All Over the Place

by Geraldine DeRuiter

  When I was little, I knew none of this. Not that my grandfather’s village was in the mountains, or that my grandmother’s was nearby. I knew only that their country was boot-shaped and it stuck out oddly into the sea, a permanently misplaced step into the water.

  Later, as I grew older, the details of my family history would be filled in. Nonna was from Guardia dei Lombardi—Guardia for short. Nonno was from the neighboring village of Frigento. Back then it was (and frankly, still sort of is) taboo to marry someone from your own village. This makes sense—when your town consists of only a few thousand or even a few hundred people, you need to wade a little further out of the gene pool.

  So you can imagine the reception my grandfather received when he returned home with my grandmother, and she had her five pretty younger sisters in tow. Overnight, my grandfather increased the female population of the village by 0.25 percent; because they were from a neighboring village, they were entirely eligible. I think part of the reason so many people in Frigento still remember my grandfather, even today, is that they owe their very existence to him.

  He was the life of the party, but my grandmother was the heart of everything. She pulled everyone toward her, not by demanding attention but by giving it. She would ask if we were hungry and, regardless of the response, would spend long hours in the kitchen, emerging with massive pots of pasta or pizzas the size of coffee tables. She would sit, quietly, listening intently to whatever anyone had to say, distracted only on occasion by her own sadness. My mother said that it stemmed from the death of my nonna’s infant daughter, for whom I was named. The fact that I was the second Geraldina to come along meant that my role in her life was already written: a recipient of all that deeply stowed love, a tiny counterweight to her decades of grief, a demander of candies.

  She was small in stature, but because my entire world seemed to move around her, it escaped my notice. In the scope of my life, she was a giant. She made a room warmer just by being in it. She made me believe I had stories worth telling.

  The pin-straight hair and cheekbones I inherited from her, along with an affinity for oversized cardigans and a disdain for wearing socks to bed, despite my freezing toes.

  I adored her. As I got older, it became an increasing source of anxiety for me. She grew frailer; I knew it wouldn’t last.

  WATCHING RAND DRIVE TOWARD where the map indicated, something felt not quite right. The distance felt too long, but not because I remembered the drive. I’d been there only twice before: once right after my grandparents passed away and again a few years later with my mother. I’d stayed there only a matter of hours and days, respectively, and even my most recent jaunt out there was nearly a decade ago.

  No, the reason the road felt wrong was this: I knew my grandfather quite well, and I couldn’t imagine him going all this way, even for a wife.

  I don’t mean to be unromantic, but I’m a realist. A fifteen-minute drive is roughly ten minutes longer than my grandfather would have been willing to go to meet the woman he’d be married to for more than sixty years. He spent time on his hair. Not on chivalry.

  We drove on, nothing looking familiar, nothing feeling right. The light was nearly gone now, the mountains dark shadows against the indigo sky.

  A few minutes later, we were standing in a stone square at the center of which was a large fountain. Lovely and serene, softly lit, the sort of place that had and would continue to look the same for centuries. There was just one problem: it was not the right mountaintop village.

  I explained this to Rand.

  “But this is where Google Maps said it was,” he protested.

  “This is southern Italy,” I said, waving my hands in the middle of the square like a local. “Nothing is where anything says it is.”

  I know I am in my mother’s homeland when the civil engineering is so nonsensical that not even the most powerful entities on the planet, aided by satellite technology, can make sense of it. Google definitely knows what style of underwear I prefer (full-coverage cotton granny panties, because we’re almost at the end of the book, and let’s be honest, there really isn’t any mystery left at this point), but once you get south of Bologna, you’re on your own.

  Rand and I squinted at the map on his phone—we were in Villa Maina. I followed the road back with my finger, tracing a squiggle on the screen of the phone until I saw it: Frigento.

  “There,” I said, pointing to a dot at the summit of one of the peaks.

  We retraced our drive, and once again found the sign for Guardia dei Lombardi that I’d pointed out before. From this new angle of approach, we could see another sign, small and somewhat hidden, pointing up in the same direction.

