Escaping My Demons

By Joseph Fagarazzi

Throughout this book we learn about the sufferance of a baby boy, unwanted by his teenage parents.

This boy grew up with an aggressive and womanising father that constantly reminded him that he was a mistake that ruined his father's life.

While been beaten and mentally abused, all he craved from his parents was love but received nothing but humiliation and sufferance from his father. This caused detrimental trauma to the young boy, and he grew up believing that he would not achieve anything in life.

I was this little boy, and this is my story.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Joseph Fagarazzi
• Release date: Nov 6, 2022
• ISBN: 9781922757135

Book preview

Chapter 1

Early Childhood

Iwas born on 7 September 1951 in Venice, Italy, not long after the Second World War ended.

The day I was born, my father was in the Italian National Service and was notified of my arrival by telegram. Shortly after my arrival, he was discharged from the army and returned home after a grand career of just a few weeks; apparently, he did not pass the medical requirements.

My mamma, at the time of my birth, was a beautiful young woman of just eighteen years of age, and my father was only twenty years old. My mamma was six months pregnant on her wedding day, and therefore, at the time, would have been an embarrassment to both sides of the family. With family pressure from both sides, they decided to get married to prevent a scandal from occurring; in those days, this was the honourable thing to do to stop people gossiping. Nowadays, the new generation doesn’t seem to care: they live together, have children without tying the knot, and seem content with their lives without being ridiculed by others.

I was born on the second floor at D’orso Duro 451 San Vio where my grandparents on my mother’s side of the family lived. The government house consisted of three floors: the ground floor, first floor, and second floor. The total floor space was slightly bigger than a single bedroom. The room, I was told, was gutted, with broken wooden floorboards, wooden ceiling rafters, and bare brick walls with holes and cracks throughout that frequently allowed the uninvited carnivorous guests to come through the crevasses and enter freely as they pleased.

The rats in Venezia were, and still are, the size of cats—if not bigger—and I once saw with my own eyes a big cat that tried to corner a local rat, but unfortunately for him, that day, he ended up coming off second best.

After my birth, we ended up living as a family downstairs from my grandparents in the old storage room where the coal and wood were stored for the winter.

The storage room would have been at least fifteen square metres of living space that, in the years that followed, was eventually converted and divided into two very small, pokey rooms: a bedroom and a small kitchenette with a stove and a concrete sink/trough.

The large concrete kitchen trough had a multitude of uses for our family: Mamma used it to do her laundry as well as for washing the plates and cutlery. There was no bathroom or shower; we washed ourselves in the trough.

The bedroom was only just large enough to fit the double bed that was to accommodate the three of us for years to come.

I still remember the low, damp ceilings and the water dripping down the humid walls of our tiny bedroom.

To this day, out of the blue, I occasionally get a whiff of the musty smell of mould that takes me back to my childhood days.

There was so much fungus and humidity on those ceilings and walls that the powdery wet plaster in those rooms would dislodge and expose the wide missing gaps of the mortar on the bricks. I continue to use an inhaler twice a day to keep my asthma under control.

Years later, the place was eventually partially restored and painted with whitewash—a sustainable painting material produced by burning oyster shells. This clever idea originated from fishermen painting their houses, but if it ever got into your eyes, it would burn like crazy.

Although this was done, the dampness never seemed to disappear. It continued to persist and seemed to linger on forever.

Three of us slept on the same bed. I always slept at the tail end and, for me, the confinement was to be the start of claustrophobia that stayed with me, and at the mature age of seventy, I still dread the thought of getting into a small, crowded lift. Whenever the time arises, I make sure that when I get into a lift, I’ll be the last person getting inside it in order for me to be the first one out.

As previously mentioned, there were no inside toilets or showers in the building, and there was only one toilet in the courtyard shared between three families. There was a total of eighteen inhabitants living in the same building. We all had to carry our own nightly waste in a bucket from the night before and eject it into the only shared toilet available in the building.

Thinking back at all of this, it seems barbaric and crude, but you have to remember that all of this was not long after WWII ended. With no jobs and money around then, like it or not, this was how life was in those days.

Back then, my mamma cleaned houses and washed and ironed clothes for various well-to-do wealthy people in the nearby areas. No-one had washing machines in those days; all the washing was done in the backyard by hand in a large wooden bucket and with a wooden washing board for scrubbing the clothes.

Sometimes Mamma would bring home a bag of hand-me-down clothing donated to her by the wealthier people she serviced, and I was grateful and appreciative for their donations. With the little my parents had to live on, these kind gestures certainly helped my parents out in their time of need.

Mamma would often leave me at home by myself for her to be able to go to work and, as always, would lock me inside the house as I waited for her return. I cried my eyes out until she finally arrived.

Mamma through the years had told me the story of this particularly cold winter morning when I woke up finding myself alone in the house and eventually turned up at the doorstep of her place of work. Mamma said that this story stood in her mind for years.

