Linda Cardillo - Dancing On Sunday Afternoons

by Linda Cardillo

  On the days Signore Ventuolo wasn’t there, she listened to me read or had me practice my multiplication tables. Pasqualina took the little ones for a walk so my mother and I could study.

  My mother said that Signore Ventuolo lived alone in rooms in Napoli, with no mother or wife to cook and wash for him. She told him to bring his laundry when he came, and Zia Teresia starched and ironed so that his shirts, though old, were neat and white.

  Zia Pasqualina and Zi’Yolanda, my uncle Tony’s wife, sat in the courtyard at Giuseppina’s house peeling eggplants one day, several months after Signore Ventuolo had become my tutor.

  “Anna would adopt Signore Ventuolo if she could. I don’t know what else he’s good for. Who ever heard of making a living teaching little girls? Why isn’t he out working for his father? I know for a fact that his family is in the textile business. So why is he here instead of in the mil ? Did they disown him? Is he one of those anarchists, throwing bombs at his father’s factory? Is that why Anna brought him here?” Zia Pasqualina jabbed at the skin of the eggplant as she continued.

  “He feeds his bel y on my cooking, dumps his dirty clothes in Teresia’s wash bucket, drinks Felice’s wine. Al for such nonsense as teaching Giulia to read and write. Why couldn’t they leave wel enough alone when the Reverend Mother sent her home? Couldn’t they see Giulia wasn’t meant to be schooled? Wasn’t it enough that the sisters think she’s uncontrol able?

  Do they want her to run away from here, too, for the entire vil age to see? How long does Anna think Giulia wil sit stil for these lessons she’ll never use? She should be in the kitchen with me, or better yet, here in Giuseppina’s garden, helping her grandmother who needs her eyes, her ears and her sturdy legs.”

  Zi’Yolanda nodded her head in agreement. “Al these books will give her too many ideas, make her lazy and useless. Look at Anna, for heavens sake!”

  I had been in my room, reading one of the books from Napoli. I wanted to tel them that I did sit stil . I was back in Giuseppina’s house, but now a desk stood under the window, stacked with texts and copybooks and ink pots.

  “Look at me now, turning the pages of this book, laughing at the stories, going far away in my mind to the places I read about,” I wanted to shout at them.

  But Pasqualina and Yolanda moved on to another topic, their opinions of my mother and her passion for education fal ing in a heap with the eggplant skins at their feet.

  I wanted to tel them that Signore Ventuolo was not at al like Sister Philomena. He brought me sweets from the conditoria in his neighborhood in Napoli. After I read my lessons to him with no mistakes, he rewarded me with a bonbon. Every week he had something different in the white-and-gold bag. Sugarcoated almonds in pale colors of pink and green and lilac, cherries dipped in chocolate, colored fruits and flowers made of almond paste.

  The only thing I didn’t like about Signore Ventuolo teaching me was the look on Giuseppina’s face—her annoyance when I left with my packet of books to walk to my mother’s house and her pain when I returned, ful of lightheartedness and excitement that I could not share with her.

  CHAPTER 6

  A Game Cal ed “America”

  The changes my mother initiated by educating her daughters were only the beginning. Within two years, the foundation upon which we based our lives began to shift, creating tremors as real as the earthquakes that sent whole vil ages toppling down the mountainside in our val ey. My brother Claudio decided to leave Venticano right after the feast of the Ascension, as soon as he turned eighteen. He wanted to be someone other than what Papa wanted for him. He told us al , in that voice of his that was always so sure, so smart, that there was no better place for him than New York.

  In the last months before his leave-taking, Claudio and Papa had done nothing but argue with each other—

  thunderous shouting matches that began out in the courtyard and carried into the house at dinner.

  “Smal potatoes,” he cal ed Papa’s business.

  “The world, is wider than the road from Venticano to Napoli,” Claudio told him. “This is the twentieth century, for God’s sake. This region is dying. Pretty soon you’ll only be hauling caskets to the graveyard.”

