Characters I Have Known

These are a few of my characters:

Giuffré The Baker

As she passes his shop, Giuffré the baker appears and Fina, breathing in the warm comforting smell of baking bread, yells his name. She buys a round loaf. He wipes his hands on the green apron around his fat belly, looks slowly, appreciatively at her full figure and smiling with pursed lips, thinks, oh for one glorious moment inside those delicious thighs. Instead he breaks off a piece of bread, stuffs it into her mouth and winks. Beads of perspiration travel down his face and lose themselves in his graying whiskers, one drip hanging off the tip of his nose.

Giorgio Fiori

[Serafina persuades her mother] that Giorgio Fiori despite his swagger and his wandering eyes, a large fleshy mole on his left cheek – the Fiori mole, Giorgio called it, a sign of the family’s powers of thought – and a growing paunch even at twenty-four was the right mate for her. Giorgio was the apothecary’s oldest son, you see . . . .

Although he had predilection aplenty for the sudden squeeze, the ecstasy of hot passion’s piercing moment – just five minutes with me, please, the doleful hungry eyes pleading, please, oh please, only five minutes behind the storeroom door – Serafina and life in a stark land squelched opportunity . . . .

Serafina and Giorgio drew closer through the years, both being alike, friends, really, yet complementing one another – Giorgio the thinker rubbing his large fleshy mole with forefinger, and Serafina the woman of fearless prescience and decisive action . . . .

He smiles, his mouth full of food, jam and honey drizzling out of the corners of his mouth and onto his beard. He swallows noisily and clears his throat. “I heard,” running the sleeve of a freshly-laundered shirt over his forehead, wiping his hands on his apron.

Fina is thinking, a good man, my husband. She smiles.

He grunts.

“A powerful scream he had. Right from the beginning. One day he will make some woman a very good husband. And their offspring, our family, will flourish.”

“From your lips, Fina.” . . . .

He looks at her, muddled, brain stammering, brows furrowed, yet never doubting her quick grasp of life. But right now he does not quite understand what she is up to, just that for sure she must be up to something. For Fina’s stove, he knows, is always cooking, while in the beginning he struggles to comprehend. Don’t mistake what I say: Giorgio is capable of profound thought – after all, he has the large Fiori mole on the left side of his face, remember. But it takes him time to unravel the puzzling and mysterious, the complex causal relationships of life and history, time past and time future, the seemingly disparate elements that come together so magically for his wife, fitting to perfection in her mind.

Why, he asks himself, are there roses in her cheeks, his Fina, working most of the night and stinking now from the birthing room. How he loves her still, the deepness in her eyes that he knows he tries in vain to fathom, her moist fleshy upper arms, her full breasts – these he understands – he could almost, but, no, careful, there might be customers, ah, but, really, it is early enough. He walks quickly to close and bolt the door and pull the shade. . . . . .

Giorgio, beaming and winking at his youngest, kissed her, patted Mario’s head, ate and drank in a blink and when finished, kissed her again and handed her the dirty dishes.

Lorenzo Coco

She hears music coming from Lorenzo the violin maker’s shop next door. Lorenzo is a cellist trying in vain year after year to gain a position in the Palermo Symphony, but never mind, when not making stringed instruments he will teach. And so he does, having more students at times in his shop than instruments, the half-made, empty-pegged violins and violas suspended from the ceiling in unfinished solitude.

Each morning for an hour before school Lorenzo invites students to his shop for ensemble playing, grouping them together in pairs or trios or quartets, and he gives them one direction only, make music together. He uses every available corner, the shed in back, the storeroom, even the living space he shares with his blind wife, Minerva who learned to play the viola when gifted with sight and still plays a limited but deepened repertoire, helping him to teach, the sight of his life he calls her, her viola more accomplished, the sound richer, he thinks, since she lost her vision.

He forms a small orchestra, waxing in fall at the beginning of the term, waning in late spring at the end of the school year, choosing works by Vivaldi and Scarlatti and early Mozart, something children can play and begin to understand. Children, he says to himself late one night when he is alone in the studio, laughs and shakes his head, some have stayed in his little orchestra for years. Take Stefano, he is married and has two little ones. With his shop and the music of his trios and quartets and now even a stringed orchestra, Lorenzo has created a world he loves, despite Don Falco’s men bothering him with their silly innuendoes.

Puffing his chest, he walks absentmindedly around the harpsichord, his head bumping violin bodies hanging from the ceiling. He sweeps dust from the keys in arcing movements like a conductor scaring away ghosts, his hand disturbing a violin maker’s detritus gathered on top of the instrument. Pieces of string and pegs and part of a viola neck fall onto the keyboard making dissonant, crashing chords. He tells himself with internal swagger that he does not fear Don Falco. But his specter haunts the darkness in Lorenzo’s mind.

