What most people never consider is that we are shaped by many forces: genetics, place, culture, habits, social context. From this comes an instinctive, shifting nature — we oscillate between brilliance and humor, or between sensitivity and stupidity.
In my travels around the world, one thing is universal: people need to recognize themselves. In small towns, this happens through nicknames — usually born from accidents, popular judgment, or undeniable facts.
In my father’s family, from an Arbëreshë village of Albanian origin, the nickname was “SCHIAVIT.” A mark that meant absolute dedication to work, reliability, seriousness, no whining, no complaints, no structural limits, and no concept of “hours.” People who endure. People who hold.
On my mother’s side, the nickname was “OTTANTUNO.” The ancestor who earned it was a state worker with thirteen children. When anxiety overwhelmed him, he drowned in alcohol. At night, returning home, he could not find the house number and shouted “81” so someone would guide him. Around him lived opportunistic but good‑hearted people: willing to undress to give you something, but never to dress you again without taking something in return.
So, in the village, whoever met me immediately traced me back to my family through the nickname. It was always like that. It still is. It always will be.
Work shaped identity too. I worked eighteen years for Gillette, my father forty. That turned us into “the razor‑blade people.” Back then, you did not say “razor blade.” You said “Gillette.” It was a synonym.
I thought that leaving that world would change things, that recognition would shift to my new professions. It never happened.
I was born a thief.
One of my ancestors, on my father’s side, was a Georgian‑Russian thief. In the mid‑1400s he was arrested with stolen goods he had not managed to hide. In prison he noticed an Albanian woman who brought food to the inmates. He understood immediately she could be his escape route. He made her fall in love. They fled together. She convinced him to choose freedom — but only in Albania.
He was never free. He had only changed jailer. Ahahahah.
Once in Albania, he invented a new identity and coined the surname FREGA. A surname that, in every language I know, means the same thing: one who steals, one who deceives, one who takes, one who subdues, one who steals money. But no one notices when someone steals your soul.
The bloodline prospered: the two raw materials never lacked — women and money, money, and women. In five centuries, it grew so large that today it is the third most common surname in Albania, and well‑spread elsewhere.
And when I began my new professions, no one ever called me salesman, manager, consultant, director, professor, swindler, fraudster, writer, author, publisher, lawyer, or heart‑thief.
They all found the same adjective:
UNPREDICTABLE.
And that is why I write. Because every story is the legacy of a moment that never returns.
Nando