50 Lire

Issue 34 • Fall 2016 • Nonfiction

THIRD PLACE NONFICTION IN THE 2016 SUMMER CONTEST

This essay’s ability to depict resentment and also empathy is rare and remarkable.
– Debra Monroe

The night my sister and I met our stepfather, I didn’t know that shortly afterwards I would wish him dead. I was five years old, Paola nine, on our first summer holiday after a lifetime of mourning our father’s death. It was the summer my mother stopped wearing black, the color I had seen on her since I was born, and began to wear colorful blouses that revived the beauty and youth she had buried along with my father. We were staying with one of my mother’s older sisters, who had rented a house on the coast, midway between Naples and Rome, and took care of the three of us as her own children. 

That night, Paola and I had not been asked to wait for our mother at home. To our surprise and joy, we were invited to go out with her and our cousin Lorena. We loved Lorena, nineteen years old and the embodiment of the uninhibited sexuality of the late 70s, which we could not understand but could sniff in the air around her when she sunbathed topless on the beach and talked to men without covering her bosom, or when at home she left the restroom door wide open for us to peer in and steal another glance at her breasts or —if we got lucky—at her pitch-black bush. We were thrilled to be part of this small tribe of women, and we savored the appetite for life that Lorena was passing on to our mother along with her vibrant Indian tunics that made mother the most beautiful woman we had ever seen. 

We walked into the Lido disco bar with trepidation. The familiar beach deck, coated with sand during the day, had turned into a shiny dance floor at night, with a glittering ball spinning on the ceiling, a jukebox blasting Donna Summer and Gloria Gaynor, and a row of pinball machines beckoning us from within a cloud of cigarette smoke. We had entered the world of adults, and it was loud and hazy and electrifying. 

At first, we did not understand. A mustached man, leaning against the bar, looked as if he were expecting us. He instinctively moved in our direction, grinning, then stopped abruptly, seemingly responding to a signal from our mother, and pretended to join a group of dancers. The disco ball cast light and shadow over him, and we could not fully see his face. Rocking to the rhythm of his own music, he then traced his steps back toward the bar and lit a cigarette, waiting for another invisible signal. We sat at a table across the bar, from which we studied the exchange of glances across the dance floor. The mustached man kept watching my mother, and she watched him back. He smiled, she didn’t. She lowered her gaze, aware of ours. Then, she sent us to ask him for some change to play a pinball game so we would stop staring at them staring at each other. 

“I’ll go,” Paola said. 

“Me too.” I grabbed Paola’s hand and followed her through the dancing crowd. 

“Scusi, signore, do you have 50 lire for the pinball game?” Paola and I said in unison, because speaking together gave us courage, and because we were unable to contain the excitement of approaching a man who—it was not hard to guess—already seemed to know who we were. 

“Only 50?” he said, smiling. 

Eager to put his hand to the wallet, he gave us more than we had expected: we could play not one, but four games. He leaned toward us, and up close, we noticed that he had slightly bulging eyes. Later, my mother—and we after her—called him “Maurizio occhi a palla” for his soccer ball eyes. We thanked him and returned to our mother’s table, around which now hung a cluster of men. Maurizio was not the only man not taking his eyes off our mother; with her coffee-colored skin and eyes enhanced by the turquoise of Lorena’s Indian tunic, she looked aware, but not in control, of her stunning beauty. She was thirty years old; she smelled of jasmine and figs and all the good fruits I discovered that summer in my aunt’s garden, and she had an edginess in her manner I had never seen before. Later, I realized it might have been desire. Desire to be loved, to be plucked like a fruit by some male hands, to be plunged back into the carnality of life she had tasted for less than four years during her marriage, and that had been taken away from her too soon. A desire—and the shame of it—I could not understand yet, but that the men in the Lido bar surely did and were eager to satiate. 

“Mamma, that man gave us two hundred lire!” Paola and I said, excited. 

“I told you Maurizio is a good man,” Lorena said. 

“Maybe,” my mother said. 

“Now he has met these two.” 

My mother blushed. 

“It’s time you find a man for your kids.” 

Actually, I am lying: I never heard Lorena say that last line. Yet, it was the line all our family members told our mother every time they came to check on us after weeks of her not leaving the house. They brought her food, cigarettes, and cash, alongside an injunction to live, which was tantamount to finding a man: “If not for yourself, do it for the love of your husband’s daughters.” 

