eighteen. Still made from sugar, though lower in calories and more about heightening potency. The Gransignore took over presidency of the automobile corporation from the godfather - his godfather. Dottori, professori, ingenieri, avvocati, monsignori, among themselves. Whose avvocati? Their own? Whose professori? Aren’t they all venerated and feared at the best university of Italy? At the Bocconi in Milano? No, they keep hiding: behind a veneer of jurisdiction and justice. Both of them. Isn’t a grand old man said to have loved small boys, to have obtained them - he could, after all, with his influence, his power, his money. He, the godfather. MIND GAME. Power & control. Again. But not just that. Do such affectations rub off? The perversion that knows no boundaries? How far do you go - here, in this Italy where nearly everything is permitted, remains unseen because of fear? Do I now have to imagine that the old man, the “generoso” who handed his empire to the Gransignore in Carozza, also handed him the silence of the children whom he was assumed to have abused? Yes,
I suppose so. When many people know about it, when they whisper and keep quiet about it, then those who are close associates will know a lot more about it. They just turn away. Pretend it isn’t true. Even I could not believe it, but it was just too similar to all those stories about Michael Jackson - be they true or not. No smoke without fire, right? And this is the man that my God of Love, Amos, is so close to? The man who preaches water and drinks wine. Wine, incidentally, that he knows nothing about. All that aside: a man who maybe would offer his only son, Feliciano, as fodder to this mob? Physically as well as emotionally? In preparation for his future responsibility? What a saint Silvio Berlusconi is, compared to them! Having little defenceless children on the menu is in a somewhat different moral league than bedding someone who isn’t quite eighteen yet! I think of my own son and a veritable shudder engulfs my entire body. Adrenalin. Rarely experienced to that degree. Rarely tasted. Persisting. Is my imagination going too far? No, not at all. I am a mother. More than these men ever will be or have been fathers. Their love is focused on themselves. Only on themselves. They sacrifice nothing. Nothing is sacred to them. Nothing is precious. Their values are adorned with numbers followed by many zeroes, in their secret accounts in Luxembourg, Switzerland, the Cayman Islands, Hong Kong. Offshore. Official. You can read about it in many articles of local and regional gazettes and the more serious national papers. Written by journalists who have uncovered more details than the police, the Carabinieri or the Guardia di Finanza ever have done or will do. Circumstantial evidence only. No proof. These are persons “di buona famiglia” - from a good family, practically untouchable. I grab at them, touch them, hit them. Torment them. Them, whom the world applauds. Them, whom the world envies.
“Attention at the platform! Train floating in!”
The new slogan for the successor of the “wheels”, the horsepower from Southern Italy. The new means of transportation in Italy, the overhead railway, feathered with corrupt machinations? How else would this be financed? Everyone has a share: a percentage share in the directorships and executive boards - same as ever: Amos, Bellarosa, the Gransignore, fashion manufacturers and all the rest of the Clan. Careful, the shares are down! Calling all stock exchanges! I am reminded of Pasquale -the character form Roberto Saviano’s book “Gomorrah”. Pasquale is a tailor in Caserta Province north of Naples. He makes the most beautiful dresses, creates what even designers can’t put on paper. Pasquale himself has no idea for whom he sews those badly paid dresses. They come down from Milano, give their orders to whoever promises to work fastest and cheapest. For starvation wages, without security. They only survive for as long as they can sew. The alternative is to get involved with the Clan proper: drugs, human trafficking, garbage crises. The planned poisoning of the earth. Murdering their own families - this generation and the next and the ones after. They stop at nothing. The fish provided by the Mediterranean around Naples is unfit for human consumption thanks to the toxic waste illegally sunk into ocean and earth. People fall ill, die. Nobody wants to know. Is it them, the Clan from Milano and Ferrara, who make their profits that way? One day, Pasquale sees Angelina Jolie in the papers, on television. Pasquale can’t go to Ponza, where they are at home - the mighty members of the Clan. Pasquale does not believe his eyes when he sees Angelina Jolie in HIS dress. He who gives his talent, his skills, for a few cents an hour, to be able to feed his family. He gives up and never sews again. Instead, he joins the Clan. Life is hard for him and his family. The only alternative left for him - as brought about by the Clan - is the Clan. That’s what Roberto Saviano tells us in his book “Gomorrah”.
Back to the overhead railway: they want to have it manufactured down here, near Naples - the new railway. Utilizing public funds to set up tax avoidance schemes for some selected clowns of Northern Italian society? Everything rolling nicely. Except for their yachts, which float, and their private planes and helicopters, which lift off, just like they do themselves. Among their own kind with all their old millionaire and billionaire chums on Ponza. The olden days music box blares “Oh sole mio” in the little bar on Ponza, down by the harbour, where I linger, observing, while the Monopoly players on the island nurse their power and glory. The jukebox warbles “Azzurro, il pomeriggio e troppo azzuro e lungo per me” in mono. Drop another euro in and I’ll have free choice again.
MOLISE - CAMPOBASSO
In Germany, we know the Molise Region predominantly from Jan Weiler’s humorous descriptions in “Maria, He Doesn’t Like It”, where, with the utilization of every possible bit of love for Italy, he depicts Antonio Marcipane from Campobasso in a way that moves the German soul to tears. Panettone. If you don’t eat, you don’t like it. That’s logic, isn’t it? Italian logic. Yes, it is the smallest region of Italy and one of the poorest. Dot-tore Amos, my hero, didn’t have enough to eat as a child, was left on his own as both parents had to work. They didn’t even have a loo in Molise. His place of birth, synonymous with the misery of an entire region.
”My parents loved me,” he tells me, tears in his eyes.
“Even though they beat you all the time?” I ask, provocatively and disgusted, while applying dark red nail varnish.
“Of course! You don’t understand! That’s love.”
Love, the Italian way, I think.
“And paint your nails more delicately. White or pink. Natural-looking. I want you soft and fragile.”
Then the emigration to Emilia Romagna. A career created in Ferrara: father working in the factory, on one of Bellarosa’s many production lines. His mother is a housemaid. Maybe she’s trying to see herself in the role of the signori for whom she works.
“That’s why she chose this name,” Amos explains to me.
The beloved, the lover. Amos, the lovely! It’s not that hard to move up. The real challenge is to behave as though that’s where you already come from - UP THERE - not from down here. Amos learned well. And turned into a carbon copy. A bad copy. The replica of Bellarosa and her way of life.
CINDERELLA THE ITALIAN WAY
Of course, every Saturday his sisters also sit around the traditional lunchtime table in Ferrara. Brunilda is divorced, one son. Brunilda and Petunia - the two sisters from Cinderella. When Brunilda’s son was eleven, Dot-tore went to visit him in England - the kid needs to learn English. So he sends him off to a summer camp, where all the Italian kids go who have parents and uncles with no gift for languages. Naturally, they speak Italian there, learn hardly any English. I’m waiting for Dottore in a small café - at long last, I’m allowed to smoke! As Brunilda can’t very well raise her son on her own, Dot-tore has assumed the male role and control in this game. Power and control. He accuses his sister and her son of separation anxiety - an inability to step back from each other, that’s what his inner amateur psychologist says. Years later, he’ll repeat that diagnosis. They are all called Franco: Franchino, Francesco, Frank - or similar. Even the dog, a Yorkshire terrier who peers out of Petunia’s tiny Gucci handbag. Has to be pure-bred.
