Our Roots Are Deep with Passion

by Lee Gutkind

  For a while, things proceeded uneventfully; then, toward the end of summer, there came that fated night when it rained outside, and our behinds still ached with memories of our parents’ spanking for another palm tree defiling. Lucia was back, quiet and frail like that freckle-dusted nose of hers that defied the aquiline-snouted legacy of her proud Roman race. She spoke again under her breath, and with a fist under the thick curtain of her hair. Pietro Testa was away hosing gas for his boat from the unsuspecting tanks of visitors. We were all angry at him, anyway. We rallied happily to his revolutionary calls against Mr. Duri’s shrubbery, but we fiercely resented our mothers’ anger on his account. That night we were humble enough to lounge around in our living room, handling a card deck among us without any desire to play, and sampling an adult-like drink called Shandy that mixed our usual fizzy sugared water with a little drop or two of beer.

  But Giovanna kept grinning at Lucia, though it took many of the Roman girl’s skittering glances before Giovanna, as we Italians say, “spat out the bull frog”:

  “You should hear the talk around here, the way they build you up to look like you’re a witch. These little kids think you’ve got the power to summon the dead. I have to tell you straight up, I don’t believe in any of this shit. I think it’s all power of suggestion. Me, I guess I’m like St. Thomas: I’ll believe it when I see it.”

  Lucia wasn’t slow to take the bait. She straightened her posture.

  “Do NOT speak lightly of these things!” Her voice quavered for effect.

  We were all smart enough to build on the opening: “Oh, please Lucia, please, you promised. We’ll be good, we swear. We won’t call up any bad ghosts. We want to see for ourselves. We want to experience Spirit. You promised us one day you’d do it. We’ve been waiting all summer! Would you rather we did it ourselves? If it’s as dangerous as you say, isn’t it better that you help us?”

  “All right,” Lucia relented. “Maybe it’s better that I show you. But not a chain sitting. That’s too dangerous. The spirits can sit inside you if you don’t do it right. I won’t do that. I will do a Ouija, just that. Because look at that girl,” she said, pointing at Giovanna, who was grinning and snorting evilly. “That girl is a troublemaker.”

  We rounded up drawing paper and a small ashtray before Lucia could change her mind, and we warned Giovanna that if she was going to be that way she might as well walk in the rain back to her villa, or to her German friends and see what they knew about spirits. We drew the letters and the yes and no, and sat around the big dining room table with our fingers lightly resting on the thin glass ashtray while Lucia invoked Spirit with her eyes closed and her mouth set seriously in her face.

  “Spirit, if you are out there, please send us a sign.

  “Spirit, if you are out there, please let us speak to you.

  “We mean no harm, Spirit. We only wish to ask you simple questions.

  “Spirit, please reveal yourself; if you are here, let us know.”

  We held our breaths, as if breathing might scare away the ghosts, and we tried hard to keep our fingers light on the edges of the ashtray, lest we be accused of cheating. Only Giovanna grinned, now and again producing a cough that sounded terribly much like a laugh. Lucia threw her hands up, her long strands of hair flying behind her shoulders.

  “I won’t do it like this. When skeptics are in the room, only devils come.”

  “Oh, come on, Lucia, please. It’s only stupid Giovanna.”

  “I can’t help it,” said Giovanna, both hands pressed against her mouth. “I’m laughing because I’m nervous!”

  Lucia would not hear it. She kicked the chair back, and only because Giovanna grabbed her wrist and apologized did she finally agree to sit down and give Spirit another try.

  “But no laughing,” she warned. And Giovanna allowed a minute to let the giggles wear out, recomposed herself, and promised. No laughing.

  Lucia directed our fingers back to the edges of the ashtray, and after a brief apology to Spirit, she settled back into a trance-like quiet, her eyes closed, but rolling rapidly under her eyelids. She again intoned as before: “Spirit, if you are here, send us a sign. Spirit, alert us of your presence if you are with us.”

  She paused for a long while, her silence broken only by a barely audible whisper, the utterance of something like, “It’s here, I can feel the air changing.”

