If It Hails in May: When handicap comes after God

By Rolando Rizzo

The title of Rolando Rizzo's novel already contains in its conciseness the essential design of its contents.

Life in its beauty sometimes resembles a green expanse of fallow wheat that promises a rich summer harvest, but an hour’s violent hailstorm is enough for it to become desperate desolation.
There are two fundamental types of handicap: one caused by narcissism and irresponsibility and the other that belongs to the chromosome lottery. Both often devastate happy families, or in any case force them to remodulate their whole existential path sometimes with heroic and, otherwise, desolating results.

In Rolando Rizzo's novel, both types of handicap plummet like lightning upon a family and its wealthy and strongly religious community, breaking down fronts, clichés, exalting appearances, to reveal the real substance we are made of and the basic choices everyone sooner or later has to deal with when "hail falls in May".

The novel speaks of solidarity and betrayal. Of lives that interweave, that are lost, that are redeemed, that in being irreconcilable are all reconciled, some to trace new seasons of love and freedom.


The author

Rolando Rizzo was born in 1944 in Rossano Calabro.

He was raised by a very cultured illiterate father, a very sweet authoritarian and violent narrator, unwell, he discovered the Bible at forty years old and adored it, but read the New Testament in the light of the old, he was disillusioned with humanity; and in love with women who he esteemed if they submitted.

Rolando Rizzo spent his first six years with a mother who was a talented, feminist, ante litteram, rebellious and independent, who rejected without question any form of male submission, domination and violence so she soon left the conjugal roof, the village and her son to eclipse herself in the eternal city.

The adolescent Rolando stayed with his father until he was fourteen and was then accepted by the Adventist Institute in Florence where he earned a living working as a farm boy and dishwasher up to the age of twenty-one. He was in love with football and cinema. He devoured Mickey Mouse and Tolstoy, The Little Ranger and Malaparte, the Guerin Sportivo and especially the Bible.

He wrote his first piece on the students' “mural newspaper” of Villa Aurora, and since then has never stopped...He graduated in Theology in 1972. He was an Adventist Pastor, youth animator, lecturer, author of theological and nonfictional publications, he devoured novels. In 1990 he returned as Professor of Practical Theology to the Institute he attended in 1958, and in 2008 he wrote his first novel Il Mulino sul Colognati defined by the director of the editorial Leggere Tutti as "an unexpected masterpiece".

Followed by Il Viaggiatore, Il terzo treno, Cieli Tamarri, Il Nulla e l’Incanto, Il principino scomparso, Marmellata di prugne gialle, La viola e i gigli della campagna, If it hails in May. When handicap comes after God.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Rolando Rizzo
• Release date: May 15, 2020
• ISBN: 9788835828754

Book preview

garden.

The Calicanthus

Author’s introduction

It is rigid like no other year

this January twothousandandseventeen.

Seemed without snow

Which instead, candid death shroud,

comes to us from the ravines of Amatrice,

penetrates our bones, our souls.

Invades sixties boom year

country villas.

So many different homes among beeches and pines.

Thousands and thousands of gardens

that in March will perfume of hyacinths

and smile of crocuses and violets.

But now humiliated by an unexpected freeze.

And yet a strong fine fragrance

delicate and intense invades the air

like a gentle dream, like hope.

But can this freeze without sun have a perfume

following me in my steps?

How is it I have never met it

never seen the flower that sings it

in all my long and countless seasons?

And yet it has been there since the beginning of time

Can only just be distinguished, between the bare poplars and naked birches,

from the rusty hawthorn.

From a distance it has tiny rusty sprouts,

anonymous,

but close up a crown of yellowish petals,

elegant and discreet,

is honored a brownish nucleus

and a perfume that astounds:

only the flower seller on the corner gives me the name:

the Calycanthus.

It recalls me of so many of the brother’s names

who have perfumed my winters:

Maria is their champion

who walked light and invisible

between an uncouth and presumptuous husband

and belligerent, rude children.

She always wore a candid white apron,

the few words she pronounced only in peace,

but perfectly suited.

She produced impossible harmonies.

The Calycanthus reminds me of Franco:

gentle Deacon in a community that was bickering

presumptuous and arrogant.

He like Maria with a light step,

words sparing, mild and agreeable

and silent closeness in pain.

He created celestial euphonies

just like the clusters of Calycanthus

in this unexpected freeze.

