the balance of devotion - part 2
On a less personal and far more stressful note:
We may be destroying life as we know it. Just casually throwing that possibility out there. The Vongola may collectively turn out to be the Antichrist, which would at least explain Spade.
The Maria thing, I can fix. The political and social chaos we may or may not be creating? I’m at a loss on that one.
Brigandage was a zero sum game. There weren’t enough brigands and they weren’t organized enough to have any real effect on anything outside their local area, their own campanile. But we’ve suggested the idea of organization to them now. We have imitators; I feel very popular. And I heard this word the last time we were in Palermo, this word Mafia. Some people said it with respect, but more with fear. I don’t like it. And I don’t like that it’s the same way people say Camorra in Napoli…and Vongola in Matera.
Structure breeds administration breeds corruption, and that’s how we ended up with the Vindice. The walls of this thing Giotto helped build are barely upright, and already there are cockroaches in them. That’s the miracle of life for you.
In a world full of shit I don’t like, the Vindice are fighting Spade and espionage for the title of my least-favorite thing. Giotto’s forbidden me from attacking them, though; he claims I’ll die. I feel he’s missing the point.
I feel he’s missing the point in general, come to that.
Which isn’t to say I blame him for masterminding this mess-he didn’t. He just caught the first wave of the Zeitgeist. Politics made this. Economics made this. Garibaldi, despite the best intentions in the world, made this. It was hardly all our doing. But we helped.
It’s a sad fact, but people often fuck up most catastrophically when they’re trying their hardest to do good.
Giotto’s starting to notice the way this is sliding, too, because despite occasional evidence to the contrary, he’s not a stupid man. He’s trying to fix it by scaling back the violence, but it’s too late for that. The crime families have their own momentum now, and he’ll see it, sooner or later. He’ll see it as clearly as I do.
This is selfish, but I’m hoping I’ll be dead by then.
* * *
And while all this is going on? Cozart gets married and makes a whole litter of babies. Cozart meanders up and down the Amalfi Coast from one gorgeous town to another. Cozart all but drops out of any world-reforming schemes, and he lives a quiet life, surrounded by his little family, his kids, probably dogs.
I’d like to say I’m man enough not to hate the interfering bastard. I’d like to say that.
* * *
I knew scaling back wouldn’t work. What I didn’t know was that it would make everything worse almost immediately. Cutting back on violence made us look weak, and whatever Giotto likes to think of human nature, looking vulnerable to attack means you’re going to be attacked. And so we were.
We’re standing in the wreckage of Elena’s room, hovering over Elena’s corpse, reading the horror story spelled out in the chaos. The dead bodies all around us with hideously contorted faces and no physical injuries. The tear tracks on Elena’s dead face and the bloody streak down her cheek, as if someone traced his fingertips there.
We failed Daemon Spade, and he’s snapped. I don’t even have it in me to blame him. As always, I understand the guy too well.
I know what I would do if the Guardians had failed to protect Giotto, if I’d watched him die because they were squeamish. I would hunt them down. All of them. I would take my time; I’d enjoy it. They didn’t like fucking violence? I’d feed them to their own nightmares, I’d show them violence (and I’d show their children and their children’s children, unto the third and to the fourth generation, amen, amen).
The only difference between me and Spade is self-awareness.
“Oh, Daemon,” Giotto breathes, horrified. Horrified about all the wrong things.
We were going to introduce Maria to Elena next week, in the hope that Maria could talk Elena into being more careful. Guess that’s not happening. Guess I get to watch Giotto tear himself apart about it instead.
Ugetsu turns away from Elena’s corpse and studies Giotto. Even Ugetsu looks angry and miserable. Not good, coming from our own Zen master.
“I’ll help Knuckle,” he tells Giotto in a soft voice, a voice for invalids. “With the survivors.”
Giotto nods stiffly. Ugetsu looks at me, sharpness coming to the fore. I’m trusting you to take care of him.
I nod back. That’s why I was born.
Ugetsu leaves. Very tactful, Ugetsu. Very diplomatic. I’ll remember this about him. Man just found himself a whole new set of jobs.
“Stay, boy,” Alaude hisses as he brushes past me on the other side.
I didn’t even hear the bastard walk up. That is so disturbing. “Woof woof,” I call after him, and he glances back with a razor’s edge smile, then heads into the next room to see if Spade left him any enemies to play with. Apparently this is what Alaude looks like when he’s worried. Cute.
Too bad Giotto was too busy staring into the abyss to notice any of it.
“Do you think Daemon will be…do you think he’ll survive this?” he asks bleakly, eyes on the destruction.
“Yeah,” I tell him, voice rough with too many cigarettes, too much smoke, too much yelling. “Yeah, he’ll survive.” Vengeance is a great motivator.
“Will he ever forgive me?” he whispers.
If we were twelve, he’d be bursting into tears about now. But we’re not twelve. We’re adult murderers, and we don’t get to cry. “I don’t know. Time usually softens things. Hold out for that.”
“Do you really think anything will soften this?”
