Chapter 4

Blood, as a rule, comes out of wounds only after heated arguments and dirty insults, and things always follow this order. My father - I think he was a good man, but he also cursed when confronted with people who, in his words, "did not deserve to live in this world," especially Don Achille, for whom my father always found a reason. Sometimes, I put my hands over my ears to avoid hearing those unpleasant words. When my father spoke to my mother about Don Achille, he would call him "your cousin," and my mother would immediately deny the relationship (they were distant cousins) and join my father in his curses. Their anger scared me, and what scared me the most was that Don Achille might have heard him cursing from far away, and I was afraid he would come and kill my parents.

In any case, Don Achille's sworn enemy was not my father, but Mr. Peluso. Mr. Peluso was a carpenter and very capable, but he was always broke and lost all the money he earned in the backrooms of the Solara bar. Peluso was the father of my classmate Carmela, who had an older son named Pasquale and two younger children. They were both more miserable children than us, and Lila and I would sometimes play with them. At school, outside, they would always steal from us: pencils, erasers, snacks, and would always come home with bruises on their noses because they were always getting beaten up by us.

Sometimes we could see Mr. Peluso, too, and he looked desperate. On the one hand, he lost all his money gambling; on the other hand, he was blamed by everyone because he was keeping his family underfed. I don't know what it was, but he blamed it all on Don Achille, to whom he owed money, and all his tools were taken away as if Don Achille's body was made of magnets, and all the tools for carpentry work were sucked away by him so that there was nothing left for that carpenter's workshop. He cursed Don Achille, and later the workshop was taken away by Don Achille and turned into a butcher store. For many years, I imagined the saws, clamps, hammers, hammers, and thousands of nails, all following Don Achille like a swarm; for many years, I imagined all kinds of ingredients - sausages, cheese, bacon, lard, and ham - sprouting out of his rough body like a swarm.

This was all happening in a time we don't understand before we were born when Don Achille would have shown his terrible nature. "Before" - Leila usually used this expression, both in school and outside, and I don't think she cared about what happened before us. What happened before is usually confusing, and the adults don't talk about it, or when they do, they blink. It seemed that Leila cared more about whether there was a "before" or not. At the time, it was something that disturbed her, even bothered her. After we became friends, she would often talk to me about ridiculous things - "before us" things - which made me feel a little anxious too. Before - it was a long, long time before we existed, and during that time, Don Achille showed everyone what he was: a very evil man, half animal, and half mineral, as if he could make others bleed and never bleed himself, and you couldn't even scratch him.

We were in the second grade, and maybe Leila and I hadn't even started talking yet. At that time, it is said that in front of the Holy Family Church, Mr. Peluso came out of Mass angry and cursed at Don Achille, who, leaving behind his oldest son Stefano, his daughter Pinocchio, his wife, and Alfonso, who was about our age, suddenly revealed his creepy nature, jumped on Peluso at once, lifted him, threw him against a tree in the small garden, turned around and was gone. Peluso lay there, half dead, bleeding from head to toe, too late to say, "Help me!"