The start of winter had been milder and had seemed less somber to me than usual. Nanna Stella had wrapped green tomatoes from the summer’s bumper crop in newspapers, and they had ripened slowly. It was unheard of, she said, to eat red tomatoes until the end of January. Mother spoke less and less of the war days, when all they’d had to eat were wild field greens and a few thin slices of rationed yellow cornbread. Now the bread was baked at Nanna’s store and was white and plentiful. And, for snacks, she spread it with formaggino, the triangular-shaped little creamy cheeses wrapped in silver foil.
Since we had received our visa, there wasn’t a day that someone didn’t offer me something to eat or drink and say, “Eat the capicollo” – or the fig, or the chestnuts – “while you can, for you’re never going to see them again.”
While Mother reminded me of all the good things around us that we would be leaving for good, she also smirked at the desire for luxury that was sweeping the village. Che lusso! she’d say, whenever we allowed ourselves a new indulgence.
The Amatesi had not only gotten their ice-cream maker before the Mulerinesi. They had also been able to watch the black-and-white television screen at their local bar almost a full year earlier. Many of the men and boys had walked to Amato every Thursday evening to watch Lascia o Raddoppia. In the show, contestants were asked impossibly difficult questions on
geography, history, politics, and literature. After a first correct answer, they won a large sum of money. They then had to decide whether to walk away with their winnings – lascia – or take a chance with another question and double the loot – raddoppia – if they answered correctly. If they were wrong, they lost everything. The show’s host was Mike Buongiorno, a suave, good-looking man who had gotten the name Mike after a short stint living in New York. The day after each show, the talk around the village was of how much money had been won or lost. Most of the amounts, in the millions of lire, sounded astronomical and unreal to the villagers. The whole nation was glued to the TV set every Thursday evening, watching the winners, who became millionaires and instant national celebrities.
In Mulirena, part of our newly felt prosperity was due to the dollar bills that my father and other men sent in each letter to their families. This allowed our mothers to buy us formaggini, gelati, and new clothes.
But now, after almost two years of living apart, our family would finally be together. And Lucia would be travelling with us to join the husband she had never met. We would be boarding the boat, Saturnia, in Naples on the last day of February. We would arrive in Halifax eleven days later. Mother could not speak of the voyage without her eyes widening with panic. She had never ventured beyond Mulirena unaccompanied. And now she would have to cross an ocean, in the depths of winter, alone with two children and the ever-willful Lucia. Since she got married, Lucia kept to herself, but she paraded around the village to show off her new clothes, and she still had constant run-ins with her brother Alfonso. This had reinforced Mother’s view that Lucia was both unreasonably headstrong – caparbia – and a tease – a civetta – to boot. These were two serious and dangerous faults in a new wife.
As the weather got colder, our minds had turned to the upcoming voyage, and Mother had set out to do what everyone else before her had done. She found a buyer for her wedding costume. Traditionally, the women were buried in their wedding clothes. During the war, many brides had borrowed one another’s costumes, since the materials needed to make them were quite expensive. Now, as more and more women shed the traditional garb to go to America, they sold it for a few lire to those who remained without one of their own. No one thought of taking the traditional pacchiana clothes along as a souvenir; they were much too cumbersome to pack. She found room in the trunk for a black shawl and a lacy mandile.
Worrying about the trip had made my mother lose weight. When Giovanna took her measurements for two new dresses, Mother, deprived of the layers of clothing the costume had provided, hated herself in the mirror. “Paru na sarda asciutta,” she said in disgust, comparing herself to a dry herring. Despite trying on other colours, Mother chose blue for both dresses,
blue being the only colour she found neither too drab nor too showy. She insisted on the same style of modest round collar on both pieces. She also had to be measured for a bra, which, as a pacchiana, she had never worn. Because her breasts were almost non-existent, Giovanna stuffed the cups with leftover lining material, and then laughed at Mother screaming in protest because the two cups turned out too pointy.
I was also measured for a new dress – a pleated, brown woolen one with long sleeves – and a red wool coat. Lucia kept Giovanna working nights. She ordered dresses, skirts, a suit, and a coat with money sent by her new husband.
Mother started wearing the new dresses two weeks before leaving, just so she could get used to them. The next thing that needed attention was her hair. She had let her braids dangle to her shoulders, but my father had written that she should have her hair cut and permed. There were no hairdressers for women in Mulinera, so Zio had Don Cesare drive us to Catanzaro. Mother’s hair was not as thick as most of the other women’s. As long as she had kept it braided and puffed on the sides, this deficiency had not been too obvious, but as soon as the hairdresser cut it to a short chin-length, it just fell flat and separated at the crown, showing three bald patches, the results of carrying heavy loads on her head for years. “Paru na gallina spinnata,” she said.
