Looking for Alibrandi

by Melina Marchetta

  “Have a good life, Mr. Andretti,” I said to him.

  He nodded and we tried avoiding each other’s eyes for a while, before he walked out.

  Mama asked me about him that night.

  We were sitting in front of the television pretending to watch the news. We were still in the same clothes from the barbecue and I noticed that her nose was sunburnt.

  I ignored her when she first asked me about him.

  “Come here,” she said, patting the carpet between her outspread legs.

  I sat between them and she wrapped her arms around me. We seemed all brown legs and brown arms.

  “If you want to know what I think of Michael Andretti, I think he’s a lovely man. Very talented by the looks of things, and he should go far,” I said stiffly.

  “Oh, really?”

  “You don’t believe me?”

  “You spoke to him today, didn’t you?”

  “You did too, didn’t you?”

  “I asked first.”

  I shrugged. “We made our positions clear.”

  “Knowing Michael’s tact, I’m sure he told you he was glad you weren’t in his life.”

  “I told him the same.”

  “Are you upset?”

  “Don’t be silly, Mama. I just hope he doesn’t go around upsetting you.”

  I pretended to be interested in the scene on television.

  She pulled me back and held her cheek against mine.

  “You’re not so tough, Alibrandi. I can see through you.”

  “I can see through you too, Alibrandi. I’m thinking the shithead is probably going to want kids now and why not then and you’re thinking he will marry someone else one day and why didn’t he come back to marry you?” I said. “All I can come up with is that women keep their brains in their heads and men keep theirs in their pants.”

  She laughed and hugged me closer. “It’s his loss, kiddo.”

  I turned around to try and look at her.

  “It was so weird, Mama. I had it planned out so differently in my mind. I think it was too neat and tidy.”

  “Things don’t turn out the way you expect them to.”

  I took her hand from around my chest and played with the ringless fingers. “Can you answer something for me? The truth. By eliminating me out of the picture you won’t hurt me, okay? I just want you to tell me how you wanted your life to turn out when you were seventeen.”

  “Josie, I like my life . . .”

  “Mama,” I sighed, closing my eyes. “I’m not saying that you don’t. I just want to know what you dreamt of when you were seventeen. I dream of being successful and of falling in love with someone with money. Of someone loving me. Of having two children. One boy and one girl. What did you dream of?”

  She smiled and sat back. She kind of reminded me of Anna. Such pensive, peaceful people. How Mama could have come from Nonna Katia and Nonno Francesco and borne a child with my personality confuses me.

  “I dreamt of marrying a man who didn’t necessarily have to have money, but who would take care of me. We’d talk a lot. Talk so much. We’d have four children. I wanted lots of girls. I love little girls.” She smiled. “The most important thing was that he would like me and my children would like me. That’s what I dreamt of, Josie.”

  “Was the man Michael Andretti?”

  She nodded.

  “What a simple dream.”

  “Simple dreams are the hardest to come true.”

  I shrugged and she entwined her fingers in mine.

  “How about pizza?”

  “Pan-fried,” I insisted.

  “Supreme with pineapple.”

  “Mama, we’re Italians. Italians don’t have pineapple on their pizza,” I said in disgust.

  She laughed and reached across for the phone while we continued arguing about the pizza.

  Seven

  WE NEVER DID go away at Easter. We did the same old thing that we do every year and spent the day with my grandmother’s family at Robert’s place. I didn’t even get any Easter eggs. Just stuff for my hope chest. It’s so exciting receiving tablecloths and crocheted doilies while everyone else is eating chocolate bunnies.

  I thought about the chest while I was sitting on the verandah on Wednesday night. The way my mother’s relatives had looked at me pointedly when they told her how grown-up I was now.

  If life were a silent movie I’d be able to see the captions under their faces. “A boyfriend next,” Cousin Maria’s pointed look would say. “Yes, then a three-year courtship,” Cousin Camela would indicate by nodding her head. “On her twenty-first she could have her engagement party as well,” Zia Patrizia would display with a proud smile. Mama and I would be the heroines who gasp in dismay.

