Francesco glows as he descends from the train, his belt loosened to accommodate the effects of American food, his saddlebags and suitcase straining with spiffy American sports clothes, his English flowing colloquially, and his head full of plans for next summer’s trip. A few days later, when I say to Pam that Francesco loved such and such in America, he interrupts to correct me.
“I loved everything in America.”
The Greeks traveled at the beginning of August too. According to Hesiod, “The best time for making a voyage is during the fifty days that follow the solstice, when summer is drawing to a close,” and in Athens this was also the month of the Metageitnia, the festival celebrating Apollo as promoter of neighborly union and therefore the month most favorable for moving house and making new neighbors. Most Sicilian rent contracts still run out in August, and even we, while staying put, promote neighborly union in our own small way by renting out the guesthouse.
The guesthouse occupies what was once the sharecroppers’ quarters, one very large room with a hayloft, and the former chapel, whose vaulted ceiling collapsed beyond any restoring in the earthquake. We built it with present visits from America and future generations in mind, but between one visit and the next it sits empty across the courtyard, its two glazed doors eyeing us reproachfully for our wastefulness. Tonino responds by talking of renting and I by pressing my thighs together, unable to overcome the sensation that renting part of Bosco is akin to prostitution.
The problem resolved itself very happily last year when Maria Vica told me she was looking for somewhere peaceful and inexpensive to spend a month together with her mother. They turned out to be perfect tenants, discreet and tactful, yet always available for a chat when the evening breezes bring us out into the courtyard, for an afternoon’s trip to see the ex-votos in a rural shrine, or for a brief exchange as, coffee cup in hand, I inspect the plants to see what the night has wrought.
This year a friend comes to visit them, an elderly woman who returned to her native Catania to live after her husband’s family palace in Palermo was destroyed by Allied bombs. The palace’s library, built up by generations, burst into an explosion of paper that rained back down on the city—yellowed, irreplaceable pages and priceless illuminated parchments that zigzagged gently downward and sent people scurrying after what they took to be Allied propaganda leaflets.
Stout and comfortable in her steel-rimmed spectacles and flowered housedress, she knits and tells us stories of the Sicilian aristocracy, passions and scandals: a senile baron solemnly asking his granddaughter’s hand in marriage; the aged principessa who was given to making regal apparitions at her balcony, stark naked; the two spinster sisters much sought after for their mastery of the malapropism, who, when complaining of the inefficient central heating, claimed that they couldn’t get warm even with two gladiators in their bedroom, and who were heard to announce, while pointing to some porcelain eggcups in a shopwindow, that they had decided to make the Contessina So-and-so a wedding present of those lovely French ovaries.
Tonino, coming home one day, says that he has seen a spectacular Saint Joseph’s altar being built in one of Alcamo’s back streets. I quickly call across the courtyard, inviting Maria Vica and company to explore with me this unseasonal windfall. Although the directions Tonino has given us are somewhat vague, the sound of hammering leads us through the maze of narrow streets and whitewashed houses, where large bunches of palm fronds decorate the intersections, until we find our path blocked by an enormous wooden stage stretching across the street from house to house and hung with lace tablecloths and swags of velvet. On the upper stage is the altar with the traditional tiers of beautifully molded bread and a table set for three, surrounded by houseplants and huge sheaves of gladioli. The apron of the stage is concealed by a large plush wall hanging printed with a reproduction of Leonardo’s Last Supper, which in turn serves as the backdrop for a lower level, occupied by a long table with thirteen places set, according to the neighbors standing about, to accommodate Christ and the Apostles.
At the other end of the block some men are at work constructing a lean-to, covered with more palm fronds, which our informants tell us will be the Grotto of Bethlehem, and the ground-floor garage adjoining the stage is filled with trestle tables on which a swarm of aproned women are setting out seemingly endless rows of plates. The virgineddi will come at noon the next day, the neighbors say, urging us to return then to see the show. Intrigued by such ambitious scenography, we promise to be back.
