The Girls of Piazza D'Amore (11 page)

To lie on a beach in Ostia, next to a semi-nude Roman girl, and to be caressed by one, must have been a heady experience for Michele. He said he felt that the most honourable thing to do was to leave Tina as soon as possible. Other men with similar experiences chose to keep and marry their village girlfriends, while continuing to enjoy the favours of the more liberated city women.

He added, “Here you can breathe. Rome is something else!”

“And the women!
” Tommaso said, winking at Michele. “Ask Michele about the women, and the conquests he's made already.”

Michele grinned in response. He looked slimmer and wore his hair differently than in the village – a long chunk of wavy hair falling on his eyes. He looked like a movie star.

“I want a future in Rome,” he said, “like Tommaso.”

“Eh,” Tommaso added. “
Rome will always be Rome!”

Just then Totu appeared, unannounced, and chimed in, “Rome was, is, and probably always will be a city built as a monument to the egos of conquerors. But Michele and I are thinking of different conquests, eh Michele?” Then he sheepishly shook hands and kissed all of us. “Welcome to Rome,” he said while pinching me on the cheek.

Tommaso and Zio Pietro convinced Mother to prolong our stay by a couple of days, after spending the entire next day at the Canadian Embassy to get our visa.

“When will you and the kids get the chance to see Rome again?” Zio said.

The next day, Totu took us to explore Rome. As we walked past grey stone buildings, fountains, and statues built to the scale of giants and gods, I understood Rome's reputation for things colossal and eternal. I could not help but feel my own smallness. I felt a real sense of physical fright when I stood in front of the larger-than-life statues in St. Peter's Basilica.

Totu made us observe how each epoch had left its landmark structure on the city: the arc of Augustus, the Coliseum, Castel Santangelo, St. Peter's. When we stood in front of the Monument to the Fatherland in Piazza Venezia, he said to Zio Pietro, “Remember, Mussolini's humiliation – his hanging head down while people spat in his face and kicked his shins – was made into a public spectacle, not in Rome, but in Milan. Is it not significant?
”

“He deserved what he got,” Zio said, “in Milan or Rome.”

“Yes, but the image that has remained of Il Duce in Rome is that of the young proud leader who stood on that balcony in 1922 and called to his countrymen to follow him.” We all gazed at the all-white marble building, layered like a wedding cake, which overpowers the square with its bulk and was built, Totu said, just in time for Mussolini's March on Rome.

“Just think, Pietro. Twenty-six thousand people gathered in the square to cheer him on that day, and millions of Italians at home and abroad believed they had found the man to return them to the glory of ancient Rome. It's mind-boggling. Now it's the so-called Democrats who are herding in people like sheep.”

“Let's not start talking politics here,” Zio said. He was a staunch Christian Democrat, and Totu knew it.

But Totu was in a talkative mood. Over
panini
eaten on a park bench at Villa Borghese, the conversation turned to Mulirena, and Totu talked non-stop, as if wanting to unburden himself.

He started by saying that the quarrels he had left behind seemed by now as insignificant as the squabbles between the pigeons in the gardens around us. The first time he ran away, he had felt like a ragged marionnette pulled by the strings of petty village politics, with both his uncle and Lucia badgering him with one angry letter after another. Then he was new to the city and trying to make his way in university.

“That first year was very difficult, and no one in Mulirena understood that,” he said. His uncle had wanted him to enter law school, but he barely managed to get admitted to the university in literature. Even at that, he had to struggle to keep up with the other university students, whose language proficiency was far superior to his. At first, he said, he partook in the outings and activities of the group headed by Loredana and Santo, who had become a couple. After his initial curiosity, though, Totu found her and most of her friends insipid and shallow, and he became bored with their company. He joined them only when they went to the cinema. His studies took up much of his free time. For spending money, he had to count on his uncle, who infuriated him with news of provincial politics and expected Totu to make new connections in Rome.

“This is not Catanzaro, where we know everyone and everyone knows us,” he said. “My uncle never understood this.”

Lucia also insisted on a commitment from him, especially after Michele broke his engagement to her friend, Tina. “She thought I had fallen for a Roman woman.”

I remember the note he sent her at the time. “Rome is full of beautiful and available women, but my mind and heart are taken up by other interests and concerns that you cannot understand. I want to end the story with you and all of Mulirena.”

