Teresa was already thirteen months old when I was born.
Our parents were consumed by the love and fire of the Sixties.
Commercial television did not yet exist in Italy, and it had not found its way into homes to distract families with programs stripped of human and cultural value.

Couples simply made love.

When I began to pronounce my first sounds, I did not say “dad” or “mom” like billions of children do.
I said “TETA,” calling Teresa.

She had a strong character — at least that was the general belief.
I was just restless and stubborn.
Today they call it persistence, but the truth is simple: I never gave up easily.

When I wanted something, I did not ask for it.
I took it.

Like women do.
Ahahahah.

The real war at home was always with our mother.
She was intelligent, but she had never been educated.
And that placed a limit on where her intelligence could go.

She was incredibly young.
Married at sixteen.
By eighteen she already had two children.

The two of us were like those dolls that, once you grow tired of them, you leave in a corner and no longer want to see.

That is why she sent us away to a Catholic boarding school for eight years.

I was only five.

I remember her hugging me.
And inside myself, I said goodbye.

All that suffering turned into the anger I carried within me for sixty years.

Even today, when I stand at her grave and cry, I ask her only one thing:

why?

Teta went to the father in 2024.
She was sixty years old, just like me.

And I am still here, doing what I was born to do:
a man who turned his life into a theatre,
playing every role as best as he could.

I was never the best.

I was only myself.

Goodbye, Teta.

Nando

You held my hand first.
I misunderstood everything.
Forgive me.