ENRICO G

CHAPTER 1

SAN GIUSTINO

My region, Abruzzo, in central Italy, has often been dismissed as a desolate land, home to poor, illiterate peasants. Even in the hardest times, we always had enough wine to drink ourselves into forgetting that we were poor and illiterate.

As we say in our Abruzzese dialect, “There’s nothing to be gained by living a life of poverty.” I made sure I wasn't illiterate or stayed poor for long.

As for the landscape, this was a cruel description. Hopefully, someday the world will appreciate our majestic mountains, our preserved medieval towns, the unspoiled forests, the rugged coastline, and of course, our wine, our cuisine, and our olive oil. My Gardini olive oil.

My village, San Giustino, was built on the south side of a mountain and founded around 1100 when the popes and European emperors had temporarily stopped killing each other. My beloved Abruzzo was handed around like a hot potato, from the savage Normans, the corrupt popes, and the greedy Spaniards to the picky Austrians and the little Napoleon. In 1860, Italy was united by Generale Garibaldi, who assembled an army with these words, “I offer neither pay, nor quarters, nor provisions. I offer hunger, thirst, forced marches, battles, and death.” That guy was fierce with a huge set of balls.

On a clear day, you can see the Adriatic Sea from a village whose population was never more than seven hundred. My family, the Gardini, had lived in San Giustino since the Middle Ages, as the village slowly evolved into a maze of winding cobblestone streets. The stone houses were built on terraces, clustered around a piazza and two churches. The oldest, dating to the twelfth century, stood at the top of the mountain. The other, built by the Spanish in the sixteenth century, was farther down the slope for the elderly who struggled to climb the hill. I'd see neighbors carrying an old relative piggyback to Mass. Since the Gardini were big people, that was never an option. Our old folks either walked to Mass or prayed alone at home.

The San Giustino hillside graveyard held four generations of Gardini. Whose stupid fucking idea was it to put a village cemetery on a hillside? Every fifty years, the bodies had to be moved. Storms and erosion would collapse the coffins, exposing the bodies and sending them tumbling down the mountain.

“What else can we do? There’s no flat land to bury our dead,” my papà, Giuseppe, said when they had to rebury his grandfather, Bernardo.

My great-grandfather began acquiring land in 1800, when the French ruled. He won fifty hectares of olive groves with a pair of aces in a game of briscola. His opponent was an arrogant Frenchman and asshole, Comte de la Tour, who at the time, owned most of the land in the village.

“Merde! Monsieur Gardini, you’re now the owner of my olive groves,” said de la Tour.

“You’re fucked, Your Highness. Now get the hell out of town,” replied my great-grandfather.

An artist sketched the famous card game. Bernardo, an imposing, burly figure in work clothes, sits across the table from a thin count in a fancy suit and powdered white wig. Bernardo smiles, while the count scowls.

“The count looks liked a femminuccia, a pansy, in that suit,” Papà liked to say, standing in front of the sketch in our small parlor.

Papà built a new house in 1871, the year I was born. The freestanding stone home overlooked our terraced hillside’s olive groves. It had two floors and an attic. The front door opened onto a hallway. To the left was a small parlor with two chairs and a settee. To the right, a door led to the dining room. A doorway beside the stairs opened into the kitchen, which had a large table, a door to the outside, and another connecting back to the dining room. A narrow staircase climbed to the second floor, with its two bedrooms. The attic held all our family secrets. At least that’s what Papà liked to say. I never found anything there except old clothes and dead birds.

It was in a second-floor bedroom that my mother, Rosaria, had died after giving birth to a dead baby. I was only five.

My grandmother blamed my papà. “It’s your fault my Rosaria and the baby are dead. You brought the doctor too late, and he was drunk.”

She was a mean old crone. We were not sad when she died while knitting. We buried her in a plot that was sure to get washed away in the next heavy rainstorm, which it did. But I don’t remember if we reburied her.

When I was seven, Papà married Marianna, a woman from a neighboring village, only ten years older than me and very shy. In the beginning, we laughed and sang songs together, but she stopped after Papà was arrested.

Papà was accused of killing Nino Danenza, our neighbor. Nino was suspected of stealing our olives under the cover of night. Papà organized a posse of our tenant farmers to patrol through the night, and they caught Nino loading our olives into his wagon at midnight. Papà approached his neighbor, who tried to get away with his horse and cart. According to Papà, he chased Nino on horseback until the thief tumbled from the cart. He claimed Nino hit his head on a rock and died. Papà was arrested a few weeks later.

It didn’t help that Papà had threatened, “I’ll carve you like a pig, Nino. You’ll never steal again.” He even shouted it in the San Giustino town square, “Ti intaglierò come un maiale.”

Our own neighbors testified about my papà’s outbursts, and the tenant farmers admitted he was always angry. When the authorities held their inquiry, Nino Danenza’s five-year-old son, Carlo, testified against my papà. That little shit had been asleep in the cart and woke up before his father fell out. I hated that snot-nosed Carlo. I’m convinced he made the whole thing up in his five-year-old pea brain. Someone probably bribed him with a piece of candy. Nino’s widow didn’t seem sad. Someone mentioned that my papà had done her a favor, as Nino would beat her and little Carlo nightly.

The magistrate didn’t buy the “tumbled from the cart” story. Papà admitted he'd punched Nino so hard that the man flew off his horse and smashed his head. They convicted my papà of murder and dragged him away in chains.

As they loaded him onto a wagon with other prisoners, I followed behind, crying, “Papà, Papà!”

“Be the man of the house, Enrico. Take care of the olives!” he called back

I was only eight. It was always about the olive groves.

