by Lee Gutkind
I am almost forty when I begin to realize how much these two figures—my father and my grandmother—and their excesses are entwined like the braids of a wicker basket. I don’t fully understand at first to what extent one generates and sustains the other in a passionate, symbiotic relationship; this intricate relationship is not unlike the devoted hatred that connected my paternal grandparents for a half-century, preventing them from staying truly apart from each other, though my grandfather indulged in escapades—perhaps there were other women—that led him to live away from his home, away from his town, at one time for years. After my grandfather returns home, there is no reconciliation between my grandparents, but they spend the last years of their lives together—ten? twenty?—confined in the upstairs apartment of their house, their resentment seeping through the walls, their voices resonating in the rooms downstairs where no one lives. They will not sleep in the same bed, eat at the same table. They will spend days, weeks, months without seeing each other, but they will yell and curse at each other through the walls they share.
The house is theirs. It has two floors and a roof verandah. Once, I climbed the steps to that verandah, I think with my grandfather, and saw pigeons, lots of pigeons. That’s all I remember. At some point, my uncle Remigio had some kind of office downstairs. I think it was a driving school. For a while, the house was full of people and their voices, though my grandmother and my aunt kept to themselves upstairs. Then, it was quiet again. Except when my grandparents fought.
Upstairs is where they chose to live: two large rooms, two bathrooms, and between the two rooms a small foyer where my grandmother cooked—there was no kitchen. Living downstairs would have allowed my grandfather some peace, some distance from those women who seemed to hate him—a sentiment he reciprocated. But he chose to live upstairs, in the room with the only door leading outside. Since my grandmother and my aunt never went out, my grandparents could cohabit without ever seeing each other—all they shared was a wall. The layout of the house enabled them to live together and apart. The two women never crossed the threshold of the door that separated their living space from my grandfather’s because they didn’t need or wish to. My grandmother was satisfied with her voluntary imprisonment, hers and her daughter’s. She saw it as necessary, just, inevitable.
Every forced break from their life represents, for these two recluses, a traumatic event, a forced encounter with a world they do not trust and with which they do not wish to come into contact. My grandmother would tell the story of my aunt’s injury over and over again, while my aunt would repeat a word, a phrase spoken by her mother, for emphasis or simply out of habit. When Zia Edvige was born, my grandmother became ill. It was an illness that to this day remains unnamed. I suspect it was postpartum depression. I know she was so sick she could not take care of the baby and, I presume, of her three little boys. They hired a wet nurse to care for baby Edvige. It seems that my grandmother came from a relatively wealthy family. My grandfather had made money in the twenties, selling tractors that modernized the local agricultural economy—the story goes that he was one of the first people in Gela to own a car. In those times, in any case, wet nurses were not uncommon. But this wet nurse’s baby happened to develop whooping cough. My aunt caught it too and one day had a seizure; probably, she had had encephalitis. The seizure caused major damage to the right side of her body. Her arm became limp and twisted in spasms, like the ones that shook her body in frequent convulsions. Her right leg became a useless limb she dragged behind her. Her feet became forever trapped in awkward orthopedic boots. I do not know how old she was. She could have been a few months, one or two years old. This story, retold with ever so slight variations, was what defined my grandmother, the frame the old woman offered us so that we could understand her, and for my grandmother, there was no other story to tell.
She had denied her own milk to her first and only daughter. And now little Edvige was a cripple. And Ciuzza Giunta fiercely embraced her daughter’s disability as if it were her own. She would not part from it, not even for a minute. And she would not part from her daughter. Ever.
