By Anthony Valerio
· Paperback: 81 pages
· Publisher: Bordighera Press
· ISBN-10: 1884419941
· $9
· amazon.com
“The Little Sailor is a literary gem from one of our foremost writers. Anthony Valerio’s evocative prose woos the characters across the page and into the hearts of its readers. His charming, eccentric, deeply moving women emerge from a world of distant memories with extraordinary force and passion—sensual, enticing, unforgettable—and the reader is mesmerized.”
--Edvige Giunta, author of Writing with an Accent: Contemporary Italian American Women Authors
About The Little Sailor, Anthony Valerio writes:
“I enjoyed writing The Little Sailor more than any of my other books. I had never recalled so early, with such pleasure. These are the beautiful women who raised me. Who taught me. Happy women and sad. Sainted women and scorned. Lovers appearing in the guise of goddess and sibyl. It’s a sensual, picaresque odyssey in which Antonio known as The Little Sailor seeks to hold onto his openness, his innocence, and thereby his ladies and their beauty. I have never loved anyone as much as the grocer’s daughter, Frances Palermo. To revisit and sustain this pure love, I believe I had to morph into the reformed arch criminal Kasper Gutman, known in elite crime circles as the Fat Man, and resume the hunt for the notorious statuette of a bird filled from beak to claw with fantastic riches—the Maltese Falcon.”
Anthony Valerio is the author of five books, including Lefty and the Button Men, Valentino and the Great Italians, and The Mediterranean Runs Through Brooklyn.
He resides in Connecticut and Rome.
“He’s just crazy enough. He knows characters. He gets in, tells his story and gets out. It’s what good writing should be.”
--Shel Silverstein
EXCERPT
Mrs. Tanzi
“Who is she?” Antonio asked his mother in her yellow kitchen after describing a big woman down on the street with a massive, rounded back, knotty calves and a small black hat with veil draped halfway down her round face with full cheeks. Every afternoon this woman crossed Bay Ridge Parkway and Sixteenth Avenue, cars and buses going in opposite directions, and then stepped over the sewer and onto the corner.
The Little Sailor happened to be standing by the hedges in front of the dentist’s office.
His slightly downcast eyes and the woman’s smiling eyes locked, and she said with a broad smile, continuing to walk, her eyes shining:
“Hi, Antonio. I’m Mrs. Tanzi.”
It could have been a chance meeting, so the next afternoon around the same time, from wherever Antonio was in the world on the street, he broke and went and stood by the hedges.
Here she comes! Crossing with the light, over the sewer and onto the corner.
No matter how hard the Little Sailor tried not to look up and meet her eyes and see her wide smiling face in the open beneath her veil, when she was about to pass, he looked up. She saw right through him.
“Hi, Antonio. I’m Mrs. Tanzi.”
Their encounters repeated day after day, with no one else around.
“That’s Mrs. Tanzi,” Margherita answered.
“I know. But who is she?”
“Mrs. Tanzi!”
Only Margherita and the flirtatious woman herself called her Mrs. Tanzi. And no one had ever seen Mr. Tanzi. Mrs. Tanzi was not married, there was no Mr. Tanzi. Her entire adult life only she and Margherita knew that she longed to have a handsome husband, Mr. Tanzi, and, in the boy she passed at the hedges, she saw the husband she would have, the child they could have. Margherita and Mrs. Tanzi consummated her desire by bestowing a husband upon her solely in name.
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