by Mary Contini
‘Your mother taught me, Alfonso, but I still can’t make mine as good as hers!’
They all laughed. The women went into the kitchen to tidy up. The children played happily together. The older ones jumped from dialect to English with ease, their accents a mixture of Scottish and Italian. Olivia and Lena sat under the table and played with some coloured wooden bricks.
Alfonso and Cesidio sat at the table.
‘Is everything settling down, compare? How’s business?’
‘I can’t complain. We’re working all hours. We’ve rented a flat across from the shop so we can make the back shop into a café. I have some money for Zio Benny. Can you pass it to him for me?’
‘Of course. I’ll see him this evening. How’s Marietta? She looks very happy.’
‘She’s very happy. She’s really good with the locals. It helps that she speaks English so well. How’s Maria?’
‘Oh, I don’t really know. She is quiet sometimes. She works in the shop half the day then looks after the children: you know, constant cooking, washing, ironing. She never complains but she is alone quite a lot. The older children are at school so I’m really glad we have Olivia. She keeps her mother company.
Cesidio wanted to know what was going on in Italy. He got no news down in Cockenzie. Alfonso usually knew what was going on.
‘There are even more strikes, one political group fighting against the next. If there’s not a strong government in Italy soon, who knows what the workers will do. I don’t blame them really. If you can’t feed your family what would you do?
‘It’s just as bad here, what with the miners striking. You wonder, what was the point of the war?’
‘Some of the soldiers I fought with have told me they are thinking of voting for Benito Mussolini. He is against the Communists and the strikes. Even the Catholic politicians are joining him in some parts.’
‘Well, let’s wait and see.’ Cesidio felt he was far better off having emigrated, so he was not too anxious about the future.
Alfonso lowered his voice and moved towards his friend, ‘Don’t tell Maria, for the love of God. I’ve had a summons from the police.’
‘Alfonso! What have you been up to?’
‘Nothing bad: well, I don’t think so. You know we’re supposed to close at eight at night? The bakery down the road finishes up at nine. I sometimes let the boys sneak in. I can sell another few packets of Woodbines or a bar of chocolate. If they don’t buy them from me they’ll get them from Simpson’s in the morning with their paper.’
‘What’s the fine?’
‘£4. Sssh … don’t tell Maria.’
Cesidio laughed. ‘Never mind the police. If she catches you out you’ll get more than a fine!’
‘Eh! You two. What are you up to scheming over there?’
Marietta always wanted to know what the men were up to.
‘Nothing, nothing.’ Alfonso blushed.
On the way home in the tram, Cesidio told Marietta all about Alfonso’s antics.
‘He’s harmless, Cesidio. I am glad we are not living in town though. I think it’s a lot harder there, by the looks of things. Maria told me he was already fined for selling sweets for a penny over the fixed price, 9d instead of 8d,’ Marietta laughed, ‘I’ve done it myself but I didn’t get caught!’
‘Don’t be clever. We’re doing quite well. If we just keep saving, in about a year we’ll be able to pay off our debt to Zio Benny.’
‘Cesidio, I’ve been thinking about that. If we pay off the debt too quickly they’ll know we are doing well. Zio Benny might send another family down here and open another shop. Port Seton is just five minutes away. There’s no ice cream shop there. Let’s just keep a bit of money aside and, instead of paying Zio Benny, we’ll buy the corner shop at the Links at Port Seton. It’s a great site. We’ll protect our future first. Then we’ll pay Zio Benny back.’
Cesidio didn’t answer. She had a point. She was furba! At the beginning the Italians worked together but one would eventually come out stronger than the other. Marietta was clever. He had chosen well. Not only that, she was beautiful too. He felt they could tackle anything together. Lena and Giovanni were happy looking out of the window. Cesidio looked down at Anna and soothed her brow as she slept on Marietta’s lap. He felt very lucky.
He bent over and kissed his wife on the cheek and whispered, ‘Ti amo.’