He’s talking to himself, I know, and these questions are rhetorical. It’s one of the flaws in my character, though, that if you’re stupid enough to ask me a question, I will answer it. He knows that. He’s looking to burn himself, and he can count on me to deliver. “Giotto, look around. Elena’s dead. She’s gone. She was his only link to sanity, and she’s never coming back. So no, if you want the truth, I don’t think time will soften this; I think it’ll just crack him deeper and deeper until he’s a monster. And there is nothing we can do. We were too late, and we’ll never make up for it.”
He sucks in a breath and chokes on ash, then turns and slams his body into mine, coughing or sobbing into my shoulder. I put an arm around him and rest my cheek on his head, feel him shake like he’s having a seizure.
It was bound to turn out this way. I always knew it.
But the thing is, he never did.
* * *
Spade sticks around, which isn’t a huge surprise. He sticks around and acts, if anything, more devoted to the Vongola than ever. Apparently Elena’s last words to him were something on the order of “Care for the little man,” and he’s turned them into a near-religious creed. Giotto thinks this means I’m wrong, that Spade will eventually heal and turn sane.
Optimism is one of the greatest evils in this world.
Months pass, though, and Spade doesn’t do anything drastic. I almost wish he would, but no, it’s a slow slide. Spade, the champion of the little guy. The ever more violent and twisted champion, not that he was starting from a happy place. And you can’t argue with him, can’t tell him to go easy on people. He says going easy got Elena killed, and he’s not wrong.
Giotto is in the process of overlooking Spade’s rapid descent into slavering madness, who’s surprised? Giotto has a real gift for overlooking things he doesn’t want to see.
Me, I see everything. Maybe that’s why I’m crazy.
* * *
“Do you think,” Giotto begins, then cuts himself off.
He’s lying across our bed, pointy chin digging uncomfortably into my stomach, reviewing the newest weapon designs courtesy his weird little machine-loving friends who shoot at him. I’m leaning back against the pillows, running my fingers through his always-impossible hair, and reading Alaude’s latest reports, which are as educational as ever. I get that spies are meant to be thorough, but I didn’t realize they had to be snotty and sarcastic, too.
It’s nice, actually, just the two of us, being still and not doing much. Which is sad, in a way. Like we’re old men already.
“Spit it out,” I tell him, setting down the reports.
He drops his paperwork, too, and rolls onto his back to face me. His shirt is unbuttoned, so I approve of this move, aesthetically speaking. And, as an added benefit, his chin isn’t digging into me anymore. “Are people afraid of us, G?”
Are people afraid of us. Shit, Giotto, we have bloodstains in every item of clothing we own. What do you think?
“‘It is far better to be feared than loved if you cannot be both,’” I tell him. That’s courtesy Niccolò Machiavelli, who wasn’t half bad, for a Florentine. Bitter. Self-mocking. Hated farming. My kind of guy. “‘Since men love as they please but fear when the prince pleases, a wise prince should rely on what he controls, not on what he cannot control.’”
Giotto laughs and reaches up to brush hair out of my face. “How logical. So are we loved or feared? That was the question, oh Right Hand of the Vongola.”
“You’re both, beautiful. Congratulations, you win. Pretty sure I’m just feared. Not sure how the family stands as a whole.” And I wish you’d stop thinking about it.
The smile fades, and his face settles into serious, working-day lines. I can tell where all the wrinkles are going to be when he’s old.
He’d better live to be old.
“I’m a little concerned,” he says, “about Daemon.”
Those words could make a man’s year. “Really?”
He raises an eyebrow at me. “You don’t have to sound so happy about it.”
Hey, I didn’t bounce around or punch the air with glee. He should be giving me more credit, here. “Would I be happy? Would I be happy to be proven right over the guy who’s always telling me he’s an excellent judge of character while I just hate everyone? Surely not.”
“You do hate everyone,” Giotto snaps. “Even a stopped clock is right twice a day.”
“Ouch.”
Giotto sighs and rubs his eyes, unhappy lines bracketing his mouth. I really shouldn’t play with him right now. I hated Spade from the start, sure, but Giotto trusted him, and Giotto doesn’t understand disloyalty any more than he understands jealousy. He’s hurt and he’s confused. I shouldn’t play. Even if this is the happiest news of the year.
“So what’s your plan?”
He squirms uneasily. “I don’t know. I can’t act until he actually does something wrong.”
“Yeah, I respectfully disagree, oh Vongola boss. He’s already done of ton of creepy, evil shit. He’s just been careful not to do it while you were watching.”
Giotto gives me a scandalized look. “And you never saw fit to mention that to me?”
“Up until just now, I figured you knew and for some reason thought he was worth it, Mr. Intuition.”
“When you say evil-”
“I am talking about the kind of stuff that is in no way going to be discussed in our bed,” I say firmly. “Anyway, what brought this up?”
Giotto turns to dive halfway off the bed and rummage in a box underneath it. Again, I approve of this move. Aesthetically speaking.
He finds what he was looking for with a satisfied ah ha, and flings an arm back for me to catch. I haul him back onto the bed, and he hands me a letter.
