Victory Parade

It was April when Stephano Bosca, the regional giudice di pace from Avellino, arrived in my village and sat in the main hall of the palazzo communale to hear local cases as he did every spring. For Venticano, it was the time of year when the accumulated resentments of the winter—barely contained in stifling, overcrowded kitchens and the hazy corners of Auteri’s bar—spilled out in the makeshift courtroom of the palazzo and, ultimately, onto the piazza.

Everyone knew that Elvira Tucci had given birth to a baby boy in February. She had taken no pains to disguise her belly or hide in her mother’s hovel as her condition became more apparent. Instead, she had displayed herself in much the same way she had done before she became pregnant. Even with the extra weight in her last few months, she still turned the heads of the men as she ambled past them clustered outside of Auteri’s, or raised the eyebrows of the housewives as Aniello, the butcher’s apprentice, slipped an extra pork loin in her package. She had money enough to pay for the meat, money that the housewives suspected was coming from someone’s husband.

After the baby was born, Elvira dressed herself in black and her son in white and brought him to the church on the first Sunday after Easter to be baptized.

“Don’t visit the sins of his parents on this innocent,” she told the old priest, who poured the water and gave the boy his first name while the donnas of the village pretended to click their rosary beads. The following week, when she carried the child into the palazzo communale on the first morning of Bosca’s arrival, it was the baby’s last name that she was seeking.

It did not take long for the clerk who was recording the petitions to send a messenger to my father’s house. However, Papa had already departed for his daily journey to Napoli.

It was Mama who saw Guillermo Nardozzi through the muffled light of her parlor curtains, who saw the purple-red seal of the court on the papers in his hand, and who moved swiftly and decisively to intercept my Zia Pasqualina and answer the door before Guillermo had even lifted the knocker.

She impassively signed the multiple receipts that Guillermo held crumpled in his arthritic left hand and slipped the summons into the pocket of her dress. Without lifting her eyes to acknowledge them, she knew that her neighbors had not let the messenger’s arrival pass unnoticed. As quickly as she had greeted Guillermo, my mother dismissed him, closed the door, and retreated to her bedroom.

Once behind its locked door, my mother withdrew the summons from her pocket and sliced through the seal with her fingernail, sending a chunk of wax onto her bed. She unfolded the papers and began to read, ignoring the stain from the still-warm wax seeping into the starched and embroidered linens of the bed.

When she finished reading, she did not retreat under those same linens, but sat at the round, marble-topped table she used as a desk, set out her letter paper, and began to compose a response to Elvira Tucci’s complaint naming my father as the father of her illegitimate child. When she was finished, she tore the linens from the bed and burned them.

Papa arrived home shortly before dusk, washed up in the stable behind the house, and found my mother waiting for him in their bedroom with the court papers.

Papa waved his hand in dismissal of the words on the summons. “The girl is shrewd. Why accuse the goat herder, who can only bring her a pint of milk, when she can name the man in the fine suit with the big house? I’ll throw her a few hundred thousand lire and be done with it.”

“Are you the father of that baby?”

“No more and no less than half a dozen other men.”

“Then let one of the others give him a name. It’s not the money, Feliz. It’s having to watch her squalling brat grow up sharing my children’s name. It’s having to endure the knowing looks of the other wives who can still pretend their husbands are faithful. I’m the last one to expect you to have stayed out of her bed, Feliz, but don’t drag me and the children through the mud because of it.”

And so my mother demanded that Papa fight the accusation.