  “Hasn’t this life given you enough?” Papa demanded. “You, with your fancy suit and the respect you get just because of your name. What do you think bought you that respect? Who built this house that stands higher than any other in Venticano, so that you, too, can hold your head higher? From living over a stable with your grandmother’s herbs hanging from the rafters, I have brought al of you to this. Stone by stone, this house was built because every day I traveled that road to Napoli—that road you say is so narrow. Every morsel you put in your mouth, every thread on your body…”

  “And just as living over a stable wasn’t enough for you, staying here in Venticano isn’t enough for me! Every day I drive into Napoli I hear the same stories at the docks—the opportunity, the immensity and fertility of the land—that’s what I want for myself, a future in America!” Claudio shouted back at Papa.

  “You think America is going to give you this and more? You think you’re not going to have to work hard? You think you can turn your back on your family, on your heritage, and succeed? Then go. Get out of my sight!”

  Papa slammed his fist on the table, my mother caught his flying wineglass, and Claudio grabbed his hat and bolted out the door and down the hil to Auteri’s for a glass of grappa. The rest of my brothers and sisters watched wide-eyed and swal owed silently, not wanting to draw Papa’s notice and take Claudio’s place as the object of his wrath.

  “There will come a time he won’t come back,” warned my mother, mopping up spil ed wine.

  “Then good riddance. Let him go.” And by the middle of June go he did, driven by his own dreams, my Papa’s stubbornness, my mother’s pride. It was my mother who paid for his passage, sel ing some of her jewelry to finance his journey.

  On the day he left, my mother dressed in her most elegant gown, put on her ruby earrings and stood on the balcony over the front door of her house—the balcony that looks out on the main street of our vil age and beyond, to the entire val ey below. The balcony from which anyone can see and be seen.

  She stood there without tears while everyone else wailed and sobbed, her face shielded from the scorching sun by her wide-brimmed silk hat with the blue feathers, as Claudio walked out of the vil age and down into the val ey on his way to America. She stayed there hours after he was no longer visible to us, but I think she saw him in a way no one else could—his safe journey, his arrival, his triumph. I remember the look on her face, her belief in the Tightness of what Claudio was doing.

  For Papa, however, Claudio’s leaving was a defeat. Claudio walked away because Papa refused to take him in his own carriage. Papa spent the day in a darkened corner of Auteri’s tavern and spit on what he cal ed Claudio’s worthless dreams. Claudio had wanted nothing that Papa could give him.

  My parents’ house was very quiet in the days after Claudio went.

  But his going left a hole in our lives. My family had been in Venticano for nearly five hundred years. How many times had I heard Giuseppina recite the litany that began with Alessandro Fioril o, the crossbowman who’d sailed from Barcelona to invade Napoli under Alfonso the Magnanimous of Aragon? He never returned to Spain. Instead, he fel in love with the beautiful Maria and remained to cultivate a patch of earth and father her babies.

  Giuseppina could not comprehend Claudio’s leaving Italy. When he set off from Venticano, Giuseppina had taken a lock of his dark hair, his fingernail clippings and a milk tooth she’d saved since his babyhood. She kept them in a pouch, blessing them every year on the anniversary of his departure.

  For us children, the pain of Claudio’s departure had been much simpler. We could not understand, could not forgive his leaving us. The only people before Claudio who’d left Venticano, never to return, were the dead.

  What was this place America—farther than Avel ino i
n the val ey, farther than Napoli on the sea—that had swal owed up our brother?

  In America, Claudio was successful right away. The money began arriving that August. I think my mother knew how well it would go for Claudio—how well it would go for al of us. When Claudio started sending us money, he also sent us letters fil ed with stories. He recreated for us the streets of New York, teeming with people and commerce. It was the commerce, especial y, that fascinated Claudio and presented him with opportunity.

