Green Rainbow Rain

Chapter 25

My classmates used to mock me for spending so much time with the dog. They didn’t know I had no choice. Reality looks different from the outside.

I usually walked Frizzy in the neighborhood. Near the house there was a plot of land with trees, and I would let him loose there to roam around. One morning, after setting him free, I heard someone screaming. I looked up to see the garbage collector running with his pants around his ankles.

“Get this damn dog away from me!”

The man had been relieving himself under a tree when Frizzy appeared and scared the life out of him. I still laugh thinking about it. What made it worse — or better, depending on your perspective — was that Frizzy found what the man had left behind absolutely delightful.

Life with Frizzy was rarely dull. But what came next was less amusing.

By eating scraps from the butcher shops every night, it was inevitable that Frizzy would eventually get sick. He developed an intestinal virus and what followed was a diarrhea of truly historic proportions. He would go at any moment, in any place, including inside the house.

My father, to his credit, took Frizzy to the vet. The diagnosis was not good. The dog had a serious intestinal virus and the vet wasn’t sure he would make it through the night. We went home with that hanging over us. That evening, I kept Frizzy outside longer than usual, partly hoping the fresh air would help, partly dreading what might happen if I brought him upstairs too soon. When I finally did, I was exhausted. I put my head on the pillow and was gone before I could think another thought.

“Wake up! Wake up!”

My father burst through my bedroom door, shaking me like the building was on fire and we had seconds to get out. I was still half asleep, barely aware of what was happening, a torrent of Coriglianese dialect that I won’t attempt to translate here. Nothing kind, I can assure you.

“I told you to keep the dog outside longer! This is your fault! Now take him downstairs so people will think he was out there all night!”

The sheer stupidity of that plan was slowly filtering through my half-asleep brain. I took Frizzy and went outside. From the street below our fourth-floor balcony, I looked up and couldn’t believe what I was seeing.

Frizzy had suffered explosive diarrhea during the night, but was apparently more afraid of my father finding out than of his own condition. So, the dog, in a moment of pure genius, stuck his butt over the edge of the balcony and went full blast. The result was a magnificent green cascade that hit the sun blind of the lady on the third floor, the sun blind of the crazy lady on the second floor, and the balcony of the family on the first floor — car included. Floor by floor, nobody had been spared.

How was I supposed to convince these people that the dog had been outside all night? Who else would have done this to their balconies?

My father went to work.

I spent the morning going door to door, apologizing to each neighbor and offering to clean up the mess. I have never felt so embarrassed in my life — and for something that was entirely out of my control. You could not make this shit up.

The dog was the least of my problems. Something more sinister was in the works.

Every day in school I would take notes so that once home, I could study and do my homework. From one day to the next, while going through my notebook, a page of notes from the school day would disappear. I could see that the page had been ripped out. All the students in my class took their own notes, so I found it odd that someone would steal mine specifically. I was going crazy, especially because in the same period my grades started to go down. I talked about this with my father — he blamed my peers at school. We spoke to the teachers, but they all thought I was imagining things.

If you had to guess, who was sneaking into my room and ripping out pages from my notebooks? Your intuition is as good as mine. That was only the beginning of the things done to me in secret, while I kept believing I was the one going crazy. My sister started to notice as well — at least I had not made anything up. I was not insane after all. In all her vacant stares, dull smiles, and unimpressive personality, Immacolata was beginning to unveil herself as something entirely unexpected. In reality, she was mentally unstable.

The underwear incident came first — or at least it was the first one that played out in front of everyone.

One day my father noticed women’s underwear hanging outside to dry. They were washed, but had a visible yellow streak running through them. When he asked Immacolata about them, she told him they were Elia’s. He went straight to her room and confronted her — disgusting, he said, questioning her hygiene in front of everyone. Elia, appalled, went to her drawer and pulled out a pair of her own underwear. Thongs. Not the ones hanging outside. Those belong to your wife, she said. You can imagine what followed.

The notebook pages were already gone by then. But I was still telling myself it had to be someone at school.

That summer I worked a week at my uncle’s woodshop. With the money I earned I went to the store and bought myself something I had been waiting a long time for — Intesa Uomo, the red bottles. Shower gel, shampoo, deodorant. Mine, bought with my own hands.

I showed them to my father when I got home.

“I’m going to use those too,” he said.

“Dad, I bought those with my own money. I’d prefer you didn’t.”

