by Lee Gutkind
A Knock at the Door
It would happen like this. A knock on the crackled glass of the door to our tenement apartment in Hoboken, New Jersey. My mother, not expecting a visitor, opening it as she would for anyone who troubled to climb the four steep flights of stairs. She had nothing to fear. She knew that if the visitor was a stranger, by the time he got to our door, he would have been stopped, thoroughly checked out, and granted passage up to our apartment by one of the young men hanging out on the corner of Fourth and Adams in front of Albini’s Drugstore, by the old woman leaning out the window on the first floor of our building, or by the old man sitting in the sun on our front stoop.
So because there was nothing to fear from a knock on the door (World War II was over, my father back home unharmed, at work a few blocks away), my mother would put down her mending, or turn away from her ironing board, or pull a pot off the coal stove and open the door, hoping, perhaps, that it was my father home from work early or Argie from down the block—the only friend who could lure her away from the punishing rounds of her daily household chores.
Outside the door, not my father, nor Argie, but an old Italian man. Short, stooped, ruddy-faced from years of work in the sun, wearing a cap like my grandfather’s. Surprise on his face. Then, shame. A slight bow, as he took off his cap. “Mi dispiace proprio,” he’d say. “I’m very sorry.” He hadn’t known a woman would open the door. “ ’Mbriago?” he’d ask. ’Mbriago, the drunk. My grandfather’s nickname. The man had come to see him. He would be a distant relative from Vieste, my grandfather’s village in Puglia, or a crony from his railroad days in upstate New York, or a pal from his years of working on the docks in New York City. And he would be needing a loan.
Ours was a neighborhood of nasty nicknames—“Joey the Fat,” “Jimmy Goose Face,” “Bobby Snot Eater.” Even mine—“Miss Prim,” “Miss-too-big-for-your-britches,” or “Miss Smarty Pants”—given me by my father, were far from endearing, revealing my father’s disgust at what he called my holier-than-thou attitude. So my mother never recoiled at her father’s being called Umbriago. There were many old Italian men like my grandfather who worked all day, drank wine all day to fortify themselves for work, staggered home drunk, washed themselves at the sink, changed their clothes, poured themselves a little glass of wine to restore their spirits while they waited for their suppers, poured themselves a large tumbler of wine to accompany their meals, poured themselves a little glass of digestif so they would sleep all night. They, too, were called ’Mbriago. And even the ones who weren’t called ’Mbriago were drunk much of the time.
“Next door,” my mother tells the visitor, pointing. She knows that anyone who comes to see her father comes for a loan, the bargain sealed by a few glasses of my grandfather’s homemade wine. My mother, worrying about how my grandfather will support himself when he retires if he gives money to everyone who comes to his door, and because she embraces the American doctrine of self-reliance, slams the door on the old man, shakes her head, and grumbles her way back to her work.
The Table
In all the photographs, in all the moving pictures of my grandparents’ table, there is always bread, just enough food for satiety, and always a flask of wine. But there is never water. Not a pitcher of water, nor a glass of water. My grandfather, so far as I know, never drank water. Nor did my grandmother, much. A little glass of water for her on the hottest of days is all I can remember.
When I am young, I never notice that my grandfather does not drink water, that he drinks only wine. And his nickname, ’Mbriago, tells me nothing more about him than if he were called something else. For his drinking wine instead of water when he was thirsty was not something I questioned or remarked upon. It was as natural to me as the green of the trees in the park around the corner in springtime, the sweat of summer, the melancholy falling leaves of autumn, or the death of the soul in wintertime.
Home Movie
In one moving picture, taken by my father, my grandfather is standing behind his kitchen table, miming drinking down an entire flask of wine. My grandmother looks annoyed, tries to take the flask from him. He pulls it away from her, mimes drinking the entire flask of wine again. She becomes annoyed again, grabs his arm, tries to take the flask away again. But he turns away from her. He is the hero in his son-in-law’s home movie; he is enjoying playing the drunk that he is.
My mother sits at the table, looks away, cups her face in her hand, a gesture that I have come to understand indicates her displeasure at what is going on. There is an antipasto on the table. Another flask of wine. A cup of milk for me. But no water.
Water, Water
My grandfather began to work in the fields of Puglia when he was seven years old. When he worked in the fields, he was not given water to drink by the landowners or their overseers. Water was scarce; water was needed for the crops and for animals, who were viewed as more valuable than farmworkers who could more easily be replaced if they sickened and died.
In the fields of Puglia, as in fields all across the South of Italy, people working in the fields drank wine to quench their thirst, not water. Wine was abundant; wine was cheaper; wine was safer to drink—at least that’s what the farmworkers believed. Even now, if you travel to the South, if you see a group of farmworkers stopping their work for a few moments to rest, you will see them passing a flask of wine among themselves, you will see each man or woman wiping the mouth of the flask before passing it on to a comrade. “Passing the saint,” they call it.