She explained that I must have been two to three years old at the time; I was told I grabbed a chair and crawled out by squeezing through the iron bars of the kitchen window.

The kitchen window was facing the main street, and the iron bars were wide enough to enable me to thread my head through them; the drop from the window to the ground would have been at least two metres in height. At that age, it might as well have been twenty metres. Apparently, it had been snowing for days when I finally managed to get out, dressed in my pyjamas, and walk barefoot in the snow. Mamma said it was snowing heavily that day and said that I somehow managed to remember where she worked. I obviously remembered because she took me there many times before!

It was a long walking distance from where we lived, or so it seemed to me at that age. When I finally arrived at Mamma’s work, she got the shock of her life when I showed up barefoot in my pyjamas; she could not comprehend how it was possible for me to have managed to remember how to get there.

They didn’t have childcare facilities in those days, and if they did, the working class did not have the money to be able to afford it; they either had to depend on family members to help out or they did what they could at the time.

I guess Mamma had to do what she could in order to survive on a day-to-day basis, and by no means do I begrudge her leaving me at home in order to try to make a living. She did what she could to help my father put food on the table, and from that day on, it was to be the very last time I was left alone, as she took me to work with her.

Times were hard for everyone then and would have been especially hard for a young woman like Mamma. Getting pregnant and having a child was definitely not on my parents’ radar; it disrupted their youth, and being a young couple, as they were, must have made it even harder to cope with the embarrassment.

My father was too busy either womanising or socialising and playing cards at the bar with his mates; as a child, you seem to see and witness things that people do or say without them realising or even noticing that you’re around them at the time things are going on.

Mamma would always send me to go and fetch my father from the bar and ask him to come home. My father never seemed bothered to find the time to try to be the father and husband he should have been.

It was well known by everyone in our area that my father was a womaniser; the flirtatious ways he displayed with other women in front of Mamma were humiliating and embarrassing for her, and this type of conduct would always seem to end up in an argument between them. Mamma would then accuse him of flirting and object to his behaviour even while in my presence; the argument would turn into a vicious fight, and Mamma would end up receiving a slap or two in the face.

My grandfather Angelo was a very sick man and died at a very young age of forty-five; he was a very kind, gentle man and was not the type of person to get involved in an argument. I was devastated when he died at such a young age, by today’s standards. I loved my grandfather! When he died, I must have been four or five years old; I still recall him whistling and calling me from the outside kitchen window to take me with him on walks.

I was the first boy to be born on my mamma’s side of the family. My grandfather was so proud that he would show me off to everyone he knew. He would proudly say, ‘This is Pino [short for Giuseppino], my grandson.’

Jobs were hard to find then. My father tried his hand at everything that was available: he planted wooden poles underwater, carried sacks of coal, and eventually ended up being a gondolier by inheriting my grandfather’s gondolier’s licence, which was passed on to him soon after he died.

As a provider, and in terms of his work ethic, my father could not be faulted, and I must give him credit for doing whatever he could to provide a meal on the table and for not being afraid of hard work, but apart from that, he was never much of a father to me. Showing affection was never part of his charm.

The only memories I have of my father are the beatings I received from him. He would always find a reason to give me a belting when he got home; it was either because of his mood swings or because Mamma couldn’t wait to tell him I was a naughty boy during the day.

If I was asleep by the time he came home, it didn’t matter to him, and he would wake me up and give me the hiding he felt I deserved. The truth is that it didn’t take much to set my father off!

My grandparents and aunties from my mother’s side were my protectors. They were not fond of my father; even though they all seemed afraid of him, they would always display gestures of defiance towards him.

They would frequently hide me from my father in the bedroom of their home when they knew I was about to receive another beating. My father would go upstairs and knock at my nonna’s door to ask where I was, but she would always refuse to tell him. Eventually, though, her efforts were ineffective, and—unfortunately for me—he’d find me and beat the living hell out of me.

It’s strange that the only things I remember growing up as a child are the beatings I received from my father, and never once can I remember him hugging me during my childhood years.

As a child, I became more of a street kid, always playing in the street. My parents would always say I was a naughty child, but my relatives would say otherwise. They would tell my parents that I was lively but that I was also a good child and that the reason for my behaviour was that I felt neglected and was crying out for love and attention.

They were right!

Chapter 2

My Father, the Gondolier

In the gondoliers’ industry, my father became well known as a troublesome, argumentative individual; his arguments would instantly escalate into fights if things didn’t go his way. He started getting a reputation as an aggressor in the gondoliers’ industry.

Most were aware not to argue or get on the wrong side of him, for their own sake.

My nonna despised my father and certainly disapproved of Mamma’s behaviour as to how they both treated me. She did not like the ‘tough guy’ behaviour that my father often displayed; my nonna had no time for his aggressive demeanour and would let him know in more ways than one. My nonna stood up to him. She was a tiny lady but tough, and she stood her ground. She was feisty and defiant.

In later years, my father would tell me stories of how much Nonna hated him and what she did to get back at