From the expression on his face, the hairdresser seemed to agree that she looked like a plucked chicken. “Of course, you need a permanent,” he said. Zio left us to attend to other business, while I sat and watched the whole procedure. The hairstylist rolled her hair on rods and then attached each rod to a clamp connected by a wire to a machine. I sat on the edge of my chair until the hairdresser finally disconnected mother from the dangerous-looking contraption. What if she needed to get up and run out of the store? When the permanent was finished, the hairdresser flattened the tightly-curled hair at the crown with some pomade, and then arranged it like a halo around her face and nape. Zio came back with a green cashmere hat and a small blue purse, both for me. As we walked back up from the piazza in the late afternoon, I felt like a new person, wearing my new hat and carrying my empty purse around my wrist. Mother looked very much like a city woman in her new dress and permed hair. She would never be able to make her hair look that good again. After a few days, it lost its halo shape. And when she tried washing it, it curled out of control. “Mo, paru na crapa,” she said, and said she wished she could pull it all off since it made her look like a goat.
As she packed the trunk and suitcases, Mother again wanted to pull her hair out, in exasperation this time. Besides our clothes and Mother’s trousseau of bedspreads, embroidered sheets, and pillowcases, we had to find good hiding places for the heavy capicolli, sopressata and sausages. Everyone knew by now that cured meats were not allowed in the new country, yet everyone took chances. We felt that this was what our families were missing and valued most. The going joke was that, if the meat were confiscated, we should just eat it all in front of the customs agents. After all, there was no law against eating smoked salami before entering the country. The first bit of news that the villagers were anxious to hear was whether their salamis had made it through customs.
Mother could not refuse anyone. “If you refuse one then you have to refuse them all.” We spent the last week stuffing the trunk and suitcases, and weighing them on the grocery store’s scale since we were only allowed a specified maximum weight. The trunk was locked, tied, and sent in advance. The suitcases remained open until the day of our departure.
On the last Sunday, Mother took out the only piece of jewellery she owned, a gold chain given to her by her parents on her wedding day. She tied it around the neck of the statue of the Madonna del Rosario as an offering and a plea to help us through the long sea voyage.
On the morning we left, after I went to school for the last time to sa
y goodbye to my classmates and to Signor Gavano, I passed the bar where everyone was waiting for the television to be delivered. I didn’t stop because I had promised Mother I would go straight home and help repack the suitcases. The day was rainy and wet. As I walked up the hill, Aurora’s mother, Paola, came out of her house and waved at me to come inside. Her house smelled of cabbage and pork rind. She wiped her wet hands on her apron and planted a kiss on my face. “Oh Catarinella, mia,” she said. “So I won’t be seeing you walk up anymore.”
Then from her apron pocket, she pulled out a small sopressata wrapped in an oily paper, and insisted that I take it. “I’ll come and see your mother later, but give her this to pack. If they take it, they take it. If it passes, then you’ll eat it with my love when you get there.” Then she kissed me again, and said, “Va, va, bella mia, e buona fortuna.”
I walked up, holding back the tears, holding on to the little gifts that my friends at school and Signor Gavano had given me. By late afternoon, my grandparents, uncles, aunts, and cousins started congregating at our house. Zio, swearing, had to get Luigi to stand on each suitcase so he could close them and tie them with a cord. By the evening, the house was packed with people, and the conversation centred on the TV show that they would soon be watching. When the time to leave got close, Nanna Stella started crying, and Zio got upset at her. “Stop the crying. They’re going to America, not to a funeral.”
When Don Cesare came with a couple of other men to get the suitcases, Zio started wailing like the others, embracing Luigi like he didn’t want to let him go – even though Zio would be travelling with us to Naples. From all that crying, I got the feeling that we were leaving Mulirena forever.
The train station at Santa Eufemia looked unfamiliar in the dark of night. I had taken a train there before, to go to Rome for our visas. It had been daylight, and the white-stucco station, with its rows of pink oleanders along one side and a palm tree on the other, had buzzed with the noises of trains and people jostling to get on and off.
The ten o’clock train for Naples was not there yet, but Don Cesare and Zio rushed to move the suitcases onto the platform as though we were late. Don Cesare shook hands with Mother, hugged my brother, and pinched me on the cheeks. Lucia stood back from us, not making any move to shake hands with him. As he walked away, he bent his head in her direction and said, “Buona fortuna a tutti.” Everyone became silent again.
