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Father’s Day, 1990.
Trish Una toddled out of the double-doors of her elementary school. She had a lunchbox in one hand. Her mother stood across the grass, waving her hand and bending down to greet her. The girl ran to her mother, swinging her lunchbox in one hand and a construction paper card clutched in the other. She was very excited to show it off. It celebrated the holiday with big misdrawn letters in bright green Crayola marker on pale pink construction paper. Just below HAPPY FATHERS DAY was a stick figure with a big smile on its face and pretty long pink hair.
Trish said as much.
“I remembered his pretty hair,” she said, pointing and running a stubby finger across it. Her finger came back with glitter on it. The swirls of white and pink glitter glue caught the afternoon light. Donatella Una looked down at the card with a strained smile plastered on her face. She told her it was just beautiful. That she did a great job, sweetheart. When they got home, she hung it on the fridge with a shake in her breath. Trish didn’t notice. She was only five years old, now. All she knew was today their class drew pictures. Everybody’s dads look real different, she came to understand. Some have long hair and some have short hair. Some are little and some are big. She didn’t realize that they’d all really known their fathers. She assumed, in her child’s mind, that everybody was drawing from a picture on the mantel.
A family was this to Trish: a strong and beautiful mother, a little baby, and those piercing eyes in the frame in the living room. That picture was her father in every way. She looked up to it. Kissed it goodbye. She could barely remember now, what he was really like. He’d left with a storm when she was too young to really remember it. But there was no absence of a father in her life. He was right there, always staring out.
“Goodnight, Papa!” She would call out across the hall, blanket in her arms. Her mother stood behind her, a hand on her shoulder, leading her forward. She winced, and Trish didn’t notice. Each night, she would sit Trish up in her bed and brush through her hair. It was the same shade as her fathers. Trish wore it long. She loved it. She thought it made her look like a princess. She wanted to be just as beautiful as her father was. Donatella would wind it into twin braids for her to sleep in so she would wake up with it in waves. One night, running her fingers through the curls, Trish asked about him. A small question.
“Is he ever coming home, Mama?”
Donatella frowned. She has kept herself afloat all these years on one conviction: “Yes.”
She says it because she believes it’s true. Because she has to.
“When?”
That, she could not answer.
Autumn, 1984.
Donatella Una ended the summer of her eighteenth year directionless. She pursued nothing, but languished in the sun all day and soaked up what goodness she could. She vowed that now that she was of age, she would move out of her parents’ home. She hated them. They were now pushing their sixties. They had her far too late in their lives. She was their little miracle. The only child they’d ever been able to have, after years upon years of failure. They wanted great things for her. She bore the weight of the entire family name. She was their last hope. She wasn’t allowed to fail, wasn’t allowed to have faults. They disciplined her like drill sergeants. They hit her when her report cards came back lacking. No more dinner ‘til this is fixed, they’d say. And don’t bother coming home until you want to take this seriously. I don’t want to hear any more excuses. She’d sneak out her window.
She was always out at night, wandering the streets. Anywhere but home. She’d sleep on park benches and come back home in the morning to another hand coming down hard. 18 was a blessing, but the money wasn’t there. She’d been having a hard time keeping a job. She just kept on wandering. At least the boys loved her. She could usually count on lunch from some red-faced boy. She’d have a new date everyday just to fill her belly.
Of course, this meant her presence was soon met with points and snickers. Her name in overheard conversations always punctuated by some filthy word. She didn’t care if people called her a slut. They didn’t know her at all. It didn’t bother her.
The summer dragged lazily along like a fat old cat. By the fall, she was expected to enroll in university. The second the calendar turned September, she’d have no place at home. If she disappointed them, she might not ever have a place there again. But it just wasn’t what she wanted from life. She didn’t know what she wanted. She wanted to run far, far away. All these dates were just a means to an end. She was quite good at the game. Short skirt and makeup stolen from the drugstore. Giggle and bat your eyelashes. Order as much as you can without making yourself look like a pig (boys don’t like that one bit.) It was a delicate game. She tried to summon any feelings of guilt for taking advantage, but just couldn’t find it in herself. It was what she had to do to survive. But she wished the connections had been honest. She would love to feel seen by the men she dated, but never did. She felt that they looked right through her. They didn’t mind one bit what lay behind her “bedroom eyes”, only that they shone in the sunshine like jewels. She felt jaded by 18. A doll more than a woman, a mannequin more than a girl.
By some strange twist of fate, September brought Solido Naso.