Our return the next day finds the noon sun centered mercilessly over the narrow street, into which all the neighborhood has squeezed itself to wait, fanning and mopping its collective brow, until the show begins. Rumor and anticipation agitate the crowd, pulling it this way and that, until at last the sound of music draws us toward the far end of the street. A three-piece band cleaves the crowd to make way for a donkey, led by an elderly contadino, which carries a youthful Madonna with a small baby in her arms, while an adolescent Saint Joseph walks beside her, perspiring heavily under his Biblical robes and solemn self-consciousness. No such dignity troubles the twelve young Apostles who follow on the heels of the Holy Family, shoving and giggling and tripping over their long tunics. The procession closes with Christ grown up, a boy of about thirteen quite preoccupied with scratching his chin under the woolly beard tied on with elastic and with trying to find a comfortable position for his crown of thorns.
Once the Holy Family has been installed in the Grotto, the hostess, a handsome and well-dressed young woman in her late thirties, comes forward together with two children to invite the virgineddi to come and eat at the altar. Although a loudspeaker hung from a nearby balcony transforms the speeches, which are recited with considerable prompting in rhymed dialect, into a series of squeaks and whistles, the invitation is accepted and the Family moves on, losing on the way the tiny and protesting Christ Child, who is whisked away to the arms of his mother. His four-year-old substitute appears miraculously and in some distress. He has been suspended by a rope from a balcony just above the corner of the stage and concealed from view by an embroidered bedspread; at the appropriate moment he is slowly lowered, flapping and revolving like a fish on a hook, while the crowd claps and cheers. When at last the participants are all seated in their places, the Holy Family on the higher level, Christ and the Apostles on the lower, the meal is served.
A long line of waiters comes stepping out of the garage, chins up and eyes straight ahead, all the male members of the extended family from elegant youths with modish haircuts and an air of savoir faire to bent-shouldered contadini with the white line of the coppola across their tanned foreheads. Dressed in red dinner jackets, they carry linen napkins on one arm and serving trays balanced, often precariously, on the other. These minions, one to each saintly personage, are supervised by a rather beautiful and very supercilious professional waiter in white jacket and black tie, who demotes one waiter from the upper stage to the lower because a button is missing from his jacket, assists the host and hostess in serving the Holy Family, and averts his eyes in pained contempt as a gray-haired old peasant with only one eye chases a fried fish around the platter, unable to grasp it between fork and spoon, and finally spears it inelegantly and dumps it onto the plate of his Apostle.
The script as its authors must have seen it in their mind’s eye apparently did not take into account the need for a dress rehearsal or the requirements of posterity. The actual projection is not a movie but a slide show: long intervals of confusion, discussion, shifting of position, and arranging of veils, which eventually congeal into tableaux for the benefit of the crowd of photographers, both amateur and professional, who climb up on chairs for a better view and shout out their directions. They are the uncontested protagonists of the morning; at their command all the actors freeze into solemnity until the clicking of the shutters stops, then they melt again, the Apostles tucking into the food, giggling, choking, and getting pounded on the back, while the younger waiters try on the crown of
thorns for size, and all the gravity and composure of the host is lost in arguments with the waiter and with his wife.
After the third course we leave, taking with us a sense of loss, and we never learn what grave illness or miraculous delivery has motivated such carryings-on, or for what reason—a factory’s closing, an emigrant’s return—they have taken place in August, like hothouse fruit ripening out of season, all show and no substance.
Beyond the conversation and the company they offer, my August neighbors across the courtyard are a Greek chorus for which I am most grateful. Their delight in Bosco and their appreciation of the life we share there is a warm bath of approval that restores me after the puzzlement with which my mother-in-law regards me.
“Si usa?” is her most frequent comment on my clothes and habits. “Is that what’s done?” And with her next breath she may remark on how lucky I am to have such well-brought-up children.