  Then the ashtray moved.

  Only a little, but very abruptly. It shifted just below the starting point.

  “Spirit, are you here?” Lucia asked. Her words broke up as she asked her questions. We understood what she said not because of each particular word, but because of our collective mood.

  The ashtray edged slightly toward the “yes.”

  “I can feel it,” whispered Lucia, her voice a frail reed. “A spirit is here, all right. Spirit,” she said to the ceiling, “do you wish to speak to us?”

  This time, the ashtray slid firmly to the “yes.”

  A chorus of questions exploded from our collective mouths; we all wanted to know if it was true, what was it like to be a spirit, what kind of spirit was it, where did it come from, and could Lucia ask it what it was like in the afterlife? And was it very, very painful to die? Was there really a God, and had the spirit seen Him? Could the spirit tell us the future? Would Marzio’s farts smell as bad in that other world?

  The ashtray began to swing, at first gently, from the yes to the no and back again.

  “Too many questions,” said Lucia. “One at a time.”

  The ashtray continued a slightly elliptic pattern between the yes and the no on our improvised Ouija board, picking up speed as we all fought over what the first question should be. The ashtray spun strongly enough that some of us lost hold of it, at which point it came to a hesitant halt, long enough for an accusation to fly: “Come on! Marzio’s been pushing! I can feel him pushing from here!”

  “Don’t push. It confuses the spirit. It’s like trying to put words into people’s mouth!”

  “I wasn’t pushing! My finger wasn’t even touching. Look here! Look! I have my finger above the ashtray.”

  Lucia shook her head and spoke authoritatively: “First and foremost, we must ask Spirit what his or her name is. Now stop, be quiet, and concentrate.”

  For a moment we settled. Lucia breathed meaningfully. Then, looking at the ashtray, and with a furrowed brow, she asked: “Spirit, what is your name?”

  Giovanna laughed. We all, finally, heard her. It was evil, the way the chortles throttled her breathing, the way her spit popped against air in the back of her throat. For a second or so, Giovanna’s chortle was the only sound.

  “Stop it! Stop it!” Lucia gasped.

  As if suddenly weakened by that cry, the ashtray edged slowly, painfully, toward the letter S. Then it climbed back up and around the yes/no circles to turn left toward the letter A. Giovanna snorted just as the ashtray turned downward and edged again, with somewhat greater decisiveness on the T, angling to crawl upward to the beginning of the alphabet, aiming for the A. Lucia shot up, her eyelids pushing back from her popping green eyes, her hands raised up to the sky: “Oh Lord and Little Madonna of Mine, protect us from this evil! Forgive us! Forgive us! Oh Lord, protect us from this evil presence!”

  Lucia’s full chest heaved with the weight of her droning, her eyes downcast at first, then popping open again, witnessing a terror we could neither see nor entirely understand.

  Some of us littler ones kept looking from face to face for clues, wondering if it was all right now to take our fingers off the ashtray, even though Lucia had earlier warned us that to do so would piss off Spirit big time, not to mention weaken the energy flow. The older kids had pushed their chairs back, their hands in their laps, their faces turned eagerly to Lucia.

  “What was that? What did it say?”

  “It was trying to spell SATAN,” someone whispered.

  “Shhhhh,” Lucia warned. “Don’t even say that!”

  The ohhhs
of our freshly enlightened acumens died in our lungs, extinguished immediately by the chilled hush of fear. After all, we’d all grown up with Baptism, Communion, and Catechism, and we’d heard the S word hurled often enough at us from the pulpit to lose our milk teeth from chronic chattering.

  “Spirit, rid us of this evil presence,” begged our rattled medium. “Protect us from its dark influence. Even though we have called its presence upon us, we respectfully ask that it leave this house and that it not harm us.”

  Lucia cleared our hands off the table with a brief flutter of hers, and grabbing onto the hand-scribbled Ouija she ripped it in several pieces, reciting quick prayers and blowing on the broken edges each time before folding the pieces and ripping them anew. She invoked the Lord and Mary and Jesus and begged for their forgiveness, promising never to dabble lightly in such matters again. When she was done, and the Ouija pieces burned in a plate on the table, and when the ashtray was ordered covered in salt and then discarded, she drew a long sigh, her eyes closed and her chin over her chest, her hair draping around her like the painting of a Raphaelite Madonna.