He got upset. Since he bought everything else in the house, he told me, once my products ran out, I would not be able to use anything else he bought. Zero. He meant it as punishment for daring to have my own stuff. End of discussion.

I took Frizzy for a walk to clear my head. As I was going around the building, I noticed something near the wall — the manhole cover for the building’s sewer drain was foaming. I got closer. The foam was large, and the smell was distinctive, familiar. I ran upstairs and went straight to the bathroom.

The bottles had a quarter of product left in each one. Someone had poured most of it down the sink while I was outside.

I stood there in the bathroom and cried. Quietly, so nobody would hear. I didn’t know what to do with the injustice of it — so deliberate, so small, so impossible to prove.

It kept happening. A favorite blue Nike shirt came out of the washing machine discolored — bleach, not an accident. A fly on my plate, placed there on purpose. Rabbit served for dinner with the intestines and some dung left inside, cooked just for me. I still recall my exclamation “There is shit inside my plate!”

Each incident was deniable on its own. Together they told a story I was only beginning to understand.

There was a boy at the arcade I had become friendly with. He knew I loved the game Street Fighter and offered to lend me his copy. I was excited — brought the game home, asked Immacolata if I could use the PlayStation, she agreed. When I went back the next day the game was in its case. I took the disc out and turned it over. Deep scratches, all the way across. She had taken a pair of scissors to it. When I asked what happened, she said the dog did it.

I protested to my father. It was useless.

For a month I avoided the arcade. I didn’t want to face the boy who had been kind enough to trust me. When he eventually came to the house, I handed him the disc and told him the dog had got hold of it. That day I lost a friend. It was painful in a way that is hard to explain — not just the loss of the friendship, but the shame of having to lie to protect myself from something I hadn’t done.

Life has a way of surprising us, usually to teach something. We go through hard times and figure there’s probably a lesson buried in the pain. At times the pain comes from our own dumb choices, then yeah, we need to grow up. I was a silly, inexperienced teenager—I’ll own that part. But what happened had nothing to do with me or any mistakes I made. Even now I can’t really say what the lesson was supposed to be, or if there even was one. I don’t know if some higher power was watching and trying to tell me something, or if it was just random with no point.

What we didn’t know then was that Immacolata’s behavior had a history. As a child she had fallen from a height and hit her head. She had developed mental health problems — personality issues that her family had quietly decided to ignore, hoping that marriage would fix what medicine hadn’t. They said nothing to my father.

She had episodes of rage that came without warning. In those moments she was a different person — mean, screaming, out of control. In one of those episodes she cornered Elia and me and hit us with a radio charging cable. The bruise on Elia’s arm was visible for days. My father didn’t believe us. She would hit him too, and he never raised a hand back. After her storm passed, she would return to normal, as if nothing had happened. As if we hadn’t all just lived through the same thing. It was surreal.

We knew. We couldn’t unknow it. And there was nobody to tell.

One night Elia and I heard them arguing from our bedroom. Her voice was soft but wrapped in anger.

“It has been forty-two days,” she said.

My father, exhausted, replied: “I want to go to sleep. Leave me alone.”

It wasn’t hard to understand why. After the wedding she had settled into a life of telenovelas and the couch. She barely cleaned, rarely cooked any good meals, and had let herself go entirely — not that she had much to let go of to begin with.

When she went grocery shopping, she came back with processed food and snacks, which she would crunch with great satisfaction during the day while the television ran. My father was a man who had worked with his hands his whole life, who dressed well, who took pride in himself. I wonder sometimes what he saw when he looked across the room at her.

My father, for his part, thought that having a child would calm her mental illness. Then he thought a second one might finish the job. Neither did. If anything, having two babies made everything worse — because now her episodes were no longer just a danger to herself, but also to two small children who had no say in any of it.

I witnessed one of those moments myself. In the middle of one of her rages she turned to my father and said:

“You want to see something? I am not going to feed the baby anymore.”

I stood there in shock. I had seen a lot by then. But the idea that a mother’s bond with her own child could be overridden by whatever was happening inside her — that was something I wasn’t prepared for.

Before all of this, I had believed that life after the orphanage would be different. That I had paid my dues, that a lucky break was coming. Instead, I found myself still without agency, still without control over my own circumstances, still living under the weight of someone else’s instability and troubles. I didn’t know how to respond, what to do, who to turn to. In my heart I always carried the idea that someone would come to the rescue. Nobody ever came.

Maybe that was the lesson all along — stop waiting, start relying on yourself, make your own way. You need to get stronger.