by Lee Gutkind
Last Supper
“The day your grandfather dies,” my father says, “he’s digging out the basement in the house of one of your grandmother’s relatives. And it’s hot down there, and it’s hard work because he’s got to put all the dirt he digs into a sack and carry it up the stairs and out to the back yard, and your grandfather is doing this to make a few extra bucks because his pension isn’t enough to live on and because he’s always giving his money away to anyone who comes to his door, and this pisses off your mother and your grandmother, but they can’t do anything to stop it.
“And this day, he isn’t feeling so good. He’s tired and dizzy even before he starts working, and after a couple of hours, he wants to stop working, but they tell him a deal’s a deal, and that he has to keep working. And to keep him working, those bastards gave your grandfather wine to drink. And, you know your grandfather, there wasn’t a glass of wine he would ever refuse. So he takes the wine, quenches his thirst, forgets he’s tired, and keeps right on working until mid-afternoon when the job is done. Keeps working through the heat of the day. Keeps working even though he’s hot and tired and dizzy and feels like he can’t breathe.”
The rest of the day goes like this.
My grandfather comes home, washes himself at the sink, changes into a clean set of clothes, has a glass of wine and a bite to eat with my grandmother. After he finishes his meal, he pours himself another glass of wine, gets the spiral notebook that lists the money people owe him, sits down at the kitchen table, starts tallying his accounts using a system of his own devising—he’s never gone to school, never learned arithmetic. He’s scribbling away, getting angry, because it’s a year later, and his wife’s relatives in Long Island still haven’t paid their debt, and he’s tallying how much they owe him when he falls to the floor. He’s had a massive heart attack.
A few hours later, my mother, my sister, and I come back home. My mother knocks on her father’s door to ask for help. We’ve been shopping; she’s tired of being with us; she wants him to take care of us while she puts her groceries away.
He doesn’t answer. She panics: He’s supposed to be home. She struggles my sister and me into our apartment. Tells me to climb through the open window out onto our fire escape. Tells me to climb through my grandparents’ open window, tells me to unlock their door.
I do as I’m told. I’ve done this before when my grandfather’s forgotten his keys. So this is why I’m the one who finds my grandfather dead.
Last Rites
At the wake, I go up to the casket to see my grandfather’s body. He is wearing his one good suit, the one he wears to my First Communion. There is the smell of flowers from a few commemorative wreaths surrounding him, the smell of mothballs emanating from his suit, the smell of death.
“That doesn’t look like Grandpa,” I say. “And it doesn’t smell like him, either.” A neighbor stands behind me. She is watching me, listening to me, awaiting her turn to view my grandfather’s body.
I am kneeling down, as I have been told to kneel by my father. I am supposed to be paying my last respects to my grandfather, as he has told me I must do. I don’t know what last respects are, just like I don’t know what first respects are, so I don’t know what I’m supposed to do. But I have watched the stream of visitors go up to the coffin, kneel down, touch my grandfather’s hands frozen in prayer, make a hasty Sign of the Cross, kiss their fingers, and move on. My mother kneels in silence next to me. She hasn’t said much since the day her father died; she will say even less in the years to come. Sometimes it will seem that she has followed him to wherever he has gone.
Everyone in the funeral parlor cares about how she is “taking it.” No one is concerned about how I am “taking it.” My grandfather, the man who took care of me whenever he could, who sang me songs, who told me stories I couldn’t comprehend of a land where wild seas drowned fishermen, where rainfalls were so powerful they made the land slide away, rainfalls so relentless that they washed away all the good earth and made it impossible to grow anything to eat; of a land where wolves ruled the night and men and women walked to the fields in the dark and worked in the blaze of day without a tree to shade them during their precious few moments of rest.
“And what did your grandpa smell like?” my neighbor asks.
I remember my grandfather, at his table, drinking wine. I remember my grandfather at our table, drinking wine. I remember my grandfather crushing grapes in the basement, stomping on them with feet that would stay purple until late summer. I remember my grandfather drinking wine when he took care of me, drinking it, sometimes, right out of the bottle. I remember my grandfather giving me watered wine to drink when he took care of me when I told him I was thirsty. I remember my mother being angry at my grandfather when she came back home and found me drunk, asleep on my grandparents’ bed, under the giant cross on the wall with Jesus Christ bleeding.