Johnny

Chapter 1

Giorgio, who for many years had only lived days of splendid sunshine and nights of moon and fireflies and would never have imagined what was to happen to him, lifted the sheets colored with blue and white ducks, as he did every morning, and took the two warm, softly throbbing feet of his lastborn baby into his hands; two small cotton balls laced with pink, woven with the sun. The baby, as with each dawn, felt the pleasure of being caressed by hands like silk and continued to snore like the little curly-tailed pigs of the Disney cartoons.

Giorgio gently shifted the little sheet up to his neck and, as always, was moved in contemplation of the golden curls covering his face, leaving only his pouted lips milk-scented uncovered.

Giorgio was a captain of industry. He ran a company that produced small agricultural tools, some of his own invention, in a huge warehouse from which a small fleet of vans departed every day to supply the agricultural consortia of the entire region, and also a lorry that served many sales points in other regions of Italy.

For years now he had been leaving his private office at dawn to go to his business center a hundred meters away, an office in the middle of an industrial cube of glass and steel.

His employees and workers came in at eight o’clock sharp, but he was always at his desk by six o’clock on the dot. Those two hours were the most precious and most productive because, being rested and with a fresh mind, he prepared the day by examining every priority in each sector of his company.

Many businessmen work late into the night. But Giorgio returned home no later than five in the afternoon to attend to his family until ten in the evening. From then until five in the morning he slept soundly. His staff were under strict orders never to call him during those hours. He would say, I have trustworthy collaborators at the head of every sector of my company, even if the factory burns down, everything will be resolved in the best possible way without me. From five in the afternoon to six in the morning, pretend I don’t exist. Otherwise, my family would soon no longer exist.

Johnny was the last to be born in the Garelli household, the fifth who had four more heirs: two boys and two girls. Domenico known as Nico, Giovanni or Gianni, then Angelina or Ina and Rosalia or Lia. The lastborn had only been given a foreign name to honor his now very old grandma who seemed to come back to life when she heard her favorite singer Johnny.

Giorgio had loved and still loved all the children he had always pampered, but in his relationship with them what had always moved him most was to caress their little feet in their early morning sleep. The same magic was repeated every time, even if not all the children were as beautiful as Johnny who looked like a cherub drawn by Raffaello.

Five children were not few, but when someone reminded him of them, he would say that, the way they had turned out, he would have accepted even twice the amount.

His wife Susanna didn’t complain, but half joking and half serious, said that five was quite enough.

Giorgio and Susanna seemed very close. In public they were kind, complimentary and affectionate. The children, as you can imagine, could sometimes make them angry but for minor reasons. For core values, all relationships were more than good. The friends, neighbors, acquaintances, employees who idolized Giorgio sincerely said, An extraordinary family! An unusual boss who had come out of his apprenticeship and never forgotten his past as a worker.

Giorgio’s career had been short and remarkable. He had married Susanna when he was a simple worker, son of cultivators who were neither really poor nor well-off, from Romagna.

His parents were the owners and farmers of a small mountain farm that provided for their bare necessities, but no more than that.

The lastborn child of a very large family led by an honest and hard-working father but with very narrow views, Giorgio finished, like all his many brothers, only primary school. He attended a mixed class set up in a small room next to an old stone church in the middle of a crossroads surrounded by pastures, at eight hundred meters altitude.

He had the good fortune to descend to Sernafolice, a beautiful town in the plains, hired as a boy by an elderly widowed and childless uncle who ran an old agriculture and gardening shop. He had set the shop up in his parents’ old farmhouse in the open countryside few years before, but the town had now come towards it and promised to go beyond it.

It was really a tiny place in the old animal shed under the house, but it faced the old farmyard adjoining a peach plantation.

In the yard in spring and throughout autumn his uncle would leave sacks of manure, terracotta pots, tools and platforms of garden and vegetable plants. All this was left unattended at night given the rural honesty which was a local custom.

Giorgio was 21 when he came to town in the late 1940s. He wasn’t an Adonis. Though not very tall, he had a compact and slender physique, thick dark hair and a face with rough but harmonious features. He was a naturally cheerful young man; he always expressed optimism and had a pleasant eloquence, almost always in the Romagna dialect because his Italian was approximate. He had an imperfection that made him likable, however, causing his laughter to be spontaneously funny: a small natural gap in the center of the lower row of teeth. Almost as if he were missing half a tooth.

An outstanding worker, always willing, he soon won over the heart of his uncle, who increased his responsibilities day by day. He was supposed to live in the modest apartment above the little shop for a short time, but the old man convinced him to live with him and both were helped by a young girl who cleaned house and prepared them food.

