself, everything already proven for you. “Maybe,” I said to myself, “if my father had grown up in a world more in keeping with his own dreams, everything would’ve turned out differently: Rusinè wouldn’t have died so soon and even we kids would have become different people.” Or maybe not: maybe everything would’ve been exactly the way it was, because a person’s existence is not made up of things, but of flesh and bones and blood; a great view from a balcony doesn’t erase a person’s obsession with themselves. “But,” I thought, “it gives you sharper pearly whites.” It’s a lenitive. It’s the ease of painting a large-scale work in a big, bright room without a care in the world. It’s a cease-fire in an endless war against the world.

Lippi, for example. I don’t think that my father was still angry with him when he told all those stories. He had encountered him on his path and turned him into an icon of bitterness. Nothing more. His problem was a different one: how to get beyond the confines within which he felt unjustly imprisoned.

Soon it wasn’t enough that one of his paintings hung on the wall of an art gallery or that he be written up in the local newspapers by the critics. For example, when he took part in a group show in 1952 at the Galleria Medea, Alfredo Schettini wrote in the Corriere di Napoli that Federí’s work redefined themes present in the late works of Léger. Federí showed me the clipping as proof. Nice comment, he said, thanks a lot. But did Schettini have any idea, he started to rant, what kinds of conditions he had to work in while redefining those themes present in the late works of Léger? Did Vespignani ever have to work in conditions like the ones he faced? Did Guttuso have to work the way he did on Via Gemito?

At this point he’d bring up my mother’s relatives. In the early 1950s, he considered them a constant affront to his most urgent needs, especially when they showed up at our house bearing gifts of all kinds. They arrived all at once: Zio Matteo and Zia Assunta, Zio Espedito and Zia Maria, Zio Attilio and Zia Carmela. Out of love for their niece (and definitely not her husband), Zio Espedito the baker brought baba, cassata, sfogliatelle ricce, sfogliatelle frolle, and cannoli. At Christmas, he’d bring raffiuoli, roccocò, and mustacciuoli. Zio Attilio showed up with trays of sliced mortadella, salami, prosciutto, or an Auricchio provolone, fresh mozzarella, and a bladder of lard. Zio Matteo the greengrocer crowded our kitchen table with pumpkins, gourds, squash of all kinds, tomatoes, peppers, and everything colorful the season had to offer.

It was the end of Lent, carnival. My mother looked rejuvenated, her cheeks were flushed pink, her eyes were bright with affection. Even my father, when he saw that bounty, lightened up, he joked and laughed, his puns were a source of great entertainment, his sexual allusions and bawdy jokes made my aunts turn beet red and laugh hysterically. He became almost excessively sociable.

On one particular festivity (it may have been my mother’s saint day), the kitchen was so packed with live chickens, freshly butchered meat, charcuterie of all kinds, desserts, and wines that the table looked like a still-life from the 1600s or the stock room of a top-notch restaurant. The eating and drinking went on for hours. At one point, my father grew rowdy and started to shout, “Hey, Espedì, is your wife a cigar-smoker?” He kept repeating the question in various ways (“So, Marì, d’you like to smoke the old cigar? You know what I mean, a good cigar, once in a while? Tell us!”) making everyone double over with laughter, even Zio Espedito, who threw a glass of water in his face in the name of fun. This amused my father so much that he poured an entire bottle of seltzer water on Zio Espedito. Not long after, to the delight and fear of all the children present, that mass of people, stuffed with food and swollen with wine, started running up and down the house, from the kitchen to the dining room and back, laughing and splashing each other with liquids, whether it was from a glass, pitcher, soup tureen, straw-covered fiasco, or pail. It was a war: the floor was slippery and wet, it was family against family, tensions were released, and feuds were ended once and for all.

As soon as the party was over, after the uncles and aunts had left, my father started to grumble and complain. To his mind, the gifts brought by their relatives were not really tokens of generosity. Actually, he said to my mother, wounding her feelings deeply, your uncles and aunts are using them to trick us. Those gifts aren’t really gifts; we’ve already paid for them handsomely without even realizing it. How? He explained to her how. Don’t we do all our shopping in their stores? Don’t they deliver us our food each month? Don’t we have to pay for every single purchase, whether it’s pasta or sauce or anything else? And how is it that all those foodstuffs never lasted a whole month, but were finished within two weeks? Did Rusinè ever check to see if what she paid actually corresponded to the amount that her stinking pieces-of-shit aunts and uncles said they delivered?

My mother turned ashen; such insinuations were anathema to her. She replied that the provisions finished quickly not because her relatives tricked them with the weights but because we, meaning him and us boys, ate like wolves and it was difficult to budget and control us and that’s why we always needed more things, more money. When she talked about such things, her lower lip trembled as if she was about to cry, but Federí didn’t care and insisted with his theory. There was a hostile rally of insults: “Don’t say things like that, you’re lying!” she said. “Me? Tell lies? I only tell the truth!” he replied. “Your version of the truth!” she answered him back. It ended with shouting, crying, and the sound of her being slapped.

Following that episode, my father, in addition to having to work for the railroad, make humiliating portraits for the Americans, and conceive of his own works of art, was forced to keep a watchful eye (“like the KGB of home economics,” he said) on the sugar, coffee, pasta, beans, rice, chick peas, basically every single article those stinking pieces of shit delivered to his wife, their cost and weight and quality and brand, and so forth and so on.

His inspection lasted only long enough to see that his wife was right, that they weren’t being ripped-off or cheated, but that there were hungry mouths to feed and a constant need for money, money, money. And so he stepped back with the excuse that he had far more important things to think about. “You want to get screwed out of money?” he yelled at Rusinè, “Fine, get screwed, it’s your loss. I’m not going to give you a single lira more than necessary: you’ll have make do!”

And that’s what my mother did. She hunched over her Singer day and night, except when she had to rest due to illness or a miscarriage. Even so, she had a hard time making ends meet. And when she had no other choice, she’d sigh, and drag us boys over to my father. For the most part, Federí could be found sitting at his easel. She wouldn’t bother with any overtures, she’d jump right in and say, “Look at these kids’ shoes.” Geppe and Toni and I would lift up our feet and show him the worn bottoms of our shoes. “What’s wrong with them?” he’d mumble distractedly. “There’s nothing left to them,” she’d say. “Get them re-soled,” he’d say. “The shoemaker said there’s nothing left to be re-soled,” she said. “The shoemaker is a fucking idiot,” he’d say. “The shoemaker makes shoes and he knows what he’s talking about,” she’d say. “Oh really? Well, as soon as I have a little free time, I’ll fix their shoes, and we’ll see if the shoemaker knows what he’s talking about.” Then, in conclusion, he’d turn to us and say, “Don’t worry, kids. Papà will make you each a new pair of shoes.”

But my mother didn’t back down. Our shoes were so ruined that even if she wanted to, she couldn’t. She was as perseverant as a dripping tap. She bothered him so frequently that, in order to continue painting in peace, he’d chase us out of the room, dig through his secret hiding places, and then walk into the kitchen with hauteur and munificently hand her some money. “Here, take it, Rusinè,” he’d say. “And quit busting my balls.”

Then he’d go back to the easel. Fuck food, money, clothes, shoes: the only true pleasure in life was painting.

 

Painting. This was Federí’s absolute passion and it tortured him his entire life. He always thought that if he had had more money, a better space, or more light, he would’ve been able to fulfill his destiny as an artist faster and more efficiently. Because—he explained to me, with regards to The Drinkers—while it’s true that a person can feel as though they were born to be a painter, there are also practical aspects to consider; you need a Neapolitan mastiff, you need construction workers who don’t look alike, each one has to be different, with their own characteristics. In other words, he exclaimed, you need reality. But it can’t seem too real because real life is actually always changing and unstable, and it can’t be too artificial either, or else what purpose will it serve?

The fragments of reality that, over the course of the spring of 1953, would go on to become that enormous painting appeared in our house not all at once, but in bits and pieces. One afternoon someone knocked on the door and I went to open it. It was Luigi, the street fruit and vegetable vendor, ’o verdummàro.

A swarthy and stocky man, every day he made his way down Via Gemito with his donkey and cart, pulling the animal along by its halter. “Puparuóli-friariéll!” he’d holler and the women would lean out their windows, yell down their orders, and lower their baskets. Luigi would weigh out the merchandise on a scale that he handled with great ability, wrap the goods in a piece of newspaper, and place them in the basket so his clients could pull them up. After serving everyone, he’d grab the donkey by the halter and shuffle off, calling out his wares as he went.

Until that day, I had only ever seen Luigi from the window. His savage appearance and strange call struck me almost as much as the knife-sharpener’s ugly mug and cry, or the ghostly white pizza vendor who bellowed under our window at dinner-time. I often watched Luigi from upstairs and was actually doing so on the day the donkey bit off his thumb: he was filling an order of a kilo of potatoes for my mother and reached around to the halter with his right hand in his usual manner when the animal chomped down on his thumb and didn’t let go until it had chewed it off entirely. For as long as the donkey’s teeth were firmly clenched down, Luigi leapt this way and that, following the movements of the donkey’s head and neck, screaming, “Argh, let go! Aaargh!” When his thumb was finally severed, the fruit and vegetable vendor fell to the ground, covered in blood.

And now there he was standing in front of me, with his dark hair and thick eyebrows and stubbly cheeks. Even before he spoke, I glanced down at his right hand to see if the donkey really had eaten off his thumb: it had. Then, to my great surprise, I heard him ask not for my mother about an issue related to vegetables or money but for Don Federí. It all happened very quickly. He hadn’t even finished saying his name when my father came out of the dining room and greeted him warmly. “Come in, Luigi, come in.”

My mother and grandmother looked in both to say hello to the vendor and to try and understand what exactly he was doing in their home. Even my brothers and I were curious. It soon became clear that Luigi had come to sit for my father. I stared at his mutilated hand some more: it seemed to me to be an atrocious omen. I wondered why my father had chosen to use him for inspiration. The construction site across the street and the ones that were popping up like mushrooms in the countryside around Vomero were filled with real builders. Theoretically, all he had to do was say to one of them, “Come and pose for me.” Instead he had chosen Luigi and he was already instructing him on where he should sit, and how, in what position.

The vendor looked uncertain about it all. He smiled with embarrassment, he wasn’t entirely sure if he should. My father, annoyed, turned to his mother-in-law and wife who were standing in the doorway. “What’s the matter? Don’t you have anything to do around the house?” he yelled, and the women retreated. He then politely explained to Luigi that he needed him to take off his shirt: he wanted him sitting on the ground, bare-chested. “You have to do me the favor of staying still,” my father explained. He then lifted up Luigi’s mutilated hand. “You have to keep your hand like this,” he said, wanting it in full view. But Luigi pulled his hand back in embarrassment. At that point, my father sent us kids out, too, and he closed the door behind him.

We stood there in the hallway: Geppe, Toni, and me. Toni wanted to play, but Geppe and I were older and knew better. “Be quiet,” we said. If we disturbed him, he’d get angry. He needed total concentration. There were no fathers like him in any of the other apartments on Via Gemito. He was the only one to have rolls of drawing paper, canvases, paints, charcoal, and that special colored pencil that made blood-red markings. He was probably already hard at work, intent on capturing that stump of a hand, maybe even the donkey with its yellow chompers, and the way it brayed ferociously when it bit through its owner’s finger. I was daydreaming. Daydreaming that my father knew how to draw the sound of Luigi screaming, people standing on their balconies and at their windows watching, blood shooting out of the animal’s mouth and onto the cobblestones. I imagined that my father was capable of reproducing not only that specific individual, the man who had brought barnyard smells and street sounds into our house, but everything about him that existed in my head, all my memories of that incident, the ascetic distance with which I had seen it unfold, as if a nightmare. I stood outside the door waiting to see the miracle on the canvas.

When the door reopened, and while my father accompanied Luigi to the door and said, “I’ll let you know when I need you again,” I snuck into the dining room. The vast canvas was still grey. Scattered across the floor, torn rapidly from a pad of drawing paper, were my father’s charcoal sketches of a man sitting on the floor, as seen from the back, with no shirt. There was only a hint of his arms, and they ended at the wrists. It was nothing like I expected.

I went into the kitchen, where Federí was already arguing with his wife. He wanted to know why she had come and stuck her nose into his business. Had she wanted to see Luigi’s bare chest? “You’re crazy,” Rusinè replied indignantly. What did she care about seeing Luigi’s bare chest? Don’t say such stupid things, of course not. It took a while for them both to quiet down because he needed to be convinced that she was entirely indifferent to that man’s hairy chest. When that was accomplished, he started complaining about the street vendor’s qualities as a model. “That idiot can’t even sit still for a minute.” It was exasperating, he was a terrible model, he kept looking around, got easily distracted, kept turning this way and that. “What a shithead,” my father said, getting angry at the mere thought. “What does it take to sit still for sixty seconds?”

Even worse was the fact that he refused to let Federí paint his mutilated hand, and that was the main reason Federí had asked him there. He had wanted to study the stump, that was his goal; he wanted to reproduce it exactly as it was, scar and all. But Luigi had asked him, begged him, almost as a kind of favor, to paint his hand intact, with all his fingers, the way it was before the donkey bit off his thumb. My father was in a quandary. What could he possibly say? “Alright,” he had agreed unwillingly. “Fine.” This was a perfect example of how hard it was to do his work well. This was a perfect example of how things were different in Caravaggio’s time, when an artist could use a whore for a Madonna. He, meanwhile, couldn’t even paint a builder whose hand truly was mutilated. And to make things worse, the bastard couldn’t even sit still for a minute.

 

As a child I was always scared that one day my father would say, “Sit down, I want to do your portrait.” The anxiety I experienced while sitting for him is a wound that has never entirely healed. Federí was dissatisfied with everyone—relative, friend, or acquaintance—who modeled for him. “He kept fidgeting, it didn’t come out well,” he’d say afterward. “What are you talking about, Federí? It looks just like him,” my mother would say in reply. “No, he kept moving,” he’d insist with a disgusted look.

He wanted her to understand that the results he was capable of obtaining, despite the thousands of other obstacles he had to deal with, would’ve been far greater if the people who posed for him had been more aware of their actual role. But they didn’t even know their right hand from their left, he said, and as fast as he tried to work, if he glanced down to refinish a few details, when he looked up it was inevitable: the model had moved.

The more time passed, and we’re talking seconds, not minutes, the more the figure he had started to draw differed from the person sitting opposite him. It was impossible; he’d never get anything done that way. “I told him he had to sit still, and even so, that idiot moved,” he’d gripe. “Look how badly this ear turned out,” he might say, or, “I got the nose all wrong.”

All of us thought his ears and noses were excellent, but not him. When he was a student at the Scuola libera del nudo, he used to say, things like this would never happen. Models there had self-discipline, especially the women. They sat there completely nude, even when it was cold, which was often, but they never moved. You could take all the time you wanted to study one of their feet, their ass, one of their tits, a single varicose vein, or the hair on their cootch. No one ever complained. You put them in a position and there they stayed. Without moving. If you needed to, you could even go and touch them, and feel their ankles, feet, shoulders, to understand the musculature better, to study it.

But none of his friends or relatives, not even Rusinè and his mother-in-law, had self-discipline. First they’d beg him to do their portrait and then they wouldn’t sit still, not even for one single minute. They all thought he was like some kind of photographer: click. Done. They didn’t understand how art was fatigue, sweat, suffering. An artist who works from real life suffers, and likewise, real life suffers under the eyes of the artist. If a person doesn’t understand that, it’s pointless for them to model for him.

He shook his big head with visible discontent. You want an example of someone who didn’t understand at all? He could give me hundreds of them. But the worst was Peppino, his brother-in-law. Draw me, Federí, he said. Do a portrait of me, Federí, I’ll sit still, I’ll be good. Fine, Peppì, take a seat. The man couldn’t even hold a position for a single minute. He yawned, laughed, turned around, and looked at his watch. He apologized and tried to find the position again, but the idiot couldn’t remember it any more. And there he was, wasting his time. No one ever did it right.

He got frustrated with everyone, even with members of his own family: his brothers Antonio and Vincenzo. He’d sit them down, close the door, and for a while there’d be silence. We’d be sitting in the kitchen, relaxing, busy with our own things. Then, inevitably, the screaming would start. “Viciè, for fuck’s sake! Can’t you sit still? Not even for a second?” We’d all look at each other with concern: mother, grandmother, children. When he screamed like that, it felt like I was being whipped.

 

I stopped in a café on Via Partenope to admire the imposing palazzi of the grand hotels and munched on a plain croissant, the kind with a crunchy knob at one end. All of a sudden an old, beat-up Ford careened down Via Santa Lucia, nearly swiping a taxi and cutting off an oncoming Renault Clio, the driver of which slammed on the brakes to avoid an accident. Then the driver of the Clio, a middle-aged man, leaned out his window and started screaming insults at the car. The old Ford swerved to the left, stopped, and two young men jumped out, shouting insults at him in reply. The middle-aged man drove quickly off up Via Partenope. The two young men chased after the car for a hundred meters or so on foot, hurling bloody threats at him and waving their arms around like swords: demons of intimidation in the heart of a city where people knew their place. They then rushed back to their car, jumped in, did a quick U-turn, their tires screeching, and zipped past me, I could see their profiles pointed with rage, bodies craning toward the windshield, intent on pursuing the Clio.

That scene completely ruined my enjoyment of the pastry. My father got angry in exactly the same way, hurling ancient invectives passed down from generation to generation. If you tried to reproach him for something he did wrong, he’d become irate. He was never wrong, never guilty, he always had good reasons for doing everything he did. It wasn’t about him, it was about art. So what if the people who posed for him got tired? The shitheads should’ve been stronger. They agreed to sit for him; they should’ve been willing to drop dead without complaining. What were they made of? He asked this question in a disparaging tone, and often, when I was a kid, it just increased my level of anxiety. They were flesh, bone, nerves, live organs, a pulsating vein on their forehead or hand, nothing more. They were living matter, there for him to look at. So, let him do his work, let him transform them into laborers, fishermen, construction workers, and other permanent symbols of the human condition. That’s why artists exist, after all. That’s why Federí didn’t hesitate to call on those stinking pieces of shit that were his wife’s relatives; he needed them. Anyway, in his hands, even shit turned to gold.

That’s why, during The Drinkers period, even Zio Matteo was forced to sit and pose for him. After mulling it over at length, Federí realized that his stocky build, crude features, and aura of calm resignation would make him, despite the fact that he was selfish through and through, a good fravecatòre, a profession that was once considered truly noble, he said, back when the people who built houses didn’t just put one stone on top of another, but were engineers, architects, artists, and not just lousy, stupid, vulgar builders.

And so Zio Matteo started coming regularly to our house to pose for my father. His job was to sit on a wooden crate, a glass in his right hand, a benevolent smile on his face, and stare off in the exact same direction as the Neapolitan mastiff.

By then already older and heavier, but still good-looking and always wearing a kind expression, he usually arrived at our house with a basket full of fruit and vegetables from his shop, a gift from him and Zia Assunta.

He’d walk into the kitchen somewhat out of breath and set the basket full of aromatic goodies down on the table. The scent I liked best was that of the basket itself, which was woven out of tender chestnut branches, pliable shoots that still revealed their clean, white pulp.

We’d gather around him, clambering to see what delicious things he had brought us. My grandmother treated him with kind respect, my mother fêted him with childish joy, happy to receive the gifts. He sat down and mumbled phrases of appreciation for the warm welcome. After a bit, my father would arrive and invite him into the other room. Zio Matteo would follow him out in his easygoing manner.

It was always that way, with his models. They’d arrive happy and leave angry. Initially they thought that somehow they’d benefit from being painted, that it would make them look good. But they were always disillusioned. It was tiring to stay still for so long and it was pointless, really: being in a great artist’s painting wasn’t so appealing after all. This was not only because they didn’t understand a single thing about art, my father said, but because they didn’t understand anything about anything. Zio Matteo, for example, had driven a cart most of his life, travelling through the countryside of the province. That’s how he had spent his time. When he eventually made enough money and got his license and bought an automobile, the first time he went for a drive was a terribly exciting moment. Unfortunately, when the automobile started going excessively fast, he got scared, and, instead of hitting the brakes, he pulled on the steering wheel as if it was reins and shouted, “Whoah.” He crashed into an electrical pole and destroyed the new car. A complete disaster. I loved that story, it was both funny and heart-warming. But Federí told it to make his point: “How could my likeness of his hand possibly turn out well, how could my likeness of his drinker’s face possibly turn out well, when I was forced to work with such an idiot for a model?”

Meanwhile, the image started to extend across the canvas. One side of it grew carefully and steadily; the other side looked overrun, as if the smell of the oil paints had gone to his head, dazed him. It was fascinating to see how what was in his head transformed into color. The Neapolitan mastiff looked tensely off to the left: paws, muzzle, all of it. A builder’s muscular back was visible in a play of light and shadows: that was Luigi. Zio Matteo sat on a wooden crate with a glass of wine in his right hand, but the figure wasn’t Zio Matteo any more, he was an expert mason with a trowel. Heavy rain clouds suffocated other figures and the construction site background, or pressed down heavily on the right side of the canvas as reminders of chaos.

Sometimes my father stood up and walked back to the door and tried to get a look at the work as a whole. He was not pleased with it. He complained that some areas were unfinished or, to his mind, unsuccessful. “Look at your uncle,” he said to Rusinè, if by chance she came into the room. “He said he had to leave, that he was in a hurry. Now what on earth could that insignificant man have to do that was so important?”

 

One day, suddenly, I was called to sit for him. I had just gotten back from school. With my satchel still across my chest, I went to greet my father, who expected a kiss from us when we left the house and when we came home, when we went to bed and when we woke up. It was an important ritual of affection for him, and he got annoyed if we skipped it even once. He kissed us and he let himself be kissed as if every farewell kiss might be the last and every hello kiss celebrated our safe return from journeys taken either wide-eyed or asleep. He was the only one who kissed us and expected to be kissed. My mother never showed the same obsessive rituality. Neither did my grandmother. Only him.

He was standing at the easel that day, absent-mindedly smoking. He looked sullen. I could tell that something was wrong. Maybe he didn’t like the painting any more. I kissed his cheek, the thick dark beard of a disheveled man who shaved unwillingly. He kissed me swiftly in return, more the air than me. Then, without any preamble, he told me to take off my shoes.

I took them off with some hesitation. Normally he didn’t want us to walk around the house barefoot, worried that the cold of tile floors coming into contact with the bottom of our feet would climb up into our bronchial passages and lungs and cause us to become ill. But this time he ordered me. “Mimí, take off your shoes,” he said in dialect. Then he pushed me into the center of the room, made me get down on my right knee, wedged a straw-covered demijohn with a dark green glass neck under my left arm, and tipped it forward as if pouring out a liquid. “Stay just like that,” he ordered me.

I stayed in that exact position while he went back to the easel and peered at me carefully from there. “Look down at the ground,” he said.

I looked down at the ground but not too much, just enough so that I could still perceive his movements, his mood. He scoffed with dissatisfaction and came back over to me, took my head between his hands (he was holding his cigarette between his index and middle finger, the smell of paint mixed with tobacco always made me a little nervous), rotated my head a tiny bit toward the demijohn, and, pressing on it lightly, forced me to look farther down. “Don’t move,” he said firmly and went back to the easel to look at me again from afar.

In that new position, I could no longer see him. I could only see the neck of the bottle and the hexagonal-shaped floor tiles. And yet I felt his presence and perceived the tension. I don’t think he was entirely pleased with me. Maybe I didn’t live up to whatever he was imagining. In fact, he came over to me again, placed his fingers under my chin and raised it ever so slightly, less than a centimeter. “Listen to me carefully: stay just like that,” he said, then came over to my left side, grabbed my ankle and slowly dragged it toward him until my knee was in a deep bend and only the big toe of my left foot rested on the ground.

He kept his cigarette firmly between his lips, squinting one eye almost shut to shield it from the spiral of smoke. I heard him breathing, the sound of a phlegmatic man with blackened lungs. He straightened up and was about to head back to the easel but then he thought of something else and bent down to position the demijohn better under my arm, assuring himself that my right hand held it firmly, that the vessel rested with the appropriate heaviness in my left hand and that the back of my left hand was pressed deeply into my thigh. “You are the boy pouring the water,” he explained. And then he added, pointing to a space slightly beneath the neck of the demijohn: “The glass is here. That’s where you have to look.”

I looked at the spot intently. I hoped that my father was pleased and that he’d step back soon because the smoke from the cigarette, which he had since removed from between his lips and now held in his fingers, was getting in my eyes, and making them smart and tear.

With relief, I heard him make his way back to the easel. He picked up his roll of sketching paper and started to unfurl it. “When you get tired, tell me,” he instructed me. I didn’t move a muscle, nor even nod in understanding. I already knew that I’d never confess “I can’t do this anymore.”

 

I returned to my brother’s house around dinner time. At the table we discussed how we’d travel to Positano. The best way, Geppe said, is by car. But he knew I hated driving, all those vehicles on the road, the traffic jams, the aggressive honking. And the insults, I added, the rage, the angry pursuits, everything I had seen on Via Partenope and Via Santa Lucia. “I’m not courageous enough to get behind the wheel,” I said firmly.

