Raising Cubs

A Trastevere tale

raisingcubs — Thu, 10 Jun 2010 19:11:47 +0000

September 1980. His body riddled with bullets from the guns of a rival gang, Franco Giuseppucci or ‘Er Negro’ takes his last faltering steps just moments away from his lifelong home in Trastevere. His demise comes just four years after his founding of the Banda della Magliana, the notorious Roman criminal organisation implicated in some of the century’s darkest crimes, from the kidnapping of Aldo Moro to the murders of Mino Pecorelli and Roberto Calvi; a web of events allegedly linking Giulio Andreotti, elements of the extreme right, the infamous Loggia P2 and even the Vatican, and over which a shroud of mystery remains to this day, rendering impossible any meaningful separation of fiction from fact.

The year is 2006. A woman in the last stages of pregnancy, looking for all the world like Moby Dick in a frock, hauls her bulk through the display area of Ikea in Rome. She’s a resident of Trastevere, just a few minutes’ walk from the spot where Giuseppucci drew his last breath. She encounters a couple with a tiny baby who cheerfully congratulate her on her pregnancy and wish her all the best for the arrival of her little one. They’re young, friendly, good-looking and exquisitely polite, and the man looks strangely familiar.

Two days later, Mrs Moby Dick huffs and puffs her way through labour in her front room while glued to the TV. They’re watching the film Romanzo Criminale, Michele Placido’s adaptation of Giancarlo de Cataldo’s semi-fictional account of the rise and fall of the Banda della Magliana. Of course – that’s who the man in Ikea was. Pierfranceso Favino, playing a lead role in Romanzo Criminale as the ‘Libanese’, or rather Franco Giuseppucci.

Let’s go back another three or four years. Mr and Mrs Moby Dick are eating breakfast in their local bar. Mr Moby Dick turns an odd shade of grey and appears to be choking on his croissant. He’s reading La Repubblica, which reports the capture of a group of thieves wanted by the police for some time for a series of bank robberies. It emerges that their leader, known as ‘Lo Sciampagnone’ on account of his prodigious consumption of champagne in the topless bars around Via Veneto, is Mr and Mrs Moby Dick’s landlord. He and his accomplices are all in their 70s yet still active in the seedier side of Roman life. They were somewhat comically captured after having been observed dividing their ill-gotten gains in a bar next to the local police station, after what must presumably have been a rather low-speed chase, given their advanced years. Mr Sciampagnone finds himself in Regina Coeli jail where, in a sublimely comic touch, his sister-in-law works as a guard.

And so to the present. Lo Sciampagnone is free but harmless, due to fragile health, and with an increasingly tenuous grasp on reality. A local catering company is engaged to provide the refreshments for a family party at his home in a Rome suburb and employees gossip afterwards about his splendidly overblown villa with an indoor pool accurately modelled on Tony Montana’s abode in De Palma’s classic gangster film Scarface. Rumours start circulating about his past involvement in the Rome underworld and, more specifically, how he was able to make his fortunes in Trastevere precisely at the time that the Banda della Magliana controlled the area. Suggestions of collaboration with the now legendary criminal band abound, not for the first time. Gossip, extrapolation, exaggeration? Maybe. Truth? Not impossible.

Baby Moby Dick was born in 2006, an authentic (semi-)Trasteverina. The story of Romanzo Criminale provided her soundtrack as she prepared to enter the world. She received the warm wishes of its leading actor just two days before. Her mother purchases groceries and groovy Scandinavian baby clothes just metres away from where Franco Giuseppucci took his last breath. And she takes her first steps and utters her first words in the home of Lo Sciampagnone, who may or may not have collaborated with the Banda della Magliana but is hardly Santa Claus whichever way you look at him.

Mamma Wolf can’t help but feel this does not augur well…

Swing low, sweet chariot

raisingcubs — Tue, 08 Jun 2010 08:45:04 +0000

Mamma Wolf is forced to acknowledge that, while her first pregnancy gave her some welcome (if transient) curves, her second made them migrate south, and after several months of uncomfortable squirming and rearranging, the time has come to ditch the old bras in favour of better fitting ones. So one morning she decides to brave a department store lingerie department, plying the Master Cubling with crackers to keep him occupied.

It soon becomes clear that the store caters for just two categories of women, one akin to Queen Victoria and the other vaguely resembling a poor man’s Dita Von Teese. Black satin-trimmed confections hang incongruously next to fearsome cantilevered structures in various shades of porridge, seemingly engineered by Isambard Kingdom Brunel. Mamma Wolf grabs the least unappealing items on display in a number of sizes and heads for the changing room. There doesn’t seem to be anyone around so she opens the curtain and almost leaps out of her shoes to find a transvestite perched daintily on a stool in the changing room, eating a bag of crisps. His Adam’s apple bobs disconcertingly as he munches.

