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Gino, circa 1785 "Family comes first, sí?" "Don't let 'em know what ye' thinkin'." -Gino He was not a good man. It was only through the hazed phrasings and doublespeak that he covertly tricked the bystanders of his twisted old life. His charm, per se. Only a few unlucky souls could confidently say they knew Gino Falcone. They saw through his counterfeit virtue. Most of them were under the sod. Dead, by his hand or otherwise. Even through all his endeavors, he was exposed to each and everyone. In his rare moments of frankness, he widely opened the door to his sin without usual fear. Perhaps tired, or simply naive to the consequences he fully saw. Lies, cheating, theft, murder, perjury, threats, extortion: you name it, he was guilty or a firsthand witness, and he wasn’t testifying beside the plaintiff. It was his matter, him, yet. What was it that mattered? The riposte was orthodox, by his character, at least. “Depends who you ask.” He’d say. He’d reassure, that as long as the wider apparatus was cracked and broken, he was simply ascending beyond it’s trickery; he was no worse. Nevertheless, he’d long for a connection, an empathy he did not know, to his kin, and to another: a yearning. It was true. In all his lies, the sham that was his livelihood: that was a veracious account. Though, few knew it. He didn’t. He was the blindest of the bunch, simply adamant enough to holler the utmost stridently. Where had it begun? The sand was initially entrenched within his eyes in 1778, summertime in Thyra: the jewel of Seyam. Twenty one summer's lived, a young man without much more experience than moving boxes and preaching God. He was of a quaint upbringing with a father, stepmother and wittier brother. In a sudden whirlwind, dislodging everything the man knew as “home,” every constant, arose a plain war. War meant evacuation. And thus, the sandstorms raged. Wreckage and havoc, leaving the trade-state halfway to hell. The brothers had migrated from the forsaken region with wholly two cents, a set of clothes and a utopian ambition to their name. They’d escaped by the skin of their crooked teeth. So easy to sled down the hill that trailed under, little did they know, the consequences in their terrible, terrible domino effect. Helena, 1779: it was the paradigm immigrant tale, and they would find a better life. She was a bustling city, and her light never seemed to fade. As the sun would set, the city lights substitute it with an equal glow. Confined in her intricate walls, she embodied the promise of wild love and adventure. Intoxicating, without exception, could make somebody or nobody forget. Gino and Vittorio were just two chaps. There was one unequivocal factor of the dreadful apparatus. It was a town of connections, and how many names you knew. You’d never catch her eye, otherwise. Two nights in the rat race to win her heart, staying in a small-fry tavern, and they loved it. Gino slept neither, but he neither found himself tired. He ambled through the alive pavements, coming to know each corner, each street like a native. However, sanguine hope, naive certainty and boyish flirting were not enough. The duo needed Marks. Yet, even that would not satisfy him: with an innermost lust for a mark, a spot on that holy block, an importance. They enlist in the navy, an old family pen pal of Vittorio’s leading it by the name of Oisin O’Rourke. They came to never know him well; he was merely too important, and they (though they would not admit it) were pawns. They made a modest wage, by domestic tasks. After all, there was trifle benefit of the sailors in a war of that horrible fire. Seconds molded into minutes, molded into hours, molded into days, weeks, months: it all elapsed in haste. The inherent fascination the capital exuded never faded. It endured. In ‘81, Gino found himself sojourn in a bland room, in a bland apartment, settled in the viridescent countryside. Vittorio had found a lover, starry eyed, and the brothers had split into their separate lives apart from fleeting scenes at a bar or a time to smoke, hazing the air. In the suburban scenery he’d so ambitiously hoped to escape, he met her. It was love at first sight, and Gino did not believe in cliches. She was beautiful, but not in the Imperial sense of pale faces and rouge with delicate, toy noses and pale eyes. She was the woman a man would come to yearn for, a donna. There was a sparkle in her olive eyes and lure in her laugh. She had antics. She had notions, and she was a keen soul, kindred. She was unafraid; her name was Florenza. They’d sprouted as friends. He was infatuated with her, an angle he couldn’t elucidate, a perplexing puzzle. She was an adventure, sprinting into the moonlight without a care to the uncharted, drunken with mania. He was a man. “Gino,” She’d spoken softly with a distinct idea. He’d turned, inquisitive. “Let’s go!” Her voice lifted up and she lit up at her hypothetical. He paused. Where? He wondered. He could not jump in, lest he knew. “Where?” He asked. “I don’t know!” She replied matter-a-factly. He wasn’t a