The girl was Susanna; she was eighteen years old and lived in the house opposite, the lastborn daughter of a Romagna peasant family who at her age knew how to do everything in the house and on the farm.

After only three months the two youths fell in love and after another three months they had got married with special permission from the Curia and the municipality. When you saw the two together they didn’t look like adolescents, but rather children with a spontaneity and joy of living even though they were more than adult for their trustworthiness and common sense.

The old farmhouse above the small emporium was large and had high and spacious rooms as well as a large kitchen with walls covered with old copper pots above four stone fireplaces that had been left still working. A thick chestnut table and eight straw seated chairs, still in good condition, completed the old furniture reminding the uncle of his childhood and the big family that gradually, year after year, had left him on his own. The last to go, just before Giorgio had come down from the mountains, had been his wife.

For the old man, this marriage made the old rooms and the yard come back to life. He gave the newlyweds the right to live in the house and change it according to their tastes as long as the kitchen stayed intact, especially the copper set over the fires that had covered the wall for at least a century. They could add anything they wanted to it but without taking anything away until he died.

For three years, they lived in peace and harmony with two little children to gladden every season. Then suddenly the uncle died. He hadn’t turned eighty and wasn’t ill. They found him one morning in June smiling on the bed, holding his extinguished pipe in the right hand. It looked as if he had died of happiness.

In the will the two youths were named universal heirs. In fact, they inherited the house, the two hectare peach orchard opposite and a modest sum. But Giorgio, almost illiterate, had foresight, far greater foresight.

The boss

Chapter 2

It had rained all day. The night air was fresh and clear, a light breeze had pushed all the clouds southward and the clear sky was a blue vault laced with lights. You could hear distinctly the river Montone flowing at the bottom of the valley and in the garden discreet swarms of fireflies were flirting with each other.

Four of their five children had all gone to down to the valley to a party. Only Johnny was already snoring tired of the usual mini earthquake of a day.

Under the patio, Giorgio and Susanna were holding hands silently relaxed upon a bamboo rocking chair, a gift from their workers for the silver wedding anniversary they had celebrated a few days before.

It was a bit chilly, but the spectacle of the valley and the sky, in the absolute and rare silence of their home, was too beautiful to miss. A soft plaid of wool provided the necessary warmth.

The heart could only be drawn towards happy memories.

Susanna my dear, can you believe 25 years have passed? So many things have happened! Do you remember how worried you were and when you cried that time you wanted to see the accounts and realized we were several million liras in debt? Giorgio said with a little narcissistic satisfaction. Susanna was in love and looked up to her husband, but despite the extraordinary success achieved in all fields, there was still a little resentment and she made it no secret even in magical moments like that night.

Among things that have happened there is also my all white hair you can’t see because it’s dyed. It’s there thanks to all that worry I’ve had for so long. We’ve been living in debt for years.

But they were investments. I’ve always made it clear to you.

Yes, but they were investments you made without ever asking my consensus.

But would you have ever agreed?

Never. Debts never, no matter what!

But you can see I was right! Everything we have achieved would have never existed if I had reasoned with your anxieties.

It’s true! If you’d listened to me, you’d never have become a great industrialist. Maybe we’d still be living like your uncle with the small income from an emporium and just two children!

Aren’t you happy with the wonderful children we have?

They’re here and as Eduardo says they are now a piece of our hearts. But how much have they cost us?

Have I ever left you on your own, haven’t I loved you more than my life?

No, you have been and still are a wonderful father, a husband who’s affectionate and always by my side… But it’s always been just you to decide all the fundamental things of life, including the children. But in spite of everything I love you more than myself.

And it was thus that also that evening love prevailed under an amaranth and yellow check woolen plaid in a silent dance of fireflies.

Seen from the outside, the life of the Garelli family was a beautiful fairy tale come true. But, as a stretch of woods contemplated from a height appears to be completely alive and perfect, it’s in passing through it from below that fallen trees, dead branches, dry plants, trunks gnawed by parasites are revealed. So this beautiful family, like all, appeared to be totally realized at a superficial glance but was not without its serious problems.

The first problems were due to his extraordinary guidance. Giorgio was a loving, faithful, caring husband and father whose thoughts placed his wife and children before everything else. Having acquired considerable means, he managed them with great social awareness and, of course, his family was not lacking in anything.

He was willing to do anything, from preparing food or doing the washing up, to answering to anyone in need at any time. He was the one who