The withdrawal from the outside must have been a gradual process. I know my grandparents traveled everywhere in Italy seeking doctors who could cure their daughter, to no avail. That was in the 1930s, when traveling was neither easy nor common. They went as far as Genoa, in northern Italy, probably a two-day train trip in those days. In time, the cause of my aunt’s disability became mythologized. For a long time I believed she had polio when she was four. We knew about polio: I still have the round marks from the polio vaccine on my right arm, and so do my older sister, brother, and cousins. We attached a word, a disease that was familiar to us, to my aunt’s story, a story that still remains, for me, full of questions. Nobody ever mentioned the word encephalitis, either because my grandmother did not know the word or because this word, so scientific, could hardly contain the magnitude of this family tragedy. “La mia croce,” my grandmother tells us, her head slightly bent toward my aunt. “My cross.” When we get older, we, the grandchildren, scold her for this cruel appellation, but my aunt seems perfectly at ease with her role as her mother’s torturous burden. In any case, she never dares to disagree with her, still a child at sixty. She just sighs, her chest heaving, her lips tight and turned downward, in resignation and disappointment.
The architectural space my grandmother and aunt inhabit mirrors their symbiotic lives, their isolation, and their refusal to allow anybody in, including my grandfather. The narrow balcony looking over Via Cairoli offers the only respite from the two women’s seclusion. The balcony is very small. Only two chairs fit. A third leaves no space for legs. No geranium plants soften the gloom of the house, the hardness of the plain old tiles.
Daily, the two women reach out to the world and lower a basket below the balcony, dangling it in front of the grocer’s open door on the street below. He leaves all his other customers and dashes out to collect the list of necessities my grandmother has scribbled on a scrap of paper with her antiquated, elegant handwriting. A few minutes later he runs out again and fills the still-dangling basket with the few items my father’s mother and sister need for their survival: pasta, cans of tomatoes, milk, bread. Zio Remigio brings them meat from his butcher—nothing fancy, beef cutlets to grill on the stovetop; they do not have an oven. My father attends to their finances and brings the family physician when they are sick. Zio Rocco attempts to modernize their home, bringing them a radio, a television, or recording my grandmother’s recitation of “Dei Sepolcri.” My mother sends fruit and vegetables from our garden. Sometimes she sends over a special dish—homemade pizza, lasagna—but, out of spite, they do not touch her food. The grocer, the family, the neighbors, the town itself—they all become unwitting accomplices in the making of a life lived in seclusion. Their compliance makes it possible for my grandmother and aunt never to cross that line between them and the world, a line that gets thicker every day. Survival is the word that best describes these two women’s relationship to the world, a world that, my grandmother taught my aunt, had betrayed them, a world that, they had learned, was hostile and ruthless. The laughter of elementary school children mocking my aunt before my grandmother decides to take her out of school—at six? seven? perhaps even as late as ten—gives her the reason she needs to seal herself and her crippled child inside that second-floor apartment on Vico Marino. How appropriate that they live on a vico, not a via, which is a street that stretches out in opposite directions. Instead, a vico has no way out: it’s a dead end.
For years, they will sit in the one room where they spend their lives, a room divided into different living spaces by large, flowered curtains hanging from the ceiling and serving as walls: a sitting area, an eating area, a sleeping area, a closet space framed not by walls or wood but, again, by curtains hanging from the ceiling. Piles of things we were forbidden to see or touch barely peeked from behind the curtains. In this cluttered room, they submit willingly to a paralysis that is emotional as wel
l as physical. My grandfather’s room is instead sparingly furnished: a twin bed, a night table, a chair by the bed, an armoire, a small table, another chair, and a small cupboard. There must have been a refrigerator, but I don’t remember one. Nothing ornate or elegant. Unlike the crammed room upstairs, the living room in the downstairs floor is spacious and uncluttered. It’s what is called il salotto buono, the nice living room. Yet living room does not faithfully translate salotto. In Sicilian homes, a salotto is, or at least used to be, a room that was kept closed, though regularly and thoroughly cleaned, and was opened only for special visitors. A living room is a soggiorno, from soggiornare, which means to sojourn, to stay, and is used to entertain regular visitors. My grandmother and aunt’s dwelling space upstairs did not allow for such subtleties: one room sufficed for all. Their salotto downstairs was conspicuous because its quaintness and neatness contrasted so much with its cluttered and shabby counterpart upstairs. A sofa, a couple of chairs, and a few scattered items of furniture testify to better times, times of wealth if not happiness. I cannot imagine a time in which my grandmother could have been happy. Gloom, not happiness, suits her best, though occasionally, when we visit her, she smiles and even laughs, her mouth closed, her body shaking lightly. I look at her expecting her to crumble to pieces any minute.
