by Lee Gutkind
Nonno Diego, my grandfather, felt suffocated in the dingy, tragic home he shared with Nonna Ciuzza and Zia Edvige. So even when he broke his hip in his eighties, he recovered quickly, against everyone’s expectations, although he did not undergo surgery because the doctors felt it was too risky at his age. Every evening—around seven o’ clock in the summer, around five in the winter—he would go out, smelling of cologne, impeccably dressed: black suit in the winter, beige in the summer. Supporting himself at first with crutches, then with a cane, he would descend two flights of steep stairs with the help of one of the grandchildren enlisted for this important if not welcome task. Then he would walk on his own to Docente, the clothing store across from the Cathedral of the Madonna of Alemanna, and would sit there with other old men. The store was right next to Piazza Umberto, the town’s main square, a mere five-minute walk from his home, although it would take my grandfather ten, fifteen minutes to get there. Watching the evening passeggiata flow by along the corso soothed his ache for life. For my grandfather, these daily outings were life sustaining, and he dreaded the cold winter days when he could not go out.
He sits there, looking so dignified, wearing his old-fashioned hat, saluting and saluted like a king. Older people say, “buona sera cavaliere.” Many address him as “parrì”—godfather. My grandfather, though, was not a mafioso; he was a patriarch in the etymological sense of the word: pater, father, ruler. My father and his brothers and cousins remember him presiding at the long table where generations of them sat, his flask of wine at his feet, administering orders and food, love and terror. When he gets old, his children no longer listen to him in respectful silence. Their behavior toward him is marked by a mix of respect and resentment, derision and reverence. Now that he is old, he no longer rouses the old feelings of fear and deference, and his grown children retaliate, often dismissing him, flaunting the power that once was his. My older sister and I pass by Docente quickly, even cross to the other side so as to avoid the lengthy chat with him that he will inevitably demand if he spots us on the street. We fear that he will whistle to get our attention and thus embarrass us in front of our friends. Our adolescent dread of old age makes us ruthless: we turn away from our obligation and care little about his disappointment, which he never shows anyway. But sometimes we do stop by, hoping for the one thousand lire note he will occasionally offer. His fingers entwined around his cane, sunglasses on, he inquires about my mother, my little brother and sister, school. When we bend to kiss him goodbye, he smiles benevolently, still trying to exude authority through his slow and deliberate gestures, through his tone of voice, firm and loud.
My mother was my grandfather’s captive audience. “Cettì, ascolta!” he calls out to my mother while she is busy at the stove, frying eggplants and meatballs and stirring tomato sauce, the bubbling of the pasta pot intermingling with the sounds of my grandfather’s voice. He demands but also begs for that attention his children deny him. For a year or so, when I was eight or nine years old, my grandfather ate his meals with us, lunch and dinner, every day. Coming to our home allowed him to escape the solitary meals and the silence of his house, where his wife and daughter led a life so alien to his worldly taste. I imagine my grandfather eating in his one-room dwelling in Vico Marino, sitting on the one chair at the table that faces the cupboard. I turn away from that scene. His solitude must have been unbearable. But while he did not relish it, he tolerated it far better than his wife’s and daughter’s company.
One day he storms out after another proverbial argument with his wife, which occurs, as always, not face to face, but through the wall. Their voices—my grandmother’s shrieking, my grandfather’s deep and raucous—bounce on the whitewashed walls, resonate in the house; their echo reaches the houses of the neighbors who are, by now, used to my grandparents’ vociferous altercations. My grandfather yells to the two women that he hopes the roof will collapse on their heads. And indeed it does, a few hours later, while he is out. My grandmother and aunt are unharmed but hysterical, and my father tries in vain to persuade them that my grandfather couldn’t possibly have had anything to do with it. Like my grandmother, I take curses seriously, and while I smile in disbelief every time I tell this story, I cannot help wondering.
