Chapter Text
A mother's love is the purest feeling that exists, they say, such is its purity that it does not distinguish between good and evil, does not notice intensities or measure distances. No one can regulate it, it's like a bomb, once you release it you just wait for everything around you to perish without the slightest chance. She consumes everything in the blazing fire, even her own childrens.
But perhaps it was not love that moved her, perhaps the contempt she had carried since Immemorial times had more weight in her actions. She loved her son, but not enough to be content to see him sigh for the youngest of the Crocetti's, she could grabs him by the shoulders and repeats between shouts that it is forbidden, and the boy only listens, with his head down, in an attempt to hide the tears that come out of his eyes, but which never shows regret. She loved her son, but hatred was capable of consuming her much faster, like a fuse in contact with a spark of fire.
There are nights where she doubts, where her most conscious and human part shouts that the resentment is only rotting inside, to everyone, she begs and begs a God who never answers her for a little peace, so that perhaps, the next morning when she goes to the market and meets Mrs. Crocetti, don't end everything as it always does. She is tired of throwing and receiving hurtful comments to the letter, she is tired of hating. But it is the only thing she knows how to do. She doesn't even remember how it started, or why, But she's sure of something, as sure as the love she has for her son, will one day end, and when it does, it will drag them all to the tears of hell.
Autumn of 1945, in that little piece of the world that was not very clear, they lived in a town on the coast, but she always considered herself an expert in the climate. It was a good life, the war was just over, the breeze was a little colder in the afternoons, and the town in general had become a little more colorful. She still remembered when they arrived, a suitcase for her and her husband and a small backpack that her son was carrying, his small family fleeing Jewish hunting in Germany.
The road was not easy, Danny had spent his last Reichsmarks on train tickets, it didn't matter at that time where they were going, there was only that burning feeling of fear, they knew that if they stayed they could never escape again. Six years had passed, they had established their base in a small Italian town, a place far from the city where not even the government had a place, the villagers had no qualms about welcoming them either, but in every place there is someone who doesn't like you and that's fine. Then things did not remain in simple displeasure.
"Jerome, please hurry, you know it irritates me to be late anywhere." With that cry from the entrance of their house, she began the day, quite early as any other. That week would be the monthly fair, in the market there would be things brought exclusively from the city. It was one of the few disadvantages of living in a town located in the middle of nowhere, it seemed bewitched, as if it had stayed forever in the 19th century.
At that time of the month it was just her son and she, her husband would go to town for weeks to work at the steel mill. She was sure that when he returned, he would bring hundreds of gifts with him, he was a pretty loving man despite the circumstances. Meanwhile, she loved her son's company.
Jerome, was just finishing his adolescence, but he was a charming boy, his mother used to tell him "My dear child, you are not made to live in this town, your ambition and genius will take you far from my arms'' he would tell her that it would never be true, that she would always have him to take care of her, he would hug her and fall asleep in her arms. At soul, Jerome sure being a scared little boy, she still remembered when he debuted in his bar mitzvah, all tender and shiny. Now he was a little man with the heart of a baby.
She always knew that her child was different from the rest, he was a dreamer, a creative genius, but also a bit of a weird kid. She had discovered him on a few occasions wearing his dresses and heels, acting funny for an audience that was only made up of stray dogs at the back of the yard, he was not the most masculine young man in the place, nor the stockiest, the girls thought he was quite cute, but Jerome never paid attention to them, beyond a friendship. Her husband played at ignoring that fact, but it was something that she did not let sleep at night, worried about her baby.
And she had a lot to worry about.
"Jerm honey, you could pass me the tomatoes?... Jerome, are you listening?..." Of course he wasn't listening, that's what happened every time it was market week, when the youngest of the crocetti's returned from the steel mill. She didn't know how, or when, much less why, but one day her son simply stopped lending the same emotion to the moments he shared with his mother, preferring to lose himself in a distraction much more... Male.
And she wouldn't have cared in the least if this man had been any other young man in the village, but life seemed to make fun of them at every opportunity. Dino Paul, the youngest son of the Crocetti's, the most Catholic and conservative family she had known in her life, in addition to their personal hell, was the damned platonic love of her son, a Jewish boy, thin and weird nine years younger than the young crocetti, the perfect combination to kill Gaetano, head of the family and a man whose hatreds have rusted his heart to the point of rot.
Now she had to take care of his little child every time he met him, the boy acting as if he were bewitched, as if the eyes of the other young man were a natural attraction to his body, a magnetic and invisible force. She had noticed that this magic affected the other boy as well, and for a second she feared. She feared because the possibility became tangible , because now it was perhaps coming to life and she knew for a moment that if reciprocated, it would be the final sentence for her son and for the young Crocetti.
But what she could do in the designs of love, they were worse than the song of a siren. Love drags you to its depths, where you die in a deliciously slow agony. and it seemed that those boys were more than willing to perish of love.
If she were asked now, she would answer between stifled tears that ignorance would have been her best companion, she clouded her judgment in a world of fantasies where her son did not fall into the arms of that Italian, But within her lay that mother's intuition, that hunch that lived in the core of her being, that grew in branches from the heart of her womb to her restless mind, that screamed at her in fear. She knew that there was no turning back, that the damage had been done.
Damn, of course she knew, she know her son as if he were part of her and not a natural extension of the body that life had given her, she knew him and lost him more and more every day, because she was too cowardly to face the fact that there was love between those two boys, frightened and fascinated her at the same time, she found it grotesque, depressed her, like man throughout history, who furiously flees from what his tiny mind cannot understand.
Jerome knew it too, her gaze gave him away, it faded, grayish like her soft hair, she tried to camouflage it with an empty smile that did nothing but turn the poor boy's stomach, who felt like a treacherous bastard, a dirty being, he shouted it in silent words at the forbidden hours, when in their home not even the whisper of the wind could be heard, the world so still in those moments that his sobs become even more heartbreaking.
Every time he searches and finds the strength to tell his mother, Something inside of him collapses, so he swallows even more that knot that lives hanging in his throat, that bundle of nerves that prevents him from speaking, terrified to the core. Then he also prays, prays and prays for minutes that feel eternities, imploring to be cleansed, let the angels come down there and tear him to pieces in the flesh, purify his soul, but he knows that it will be in vain, because only that person who repents of they sin is forgiven, and Jerome can only bathe in his pleasure when he commits it.
But he has postponed confession so much that he feels more and more distant. more and more he loses his way, that reason to free himself, to tell it, although exactly, what should he tell? his heart boasts presumptuously that it belongs to another man, even with the full knowledge that he only is a different body for the Italian, accustomed to large and round breasts, when his is thin and bony, to curved hips, when there is no apparent roundness in his being, So different from any other but the same in all its glorious anatomy, a déjà vu of himself, bizarre and disturbing.
They didn't even call each other by their names in those encounters, they were like wild animals, without speech, without manners, without tenderness, not even kisses, it was all friction, chemistry and hormones, maybe a little filtered hatred. And so he prefers it in the corners of his mind, because he knows that if he glimpses in those eyes a streak of love threatening that dark iris, he will be able to go against the little that he still respects just to unite himself in flesh and soul to that man whose hands run over him with delicious brusqueness, with contempt and lust.
He prefers his hatred because he knows that if one day he manages to get his love, he will lose it forever.