A letter from him to Cozart. A letter from him to Cozart signed Primo. There’s only one asshole we know who’s so sure the Vongola will continue on in perpetuity that he’s already assigned us a number.
“Spade wrote this, huh?” Interesting piece of work. The babbling, I have to admit, is very much in the style of Giotto.
“He did.”
“Not his handwriting, though.”
“No. According to Maria, the original looked a lot like my handwriting. This is just a copy; she sent the original on.”
Takes me a second to work through that. Maria saw this letter before it had a chance to leave town. Maria’s chatty best friend has an uncle who’s in charge of collecting and distributing the mail. If she wanted to, I guess Maria could get her hands on any mail at all.
“Maria reads our mail?”
“Well, she thought this seemed suspici-”
“Maria reads our mail?”
“…Generally speaking, I don’t think so.”
Maria reads our mail. Well, shit.
Have I ever said anything bad about Maria in a letter? Have I ever said anything bad about her chatty friend? The only thing that’s saving my ass here is that I hardly ever send letters that aren’t about business. And those are all in code.
That’s right. I never say much in letters, have in fact been bitched out because of it. Turns out I don’t care if Maria reads my mail. Whatever.
“So Maria reads our mail, and Spade’s an evil dick who’s trying to kill Cozart.”
“Interesting which of those facts you find more surprising,” Giotto murmurs, studying my face, intent.
I sigh and glance at the letter again. It would be Cozart. Every fucking thing comes back to Cozart. Something to do with gravity, maybe. “I assume we’re dividing and conquering on this one.”
“You save Cozart. I’ll deal with Daemon.”
“Switch you.”
“No.”
“But-”
“No.”
Such a killjoy. “Just keep in mind that Spade’s evil. Think like me for a change. Smash him, don’t go easy. Shit, I don’t trust you to do this right at all.”
“You don’t trust me?”
“Oh, fuck you.”
Giotto smirks, but it only lasts a second before his face goes back to grim thoughtful. “Even now…we still owe Daemon quite a bit.”
“Really? Because I never noticed him doing anything worthwhile.”
Giotto curls into my side and gets a death grip on my shirt, like I’m his favorite cuddly toy. I think I kind of am his favorite cuddly toy. “He told me,” he whispers, breath warm across my chest, “where Giovanni was going to be.”
“And you still picked that crappy ground?”
He lets go of my shirt for a second to thump a fist into my gut. I wheeze; he grabs hold of my shirt again. “He warned me about the arsonist in Melfi. He warned me when the Gelsi were about to ally with the Sicilian families. His information is the only reason we have an alliance with the Balsamo family. And we didn’t protect Elena. It was all he ever asked, and we…G, we owe him a lot.”
Uh huh. There’s a pattern to these favors. I recognize it because, haha, I’m also guilty, if significantly less psychotic. Those were all things that were more important to Elena than anyone else, and the pattern says, All for the love of you. But Elena’s dead, and, not to put too fine a point on it, what has Spade done for us lately?
Can’t say that; Giotto would have a fit. “Tomorrow, since you apparently really don’t know, I’m going to tell you about the stuff he hasn’t been letting you in on. In gory detail, Giotto. And then you make your choice, and remember we all have to live with it.”
“You always have to live with my choices,” he murmurs, shuffling closer, having one of his fleeting moments of insecurity. I never know what to do with those. Luckily, they only happen about once a decade.
“Get over it,” I tell him with maybe less than perfect sympathy. “Whose fault do you think that is?”
“Mine,” he mutters.
“Actually, it’s that asshole Cozart’s, but I guess you’re gonna make us save the jerk anyway.”
“You still hate Cozart?” Giotto asks in despair.
“I don’t hate him,” I huff, tucking an arm around Giotto and messing up his hair. I resent Cozart, that’s all. I am capable of seeing he’s a good guy, despite that. “I don’t actually hate everyone.”
That gets an honest smile. “I know.”
“I don’t hate any of the guardians except the evil one whose name is already stricken from my memory.”
Giotto laughs, but it sounds like it hurts. Distraction time.
“I don’t hate your Maria.” Even if she does read our mail like a creep.
He looks up at me in something like horror, something like fear. “She’s not my Maria.”
“Yeah, well. She will be.”
“G, I would never-”
“Yeah yeah yeah, I know. I know you backwards. But Maria and I made a deal, so you don’t have to worry about it. We’ve got a system. We’ll share.”
I win. Now he’s completely distracted from brooding over that asshole Spade. In fact, it looks like his brain just broke.
“…Thank you?” he tries, sounding like he has no idea what’s coming out of his mouth.
“Sure. Hey, she’s part of the family already. It’s no trouble.”
He thinks about that. “Knuckle is going to kill us.”
“She claims he won’t. According to her, we even get to keep our bits.”
“Generous,” Giotto allows, still having trouble believing in this conversation. “But, G, I-you know I haven’t talked about…anything with her. Or with you, for that matter. I haven’t even really looked at her, and you seem to think we’re. What? Getting married?”
I shrug. “Seems proper.”
I get the chance to mess with him like this so rarely, see. I can’t help myself. He always does this weird, what-the-fuck thing with his mouth, it’s hilarious.
