The Lost Father

by Marina Warner

  Lucia from the front, with a sharp tilt of the head, overheard, though Imma had spoken softly, and put in, ‘That’s right, your Auntie Imma is right, you listen to her. And when I pack up and leave to go and live near her by the ocean, and with Auntie Talia too – you know every day is Sunday for me when I’m with my family – I am going to take Mamma with me.’

  ‘What’s that, Lucia?’ Imma was still holding my hand; hers was cool and smooth and firm, in spite of her tremulous voice. I could feel the purpose in her that had made her, as you always said, your other parent, the one who’d made sure you were taught to read and write and count and parrot English from the songs.

  ‘Yeah, Imma, I’m not going to leave Mamma where I can’t visit with her; I’m going to have her moved to be near me.’

  So Maria Filippa, who now lay in an alcove in Grovetree cemetery under the plaque with her name and dates, ‘Dolmetta 1895 – Parnassus 1972’, would make one more migration, and Lucia would continue her weekly prayers by her mother’s side.

  ‘I will do my best,’ I said.

  ‘They were terrible times, darling,’ Imma said, patting the back of the hand she was still holding, as if knocking on the person inside to come out and listen. ‘Why write about those times? When things now are so much better. This is what our Mamma worked for us to have, nice homes, nice children, plenty to eat now and pretty clothes to wear. It was terrible then – I remember one time Papà Sandro coming back and lining us all up, all the children – the three of us and Cati’s two and Rosa’s two and some others I don’t remember. And he said, “You’re all brutte and stupide, all of you. Except my two, they’re the only beautiful and clever ones. You might as well be dead.” I felt I agreed with him, I’m telling you. I felt we might as well be dead. Mamma was out working all the time and we were locked up inside. They put a cross on our door one time and sealed it tight, on account of us being sick. We were very sick one time. It’s God’s mercy we didn’t die.’

  She looked into the distance, where the traffic was at a standstill.

  ‘You remember that’’ Lucia was nodding, impressed.

  In Imma’s clear skin, I could see the veins like a script fading on vellum, pulsing slightly. She was saying, picking a tadpole of thread from my blouse and blowing it from her fingertips, ‘So I got married, soon as I could, the very first man who would marry me! I wanted to spare my mother, working, working and worrying how to feed us with no work, with the war, and three sisters littler than me.’

  I remembered, he had died, Imma’s first husband, in the fighting round Naples; his body had not been identified. Like Tommaso, he was one of the thousands of untagged corpses found scattered across vineyards, beaches; an arm here, a foot there. You told me, her war widow’s pension had gone a long way to help the family survive through the war; though it only came fitfully. Sometimes the clerk in the Post Office would pull out his cash drawer to show people that he was telling the truth when he said, ‘Look, lady, look, sir, I have no money. There is no cash. Mother of God in heaven, what can I do when they don’t give me the stuff to pass on to you? I’m not Jesus Christ to make a miracle and multiply into loaves and fishes. Away with you all! Away with you!’ And he’d drop his blind down on his booth and close the counter altogether. But when he did produce it, they could go to the black market and buy some bread. They were so thin then, that the soldiers arriving with the British army and the American army would fill up their cheeks and puff as they walked past, as if to blow them away like dandelion clocks, and then laugh cheerfully at the joke.

  The traffic flanked us on all sides; the road roared through the stopped-up windows, like a cataract in the mountains. I’ve often thought that nature’s noises contain far less harmony than the romantics vaunted; on the San Diego freeway, with my eyes closed, I could imagine myself on a ledge in the triple-canopy jungle of the Amazon basin, coming upon falls no white woman had ever seen before.

  You were getting anxious about the time, fretting about Talia and the others waiting for us. Nicholas picked up on his grandmother’s worry, and finding the packet of sweets empty, protested, ‘When are we getting there? We’ve been going for donkeys’ years.’ We started playing a game, guessing the number of yellow cars we’d see before we turned off on the ramp.

