The stork arrived home Luckily dad killed her – Corriere.it

Memory.
I needed a starting point, I found at least two: the birth of my brother Toni and a nightly argument between my father and my mother. The drive to write probably came from those tiny slivers of memory. They are fragments of terrified nights, I don’t even call them memories. They seem to me feelings, or perhaps they are already fictions.

1

The birth of my brother Toni, in 1948, has to do with a drawing of a stork. It’s about the stork that brought him into the world and that moved my head for several years. I brought it up, however, only when I read My Africa. Right at the point where Karen Blixen says she was told a story as a child accompanying the words with drawings – which, as in the fable, would have composed a stork magnificently in the end – I remembered that I too had a drawn stork in mind, only that mine was excellently composed at the beginning and horrendously decomposed at the end. It would be nice to choose what marks us as children, but it doesn’t happen and so we have to make do with the signs that happen to us.

The drawing of the stork had been done – for me who was five years old, and for my brother who was three – by our father when he had told us that a third brother was about to arrive and that, if he brought it to us as a gift hanging from his beak, it would have been no less a stork, exactly the one that meanwhile was emerging, splendid, alive, from his pencil strokes. How I must have liked that animal, my father was an extraordinary artist. We loved him very much when he was in a good mood and he drew us all, my mother, my grandmother, my uncle, my brother, me, and now also that wonderful bird that carried its little brother and was called the stork.

Then one night my brother and I wake up scared, our mother is making heartbreaking screams. Let’s stay in bed for a while, I don’t know what to do. When the shouting stops, we decide to go out into the corridor. There is nobody, not even in the kitchen, and the door to our parents’ bedroom is closed. We wait, the door opens. Our grandmother appears, or perhaps the midwife, or one of our aunts, who knows: I only see that she wears bloodstained sheets. And even the indefinite figure of a woman, when she sees us, just thinks of blood, says uneasily, in dialect (everything happens in Neapolitan, during my childhood): «Go back to sleep, mum is fine. The stork brought her little brother, but then she wanted to take him back and your father, thank goodness, killed her.’

2

The quarrel between my parents has the color of the streak of light that comes from the ajar door. I woke up with a start, my father screams. He’s mad with jealousy and humiliated by his own jealousy, he’s shouting at my mother his reasons for him. Fury spreads in his everyday Neapolitan, even my anguish has that language. When suddenly he, messing up the night, the fear I have of his anger, the same tone as him, throws a mysterious word at my mother — vain — pressing her more and more as she cries: vain, vain, vain.

To me, “vanity”, despite my fear, seems like a precious sound, more aggressive, more contemptuous than those in dialect, and yet supple, elegant. My father himself, to articulate it, is forced to change key, to spell it well, not to neglect any vowel. I sense that it’s a word from books, that he furiously removed it from the writing and grafted it into the Neapolitan voice. She did it to underline her superiority, to better mortify my mother. Now writing and voice collide mixing. I feel guilty because I like that word.

3

My desire to write begins long after those nights, yet I have no doubt that it has its roots in them. It is probable, of course, that that passion also derives from reading some well-finished text: Heartfor instance, which the master had sent me once when I was ill, and I had read it passionately despite my fever. But I’m almost certain that the origin is in the bewitching stork fiction which suddenly pours real blood, in my father’s violent dialect broken even more violently by “vanity”, in those sounds of the world that skid every time I bet I can make – of that night and its voices – writing.
(1997)