by Lee Gutkind
—the piercing gold edge of the ruler—
“—Jesus?—”
—the piercing gold edge of the ruler—
“—Holy Mary, Mother of God—”
—the piercing gold edge of the ruler—
“—Pray for us sinners—”
—the piercing gold edge of the ruler—
“—Now and at the hour—”
—the piercing gold edge of the ruler—
“—Of our death. Amen?”
She strikes seven times.
I feel a warm trickle between my legs. I have soiled myself. Normally every kid in the class would laugh at this—this, and throwing up in the cafeteria during lunch.
But no one is laughing now. No one.
I suddenly think of the look on St. Sebastian’s face in the vestibule and it calms me. I think of the maroon trickle of blood, and the brown stain softening between my legs. I look up, right into Sister Gonzaga’s eyes. I am no longer afraid. She looks sad and lost and crazy. Trapped in something, by something. She is surprised by my calm and winded by this spasm of rage that is only the tip of her sadness.
I don’t cry. I say softly aloud, as if trying the phrase on for size, “The one who wounds me deepest loves me the most.”
Sister Gonzaga stops, her robes heaving up and down. She blinks. “St. Sebastian said, ‘The one who wounds me deepest loves me the most,’ ” I repeat. “That’s you, Sister.”
Sister Gonzaga is frozen. Rhonda Lawrence makes the Sign of the Cross.
I know the answer to the third question.
Part Two: The Question
I am happiest in school; the logic of the institution makes perfect sense, and what I least understand I defend with added vehemence. The routine is easy and occasionally interesting, and there are 55 other kids in the room with whom to play at recess. But more than anything else, I can look up at the clock and tell by what time it is exactly what is going to happen next.
When the women from the CYO bowling league come over to play bridge because it’s my mom’s turn to have the girls over, she calls upstairs, Raaaaaaaaaan-Deeeeeeeeeee! and I come downstairs in my pj’s and my mom says now tell the girls what you want to be when you grow up and I say shyly I want to be a priest. Then Judy Constanzo says isn’t that the cutest goddamn thing you ever heard?
We play this game for decades. This way neither of my parents will have to really own what they know.
The question is: Who—or what—does this serve?
In graduate school, my mentor, Carol Gilligan, used to point out that the hallmarks of loss are idealization and denigration and underneath both, profound sadness. I pretend I will be a cleric one day, so that my celibacy will sanction ideals of goodness and control. Then no one will have to think about what the loss is. Or for whom.
I hear my parents arguing about money then I hear my mom moaning stop it, you’re hurting my arm and I remember the picture of my father in the basement as he posed with the Ohio State wrestling team he was pinning another guy twice his size to the mat and then I heard a loud noise so I got up and went into my mom and dad’s room they were standing over the bed with their arms up in the air twisted like they were dancing and my dad said you march yourself back into that goddamn bedroom and I looked my dad right in the eye and said in the voice of a penitent you just stop hurting people and my dad blinked his eyes for a minute and took off his belt it slid from the loops of his navy blue salesman’s pants with a quick whizzy sound and then a black snake hung in the air above his head and something made me want to fall backward as I watched my glasses go flying off my face and ring the statue of the Holy Family on my mom’s dresser just like when we play horseshoes at family reunions in Pepper Pike but nobody yelled that’s a ringer and I stared at my dad for a long time and hot red iron and fire burned a line across my face and I stood there in my cowboy and indian pj’s with snaps on the front and my mom said go to bed now and the next morning when I came down to breakfast I couldn’t open my right eye and my dad put the Akron Beacon Journal down.
Jesus, he said.
It was very quiet.
I ate a bowl of Maypo and I looked at my dad. I watched him. He was staring at me. Then he asked, what are you going to tell Sister Gonzaga if she asks what happened to your face. He said it softly.
And I answered I’m gonna tell her my father beats his kids with a strap.
—Dominus vobiscum.
—Et cum spiritu tuo.
I looked at my dad. I heard the high whizzy sound of the snake again. I looked him in the eye.
