Chapter Ten

Chapter Ten

So Dear reader, here we are, thirteen hours and thirteen and a half thousand words to go. Do able? I have no fucking idea, sorry for my language Dear Reader, but panic has now set in. right back to the story. Where were we? Ah yes, young Giacomo was spark out on the floor. Shall we wake him up? Shall we find out where he is? Okay, let’s go for it.
Giacomo felt the cold water hit his face. At first he had no idea what it was, when he had worked out that it was indeed water, he could not understand where it was coming from. Some where, through the ringing and fuzzy hum, buzzing through his ears he could voices, quiet voices, not whispering, but lowered, concerned, almost sympathetic.
Slowly he tried to open his eyes. At first it seemed as though he had forgotten how they worked, his brain kept sending them signals but the eyelids refused to obey. The voices spoke again, still fuzzy, still muffled, not so concerned, more urgent. He listened carefully trying to make out the words, occasionally he caught one, ‘alive’, ‘breathing’, ‘hit’, ‘hard’, and the brain tried to remember their meanings.
More water hit him in the face and he gagged and spluttered as it filled his nose and mouth, his eyes remembered what that where for and the lids decided that they could open after all.
Giacomo looked around, his brain searched for clues in they blurry shapes and the fuzzy colours that surrounded him. slowly, very slowly his brain took control of his eyes and started to work on focusing. Again he looked around, the brain trying to put the collection of objects that it could see in to some sort of order. Slowly it realised where it was. It was in the alley way, surrounded by the boxes and bins that Giacomo had thrown about earlier. How much earlier, seconds ago, minutes, hours, how long had he been unconscious, why had he been unconscious, why was he half lying half sitting against a wall in some rubbish strewn alley.
A large pink blob presented itself before him, the eye’s tried to make some sense from it, tried to find some point on which to focus, to find something recognisable in the mass of pinkness and shadows.
A voice spoke, “See, I told you he’d be okay.”
A dark hole appeared in the pink blob and another voice spoke, “I think it was more luck than judgement, I told you Signore Gangster did not want him hurt.”
The first voice again, “I only gave him a tap.”
The pink blob, “If that is your idea of a tap, god preserve us if you ever hit anyone properly.”
Giacomo’s brain suddenly and quite unexpectedly decide to join all the little clues together, pain, alley way, two voices, big pink blob. It remembered what had happened, it would have been a lot better for Giacomo if it had not. The brain decided, against the better judgement of the rest of the body, that there was danger again and that it needed to get Giacomo as far away from here as possible.
Surprisingly to Giacomo and the two men watching him, he leapt to his feet, grabbing at a wooden crate as he did so and swinging it at the pink fuzzy blob in front of him, he felt the crate make contact, heard the thud of wood on skin and bone and saw the pink blob disappear sideways. He turned and saw a tall dark shape moving towards him, Giacomo sprang forward and again swung the wooden crate. He heard the wooden crate make contact but this time the shape did not disappear side ways. It remained in his path and it seemed to have control of the wooden crate. The crate came swinging back towards him, it made contact on the side off his head, and he spun round and found himself face to face with the pink blob. His brain had begun now to make sense of the shapes and sounds and chose this moment to inform Giacomo what it had found out. The pink blob moved closer and Giacomo recognised it as the face of Little Paulo, Giacomo didn’t see the punch coming but he felt the blow hit his stomach making him double over forward, he felt the second one strike his jaw and send him reeling backwards towards the bins and boxes, he felt the kicks and blows raining down on him, he could hear Little Paulo’s voice repeating the same words over and over, “We were going to do this nicely, we only wanted a chat, Signore Gangster had an offer to make to you, he had a way for you to pay off your debt, he was going to offer you a job”
The blows and shouting stopped suddenly, Giacomo lay for a moment curled up in the foetal position, then something started happening, not to him, but around him. There was shouting and scuffling and the sound of blows being exchanged and then footsteps disappearing in to the distance. Giacomo lay for a moment, unsure of what to do, too scared to move, too scared not to, he braced himself, ready for the blows to start again, he flinched as he felt a hand on his shoulder and then he relaxed as he heard a familiar voice, “Como my boy, are you okay?”
Giacomo began to uncurl, he took his arms away from his head and uncovered his eyes, he was happy to see the concerned face of Mario kneeling beside him.
“Come on boy,” Mario continued, “let’s get you cleaned up.” Mario helped Giacomo to his feet and supported him as the two men made their way across the small square and to the bar.
