1981 is underway, and the labyrinthine city of Reggio Calabria in the south of Italy lives under mafia rule. Lucia Carbone, sixteen, harbors a burning hatred for those who killed and dumped her aunt Rosa, a lover of books and flowers, by the roadside. But her family cloaks itself in silence, and if Lucia wants revenge, she will have to take justice into her own hands.
Next we share an excerpt from I Take Care of the Shadows (NED Ediciones), by Anna Mallamo.
*****
Dark Shadows
The day I decided I would kidnap him and kill him was a Saturday in March, the buzzing month. I remember it very well: a cold sirocco wind blew, a day of bad temper. Beatrice had forced me to follow him closely along Garibaldi Avenue, whispering, filling my ears with sighs and gripping my arm so hard she left a mark.
—Let’s go back now —I kept telling myself.
—Just a little farther along the sidewalk —she pleaded, never letting go of me and with her eyes fixed on him, who walked at the center of the road, slowly, hands in the pockets of his black coat.
Black as a mal shadows.
—He’s ugly —I told her, just to annoy her. It’s easy to give Beatrice a fright.
—He’s ugly and dirty —I repeated very softly, sliding the voice through clenched teeth. If you want to protect someone, you have to scare him.
But she paid no heed; hooked to me, she tugged at me to slow down, to hurry up, to try to hide, to make herself noticeable, to pass on a bit of her loving anxiety, to stay afloat. All at once.
—Enough already. —I had to shake her and stop short—. You’re going to tear my sleeve.
—Oh, sorry, sorry.
It’s easy to make Beatrice feel guilty.
—I’ve had it, I’m going to the bus stop —I told her, smoothing the anorak. It was handsome, though worn and too red: Aunt Rosa’s parka, the little aunt, the youngest, the stolen aunt. When I had taken it from her wardrobe, and no one spoke Aunt Rosa’s name anymore, and no one touched her things, Mom had looked at me coldly, and every time I wore it I felt her impulse to tear it to pieces with the large scissors, the ones used by tailors; even more so, with those of the goddess who cuts the thread of life, one of the Fates, the one who has more power than the other two. In my mythology book — Aunt Rosa used to say everything is in there and she was right — that chapter was full of underlines and little drawings.
—Okay, I’m sorry —Beatrice answered desolately, with her glasses slipping down her nose. I looked at her and at that exact moment I heard a loud thud, and after a moment of silence a confused roar and people running: he lay in the middle of the street, a red hole in his forehead, his face stupefied, arms spread out in a cross.
“Amen,” I was about to say, and perhaps I did. Beatrice answered me with a simple “What?”, grabbing my arm and giving me a shake. There had been no shot and there was no one lying on the ground with a bloodstained forehead: I had been daydreaming, absorbed in a scene I had invented in one of my lucky alternate endings. Things that happen only inside my head.
—Amen, amen —I said—. After all, we know where he’s going: up —I concluded, as he vanished into the crowd and the sirocco.
I let go of him badly and quickly out of disdain and arrogance. We were forbidden from using coarse words mixed with the dialect. Our parents didn’t want it, for they believed that was how the poor and the country folk spoke, and we were young city people, but we liked it. It was the adults’ slang; we spied it on their lips, we claimed it in secret and used it for the same things as the grown-ups: to mess with others or to hide certain things, just like them.
Beatrice had sighed a “Yes.” It was the day Rosario, the younger son of Rocco, of the Cristallo family, returned home, a rugged refuge in the Aspromonte, protected like a fortress and as dark as a sanctuary.
She had fallen in love because he spent his life up there, always wore the black coat and did not speak to anyone. They said his father was a scoundrel and had sway on the mountain. That is why I hated him.
Beatrice did not fall in love with a person: only with gossip, gestures, tokens, words, and demeanor. Although perhaps a person is precisely that, or love is that. Hatred too.
—————————————
Author: Anna Mallamo. Title: I Take Care of the Shadows. Publisher: NED Ediciones. Availability: Todostuslibros.