He was very beautiful. He was awkward, but held some quiet regality and dignity she had never known in any other man. She found herself wanting more and more to see him. Most times, she would give a quick wave behind her and be sure to walk the opposite way when leaving a date. She’d politely shrug off all offers to walk her home. But with Solido, she’d follow him right out. He spoke fantastically. He dreamt of the world, of gilded thrones and shiny rings. She’d never seen such things. She grew up in a small house under cruel and wrinkled hands. She’d known nothing of the picture of golden and youthful beauty he painted. Sitting up in bed, the sunlight framed behind him and he looked like some displaced king. He was a poor preacher’s son. But his soul was gaudy and plated in gold.
At 18, he had no university plans. He dreamt of nothing more than his grand ideals. He invited her right along. He promised she could be an empress beside him. She loved the idea of that. Conquest in the bright, searing sunshine. Power! Control! A large bed to sleep in and a lock on the door. To have those red-faced boys who saw her as a doll doing her bidding, their guns trained on one another. He hurt me, and you hurt me, and he hurt me too. Get rid of each other.
Once, they took notebook paper and a blue ballpoint pen and designed their castle. Solido ran ahead and started drawing out gilded pillars, when Donatella held a hand up to stop him.
“We have to do the measurements first, silly.” And she started scrawling numbers and symbols, sighting angles and laying out an honest-to-god blueprint. His head on her shoulder, astonished, Solido asserted, “I thought you failed math.”
She nodded her head.
“I did. I’m great at math, though. Teacher just wouldn’t leave me alone. Couldn’t do it anymore. Stopped coming to his class.”
Solido did not press. She finished the calculations swiftly and pointed him to where his pillars could go in their layout. She tapped her chin thoughtfully.
“Let me add him to the list.”
There was no physical list. It was never written down. It was a running collection of hypotheticals. Ways they would get back at the people who’d hurt them once they got to the top of the world.
“Okay. What are we doing to him?” Solido asked.
“I think we ought to cut his hands off.”
She smiled wryly and leaned back against him.
He nodded his head, committing it to memory. He kept the list in his head. His memory was typically very sharp.
He never told her, but many years later that very same math teacher had attempted to join Passione’s ranks. He was finally fired when another girl brought his wrongdoing to light. His expertise was worth nothing, now. He’d never be hired by another school again. He thought perhaps he could be useful to the mob, some clerical job. Payroll, maybe. That involves math. He thought, being the mob and all, they may just be the only place accepting of his record.
His stint in Passione was short. He was inducted and a single day later, an order came down from the very top of the line. A very simple order.
“You must have pissed the Boss off real bad,” spoke a gruff voice from behind.
For the rest of his days, Mr. Esposito, former geometry teacher, walked around with no hands to his name.
Donatella never knew about this. It’s hard to say how she would have felt if she did.
The list, for her, was certainly hypothetical. She was enamored with Solido’s ability to dream, thankful for the ability to lose herself in those fantasies. But that was just it. They were just fantasies. While he planned his kingdom, she felt kicking in her stomach and knew she would have to start worrying about reality. She went on early morning walks while he slept, sometimes she would pass her old home and see if she could see anything from across the street. She squinted and tried to focus her eyes on the kitchen window. She tried to see her mother doing the dishes. She tried to see her father stretching his arms high above his head, creaking and groaning with sleep. She could never see anything from that distance. She wouldn’t get any closer. Lost somewhere between resentment and longing, she stayed out of their sight and held to her stomach. She vowed to raise her child unlike them. She vowed to keep her away.
Sometimes, upon her return, Solido would be gone already. He would return much later in a state of disarray. He would not know where he’d been. He did not know how to explain. Often, he would wake confused and bleary and with his voice pulled tight. She did not understand him. She did not know what he did with his days, did not know why at times he appeared to be a different man altogether. He retained his gentleness for her. He was a meek and kind man. Even when in pain, he wouldn’t hurt a fly. She thought, so long as he does not hit me, so long as he does not scream, he can act whatever way he likes and I will find a way to love him regardless. And she did. She did love him very much.
She braided his hair for him. She thought of him like a noble lion, bowing its head to her. When he was confused and afraid, she held him tightly. She washed his back in the shower. He cried without knowing why. There was something in his memory he couldn’t get to surface. It gnawed at his ankles. He vowed to tame it. He vowed to do right by his child.
They were having a baby girl, so they married. That was what you did. His father married them in the church he grew up in, pink roses lining the pews. They were so happy that day.
Trish was born the following June.