He sat Giacomo on one of the rusting chairs and disappeared in to the blackness of the bar. Giacomo gingerly touched his face, he winced as he found a particularly tender spot just below his left eye, he drew his hand away and looked at it, the tips of his fingers were covered in blood. His brain, having done it’s best to protect him up to this point, decided to inform him about how the rest of his body felt. It felt bad. Muscles burned, joints ached, ribs cried out in pain, even the back of his eyeballs hurt.
Mario reappeared from the bar carrying a bowl of steaming water, some slightly grubby looking tea towels were draped over one arm. Behind him walked the young waiter carrying a tray containing two glasses and a large bottle of brandy. Mario indicated to the waiter to just leave the tray on the table and then he set about the task of cleaning Giacomo up.
Giacomo was surprised, Mario’s touch was soft, his movements and actions gentle. Giacomo looked at Mario and saw the concentration and concern in his eyes. After a few moments Mario spoke, “You won’t need any stitches, they’re not deep cuts, but you’re a skinny little runt and they’re right on the bone. I wish I had some tape, I could stop this bleeding in seconds if I had some tape, here, hold this.” Mario guided Giacomo’s hand up to his cheek, “Pinch the skin together here, don’t let go.”
Mario dipped the towel in to the water again and started to clean the cuts on Giacomo’s free hand, Giacomo watched as Mario worked, “This is not the first time you’ve done this?”
“No.” Mario said without looking up from his work.
“It’s a useful skill to have.” Giacomo said.
“Useful, necessary, there’s world of difference.”
“You were a boxer weren’t you?”
“That was a long time ago. It was in a different age, in a different world”
“Tell me about it,” Giacomo winced as Mario cleaned a graze on the palm of his hand, “Why did you give it up?”
“I’d rather not. It’s not something I like to talk about.”
“Please Mario; humour a young man who is in great pain.”
Mario stopped cleaning Giacomo’s wounds and looked at him, he sighed heavily, laid down the cloth and then sat down. He began to pour two glasses of brandy, “I don’t think I actually ever gave it up,” he said handing Giacomo a glassful of the dark heady liquid, “I think it gave me up.” He settled back in the rusty steel chair, took a fat cigar from his breast pocket and stuck, unlit, in to the corner of his mouth, and then he drained the glass of brandy in one and began to pour another.
“I was born at the arse end of World War Two,” Mario said, swirling the brandy around in his glass, “not far from here actually, a little apartment in the Via Di Compact Recorder.”
“Compact Recorder? That’s all factories.”
“It is now, they cleared the apartments in the early seventies, cockroach infested slums they were, rats the size of cats, but it was home and we loved it. I was the seventh of nine children, I don’t remember my youngest brother and sister, they died before I was four years old and so technically, like you, I was the youngest, the baby of the family.” He pulled out a Zippo lighter and lit the cigar, “I was always in trouble as a kid, as soon as I could walk I was in to every thing. The day I found out how the latch on the front door worked, my mother cried.
By the time I was seven every policeman in Suoloduro new my name and where I lived. My Nonna was convinced I was possessed by the devil, my zia’s suggested sending me to a children’s home and my Zio Frangipani suggested putting me in a sack and dropping me in the Vestavia River. By the time I was ten I was uncontrollable, my mother had given up on me and my papa, well my papa, somewhere in between the beatings I could tell he had not given up, I could see he still had hope, that he could see in me a spark, a spark of what I don’t know, but he saw something.”
Mario lent forward and poured them both some more brandy, “On my eleventh birthday he came home from work and said ‘son I have some thing for you, come with me’, well I tell you, I got ready to run. When ever my papa said he had something for me it usually meant a another beating.” He smiled to himself and took a long a drag on his cigar, “He took me by the hand and led me, down the dark narrow stairs, and out of the apartment block, I was quite scared, shit I thought, this is going to be such a beating he doesn’t want the rest of the block to hear it. Then I thought that perhaps he was going to give me away, I hadn’t noticed before, but I realised that he was carrying a brown paper parcel tied with string, I bet that contains my clothes, I remember thinking. It wasn’t a very big parcel, but then again I didn’t have very many clothes.
We came through here, passed right through this square, it seemed a lot bigger when I was a kid and of course in those days the fountain worked. It ran day and night with cool clear fresh water, channelled down here in pipes from the springs up in the mountains. The women of the area would come each day to fill buckets and pans, it was a time to gossip and catch up on the local news. We all had stand pipes at the back of our apartments but nobody trusted them, the water was pumped in from the river and we all knew what went into the river, mainly us kids from the bridge in the middle of town.” He laughed his pistol shot laugh and it echoed and reverberated of the buildings.