“My lover just betrothed me to a woman I hardly know,” he informs my shirt button. “Why?”
The button has no answers for him, so I figure I ought to make up for the lack. “Hey, I’m good at matching the right people to the right job. And you can say whatever you want about not looking at her, but trust me, you looked. Everyone knows it but you.”
“I didn’t want to look,” he insists.
“But you want Maria!” I counter. I will be winning this argument. Truth is, at this point I’m pretty invested in the idea of Giotto’s flock of brats. I could be Uncle G. He’s not taking the Uncle G title away from me just because he’s prudish.
“Is there anything I could possibly want that you wouldn’t try to give me?” he asks, low and disturbed. Scared.
And he should be scared, because the answer’s no. Guy makes you his whole world, that’s a lot of pressure. Too much. Which means he wants me to lie, right? And what he wants…
Really don’t know how I got so crazy. I’m inclined to blame Giotto. “You can’t have my hilariously wrong 1258 map of the world. That is mine.”
“Stingy,” he murmurs, pleased. His forehead smoothes out, his face softens, and that little half-smile he always has when he isn’t actively upset comes back.
Lies. They hold the world together. “Yeah. It’s my inner five-year-old.”
“You used to give me your toys when you were five.”
“My inner two-year-old.”
“You used to-”
“You’re not sexy when you’re splitting hairs like a lawyer.”
“Oh, really?” He moves like a giant cat; natural aptitude on top of too many years of fighting. It has its advantages. Can’t say as I mind being pinned down by a half-dressed, gorgeous, wild-eyed man who plans to have his way with me.
“Not really,” I tell him. And I lean up as he leans down.
Hey, maybe we are destroying Italy. Maybe we’ve gotten rid of the problem by making a bigger problem. Maybe we’re all going to die in a mess of blood and bullets, and maybe we’ll deserve it when we do.
But it’s what Giotto wants, and I would trade the world for Giotto in a heartbeat if I had to. All for the love of you. It makes perfect sense and isn’t a bit creepy.
Just ask Spade.
* * *
“Okay, kids. Today we will save a guy called Simon Cozart,” I inform the guardians. Well, all the guardians except the sneaking, psychotic, traitor guardian. With any luck, Giotto will burn that one to crunchy bits later on.
No, there’s no fucking way. I shouldn’t even get my hopes up.
“Cozart,” I tell them, “is a good, well-meaning man who talks too much and habitually sticks his nose where it doesn’t belong. That is why he’s in the situation he is currently in. If you ask me, it’s pretty much all his fault. If you ask Giotto, it’s not his fault and he deserves rescuing. Lucky for Cozart, Giotto’s the boss, so off we go. To the rescue.”
“That speech was ultimately not filled with God’s love, G,” Knuckle says earnestly.
“Don’t make me punch a priest before we even get to the battlefield. That’s gotta be bad luck.”
“Our plan?” Ugetsu asks, calm, serene, like he doesn’t notice our bickering or Lampo’s whimpering or Alaude’s sulking. This Zen routine used to bug me, but I’m really coming to appreciate it as time goes by. At least there’s one of us who’s calm. Other than Giotto, that is, but he doesn’t count, he’s an alien.
“Our plan, right. So we’re-Lampo, shut up, stop crying, get your ass out of that chair, and go grab your shield before I remind you who you really ought to be afraid of.”
Lampo leaps up and scurries along the wall and out the door like a rodent. My technique is effective, I don’t care how many nasty looks Knuckle gives me. He’s just leading that kid on anyway. “And hey, someone tell Alaude we’re on our way to beat the crap out of a bunch of corrupt haters of discipline, but we have to do it in disguise. Make sure he understands that we need to wear disguises-he can’t just fuck off and do whatever he wants this time.”
Ugetsu dutifully repeats this to Alaude pretty much verbatim, only more politely. Another nice thing about Ugetsu: he’s never once asked why it is that Alaude and I can’t communicate directly. Thank fuck.
Alaude hears him out, nods, yawns, and wanders off. Presumably to stockpile more handcuffs. He tries to act blasé, but I see that maniacal, gleeful little gleam in his eye.
“Disguises?” Ugetsu asks, hands clutching protectively at his Genji clothes.
“Disguises,” I tell him, no mercy. I then proceed to explain the plan to him and Knuckle, who are really the only ones who care.
* * *
Simon Cozart strikes again.
Don’t kill the traitor, says Cozart, because he’s…scary? Leave him alive to torment everyone, it’s all good!
I see no possible way this could come back to bite us in the ass.
And then, not finished yet, he says, Leave me behind-he says this to Giotto. That’s like telling Giotto to amputate a limb. No, it’s worse, because he’s not as attached to his limbs as he is to his people, that’s the charm of the man. For fuck’s sake, wasn’t that Cozart’s rationale for starting him on this vigilante bullshit in the first place?
And then those eerie, mummified sons of bitches show up like the plague they are, and now we’ve got a bona fide family curse. Who does that? Seriously, are they bored? Is that what this is about? Shit. And to think, all this time, I was waiting for Knuckle to bring down a curse on us. But no. No, it was Cozart.