The boyfriend of one of my nieces took it upon himself to offer to be our driver. With a daily rate of a hundred thousand, he said playfully. “A little over budget, but I’ll think about it,” I promised, and there and then I liked the idea of a trip down the coast without any worries, going from Portici to Sorrento and Sant’Agata sui Due Golfi, with Vesuvius behind us, as if floating on the horizon. Then, surprising even myself, I announced, “I’m going to stay another day or two.” There were other streets and places in Naples I wanted to see. And I like your house, I added, it’s relaxing.

After dinner, pleasantly exhausted, I observed my brother’s children without him noticing. I was looking for traits passed down from Federico and Rusinè. I found several similarities here and there: eyebrows, eyes, fingers, even a whole hand; their way of moving; they were like apparitions present in their living bodies; phantasmatic details that appeared and then disappeared in beings that were entirely unlike them, that had different builds, different histories. I noticed an ironic look that seemed familiar, a warm greeting, a cocky gaze from an excess of self-esteem. It occurred to me that I should spy on all my siblings, on their children and my own, on relatives both close and distant, and on myself, rather than wander around the city, go to dusty libraries, look through old photos and films, decipher calligraphy, and do some of my own writing, create lasting impressions of people and facts.

When I went back into my bedroom, before turning off the light and falling asleep, I studied my father’s framed drawings on the wall. There was my grandmother, with her head bowed, knitting, wearing a dark dress and apron. There was my mother, sitting with her face in the shadows, reading a magazine, Annabella perhaps, her hair done in an unrecognizable style. There was my father, around fifty years old, the skin on his face hanging from his cheekbones like a stretched-out sweater, looking at me obliquely, the way an artist looks when he does a self-portrait in a mirror.

Pieces of art, traces. He had a strong hand, he definitely had talent. And yet it seemed like there was actually nothing of those once-living and breathing human beings on the paper, under the glass. While my memories of them may have been dull, they were still more intense than what the reliable seismograph of art had been able to register. What point was there to holding a pose? What point was there to moving around in front of a camera lens? What point is there, now, imagining them while they talk, yell, and laugh? What point is there, now, trying to preserve, through mere combinations of the letters of the alphabet, the residue of their lives conserved in mine? Much more sensitive tools and sophisticated techniques are needed to capture that cluster of voices, gestures, pulsations, instances of illness and health, hiccups, belly laughs, and groans of pain that we conventionally refer to as individual. Layer on top of layer, messily added. The remote past that lives within him. Other people who invade his space, dissipating him; him, spilling over into others, dissipating himself. Federí, Rusinè. The deception of graphic signs.

I yawned, my eyes started to close. Earlier that evening, my other brother, Toni, told me that recently he went to Pompei for work and in the office of some council member he saw one of our father’s paintings hanging on the wall. He spoke about it with pride. The sense of the conversation was: “Papà didn’t just tell lies; his art really does hang in important places.” I promised him that I would go to Pompei to see the painting. “If you want, you can even see some at Palazzo San Giacomo,” my brother Geppe added. In Naples, in the municipal offices, in other words. “When we come back from Positano, I’ll go see those, too,” I replied, but without much feeling. Each in their own way, my brothers were trying to tell me something different. They were encouraging me to look at our father with less bitterness. They expressed themselves with restrained pride. They mentioned paintings that hung in grand rooms of imposing palazzi, in the offices of powerful people. It was as if they were hinting, “After all is said and done, we should be happy.”

I hadn’t been able to explain to them that it wasn’t our father’s talent that was up for discussion. For many reasons, I loved his paintings at least as much as they did, but I was confusedly searching for something else. I was trying to understand how life decays when we’re overpowered by an obsession for results. That’s why I wanted to find The Drinkers; I recalled it as being full of decay. But I wasn’t illuding myself. The dregs of all that torment and unhappiness and violence and disdain and arrogance and desperation and even love really only existed in my body and theirs, in the bodies of their children, in the teeming images that crowd your mind before you fall asleep and which then turn into either dreams or nightmares. When faced with that electrical storm of nerves, all art falls short. Living and thinking matter—I seemed to comprehend while falling asleep—is the only set design worth loving.

 

I’m standing in the center of the room, I hold a demijohn under my arm, and the event I have always feared is now happening: my father needed me and now I am posing for him.

I feel a great responsibility but my sentiments are confused. I want to offer him my complete assistance and am even willing to die under his gaze just to help him become the artist he wants. But my objectives do not follow a straight line, my thoughts pile up, it’s difficult to put them in order according to the tenets of filial devotion alone. I am also looking for an exchange, for affirmation. I have decided to hold the pose so well and with such rigor that my father can’t possibly complain. I want to see if he’ll calm down, if he’ll finally stop unloading all his blame on us for getting in the way of his art.

A few months earlier we lived through a major turning point, first joy and then disillusion. Initially my father received heaps of praise and then was deeply wronged. He suffered and he made us suffer. Why he mistreated us merely because he was mistreated still confuses me, and I wish I understood it better. But I only think about it in spurts, sporadically and not in complete thoughts. The recent insults came from Rome, but the whole story started in Naples and that’s where he unleashed his rage, shouting and threatening people. Everything begins at the Scuola libera del nudo, where he learns to draw the human figure thanks to those oft-praised models, whom I am now seeking to imitate. The Scuola is part of the Accademia di Belle Arti and Federí first signed up for classes in 1951. His instructor is Emilio Notte, an older painter who admires the speed with which he sketches and the deftness and precision of his line. Federí attends classes after his job on the railroad, and when he comes home, his satchel is full to bursting with female or male nudes done in charcoal or sanguine. He shows them to my mother and doesn’t stop us kids from looking at them; we’re boys after all. I examine the drawings carefully. “So this is what my father studies when he goes to school,” I think with embarrassment. His math and science are tits and asses. I imagine Federí walking into a classroom just like mine at Vanvitelli elementary school, sitting down at a desk, opening his satchel, and taking out pencils and pastels. His teacher, Emilio Notte, doesn’t bring books or a geographical map into the room, but a fully dressed woman who looks like my mother when she gets dressed up for special occasions. “Listen, today I am going to explain this lady to you,” the teacher says. And he explains her by taking off layer after layer of clothing, even her brassiere and underwear. Sometimes, as Federí enjoys telling us, he has to massage her body with his hands so he can understand her musculature better. As he shows us the drawings, I imagine every single gesture, and all that imagining causes a pleasant warm tingling inside which comes to a sudden halt when I think, “Wait, what if my father wants to draw us naked? Or my grandmother?” What if he draws my mother naked? This potential situation makes me deeply anxious, and I truly hope he does not. It’s so hard to hold a pose, and he’s never happy. He only smiles and seems happy when he comes home from class and says that Notte praised his work. Notte or anyone else. In his second year, 1952, they get a new teacher, a man named Bresciani. Raffaele Lippi is a fellow student. My father doesn’t give a damn about him and continues to study with great zeal; he knows he’s the best one there.

One day, Lippi, just to put him in a foul mood, turns to him and says, “Guess what, Federí? I’ve been invited to take part in the ‘Mostra dell’arte nella vita del Mezzogiorno d’Italia’ show that’ll be held in Rome at the Palazzo delle Esposizioni next year.” Then he adds that other great Neapolitan artists like Armando De Stefano and Mario Colucci have also been invited. “Were you invited?” he asks roguishly.

My father feels like he’s been stabbed with a flaming sword. He blinks quickly, opens his mouth to speak and is forced to admit that not only was he not invited, but he hasn’t even heard about the exhibition, the goal of which is to bring together works by contemporary artists from all parts of southern Italy. To prevent Federí from starting to rant about how things are always organized in secret in order to exclude dangerous competition like himself, Lippi informs him that the exhibition participation guidelines are posted in the foyer of the Accademia, that he should go look for himself.

My father stomps over there, chewing gall. That’s just how he is, always on the verge of losing self-control. According to him, he’s always calm, sees the big picture, in control of the situation. But over the years, I have learned to decipher the secret signals in his voice, and I can tell he’s not at all pleased about it. He can shut an eye on the fact that the organizers in Rome invited Armando De Stefano to take part—Armando is young, only twenty-six years old (nine less than him), he’s cultured, well-educated, talented, and he has good connections with people who count. But the others? Why Raffaele Lippi and not him? Why Mario Colucci and not him? Who the hell are those two? What do they have that he does not?

He studies the guidelines and learns them by heart. He discovers that a number of prizes will be awarded according to rules that have yet to be written. He discovers that although the exhibition is by invitation only, artists can also be granted entry by sending three pieces of art to Rome, where a jury will examine them and make their final decision. He discovers that it’s easy to take part: fill out a form, submit a description of the works by December 20, and send the actual pieces by January 10. And that’s exactly what he does, immediately.

He is then overcome by the usual frenzy that we, at home, know well. First, he pretends to be sick so he doesn’t have to go to work. He then stops doing portraits for the Americans, even if the amount they pay combined with his meager salary as second-class station manager allow us to survive (his work for the communist press is nonexistent, he no longer talks about it, who knows if it ever really existed in the first place). With the money he has squirreled away in the pages of his books and among the boxes and knickknacks he inherited from Zio Peppino di Firenze, he buys canvases and paints. To hell with the bastards who hate him and continue to plot against him: he’ll create three paintings that will leave the Roman jury stunned, paintings that will rip both Lippi and Colucci new assholes, as well as anyone else who tries, either overtly or covertly, to rip him one.

This is the ferocious language of revenge. And watch out, never contradict him or make objections. Never say, “But the electric bill needs to be paid; they might cut us off.” At times such as these, he doesn’t care about the house, us, or anything. If he doesn’t have enough money for cigarettes, he gathers up old butts, extracts any leftover tobacco, and rolls it up in either regular paper or cigarette papers and angrily blackens his already tarry lungs, and keeps on painting.

First he arranged a still-life on one of the military blankets that we use to stay warm at night: a globe, some books, an iron, and a Neapolitan coffeemaker. While I spied on him painting that with his steady hand, it occurred to me that those objects lay as still as the dead, they didn’t get tired, they didn’t have bodies that trembled or blood that ran through their veins. They let themselves be studied and painted, and the canvas filled up quickly and easily, without fuss or frustration.

But as soon as my father moved on to his next idea for two paintings, one of a happy fisherman and one of a sad fisherman, I felt his impatience growing. Models came and went: Zio Peppino, Zio Antonio, Zio Vincenzo. He sighed, groaned, and huffed in anger. He tried to get something out of each of them, and did endless drawings. He went through at least ten good sanguine sticks before moving on to painting on canvas. A thousand or so sketches were shredded in rage, a terrifying sight to see.

When he wasn’t home, I went into the room and studied the paintings in progress. I didn’t see them for what they actually were but only perceived his discontent. I begged the Virgin Mary and saints and even the Padreterno to help him concentrate and succeed at what he set out do, and overcome all of Zio Peppino, Zio Antonio, and Zio Vincenzo’s shortcomings. Just like in the prayers they taught us at school, I asked that we be able to live in peace, without the burden of his dissatisfaction, or his cussing and obscenities. I wanted this joyless period to come to an end, I wanted him to be in such a good mood that he’d want to take his mandolin out of the closet and play it like he did on the rare occasions when he truly was happy.

I imagined he did precisely that when the paintings were finished. Because I remember them as stunning, among his most beautiful. He left them to dry, played the mandolin, and praised them over and over, saying, “You can forget about social realism, forget about Guttuso, Pizzinato, Paolo Ricci, and Lippi. Here you see the true influence of Caravaggio and his school.” And when they were dry, he took the paintings to Rome personally.

The jury was made up of several important artists: Giovanni Brancaccio, Pippo Rizzo, Giovanni Consolazione, Marino Mazzacurati, and Alessandro Monteleone. My father dropped off the paintings and asked for a receipt. He said he was confident even though he actually was not, he said he was calm even though a storm was brewing in his chest and his eyes were popping out of his head. And then he waited and waited, and didn’t want to do a thing.

Those were awful days, but I can’t say that he was particularly argumentative. He was like a heavy, dark sky that never seems to break into lightning or dissolve into a thunderstorm. Not only was he disgusted more than usual by his job on the railroad, he didn’t even have the energy to think about painting. He lived in expectation, and weeks and months went by.

That November, at the age of thirty-one, my mother gave birth to her fourth son, Walter. Federí, being distracted and under pressure from his mother-in-law and all of Rusinè’s relatives, called for three midwives, and in the end had to pay all three, swearing high and low as he did. Four sons, a wife, his mother-in-law: they all depended on him. He felt defeated. Then, in March of 1953, two days before the opening of the exhibition in Rome, by which time he had forgotten about it altogether, he received the news that his paintings had been accepted.

Here I could say that he rejoiced, but that would be too easy. First he celebrated: he told anyone he encountered in the street, “The jury in Rome accepted all three of my paintings!” and then he grew even more arrogant, garrulous, and presumptuous. Then, just like that, he went back to his anxious self, exultation blending with a state of alarm. I can’t just sit here, he said, firing off a volley of announcements: I have to go to Rome, I have to make my move, I have to take advantage of the opportunity.

My mother rooted through her closet to find the prettiest dress that she could adapt for the exhibition opening. When he was euphoric, he let her do whatever she wanted. Then, when his mood grew more complex, he asked her where the hell did she think she was going, she’d just given birth, she looked jaundiced, and the baby needed to be nursed. But Rusinè persisted and tried as hard as she could to go with him. Federí screamed no at her, she asked why, he screamed back because I said so.

In fact, there was little for him to explain. He didn’t have a single good reason why she shouldn’t come with him. He just wanted to feel free to move about and see beautiful people and make strong connections and even make a fool of himself or be subjected to humiliation if he wanted, all without his wife sitting there and eyeing him, judging him all the time. And so he left her behind with us in Naples, and set off with Armando De Stefano, and went and mingled with that outfit of artists, critics, intellectuals, and art-lovers that filled the rooms of the Palazzo delle Esposizioni.

 

There was a crowd, and he felt lost. Now, as I write, it pains me to think of him there. He arrives, thinking he will be met by applause, that important people will come up to him and say bravo. Instead, it’s a melee: he learns that the total number of works of art on display, both invited and jury-approved, is 807. Eight hundred and seven. The walls of the gallery were covered with art, painting above painting, one next to the other as if it was the Sistine Chapel, Mimí, like ex-votos in a church. Never seen so many pieces of crap all at once.

It didn’t take my father long to understand that, thanks to the usual shady dealings, they’d included everyone in the show, oves et boves, every ragtag and bobtail, without distinction. All his enthusiasm and hope vanished, with malicious rancor taking its place. The only consolation was that his paintings hung in room number 50 alongside those of Paolo Ricci, Armando De Stefano, Pippo Giuffrida, Nino Suppressa, and Giovanni Savarese. Lippi’s work, luckily, was in a different room, number 51. At least there was that.

He stayed in Rome for a total of two days. He couldn’t stay any longer. He and De Stefano shared a hotel room, the two men exchanged numerous opinions on art, they ate at restaurants together, and became even closer friends than they already were. But then Federí, who had a job and a family, had to go back to Naples, back to work at the railroad. De Stefano stayed on in Rome to keep an eye on the situation.

It was an unusual time. At work he was calm, at home his behavior was quietly forlorn. He talked about how everyone was up there in Rome, at the Palazzo delle Esposizioni, taking care of business, and that he was the only poor bastard tied down with a family and job on the railroad. But he didn’t yell or scream, he didn’t kick and shout. He just kept repeating in a feeble voice how much he regretted not being able to be there to keep an eye on exhibition room 50 and watch the people come in and admire his work. Other than that, he slept a lot, didn’t paint at all, and ate little, always with a distant look in his eyes.

Then, suddenly, he came roaring back to life. One morning at around seven o’clock, on his way home from a night shift at the railroad, he bumped into Carlo Montarsolo at Napoli Centrale. Carlo was an air force captain and painter, whose work, my father said, had been admitted by the jury in Rome thanks only to some pulling of strings by his brother, a famous baritone. Montarsolo told him that he was rushing off to Rome because they had finally published a catalog for the exhibition and he wanted to buy a copy as a keepsake. There was a catalog? my father enquired dejectedly. “Yes,” Montarsolo replied, “and you’d better hurry up if you want one because they’re selling out quickly. It would be a shame if you didn’t get one as they even included a picture of one of your fishermen in it.”

My father lit up with pleasure, his mood suddenly changed. His work had been included in the catalog. He knew in a flash that fame and recognition were about to rain down on him. “Are you certain?” he asked Montarsolo with great excitement. Completely certain. He was the only painter whose work had been accepted by the jury to have been included in the catalog. Basically, the baritone’s brother explained to him with great admiration as he boarded his train to Rome, that meant that Federí’s paintings had been highly appreciated and he stood a good chance of winning the Mancini prize, with its purse of 500,000 lire generously offered by the Cassa del Mezzogiorno. The award was to be given to a painter from the south (he was from the south), under the age of forty (he was under forty), whose work was in the show at the Palazzo delle Esposizioni not by invitation but thanks to the jury. Buona fortuna, Federí.

 

He came home beside himself with joy. He announced the good news to his wife, saying he had to go to Rome right away to buy the catalog, even though it cost 1,000 lire, which was a pretty penny indeed. He started hunting around the house, in every nook and cranny, but he couldn’t find any money. He started swearing. He asked Rusinè to go knock on her relatives’ door and ask for the money. It was important, his destiny was on the line. She let him scream and yell but didn’t give in. They owed the relatives so much money already that she was embarrassed to go and say, “I need 1,000 lire so that Federí can purchase a catalog from the exhibition.” He shouted at her and threatened her, maybe he even hit her, but she was firm. My father gave up and ran to his parents’ house on Via Zara. He managed to get 1,000 lire from his mother, Donna Filomena, without his father, Don Mimí, finding out; had his father known about the existence of that money, he would’ve spent it on a game of cards or at the horse or dog races. Thanks to his mother, Federí was able to jump on the first train to Rome and that was that.

Once he arrived in the capital, he went straight to the Palazzo delle Esposizioni and bought one of the last available copies of the catalog, a slender book with a red cover, published by De Luca Editore, with Table CLVIII a reproduction of his unhappy fisherman staring absent-mindedly at his empty vat, a crust of bread in his hand.

He leafed through the rest of the book, examining the other images and comparing them with his own in order to have the proof that his was the best. Bolstered by what he found, he approached the gallery receptionist, Signora Dompré, with all the charm he could muster, and started chatting with her to find out how things were going.

The receptionist greeted him politely. “There’s great interest in your work, Maestro; everyone is talking about it,” she said. Federí’s mind went blank. “Ah,” was all he could say. “And what about the Mancini prize, the half a million lire award?” he asked point blank. The secretary looked at him complicitly and smiled. “What are you trying to do? Get me to talk?”

Her words were enigmatic, but my father knew—and he told us about it for the rest of his life, every chance he got, with both sadness and longing—that the wind was blowing in his favor. He went back to Naples and proudly waved the catalog under Rusinè’s nose and made her admire Table CLVIII at least a dozen times, then he showed it to mother-in-law Nannina, then to Don Ciro the building porter, then to all the neighbors, and finally to his stinking piece-of-shit relatives. He especially enjoyed showing it to the three of us kids, but not to his youngest son because he was only four months old.

While I can’t speak for Geppe or Toni, I personally derived great pleasure from the catalog. Whenever possible, I went and secretly admired the image of the fisherman. The book felt like it was imbued with good magic, as though it had the power to transform my father into a man free of all discontent. He would finally make peace with fidgety models, with everyone, with reality. He’d go from being a gaunt man with a crazed look in his eye to a calm, reflective one, like the other fathers on Via Gemito. What a relief. I had already started seeing signs of his transformation. I saw him whisper into my mother’s ear and saw how she giggled. “Rusinè, I’m clearly going to win the prize of a half a million lire,” he’d say, and she’d laugh some more.

Was there a reason for that good cheer? I’m not entirely sure. As the days and weeks went by, it seemed to him that there was. Words of praise grew and multiplied. They arrived on a daily basis, and when none came, my father immediately grew anxious. “Why no compliments today? What’s going on?” he wondered.

One day he had to rush up to Rome because Signora Dompré called for him. He went to work on his shift from eight o’clock in the morning until two in the afternoon and then jumped on the first train for Rome. When he got to the Palazzo, Signora Dompré gave him some wonderful news. “Maestro, all three of your artworks have been sold.” Unfortunately, I can’t say now to whom; my father often changed his mind about who purchased them and mentioned several names, and yet they were always famous people. In his notebooks, there in black on white, he says that the happy fisherman was bought by Senator Paolo Rossi, the sad fisherman was bought by film director Roberto Rossellini, and the still life with the iron was bought by Spanish actor Juan de Landa. Total earnings: 270,000 lire.

A tidy sum. Everyone wanted to celebrate so my father took them all to the bar across the street from the Palazzo delle Esposizioni and offered pastries. Marcello Gallian, the art critic for Turismo-Svago ate a whole mountain of them, and while he used the photograph of the sad fisherman to illustrate something or other in his review, he forgot to include the artist’s name. Piece of shit. But what did it matter? Unbelievably, nothing could make Federí angry.

He came back to Naples loaded with money and good cheer. The first thing he did was buy Rusinè a diamond ring. Then he got everyone a new wardrobe (in a manner of speaking, since we had no actual wardrobe to speak of and always wore the same thing). The next thing he did was let those stinking pieces-of-shit relatives taste the sweetness of his success. And finally, he handed out confirmation gifts to the children of friends and relatives, thus acquiring a whole host of godsons and goddaughters for his wife and himself. In a short amount of time, even though he tried to hide some of the money so he could spend it on his own in Rome as needed, he frittered it all away with active assistance from Rusinè. Somehow the sun always comes out from behind the clouds.

 

As a matter of fact, on a splendid late-March day, as he was walking out of Bar 2000 in Piazza Carità, he heard someone call his name. It was his old teacher, Maestro Emilio Notte, and he was yelling his name from the newspaper kiosk across the street. “Federí, come here, I have to tell you something important!”

Federí crossed the street to see what the elderly painter had to say to him. He was in the company of his student Bruno Starita, who would in turn go on to become a professor of etching at the Accademia. “Bravo, you troublemaker! We were just talking about you. How much money did you make in Rome?” he asked. “270,000 lire,” my father proudly divulged. “No, my friend, you earned much, much more than that. You earned 770,000 lire,” he said. “I don’t understand, Maestro . . .” my father said. “Federí, I am part of the commission in Rome that decides who gets the awards. Even though I, personally, don’t care much for your work as it’s not in line with social realism, we’ve decided to award you the Mancini prize of 500,000 lire because your work is strong. Now let’s go celebrate!” he said, insisting they go to Bar Motta, which was nearby. “And now,” he went on to suggest, “you should hurry up to Rome and get a copy of the official announcement; don’t wait for it to come by mail. Stay well, Federí.”

My father let himself be warmed by his good fortune. He told Rusinè about the good news and went back to Rome. He ran to see Signora Dompré to verify that it was true—that he had indeed won the Mancini prize—and he tried to get his hands on the money right there and then, or at least an advance. But he had to wait, as dictated by the rules, until the official letter arrived by mail. “In the meantime, enjoy the good news,” Signora Dompré said.

And that is exactly what Federí did. With eyes on fire and skin stretched taut across his cheekbones from the tension and enthusiasm, he went and told everyone he saw there at the Palazzo delle Esposizioni, that he had won half a million lire from the Cassa del Mezzogiorno; he, who, at the age of thirty-five, had been admitted to the exhibition not by invitation but via a jury. He happily flitted from person to person. No one could stop him. His heart was filled with joy, pure joy pumped through his veins, infinite joy.

 

“That’s just how things work,” he said when he was elderly, “one good thing leads to another.” Sometimes he even added philosophically, “Success stays with the successful, bad luck with the unlucky.” He spoke in clichés just for the love of hearing himself talk. When he was going strong, there was no stopping him, his stories flowed with great creativity; he was always at the center of a surprising dance full of joyful moves.

This afternoon I’d like to get those tones down on paper, the scenes from the life of an artist the way I still hear them in my head, stories about days that were complaint-free, stories that occasionally were over the top, and sometimes didn’t quite add up. Federí accumulated experiences left and right, he doesn’t know how to simply be happy, it’s hard for him. He spends a lot of time at the bar at the Palazzo delle Esposizioni, sitting there and reflecting on art and his future as an artist. Suddenly, Guttuso walks in with Vespignani, Monachesi, Pizzinato, the whole gang; he walks up to the bar and starts talking about Courbet. My father listens without saying a word, off to one side. He’d like to add a few things but he doesn’t want to draw attention to himself, not in front of Guttuso, who’s famous. Even though he has three works on show in the exhibition, even though he sold them to famous people like Roberto Rossellini, and even though he won the Mancini prize, he doesn’t want to stand out, he’s scared that someone in the group will try and embarrass him as usual, ask him what time the next train to Naples is. His story could well end there: the bar, Guttuso, his sense of malaise, but I know—ever since I was small I’ve known—that he can’t stop himself, not even if I were to ask him to do so explicitly. He keeps going. He talks at length about his composure while also describing the sycophantic manners of the lackeys that hang around the famous painters. This goes on until Guttuso, who clearly had asked Signora Dompré about him and his exceptional work, and consequently knows who he is, turns to him in a friendly manner. “Federí, what’re you doing there all on your own? Come and join us.” He, grateful for the warm invitation, immediately joins the group and shares his thoughts on Courbet. Everyone is impressed: Guttuso, as well as Vespignani, Pizzinato, and Monachesi. Before he says goodbye, he feels compelled to buy them all a coffee.