In the evening, my grandfather brings us small milk chocolates wrapped in gold and red foil. We search eagerly in his pockets, always surprised by this bounty, unused to receiving gifts from our paternal grandparents. After this sweet ritual, we play cards: briscola, sette e mezzo, scopa. When we move to a new house—the two top floors of a five-floor building without an elevator—he comes only on Sundays; perhaps the flights of stairs are too much for him. My father picks him up around eleven o’clock in the morning and delivers him to my mother, then goes back to the town’s center to talk politics and does not come back until lunchtime, around 1:30. My mother complies dutifully but occasionally becomes impatient and snaps, complains to her father-in-law that he is distracting her from her many chores, only to be reprimanded by him with a brief, sharp word or a stern glance.
My mother was attached to my grandfather, grateful that he loved her. Of the three daughters-in-law, she was his favorite. She keeps an old card on which he wrote: “A Cettina, la migliore dei miei figl”—To Cettina, the best of my children. This devotion pleased my mother, hurt as she was by the rejection of my grandmother, who treated her condescendingly at best. My parents had married in the midst of fiery opposition as soon as my mother had turned twenty-one: my father was a communist and my mother the niece of a priest. They had to obtain special permission from the bishop to marry in the church nine months after they got married in the town hall. Nobody from either family attended the wedding. A few weeks after their wedding, a distant relative came to Gela from a nearby town to bring a present to the newlyweds. Not knowing where they lived—few owned a telephone in 1955—she asked around where Vincenzo Giunta lived. Someone pointed her to Vico Marino, where my father had indeed lived until recently. The woman walks into the deadend street, carrying the gift, and knocks on the door. A woman clad in black leans out the window: it’s my grandmother. In response to the well-wisher’s request to see Vincenzo Giunta and his new bride, Nonna Ciuzza proclaims: “Mio figlio è morto”—My son is dead.
My mother regaled us with these stories. We found them melodramatic, funny, absurd, and we could not understand how our grandmother could not love our gentle, soft, sweet mother, our mother so beloved even by my father’s other relatives. And we could not understand why my mother would still want to have anything to do with her mother-in-law, why she craved a kind gesture, a word of appreciation from her.
For years my mother tried to please my grandmother, and when my grandmother died, she tried to please her daughter, never resigned to the fact that these two women could never, if not love, at least appreciate her. She worked for them as my father, his brothers, and their wives never did: cooked for them, washed their clothes, ran their errands, and always made sure we went to visit them. “I washed the staircase in her house, step by step, on my knees while I was nine months pregnant. She never even uttered a thank you!” my mother would recall resentfully, with that taste for melodrama that runs through my family. But my grandmother had only cutting words for my mother, though she usually spoke them politely. She would enunciate each word in Italian whenever she spoke to my mother, denying her the intimacy of dialect. Incapable of gratitude, she expected my mother to serve her, and so did my aunt, her daughter.
The hierarchy was already established when I was born: my mother laid herself down to serve as the foundation, the soil, upon which my father’s strength could grow. She remained in the shadows, always there to support, stalwart like the stubborn Doric column at the Parco delle Rimembranze—the Park of Remembrances—that stands solitary, defying the elements and the merciless hunger of time that has already swallowed its sisters. My mother’s strength never ceases to amaze me. “What’s your secret?” ask those who have not seen her for some time, stunned by t
he fact that she always looks so serene, so young, her face smooth, with hardly any lines. She smiles somewhat bitterly. Sometimes she replies: “Collere e dispiaceri.” Sorrows and worries.
By the time my parents got married, my grandmother and aunt had already established their life as recluses. Before my eyes is the image of two women clinging to each other in terror on the occasion of a rare and sporadic outing that could not be avoided: a hospital stay, a trip to the bank or the town hall where their signatures were required, or to the voting booth when my father ran in the elections. Never a wedding, a christening, a celebration, not even my grandfather’s funeral: only dire necessity or obligation justified the breach of their seclusion. On my wedding day, my husband and I visit them after the ceremony for the obligatory photograph taken in the nice room downstairs, a room they had reopened after my grandfather’s death for occasional visitors. My grandmother never allowed anybody to take pictures of her or her daughter, except on the occasion of a granddaughter’s wedding. Then she claimed the photographs for herself. She could not allow her semblance or her child’s to leave their house, as if in the unwanted contact with the outside world they might fade like ancient mural paintings uncovered after thousands of years.