14
Edinburgh
March 1922
Maria banged on the shop door screaming for Alfonso. Her hair was in disarray, a shawl pulled hastily over her shoulders. It was teaming with rain. She was almost soaked through.
She banged again.
She saw the light in the back shop and just as she was going to shout again the door swung open.
‘Maria, chè successo? What’s happened?’
‘Alfonso. Oh Dio! Alfonso. Olivia è malata! Aiuto. Aiuto. Get the doctor. Forza! Forza!’
She turned and ran back home, barely avoiding getting knocked over by a horse and carriage that was charging down the street in the dark.
Olivia was breathing very shallowly. Every time she tried to fill her lungs she made a sinister wheezing squeak. Maria had seen children ill before. She knew Olivia was really sick; something was very wrong.
The children were standing round their sister’s cot whimpering with fright. Olivia coughed again, almost desperately trying to catch some air, a coarse barking cough that she had had for almost four weeks, almost since Ash Wednesday.
Dr Sinclair had already been called out twice. He had told Maria to keep Olivia warm and put lavender oil in warm water by her bed. It didn’t do any good. The lady in Lindsay & Gilmour’s pharmacy had told Alfonso to make a poultice of bread and grated soap and warm it to put on the child’s chest. Nothing helped. Preziosa said they should take her out for fresh air but it was so cold and damp Maria had been afraid and had kept her in.
‘Mamma, what’s wrong with Olivia?’ Domenico was nine now and old enough to realise that his mother was really frightened. He took Olivia’s hand and bent over to give her a kiss. He patted her head.
Olivia coughed again.
They heard a commotion in the stair. Margherita opened the door for the doctor and her father.
As the doctor examined the baby Maria took a step back from the cot, too afraid to look. She started to cry. Alfonso put his hand on her shoulder to try to calm her, but she pushed him away.
‘Take the children next door, cara. Take the children away.’ Alfonso insisted. Maria’s heart sank. ‘Oh Dio! Oh Dio!’
She took Margherita and Vittorio through to the bedroom. Domenico slipped her hand and stayed back in the room, moving into the shadows, refusing to leave his father alone.
He heard his mother start to say her rosary and a chill gripped his heart. She only said the rosary when they were all in bed or if something was wrong. His mother still didn’t understand English. He did. Over the last few days he’d heard the children in the stair whispering ‘The Tally bairn’s goin’ to cop it, she’s got the croup.’
Olivia coughed again, but by now her breathing was even shallower, making a whistling noise like Zio Benny when he played the mouth organ.
Domenico thought she looked just like a blue angel; her face was round and pretty, her lips cherub-like, delicate and gentle. Her big brown eyes were wide open, staring at him in the corner of the room. He covered his ears with his hands, not wanting to hear her cough again.
The doctor listened to the little girl’s chest. He kept listening and listening as if he was looking for something, something that he couldn’t find. Something that had disappeared.
The doctor stood up and put his hand on Alfonso’s shoulder and moved closer to him, saying something very quietly in his ear. Domenico’s father leant over the cot and kissed Olivia, then put his fingers over her eyes and closed them, as if he was putting her to sleep.
Domenico went into the bedroom and stood close to his mother. He understood. ‘She’s gone, Mamma, Olivia
non è più.’
Maria let out a strange noise, a noise like an animal makes when you hurt it badly: a long, loud agonising wail. A terrifying noise to Domenico; it was as if his mother’s heart had broken there and then, right in front of him. He put his arms round her and held her. Instinctively he pulled his sister and youngest brother beside him. When his father had been away he had sensed his mother’s every mood, he had known when she was anxious. He had never seen her as desperately upset as this.
The news travelled quickly around the Italian community, one family telling the next, just as they would have done in Picinisco. The next day, when Cesidio and Marietta arrived, they were shocked when they saw Maria. She looked devastated.
The house was full of women, dressed in black from head to toe, sitting around talking with quiet voices, crying and consoling each other in turn. The men, dark suited, stood silently near the door, hats in their hands, black mourning bands already stitched onto the left sleeve of their jackets. Father Michael had come from the Cathedral, the first time he had been in their home.