Sunlight spilled through the nursery window. Donatella and Solido held one another up, exhausted from the days before. She was really here. It was hard to believe. One golden dream come true, a relic of their fantasy in flesh and bone. Her light hair in the sun made a halo. She looked just like Solido. They cried wordlessly looking down at her. They held her little hands.
“We have to keep her safe,” Solido said, choked up.
“Yeah,” Donatella breathed.
“We can’t,” he said, a panic in his voice.
This continued intermittently through Trish’s very first days, Solido’s absolute terror. He couldn’t understand why. There was just a gaping, gnawing fear at the pit of him that he’d fail her somehow. He’d known this world to be cruel. He wanted nothing more than to protect her from becoming a pawn in that cruelty. He’d fall asleep on the floor in the nursery, as if he was afraid that she’d be taken in the night. Donatella would crawl down to lay beside him and pet his hair.
“Nothing is going to happen to her,” she’d say. “I won’t let it.”
They made a very nice family. They lived in a small home near the church. Solido worked for his father, so it was a short walk to work. Donatella stayed home with the baby. She drew up plans for their dream home. She took Trish to play in the yard and read books in the grass. Solido would come home for lunch and they would all eat together. When he came home after work, he would sing hymns for Trish and dance around the living room with her in his arms until she fell asleep. The perfect family. The list faded away. Their power-seizing dream of youth softened. All they dreamt of was a larger yard.
Childhood is a time without control. When harm comes your way as a child, especially from an authority figure, you don’t have a choice. You have to keep your head down and take it. You’re too little to be heard. These power fantasies were just a reaction to that helplessness. A life careening out of your control is terrifying. You want to take the throne yourself. You think, I have got to make myself big enough that nobody can touch me ever again. You recast yourself from the small child to the cruel king. It makes you want to hurt. The violence seeps into you. You don’t want to keep it inside yourself anymore. It’s a cycle. You pass it on.
Solido dreamed of conquest and power because he was helpless. Donatella dreamed of love and beauty because she’d never known anything but plain cruelty. As they came into adulthood, they finally had control. They could reconcile their pasts, their identities, who that made them, and decide their own destiny. It made the violence settle. They knew who they were.
They could accept it, cruelty and all.
The following May, a woman came into town. She arrived at the church around 11 in the morning in a pretty red dress. Solido was mopping the floor when she came in, and he stopped to greet her cheerfully. She told him she was looking for the son of the preacher.
He said, “that’s me!”
Her eyes went huge. She asked if he had an office where they could speak. He said, of course, led her to his father’s office and offered her a drink. She declined. She was all business. She clutched her handbag too tight, white-knuckled and nervous. And she explained everything.
Diavolo looked at his mother. He didn’t know who he was after all.
He’d been lied to all these years.
He’d had some part of his memory burned off, couldn’t ever find it. He couldn’t trust his world. He told himself, surely, his father would never do anything. Would never lie to him when he said nothing had ever happened to him.
If he would lie about this, why wouldn’t he lie about that? He felt himself cracking.
And it was her fault. She’d given him life and thrown him to the sea. She’d broken a sacred vow. She didn’t protect her child. All he knew was false and constructed.
His humble castle was crumbling by the minute.
The golden sunlight burned. He felt the back of his neck burning red like the devil where the sun streamed in from the stained glass windows. In the church he’d grown up in, violence and hate ate him up like he were Lucifer. He’d been raised to believe things. He’d been stuffed in a polyester costume and made to play an angel in their Nativity plays. He’d been called a son, he’d suffered for it.
He called to mind their list. Crime and punishment. What was an appropriate reaction to this? To the uprooting of a life? To the death of Solido Naso as he knew himself?
He stuffed her under the floorboards.
Sewed through her mouth so she couldn’t reveal any more truths.
Truth can be just as violent as lies, Diavolo thought to himself. After all, his father’s lies and her truth worked together to kill him. Two halves of a whole.
The clock on the wall said it was lunchtime.
He washed his hands in the communal bathroom and he went home and ate a ham sandwich.
And then he threw it up and came back to the kitchen and held onto the back of a chair with one white knuckle. He stared out the window with his legs shaking. He said they had to leave. Right now. They could never, ever, come back.
Donatella went cold and quiet. She clutched Trish to her chest. He often acted out of character, often panicked, often got ahead of himself with worries. But this was new. This was matter of fact. Far too serious. His eyes were far too focused on the wall behind her.
She begged and cried and reasoned with him but he wouldn’t say what had happened. She tried to walk over to the church herself and he made his body a barricade between her and the door.