Fuck Cozart. This was his fault from the start.
“Let’s kill Spade,” I say again. I’ve lost track of how many times I’ve said it. My hope is that I’ll eventually drive Giotto to do it just to shut me up. A forlorn hope, but a man has to try. “We don’t have to tell Cozart. We’ll do it on the sly.”
“G, I know things are…different now, but he was family. We can’t just kill him.”
“We really, really can. I don’t know what the fuck goes on in your head sometimes.” Except I do, that’s the annoying thing. Loyalty is loyalty. Just because a guy went batshit and tried to kill us all, that doesn’t give Giotto the right to turn on him. Or so goes the ethos.
Giotto is weird. Sometimes it’s charming, but more often it’s a pain in the ass.
“You think you want to kill him,” he tells me earnestly, “but you wouldn’t feel any more comfortable killing family than I would. You’d regret it, G.”
I would not regret it. It’s pretty rare for me to regret anything. That’s more Giotto’s line.
* * *
If I’d been focused on the present instead of fretting over the inevitable day when Spade will drive us all crazy in our sleep, I would’ve noticed Giotto was up to something the minute he dropped his Maria-denial and abruptly announced that they were getting married. I would’ve seen that gearing-up-for-insanity gleam in his eye. Instead, like an idiot, I put it down to wedding nerves, as if Giotto would have any such thing. Ha.
No, the wedding nerves were all mine. I had a full-on panic attack before the ceremony and the bride had to calm me down, how’s that for mortifying? And Knuckle witnessed way too much of it and came to a bunch of cockeyed conclusions. He then spent the whole ceremony-which he was conducting-casting me well-intentioned but misguided sympathetic looks. And since he made us do a Catholic mass despite the fact that none of us are Catholic, the ceremony took approximately a year out of my life.
At some point during the party afterward, Maria seized me, shoved me into a room with Giotto, and slammed the door behind us. And because that wasn’t weird enough on its own, she then shouted through the door that Giotto had better be up for two rounds because it was her fricking wedding night and she wanted her turn. Giotto promptly dove for my pants murmuring something about not disappointing the lady.
My life is surreal. But if Maria figured her insane tactics would fix my wedding jitters, well, I can’t deny she was right. I like Maria.
Of course, it wasn’t our house, which made things awkward. It was, in fact, Knuckle and Maria’s mother’s house. The many ways in which that could’ve gone to shit don’t bear thinking about.
So yeah, looking back on it, it shouldn’t have been a surprise that the wedding was a sign of impending disastrous upheaval.
* * *
“I never meant to return to Japan,” Ugetsu says quietly, sitting on the deck of the ship, sword balanced across his knees. He’s gazing out at the water, unnaturally still. “I didn’t want to return to Japan. The truth is, I…very much dislike Japan.”
Those are incredibly strong words coming from Ugetsu. But since the water he’s looking at is the Sea of Japan, it’s a little late for him to be announcing this.
“Sucks to be you,” I allow.
I actually am sympathetic to the poor bastard. I’m still counting my blessings that Giotto didn’t decide to drag me back to Napoli by the ear. Lucky for me, he decided Japan would be a peaceful place to raise a family, and nobody can make that claim about Campania.
Well. To hear Ugetsu tell it, nobody can make that claim about ninety percent of Japan, either, which means the only thing the place has going for it is its lack of Daemon Spade. Not that that isn’t a big plus.
So, yeah, sucks to be Ugetsu. Imagine fighting your way out of the pit you grew up in, thinking you’re shut of it for good, knowing you’ve put thousands of miles between you and there…and then getting unexpectedly hauled back. Life’s a bitch. “So what’s with the Genji clothes? I mean, if you hate the place, why didn’t you ditch the clothes?”
He frowns and rubs sleeve material between his fingers. “I wanted to remember,” he says. “I wanted to dress every day, look in the mirror, and remember what I would never have to deal with again.”
Wow. So this shit with Japan is personal. “Uh huh. Where’re you from?”
“Edo. Tokyo, now.” Never knew Ugetsu could do glum, but apparently all it takes is a mention of home.
“Well, we’re not going there,” I remind him, and, before he has a chance to shoot that down, “And even if we were, it wouldn’t be the same. I mean, you could move back into the same freaking house and it wouldn’t be the same. You’re Giotto’s now. Forget what the landscape is like, it doesn’t matter.”
Ugetsu’s giving me the old knowing smirk, which I guess is better than the glum face. And I deserve the smirk. After all, we’re both pretty sure my lover’s below decks having sex with his wife, and apparently I’m fine with that. I am such a tool. But hey, so’s Maria, so’s Ugetsu, so are all the Guardians, especially Alaude. I mean, we did leave Spade alive behind us in Italy because that’s what Giotto told us to do. What the actual fuck.
If I were planning to feel guilty about anything, I’d feel guilty about ditching Italy and leaving them to cope with Spade, who’s, yeah, family. Who’s our problem, no matter how you cut it. But Giotto seems oddly unbothered.