He romanticizes. He roams around the city through the month of March and possibly April, too. Piazza di Spagna is full of springtime flowers and gaiety. He stays on in Rome so he can closely follow the events related to the prize but, in his spare time, he sits with his back to Via Condotti, not far from the La Barcaccia gallery, and sketches the Trinità dei Monti.

I listen carefully. I’m ten, so Rome feels light years away and my father seems like a man who has been kissed by a thousand marvels: there’s a piazza filled with flowers, sunlight, rich women stroll down the street, elegant gentlemen pass by and praise his work, saying things like, “Well, would you look at how well this artist draws.” It occurs to me that maybe the warm spring light and breeze will be good for him, and his adventures, too.

And then, suddenly, a young Egyptian appears before him: he’s a relative of King Faruk and his name is Fuadí. The prince wants to immediately purchase all his drawings for 30,000 lire. Federí hands them over. Here you go, Prince, 30,000 is fine. It’s a good deal. Fuadí then wants to chat about art and the kinds of colors that were used in the pharaohs’ tombs. Federí talks to him in English, thinking with delight at how easy life is for an artist in Rome: you draw a few lines on a sketch pad, a foreign prince appears, you chat about the funerary art of ancient Egypt, and have an international conversation. If only he were always on his own, with no family obligations. If only he could move here.

Then Nino Ruyu, the official mail carrier between Naples and Rome, walks by. “Federí, I’m on my way to Renato’s studio. Do you want to come along?” he asks. My father says sure, and Prince Fuadí joins them. They walk from Piazza di Spagna to Via del Babuino and down Via Margutta. “Me and Guttuso,” Ruyu says over and over, “we’re good buddies. If you ever need anything, Federí, I can put in a word for you with him.” My father shakes his head. “I don’t need anything, Ruyu. I was born a painter. All I need is my talent. Did you hear that I won the Mancini prize? 500,000 lire,” Federí says proudly. “Oh, really? I had no idea,” Ruyu says ironically and congratulates him but then goes back to talking about his close friendship with Guttuso to the degree that my father can’t get a word in edgewise and continue boasting, as he wishes he could, about the Mancini prize, about its purse of half a million lire.

Springtime in Rome. I envision the three of them walking down the street. I especially like the prince, who wears a red turban and carries a precious dagger tucked into his purple silk belt. Fuadí tells them about Egypt, the pyramids, camels, odalisques; Federí talks about the Mancini prize; Ruyu talks about Guttuso and other things. At a certain point Ruyu speaks up. “Federí, if you say they awarded you the Mancini prize, I’m happy for you, really. But watch out, because you know how things are here in Italy: you never get something for nothing,” he says ominously. “What do you mean?” Federí asks, feeling suddenly nervous. Ruyu explains that he was just speaking in general, that bribery is everywhere, in Russia as well as in the USA. Then he turns to Fuadí and laughs. “Even in Egypt, isn’t that right, Prince?” Ruyu asks. Yes, Fuadí replies.

In the meantime they reach Guttuso’s studio. Ruyu looks at his watch in surprise. “Hell’s bells,” he says, “it’s lunch time. Maybe I should go up on my own, Renato might be having lunch. I’m sorry, I’ll be right back.”

Ruyu runs upstairs, leaving my father and the prince waiting in the street. Not a minute passes and he’s already back. “He has guests,” he says, “and I don’t want to disturb them. Let’s go to the Pincio gallery in Piazza del Popolo instead. Carlo Levi is having a solo show there. I’d like to say hello.”

My father shrugs and turns to Prince Fuadí. “What do you think, Prince? To be completely honest, I don’t give a fuck about Carlo Levi but if you want to go . . .” The prince wants to go so they all walk over to the Pincio gallery. I see Ruyu in his postman’s uniform, my father in his artist’s clothes, and Fuadí dressed like a prince in his turban.

At the Pincio gallery they see Carlo Levi. His skin is blotchy with rosacea and he’s wearing a fur coat even though it’s relatively warm outside. He also has on a fur hat that’s pulled down tight around his ears, and curly ringlets poke out from underneath it, damp with sweat. Ruyu goes and greets him politely, but Levi just looks at him suspiciously and doesn’t say a word. The mail carrier is about to try again when all of a sudden Renato Guttuso and his entourage appear in the doorway.

The air is tense. Federí doesn’t want to be the first to say hello so he pretends to be keenly interested in a painting. In the meantime, Guttuso goes and pays his respects to Levi, at which point Ruyu calls out a “Greetings, Maestro,” and throws himself into the melee. Guttuso looks at him squarely. “I’m sorry, but do we know each other?” he asks. “My name is Ruyu, I’m the mail carrier, and a pupil of Vincenzo Ciardo, with whom I study landscape painting. We were introduced by Paolo Ricci, if you recall,” Ruyu says, bowing deeply. “Ah, I see, do give my regards to Ciardo and Ricci,” Guttuso says, waving him away dismissively. He then turns toward Carlo Levi but catches sight of my father’s striking figure and calls out to him warmly. “Federí, what are you doing here? Come say hello.”

My father makes his way forward. All of them—Pizzinato and Penelope and Salvatore and Sarra and Monachesi, as well as all the other lackeys in the entourage—treat him like an old friend. Even Levi says hello and praises his work. “Your fishermen are beautiful, Federí.” This makes Ruyu green with envy. Prince Fuadí, meanwhile, is delighted and reverentially calls my father Maestro.

 

Later it occurs to Federí that Ruyu, with that allusion to bribery, might have been giving him a sign, letting him know he was plotting something behind his back. In fact, not long after, the villains got the upper hand and everything changed course. First off, he received an unpleasant surprise tied to the Cinema Ideal, on Via Scarlatti, in Vomero. My father was walking by when he bumped into his friend Salvatore Affuso, who had just walked out of the cinema, where they were showing Orfeu Negro. Affuso embraced him warmly, congratulated him, and said bravo, well done. Seeing that my father didn’t understand what he was referring to, Affuso explained. “What? Don’t you know? Before the feature film they showed a color documentary about art. It’s called Il sole sorge nel Sud and you’re in it. Or rather, your paintings are in it, the ones on show in Rome.”

My father went into the cinema, his heart beating wildly in his chest, watched the film, and saw his paintings on the big screen, in color. He also saw Armando De Stefano’s painting, Antonio, and Domenico Purificato’s Ricordi della Ciociaria, but he had the impression that the camera rested a little longer on his works. Deeply excited, he rushed home to tell Rusinè. The following day, he told her to dress us up as if it was a holiday, and took her, my brother Geppe, and me to the Ideal. I saw everything with my own eyes but I can’t say exactly what it was. That’s right, I have to admit it. I just don’t know what I saw. My experience of it is worth nothing. My father told me the story about the Cinema Ideal so many times that, now that I am trying to write about it, I can’t distinguish between what I saw and what he led me to see with his words. But since it’s his words that matter here, I will say that I saw his three paintings, and especially the unhappy fisherman, and that my jaw dropped. My father’s art was on the big screen. It truly was incredible.

The following day he rushed over to Via Zara and dragged his mother and father out of the house to see the film. They wanted to invite a few of their special friends. Fine, he agreed with pleasure. He accompanied them all to Vomero, paid for everybody’s ticket, and had them sit in good seats.

The documentary started. It showed De Stefano’s paintings, it showed Purificato’s paintings, each still frame, one after the other, but not his. Fuck. They were gone.

His father (my grandfather) flew off the handle at what a waste of time it had been, his son had to stop inventing things for once and for all. “You’re full of shit,” he shouted at my father, you’ve been a liar since day one, you made him look stupid in front of his friends, with all that famous painter bullshit. Painter di questo cazzo.

Federí left him standing in the cinema foyer and ran upstairs to the projectionist’s booth. “Where are my paintings?” he screamed. “What paintings?” the projectionist asked. “The ones that were in the documentary Il Sole sorge nel Sud,” my father replied. “The film got burnt,” the man said. “You’re saying it burnt right at the point where my paintings appear?” my father asked. “Yes,” the man said and then continued in a whisper, “Let it go, Maestro. Don’t fool around with these commies. They came in and told me to cut that part out, they’re jealous. Go see your paintings in a movie theater in Caserta or Rome. People are too envious of you here in Naples.”

 

After that, things went back to being the way they always were. My father went back to being nasty and lashing out at my mother, believing it was all a plot by Lippi or Paolo Ricci, or all of them put together, whatever their political affiliation—pinkos, blackshirts, the white whale—they were all against him. He rushed to Rome in a state of alarm to find out if the official letter announcing the conferment of the Mancini prize had finally been sent. Signora Dompré, with somewhat less warmth than on other occasions, told him that the delay was due to bureaucracy: 500,000 lire was a large amount of money, they needed approval from the Cassa del Mezziogiorno before they could send out the official letter. “Go back to Naples,” she ended, “and be patient. No one can take away what you rightfully deserve.”

Of course they can. One morning, Francesco Caiazzo, another painter who had a couple of paintings in the show in Rome, showed up at our house on Via Gemito. “I’m sorry, Federí,” he said in a singsong voice, “but it looks like they took the Mancini prize away from you. Apparently, someone told them that you work for the railroad and the rules clearly state that the money has to go to someone who makes his living from painting. However a part of the jury is on your side and resigned in protest. Even Emilio Notte resigned.” Moreover, he continued, while Federí grew paler and paler by the second and felt like he was dying of unhappiness, the person named as the recipient is twenty-four-year-old Claudio Lezoche, a war orphan, backed by both Segni and Scelba.

My father waited until Caiazzo left the house before starting to rail against the corruption that permeated Italy and how it had worked—and always would work—against him. Then he started in on God, the Virgin Mary, the saints, communists, Christian democrats, Segni, Scelba, Caiazzo, Lezoche, and my mother, who told him to calm down.

Later, he went to see Emilio Notte. “Don Emí, is it true what they say about this whole story?” It was true. What could be done? Not a single thing.

Still beside himself with rage, he hunted down the communist critic and painter Paolo Ricci and faced him squarely. “Do you know what they did to me?” he said. “They took away the Mancini prize. Segni and Scelba want to give it to Lezoche. Maybe we should inform Amendola, maybe the party ought to know . . .” But Paolo Ricci replied firmly, “The party has nothing to do with your personal interests, Federí. The party is not at your beck and call.” That’s exactly what he said.

What could he do next? My father, yellow with nausea, his lips livid, made his way back to Rome and stood in front of Signora Dompré’s desk, hurling vulgar obscenities and swearing that he’d kill Lezoche the first chance he got if they gave him the prize. It was pointless. Discordant rumors abounded. First, maybe to calm him down, they said that the prize would be divided between five painters, a hundred thousand each: him, Lezoche, Giuseppe Ruggiero, Agata Pistone, and even Mario Caiazzo. Then everything went silent, there was no more talk about the Mancini prize at all, it was as if the Cassa del Mezzogiorno had backed out and said, “Screw them all, easier just to cancel the Mancini from the list of prizes.” Finally, rumor had it that the entire sum of half a million lire was given to Claudio Lezoche but in the form of a scholarship.

My father was well into painting The Drinkers the day the bad news arrived. By then he’d already gotten it out of his system. “Those stinking pieces of shit,” was all he muttered, frowning and painting with renewed spite and rancor. I was left with a feeling of mistrust, like when I was small and I’d bring him a toy to fix and he’d repair it, and then it would break again as soon as I started playing with it.

 

Now Federí is sitting at the easel and I’m seated across from him in this uncomfortable pose that he’s forcing me to hold. He’s starting to draw. I feel him casting glances at me, not his normal looks but those of an artist, the ones that feel like ropes with huge hooks or barbs or spears attached to the ends. They pierce me at regular intervals, and are accompanied by rapid, tense gasps; they tear off parts of me that he will use to build his builder’s apprentice, so that I will pour water into the foreman’s glass. The charcoal stick scratches the piece of paper with a nerve-wracking sound, capturing his dark mood and dissatisfaction. I feel my blood pulsing through me but try to avoid letting even the smallest of vibrations resonate through the neck of the demijohn.

After some time, my brothers come to the door and peer in. They see me kneeling in that pose, they’re surprised, they snicker and run off. Then I detect other sounds in the distance, exclamations and laughter from the kitchen. A few minutes later I hear my grandmother shuffling down the hall in her slippers. She also stops at the entrance. “Are you tired, Mimí?” she asks me in dialect, as if her son-in-law doesn’t exist. My father, peevish as ever, replies for me. “We haven’t even started yet; could you please let us work in peace?” And when Nonna Nannina turns and heads back to the kitchen, he starts to sing nervously, first in a deep voice and then in an unusually high-pitched one, and only stops when certain parts of me, the most difficult ones, require all his artistic attention.

 

He didn’t sing for long. At one point, he threw all the sketches on the floor and went to get more paper. Then he started drawing again, but not in silence; this time around he talked to me. I can’t remember exactly what he said, initially it was just nervous chatter. But I imagine that he said the usual things about art, showing off his skills, in the same way ancient warriors roared before going into battle, both to diminish their adversaries’ courage and to boost their own. It’s highly probable, actually, that he went back to talking about the exhibition in Rome, as it had been deeply gratifying nonetheless. He liked talking about the standing he had acquired in the capital and how, even if he had initially been at a disadvantage, and despite all the usual shady deals, his work was considered even better than Armando De Stefano’s—and he was a good painter. He counted up every single line from every positive review that had been written about him and compared them to the scant number that other artists had received. Basically, he enjoyed giving numeric proof of the great leap he had made and backed up his case with trivial figures (all of which he wrote down in a notebook in 1992, providing me with my source): the indisputable mathematics of how much his work was liked.

“The jury,” he’d begin, “had to choose from a grand total of 807 paintings, 162 sculptures, 148 black and white photographs, and 47 works of craftmanship. If you do the math, that means that only 289 of us artists were selected to take part in that important exhibition in Rome, with an average of 1.83 works per artist.”

Here he stopped to see if I was following him. Since, at all ages, young and old, whether I was ten, thirty, or fifty, my eyes glaze over with repulsion at the mere mention of numbers, he’d sigh with disappointment and get to the crux of the matter.

“In actual fact,” he went on to explain, “the statistic of averages doesn’t reveal the full truth. Even though each artist submitted three works of art, not all three of them were accepted. 126 artists had only 1 piece of work accepted, 60 had 2 pieces accepted, and only 27 artists had 3 works accepted. Your father, Mimí, was one of those 27.” I listened and said nothing. Just like in the Teatro Bellini story when he was offered the chance to move to Hollywood, here too, at some point, he’d start in on his wife, how attached he was to our mother, how he didn’t want to move far away from the family, and so on and so on. That was the only reason—he complained obsessively—he hadn’t been able to take advantage of his enormous triumph in Rome and continued to be an employee of the railroad in Naples. He really ought to have said to hell with it all—Via Gemito, those scurnacchiati sissy painters from Vomero and Via dei Mille, the tram that took him to the station each day and brought him home exhausted, the Americans with their big teeth who sought him out, family, all of it, even us kids (he didn’t actually say us, he never would’ve said that)—and finally break free; he’d find an attic on Via Margutta, join the group that rallied around his friend Renato Guttuso, who wasn’t some bastard like the others, that man knew straight off the bat who had talent and who did not.

That’s what he said in 1953 and on subsequent occasions. And although I wouldn’t bet on it, maybe he made comments like that when he started to sketch me. At some point, my mother would come into the room and say, “Time to stop, come and eat,” but I only heard her voice, I never saw her—my eyes only saw the green neck of the demijohn and the hexagonal floor tiles—and I thought he’d yell at her for interrupting him. But the sound of the charcoal stick scratching the paper kept going. “Do you want to eat, Mimí?” my father would ask. I would answer him with the reply that the forcefulness of his question commanded, “No,” but in an almost imperceptible whisper so that my breath, uttering the word, wouldn’t disrupt my posture at all.

 

My mother hesitates in the doorway. Clearly, she’s not happy that he’s forcing me to stand there like a pillar of salt and she’s upset. But even though my temples are throbbing and my knee on the ground hurts and my arm holding the demijohn is falling asleep, I hope she leaves me alone and goes away. I’m frightened that if she dares say one more word, he’ll throw the paper and charcoal sticks down, turn the room upside down, destroy the large canvas, and start screaming and sobbing that, in this manner, he’ll never be able to accomplish everything he wants. Ever since I can recall, I’d been terrified by scenes like that, as I’ve already mentioned. And even when my mother forces us to band together with her, “Let’s go talk to your father,” so that we can, all together, voice our needs as children and tell him how our shoes are falling apart or how we desperately need haircuts or pens or notebooks or have to pay our school taxes or even my teacher, Bonanni, who insists that I take private lessons in light of upcoming middle school examinations, I always hold back and beg her in a whisper, “No, no, I don’t want to go talk to him, let’s leave him alone, I don’t want to go in there.” I try every single way I can to avoid creating the kind of disturbance that she wants to provoke at all costs. But now I feel something else, something new. The repugnant admiration that I feel for my father, that blend of devotion and disgust that, ever since I was a child, I’ve always felt for his art—how exposed and fragile and vilified it is, and yet so absurdly central to our lives—now rests on my shoulders, and it is almost too heavy a burden for me to bear.

I observe Rusinè’s tired and blasé disregard for the hours of ecstasy that he spends in front of the easel, her mistrust in the hierarchy of important things that he presumes to impose on her, her feeble disobedience of his implicit and explicit rules, and wonder what I should do. The thought of emulating her behavior frightens me, so I retreat from it, I tell myself she’s making a mistake. My mother does everything possible so that he’ll end up blaming her if the paintings don’t come out the way that nature intended them to, absolutely perfect, in other words. That really doesn’t seem helpful to me. I would prefer, especially now that I have suddenly been forced into holding this pose, to help him the best way possible, so that he can draw and paint to the best of his abilities. I don’t want to give him any reasons for blaming me the way that he blamed his other models. I want him to be entirely satisfied with my participation. I wish that everyone, absolutely everyone, would behave the way I am, and my mother most of all.

I feel great relief when she walks out of the room without a word, leaving me there to feel as though the tiled floor is slowly opening its jaws and devouring my knee, cutting into it. I want my father to obtain everything he desires so that even if De Stefano becomes more famous than he, even if Lippi is chosen to do another portrait of Stalin, even if Lezoche wins the Mancini prize and he does not, he has no reason to blame me, and I can legitimately wonder, as I may have been wanting to do ever since I saw the peacock in the bedroom with its entire train, if the time hasn’t come, cazzo, for him to assume his responsibilities.

 

“Cazzo” sits there in the fictional world of the page of writing as if to emphasize my first unsteadying jolt of intolerance. But back then, those words were unutterable, unthinkable even. When I woke up after a sleepless night and decided to go see the places where my father had been raised, I remembered how he completely forbade us from using obscenities. That memory put me in an altogether surprisingly good mood and, walking down street after street, I kept repeating vulgarities to myself. As I wandered down the wide and dirty Via Casanova, one clothing shop after the next, I enjoyed whispering expressions like ocazzochecacàto, mannaggiacchitemuòrt, figliesfaccímm. I walked through Porta Nolana and wound up in Piazza Santa Maria La Scala, stepping over garbage that had been tossed here and there on the disconnected black paving stones—past long, narrow alleys of shuttered shops, old warehouses that looked like grottoes, a Phone Center in the middle of it all, then squalor and more squalor all the way to Piazza Mercato with its abundance of merchandise for sale—but my good mood held up, and even if the city was so quiet it seemed empty, I continued to hear the music of foul language, whether offensive descriptions or insults, sfaccimmúso, peretasanguégna, stupplecèss. This was the rosary of my youth.

As a child I used to know tons of vivid expressions such as those. Although they were often on the tip of my tongue, I always had to stop myself from using them and keep them tucked away inside, secret. My brothers and I never used bad words, Nannina forbade us. She herself would never have said “vafanculo” to someone simply because of the presence of the word “culo” in it, which sounded to her like an offensive word. She preferred using imprecations without obscenities, such as “vafammoccammammeta” which she used frequently throughout the day and which meant something like “go take a hike” or “buzz off” or ominous expressions that she’d hurl in our direction, words like “puozzesculà” which had nothing to do with culo but scolare, referring to the process used to bleed or drain corpses of fluids before being buried.

Nannina was contrary to obscenities because she wanted to stop us from growing up like our father who, she said with great disgust, was born in Lavinaio, a section of the city known for its uncouthness, and that’s why he didn’t know how to speak without dirtying his mouth. “Alright then, let’s hear how people in Lavinaio talk,” I said to myself as I walked around that neighborhood of Naples, which I knew well. I made my way around Piazza Mercato, headed toward Piazza del Carmine, climbed confidently up Via del Lavinaio—shady dealings taking place on every corner—past Vico Molino, Vico Zite, Vico Grazie a Soprammuro, always looking for the source of the linguistic tones that Federí used when he said things like strunzemmérd. But I didn’t hear anything that I didn’t already know. Words were as clear as crystal, like dewdrops in a garden, some of which I loved, some of which amused me; they were the sounds and smirks and gestures that form the humor of the school of hard-knocks. There was nothing vulgar about them, nothing at all.

Sometimes my mother also pointed out her husband’s roots, especially when her eyes were red and puffy. She’d say he was born rintolavenàro, in the heart of Lavinaio, which when she uttered it sounded like a revolting place, a place of decay of both body and soul, a geographical term that meant you’d grown up rotten. We shouldn’t be like him—she urged us—but, instead, like Zio Peppino or her or our grandmother, her relatives. They were better brought up. They came from somewhere (I’m not sure where: I know the road where Federí was born but I never bothered finding out where Nannina grew up or where my mother was born) that was far less coarse than our father and consequently they took it upon themselves to raise us well.

Naturally we resisted their efforts. We knew all the bad words, inside and out, even the most colorful ones, and we could have easily used them out of earshot. But we never did, and I, not even as an adult. The reason for this was not because my grandmother and mother were against them; it would have been easy to break their rules because their threats carried no weight. It was because my father didn’t want us to.

“Don’t use bad language, Mimí,” he advised me. He wanted me to grow up saying complex words, words full of knowledge. Not that bad words, he stressed, didn’t have their own kind of beauty, especially those in Neapolitan dialect, which were truly phenomenal. Actually, he often not only explained them to me but invented etymologies for them, on two feet and with great imagination. Because, even though he tended to speak with a Tuscan air, like Zio Peppino di Firenze, in order to impress people, he adored using the obscenities of dialect and the dialect itself: it was his true language. All the same, he’d add, it was better if we kids grew up speaking properly, as if we were the children of an artist who had grown up on Vomero, on Via Gemito. He wanted us to mature well so that we’d have a less difficult time accomplishing all the important things in life.

At that point, he’d start in on his childhood, which, he said, was definitely not one of the best, and a frequent source of his unhappiness. To make up for that, he talked about it. He talked about his early years especially when something in his painting went wrong. As things stand now (but I reserve the right to change my mind), I can say with almost complete certainty that he talked about his childhood a great deal when I was posing for him. I actually believe that his anecdotes filled all the hours and days that I sat for him. I deduce this by the fact that every time I think about his childhood, the image of The Drinkers comes to mind, as does my mother walking out of the room, my father sitting down at his easel and saying about her, “What a goddamn cacacàzz, that one.” And yet, he never blamed any shortcomings or limitations he might have had on his childhood or the slums where he grew up, he never said anything like, “The reason De Stefano became such a successful artist so quickly and not me was because I was born in Lavinaio.” Rarely did I hear him make claims like, “Mimí, if I had been born in a richer, more educated family, I could have achieved much more.” If anything, I could’ve been the one to suggest things along those lines, but he’d never rely on arguments like that. He didn’t like sociologisms, they were the stuff of communists. He was convinced, and he said it over and over, that if the Padreterno gives you a special kind of brain and a certain kind of genius, you will, no matter what the circumstances, become a man of intelligence, a genius, not a shithead. He talked about what kind of child he had been only to clarify the details about the state of poverty he grew up in, and to highlight how he had been chosen out of the billions of creatures that crawl across the face of the earth. “Chosen,” he underlined with virulent stubbornness. Lavinaio or non-Lavinaio. And anyway—he’d rear up proudly—what was so bad about being a Lavenaro? “Nowadays it sounds like a terrible place,” he said, enlightening me with imagination as the charcoal moved swiftly across paper, “but actually the word is quite beautiful. It has the fiery ‘lava’ inside it as well as the Latin word ‘lavare,’ the cleansing waters of rain that wash over the earth, the way the Fiumara river used to run down Vomero all the way out to sea . . .” He could turn the tables on anything, just to get his revenge. He erased the decay, ugliness, and obscenity and artfully dabbed water and fire around him and the place of his birth.