And so it was for the love of us, that Paola and I were dragged into a disco club that night. We knew we were on a mission, and that we had the consent of the entire family: our grandparents, aunts and uncles, all wanted my mother to find a man. Not any man, but one to replace my father. One who was not afraid of joining a family with no male head and with three pairs of female legs. 

Except for the uncountable pinball games and my mother’s turquoise blouse, I do not recall much else from that first encounter. All I know is that not long after that night—the night that determined who I would become, and how much love I could get and give—Maurizio, my mother, my sister and I were walking on the beach like a family: Maurizio holding my mother’s hand, we right behind them next to bare-breasted Lorena. We liked Maurizio because he bought us ice cream and pinball games, and because finally here was one man by our mother’s side, one that would keep away all others who offered to fulfill the needs of a young widow after her daughters were put to bed. 

Maurizio kept visiting us after summer was over and we had returned to our apartment in Naples. On Sundays, he took us to the amusement park; we always came back home with toys in our arms and cotton candy stuck to our lips. I would sit on his lap, and we would call each other Cuoricino mio—“My Little Heart.” 

“Let’s pretend that you are my daddy,” I said a Sunday evening, eager to have a father like all the kids I knew. 

“Yes, Cuoricino mio.” 

Soon after, with the approval of both my sister and me, and to the objection of the entire small town he was from—a town that considered a Neapolitan woman, a widow with two daughters, seven years his senior, a disgrace that would ruin his life—Maurizio came to live with us. 

* 

This was before the fights started. Before Maurizio punched furniture and smashed plates. Often, it was because of his jealousy. When my mother returned from grocery shopping, he objected that she looked too well-dressed or too made-up, that she stirred the fantasies of the butcher, the baker and all the shop owners on our street, and forbid her to set foot in any shop run by men—virtually all the shops in our neighborhood. Soon, even knocking at the neighbor next door was not allowed. Signora Lucia had lovers— the whole neighborhood knew, and in Maurizio’s mind a simple chat with the adulterous neighbor made my mother an adulterous too. 

“What were you doing there?”

“To borrow some basil, then we smoked a cigarette.” 

“I don’t want you smoking a cigarette with her.” 

“Why not?” 

“Because I say so.” 

“She’s cheating on her husband, not me. Stop being jealous.” 

Maurizio was not simply jealous; he was infected with jealousy: a jealousy that, like a dormant virus in his blood, could awake at any moment—violently and capriciously—and for which there was no cure. With time, I understood jealousy was a way of claiming for himself what he could not fully possess. Not a real husband, nor a real father, Maurizio reacted to his own predicament by picking a fight with any pretense of threat: the phone ringing, a knock on the door, the cigarette drooping from my mother’s lips, which made her more desirable, yet defiant. 

Above all, every day he fought a solitary battle with my father’s ghost. Every day, he saw the prints of my mother’s lips covering the photograph of my father on her bedside table, and felt defeated. The photo bore more kisses than he could ever dream of getting, and the clear outline of my mother’s mouth was the unmis takable evidence of her infidelity—of which he could not find her guilty. The man in the photograph, snapped on his wedding day, was this woman’s husband. He was not. Five years into their relationship, not only had she not married him yet, she also had not forgotten her husband, who had passed away more than ten years earlier. 

As for Paola and me, we were no longer little kids. Maurizio was only twenty-three that summer at the Lido bar; had he really conceived us, he would have had my sister at fourteen and me at eighteen. In order to widen the uncomfortable closeness in our ages, he played the father’s role harder. He imposed on us the same prohibitions he had on my mother: we were not allowed to visit the neighbor’s kids, because the girls next door had brothers, and in Maurizio’s world boys and girls did not play together. He forbade us from taking phone calls, to the point that when the phone rang, it spread terror in the house, and we, nailed to our fear, waited for the ringing to stop—you pick it; no, you do; who is going to pick up the phone?—, and the more we waited, the more the ringing spread terror in the house. If on the other end of the line there was a male voice, no statuettes or knick-knacks that covered my mother’s sideboards and dressers would be safe. Once, Maurizio smashed my sister’s guitar, which he had bought her a month earlier: a sweet gift that turned sour. 