When the downstairs room was reopened for my grandfather’s funeral in December 1976, for the first time in years people flocked to my grandparents’ house to pay their last respects to Diego Giunta. On the day of the funeral, my grandmother’s ululating laments echo in the house, while relatives shake their heads and smile to each other knowingly. One relative snickers in Sicilian: “Si Decu Giunta ‘ssi rrvigghiassi, murissi i spaventu!”—If Diego Giunta were to wake up now, he would die of fear. The relatives and the townspeople respected my grandfather, and accepted, as my father and his brothers did, that his wife was mad—not the kind of madness that requires institutionalization, but madness as a word, a concept that would help them to condone, if not understand, the excesses that characterized the life of Ciuzza Giunta.
When the body is taken out of the house, her wrenching screams, echoed by my aunt’s, can be heard blocks away and accompany us as we get into the cars to go the cemetery.
No church for my grandfather. An atheist to the end, he made my father promise they would not take him into a church after his death. And my father respected his wishes, in the midst of the hardly contained criticism of many family members. We drive away and leave my grandmother and aunt behind in the room downstairs, the room for special occasions, weeping for the man they hated for most of their lives.
After his death, they dress in black, the color that suits them best. My aunt, who never even dignified her father with a stare, when she talks about him now refers to him as “il nonnino,” a warm, loving diminutive for “nonno,” grandfather. If anyone mentions his name, they both begin to weep, sometimes quietly, sometimes uncontrollably. For months after his death, every evening they sit at the sides of his bed, now stripped of mattress (probably piled up with the others), a worn bedspread lingering on the old, shaky frame. On the bed, my grandfather’s black suit lies, a stiffened weightless body with handless arms that stretch out toward the borders of the bed. His passport picture rests in place of his head, above the imaginary neck extending out of the jacket. In the evening, when my siblings and I, sometimes accompanied by my mother—never my father—go to visit them, we find my grandmother and aunt sitting like guardian angels at the sides of Nonno Diego’s bed. We open the door, and our eyes encounter the gloomy sight of the two women immersed in their grotesque ceremony of grief. Once my father asks his mother how could she possibly cry for her husband considering that when he was alive all they did was fight. How could she cry for a man she hated? “He was still the father of my children.”
It’s January 1990. Nonna Ciuzza battles death. She has to stay alive. She cannot leave her daughter alone. She hisses orders to her daughter, who weeps quietly by her side. Don’t sign anything. Don’t sign anything. Don’t throw anything away. Don’t change anything in the house. Don’t ever leave this house.
My father is so different from his mother. He is worldly, more like his father. The first college graduate in the family—in fact, the only one of four children to go to university, to have the discipline and the determination to do so—my father is smart, eloquent, daring, outgoing. My father the professor, the politician, the man with the big voice, my father the Marxist—my father knows how to tell a story to a crowd of listeners. He embraced his own father’s passion for rule and, in trying to emulate him, surpassed him. He became the town’s father, its historical memory, the one to preserve its ancient glory when the present was dissipating its eminent tradition, when the fumes of the oil industry had forever contaminated the same sky where Aeschylus’s fateful eagle flew one day, so many days ago.
My father is an astounding orator, in the Roman tradition. Well-versed in history, law, philosophy, Italian literature, politics and, as I believed for a long time, in just about everything one can think of, my father is what you would call a born speaker. He can improvise a stunning lecture for audiences of one or one thousand. With his words he can evoke a battle that took place in the bay of Gela thousands of years ago or explain with extraordinary lucidity the philosophies of Plato, Hegel, or Marx. Give him an audience and I promise you, he will dazzle it. His words flow magically, his voice rises with passion and fervor. And you sit there, in awe of this miracle. He knows language and wields its power well. He is a magician with words. And words rarely betray him. In my hometown everyone refers to him as “il professore.” “U prufussuri.” How many times have I heard people in Gela address him with that title? I was always ’a figghia do prufussuri—the daughter of the professor, appellations resonant with respect and familiarity, part of our names, our identities, our lives in the town of my origins.
