Our Roots Are Deep with Passion

by Lee Gutkind

  When I visited Lisbon, the old Portuguese women looked and sounded like my grandmother to me, something about the swing and clip of their words. We all know about the influence of the Arab “u” in the southern Italian dialects, but what about the influence of the Albanese, Francese, Tedeschi? What about the influence of all those eastern Mediterranean cultures? Like Comma’ Luci’s family who were Grigiott’, the Greeks, who lived in a certain neighborhood of Tolve. What does it mean that they were “Greek”? Does our dialect include residual Greek words and phrases? Whatever the elements are that make it up, our dialect has the sounds of intimacy, the sounds of an enclosed, hermetically sealed world.

  The words Miss Collins used that day were the strange ones. If she was correct, she was not right. What did she know? She wasn’t the one who made the weekly bread supply along with ’a pizz’—to be eaten on Saturdays—in the woodoven Grampa built for his ’a Figliol’ (young girl) Gramma, down by the road once a week. She didn’t help to slaughter a pig and then pour boiling water on the pig’s skin to get the hair off, then gut its innards so that we could roast the pig carcass on a spit, or butcher it in order to make salscici’ for the ragu, or ’a salscici’ that was then dried and preserved in olio di’oliv’. She didn’t cure the prosciutt’, can the peaches. She hadn’t gotten up before dawn to feed the chickens, collect the eggs, milk the cows before she went to school as my mother and her sisters did. She didn’t shovel pig shit into barrels to fertilize the garden.

  Miss Collins doesn’t know the smell of pig shit on a hot summer day that filled the nostrils of my mother and her sisters one summer as they picked bones out of the pig manure to sell because it was a hard time for her family. She doesn’t know the intense, salty, cheese and prosciutto smell from the wine cellar where all the drying cheeses, prosciutt’, and salscici’ hang, the smell from the wine barrels soaked with intense red wine, the damp smell from the damp stone walls, and the smell of the fat crisping from the pig roasting on a spit in summer. She doesn’t know the smell of tomatoes that have been picked in the summer heat, blanched in boiling water, peeled, then packed along with basilicol’ into large glass jars that have been boiled on long hot summer afternoons in gigantic pots to sterilize them. This project alone took weeks every summer, as the tomatoes were jarred, then carried down the rickety stairs in bushel baskets to line the long sciangiatt’, creaky, wooden shelves in the side canning cellar, not in the root and wine cellar where the prosciutt’, scamozz’, and dry salscici’ and other preserved foods that Gramma makes hang, not the main cellar where the salscici’ is made. She hasn’t laid the rest of the tomatoes out on large sheets in the sun to dry to make ’i conserv’, which will thicken and sweeten the ragu all year long.

  Still, Miss Collins has ripped a tear in the fabric of our mapped world. Our language wasn’t “real.”

  Miss Collins went to grammar school with the movie star Rosalind Russell. “Even then she was a devil. She’d try anything. Oh, she was a wild one,” Miss Collins said, proud to have had such a friend as a child. “She was always climbing over fences. One day she ripped her underpants and she took them right off and threw them on the ground.”

  She was short and elegant, sharp, and a snappy dresser. She traveled in the summer with Miss Burney, who taught second grade, who was quiet, sober, not sharp or a snappy dresser, but she wasn’t sad and alone like Miss Martino, whose sadness made her mean. Miss Collins, the snappy dresser, liked us. There was always a light in her eyes that spoke of humor, pleasure at being alive, a lack of resentment at teaching us, the sons and daughters of the flotsam and jetsam that had floated ashore in America.

  We girls, who sat on the stairs near the baseball field brushing our long flowing hair so the boys would notice us, couldn’t reconcile our sense of our teachers as women who held great authority over us with the fact that they had agreed not to be married. Miss Collins alluded to romance. Men she met when she traveled in the summer? Did I make that up? Was she independent and didn’t want the must and should that all the women in my family lived with?

  Now I wonder if she and Miss Burney were more to each other than we could have understood. Was teaching a haven for gay women? Was the convent a sanctuary of professional life and respectability for our nuns who taught us catechism on Monday afternoons in the convent on Hillview Avenue?

