Dear Papa

You were a body before you were a word...

Photo by June Hansen on Unsplash

Dear Papa,

It’s late—or early morning, as others would say. Lydia is asleep. The house feels as if it’s holding its breath. Maybe she’s asleep too, talking in its sleep, because the walls whisper tired sounds of old wood.

This letter wasn’t planned. I only meant to have tea, hoping that it would lead to sleep. But the mug’s gone cold, and I’m too awake now to go back to bed. The kitchen light is too bright; I should have sat in the dark instead.

I’m at the table where you used to sit with the paper on Sunday mornings, turning pages as if they were shields after the long week. That image has been following me all evening—your half-turned face, your thumb scraping the margin, a cigarette burnt to the paper in the ashtray beside you.

“Dear Papa”—my hand wrote it before I thought. The words look ceremonial now, maybe wrong. You were never dear, or I can’t remember if you were. I was nineteen and too angry when we buried you at forty-seven. Now I’m sixty-six—older than you ever were. I’ve walked further into the years than the man who made me. Yet some part of me still braces for your disappointment, as if the dead keep handing down their judgments. The pen moves across the page. The mug rings when I push it aside. My hand is steady except for the tremor that comes when I try too hard to hold still.

You were a body before you were a word. I still see your forearms, corded from work, the veins like blue ropes. The smell that clung to you—tobacco, leather, and the sharp-edged soap you used—carries me back to the first rooms I remember. Back when you called me cioccolattone for my sweet tooth.

You taught me how to whistle. You whistled when you shaved.

Tenderness diluted by the discipline you demanded—ruled with leather or a fist.

I remember, as clearly as a wound remembers its cause, one of the many times you struck me with the belt. The sound of it. The rectangular pattern on the marble floor—I counted the tiles, four by six, while my breath came shallow and my hands stayed flat against my thighs. The silence after. I didn’t cry. I learned not to. I watched dust move in the light from the window and waited for my heartbeat to slow. The temperature of your anger. Never an apology.

Yet there were gestures that didn’t fit the cruelty. You were clumsy with jokes. Once, when I was very young and we got home late, you tucked a blanket around me before lifting me from the car and carried me inside. I pretended to be asleep, but I remember. I remember walking to the barber shop with you, my hand too small to hold yours, so I held your thumb instead.

I found scraps of the life that came before you were my father—photographs, names, places, old handwritten love letters to mom. Windows of your past.

You were shipped by boxcar. The photograph shows you at fourteen, standing in a group of other boys outside the compound. Your eyes look past the camera. Someone wrote on the back in pencil: Ferramonti, 1941.

You were broken in ways I’ll never see. What they robbed from you—the innocence of childhood violated, the right to safety—was never returned. In one of the letters to mom, you wrote about nights in the barracks when the older men told stories to keep the children from hearing other sounds. You never told me those stories.

Rounded up, beaten, violated. Words too neat for what they meant.

When I see those windows inside the rooms of my childhood, I see how the drafts moved through—the way you flinched at loud voices, the way you taught me to flinch from yours.

I tell myself that knowing this should make me kinder. But it doesn’t work that way.

Knowledge is a lens, not a cure.

To see the child you once were doesn’t take the lash off the man you became.

I try to hold both images at once: the small, frightened boy and the large, furious father. Both are true. They live in the same chest, and sometimes they argue.

I have two children of my own now. One used to answer my letters until she stopped. The other doesn’t call, and when I call her, she asks about the weather.

My face isn’t yours, but I hear your words come out of me—the quick, dismissive tidy-up of an awkward silence, the impatience that clanks like iron where gentleness should be.

Once, my youngest asked me a question at dinner—something small, I don’t remember what—and I said, “Not now,” in that flat tone that ended things. She went quiet. The same quiet I learned at her age. I saw her shoulders pull in, saw her hands go still on the table, and recognized the small erasure happening. That night I knocked on her door to apologize, but she said it was fine, she was fine. She wasn’t. I heard the learned courtesy in her voice, the distance already forming.

Another time, when my eldest was small, the memory of you rose in me. My hand lifted before I knew it. The muscle remembered your way. I didn’t strike her. I put my hand back in my lap, and the shock of myself was cold and clear.

I sat there after, knowing the thing you gave me would pass along unless I learned to hold it differently.

You can’t say you’re sorry, even if you wanted to.

Did you think you were toughening me? Did you think I would forgive you? Did you even think of forgiveness at all?

Nor can I ask if you were measuring me against some private standard you never named.

I don’t expect answers. The paper is wise enough to keep its silence.

I’m the only one left who knows your story, and the questions feel like a way to keep you alive.

Sometimes I imagine you older, impossibly, sitting across from me, speaking in those short, practical sentences you favored. Other times I see you small again, frightened, before you knew the word for shame.

I hear a cough from upstairs. A car just passed. The night is starting to wake. Still, I keep asking, as if the morning light will come with answers.

I don’t light candles. I don’t pray for release. But there are pieces of you I can look at now without flinching. The foolish, frightened boy in the uniform photograph makes me feel as if I were the father and you my son.

That feeling—pity, tenderness—rests uneasily beside the anger. But it’s there.

If forgiveness is a ceremony, consider this letter a small, private rite.

Some pains can only bow to each other across the table.

What will I do with this letter?

Burn it?

Fold it into a drawer?

Maybe I’ll leave it here, on the table where you once sat—let the house carry it to you in its slow, breathing way.

Or I’ll fold it and put it with the other things I couldn’t throw away, so that some future hand might find it and read the handwriting of a tired man who turned out to be almost like you.

—Your son

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Luciano Conte, born in Formia, Italy, roots himself in tactile arts like film photography, painting, bread baking, and house building. He writes in order to probe those persistent, buried forces that shape us from beneath the surface. For him, silence is not absence but presence: a pause that resonates the loudest, like the pause in a conversation that carries more weight than words. He speaks his lines aloud while writing, tying rhythm to breath, making language a living, physical act where sound and sense fuse, just as photography captures light and shadow. He urges readers to read his work aloud to unlock layers that silent reading misses, letting the cadence shape the experience in the same way as kneading dough or laying foundation stones, where each gesture is deliberate and consequential.

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