And so, my grandfather began “passing the saint” when he was seven years old as he worked in the fields; he “passed the saint” each day of his farm work in Puglia until he left for America. And one of the reasons he left for America—one of the reasons many people of the South left for America—is because the South was arid, the South was drought-stricken, and because of this lack of water, farmworkers did not earn what they needed to support themselves during bad years. So, at the beginning of the twentieth century, when there were a series of droughts that left many unemployed, America beckoned. And by the time my grandfather left Puglia, the habit of drinking wine, not water, to quench your thirst was ingrained. Water was dangerous, he believed (and it often was); wine was safe (even though drinking wine long term would kill you, but this he did not know).
If my grandfather had lived in Puglia until 1939, if he had not emigrated to America very early in the twentieth century, he would have witnessed the completion of the great aqueduct that now delivers water to Puglia, albeit inadequately. It was begun in 1906 and encompasses 213 kilometers of subterranean tunnels built by 11,000 workmen. During the Roman Empire, eleven aqueducts served the imperial city. But the Pugliese people had to wait until almost the middle of the twentieth century for water to be brought to their arid land.
Perhaps my grandfather would have been one of the men building that aqueduct. But he was not. He lived in Puglia when water was scarce; when whatever potable water was available was sold to the poor at exorbitant prices; when much of the water of Puglia was tainted and undrinkable; when much of the water of Puglia was standing water, which bred mosquitoes, which gave the people of Puglia malaria, which killed the people of Puglia in astonishing numbers, especially the children and the old and the weak.
But the South of Italy was not always an arid land. The aridness and the lack of safe drinking water in the South when my grandfather lived there was caused by human beings and rooted in history and racism—the history of conquest, exploitation of the land and its people, and the refusal of the governments of the North to provide the South with the water it needed to sustain life.
The Englishman Norman Douglas traveled through Puglia and Calabria in 1922 to see how the modern South compared to descriptions of the region in ancient texts, such as those in the odes of the Roman poet Horace (65–8 BCE), who was born in Puglia, and the Iter Venusinum of Lupoli, and the texts of Virgil, Martial, Statius, Propertius, Strabo, Pliny, Varro, and Columella. He wrote about what he discovered in
Old Calabria, originally published in 1915. Everywhere he went Douglas looked for rivers, or streams, or springs mentioned in these ancient texts, and he discovered that virtually all of them had disappeared. He remarked upon how waterless the modern South is. How in the South, unlike the North, rains come during the winter when nothing is growing—in spring and summer, instead of rain, there is hot dry air, which makes it essential for the government to provide a system whereby water is captured when it’s plentiful and distributed when it’s not, only this isn’t done. How the only water to be had is bottled from mineral springs and sold by vendors. How peasants and farmworkers drink wine, not water; how they’re often drunk by midday.
But in Horace’s time, the South was “covered with forests,” and the forests were full of “hares, rabbits, foxes, roe deer, wild boars, martens, porcupines, hedgehogs, tortoises, and wolves,” virtually none of which survive now because the forests have been cut down or burned by invading armies. For Douglas, the South’s poverty was linked to how despoiled the land had become; he attributes the lack of water to deforestation; he attributes the diseases that have plagued the South—cholera and malaria—to what has happened to the water in the South because of deforestation.
He tells of the “noisome” waters that exist in this generally “waterless land” of the South, of how little the government has done to drain the swamplands that breed mosquitoes. He writes about how prevalent malaria is in the South, how taking doses of quinine is necessary to prevent malaria, but how the poor can’t afford quinine.
“I dare say,” writes Douglas, “the deforestation of the country, which prevented the downflow of the rivers—choking up their beds with detritus and producing stagnant pools favourable to the breeding of the mosquito—has helped to spread the plague [of malaria].” He writes how cholera is increasing, and how the government’s not providing adequate sanitation in the South has made its spread inevitable. He tells how, because of deforestation, there are more frequent landslides, and of how, after landslides, the threat of cholera becomes greater.
Centuries of invasion left their mark as well. Invading Turks burned down everything they encountered—towns, cities, forests—as they rampaged through the South. Spanish viceroys and Bourbons and Arab invaders destroyed the land. The Adriatic seacoast was depopulated during the Arab invasion, and villages and towns were destroyed: everything in the path of the invading army was burnt to the ground, and “the richly cultivated land became a desert.”
And what the foreign invaders began, the government in the North completed. Northern and German industrialists acquired rights to the timber of the South, and Douglas saw the slopes of existing forests felled during his journey. To denude hillsides of trees in countries with abundant rainfall was one thing. But to do so in a country with insufficient rainfall was “the beginning of the end.”
Douglas believed that politicians and industrialists were greedy and did not care that their practices would lead to disaster for the economy of the South in the future. Once hillsides were denuded, rainfall washed the soil away, exposing the rocks beneath, making reforestation impossible. But why should they care? They did not live there. The immense profits gained from these destructive practices went north, went out of the country, and often the workers who cut down trees were imported. So the people of the South did not profit from their country’s abuse.
Centuries of conquest coupled with the ravages of exploitative capitalism left the South devoid of two important natural resources, forests and water, and turned the South into the arid land my grandfather left. These acts changed the character of the people of the South. It led to the kind of “bestialization” and “anguished poverty” that Douglas observed—until the 1880s, the poor sold their children by officially sanctioned contracts.