  “Frigento,” it read.

  “You have got to be kidding me,” Rand said. “How the hell were we supposed to see that?”

  “Shhhh,” I said, gently stroking his hair. “It’s Italy. It’s not supposed to make sense.”

  When we stepped out of the car for the second time that night, I knew we were in the right place. I’d barely spent any time there, but on some fundamental genetic level, I was able to decipher something that even satellite navigation could not: that everything started here.

  There was little greenery—only stone, which made up the houses, the streets, the courtyards. There were gardens, but they were hidden from view, nestled behind each house in adjacent rows. The streets looked as though they should have been open to pedestrians only, but the concept of prohibiting a car from going somewhere doesn’t really exist in Italy. Piazzas, sidewalks, staircases—where there’s a Fiat, there’s a way.

  The roads all wound up in the same direction, toward the summit of the little mountain. It was chilly and dead quiet, and surprisingly well lit. Orange light spilled out from dozens of lampposts, casting everything in a coral glow.

  Somewhere, wood was burning, and the warm, charred scent caught on the air, mixed with the faint fragrance of the first flowers of spring.

  Even if I had never seen it before, I’d have known this was the right place.

  We stayed in a tiny bed and breakfast on the bottom floor of one of the stone houses, a dark cave of a room, absurdly affordable if a bit chilly. We were meeting my family the next day, Sunday, for pranzo—the midday meal in Italy, usually the largest one of the day, and on Sundays a several-hours-long undertaking. Tomorrow’s pranzo would be at my aunt Rosamaria’s house. She was my mother’s first cousin; her mother, the only one of my grandmother’s five lovely sisters that was still on this earth, lived in the house adjacent to her. We’d be joined by Rosamaria’s husband and brother (both named Gino), as well as my Uncle Enzo, his wife, Antonietta, and my cousin, Valeria, who were driving three hours just to see us.

  The next morning we woke early, heard the soft chirp of birds and the distant sound of church bells, and wandered through the village, passing the occasional widow, clad head to toe in black, on her way to mass.

  We wished the women “Buongiorno,” a greeting that they returned, seemingly surprised we addressed them in Italian. I didn’t know any of them, but their faces as they passed weren’t entirely foreign to me. I’d seen bits and pieces of them before—an eyebrow here, a dimple there, their faces assembled from the same molds as those of my family had been. I assumed that I was exempt from this (I’ve always favored my father, with his formidable nose and mustache). But more than once over the next few days, when I mentioned who my family was, people would nod and say, “Yes, I can see it in your face.” And I’d suppress the desire to kiss them, full on the lips.

  We wandered through town, stopped at a little fruit stand, and bought a few tangerines and a handful of cherry tomatoes that we ate by the side of the road, watching people pass. I would have led us to my Aunt Rosamaria’s house, but I wasn’t sure which one it was.

  “The door is green,” I offered to Rand, which wasn’t at all helpful. So instead we sat on a low stone wall, and I assumed that the answer would come to me. It did, in the form of a white-haired gentleman
in dark glasses and a blazer, a local who instantly pegged us as out-of-towners.

  “Ma, voi a chi partieni?” he asked, peering at us curiously. To whom do you pertain? This remains one of the most wonderful ways I’ve ever been asked precisely what the hell I was doing somewhere.

  I was stunned by the directness of it, but that wasn’t unfamiliar, either. My grandfather had had this same sort of way about him, intrusive, charming, entirely unsubtle.

  “My family was from here, but they left for America quite a while ago,” I said, before trailing off, expecting the conversation to end there. But he continued to stare at me expectantly, and I realized it would be rude not to divulge the answer to every online security question I’ve ever been asked. So I began to tell him my mother’s name, and my grandparents’, and he soon cut me off, nodding.

  “Oh, of course,” he said, as though he’d already known this fact and I’d just reminded him of it. He pointed down the hill from which he had come, explaining that my grandfather’s sister had a house down there. I remembered this, vaguely, and was about to mention that fact, but he’d already taken off down the hill, beckoning us to follow.

