Let’s remind ourselves that exercising coercive control
has not been considered a crime since 1981

and those were the years of Berlusconi
and TV fraudster Wanna Marchi—whose faces,

expressions, and quips we all know: they multiply
on camera, in individual and collective memory,

we repeat them in our gestures and are deeply
drawn to them, and we still feed them, not knowing why,

incognizant of what glance, what wrinkle
forms around their eyes

when, behind all those words, they are afraid.
By five in the afternoon, Pina was back in Italy;
they picked her up at Fiumicino; she hadn’t slept a wink, there was no reason to stay.

Peppe stays and ends up losing everything; and so do the others, millions, swallowed up by the local mafia,
the most ruthless businessmen; every now and then, for the next twenty-five years, someone would call,

looking for him to ask about this or that apartment,
which they had once known to belong to him, and he would politely hang up.

But an open fault takes root and can only be patched on the surface; the ruins
can be shored up; you return home, but to a house filled with silent doors

and staircases the inner fault whispers at first, then stops speaking, you forget
the rift becomes normalized; it’s something you can even share, justify as you think about other things.

About the Chinese, for example, now it’s their turn. Their warehouses are huge; they pack millions
of ready-to-wear garments, pay in cash, buy up everything; at their counters, naked young girls,

with hot water bottles on their bellies; they produce, reproduce, and multiply,
children of all ages in the hallways, little girls dressed like dolls, the boys still half-Communist

with improbable Italian names—Romano, Giada—and eyes that look like diamonds when they spot
a 500-euro bill.
Like just about everyone in my generation, we grew up with Tonio Cartonio the elf from kids’ TV,
my father worked in a bank, shouts rang as numbers went haywire, the stock market plummeted,
then at dinner at Salentino’s, same images on a loop all day long on every TV in every restaurant.
Fiorenzo and Rachele—maybe at Ideale’s, we were all together, I don’t remember—
for me, it was nice to be together, commenting on a historic event—my own story.

That evening we were to celebrate our new home, my father and his friends, we were at Salentino’s,
only a passing remark on the towers collapsing, it was a bad omen they said, then raised their glasses,
commenting on the images on the screen, you could see the police running with their guns
at the ready on their belts, as if the devil might emerge from that cloud of dust.
I’ve learned to interpret gestures and contexts,
when it’s easier to say yes than to say no
it requires an explanation, one that’s too complicated—
but when it’s impossible to say yes, then you make use of
the unspoken, the preverbal language; what is left unsaid,
what is hinted at says everything; you speak with your body,
through tones, pauses, silences, references, and symbols;
in essence, you go back to an animal lexicon.

Learning this means learning to read the Sibyl’s leaves
scattered in the wind, which have one meaning
when arranged in a certain sequence, and the opposite
if arranged differently.

To protect me,
she avoided certain symbols, preferred not to speak,
or would beat around the bush making wild leaps,
so absurd they were, that they seemed ordinary.
You find yourself in a concrete crevice with a key in your pocket,
gloves on your hands, a chisel and hammer, a bucket, and a few plastic bags.
You’re choking on dust and cobwebs and rat droppings, tires, cables,
an old beach umbrella, bricks, roof tiles, half-open sandbags.
We all knew of their existence, but only I knew the location; my mother, on the other hand,
knew about the keys. You think about the importance of sharing the burden of information,
sharing as camouflage, like a broken heart whose pieces you join back together
at the right moment. It has to be in the daytime; at night, the noise would raise suspicion.

You discover that even breaking down a wall requires a technique,
a simple way to do it, or else you end up completely exhausted. You’re blinded
with shards; you discover that behind the bricks there’s a whole casing of EPS,
cellophane, and tape sealing it all up. You discover the advantages of mechanical methods,
an electronic system could get damaged, a battery could explode, and ruin everything held within.

The kickback bundles are sorted by bill denomination, each in its own freezer bag and a silica gel
packet to keep them as safe as possible from moisture, but you realize it was all for nothing,
the stench of mold hits you like a gust of wind. You stuff everything into the bags and resurface.
You spend the next two nights unwrapping the bills, peeling off the rubber bands fused to the money,
then counting, sorting, and vacuum-sealing everything. You discover that money ages,
every so many years the design changes, maybe even the size, the colors and signatures change.
They came back in my dreams for months, black as a tumor, their deadly smell, the rustling wrappers,
your fingers turning the color of mold. And the numbers, the counting goes on
in your head all day long, following you like a shadow. You sleep poorly, you don’t sleep,
perhaps you’ve never slept at all.