Ending his relationship with Lucia that first time, he explained, was the first step out of the inertia he wanted badly to escape. In time he connected with a group of Political Science students and started attending discussion meetings with them. A nucleus formed. They met regularly after classes and late into the night. Totu experienced a sense of belonging with this community of intellectuals that he had never felt before. They read and studied the writings of Antonio Gramsci. He tried to explain to Zio about Gramsci's ideals of creating an alliance between the peasants of the south and the workers of the north. As a student, he said, his role was clearly identified by Gramsci: “An elite of ‘organic intellectuals' who would bring about a new social order in post-Fascist Italy.” He spoke with passion. “In the south, you have all become puppets of Rome and care little about the proletariat.”

My uncle got up to stretch his legs, wanting to change the conversation. I knew Mother was itching to ask him about the events of his last night in Mulirena.

After a long pause, she asked him,
“Totu, let's talk seriously now. If you wanted to end it with Lucia, why didn't you leave her alone then? Why did you use this child for your own dirty tricks?”

I wanted to disappear behind the bushes.

“Teresa, you're right,” he sounded contrite. “It was a barbaric way of doing things, what we tried to do. That's why I couldn't go through with it. We're not living in the Middle Ages, but nothing happened between us.” Then he turned to me. “I apologize, Caterina, for that evening.”

I didn't know what to answer, and only shrugged as if to say, “It's OK.”

He continued,
“I feel I owe you an explanation, but this remains between us. Everyone thinks I ran away because I was afraid of Alfonso. The truth is, I couldn't go ahead with the farce my friends had set up for me, out of principle. It's hard to explain. In Mulirena I become a different person, one I don't like. That's why I had to get away. I'll never set foot there again.”

“Eh, don't be foolish,” Zio answered. “You still have your father there. Of course you're going back.”

“My father is dead to me, after last summer, but, Teresa, I have to admit, I love Lucia and always will. My intentions were honourable, but the means were not. I could only make a clean break with Mulirena by ending my relationship with Lucia. The Party has now become my religion and my only love.”

On the train back, Zio and Mother spoke again about Totu. “He's confused and full of shit. He cares more about his ideas than real people,” Zio said.

“He grew up without a mother, and his father was never there for him,” Mother said. “Still, I don't understand him. He's so intelligent that sometimes he doesn't make any sense to me.”

I didn't understand all that Totu had tried to say either, though I understood why Lucia liked being with him so much. Totu was different from the other men. To feel that he had arrived, Tommaso found room at the palazzo. Michele set out to conquer as many Roman girls as possible. Totu had higher goals. He wanted to own the city. From the anxiety in his voice, I sensed the same paralyzing fear of Rome I felt, which he could only conquer by cutting all ties to Mulirena. Lucia was the helpless casualty of the battle.

Once we had our visas, our departure suddenly became real. I looked on at every village activity as the last of its kind. Mulirena's carnival period started in early February, when families took turns slaughtering their pigs and helping each other with the messy job of cutting the meat and making provisions for the year. Mother, Luigi, and I spent an evening at Nanna Caterina's house, making sausages. The women sat around the table with a metal sausage maker clamped to its edge. One woman fed the cut-up meat into the machine's top opening, turning the handle that pushed the meat into the pig's intestines. I watched as the long slimy tubes, plumped up with red meat and speckled with white fat, slithered and curved onto the table like snakes. Another woman pricked the sausages with a safety pin to let out the air, while another tied them tightly into links.

All evening, I had wanted to help. Nanna let me do some pricking, but I wanted to go through the whole process by myself. When they finished, late at night, Nanna gave me some scrap meat and some intestine to play with – just when Mother was ready to go home.

“Let her stay; she can sleep here,” Nanna Caterina said. “You're going away in two weeks. Who knows if I'll ever see her again.”

Mother wasn't convinced. Since the incident at the Timpa with Lucia, I had become fearful and clingy, especially late at night, but I wanted to stay. While Nanna cleaned up and got ready for bed, I played at turning the handle and stuffing and tying the tube, as I had seen the others do, though I was disappointed that my sausage turned out skinny and soft.

After Nanna had finished washing the pans and cleaning the table, she undressed and asked me if I needed to go to the bathroom. The cold, smelly cubicle was in a dark corner of the house, so I said I didn't need to go. I went to bed with my clothes on, since it was quite cold, next to her. She slept in the middle between me and Nannu Luigi.

I had often slept with my other Nanna, but never here. After the lights were turned off, the room looked completely different and foreign. I couldn't fall asleep. When I slept as a baby at Nanna Stella, she used to sing me a lullaby about wolves eating a sheep, and now the shadows all looked like wolf faces. If I closed my eyes, I saw myself alone at the Timpa, terrified by the darkness. If I opened my eyes, I was just as scared by the shadows made by the moonlight shining on the whitewashed walls through the slits in the closed window.