  The restaurant was called The Olde Pasta Pub; it looked like a set for Bleak House from the outside, a Thames tavern from the 1850s, with crooked balustrades and clinker-built weatherboarded walls, grey and blistered and peeling with counterfeit antiquity, rendered no doubt by Italian cabinet makers whose families had specialised in false veneers for generations. The painted sign, showing a pirate with a forkful of spaghetti, creaked purposefully as it swung over the door. Inside, flames flickered in inglenooks at different points in the huge area; even though the temperature outside was in the seventies, the air conditioning indoors kept it wintry enough to require the log fires which gave it that authentic cheering look. We found our party up a nautical staircase with a rope banister, gathered in front of one of the chimney breasts, and were greeted uproariously, with prolonged hugs and squeals of pleasure and delight that we had come to no harm and were still – almost – impeccable in appearance.

  I was made a fuss of; my first cousins welcomed me like family. Which I am, of course. Talia’s eldest daughter, curly-haired, blonde, wearing slim trousers, kissed me gently on both cheeks. Lucia’s son, Scotty, came and kissed me too, and for a moment I got a choking in my throat, for I saw that he looked like Nicholas, or rather that Nicholas looked like him, and that a stranger might say, Yes, peas in a pod.

  His T-shirt of pale green cotton was blazoned, ‘Just when you thought you were winning the rat race, along came faster rats.’ Yet with his black eyes, his black eyes of the south, almost hexagonal in outline, the orb larger than the iris, he looked as soulful as one of the Christ pantocrators whom the Byzantines made in mosaic in the churches of southern Italy.

  Nicholas was remonstrating, ‘I said there’d be five yellow cars before they came, so I was wrong. But who said seventeen? Because they should get the prize? What is the prize?’ One of our relations produced a five-dollar bill. ‘You want a prize? Here you are, smart guy.’ But Nicholas, honourable in the rules of the game, refused it, awed and regretful.

  Every time one of your relations commented on how like you I was, how I had inherited your looks, your legs, your eyes, your hair, I thought of Mr Van Mond and wondered if he saw the same attractions in me, or if my aunts and my cousins were simply carrying on the exchange of flatteries and blandishments that defines the family and fortifies its members against the threatening existence of strangers outside the clan, those others, who had strolled in the passeggiata, never passing muster. Their ankles too thick, their hair too limp, their hemming clumsy, their noses long, as in the old days on the seafront.

  ‘You’re just like your mother, Anna, a lovely woman,’ Imma was saying. ‘You’ll find another husband.’ She sounded sad, her voice, always small, had shrunk. I knew if I told her I was glad he’d gone, I’d sound proud, protesting too much. I thought of Mr Van Mond, I kept on thinking of him, most particularly thinking of him in bed.

  I wanted to ask you what you would have done in my place.

  We went to the table; I was sat between Scotty and a silver-haired man, Cati and Papà San’s second child, Rodolfo, known as Rudi. His gold-rimmed bifocals gave him four eyes when I looked at him from a certain angle. He’d made a small pile in insurance, and retired. He said to me, ‘All they did in the old days, they did for us, and I’m truly thankful, yes, I am.’ He wagged his head, wonderingly. ‘My father began in the furnace of the tramp steamer to Argentina … Just think of that.’

  Scotty was saying, ‘I went to Italy last summer, to have a look around; but I didn’t go to Riba, I figured it was too far and there’s no family there now. Hey, did I tell you the story about my friend?’ He was addressing the table. ‘Charles Ciliegia. He knew that his folks came from somewhere around Beneve
nto, near Naples, and he was on a business trip and so he figured he’d drive around a bit. He was in the hills, and it was getting real hot. So he stopped in a village for something to drink, and there was this war memorial. He looked and my God, from top to bottom, Ciliegia, Ciliegia, Ciliegia. So he reckoned he’d about hit the right place …’

  My cousin Rudi went on, to me, in confidence, ‘When he died he left me and my brothers and sisters almost three quarters of a million dollars, you know. All they went through to get there, they went through for us.’

  Scotty was continuing, ‘And so, my friend announces himself, and within seconds, there’s about another twenty people all called Ciliegia around him and they’re carrying him off to meet the head man, Papà Ciliegia himself, who’s a big guy, with a big happy red face and a big belly who says, “Come to dinner later.” Which he does, but before he does, he reckons he should buy the family a gift, you know, to show his appreciation. So he buys a few bottles of the very best French wine he can find in Benevento, he really lays out the dough on this stuff, and he presents it to Papà Ciliegia when he arrives. Well. This guy’s been making wine since before the Flood, you know. He’s just about pickled through and through in his own stuff. He just looks at this French wine and takes the bottles by the neck and smashes them against the edge of the table, one by one … Then he takes hold of a demijohn of his own stuff and swigs it at the table. “Now we drink,” he says.’

