Excerpt from ANACONDA: FROM HELL TO RECKONING
SHORT FUSE
Evil didn’t begin with me.
It was forced into me, tearing through flesh, bone, and whatever joy there was to live for.
I came into the world as a child, full of dreams. Then everything blew apart. One flash—and childhood turned to dust.
Blood replaced the games, fear wiped out everything else.
From that day on, no soul left. Only hunger. Rage. Ferocity.
Saturday, August 12.
The heavy heat of the summer of ’72 crushes everything.
The week is done; I head to Mastro Gasparre for my wages.
“After Ferragosto I’m not coming back” I tell him, without fear.
I promised the neighbor’s son I’d return to Milan with him.
Peppino spent his vacation in Trani, and I’ve made up my mind: I’m leaving. He’s a good guy, a little short, but with that blond hair and dark skin, he looks like he’s stepped off a rock album cover.
I might still be a kid, but working with him and his wife at the bar made me feel grown.
Mastro Gasparre doesn’t like my decision. When I see his face darken, the blood in me freezes. Tall, broad, almost shaved, hands like paddles: one look is enough to command respect.
He tries to change my mind, even offers me a raise.
I don’t budge: a promise is a promise.
With my last paycheck in my pocket, that afternoon I head to the sea with my friends, to the rocky cliffs where we dive and hunt for sea urchins and date mussels.
As a boy, I was good at it—sea urchins especially. Buckets full, always leaving some for Peppino and even for Mastro Gasparre.
That evening, my father and two friends, Mario and Vito, decide to go fishing. I go with them.
The sea is flat; the heat is suffocating.
We fish all night, fill crates; the work keeps us awake. At dawn we clean the catch, pound the octopus against the rocks at the Bocca d’Oro beach. Back home, after lunch, I collapse and wake up only the next morning.
By afternoon, Mario and Vito are back, my father’s mason friends. They want to head out again.
My father grumbles. ”You know I sleep in the afternoons. And tonight’s Ferragosto—every neighborhood’s got its Greasy Pole contest.”
I suggest going to the pier to get date mussels.
In the water, I can hold my breath for over two minutes; tying a rope to rocks full of dates is nothing.
So we do, and by the time we’re done pulling them up, it’s late afternoon. After dividing the haul, I head home, passing through Piazza del Castello, by the prison. I leave a handful of dates to Uncle Nicola, sitting on the steps. Nicola—my favorite uncle. Always kind to me. He spends his life at sea, big trawlers, night and day. When he’s not fishing, he’s there, sitting in the breeze between the alleys.
But this time I don’t go straight home. I stop at Bar Mocambo, Piazza San Giovanni. My friends are at the counter—Peppino, Pinuccio, Carluccio.
“What’s going on?” I ask.
“We’re setting up for tonight. You coming?” says Pinuccio.
“To do what?”
“Blow a charge for fish.”
“No. It’s late; I have to get ready.”
Peppino pushes.
“If you don’t come, I’ll set it off alone. Your loss.”
I can’t let him have the last word.
“Fine. But make it quick.”
We go to Piazza Duomo, but it’s crowded. Few fish. So we move behind the abandoned Angelini distillery. The slabs are slick, but the spot is perfect.
What happens next has never left me. The smell is burned into me.
I’ve got the stick in my hand. Try to light the fuse. The powder won’t catch. The fuse is wet, too short. I grab a shard of glass, trim it, try again. It sparks—now it’s barely there.
No time to throw.
The charge explodes in my hand.
A blast. The sour taste of gunpowder fills my head.
No pain at first. I look down. My right arm is nothing but a stump, bone and meat hanging.
The hand is gone. Pieces scattered on the rocks.
I press my forearm to my chest and run. I jump slabs, slide between stones, climb a slope tangled with dry branches and cow dung.
I reach a house—Maria the Biscegliese lives there.
I knock. She opens, recognizes me, doesn’t say a word. Grabs a towel, cinches it tight around my arm, loads me into her daughter’s fiancé’s Mini Minor. «Please, don’t tell my father» is all I manage to say.
I don’t understand yet how bad it is.
