The House of Scorta by Laurent Gaudé Page A

would leave Montepuccio to go to San Giocondo by donkey. There was an office of the State Monopolies there. 12 He would bring the director prosciutto, caciocavallo cheese, and a few bottles of limoncello . 13 He went back and forth tirelessly. All the money went to buy these delicacies. Six months later, the authorization was granted. The Scortas were finally in possession of a licence. But they had nothing left. Not one lira. Just the walls of an empty room and a little piece of paper that gave them the right to work. There wasn’t even enough left over to buy cigarettes. They got their first crates of cigarettes on credit. Domenico and Giuseppe went to fetch them in San Giocondo. They loaded everything onto the donkey’s back and, on the way home, for the first time in their lives, it seemed to them that something was finally starting to happen. All they had done up until then was endure their fate. Choices had been made for them. For the first time, they were going to fight for themselves, and this prospect made them smile for joy.
    They laid the cigarettes down on cardboard crates. They stacked up the cartons. The place looked like a contrabander’s outfit: no counter, no cash register, nothing but the merchandise on the floor. The only thing that indicated that it was an official sales outlet was the wooden sign they had hung over the door, on which was written Tabaccheria Scorta Mascalzone Rivendita no. 1 . 14 Montepuccio had its first tobacco shop. From that day forward, they would dive heart and soul into a life of sweat that would break their backs and kill them with exhaustion. A life without sleep. The fate of the Scortas would be bound to the boxes of cigarettes they unloaded from the donkey’s back early in the morning, before the workers got to the fields and the fishermen returned from the sea. Their whole life was bound to the little white sticks that men held tightly between their fingers and the wind slowly consumed on mild summer nights. A life of sweat and smoke, which was just beginning. A chance to escape from the misery to which their father had condemned them. Tabaccheria Scorta Mascalzone Rivendita no. 1.

 
     
    W e stayed on Ellis Island for nine days. We were waiting for a boat to be chartered for the return. Nine days, don Salvatore, to contemplate the country that was forbidden us. Nine days at the gates of paradise. That was the first time I thought back on the moment when my father came home after his night of confession and ran his hand through my hair. Now it seemed that a hand was passing through my hair again, the same hand as before. My father’s hand. The hand of the cursed winds of the hills of Apulia, calling me back home. It was the dry hand of misfortune that, since the beginning of time, has condemned whole generations to remain simple clods, living and dying under the sun, in a land where the olive trees are more coddled than the people.
    We boarded the ship home. The embarkation wasn’t at all the way it was in Naples, with all the confusion and shouting. This time we took our seats in silence, walking slowly, like convicts. The dregs of the earth got on that boat. The sick from all over Europe. The poorest of the poor. It was a ship of sadness and resignation. A boatload of the luckless, the damned, returning home with the endless shame of having failed. The interpreter hadn’t lied, the crossing was free. In any case, no one could have afforded a return ticket. If the authorities didn’t want beggars piling up on Ellis Island, they had no choice but to arrange the return trips themselves. On the other hand, there was no way they could charter one boat for every country or destination. That ship of rejects crossed the Atlantic and, once in Europe, slowly put in at all the main ports, one by one, unloading its human cargo.
    It was a long journey, don Salvatore, endless. The hours passed the way they do in a hospital, to the slow drip of the IV. People were dying in the