  In Little Italy, he saw the pushcarts laden with vegetables and fish and shoes and pots that provided the daily necessities to the tenements. Uptown, he saw the glass-fronted shops, their shelves fil ed with goods—goods he knew had to come from somewhere outside the city. Goods that had to be hauled from where they were made to where they were sold. And so, after a few months of laboring for someone else, Claudio turned in his shovel, and with the money he’d saved, together with what remained of the money my mother had given him, he bought a horse and wagon and began hauling everything the city needed. He had found a place that, unlike Venticano, was not shriveling in the sun but was expanding, exploding.

  What we gleaned from Claudio’s letters was the sheer immensity of America. So many people, so many streets, long vistas that stretched as far as the eye could see or dream. And one by one, my brothers—first Aldo, and then Frankie and Sandro, who are even younger than me—begged to join him. The hole created by Claudio’s departure did not close. Instead, it widened, tearing apart the life my family had known.

  My oldest sister, Letitia, had married six months before, a marriage arranged by my parents with the jeweler Samuel Rassina, the son of one of Papa’s business associates. She was eighteen and already bitter. She seemed to spend most of her time in the church, “praying for babies, instead of staying home making them,”

  her mother-in-law complained.

  I knew, from observing other girls in the vil age, what lay ahead for me. A year or two of meeting stiff and boring boys at gatherings with families like ours, always under the extremely watchful eye of my mother. And then, after the families nodded and whispered, the women sitting on the sofa and hiding their conversations behind painted fans, the men out on the porch with their cigars and their eyes narrowed, estimating the worth of the girl’s family or the boy’s land—then, the banns of marriage would be announced in both churches. A string of novenas would fol ow, the girl’s grandmothers and aunts pitying that no unforeseen obstacles would tumble into the couple’s path, like the loose boulders that had slid off the mountain, crushing five of the vil age goats and blocking the road to Pano di Greci for three days. Praying that the wedding would take place before the girl had a chance to disgrace the family with a baby born too soon, like Constanza Berti. She’d come to the doorstep of my cousin Arturo’s house and thrown the baby into the arms of Arturo’s mother, screaming, “Here, this is yours!” My aunt and uncle had made Arturo marry her and take her and the baby away.

  My mother wanted no Constanza Bertis in our family.

  “You are not peasants! You are the daughters of Felice Fioril o.” Her greatest weapon in her defense of our honor was our pride. From the time we were smal , she had Zia Pasqualina scrubbing us and dressing us in starched white dresses while the other children in the vil age ran around barefoot and in tatters. When the money from Claudio began coming, the dresses became finer, and we ordered fabrics from Napoli for the bed linens we were to take to our marriage beds.

  Painstakingly, under the instruction of Zia Pasqualina, I embroidered red silk GFs on the elaborate pil owcases I sewed, festooned with tucks and elegant lace. My fingers cramped from the tiny stitches. My mother held up these beautiful objects to us like Giuseppina’s talismans. If we wanted a life fil ed with beauty and elegance, a life where we could rest our heads on an embroidered pil owcase, rather than a life spent washing someone else’s pil owcases, then we had to remember that its cost was far more than the silver she’d paid for this linen. How would we be able to put our heads on these pristine objects if we ourselves were soiled?

  My sisters soaked up these lessons without question. They were wil ing to sit for hours with their needles and thread, gossiping about wedding dresses and arguing over the placement of a flower. They looked at the not-married and the married in our family, in our vil age, and had decided which side they wanted to be on. I was not so sure.

  I was haunted by Letitia’s heartache. How lonely she seemed! Her husband had no brothers and sisters, and he was often away, leaving Letitia alone with his nagging mother.“No wonder she seeks refuge in the church,”

  my mother muttered one day.

  The lonelier and more withdrawn Letitia became, the more I began to share my brothers’ growing excitement with each letter from Claudio. I was stil young enough to be granted an occasional excuse from the sewing circle, and then I went off with Aldo and Frankie and Sandro to the hil s and played “America”—the rules defined by whatever wonders Claudio had described in his most recent letter. The more I learned from Claudio, the less willing I was to do as my mother expected.

  I wanted to laugh, I wanted to dance. I did not want to spend the rest of my life praying to the Blessed Virgin in a vil age church.