  In the fifties we felt so sorry for the nuns who were “married to Jesus,” we said with our eyes round and shocked, heads shaking in a studied admiration that barely hid our disbelief, our condescension. Most of us would have signed right up to be nuns if it hadn’t been for the prohibition against marriage and having babies. For our teachers it made even less sense. They weren’t married to Jesus. “They couldn’t get married back then. That’s terrible. Then it was probably too late.” Whose words are these, stored so carefully in my head? Our mother’s, then ours?

  Miss Collins, the snappy dresser, the very pretty, the teacher who traveled with Miss Burney, who had had Rosalind Russell for a childhood friend, who had the good sense of humor and real affection for us, said, “I went to Roma, this summer,” with an unmistakable American pronunciation. “It’s called la pizza and it means pie. It’s not ’a pizz’.” I guess you could call it mutual condescension made of whole continents of misunderstanding.

  Miss Collins didn’t know that our dialect preserved the ancient firstperson form of sapere, which is saccio, the word that Dante uses for “I know” in L’Inferno. In modern Italian it’s been changed to so, even though the cognate structure for fare still uses faccio for “I made.” Fare and all the “made” constructions are practically copulatives in Italian, used the way the infinitive “to be” is in English. At Boston University, years later, I sat through years of Italian taught by our old Pirandellesque professor who refused to do anything but read each book to us droning for an hour and a half on Tuesdays and Thursdays, reading the Italian, then translating it, looking up in disgust every half hour or so to ask, “Are there any questions?” daring us to even consider engaging him.

  I learned nothing about Dante, but two things about our dialect. I noticed that Dante used saccio, just like we did. Ma chi sacci’, i sacci’, no sacci’ i. Who knows, I know, I don’t know, were all a part of our everyday parlance in Waterbury. Once in my Dante class, the word sciagurato came up in the middle of Book XX. When I heard from the periphery of my miasmic fog the professor ask if anyone knew what the word sciagurato meant I swam up out of my stupor and raised my hand for that one and only time and said, “I do. My grandmother used to say ‘chiest’ femmine si chiamano sciaguratu’, remaniesc’ senz u’ marit’ e senz’ innamurat’.” These bad women who are called sciagurat’ wind up without a husband or a lover.

  He snorted in bitter recognition, then caught himself and stopped. “Yes, it means something like that, a person of a slovenly nature.” That was the only spark of life I ever saw in that class. I learned that my dialect had some deep connection to an older world that I barely glimpsed that day.

  Miss Collins and Miss Burney who sometimes traveled together in the summers didn’t know that my grandmother sang to all her creatur’, rocking them in their baby carriages, one foot rocking the front axle of the carriage, like the treadle of a sewing machine, the wheels of the carriage creaking in rhythm, her hands free to crochet in rhythm, while she chanted, Ninna nonna, ninna nonna, which means sleep grandma, implying sleep for Gramma’s sake. It was common for a mother or grandmother to address her child by her own appellation, a commonplace of affection and connection. Individuation was not on our map, only connection, union and merging. It’s not until I live in New York and I hear Spanish mothers and grandmothers saying this to their little ones, “Mami, don’t do that.” Meaning “my child, child who belongs to me or even child with whom I am one, don’t do that.” We’re one culture.

  The summer my husband, Bill, and I went to Portugal, we spent days along the Tagus. The next summer we went to Turkey and spent the same overheated listless summe
r afternoons along the Aegean coast. Each end of this Mediterranean felt the same. At times I would look up and think, “Italy? No, Turkey, no, wait …”

  Then the following year we had no money and we spent our long summer afternoons bleeding into evenings, bleeding from cerulean blue into indigo, along the estuary of the Hudson rushing out toward the western shore of the Atlantic, on the promenade in Battery Park City, in New York City. Here again, the same watery edge on the lip of a large expanse of sea or headway rushing into the larger body was the same. Always the golden glow, always the sense of being held just at the edge of the larger other that an immense highway of water brings to its shores. All my connections were here: the eastern antecedents of the Greek, Semitic, Turkish cultures that flooded over into Sicily and southern Italy, then the trip our Mediterranean ancestors made in distress via Portugal, Spain, France to the shores of America. These connections, the eastern Mediterranean, the western Med, rushing out into the Atlantic, which rushes across to American shores, they all hold the same hope, the same imprisonment, the same possibility.