His favorite punishment was to lock us in the bathroom; he would hide the key in his pocket, then lie down on the couch and take a nap. His long naps became our out-of-cell time: my mother snatched the key and set us free. And it was always when he was sound asleep that we would visit the neighbor, make a phone call, sneak out of the house. We got a kick out of fooling him; it was our only way then—sly and yet submissive—of fooling violence. I wonder now if violence on those who are very young hurts more in the moment, or later once its measure is fully grasped. At the time, I didn’t call it violence. It was a mischievous game in which I could test disparate tricks in order to win it, and in which I never felt completely defeated every time I lost it, but rather more combative and ready for the next round. 

With time, the punishments didn’t hurt me anymore; instead, I wanted them. I wanted the kicks in my shins, the slaps across my face. I wanted them and I expected them, so that I could prove how strong I was. I spent my confinement time—half-hour, an hour, sometimes longer— thinking hard about two things: one, how much I wished him dead; and two, how I could make him die. Regularly, I contemplated plans of poisoning his food or of making him breathe gas in his sleep without burning down our house. Regularly, I did not accomplish any of these plans, nor did I even try, and resorted to wishing and hoping and praying that he would die naturally, that he wouldn’t wake up in the morning.

While I got used to Maurizio’s aggressive outbursts, I remained terrified when he and my mother fought: if I could resist the punishments he inflicted on me, I could not bear to watch the ones reserved for my mother. My mother’s tears were—and will always be—more painful than my own, more hurtful than any blow or slap I could receive. The fights between the two would typically happen at dinner time: it was then, while we were all gathered for our meals, that Maurizio tested his authority the most, and the faintest sign of defiance was enough for him to flip the table over. At first, my mother fought back: she argued, yelled, cried. Then she stopped. 

Once, during one of Maurizio’s fits, she stood up, stormed out of the kitchen, and locked herself in the bedroom. She emerged five minutes later wearing one of my father’s ties around her neck: an elegant silk tie, with red stripes, the knot perfectly tied, the ends falling neatly on her kitchen apron, as if she had starched them and ironed them for a special occasion. She had a whole compartment brimming with my father’s clothes: his jackets, his pants and hats, all wrapped in cellophane, smelling of mothballs and of a time before mine. After the tie, it was the turn of a wrist-watch, a cardigan, a shirt; she would roll up the sleeves, sit back down at the table, and continue to eat with vacant eyes. My mother had finally found a way to oppose Maurizio, and it was with the only weapon that could make her invincible: her husband’s spirit; her access to an otherworldly force that nobody—not Maurizio, not me, nor my sister—dared to take away from her. The ghost had been summoned, and Maurizio, now tamed and embarrassed, mumbled something under his mustache, and kept on eating with downcast eyes, swallowing his food without chewing. 

*

My mother’s frequent conjuring of my father’s garments at the table would protect her and us from the fights, but it did not make me feel safe, and had me ponder about the father I did not have. I would stare at my plate and debate with myself what makes a man a father. I had heard my aunts say that a father is the one who raises the children, not the one who conceives them; I had seen them periodically warn my mother that if she left Maurizio she would lose a father for her children. “He treats them like his daughters,” my mother would end up agreeing as a way to solve the constant battle she fought—not with her sisters, but with herself. She would not mention that the daughters’ treatment included punishments, prohibitions, and violence. After all, it was part of the Neapolitan father’s deal: care, financial support, protection from the outside world went hand in hand with authority, power, and fear. We saw it in other families around us, hence it must have been true that Maurizio treated us like his daughters. Indeed, my sister and I had soon learned to call him father, although for years—until this day—I cannot help adding a line in my head: mio padre—che non è veramente mio padre. Our mother, on the other hand, never introduced Maurizio as her husband, and when she felt she had to in order to avoid gossips, the words “mio marito” slipped out of her mouth quickly and bashfully, in a voice two tones lower than her normal pitch.

I, for my part, wanted blood to matter. I was not born of Maurizio. I was the spitting image of my deceased father, whom I never knew, about whom I had heard stories that depicted him as the kind of man you meet once in a lifetime: beautiful, patient, and kind. When Maurizio treated us like daughters by locking us in the house and smacking us, I repeated in my head: Tu non sei mio padre.. 

You. Are Not. My Father. 

During the fights, I imagined what it would be like to go back to a fatherless life, the way it had been until the summer we asked Maurizio for 50 lire for the pinball game. What would it be like if Maurizio died. I told myself that if I had endured the death of my real father, two weeks before I was born, I could endure the death of his surrogate. And since he was a stepfather, he deserved to die twice: once for having taken my father’s place, and again for not really taking his place. Those moments, as I sat petrified at the table—glass shards on the tablecloth, food splattered on the floor, tears streaming down my cheeks, and the large tie knotted around my mother’s neck—I wanted the stepfather, the only father I’d ever had, to die. 