“Solido,” she begged.
“Please don’t say that name right now,” he whispered.
“You’re scaring me,” she said.
“I don’t want to hurt you too,” he said.
By the end of the night she had talked him down to the ground. He curled up in on himself in the middle of their dirty living room floor. She laid next to him with Trish on her stomach. She was filled to the brim with dread. Trish only knew two words, and she made good use of them. Mama and Papa. Donatella hushed and shushed her and petted her hair.
Diavolo knew he had to leave before morning. He was alone at the church today, but his father was to be there bright and early the next day. He was sure there was some hint that would reveal it all. There was no choice. There was no way out.
And to think what it meant for Trish turned his stomach inside out. He couldn’t bear to think of it. Her hair just like his, her eyes the same green. That woman’s eyes had been that same bright green. It scared him. He shook. He shook and shook.
The list was supposed to be hypothetical. He didn’t think he could really be that cruel king. He guessed now, he was doomed to be. He’d never get this blood off his hands. He looked at them and saw it still there. He was sure he’d washed them. Washed them ten times.
He had to get rid of the evidence. Every last bit. His father had to go, he’d lied all those years. Even more, he’d done something to him that had split him in half. His mother was already gone. She knew the truth. The truth had to disappear. The church had to go, it held the truth in its infrastructure. He’d walked these city streets, eaten at this dining room table, bathed in that shower, slept in that bed. Everything he’d ever touched was guilty by association.
An important question.
Which is stronger: love or fear?
He looked at his wife and daughter. He’d held them too. Guilty by association. Burn them too? Bring them along? They’d all been lying on the floor for many hours. The sun had fallen completely and the house was dark. They were asleep. He shook Donatella. His voice was clear now.
“Come with me,” he said.
Still hazy with sleep, she asked: “Where?”
“I’m building the castle.”
She pressed her hand to her head and took a deep breath.
“I’m burning this place down,” he said.
“This house?”
“The whole town,” he said, matter of factly.
She began to cry.
He said there was too much cruelty here. It was unbearable. It had to be destroyed. Crime and punishment. He’d let his dreams go, he’d gotten sidetracked. He needed to be king. He begged her to come. She said it would put Trish in danger to run away like that. They couldn’t live on dreams anymore. They had to be realistic. There would never be any kingdom. He would never be an emperor.
He left with nothing. The clothes on his back. A burning in his bones.
She didn’t want to believe him. She took Trish and they went to bed. When the sirens woke them up hours later she started to cry again and didn’t stop for a long time. She packed a small bag and left into the night, leaving the burning town behind them.
She never knew what happened. Her and Trish moved into a little apartment. Their old home was burned to ash. The church, too. All of Trish’s grandparents. There was nobody now.
She brought a photo album along when she left. She took a photo of Solido and placed it on the mantel in their new place. Pretended nothing at all was wrong. Smiled at that photo like her husband was on his way home just now. She didn’t know why she did this. She knew it was him who’d burned Sardinia. But why?
The question kept her up at night. It kept her held by her faith in him as a good man. There must have been a reason. He was a good man. She loved him very much. And he loved his family. He warned them. Something was horribly wrong. It couldn’t have been the Solido she loved.
One day, it occurred to her that he may have died in his very own flames.
She chased that thought from her mind. She felt him in the sunlight sometimes. Felt his power in the beauty. She knew he was out there.
When Trish, at five years old, asked if he was coming home, she said yes.
Summer 1996
Solido Naso stared out from his frame.
“Why do we even keep that up?” Trish asked.
“He’s your father,” Donatella said, not looking up from her book,
“Hardly,” she said, rolling her eyes and crossing the room.
She came to scan the bookshelf which held even more pictures, of only Donatella and Trish. This was her family. She did not consider that man her family at all. He’d abandoned them. Frankly, she didn’t know much of the story. Her mother wouldn’t share.
Just that one day, he left. And he never did come back.
It disgusted Trish. She would watch her mother still ruled by that old grief. She would sometimes wake up drowned in it. The grief faded over the years like a dull knife. It grated in a different way. Most of the time, it was a low-grade gnawing. Others, it pulled her down into the earth and she lay on the floor like she used to then. She’d raised Trish alone. She’d done the best she could. She couldn’t help but imagine all the ways it could have gone better with another pair of hands. She’d gotten through eleven years all alone. Trish was becoming a real person.
“We should rip it up,” she said. She flipped herself over the back of the couch.
“Absolutely not,” Donatella said. “We are not going to do that.”
