“Where is your coat? How could that nun let you outside in this weather without your coat?” Giulia stood on the sidewalk and scolded me from across the street.
She was making a spectacle and I was mortified. The only modestly saving grace was that she was speaking in Italian, but her gesturing and agitation were clearly understood by the nuns and my classmates.
“Go back inside this minute and get your coat!”
I wanted to explain to her that this was a fire drill, but was afraid to speak, afraid to break the rules so dramatically presented to us by Sister Agatha as a matter of life and death. Six hundred children had burned to death at Our Lady of the Angels in Chicago because they hadn’t followed the rules.
My grandmother knew none of this. She knew only that her grandchild was shivering and the woman responsible for her was ignoring that.
I had watched in horror as Giulia crossed the street, removing her own coat and ready to wrap it around me, when the bell rang and we began to retrace our steps back into the building.
Now, inside Giulia’s house, I adjusted to the dim light of the long front hall. The portrait of the Sacred Heart, his hands spreading his cloak to reveal his throbbing scarlet heart, still hung in its place of honor above the radiator.
The house smelled of ammonia and wax and lemon oil. I was sure Giulia had scrubbed and polished meticulously before she left, leaving the house spotless, reflecting her own sense of order.
My sandaled feet echoed in the silent house as I walked down the hall. Although what I’d come for was upstairs in Giulia’ s bedroom, I went first to the kitchen.
Check the sink, the freezer, the pilot light on the stove, she had instructed. Make sure the back door is secured. Dominic Grazza, her neighbor who was supposed to be watching the house, wasn’t as reliable as she would like.
But all was as it should be. I drew myself a glass of water and sat in the red vinyl chair at the small table tucked into the alcove formed by the chimney wall. The table was only large enough for two. Through an archway was the larger table where supper was served, but at noon, when it had only been my grandmother and me, it was at this small table that we’d eaten together. I attended the morning session of kindergarten and came to her house every school day for lunch and to spend the afternoon. She always had ready a warm bowl of her homemade chicken soup or pasta e fagioli.
After lunch, when the dishes were dried and put away, I had remained at the table, my back against the warm wall, and watched and listened as women from the neighborhood came for my grandmother’s magic.
We called it the “eyes”—her spells to ward off headaches and stomach cramps; to bring on a late period; to counteract whatever curse had been set upon the suffering soul knocking at my grandmother’s back door.
It wasn’t just the immigrants who came. My own mother, my aunts, women who worked in banks and offices and got dressed in suits and stockings and high heels every day, made their way to her kitchen. There she’d lay her hands on them and dispel the pain with her incantations. When I was sick, the fever and nausea and loneliness flew from my troubled body into my grandmother’s open and welcoming arms.
Later in the afternoon, she always went upstairs to sleep, exhausted and without words.
I would retreat to the living room, knowing it was time to be quiet, and watch “The Mickey Mouse Club” until my father came to pick me up at the end of the day.
My afternoons with Giulia were an arrangement put in place because my own neighborhood had no Catholic school. Sending me to kindergarten in a public school was not an option in our family, so I spent the first year of my education in Giulia’s parish until my family moved uptown. Everyone seemed happy with the solution, especially my mother, home with two younger children and relieved of the burden of getting me to and from school every day.
I finished my water, carefully rinsed and dried my glass and replaced it in the cupboard. My responsibilities in the kitchen were fulfilled, and I walked slowly up the stairs to the back of the house, where Giulia’s bedroom overlooked the backyard and the garden. On her dresser were propped more images of saints. In front of them were three small red glass pots holding votive candles. It was the first time I’d been in the house when Giulia wasn’t there, and it was a disturbing reminder of her absence that the candles were unlit. I pulled out Giulia’s list and began to open drawers, tugging at the wood swollen with August humidity. Her checkbook and accounts ledger were in the top drawer, as expected. I had to hunt for the sweater she thought she’d need now that the evening air in the mountains was beginning to chill with the approach of September. A few more small articles of clothing were easier to find. The last item on the list was identified simply as a “cigar box” that was supposed to be in the bottom drawer under some bed linens. I was expecting another set of the flower-sprigged percale sheets and pillowcases that were on her neatly made bed, but these bed linens were heavy white cotton, elaborately tucked and embroidered with Giulia’s large and graceful monogram. I had never seen them on her bed. Small packets of cedar were scattered in the drawer and the pungent smell indicated to me that the drawer had not been opened in a long time. I lifted the linens and found a boxlike shape wrapped in another embroidered cloth. When I unwrapped the cloth, I saw that I had indeed found the cigar box.