Alfonso greeted his friends. He looked stunned, haggard in fact, worse than he had ever looked while at war. He took them through to the bedroom where Olivia had been laid out. Marietta had to cover her mouth to stop a cry escaping. The beautiful child they had seen only four weeks before was lying lifeless.
She was dressed in a white long-sleeved silk dress that stretched the length of her slight body. Peeping out from under the hem were her pretty bare feet. Her tiny hands were crossed over her chest, white rosary beads entwined in her fingers. Her olive-coloured skin was as smooth as porcelain and her tiny cherub lips had gained some colour and stood out like a pink smear on her face. Her dark lashes framed her closed eyes, her black hair fanned out over the white pillow. On her head was a garland of fresh yellow primroses that framed her head like a halo.
Cesidio and Marietta knelt down and whispered their rosary for the little girl, praying for an hour or more until the next family came in to take over the vigil. On the mantelpiece was a picture of Sant’Antonio Abate illuminated by two flickering candles at either side. The room was filled with the aroma of candles burning and the scent of the flowers.
Marietta stayed through the night, preparing food for the mourners and consoling Maria when she collapsed again and again into unendurable despair. Maria could not bear Alfonso to touch her, recoiling in shock if he came near. Instead she clung to Margherita and her two sons. She found solace only in her rosary. She prayed decade after decade to her Holy Mother, desperate to avoid every thought that struggled into her consciousness.
She blamed herself. Had she neglected her little daughter? Had someone pointed the evil eye? Would her child be alive if they had never left Italy? She wanted to scream at Alfonso for putting her through this. She wished they had never met, never married. How could their love cause so much pain?
When she looked at her other beautiful children she was tortured with guilt and beseeched God for forgiveness for her wickedness and her ungrateful thoughts.
The women in the stair were wary. They had listened to the sound of the coughing of the Italian bairn and knew it was the croup. They kept their doors closed and told their own children not to go near the Tallies lest they catch it. They had all seen bairns die of this curse and they were afraid for their own. They felt sorry for the Tallies of course, but they were wary in case their bad luck would rub off on them. They wished among themselves that the Italian family would go and live somewhere else.
The next day the white-plumed horse-drawn hearse stopped at the door. Spending the last moment with his little girl alone, Alfonso blessed his daughter and kissed her forehead. ‘Addio, mia cara. I’ll pray for you every day, every day that I live without you. Cara Olivia.’
Before they closed the small white coffin, he sprinkled cologne over the flowers on her head. The scent of his ‘Ashes of Roses’ perfume lingered in the air as she was carried out of the house.
Neighbours and shopkeepers in Easter Road were all standing in respectful silence at their doors. Outside the ice cream shop, Mrs Glenn, Mary Praties and Lilly Rough were crying. The Italian families were all waiting silently behind the hearse.
It was a strange sight, all these foreigners walking together. The men led the way, hats in their hands, their dark good looks adding an air of excitement. The women were dressed in severe long black lace dresses with high collars buttoned right up to their necks, fine black lace mantillas covering their faces. They held their children beside them, all beautifully dressed and respectful: healthy, strong-looking children with dark skins and thick black hair.
The procession turned up Montgomery Street and made its way along to Elm Row then up to St Mary’s Cathedral. Maria walked beside her husband. She was retracing the steps that she had taken that first afternoon when she arrived at Waverley Station and Alfonso had come to meet her. Only this time she was burying her youngest child.
If she had known the hardship she would have to face and the sorrow that would fall on her, she would have turned back then and given up this mad adventure. What kind of improvement had there been? Working day and night, a stranger in a city, and now a child dying before she was two? Anger swept through her like an irrepressible dark wave. She wanted to lash out, smash everything in her sight.