 

Donna Filomena—he said—gave birth to him on January 17, 1917 in the Za Rella fondaco on Vico dei Barrettari, right behind Piazza del Mercato, while the bonfires burned wildly that night in honor of St. Anthony the Abbot. The fondaco was so huge that there was room for at least two bonfires, he clarified as if recalling it personally, and the flames had accompanied both Filomena’s labor pains and the actual birth, which took place at ten o’clock at night. The blaze threw sparks into the sky and was accompanied by much dancing and singing. He went on and on about the lively neighborhood, its bustle, the shops, Piazza del Carmine, and the Marina. It was as if the colorful streets had influenced his vision immediately, even as a newborn baby.

Then, gradually, he’d shift away from the urban setting and go on to talk about his mother, Donna Filomena, praising her beauty, sensitivity, and intelligence, all qualities that she had passed on to him. As I listened, it occurred to me that, yes, they did have the same nose and mouth, it was true, but I just couldn’t imagine Nonna Filomena as a young woman, or pretty, or even intelligent, since on several other occasions he had called her crazy. As he talked about her, I imagined her giving birth on the bed, already the scary old woman with grey hair that I remember coming over to our house on Via Gemito when I was eight years old, pulling me aside to tell me a story about St. Anthony the Abbot, as a matter of fact. She practically whispered the story in my ear, as if it were a secret. One evening, she said, a young, dark-haired woman went up to the saint; after much brushing up against him and moaning in a seductive voice and giving him flirtatious looks, she showed him her ample bosom and said, “Oh, St. Anthony, won’t you please touch my titties!”

I looked up at my paternal grandmother—whose eyes, come to think of it, were exactly like those of her son—hoping that my maternal grandmother, Nannina, hadn’t heard her. Nannina would never tell me a story like that and if she had heard Nonna Filomena say “Touch my titties, St. Anthony!” she would’ve said, like mother, like son. Same low-class, foulmouthed Lavinaio talk. But in the meantime, Nonna Filomena’s story went on. St. Anthony refused to touch her tits. Since the young woman was actually the devil, to punish him she transformed into tall flames of fire that went all the way up to the ceiling: tits, coal-black hair, everything.

I remember being deeply impressed by the story. Every time my father talked about his birth, I saw that bonfire of a woman-devil blazing in the Za Rella fondaco, with his coming into this world seeming even more grandiose because of it. What extraordinary things happened in Lavinaio. There was Nonna Filomena, lying on the bed in her black housedress just like the one she always wore as an elderly lady, surrounded by saints and candles and holy cards. She sweated and suffered and swore through her way through labor, her cheeks red from St. Anthony’s bonfire that devoured everything in sight in the fondaco on that cold, winter’s night. And then, suddenly, my father appeared: a radiant newborn baby. He was immediately placed on a light blue cushion with golden tassels. Meanwhile, the beautiful demon girl burst into flames like dry grass. Even if it was dark and the middle of the night, the light she gave off was more blinding than the sun.

 

His father—my grandfather Domenico, whom everyone called Mimí—appeared on the scene later. He stood next to his wife in his Regia Marina sailor’s uniform. The midwife held the newborn up in the rays of fiery light, and how he cried! Don Mimí was immediately bothered by the child’s birth and all the good omens that surrounded him. The baby cried constantly, day and night, clearly he wanted everyone to hear him, and all his father could say was, “The cacacàzz never shuts up.”

It’s true, my father admitted: his crying must have been particularly bothersome. Even his very own mother, Nonna Filomena, complained in dialect while she was recovering from childbirth. “Hand me a shoe so I can crush the baby’s skull with the heel. He’s just been born and I already can’t deal with the kid!” But Filomena’s rage was the norm; she got angry easily. It wasn’t her fault and my father never doubted for a minute that his mother didn’t love him. It was the hostility his father felt toward him ever since he was born—he said with great tribulation—that weighed most heavily on him.

As a child, I always felt contradictory feelings for Don Mimí. Even though my father extolled his intelligence and good looks, he also spoke about him with such loathing that even the mere mention of his name scared me. But at the same time I was fascinated by him, he seemed untouchable. On the rare occasions that he came to our house or we went to his, Federí was always pleasant, made a few jokes, bragged a little, but always with delicacy and caution. My grandfather showed no feelings whatsoever. He never even smiled. He was unflappable, and just sat and read, or pretended to read, the newspaper. If he ever said anything at all, it was along the lines of, “You were a shithead then, you’re a shithead now.”

I was always shocked to hear him say things like that, and I’d quickly glance at my mother. It was strange not to see my father react in his usual way, and kill him right then and there. What’s more, Don Mimí always said it right when Federí was talking about the things that meant the most to him. Things like the bonfires, or the repetition of the lucky number 17 in his date of birth (January 17, 1917). As soon as Federí started talking about such things in front of his father, Don Mimí would start to grumble sarcastically, “Right, the bonfire. Right, the number 17.” And that would make my father moody; the vivid scene of his birth and those lucky numbers were important matters to him, serious issues, and signs of his great destiny. He relied on them to justify the obstinacy with which he sought to prove that he was different, cut from a richer cloth, better animated by the breath of God, and to this end he wouldn’t tolerate anyone doubting or correcting him.

Who cared if his identity card or some other document showed a different date of birth? That was the midwife’s fault, he said. Like all the rest of them, she had mixed up apples and oranges and had registered his birth along with all the other babies she delivered only when it was convenient for her, on the 23rd at the Sezione Mercato, thereby denying him the possibility of relying on official documents for the date that meant so much to him: the 17th of ’17. “But even so, my birthday is on the 17th,” he’d point out, in particular when we adults had a hard time remembering.

Truthfully, we always remembered, but those of us who were bitter about the way he managed to shape his life by an exception and not by the rules, resolutely denied him the possibility of celebrating on the 17th, which we considered not as his birthday, but the day all the lies began. Sometimes we wished him happy birthday a day before, sometimes after, but never on that exact date; it was a silent form of resistance. We didn’t want to indulge his interpretation of the facts that took place on Vico dei Barrettari. I, more than anyone else, made the mistake but I did it on purpose, even though I always apologized. Oh, how foolish of me. Of course, I wasn’t thinking straight.

Don Mimí, on the other hand, didn’t bother with such subtleties. Whenever he heard Federí talk about the bonfire, or the seventeenth, or any other such nonsense, he’d sneer, look up from his newspaper, and deliver his usual line: “Kid, you were a shithead then and you’re a shithead now.” Quickly I’d glance first at my father and then my mother. But nothing ever happened. Federí would grow tense, then laugh, sometimes start bickering over something unimportant with his sisters, but never much more than that. The words had a different effect on Rusinè. They made her eyes sparkle.

 

I can still hear his voice in my head, talking and drawing. What has stayed with me from holding that pose with the demijohn under my arm is the pain of not being able to move and the tone of his voice. It occurs to me now that he was trying to communicate something urgent to me through his stories. He was endowing the moments of his exceptional childhood with a corrective message intended to extinguish the glimmer of hostility, the flash of antipathy, that he may have seen in my eyes. Something akin to, “Pay attention to what I’m saying, Mimí, and don’t listen to your mother; don’t underestimate me.” But maybe it’s only the residue of concerns that I had back then. On a thousand other occasions, so many over the years, his detailed anecdotes served only to adjust a life that continually tried to disappoint him.

It was as if he remembered everything since the day he was born. He spoke in detailed terms about events that took place when he was only a year old, in 1918, when he and his parents moved out of Vico dei Barrettari. His father was then a man of twenty-six, tall and slender, with elegant features, and all his teeth, though not for long. He wasn’t dissimilar to Jimmy Stewart, but better. He was better proportioned, he said, less lanky, more handsome, without that idiotic gaze that blue-eyed people have.

In terms of his profession, Don Mimí was a turner, and an excellent one. During the Great War he was a sailor on a torpedo boat, then a laborer in a workshop that produced wartime materials. After the war, he was hired by the Ferrovie dello Stato as a first-class turner and sent to the Reggio Calabria trainyard facility.

Federí recalled all the details of the housing facility provided for railroad workers on the outskirts of the city, shacks that had been built after the earthquake in Messina and planted with flowers of all colors. The season? It could’ve been spring with that sharp as razor sky, or summer, with its steamy and opaque heat. Beyond the field was a brook where, at the age of eighteen months, he went and played every single day, sneaking away from his mother’s watchful eye. He toddled across the pebbles and through the mud with precocious confidence: the water was cold, the grass was tall, and there were flies, wasps, frogs, either rabbits or chickens, and definitely cicadas.

Filomena, who was pregnant again and consequently had a hard time moving around, tried to keep up to stop him from running off. As her belly grew, her dress got longer in the back and shorter in the front. She was also twenty-six, and rather high-strung; some people say it was because of the meningitis she had suffered as a child, which left her with a constant whistling in her head, as if a sirocco blew between her ears, while others said it was because of the worries her husband gave her: his passion for cards and gambling, and less for his family. But she attributed all her problems to my father. She said he was a cacacàzz, she couldn’t control that pain-in-the-ass kid. “F-d-rí! F-d-rí!” she screamed, as if she wanted to stab him with her voice, chasing him through the laundry hanging out to dry in the sun between the shacks, with her hands outstretched, practically falling over her belly in her high-heeled shoes with their pointy toes, every single nerve in her body raging with ferocity.

As soon as she got her hands on him, she’d smack him so hard and so many times that she almost broke his bones, including his skull. Fdrí screamed, wriggled, whined, cried, got away, and ran to hide; it was risky because of the danger of drowning in the brook. “Do you want to drown, Fdrí? Fdrí, do you want to drown?” she’d scream at him in a growing crescendo of anger, hunched over him and walloping him, harder and harder.

My father was only one-and-a-half years old but he remembered it as if it was yesterday; no, he didn’t want to drown. He just couldn’t sit still, he said. So he ran away from his mother and through the grass that was taller than he was, and went and looked for his future beyond the fence. A future, he quickly came to realize, that had to do with his vision, his breath, and his hands. A mysterious gift, the instinct of art, was nesting there, and it shaped him deeply. That was what led him to the brook, over and over, with the dandelions scattering their seeds on the wind and cabbage whites fluttering around him like a halo.

 

Fdrí advances. In the distance is the sound of the trainyard and the workers’ voices. But the child only wants the cool mud at the water’s edge. He stops, digs, and piles some up into a mound, but it’s no good, there’s not enough. And so he walks further off, the shacks recede behind him. When the clay-rich mud is just right, he can let go, the game begins, he feels a flow of energy run through his body and he dissolves, it’s as if he’s fainting, his fingertips have eyes, he gasps repeatedly with pleasure.

A worm wriggles by, a snake darts past, the smell of the grass intensifies, the shadows lengthen. There’s also a faraway sound: it’s Filomena, she’s calling his name, and other women soon join the chorus. Fdrííí, Fdrííí. But the child doesn’t hear the way he usually does. His senses have all been transferred to the ductility of the mud. His eyes see, his hands make, and his sense of smell and hearing and taste only absorb the smells and sounds and flavors that are associated with handling the clay, whether it’s the salty snot that runs from his nose, or the thick soup of petals and insects that macerate in puddles of water. Everything else has ceased to exist. Time has stopped. There are only his rapid intakes of breath, the wondrous “ah” sounds he makes as the number of his creations next to him on the shore grow.

For hours on end, he toys with the power of forgetting one world in order to build another. He feels as though—he told me practically in a whisper, as if he was revealing a secret that he’d never told anyone before—he has a mass of beings inside him who come out of his fingers on command: a flower, a frog, a snake, a butterfly, his worried mother. Clay creations lined up along the babbling brook. There’s even a mud statue of his father, Don Mimí, sitting on the water’s edge, the same Domenico, apprentice turner, who comes home from work swearing left and right, up and down, to all the virgins and saints. Where’s the kid? Did that little cacacàzz disappear again? He’s probably drowning at the bottom of some pool of rank water this very minute . . . Filumè, Filumè, he’s dead for sure, slimy snails are probably crawling all over him, country mice are probably chewing him up as we speak, spiders are probably weaving their webs over him in the humid air of night. Help us, everyone. Hurry, please.

The men, exhausted workers who’ve just gotten home, give up their dinner, band together, light their torches, leave their huts, and tramp through the countryside screaming Fdrí, as if my father was a figure from a poem by Giovanni Pascoli set in nighttime Reggio Calabria.

 

And then the child is startled and he remembers that he is that name, Fdrí is him, his eye and hand and breath, everything that has gone into making his creatures and objects that line the water’s edge.

When he recognized the reality hiding in that name, he temporarily abandoned his own, and left his mud-parents on the river’s edge, afraid of being punished by his real ones and ran off in fear of the torch-bearing shadows, of the sound of his name, which, hollered by throats who knew nothing about the art he created by the stream, and knew nothing of the importance that one day it would have. It was only the name of a moment in time that was not yet his; it was the name of the son of Don Mimí the sailor and apprentice turner with a passion for cards.

Fdrí ran through the night like the frightened ghost of a child who died in the middle of a game along a river’s edge. He tiptoed into his parents’ shack and hid in their bedroom, behind the door of the wardrobe. He had to pee, but he squeezed it back so tightly that he broke out in a cold sweat. And still, he didn’t move. His heart was like that of a wounded puppy. At a certain point he realized Filomena had come home. She walked down the hallway, her nerves quaking as if being rattled by some evil god, limping, there was the sound of only one of her shoes. She entered the room, opened the wardrobe, and stood—massive, black with anger, and fiery-eyed—above the child, the missing shoe in her hand, high above her head, far above her swollen belly. With a scream, she struck him over and over with the heel, without holding back. The child couldn’t hold back either and peed all over himself.

 

My father later said with a laugh that he didn’t harbor any bitterness toward her. He reserved that emotion for his father, the turner, who, following that horribly frightening night, did something of enormous cruelty. To hell with the clay, the child’s creations, any joy that the river might have ever given him. Towering above them all, his father made an unappealable decision. He called for the mailman, Simeoni, and entrusted him with his firstborn; he told him to take the child from Reggio Calabria to Naples and deliver him to his mother-in-law, Donna Funzella. Address: Via Casanova, across from the parish church of Santa Maria delle Grazia. “You’ll see a large five-story palazzo, Simeò,” my father said, imitating his own father’s cruel voice. “It was built two hundred years ago to be a monastery, its front door is one whole story high and wide enough for a horse and carriage. Go through the entrance to the large courtyard, which is at least 40 meters long. On either side are two wide stone staircases that lead to the different floors. All the front doors of the apartments in the building look out onto the big central courtyard, all the way up. Donna Funzella, my mother-in-law, lives in a small apartment on the second floor, take the staircase on the right. Bring her this cacacàzz.”

Door-to-door delivery, like a package, not a person. From one day to the next, Don Mimí expelled him from his natural family and their shack in Reggio Calabria. He didn’t care about his son’s artistic vocation or his urgency, and he exiled him by entrusting him to Simeoni. I bet my grandfather didn’t even interrupt his card game. “Take him tomorrow,” he probably said. I pictured the mailman in his uniform as a dour man with a mustache, dragging the child away, then sitting with him in a train compartment as it made its way through the dry and scorched south, surrounded by piles of letters tied with twine and packages sealed with wax, while he, Fdrí, that explosion of consonants, sat bound and gagged, eyes darting this way and that, in a corner.

It was a long journey. Finally, the dirty, red-eyed, snotty-nosed child was handed over to Donna Funzella Pariota, his maternal grandmother, who was originally from Solofra and a good woman, the last of 24 children. Her father, a man named Salvatore Guarino, had been a customs clerk for the Bourbon dynasty. Fdrí’s grandmother took him in, cleaned him up, and took care of him. But Fdrí cried for a long time. In 1920 his father was transferred back to Naples and he and Filomena came to live in an apartment in the same building on Via Casanova with their second-born son, Antonio, one floor above Funzella. But they didn’t want their firstborn back. They left him downstairs at his grandmother’s. They said it was as much to protect the porcelain figurines that Filumena had graciously placed around the house as the life of Antonio: Fdrí’s displays of fraternal affection were so violent that the baby, who was horrified by him, screamed “Gnòppete!” each time his brother came near, as if he was a Calabrian bogeyman. What torment!

As he told his story, he shook his head bitterly and continued to sketch. No, he said, the problem wasn’t Antonio or the porcelain figurines. The problem was a different one entirely. The problem was that Don Mimí had perceived the child’s vocation to become something greater, something more. He realized that his son was practically an incarnation of a “plus” sign, and this irritated him. In that + sign, he perceived the cross that he—or anyone close to his son—would have to bear in order to keep up with his childhood antics, that artéteca of his, a word of the south used to describe both the arthritic pains of the elderly and squirrely children. So Don Mimí washed his hands of his son and left him with Nonna Funzella, without worrying how the child might suffer the exile from his family or the nostalgia for the mud of Reggio Calabria, that clay-rich sludge which was so perfect for making dolls and effigies.

Gradually, Fdrí surrendered. “But a true need, Mimí,” my father instructed me at this point in the story, “never stops making itself felt.” The child stopped crying, wiped his nose on his sleeve, and started looking around for other ways he could use his eyes, hands, and breath. He started by drawing with bits of gesso he peeled off the plaster walls (white on black) and then with charcoal gathered from the ashes of the hearth (black on white). He rediscovered, even there in that apartment on Via Casanova, the sensation of sight slipping into his fingertips, his breath growing heavy, sputtering, and snapping into flame the way blackthorn catches fire under a cauldron with a whoosh.

Squiggles and swirls and decorative lines soon connected objects and dreams on nonna Funzella’s door, the wall outside the apartment, along the landing, down the stone stairwell. When people walked past, they had to climb over the sailor-turner’s son, and would often stop to say “bravo.” Those bravos stayed with him, helped sharpen his eye, made his sight keener, his hand more precise. His marks spread across the walls like a creeper. Numbers, too. He copied Arabic numerals from the calendar and learned them on his own, precociously, at the age of two: 1, 2, 3, 1920, 1921, 1922. His hand saw them and he copied them out onto Nonna Funzella’s dark door. She was pleased with them, or maybe just happy that something kept the whiny, fussy child busy. Not only did she not erase them, she went and bought him colored chalks and paints; as long as he was good, that he didn’t bother anyone, especially not Filomena, mark my words.

But he didn’t always know how to control himself. His hand wanted nothing more than to leave signs that went up the stairwell to the third floor, to spread his colors as far as his parents’ front door. And when he did manage to sneak inside their house, he’d demolish his mother’s porcelain figurines. While I’m sure it got him into a lot of trouble at the time, when my father talks about it, while he’s sitting at the easel, he only mentions the joys of childhood, how pleasant it was to explore the world around him, his curiosity, and the mysteries that lay in darkened rooms in summer. “I only wanted to caress them a tiny bit,” he says to justify himself.

Apparently he caressed them ferociously: the fear of getting caught mixing with a disregard for other people’s belongings that would later become his norm. He ran in, picked up an object, smashed it into a thousand pieces, and ran out. When he managed to get away from his mother and the heel of her shoe and run crying to Funzella, his head pounding, his grandmother would say, “Fdrícchie, don’t worry. Filumena’s shoe is moving something in your brain. You should be happy, it’s why you’re so intelligent.” Rusinè never quite agreed with her husband’s grandmother on this; years later, she modified the woman’s interpretation with her own, more pessimistic one. “His mother messed up his brain by hitting him so many times with her shoe. That’s how he got so crazy.”

 

My father took his wife’s occasional accusations of insanity as a compliment. In his eyes, the craziness attributed to him by common people was actually a sign of genius. “For you I might be nuts,” he said in dialect, “but actually I’m a born painter.” His childhood provided a solid basis for this argument, where “born” signified that he hadn’t learned it from anyone, there was no trace of artistic tendency in his family of origin, and that art had come to him either from nothing or directly from the padreterno.

Certainly not from his father. His father, for fuck’s sake, only ever humiliated him. “You were always a shithead and you always will be a shithead,” he used to say. His parents had never understood him, he said, they always treated him like an odd child, to be kept under close watch. And not just them, to tell the truth. Not even his Nonna Funzella trusted him, and she loved him deeply. According to her, Fdrí had quicksilver running through him; he was mercurial, and it wasn’t just a case of artéteca. So she sought to limit his range of movement. She barely tolerated having him in the house, and constantly sent him out on the landing where, to keep him quiet, she let him colorfully scribble the numbers, days, months and passing years on her door: 1923, 1924.

When Don Mimí crossed his path, either going upstairs or coming down, he’d merely climb over the child without the least bit of interest. He was concerned only with getting his two packs of Macedonia a day, a stack of newspapers, and a little money for gambling: cards, horses, and dogs. For Don Mimí—my father said bitterly—life was all about the excitement of peeking at his cards, of seeing whether they were good or bad, if he won or lost. Out of love for that thrill, he was always on the hunt for money. Before the fascists started running everything, he used to go and play down at the socialist party headquarters, in Piazza Principe Umberto. Once, he lost his entire pay there. He got to his feet, calmly said goodbye, and walked out. Then he collapsed, fell down the stairs, and broke his teeth. The accident gave him an even angrier expression than the one he naturally had. He came and went in silence. At the very most, when he noticed his son playing on the landing outside of Funzella’s house, he’d say, “One day I’m going to make you clean all that up.”

Pfft, clean it up. Funzella loved those numbers, my father said, sighing with heartfelt gratitude. Initially he drew them in white chalk, and he kept getting better and better: 1925, 1926, 1927. Later he drew frames around them in red and orange, and shaded them with yellow, green, blue, and purple, going back to orange through red. This went on until 1931, the year his childhood masterpiece was interrupted.

“It came out so well,” he explained to me (but not in 1953, when I was afraid that the demijohn might slip out of my hand because I had lost all sensation from kneeling without moving for so long, but in 1997, when we celebrated his eightieth birthday in a bleak and funereal mood). “That door, Mimí, was Pop Art before Pop Art even existed.”

As an elderly man, with all those years behind him, he often expressed regret at not having saved that door. “Today,” he’d say in a mix of sarcasm and bitterness, “it would fit right in at the Biennale, next to the works by that shithead”—that shithead! he’d say again for good measure if he saw a hint of irritation in my expression—“of Andy Warhol.”

 

At times, when he mentioned the names of famous artists like Oldenburg or Rothko or anyone else, his swagger would give way to glumness, which made me glum, too. “If only my father had encouraged me,” he said. He never complained about Don Mimí’s cultural shortcomings, he complained about his overall shortsightedness. But then he’d sneer with revenge and go right back to talking about the early signs of his vocation, of the happy period when he was all but forgotten at Nonna Funzella’s, who, in order not to have to deal with him, also let him spend time on the street-facing balcony.

“You can only stay out there a little while,” Funzella would say but then would forget about him. What an amazing place the balcony was. My father used to say that he trained his eye on that balcony for at least two years of his life, sometimes trying to squeeze his head in between the bars in order to see better, sometimes sitting on a pile of flowerpots to watch life go by on the street below. He was out there in rain and shine, he was out there constantly, he wanted me to believe.

I was mesmerized. That image of an extended period of explorative solitude, interrupted not even by a change in season, stayed with me. I lost myself in a reverie about a child who’d been forgotten on the balcony, exposed to the wind and elements in both hot and cold temperatures, with the plants next to him either flourishing or dropping their leaves, the soil in terracotta pots freezing over, the nightingale with burnt-out eyes (the work of a cruel Calabrian) singing in his gilded cage, the yellow Christmas melons hanging over the edge and ripening, and the sea breeze, which Fdrí tried to grasp in his hands, continuing to blow, pulling the seasons along, those with perfumes that waft on the air, those that turn your nose red, those that burn your skin, and those that soak you through with their sudden squalls.

The sorbs change color and their flesh sweetens, he prods them with grandfather Angelo Pariota’s walking stick, and eats them when they’re ripe; or if they’re bitter, he spits them onto the fruit and vegetable shop display below that belongs to Maria, who’s an expert fryer—her deep skillet positioned over an open flame just a few steps away from the tram stop—and cooks up so many ciurilli, scagliozzi, pastacresciute, and panzerotti that people call her Maria the panzarottara.

Odors blend with colors, colors blend with sounds. Fdrí’s eyes take in the perfectly visible labels and signs that advertise the numbers and prices of products to the public, signs that have been drawn by skilled craftsmen and tucked into the large cloth sacks of dried chick peas, favas, and lentils situated in front of the store belonging to Ferdinando ’o casadduoglio, who also sells cheese and real Bitonto oil, which he measures out with a cast-iron cup: however much you want, one-tenth, two-tenths, whatever you want.

The child sees, smells, and listens. It’s 1920 and he’s three years old, no more than that. From the balcony he looks down and admires the radiant numbers on the price tags—did he learn how to do the numbers that appeared on that avant-garde door from these?—and the bluish paper they use to wrap up pasta, the chrome-yellow swish of handfuls of chick peas, the smoky scent of lye, potash, and soap for sale in the piazza in either liquid or chunks, created to great acclaim by Mira Lanza.