It was papered in garish yellow and brown with the portrait of some nineteenth-century barrel-chested tobacco mogul on the cover, and a Spanish label. The box had once held Cuban cigars, but I was sure it wasn’t cigars I was bringing to Giulia.
I sat on the floor and carefully lifted the cover. Inside the box were stacks of letters on pale blue notepaper, each stack tied with a thin strand of satin ribbon. I could see that the letters had been written in a flowing hand in Italian and signed Paolo, the father my father had been too young to know, the grandfather whose red hair I had inherited.
I closed the box, feeling I’d already gone too far, that I had violated the privacy of a very private woman. Why she would want me to remove these letters from what appeared to be a hiding place and carry them across the Atlantic to her was both perplexing and intriguing. The woman who was asking me to do this was not the woman I knew my grandmother to be—the matriarch of our very large family, who had not only her sons and daughters, but her nieces and nephews, grown men and women in their fifties and sixties, listening to her and deferring to her as if they were still children; the businesswoman who’d asked me to collect her mail as well as her checkbook so she could manage her real-estate investments from her hospital bed; the woman who could be counted on to have a sharp opinion and directive about everything that touched the lives of her children and grandchildren.
Perhaps because I’d been a baby when her husband Salvatore had died and I had only known Giulia as a widow, I could not fathom her ever being in love. I knew, of course, that she’d been married before Salvatore to Paolo Serafini. But that had been long ago, and whatever traces of him remaining in her memory were well hidden. We did not even have a photograph of Paolo.
Giulia had never seemed to have much use for love. She had warned me away from romantic entanglements more than once when I was a teenager.
“Stay away from Joey Costello,” she told me one evening as we were shelling peas on her front porch. I was thirteen; Joey lived next door to her. He was a year older, full of the swagger and bravado of the good-looking Italian teenage boy. But he had noticed me and was paying attention to me in ways that I, bookish and reserved, found thrilling.
“He’s nothing but trouble. You don’t need to be hanging around the likes of him. At the very least, you’ll get a reputation, like that putana of a sister he has. And at the worst, he’ll break your heart as soon as somebody who can sway her hips better than you walks by him. You’re too smart, Cara mia. Don’t waste your time on boys like that.”
Later, when I was sixteen and spending a week with her while my parents were away, I developed a crush on a neighbor who lived nearby, one of her tenants. He wa
s married and in his twenties, with two small children. But he did chores for Giulia around the garden and the house, so he was around to talk to as he fixed a faucet or dug up some rosebushes she wanted to transplant. He was cute and funny and attentive and, in the short time I’d been there, it seemed to me he was finding quite a few things to do for Giulia. When his wife went to visit her mother with the kids, I suggested to my grandmother that we invite him to Sunday dinner.
“Phil’s all alone today. Wouldn’t it be nice to ask him to eat with us?” I was trying to sound like the gracious lady of the manor, bestowing kindness on the hired help, rather than the infatuated teenager I was, looking for any reason to be in his presence. I was nonchalant, mentioning it as an afterthought as she and I cleaned up after breakfast.
Giulia looked me in the eye, put her hands on her hips, and said, “Absolutely not. Don’t think I don’t know what’s going on in your head. He’s a married man. He stays in his house and eats what his wife left for him, and you put your daydreams in the garbage where they belong.”
