Chapter 1: Beatrice
I was told I was wanted. That is not something I remember; wanting is never remembered by the one who arrives, but it is something that was repeated to me so often that it became a borrowed memory. Beatrice, they said. She who brings happiness. A name chosen carefully, reverently, as if the sound itself could secure fate.
My parents, Elena and Matteo, had been married for two years when I was born. Not wealthy, not comfortable, but hopeful in the way young couples often are before reality sharpens its teeth. They had longed for a child, and when I arrived, the joy was apparently unmistakable. I am told neighbours came bearing small gifts, that my mother smiled in a way she never would again, and that my father walked taller for a while. All of this I learnt secondhand, stitched together from other people’s recollections, because I was too young to remember a time when happiness was uncomplicated.
They did not keep me long.
Opportunity called from elsewhere, or perhaps desperation did. Italy could not give them what they wanted, so they decided Germany would. Work, stability, and a future: words that sounded solid enough to abandon a child for. They left me behind with relatives when I was still small enough to be passed from arm to arm without protest. I stayed there for 3 years while they crossed borders and chased the promise of greener pastures. Only later, once they had assembled something resembling survival, did they come back for me.
Before that reunion, I was told I was a good child. Sunny. Confident. Adventurous in the careless way children are when fear has not yet been taught to them properly. I climbed where I shouldn’t have, spoke when I should have been quiet, and wandered too far simply to see what was there. I got into trouble the way children do: mud on my dress, scraped knees, laughter at inappropriate moments. And still, they said, I was a delight.
That word would not survive my childhood.
My parents were cut from the same stubborn cloth. Two goats locked horn to horn, neither willing to yield. They disagreed about everything, how money should be spent, how words should be spoken, and how silence should be used as a weapon. It is easy, looking back, to see how separation was not an accident but an inevitability. Still, they did not begin fighting in earnest until I joined them in Germany when I was six years old, old enough to listen, old enough to remember.
My mother ruled the household the way generals rule conquered land. Elena was the firstborn of many children herself, raised to command, to organise, and to dominate. Compromise was not a virtue in her vocabulary; obedience was. She believed children were raw material to be shaped, and she shaped me in her own image, sharp edges and all. I was to be a smaller version of her, unyielding, disciplined, unquestioning.
When I failed, the punishment was never proportionate.
Once, I remember hiding behind the sofa after taking sugar cubes from the kitchen without asking. A small crime. A childish one. I had fed them to the dog, giggling as his tail beat against the cabinets. When she found out, she dragged me into the light by my arm, her nails biting into skin.
“There is a demon inside you,” she said, her voice calm in the way that was most frightening. “What else would make you behave like this?”
Another time, after I laughed during prayer because my mind wandered somewhere it shouldn’t have, she leaned close enough that I could smell the soap on her hands. “The person who bewitched you is long dead,” she told me. “No wonder you never change.”
These were not words meant for a child. They were seeds. They lodged themselves deep, took root, and stayed.
Insults were often followed by whippings, methodical, controlled, and justified in her mind as correction rather than cruelty. Pain was a language she spoke fluently, and she expected me to understand it without translation.
My father, Matteo, occupied a different kind of absence. He was incompetent in ways that mattered and unreliable where consistency was required. He worked across provinces: construction here, factory shifts there, always somewhere else, always exhausted, always claiming necessity. When he was around, he tried, clumsily, to connect. A joke here. A pat on the head there. But effort without presence is thin comfort.
And despite the mythology of the hard-working provider, the truth was less generous. He was selfish. He would give you what you wanted if it amused him, never what you needed if it inconvenienced him. Household finances had to be begged from him like favours. If he bought me something, it was because it barely grazed his wallet. Sacrifice was a performance he refused to rehearse.
Still, they said I brought happiness once. Enough happiness to earn a name like Beatrice. I grew up carrying that irony quietly, like a secret I was never meant to open.
