Advice for Italian Boys

by Anne Giardini

  On Sunday mornings Nicolo’s mother and father carry out their routines in peaceable silence. They drink their coffee without more than the briefest of exchanges, although their fingers may brush together when Paola hands Massimo his cup to carry outside and in this passing contact is enfolded the whole of a conversation of which they know every tone and nuance. The house is warm and silent. They place their empty cups, rinsed once quickly under a brief stream of water from the tap, on a folded dishcloth in the sink. They dress with careful attention. Paola sheds her soft, faded, fraying housecoat and puts on satiny underpants and bra, both of a matching mocha hue. She drapes and fastens one of her two good dresses, the navy blue one with the slim self-belt, or the red one with a wave of gathers at the waist from which the fabric drops in a slimming cascade as fluid as falling water around her hips. She pulls on stockings and places her black shoes beside the front door. She combs and pins her hair in a heavy knot behind her head. Massimo wears his black pants, and a white shirt that has been ironed and starched by Nonna and hung on a wooden hanger in the closet that he shares with Paola. He knots a careful tie under his chin. At the door wait his solid black brogues, the ones the boys bought him a few Christmases ago, so sturdy that no one in the family would have been in any doubt at all, had the question been raised, that, with Massimo’s customary care and frugal use, these shoes will be on his feet when he is laid out in his coffin—even the shoelaces are barely worn.

  Massimo can never look at these good shoes without seeing his own father’s brown, callused feet with their thick nails, ridged, dented and black-edged; his father, Peppino, had not worn shoes until he was ordered at age nineteen and a half to go north to the town of Tarsia to help guard two thousand rounded-up Jews at the Ferramonti internment camp. Afterward, near the end of the war, out of fear of reprisal, he had thrown the shoes and uniform that he had been issued into the river Crati. It was the morning of the day that the camp was liberated by British and Canadian troops—strong boys who advanced in confident ranks, long-legged, pale-haired, red-skinned—and although he had longed to keep the shoes, which had thick soles and strong laces, instead he had walked home barefoot, a journey of five days, mostly at night, wearing civilian clothes he stole from a pile behind the camp laundry in order to blend in with the local citizenry who thronged to the camp to watch the tall soldiers arrive. He kept his homeward steps on pace with a silent song.

  Filomena mia, fammi nu vutu, Fammillu no mi vaiu pe surdatu.

  Fammillu no mi vaiu pe surdatu.

  Mi vaiu a Catanzaru e m’u m’indi votu.

  Filomena mine, say a prayer for me, So that I won’t have to go to be a soldier.

  Say it so that I won’t have to go to be a soldier.

  I’ll go as far as Catanzaro and then come back to you.

  Peppino’s bare feet bled at first, and at night he dug soft, powdery clay from the riverbanks and applied it to his cuts and blisters to draw out any infection. His feet got blacker and coarser and tougher as he trudged closer to his wife Filomena, with few stories that he could ever bring himself to tell her except that the prisoners had taught him, an unlettered peasant and their jailer as well, how to read, starting with the backs of cigarette packages and then moving up through scraps of old newspapers to books, real books, including parts of the Bible, but only the older stories. For some reason the Jews’ Bible had in it nothing from the gospels of saints Matteo, Marco, Luca or Giovanni, or from the letters of Paolo to the earliest Christian flocks right there in Italy, up in Rome where everything, as he had thought, had begun.

  He had not owned shoes of his own after that, except for the local style of sandals with thick leather soles, until he died, aged fifty-one, of a twisted, septic bowel, in agony, but relatively quickly, which was a sure sign of God’s kindness and mercy, everyone told Filomena, who listened to these reminders of God’s grace with her head bowed to conceal her expression, and closed her hands into tight fists in order to feel the pain of her fingernails digging into her palms. Her acid silence made her tongue swell inside her mouth. She acquired during the week following her husband’s death a hard-edged ball of disappointment and thwarted sensual longing that settled in her chest and had never thereafter been dislodged or dissolved. Having no one else to blame, she had laid her loss at the feet of the bungling, ineffective God of southern Italy.