And that was that. I spent the day sulking at the lost opportunity and marveling at Giulia’s ability to sense even the most subtle vibrations of sexual attraction. She was the watchdog at the gates of my virginity, the impenetrable shield that would keep me from becoming a tramp.
Now I gathered up Giulia’s possessions and stowed them in the zippered tote bag I planned to take onboard the plane. After a final glance around the room, I shut the door and headed down the stairs and out to my car. I pulled away from the curb and the memories and headed for the airport and Italy.
Chapter 2
Journey to the Mezzogiorno
THE CACOPHONY OF THE Naples train station assaulted me as soon as I stepped off the express train from Rome. Announcements of departing trains reverberated across the vaulted space; mothers scolded misbehaving children; whistles shrieked; a group of yellow-shirted boys kicked a soccer ball near the far end of Platform 22.
As I adjusted the strap of my bag, I also adjusted my mental state—from efficient New York manager and organized mother of four—to Italian. It was more than recalling the lyrical language that had surrounded me in Giulia’s house. I knew I had to pour myself quickly into the fluid, staccato pace of Campania in August or I would be trampled—by the surging population, the Vespas leaping curbs, the suspicion of strangers and by my own sense of oppression.
I knew this because I’d been here seventeen years before, a bright-eyed high-school art student who’d spent the summer in the rarefied atmosphere of Florence, living in a cinquecento villa, painting in the Uffizi on Mondays when it was closed to the hordes of summer tourists, reading Dante and Boccaccio. I had believed that I knew Italy. But then I had come south, to visit Zia Letitia.
I had traveled by rail then as well, through Rome to Naples. A stifling heat had encroached on the overcrowded train as it journeyed farther south, toward an Italy that I didn’t recognize. The blue-greens and purples of the Tuscan landscape, warmed by a honeyed light, had given way to an unrelenting sunshine that had seared the earth to an ocher barrenness.
Everything I saw seemed to be the same color—the rough-hewn cliffs, the crumbling houses, the worn faces.
When I’d arrived at midday in Naples—sweaty and cranky—I felt myself to be in a foreign country. For the first time in my life, I had felt menaced—by the drivers in minuscule Fiats who ignored traffic signals, by the barricaded expressions of the people massing and knotting around me, by the heat and clamor and stench that had so unraveled the beauty and civility of this once-splendid city. The life of Naples was in the streets—raw, intemperate, flamboyant—and to the eyes of strangers, emotionally closed and hostile.
That day seventeen years ago, I had escaped on the two o’clock bus to Avellino, arriving two hours later in front of a bar named the Arcobaleno. In contrast to the press of humanity in Naples, a melancholy emptiness greeted me here. In the bar, where I bought a Coke and sought a telephone, I was the only woman. Two old men in the corner interrupted their card game to stare openly; the younger men, playing pinball, were more surreptitious but watched just as closely.
I called a phone number given to me by Giulia to make arrangements with a distant relative who could take me to Letitia. But the woman who answered was irritable. She had no time and could not help me. I would have to manage on my own. Take the bus, she barked. Just tell the driver you need to go to Venticano. And she hung up.
Shaken and feeling increasingly alone, I’d found a bus that could take me up the mountain. Later than I’d hoped, the driver cranked the door closed and began the laborious climb out of the valley. He’d brought the bus to a halt in a deserted piazza and thrust his chin at the door to announce my destination. Within seconds I stood alone in the road, facing shuttered houses and an overwhelming sense of abandonment. Why had I even considered making this journey? I had naively traversed half the length of Italy expecting to be welcomed in my ancestral home, but instead the doors were locked and no one was willing to acknowledge me as their own.
With only Zia Letitia’s name—no address—I had approached a woman darning in the doorway of a nearby house, whose wary eyes had been upon me since I’d descended from the bus.
“I am looking for Signora Letitia Rassina,” I had explained, proud of my flawless High Italian, the only thing that stood between me and panic.
“You come from the north.” It was a statement, spat out in distrust and contempt, not a question requiring confirmation.