After he was arrested, we didn’t know where he was going or for how long. Marianna sobbed, declaring that we were ruined. The local magistrate sentenced my papà to fifteen years in prison. He was sent to Rome, hundreds of kilometers west of our Abruzzo mountain village. A few villagers said Papà was lucky to be near the pope and Vatican City. What stupid, ignorant fools. Did they think he'd stroll past the pope every day? He was in fucking prison, rags on his back, bread and water in front of him, sitting in a dungeon. We thought we'd never see Papà again. I hated him for leaving us.

A few months after he was gone, I noticed Marianna’s growing belly. When she said a baby was coming, I expected her to die like my mother. At night, I cried, imagining being left all alone. They made me stay in the room while Marianna writhed in pain. I was instructed to hand the midwife clean rags. I'd seen animals being born, but this was far worse, watching a bloody, screaming thing emerge from her body.

“I’m never going to have one of those,” I said.

“You won’t, but your wife will,” the midwife replied.

I was angry with little Lucia, who screamed day and night. Marianna was too weak to feed her, so a wet nurse came from a neighboring town. The wet nurse was fat and smelled bad. We paid her in olive oil. Lucia and Marianna survived.

Miraculously, eight months later, Papà walked back into the village, a free man. King Umberto had declared an amnesty for Italian prisoners. All convicted murderers, robbers, brigands, rapists, and anarchists were released.

“Enrico, my son, pray for the king. Those anarchists couldn’t stop talking about killing him,” Papà said.

“Why?” I asked.

“They just hate kings, good and bad, even after he frees us.”

King Umberto hoped to appease the jailed anarchists who were threatening him. They assassinated him anyway while he was slurping his minestrone in a Monza restaurant, near Milan.

Papà was very thin after eight months in prison. His hair hung long and wild like a madman, and his beard was bushy. It took Marianna hours to clean him up. It wasn’t long before he looked himself again, sporting a trim mustache and a belly.

There was plenty of village gossip about my sister’s birth when Papà returned.

“How will Marianna explain the baby?” a woman whispered.

Papà didn't treat Lucia nicely until she grew into that bulbous Gardini nose. Then he was sure it was his kid. Luckily, I inherited my narrow nose from my mother, Rosaria. Maybe I wasn’t a Gardini. When I turned twelve, Papà showed me the rock where Nino had hit his head.

“Talk before action, son, or you could end up in prison,” he said.

He handed me a small knife and told me to etch my name in the stone. I dismounted my horse and approached the slab, which still seemed to bear Nino’s dried blood. I managed to carve “Enrico,” but there was no room for “Gardini,” so I just etched a “G.”

Papà looked down from his horse, grinning. “Enrico G, a man of power and mystery. Perfect.”

From then on, I always introduced myself as Enrico G. I liked being powerful and mysterious. Before that, when I said my last name was Gardini, people would shake their heads and mutter, “The prisoner’s son.” But when I said my name was Enrico G, curiosity followed me everywhere.

After a few years, not many villagers remembered Papà’s prison adventure. The San Giustino population was shrinking. By the 1880s, many had emigrated to America, hunting the streets of New York for gold. My friend, Bruno Ranni, was itching to get to New York.

He said his uncle would send for him when he turned twenty with enough money to start a business. “You see, Enrico G, I’m gonna be a rich man in America.”

“Good luck. I’m staying here with the olive groves, making Gardini olive oil.”

Bruno was a few years older than me, not as tall, but stockier. You didn't want him landing on you in a fight. He could crush you to death or, worse, kill you with his bad breath. His farts were notorious for both volume and lingering effects. If there were any bad smells around the house, my stepmother would ask, “Has Bruno been here today?”

Despite those drawbacks, my sister had a crush on Bruno. “I want to show Bruno my new bows.”

Papà would always reply, “Make sure he hasn’t eaten bean soup.”

I didn't have much in common with Bruno, not even our taste in women. I suppose that was a plus, because we wouldn’t be chasing the same girl around town. We were all encouraged to marry within the extended family to preserve land and assets. Several generations of Gardini married their first cousins. It was also customary for a widower to marry his deceased wife’s sister, or for a wife to marry her deceased husband’s brother. One uncle even married his niece, though it was against her will.

The village families were proud of their arranged intermarriages, but the priest wasn't pleased. He often delivered a sermon on Sundays, warning that the village was producing too many sickly, goofy-looking children who would be useless.

“Look at God’s children, your children,” the priest would say, pointing from his pulpit at some of the congregants.

Mothers clutched their children and whimpered. [ac1] Fathers grumbled that the priest was out of line.

But the priest would press on. “Gaze upon their twisted limbs and blank expressions. Inbreeding must stop! These genetic defects and polluted blood will be passed down for generations.”

The villagers paid no attention, continuing to marry within families to protect their land and keep the dowries in famiglia. Families offered to pay the priest double for weddings to keep his mouth shut about inbreeding and mind his own damn business. The priest had a small notebook to track who was courting whom. If he suspected a potential liaison between close relatives, he'd drag a poor inbred child with distorted features to the girl’s house.

“Is this what you want to give birth to?” he'd ask.

Some couples were scared enough to end the courtship, others told him to fuck off. Weddings and village life went on, despite the meddling priest.

The olive harvests treated us well, and Papà seemed happy except when the tax man came to visit.

“The taxes will ruin us!” he’d shout, brooding for days afterward.

But in general, life was calm for our little family. We got through the harsh winters thanks to our food stores, and in spring and summer, the mountains awakened and blossomed. During the fall olive harvest, we worked day and night. The Gardini olive oil was famous and in demand. We weren’t rich, but we had enough.

Everything changed in the spring of 1888, when I was seventeen. I became a man, though not by my own choice.

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