  Shortly after, she began encouraging Massimo to leave. She knew that her only son would send for her once he was settled, and after that, the God who had not lifted so much as a finger to take care of her good, devout husband could look for her all over Calabria as hard as he wanted, she would not be there to be found. At the last minute she took Paola with her. Paola was not the most beautiful of the neighbourhood girls, but she had been left with no one—her father gone first, of black lung from his years working in the Belgian mines, and her mother not six months after, of a broken heart—and Filomena saw that she might do for Massimo.

  Dressed, brushed, polished, Paola and Massimo leave the house as quietly as possible. They pull the door softly, softly shut behind them. They do not want to risk waking any of the house’s sleepers and they want even less for anyone to express a desire to come with them. This is one of the few times during the week when they are alone together. They close the door behind them with care. When they walk down the path to their car, Paola rests her hand on the warm sleeve of Massimo’s jacket. Massimo opens the car door for her, and he cradles her elbow as she slides her bottom into her seat. Paola’s scent (shampoo, face powder, a lingering suggestion of coffee) mixes with Massimo’s (aftershave, deodorant, shoe polish, fresh air) inside the rumbling car that conveys them the eight blocks to the church. Paola inclines slightly toward Massimo’s shoulder as he negotiates the car around a right-hand turn. He swells taller, larger, with pride in her, his own, attractive, competent, steadfast wife.

  They are young, after all, younger than you might imagine. Paola was only eighteen when their first son was born. She is forty-four now, and Massimo won’t be fifty for three more years. Paola knows of someone, a near neighbour, a few blocks to the east, in one of the smaller houses east of the old mill pond, who gave birth a month ago to twin boys at age forty-eight. She hasn’t seen the babies, but she has heard reports of their birthweights—five and six pounds—and complexions—fair like their mother. Almost anything remains possible for Massimo and Paola, even this.

  Massimo’s hair is still black and thick and it has receded from his forehead by no more than the breadth of his thumb, and although Paola’s waist has expanded by several inexorable inches, her breasts are almost as high and full as the day she was married. Massimo still interests her, thrills her sometimes. Her own heart can surprise her, spilling like an overflowing glass of wine without warning some mornings when she looks at him. Her emotion rises sometimes like a flush into her throat, where Massimo has observed it pulsing. In bed, Massimo can’t gaze on his wife’s naked, unguarded face without perceiving her affection. He makes love to her in the night under the blankets, beneath her cotton nightgown, in full darkness, his hands on her large brown nipples, to keep his great fortune doubly and triply safe and secret. He falls asleep at night with his head in the deep valley between the tenderest inner slopes of her wonderful breasts and he hears the ocean in her heartbeat. She lies against his back with her fingers threaded in the curls on the thick skin at the nape of his neck, her thighs tucked inside the hot crook of his legs, and feels like a fragrant pink shrimp floating snug inside its tough and resilient shell. Her three sons. Her husband. Her heart is almost entirely filled with them.

  Nicolo doesn’t go to Mass on Sunday mornings. He wakes up hours later, usually after nine o’clock. What pulls him from sleep is the scent of Nonna’s strong, dark coffee hiccuping in the espresso pot on the front of the stove, and the clattering noises she sends forth from the kitchen. He can also hear his parents talking to each other. They have returned from Mass—unburdened of their trivial sins, forgiven, shriven, blessed
, renewed—and they are lifting the heavy oak dining room table between them and ferrying it to the far side of the room underneath the lace-curtained window. “Careful.” “Watch your foot.” “Hold it one more minute while I…” “We can put it down here.”