(In high school, I am the girl who drinks too much at parties. The girl who is always thirsty but who never drinks water when she is thirsty, only booze. The girl who drinks so much she can’t remember how she gets home. The girl who drinks so much that she passes out on the way home, once, in the middle of a four-lane highway.)
“And what did your grandfather smell like?” the woman asks again, for I have not answered her.
“Like wine,” I say.
The woman laughs. “ ’Mbriago,” she says. “That’s who your grandfather was: ’Mbriago.”
“No,” I say. “That isn’t who he was. He was my grandfather. Salvatore Calabrese.”
Transubstantiation
In Pier Paolo Pasolini’s 1966 film Uccellacci e Uccellini (The Hawks and the Sparrows), a contemporary Italian father and his son travel into the past, to the time of Saint Francis of Assisi, and become monks. The father, Brother Ciccillo, prays for a miracle. He prays that all the wine in the world be turned into water. He prays that there be no more wine in Italy. He prays that there be enough water in Italy so that those who have become drunks because they have had no water to drink will drink water, for they will no longer need to drink wine.
I read about Pasolini. Learn of his belief that the workers of the world, like my grandfather, will save the world. Learn that his father, like my grandfather, was alcoholic. Learn that his father, like my grandfather, died because he drank.
Brother Ciccillo’s hoped-for miracle: wine into water, not water into wine.
LOUISE DESALVO, winner of the Laura Pizer Prize in Creative Nonfiction, is Professor of English and Jenny Hunter Endowed Scholar for Literature and Creative Writing at Hunter College. She has published four memoirs, among them Vertigo, winner of the Gay Talese Award, and, most recently, Crazy in the Kitchen, and is at work on another memoir.
Words and Rags
. . . . . . . . . . . . .
JOANNA CLAPPS HERMAN
There is a hierarchy of rags in my house on North Main Street: the very good dust rags, the regular rags, the polishing rags, and finally the under-the-sink rags. Our old clothes, old sheets, and mappines are ripped into squares, and each is designated to its rag station. The rags descend from high to low as they rip and wear further, until they wind up under the sink to clean our filthiest messes. There, dried into dirty gray twists, these rags hang over the pipe. As said above to clean up our filthiest messes.
“Good dust rags” have the highest place and rank. After they’re ironed and folded they are carefully tucked behind my mother’s underwear in her bureau.
But the mappin’ is the flag of our everyday life. Though not of the same high rank and station as the good dust rags, the mappin’ is ever present, always ready to mop, wipe, dab every ordinary bit of mess and dirt. Slung over our shoulders, it is a mantle conferring affiliation in our female world. It’s our job to keep nature and civilization perfectly balanced: nature with all its incumbent mess outside, us neatly inside. All dirt, grass, leaves, insects are to be swept, dusted, pushed back out through windows and doors. If they can’t be pushed out, th
ese bits of fluid nature always wanting back in are to be vacuumed, scoured, dumped, made to disappear. All wood must be scrubbed, waxed, and polished until it resembles a material as far from the wildness of nature as possible. All stone, clay, glass must gleam, glimmer, and shine—vested of every rough uneven bit of soil or tree or mountain it may have emerged from. Our rags are our implements—the female equivalent of hammers, chisels, and saws—but the mappin’ is first among these, the most important tool in our polished female world.
“What a mess!”
“Quick. Where’s the mappin’?”
“Wipe that up!”
Things are often sciangiat’, strisciliat’, stambl’, sporc’ in Waterbury. Respectively these mean broken down, tangled up, a mess, confused or dirty. There are a lot of dirty, mixed-up messes in Waterbury. What if you are ’broglon’, someone who makes a big mess? No’ buon’ or non good. What if you’re stunad’, out of it, stupefied, citrull’, a cucumber (that dumb), and brazen about it? This could mean that you’re scustomad’, mal educa’t, senza educazion’, without custom, badly educated, without education, in short, ill-mannered, ill-mannered, ill-mannered. Bad, bad, bad.