“I studied in Firenze, but I come from America. I am the granddaughter of Signora Rassina’s sister.” Unwittingly, I had uttered the magic formula.
The guardedness and suspicion fled from her face. She took me by the arm.
“Come, I’ll show you where the signora lives.”
As we turned to walk down the hill, I saw faces appearing at suddenly unshuttered windows and heard voices calling out to the woman. Within minutes, nearly thirty people crowded around us, jostling for a glimpse of the Americana as we arrived at Letitia’s house.
The house—ancient, once elegant—presented a silent facade to the tumult in the street below. No one responded to our energetic knocks and shouts.
“She must be sleeping. Giorgio, go around and get Emma.”
“Emma takes care of your aunt, and she has a key to the house,” she explained to me.
A few minutes later, smoothing down what seemed to be a hastily donned black dress, a middle-aged woman had hustled breathlessly after Giorgio with a key ring in her hand.
“No one sent me word from America that someone was coming!” She was both suspicious and injured to have been left out of the preparations for my visit.
Horrified that I’d been allowed by my family to travel alone, she was nevertheless satisfied that I was indeed Giulia’s granddaughter. With a shriek of pleasure, she inserted an iron key into the massive arched doorway of the house.
Inside was a musty vestibule, lit by the late-afternoon sun streaming through a window on the rear wall where a stone staircase led to a landing on the second floor. Emma led me up the stairs. Behind us came the rest of the villagers.
Once again, our knocks were met by silence. Emma called out Letitia’s name in a loud voice. “She’s old. She doesn’t hear so well anymore,” she murmured to me.
Finally, the door opened and a woman appeared, her face marked by confusion. She stared uncomprehending into my face. I stared back at a woman who could have been my grandmother’s twin. Letitia’s confusion receded as she listened to me identify myself, ignoring the commotion that surrounded her. Then she reached out and stroked the opal hanging from my ear. It was Giulia’s, and she’d given it to me on my sixteenth birthday. I’d been wearing the earrings all summer, and they had become so much a part of me that I’d forgotten their origins.
“Giulia’s earrings,” she whispered. “You are my blood.”
Letitia had pulled me into the apartment, embracing me with the mingled old-woman
aromas of garlic and anise and must. She sent Emma down to the shop to purchase ingredients for dinner and told the villagers lining the stairs to go home to their own kitchens. Alone together, we sat with a glass of very strong wine as she hung on every word I brought her of her distant family.
After dinner a group of young women from the village had arrived at the door to take me for the evening passeggiata—a walk around the village. Letitia had shooed me away with them. Severia, the young woman who’d been my tour guide, was the schoolteacher in the village. I was stunned when she told me she was only twenty. Like Emma, and nearly every other woman in the village, she was dressed in a severe black dress that extended below her knees. She wore her hair in the style of my mother’s generation.
The village was a grid of two or three streets clinging to the side of the mountain. Only the main road from Avellino that continued farther up the mountain was paved. Few of the stone buildings had electricity, and all of them showed the ravages of centuries of wind and earthquake. Dust swirled at our feet as we crossed the meager piazza, shared with a goatherd leading his scraggly flock back to a lean-to for the evening. Severia had pointed out with pride the small schoolroom where she taught from first through sixth grade. If parents wanted more schooling for their children, they had to send them down the mountain to Avellino.
I had recognized that what I was seeing and the lives that were enclosed here were little different from what Giulia had experienced as a girl. In that instant, I had understood that it might have been my life, as well.
“Thank God,” I had whispered to myself. “Thank God that my grandmother got out.”
The next morning I left, as I had come, on a dusty bus that had stopped when Emma flagged it down. She’d packed me a cloth-wrapped sandwich of bread and pungent cheese, with some tomatoes and figs from the garden behind Letitia’s stone house. She had clucked and worried about the long trip ahead of me to Milan and my flight home and had given me stern instructions to speak to no one on the way to Naples.
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