bore, nor was he a voyager. Nevertheless, they went. They burrowed through the raw snow, against the flurries in summer clothing. The North was bleak and coarse, jarring. The frost pierced his every sensibility, and he flinched with every arduous step through the snow. Regret: the sun had set into a dim overcast, why’d he tag along? That, he did neither know. What time, what hour, what day had he transformed into a reflective sort? Was it a destiny? That too, was a pensive notion. There were countless doubts and questions, all without answer, only circumvention. It was a cool autumn day, lodged in the midst of the month. The tinted buildings were rampant with guileless kin. The brother’s were meandering down the paved roads, leaving a trail of smoke wherever they led on. It was election season; Gino had struck intrigue in the field, captivated. It was unforeseen that day, when they were plucked up by their collars, hastily awaking in an office with their step uncle sitting across. The man had a harsh gaze, coldly stoic in his cunning. He was nimble, but aged, be it years or a certain stress. He was terribly pale, and flourished a blonde, well groomed mustache. The appearance implied his identity being a blooded Imperial, he was not. They knew him as an Adunian, as a distant family. He wasn’t their blood. “Ahh,” the man began, Padraig O’Rourke was the name. In minutes, the dirty deal was settled. They were workers of the O’Rourke company, and once you were in, there was no out. Yet, anything to feed the family, he supposed: anything at all. The two were to be provided more apt adornments, and the meeting concluded. They talked much of the future, but little of what it portended. He was caught up. A dog chasing its tail, never satisfied. He soon withdrew from the Navy. He made handsome earnings from his superiors. The epoch was a renaissance; he was graced with little to worry over. The principal, the morality, of the work was dubious, but he did not think. Nay did he reckon, did he feel, did he judge, did he debate. His eyes were shut, and he unaffectedly was. He’d come to be an apathetic man, in that way. The brother recruits had been familiarized with those among them, and those not. Their organization was loyal to the Josephites, and opposing the wig wearing Nationalists. When Padraig was preoccupied as a politician, they came to be acquainted with a Raev: Dimitri Orlov. He was a steadfast, bearded man with steadfast soliloquies of life’s cost. Gino didn’t care for philosophy. There were others to be known: George Galbraith, an opportunist, an idealist, an eccentric and a politician, a friend. Ostromir Carrion, a soul of noble birth and mannerisms, gothic and pale, with the darkest theses. Santiana O’Rourke, a cousin with an inherent naivete akin to the Falcone’s, a companion. And Giada, a dear Illatian, and the dearest friend birthed as an enemy and cousin to Florenza, loyalties with a low-life cartel, recruited to the flipside by her wit. But as all reveries do, the short era ended with a snap. Unrest advanced against the Josephite muscle, occultist pagans permeated through the ISA, and Florenza grew suspicious of his “union duties.” At all the alleys there was a secret, and with mystery, there was paranoia; and with reticence, there was worry. Fear, it filled him to the brim, he did not spill. It was not him, he’d instilled. The line smudged, of who Gino Falcone was, and who he was not. He was restless, paranoid. With each stride, his palms were tightened in underlying burden. Not his work, but it’s fallout. The danger that glared at him so bitterly: dread. Echoes haunted the evening streets as he paced throughout the alleyways as he had since he’d arrived: a peculiar habit, walking, or following. He proposed little acknowledgement to any architecture, wandering within his own psyche. It was, and always had been,a yearning to clear a clouded mind. Yet, it only imparted further eludings: ironic. He followed, focusing on the sound of a duet’s footsteps in quarter time. The night was of routine in every rationale and facet. It was of a pleasant, cool temperature. The heat was entirely expelled through the words Gino met. Even her living room, he figured, exhibited such a homely portrait, calming, as she screamed. “Tell me the truth!” She’d yelled with such conviction of a sure judge. His love - Florenza had brought light to his tenebrous work. He’d frozen, as an effigy, faltering with zero words to the reminder that he was a single sinful man. He resented the fact that dormantly he knew. Inadvertently, she did too. They yelled, as he retorted tepid lies he had no belief in. Neither did she. He left, zealously removed. That was it, the end, without a proper goodbye. “I said get out!” She’d shrieked. “Ti odio!” was her word. I hate you, it meant. She’d pressed him out of the interior in fervor. Though, before he could voice anything at all, the door was slammed shut. He could not muster a thought. In and out, in and out, with his own breaths. A left, a right, a first, a second. The repetition led him home to a drafty room; exhausted, he