  “Come,” he said, walking at a crisp clip in the sunlight. “I’ll introduce you to some of your relatives.”

  I raced to follow him, and Rand, in turn, hurried to follow me, completely confused.

  “Where are we going?” Rand asked.

  “Um… to meet some of my relatives?” I’d forgotten, momentarily, that our conversation had been entirely in Italian and Rand had been unable to follow it. When I tried translating the exchange to English—tried explaining that we were following a stranger down a hill in a foreign town to meet more strangers—it made less and less sense. This felt like my family in microcosm.

  “Who?”

  “No idea.”

  A few minutes later the white-haired gentleman stopped at a little house made of white stone on a tranquil, sunlit street and promptly began banging on the front door while screaming, “OPEN UP, I’VE BROUGHT YOU YOUR RELATIVES.”

  This is not generally how I like to make an entrance. I prefer to stay away from any lines that could conceivably be uttered by an unstable character in a Scorcese film, particularly before 10 a.m. on a Sunday. The door opened, and a formidable-looking gentleman wearing a black tracksuit and an understandably pissed-off expression glared at us with piercing blue eyes.

  “I’ve brought you your relatives,” the white-haired man said again. Somehow—miraculously—he was already inside the house. “Invite them in.”

  Mr. Tracksuit’s expression softened, but his bright blue eyes betrayed him: he had no idea who we were. He was fortyish and bald, not at all unhandsome, with a square jaw that was vaguely familiar to me. But then again, everything in the village was.

  He introduced himself as Valerio, and, somewhat surprisingly, he did exactly as the white-haired man said and invited us in. His wife—wearing a pink tracksuit and sweetly greeting us with a kiss on either cheek even before it was clear who we were—put the espresso maker on the stove. Standing in the small house, I realized I’d been there before. I recognized the archways, the white walls, even the small room off to the left, where I remembered a photo of my great-grandfather had hung on the wall.

  Our great-grandfather, as it turned out. We soon put the pieces together—my grandfather and Valerio’s grandmother had been brother and sister.

  “Right, right,” he said, slapping an enormous hand down on the table, “the one who went to America.”

  “Wait, wait,” his wife said from the kitchen, a glimmer of recognition flickering across her face. “Was he the one with the hair?” And she held her hands out on either side of her head.

  I laughed. Yes. The hair.

  My grandfather was one of the most stylish people who ever lived. In his healthier years, he wore a suit nearly every day, with some wide, quasi-psychedelic tie knotted in a full Windsor under a massive, stubbly chin.

  In my parents’ wedding album, there is a picture of my mother with her father that was perfectly emblematic of who he was. In it, the two of them are standing with the ruins of the Roman Forum behind them. My mother looks angelic in a simple floor-length dress, and my grandfather stands next to her in a dark three-piece suit and Persol sunglasses, looking cool as shit, as though the beautiful woman on his arm might be his youngest daughter, or possibly just his date for the night.

  And yet despite this, and so many other singular characteristics (including the ability to crack walnuts open by simply squeezing them in his fist), the thing that nearly everyone remembers about him was his hair.

  My grandfather had masses of it. If I search through my earliest memories, I can remember it being silvery gray, a rolling storm cloud above his head. But for most of my life it had the texture and color of raw wool.

  He would take a wide-toothed comb and sweep it all forward, covering his eyes, and then comb it all back. Because there was no chance of it staying put, my grandfather would hold his hair in place with a thin plastic headband—the kind you could buy at the drugstore by the dozens in the 1970s and 1980s. My nonno would match the colors to his suits and ties. (If you are wondering whether you can pull this off, I can safely say this: unless you are my grandfather, then no. No, you cannot.)

  Everyone, even people who barely knew my nonno, had stories about him. Some flattering, others not so much. He was generous to a fault; he was the life of the party; he had a temper; he yelled; he drank too much. I’ve heard everyone’s tales of him, whether I’ve wanted to or not. I figure it’s not fair to hold against him memories that are not my own. I try not to convict him by hearsay.