“Buongiorno!” says the transvestite cheerily between mouthfuls, revealing a diamond set into one canine incisor.

“Buongiorno”, squeaks Mamma Wolf, hastily closing the curtain. She hears the transvestite let forth a throaty chuckle behind her as she beats a retreat, with the cracker-chomping Master Cubling in tow.

Seconds later she comes face to face with a stern assistant wearing spectacles with impressive dorsal fins and whose load-bearing undergarments are definitely from the House of Brunel. This gloomy matron scrutinizes Mamma Wolf’s chest much as one might eye a particularly large and abhorrent cockroach, sighs deeply and announces to no-one in particular that “One supposes one must take the larger of the two as a point of reference”. Your heroine flees without awaiting further judgment, following the crumb trail her future cub scout son has with some foresight scattered throughout the entire store.

Perhaps performance lingerie is not the answer, muses Mamma Wolf. Maybe a more radical surgical solution is in order? However she dismisses the thought immediately at the recollection of a conversation with Mister Wolf over a coffee one lazy afternoon pre-cubs. They are the only people in the bar apart from two elegant American women in their early fifties, newly arrived and still with suitcases in tow.

“You know,” begins Mister Wolf, “I keep seeing the hooker entering and leaving that really beautiful building over there. I think she lives there”.

“How come you’re so convinced she’s a prostitute?”

“How come you know who I’m talking about?”

“Touché. But seriously, do you really think she’s a hooker?”

“Of course she is. She has fake boobs”.

“Lots of women have implants and it doesn’t mean they are hookers. The avocatessa has fake boobs, I think.”

“And a facelift. Have you noticed that she always wears two Bluetooth earpieces at the same time? It’s to hide the scars.”

“No! You don’t say?!”

And so on.

The two women are gazing over their cappuccini at the gesticulating couple on the next table. One comments to her friend, “You know, I love the way that, even though I don’t understand any Italian at all, it looks as if those two are having a really intellectual conversation. That’s what’s so great about European bars”.

Mamma Wolf could, of course, disabuse her of this notion but prefers to practise that other European fine art, bluffing. After all, not even sophisticated European coffee-bar intellectuals are immune to the pleasures of gossip and silicone-spotting once in a while.

If the shoe fits

raisingcubs — Sun, 02 May 2010 18:25:04 +0000

The She-Cub has entered into a love affair with the doe-eyed Disney damsels-in-distress, a rite of passage that other mothers assure us is an inevitable and physiological part of female development. And of course, the page she always turns to, the scene she always skips back to and watches again with bated breath and expectant eyes, is Cinderella’s transformation from downtrodden scullery maid to glistening princess. It’s the moment we see that dreams really do come true, that Cinderella will indeed go to the ball… but that’s all by the by. We love it because it is a moment of supreme sartorial satisfaction. Do not be fooled by the Prince’s role – the Disney menfolk are on the whole surprisingly anodyne and unlikely to provoke any grand passion. His is a bit part that serves merely to illustrate the magnificent power of fancy frocks and, above all, shoes. Of course, ladies. It’s all about the shoes.

Cinderella was using a tried and tested technique when she slyly slipped off one of her Louboutins on the palace staircase. Some ancient Roman wags inscribed lewd messages on the soles of their sandals which would then be transferred to their tracks in the ground, in the hope of gaining followers. (What’s that, Cinderelly? You left your shoe behind by accident? And didn’t run back for it, curfew or no curfew? Pull the other one, love!). So in the “Sex and the City” movie, that sassy Cinderella story for grown-ups, it was no surprise that it was those darling blue satin Manolos that led Carrie back to her walk-in closet and straight into the arms of Mr Big.

The She-Cub is already wise to the almost shamanistic magnetism of shoes; she gazes saucer-eyed at glitzy footwear in shop windows and clip-clops about the house in mummy’s heels, that most universally adored pastime of little girls (and plenty of little boys). She recently declared her mother “very naughty indeed” for failing to purchase a pair of silver peep-toes with 4-inch heels (and a similarly vertiginous price tag) she spied gleaming in the window of Ferragamo. Pretty shoes add yet further weight to Mamma Wolf’s (admittedly rather disturbing) hypothesis that in some respects there is fundamentally very little difference in the female of the species at four and forty years of age.

So, why are so many apparently sane women prey to this almost visceral adoration of shoes? Perhaps the answer resides in their sculptural quality that doesn’t depend on the wearer’s body shape or age to look good. But then surely that other great object of feminine desire, the handbag, is even more democratic in this respect. Perhaps it’s therefore something to do with the fact that the shoe still interacts with the wearer’s body – stepping into a shoe means altering aspects of one’s appearance – height, gait – that other garments do not touch. And then of course one could wax lyrical about the semantics of shoes – the same dress tells us a very different story when paired with predatory heels rather than playful ballet flats.

