First Love
Chapter 27
On Saturday evenings, Corigliano Scalo had a pulse. Teenagers would gather along Via Nazionale, the main road, drifting toward a side alleyway everyone called la traversa. It was one of those spots that becomes famous among young people without anyone being able to explain why. I had a few friends I could go out with, and for a few hours each week the rest of the world didn’t exist.
One evening I found myself in conversation with a group of kids I hadn’t met before. I don’t know how it started, but somehow, I ended up holding court on the subject of couples and love, a topic I knew virtually nothing about. But when you have an audience, the show must go on.
While I was talking, my eyes found her.
She was petite, brunette, with brown eyes and glasses and a face so well shaped it stopped you mid-sentence. And lips that said — well. They said things that had nothing to do with the conversation I was supposed to be having.
I gathered whatever courage I had and walked over.
“Hi, I’m Benito. What’s your name?”
“Hi, I’m Vincenza,” she said, smiling at me.
We talked for a long time. She was an apprentice hairstylist at a nearby salon. By the end of the evening we had exchanged numbers.
Vincenza was the brightest ray of sun in my life up to that point. I had met casually other girls before, but this was different. For the first time I was truly captured — not just interested, not just attracted, but captured. I experienced love in a way I hadn’t expected and couldn’t have prepared for. Maybe I put too much on her. Maybe she became my everything a little too quickly. But she didn’t mind.
On Saturday nights we would go out for pizza, taking long walks through her neighborhood, laughing about nothing in particular. It was the kind of laughter that doesn’t need a reason. We had fun just by being together.
There was the anticipation of seeing her again — the butterflies in the stomach every time I saw her. Missing her when she was not around. Time that stretched into an eternity when we were apart, while a few hours together passed in the blink of an eye. That is first love. Nobody warns you about it. And nothing quite feels like it again.
What I found with her wasn’t just a first love. It was a language I had heard of but never spoken. I knew love existed — I had seen it, read about it — but I had never lived inside it. She taught me. Not that she could fill the void left by years of missing parental warmth and affection, nobody could do that. But she filled something else. A different kind of emptiness. And with her, for the first time, everything was simply okay.
We discovered things together the way only two young people can — with the ingenuity and innocence of kids who come to each other without preconceptions, without a blueprint for how things should be. With Vincenza, things just were. And that was enough.
Outside of those hours with her, home was a different story entirely.
Living with my mother was somehow uneasy. Mario, of course, wanted a portion of my salary to contribute to the household expenses — something I was against from the very beginning. At the time, I did not fully understand the financial pressures in the house. My two brothers were living there, along with several of Mario’s children. There were many mouths to feed.
Another condition for me to stay there was that on weekends I had to help with the endless menial work on Mario’s property. Farm labor, hauling bales of hay, splitting wood, digging trenches to lay irrigation pipes for the field behind the house. There was always something to dig, build, or move, and nothing was ever light or easy. My body was already spent from the week working at the supermarket. By the end of it I had nothing left. Still, those hours of work, tedious as they felt to my teenage mind were also an opportunity to learn something. To appreciate hard work. To remember that life is not always easy. It kept me grounded.
On those Sundays, Mario would repeat the same mantra: “Come on, let’s go. It won’t take long — just a couple of hours.” It never was. Those “couple of hours” always stretched into something much longer.
At home I shared a room with the eldest of Mario’s sons and one of my brothers. One of them had the infuriating habit of falling asleep with the TV on every night. I despised the light flickering, and the sound murmuring in the background. I have always had a hard time falling asleep that way. Everyone in that house woke up early, yet it didn’t seem to matter to anyone but me. Living there felt like being a guest among strangers. My mother was the only person I truly knew, along with my two brothers. I never connected with the others.
After all those years, it was the first time I had the opportunity to truly spend time with my mother. The longest stretch since childhood. To me it was an attempt to mend a relationship I never had the chance to develop. Mario quickly noticed how much I wanted her approval. Showing affection toward her in front of him was never a good idea — it made him uneasy, almost angry.
The problem was wine. When Mario drank, his repressed emotions came to the surface: the jealousy, the paranoia, the need to dominate. He was capable of twisting almost anything into something suspicious or offensive, and sober or not, that side of him was always there, just waiting.
My mother, on the other hand, never changed around him. She remained completely submissive. She was afraid to speak up, afraid to protect herself, afraid to protect me. After all those years she still endured that man. And for what?
Did she love him? I do not think so.
She had become a prisoner of habit. Mario was everything she knew. She could not imagine herself independent, capable, and free. She was more afraid of facing the unknown than of continuing to live with the devil she already knew. She had no money and no way to live on her own. To me, that bargain felt like a slow death. To Mario, she was simply his insurance for old age — someone who would cook and clean for him, like a servant. In that silent transaction my mother traded freedom for security.
Mario often came home drunk late at night. We made sure to go to bed before he arrived. I would pretend to be asleep. From my bed I could hear him calling my mother, ordering her to go to the kitchen and make him something to eat, even at those late hours. Sometimes he would call us too, expecting us to sit with him and keep him company while he ate.
Those moments were uncomfortable — and dangerous. The air was thick with tension and the smell of alcohol, and you had to be careful about every word you said. It felt like being a hostage, waiting for him to explode over the smallest thing. He would ramble endlessly, speaking badly about people he knew, expecting us to agree with him. I nodded along, careful not to provoke him.
One night he came home drunk and already agitated. Earlier that day we had words over something trivial. He claimed I had offended him, and he had not forgotten. He stormed into the room, grabbed me by the neck, and dragged me to the ground.
My mother tried to intervene, and he lunged at her.
At that moment something inside me broke. My blood began to boil.
“Leave my mother alone! Leave my mother alone!” I shouted, my voice shaking with rage.
Then I collapsed into tears. All the years of held-back pain — the orphanage, the broken promises, the loneliness — it all came out at once. I was not crying for myself. I was crying because I was seventeen years old, watching my mother get lunged at by a drunk man, and there was nothing I could do to stop it. That helplessness was the worst feeling I had ever known.
He eventually walked away and went to sleep. The next day everything was back to normal. Smiles. Jokes. As if nothing had happened.
This was not the first time. Countless times my mother had mustered the courage to leave him, finding refuge at her sister’s house or her brother’s. The next day Mario would show up with flowers and another promise — that from that moment on everything would be different, everything would be alright. And she would go back. I do not know what made her return each time. Maybe it was the hope that this time the promise would hold. That this time would really be different.
That was many promises ago.
Just like with my father’s wife, the slate was clean once again. But promises are cheap. We carry our wounds not only on our skin but in our memory.
I could never reconcile the idea of someone acting violent one moment and smiling the next as if nothing had happened. I had seen them doing their worst. You cannot unsee that, but you can choose how to feel about it. Maybe you will find someone that will make you remember that there are many other things worth living for.
Vincenza was my island of peace. When I was with her, none of the rest existed—not Mario, not the noise, not the crushing weight of everything else. For those few precious hours together, the world was simply good.
I was always cheerful around her. Knowing how dark life can be gives you more reasons to smile when the chance comes—and perhaps to pass that lightness on to someone else. Making her laugh was reward enough. Even then, I carried hope in my heart, because I had learned something early: misery is a choice. It is a path to self-pity and destruction—a lonely path toward despair and bitterness, and I had seen more than enough of both.
Just because the world around you is dark doesn’t mean you have to match its shade. You always have the choice to be different—to become that single ray of light breaking through a gray, clouded sky. That is what I tried to be.