Fdrí can concentrate for long periods of time, and he uses this skill when he manages to get his hands on some white butcher’s paper (which is rare, with what meat and salami cost) and from the balcony on Via Casanova he draws, in charcoal, Maria the panzarottara, Consiglia the milkmaid with her cow that produces frothy milk, the priests from Santa Maria delle Grazie parish, donkeys either passing by or waiting, and even the zeppelin that appeared in the skies in 1920 or 1921, striking fear into the people on the streets below.

Every so often, when she remembers, Nonna Funzella sticks her head out on the balcony as if to supervise him and pretends to be impressed by his drawings. “Well done, Fdrícchie, that’s Titina, isn’t it?” she says. “Yes! It’s Titina,” he replies with pleasure; the real Titina wears a red skirt; he made hers out of a tomato peel. “And that one? That’s Sarina isn’t it?” Nonna Funzella asks. Of course it’s Sarina. The actual Sarina has golden blond hair; he managed to create a similar color by using the skin from a yellow bell pepper, which he stuck to her circle-shaped head.

He lists his miracles to indicate his genius and the incredible life that lies ahead. Even Don Carmeniello the house-painter, father of Don Federico the cop, once happened to see the child’s work and said, “Those aren’t just little kid splatters.” Not just finger painting. Not just doodles or scribbles or crap that falls out of the sky like bird shit onto a clean shirt, onto a blank page, soiling it. Don Carmeniello makes an unsettling pronouncement that day; he wants to be clear with the kid. “Fdrí,” he says, “this stuff has the dignity of art.” My father goes on to use that expression in his stories, he heard it with his own ears—the dignity of art—and it’s followed by the objective comment, “You’re an artist!” which, in turn, is followed by a prophetic one: “Yep, you’re going to be a real artist one day, Fdrícchie.”

Don Carmeniello was not alone in his observations. Even the neighbors upstairs, Donna Graziella and her children, said so when they peered over their balcony and watched the child-artist at work. These were people who knew what hard work was, they cut leather and made patterns for shoemakers from home. The whole family admires him; they encourage Fdrí from one flight up, leaning out over the railing, and hollering with amazement. Donna Graziella, Aldo, Zaccaria, and even Elisa, who’s sixteen years old and goes out at night with her brothers and friends to the local cabaret dressed in the latest Charleston style, wearing a silk skirt with fringe that doesn’t even reach her knees and her blond hair cut in a pageboy.

They encourage him by giving him the gift of a tin that contains a special kind of glue that they use on leather, together with some strips of shiny paper of various tonalities and colors. “Bravo!” they call out to him in harmony. And the child runs away into his imagination and disappears into his hands, into the charcoal and glue and strips of colored paper. He starts to draw and then carefully tears the shiny paper into strips (no one wants to give him scissors, not even Funzella), trying hard to be precise, and then he tries it again and again with all the tonalities and colors without ever getting tired of that extraordinary game, until he finally obtains, like a god in heaven and on earth, the effect that he really and truly thinks is good.

Only then does he stop. People look down from their balconies and exclaim how marvelous. These are people who are used to struggling, but in those circumstances, when they see what beautiful creations young Fdrí has made, they feel invigorated. He, at feeling their collective consensus, freezes, his arms bent at the elbows, his hands in tight fists, his whole body a painful and happy contraction of muscles.

Relaxing and returning to himself is a slow process, and it leaves him with an irritating sense of disorientation, ill at ease with everyday life, and the need to start over.

Via Casanova is a wide street, a bedlam of both living and dead material that he can use to make his mark. The precocious child trains his eye to notice things quickly: a tram, the sidewalk, the tracks, the streetlight, even the zeppelin. He sees the outline of the city, with its variety of edifices: churches, public housing, the sooty nail factory, the rows of five-story complexes that were built on Corso Garibaldi during the Risanamento phase, the prison of St. Francesco with its inmates standing behind the barred windows, the low-cost Magazzini clothes warehouse, and the dark cavernous building that looked out onto Via Cavalcanti. There are curved and straight lines and perfect circles drawn with the care of Giotto. With his head tipped to one side, he can capture the variety of the world from the balcony as far as the great curve in the distance, Corso Novara, and beyond, all the way to the narrow-gage tracks of the so-called Nola–Baiano line.

People and things. The two-story electrical tram that connects the towns of the province with the city, that zips through the streets, and almost crashes into the balcony. It feels like he can reach out and touch it. The child feels its vibrations, how it lacerates space, how it musses people’s hair and sends up gusts of heat from the deep-fryer, smells of cacio cheese and oil from Don Ferdinando ’o casadduoglio, flies from Don Angelo ’o chianchiere, smoke from the kitchens of Don Ferdinando il cantiniere.

But when the tram moves off into the distance, things settle back down. The balcony railings stop thrumming, the hot metal sheen of the normal-gage tracks fades, the roadbed reappears with its metal tee beams and side drains, which fill with rain when it pours and then run off into puddles along the sidewalk, which gets trodden by priests, donkeys, and even Consiglia the milkmaid, who pulls her cow with its heavy udders by a rope tied around its neck.

Handsaws scream as workers cut slabs from blocks of marble that glisten white in the distance, just below the public housing building and practically next door to the enormous old factory where steel nails are made. The metal teeth grind through the stone, raising white dust. The blade goes back and forth, turning a fiery red, with a worker periodically cooling it down by spraying water on it, making it sizzle and steam. This goes on until ding! ding!—a jolt runs through Fdrí—the railroad signal for the departure of the Nola–Baiano train sounds, not far from where the stonecutters are working. The signal changes from red to green, and the train sets off. The plume of smoke from the steam engine gets farther and farther away, the black shadow of the little train running along the gorge, which was dug parallel to Strada Vecchia, with its road of beaten earth known as Poggioreale. Trailing behind the locomotive, the train cars whip through the buildings of the city, hurrying after the grey smoke from the engine, gradually turning into a string of dark yarn that gets pulled taut between one road and another, between one alley and another. It runs all the way to the level crossing on Via Casanova, all the way to the tram stop that then leads back out to the provinces, where, at a certain point, it seems to the child that it competes with the electrical tram; and instead it turns brusquely to the right, following the wide curve all the way to Corso Garibaldi.

And finally, there’s the gas streetlight. The glass and metal fixture sits just beyond the balcony, right where the railing is missing a post. An inert eye during the day, it comes to life at dusk. Every evening it gets lit by a mustachioed man whom Fdrí assists by reaching perilously through the gap in the railings and opening the little door of the fixture so the lamplighter can fill it with his flame, thereby illuminating the shiny tracks, the Christmas melons, the sorb fruit, the blind nightingale, and the child’s own eyes.

And then the reds and blues dart to life, carrying with them the odor of gas. Moths fly about crazily then fall with soft thuds and die. Shadows are born, but not the kind that shift and stretch during the sunlight hours; these remain the same, all night long.

Fdrí observes, imitates, and learns. The joy of his art begins there, on that balcony. Unfortunately, one day Don Mimí suddenly appears, swearing and blaspheming—Mannaggiamarònn, mannaggiopatatèrn! Cazzoncefàstacriatúraccaffòra?—and angrily weaves metal wire between each one of the railings. As much as the cacacàzz screams and tries to tear and kick it off, the metal fence impedes his path to the light fixture forever.

 

I made my way back up Corso Garibaldi to Via Casanova. I could not recall a single happy story of my father’s where his own father was involved. As a child, I wondered whether fathers were naturally forbidden to spend time with their children when they were happy. Perhaps—I thought—moments of joy are a mother’s prerogative, or else grandparents’, sometimes maybe an uncle’s, but never a father’s. Sometimes Don Mimí’s role was to step in like Death and deny the child what brought him most joy.

I had a headache from the heat, I was tired, my good mood had vanished. I bumped into people distractedly, brushing up against snippets of conversation: it’s too hot, there’s going to be an earthquake; somebody was pickpocketed in Piazza Carlo III; maybe it’ll rain tomorrow; two ATAN bus drivers were almost killed; the stench by Porta Capuana is unbearable. As I was distractedly walking by, at a certain point I bumped into someone who was so shocked, he jumped. “Mannaggiamarònn!” he exclaimed. I apologized numerous times, the man nodded as if to say it’s alright, but before walking off he chided me in dialect. “Just watch where you’re going.”

I had been watching but could only see what was going on in my head: a boy holding a demijohn, kneeling in the middle of a room; a thirty-six-year-old man intent on drawing and talking about himself; a child on a balcony on Via Casanova, the same road I was walking along now. What happened to that big building where Funzella’s apartment had been? I couldn’t see a trace of it; that road conserved so few signs of the past. No more family-run shops, the artisans were gone. Maybe the time had come to take my father’s words at face value. Enough of this back and forth. There was no balcony that stood as a testament to the play of light from the flickering gas streetlamp. I had to entrust Federí’s childhood and stories to his adult voice, and let him creatively and scrappily choose the nouns and verbs he wanted to highlight his grand achievements. My father would’ve been disappointed to hear that I was trying to tell the story by relying on actual places, facts, and dates. “Come, sit down, I’ll tell you everything you need to know,” he would’ve said immediately. You want to know where Don Ferdinando ’o casadduoglio’s was located? You want to know what shop was next door, what their wares smelled like, the customs and habits of the vendors and their customers? You want to hear the story about the carabinieri officers? Did I ever tell you that one? All of it? And then he’d jump right in, adding a wealth of details. One morning, he’d begin, as if it was the first time he was telling the story and not the hundredth, he walked into Don Ferdinando’s cantina and saw the bright-colored uniforms of a few carabinieri of gigantic stature. “Those figures, Mimí, had a huge impact on me, even if I was only three years old,” he’d say to get me interested. They were one of the most important steps in the formation of his childhood genius. And that’s pretty much all that mattered to him.

It was a Sunday in May, 1920. His grandfather, Antonio Parota, the husband of Nonna Funzella, turned to him and said, “Fdrí, you want to come with me to get a liter of Gragnano?” The surprise invitation pleased the child enormously. The sun was warm, the air smelled good, and he held his grandfather’s hand. Don Antonio, whom Nonna Funzella sometimes called Briacone for how drunk he got on weekends and festivities, carefully made his way across the street to o’ casadduoglio with a Toscano cigar in mouth, grandson in one hand, and empty fiasco of wine in the other. Grandfather and grandson (naturally, joyful moments never have fathers as tutelary deities) walked past the leather tanning warehouse, past the barber shop run by Don Giuvà and his assistant Don Luigino, and finally came to the two entrances that led to the below-street-level cantina, a space that smelled of the barrels of aging wine that lined the walls beyond the tables.

The child and Don Antonio walked in. All it took was a moment’s glance, a fraction of a second, and nothing else existed beyond what Fdrí saw on the wall behind the bar where the white wine was kept on tap. Two enormous carabinieri officers. Looking straight at him. The tall, flame-like red feathers on their military caps went all the way up to the ceiling. They both kept their left hands on their sabers, which hung across their chests in white holsters. Their right hands held glasses of wine to their lips. They were stiff, as identical as twins, and each one was outlined in black. In the background, a long row of wine barrels and tables where men sat calmly drinking.

He never forgot those two figures. Whenever my father told the story, even as an old man, he grew emotional. He had seen his fair share of carabinieri from the balcony. He had studied their uniforms at length and compared them with the less elegant ones of the royal guards. But there they stood in front of him in a gigantic format with painted faces, painted mustaches, painted uniforms, painted sabers, painted plumes: proof that other people out there looked at the world and took ownership of it through the eyes in their fingertips, too. For the first time ever, he said with a touch of emotion, he felt that life is beautiful only when it can be painted.

Sure, the person who had painted the mural of the two carabinieri, wine barrels, tables, and drinkers on the large cantina wall—he added with a critical air, when he was an already experienced artist who knew how to judge better than a child could—didn’t really know what he was doing. The anonymous painter was just some handyman from the neighborhood, a fellow who got by doing odd jobs like that. Briacone, his grandfather—a man who knew a thing or two about cantinas—explained to him that the mural had not only been done to embellish the wall but to communicate, as was the custom, that in Don Ferdinando’s osteria people respected the law, that only non-belligerent people were allowed to drink there, that wine was meant to be consumed in good cheer and that’s all.

“You see,” he pointed out so that I’d understand the complexity and importance of art. “An artist says so much with his work when he paints, even without realizing it.” But then he’d pull a long face and start to point out the painter’s ineptitude: the black outline, a wrong use of perspective, a stiffness in the figures, the similarity of the two men. And yet it was evident that the first painted scene he witnessed as a child had a greater effect on him that any real-life one that he had observed from the balcony. He went on and on about it, he even wrote about it 1991, in his notebooks. “From that moment on, the words ‘cantina’ and ‘cantiniere’ always made me think of carabinieri officers, not cellars or wine.”

In other words, it had such a powerful impression on him that it was hard to say exactly what the consequences were. Now it’s meaningless to even try and understand. The point was that, sometime later, Fdrí broke out in pox—but the good pox, well, no pox is ever good, but these were the ones that Nonna Funzella called “the black pox,” or at least my father remembers her calling them that, but the actual term was Asian pox, which meant they were exotic, and so closer to mother nature although still a problem—and came down with a dangerously high fever and started to hallucinate. In his delirium, Funzella said later, deeply shaken by her grandson’s illness, he saw the two enormous carabinieri standing in front of the barber’s shop. Somehow they had come unfastened from the wall of the osteria and made their way out into the street and now they stood staring up at him, their heads bobbing on their necks: two of them, four of them, ten, their eyes, noses, and mouths multiplying and warping as if they were alive, as if they were painted on the expanding and contracting bellows of a concertina.

 

Via Casanova and its surroundings had a hold on him and made their way into his visions, dreams, and even hallucinations. Fdrí was young, four years old at the most, but growing quickly in both intelligence and sensitivity. He studied his father’s behavior. If his father read the paper, the child wanted to sit in exactly the same position and pretend to read. But his father didn’t want him around. He was protective of his belongings and didn’t want the child to touch his newspapers. So Fdrí would sit off to one side and observe him. Over time, all that observing taught him to read, even when the writing was upside down and backwards.

The inhabitants of the building on Via Casanova were proud to have a child who was not only a precocious artist, but also a reader, in their midst. The turner, however, couldn’t for the life of him figure out how to get that pretentious firstborn child out of the way. “That little shit better not touch my newspapers. There’ll be trouble if he does,” he’d grumble. But Fdrí would touch them anyway, and shouting and threats ensued.

One day, Nonna Funzella, whose nerves had also been worn thin by the child, came up with a solution. “He’s so intelligent we should send him to private school.” And even though Donna Filomena was extremely moody, even though she regularly hit the child on the head with her heel, she also intuited that he was gifted, and she managed to convince her husband to send him to a school located in Piazza Carlo III, in the enormous Palazzo Salsi, across the street from the Albergo dei Poveri, the poorhouse.

The school was run by Maestro Umberto Piantieri who, for nine lire a month, agreed to find a place for Fdrí. It was a long walk from Via Casanova to school, and my father recalled every single detail of it. He spoke about it as if the bars of the balcony where he had spent so much of his early years had dissolved and he finally managed to descend into the real world. Funzella—his voice cracking with joy—took him to school each morning. They walked hand in hand, breathing in the scent of the perfume factory, past the cemetery (which his grandmother called the Protestant graveyard), past the Donvito wallpaper factory (which was called the money factory because once there had been a mint there), past the bicycle store that smelled of rubber, and very slowly past the cookie factory so that they could taste the aromas that emanated from it.

When Sant’Alfonso de’ Liguori church came into sight, Funzella crossed herself and told Fdrí to do so, too. The child obeyed but he was distracted. What caught his attention were the colored shapes and words on the posters on the walls. He sounded them out as best as he could and associated colors with the letters, without knowing a thing about Rimbaud or his sonnet about vowels.

At first things didn’t go too well at school. It was a grim place. The teacher was unkind and not encouraging, my father said. Actually she didn’t give a flying fuck that he knew how to do things and she treated him like a bratty child. He cried and didn’t want to stay there; he couldn’t stand the fact that they didn’t acknowledge his gifts. One day an inspector from the Ministry of Education came to check on them, the type of person who’s tough on teachers but kind with pupils. The inspector wanted to see what such a young child could do and was surprised to learn that he knew how to draw, paint, read, and write far better than the other children not only in first grade, but even in third. The inspector was amazed and called for Maestro Piantieri. He then ordered the teacher to take especially good care of Fdrí. Piantieri obeyed with pleasure. He scolded the teacher for not pointing out the young pupil’s exceptional skills and focused on the child himself, swiftly administering end-of-year examinations and moving him up to second grade.

When my father spoke about Maestro Piantieri, his affection for the man was evident. He described him as patient, watchful, kind, and a great admirer of Fdrí’s natural Italian genius. But Piantieri was especially impressed with the speed with which Fdrí could draw and paint anything at all. For example, if he saw a dog on his way to school, as soon as he got to class, he’d dip his pen into the metal inkwell and draw a dog. Or, if he saw some graffiti that showed a bundle of twigs, as soon as he got to class, he’d replicate the fasces perfectly, together with the “long live fascism” slogan that appeared alongside it. Piantieri encouraged him. Bravo, he said.

The most gratifying episode took place one day when, on his way home from school, he noticed some graffiti that showed a repeated series of heads, all of the same person, one after the other, in black on the grey wall. His grandmother, who had gone to pick him up at school, realized that the child was interested. “Do you want to see how they do it? Look,” she said.

Not far away a group of teenagers stood with a pail of black paint, a brush, and a perforated zinc plate. They held the plate up to the wall and brushed it with the paint. Then they removed the plate and that person’s face remained on the wall. Cazzo—my father exclaimed as he told the story—seeing that had a major impact on me.

When he got home, he immediately went and told Don Mimí what he had seen, and then asked his father whose head that was. Don Mimí replied curtly, without the least bit of satisfaction: “A shithead named Musulline.” And that’s it. The turner was usually a man of few words; for Musulline and his comrades he had even less to say. They were either schiattamuorti or becchini. Undertakers or gravediggers. That’s what they were.

Fdrí was disappointed and couldn’t get that black-grey portrait that he’d seen on the wall out of his mind. He couldn’t resist, he had to draw it, even if the man was a shithead. But since he couldn’t do it at home, afraid that his father would get angry, the next day he drew it at school in his math notebook.

Maestro Piantieri noticed it while he was walking between the desks. He stopped. There was a long and amazed silence. Piantieri congratulated him warmly. “That’s beautiful,” he said. He wanted Fdrí to give it to him as a gift and he showed it to everyone: colleagues, friends, and relatives, and he even said he would frame it. Apparently, he did—my father happily recalled as an old man—but he didn’t keep it for himself. He gave it to the honorable Mussolini when he came to Naples to give a speech in Piazza Plebiscito. Maybe Mussolini even hung it on the wall of his office in Palazzo Venezia.

 

My father had a stellar career, in other words. From a river bed in Reggio Calabria in 1918 to the portrait of Musulline in 1922, at the tender age of five. What other great things did the future hold for him?

Maestro Piantieri talked to everyone about the child’s extraordinary talents. Fdricchiè knew not only how to draw, color, read, and write but he could also hold his own in a conversation about art, showing a precocious critical spirit matched by equally precocious skills.

One day, the story went, Piantieri brought an oil painting to class by an artist named Colizzi that showed, as the title indicated, Effetti di neve all’alba (Snow at dawn). It was the first oil painting that my father ever saw in what would be a very long life and, then and there, it had a strong and positive impression on him. But after observing the painting carefully, he noticed endless problems with it and started critiquing it and its mistakes, revealing the weaknesses of Colizzi, the painter. Piantieri, who was beside himself with amazement, telephoned Don Mimí right away. “This child must immediately go to art school.”

Don Mimí showed up grudgingly. His presence was like a deathly illness to any and all possible gratification or happiness that the child might have felt. The teacher showered the child with praises and listed all his merits to the father: he was the best in arithmetic, he wrote well, he could hold a tune, he had an ear for music, and he had even drawn a beautiful portrait of the honorable Mussolini. Nothing. Don Mimí didn’t give a fuck, especially about the last thing. As soon as they got home, he announced his verdict. “Your teacher’s a shithead! Does art school put food on the table?” From that moment on, he started to wonder out loud, to a public made up primarily of Filumena, “Is Fdrí better than me?” Before his wife could butt in, he’d answer his own question. “No, he’s not. So he can be a worker, too. After all, what’s so bad about being a worker?”

At this point, my father, who was sitting at the easel and drawing, would look up and explain. “If someone knows only how to be a worker, Mimí, there’s really nothing wrong with it. But if someone has another destiny, if there are all the signs that point to something different, what the hell does ‘What’s so bad about…’ even mean?” It didn’t mean a thing. It was just a way for his father to send him off to work at a young age and pocket the money that his firstborn made so that he could squander it on cards or at the dog races.

That’s how Don Mimí was. He didn’t want to see or hear a thing. He had perfect sight and hearing and was an intelligent man. He could’ve said, “Cazzo, would you look at the son I’ve gone and created.” Instead, my father pointed out with deep suffering that his own father stubbornly insisted on digging his son’s grave. He was a monster, a forerunner of all the other monsters that would appear in his future: damn spineless scurnacchiati railroad managers, presumptuous nouveau riche, and shithead, idiot painters who stole his important exhibition prizes away from him.

 

I leaned up against an iron railing that functioned as something of a parapet over a raised mound in the cobblestones. “Is this the Casanova bridge?” I asked a youngish man who was walking briskly by with eyes downcast, mainly to hear the sound of my own voice.

The stranger turned out to be very nice. He said yes, and went on to explain clearly and knowledgeably that behind me, where there was now a ditch, there used to be a canal that would carry run-off rain down to the Arenaccia. The bridge went over it, he said, but bridge is too grand a word for what it was, it was never a real bridge. “How do you know all this?” I asked him. “I studied it at university,” he said with a laugh.

I observed old Corso Novara, sliced in two by the elevated train, and continued on toward Piazza Nazionale and Via Poggioreale. I meandered up and down and across the streets and piazzas that linked my adolescence with that of my father. For example, he used to say that he met up with his friends in Piazza Nazionale, and decades later, that’s where I met up with my friends, too. In reality, though, the only similarity that existed between us was in the words we used, that we met up with friends in those places, and nothing more. What did my adolescence share with his? Studying is, above all, a show of faith in language: whether it’s knowing about bridges, knowing how to whine and complain, or about making a mark to describe people and things, it’s always a tool for making the center hold. Studying gives a person the illusion of continuity, cause and effect, an event and its consequences, syllogisms. All you really have to do is grab one end of the thread and tug on it to unravel the knot. Something that was never true will soon start to seem it.

My father talked a lot about the importance of school and studying. The urge I feel to study comes from him. In everything he said, in all his chatter, whether aggressive or heartfelt, there was always the seed of regret of not having been able to study enough, which was then quickly followed by a harsh critique of the inept people who taught with neither substance nor imagination. He’d gladly spar with anyone who had gone to high school or university. He wanted to face off with them and prove that he knew more than they, or at least that he knew how to make more out of the little he knew better than anyone who had completed high school or university.

As a young man I didn’t quite understand. One day he’d say he had graduated high school, another day that he had not. He was capable of talking about all sorts of subjects, both in theory and practice. To my mother’s great chagrin, sometimes he even went out on a limb and said that he had a university degree. This confusing situation was a source of embarrassment for me for years on end: I didn’t know how to define him to my friends. Then, gradually, Federí stepped back and, as he got older, preferred to admit that he had neither a high school diploma nor a university degree. But he only did that so that he could inveigh more effectively against his own father.

It was all Don Mimí’s fault, he said. When his genius son reached the age of ten, the turner decided to send him off to work in France with a brother of his who had emigrated. But he encountered strong opposition from both Nonna Funzella and Filomena. And since he feared his wife’s brand of drama—true manifestations of rage with no limits, because Filumè could be dangerous both to herself and others—he resigned himself temporarily to enrolling his son at the Casanova vocational school: eight hours of classes a day, a taste of factory work to come.

At that point, Federí usually opened a parentheses. “You, however, will go to university. I will not behave with you the way my father did with me. You will be able to become whatever you want: a railroad engineer, whatever. I will not stand in your way.” Listening to him, I sensed that I actually would’ve preferred some kind of opposition. I confusedly intuited that behind his desire for me to become “whatever you want” lay his need for me to do something deeply gratifying for him, such as become a railroad engineer. And so I was trapped by the fear of not meeting his expectations; I ended up envying him his father who obstructed his path at every turn, which then made it easy for him to say, “It was all my father’s fault.”

But he didn’t realize it. The parentheses would close, and he’d go on. “My father wanted me to do grunt work.” It was thanks only to Filomena’s dramatic tirades, which were witnessed and remembered by the entire building, that he managed to wriggle out of going to work after his apprenticeship. Don Mimí gave in and sent his son to the Alessandro Volta institute to get a degree as a specialized machinist but did everything he could to make his son’s school life difficult: he paid his school taxes late, never purchased him the books he needed, and tried to get him to fail or be held back or expelled.

At that point of his life, my father’s stories, which were generally so colorful, became muted. Even later on, in the 1990s, and in his notebooks, a veil fell over his blustery stories of artistic precociousness, his lively tales of self-celebration faded, the desire to constantly reinvent himself from head to toe dried up. It was as if for a number of years he kept his genius inside, and, feeling deep humiliation, decided to silence it.