“Anyway,” Mario continued, “we walked down through here and made our way through the side streets and alley ways until we came out in another little square, another little square a fountain. He gripped my hand tighter as we made our way across and I thought, this is it, he’s going to give me away or put me in the children’s home. He stopped outside the church of St Anthony of Padua, you know, the little church we went to the other day?”
Giacomo nodded and sipped at his brandy, the liquid was warm and soothing but had a nasty habit of finding the cuts and sores in his bruised and swollen mouth.
Mario looked at Giacomo for a moment and then continued, “Anyway, there we were stood outside the little church, me, well by this point I’m thoroughly confused, I’m thinking to myself, is he going to beat me and we’ve come here so that he can ask forgiveness, is he going to give me to a family the priest has found, is he going to leave me here and let the priest take me to the orphanage, or is he going to put me into the church, perhaps they’re going to have me trained as a priest or a monk.
After a moment or two, Father Dominic appears at the main doors and makes his way down the steps, greeting my papa like an old friend, that’s it; I’m starting to cry now, great big, hot, fat, tears running down my face, and I start to plead with my papa, ‘don’t leave here papa, don’t send me way, I’ll be good papa, please papa, don’t let them take me away’. Big bubbles of snot are exploding from my nose and now I’m gripping my papa’s hand, holding on as tight as possible. If they want to take me away they are going to have to cut my hand off to get me away from my papa.
The priest is standing in front of us now and he shakes my papa’s hand and say’s ‘well Franco, is this the little fella?’ my papa looks down at me and I can see the tears in his eyes and he doesn’t say anything, he just nods. He kneels down and wipes the tears from his eyes and then starts to clean my face, wiping away the tears with his big white hanky that always smelt of engineering oil and making me blow my nose. He looks at me straight in the eyes and says the words I been dreading, ‘ciao Mario, I want you to be a big brave boy and go with Father Dominic.’ He kisses me on the cheeks and then on the forehead, stands up and passes my trembling hand to the Father.
Well, I thinks to myself, if that’s how it’s going to be, then that’s how it will be, if they no longer want me, I no longer want anything to do with them. I stood next to that priest like a soldier at attention; I drew my self up as tall as any eleven year old has ever been and even though inside I wanted to scream and cry and beg for one last chance, not a tremor or a tear appeared on my face. My father handed the parcel to the priest and said, ‘these are for the boy’, then he looked at me one last time, ruffled my hair with one of his big strong hands, turned and without ever looking back, walked off.”
Giacomo wiped a tear away from his eye and took a swig of his brandy, and then he cleared the lump in his throat and said, “Was that the last time you saw any of your family?”
Mario looked at him, “whose story is this?”
Giacomo looked down at his brandy.
Mario continued, “Then let me tell it at my own pace.” He topped up their glasses and took another puff at the big cigar, “The priest looks down at me and then kneels, so that we are looking at each other eye to eye, but I can’t take my eyes off that parcel, which the priest now has tucked under his arm, ‘Look at me Mario’, he says, I suddenly noticed how soft and quietly spoken he was, not something I’d heard in a priest before, the Christian Brothers who taught at my school were always shouting and screaming, I don’t think they could manage anything below a yell. So I looks at him, straight in his steel blue eyes and he says, ‘Your papa says you’re a bit of a tearaway, that he and your mama don’t know what to do for the best any more, they’re hoping that I might be able to set you on the right path, before it’s to late to save you. Come with me lad’. He stood up and, gripping my little hand, he led me off around to the side of the church.”