  CHAPTER 7

  The Spel

  On Christmas eve every year the entire family gathered at my parents’ house to celebrate—my grandmother, Giuseppina; my sister Letitia, her husband and his widowed mother; Papa’s estranged brother Tony, who had begun to talk about fol owing Claudio to America with his wife Yolanda and their son Peppino; Zia Pasqualina and Zia Teresia, who did al the cooking for the feast of seven fishes, the traditional Christmas eve meal; and al my brothers and sisters who were stil at home. In the two years since he’d been gone, my mother had set also a place for Claudio on Christmas eve, an empty chair she al owed no one else to sit in. She did not set a place for the wife Claudio had written us about in October of that year.

  The house was ablaze with light. Every candlestick in the house had been polished and arranged on the table, the credenza, even the windowsills. My mother and Pip had laid the table with a damask cloth, heavy silver and platters painted with cherubs and goddesses. For one night, everyone put aside grudges and resentments, ate abundantly and then walked across the piazza to attend midnight Mass together. At the end of the service, as the bel s chimed “Adeste Fidelis” and the snow swirled around our feet, we bid one another

  “Buon Natale” and separated.

  After we returned to my grandmother’s house, I started toward my bed, but Giuseppina reached out for me with her blue-veined hand. My Christimas eve was not yet over.

  “Wait,” she said. “I want to show you something, figlia mia.”

  She gestured for me to fol ow her to the kitchen, where she stirred the coal embers in the grate and then sat on her chair— the stool where she sat every day when “the parade of the afflicted,” as my mother cal ed them, came for her ministrations and her medicines.

  “How old are you, Giulia?”

  She asked a question she knew the answer to. This was just like Giuseppina. She often asked the simplest of questions, questions whose answers seemed so commonplace, so obvious, that at first you worried she was becoming feeble-minded and forgetful. But then, when you answered her question, scoffing, “But, Notina, you know already!” you found that your answer meant something else entirely.

  “I’m fourteen, Norma,” I answered, puzzled by what Giuseppina was seeking, by what my answer would reveal to us both.

  “Ah,” she sighed. “Fourteen. Yes, I thought so.”

  Giuseppina did not keep track of time the way my mother did. She could not read the baptismal certificates pressed between the thin pages of my mother’s Bible that recorded our names and the years of our births. She had no calendar hanging on the wall next to the washbasin advertising the granary in Avel ino. She had no gold-leafed clock sitting on a mantel that needed winding with a key. Giuseppina measured time by the season. Planting
, tending, harvesting. She measured time by the length and warmth of the day. She measured time by the flame in her votive candles.

  She looked at me then and measured another kind of time—one that marks the distance between the three-year-old chatterbox she took under her roof and her wing, and the almost-woman who, cicada-like, fil ed the silences in her house with words, questions, songs and stories. She eyed me, in my fine Christmas dress, my face stil flushed from wine, the walk home in the cold air, the warmth rising up from the stove.

  “When I was fourteen, I had already been promised to your grandfather Antonio,” she mused.

  Has she found me a husband? I wondered. Was that it? I was old enough to be married off? What about Til y and Pip? Weren’t they supposed to go before me? I wasn’t prepared for this, if this was what fourteen meant to my grandmother.

  “When I was fourteen, I also sat with my nonna on Christmas eve.” She waved a hand in front of her eyes as if to clear away the clouds that obscured the memory of another old woman and her granddaughter. I was more comfortable with this image. A girl sits at the feet of her nonna, listening and watching.

  “It’s a sacred time,” whispered Giuseppina,“for the maghe.”

  A shiver of recognition rippled its way from my hairline down my spine. I was no longer comfortable, but I was also not unwil ing. With relief, I realized that Giuseppina did not see me on the threshold of marriage, as she had been at fourteen. But I understood that she did see me as her heir in something far more mysterious, far more powerful. My heart was pounding.

  “You are ready,” she announced to me, taking my hands in hers. “Ready to learn the first spel s.”