  At my insistence, he would pick strawberries from his small garden and wash and cut them just for me. I single-handedly decimated those plants like a plague of locusts. When someone inquired as to what had become of the fruit, he would just shrug and say, “It’s gone.”

  On Wednesdays and Sundays he would shave, working his shaving cream up into a lather with a badger hairbrush. He knew I loved this process, and so he let me sit and watch as he applied the foam all around his face and then shaved it off.

  People have told me he was a jerk. I remember him letting me press my hands into his hair and squeeze it like a sponge. You love who you love; not everyone else has to.

  We finished our coffee and a little while later left with the white-haired man. And there, on the street, after he led us down the hill and after he pounded on Valerio’s door and after he invited us and himself in and after he shared his memories of my grandparents and after he drank an espresso, he finally saw fit to tell us his name: Marciano.

  It was nearing lunchtime, and I’d unexpectedly found my grandfather’s relatives but was still unsure where my grandmother’s family lived. I realized that Marciano, who seemed to be a collector of stories that were not his own, might know where their house was.

  “Via San Giovanni,” he said. “Sempre su.” Always up.

  And so as he walked down the slope of the road, we walked up. We reached the top of the village, Rand warily asking me if I knew where I was going, and I offering uncomforting replies like “Maybe” or “No” or “The door is green.” But the strange thing was, I never felt lost. I never made a wrong turn. I just kept walking, as though I knew the way.

  Here, and absolutely no place else in the world, I knew where I was going.

  Knowing the color of a building’s door in lieu of its address is not generally useful when you are trying to locate it, and my tendency to retain useless information of that nature is part of the reason I’m consistently lost. But somehow, here, in my grandparents’ village, knowing the color of the door was enough. There were at least half a dozen in varying shades of emerald, but I was able to pick out the right one. Massive, with an arched top, and centuries old.

  We found my mother’s cousin inside the courtyard, and eventually we’d all congregate there—my great-aunt, tiny and bright-eyed and animated with a sort of playfuln
ess that was absent from her sweet, serious sister, my own dear grandmother. The two Ginos would arrive, as would my uncle and aunt and my green-eyed cousin, Valeria, who enters a room the way my mother does: like an affectionate hurricane, knocking over people and houseplants and load-bearing walls with an assault of hugs and kisses.

  We sat around the table for several long hours. My family had given Rand the seat at the head of it, a place of honor usually reserved for some much older relative. I remembered all the pranzos of my childhood, my grandfather on one end of the table, my grandmother on the other.

  In Italy, the midday meal of pranzo is a sort of sprawling feast, lasting hours. It is the reason many of the shops in Italy are closed between noon and 3 p.m. Because food is more important than capitalism.

  In hindsight, I probably should have warned Rand.

  “Pace yourself,” I should have said.

  Honestly, though, I thought he knew. That is why I didn’t lean over and whisper, “There are four more courses to go.”

  I mean, why else are they called primi and secondi? They are referring to courses. What they don’t really mention in Italian restaurants is that those are just the beginning.

  There are also antipasti and contorni and insalate and dolci. There is wave after wave of food, eaten by ridiculously skinny people. (Don’t ask me how this works, because I haven’t cracked that part of the code. I can only assume that incorporating vigorous hand gestures into conversation burns crazy amounts of calories.)

  When I was a kid, I would return home from school just as my grandparents were finishing up pranzo. There would be a massive white tablecloth on the table, decorated with breadcrumb confetti and the occasional stain of wine or pasta sauce, in dueling hues of red.

  Since most of my family came to America right around the time I was born, those early memories in Seattle are of people who were far more mired in their Italian-ness than they are now. I remember my grandmother making pasta on a hand-cranked machine in the kitchen. Pigs’ feet cooking in massive pots. A stovetop espresso maker that was constantly being forgotten on a burner.