He lent back in his chair and stared in to the darkness of the bar, “Hey, Marco,” he called, “bring me and my young injured friend some snacks, all this talking is making me hungry.” Mario turned back to the table, “Down the side of the church was a wooden hut type affair, it’s not there any more, I think it fell down years ago, it was big, well it seemed big to a little lad like me, I guess it was about twenty, twenty five feet wide and about forty foot long (I know dear reader I been doing measurements in metres but I can’t be bothered to do the conversion at the moment that’s what second drafts are for) it had little windows high up all the way around and at the front a couple of concrete steps leading up to a set of wooden double doors, above the doors was a sign it read, ‘Saint Anthony of Padua Boys club’, that meant absolutely nothing to a kid like me, I just assumed it was the name for the children’s home, my little legs were shaking like a jerry built apartment in an earthquake, as we got to the bottom of the steps Father Dominic stops and sits down on the bottom step, he patted the space next to him, and relieved to get the weight off my little frightened legs I sat down. He placed the parcel on his knees and turned to me, ‘do you understand why your mama and papa have sent you to me?’ I looked down at my feet, I remember saying something like ‘They don’t want me no more, they want you to find me a new family’, I can remember his laugh to this very day, a gentle rolling laugh, like, like a spring stream at the height of the thaw bubbling and babbling over the rocks, I looked at him and remember thinking, what a bastard, laughing at me because my mama and papa don’t want me no more, he could obviously see the fear in my eyes cause he suddenly stopped laughing and looked at me all serious like, ‘did your papa not tell you what this place was?’ I shook my head, again he took my hand, tucked the parcel under his arm and pulled me to my feet, ‘come on lad, I think your going to like this’ he said as he dragged me up the couple of steps and through the doors.
In side that hut I found my second home, in there was what I had been searching for all my short life. ‘The saint Anthony of Padua Boys Club’ was a boxing club, for the next five years in that hut I learnt what it means to be a man, I learnt lessons that have stayed with me to this very day.
Father Dominic took me in to the room and showed me around. The Weight training equipment, the punch bags, the speed ball and finally the ring, a place I was to get to know very well. We stopped at the bottom of the steps and Father Dominic sat down again, he placed that brown parcel on his knees again and held it as though it was a small injured animal, ‘shall we see what’s in here then’, I nodded my head, not daring to take my eyes off the parcel, Father Dominic took out a small penknife and cut through the rough string that was holding it together, slowly, to me painfully slowly, he peeled the brown paper back, inside was perhaps the most beautiful thing I had ever seen. A pair of dark rich brown boxing gloves, they weren’t new, but they were mine, not those of an elder brother, but mine, bought for me by my papa. I learnt later that he had been putting a couple of Lira away each week until he could buy them from Signore Lender the pawnbroker.
‘lets see if they fit’ said Father Dominic and I held out two trembling hands and he slipped them on an laced them up. I remember that feeling, they were tight, not nasty tight, but safe tight, comforting tight, as though they had been made for me, as though they were already part of me, ‘do you want to give them a go?’ I didn’t say anything, I don’t think I even nodded, I just stood and grinned, a big stupid grin, we climbed up the steps and I clambered through the rope and in to the ring.
It was the greatest thing I had ever seen, it was only four post with ropes strung between them and a wooden, sprung floor covered in a grubby, stained, canvas, but it looked and smelled as an arena should, of fear and bravery and hard battles fought and won. Father Dominic walked me to the centre of the ring and knelt down beside, ‘would you like to give it a go lad?’ this time I did speak, I spoke loud and clear, ‘oh yes Father.’ He called over another lad, I can’t remember his name, now there’s a shame, my first opponent and I can’t remember his name, father Dominic turns to me and says, ‘I hear your quite a scrapper lad, lets see how you do against young Giovanni here,’ Giovanni, of course Giovanni Calbresse, any way I looks at this lad, he was twelve, maybe thirteen years old, a couple of inches taller than me, but I thinks to myself, I’ve licked kids twice his size, this should be a piece of piss.
So father Dominic says ‘right Mario, your in the boxing ring now, not on the street, so you’re only allowed to use your fists, no grabbing, no biting and no kicking, do you think you can do that’ I nodded not taking my eyes of Giovanni, ‘okay he says, all you have to do is try and hit young Giovanni here, and he’s going to try and hit you, right lads, someone ring the bell.’
I learnt a very valuable lesson that night, never under estimate your opponent. That lad danced me all over the ring, I don’t think I laid a glove on him, by the time he’d finished with me I’d got a lose tooth, a black eye and a bloody nose. I was the proudest I had ever been, I knew what I wanted to be in life, I wanted to be a boxer, I wanted to be able to dance around that ring and control my opponent like Giovanni had.
My dad came to collect me three hours later and despite the aching muscles and the sore ribs I walked home feeling taller than I ever had. That night I fell asleep dreaming of being in that ring, I was as good as gold at school the next day, I was too busy thinking about boxing to think of trouble to cause and that afternoon, straight after school, instead of going in to town and finding trouble with my friends I ran all the way to that hut, I couldn’t wait to get back in that ring again, I even got there before father Dominic, I had to sit on the steps and wait.”
He smiled at Giacomo and drained the brandy glass, then wiping the tears from his eyes he said, “Damn cheap brandy, makes your eyes water.”