Come l'oleandro from Gabriella Badalamenti.

This is a story inspired by facts and fictions of "a man of honour". It's the life-story of Faro Badalamenti, as he himself told it to the wife of his nephew, a very young and naive girl, member of an avarage bourgeois family.

It all happens in a region of Sicily that historians define as the cradle of mafia. It is the flavor of times past and the atmosphere of romantic enchantment that traps Faro's young listner: an adventurous life becomes the real soul of a fairy-tale. Faro's life-story unfolds in a mountainous countryside, where he lives proudly, at times like a wolf among lambs, because it's a world where "you are a lamb or you become a wolf". He is a wanted man since his early youth, for the murder of a Forest Trooper. Faro's only guide is that primordial, fail-safe wisdom which he finds in the thousand of proverbs and practical rules-of-life which are the very soul of the millennial Sicilian identity. The impression of the young listner recording his memories is that of "an hero with no fair, able to speak to the animals".
Faro Badalamenti lives actually like a medieval knight or a patriarchal figure almost by destiny. It all starts with a family vendetta and an adventurous life-style where clan-fighting alternates with short-lived armistices.There is only little time for pure love outside the tyranny of his society, outside the violence and betrayal that do not spare even his nuptial bedroom.
In Sicilian dialect the word "trust" does not exist: there is only the past time of the verb "to trust" like in the sentence: "He trusted them and he died!" Gabriella Badalamenti is aware of that shadowy, biological destiny. It's an ancient tragedy that repeats itself, that marks her own existence and, at the same time,`fascinates her with the ambiguity of the attraction for adventure "as the lure of the scent of the poisonous oleander". The writer offers to the reader her story like a grim fairytale: maybe the first fairytale of mafia.