  Sitting outside with the sun going down, among the changing colors of autumn leaves, and feeling the breeze on my face made it all seem so frivolous and unthreatening. It was easy to slip away from the problems in my mind. Until my mother came out to tell me that she had to keep her cousin Camela company overnight while her husband was in the hospital. I was going to Nonna’s.

  Penance to me isn’t saying a few Hail Marys and Our Fathers. It’s sleeping at my grandmother’s house.

  “I’m seventeen, Mama. I can look after myself,” I argued as I followed her into the house.

  “Iron your school shirt before you go, so you won’t have to iron it in the morning,” was her answer. “And pack your sweater.”

  “Oh God, Ma, I have to sleep in the same bed as her. She doesn’t shave her legs.”

  “I’m leaving in five minutes. Be ready.”

  “She’s old.”

  “You cannot catch old age by sleeping with your grandmother, Josie.”

  Somehow, lying beside Nonna that night made me wonder if that was true. The curlers she vainly insisted on putting in her hair made a rattling noise every time she moved. Her vanity really got on my nerves. I mean, why would a woman in her sixties want to look good and who cares?

  She asked me a hundred times if I wanted to see some old photos.

  “No, I’m tired,” I explained to her.

  “You look just like I did, Jozzie. Just like Christina as well.”

  “Really?” I said, looking at her. I must admit she has beautiful olive skin like Mama. Every day, because of the curlers, her hair looks as if it’s been done at a hairdresser’s. She doesn’t wear makeup because she’s natural-looking like Mama, but I have caught her on odd occasions bleaching her upper lip. One of the curses of being European is facial hair.

  “Oh, Jozzie, Jozzie, when I was your age I ran around my paese like a gypsy. A gypsy, Jozzie. People would say, look at that zingara, Katia Torello.”

  I sighed, knowing that unless I gave her my full attention she wouldn’t stop.

  “Mama and Papa, they used to tear out their hair. ‘What are we going to do wit you?’ they would say to me. Oh, Jozzie, tings these days are so bad because you can get away with anyting. But tings those days were so bad because you got away wit nuting. Nuting.”

  “What did you do that was so bad?”

  “I wanted to talk to the boys.”

  I laughed and she joined in.

  “My cousin Adrianna and I, we used to talk all the time while we washed our clothes. By hand, Jozzie. The old women would yell at us to be quiet and we’d laugh at them. Stupid old people, we would say. But look at me now,” she said with that famous cry in her voice. “I’m a stupid old woman.”

  “You aren’t old, Nonna,” I said, rolling my eyes at her vanity.

  “Anyway, my Zio Alfredo, who was my father’s oldest brother, decided that I should marry. He found a husband for Adrianna first and then me.

  “Francesco Alibrandi was fifteen years older than me, but he was established and promised to treat me well. So my parents agreed. It would be good for me, they said, to marry an older man. I remember walking down the road in my town on my wedding day. People came out and followed me in a procession. I was very happy.
/>   “Another girl, Teresa Morelli, had been engaged to a boy, but her father found out that he had been wit another woman. So they finished it wit him and she became engaged to someone else. But on the day before her wedding she was walking down to wash her clothes and the first boy took her. Eloped, Jozzie.”

  “Did she want to elope?”

  “Oh, no, no. Not Teresa, poor girl. But he took her away for a night and that was it, Jozzie.”

  Nonna Katia wiped her hands clean in the air.

  “He did not want her anymore and returned her to her family and she never married again. No man would have her.”

  “But that’s not fair. She didn’t want to go,” I said, indignantly. “That makes me so furious.”

  “So many times that happened, Jozzie, so many times. Anyway my cousin Adrianna was going to America wit her husband. America, Jozzie. Back then it was like going to heaven. You were going to be rich if you went to America. We were going someplace too. All the time I would hear Francesco talk to his friends. Never to me. I thought we were going to America too. I was sad to leave my family, but happy because Adrianna would be there.