could not sleep. Notes were penned to no reply and hollers screeched without echo. Naught, and in ultimatum: it all ceased, delving into a pool devoid of voices, wishes, pleas but darkness. It was a cold day when they met again, magnetized begrudgingly it. It wasn’t the type of day you would expect to see an old soul roaming, only to have fate shove them into your peripheral focus, and life once more. Fate or luck, or plain coincidence: Gino thought not of it. Only rushing into her, begging as a child. “Flor, Flor, Flor, please.” He pleaded. “Eugh! Fine.” They sat, and spoke. He told her of the truth, of his work, and of him. She’d paused, silent. “I think I’m going to have a heart attack.” She uttered, facing his eyes. They were not cold, but tense, scared. Scared at what she may have said next, what she did not ponder aloud. He’d lost control; he’d inadvertently transformed from the player, to the spectator. He twiddled his thumbs. “Gino,” she frankly remarked. “I don’t want to be a mob wife.” “You don't have to be.” He said, detracting his gaze. “I’m sorry.” “I don’t think you are. I think you’re sorry you’re caught.” “Maybe, maybe not.” He pondered. “I’d do it all for you, I would.” Would he? Maybe, maybe not. “I know you would.” She said, judging, frowning, but genuine. “I shouldn’t have spoken with Morgryn.” He said, a sigh escaping him. “It doesn’t change the scene, but I’d hope the words make it prettier.” It was her turn to pause. “It doesn’t, but at least you tried to fix it.” She offered, flashing a bittersweet smile. He returned the favor, shifting in the booth where they sat across. “Ti amo.” He said. I love you. Therein, he knew. There was no doubt, and no lie. She looked away. “Ti amo anch’io.” Vice versa, I love you too. They’d come together by frosted truth in glorious colors of the hopes and wishes of what they sought to see. What was that smile, like the sunrise ensued after a starless night? It was a fire, one that burnt your edges soon enough, sparing only ash from the bygone portrait of a pleasant picnic. 1787. “Do you often look up to the stars, Mr. Falcone?” A sage and a mystic of mysterious origin of yesteryear or tomorrow stood tall, forth. The stars would, in the twinkling of an eye, show their face. That evening glimpsed into nighttime. “What?” The implicit rationale escaped him. Then, too, perhaps, he sought answers. Nay, rather, justification, an excuse for the half-truths. The sage led backward to the depths of a starless night within a dark interior akin to cavern. He led afar, into Gino’s precise consciousness, to another realm. When the duo awoke from the trance and dream, discombobulated, a single remark struck him, and prevailed. “What is your creed?” “Canonism,” he’d imagined. “I’m in business - dirty business. I’m not a lunatic.” His faith, and his service, a naturally conflicting duet. Yet, he knew, deep down; it was his definition. “You allow for your business to decide upon who you are, what a fascinating feat.” They’d long drifted from the vibrant districts, left traversing the dim pavement once more. That experience, that transient stupor, why did it so avidly sit? In younger years, craving escape, a walk miles from who he was, a distraction. Dope had perpetually been a bad business; he was a hypocrite, per usual. “Where do we head?” He suddenly queried to a turned head, in partial presence. “Esbec.” The leader led on. What a distance, he thought - but not aloud. Alas, it was the manner of any pursuit, any business at that. With fortuity and unpredicted exterior force, Gino and Florenza were married. The wedding was a merry day, absent of discord, of dispute or routine bickering. It was broad, surrounded by the families and the work in thoughtlessness. They settled at a pleasant street, as a pleasant family with twin infants, and the lights of a so-called family man’s world: Cosimo Antony, and Lauretta Ivanna. For moments, the world appeared simple. None the wiser were they to the quarrel swathed behind the curtain. They’d fight over his varying deceit, his betrayal, and split, only to fall into connection once, in longing of fantastical woulds and shoulds. Even when he slapped her, and she screamed, and he swivelled offset from the world: cold as ice. In that twisted way, it was love. Time slowed. The Josephites dominated opposition, days were repetitive with equally repetitive feuds that therapy rarely succored. In the flash of a second, yet, Gino had lived such a life for a decade, in 1790. As time sped on lacking an instant to catch its breath, fate itself never wavered, nor did he: stuck in his ways, his “tradition.” Naturally, restlessness expanded, as did that destined dread. He found solace in a platonic adjacency with Giada. She understood, as she was. He knew naught but that vague, wondrous relation as sympathy to oneself, and incidentally another. They shared a mutual respect to the other. A break from the lonesome night, from a roaring fight; the next day, it would begin again, in sunlight anew. Deception, deceit and duplicity, was that all he was? It couldn’t be, it was an