“Go ahead and hit me,” I said. I was seven. “The one who wounds me the deepest loves me the most.” I know this by now. Years later a doctor will tell me, “You eroticized the violence in your upbringing in order to make it tolerable.”
My father puts the belt down. Then something else happens. Something worse than the belt, worse than the arrows.
He stands with the belt in the air and suddenly he doesn’t know where he is anymore.
Then my father breaks in half. Like the communion host, he snaps into two pieces.
Then I become my father and he becomes my son.
—Per omnia secula seculorum.
—Amen.
During Religion class the nuns tell us that on our seventh birthdays we hit The Age of Reason. When we turn seven, our innocence dies. This means we’re old enough to know the difference between right and wrong and so God will be watching everything we do from now on and our sins will be burned away in Purgatory like the warts I had on my knuckles and on the back of my head that my dad got rid of by painting on clear medicine that smelled like ether from a dark blue bottle with a thin glass stick attached to the cap.
My Grandma Carmella Randazzo dies when I reach The Age of Reason, she dies just after midnight, right after my birthday and I’m certain she’s in Heaven. My grandmother, Carmella—my father’s mother—is there because she said the rosary every day on her knees in her living room then attended Mass right before breakfast.
On the morning she becomes a saint, on the morning I reach The Age of Reason, my dad and mom call my brother and me into their bedroom and it was the only time we were ever allowed to get into bed with them and my dad puts his arm around me and says Grandma went to heaven last night boys.
Why? I ask.
What is this question, my father says.
On a corner of their nightstand sits a wool pair of brown pants my Grandma Carmella got me before she went into the hospital because she knew she had something wrong with her blood cells and probably knew she was going to die and my father kept crying she even got you those pants she even got you those pants and I never saw my father cry like that it was high-pitched and scary and he cried right into his hands and my mother cried too and when we got to the funeral my Aunt Rosie walked up to the coffin and she kissed my Grandma and said you were the only good one in this whole goddamn family and then all of us kids are taken downstairs and they give us a piece of dry white cake from a sheetcake that says “Rest in Peace, Carmella” on it but I couldn’t eat cake when I could hear my father crying so hard upstairs so that night when we got back home and my parents were watching The Jack Paar Show I took the brown wool pants into the backyard where we had a big round metal trash burner way in the back of our house near the woods that began where our yard stopped and I put the pants into the burner with a pronged twig and poked them down under the layer of ashes and the next day when my dad took the trash and the newspapers out to the burner and burned them and I was sitting in my bedroom looking at the World Book Encyclopedia under “Blood cells” and I could see black smoke coming from the trash burner and I thought of those pants in the ashes and then I thought of my Grandma Carmella in the ground because we had gone to the cemetery and we watched them lower the casket into a hole that somebody had already dug and then we all threw red carnations into it but I didn’t throw mine I hid it in my jacket and when my dad came in from the burner his hands had that smell like ashes with after-s
have mixed in and then I knew the pants were burned and I wouldn’t have to wear them because then my dad would cry all over again and then I would have to kill myself but suicide is the one sin God never forgives.
Oh, St. Sebastian, how many times I have looked at your slumped body in the vestibule and wondered what it would be like not to die for others, not to find glory in humiliation?
But we are the Flames of Hell.
Epilogue: The Divine Petitions
Slumped, the body hangs in the gold-leafed church vestibule from a brown ceramic tree. In suffering beauty, thick neck and twisted face are upturned. Like the eyes, the mouth is wide open, frozen in a spasm of pain, the sculpted forearms entwined by delicate purple veins. Tousled, shoulder-length crow-black hair splays across powerful broad, white muscular shoulders, the torso pierced by seven arrows and tied by cords to the tree.
St. Sebastian, patron saint of archers, pray for us.
St. Sebastian, patron saint of athletes, pray for us.
St. Sebastian, patron saint of soldiers, pray for us.
St. Sebastian, whose own men were ordered by the Roman Emperor to kill him on discovery that he was a Christian.
St. Sebastian, the Italian solider whose men refused to carry out the Emperor’s orders, putting themselves in danger of being executed until Sebastian made a game of it by saying (says the libretto in Debussy’s “The Martyrdom of St. Sebastian”), “He who wounds me deepest loves me the most.”Archers. Athletes. Soldiers. Men.