My father stands on the podium of the main square in my hometown while the naked bronze statue of Ceres on its pedestal hovers, enigmatic, over the heads of the crowd, made up almost exclusively of men. A political speech, a comizio. This is his space, physically and intellectually. He is a lover of open spaces, a public figure, always at ease surrounded by the crowd, the spotlight on him: orator, teacher, adept politician, even mayor for a time. The square is his mistress, whom he indulges, seductive and seduced. In this embrace, his figure, tall in my mind, emerges strong, like the warriors of Riace, his voice powerful, his tones carefully modulated, the Sicilian accent roughening his flawless Italian. My father is a lover of the agora: agoraphilia is his addiction.
My father’s passion for the agora is such that he never wishes to leave it. He does not like to leave the town. A creature of habit, my father dislikes traveling. Each trip represents a major disruption of his routine, a trauma to be avoided at all costs. My mother becomes the custodian of his precious, fragile equilibrium, while the children become both her allies and enemies, depending on whether they cooperate in maintaining it or work, unwittingly, to destroy it. As he grows older, his reluctance to go beyond the town borders becomes more and more pronounced.
Where do I stand between my father and his mother? I am an immigrant, by choice and necessity. Desire, fear, curiosity, dissatisfaction, ambition: Which one has propelled me out of Sicily and catapulted me across the Atlantic? Perhaps all of them. I have traveled to places nobody in my family had ever seen. No one else in my family was in this country to meet me. I have left family behind, though over the years I have created and destroyed other versions of family. I leave when need or desire make it necessary. Only once in thirteen years have I experienced a sense of loss at leaving one of my American homes: an apartment with a porch in northern New Jersey. Sitting on the porch, I could see trees, touch the branches and leaves of one tree that hung over the fence. I could make believe it was Sicily.
I develop no particular attachment to the spaces outside the homes I inhabit. The palm trees of Miami, the beaches of the Hamptons, the heavy snow of Schenectady—they all blend into one landscape, a past left behin
d without regrets. Yet, while I wander from Sicily to Florida, to Long Island, to upstate New York, to New Jersey, changing homes ten times in thirteen years, I begin to cling to small spaces in the homes I inhabit. Shortly after each move, I reconstitute certain spaces: the black and white photograph of Sonia, my friend who died at twenty-seven of cancer, always in my bedroom; a colorful De Simone plate depicting the picking of oranges always in a visible corner; the silver frame with a photograph of my mother as a beautiful twenty-year-old on a small round table in the living room, surrounded by a blue and gold Limoges china box; two small silver frames with pictures of myself and my daughter; and a tiny bowl of Deruta ceramics, the bomboniera from my older sister’s wedding, filled with small dried yellow rosebuds. Each new home becomes a modified replica of its predecessors. Miraculous parthenogenesis. But I never succeed in finding the home I crave. I never quite get it right.
I left home to become a scholar, a writer. But I am also a teacher, just like my father. I am, after all, the daughter of the professor. But I am also Nonna Ciuzza’s granddaughter. So far away from what was once home, long after my grandmother’s death, I find myself thinking about her, wishing she could answer my questions, that she could explain what happened to her. Was it a conscious decision to lock herself inside that wretched room in the upstairs apartment on Vico Marino? I wonder about the terror my grandmother and my aunt experienced during their sporadic outings. I wonder whether the space all around them—the streets, the people, the cars, the noises—felt like a prehistoric monster coming at them, merciless, unavoidable, about to swallow or crush them as they maintained a delicate balance on the space where their feet stood precariously: my aunt’s crippled arm and leg twisted in spasmodic tension, her eyes petrified in terror; my grandmother’s arm extended around her daughter’s shoulder in vain protection, sharing and feeding her terror; my father behind them, concerned but impatient, his face turned away from that sad spectacle.