The Sheep on the Fourth Floor

Chapter 23

Life outside of the orphanage was indeed different, for us and for our father alike. Sometimes I think it must have been difficult for him to suddenly find himself with two teenage children he barely knew. We rarely engaged in deep conversations. He would leave early in the morning and come back in the afternoon. I could see him returning exhausted, his clothes dirty, his hair and mustache full of dust. I was always happy to see him, and no matter how big I had gotten, I would always run to hug him when he came home. After not seeing him all day, every time he left felt like a goodbye, and every time he came back it was like a renewed welcome. I wonder if the years in the orphanage had shaped our sense of permanence. Even exhausted as he was, he would manage a smile when he saw me.

He would clean himself up, sit down for a little while, light a cigarette—he smoked two packs a day—and relax in front of the television with a beer. His wife Immacolata would cook, or warm up, I should say, the same processed dishes every night: cordon bleu or würstels—cheap, prepackaged meals.

His workday in construction was grueling, and he consistently encouraged us to aspire to be better than he was, urging us to attend university and pursue careers as doctors or teachers. He frequently cautioned us not to follow in his footsteps. Perhaps this was his way of protecting us, caring for us, loving us.

“You, who have endured suffering, will one day lead a better life because fortune will favor you,” he would often say to me and Elia.

In my immature state, I took that expression literally. I believed we had already paid a high enough price in suffering, and therefore a better future was simply owed to us. It was naïve thinking—as if all the suffering stopped there, and good things would just arrive on their own. He should have stressed that if we worked for something, things would change. Instead, the focus seemed to be on fortune rather than responsibility.

For now, fortune was the simple freedom of walking out the door each morning and making my way to school. I would leave the house and walk, taking in everything around me. I enjoyed the morning sun, often looking at the clouds, even admiring the rain from under my umbrella. The idea of doing that for the first time felt liberating. Soon I learned to find different ways to get there, like exploring an open world for the first time. I would observe the cars going by, someone coming out onto a balcony beating a rug, people heading to work. The world was moving, and for the first time, I was moving with it.

The area around the high school had its own ecosystem. Most kids would hang out in a small bar not far from the entrance. Others would sit outside on a low wall that marked the edge of a dirt soccer field. The bar sold sandwiches, and inside there were a couple of arcade machines where kids would try to beat the games right before the bell rang. I was there often to watch. Like any kid my age, I was mesmerized by video games.

The class was not that large—eighteen kids at most, and only two girls. The subjects were mostly technical in nature: electrical circuits, electronics theory, along with physics, math, English, and Italian literature. Everything was new to me, and every little thing left me appreciative and in awe in a naïve way. I was detail-oriented, taking notes religiously, determined to complete every assignment and learn as much as I could. I was a good student. The saying “the master appears when the student is ready” felt true. Teachers seemed more motivated knowing there was someone following so closely, with curiosity and diligence.

I discovered I could really focus on sports. Physical effort gave me a sense of control—as if by doing something hard, I was taking ownership of my destiny for once. For years, everything had been decided for me: when to wake, when to eat, when to sleep, how to behave. But here, on the track or the court, the harder I pushed my body, the more immediate the results. If I ran faster, I got faster. If I practiced longer, I got better. It was simple, direct, and entirely mine. I enjoyed playing volleyball twice a week and soon joined afternoon meet-ups for track and field.

We did not have much of a sporting infrastructure. Along with the dirt soccer field, there was a narrow stretch of asphalt behind the building—a makeshift court squeezed between an emergency staircase and a cement fence, with a net stretched across what had once been a parking lot. It was not the kind of surface you wanted to dive onto to save a volleyball. Still, we made it competitive enough to push our limits and have fun.

To prepare for track and field competitions, the PE teacher would let me run around the building for time—just going around and around. It turned out I had good athleticism and stamina. I took every instruction seriously, as if someone finally believed I could do something. And I gave my all.