St. Sebastian, Man of the Church.
Patron Saint of Homosexuals, pray for us.
Profound Sadness, pray for us.
RANDY-MICHAEL TESTA is a teacher, writer, and editor living in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Growing up near Akron, Ohio, Testa was both a choirboy and an altar boy.
Daughters of Mongrassano
. . . . . . . . . . . . .
JEANNA LUCCI CANAPARI
I think it was a few weeks after my first Communion when our neighbor, Priscilla, stormed into the kitchen of our two-family house on Long Island, wringing the hem of her housecoat. I could recognize a worried grandmother from my dishcloth-folding post at the kitchen table, so I folded myself into a safe corner.
“I know that my daughter thinks I’m nuts.” Priscilla paced the linoleum in her bedroom slippers. “She thinks Anthony has a cold. I’m telling you, he doesn’t.” As Priscilla spoke in her heavy Long Island accent, my mother softly translated her rant, selectively, for my grandmother, who was standing at the sink defrosting a chicken under a running tap.
My grandparents, who lived in the second-floor apartment of our house, arrived in Long Island when my mother was a small child, but spoke only the Italian dialect of Mongrassano, the mountaintop town in Calabria where they were born. Though English was our first language, my two younger sisters and I knew all the Calabrese words children would hear from a grandmother (or Nonna, which became Nanny to us) and a grandfather (Nonno). We knew quiet! (Chitta!), I love you (ti voglio bene), and turn down the television! (Vascia la televisione!)
“We saw my sister Mariangela yesterday,” Priscilla went on, “the one that lives out in Ronkonkoma? Well, she was all over him. ‘Oh what a beautiful child, oh God bless him, oh oh oh.’ Yeah, right! I told Mariangela, ‘Quit looking at my grandkid and tell your daughter to get busy!’ Meanwhile, six hours later, Anthony’s throwing up all over the place. He’s got a fever. And Marie won’t bring him over. What, she thinks St. Joseph’s aspirin is gonna cure the evil eye?” she said, extending her pinky and forefinger up toward the ceiling.
I wasn’t sure what the evil eye, or malocchio, as Nanny would say, was, but it made me shiver whenever anyone mentioned it. When I saw Priscilla make the sign of the curse toward the ceiling I remember thinking, who’s upstairs? My sister? Is she going to start throwing up now?
“I’ll call Marie and tell her to bring him over,” my mother said.
Thirty seconds into the phone call, Priscilla stamped her foot, her slipper muffling the stamp’s intended effect.
“Is she coming or not?” she said.
“OK,” my mother said into the receiver. “Bye.” She hung up the phone and turned to Priscilla, who was looking at her expectantly. “Yes, already! She’ll be here in a minute.”
It was a mild evening in April, but when Marie showed up with Anthony she had him wrapped in three crocheted blankets to make the trip from her house around the block. All I could see of the two-year-old was one bright red cheek.
“Anthony!” Priscilla hovered over the baby as he started to cry. “Oh! Menaggia miseria! He don’t look good!”
“Ma!” Marie’s pocketbook hit the linoleum with a thunk. “He just has a cold. We were with Daniela the other day and her kid was sick. This evil eye thing is a joke!”
“Oh, what do you know?” Priscilla said, standing closely behind Marie as she settled onto a chair at the kitchen table. “Just let her see! If it’s nothing I won’t say another word.”
As Nanny turned to reach for Anthony, she remembered I was in the corner folding furiously and used her free hand to shoo me out of the room.
“Vattene!” she shouted at me. “Go watch TV!”
“Why can’t I stay?”
My mother ushered me into the foyer by my shoulders.
“That’s not fair!”
“Jeanna, just go upstairs and watch TV with Nonno.”
“I’m going already,” I said.
I spent a few minutes upstairs trying to listen through the floor while Nonno looked at me over the top of his Gazzetta dello Sport, confused. After a few minutes, I gave up and turned on the television. About half an hour later, I heard Priscilla, Anthony, and Marie leave, the jalousie door slamming behind them. I went to the window behind the sofa where Nonno sat and watched them walk away.
