TWO GENES LINKED WITH VIOLENT CRIME, THE HEADLINE read.
It was a small story, which most people probably missed, and it broke the week after I got back from Italy. I read it once and then read it twice, thoughts of Cesare Lombroso spinning in my head.
A genetic analysis of almost 900 offenders in Finland has revealed two genes associated with violent crime.
Those with the genes were 13 times more likely to have a history of repeated violent behaviour. The authors of the study, published in the journal Molecular Psychiatry, said at least 5–10% of all violent crime in Finland could be attributed to individuals with these genotypes.
The study, which involved analysis of almost 900 criminals, is the first to have looked at the genetic make-up of so many violent criminals in this way.
This group had committed a total of 1,154 murders, manslaughters, attempted homicides or batteries. A replication group of 114 criminals had all committed at least one murder.
These all carried a low-activity version of the MAOA gene, which previous research has dubbed the “warrior gene” because of its link to aggressive behavior.
The warrior gene. Is that what it was called? And did we have it in my family? Dean had always been especially obsessed with military history. Was this why?
I DIDN’T MENTION THE STORY TO ANYONE BUT MY HUSBAND. I DIDN’T want the kids to know that Mommy’s crazy rantings about her criminal family genes might actually have some basis in reality.
But the story pushed me over the edge in some strange, emotional way. I decided right then and there that no halfway measures were going to get me what I wanted. No more reading books from 4,500 miles away. Or searching for cryptic clues in prehistoric caves.
Lying in bed at night, my body still tanned from the beach, I decided to dive back in, headfirst, to find my family murder. I couldn’t wait for another ten years to pass. I was going to find Vita’s story, to solve the question once and for all of whether my family was genetically flawed. It seemed counterintuitive, but I had to leave my family to make sure they were safe.
I needed a month—at least. Maybe two. Maybe even six. I announced my plans to my stunned family and booked my return flight to Rome. I bought my train tickets to and from Metaponto and arranged to have Leo, my long-lost cousin and beach bar owner, pick me up at the station.
As if getting ready to give birth, for the next eight months I prepped and researched and hunkered down for the blessed event. I contacted everyone I knew there and planned my strategy. The owner of the San Teodoro farm knew a woman who rented an apartment in Pisticci for fifteen dollars a day. I took it. I contacted a professor in Potenza—a friend of a friend of a friend—who could help me search the archives there.
I emailed Professors Tataranno and Salfi and everyone else I had ever met in Basilicata and asked for recommendations on hiring a researcher/translator. I made list upon list, with names and numbers and email addresses, then interviewed a dozen candidates over Skype.
I found two—one from each of the towns my family lived in a century ago. I hired Imma, a twenty-eight-year-old writer from Bernalda, and Giuseppe, a farmer whose family were landowners from Pisticci, who would help me between his apricot and wheat harvests.
We strategized over Skype and they got started immediately, searching town records and quizzing the locals. Meanwhile, I downloaded translating apps, texting apps, and used the Internet to brush up on my Italian and connected with countless Bernaldans and Pisticcesi over Facebook. I went to Chinatown and bought a duffel bag full of baseball hats and T-shirts with New York emblazoned on them to hand out as gifts to anyone who might help once I got off the train in Metaponto.
I packed and repacked, including my favorite books on Basilicata, then checked and double-checked my itinerary, my flights and train rides, the places I would stay, and the contacts for the people who, I hoped and prayed, would help me find my family murder.
When I told my mother I was going back to Italy for a month alone, I could hear the disapproval and worry in her voice. What kind of Italian mother left her kids behind for a month? Now I was slightly sickened by the thought. I didn’t eat on the day of my departure, though the refrigerator and freezer were crammed with food. I left frozen dinners I had prepared in the weeks before, meatballs, beef stew, sausage and peppers, pasta fagiole. It was a greatest-hits medley of my Italian family classics, for fear my family wouldn’t survive without me. In keeping with my family credo, passed down from the prosperous days following centuries of poverty and hunger, it was always better to make too much than not enough. Basta!
Being without my children on that last weeklong trip had been incredibly freeing, but unnerving the whole time, as if I were missing a limb or had forgotten my purse somewhere. But I knew I shouldn’t worry so much. My kids were good kids and they were in safe hands with my husband. Maybe the criminal gene had luckily skipped over them, like it had over me and my siblings and Leonardo, my great-grandfather, or maybe it was because I had been there to yell at them when they did something wrong and hug them the rest of the time. Nature versus nurture. We would never know.
But maybe, just maybe, that warrior gene was buried deep inside them, or one of them, slowly ticking, ticking, until finally it exploded in some tragedy or drama that I couldn’t foresee or control. Maybe it would happen while I was gone.
SO I LEFT AMERICA IN SLOW MOTION.
First I was stopped at airport security because they inexplicably found explosive traces on my hands. After an “over the clothes” body search and some tough questions in a private room, I was allowed to proceed to the gate, only to have my flight delayed, and finally, because of a raging thunderstorm, canceled. I rescheduled my flight and texted Leo, Imma, and Giuseppe that I’d be a day late.
Though a part of me—mostly my stomach—didn’t want to go at all.
What if my plane crashed? What if someone else, someone they should be inspecting for explosive traces, had a bomb? Would my children ever recover if I never returned home? Would Wendell remarry?
He would have to remarry. He could never raise them alone. Maybe my mother would move in. I imagined that scenario and thought it would make a good premise for a TV pilot. What happens when a mother dies on her way to Italy and her eighty-three-year-old mom moves in to raise the kids? Hilarity ensues. Tuesday nights at eight on Lifetime.
Maybe I should just stay home, I thought that night as I pulled up to our house in Brooklyn, back from my unsuccessful visit to Newark International Airport. Forget Italy. Forget the crime. Maybe this was a sign I should forget the search for Vita. First the explosive traces and now the canceled flight. Leave the dead in peace, like Miserabila had said.
And then it hit me: maybe she had understood what I was saying to Maria Natale back in October in my broken Italian, knew I was returning, and had put a curse on my plane.
I laughed at the thought of it, trying to shake the idea from my head.
That evening, with Paulina sleeping next to me, curled inside me like a shrimp, I couldn’t help but think of all those curses I had come across in the book I’d read on magic in the South. The evil eye. The potions. The spells. The horrible little people who tried to suffocate you.
I pressed Paulina closer to me.
I fell asleep and dreamed strange dreams. I most vividly remember one in which I rent a mule instead of a car when I get to Italy. The mule moves so slowly that I decide to simply walk everywhere I go, from town to town, much like my ancestors.
Buia a buia. Dark to dark.