If you know what’s good for you, you’d better stata citt’ and fate fatti tui’, shut up and mind your own business. Because if it turns out you’re fracomoda’, too damn comfortable, so comfortable as to be unable to move, lazy—which definitely makes us the kind of girls who will mai ess femini’ della cas’, never be good housewives—we’re going to get straightened out but good, with such a palliad’, such a beating, because you’re making your mother sciatt’, burst.
So it’s essential to get these messes cleaned up, straightened up. Subit’ mo’! Immediately! Now! If we’re up the farm with Gramma and we answer back, “I didn’t make that mess, Gramma. She did,” then she’ll say, “Citt’ na nonna.” Be quiet, Gramma, meaning, you be quiet, so you might as well just be quick about it and get that mappin’. Gramma, like all the old-timers, addresses the children with her own appellation. “Gramma, give Gramma kiss,” Gramma says, extending her permanently wrinkled, permanently garlicky cheek toward you.
My mother, my sister Lucia, and I have a mappin’ slung over our shoulders as we go about our work in the kitchen, to sweep past our mouths after we sample some steak pizzaiol’ from the pan on the stove, tasting the combination of steak with peppers, tomatoes, onions, garlic potatoes, all simmering in olive oil. Does it need salt? A little more hot? Or if we grab a bit of salad from someone’s plate when we’re clearing the table, we hold the mappin’ just under our chins as we lift the tomato dripping with dressing to our lips. Then we whip the mappin’, ready for us to wipe down the olive oil that dribbled onto the floor. A quick shake of the mappin’ into the sink and it’s clean again. Like kissing something up to God, shaking it out makes the mappin’ immediately clean. Unless it’s just come out of the mappin’ drawer, it’s always a little damp and makes the perfect rag to swipe every ordinary spill and mess.
The mappin’ is as basic to our lives as food. We’re out to clean the dirt off our hands and the manure off our peasant feet.
There are only two or three “good” mappines to use when company comes. The linen ones, always clean, ironed with perfect creases, are taken out of the linen closet a couple of times a year to dry the gold-trimmed etched glass water goblets that my parents still have left from their wedding presents. When company’s coming we take the glasses down from over the fridge and wash them in very hot, hot water. Then we dry them with the linen towels—the good mappines—until the glasses squeak. But those are very rare occasions. Maybe it’s because the New York relatives are visiting.
The everyday mappines have been recently laundered (at least one laundry a day), ironed, and folded in the precise and prescribed way—first lengthwise in three, then folded in half, and laid in piles in the mappin’ drawer exactly to the left of the equally ripped and ironed and folded cloth napkins. None of these are very far from their rag incarnation.
Mappin’ is our dialect word for dishtowel, but how ’Merican (pronounced Mer-i-KAHN) that sounds. But the word “dishtowel” connotes a neat cloth folded over a towel bar near the stove: clean, intact, more for show than use. It has nothing to do with the mappin’ as we know it. If the idea is to convert this word back to what might be, what no doubt is, the original Italian word, in the singular it would be mappina, plural would be mappine.
The daily use of dialect words in the course of the day is one of the ways we knew we were Italian and not Italian American. Although my generation doesn’t speak my mother’s family’s Tolvese dialect, we are definitely Tolvese, and Italian. We use the English nominative plural, the “s” to make the mappine into mappines. To us “dishtowel” sounds stilted, pretentious. Dishtowel, dishrag, wash rag. These ’Merican words sound awkward, unnatural. Don’t ’Mericans feel stupid when they use those words? A word like mappin’ should have a kissing closeness to onomatopoeia.
“Colander,” too, sounds so Anglo as to be Saxon. Scola maccarun’ sounds real; it rolls off the tongue like it’s supposed to.
“What does scola maccarun’ actually mean, Mom?” This occurs to me in a burst of linguistic awareness as I’m reaching for it from under the sink. It’s a Friday so we’re making aglia olio, no meat.
The three of us are in the kitchen. Lucia’s setting the table. My mother is frying the garlic in oil. I’m washing the parsley when my mother tells me, “Get the scola maccarun, Jojo.” Until that Friday, it has simply been the word for the object we use to strain the water once the linguine is cooked. (NB: You only use linguine for aglia olio.)