At the hospital they throw me on a gurney. The nurses are scared; the bleeding won’t stop.
It’s the days before Ferragosto; the doctor’s nowhere to be seen.
Uncle Bartolomeo arrives—Maria called him. Still looking young, brown hair cut short, sunglasses on, light blue shirt half open, gold chain swinging from the tension. He talks to the nurses; no one moves.
“Someone will come” they say.
Two hours pass. The blood keeps coming. I wait.
Finally they transfer me to Bari by ambulance. Bartolomeo stays with me. At the hospital, the verdict is cold: nothing can be saved. The hand is already gangrenous. Amputation.
It’s up to my uncle to sign.
In the operating room, the light burns my eyes. The anesthesia won’t take. “Stop, I can feel everything!”
The saw bites into my forearm. A wet cloth on my face. Blackness. When I wake, the arm is a ball of bandages.
Aunt Rosa is there.
“Do I still have my hand?” I ask, voice not my own.
She smiles.
“Yes, sweetheart. You still have it.”
She’s lying. Under the gauze there’s nothing left.
“I need a notebook and a pen.”
She looks surprised.
“Why?”
“Because I have to learn to write with my left.”
She cries. She’s the only one who truly understands.
A few days later they change the dressings. They peel off the bandages. What I feared is there, raw and ugly. Christ, it can’t be. The hand is gone.
I jump from the bed. I scream, thrash like an animal. The doctors try to hold me.
Only Aunt Rosa can. She holds me, speaks softly, keeps me still. It’s her voice I hear over everything. I curse my friends. I curse Vito and Mario and their date mussels. I curse everyone. But most of all, I curse myself—for changing course that day.
After a few days, it’s time to go home. I leave the hospital with fear on my back. I fear my father, fear his judgment. I don’t know what he’ll think of a son missing a hand.
He opens the door, hugs me, says nothing. His eyes speak, and in them I see a pain bigger than mine.
One night he comes back from fishing. He enters my room, I pretend to sleep. I hear him lift the blanket to look at my arm.
“My God… why him?”he whispers, tears in his voice.
I have to accept being one-handed. Shame burns on me. For days I don’t leave the house.
After about ten days, my grandmother lays a light blue sweater over my arm. «Go for a walk, get outside» she says.
But I don’t want people to see me like this. I don’t want pity, I don’t want to be the family’s burden.
The days crawl by. I look out the window and think about everything I’ve lost: the hand, the job, trust. At home, words are few, each of us locked in our own pain. My mother sometimes looks at me, then stops. She doesn’t want to hurt me, or maybe she hides her own grief.
Every night I relive that smell of gunpowder, the blast, that second that changed everything.
I can’t give up. I can’t stay like this.
I need to fight back, to feel useful again, to prove I can make it even now.
Money at home is always short. My mother trades fish for vegetables, buys on credit at the grocer’s. But more often, there’s nothing. The shame of being another mouth to feed strangles me. Since it all happened, Aunt Rosa slips me a few bills, always quietly. But no one at home asks for help, least of all me. One thing is clear: it can’t end here.
The real pain wasn’t the missing hand. The real pain was the wound I left in my father, the disappointment in my family’s eyes. At fourteen, I could have had everything. But now I am broken.
Knowing I’d caused them that sadness—that still hurts more than any scar.
Bio:
Riccardo LoFaro is an Italian journalist, author, and ghostwriter who has lived in New York City for more than twenty years. Bilingual in English and Italian, he has written or ghostwritten more than sixty books, including biographies and memoirs for clients across the U.S. and Europe. His subjects have included Oscar winners Dante Ferretti and Giorgio Moroder, conductor Antonio Pappano, actor and producer Sylvester Stallone, and retired NYPD detective Frank Serpico. For ANACONDA, Riccardo conducted over a year of face-to-face interviews with “Vito Anaconda” in undisclosed witness protection locations, giving the book rare authenticity. His work with major cultural institutions and organizations—including the NYPD, the United Nations’ Permanent Observer of the Holy See, and the Italian State Police—has earned him international recognition, including the ANPS International Award at the United Nations. More about his work is available at http://www.rlfstories.com
OVUNQUE SIAMO 