For my aging grandmother and her crippled daughter, every descent downstairs to the famed salotto was slow and painful; yet it offered a variation, desired and suffered, from the suffocating sameness of their days. The grandchildren ring the door bell and it takes ten to fifteen minutes for my aunt to come to the window, wave, walk to what used to be my grandfather’s room, press the button that will open the outside door, and come downstairs with my grandmother if we have brought company: a rare friend, a fiancé for the official introduction. Downstairs is for select visitors: estranei, strangers, not necessarily people they don’t know, but people who are not part of the family, not blood. My mother fluctuates ambiguously between the positions of insider and outsider. And so do I and my siblings: “Vi voglio bene perchè siete sangue del mio sangue”—I love you because you are blood of my blood. “I love you because you are my son’s children,” my grandmother would tell us with pride. That left me wondering, confused by what felt like both an embrace and a rejection. Could she forget we were also my mother’s children?
Upstairs, three or four mattresses sit on the twin beds in which my grandmother and my aunt sleep. The beds are lined against the wall, the headboards against each other, almost conjoined. Every night the two women have to climb onto their beds, an ascent that must have been as uncomfortable as the descent to the rooms downstairs. My grandmother did not throw anything out and old mattresses were never discarded: they were simply piled up. She kept and accumulated valuable items and worthless objects, such as empty marmalade jars, tomato cans, rusted tin boxes of biscotti Doria. Once, when I was eight or nine, she gave me a plastic bag full of tomato paste and toothpaste tube caps as a gift, the only “toy” she ever gave me. I plunge my hand into the bag and stir the red caps, trying to hide my disappointment, while she smiles at me eagerly, expecting signs of enthusiasm. I look away from her face, from those eyes sinking deep into the crevices of old age, from those cheeks that hang on the sides of her face like empty sacks, from the hairy mole on the right side of her chin that she called jokingly “lo spazzolino”—the toothbrush—laughing at her grandchildren’s thinly disguised attempts to avoid touching it when we kissed her. I always kissed the left side first, trying to avoid the contact with that excrescence of her skin. She would shove the repulsive spazzolino into my reluctant face, then giggle, amused with what she thought was a game.
Nonna Ciuzza’s obsession for keeping went hand in hand with a need for acquisition of basic foods. She would purchase such foods in great quantity: bags of pasta, flour, and sugar; dozens of cookie boxes. Vermin would grow before my grandmother and aunt, who always ate frugally, could consume these obscene quantities of food, food destined to expire, like the money she hid, predictably, under her mattresses until my father persuaded her to trust a bank. My grandmother lived all her life in the expectation of a catastrophe of apocalyptic proportions. She made sure that she and her daughter would be ready to face it. She spent her life trying to keep the world outside at bay. After years, she finally agreed to have a telephone and a television, but those futuristic objects did not belong in a house ruled by its own rhythms, its own time. One day my father finds his mother and sister sitting in front of the blank TV screen, as if they are watching. “What are you doing?” he asks, surprised. My grandmother sighs, echoed by her daughter, and whispers that a man and a woman were kissing on TV. She had switched off the infernal machine to protect the chaste eyes of her daughter, who by this time was in her fifties.
They never receive us standing, though occasionally my aunt meets us limping at the door. They always sit, like twin statues, sometimes on two rickety chairs, sometimes on a bed that served as a sofa, covered with a faded flowered bedcover. They sit on the edge of this bed, in what must have been an uncomfortable position. Comfort does not befit them. They do not face each other in the light, but sit side by side in the dark all day long, until an occasional visitor opens the balcony or turns on the light. When I was very little, the two of them would embroider; they accumulated precious items for my aunt’s dowry. The linen chest filled with delicate bedcovers, sheets, towels, tablecloths, napkins, curtains—none would never be used. My grandmother had embroidered “EDVIGE GIUNTA” onto a curtain. How little did this ostentatious object reflect the reclusive life of Zia Edvige. My father used to say that one day the curtain—which none of us grandchildren ever saw—should have gone to me, my aunt’s namesake, but I always recoiled at that suggestion, horrified by the implication that I was the one most closely connected with Zia Edvige. At some point, I don’t remember when exactly, the baskets that sat at their feet disappeared. Maybe my grandmother’s eyesight was failing, and my aunt, of course, would not embroider alone.