  “But when he told me that we were going to Australia, oh my God, I didn’t know what to do. Who knew back then, Jozzie? Who knew where this Australia was? Under Africa, people would say.”

  “Africa?”

  “Madonna mia,” she said, fanning herself.

  I almost laughed at her theatrics.

  “I cried and cried. I begged him. ‘Please, Francesco, please.’ My mother even begged him not to take me away, but my father shook his head and shrugged. ‘What can I do?’ he said. ‘She is his wife. She goes where he goes.’ So I will always remember that day in Messina waving to my mother. She fainted, Jozzie, because it is not like these days where you wave to your mother and know that you will take a Qantas flight the next year to see her. You sometimes never see these people again. These people who are your family. Yet we all did because it was our husbands’ will.”

  Such self-sacrifice is very hard for me to understand.

  “For half the journey I cried. I stayed in my cabin and cried. I was sick. All I could tink of was my mama fainting in Messina. Then one day I heard the music. The tarantella. Oh, Jozzie, I loved to dance. I remember going up on that deck and dancing. People clapped as I danced. I took off my shoes and my hair was down. Like yours, Jozzie, when it is out. Long and wavy. I saw the way the men would look at me, Jozzie. Pooh, I was better looking than any of their wives.”

  “And modest, of course.”

  As beautiful as the photos are of her, I doubt they do her justice. I looked at her sitting there, excitement in her eyes, large and dark, as she told her stories. All I could think of was that she must have been the most beautiful woman around. It’s funny that everything has aged. Her face, her hair, and her hands. But her eyes haven’t. Her eyes that night were identical and as youthful as her eyes in the photos.

  “But when Francesco saw me out there he was red in the face,” she continued. “He grabbed my arm and pulled me down to the cabin and I was never allowed up there again.

  “When we arrived in Sydney, I saw the Sydney Harbor Bridge and they let us get off and walk across it. Sydney, of course, wasn’t anything like it is today. There was no Opera House or skyscrapers, no beautiful boats in the harbor and no beautiful houses and worse still, Jozzie, nobody spoke Italian.

  “In my whole life I had never been out of Sicily, so I had never heard a language apart from Sicilian. The people, they dressed different to us. A lot of us were from small villages in Sicily and there we were in a city where the women were painted up wit red lipstick. Your nonno went to a pub, Jozzie, and there was a woman working in there. A woman, Jozzie. The Australian men would call out to us and whistle. In Sicily men did not call out and whistle to a woman that belonged to somebody else. Oh, no,” she said, shaking her head and finger, “I tell you, Jozzie, it was like going to another world.

  “We boarded the boat again and finished in Brisbane and from there we took a train to Ingham. Ingham was even worse, Jozzie. It was bare. Where we lived out in the bush there was nuting but us and the snakes. I did not see anyone but your nonno for six months. It was so hot, Jozzie, that I would wash myself and two minutes later I would need to wash again, but I couldn’t because we could not waste water. There was no air-conditioning then. No tiles on the floor to keep the house cool. No room I could go to, to cool down. The house was a shack. One room and a dirt floor.”

  I looked around at the room we were in and it amazed me how far they had come from being penniless immigrants from Sicily.

  Over forty years ago she had a one-room shack and today she was living in a two-story house with Italian furniture, carpet, air-conditioning, a swimming pool and many other luxuries. Nonna’s house is tasteful and I somehow had the feeling that her one-room shack would have been as tasteful as she could make it.

  “The Australians knew nuting about us. We were ignorant. They were ignorant. Jozzie, you wonder why some people my age cannot speak English well. It is because nobody would talk to them, and worse still, they did not want to talk to anyone.

  “We lived in our own little world, and as more relatives and friends from the same town came out to Australia, the bigger our Italian community became, to the point where we didn’t need to make friends with the Australians.”

