Stories I Forgot to Tell You by Dorothy Gallagher

Author:Dorothy Gallagher
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: New York Review Books
Published: 2020-11-10T00:00:00+00:00

The Goods

I WASN’T VERY EDUCABLE. That was sad for you, given your habit of mentoring young women along literature’s path. “Meet my wife,” you’d say, “she’s set in her ways.”

It was true that I hadn’t read Adorno, Gramsci, or Lukács; I tried Ulysses and tried again, never making it more than halfway through; I certainly didn’t go on to Finnegans Wake. Okay, I would read Proust, but I wouldn’t be rushed. Classical music put me to sleep. I more or less refused poetry unless it was sung by Bob Dylan or Leonard Cohen or John Prine. Also, I didn’t care much for the theater, which you loved second only to the books I hadn’t read. How would I hold your interest?

Like Scheherazade, I entertained you with stories beyond your ken. I could narrate the villainous lives of Lucky Luciano, Vito Genovese, and Carmine Galante; I knew many interesting details about Stalinist machinations during the Spanish Civil War; about Mussolini’s pre-Fascist life as a Socialist, and his friendship with Angelica Balabanov; about the early Wobbly strikes in Massachusetts and New Jersey. I knew something, although not nearly enough, about the maddeningly esoteric arguments among various Italian-American anarchist factions in the early part of the twentieth century. Also, I had information about a mysterious man named Enea Sormenti, aka Vittorio Vidali and Comandante Carlos, who was suspiciously nearby when Trotsky was assassinated.

I had plans for these stories. When I had finished sorting them out they would blend seamlessly into a larger story and appear in print between two covers. That day was more distant than I could have imagined, and I did not yet know of all the impediments that would spring up along my way. I was still lighthearted when we met.

•

So. I was writing this biography about someone named Carlo Tresca. You’d never heard of him. I’d never heard of him until one evening, when I was at a dinner party, someone mentioned his name in my hearing. I eavesdropped. It seemed that this person was an Italian immigrant, an anarchist, and he’d been mysteriously murdered on Fifth Avenue. I liked a good murder story, but I knew almost nothing about anarchists, I didn’t know the Italian language, and I had never tried my hand at extensive research. Nevertheless, and much to my surprise, when I woke up the morning after I’d heard Tresca’s name for the first time, I discovered that I had made a decision to write his life. Was it a whim? I like to think it was recognition.

Actually, I wasn’t all that lighthearted. If you wanted to hear my stories, you had to listen to my anxieties. I was obsessed about the safety of my research notes and documents. The more I stuffed my file cabinets with papers, the more I worried that they would somehow disappear. A thief in the night? Fire, more likely. Remember that night I woke you up in a panic? I’d heard a siren go by, and I knew, I just

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.