In winter San Menaio is particularly damp and cold, facing north between the sea and the pine woods. The old house had no heating, only a fireplace, and you were immersed in silence, in the smell of the wet pine woods and of smoke. What we had available was fresh pinewood, hardly suitable for burning, because it pops and crackles, throwing out burning embers, and the resinous soot clogs the flue, with the risk of it catching fire. Luckily, though, we didn’t know that at the time. In that season, in the days after the sea storms, when the water became clear enough again, shortly after dawn we were often woken by the “bang at sea”. They weren’t fireworks, but the bombs of the usual suspects, who with TNT or gelignite from the Apricena quarries were little by little destroying those few submerged rocks to collect, at best, three mullets and a little sea bass.
From the only radio station we could receive – clear, loud and clear, as if it were broadcasting from Vico – a voice, always the same young lady with impeccable pronunciation, reeled off every day, all day long, an endless list of good news and above all figures for exceptional agricultural output and prodigious industrial successes. Only rarely was that incessant, hypnotic singsong interrupted by a bit of music, with little songs similar to “Quel mazzolin di fiori”, but in Albanian. It was Radio Tirana, and in Hoxha’s day it genuinely showed what a dictatorship’s political propaganda was like.

I had taken over half of the big living-room table with my books and notes. The table stood between the fireplace – with its well-stocked woodpile – and the wooden sideboard designed by our father, one of whose doors Andrea had smashed some time before with a punch in a fit of anger, when he came back from the new house after a quarrel with Dad. The other half of the table was neatly laid out with everything needed to load cartridges.

I n the middle of a drizzly morning I hear the sound of a car stopping, excited voices, the sound of doors slamming, the little gate opening and the thuds of quick footsteps coming up the stairs. Andrea had arrived, and he wasn’t alone. I opened the door and he came in with a big smile and no hugs, being loaded with bags and portfolios that were immediately put down on the table. Behind him were two friends, one big, who greeted me with a working-class southern accent, the other a rectangular little wardrobe of a guy, with a fixed smile and a great ability to avoid my gaze. Their names were Tanino and Stefano.
I was glad Andrea had come, but I felt the presence of those two friends to be terribly intrusive. Caught up in his friends and his projects, Andrea considered the presence of a brother already settled in the house irrelevant, and shifting my things a little he began to cover them with portfolios, sheets of paper and cases of markers. While spreading out over the table he assigned the rooms with quick gestures in a growing frenzy. They had to discuss, or finish, a color drawing that had appeared on the table, which was funny and showed a guy devouring his own belly with a knife and fork.
Getting the message, I moved, very annoyed, to the new house. In the evening we got together for dinner. It was the time of Aldo Moro’s kidnapping, and at the table I brought up the subject. I shuddered at the sneers of the three of them, and in the following days I stayed away from them.”