My grandmother always speaks first. My aunt follows, echoing her last words or sighing, hands folded on her lap, her crippled foot coyly hidden inside the black or beige orthopedic boot peeking out from behind the good leg. Those sighs contain so many words, trapped like birds with clipped wings fluttering in uselessly open air. Occasionally, my grandmother offers a gift: a few coins, a box of stale cookies, decades-old chocolate wrapped in brown paper that says “Italian Army.” This chocolate has lost its deep brown shade and has been taken over by the whitish streaks of time. She offers us candies that have been too long in a drawer and now stick obstinately to the crackling paper wrap, refusing to leave their home. Before we go to visit, my mother warns us not to eat anything she gives us. We accept the sweets, say thank you, and throw them out as soon as we turn out of Via Cairoli and onto Via Bresmes, after we wave goodbye to the two of them who still wave from the balcony.
For my college graduation, Nonna Ciuzza tells my father that she has a special gift for me: a pair of gold earrings. My father is pleased, painfully aware as he is of the discrepancy between my maternal grandparents’ generosity and his mother’s notorious avarice. This announcement causes great excitement in my extended family, as my grandmother never parts with anything of value. A few days after my graduation, which, of course, neither she nor my aunt attends, I visit them to secure my gift. Following the ceremonial congratulatory talk, my grandmother keeps silent for a while, then bends her head imperceptibly toward the curtain that separates the living room space from what we refer to as their sleeping quarters. My aunt, ever so receptive to my grandmother’s silent language, gets up with a deep sigh and disappears behind the curtain. I hear her moving around, dragging the crippled leg and foot that both she and her mother refer to as “la gambetta” and “il piedino”—the tiny leg and the tiny foot—in that tragically infantilizing language Nonna Ciuzza and her children always used to describe my aunt. Her sons always use the Sicilian words: ’a iammuzza, u piruzzu. But while m
y grandmother spoke Sicilian to her sons, she only spoke Italian with me, my siblings, and my mother. It kept the distance, marked the perimeter of intimacy.
My aunt comes back a few minutes later, holding a small, ancient-looking velvety blue box. My grandmother takes it from her daughter’s hands, holds it in her cupped hands as if to shelter it from light, then opens it. Beaming, she reveals the delicate earrings that once adorned her young ears, her mother’s, and even, she proclaims, her grandmother’s. Pushing my face closer to the box to see better, I move my hand gently to touch my grandmother’s first real gift. Snap. The box shuts and my grandmother says, “This is your gift.” My aunt’s hands receive the tiny box and take it back to wherever it came from. “I will keep this for you,” my grandmother says. The gift consists in the brief viewing of the earrings.
Those earrings today are mine. After my father learned of his mother’s preposterous gift, he did not say a word. This was unusual for him. Whenever we would complain to him about the two women’s antics, he would laugh and say, “Ma lasciatele perdere. Sono due povere pazze”—let it go, they are two poor lunatics. He seemed to have made his peace with the grotesque, absurd ways of his mother and sister. But this time, he did not say anything. Later that day, he went to see her. I don’t know what words he spoke to her, but when he came back, he had the earrings for me. I have never worn them. I don’t know why. Perhaps I am afraid of letting the thin gold that touched my grandmother’s and her ancestors’ earlobes pierce mine. Perhaps this gift, so reluctant to leave my grandmother’s abode, does not yet feel mine. But now they are with me, in the United States, locked away with other pieces of jewelry. One day, they will become my daughter’s. I wonder whether she will wear them. One day a female descendant of mine will receive these earrings as a special gift and will ask her parents where they come from.