But I think that for the She-Cub, the joy of shoes lies in the fact that it is a definite victory for girliness, and this rings true at ages six, sixteen and sixty. Men’s shoes are just so dull by comparison. The woman’s shoe is a homage to the very serious business of frivolity. It brings to mind just one aspect of how great and how varied it is to be female. God may have made us endure labour but in his infinite wisdom he also created Louboutin. Amen.

Natal self-deception

raisingcubs — Mon, 26 Apr 2010 20:44:11 +0000

With just a week to go before the Master Cubling’s first birthday, Mamma Wolf encounters a woman at the children’s playground bearing a clearly full-term belly with enviable grace. It transpires that her son is due on the same date the Master Cubling was expected to arrive last year, and Mamma Wolf inevitably finds herself reminiscing about the end of her pregnancy.

She remembers the dawning realization that before long she would again have to face the tricky business of getting the little critter out. She recalls that in desperation she began perusing material on relaxation and hypnosis in birth, in the hope of discovering how to painlessly evict the incumbent of her burgeoning belly as if it were a bar of soap whilst chanting mantras and playing the guitar.

However she was also somewhat aware of a vague mismatch between reality and the delightfully reassuring and persuasive prose she found in those books, with their delicate pink covers and soft-focus photos of supremely coiffured, beatific new mothers and their angelic progeny. Mamma Wolf, aka Mother Titanic, therefore decided to adapt the material for the benefit of those who might find themselves in circumstances more closely resembling her own when delivering the She-Cub:

Journey to the hospital – a journey of the soul

The taxi shall be your vehicle to a new stage of self-realization. Each cobble and pothole over which its wheels pass will take you further along the spiritual journey you make with your baby. Neither the swearing of angry Roman drivers nor pursuit by traffic police shall disturb your serenity as you go deeper into your birthing body, merging as one with the tarpaulin sheet your driver has thoughtfully positioned to protect his faux leather upholstery.

As you arrive at the hospital the realization that you will shortly meet your baby will dim your awareness of the decrepitude of your surroundings. The plaque indicating that the hospital was opened by none other than Benito Mussolini will reassure you of the rigour of your caregivers, and its exhortation to “do your duty to the Fatherland” will fill you with pride and remind you of the importance of the journey you have embarked upon. The striking resemblance of the midwife on duty to Il Duce himself shall serve as a thread linking past and present and remind you of your role in the eternal cycle of pointless bloodshed birth and regeneration.

Reception – gateway to a higher plane

Note the glassy eyes and apparent oblivion of the staff on duty upon your arrival. They too are in a profound trance-like state achieved by nothing more than asinine late-night television finely-honed skills of self-hypnosis. Take a moment to visualize the anaesthetist – although very, very far away, he too has attained a similar state of extreme relaxation that not even his pager can disturb. Hope like hell trust that you will be able to do likewise.

The delivery suite – Mother Nature’s sanctuary

As you enter the delivery suite, listen with joyous anticipation to the glorious natural music of other mothers in the process of birthing their babies. Every time you hear the phrase ‘I’m going to die!’, your brain and body shall be flooded with calming endorphins. Every unearthly howl shall draw you closer to the inner calm you seek.

Note the squashed mosquitoes conveniently attached to the wall. As you count the squashed mosquitoes, relax each muscle of the body in turn. (Rest assured that there is a sufficient number of mosquitoes to correspond to the 700 or so muscles present in the body).

Welcome with joy the sound of Radio Monte Carlo drifting from the nurses’ station and let it be your guide to a higher, possibly delirious state. It’ll still be blaring out the Village People by the time this whole wretched ordeal is over.

Post script: Mamma Wolf / Mother Titanic confesses that the said hypnotherapy book enabled her to weather a hospital journey that made it into the newspapers, to narrowly evade giving birth in an elevator and to pop out the Master Cubling with a Taliban-esque lack of pain relief, all while singing Rule Britannia and tap-dancing. (OK, so maybe I made up just a very tiny bit of the above).

Day tripper

raisingcubs — Sat, 24 Apr 2010 21:15:07 +0000

Mamma Wolf has chalked up another milestone – survival (at least in the short term) of the She-Cub’s first ever school trip.

The first cut is indeed the deepest, especially when that first cut is a 5.45 am start after a night of relentless teething on the part of Master Cubling. The She-Cub attends a convent nursery and nuns love to do things Bright and Early. She-Cub weathers the wake-up call admirably well but has an inexplicable tantrum on the way to the pick-up point, and has to be carried screaming though pouring rain by an already heavily-burdened Mamma Wolf, who swears sotto voce for the entire journey and arrives sweat- and rain-soaked.