Sure, if the opportunity arose, he wouldn’t hold back from talking about the time that he impressed a painter who was copying masterpieces at the Museo di Capodimonte; he spoke of that encounter as if the two of them were Cimabue and Giotto. But he did it joylessly. He preferred talking about his first romantic interludes or his friends when he was a teenager or his boxing or his exceptional skiing skills, which he developed in the railroad militia. All his value as an artist, which had exploded onto the scene as a young child, suddenly grew dormant. Did he continue to draw or paint at the age of twelve, thirteen, fifteen or eighteen? Did he continue to garner praise for his talent? It’s hard to say. There was a gap between 1927 and 1935, the year his father won out and forced him to leave the Alessandro Volta institute without receiving a diploma, despite Filomena’s wailing and screaming. No art school, no vocational school, no academic degree. That’s what Don Mimí did to him.

“You should be grateful to him,” Nonna Nannina once interjected. “He let you stay in school until you were eighteen.”

I recall the heavy silence that fell after she uttered those words. I was aware that even my mother disapproved of Nonna Nannina voicing her opinion, which she did rarely. It was as if my grandmother were pointing out a discrepancy in his story, as if she was reminding her son-in-law that while Don Mimí surely had his flaws, he had paid for his son’s schooling for a dozen years.

Her silence extended like a slow sigh until Nannina herself broke the silence. “Me, I had to send my son Peppino to work.” And with that, Federí’s jaw dropped in shock. “Are you really comparing Peppino with me? Because your son is a shithead.”

 

The paper on which he sketched, which he held steady with his left hand, lay across a large board that rested on his crossed legs. He sat with great composure, his back to the window. I hear him speaking softly. “At the age of eighteen, Mimí, my father forced me to take an entrance exam for a job on the railroad, and that’s how I ended up in that grime and filth, always one step away from death.” When he talks about the beginning of his life on the railroad he speaks in a particularly dramatic way. I can’t separate the significance of his words from a general sense of physical pain. Maybe it was a blending of different kinds of suffering: that of the young artist forced by his father to work as an electrical repairman with my own, a boy who had been compelled, out of love for that large-scale painting that he’ll go on to call The Drinkers, to pose as the apprentice, servant to the master builder and overseer, knee bones crushed against the hard floor, the straw of the demijohn digging into the flesh of my arm.

“I had to do inspections and repairs on the electric locomotives,” he continued. He was forced to squeeze into narrow, foul places. His overalls were always lurid with rancid grease, his body covered in it. After work there was no way to wash up, there weren’t enough tubs or sinks at the depot, all they could do was rub their hands with oil and sand. They could only bathe comfortably on Sundays, when the tubs at the depot were free. And what came out of all that horror? Nothing, not even money. At the end of every month, he’d go to the cashier to sign his chit, the cashier would count out four 100 lire bills and five silver coins, but he didn’t even have time to handle the money before his father would swoop down and whisk his treasure away. It was pointless for him to try and ask to keep part of it. The answer was always, “What do you need money for? What do you need?” Just to be sure, though, out of fear that he wouldn’t go and tell Donna Filumè, he slipped his son a silver 5 lire coin.

Don Mimí confiscated his first three paychecks and kept the money for himself. He didn’t hand over a single lire to Filomena: he told her that new employees were on probation for the first three months and he gambled away the entire amount. First, the man suffocated his artistic vocation. Then, he took away his money. Over the years, he did even more than that. During wartime, Don Mimí even found a way to steal the part of his salary that was destined for Federí’s wife, Rusinè. That socialist screwed every one of them.

Days and years of great hardship passed. The electrical repairmen worked on the locomotives in a large area big enough for thirty iron beasts, protected from the elements by a roof and yet exposed on all sides. The engines were dismantled with the assistance of a rotating platform which, when the work was complete, was used to recompose the machines and reconduct them to the trains that needed to depart. Each locomotive engine was positioned above a pit that was as tall as a man. Resting at the bottom of the pit, which was made of cement, stood a ladder with four steps. That was their workplace.

It was hard to balance on the ladder because it was rickety and the ground itself was slippery with oil and grease. They had to hold onto the locomotive wherever they could, so as not to fall. But even worse was when they had to work on the roof of the train. Under the depot roof ran the high-tension wires for the copper pantographs, two for each train engine. The two pantograph arms usually lay flat, each one having its own command cabins, forward and aft. The personnel in charge was able to maneuver them as needed, using four-bar high-pressure compressed air to raise them up until the slides touched the high tension contact wire, and lowering them by releasing the pressure.

Details such as these were precious to my father to explain to me exactly where my grandfather had forced him to work, to show me what a miracle it was that he didn’t lose his life there. As a matter of fact—and here he started mumbling—an awful accident took place one rainy afternoon in February 1936. He was hard at work deep inside a locomotive that had been assigned to him. Not far off, a twenty-four-year-old fellow named Barca was working on his own locomotive. Barca was an expert and very confident; he knew how to get things done quickly and never wasted any time. In fact, he only turned off the high tension wire when he had to balance the pantograph, which was done by switching it on and checking how much pressure it required to get into place. If Barca had to change the sliders—which was done when the pantograph arms were lowered—he didn’t even switch off the electrical current so as not to waste time. And that’s exactly what he did that day, the rain coming down in buckets. At a certain point, my father had to get out of his pit because he needed some special brushes for the dynamo. He headed toward the warehouse. As he walked by Barca, he saw him standing on the roof of the train, two meters up, struggling to remove a pair of pantograph sliders. It was a dark day, the lighting was dim, and the workshop roof was being hammered by pounding rain. My father had to jump over puddles that had formed on the ground. Suddenly a flame lit up the workshop as bright as day. Federí barely had time to turn around to see what happened when a second blaze lit up the sky, followed by a loud snapping sound. The air turned pink and smelled like burnt flesh; it was hard to see what was going on. Long tongues of fire flared up in the space between the two pneumatic actuators on Barca’s locomotive.

My father ran toward the train immediately. He saw Barca leaning over the actuators amid gusts of steam and flashes of light, as if the young man was soldering something with an oxyhydrogen flame. Then there was a third flash, blinding, followed by the cracking sound of a whip. The high-tension wire had snapped, it flicked through the air and came into contact with Barca’s body.

Federí called for help. A middle-aged worker named Ranauro shouted at him to stay away from the locomotive and then ran to hammer off the lever on the high-tension wire. Barca was already dead when they brought him down. They calculated that he had just finished changing the slider on the pantograph and was about to descend from the roof when he slipped and instinctively reached for the first thing he could: the high-tension wire.

Over the years, a number of people were wounded or killed in the repair depot. I listened to him and imagined that grim place, with its dangerous electrical currents. Once, even my father fell off a locomotive, a drop of two meters. His right hand got bent back all the way up his arm, but luckily someone had been able to yank it back into place.

He told his story without exaggerating. The subject was so worthless to him that he didn’t even try and embellish things as usual. When he talked about the dangers his colleagues found themselves in, he never endowed himself with any kind of salvific role, always admitted to being paralyzed with fear, never showed off or said that he was the fastest to respond. In that somber phase of his life, he was never the most agile or strongest, he was never brilliant. The end of his marvelous childhood had been traumatic and debilitating. The real proof of his strength and intelligence—it seemed to him now—was not getting acclimated to the setting or executing memorable tasks, but getting out of there unharmed, holding on tight to the mane of good fortune and galloping out. He needed to get back to the surface and tap back into the good luck that the bonfires at the feast of St. Anthony the Abbot had illuminated in him, rediscover the ecstatic joy he first felt in the brook in Reggio Calabria, forge his way through the crowds of scum and dabblers who always sought to clip his wings, sit at the easel like he was doing, and work on a piece like The Drinkers despite the fatigue, the lack of space, the lousy models, his family, Rusinè.

 

My computer suddenly crashed. I tried turning it off and on again, but nothing happened. The screen stayed white. For a while I just sat there, depressed, looking at the bright rectangle, reading the words Macintosh Powerbook 145B. For months now, I’ve been pouring my father’s words and manners of speech into this machine, one of the few objects in which he was not interested in solidifying his expertise and never used. Not too long ago, I even playfully thought that this contraption is too modern and elegant and sophisticated to contain words like Fdrí, Asiatic pox, Musulline, pantograph sliders, and even that beat-up mandolin. One day this machine is going to break down. And now that it has, I’m terribly upset about it. How can an electronic memory, which is usually so indiscriminately receptive, refuse to “save” Federí and his language?

I took it to a computer technician right away. The man took one look at the laptop, smiled gently, and said, “Nice machine. But once in a while, sir, you need to update your model. Using this is kind of like taking a road trip in an Alfa Romeo Giulietta. You remember the Giulietta?”

What a relief. This time Federí wasn’t to blame, not even metaphorically. The guilt was my own and that of my computer, which was now, I learned with some surprise, considered old. I had not entrusted the facts about my father to who knows what kind of modern machine, as I believed I had, but to a tool that precisely because of how quickly technology ages was equivalent to the car driven by Zio Attilio the sausage-maker. I had been working on a computer that was the equivalent of a Giulietta, an automobile that was a symbol of wealth back in Federí and Rusinè’s day. Forty years ago, my mother gaily and coquettishly climbed into Zio Attilio’s car when he came over to flaunt his wealth, my father always standing to the side and fidgeting with envy, bitter about being an artist and not being able to possess an automobile. What sense did his miraculous childhood and all its signs and portents have—he’d whine, but in his words—if any old guy, a man who sold deli meats, could possess all kinds of luxurious, modern objects? Zio Attilio didn’t have his vision, his artist’s eye, he wouldn’t have been able to see a damn thing from his balcony, not even with a pair of binoculars. And yet, there he was in his shiny, blue-green Giulietta. Federí seethed. I seethed along with him as I stared at the technician. “But I bought this laptop only three or four years ago.”

The expert got to work on it. “When did you start using a computer?” he asked, trying to make small talk. “In 1985,” I replied. “Are you sure?” he said with a snicker. “Perfectly,” I snapped. “Well, I’m sorry to tell you but, in all this time, you haven’t learned a thing. It’s apparent that this machine has suffered a great deal in your ownership,” he said regretfully. He then made a general comment about how too many people don’t really understand technology, and so on. Eventually, in some roundabout way he even uttered a cliché along the lines of, “In today’s world, when something new comes on the market, it’s already obsolete.”

Most of his rambling meant nothing to me but I was caught by the expression, “in today’s world.” What is today’s world? Did Federí live in today’s world? Is my laptop from today’s world? What about me? What measurable span of time makes up today’s world? Does it mean “now?” Or does it mean “in the past couple of years?” Or does it allude to your whole life, memories and all, until the day you finally close your eyes—both the inward-looking ones and the ones that gaze out—and today’s world comes to an end?

When I went home with my laptop repaired, it occurred to me to try and write using only the imperfetto and the passato prossimo, the two tenses that I love most because of the way the “now” is never over but, at the very most, stationed nearby, like the shades of the dead in scary stories. For a while I tapped away diligently, hoping that sooner or later the imperfetto and passato prossimo would definitively take the place of the passato remoto and the presente, while continuing to grant the future tense its humble role of inducing anxiety, the glimmer of hope. But then I stopped. I went back to using Federí and Rusinè’s syntax. All those words, an astounding number of characters that formed a compendium of facts, places, and periods in time. I am in my house—I wrote—I am on Via Casanova, I am in Piazza Nazionale, I am kneeling on one aching knee so that my father can paint a builder’s apprentice, I am my father himself and my mother, I am even my grandfather, Don Mimí, the turner, who refuses to acknowledge his son’s great talent. I am so many things. And if I press the “delete” key, I said to myself, resorting to the simplistic way I thought about things when I was still an adolescent, I become nothing: nameless, sexless, just a blur on a broken screen.

The thought frightened me. I started typing diligently again. Now I’m in Piazza Nazionale. An inflated condom, identical to the ones the Allied soldiers threw down from the boxes of the Teatro Bellini, bounces down the lurid cobblestone street in the hot wind. From here, and for as long as I believe that I possess a thread that can be unraveled line after line, I will make my way back to the boy kneeling in pain on Via Gemito, and to the father who continues to paint and talk about himself.

 

When I reached the park in Piazza Nazionale, and while looking around for a fountain to cool off, I suddenly decided to add a stop on my itinerary and phoned the city-hall offices. My father, I said in the same way that I introduced myself to the employee in Positano, was a painter. A good one, well known. Some of his paintings are hanging in Palazzo San Giacomo. Would it be possible to see them?

The operator gave me the number of the person in charge of city-owned cultural property, a certain Dr. Guidi. I called the number. “Is this Dr. Guidi?” I asked. Yes, it was she. I went on to explain to her, too, that my father had dedicated his life to art: he was a painter, yes, quite well known; if it was no trouble, I would really like to see his paintings that hung in the town hall. Dr. Guidi asked me if I was sure that my father’s paintings were in Palazzo San Giacomo. No, I said, with my father nothing was ever certain, but I insisted and asked to have a look. “Come tomorrow morning at half past nine and I’ll show you around,” she graciously replied.

Even though I had a pounding headache, I was satisfied. Suddenly, I experienced what my brothers had suggested I do all along: accept the image that Federí wanted to portray of himself, pay homage to it, and behave as though I was going to see his art in a famous gallery. Yes, I was happy. This way, I thought, I’d be able to draw a straight line between the eighteen-year-old boy who had lost all hope and was resigned to not becoming an artist but a worker, and his many works of art from decades later, works that had escaped from Lavinaio, Via Casanova, from Don Mimí’s persecution. I told myself that I’d go to Positano at a later date, when I felt calmer and had clearer intentions.

I walked in the direction of Piazza Carlo III looking for a bus that would take me back to my brother’s house. For a while I felt like a good son, freed from the generations of chains of indentured slavery and conflict. Then, ever so gradually, I went back to feeling like I was still holding the pose, kneeling on the floor in the house on Via Gemito. I felt all the pain of having to stay still for an endless amount of time, I experienced both the fascination and abomination that Federí’s voice inspired in me as he fabricated details that would prove to me just how talented he was while also shedding light on the infinite wrongs he’d suffered. I imagine Rusinè, too, her head tipped to one side as she looked with puzzlement at how her bedsheet had been transformed into a scene from a construction site. I experienced anew all the dismay I felt back then.

When I got on a crowded bus that headed slowly up Santa Teresa degli Scalzi, I realized that my mood and sentiments had changed yet again. I was already regretting the appointment I made with Dr. Guidi. I should’ve just slammed the book shut on the story behind The Drinkers.

 

How long did I hold that position that day? Fifteen minutes, half an hour, an eternity? It’s hard to say. To be honest, I don’t have a clear memory of the passing of time, nor do I feel the need to invent one. I prefer to let my memories amass randomly, the way I have done up until now: the time my father called me over and did a bunch of charcoal sketches of me, the time my mother walked in and announced “Dinner’s ready,” the time that he finally seemed pleased and we really did go and eat, the time he called for me and told me to take up the position again so that he could transfer the sketch of the boy pouring water onto the canvas.

I remember details, phrases, lighthearted moments, and moments of tension, but not in any chronological order. In my mind I see him drawing and then painting, sitting and then standing, the painting is almost done, the painting is still a sketch, on the right of the canvas is a grey blotch to mark the space where my body will be, directly above the builders’ meal, which has already been completed: bread, four tomatoes, and some grapes.

In short, I can’t say anything specific. I only know that the position was very uncomfortable, I know the pain. I can’t rule out that as he glanced at me, intending to capture a kneecap, a big toe, or an elbow, he stopped to ask, “Everything ok, Mimí?” He may well have encouraged me by saying, “Another little bit and then we’re done.” He might have even said something like, “In a few minutes we’ll stop to eat.” But what has stayed in my memory above all is the fatigue of holding the position, a growing sense of inadequacy, and the way he insisted, first earnestly and then with braggadocio, on his successes, his artistic precocity, on the way his father tried so hard to reduce him to being just an ordinary man.

As I tried to stay still, I remember thinking to myself, “What’s so bad about being an ordinary man?” And when I had those thoughts, I suddenly felt like an empty shell, as if the admiration my father urged me to have for him left me with a sense of loss. I can’t find any other words to describe that feeling. It felt like I had lost something because I had paid too much attention to it, like when you’re seduced by something. My fascination with his extreme vitality, a trait of his ever since he was born, devitalized me to the degree that, to this day, I think that I was able to stand as still as a statue for him only because I didn’t have the strength to have a childhood, an adolescence, an existence on a par with his.

There I was: apprentice builder suffering the condition of servant to master. As he talked, the pages of his childhood and his titanic struggle with my grandfather turned as if blown by an invisible breeze. Pain running through each muscle, I scrutinized my few years of life for something equally as powerful but found nothing comparable to those hints of his greatness. This led to a feeling of paucity that sunk its teeth into me and stayed with me my whole life.

And then he’d say, “That’s enough for now,” and interrupt his storytelling. I remember those words perfectly, as if his voice was a cannon shot, the kind they used to use to signal lunch break. Enough for now, he’d say and start to pick up the sheets of paper that were scattered all over the floor, my figure roughly sketched on them.

My limbs felt like they melted with relief. I’d put down the demijohn and stand up straight without even daring to rub my knee, without stretching. And thus would begin his generous praise of my self-discipline, how I never complained. And when we sat down at the table—my grandmother, mother, and brothers all waiting for us, food already served and covered with other plates to keep it warm—he’d start insulting all the other people who had sat for him, especially Zio Matteo and Zio Peppino, who, he recalled, were incapable of sitting still for one single moment. He did it just so that he could turn to my mother and say about me, “But he didn’t even move a millimeter.” He then went on to praise our race—that was the word he used, race, in the sense of bloodline—and with that he meant his family, the one he descended from, but him above all, as the superior example of it. We, as his offspring, promised even greater things. He used me as an example of someone who had skills that other races, especially those on my mother’s side, couldn’t even dream of.

That’s more or less it. Facts and the desire for facts blend together, like words that were actually spoken and words that were merely desired. I’m not even entirely sure if his excitement and good mood really existed. Occasionally he was happy, and I like to think that his happiness derived from how he managed to resolve the pictorial puzzle of the painting. That made me happy, too. My knee was purple and the arm that had been holding the demijohn ached terribly. I’d rub my wrist theatrically so that my mother and grandmother, and in particular my brothers, would appreciate the full extent of my undertaking. I’d look over at my father, who sat there devouring his food and joking, and I was proud of having helped him just the way he wanted. Things at home were good, finally.

And then? And then, suddenly, the way a door slams in the wind, I’m back in that terrible position I just left, in front of the easel. I’m back kneeling on the floor, holding the empty demijohn. I don’t know what happened in between. Maybe something my grandmother said got him angry. Seeing me continually rub my wrist, she’d suddenly pipe up, “Are you hurt?” Right away, I’d stop massaging my wrist out of fear that he’d get angry. But the words had already been uttered and my father’s mood had already changed, and he’d say something like: “He’s fine, dear mother-in-law, nothing wrong with him at all. Your grandson isn’t made of ricotta, not like your son.” And then he’d get up halfway through the meal and beckon to me to follow him back into the room where he painted. Harmony was delicate back then and it didn’t take much to make it end.

But maybe things happened differently. Maybe there was a long silence, with me wishing I had a net strong enough to catch my grandmother’s misspoken words, or my wrist-rubbing, or even the sound of my brother snapping his fingers, because Geppe was always practicing his finger-snapping back then. But since that was impossible, I’d resign myself to waiting to see the shape my father would give the rest of lunch, even though, at moments like that, it was entirely predictable. If something irked him while we were eating, he’d immediately go quiet, purse his lips tightly together, and then eventually break the silence by choosing an interlocutor—me, usually, he liked choosing me—and, just to irritate everyone, he’d start droning on and on, so that by the time the rest of us had reached the fruit, he’d still be on his first course. My mother and grandmother would wait for a bit and then, with utmost discretion, start to clear the table. He’d ignore them and keep talking. My brothers would get up from the table and dawdle about nearby, waiting for me to join them in the hall. But he ignored them and kept talking. We’d sit across from each other, my father and I, dishes and cutlery on his side of the table only, everything else cleared away, while he ate and talked, talked and ate. Lunch became like a guillotine that, because of some strange spell, took forever to fall. The two women stood to one side, wondering if they should start washing the dishes or not. My brothers hovered nearby, uncertain if they should come and sit back down and pretend to listen. I dreamed of being liberated by a flash of light or something. And then Federí suddenly stopped talking and, in reaction to some gesture or slight movement made by my mother, he’d start screaming and yelling and throwing things. He yelled at us all, called us ball-busters, and got up quickly from the table. And that is precisely what happened, I think, on one occasion when, after swearing to the high heavens, cursing all the saints and virgins, he said, “Basta! Enough of this ball-busting! Come on, Mimí! Let’s go.”

Or maybe it didn’t happen that way. Maybe he spent days on end mulling over the shapes of those builders—travelling from home to work and back again—visualizing them in detail inside his adult head and yet very much still that child on the river’s edge in Reggio Calabria, the child who scribbled colored numbers all over Nonna Funzella’s door, the child who saw everything unfold from the balcony, who saw the two carabinieri.

When his eyes opened inward they saw things more clearly than his outward-looking eyes. He imagined his figures alive, each one occupying its own space at the construction site, the mastiff keeping a vigilant eye over things that took place beyond the canvas, even Zio Matteo looking off in that direction, a slightly bemused expression on his face; Luigi, meanwhile, just sat there, his left hand resting on the bare ground and his right arm, which would eventually reach out with a glass in hand for the water, was not even sketched yet; the water-bearing boy was still in a gestational phase like the two builders who would eventually be situated next to him, but doing what? Who knows. Basically, half the painting still needed to be painted. He wasn’t even sure how to use the sketches that he had done; he needed a burst of imagination, energy, and time. And then one day it all came to him. That was the day he said, “You’ll make one more small sacrifice for your dad, Mimí, won’t you?” and the torture, the immobility, the posing began again.

Of that I am certain: it definitely began again. From the top. And so, here I am, holding the pose in the center of the room, next to the vitrine with its broken glass where the silver is kept, a few inches away from the table. Even if there had been a period of reprieve (and as I remember it now, there wasn’t one; I believe I stayed in that position day in and day out for weeks on end), it definitely didn’t ease the tension or fatigue. I’m a tightly knotted and taut rope. Time goes by, nausea hits, I feel feverish. I start hallucinating. I imagine that the man sitting at the easel busily painting The Drinkers is not my father, but Federí as a child. He’s the one who’s doing the painting: a three-year-old version of my father is painting his future ten-year-old firstborn son. What difference does it make if the person who is painting me is three or thirty-six? My father always used to say that you either have talent or you don’t, and if you do it’s because you were born with it. He was born with talent. And that’s why I envision him as he appears in a childhood photo, with a large head and chubby cheeks, but with a cigarette between his lips, a paintbrush in his right hand, looking at me, and sighing ah as he dabs the canvas with his brush.

I see this and other things. I see the floor has turned to dirt. The setting of the painting has practically spilled over into the room. My knee rests on the earth of the construction site, my bare foot in contact with the white cloth on which lies half a loaf of bread, a plate with four tomatoes, and some grapes—the builders’ lunch. But the perspective is different: I now see those things from my position, not from my father’s perspective. I see them. I also see Luigi. While my father placed him so that he can see his back and partial profile, I see his face, his dark hair, his low forehead, his cheeks unshaven for days, his hairy chest. The only thing that’s missing is his right arm, the one that will hold the glass.

I’m dreaming with my eyes wide open—or maybe they’re closed, I’m not sure, but the vision is perfectly clear either way—when something odd takes place. The empty demijohn I’m holding starts to gush water. But the water doesn’t spill into a glass, it splashes onto the tomatoes, the plate, it wets the coarse cloth, spatters the grapes, it’s soaked up by the earth and the doughy part of the bread. I flinch as I realize something terrible. In my mind’s eye, I quickly complete Luigi’s arm. I place an imaginary glass in his hand and have him extend it toward the demijohn. I’m overcome with despair and feel like I’m going to die.

My position is all wrong.

The water will forever spill onto the tomatoes, the plate, the cloth. My father placed me in a position where, even if Luigi reaches out as far as possible, I will never be able to pour the water into his glass.

 

As I write this, I try and put order in my thoughts, I look for reasons, I draw on what I have learned over the years. Back then, however, I felt the urgent need to save Federí, once he discovered his error, from blaming me or my mother, her relatives, everyone in the family.

Emotions crowded my mind. I was paralyzed with panic. I felt bitterly angry because all the energy I had put into being statuesque had been pointless. I was afraid that he’d be furious for all the time he’d wasted and would scrape away the fresh paint from the canvas with his spatula or knife, curse all of creation, in heaven and on earth. I felt pain for him because ever since he was born, he never actually managed to become the great artist that he said he was. My heart was exploding with a sense of responsibility because the destiny of that painting now depended both on my skill as apprentice builder and my filial devotion.

It didn’t take much to double check it: the space between Luigi and me was too great. My father would be forced to paint a disproportionately long arm if he wanted the builder’s glass to reach the flow of water from the demijohn.