  Gramma said, rubbing our bruises in a gentle circling motion, “San’ e san’, ogg’ ruot, e crai è san’.” Heal, heal, today broken, tomorrow healed. Years later, when I was teaching a women’s poetry class we began to discuss the ancient oral tradition of love poetry, or ritual songs and chants that women were often responsible for, marriage songs, funeral chants, birth songs. We began to discuss our own female oral traditions and I asked my students to bring in their mothers’ and grandmothers’ chants, blessings, sayings, and songs. When I sang my grandmother’s healing chant of san’ e san’ to show them what I meant, Inez, a Puerto Rican student of mine, said, “My grandmother sang the same thing all the time, exactly the same way.” Did that healing song travel the Mediterranean from southern Italy to North Africa to Spain, then to the New World? Did the Spanish bring it home with them after they conquered southern Italy? Did they bring it to us when they came and lived among us? This map of oral language was preserved in invisible ink and connected me to this woman’s family. I felt a wave of connection between this Latina woman and the women in my family. Our grandmothers healed us with the same chant.

  Miss Collins couldn’t know that. She couldn’t know that in places like Waterbury we’ve preserved these ancient words and songs and sayings long after Italians on the rest of the peninsula gave them up. When my mother and her sisters went to Tolve in 1986, our people laughed when they spoke the dialect language they had always used, the one my grandparents had brought with them when they arrived in the first decade of the twentieth century. Our relatives in Tolve had given up the dialect after radio and television took over their language. They didn’t say, “Si volema schi schiama nin se no, non schima scen,” if we’re going to leave, let’s go, if we’re not, let’s not go. (Let’s stay.)

  What could Miss Collins know about a mappin’? I’m sure she didn’t know that the word “map” comes from the same root word that mappine comes from. The Latin root word mappa means cloth or towel. In Medieval Latin, Mappa Mundi means sheet of the world because maps were originally drawn on pieces of linen. The word “mop” come from the same root. She didn’t. And we didn’t. But deep in the south of Italy, in the hill towns, this word root, this idea of the small piece of precious cloth that holds your world together, connecting worlds that you hardly know exist, held that meaning.

  If a dialect is a language without an army behind it, the mappin’ is our flag, our banner, holding aloft everything that has kept us at the edge. It’s the flag that hails our marginality. We were the backwater to all the great Mediterranean empires that conquered southern Italy. So the words that come down to us are words without formality, without hegemony, entirely noncanonical words. Is that why the words of confusion, mess, disorder, the curse words, the words of ruin, crippledness, dirt are the ones that have passed down to my generation? We had mappines on our shoulders, shovels in our hands, dough under our fingernails, bits of sausage caught between our teeth. The church damned us on the one hand for being the pagans we were, and all the Italians north of us, which means most Italians, damned us on the other hand as “those Arabs down there, those Africans.” They still say this even now, as they dismiss our people with a laugh and heads tossed in contempt, so afraid that they might be connected to us. They shouldn’t worry so much. They’re not. We’re not. Connected.

  Em beh’, what are you going to do? If anything we’re an ancient Semitic, Phoenician, Greek, Byzantine, Anatolian, maybe even Roman misconbrulia, mixed-up mess or confusion, an island of people that came loose from the eastern shores of the Mediterranean, more Near Eastern than Western, but from which in desperation, at the end of the nineteenth century, we floated ourselves across the Mediterranean in bits and pieces, in such tiny pieces we floated one or two people at a time through the Straits of Gibraltar and washed up on the shores of America. We collected in threes and fours along the edges of America. We made communities where the ancient mores of our culture preserve something so old it doesn’t have a written record, only a song here and a rag there.