It had rained here too, and the air was chilly. Mother hugged both Luigi and me to her body to keep us warm. After a few minutes, a family from Amato arrived by car and came to join us on the platform – a man and a young woman who was holding a sleeping child in her arms. I didn’t know them, but Zio struck up a conversation with the man. He was the woman’s brother and, like Zio, he was accompanying his sister to Naples. She would be taking the same boat as us, but then would remain on the train for another two days to go to Winnipeg to meet her husband, who had left just before her two-year-old son was born.
Zio said to the man, “You’ll soon be going to Winnipeg too?”
“God willing,” he answered.
The woman smiled and nodded at Zio, as she shifted her weight, rocking the heavy child, whose head rested on her shoulder. She didn’t talk to anyone, but the woman had a constant smile on her face. She was so unlike Lucia, who neither cried nor smiled.
The sleeping child kept everyone quiet, but the silence was soon shattered by bells announcing the arrival of the Espresso train. It arrived so quickly and noisily, expelling steam on the rails, that Mother instinctively stepped back, hugging us closer to her. Zio, who took trains all the time, was the first to run toward it, dragging the two heaviest suitcases. We all followed him. He took the first empty cabin and arranged the suitcases on the shelves over the seats. The train, which was coming from Sicily, was not very full at that time of night, but judging from the amount of baggage in the corridors, most of the other passengers were headed for the same boat trip.
Zio found another empty cabin for himself and Luigi, so that we three ladies would have plenty of space to stretch out. We used our coats as pillows. Lucia and I lay on one seat, with our heads on opposite sides; my mother on the other.
Maybe feeling sorry for Lucia, who looked so forlorn, curled up on the bench in a fetal position, Mother said, “Departures are ugly for everyone.”
I thought it especially ugly for Lucia who seemed snatched unnaturally from the love of her life, the only man she had ever loved, who ran away from her only because she reminded him of Mulirena. I curled up, too, on my side of the bench. I hardly slept, though. The whistling and the screeching of wheels as the train approached each station kept me awake. We had passed these cities twice before, and their names had become familiar – Benevento, Amantea, Salerno …
On our other trips, we had passed rows and rows of tenement buildings built so close to the tracks that we could almost touch their balconies. I had noticed the peeling, stained stucco, the piled-up garbage. But the neighbourhoods had teemed with life. We saw women hanging clothes on these same balconies, the sheets and underwear flapping in the wind, while in the streets, small boys in sandals played soccer and waved at the train. I thought of the people sleeping in the dimly-lit apartments. They’d wake up in the morning to their normal routines. The children would go to school, the men to work and the women would go about their chores. They would know nothing of us, who had passed this way for the last time, sliding past them so quickly in the night.
Acknowledgements
The stories in this short novel originally formed part of a much longer work, a 600-page multilayered novel I presented as a Master’s thesis at Concordia University in Montreal. Extracting them from their original context was painful but ultimately liberating. I would like to thank my publisher Linda Leith for taking a leap of faith that I would succeed in this, and for her firm guidance as an editor.
In the fourteen years since I started writing some of these stories, many people have helped me with critical feedback and moral support. It is to my first writing teachers at Concordia University that I owe the greatest gratitude. I’d like to single out Scott Lawrence, who made me believe that my stories were worth writing; Mary di Michele and Kate Sterns for their thorough reading of my thesis and valuable recommendations, and mostly Terry Byrnes, teacher extraordinaire, for his grace and patience as thesis supervisor and for guiding me through every phase of the writing. I’d also like to acknowledge the following people who have offered comments, suggestions, encouragement, and blunt criticism: Ann Diamond, Elettra Bedon, Antonio D’Alfonso, John Asfour, Julie Roorda, and Michael Mirolla. To my extended family, my close friends – you know who you are – my sons David and Anthony, and my daughter-in-law Melissa, thank you for being close to me at painful and happy times and for encouraging me in my passion for writing in spite of the sporadic state of amnesia it often caused.
This is a work of fiction. I was born in a Southern Italian village much like Mulirena. Real people, historical events and personal circumstances provided the initial inspiration for the stories that have shaped the work. Once on paper, however, my characters took on quirky and erratic lives of their own, refusing to obey common rules of discretion, so that any resemblance to actual people, living or dead has become entirely coincidental. That said, I would like to acknowledge the work of Antonio Caccetta, and his book, Miglierina, un paese due campanili, il tempo e la memoria. for the historical information used as background for the fictitious village of Mulirena.“Without historical memory,” he wrote, “we lose our orientation and skip over our relationship with time, space, our own self and others.”
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The Girls of Piazza D'Amore Page 11