  After several moments in this memorable pose, Lucia got up and briskly dismissed herself. That was the last we ever saw of her. The night ended quickly after that: we gathered what was left of the candle stubs, the citronella spiral and its ashes, the glasses we had drunk from, the pencil we had used to draw our Ouija and various other accoutrements and dutifully cleaned up, as our mothers had taught us to. Then each returned to his or her respective home, shaken some, yes, but mostly just excited.

  We did not yet know the dramatic and protracted epilogue to this story.

  A month after our sitting, we will hear of the car accident: Lucia driving home toward Rome in her boyfriend’s Fiat 500 way too late at night and way too drunk; how it will take almost an entire day before anyone finds her unconscious in the car; the two littlest boys of the group, Marzio and his best friend, Simone, will wake up screaming from nightmares for many nights; how each will ask his mother if Satan can really come and take a person’s body; at our villa, where the sitting took place, dishes and glasses and plates will come flying from the kitchen cabinet where the fated and duly salted ashtray was replaced the very morning after the accident; how later we will vigorously proclaim it a coincidence to each other, saving our real fears for storytelling in years to come; three baby magpies will be found dead in the backyard that morning, each impaled on the sharp, needled limbs of an agave cactus; how we will ferociously blame the Sardinian pack we had previously tormented and their morbid sense of vengeance.

  And we will blame Sardinians also for the strange noises that are heard at night, noises like a goat rubbing its horns against the wooden hurricane shutters of our bedroom windows, noises accompanied by prophetic whispers and by the ensuing scraping of goat hooves on the roof. We will say it was some disgruntled gardener who wanted work and found none, some unhappy shepherd embittered by the ostentatious sloth of the vacationers. We will even try to blame it on Pietro, who will stop speaking to us by and by.

  But at the villa the night took over with its crickets and cicadas, with its tree frogs and its bullfrogs, and with the smell of hibiscus and oleander, and with the balmy scents of the sea. Sardinia’s damp-and-dry slipped with us beneath the toasty sheets and blankets. It was cool and quiet outside, and we curled on our beds with the peace of heart of those who have earned their rest, with the sun still baking our skin, with the salt still saturating our pores, with the memories of the slapping waves and the hot fine sand and the jagged stones and pebbles still playing our bodies’ senses like an action film’s soundtrack. The ghosts of our recent Ouija adventure might have been gossamers even then, tingles on the back of our necks, but we felt protected by our beds and by the certainty of our adult parents returning home soon, bringing safety with their casual clamor of jingling keys and scraping shoes, slamming doors, and poorly restrained whispers. The light that seeped underneath our doors soothed us to sleep. We forgot all about the jolts and jerks of the ashtray and its awful intimations, traded it for dreams of frosty seas and air mattress battles and the glamorous body-surfing exploits we would undertake the next day.

  LAURA VALERI is the author of The Kind of Things Saints Do, winner of the John Simmons and John Gardner Awards. She lives in Savannah, Georgia, where she teaches writing and is at work on a novel.

  The Walls of Gela

  . . . . . . . . .

  EDVIGE GIUNTA

  The Greek walls of Gela survive. Protected by glass, they suck the heat of the sun. My father stands by these walls, the bay behind him, open and eager. I watch him, silent audience, necessary audience. Then he begins to evoke ships, warriors, noises, blood, spears, the smell of war and fear and conquest.

  Peoples who inhabited my island, Sicily: layers and layers of faces, of oppressors and oppressed, conquerors and conquered, invaders and exiles, betrayers and betrayed, faces underneath mine, strata of histories and stories that make up a past laid out in front of my eyes, momentarily blind. Sicans, Sicels, Elymians, Greeks, Carthaginians, Byzantines, Romans, Arabs. By the first century AD, at least seven major civilizations had inhabited Sicily. Normans, Spaniards, and others would soon follow. My father tells their stories.