And in the gloomy light of my mother’s eyes, I wondered, and never dared to ask, if that ever was her wish too. 

*

Almost thirty years later, Maurizio still sits with my mother at the same table. I sit with them when I visit from San Francisco. Ever since I left their house, in my early twenties, I’ve come back to it uncountable times. First it was Rome, Milano, then London, Glasgow, until it was farther away. Until I did not go back. I’ve been living in California for nine years, and every summer—sometimes at Christmas—I sit with them at the same spot, anticipating that something will go wrong, that talking face-to-face, and not over the phone ten thousand kilometers away, will make my mother’s meals taste bitter. I know there will be bickering and quick tempers, but there won’t be real fighting. It’s been a long time since Maurizio smashed plates—now he helps wash them. A month ago, he got laid off, and he spends his days at home. The elderly man he took care of for almost ten years passed away, leaving him unemployed and ten years older. Maurizio himself has turned into an old man: his hair completely white, large rolls of fat on his belly, a stent in his heart, and chronic bronchitis from chain-smoking. A week before I arrived on my last visit, he was taken to the ER. Diabetic shock. He didn’t even know he had diabetes, and the doctors said he was lucky. He spent a week in the hospital and was sent home with daily insulin shots and a list of warnings and precautions. It’s the second time he’s come close to death; the first was four years ago, due to a failure of his heart, now beating regularly via an electric box sewn beneath his skin. 

“How did you get to this point?” I ask Maurizio. 

“I was just a bit dizzy.” 

“Diabetic shock, you could have died!” I cry. 

“I thought I just needed new glasses,” he says. He reaches for his cigarettes. 

“And you’re still smoking. Both of you,” I say upset, turning to my mother. 

“Don’t start,” my mother says. 

“Diabetes has nothing to do with smoking,” Maurizio says. 

I am astounded by his answers, but I should not be. I understood long ago that Maurizio and I never thought alike. I roll my eyes, and say nothing; I realize that I am the one ready for a lunch-time fight, although I know I will lose it. Conversations about my mother and Maurizio neglecting their health and smoking like chimneys have been pointless and hurtful for a lifetime. They have both damaged their lungs to the point my mother sprays asthma aerosol into her mouth after every meal. Her daily dessert. 

“I smoked only three since this morning,” he says, triumphantly, coughing his perennial smoker’s cough. “Isn’t it so, Gigi?” 

Gigi is their dog, a seven-year-old black mutt, small and fat, its body so misshapen it looks like a seal rather than a dog. I now call him “La foca” La foca perks up at its name and laps around the table waiting for food. When Maurizio cannot bear to talk about something, he either changes topic or talks to the dog. Now, he does both. 

“Gigi, did you tell her I am buying a scooter?” He says, not looking at me and dropping breadcrumbs into Gigi’s mouth.

“You shouldn’t drive a scooter,” I snap. 

“I need it to find a job.” 

“Mamma, what do you say?” 

“Wasted breath. You know how stubborn he is.” 

The phone rings. La foca barks angrily when Maurizio picks up the phone. 

“Gigi is so jealous that it gets mad when Maurizio or I talk on the phone or to a neighbor,” says my mother, pleased at her dog’s reaction. 

I am not as amused as my mother. Gigi protesting at Maurizio answering the phone reminds me of an old pattern, as does its way of showing love through absurd jealousy. The dog has inherited its master’s behavior without inheriting his genes: conditioned by family ties alone, which have nothing to do with blood. The dog-master relationship, a kind of child-parent relationship, makes me think of how much of Maurizio I have in my blood. I inherited the features of my real father, but it is the encounter between this man and my mother, their love and lack of love, their fights and their reconciliations, that went on making me. This is where I come from. My origin. Before which I remember nothing, except for my mother’s mourning clothes. 

I hear Maurizio making arrangements with a friend to go check out a scooter deal. 

“Maybe you should wait to buy one until you feel better,” I say calmly when he hangs up. The California side of me is speaking, the one that has learned to negotiate and doesn’t yield to my Neapolitan side that would just snap at him. 

“I feel great. See, I am strong,” he says, and flexes vigorously his limp biceps. 

