ONE

~A BOY and HIS DUCKLING~

Ask someone when the First World War began and they will say in 1913, with the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand. Ask a historian and they will say it was years earlier.
Much like that, my story begins in Nelas, Portugal, in 1935.
Selene Fernandes was born to parents whose names I don’t know. She had a sister - either older or younger - who eventually settled abroad. They would send letters to each other across the globe before Selene grew too frail to write them herself. Then no one bothered to help her. I tried, but my grandmother’s dementia and the language barrier hindered any chance I had.
(My grandfather was born the following year, but frankly I’m not concerned about him.)
Over seventy years later my grandmother would only tell me one thing about her childhood, in a moment of rare clarity when she could speak English properly. We were sitting in her nursing home room, and as she gazed out the window to the fenced in concrete yard, she said; “I feel like I did when I was a little girl, when I couldn’t go outside because of the planes.”
The planes that screamed over that small town in Portugal in search of war.
Eventually Selene met a man named Americo. They were married and had their flock of children before moving to Australia in search of better careers. This was the first lie, the secret that my family was seemingly happy to ignore; Selene was a pious woman. She adored God with all her heart. So tell me why she would have her first child out of wedlock? Perhaps she was a modern woman for her time, but the grandmother I knew was traditional in her faith. If you combine that with the fact that my father was born nine months exactly after his older brother, you begin to see the cracks.
Their move to Melbourne was abrupt in reality, and it was only when I was a teenager when I learnt that financial freedom was not the only reason they left our motherland. The second reason, the reason that sent my grandparents board a steamboat to cross the ocean, was our extended family.
It was during a visit to my aunt’s, before she turned from me too, when her face paled as I mentioned that my father taught me to read tarot cards. She told me that - back in Portugal - she woke one night to what sounded like hundreds of hooves storming across the roof. She said she felt cold, like there was no warmth to be found on this earth. She thought this was demonic. All those decades later she still described it vividly. Our family was consorting with forces beyond anything natural, spilling blood to harness what they believed to be magic. Portugal’s mysticism is ancient. The forests of Sintra and waves of Nazaré hold more voices than you or I will ever know. Real or not, it scared my grandparents enough to flee.
They arrived in Melbourne and settled in Fawkner. My grandmother painted every possible surface in several rooms bright pink- the light switches, the toilet seats, the ceilings. My father, Daveed, was the third of four children; Santos, Emil, himself, and Paloma. There the six of them lived in a three bedroom house and attended the local Catholic school.
Daveed would describe his childhood in fragmented ways, but this is what I know to be true: he was ridiculed for his skin colour by white children, and would return home to face his worst bully - my nonno.
Americo always scared me growing up. My sister and I were never allowed at our grandparents’ house past four pm, because by then the alcohol he’d drunk all day would’ve caught up to him. Daveed would tell me about how my grandfather would make his own wine back in the day, which would consist of dragging his children outside in cold winter mornings to squash freezing grapes with their feet.
Decades later every one of his children would think that it was acceptable to slap their children. The children his sons sired would all grow to hate their fathers in an intimate way, a way some of them never acknowledged. But I watched. I saw.
None of us hate them as much as Daveed hated Americo.
When Daveed was young, perhaps five or six years old, he found himself with a pet duckling. He tended it, patted its fluffy head softly, would sing it to sleep. Eventually it grew into a fully grown duck. Daveed came home from school and had dinner like any other night. After, he rushed to the hay covered pallet he’d fashioned to give his pet a dry place to rest.
The duck was nowhere to be seen.
Americo laughed as he told his youngest son about how he’d killed, prepared, then cooked that duck for their dinner. It was a funny joke, like how my step dad would jump out from around a corner to spook me. But it was nothing like that at all. It was a violation of trust so deep that it scarred my father.
It would be nothing compared to what was to come.
My father attended a Catholic secondary school, just around the corner from where he grew up. A priest from the school befriended my family, and by the time Daveed was fifteen he grew the courage to tell my grandparents what this priest had done to him. Neither of them believed him; my grandmother’s faith meant so much to her that it wasn’t possible for a man of the cloth to do such a thing. My grandfather just didn’t care.
I thought about that priest a lot when I first found out that secret - one man’s greed ruined the last remaining innocence my father might have saved for his own children. Much later on in his life Daveed would be diagnosed as sociopathic, despite the fact that many would consider his future actions to be psychopathic. But according to most medical experts, the distinction between the two is one being born and the other being made.
The courage it took for my father to approach his parents with such a heavy truth is a weight I know firsthand. As a child he stood there, desperate for kindness, alone. Later he walked to his school. He set the science wing on fire. And as it burnt I believe something within him broke. He transformed from a boy with a future to a person so desperate to escape each waking moment that nothing could make him look forward.