  Nicolo hears the doors to the stereo cabinet pulled open, the snick of the magnetic clasp being pulled apart, a reverberation of the doors of the veneered wooden cabinet as they reach the outer limit of their hinges. The sound of hands fumbling with a record or tape. And then the music begins. Waltzes mainly. Foxtrots. Quicksteps. Sambas sometimes. Occasionally a rumba, or the exotic to-and-fro of a tango. The sounds of a weekly hour that begins slow and ends with something fast-paced and difficult—salsa, mambo, merengue or swing. This is what Nicolo and his brothers think of as classical music, the music they heard on Sunday mornings when their parents came home from Mass, shriven and sinless, and, still in their church clothes, cleared an open space in the dining room, the largest room in the small one-storey house, and danced.

  Massimo and Paola begin with the most sedate of waltzes, moving in small circles in the centre of the oval hooked rug, arms around each other’s back and waist and neck, her hair or cheek occasionally brushing, accidentally in passing, the skin of his shaved jaw. Massimo holds his left elbow high and uses it much as a yachtsman uses a rudder, steering them both through the dining room in more or less the same area that is occupied during the rest of the week by the large circle of lace that sits on the table weighted down by a white china soup tureen with its matching china ladle. They get bolder as they go, venturing outside the circumference of the lace tablecloth, their orbit expanding. The music gives a charge to the blood in their veins. Their tendons loosen. Their bones rock and their muscles swim. One of them reaches over to the stereo and turns up the volume. Massimo pulls Paola closer, enfolding her progressively nearer to his chest. Paola adds a flourish with one leg. She kicks up the heel of a shoe. Her eyes and hands and ankles move and slide around him. She sends him glancing sideways looks of comic-book love, or turns away false-haughty, teasing, enticing. Massimo pulls and then spins her from him to the end of his grasp, to his fingertips, and then reverses to pull her back again into his embrace. He changes direction, light as a moment on his feet, and her feet reflect his steps so closely that it is impossible to tell that they are not following a single, shared inclination. All the atoms in the room and in their liquid bodies are spinning end on end. When their hour is done, on the last note, Massimo dips a trusting Paola backward through a sphere of space. They trace together a final large, sweeping parabola. Then, briskly, they release each other, pull away, smooth their clothes.

  They lift and carry the table back to the middle of the room, where it belongs. They unroll and smooth the rug. One of them switches off the stereo and closes the cabinet doors, and they both go to change into work pants and housedress to take up the afternoon’s tasks. Nothing is left over from the dancing; no expression or gesture gives them away, except perhaps, if you are watching for it, the faintest trace, like atomized mist, of contentment, of serenity, of something essential having been accomplished.

  The boys sometimes used to peek at their mother and father through the doorway, and there was a time, even further back, when they would sit cross-legged on the floor under the dining room table and watch. But as soon as they were old enough to sense that Sunday dancing was something between their parents only, and perhaps more hallowed than the Mass that preceded it, they began to find something to do other than watch their parents behaving so strangely. Sometimes when they were younger, Nonna would give them cookies to eat to distract them, or even allow them to sit in front of the television and eat bowls of sweet canadese cereal drowned in milk.

  In grade eight, Father Santino taught Nicolo’s class that the first proof of God’s existence as laid out by Thomas Aquinas was that nothing can move itself, that the first object in motion needed a mover, and that the first mover, the unmoved mover, is called God. Listening, Nicolo felt that this was something he already knew and understood because he had been a witness to this fact since his earliest years. His mother and father, his first childhood gods, his genii loci: it had always seemed to him that they set the world in motion, wound it up like a watch, from the very centre of the household, not the hearth or the stove, but from the area created when the dining room table was lifted and displaced, a central, crucial, fundamental space in which constancy, goodness, decency and ardour dwelt, and in which shelter, safety, beauty and love were created and recreated over and over every Sunday morning from the beginning of time without cease forever.

  Massimo and Paola were strangers on the night of their afternoon wedding, and Massimo, who had been taught as a boy to waltz by his uncle Rudolfo, a small-town dandy with polished two-tone shoes and a thin moustache waxed to twin tips pointing northeast and northwest, taught downcast Paola the three-step between the hours of ten and twelve, after which they fell asleep with several modest centimetres between them in a double bed in a small room. It wasn’t until weeks later that Paola conveyed an invisible signal to Massimo that he had earned her trust and Massimo parted the folds of her embroidered nightdress and discovered with his hands and then the rest of him her secret places—her warm, giving softness formed into ridges like sand carved by wind or water, flesh laid down unstintingly over bone that fit into his palm like a shell, his fingers reaching inside his wife as if he were a sailor and she were the warm, glossy, eternal ocean—and they began the process of creating Enzos and Nicolo.