impossibility. So profoundly, he’d devastated his humanity. Had it ever been present, at all? Another ponderance unanswered, another thing lost for forsaken greed. He was devout. “This is not who I am.” Silently, he fell into a repetition, as an anthem to oneself in his native tongue. Alas, it was. Albeit, something he dashed from ‘till he could walk no longer. He was a steadfast man, an odd man, a crook and killer to some, a friend to some, a husband, a father, a brother. Yet, when they’d all retired, one appellation remained. In that precise evening, he was a father: distant, at that. He’d sought to be loyal, for connection, for a link that could not be true if he was not. He'd failed. His brother vanished from sight in 1793, leaving a blow to the being, a gaping stoic absence. The first of dominoes to fall, the first of the purge into an isolation. A disappearance was an optimistic designation, as in the last of days alongside Vittorio, he was supposedly dying. Gino had no room to think else from his disappearance as a loss, a death: a disappearance from life. The parting words were half-hearted, a reminiscence upon the before, seeming common with any dying man. A man had hoped to hang upon a crucifix, if it entailed awaking in the Skies above. Torture - for something you could not see, and witless retribution. He’d held the present world in a clasped palm, to cease. And to know, discerning yourself in the flipside, a reflection. He too had partaken in the offenses, the sin. Save, Vittorio seemingly knew such. Knowing not where his confidante had gone, spiritually, nor plainly, he was simply alone. How whimsy that concern was. He’d never meant to be a sentimentalist. The images flickered across his psyche’s forefront, rushing like fish down the river, incidentally sentimental in their cursory essence. They did not lie; they did not bend. His legitimacy, his newspaper: even that journalism. What was it but another falsehood - another fictitious ideal? Life slapped him in the face. In a moment, all seemed without guile. Yet, perhaps that too was a rosy memory - another half truth. Had that foreboding shadow always towered over him? Had he forgotten the face of the sun withstanding in its luminosity? His work, his side of town: it’d always acted as a nocturnal entity, amid the night’s. They traversed throughout the unpaved plains in the hours past five ‘o clock, till his gait grew heavy and his footsteps slowed. The towering city and it’s light was but a silhouette, far away. He grew cold, though spoke of naught; there was not a soul he trusted to listen. There was a deja vu, and a peculiar nostalgia with their endless trail to an uncertain destination. Storming rainy weather poured down upon them, speckling his coat with droplets like memories. It was his life: a chase and yearning to something, perhaps nothing, a child’s game of tag as every businessman, every crook, every politician sought to escape an unequivocal conviction of their very actions, and their very consequences. What did they wish for? An idealist’s heroism? What folly egoism, he thought. Gino had lived his life in a way to be a puppeteer as opposed to the marionette. He did so in excess, in greed for further control unto the strings. Only to learn that the people were not puppets to be tossed or contorted, and reminded. Stringed along, till the thread broke into thin strands and he knew not where to follow. Till there was no road, but a solemn darkness of the privy. He knew of his circus masks, where he’d act as two men: twofaced. He knew of the sin too countless to possibly count. He knew of the worldly wishes that had come to fruition, for what? For a lonely superiority, for a power over the dead man that could not shake his hand? For a corruption that rivalled what he’d arrived to overcome? For seclusion from the kin he'd sworn himself to, therein crashing down? Wonder, want - it was a dangerous thing. It brought hope to the young, and fools from the older. It led a false tale to the could, an attraction, a magnet. It led boats into the sea, and innovation to scrape the skies. It brought the pious to their sermons, and the heretical to a deeper crevice. It brought wanting, in the unknown “more,” of a brighter room. It was a siren, a summoning melody far from the candid: the real importance. The man halted at an edge, wherein the grass transformed into cobblestones, a shoreline of the wilderness to the rural at the riverside where a road led. Sometimes the traveller would pass by, as an immigrant, a salesman, a thief, a revolutionary, a wisher… He was not solus. Before him, there was a man: someone he knew from the earliest day onward, a son. He knew him as a boy, but at twenty five, there was scant boyish about the man that had come to adopt distinctions from his father, his pa. Where was his other family? The priority he’d promised as his first, and so sorely severed? His wife Florenza, driven to death by his inadvertent endeavor. His eldest daughter Lauretta, distant, offset from the world proceeding his wife’s death. Giada, dead by reckless behavior and reckless