  I asked Rudi, when everyone had stopped laughing and started up about the other things, if he thought much about the way things were, back home.

  He said, ‘I’m just grateful, like I said. That we don’t have to live that way. It’s home, I suppose. But I was born in New York City – and that’s home too!’

  I said, ‘Did your mother talk to you about those times? Did she ever tell you about the way they lived?’ I took a breath, ‘Or about the duel? The duel that killed their father.’ I nodded towards Auntie Lucia, and my mother, who were laughing together, about the size of the pepper mill one of the waiters was brandishing over them.

  Rudi twisted away to let the waiter place a dish of spaghetti in clam and cream sauce in front of me, and then answered, turning his doubled gaze from my plate to my face, ‘She said something about it, something about a boy who kept hanging around her sister Rosa and this annoyed your grandfather. You know how it was, in those days! There were love letters too, but the boy was from some family out in the countryside, a nobleman’s son, I think, something like it. That’s what Mamma said, once. Though I don’t remember her talking about it much. She didn’t like talking about the old times, either.’

  Nicholas’s food had not yet come, and he was protesting; I gave him my bread roll in the interim. He wouldn’t eat clams: ‘Are those little snails?’ he cried. ‘Ugh!’

  Another cousin put in, ‘It’s so cute you called him after our patrono San Nicola!’

  From the end of the table, Bella interrupted, ‘Catholics will believe anything. I don’t go with that stuff anymore.’

  ‘Uh, huh,’ I said, wanting neither to approve nor disapprove. I smiled. Then I turned back to Rudi. I asked him to go on.

  ‘I think it was something like this, see: he was walking up the path to see the young man’s family and say, “Well, what are you thinking of with my sister?” Something like that, to make it regular. Honour, the family, this was Italy, remember. And the guy just leant out of the window and levelled’ – Rudi mimed the gunsight down his nose – ‘And, I guess, just fired at him, to warn him, see. But … well, you know what happened – he hit him.’

  I twisted up a forkful of pasta and ate it. To one side of the table, a sudden burst of ‘Happy Birthday’ made every other sound inaudible; the waiters and waitresses from all over the Pasta Pub were clustered round a girl who was weeping with excitement at the strawberry shortcake, blazing with candles, which they were holding up in front of her; then, after barking out the song to a fast marching rhythm at the tops of their voices, they stopped as abruptly, and their scurrying forms, wrapped in blue and white butchers’ aprons, moved back to their posts in the huge room.

  Lucia interrupted, ‘No, no, Rudi! It didn’t happen like that! You don’t know. You were a kid. Your Mamma, she didn’t want to tell it the way it was. She couldn’t admit she was involved, that she was the one our Papà fought over. She was too modest. But we always knew it was her.’

  Fantina came in, ‘Are you sure, Lucia? Rosa could have been the one? Rosa, not Caterina.’ She addressed Rudi. ‘Your mother was so angry when I asked her about it. I thought we’d maybe mixed them up.’ You looked bewildered.

  Lucia protested, ‘No, no, it was Caterina. Definitely. How could it have been Rosa? Rosa was wild, maybe, but not like that. She got into politics when she got to America, with the unions and organising – lobbying and such. She even went to Washington, one time, and gave evidence in a House hearing. About conditions in the garment workers’ business. We heard about it later.’ Lucia was nodding her head, her bottom lip stuck out in appreciation. ‘She carried a lot of weight, I’m telling you. But she wasn’t romantic. She couldn’t be, not with her looks.’

  Bella said, ‘Zia Lucia, that’s not fair. You want only beautiful people to enjoy romance?’

  ‘I don’t want it, cara, but I’m afraid it’s like that.’ Bella and I exchanged a look: the moment of complicity cheered me.

