MOLISE - CAMPOBASSO
In Germany, we know the Molise Region predominantly from Jan Weiler’s humorous descriptions in “Maria, He Doesn’t Like It”, where, with the utilization of every possible bit of love for Italy, he depicts Antonio Marcipane from Campobasso in a way that moves the German soul to tears. Panettone. If you don’t eat, you don’t like it. That’s logic, isn’t it? Italian logic. Yes, it is the smallest region of Italy and one of the poorest. Dot-tore Amos, my hero, didn’t have enough to eat as a child, was left on his own as both parents had to work. They didn’t even have a loo in Molise. His place of birth, synonymous with the misery of an entire region.
”My parents loved me,” he tells me, tears in his eyes.
“Even though they beat you all the time?” I ask, provocatively and disgusted, while applying dark red nail varnish.
“Of course! You don’t understand! That’s love.”
Love, the Italian way, I think.
“And paint your nails more delicately. White or pink. Natural-looking. I want you soft and fragile.”
Then the emigration to Emilia Romagna. A career created in Ferrara: father working in the factory, on one of Bellarosa’s many production lines. His mother is a housemaid. Maybe she’s trying to see herself in the role of the signori for whom she works.
“That’s why she chose this name,” Amos explains to me.
The beloved, the lover. Amos, the lovely! It’s not that hard to move up. The real challenge is to behave as though that’s where you already come from - UP THERE - not from down here. Amos learned well. And turned into a carbon copy. A bad copy. The replica of Bellarosa and her way of life.
CINDERELLA THE ITALIAN WAY
Of course, every Saturday his sisters also sit around the traditional lunchtime table in Ferrara. Brunilda is divorced, one son. Brunilda and Petunia - the two sisters from Cinderella. When Brunilda’s son was eleven, Dot-tore went to visit him in England - the kid needs to learn English. So he sends him off to a summer camp, where all the Italian kids go who have parents and uncles with no gift for languages. Naturally, they speak Italian there, learn hardly any English. I’m waiting for Dottore in a small café - at long last, I’m allowed to smoke! As Brunilda can’t very well raise her son on her own, Dot-tore has assumed the male role and control in this game. Power and control. He accuses his sister and her son of separation anxiety - an inability to step back from each other, that’s what his inner amateur psychologist says. Years later, he’ll repeat that diagnosis. They are all called Franco: Franchino, Francesco, Frank - or similar. Even the dog, a Yorkshire terrier who peers out of Petunia’s tiny Gucci handbag. Has to be pure-bred. And small
- big and snappy they already were themselves. Big from Amos’ money and power. Dottore, my God of Love, carried the poor creature back with him on the plane, from England. Presumably they both travelled business class.
“Coffee, tea, me?” he heard the stewardess ask, in his randy fantasies.
Today, the dog was replaced by Matto, the crazy one. Another Yorkshire terrier. Meanwhile, they are all well fed: Mamma, Brunilda, Petunia, Petunia’s husband, Franco & Francesco in Ferrara underneath the socialist haze of Emilia Romagna, thanks to Dottore and of course Bellarosa. Today, Brunilda wears Moschino and Versace
- always a little on the cheap side. It was their mother who named them, after Cinderella’s evil sisters who wanted him, Amos, the prince. These days, Amos reminds me only of Lord Farquaad from the movie Shrek. Mean, small, with an ego larger than the sum total of all the crisis-stricken Southern European countries. Lifted up onto the high horse by Bellarosa and the Gransignore. His legs are too short to get up by himself. Brunilda has a penchant for Southern Italian island dwellers who have problems keeping their virility under control. She brings one of them back to Ferrara, as a souvenir. Of course he doesn’t do any work; Amos gets to bankroll his sister’s pussy-mates as well, now that she’s able to hold on to one of them for a short while, thanks to Amos’ life of luxury. Dottore believes that his older sister Brunilda is hot and up for anything in bed.
“I am certain she needs it,” he presumes.
I wonder on what exactly he has based those thoughts about his sister... Confirming his instinct by her choice of men: hairy super-Latinos from the South, who proceed to conduct their lives at Amos’ expense. They only speak one language: Neapolitan. Not Italian. That’s also how they act. A woman in and around Naples - as a matter of fact, in the entire South of Italy - has basically only one justification for leaving the house: to go shopping. That’s where that sentence comes from:
“I’m going out to get some bread.”
Generally speaking, she’ll call out this sentence to her family, her husband, the neighbours. So that everybody knows that she’s not being unfaithful. She’s just going out to get some BREAD. Even nowadays, there’s a lot of that going on in Naples. It’s surprising to us Northern or Central Europeans, how often some women go out to buy bread. A left-over from the olden days, when women were only allowed to go out for shopping purposes, “fare la spesa”. In some regions, things haven’t changed to this day.
None of them wants to remember the days when there wasn’t enough money for bread. Friends who had to lend money to keep the hunger at bay. They had no bath, no toilet. Not enough to eat. Not in Molise. Not in Ferrara. They borrowed money to be able to buy bread. And most especially, to ensure that none of the children or his wife would go without the father’s love. Amos’ mother saw her husband’s whores come and go, as did Amos, for whom this became normal, and she spent long nights crying about the unfaithful husband until at long last, fate stepped in and he - thank God - having tormented his family to the last, finally died, of prostate cancer followed by lung cancer caused by all those years of smoking. At long last!
“My mother blackmailed me all my life with her crying and whining about my father,” that’s how Amos always accused his mother of emotionally pressurizing him with her tears and her grief and her emotions.
Entirely misunderstood!
“In reality, my father was the innocent, my mother was the one responsible, she drove him to it,” he kept wailing, always and all the time, poor rich Amos, the God of Love.
The truly guilty party, in actual fact, was his mother -poor Franco, he couldn’t help being unfaithful, could he?
No sooner does he come home with the money, than he spends it all on other women, instead of handing it to his family. Really! It requires the brain of a philosopher or a complete idiot to comprehend that kind of logic. Guilt reversal, that’s what it’s called. Learned at an early age, practised to perfection. Very Italian! That’s what he is like - to this day.
Amos never described the hunger, but he did describe not having a loo.
“We didn’t even have a bath, a toilet. But we were so happy,” my Amos retrospects.
I listen. Listen well. That’s another thing I excel at. The world is small and people are bad, especially when it concerns another’s discomfort.
Today I know that the hunger must have been terrible. I now have friends in Ferrara - nothing happens by coincidence. By the most bizarre route possible, I learn that my friend’s cousin was a schoolmate of Amos’ sister, who constantly talked about