The Boy Who Granted Dreams Read online

  Luca Di Fulvio

  THE

  BOY WHO

  GRANTED

  DREAMS

  Translated by

  Ann McGarrell

  BASTEI ENTERTAINMENT

  March 2015

  Digital original English edition

  Copyright © 2015 by Bastei Lübbe AG, Köln

  Bastei Entertainment is an imprint of Bastei Lübbe AG

  Original Italian edition:

  Copyright © 2008 by Arnoldo Mondadori Editore s.p.a., Mailand

  Title Italian original edition: “La Gang dei Sogni”

  Original publisher: Arnoldo Mondadori Editore s.p.a., Mailand

  Written by Luca Di Fulvio

  Translated by Ann McGarrell

  Edited by Toby Axelrod

  Projektmanagement by Lori Herber

  Cover design and illustration by Jason McFarland

  E-Book produced by Urban SatzKonzept, Düsseldorf

  ISBN 978-3-7325-0166-3

  Visit us at:

  www.bastei-entertainment.com

  About the Book

  New York, 1909: Fifteen-year-old Cetta arrives on a freighter with nothing but her infant son Natale: strikingly blond, dark-eyed, and precocious. They’ve fled the furthest reaches of southern Italy with the dream of a better life in America.

  But even in the “Land of the Free,” the merciless laws of the gangs rule the miserable, poverty-stricken and crime-filled Lower East Side. Only those with enough strength and conviction will survive. As young Natale grows up in the Roaring Twenties, he finds he possesses a certain charisma that enables him to charm the dangerous people around him...

  Weaving Natale’s unusual life and true love against the gritty backdrop of New York’s underbelly, Di Fulvio proves yet again that he is a master storyteller as he constructs enticing characters ravaged by circumstance, driven by dreams, and awakened by destiny.

  Haunting and luminous, this masterfully written blend of romance, crime, and historical fiction will thrill lovers of turn-of-the-century dramas like Once Upon a Time in America and Gangs of New York.

  About the Author

  LUCA DI FULVIO was born in 1957 in Rome where he now works as an independent author. His versatile talent allows him to write riveting adult thrillers and cheerful children's stories (published under a pseudonym) with equal ease. One of his previous thrillers, L'Impagliatore, was filmed in Italian under the title Occhi di cristallo. Di Fulvio studied dramaturgy in Rome where he was mentored by none other than Andrea Camilleri

  PROLOGUE

  At first there were two of them watching her grow up — the mother and the padrone. One of them watched with dread, the other with a lazy lustfulness. But before she could become a woman, the mother made sure that the padrone wouldn’t look at her any more.

  When the child was twelve years old, her mother mashed a thick juice out of poppy seeds, as the oldest women had taught her. She made the girl drink it, and, when she saw her start to stagger and grow drowsy, she picked her up and carried her on her back across the dusty path in front of their hut — on the padrone’s land — down to the dry stream bed and the dead oak tree. She broke a big branch off the old tree, then ripped the little girl’s dress and struck her forehead with a sharp stone, there where she knew much blood would flow. She pulled her daughter into an awkward pose on the stony riverbed — as if she’d rolled down the bank, falling from the dead tree — and left her there, with the broken branch on top of her. Then she came back to the hut and waited for the men to return from the fields, while she kept on stirring a pot of soup with onions, and lard. Only then did she tell one of her sons to go and look for Concetta, the little girl.

  She went on grumbling, saying that girl was always running off to play, maybe down by the old oak. She complained to her husband that that child was a curse, moving like quicksilver but with her head always someplace else; she couldn’t give her a task because she’d start out and then forget it halfway through, and she was no help in the house, either. Her husband called her names and told her to shut up, and then he went outside to smoke. She — while her son went across the path that led down to the riverbed and the dead oak — went back to stirring the pot of soup with its lard, and onions; her heart hammering in her breast.

  While she was waiting she heard, as she did every evening, the padrone’s automobile pass in front of their house. He always sounded his horn twice, because, he said, the little girls liked it so much. It was true that Concetta was drawn by that sound every evening, even though for the last year her mother had forbidden her to run out of the house to greet the padrone. She would go to the window and peep out. And the mother would hear the padrone laughing from inside the cloud of dust raised by his automobile.

  Because Concetta — everyone said this, but the padrone said it too often — was a really beautiful child and was going to be a beautiful big girl.

  When she heard the boy she’d sent out to look for Concetta come running back screaming, the mother didn’t stop stirring the minestra of onions, and pig fat. But her breath ached in her throat. She heard her son saying something to his father, heard them rush down the three wooden steps that had been worn black as fossil coal. Only after a whole handful of minutes did she hear her husband shouting her name and her daughter’s. Then she left the pot on the fire and ran outside at last.

  Her husband was carrying Concetta in his arms, her face bloody, her clothes ripped, drooping like a rag in her father’s calloused hands.