This morning the musicians struggle through a movement from The Four Seasons, practicing for a Sunday afternoon concert in the Duomo next month, invited by Fra Antonio. Finally he asks us, Lorenzo muses, after all these years, their playing approaching music now, the looming concert adding determination to the notes.

Maestro Donatello Rosati

The singing lessons were held in the apartment of Maestro Donatello Rosati, a fussy little Florentine in spats and morning suit with slicked-back hair, spitting when excited from beneath a waxed mustache. His arms and hands gesticulated wildly. The Maestro lived in the Apthorp between Broadway and West End, a bulk of a building with thick-plastered walls. He occupied a courtyard apartment with his bloated wife, Madama Flora Rosati “the diva named after Raphael’s mistress” she loved to remind Angelo, her laugh going up and down the scales. How could he forget. When introduced, she trilled his name and fluttered her false lashes. Long yellow teeth flashed behind painted lips. Then she rose up and balanced precariously on tiny slippered feet as she held out a gloved hand for him to kiss, looking, he thought, like a football in a dress.

Rosati spoke Italian with a lisp and shook his head at Angelo’s pronunciation, making him say the words like a Northerner of all things, even recommending an Italian diction coach. . . .

“Stop, stop, stop, too fast,” or, “Shhhhhh, pianissimo,” or, “No, no, too slow, I die of boredom,” or, “Do not breathe until I tell you,” the spray from beneath his waxed mustache catching the winter afternoon light, arcing slowly then misting into air and leaving the faint smell of sour breath on inked paper.

“Stop, stop, stop.” He wrapped with his baton against the side of the music stand. “You get ahead of the music, you are not here and now. Make me cry with the beauty of your voice. Touch the heavens with your notes and with the song.” . . . .

Yet Maestro Rosati for all his bombast had loved his voice, just imagine that, he respected his work enough to introduce him to the great man himself, Gatti-Casazza and soon his singing career began in earnest.

Teo Pandolfina

Teo slammed his hat to the ground. He took off the bandana, closed his eyes, raised his arms and put his face up to the roaring blackness. He did not care that his nostrils filled with dust or that the wind tore the sound out of his mouth. He only knew that his words were choking him and he needed to spit them out.

— God what are you doing to me? First you made me fall in love with the daughter of that bleating hippo, Serafina, the mother-in-law who gave me a constant misery for over twenty years. Then you desolated our people who are now too poor to pay me for the shoes I make. Never mind that for twelve generations before me the Pandolfinas earned a good living. No, you waited until I took over the business to send the pestilence. You gave me children and no way to feed them. In desperation, I decided to look for work in America, an untamed country filled with cutthroats who stand on the pier sharpening their knives and waiting for unsuspecting immigrants to arrive. And today, when I am on the way to buy a ticket, what do you do? You send a storm to bury me alive in the dust of my own land while this good-for-nothing sterile animal sits in the middle of the road and my children die of hunger. God, are you listening to me? Have you EVER listened to me? God, if you are there, stop it. STOP. THIS. WRETCHED. BLOWING.

With that last scream, Teo had expelled all his words. He sank to the earth and rolled around, clearing his throat, cursing and moaning every time his body hit another rock. . . . .

Teo’s Hat

Teo was cut from the stone of his land, not tall, not short, bone thin with a square strong jaw, a beak for a nose and large bright brown eyes flecked with gold. He kept most of his words to himself.

He wore his father’s fedora on feast days and to funerals. That is, he thought of the fedora as his father’s because originally it was. But when he realized he was dying, Rodolfo Pandolfina gave the hat to his son, not perhaps his favorite son for he loved them both equally despite Filippo’s wayward, pigheaded stupidity, the blindness, really, that caused his death and at so early an age. But he gave his fedora to Teo, the son who although younger took over the business, the only son he had left now, let’s face it. . . . . .

Teo, the thoughtful man, the shoemaker of Trano Mare was about to make the most important decision of his life, not just for himself, he was almost forty, but for the sake of his children and, something inside him knew, for the sake of his family for generations to come. The weight of it made him put on his fedora, sit in the corner of the bedroom and brood for two days. . . .

He smelled the leather hides and heard the silver bell as he sat now with Tirisio, sensations that stayed with him throughout his life, their sudden remembrance triggering periods of depression long after he migrated to America. Then Teo would put on his fedora and vest and sit in a corner of his bedroom with the door shut. The family knew not to disturb him until the mood disappeared.

His ‘hat days,’ the family called them. They never left, despite Teo’s success in America, the brand that he and Tasso created becoming known for the finest leather goods in New York.

And on his deathbed the sound of the bells and the smell of the hides were there to complete the circle as the priest carrying a leather-bound prayer book accompanied by an altar boy’s ringing bell entered his bedroom bringing to the dying man the echoes of his shop in Trano Mare, connecting him again and forever to his homeland.

More To Follow

Coming Soon.