I have often resented the implication that I have so little part to play in fashioning my life. But it is not criticism, I realize now, that leads to these remarks, as much as it is her inability to comprehend the range of alternatives that I believe to be available. The degree to which cultural tradition and historical circumstance have dominated her life is brought home to me now, as we work to clean out for rental the house in Alcamo, which has been empty since we transferred Mrs. Simeti to a nursing home two years ago. Nothing has ever been thrown out, drawers and trunks and packages tied up with string spill out bits of lace, moth-eaten fur collars that fall to pieces as they unfold, notebooks and old shoes, medals and medicines and tired purses, each closet and drawer giving substance to a story that Giovanni Verga might have told.
The remnants of purple velvet and the sheet music belonged to the Baronessina, my mother-in-law’s mother, who brought to marriage with a prosperous, middle-class landowner a dowry limited mostly, I suspect, to her aristocratic blood, her delicate health, her convent education, and the glory of her father’s patriotic service with Garibaldi. She died quite young, leaving her husband with a son and four daughters, and my mother-in-law’s childhood memories are steeped in awed love for such a talented, distinguished woman and in resentment at having been abandoned by her: the sound of her mother playing the piano after the children were in bed; the coach ride to the warmer climate of Palermo where they wintered in a pensione; being taken, mute and terrified, to call on the elegant friends of her mother’s convent days; her fear of the exotic, yapping lapdog; the “Institute” where the nuns made fun of her timidity and gave her a superficial grounding in academic matters and a very thorough education in needlework. We can trace her progress as we sort through the boxes, from childish attempts at samplers and pincushions, through pillows with classical scenes stitched in openwork, to a vast number of exquisitely embroidered silk and batiste baby bonnets.
Of the four daughters, one died in infancy and one on the eve of her marriage. The father, who is strangely absent from my mother-in-law’s memories, must have had premonitions of a changing era, for the son took a course in calligraphy and both surviving daughters attended lessons in dressmaking. The booklets from these lessons are tied up in ribbon, my mother-in-law’s name written on each of hers in a different kind of Gothic script, possibly the only practical application of her brother’s education, which was rapidly rendered obsolete by the invention of the typewriter.
The father, having thus prepared his children for life, died when my mother-in-law was twenty-one, and she and her sister were whisked into matrimony at four o’clock in the morning. It was 1920, postwar Italy was in a state of great unrest, so the newlyweds went no farther than the house at Finocchio for their honeymoon, and then returned to Alcamo to take up residence in the big house across the Corso from her father’s, under the aegis of the Simetis, who stare down at us from the oval frames hanging in the front hall, the wife straight nosed and serious in her high, stiff-necked dress and upswept hairdo, the man dark browed and intimidating, despite his long and beautifully tended whiskers.
For the groom, Sebastiano, it was a case of resuming residence, for he had never strayed far from the stern eye of his father, Don Turiddu Simeti, Cavaliere del Regno, who was one of Alcamo’s most respected and substantial citizens, a man of great ability and authority of whom the elder contadini (even those more sincere than the shepherd) still speak with awe and affection, a man always ready to lend money when needed without asking interest—a rare thing to judge by the air of wonder with which they say this—and never known to raise his voice in anger.
He once suffered a momentary eclipse, when rumor spread that the gold of the Madonna, of which he and some other town notables had the safekeeping, had been stolen. A crowd of angry contadini tried to batter down the door of the Simeti house, and only the intervention of the carabinieri allowed Don Turiddu to make his way to the Matrice and demonstrate that the treasure was safe in its strongbox. That was the last time he set foot in a church alive: convinced that the rumor had been the work of the priest, he became violently anticlerical and repented only on his deathbed, much to the dismay of his grandsons, who with the absolutism of youth took his request for the last rites as a betrayal.
It is not difficult to imagine with what trepidation, if not terror, the young bride regarded her father-in-law. But her guilefulness in getting what she wants and a lively sense of humor even when in pain suggest a spark of stubborn independence that might have found more productive expression had she had backing and encouragement from her husband, a rather handsome young man of shy charm, to judge by the old photograph album in the salotto, whose sensitivity and intelligence were rendered ineffectual by the overindulgence accorded him as an only and somewhat sickly child and, in later years, as a severe diabetic.