“He left us,” Trish said. “Come on. Do you think he keeps pictures of us?”
Neither had any way of knowing, but he did. Diavolo and Doppio bounced from hotel room to hotel room, establishing the beginnings of their new empire from the shadows as best they could. The hotel rooms were a crucial part of that anonymity. There never was any golden castle. There never was a throne.
Diavolo had no castle but his hand was mighty. His rule was absolute. Nobody came close to him, that’s for sure.
He had very few belongings. But in a leather case with his ratty old blanket, he had a small photograph of baby Trish and Donatella lying in the yard.
He curled up in his blanket and held the photo. What a mighty king.
The years hardened him. Each year Diavolo pushed further into cruelty. The family photo got discolored and grey.
Donatella and Trish lived their life. Diavolo kept finding a way to allow them to live. He monitored them closely. He knew that one day, to maintain his rule, they would have to be killed. He thought of this and felt a crack run along his ribcage like he was blowing apart.
Then he reminded himself that he was the king of kings. Asked himself, would an emperor weep?
He held his blanket tighter around him.
Summer 2001
The summer heat beat down. There was a beautiful large property where Passione based its operations, now. It had a private garden with gilded golden gates. Now this was a castle.
Trish and Giorno sat at a little table in the garden. They had iced tea and cookies. It was almost too hot outside to be comfortable.
“Would you tell me something about my father?” Trish asked, clinking the ice cubes in her glass.
“Of course,” Giorno said.
“Did he seem very afraid?”
Giorno paused for a long moment. “Yes, I think so,” he concluded.
“I always wonder if he really loved my mother. He must have, right?”
“I wonder the same about my father,” he said, looking up at passing butterflies. “I think even the cruelest people fall in love.”
Trish thought for a moment.
“There’s photographs,” she says. “Of him holding me. Singing me to sleep.”
Giorno nods.
“I always imagined him like that, growing up. Softened. My mom made him out to be a much different kind of man.”
“I suppose she probably truly believed that of him.”
“I guess so.”
Neither speak for a long moment. Giorno finally makes up his mind of what to say.
“Although, I think if it helps you to think of him that way, then you should. My father was a bad man. But sometimes,” he hesitates, looking at his fingernails.
“I like to pretend he would have loved me if he had known. I like to pretend he’ll come up from the grave one day and, ah. I don’t know. Play catch me with me. Whatever fathers are supposed to do.”
Trish nods her head in agreement.
“But we did find a photo,” he says. “In the hotel room he was staying in. Creased and folded a thousand times over. Well-loved. Of you and your mother.”
Tears well up in her eyes, but she says nothing.
“I do think he probably loved you. But he doesn’t deserve your love in return,” he says, solemn and cold.
“Yeah,” she says, remembering where she is supposed to stand on this matter.
She looks at Giorno for a while, the new emperor. Helpless child turned king of kings. He was better at it than her father ever was, it seems. After all, he had the castle. He had the grace. But fundamentally, they were just the same. Desperate for power. They needed it to protect themselves. She tries to understand her father backwards through him, tries to understand the control he wrests. Would he kill to keep it? Even if it was somebody dear to him?
What is scary to her is the feeling that he just might. She has not known him long at all. But there is something dangerous in his eyes.
In the months since her father’s death, he has begun to wear his hair down in its natural curls. They unfurl around his head like a lion’s mane. He is noble and powerful in this way, a catlike mischief and hunger in his eyes. She remembers her mother using these very words to describe her father. That natural air of lion-like nobility. That power and pride.
She loved her father and she hated her father. He was a collection of stories. He was nothing more than a ghost. But his eyes looked over her all her life. From the mantel or from the mirror. She saw him each time she looked at herself. That hair, those eyes. That stubbornness, those dreams. She almost hears his singing in the back of her mind. Almost remembers the sun coming through as he held her in that old house. The house was burnt down 15 years ago. Her father was buried 3 months ago (continues to be buried ad infinitum.) Time will soon fade it all away. She couldn’t decide whether she wanted to let it fade, or to cling on with everything she had. How can you know what not to become if you don’t remember the worst?
“Do you ever worry you’ll become just like your father?”
Giorno hardly stops to think before answering.
“Of course. Do you?”
“Yeah,” she says breathlessly. “All the time.”
Giorno looks her deep in the eyes before slowly blinking like a cat.
“I’ll tell you what,” he says, sipping his iced tea. “You keep me in check, I’ll keep you in check. Deal?”
Trish smiles. Feels that she can trust him.
“Ok. Deal.”