I regretted having stayed over just to make a flabby sausage. Grandfather snored and made all kinds of strange noises, I was afraid to move and fall off the side of the narrow bed, and I felt uncomfortable sleeping with my clothes on. I started to cry, softly at first, and then, more loudly. Nanna heard the sobbing and asked me if I wanted some water, or maybe I needed to go to the washroom? Crying so much, I gasped for air, I said I wanted to go to my own home to sleep.

“At this hour? It's past midnight,” Nanna said.

“Take her home,
ppe
la Madonna
,” Nannu shouted. “Or no one is getting any sleep here tonight.”

The old woman got out of bed, dressed me up in my coat, and then put on her own outer winter clothes with a heavy, black
mancale
over her head. We went out into the cold February night. The deserted streets were lit by a sky full of sharp, bright stars and a smiling crescent moon, and I felt happy again – except for Nanna grumbling all the way up the hill. She said she could hardly feel her hands and legs anymore. She had been up since dawn, chopping the gristly meat for
capicolli
and sausages, salting the
prosciutti
, pickling the hog's head for
ialatina
, boiling and stirring its blood for blood pudding. She couldn't count how many times she had rinsed out the greasy pots and pans with frigid water. And now, to complete her day, she really needed this
passeggiata
at this ungodly hour, with the
signorina
from Piazza Don Carlo!

When we got home, Mother answered the knock on the door, wearing her long white shirt and holding a lantern in her hand. She looked fearful that something had happened.
Nanna
Caterina just pushed me inside the house, happy to be rid of me. She said crossly, “Here, here, you can have her.”

Mother sounded very angry with me in front of her mother-in-law. She exclaimed, “
Oi!
Something told me this would happen. What could we expect? Go to bed with children, wake up with fleas.”

At this point, I started crying again, imagining I would get a good spanking from my mother for my acting so childishly. Instead, when Nanna left, Mother tucked me
into the warm bed next to her, kissed me, and whispered gently, “Stop crying now. It's nothing serious, as long as nothing's happened to you, and you're safe at home.”

Part V

I sit in contemplation in my bedroom, trying to ward off sleep. I've been shut in for three days, transposed to another time, in an almost different dimension. What is the relationship between that ten-year-old girl and the woman sitting alone on a bed cluttered with notebooks, wanting to write the quintessential Calabrian love story?

The people I've revisited are not only old friends and neighbours; they formed the life I was born into. With my eyes half-closed, I see them all appearing like still frames on an old grainy movie reel. I have lived in the shadows of these characters without ever realizing it. To what extent have they dictated how I've lived my own life till now?

I'm reliving the stories from a different place and time, and I can't help but question motives and actions that at the time went ignored or simply untold. If Aurora had been really pregnant when she tried to commit suicide, and Totu was not the father, who was? No one spoke of the missing piece to that puzzle. Aurora, a girl named after the dawn, was callously nicknamed a “little gypsy” in the same way that real gypsies were spoken about – people of no account, without homes, whose lives were not worth talking about.

This story has no proper ending yet, its characters suspended, as if in transit, in the labyrinth of my imagination. I know that stories need a beginning, a middle, and an end. How – or when – do you give a story floating in space its final resolution?

“Invent, invent,” is the writing instructor's mantra. Is this what writers do when truth escapes them? Already, in looking back to my childhood years, I can hardly determine if what I remember are dreams or facts. What I'm certain about is that I and the village women I've known all carry a history and worlds of stories within us – all worth telling. I'll need to set my reminiscences on paper, not only to preserve the memories but to find a compass for my own peregrinations. It's a well-worn truism: How can I know where I'm going, if I don't understand where I've come from?

For now, I relish having relived the delight and joy I derived from those evening
passeggiate
with the girls. There's one other special person who comes into my thoughts only now and then, but whenever he does, he also makes me smile.

In Mulirena, school was dismissed at lunch every day. Signor Gavano used to engage me in a little guessing game as we walked home.

“Signora Maria is having
minestra
today,” he'd say. “But it smells different from usual. What do you think it is, Caterina?”

I would take a whiff and answer: “I think it's the zucchini flowers.”

“Signora Paola is frying
pipe e patate
… again. Didn't she have that yesterday?” I liked the way he pronounced the dialect expressions.

Fried peppers and potatoes were a very common meal, and one of the easiest to detect, unless the fishmonger had been in the village. Then, from every other household, there emanated the sizzle and odour of tiny smelts frying in olive oil, and I would nod and laugh each time he repeated
pisci friuti.