“Was that so hard?” Priscilla said to Marie, her piercing voice carrying up to my second-story perch. “He’s already better, look!” Marie was aloof. She walked ahead of her mother, ignoring her words and holding the crochet-swaddled Anthony close. When Priscilla didn’t bring him back the next day, I knew Nanny had worked her magic.
I was too young then to watch the goings-on, but even as I got older and Priscilla marched in and out of our kitchen with her increasing brood of grandchildren dozens of times, my grandmother never let me watch her perform her craft. The secret prayers and rituals that women in Calabria were taught on Christmas Eve to remove the malocchio remain a mystery to me, even now. I think Nanny thought that I lived in a new world where the old ways no longer mattered. But my ear was pressed to the floor every time she did her work.
It occurred to me, only recently, the name for women like my grandmother, who add up the everyday details of a household, the empirical evidence of spilled olive oil and coffee grains, a flushed cheek of a child, and see beyond them into the spiritual world.
“Was Nanny a witch?” I asked my mother, as we recalled my grandmother just a while back. It was the fifth anniversary of her death. Nanny died on a December night, when she was 87 and I was 24.
“No!” my mother said, sitting up in her chair at her kitchen table, clutching her demitasse cup. Then she slunk back again. “Yes. Well …” she hesitated. “I guess she was a strega. But, mind you, she just removed the evil eye. I don’t want you to think she was riding around on a broomstick and hexing people. She was a good witch.”
“You don’t have to explain that,” I said. “But what I don’t understand is, she was Catholic. Witchcraft isn’t in the Bible.”
“What Bible? Do you ever remember Nanny reading the Bible, you know, in her spare time? She didn’t even own one. I’m not saying Nanny wasn’t Catholic, because she was … but in Mongrassano, I don’t think anyone would have any problem with doing both. I don’t know how to explain it better than that.”
Though we lived so close to it, my grandparents rarely went into New York. But one Christmas, when I was a child, we all went to the city, Nanny and Nonno, my sisters, my parents,
and I. We went to see the Christmas tree at Rockefeller Center, the shop windows at Saks Fifth Avenue, and Saint Patrick’s Cathedral: the trinity of the American Christmas, pagan, commercial, and spiritual, lined up on Fifth Avenue.
At Saint Pat’s, while my grandfather waited outside, Nanny went in to light a candle at the alcove of Saint Anthony of Padua, next to the gift shop. I watched as she put fifty cents in a brass collection box and bowed her head to pray for a moment in front of a statue of the saint.
What she did reminds me of how ancient Romans might have made an offering to a god. In return for her faith, and a bit of her money, she hoped that the saint would provide her with an answer to her prayer. It was the most important code in her religion, more important than any written dogma, and older. This quid pro quo began in the ancient world and became folded into Christianity when it swept across Europe and churches were built on the sites of temples to pagan gods. All over Italy, Minerva overlapped with Mary; in Rome, the Pantheon became home to the legions of saints.
In Calabria, the past is present, preserved in remote mountain towns and riverbeds and the few ancient roads that reach them. There, in the sight of churches, are thickets where you can search for wood nymphs that can improve your love life if you leave food by a certain chestnut tree. There are houses, near overgrown Greek temples, in which palm fronds are tucked behind mirrors and witches make magical potions. There are kitchens where women gather to confront the evil eye. And Saint Anthony, whose figurine rests on dresser tops in the bedrooms of town, replaced a man or beast who took into his charge all fears and desires, things lost and found. When Christianity came to scribble its legacy onto Italy, people still found room for what came before, for all of it: for churches and for the thicket, for witches and abbeys, for Easter and Christmas and potions of love and revenge, for Communion and the Evil Eye.
A thousand years ago, five hundred years ago, and today, in Mongrassano and on Long Island, this is truth: a yawn is a doorway into a baby’s soul, an opening allowing evil spirits to enter. And I remember my grandmother, with my sisters on her lap, making a sign of the cross with her thumb over their drooling mouths, locking the evil spirits out.