Maybe it’ll catch up with him later. It has been a busy few months, what with traitors, curses, weddings, abrupt immigration. All of which, come to think of it, I helped organize or recover from, semi against my will.
“It feels like being a wind-up toy, doesn’t it?” Ugetsu asks.
“Yeah, he loves us to actual pieces,” I agree.
“And beyond.” Ugetsu and I exchange looks, have an oh-shit-Spade moment. “And yet the thought of anything happening to him is…”
“…Horrifying.”
We sigh at ourselves and each other and our mutual idiocy.
“Eventually,” Ugetsu tries hopefully, “we’ll die, and he won’t be able to terrify us anymore. It’ll be over. Even he can’t control the afterlife.”
I lean back against the cargo crate I’m using as a deck chair and stare up at the sky. It’s a beautiful blue today. Gorgeous and endless and fucking inescapable. “Do you believe that, Ugetsu?” I ask. “Do you really?”
Reference Notes
Relevant books:
Christ Stopped at Eboli by Carlo Levi
The Monster of Florence by Douglas Preston and Mario Spezi
Machiavelli’s Children by Richard J. Samuels
The Prince and Discourses on Livy by Niccolò Machiavelli
*
The Primos, logically speaking (haha), must have been young adults circa 1870. The Meiji Restoration, specifically the Charter Oath of 1868, opened up Japan to the rest of the world. Before that, I really doubt that Ugetsu would have been able to slink away to Italy and join the mafia there, to say nothing of Giotto’s relocation of the family to Japan later on.
Can’t be much later than 1870, though, because the mid-1800s saw the end of disorganized bands of brigands roaming the countryside (Ninco Nanco and his lover Maria a’Pastora famous among them), and the beginning of proper criminal organizations. Though some groups had origins as far back as the 1600s, their serious rise to power began with Italian unification (which concluded c. 1871). They really became a menace, though, beginning with World War II and continuing through the Cold War, when the CIA started paying off mafiosi (and yakuza, incidentally) to menace Communists and break strikes and squash the Bolsheviki pinko Commie liberals. Because clearly organized crime is better than Communism. ANY DAMN THING BUT COMMUNISM.
I hope the KGB was paying off the mafiosi, too. That would be awesome. That would be Yemen levels of awesome.
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Italian unification, i.e., il Risorgimento, was achieved partly (maybe largely) through the efforts of one deranged guy named Giuseppe Garibaldi (1807-1882), and I’m warning you now that this section threatens to go on forever. It’s not my fault, Garibaldi was a busy man.
Little Garibaldi went to sea at age 15, becoming a ship’s captain by 25. In the course of his merchant marine career, he met some fans of the idea of Italian unification (of whom Giuseppe Mazzini was shiny #1), and decided he was a fan of the idea, himself. So he promptly tried to take over Italy. AS ONE DOES.
Curiously, the people in power were not 100% with him on this idea, and so he was sentenced to death and forced to flee Europe. For the first time, but not the last.
Not slowed down by mere exile from his home, Garibaldi made his way to Brazil, where he met an amazing and insane lady called Ana Ribeiro da Silva (Anita), who fought alongside him in the Brazilian civil war of the moment-the War of the Ragamuffins, or the War of Tatters. It wasn’t exactly a win for Garibaldi’s team, but it wasn’t a dead loss, either.
Satisfied with that, Garibaldi and his now-wife Anita headed south to Montevideo. Garibaldi, like, taught school, I don’t even. He and Anita had four kids, and Anita taught him to be a proper gaucho. While all that was going on, Garibaldi took charge of the Uruguayan fleet and fought the good fight, and is credited with ensuring Uruguay’s independence. You’re welcome, Uruguay.
This is also allegedly when he started putting his troops in red shirts, for which he would become famous. The famous Red Shirts! And supposedly this is where he mastered guerrilla warfare, but I submit that any man prancing around in a red shirt is not, in fact, a master of guerrilla warfare. I mean. Come on.
(The house Garibaldi lived in in Montevideo is now a little museum/shrine, daww.)
Garibaldi was still troubled by the ongoing shenanigans in Italy, so, having sorted out Uruguay, he headed home for a second try at Italian unification. There were many battles and near-death experiences, but Garibaldi still somehow found time to write a novel. It all ended in tears, though. He was driven out of Italy again, and Anita, carrying child number 5, died during a retreat. This is crazy, because I would have bet money she was too mean to die. ;_;
Garibaldi wandered sadly back to the Americas, this time to New York to work in a candle factory for a while because his life was the randomest thing ever to random. His cottage on Staten Island is ALSO a museum/shrine. XD But he swiftly became bored (this man was very easily bored, WATCH OUT WORLD), charged off to check on Central and South America, maybe punch some unpleasant people in the face, and then returned to Italy to try once again for the revolution.
PERSISTENCE WILL OUT. The Second Italian War of Independence, also known as the Austro-Sardinian War (more on poor, stomped-on Sardinia later) is where the Garibaldi legend really became shiny, because he led a force of around 800 (called the Expedition of the Thousand; it sounds better) into Sicily, overcame an army twice the size of his, marched north with an ever-growing fanclub of willing troops, and had conquered everything up to Naples by the time he was done. In 1860, he handed over the south to Victor Emmanuel II, first King of a united Italy.