Douglas tells how haggard the people are, and how “distraught” from hunger and thirst. He believed that it was because the land could not feed its people, could not provide employment for its people, could not quench the thirst of its people, that the great emigration of the people of the South to America occurred.
Later in the twentieth century, Carlo Levi’s observations were essentially the same as Douglas’s. Levi spent time in Lucania, the desolate region between Puglia and Calabria, as a political prisoner. In Christ Stopped at Eboli, Levi describes the state of this region when he lived there.
Hills of clay had become its most prevalent geographic feature. Wondering how they have been formed, Levi asks a local and is told that the trees have long since disappeared and the once fertile topsoil has eroded, leaving clay. Now, because there are no trees to hold the clay during the rainfalls of winter, there are frequent landslides. “The clay,” he is told, “simply melts and pours down like a rushing stream, carrying everything with it.… When it rains, the ground gives way and starts to slide, and the houses fall down … the clay simply melts and pours down like a rushing stream, carrying everything with it.”
Because the earth can’t support agriculture, many of the men of the region emigrated to America, destroying the family structure of the region. “For a year, or even two, he writes to her, then he drops out of her ken …; in any case he disappears and never comes back.” The women form new attachments, but they cannot divorce, so that many of the children are illegitimate. But the children die young, or “turn yellow and melancholy with malaria.”
Levi believed that the South became poor because “the land has been gradually impoverished: the forests have been cut down, the rivers have been reduced to mountain streams that often run dry, and livestock has become scarce. Instead of cultivating trees and pasture lands there has been an unfortunate attempt to raise wheat in soil that does not favor it.… [M]alaria is everywhere.”
For Levi, the effect of chronic malaria has been inscribed into the character of the people of the region. Malaria has robbed the people of the South of their ability to work and to find pleasure in the world.
Luxury Travel
When I take my husband to Sicily for his sixtieth birthday, we stay in a fancy hotel in Agrigento, overlooking the famous Greek temples.
At the end of the day, I take a long, hot bath. It is the time of the winds that blow up from the Sahara. There is grit on my body, in my hair, on my clothes.
Later, in early evening, I take a solitary walk into a village. I hear old women complaining to each other about how, for yet another day, there has been no water. A thousand yards down the road, in our hotel, there is an ocean of water. Here, none. Why?
When I return home, I ask a Sicilian friend. He laughs at my ignorance. “The Mafia,” he says. “They control the water.” He tells me to read Mary Taylor Simeti’s On Persephone’s Island. There I learn that in Sicily’s interior, very often there is water only once every five or ten days. This is not the fault of nature, says Simeti. For Sicily is “rich in water that flows to the sea unexploited” because of government neglect, and because the Mafia “controls the major wells and springs that tap subterranean water layers, and … sells its water at high prices” and interferes with any attempts to ensure a cheap, safe water supply for the people.
Working on the Railroad
My grandfather came to America when he was a young man. He came for a better life, yes. But he came, too, because he was afraid that if he stayed in Puglia he would die. Die from a bullet to the chest during the workers’ rebellions. Die from thirst. Die from starvation. Die from malaria. Die from cholera. Or die for no reason at all.
And regardless of the stories we have been told of the people of the South leaving because they wanted a better life in America, it was terror, more than anything else, that propelled him and the scores of others like him up the gangplank to the ship that would take him to America. Terror, and, yes, a job promised him by a boss recruiting men from his village to build a railroad line in upper New York State. The deal was simple. If you put your mark on a piece of paper, you’d get free passage to America. When you got there, you worked until you paid off your pas
sage. Until then, the railroad would take care of you. There would be nothing for you to worry about.
And so my grandfather came to America, and worked on the railroad, and slept in his filthy work clothes—there was no place to wash, no water to wash with—on vermin-infested bags of straw, covering himself with a discarded horse blanket, eight men to a roach-infested, windowless boxcar. He awakened at three in the morning, just like in Italy, and walked the line to the day’s worksite, and worked from five to twelve without stopping. For lunch, there was bread, and sometimes there was water, but not always, because fresh water was in short supply. In a 1916 essay called “The ‘Wop’ in the Track Gang,” Dominic T. Ciolli reported how the padrone of a gang like my grandfather’s complained to him because the laborers complained that they had no fresh water, had had no fresh water to drink or to wash with for weeks, and how the padrone said, “These dagoes are never satisfied.… They should be starved to death.… They don’t belong here.”
But, like in Italy, my grandfather said, there was wine, there was always wine for the workers to drink. Wine: antidote to rebellion. Wine: pacifier of those plagued by injustice. Wine: quencher of the rage. By the time my grandfather paid off his passage and moved to Hoboken to work on the docks, he was an alcoholic. But that word does not describe who my grandfather had become: a wounded man who had lost whatever hope he’d managed to salvage from the rubble of his life.
When my grandfather talked about his days on the railroad, there was a rage in his eyes, a rage that could pummel a wife, that could start a riot, that could burn down a building, that could kill a padrone, but that did not. And so. He’d take a glass, pour himself some wine, and then some more wine. After his third glass, he looked for the rage, but it was no longer there. After his third glass, he’d miss his mother, his father, his paisani.