I couldn’t think about it without feeling ill. The more I pictured just how long that arm would have to be, the more I broke out in a cold sweat. There was no fix for it. I knew how he’d justify his mistake. First, he’d shout at me. “See what you’ve done? You moved!” Then he’d start moaning and complaining about not having a proper painting studio like other genius painters did. That, in turn, would’ve made him angry with my mother, who hadn’t let him move the rest of the furniture or throw it out, or even burn it, which would’ve given him all the space he needed to give rise to the idea in his head. Finally, he would’ve railed against his great misfortune of being a decent man, a family man, incapable of abandoning us and running off to live in some attic in Paris. It would’ve been pointless to try and convince him differently, to say something like, “Fine, Papà, but you made the mistake, not me, not Mamma, not the rest of the family.” That would’ve only made him angrier. He would’ve grown distressed the way only he knew how, full of rancor. He would’ve said he was misunderstood even by his firstborn son and gone on to enumerate, just to be clear, the thousands of complexities inherent in the painting, both in terms of conception and execution. How could we possibly understand—he’d scream indignantly—the gravity of the problems an artist has to face? Did we have any idea of the mass of thoughts that crowded his brain? Did we have any idea, for fuck’s sake, how many thousands of different hypotheses there were: this one, that one, and a third? Padreterno, this wasn’t like slicing caciocavallo or filling pastries with cream, or anything.

 

I was always worried, back then, that one day he might say, Mimí, you don’t understand me. I always hated it when he took that tone with my mother (“How could you possibly understand me?”) and I was scared that one day he’d eventually speak that way to me, too.

Because I did understand him. I forced myself to. I paid attention to his every word and gesture. By the age of ten I already knew a lot about working at an easel. I had seen the birth of a large number of paintings and drawings and oils and watercolors. To my mind, he had two ways of working: either he took a person, thing, or landscape (like my mother, my grandmother, the iron, the countryside and trees that you could see from our window before it became a construction site) and he drew them just as they were and called them “Mamma,” “Nonna,” “Iron,” “Countryside,” or else he took, for example, Zio Vincenzino, who was an electrician, and he drew him as he was but added the sea in the background and a bucket with fish and called him “Fisherman.”

His large-scale painting The Drinkers followed this second route. And yet, as the days and weeks passed, there was the sense that something far more complicated was developing. It wasn’t hard to notice; it was enough to walk into the room while he was working. In addition to the usual smell of paint thinner and sweat, in those days the room was also filled with the aura of a labored and joyful excitement, the way a room smells after children have been playing in it for hours. I recognized it as the scent of our childhood games, back when we pretended to be heroes. I was amazed that he released that fragrance. Could it be that he was playing the same way that we kids did?

I studied the painting carefully. I looked at it so many times, in all phases of its composition, during the day in full natural light, and at night when the kitchen light filtered in and illuminated select areas and left others in the darkness. The construction site in the background was identical to the one outside our window: devastation, a wasteland, the skeleton of a building under construction, fencing, tool sheds. But the workmen’s knife that rested on the white table cloth was entirely foreign to those piles of cement and the mixers and the pile drivers. It was associated with a piece of plywood that he used as a palette, it was the knife that my father used to scrape away dried paint. A huge leap, both in terms of use and setting. Even the plate, the tomatoes, the bread. They didn’t belong to the builders, they came from our kitchen, straight out of Nonna’s domain (the bunch of grapes, no, it wasn’t the season for grapes, who knows where he had gotten them). The wooden crate that Zio Matteo sat on as the overseer came from my uncle’s fruit and vegetable shop, so yet another place, a space of other voices and sounds, foreign both to the construction site and our home. And Zio Matteo himself—what did he have to do with bricklayers and builders? What did he have in common with Luigi, who sat on the ground shirtless at the center of the painting? Sure, they both sold vegetables, but they didn’t know each other, nor did they want to meet each other. Luigi was a street vendor and traveled with his cart in the sun, wind, and rain; Zio Matteo had a shop and sold his produce under a roof, protected from the elements.

And then there was me. I was in fifth grade, studying for my middle school exams. My own father used to say that I, as his son and natural heir of his genius, together with my brothers, would go on to accomplish great things in my life. I didn’t see what connection there was between me and the young apprentice builders that I saw toiling away below on the construction site. Actually, I felt a certain unease for how he decided to use my persona, as if for some vague reason he had decided to brusquely erase all the grace that in other circumstances he insisted on attributing to me.

I felt my unease snake across the painting between the animate beings and inanimate objects, as if each one of us nursed the idea of “I’m not happy, I want to leave.” I saw my father sitting for hours on end with his mouth slightly open in front of the painting, sometimes mixing colors, sometimes painting, and I could detect the effort that he was putting into forcing us to blend together, to live together with ease and naturalness, people and places and things that normally didn’t mix together, but that stood on their own, without any real points of contact. Was this what made him sweat so much, even if he was sitting still? Was this why, when everything seemed to be going well, he gave off the scent of a child at play?

 

At some point during that period of anguish—I can’t say exactly when, whether it was before or after this particular thought or that sigh or cough or anything like that—I discovered something else. I realized that, sitting next to him, unseen and yet giving him expert advice, was the ghost of Zio Peppino di Firenze.

From all the objects that he bequeathed us came, I believe, whispered words of enchantment that filled my father’s head with far too much advice and too many suggestions. It was a persistent hum that I attributed to that relative, the marshal of public safety, with his Tusco-Neapolitan accent. “Do it this way, Federí; no, maybe better that way,” the voice said, offering a surplus of physical gestures and expressions, objects, and exceptional colors, all of which confused my father by providing solutions or tips that ultimately weakened his faith in what he had already accomplished.

Today I can’t say exactly which suggestions from that Florentine voice or objects he followed for The Drinkers. Unquestionably, many aspects of the Neapolitan mastiff made their way there, as I already mentioned, from a book of photos with a bright blue cover. A fifteen-centimeter-tall statuette—a crude piece of art, the head of which we kids later broke while playing ball, and made by an unknown artisan—depicting a seated male figure who looked slightly drunk, also had a relevant role. Then there was the book with the cloth cover dedicated to the great painter, Manet, that my father kept open on a chair next to the easel, so that he could glance at it now and then. “My painting, Mimí, is also an homage to the great painter, Édouard Manet.”

I understood exactly what had happened with the mastiff. The photo in the blue book showed a marble image of the dog. My father, perhaps on advice from the ghost of Zio Peppino di Firenze, or perhaps on his own, initially made it vigilant and aggressive, but then he confused it with all the mastiffs he had seen in his life or drawn while exploring the countryside. Finally, after a number of different interpretations and iterations, he decided to transfer it onto the canvas: one more difficult presence to control among so many disparate figures.

It was harder to trace the mutation of the painted gesso statuette. Without a doubt, Federí had extrapolated Zio Matteo’s pose from it: sitting, glass in hand. But only the pose. The body was clearly that of our uncle. The influence of the statue could also be seen in the old hat that the figure wore on his head and in his expression. Zio Matteo, sitting there on the canvas in his role as master builder, no longer looked like one of our relatives, but as though he was related to the statue, whom he had bumped into and asked, “May I borrow your hat?”

How much life my father must’ve seen in that object from Florence, which had originally been chosen by the thick-fingered yet expert hands of Zio Peppino. It certainly inspired the figures who stood to the left of the boy holding the demijohn, to my right, in other words. The two men, also builders, stood staring at the flow of water with an unreasonable amount of curiosity. I really didn’t understand what there was to see. Their expressions came out so well that when the painting was done and I examined them closely, I was amazed to see that they looked real, even though he had not used real live models for them. My father must have turned the statue ever so slightly, just enough to change the perspective, and in so doing had extracted more life out of it, and had artfully invented two men without having to deal with or complain about models and how they never stayed still. I studied them: they looked like Siamese twins, like Zio Matteo’s distant relatives. Their resemblance made me think about the actual person that the unknown sculptor must have used for inspiration. “Who knows how long ago he died, and yet he’s still here,” I said to myself. Back then, art seemed to me to be a bizarre, constant migration of ectoplasms.

And finally there was Manet. In the long span of time that my father worked on his painting, the cloth-bound book about Manet was always next to him at the easel, opened to Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe. Whenever my father wasn’t home and I went in and spied on the canvas, I ended up examining that image. I wondered why he kept it within view, seeing that his painting and the reproduction had nothing in common. Until one day, while I was posing for him, undergoing the torture, I realized that Luigi was not just Luigi. My father had done something strange with his chest. That’s right. There was, in Luigi’s bare chest, something of the nudity of Manet’s woman. The Drinkers didn’t contain only a photo of a statue of a mastiff that was used to inspire his portrait of a real mastiff. The painting didn’t only celebrate a statuette by sharing its attributes and physiognomy, as well as its hat, with a total of three figures in the painting—one painted from life and two invented ones—with the final result that the invented ones seemed to be relatives of the real one. My father’s painting also sought to transfer aspects of Manet’s Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe to a squalid construction site.

Now, as I write about it, I imagine my father with his big forehead and small eyes seeing things we relatives can’t see: the grey earth taking the place of a lawn, construction workers sitting in the place of well-dressed bourgeoisie, and gaunt Luigi, stripped naked down to his pants, audaciously stepping in for Manet’s opulent, nude woman.

Beyond the apparent silence of the scene and lurking deep within the painting was a tumult of real gestures and fictitious ones, homely shapes and elegant poses. Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe, Los Borrachos, The Drinkers. Statues and statuettes and Zio Matteo. Who knew what else. I even got to the point of wondering in confusion, but not with these exact words, “Is the boy who’s pouring water even me? Or does he also derive from some drawing or statuette or small painting or print hidden among all the pieces of art that Zio Peppino di Firenze left us?” I began to think of myself as inhabited by strangers. Reassembled, recreated, wildly distorted. And so I looked around the house when my father wasn’t around for sources of the figure of the boy with the demijohn. But I found nothing and eventually stopped looking. I doubt now, at this point, that I’ll ever find anything.

One thing is for certain: a mobile carnival of shapes, an effervescence of images spun around that painting for days and weeks on end. They came and went in an unstoppable flow, like bubbles in seltzer water. That’s why my father always looks so delirious, it occurred to me. That’s why he’s so jumpy and yells for no reason. Maybe, while I was sitting for him, even the carabinieri that Federí had seen as a child came around as if on patrol, even if (or maybe because of this) they drank wine while the builders preferred water. I tried not to be shocked by anything. I understood. I understood that a piece of art was a meeting place for a crowd. My father’s head was filled with shadows and he had to keep a handle on a thousand different ghosts, all of them situated at the forefront of his brain, in his forehead—“here, Mimí, right here”—without any possibility of being able to keep them in order: men, objects, dogs. He could see them all at once. He could see if they balanced each other out. He had to deduce the right distances and right proportions, what colors they’d have in the light of day, and what color they’d have under electric light. If he wanted, he could just use the light from a light bulb, as if that were daylight, and paint with the shutters closed and the light always on, even if the sun was out. Because, Mimí, because it’s so damn difficult. It’s been difficult ever since I was child; you never really know what to do: realism, abstraction, tradition, the avant-garde, that shithead Picasso, that cocksucker Léger, what is art anyway, what can you do, really? What can a person who wants to paint in this hellhole really do? He meant us kids, how we screamed and ran up and down the hallway, he meant Nonna, who complained because she couldn’t make up the beds at night or take off the sheets in the morning, he meant his job on the railroad, the night shifts, the day shifts; he meant Paolo Ricci, who says do this, and Carlo Barbieri, who says do that. You can’t possibly stay on top of everything, you know?

Yes, I knew. I understood what had happened. What had happened was that in that chaos of people and places and things and books and Zio Peppino di Firenze, and presented with all those choices of how to make, invent, reinvent, and remake, my father had made a mistake: he had not calculated the distances well. Now he was forced to paint an arm that was too long, an arm that would look out of proportion.

 

I decided that I needed to do the one thing that up until that moment I had tried with all my might not to do: move. It seemed to be the only way I could fix that awful situation. I couldn’t possibly say to my father: “The position you put me in is wrong. From where I am now, the water will never reach the glass. Maybe you don’t realize it from where you are, and I know you have so many things to think about. But from where I’m kneeling, I can imagine Luigi sitting in front of me, and I assure you that I’m too far away, the water will spill onto the ground, the bread, and the tomatoes. Please, before the damage is irreparable, it’s better if I move.” No, no. Even if I had found the courage to speak up, which I exclude a priori, he would’ve been so taken aback by my first few words that he would’ve just scoffed and, if by chance, he was in a good mood, at the very most he would’ve said, “Mimí, please. Just trust Papà.” Or else he wouldn’t have even bothered replying. He would’ve just looked at me in complete silence as if to say, “Are you the painter here? Are you an artist? No, so stand still and zip it.” Consequently, I made a plan to shift my position little by little, in tiny increments, moving so carefully that he’d never even realize I was doing it. I saw no other solution.

It was a long process and, as I recall it now, one of tensest experiences of my whole life. I actually only had to shift my position ever so slightly. My right knee on the floor would act as a pivot. All I had to do was creep my left foot forward so that I could rotate my chest just the right amount and the neck of the demijohn would be in line with the future glass in Luigi’s hand. My knee ached, my right leg and foot were asleep, but I began the procedure nonetheless.

Children exist on the cusp of either dreams or nightmares, or at least that’s how I did. Back then I was always chasing down feverish thoughts that sought out explanations or details in meaningless facts, that amplified or shrunk space as needed, and that either made time fly by or dilate. Without a doubt, I would’ve rather died than give up; every day I died numerous times. The millimeters I advanced was like traveling an immense distance, and with my bare feet I was better off than the cat and its seven-league boots. How much time passed? How long did the attempt take? I can’t be sure; sometimes, the duration of something depends on the significance that we attribute to our actions. In some ways, I think that I am still rotating, and that I will be for as long as I live, or rather, for as long as I think about it and write about it.

In the meantime, my father talked and talked about his childhood, his teenage years, girls, women, his father, his fellow painters and enemies. I shifted with the smallest movements possible. My big toe and the toes of my left foot gripped the tile floor, the muscles in my leg tensed. My body pivoted imperceptibly on my right knee. The neck of the demijohn left the white cloth and the plate of tomatoes that I had imagined so clearly in order to orient myself, and made its way toward Luigi’s glass, another necessary fiction. I was the boy who poured water and I wanted to pour it well, if only to guarantee the success of my father’s large-scale painting, which would then translate into peace and harmony for my mother and whole family.

Suddenly Federí stopped talking. A silence fell over the room that sent a chill up my spine and I interrupted my slow rotation. I waited. “Mimí, you’re moving,” he said curtly. “What’s the matter? Are you tired? Do you want to rest?” he added. “You’ve been so good up until now,” he said, trying to encourage me. “We’re almost done for the day, just a little bit longer,” he promised. And then he started to paint again.

I waited a few moments, then started shifting again. I was drenched in sweat, my toes slipped across the tiles, couldn’t get a grip. But I was almost there: the green neck of the demijohn was almost at the height of Luigi’s glass. Finally, I was in the right place.

But not for my father. He jumped up with his brush in his hand and cigarette between his lips. He had lost his patience. Why couldn’t I stay still for one more minute? Padreterno, just one more minute.

He came over, kneeled down, and gruffly shifted my body back to its original position.

 

My experience as an artist’s model ended there. There was no more need for me, not then or ever again. The painting still required a lot of work and my father continued to paint for hours, in all his free time. I came back from school anxious, expecting that from one moment to the next he’d realize his mistake. I imagined seeing him standing silently in front of the painting or in a fury. Even as I climbed the stairs, I seemed to hear him screaming about how impossible it was to work in those conditions, I imagined seeing him standing with his knife in hand, the painting shredded in rage.

But none of that happened and gradually the tension lessened. I forgot my anxiety about that problem, I had my own things to worry about. I periodically noticed the progress of the painting, I saw how I had been reproduced on the canvas, head downcast but all there, still recognizable, knee on the ground, demijohn under my arm. The two Siamese twins stood next to me, side by side, construction workers derived from the gesso statuette, looking at me with amusement, though I’m not sure why. Luigi finally had a right arm, and it was out of proportion as I expected. No matter now long my father painted Luigi’s arm, his glass would still never reach the neck of the bottle—it was too high up—and the water flowed into the glass in one long, white stream, like a miniature waterfall.

My mother came in often, either to bring a coffee to Federí or to get something that she needed. She’d stop and look at the painting for a bit in silence. He pretended he didn’t notice and continued to paint but he was clearly eager to hear her opinion. If she didn’t say anything, he’d ask her opinion without actually asking. “You like it,” he’d say affirmatively, and she knew he needed her to say yes.

She always said yes and, if he hadn’t acted cruelly to her of late and she was bright-eyed and felt like talking, she’d point out how well this or that had come out. Afterward, my father always seemed to paint with greater passion, and often, as soon as Rusinè left the room, he’d either begin to sing or even whistle Neapolitan songs and arias. I was disoriented by this: I didn’t understand why he, who usually mortified my mother with his cruel manner and words, derived so much pleasure from her positive judgement. It was a hard to solve mystery.

Either way, when they were happy I was happy, and especially when Rusinè said that I had been painted particularly well, that I really did seem to be holding that demijohn; Federí agreed, I had come out better than all the others, and that was because Matteo was a shithead and Luigi was a shithead, too, but I, as his son, was not.

He never mentioned the last time I sat for him, and how I had moved. He had generously forgotten it. He went through a period of unusual kindness and willingness; the end of that great labor put him in a good mood. One day he was even kind with Zio Matteo who came to see himself on the canvas. “Federí, you made me just as I am,” he exclaimed, even though to me he looked more like the gesso statue than his true self. My father was so pleased that he insisted Zio Matteo stay for lunch and, between the first and second course, he even acknowledged that his brother-in-law may actually have had a brain capable of understanding. He explained, “I didn’t make you just as you are, Zio Mattè, I made you better. I made you so that you will never die.”

He was even patient with Luigi, who came over to the house a few days after Zio Matteo. Shy and apologizing for being in his work clothes (an undershirt and baggy pants), the street vendor was worried about dirtying the house with his presence. But my father said no, you won’t get it dirty, come on in, and he walked into the room and just stood there, without moving, amazed, awestruck. Then he peered a little closer to see his hand better, to make sure that all his fingers were there. “Thank you, my finger really did look like that,” he said when he saw that my father had kept his promise. “No need to thank me,” my father graciously replied.

But the best day of all was that of the final brushstroke. Federí couldn’t wait to hear what a qualified person thought of it and so, to celebrate, he invited Armando De Stefano over to the house. De Stefano arrived. My father ushered him into the dining room and while Rusinè and my grandmother kept asking him in all different manners and tones, “Pardon the disarray, can we offer you a coffee?” Federí turned to him and said theatrically, “Voilà, have a look.”

It was a truly gratifying moment. Federí recalled—and even wrote about it in his notebooks—that Armando De Stefano first stood there with his mouth agape, then complimented my father, and finally exclaimed, “For heaven’s sake, how on earth did you paint such a major piece of art in such a small and dimly lit room?” The only glitch in his visit was that he left without mentioning the show of large-scale works that they were supposed to do together. He didn’t even say anything like we have to talk about it, we need to set a date, or anything like that.

My father didn’t seem to notice, but my mother did. From that moment forward, not a day passed that she didn’t ask him, “Everything alright? So when are you and De Stefano going to have your exhibition?” In any other situation, it might have seemed like a normal question of an artistic nature, and thus legitimate to my father’s ears. But even I perceived her real meaning, and whenever I heard her hit that key, I got anxious. What Rusinè was really trying to say, if she had been able to speak her mind without being slapped was, “When are you going to take this painting and all your stuff out of here so that the children can go back to sleeping in beds like good Christians and we can all go back to having a normal home?”

Of course, my father understood perfectly what his wife was driving at when she asked him about the show with De Stefano. And that made him squirm. On good days he’d say something like, “I don’t know, Armando hasn’t let me know yet.” On bad days, he’d say, “Rusinè, quit busting my balls.” And then one day he came home in such a foul mood, his face filled with such delusion, anger, and desperation that we all knew we had to hide and stay out of his way, and even my mother watched him out of the corner of her eye, careful not to say the wrong thing.

We were all sitting at lunch when he finally couldn’t hold back any more and started talking about the fire blazing through his mind. He wasn’t angry with us. He was angry with Armando De Stefano. “That shit-shoveling bastard is a shit-talking shithead,” he yelled for the whole neighborhood to hear. De Stefano had changed his mind. He didn’t want to do an exhibition with my father. That drawing professor di questo cazzo was afraid of looking bad. Instead, he wanted—my father whispered short of breath—to exhibit his work on his own, to avoid comparisons. The coward, the hypocrite. If people liked De Stefano and not him, it was because they were hypocrites. I still didn’t know what a hypocrite or hypocrisy was so I had a hard time understanding why people would like De Stefano, and I understood even less when my father screamed, “That shithead calls it good manners, but it’s just hypocrisy!” Now and then he’d add more explicit phrases. “De Stefano has never had the balls to call a shithead ‘Shithead!’” He, on the other hand, had no problem doing it; he was fearless. If someone was a shithead, he said so straight to his face, immediately, because that was his nature; he was frank, loyal, courageous, he didn’t know how to fake it; on the contrary, it was his duty to tell shitheads how things really stood. Just like Caravaggio. Because even Caravaggio—he screamed, bowled over by humiliation, by the pain of being wounded by an artist he admired—would say “Shithead!” to another painter if he was a shithead. De Stefano, meanwhile, being a professor at the Liceo artistico and a member of the Accademia and a man of elegance, didn’t have it in him to be like Caravaggio. Sometimes De Stefano defended himself. “I’m not a hypocrite, Federí. Unlike you, I’m not a chiàveche overflowing with raw sewage, I’m just a respectable person.”

I listened and suffered. In cases like that, I was in favor of people who created less trouble, and so thought to myself, “I want to become like De Stefano, not like Caravaggio.” I couldn’t stand the thought of spreading tension around the way my father did. He talked and screamed and sputtered with rage. None of us dared interrupt him, not even my mother who was sitting at his right, a place where it was easy to get slapped. She had turned a greyish color and looked melancholy. Now and then she opened her mouth as if to say something. I held my breath and prayed she wouldn’t say, “Now what are we going to do with that painting?” I felt calmer when she didn’t speak. Such an endless tide of words gushed forth from her husband’s throat, like stormy waves crashing down one after the other, that she couldn’t get a word in edgewise. Luckily.

When she finally did manage to talk, she amazed me and my grandmother and my brothers. She had only consolatory words for him. She did not say, “Did you tell De Stefano that you painted it expressly for the exhibition you two were supposed to have?” She did not say, “You’ve ruined our lives; you, De Stefano, and this obsession of yours of taking on more than you can deal with.” No, instead she said that he shouldn’t be offended, he was much more talented than De Stefano or anyone else, she had always known it, and now even De Stefano knew it, and everyone else knew it, too. She said exactly what he wanted to hear.

In fact, he immediately came back to life, leapt up from the table with a burst of renewed energy, and ordered us all to come to the dining room. The whole family lined up and stood before The Drinkers.

It was a beautiful moment. Here I should mention that the sun never shone directly on the house on Via Gemito. It was always dark and damp. Even on sunny days, only a cold, pale, bluish light filtered into the rooms. And yet on that day, the painting seemed illuminated from within. The flesh of Luigi’s hunched-over bare back was blinding, the mastiff looked at us warily, Zio Matteo beamed with the smile of a Greek divinity, the two Siamese brothers chortled mysteriously and tacitly, and I poured water from the demijohn with no trace whatsoever of the fatigue that it had cost me to hold that position for so long.

What a large-scale masterpiece. It moves me to write about it. I listened as my father explained the colors and the effects of light the way an art critic would. He spoke about tonal values and mass, the perfect eurythmy of the lines (he had collected so many words, all the better to impress his many enemies), the opposing sine waves within which the weight of the builders had been so elegantly positioned. We all paid careful attention, or at least I did. When he looked at me, I nodded to show him that I understood. But it was pointless, he didn’t need the support any more. He was so taken by the results of his art and the desire to explain how he had obtained them to someone that I don’t think he even saw me there. He only needed to be sure that he wasn’t talking to himself.

Everything was going smoothly—it was sufficient that he felt as talented as he was verbosely describing himself to be—when he turned to my mother for one more formal confirmation. That’s when Rusinè did something incomprehensible, something that left me breathless. In reply to one of his final questions, something like, “It really is beautiful, isn’t it?” she said, yes, it really is beautiful, but then she added, possibly to substantiate her yes and show him that after so many years of being married to an artist she, too, had a critical spirit and an expert eye: “It’s just Luigi’s arm. It’s too long.”

 

I’m not entirely sure what followed. I only remember those words. The rest is dust, fragments of sound, words that have fallen like shavings under the plane of time, and other clichés that basically say, a story is just a story; even if tells the truth, it just uses and abuses the imagination.

My father looked at the painting and then at my mother. He repeated her words to come to terms with it. “Too long? And where exactly do you see that it is too long?”