Well. When people say Victor Emmanuel, a lot of the time they secretly mean Count Camillo Benso di Cavour, sinister mastermind of Italian unification, shadowy power behind the throne, etc. etc. Garibaldi wanted sweetness and light and unity and equality. Cavour, on the other hand, saw that Italy as nation-states wouldn’t survive in modern Europe, so he wanted one, unified government that he could control, and he wasn’t overburdened by moral concerns when it came to getting it. He shamelessly used the star power of both the king and Garibaldi to spin things the way he wanted them. Cavour and Garibaldi had many common goals, but they weren’t…friendly. Haha. Ha.
Cavour: Let’s hand over Nice, get the French off our backs.
Garibaldi: But I grew up in Nice!
Cavour: …And?
Garibaldi: What will become of the Italians living there!?
Cavour: I guess they’ll learn to speak French. Look, it’s just not strategically important.
Garibaldi: D:
In view of all that, there’s some question of how excited Garibaldi really was about the political hand-over. Afterward, in a possibly-related fit of ennui, he announced that he was going to retire. He was 53, he’d done stuff, he had a right to kick back.
That lasted all of about 30 seconds, until the civil war in the U.S. began. Because Garibaldi never saw a civil war he didn’t like, he was deeply interested.
Garibaldi: Hey, Mr. President, would you like me to sort this out for you? I don’t know if you’ve heard, but I am pretty good at that kind of thing.
Lincoln: I won’t lie, it would be really nice to have you in my army.
Garibaldi: I think you mean leading your army.
Lincoln: …Is that what I meant?
Garibaldi: And you should probably make the war all about abolishing slavery, or else everyone will think you’re a dick.
Lincoln: It’s, um. Early days yet, and ah. You know what? I think we’ve got this one. But thanks for the offer.
Garibaldi: Hey, it’s cool.
Clearly someone should write AU Garibaldi/U.S. Grant slash. Assuming this hasn’t already been done.
MEANWHILE, IN ITALY:
Garibaldi: So I’m thinking this whole thing with Rome being its own little religious nation is a bunch of bullshit. Let’s attack the Papal States!
Victor Emmanuel/Cavour: There are a lot of Catholics in this world, Garibaldi. A lot. Of. Catholics.
Garibaldi: What’s your point?
Victor Emmanuel/Cavour: Don’t make us throw your ass in jail.
Ultimately, they did have to throw his ass in jail. Just because he wanted to attack the Papal States and cause an international incident! So misunderstood.
They let him out soon enough, though, and as a consolation prize, they gave him some weapons and troops and said, “Go beat up Austria and get them out of Venice. Do something useful with yourself.” His troops did well, but the war itself was kind of meh for Italy. Still, they did win Venice away from Austria.
But the distraction wasn’t enough, because no sooner was Garibaldi off the battlefield than he was back to his, “No, really, Rome. Let’s topple the papacy!” Haha, poor Victor Emmanuel.
And that was basically the theme of the rest of Garibaldi’s life, plus some fighting against the French and for the French and so on. He was elected to parliament and founded the League of Democracy, which was in favor of universal suffrage, emancipation of women, standing armies, stomping on the Catholic Church…
He eventually died at age 74. IN BED, what are the odds?
I think Giotto secretly wanted to be him. Hell, I not-so-secretly want to be him.
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It’s worth noting that unification was very, very new in 1875, and Italians didn’t really think of themselves as a nation. Arguably, Italians still don’t really think of themselves as a nation. Carlo Levi’s book Christ Stopped at Eboli, written in the 1930s, is pretty heartbreaking on the subject of how alienated people in Lucania (now Basilicata) felt from Rome even then.
“To the peasants the State is more distant than heaven and far more of scourge, because it is always against them. Its political tags and platforms and, indeed, the whole structure of it do not matter. The peasants do not understand them because they are couched in a different language from their own, and there is no reason why they should ever care to understand them. Their only defense against the State and the propaganda of the State is resignation, the same gloomy resignation, alleviated by no hope of paradise, that bows their shoulders under the scourge of nature.”
Matera is one of the major towns of Lucania (Basilicata). Carlo Levi described it as…ehm…essentially Hell with more livestock? Like, whole families living in tiny caves with all of their animals, starving children with malaria sitting slumped along lovely walkways, freakishly rare diseases wiping people out. The way of life hadn’t changed significantly in something like a thousand years.
Levi’s sister was a doctor, and she passed through Matera on her way to visit him at one point. Being a Northern Italian lady, she wasn’t really prepared for Matera. “A constantly swelling crowd of children followed a few steps behind me. They were shouting something…. I thought they must want pennies, and I stopped for a minute. Only then did I make out the words they were all shouting together: ‘Signorina, dammi ’u chinì!’ Signorina, give me some quinine! …The town is indeed a beautiful one, picturesque and striking, and there is a fine museum with Greek vases, statuettes, and coins found in the vicinity. While I was looking at them the children still stood out in the sun, waiting for me to bring them quinine.”