She pauses, puzzled and amused by what she finds herself saying, after she stops near the sink with the aluminum pot full of linguine. She’s ready to pour. “Well, actually it means ‘strain the macaroni.’ ” We don’t consider these words. We say them. They are our words. “Here, put it in the sink,” she keeps our preparations going.
“You mean you’re saying to us, ‘Get the strain the macaroni?’ ”
“I know, but that’s what it’s called. What can I tell you?” She throws back her curls, just released from the bobby pins but not yet brushed through, and laughs. Dad isn’t home yet and we’re hurrying to get dinner on the table. She hasn’t had a chance to run a brush through her hair and put her lipstick on, which she’ll do when she hears the truck crunch over the gravel in our driveway.
I’m asking about the scola maccarun’ because Miss Collins, our smartly dressed seventh-grade teacher, who’s just returned from a trip to Italy over the summer, said something today in an uncharacteristically peremptory manner. Just before we lined up in the pink girls’ side of the school basement to go back to our classroom, when we were talking about making ’a pizz’ in cooking class that day. “ ’A pizz’ isn’t a real Italian word. The real Italian word is La Pizza and it means ‘a pie.’ ” Miss Collins stood there, head high, certain in her pronouncement. La Pizza? Not ’a pizz’! How could that be? How could she knew more than us about our language? Where did she get this? Who does she think she is?
Miss Collins is one of the young women who went to normal school right after high school for two years to train to be a teacher. Teachers in that era were trained at two-year teacher training schools called normal schools. When these women accepted their teaching positions they signed an agreement not to marry. If they married they had to give up their jobs. Not so for men. Occasionally we’d hear a whisper about a female teacher who was secretly married until “they” found out. Then she was fired.
We are shocked that women would give up being married for a job, just as horrified as we are about their being punished, fired, for being married. We are shocked.
We know our family speaks dialect. Tolvese is our dialect and therefore buon’. “Meh,” Gramma laughs and covers the gaps in her teeth with one cupped hand when I ask her one day when she’s making distinctions between people who are Napolitano, Siciliana, and Barese, “What about the Tolves
e?”
“Su bas,” she says. Real low. Even so, being Tolvese is what we are and it seems inherently to be a good thing. Even if my generation doesn’t speak Tolvese it’s still ours. The dialect words lace our everyday cadences as naturally as English. They aren’t part of another language for us.
The words we use often have to do with the house, a cas’, or food, i’ robb’ ’i mangiar’, and to do with insults, mess, confusion, vulgarities. It’s a language of the home and street, at the margins of any lexical canon but at the center of our lives. So for example, “I have such a vuli’ ” means, “I have such a yen or desire for a particular food,” but “yen really doesn’t capture the same feeling,” my father says every time he translates it for someone outside our family. Bugiard’, liar, stravers’, perverse or pigheaded, determined to do things your own way, and therefore the wrong way, capa dost’, thick-headed, capa dur’, thick-headed, faccia dost’, thick-faced, or thick-headed. Do you see a pattern here?
Manaccia diavol’, damn the devil, va’Napl’, go to hell, or go to Naples, going to Naples being the equivalent of going to hell (I have no idea until I am a teenager that what we were saying had anything to do with Naples: the word meant how annoying), manag’ ’a ’Merican’, damn the Americans, malandren’, bad boy, mammon’, mama’s boy, but really anyone dumb or annoying, u pazz’, crazy, you make me schiatt’, you make me burst, said with fury, indignation, che bellezz’, what a beauty, really, you’re unbelievably annoying, canta tu, sing you, or go ahead and talk, tell them everything you, ma sona ma beech bastid. These words can’t be wrong. They are what we use to signify meaning and that meaning is communicated. That’s called language.
I don’t remember knowing there was another, “real” Italian until I am ten or eleven, though my mother always says about Grandpa Clapps’s second wife, Nanny Clapps, who was from Lucca, “Oh, she speaks such beautiful Italian. Her pronunciation is so beautiful.” She takes the time to pronounce each vowel fully, even the final ones. Our dialect is hurried; our family has to get out to the masseri’, the fields. Is that why so many vowels are elided or clipped?