Books & Rough Business

XII

61 Tullio Pironti XII Myself, I wanted no part of Mafia games. Toritore could needle me about “going all out” as much as he liked, but I continued to work on my technique in the ring. It’s funny how the very actions fear would suggest, stick and move, can prove so useful. I kept getting more bouts, and nearly every time I came out on top. Great days, these were, for me. In fact I doubt that, had I been winning city championships forty or fifty years later—at the turn of the present century—I would enjoy the same kind of celebrity. By the time I turned eighteen, I had my own cheerleading squad. At my fights they raised a terrific ruckus, and had their own cheer. Their name for me was “the wind-up toy,” spring-loaded, because of how fast I could strike and then scamper out of harm’s way. But nowadays, how many children would even know how a spring drive works? My fans would also bawl out “ejj avant,” an inside joke for downtowners, an echo of the local carriage drivers. In the 1950s a business might still rely on horsepower to make deliveries. Politicians would hire carriages, too, for slow-moving tours of the district, during which they’d make a speech at every corner. And then there were the rich, who indulged themselves in long rides along the waterfront. Anyone who’d spent time in the old centro had heard the driver’s cry, “ejj avant!” ——”out of the way.” But these days the phrase means nothing. In fact the leader of my tifosi (typhus victims, as sports fanatics are known in Italy) was in his way a harbinger of the times and the city to come. A boy named Sandro, my biggest fan was also the brother of one the first TV newscasters based in Naples. And the kind of street-level fame I enjoyed, driven by word of mouth, was to lose its potency as television 62 Books and Rough Business allowed viewers close to champions of so many different kinds. Fans these days can attach themselves to a Michael Jordan or Oscar de la Hoya, performing halfway around the world. The effect was the same all over the world, naturally. But in few places has the impact been felt so steeply as in Southern Italy. Perhaps the most backwards regions in Europe before the War, Naples, Calabria, and Sicily lived according to social orders and ways of thinking rooted in the eighteenth century, if not in the fifteenth. Every community within greater metropolitan Napoli was its own small town, and when my family fled the Allied bombing by hiking up past the Museum, we climbed into a whole different culture. In those orchards and tomato fields, my heroes and my slang meant nothing. Conversely, if I were a teenager winning local matches in 2005 or 2010, my presence around Piazza Dante would generate far less excitement. I might be good, but I was no De la Hoya. In the era of wind-up toys and deliveries by carriage, however, I was a star.The morning papers printed the record of my fights, with the occasional photograph. Before then, I’d had my picture taken only on rare formal occasions, such as the Sunday of church confirmation. Now, how could I not feel proud of how I looked in my trunks? In one photo my hands are bandaged and cocked beneath my chin, my chest and stomach clenched tight. One look at that, and it was hard not to feel like King of the Street. The girls also took an interest, naturally.They cooed at me, and I didn’t much resist. I enjoyed my share of dates. But by this I mean—I must clarify—the girl and I would stroll around, perhaps pick up some ice and syrup, and at the peak of the night we’d indulge in cuddling and kissing. Not that I was innocent, exactly. As my stature on Camerlingo’s squad had risen, I fell in more and more with older boxers, and between what they told me and what they showed me, I got the same sort of initiation as my father must’ve. My guess is, the great-uncle who’d opposed the Borbon king learned the facts of life the same way. But many writers have told that story, and in my case, whatever those earliest experiences consisted of, they...