Rusinè was endearing. She walked joyfully over to the canvas and pointed at Luigi’s arm, from his shoulder all the way down to the glass, exclaiming in dialect, “Can’t you see? It’s long. But it’s alright, it’s still beautiful.”

Federí lost all sense of reason. He started screaming: how was it possible that his wife, a person who hadn’t even completed fifth grade and barely knew how to read and write, dared tell him the arm was too long. Long? I’ll show you long! The arm was like that for depth. Did Rusinè know what depth was? Did she have any idea of all the calculations and practice sketches and work he had done to achieve that depth? Or did she just think that a person sat down and bam-bam-bam he was a painter? He had put all his learning, thinking, technical skills, and prowess into it, he wasn’t just some shithead. Did she know who else used the same effect he had used on Luigi’s arm? Michelangelo Buonarroti. In the Sistine Chapel. That’s right. Michelangelo had done the exact same thing with Jesus Christ, giving him short legs and a long torso so that it would look to the people from below like his slender body was rising up into the air with strength. So shut up, since she didn’t understand a thing. That’s all he needed, to have to justify himself to her. Long arm. Stand over there and look. Now where’s the long arm?

He had a furious look in his eyes, his mouth was open, he theatrically waved her over to a place in the room where she should stand and observe the painting.

He seemed confident in himself, but actually it wasn’t at all clear if he was explaining the reasoning behind his art or, wounded by the sudden awareness of his error, he was clutching at straws to demonstrate, first and foremost to himself, that the mistake wasn’t a mistake but an artistic need.

In the meantime, ever so slowly, while her son-in-law was braying, my grandmother turned around and walked out of the room. She did so in the hopes that her daughter would follow her example. But it was pointless, we all knew it: once Rusinè opened her mouth, she tended to keep talking without thinking of the consequences.

As a matter of fact, while Federí was screaming and shouting, she continued to stand and look intensely at the painting as if she couldn’t even hear her husband’s voice and was only concerned with understanding if she was right or wrong. Finally, she confirmed that yes, there was no doubt, the arm was excessively long. And look, she said, even though Luigi has such a long arm, the glass still won’t reach the neck of the demijohn. And this poor child—she pointed at my figure with a hint of irony—is too far off to one side, it would be a miracle if the water landed in the glass. You might as well admit it: everything else is perfect, that’s the only mistake you made.

It’s hard to say how long it went on. I can’t write down every single word that was said, but it was unquestionably a long war of words during which all my father’s rage found one outlet only: his wife, who commented on his work as an artist as if she were much more than just a glove-maker, a seamstress, an aspiring shopkeeper, like all her stinking piece-of-shit relatives, as if she herself were a painter who wanted to give him a lesson, with the classic presumptuousness of an incompetent ignoramus. Just shut up, Rusinè, he yelled. De Stefano hadn’t critiqued one single thing and now she was critiquing him? Oh fuck it all, fuck the arm, the glass, the water. You see the two figures standing next to Mimí, you see them? Why do you think they’re looking at the kid and the water? Why do you think they’re laughing? Why do you think they’re amused? You don’t get it, do you, you’re just talking out your ass. Those two are looking at the boy and laughing because they want to see if he’ll manage to pour the water into Luigi’s glass. You didn’t get that, did you, huh? You didn’t get it, he screamed; of course the glass has to be down there, far from the mouth of the demijohn, otherwise there’s nothing to look at, there’s no joke, nothing to laugh about. And now basta, that’s enough, I’ll be damned if I’m going to explain anything else; you say one more word and I’ll slap you.

His hand was raised to hit her but she had already rushed out of the room with my brothers close behind. I couldn’t move, my head was empty from fear, I couldn’t command my legs. I stared at the canvas. Is it true that he painted the arm long on purpose? Is it true that the two men are looking at me and laughing to see if I manage to pour the water into Luigi’s glass? Was he lying, inventing as he went? Or—and I was struck with this doubt then and still am today—were my mother and I making a mistake and using our mistake to put a stick in his spokes? Were we, for whatever unknowable reason, his main enemies, the principle detractors of his art?

I didn’t know what to think; my distress was immense. At this point I didn’t know what to make of my presence in the painting anymore. I was bewildered, in shock. What an intense feeling shock is. A thought that consumes itself because of excessive tension. I was confused about why I remained in the room alone with my father, who now stood stock still in front of the painting, his eyes glazed over like a madman, which at that point he was.

Federí stared at Luigi’s arm for a long time as if someone else had painted it. It was clear he was returning to his senses. He was starting to feel the torment of being alone and regret for having treated his wife that way, although I wouldn’t swear on the latter. When he realized that I was still in the room, he seemed surprised. He made a face that was both angry and considerate. “Do you think the arm looks long, Mimí?” he asked. I energetically shook my head, no.

 

The story of The Drinkers ends there. Or rather, there ends its story within our four walls. Its public story begins in July 1953 but it is a confused one and it shares many similarities with other unhappy stories that my father told throughout his life.

After days and days of quarreling with my mother, but the normal kind of bickering, not violent arguments, and a consistently bad mood, one day Federí came home with a couple of helpful acquaintances and took the painting away.

It was a memorable occasion. I had gotten used to seeing its rich colors in the background, and without it the room seemed both large and squalid. The women of the house must have had the same impression. My father had barely shut the door behind him and Nonna Nannina was already in the room dusting, sweeping, washing the floor, performing her rites of purification, while my mother dragged the furniture back down the hall and into the room. While waiting for Nannina to finish polishing the floor and scratching away all the dried paint from the tiles wherever possible, she looked in from the doorway to see how she could give the room a fresh touch.

Meanwhile, the painting traveled across Naples, maybe in a truck, or perhaps on a cart. Federí ignored all those kinds of details when he told the story, and got straight to the heart of the matter. His goal in telling it was to underscore the progress that he and his artistic career had made since the exhibition in Rome. While, at that time, he had been obliged to submit his work to a jury and be approved to participate in the show, now he had been asked to take part, as an invited guest, in an important Neapolitan event, the “first ever figurative art fair in the Mezzogiorno,” which was set to open in August in the Mostra d’oltremare exhibition hall. “Not accepted,” he stressed, “but invited, just like they do with famous artists.” There was also a number of important prizes: the 500,000 lire Salvator Rosa prize; the 500,000 lire Regione Autonoma della Sardegna prize; and the 500,000 lire Città di Napoli prize.

He was visibly euphoric. I was happy about all those prizes he could potentially win and for the invitation that he had received. I could visualize the invitation, how it had probably been written with all the formality and flourish that my elementary school teacher expected from us, how it had probably been addressed to Maestro Professore so-and-so, the way my father liked to be called so as not to feel less than the artist-professors at the Liceo artistico and the Accademia. It even said, in black on white, that he could show three pieces of work. But he chose to only show The Drinkers, which was worth ten paintings.

A final confirmation of how far he had come and the importance he had acquired, eight long years after the initial exhibition of the rejects, was evident when the fair opened. His painting was hung in the main hall, right in the center of a large wall. My father spent the entire evening looking at it as if for the first time, and he even watched visitors who stopped in front of it, enchanted. He couldn’t get his mind around the fact that so much weight had been given to one of his works of art. The main hall, for Chrissakes, and a whole wall. He repeated it over and over to every painter that came within range: “Well, I guess that if they put me here, they must’ve liked the painting.”

But it didn’t take him long to realize that the others didn’t share his enthusiasm. On the contrary, they tended to cut him off while he was speaking. Some of them couldn’t hide their envy, others shot daggers at him, while others just had bitter and curt words for him, like, “Well, where else would they put such a large painting?” In short, it was clear that most people did everything they could to spoil his pleasure.

But then people started saying things to him that sounded allusive and unpleasant. “They treated you better than Spinosa, and he’s got an entire room to himself because he’s the president of the ACLI union of artists,” they said, or else, “Friends in high places certainly do help.”

At first my father didn’t understand. He thought their comments were an invitation to inveigh against the system of favors and he jumped in with both feet, hurling long tirades against the scheming organized by fags and other wimpy-ass scurnacchiati to divide up the prizes, spouting a list of all the wrongs he had suffered both in Rome with the Mancini prize and that rotten, stinking mess at the Cinema Ideal. But gradually he started to realize that the people who complained about the system of favors were angry with him, and not with other people. People kept saying how well-connected he was, that he had sold his ass—that’s what those shitheads said, and they meant his wife—just to be invited to the first figurative art fair in the Mezzogiorno and see his painting hanging in the main hall. This wounded him deeply.

He later learned that the rumors began at a dinner organized by a number of other artists to celebrate Carlo Siviero (famous painter and president of the commission that decided how and where the works of art should be hung), where they intended to jockey among themselves for one of the prizes. Apparently, the guest of honor amazed all the guests by announcing that he—“Your very own father, Mimí”—would surely go on to become one of the major exponents of Italian painting in the second half of the twentieth century. “I’d like to meet this talented painter,” he went on to say in so many words. “Oh, we don’t see him around much, he works for the railroad, you know,” the most malicious among them commented immediately. “I know he works for the railroad, but please tell him all the same that he has enormous talent and that we want to give him the recognition that he is due,” Siviero concluded.

This was traumatic news for the guests. My father was told about the gracious comment and good news by Mele, owner of the Medea gallery, who had taken part in the dinner. Of course, my father would’ve preferred to hear Siviero praise him personally, but first of all, none of the painters who had organized the celebration had invited him; secondly, even if they had invited him, he wouldn’t have been able to afford the saturnalia in honor of Carlo Siviero; and thirdly, he was working a shift that night. However, Mele gave him a full report and even told him that Siviero’s comments had soured the mood. So that’s why people were looking at him with such animosity, Federí suddenly understood. That’s why there were rumors that he—he!—had been showed some kind of favor. But by whom, for fuck’s sake? By Siviero, whom he didn’t even know? By other members of the commission? Superintendent Maioli? Canino, the architect, whom he had never even laid eyes on before? By the painters De Vanna, Di Marino, Rossomando, and by Mennella the sculptor, who’d rather have their balls cut off than see him receive praise? By the communist art critic, Paolo Ricci, who now detested him? By various doctors, engineers, architects, lawyers, and senators who made sure the prizes were given to their friends and clients?

Federí was indignant. The thought that people considered him, the least well-connected artist who had painted on canvas or wood in Italy since the time of Cimabue, a person who asked for favors! Every evening he made his way to the Mostra d’oltremare in a state of high alert, ready to react to any allusion whatsoever.

In fact, when the painter Giuseppe Carrino came up to him in front of The Drinkers and jokingly said, “Tell me your little secret, Federí, tell me who pulled some strings for you,” he retorted, “You bastard, let’s take it outside, I’ll tell you my secret and you tell me yours.” So they went into the garden to duke it out but Carrino, according to my father, pulled out a switchblade, flicked it open and held it up to Federí’s throat, screaming, “Now fess up! Who’s your connection?”

It was a horrible moment. Although he had nothing to confess, Carrino kept the switchblade pointed at his throat, just a bit above his Adam’s apple. If it hadn’t been for Maresciallo Cardona, who was also a painter and had been passing by and managed to step in between the two men and prevent a tragedy, my father’s throat would’ve been slit, my brothers and I would’ve become fatherless, and Rusinè would’ve been left a widow.

That pretty much sums up his mood. From that evening on, he avoided going in other rooms of the exhibition, not for fear of Carrino—my father was afraid of nothing and even if he did get scared, he had been trained as a youngster to dominate it, the way European champion Bruno Frattini had taught him—but to avoid seeing certain shitheads that couldn’t hide their homicidal desires. You’d think, he used to say as an old man, when he was even jumpier than when he was young, that the art world is full of people who say lovely things to each other about Nature, Mankind, Feelings, Techniques, and Aesthetics, but no, Mimí, it’s a world full of goddamn, shit-spewing chiavechemmèrd, people who spend more time promoting themselves and screwing over others than talking about art; people whose only objectives in life were money and fucking. Even after he turned eighty, he still suffered deeply at that discovery.

Meanwhile, at the end of September, a few days before the official awards ceremony, Carlo Siviero, the man who championed his work, died. He had been ill for a long time. Everything that Siviero had deliberated as president of the commission with regards to the prizes, my father pointed out, was scratched. The Salvator Rosa prize of 500,000 lire went to Maestro Striccoli. The Sardinian regional prize was given to a Sardinian artist, as the regulations of the prize dictated. And the prize money of 500,000 lire from the coffers of the Comune di Napoli was split between eight artists, one of whom was Raffaele Lippi. Federí didn’t get a thing.

When he found out, he walked out of the house with the goal of doing what had become usual for him in those situations: go to the Mostra d’oltremare and crack someone’s skull open. He was about to beat up Mele, when the gallery owner offered him the runner-up Città di Positano purchase-prize of 100,000 lire. “Yes or no?” Mele asked. Federí was one step away from saying no and throwing a punch, when, at the thought of having to bring The Drinkers back home and having to fight with my mother and grandmother about where to put it, at the thought of maybe even having to destroy it because he had no idea where to put it, he changed his mind and shouted, “Fine! Yes! But I want the 100,000 immediately, before you give them to some scurnacchiato!”

And that—he concluded when he told me the story—is how The Drinkers ended up in the town hall in Positano, where it is still hanging to this day; all you have to do is go and see it. “Just think,” he added. “The art critic Piero Girace wrote in an article in Roma that the composition of the painting was truly complex and even reminiscent of Brangwyn.”

I listened and nodded and looked impressed but I had never even heard of Brangwyn.

 

I didn’t end up going to Positano. Maybe I’ll go one day, but not for this book, nor to see if The Drinkers really is reminiscent of Brangwyn. I lost all desire to explore any further after spending the morning at Palazzo San Giacomo.

In the guard booth I found not one staff member, but three or four, all squeezed into a tiny space. I had to explain what I wanted down to the smallest detail. I wanted to see, I said, some of my father’s paintings that were hanging there; I had an appointment with Dr. Guidi. “You want to see the marriage banns?” one of them asked, ruddy in the face. I slowly explained to the group that, no, I didn’t want to see the marriage banns but real pictures: oils, pastels, watercolors, even drawings, not words. I finally succeeded and the ruddy employee asked me for some ID. He examined it carefully, looked in an agenda, and told me that there was no pass with my name on it. After some back and forth, he called Dr. Guidi and finally let me in. “Go up to the third floor.”

I took the elevator. Dr. Guidi was a genteel and elegant middle-aged woman. “I had entirely forgotten about you. I’ll get someone to show you around right away,” she said. Then she looked around the office, where in addition to hers, there were three other desks: two occupied by women, one by a man. She chose the man. “Massimo,” she said, “can I entrust you with this gentleman? He’s looking for some paintings done by his father.”

Massimo, a young man with a kind and intelligent expression, seemed happy to have been given the task, and led the way. We walked through grandiose rooms with beautiful carpets, antique furnishings, and gilt-framed paintings on the wall. He stopped in front of every single artwork even if it was clearly from the nineteenth century, and asked me with amused concern, “Is this one of your father’s?” No, I would reply. And then he’d lead me in another direction. “Let’s go this way,” he’d say, adding comments like, “Artists are so lucky. They have such creative and liberating jobs. What could possibly be better than being an artist?”

We peeked into the mayor’s office, taking advantage of the fact that he had not yet arrived. No trace of Federí’s paintings there, of course. We then headed into the town council meeting room where Massimo gushed over the frames, a painting of a heavy-set woman in a painter’s studio, and a depiction of two people kissing. “But they’re not by your father,” he said sadly but chirpily. He then walked me through a number of offices, proclaiming as he did, “Sorry everyone, but we have to see if there are any of this gentleman’s father’s paintings in the room.”

Doors opened and shut. Eventually my chaperone got weary and said, “Let’s go back and see Dr. Guidi; we can call my colleague who keeps the inventory.” I looked at him. “There’s an inventory?” I asked but I suppose I wasn’t that surprised that we hadn’t begun with it. Somehow it seemed normal.

We went back to the office and Massimo got on the phone.

After a few failed attempts, he nodded at me. “Here we go . . .” I listened as he explained to a friend named Rosaria exactly what he needed. I watched tensely. He noticed it and made a gesture to relax. “The paintings exist,” he said. Then he raised two fingers. “Two of them.” He then gave more detail, making some notes on a piece of paper at the same time: “One shows an industrial setting and is in Accounting. The other is a nude in pastels and is in Sanitation.” He thanked Rosaria, hung up and said smugly, “See? We did it. First we’ll go to Sanitation.”

We started roaming down the halls again. We left behind the elegant staircases, the wide and clean hallways, the grand halls, the rooms decorated with stucco, gilt, carpets, and tapestries, and turned down narrow hallways, through dark and decrepit rooms painted the colors of third-rate medical clinics.

“Let me do the talking,” Massimo suggested. He started opening doors and asking questions without preamble. “Any paintings here?” The replies were usually answered with some alarm—“No,” even if there were paintings on the wall, or, “We left it wherever it was, we never touch a thing”—as if the municipal staff was worried less by the question and more about proving that they had no responsibility in the eventual disappearance of what we were looking for. One fellow, sitting at a desk in a room in deep shadow muttered, “Paintings? Never seen any paintings here, only junk.” Massimo laughed, amused by the word “junk.” He pressed on. “Follow me.”

He knocked and we walked into a room the color of rancid grease. On one side of the room, sitting at a large desk under a painting of a marina with an elaborate frame, was a man with a pinkish face, who was visibly bothered by the heat. He must have been some kind of office manager. On the other side of the room, sitting behind a smaller desk, was a brunette lady who looked pleasant. Massimo turned to the man. “We’re looking for a pastel painting that shows a nude woman.” The man smiled. He recalled the painting. “A lady with an ass this big,” he said, opening his hands wide. The woman remembered it too. “She had a towel over her shoulder,” she said, “she had just gotten out of the bath.” The boss shook his head, he didn’t remember the towel; only her ass had impressed him. A short discussion about aesthetics followed. Massimo and the other man started to praise small, well-shaped asses, meaty but not overly fleshy, still firm. The woman, speaking with the tone of someone who had grown accustomed to sexist talk in the workplace, defended larger, softer ones. “The Mediterranean woman,” she said, “is beautiful precisely for this reason.” To show how well-inclined they were to all examples of the opposite sex, the two men declared that they were also fans of the Mediterranean woman. “Sure, of course, you are,” the lady said. “You talk but you don’t understand a thing. The beauty of the Mediterranean woman is for connoisseurs, not for the man on the street.” The back and forth continued along those lines for a while before returning to the painting. The boss also recalled, among other things, that it had an ugly frame. “And then let’s be honest,” he added. “The painting didn’t look so good in here. So we sent it over to Via San Tommaso d’Aquino. Actually, it was pretty ugly, if I can be honest.”

“No, you cannot. My father painted it,” I said sharply.

The man hemmed and hawed and said it was definitely because of the frame. “With a better frame,” he said to justify himself, “it surely would’ve made a better impression on me.”

We said goodbye and left the room.

Back in the hallway, Massimo looked pleased with how our research had gone. “I did good not to mention at the beginning that the painting was by your father,” he said, complimenting himself. “That way people don’t censor themselves, they say what they really think. Don’t you like to hear the truth?”

I didn’t answer him, and just smiled weakly. I was too busy thinking about how my father would have reacted. He would’ve been glad to get involved in the conversation with the brunette lady, going far beyond Massimo and the boss with sexual allusions. Then he would’ve punched the man who criticized his work, and wouldn’t have let him say one more word. Then he would’ve whispered threateningly to Massimo: bastards, one and all. I had held back, and only said “No, you cannot.” As usual, I was dissatisfied with myself but I realized that my timid manner derived from a reassessment of Federí’s own. It was a shame that I had pushed his away from me forever.

“Now,” Massimo said, “let’s go to Accounting and see if the other painting is there.” While we were making our way down hallways that were just as dusty and decrepit, although significantly more luminous, he explained to me exactly where I needed to go to find the nude pastel: exit the building on Via Imbriani, turn onto Via Verdi, go straight along Via Cercantes, turn left on Via San Tommaso d’Aquino to number 15, and up to the third floor. “Unfortunately, I can’t come with you,” he said regretfully.

We passed beyond a partition. I immediately saw my father’s painting hanging above an empty desk. It was done in dusty tones and showed the view from his studio on Corso Arnaldo Lucci, where we had moved at the end of the 1950s. The painting was dated 1960. Clearly distinguishable were pylons, a crane, train tracks, and on the right, one of the pillars typical of the new station in Piazza Garibaldi. Large swathes of color, from a different period entirely. The Drinkers and my childhood were far away.

“Is it that one?” Massimo asked. I nodded. “Beautiful,” he remarked with a quick glance, immediately starting to banter with another employee, also just passing through, from which office I don’t know, about union issues. “We’re eliminating the fourth tier,” his interlocutor said. Massimo offered his opinion: It’s all CISL’s fault. “I’m sorry, because what did CGIL ever do to help?” his colleague said. “You’re right,” Massimo said, sounding like someone who is looking at the facts objectively, “Sometime CGIL can be very submissive. Are we done here?” he asked, turning to me. The other employee wasn’t ready to give up. “You’re slaves,” he said. I focused on the paltry frame. When Federí didn’t have any money, he took four planks, nailed them together, painted them with silver or gold paint and that was the frame. “Are we done here, can we leave now?” Massimo asked again.

Just then a woman in her forties came in, walked over to the empty desk, and asked, “What’s going on?” My guide explained everything. The civil servant looked at the painting as if for the first time, then went up close to it, read the signature, and turned to me emotionally. “Who did you say the painting is by?” I gave her my father’s first and last name. She came up to me, warmly introduced herself, and hugged me. Her aunt was Zia Lina, the wife of Zio Peppino, my mother’s brother.

I embraced her warmly, as if by standing next to that painting I had suddenly tapped into a deep sentiment of affection that had to do with Rusinè. “Amazing, it’s like something on a Raffaella Carrà talk show,” Massimo said. Later, as we were saying goodbye, she said, “This has been deeply moving for me. Be sure to go and see the pastel nude in the offices on Via San Tommaso d’Aquino. Don’t forget.” I ought to have forgotten everything, erased it all forever, I thought to myself.

I walked out of Palazzo San Giacomo and, bowled over by the heat and humidity, I made my way up Via Guantai Nuovi delaying my decision until I stood at the intersection with Via San Tommaso d’Aquino. At that point, it seemed impossible not to turn left and walk into number 15.

A man on his way out almost fell on top me while busily talking to a friend. “Giuvà, the workers’ struggle doesn’t exist anymore. Nothing exists anymore. There’s only shit.”

I headed up the dark staircase.

I pushed open a door, walked in, roamed through a few rooms. No one paid me any attention. I walked up to a man around my age and casually said to him, “I’m looking for a painting by my father, a nude, done in pastels. They sent me here, from Palazzo San Giacomo.” The man turned out to be helpful. He couldn’t recall the nude but he took me from room to room. “This gentleman is looking for a painting by his father, a nude done in pastels,” he said to the other employees by way of introduction. They looked at me as if to say, “Lucky guy, doesn’t have a thing to do.” A man sitting at a table covered with files and papers said, “I remember the painting.” He then gave us directions how to find it: go left, go right, see this guy, see that guy.

My escort guided me through the building to a room where six men sat at a big, long table covered in piles of papers. I looked around but didn’t see the painting. “There’s supposed to be a drawing of a nude done in pastels in this room,” said the man who had brought me there. “We didn’t take it. It’s over there,” one of the men said in an annoyed tone, while eating an orange.

He pointed to a corner where two metal cabinets stood at right angles. There, in that dead space, was the painting of the nude. The figure was depicted from the back, the flesh of her body almost violet, as if she had just stepped out of a sauna, done in large blocks of color in a Fauvist style. That painting was also from 1960. I remembered it perfectly.

The municipal employee who had accompanied me there turned to me. “It’s impasto, not pastel,” he exclaimed. The others started teasing him. “Impasto, pastel. What the hell do you know about that kind of stuff?” Something of an argument ensured. The employee said that he was actually an expert and a painter, too. The color had clearly been spread with a palette knife. His colleagues continued to mock him and laugh and gesticulate. “Well, would you listen to the artist? You know what you can paint? Paint this!” The man turned to me for verification. “Is it impasto or pastel?” he asked. “It’s impasto,” I said, thanking him and saying goodbye, I hurried to leave 15 Via San Tommaso d’Aquino.

 

Once outside, I went and sat down on the curb. A memory of my mother came to me, back when she was in hospital, in the summer of 1965. I was keeping her company one afternoon when she turned to me and said in dialect, “I know I’m going to die.” And then she broke into tears. I never forgot the pain I felt when faced with her desperation.

The suffering I experienced that morning while walking from floor to floor through the city offices was no different. The pain had grown gradually and now I was devastated by the sad truth. I was certain I had done the wrong thing and I didn’t know how to resolve the situation.

I think that’s how I came to the conclusion that I had had enough. I gave up all hope of finding The Drinkers and preferred instead to hold onto my father’s outrageous stories. For a little bit of time, with a certain amount of pleasure, and in total silence, I indulged in his ferocious and recriminating tone until a woman who looked to be around sixty came up to me. “Do you feel ill?” she asked in a worried voice. “No, I feel amazing, thank you,” I said, leaping to my feet and making my toward Piazza Carità.