  “You listen to me, Cetta,” the mother said the next day after the others had all gone out to work in the fields. “You’re getting to be a big girl now, so you can understand me when I talk to you, just the way you can look in my eyes and understand that I can do what I’m going to say to you now. If you don’t do exactly what I tell you, I’ll kill you with my own hands.” She took a length of rope and tied it around Cetta’s left shoulder. “Stand up,” she ordered, and then pulled the rope down to her crotch, so that the child had to hunch over. Next, she knotted it tightly around her left thigh. “This is a secret between you and me,” she told her. From a drawer she pulled out a loose dress she had sewn from a remnant, with a pattern of faded flowers. The dress hid the rope perfectly. She had thought about what it would have to cover, and sewn it to do just that. “You’re going to tell everyone the fall left you crippled. Everyone, even your brothers,” she explained to the child. “You’ll wear this rope on for a month, to get used to it. After that, I’ll take it off, but you’ll still walk as though you were still wearing it. If you don’t, first I’ll tie you up with it again, and then, if you try to walk straight, I’ll kill you with my own hands. And when the padrone comes by in the evening with his beautiful automobile and honks his horn, you run out to greet him. No, better you already be outside on the road, so he can get a good look at you. Do you understand?”

  The little girl nodded.

  Then the mother took her daughter’s face in her gnarled hands and gazed at her with love and desperate determination. “Now you won’t have any bastards growing in your belly,” she said.

  Before autumn came the padrone had stopped sounding his horn when he drove past the shack, resigned to the idea that Cetta was hopelessly lame. By the beginning of winter, he never dove past their house. He took another road home.

  Towards summer the mother told her daughter that she could start to get well. But slowly, so as not to arouse suspicions. Cetta was thirteen now, with a shapely little body. But that year of walking like a cripple had left its mark on her. She never quite managed, not even as an adult, to walk normally. She learned to minimize her limp, but she could never be perfectly straight. Her left breast was smaller than the right one, her l
eft shoulder was lower than the right, and her left thigh was a little bit shorter than the other. As for the leg that had pulled the shoulder down, either it had shrunken or the tendons had hardened, so that she always seemed slightly off balance when she walked.

  1

  Aspromonte, 1907-1908

  After the mother told her daughter that she could begin to recover from her false illness, Cetta had tried to walk straight. But sometimes her left leg went to sleep, or it wouldn’t obey her. And to wake it up or make it behave, all Cetta could do was bend down the shoulder that her mother had forced down. And then, when she’d twisted herself into that position, the leg seemed to remember what it was supposed to do and didn’t drag any more. Cetta was out in the field for the grain harvest that day. With her, a short distance away — some of them ahead of her, some of them behind — were her mother and father and her brothers, all of them with such black hair. And also her half-brother, her mother’s son by the padrone. The half-brother who’d never been given a name by his mother or father. Everyone in the family called him the other one. “No bastards growing in your belly,” her mother had told her over and over all that year. She’d made her half-crippled so that the padrone would keep his eyes off her. And at least the padrone had gone on to buzz around another place.

  Cetta was damp with sweat. And tired. She was wearing a coarse cotton dress with straps and a long skirt. Her left leg scraped on the mean, sunbaked ground. Now whenever she saw the padrone showing off his fields to a group of his friends, she felt safe. He was walking and gesturing — maybe he was boasting about how many hands he had working for him, thought Cetta, and she stopped with a hand on her hip to look at the group. The padrone’s third wife was there, wearing a straw hat on her head and dress of a pale blue Cetta had never seen before, not even in the sky. There were two other women with the wife, probably wives of the men chatting with the padrone. One of them was young and pretty, the other one was fat — you couldn’t guess how old she might be. The two men with the padrone looked as different from each other as their wives did. One was young and thin, tall and droopy as the stalk of wheat when it bends under the weight of the ripe head. The other one was middle-aged, with a big mustache and old-fashioned sideburns and straw-colored hair. He had big shoulders and a broad, firm chest, like an old prizefighter. He was leaning on a cane. And another piece of wood came down from his right knee, a wooden leg.

  “Get back to work, stumpy!” yelled the padrone, when he noticed Cetta watching them, and then he turned towards the two men, laughing with them.

  Cetta hunched over and, dragging her numb leg behind her, started working along her row again. After a few steps she glanced toward the padrone again and saw that the man with the wooden leg was standing still, slightly away from the others, staring at her.

  After a while, Cetta had worked her way so close to the group that she could hear what they were saying. And she could also hear — unlike them, she knew what was making that sound — the rhythmic clacking they found so strange. She looked out of the corner of her eye and saw the men pushing the harvested wheat aside, until finally, laughing, they saw the source of that unmistakable sound. The three wives came over to look and pretended to be embarrassed, suffocating knowing giggles behind their lace-gloved hands, and then they all turned to leave because it was almost time for dinner.

  Only the man with the wooden leg lingered there, looking. He stared at the two turtles copulating with their wrinkled heads in the air and their carapaces knocking against each other, clacking, making that rhythmic tock, tock, tock. The man with the wooden leg gazed at the two animals, then he looked at Cetta, and her dragging leg, and then he looked down at his own artificial one. Cetta noticed that he wore a rabbit’s foot on his watch chain.