As we reached Piazza Don Carlo, he'd ask: “Now guess, Caterina. If yesterday I had
pasta e faggioli
; Tuesday,
pasta e fave
; Monday,
pasta e rape
; what do you think I'll be having today?”

“
Pasta e patate?
” I might have ventured with a smile. Donna Rachele, his landlady and cook, had a very limited and predictable repertoire.

“Ah, maybe, but… it could also be
pasta e broccoli
. I'll tell you tomorrow, but whatever it is, it will be delicious,” he'd say with a wink and a little squeeze on my shoulder. I'd turn toward my house and he'd walk up one house further to where Don Cesare and Donna Rachele lived.

I remember Signor Gavano in tones of tan and sand. It must have been because he wore a tweedy jacket with little brown and beige squares. His hair was tawny blonde: fine and straight and parted to one side. His pants and shirts were always impeccably clean and well pressed, and he spoke the most limpid Italian I had ever heard.

I don't remember my first-grade teacher well, except that she was pregnant and was replaced by a teacher from Catanzaro in the middle of the year. This new teacher was big-breasted and had the haughty posture of all the
signore
from the city. She was always hot and tired. She would sit by her desk, which was on an elevated platform, and fan herself, complaining about the flies, while the class ran around in circles. When an inspector from the city school headquarters was expected to visit, the teacher tutored us for days on how to answer his questions. She instructed us to always look at her hands, which would be crossed behind her back. If the inspector asked a math question, she would stand or bend her waist strategically to give us the right answer. When the inspector asked how we liked our new teacher, I was the only one to confess that I liked the other one better. The Signora taught us second grade too, and the chances were that she would bring us through to fifth grade, as it was the tradition in the schools there for a teacher to take the same group from the first to fifth grades.

One day, this teacher asked the class to study a passage about love of country from the book
Cuore
by Edmondo De Amicis. In the evening, I read it over and over, and by the next day I could recite it by heart. The teacher, impressed, paraded me in front of the third, fourth, and fifth grade classes to show off how well she had taught her student.

Walking into each class, I felt nervous and afraid I would forget everything. But each time I stood on the elevated platform in front of the teacher's desk, I was able to recite,
Perché Amo l'Italia
da
Edmondo De Amicis:

I love Italy because my mother is Italian, because the blood that runs through my veins is Italian, because Italian is the soil in which are buried the dead for whom my mother weeps, and whom my father venerates. Because the city where I was born, the language that I speak, the books that I read, because my brother, my sister, my friends, and the people that I live with, and the beautiful nature that surrounds me, and all that I see, that I love, that I study, that I admire is Italian. Because…. because…

From that day on the Signora gave me preferential treatment. Most days, she would bring her torn and flimsy sheets, her husband's worn-out socks and undershirts, and have me sit on the large balcony to do her mending while the other students had to repeat the addition and multiplication tables ad nauseam. I had the company of the housewives who chatted from one balcony to the other and exchanged notes on what they were cooking for lunch.

Signor Gavano came to teach fourth grade at about the same time that my father left for Canada. The new teacher never expressed any scorn about the condition of the schoolhouse or the village, which must have been a world apart from where he came from, and he called all the women, including the peasants, Signore.

From her balcony, Donna Rachele liked to brag to everyone that she never even had to make Signor Gavano's bed or clean his room. He cleaned up after himself, unlike the men in the village. Donna Rachele even whispered to Mother that in the evenings, she often saw him make the sign of the cross and bend his head in prayer before going to bed. In Mulirena, showing religious piety was reserved for women and children.

Besides the history of the village, Signor Gavano taught me how to speed-read a book, by reading the first sentence of a paragraph and scanning the rest.

When Signor Gavano heard I was leaving for Canada, he joked sadly that soon he wouldn't even have a job in Calabria because the kids were all going away. He taught us about Canada's forests and lakes and its abundance of fresh running water – undoubtedly what he had learned from his old geography books. One day, he showed us a map of Canada, coloured green for forests, with splashes of blue for the lakes and rivers. Then he placed a minuscule boot-shaped piece of paper next to it, to show the difference in size of the two countries. He spoke of
un immensitá di spazii,
and the word “immensity”
took on the shape and colour of the silent forests of Canada. There was no mention of cities or people, as though Canada were only land and water.