  Nicholas was still singing ‘Happy Birthday’, to himself; to him, the Pasta Pub could have been another pavilion in Fun City, a replica of something quaint from long ago and far away, like the Chinese junk with the Yellow Perils in the rigging and the Constable water mill from Dedham in working order and the Sezession tram from Vienna – although all three of these, unlike the restaurant, had been brought to Fun City plank by plank, section by section, panel by panel, and reassembled on site. But in the Californian sunlight, as even as a halogen lamp’s steady flood, real junks and real trams took on the look of a theatre set that could at any moment be struck, even a real water mill grinding corn by the power of real gallons of millrace rushing through seemed just a working model, and the people operating them, or inspecting them, or walking around in them became posable figures against changing mattes, in a perpetual playtime, the longed-for state of the fairytales I catalogued in the archives. The ugly sisters enjoyed their futility, their idleness, but the story tells us they didn’t deserve it; Cinderella dreamed of such leisure, and earned it; the seven dwarves were somehow deformed by their labours in the mountain and would only become tall and strong and sunburned when freed from the mines – perhaps by Snow White when she becomes Queen (though not always); there was shame in work. But here in California, its threat was behind us, behind and forgotten in the state of the setting sun, itself named for a Spaniard’s romance about an island of golden-limbed Amazons.

  I realised that in the Pasta Pub even the dish before me of spaghetti and clams was play-acting the authentic Italian recipe. I could not put my finger on what this made me feel exactly, but all of a sudden I was on the verge of tears, as if I were in the middle of a course of antibiotics or in the last stretch before my period. And then I recognised it, that weepiness, for the state I had often been in when I was sixteen. I realised that in the company of all your sisters and your family I had become a girl again, a woman-child who hasn’t yet grown up, but is about to, because she has to. I realised I believed you all with a child’s belief, and yet I couldn’t any longer, and the conflict opened a gash in me. At Auntie Lucia’s, in the powder-blue bedroom with the powder-blue bathroom en suite and its matching set of toiletries and vanity accessories, in the single bed that had belonged to Beatrice (who was at the Pasta Pub that night, at the other end of the table), I felt untried and formless and unindividualised on the outside, and inside all hard warty lumps of needs and wants peculiar to me, which were now spilling out through my gashed being.

  I had to find a story of my own. I had to be able to give my account of the world; when I overheard you
and your sisters talking, I realised that I felt again as I had as a child, when, eavesdropping from the landing in pyjamas, I had only been able to make half-sense of the grown-ups’ chatter. Being with you sisters together, reunited so seldom in the course of forty years, infantilised me so thoroughly that I was all at once able to realise my state. I was robbed of the ability to speak up and say my piece and give my view. I could only watch and listen, and try to assemble it, like a kit for a toy. But I could at least see that this was happening to me.

  Rudi was saying, answering something you had asked on my behalf, ‘Now the last thing Uncle Franco wrote – I was on trumpet, he was on trombone, we had some friends along – it was a funeral march for President Eisenhower. It was 1969, I guess.’

  It wasn’t only Auntie Lucia’s house, with the swimming pool on the terrace in Grovetree above Parnassus and the blue furniture and flounced curtains; it was me and you and all of us who were like figures placed in the made-up settings, moved against the mattes, with our allotted roles and the painted façade of the toy theatre pushed to and latched into place, with the lights on inside, glowing, but out of reach. When Rudi, Caterina’s son, Davide’s nephew, said, ‘And the guy just leant out the window and, I guess, just fired at him, to warn him, see. But … well, you know what happened – he hit him,’ he opened the front wide and put his big hand into the bright arrangement and, for a moment, tipped things up; set them awry. It was only for a moment, for I said to him, ‘Surely not? How do you know?’

  He replied, ‘That’s the kind of stuff that happened in Italy, in those times. It was rough, you know. That’s why we had to get out.’ He laughed. ‘Mamma didn’t like talking about it, no, she did not.’

  Imma, confidentially, spoke to me, ‘I think Rudi is making it up, you know. Our Papà was a gentleman, and it couldn’t have happened like he said, that’s not a nice thing to have happened!’

  ‘You should maybe visit with Pia, you know, Rosa’s daughter,’ Lucia went on. ‘We don’t see her. On account of her mother and the union business, we drifted apart. The only ones in our family we weren’t close as close, you know. Pia was her last, she had her late, a long time after we left America that first time. Not like Cati, who had her babies straightaway.’ She dimpled at Rudi, and went on. ‘Pia must be around fifty years old. Not like us.’ Lucia chuckled, good-humouredly. ‘She’d like to meet with Fantina’s little girl!’