My father-in-law couldn’t be bothered to finish school, and with neither the training nor the health—and perhaps not even the inclination—to strike out on his own, he lived under the shadow of his father’s command for fifty years, administering the property that had come to him as his wife’s dowry and watching the simultaneous decline of his father’s strength, of his family’s fortunes, and of the provincial agrarian economy that had generated them. The only means of reaction available to him was the search for a scapegoat, which as a young man drew him into Mussolini’s wake—hence the black neckerchief and the roll of tricolor bunting that Francesco and I mistake for patriotic toilet paper—and in his later years sent his sweet and affectionate nature into storms of suspicion and bitterness over ill-mannered neighbors and thieving contadini.
My mother-in-law’s position must have been made more difficult in the beginning by her initial inability to produce an heir: miscarriage followed miscarriage, and even when at last she gave birth to male twins, her triumph was short-lived, for the elder baby smothered to death when his wet nurse fell asleep with the child at her breast.
Of eight pregnancies, three children lived to grow up. Stefano, the surviving twin, doubly cosseted and cared for after his brother’s death and very much tied to home, left Sicily only once, in 1943, when he was drafted into the tattered remains of the Italian army and took the train to Rome to report. We find in the desk a letter written by his grandfather, asking his friend the carissimo Generale to look after the boy, “a child at heart.” Stefano arrived at the Rome station, took one look at the confusion of a city from which the Germans were retreating as the Allies advanced, and took the next train home, where he remained, fighting valiantly but ineffectually to stave off the family’s decline until he died at the age of forty.
Turi came next, the rebel, who tried many trades before becoming a painter, and financed his whims and his travels, from which stacks of postcards survive, by selling off anything he could get his hands on as scrap metal, so much so that whenever someone in the family wonders as to the whereabouts of some long-missing and forgotten object, another member will inevitably answer that Turi must have sold it.
And finally Tonino, very much the baby, his early years still fairly
privileged, closeted in the courtyard at Alcamo to play with the son of the podestà and driven in the gig to his private elementary school by his grandfather (Francesco has found in the old man’s black fustian riding breeches, high boots, and spurs an inspiration for next year’s Carnival), the later years more carefree and makeshift as the harsh postwar period ground down all pretension, and after Don Turiddu’s death in 1948, there were the inheritance taxes to be paid. Bits of land and pieces of jewelry were sold off to pay taxes, to keep the younger sons at the university, and to finance the schemes—the spare automobile parts and the oil press—with which Stefano was going to remake the family’s fortune.
Surrounded by incompetent men and oblivious youths, my mother-in-law’s only strategy for survival was that of economy, a necessity that age distorted into obsession. The signs of her economies are all about us: Stefano’s first overcoat carefully made over into an inelegant and embarrassing jacket for Turi; a Carnival dress made from the yellow rayon of a parachute that Turi had rescued from a munitions dump; the wool from worn-out sweaters unraveled and wound neatly into little balls that lurk in the corners of every drawer; half-used tubes of ointment and empty pill bottles; jars of withered olives whose tops the years have soldered tight.
It is slow work to sort it all out, the objects and the memories they evoke. Each scrap of material must be recalled, identified, and narrated before it is tossed on the rubbish heap, the piles of letters reread, the faded sepia faces given a name and a place on the family tree, the hats and the lace veils modeled before the mirror. As I share the children’s delight and interest and occasional bewilderment, I regret that they will never have the opportunity to put their hands to the feel and texture of their other heritage. My family possessions, gathered after my mother’s death from scattered warehouses rather than some ancestral home, were sorted out and dispersed when Francesco and Natalia were too small to participate, and what little I brought across the ocean—photographs, a school yearbook, a few small figurines, some silverware, and a patchwork quilt—has, like a potpourri too long uncovered, lost its perfume in this foreign air.
On Persephone's Island Page 30