It

It did hit me one day – but I instantly forgot about it – that I did know what mafia meant. What it was.

Do you know that feeling you get when you have been around ugliness for so long that it appears almost beautiful at some point? Or the feeling you get when you realize you have been underwater long enough that drowning feels like breathing hard and you could barely tell the difference? That awareness.

I wish I could remember the first time that I heard the word ‘mafia’. I would probably be able to shake off the feeling I had been born around it, in it, in close proximity to it. In some way breathing ugliness, I guess, and turning it into some twisted form of normalized beauty. Because a child needs to believe in beauty. I certainly did.

I do remember, and I do see today, the beauty of where I grew up. Calabria is stunning, I always say to anyone who asks or who has never been. But is that true? Is that always true? Has it always been true? I had to open my eyes eventually and see what was what. And – spoiler alert – no, it wasn’t, it isn’t always true. Not always beautiful. And yet, one can create some sort of relationship with what is ugly.

I wish I could remember the first time I realized that ‘ndrangheta meant mafia and that the two words were interchangeable. I don’t remember anyone explaining any of this to me, but surely my father played a role in my child-self learning about those difficult things. All I remember, in fact, is the feeling of uneasiness that pervaded me, still too young to make any sense of things on my own, when hearing certain words around him, from him. ‘What is the ‘ndrangheta, Dad? It’s the mafia.’ For years, those words, some sort of unformed it in my head, meant that he was going away for work. Not that far away, mind you, only a couple hundred kilometres south of the region, and yet it often lasted for days.