Mafia Princess. Marisa Merico
saw red at this and dragged the girl, who didn’t know any better, out of the car and battered her, shouting: ‘You ugly whore!’ She loved my dad, but she didn’t like what he was doing, so she took it out on the nearest person who wasn’t family.
When Dad got to the bedside my mum said: ‘You’ve just been with other women, haven’t you?’
‘I swear on this baby’s life I haven’t.’
It was terrible, tragic. Tiny Rosella died three weeks later. She’d had lots of health complications but officially her death was down to tetanus.
Mum was devastated. She felt lost, and she knew that was definitely it with my dad. It was over. I was a little more than a year old. Mum had one baby and no income. She couldn’t afford to keep paying the rent at the apartment, so she had nowhere to stay.
She went ‘home’ – in other words, she went to Nan’s. That’s all that made sense to her. Nan was on Mum’s side. Family.
And, of course, business. Nan paid for Mum to have driving lessons. When she had her licence – Nan didn’t want any traffic laws being broken – she started in the cold mists of winter doing solo cigarette runs. She’d drive to Lake Como and also into Switzerland when cheaper consignments were on offer. Sometimes one of my uncles would go along.
It was her way of displaying loyalty to the family and earning some money for them. All the time I was happily being looked after by Nan and her troops of helpers. Dad? He was going up in the underworld, his enterprises far more dangerous and lucrative than before. His lifestyle reflected that.
For Mum it was make do as she could. She wanted us to get our own place away from the crowded craziness of Nan’s and put us down for council accommodation. It didn’t take long. I was nearly three years old when we moved into Quarto Oggiaro, into the ‘Mussolini flats’, the largest social housing district of Milan. The concrete camp of a neighbourhood started by the Italian dictator was home to immigrants, first from southern Italy and, when we moved in, from Turkey and Yugoslavia, making it a colourful melting pot.
For Mum it was our first home together and special to her. But not to anyone else. It’s the roughest place in Milan, and Milan’s a big city; a poor, grey downtrodden estate for thousands of poor people, chilled in the city fogs of winter, oppressive in the summer heat.
We had a big room, twenty by twenty, that we slept in, ate in, did everything in. It was token rent, the equivalent of a couple of pounds a week. We didn’t get much for that: one bed for the two of us, a small kitchen corridor and a little toilet. We didn’t have a bath or a shower. We’d go to Nan’s house to have a really decent wash. If not, we used to have to go to the public showers. I’d grip Mum’s hand as we stood in line to take our turn under the water. It didn’t matter what time or what day we were there, the water was always freezing cold: almost refreshing in the summer but cruel in winter.
It was about a fifteen-minute ride on the number 7 or number 12 tram and then a ten-minute walk from the Quarto Oggiaro over to Nan’s where I still saw my dad. He was always smiling when he saw me and I loved it. I wanted to hug him for ever. Yet, in a little kid way, I couldn’t understand why I didn’t see him every day. Didn’t he love me as much as I loved him?
He wouldn’t be seen dead at our place, the poorest area in the city. He drove a chocolate-coloured Porsche – this one was paid for – and lived in a really exclusive area. ‘Why are we like this, and my dad has got all that?’ I wondered.
He took me to meet Daniella, one of his girlfriends, who had a son about my age. We went to a toyshop and he told us to choose something. I was used to having the cheapest things and picked a little dressing table with make-up and hairbrushes. The lad picked a powered pedal car that you sat in – it would have cost a fortune. I liked my dressing table but later the family teased me that the lad’s present was much better than mine and I got fed up with my dad about that.
Mum was the star. She worked all hours at the Upim market, which sold everything, a sort of mini Tesco. She did shifts to work around my school timetable.
I didn’t speak English, only Italian. I understood ‘sit down’ and ‘thank you’ but Mum only spoke Italian to me. She wanted me to belong. We had picture books, Pinocchio, Alice in Wonderland and other kids’ stories. The teachers made you eat courgettes and go to sleep in the afternoon and I hated all of that. They’d prop up cot beds and we had to lie there for about forty-five minutes and have a little sleep. I pretended I was asleep because you’d get told off if you moved or said a word.
We had white overalls and each class had its own different-coloured little collar – mine was red and orange. The overalls would be various shades and sizes, some better, some worse, depending on where you bought them, but you had to have them on top of your normal clothes. It was like any school uniform, an attempt to stop there being any ‘them’ and ‘us’ in the class or playground. Most of the kids were deprived anyway for it was that sort of neighbourhood, and on the stifling hot days of summer that left you breathless it could smell like a bad Spanish holiday.
For Carnival Day on 17 February I always had to borrow an outfit from Auntie Angela. She got the costume and I had to borrow it. Whatever she had, I wouldn’t get a choice. I was a fairy one time when I was very little. One year I got a Spanish flamenco costume that Angela had never worn and I was very happy; that was special.
The school was a five-minute walk from home and Mum would drop me off just before 8 a.m. when lessons and her Upim shift began. It was all co-ordinated. I finished school at 1.30 p.m., just as Mum’s first shift ended, so she picked me up and we’d go to Nan’s, then she went back to work until 7 p.m. Nobody from school ever came back to my nan’s. Mum kept that part of our life separate. Classmates would visit at Mum’s. Her friend Linda’s daughter Simona was in my class and her son Luca was a little younger. I played ball and rode my bike with them and a lot of other kids in the yard at the Mussolini flats.
I also caught nits, one of the neighbourhood hazards. I heard Mum saying, ‘Marisa, you’re not going to like this but I’ve no choice,’ and the next thing huge clumps of hair, my long, curly ringlets, were falling to the ground. When I looked in the mirror a little boy was staring back at me. I stood there screaming with tears rolling down my face. I was wearing red wellies, a red top and jeans and a shaven head. Mum took one of her ‘arty’ photographs.
That was a big drama for me. As a youngster I was protected from all the other dramas that were going on around me. Nan’s was always warm and comfortable when I stayed there in the afternoons and early evenings. There were more people and more room than at our place, and I loved my nan’s food. Meals seemed to last for hours. I had my cousins to play with and the family would never, ever leave us out in any way. It was ‘my house is your house’. When I went there it felt like my home. As soon as Mum and I walked through the door Nan stopped whatever she was doing and walked across the room and scooped me up in her huge arms. As she wrapped me up, pulled me close and kissed me on the end of my nose, I felt as though no one could hurt me. In her arms I would never come to any harm. She was always very giving and cuddly. I thought it was an amazing place. I’d never seen so many people in one house at the same time. It was full of excitement and love.
After meals I’d play with my skipping rope in the yard along with Auntie Angela, until it was too dark to see and we had to come inside. Then we’d chase the family dog, an Alsatian called Yago, all around the house until his barking became so loud that Grandpa would tell us to quit winding him up.
Everyone loved that animal but Grandpa. He hated it. One week when he had to travel to Calabria on family business he packed up his truck and hid Yago in the back. When he reached Calabria he turfed the dog out into the woods and drove off.
Nan was beside herself when he told her Yago had gone missing in Calabria. Then a miracle occurred. Three months later when Nan answered the door to a neighbour, in walked Yago. Like everyone else, he had come back to my Nan. It turned out Grandpa hadn’t taken him quite as far as he said he had, but Yago had still found his way home from right across the other side of Milan.
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