  All at once he was on top of Cetta. He threw her on the ground, lifted her skirt, ripped her worn underpants down wanting his wooden leg to clack against the farm girl’s maimed limb — while the fat woman kept shouting her husband’s name across the field because now she wanted her dinner; while Cetta’s mother and father and her dark brothers and the other one too all kept on with their work. A few steps away from the two copulating turtles— he took her, in haste and fury, showing her what a man and a woman do when they imitate the beasts.

  After the mother had told the daughter she could start getting better, slowly so as not to arouse suspicions, Cetta tried to make up for the year she’d spent being a cripple. After the day of the turtles’ coupling, she found herself pregnant at not quite fourteen, with her belly itself swollen more on the left than on the right, as if it were leaning to the side that had been uselessly crippled.

  The baby was startlingly blond. He could have had Norman ancestors except for those eyes — black as pitch, deep and languid — that no blond could have ever expected to possess.

  “This one’s going to have a name,” Cetta said to her father, her mother, her dark brothers, and the one called the other one.

  And since he was so fair that he looked like the baby Jesus in the crèche, Cetta named her son Natale.

  2

  Aspromonte, 1908

  “I’m going to America just as soon as he’s weaned,” Cetta told her mother as she was nursing her son Natale.

  “To do what?” muttered the mother without looking up from her sewing.

  Cetta didn’t answer.

  “You belong to the padrone and his land,” said the mother.

  “I’m not a slave,” Cetta protested.

  The mother stopped sewing and stood up. She looked at her daughter nursing the family’s new bastard. She shook her head. “You belong to the padrone and the land,” she said again and then went outside.

  Cetta looked down at her son. Her dark breast with its darker nipple was startling against Natale’s blond hair. Annoyed, she pulled her breast away. A little drop of milk fell on the floor. She laid her bastard in the rickety cradle that had held her and her brothers, and the other one, too. The baby started to cry. Cetta stared at him fiercely. “We’re going to cry a lot more tears, you and I,” she told him. Then she went out to join her mother.

  The Port of Naples, 1909

  The port was crowded with ragged poor people. And a few gentlefolk. But very few, and they were only passing through. People like that would be boarding other ships, not this one. Cetta was watching all of them through a dirty porthole in its rusty frame. Most of those poor folk would be staying on land. They weren’t leaving. They would wait for another occasion. They’d try again to come aboard, they would have pawned their few wretched possessions hoping to buy a ticket to America, and in the wait between one ship and the next they’d have dissipated their tiny savings. And so they’d never be able to leave.

  But she, Cetta, was leaving.

  That was the only thing she thought about while she was looking out through the filthy porthole, listening to baby Natale, now six months old, turning himself in the wicker basket with its strangely hairy wool blanket that the fine lady from whom Cetta had stolen it used to keep her little dog warm. Cetta didn’t think about anything but the long sea voyage, while the sticky liquid she’d first felt when she was raped ran down her thighs. The only thing she thought about was America, while the ship’s captain buttoned up his trousers, satisfied, promising he’d come back in the afternoon and bring her some bread and water. He laughed, telling her they were going to have a good time together. And only when she heard the metal door close from the outside did Cetta turn away from the porthole and clean her thighs with straw from the floor of the hold. It scratched her skin.

  She picked up Natale, pulled out a breast, still red from the captain’s clutchings, and gave her nipple to the bastard she had brought with her. Then, after the baby had gone back to sleep in his basket that stank of dog, Cetta curled up in a darker corner and while tears striped her cheeks she thought: They’re salty, just like the sea that separates me from America. They’re a taste of the ocean, and she licked them, trying to smile. And when at last
the siren started to blast its wheezy voice over the harbor, announcing that the ship was leaving, Cetta fell asleep, telling herself the tale of a fifteen-year-old girl who ran away from home all alone with her bastard son and set off for the enchanted kingdom.

  Ellis Island, 1909

  Cetta stood in line with the other immigrants. Exhausted from the voyage and from the captain’s sexual demands, she watched the doctor from the Federal Immigration Office open these wretched people’s eyes and mouths, just as her father used to do with sheep and donkeys. This one would mark a letter with a piece of chalk on a few of their backs, on their clothes. Those with a letter on their backs were shunted off to a pavilion where other doctors were waiting for them. The rest shuffled towards the customs tables. Cetta looked at the policemen who were watching the officials stamp documents. She saw how desperate people became when, having crossed the sea like trapped animals, they were refused entry. But it was as though she hadn’t been with them.

  All the others had glimpsed the new land coming closer, but she hadn’t; she’d always stayed closed up in the hold. She’d been afraid Natale might die. And she discovered, in a moment when she was at her weakest and most tired, that she wasn’t sure if that would make her sorry. And so now she held him tightly to her breast, wanting her creature to forgive her for that thought he couldn’t have heard. But she had heard it, and she was ashamed.

  Before they disembarked, the captain had told her he would make sure she’d be able to pass through the inspections. And she had scarcely set foot on land, there in the huge room where all the immigrants were shoved together, when he signaled, jerking his head at a little man who looked like a rat on the other side of the wooden barrier that delimited the free zone. America. The rat had long sharp fingernails and a flashy velvet suit. He looked hard at Cetta and at baby Natale, too. To Cetta it seemed that he was looking at each of them in a different way.