  JOANNA CLAPPS HERMAN has published in Massachusetts Review, Kalliope, Crescent Review, Critic, Paterson Literary Review, Inkwell, Earth’s Daughters, Voices in Italian Americana, Italian Americana, Woman’s Day, Sing Heavenly Muse, and many other periodicals. Her fiction has been awarded The Bruno Arcudi Fiction Prize and second place for the Anne and Henry Paolucci Prize. Her essays have appeared in the collections Don’t Tell Mama and The Milk of Almonds.

  These Innocent Lambs

  . . . . . . . .

  LAURA VALERI

  An old Sardinian legend tells of a devil who came to live on this island, finding the rough seas, the rocky shores, the dust, and the desolate crags an abode more suitable than hell. The locals say they’ve seen tracks of fire where the devil’s hooves pass, and that he pesters goat-herders by turning cattle into red ants. If you ask enough people, some even claim to have seen his winged shadow. This devil has company, Sardinians say: blood-sucking women who attack babies in their cribs, and murderers who turn into goats by night because of unpunished misdeeds and scratch their horns on the window-shutters of their victims.

  Fortunately, in the early seventies, when our family spent its summers in the southern tip of this Italian island, my brother, my sister, and I were still unfamiliar with this particular stock of boogiemen tales. We were six, nine, and twelve respectively when my parents first bought a tight little cottage improperly called “little villa” (villino) on a shrubby, dry beach-cove called Costa Rei. There were only a dozen other cottages in the community, each one looking exactly like ours, and unless someone wanted to count the pizza joint seven miles north, the nearest sources of groceries or entertainment were the cattle farms far up on the hills. We could have pigs, ducks, and goats slaughtered for a modest price; we could have fresh milk, and even homemade jelly, but we could not have television, or toys for that matter, except for the few we managed to sneak in the trunk of the Renault 16 that every summer shuttled us from Milan to Rome and onto the rickety ship that ferried us into the Sardinian port.

  For entertainment we kids had ourselves—and the other twenty or so children whose parents vacationed there, decades before the Sardinian coast became the choice vacation spot of Saudi royals and European elites. We were a twenty-faced brat pack with three or four alternating leaders, middle-class urchins from cities of industry and crowd, eager to shed urban propriety. In the daytime, when we dared each other to tiptoe barefooted ever so slowly over a thirty foot stretch of pebbled road, then through the dune grass, and finally over the hot fine sand, all we knew was that the semi-precious St Lucy’s eyes could be found on the shores along with starfish, and that underwater, if you dove deeply enough, you could see moray eels twisting through cracked terracotta jars abandoned by who knows what past century’s galleon. But without movie theaters, restaurants, or even a fairly stocked supermarket, it took some ingenuity to fill the long evening
hours. Even TV antennae were a luxury.

  Parents organized nightly card tournaments and elaborate potluck dinners (kilos of ash-roasted pig, liters of cioppino, mountains of crème brûlée), to celebrate island scarcity with wine, fresh seafood, and chatter, and singing to Mina and Gianni Morandi, and calling out each other’s pinochle trumps. But we, the kids, clustered noiselessly out on the porch, measuring boredom with tales: Well, everyone’s done the Ouija, with the little glass, but that’s kid’s stuff, the kind forbidden by Catholic nuns, I’m talking about possession here, as if our lives were not uncertain enough, You’ve got to be big like me, at least in the tenth grade, that we needed ghosts to validate us, It’s not for little kids with milk on the lips, to test our prepubescent courage, You’d start crying and you’d chase away the ghost. Or worse, to swap a yawn for a shiver: You’d bring the devil. Yeah, I said the devil. You think it’s funny, do you?

  The older kids could tease us, saying we were too small for a séance, but that would only get us begging for Lucia to help, the long-haired girl with the freckles and the pretty faraway eyes, the girl who looked at you without looking at you, whose voice was always a breath or two after her words; Lucia, who already spoke like she belonged to the ghosts, her long hair sweeping over the table top as she shook her head this way and that. She didn’t mind telling us about the drowned girl, the ghosts that slipped inside her nostrils once, tying up her tongue and flouncing her about like a Neapolitan puppet. Dangerous, she said. So dangerous that after, she slept for a whole week.