influence. Augustina, young and misguided with arduous fury at a lot she’d not chosen, and a subpar father, too, too absent. And Gustavo, a man he’d seen less as a son, but kindred in a being that Gino knew well, an immigrant and of ignorance. Where was he now? At a town for what meaning, what longing? He’d no purpose, nothing but old memories and hope for God’s mercy on his ashen soul. “Here,” the voice broke the looming gloom of a long lasting silence. A rural brick build, perhaps a bar or inn, hung as an escape from the incessant pouring. Young men conspired within, of politics and parties and all that he’d witnessed before. The Josephites, the Nationalists, like teams in simple sport, of the goals being fatalities, and votes as their points. It didn’t matter, as another false pretense, another lie. Soon, the open door was closed, and fate seemed to seal an unsent letter of the unsaid. He smiled, in nothing akin to happiness, but a melancholy bittersweetness in what had not. Who was he, truly, if his motive was to hide the very identity of what had brought him beyond struggle within the navy? That was not him - not his, or the whole, he’d convinced. Yet, with each passing day it seemed the opposite was true. A great agony had filled his chest, by figurative impressions, and physically. His breathing had come to knot in his throat, laden with unease and tobacco’s residue. He kneeled, catatonic, fixated to the movement of the figure he’d figured a son. He’d drawn breaths so prolonged without lament. In the end, when all had fallen down, and he’d outlived the festive chaperones, nil prevailed but the regrets he’d sworn untrue. Loss - mortality: it brought realization to a senseless soul. That question echoed throughout each thought, each meditative reminiscence, again. A cosa serviva tutto? What was it all for, then? His horrid pride, powerless to admit - to change, even vowing, in sickness and in health, believing in the assertion. He sought to be righteous to his ménage, but with everything in his recollection, he’d only fought. He’d only pulled in an endless tug of war. He’d only done what he must, in values he’d not like to know he was less than. "La famiglia non combatte la famiglia." He uttered. Family doesn't fight family. Oh, the irony. Envied, are those fortunate to die young -- preceding the isolation and betrayal of age, and the time for mistakes. He was a man of fifty six. To the dignity of a crook, and the bliss of asinity. He’d done what he must. And so, he reeled back in breaths he could not catch, and the shuffling of feet that could not stand. The torment, as if he’d been transfixed; he had. And so, he groaned into the fray of the leaden turning eve, in a profound notion: a faithlessness he’d sworn to walk away from, only to tread right forth into it, beguiled, as he’d never guess it’d be from those one did not envisage… In such an instance, his cunning had abandoned him long before, surrounded, yet so very alone in a shock. In that moment, he could swear that naught was of any importance at all: only the pained, shallowing breaths. Cliche, for one’s life’s recollections to flicker before it would all end… Yet, heavy is the heart of the impoverished spirit, thumping with each stride - each step forth into the darkness and night. ‘Till it may drum no longer and the soul musn’t continue, and the rich man must halt. Tranquil, is the deafening silence one lies amidst, so very still. Naught would dare interrupt the reverie’s eternity, until the morn where he’d have vanished beneath- Ahead, a river dashed, stopping for no soul in it’s bustle. What wonder, a cycle forward forevermore without the hesitation of a memory’s flickering pang within his psyche. And he did not think of the unanswered questions, for it mattered not. Where would that doubtful stream lead him? Irrefutably, elsewhere from petrichor above and the loveliness of the day. It was 1779, a Helena alley scented with smoke and innocence. “So this is Helena, eh?” It was Vittorio, or Victor, perhaps too early for the latter. “Bustling town.” Gino reaffirmed, a young, cocky, strapping man of twenty two. “Nothin’ like the Old Country, I’ll tell you that much.” “Louder, the bells, the vibrancy - intoxicating, si?” He riffed, flourishing a smirk. “Far better than that old place, now: halfway to Hell under tons of sand.” “We got out the nick of time. They trust their people to protect them, their fate in the hands of selfish bastards.” He halted in a pause, contemplative. “Then, they suffocate in a dune.” “And- see? That is how we are different; we thought ahead.” He remarked, gesturing with his hands. “Just think.. Hadn't we left there, we'd be stuck in a sand pit, in a coffin of our own making.” “Makes you sure glad to have been wise to what was happening, like you said.” He remarked, an underlying bother, as an unbothered man. “...Fools.” He concluded. How the Denier or sinner themselves would reject what he’d not yet grown to be. Perhaps it would be all okay, the next day would tell. ‘Till they’d walk alone, wayward, with each following day, through the bell's toll.