Chapter 5

I don't miss our childhood at all, because our childhood was full of violence. All kinds of things happened to us, at home, outside, every day. But I remember that I never felt bad about the life we encountered then, life was like that, it was normal. One of the responsibilities we learned growing up was that we had to make life harder for others before it made it harder for us.

Of course, I loved our teachers and the polite way that priests behaved, but I don't think their ways fit our urban area. Here, even though you're a woman, you can't be too polite. Women fight more than men, they yank hair, and they hurt each other. Hurt is a disease. From a young age, I imagined that there were very tiny animals, almost invisible to the naked eye, that would come to our residential areas at night, from pools of water, abandoned train cars, stinking grass, frogs, salamanders, flies, rocks and dust, that would get into the water we drank, the food we ate, the air we breathed. These subtle bugs can make our mothers and grandmothers as irritable as vicious dogs. They are more susceptible to this disease than men. Men are constantly angry and eventually they calm down, but women, are quiet and calm on the surface, but they will be angry to the end and can't stop.

What happened to Melina Capucho - a relative of Leila's mother - had a great impact on Leila, and I was deeply affected by it. Melina lived in the same building as my parents; we lived on the third floor and she lived on the fourth. She was only in her thirties, but she looked very old, and she had six children. Her husband was about her age and unloaded goods for people in the vegetable and fruit market. I remember he was not very tall and strong, but had a handsome face and was full of pride. One night he went out of the house as usual and never came back, probably killed or exhausted. His funeral was so tragic that the whole town attended, and my parents and Lila's parents were there. After a while, Melina did not change much from the outside, she was still the same dry woman with a big nose, her hair had gone gray, and her voice was sharp and harsh. Every night she called the children's names one by one from the window, each syllable drawn out with angry desperation: Ai-da! Mi-Kai-Lai! In the beginning, Donato Sartore didn't help her much; he lived above Melina, on the fifth floor. Donato attended Holy Family Church consistently, and as a Christian who did good, he did his best to raise money for Melina, collecting old clothes and shoes and placing Melina's oldest son, Antonio, in the car repair store of his acquaintance, Mr. Glessio. Melina was very grateful to him, and in her lonely woman's heart, that gratitude changed into love and passion, and I don't know if Sartore noticed it. He was a very passionate man, but also very serious, with life always at three points: home, church, and work. He was a crew member of the national railroad system and had a regular salary that allowed him to support his wife Lydia and their five children, their oldest named Nino, in a very decent way. If he wasn't on the Naples-Paola trip or the return train, then he was at home, fixing this and organizing that. He would go shopping and push the youngest child out for walks in his cart, a behavior that was unusual in our neighborhood. No one thought: Donato was doing this to lighten his wife's load. No one thought that way. The men in the whole building, led by my father, thought that Donato was a man who liked to be a woman, plus he wrote poetry and liked to read it to others. This didn't occur to Melina either, and the widow preferred to believe it: because he was kind, he was bent over by his wife. So Melina decides to fight Lydia Sartore to the end, she wants to free Donato and unite him with herself. At first, this cruel war amused me, both in my house and outside, and people laughed with malice when they talked about it. Lydia would leave her freshly washed clean sheets outside to dry, and Melina would jump onto the balcony with a bamboo pole in her hand, one end specifically blackened with fire, and use it to soil the sheets; Lydia would pass under the window, and Melina would spit on her head or pour down a bucket of dirty water; during the day, Lydia walked around Melina's head, together with a few rowdy children; all night long, Melina banged a mop on the ceiling. Sartore tries everything to quell the war, but he is an overly sensitive, polite man. Thus, the war was escalating, and when the two women met in the hallway or on the road, they started cursing at each other, cursing very hard and fiercely. From that time on, this incident made me feel very scared. One of the most frightening scenes of my entire childhood was the one that began with Melina and Lydia shouting, followed by curses coming from the windows and stairs, intensifying, followed by my mother opening the door to see, followed by some children, and finally, a scene that looked like this - and for me now, unbearable --two female neighbors wrestling and rolling down the stairs, Melina's head hitting the stairwell floor just centimeters from my shoe, like a white melon that had missed its way to the floor.

It's hard to explain why we girls are siding with Lydia Sartore. It could have been because she was more marked and had blond hair, or because Donato herself belonged to her and Melina wanted to steal it, or perhaps because several of Melina's children were dressed in rags and filth, but several of Lydia's children were clean and their hair was neatly combed. Lydia's eldest son, Nino, was a few years older than us and very handsome, and we all liked him very much. Lila was the only one who was toward Melina, but she never explained why. At one point, she said that if Lydia Sartore had been killed, she would have deserved it! I think Lila thought that partly because she was bad, and Melina was a distant relative of hers, and that was one reason.

One day four or five of us girls were coming back from school together and Marisa Sartore was walking with us. Usually, we walked with her, not because we liked her, but because we wanted, through her, to reach her brother Nino.

Marisa saw Melina first, walking on the other side of the main road, walking very slowly, holding a paper bag from which she was taking something to eat. Marisa pointed at her and said, "That bitch! But there was no contempt in her tone; she was just repeating what her mother at home used to say. Leila, who was very small and thin at the time, immediately slapped Marisa hard, knocking her to the ground. Leila was very calm when she hit, just like on other occasions of violence, there was no shouting before or after, no forewarning, she didn't even blink, very calm and precise.

First I helped Marisa, who was crying, to her feet, then I turned around to see what Leila was doing. She was walking across the main road toward Melina, and she didn't care about the big trucks coming and going. I could see her movements but not her face, and there was something hard to describe at that moment that made me feel very uneasy. Now I can say this: she was small, with dark hair, strong, with her usual determination and firmness. She was inwardly very determined to support this relative of her mother's, and she faced the pain with determination, silent and unwavering as a stone statue. She stood close to Melina, who had a bar of black soap in one hand, which she had just bought from Don Carlo's store, and was breaking something to eat with the other.