But what appeared as diligence in academics turned into neglect at home. Without disciplinarian figures telling me what to do, I failed to take care of myself. There was an aspect of social living I did not fully grasp—that going to school meant existing in the world with other people, being seen by them. The unfortunate part was that people judged me by the way I dressed, and appearance somehow mattered. I developed poor hygiene; my socks were torn, my heels exposed. This mattered in a place where everyone took pride in how they dressed—their shoes and clothes were brand new, and they smelled good. I had none of that. And for obvious reasons, kids at that age can be cruel. They picked on me.

My father was not paying attention to how I showed up to school. He was exhausted, consumed by work, by survival. The details of how I looked when I walked out the door in the morning simply did not register as urgent to him. His wife barely ran the washing machine and said nothing about my broken socks. And I don’t mean a small hole here and there. The fabric at the heels had completely given way, threads hanging loose, my skin pressing directly against the inside of my shoes.

No one asked whether I had showered. No one checked whether my clothes were clean. There was no quiet inspection before I left the house, no hand adjusting a collar, no voice reminding me to look presentable. We lived on a single salary, and maybe these things felt secondary. There were bills to pay, groceries to stretch, electricity to keep on. Appearances must have seemed like a luxury.

My sister had her own world unfolding. Whatever attention existed in that apartment was scattered and thin, divided among too many needs. I moved through it largely unnoticed, learning without realizing it that if I wanted something fixed—washed, replaced, improved—I would have to be the one to notice it first.

One day, my peers told me I literally stank and suggested I take better care of myself. I felt a wave of embarrassment so strong it burned in my chest. From that day on, I made sure to always be clean. That moment was a turning point—humiliating, yes, but it lit something in me. No one else was going to take care of me, so I would have to learn to do it myself.

Still, there were weekends when I would spend time with my mother, and there, things felt different. She would tell me to take a shower, hand me deodorant, and quietly put clean clothes and decent shoes aside for me. There was no lecture, no accusation—just care. I would return to school on Monday morning washed, dressed properly, smelling good. For a couple of days, I blended in.

She cared for me in those small, practical ways, even while managing two other children and Mario, who was still there. Those weekends reminded me that I was not invisible, that someone noticed. But the weekdays taught me something else: that if I wanted consistency, I would have to build it myself.

At home, I saw a different kind of survival. My father, worn from long days of work, had his own ways of making do, solving problems, and keeping the household afloat—often in ways that were inventive, unpredictable, and at times almost comically so.

One night, it must have been past nine, when the building was quiet and every family seemed to be resting, he called me down to help him in the parking lot. I got to the car and heard something moving in the trunk. He opened it, and to my shock, there was a sheep. He looked at me and whispered, “Keep quiet and help me carry it upstairs.”

“Upstairs?!” I said.

“Yes! Move it! Keep quiet!” he replied, still whispering.

And so we carried the poor animal up the staircase, all the way to our fourth-floor apartment. Its tiny hooves clicked against the steps, its breathing sharp and panicked. I was sweating, embarrassed at the thought of a neighbor opening their door. Halfway up, the sheep let out a bleat. The sound echoed in the stairwell. We hushed it and hurried the rest of the way, finally locking the door behind us.

My father led our guest into the small closet where he kept his work tools—no more than four feet by four, crowded with a toolbox and a few scattered cans. “Hold the head down!” he ordered.

I pressed the sheep’s head into a blue plastic basin, my hands trembling. I had never been this close to an animal, and it felt strange and uncomfortable. The sheep struggled slightly, its hooves scraping the floor.

Then my father acted. The knife plunged into its carotid artery. My heart pounded. The bleating filled the closet until it faded, and the basin began to fill.

That was reality, and it was for our sustenance. My father told me to put aside my feelings and acknowledge that we would eat well for weeks. From this death came our nourishment.

“Mort a tia, e salut a nua,” he repeated softly, almost ceremonially.
Death to you, and health to us.

It sounded like a strange pagan offering to a deity—but in our world, it was simply life.