When Things Happen: A Novel

By Angelo Cannavacciuolo and Jay Parini

Michele Campo is living the bourgeois Italian dream. Now a speech pathologist in his forties, he resides in an expensive Naples home with his partner, Costanza, daughter of an upper-class family. Michele’s own family origins, however, are murkier. When he is assigned to work with five-year-old foster child Martina, he grows increasingly engrossed by her case, as his own buried family history slowly claws its way back to the surface. The first novel by acclaimed Italian writer Angelo Cannavacciuolo to be translated into English, When Things Happen tells a powerful and intriguing story of what we lose when we leave our origins behind. It presents a panoramic view of Neapolitan society unlike any in literature, revealing a city of extreme contrasts, with a glamorous center ringed by suburban squalor. Above all, it is a psychologically nuanced portrait of a man struggling to locate what he values in life and the poor vulnerable child who helps him find it. 
 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Rutgers University Press
• Release date: Oct 13, 2023
• ISBN: 9781978837126

Book preview

Prologue

There had always been a lot of people betting on me. Word had it that I had the right stuff—that is, if I had wanted to, my attributes could have taken me anywhere. So, that excessive confidence in my abilities led me to believe that if I worked hard and had fortune on my side—perhaps also aided by a certain optimism, which I had—in one way or another, I would have succeeded. I would have made it, despite the many obstacles to contend with around these parts and notwithstanding the fact that I had not started off—how shall I say?—with a rosy future ahead of me.

So, comforted by the hopes of others and by my own wishful thinking, I steered my boat toward the safe harbor of a peaceful life, a stable job, a roof over my head, and God willing, a wife and kids. After all, I wasn’t asking for the moon, though in the shadow of Vesuvius, even a reasonable goal might be a pipe dream. And I knew it. Yet what I couldn’t have known was that, in order to realize my ambitions, throughout my whole life, I would have to find a place in which to take shelter from those things that just happen. In other words, a place that didn’t exist—or, rather, an imaginary place where I would always hear the sad yet cheerful music of life as though it were background noise. For quite some time, it was like being there and not being there at the same time. I mean, I was there because my destiny was to be there, but I wasn’t there because I always avoided any sort of developments by hiding behind my many masks of nonchalance. However directly or indirectly certain facts related to me, they barely touched me. But if someone were to ask me the reason why I remember what happened—around the time I was turning forty—I would simply reply that one fine day, in the process of trying to make sense of the voices bombarding me from every direction, the whole world collapsed around me, thereby reawakening me from a long hibernation.

Michele Campo

1

The same thing would happen to Martina. The awareness of it seemed to be plotting with fate against me. At a highway rest stop, my eyes glanced at a newspaper left on one of the little tables in the café, and then, straining to see into the future, I saw the horizon blurred by large, dark clouds of misery. A drum started beating inside my head, and my heart felt as though it wanted to rip through my chest and flee.

Since that morning there had been some signs—the kind of details that often slip away from our attention and that we think about only in retrospect after realizing their ominous significance. I paid no mind to Costanza’s words when she spoke about the sky portending sadness, nor the look she shot me as she greeted me by the front door, and I certainly thought nothing of the rainstorm that started to pour down right after. They were just details and I didn’t give them a second thought.

Hello, Counselor Serra? This is Michele Campo. Unfortunately, I’ve run into trouble. I’m on the highway … yes, with this rain … and my Vespa broke down.… How did I do it? I had to push it myself.… To tell you the truth, I don’t feel well. It could be a fever.… Okay.… Yes, next Tuesday at five. Have the girl’s grandmother and her husband arrived yet? … Oh, so can you tell them that I won’t be able to make it? …’kay, see you Tuesday.

For an instant I felt relieved, almost freed of the burden of those responsibilities that had loomed over my miserable condition for quite some time. Then something rather nondescript had intervened. Maybe it was that feeling of oppression that had been with me for a while; perhaps it was the fever that was threatening to burn up my thoughts as well. One thing for sure, though: that newspaper opened up on that table tethered me to its dark premonitions. The more I read that article, the more I was overtaken by chills. I was shaking from head to toe.

Meanwhile the rain beat down loudly from the sky with dense, cutting bursts, which would come and go as the wind changed direction. With headlights on, cars sprayed sheets of water onto the shoulders of the road. On an electoral poster a young candidate from our region, paying no mind to the weather, raised a fist, indicating the upright determination that a faint smile on his face wasn’t able to convey. With his good-guy demeanor, he seemed to be provoking a challenge with the man on the poster next to him; the other guy’s sideways glance seemed to suggest that he would have swallowed the first guy in one bite.

The atmosphere on the highway was gray. Barely illuminating it on either side were rows of yellow streetlights, one after the other, like frozen little souls watching over a new day that was determined to die.

The old gas station attendant, bundled up in his yellow plastic rain gear, trudged from the pumps to the cars with the pained expression of someone likely plagued by arthritis.

The percentage of children removed from their original families through precautionary injunctions issued by the juvenile court is on the rise; many, in fact, will never return home. They are destined for a long pilgrimage involving shelters, group homes, or short-term care centers; temporary custody with relatives or available foster families; even adoptions. When these measures fail, they are reunited. Upon turning eighteen, if they have not found a nuclear family to take them in or are forced to leave the program, they find themselves free, alone, and with a body full of rage. So they look around with scared, suspicious eyes and see a potential ambush lying around every corner. They will never see a single honest face that they can trust. Behind every promise or helping hand, they will see betrayal forever lurking. These children’s stories are a jumble of painful events. There is sixteen-year-old Manuela. Her mother died of AIDS. Her father found another woman. With two foster care stints behind her, she says she loves no one. She prefers to stay at the group home, where she has been living for three months, because there, no one will ask her to reciprocate the affection they claim they feel for her. Luca, on the other hand, has spent the last three of his short nine years in a group home; in the beginning he would eat the dirt from the garden. Then there is eleven-year-old Matteo, who extracted one of his teeth with a screwdriver. And Maria, thirteen, who started cutting herself with a razor