Harassed mother and howling brood somehow manage to arrive in time, just as the black-and-white-garbed nuns come stalking six abreast along the street towards the coach; Mamma Wolf finds herself involuntarily whistling “Little Green Bag”. The pavement is swarming with bleary-eyed children, mothers ready for duty with pursed lips, metallic wedge-heeled trainers and Louis Vuitton holdalls, and fathers who hide their cigarettes like guilty schoolboys whenever a nun passes by. Sisters Orange, Pink and Blue rally the party in heartfelt choruses of “Hallelujah!” throughout the journey, an exclamation one imagines is not commonly heard in morning rush hour traffic in Rome.

Our destination is a marine park constructed entirely of concrete slabs and has a vaguely Soviet feel to it, not greatly helped by the gunmetal sky and the first staff we encounter, who appear to be fresh out of gulag training school. It is teeming with groups of schoolchildren in colour co-ordinated baseball caps, shepherded by harrassed teachers dreaming of the next whiskey and Valium.

The cubs initially seem rather unmoved by the nature-related events proposed to them and are far more impressed by the displays of daredevil aviation provided by the nearby military airport. Mamma Wolf misses the sea lion show on account of Master Cubling’s incessant grizzling, but she is impressed to overhear the performing pinnipeds making their stage entrance to the “Imperial March” from “The Empire Strikes Back”, and the She-Cub is delighted by their antics. The surreally brilliant spectacle of dolphins dancing the macarena concludes the morning’s agenda; the mothers reserve their most enthusiastic applause for the lithe lantern-jawed chap in a wetsuit.

The table where Mamma Wolf and cubs eat their lunch is flanked on one side by a group of children with various disabilities, and on the other by a gang of surly chip-chomping schoolchildren accompanied by a teacher resembling a blonde-wigged Vin Diesel in a leopard-print frock, who stage whispers to her flock to “keep away from the little Mongoloids”. Mamma Wolf feels as if she’s swallowed a lead ingot. Mercifully the afternoon brings a hugely enjoyable 3D film that scares the little imps into quiet submission for a while, and a cheery display of parrot antics. Mamma Wolf wonders if they’d notice if she stole the charming red parrots who waggle their tail feathers so appealingly to “Sex Bomb”.

During the return journey, the exhausted She-Cub slumbers in Sister Pink’s arms and Mamma Wolf dozes fitfully through dreams about gun-toting nuns staging a Mexican standoff before transforming into Darth Vader with flippers, and walruses swaggering along to “Mr Boombastic”. We arrive home tired but unscathed. Hallelujah.

Red (and gold) in tooth and claw

raisingcubs — Wed, 21 Apr 2010 13:06:04 +0000

A bell rings out from Rome’s Capitoline Hill at noon today to commemorate the founding of the city. It may have been the glorious caput mundi, but Rome is nonetheless built on fratricide. Romulus set quite a trend when he fatefully did away with his unfortunate twin Remus. One imagines this act as the culmination of years of cub-fighting that must have turned their canine adoptive mother’s pelt prematurely white. She, the beleaguered capitoline wolf, has had the luck to live on as the symbol of AS Roma, the city’s football team, and it seems curiously appropriate to see her profile adorning the red and gold flags, scarves and pendants of the hard men in the notorious curva sud of Roma’s stadium and thus transformed into the defender of sons only a mother could love.

The She-Cub and Master Cubling, at the tender ages of three and less-than-one respectively, already show signs of taking after both the ancient man-cubs and their curva sud successors. Witness, for instance, the following scene:

Master Cubling spots a brightly coloured box in his sister’s hands and immediately takes a shine to it. He attempts to wrestle it out of her hands and she pulls it away, hissing.

Master Cubling grabs a large handful of She-Cub’s hair and pulls with all his might.

She-Cub floors Master Cubling with a deft right hook. Master Cubling pulls himself back up to his full 80 centimetres and launches himself at the She-Cub, clawing her face with both hands.

She attempts a Chinese burn. He neatly extricates his tiny wrist from her grasp and smartly whips the box away again.

She-Cub growls.

Master Cubling rolls back his eyes to show the whites and juts his lower jaw forward, showing two menacing front teeth.

She-Cub applies a firm karate chop to the cubling, who turns wielding a long-tailed toy mouse as an impromptu nunchaku and, with a series of swinging manoevres, forces the She-Cub to duck for cover.

Mamma Wolf is momentarily tempted to do as her predecessor must have done, and slope back into the forest leaving them to slug it out, but would prefer not to have to tend to bloodied noses or broken teeth before the nursery run. Moments later they down their weapons and sit chuckling at each other through mouthfuls of chocolate biscuits. But never fear. Round Two will no doubt shortly commence and order will return to the universe.