  She went on, telling me more, and as I lay back I thought it was ironic that the same ignorance that was around back then is still here now. An ignorance that will live in this country for many years to come, I think.

  When I hear Nonna Katia tell me about how life was forty-odd years ago, I find it hard to believe that she was just seventeen, my age now, when she was married and taken halfway across the world. But then again, Mama was just seventeen when she gave birth to me, so it makes me realize how young we youth of today really are.

  Maybe we know more or think we know more, or do a lot more, but we haven’t been through as much. We’d never be able to cope with the pressures our mothers and grandmothers went through.

  But I wonder about that seventeen-year-old girl back then. I wonder what really happened to her. I wonder what she used to dream about if she ever did dream and how she turned out to be a person I really don’t like. And worst of all I wonder if I’ll turn out to be just like her when I turn sixtyfive.

  I wanted to ask her more, but I didn’t want to give her that satisfaction. So I decided to leave it for another day. Another day when I would see the photos and look for that young seventeen-year-old, boy-crazy gypsy named Katia Torello.

  Eight

  THE TIME BEFORE class starts in the morning is the most exciting. Because we haven’t seen each other for sixteen hours, it’s gossip galore.

  What happened on TV. What happened at work if one worked. What happened on the way from or to school. What good-looking guy spoke to you. What ideas you came up with during the night. What kind of nagging your parents did. What magazine you bought on the way from or to school. Who was the best-looking guy in the magazine. Why he was the best-looking guy in the magazine.

  The list goes on. By the end of the day we’ve heard it all. We’re sick of each other and look forward to getting away. But those first ten minutes are the very reason you come to school. Miss out on them and you are behind the times.

  This morning, amid all this excitement, I was unpacking my satchel and listening to the gossip.

  Standing in front of me, flicking untied masses of hair all over my desk, was Carly Bishop. Carly Bishop belongs to the “beautiful people” previously mentioned. The “beautiful people” are the ones who have the most modern hairstyles. If long hair is in, they’ve got it. If one gets her hair cropped, so do the others. If one comes to school and announces she’ll be growing her hair, so do the rest of them.

  The “beautiful people” aren’t dumb. Their marks are usually average. They do just about what they need to. They don’t complain about their marks or stress. The “be
autiful people” don’t need to.

  Carly is a part-time model. She was in Hot Pants once. We have a few models in the school. The others, though, are not vain, nor are they coy about it. To them it’s a job. A better one than most of us have, but just a job that one never boasts about.

  Except Carly.

  Carly is the type of person who is constantly in the Sunday society pages of the paper. She’s the one with her mouth open, always laughing in a fake way, surrounded by great-looking people who could have different color hair, eyes and skin, but look exactly like her.

  She sits in front of me in our homeroom as well as in English.

  Only a few people can stand Carly and her group. They’re the most pretentious try-hards in the world, but they seem to survive somehow. No matter how much we all say we detest them, though, we kind of perk up a bit when they speak to us. If one of them tells you that your hair looks good, then you feel vain for the rest of the day. To us mortals who are nerds or brains they represent that limited part of society we will never be a part of.

  Carly’s already eighteen, so she spends most of her evenings nightclubbing.

  “The nightclub was the pits,” I heard her say.

  “How come?” Bettina Sanders asked.

  “They were all wogs. They seem to be everywhere,” she snickered.

  “I beg your pardon, Carly?” I asked, sick of her daily racist remarks.

  She looked at me slightly embarrassed, scooping her fringe back between her fingers.

  “Oh, not you, Josie. I didn’t mean you. You’re not a wog.”

  “Well, what did you mean?”

  “I mean . . . just those other people. But you’re different.”

  “No, I’m not. How am I different? Do I look different to them?”

  “Well, no . . . but I know you’re different.”

  Her friends began to look uncomfortable and resentful.

  “I’m just the same as them and I’d appreciate you not going on about wogs every day. It offends me.”