  Dancing took the place of birth control in their marriage, which they both felt was undertaken under Roman sanction and scrutiny and therefore was to be practised according to its exacting rules. Their three sons were judicially spaced over a span of fifty-seven months by means of many Sunday afternoons spent dancing in the dining room, supplemented by the occasional midnight session when Massimo, in ardour, would pull Paola out of bed, sleeping, laughing, protesting, and take her in his arms and spin her on the bedside rag rug, humming into the thick waves of her hair as her head grew heavier and heavier, trusting, dozing, contented and warm on his shoulder. The daughter that might have arrived three years after their third son simply had never appeared, although Paola is still, after all these years, attentive to any possible signs that God might not yet have completed his promises to her. She believes that her daughter is waiting, floating in some small and fluid place inside her belly, a miniature of her future self, wise and pink and, while perfectly formed, not yet animated, delicate, curled up in the shape of a seahorse, eyes and ears and mouth closed as tightly as small new buds on the earliest day of spring. Paola counts the days between one month’s ever-advancing flow of blood and the next—this month it arrives on the fifth, the next month on the third, on the cusp of the next—ready for and alert to the subtle changes that may yet come. She dreams sometimes of her daughter, a girl she has provisionally named Sofia Rosa (the first name for wisdom and the second name for her grandmother, Rosa Catterina Spina, remembered still back in Arduino for her unparalleled goodness, modesty, charity and kindness), as she will be one day when she is finished, unfurled, sparked with life and born at last, the weight of her on Paola’s lap, her sleeping eyes swelling under their lids like almonds and fringed with blackest lashes. The scent and colour and texture of this daughter come to her in her dreams as well. Sofia Rosa is poppy seeds and flowers and grapes, she is pinker and creamier than gardenias. She smells of honey and yeast and lavender. She is as warm and heavy in Paola’s waiting arms as new dense bread pulled fresh and salty and sweet and soft from the oven.

  Although Paola loves her grandchildren Zachary and Isabella, they have not replaced Sofia Rosa, nor has Enzo’s wife Mima. Mima and her small children live almost exclusively in the constant, feverish, hectic dramas of the Bon-figlio family, which now has, in addition to its six handsome daughters, five sheepish sons-in-law and thirteen grandchildren (with a fourteenth grandchild and sixth surprised son-in-law pending), and so
Zachary and Isabella, although they live only a few blocks away, seldom visit, and, although Paola and Nonna are often invited to the enormous and complicated events at Mima’s house—engagement parties, wedding showers, baby showers, baptisms, first communions—Paola realized long ago that she is surplus to the Bonfiglios’ requirements, whether for dramatic actors, chorus or audience, which are more than met by the Bon-figlios themselves. Also, she has tired of the boasts of Mima’s mother, Augusta, which chiefly concern how well settled all of her daughters are, but also include frequent mentions of how close her bond is to Enzo and Mima’s children. Augusta never fails to mention that she is the only person Mima trusts with them, the broad category of persons not to be trusted including, by implication, Paola herself. Paola has come to understand some of the reasons Mima and her sisters might have been so eager to get out of Augusta’s house and into homes of their own, and she feels as if she understands why her eldest son comes by so often to help Massimo with the heavier chores—taking down storm windows, mending the back fence, splitting wood—and why he usually stays for an hour or two longer than strictly necessary, drinking coffee or a beer at the kitchen table and talking to Massimo about the plans he still has to go into business for himself. He has looked at a chicken sandwich franchise, a brew-your-own-beer outlet, and an organic grocery store, but so far he has not settled firmly on one thing or another.