Read Online Malavita by Tonino Benacquista - Free Book Online Page B

disappointing – totally dull, you find much better seafood at the Taverne d’Evreux. I went to the station to catch a train to Boston, where I was supposed to meet my company’s sales manager. It was one o’clock, I had an hour until my train, so I wandered around belowground in the huge station and chanced on the Oyster Bar. Oysters as big as steaks! The shells were like ashtrays! I never saw such a thing! And in a station! Warren, do you know the Oyster Bar?”
    Warren was tempted to say what was in his mind: “I was eight years old when my family was hounded out of the United States of America.” He was finding it less and less bearable to be treated like a future case of obesity with an IQ lower than that of an oyster in the Oyster Bar, someone ready to sacrifice everything to the God of the dollar, an uncultivated being who felt entitled to rule over the rest of the world. He longed to tell them how much he missed his childhood home, the neighbourhood, his local friends and the star-spangled flag which his father had trampled upon all those years ago. Warren found himself caught in a strange paradox: he was moved to tears by the American national anthem while simultaneously imagining himself building a Mafia state within the state, and then settling various problems that politicians could not deal with, and – who knows? – eventually getting himself invited to the White House.
    To escape from this conversation, Warren found himself reduced to joining the others in awaiting the only event capable of causing a diversion – the arrival of his father. But the great man was biding his time, shut away on the veranda with the blinds down. Maggie felt her temper rising. Fred had left her to do all the work, and the barbecue wasn’t even lit. Only the guests understood his absence, knowing as they did that writers, whether American or not, always planned their entrances carefully.
    They were all wrong.
    Fred Blake, in the pose of The Thinker, was rereading, deeply moved, a paragraph that he had struggled with for several hours. He now felt so close to those memories that the need to recount them had made him completely forget that forty-five people were waiting impatiently to meet him.
    In 1931 my grandfather drove one of the two hundred Cadillacs chartered by the legendary Vito Genovese to follow his wife’s funeral procession. In 1957 my father, Cesare Manzoni, was summoned, along with one hundred and seven
capi
from all over the country for the Apalachin meeting, which ended in a manhunt. Quite frankly, was I really going to grow up strumming guitars with the hippies? Could you see me in front of the jig-borers in a cardboard factory? Was I about to start keeping my retirement coupons in a shoebox? Was I going to rebel against tradition and become an honest man just to enrage my father? No, I joined the family firm, and what’s more I did it of my own free will, nobody forced me, I was proud to. “You only have one life,” Uncle Paulie had said when he gave me my first gun. I know now that he was wrong: you can have a second one. I just hope he can’t see me from wherever he is, sad fucker that I’ve become.
    At that precise moment, he was no longer acting a writer and playing to the gallery; he now felt that he had completed the very first stage of a job that might make sense of everything he had been through, everything he had suffered, and made others suffer.
    â€œGo and see what your fucking father’s doing!”
    Belle ran up to the veranda, where she found Fred sitting still and silent, bent over the typewriter. For a moment she thought he was dead.
    â€œDad, we’re waiting for you. Are you going to light the barbecue, or what?”
    He emerged from his trance, and drew his daughter to him, hugging her in his arms. Writing that last page had drained him, and left him vulnerable, and for the first time in ages he drew a curious kind of