Signor Gavano went back to his home at the end of fourth grade, but returned in the fall to teach the fifth grade class. By then, the village had embarked on the construction of new public buildings, and the school was moved from a converted house in the centre of the village to a new, separate building, which it shared with the municipal office. It was built on an open field,
il Campo Sportivo
, a sport's field used mostly by boys playing soccer or riding their bicycles. The new classrooms didn't have any balconies, but their large windows faced a wheat field, with stubby fig trees scattered here and there. When the midday sun hit the windowpanes, the whole classroom seemed to sparkle in brilliant sunlight.

I remember the day I went to say goodbye to my fourth grade classmates and to Signor Gavano. It was at the end of January. The wheat field, which in summer had shimmered in flaxen yellow, dotted with red poppies, was now reduced to wet stubbles of straw, and the fig tree branches struggled and bent with the wind and the rain. My friends had little going away gifts for me: embroidered handkerchiefs, doilies, a scarf. Signor Gavano surprised me with the gift of
I Promessi Sposi
, the novel
I would have studied in high school had I remained in Italy. He took my hand and held it in his. He looked into my eyes and wished me
un bel avvenire
.

“You're going to a big country,” he said. “You'll have many opportunities. But don't forget us. After all, Italy too is a big country.”

He had crystal-clear, aquamarine eyes.

I loved him.

We left Mulirena on February 31, 1957, on the same day that the first TV set was brought to the village. I spent the rainy January afternoon with mother, Luigi, and Zio Pietro, shuffling the contents of our bulging suitcases, agonizing over what to bring and what to leave behind, while a constant stream of people came by, bringing more pungent-smelling parcels to add to the pile of what was left to be packed. They came with letters tied to packages of homemade cheeses, salamis, and dried oregano to be delivered to their close friends and relatives in Montreal. Zio grumbled with each last-minute addition, and Luigi and I grew impatient because we wanted to go out and see the TV set that Peppino, the bar owner, had received that morning, and that everyone who came by was talking about.

But then, the butcher's daughter who worked across from the bar told us not to bother, that Peppino had turned the TV off and sent all the gawkers away. She had watched the commotion from her shop that morning. Peppino's sons and the bar regulars had unpacked the set impatiently, taking turns adjusting and tuning it, only to stare at fuzzy snow and jumpy white lines. She finally went over and yelled at them to at least turn off the ear-piercing sound, if they were going to stand there, transfixed like
babbi
for the rest of the day. Peppino explained to her and to the crowd that had gathered around that the sound proved that the TV set was in good working order. He invited everyone to return later when the television would truly come to life. He would serve free espresso and
bibite
while they all watched the one and only program scheduled that evening,
Lascia o Raddoppia,
a game show that all of Italy was raving about. Of course, by then, we would be leaving for Santa Eufemia to catch the ten o'clock train for Naples. I felt like I was leaving a party just when things were beginning to happen.

The start of winter had been milder and had seemed less somber to me than usual. Nanna Stella had wrapped green tomatoes from the summer's bumper crop in newspapers, and they had ripened slowly. It was unheard of, she said, to eat red tomatoes until the end of January. Mother spoke less and less of the war days, when all they'd had to eat were wild field greens and a few thin slices of rationed yellow cornbread. Now the bread was baked at Nanna's store and was white and plentiful. And, for snacks, she spread it with
formaggino,
the triangular-shaped little creamy cheeses wrapped in silver foil.

Since we had received our visa, there wasn't a day that someone didn't offer me something to eat or drink and say, “Eat the
capicollo
”
– or the fig, or the chestnuts – “while you can, for you're never going to see them again.”

While Mother reminded me of all the good things around us that we would be leaving for good, she also smirked at the desire for luxury that was sweeping the village.
Che lusso!
she'd say, whenever we allowed ourselves a new indulgence.

The Amatesi had not only gotten their ice-cream maker before the Mulerinesi. They had also been able to watch the black-and-white television screen at their local bar almost a full year earlier. Many of the men and boys had walked to Amato every Thursday evening to watch
Lascia o Raddoppia.
In the show, contestants were asked impossibly difficult questions on
geography, history, politics, and literature. After a first correct answer, they won a large sum of money. They then had to decide whether to walk away with their winnings –
lascia
– or take a chance with another question and double the loot –
raddoppia
– if they answered correctly. If they were wrong, they lost everything. The show's host was Mike Buongiorno, a suave, good-looking man who had gotten the name Mike after a short stint living in New York. The day after each show, the talk around the village was of how much money had been won or lost. Most of the amounts, in the millions of lire, sounded astronomical and unreal to the villagers. The whole nation was glued to the TV set every Thursday evening, watching the winners, who became millionaires and instant national celebrities.