I look at him, a sixty-year-old man behaving like a teenager, and I see our old roles reversed: me imposing a prohibition, flipping the table over. I want to tell him I will lock him in the bathroom; that I forbid him to go out with his friend. Why?, he would ask. Because I say so, I would reply—his old favorite phrase. 

“That’s crazy, you’re not well,” I mumble. 

There’s a long silence, except for the TV and Gigi crying for food. 

“What’s up, Gigi? Come to your daddy,” Maurizio says, standing up with the excuse to feed the dog. He hastily gives Gigi a big plate of pasta, then sneaks out on the balcony and lights a cigarette. 

“Another cigarette?” I shout from the table. 

“It’s my first.” 

“You said you had three.” 

“The first after lunch,” he laughs. 

I pretend to watch some TV program with my mother, but I am thinking about the future. I wonder if on my next visit Maurizio will have burned his lungs out after forty years of smoking. If his diabetes will be under control, if the stent in his heart will hold. If the dog will burst. 

“300 Euros is a great deal,” he says excited, stepping back into the kitchen. 

I picture him on the scooter, surely without a helmet, maneuvering through Naples’ streets swarming with million scooters honking, harassing, roaring. I see the electric box under his skin run wild, unhinge from inside his chest. 

“It’s a bargain,” he repeats. 

I say nothing, because what I am really thinking should not be said out loud: 

Death. Do you ever think about DEATH? 

“It will help me find work,” he continues his own conversation.

I look at him, and I am indeed glad that he and I never thought alike. That we don’t share the same fears. That there is nothing of me in his blood. That the tangible sense of mortality I was fed through my mother’s cord and born into had never crossed his mind. An old man with a stent in his heart, diabetes, and chronic bronchitis, rides around the city looking for a job, where much younger and healthier men can’t find any, and he’s ready to take whatever will come his way, whatever life can still offer him. He always had. Even when he was twenty-three and we, a bereft and needy family, came along. He took us. He took us without second thoughts or doubts about the future; he took us for the longest ride of all.

For years, I wondered why a stunning woman like my mother would be with a soccer-ball-eyed man, not particularly handsome, not particularly intelligent, not particularly kind. I realize now that it was because Maurizio did not know death. For about three decades, living with a woman stricken with the loss of the man she considered her one and only love, Maurizio had been immune and irreverent to death. Perhaps this is what has been keeping them together for so long— much longer than my mother ever got to be with my real father. 

Yet, in his own way, Maurizio understood it. Despite the first years of jealousy toward a dead man, he never asked my mother to remove my father’s photograph from their bedroom, never said out loud that he saw her kisses on the frame; he let her kiss it, year after year, when the man on the photograph had become much younger than my mother, much younger than his own daughters. He never flinched at my mother turning the photo into a fully-fledged altar, now adorned with roses, prayers, rosaries, and small gifts. From the very first day, Maurizio had been living with us as if death did not exist, as if he could defy it because he had taken the place of a dead man, to whom—consciously or not—he owed the duty of keeping himself alive. 

How much time I wasted wishing him dead. And how foolish of me to think I knew how to handle a father’s death because it had already happened and, therefore, I was ahead of the life game. And because, for good or for bad, I always found an excuse for my feelings in the addendum I invariably put next to Maurizio’s name: mio padre—che non è veramente mio padre; an addendum that one day, I know, will be of no use. 

*

After I left Naples, Maurizio bought an old Vespa for 270 Euros, an even better deal. 

“It helps him look for a job,” my mother tells me on the phone. “He goes out every day.” 

It’s the end of summer, I sit in my apartment ten thousand kilometers away, and I picture Maurizio on his Vespa leaving business cards with concierges at hospitals and clinics, who will probably toss them in the trash bin or ditch them in a drawer. I see him, out of breath and sweaty, and I wish that he would rest, take a day off from his job hunt, spend a few hours without maddening the electric box in his chest. 

I wish that he would enjoy the September weather, merciful and mild, with its tender light over the water, smoothing out the sharp edges of my city, and would drive along the coast, there where he used to take us as kids after work on the long and hot summer afternoons. I wish that he would go toward the sea, with a wholesome heart and without a worry furrowing his eyebrows, like he went toward my mother—and us— that summer night at the Lido bar, with no fears and no regrets, walking confident and proud toward the women to whom he did not know yet he would be giving a second life. 

Issue 53 • Spring 2026

Fiction

Poetry

Fiction

Poetry