  My father celebrates his own Eucharist. His words become bodies, the bodies of those who thousands of years ago stood on this same ground where I stand today, a ghost, a shadow, without words of my own.

  He is not a tall man—about 5′4″. He has been balding ever since I remember him. But he stands so straight, his shoulders pushed back, his belly forward as he speaks of our town’s ancient past. My father, the historian, shares only a few recollections of my childhood. These scattered remembrances document the fact that he was my father and I was his baby daughter. I hopped on his knees, danced on his belly, asked for ten liras to buy chocolate in Sicilian dialect: deci liri u caccu. His voice is soft, mellow, so different from the voice of the historian, the politician, the public figure, as he sing-songs, “deci liri u caccu. deci liri u caccu.” I smile, sometimes snicker, my awkward adolescent self embarrassed by tales that hint at an intimacy of which I have no memory.

  Where did the other memories go, the memories of all those other times he held me, played with me, rocked me to sleep? When my two sisters and I enter puberty, he mourns our childhood and clings to two or three memories of that time, fearful of our nascent womanhood. That ancient, fierce sense of honor, and that dread of shame women can bring upon the family, especially the men, saturate his ancient Sicilian masculinity. He claims with pride: “I am a nineteenth-century man.” But we, his daughters, we are twentieth-century girls. We are quick, educated—bright girls, full of ideas and sense of possibility. We like to go out on our own, evade his watchful gaze. We defy him. And we are so in spite of him and because of him. As adolescents, we begin that escape that will bring each of the three daughters of Vincenzo Giunta to live far away from home—one in Rome, two in the United States. He will have American grandchildren. He will not understand their language. They will barely understand his. Did he know already we would leave? Did he dread it, even as he encouraged wild desires and aspirations for diplomatic careers that could take us to distant places to which he himself had never traveled?

  In my memory, in my imagination, my father is a big man—always a grown man, never a young man, never a boy. His childhood is shrouded in silence, forgotten. He never speaks of it. But he compensates for this personal amnesia by becoming the repository of the town’s memory. Gelon, Caesar, Frederick. He knows them intimately. They sat at the same table, shared the masculine bread of power. But who were the playmates of the child Vincenzo? Did he play with his older brother, Rocco? The younger, Remigio? His cousins, Rocco, Saverio, Sascia? Did they play with his little sister, Edvige, my namesake, the “cripple”? What were his favorite games? Soccer? Hide and seek? Hopscotch? Was he punished for disobeying his mother? I do not know. My father’s childhood memories are locked inside the dar
k rooms of his agoraphobic mother.

  Two images begin to shape in my mind, contrasting and complementary, two sides of one wall. At times, they superimpose. Mostly they present themselves in juxtaposition, separated by a line of demarcation, sharp and dazzling, that signals the point at which two strains of my family history meet: my father, the epitome of intellectual force, and his mother, Nonna Ciuzza, the woman who spoke with assurance and disdain to her children, her grandchildren, and, rarely, her daughters-in-law—those young women who could not possibly be good enough to marry her sons, those sons she addressed using the diminutives of their childhood—Ruccuzzu, Vicenzù, Remì—even when they became middle-aged men with grown children of their own. Nonna Ciuzza, the woman who locked herself and her daughter in that house on Vico Marino for over fifty years, till she died in 1990. There they are. I am facing them: my father, whose voice rises as he talks politics and history to a handful of faithful listeners near the piazza, and my ninety-year-old grandmother, terrified of open spaces, who recites Foscolo’s “Dei Sepolcri” in her secluded home:

  All’ombra de’ cipressi e dentro l’urne

  Confortate di pianto è forse il sonno

  Della morte men duro?

  How appropriate that this woman, who slowly but inexorably cut off her ties with the outside world and barricaded herself within the walls of her home, remembered this poem—one of those poems Italian students memorize in school—a lamentation over the tombs of great ancestors. She sits still, as straight as her crooked back allows, and recites, stressing each syllable, never missing a beat. Her eyes are half closed; the loose skin of her cheeks trembles with each utterance.