Antonio Vaccaro

Tramonti, 1943

He was born on the twenty-seventh of September 1943, in Tramonti, in the hills behind the Amalfi coast. Two weeks earlier the Allies had landed at Salerno, fifteen kilometres away; eight days before he was born the Germans had begun pulling north through exactly those hills. He was born into the worst month the province had had in a century, in a village that grows lemons.

A year later, four kilometres downhill and on the water, Gelsomina Di Landro was born in Maiori. He would marry her. Whether they knew each other as children, whether the families knew each other, when they met at all — none of it is recorded, and all of it is the kind of thing somebody still knows.

The trade

He was a schoolteacher.

It is the one fact the family repeats without being asked, which usually means it was the fact he was known by. In the south of the fifties and sixties a teacher was not a modest thing to be: it was often the only person in a small place who had gone away to study and come back. What he taught, where, and for how long is not written anywhere on this leaf.

What did carry is this. His daughter became a teacher. She now runs a school. Three generations in the same room, and I am the first who left it — which is a thing I only understood by building this page.

I know the profession and I do not know the man. That gap is the exact shape of what this book is for.

The house

He married Gelsomina Di Landro and they had two children: Carmela, my mother, and Luigi. Where they lived, when they married, what the house was like, what was on the table on a Sunday — unrecorded, all of it, and all of it answerable by two phone calls.

How it ends

I do not know when he died.

That sentence should be harder to write than it is. There is no year on this leaf, no season, no place. He died before this book was begun and before I was old enough to ask, and the date exists — in a comune office, on a stone, in my mother's memory — everywhere except here.

Of the four grandparents he is the one I can say least about with a date attached, and the one whose trade I inherited most directly without ever meeting him. Both of those facts belong to the same failure, and it is not his.