Carlo Levi’s book was published in 1945, and government officials promptly freaked, labeled Matera the Shame of Italy, and forced everyone to move out of the old, cave-filled part of town (the Sassi) and into more modern housing. So, you know. Three cheers for shaming.
I like to base the Vongola out of Matera, because if you want a place where poverty and political oppression were really in-your-face horrific in the late 1800s, it sounds like it can’t be beat.
These days, though, the Sassi is a UNESCO World Heritage site. It has four-star cave hotels, for serious. IT’S COME A LONG WAY.
Here are pictures.
(DGM fans, this town may look…somewhat familiar to you. Aaand there is another town very nearby called La Martella. OH HOSHINO.)
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Sardinia. Jesus, Sardinia. I mean, I know it’s rough to be an island and all, but Sardinia’s been invaded so many times it is genuinely ridiculous. Phoenicians, Carthaginians, Romans. The Vandals and the Romans fought over it for a while like dogs over a bone, then the Byzantines came along, and, while they had no trouble booting out the Vandals, their control was pretty, um. Shaky.
From the 700s to the 1000s, the Saracens of North Africa amused themselves by attacking the hell out of the Sardinian coast until everyone abandoned the coastal towns and pulled back into the mountainous interior. I mean, after 300 years of that shit, it does seem the logical move.
You know what? I’m not even going to list all the attacks on Sardinia between then and the 1870s because THERE WERE TOO MANY. The Spanish, the Austrians, and hey, the North Africans never got bored of that game. Everyone attacked the place. It was the done thing. If you’re bored on a Tuesday, CONQUER SARDINIA.
All this conquering had a negative effect on the locals, surprise surprise. And they didn’t change much in their hostile, suspicious ways, either, from Italian unification until well after World War II. The Monster of Florence, the story of a 1970s Florentine serial killer, discusses 1960s Sardinia a fair bit, because the authors suspect that that was when and where the Monster of Florence grew up. They say, “Sardinians had always been afraid of the sea, because in centuries past it brought them only death, pillage, and rape. ‘He who comes from the sea, robs,’ went an ancient Sardinian expression…. Sardinians, especially shepherds who lived most of their lives in nomadic isolation, despised the Italian state as an occupying power.”
For hundreds of years, Sardinia was an island full of people afraid of the sea.
…Lampo has to be Sardinian.
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Veni vidi vici. “I came, I saw, I conquered.” According to Suetonius, this was all Julius Caesar had to say on the subject of his conquest of Pontus (northeastern Turkey). Julius Caesar was kind of a dick.
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“…visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children, and upon the children’s children, unto the third and to the fourth generation.” (Exod.34:7)
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Niccolò Machiavelli (1469-1527) was even more special than he generally gets credit for. He found himself on the untrendy side of a regime change, and therefore did most of his writing in political exile at the family farm in the lovely Tuscan countryside, which he hated like poison. He was a city boy in his soul, and spent most of his time in exile desperately trying to curry favor and get himself back to Florence. At first he was going to be proud about it, but after a while, his pride was weighed in the balance with a lifetime of tending chickens and found wanting. His attitude then changed to, “I will get back into Florentine politics if I have to crawl all the way there on my belly.”
Here’s part of the dedication at the beginning of The Prince, a book of advice on how to run a principality. It is addressed to whichever Medici was in power, idk:
“I hope therefore that Your Magnificence will accept this humble gift in the spirit in which it is offered. Should you condescend to read and consider it carefully, you will perceive in its pages my profound desire that Your Magnificence will rise to the greatness that Fortune and your qualities promise. And should Your Magnificence deign to look down from the lofty summit of your eminence to these lowly depths, you will see how I have suffered undeservedly Fortune’s great and continuing malignity.”
And here, here is part of the dedication at the beginning of Discourses on Livy, written at approximately the same time and addressed to actual friends of his:
“So I hope that you will accept this gift in the spirit in which all things are accepted by friends, where the intention of the giver is more important than the quality of the thing given. … I believe I have managed to avoid the usual practice of writers, who, blinded by ambition or covetousness, dedicate their works to a prince, praising him as if he had every commendable quality when they ought to condemn him for having every shameful attribute.”
l-lol, Niccolò. XD AT LEAST YOU KNOW WHAT YOU DO. He goes on to declare (in the Discourses, obviously) that principalities are a pretty useless form of government, and that republics are the way to go. His reasoning being that most people are stupid, so it’s better to aim for the mediocrity of democracy (in which there’s a cancelling effect between the majority idiots and minority non-idiots) than to experience the catastrophic lows and far less frequent highs of one man in power.
So basically The Prince boils down to: ‘Here is how to run a principality if you are stupid enough to think principalities are a good idea, see how clever and politically savvy I am, please God let me come back to Florence.’ Which makes Machiavelli’s most famous work an obscure joke at his own expense.
Surely G has this man’s entire collected works on his bedside table and has memorized more than half the contents.
back to Part 1