Laid out in front of the majestic altar, the small white coffin looked incongruous among the sinister splendour of Scottish Catholicism. The gloomy gothic ceilings and powerful images of the risen Christ made the children shiver in fear.
Alfonso knelt at the front right-hand pew and sat symbolically alone, his wife and children behind him. During the Mass, when the congregation filed passed the coffin, they each bent over and kissed it, then crossed themselves, put their fingers to their mouths and slowly bowed down in front of the cross. Each man moved across to place his hand on Alfonso’s shoulder in an act of respect. Some bent over and whispered something. Some just nodded and murmured in dialect ‘condoglianze’.
This was the first time Alfonso had seen his compatriots all together. They all came: his brothers Emidio and Giovanni, Zio Benny, Carlo Crolla from Antigua Street, and Cesidio, of course. Then Achille Crolla, Church Street; Valvona, Newhaven; Demarco, High Street; Tartaglia, High Street; Pompa, Crichton Place; Di Marco, Leith Street; Sabatino Cervi, Dundee Street and his cousin Pia, Raeburn Place; Valente and Rossi from Leith; Crolla, High Street; and Marandola from Pitt Street. Then, from down the coast, Mancini, Scapaticci, Di Rollo, Antonelli and Coppola from Tranent, Togneri from Dunbar; in all, about twenty families, most with young wives and three or four children, nearly all from Picinisco and the surrounding villages. He felt blessed by their presence.
Next the women processed up to Holy Communion, many weeping, some supported by each other. They too had tragedies in their lives. Some had lost a baby in childbirth, or an older child like Olivia; some had lost a husband or son in war.
All felt a yearning for their families in Italy. At times like this they felt strangers in this country, fearing their families were vulnerable and at risk. La lontananza came over them, that feeling of separation that haunted them. Even the Church, though familiar in many ways, did not offer the support and guidance they craved. Though the Mass was in Latin, the women mostly did not speak English and could not gain support or guidance from the priest.
There were few Scottish Catholics at the service; it was a private affair, this Italian funeral.
No one noticed two strangers at the back of the church standing aloof, watching. The younger of the two was distinctive in that he had only one arm. They were dressed slightly differently from the mourners, with expensive suits, and black shirts rather than black armbands. The pass-keeper asked them if they would like to move further up to join the funeral party. They politely refused in perfect Queen’s English. By the looks of them, they were Italians, but different; he couldn’t put his finger on it. By the time Alfonso carried his daughter’s small coffin out of the cathedral ba
lanced high on his shoulders, they had gone.
After the funeral, Maria slipped into a quiet depression and became more and more distant from Alfonso. He tried everything to help her, worried that she would fall ill. He felt bereft, alone. He wrote letters to Tadon Michele and Pietro, talking through his worries. He felt he had lost part of his wife as well as his daughter.
To calm himself he started smoking, chewing on a dark Toscani cigar. He started to sprinkle his handkerchief with Ashes of Roses, a private ritual that kept the presence of his little Olivia alive.
Maria kept her own vigil with a lighted candle beside her holy picture and prayed constantly to the Holy Mother. She had taken to bringing the children into her bed at night, as she had done when Alfonso was away at war. Alfonso slept on the mattress in the front room. He was patient and loving with her but spent more time alone, walking on Arthur’s Seat, chewing on his cigar, thinking, trying to make sense of this tragedy.
The children were subdued, so he made a point of bringing them little treats. He kept some liquorice allsorts or boilings in his pocket, which he slipped to them when their mother wasn’t looking, much to their delight. Sometimes, if the weather was good on a Wednesday afternoon, he would pick them up from school and take them on the tram to Portobello. They would walk along the promenade and visit the Demarco café for an ice cream. Their favourite treat was a visit to Signor Valvona’s car showroom. He would let one of them sit at the wheel of one of the biggest cars and pump the horn, pretending they were driving, to the delight of the other two who pretended to be passengers in the back.
When they came back from these excursions with some flowers or sweets for their mother, she smiled at them and hugged them, grateful to Alfonso for distracting them from her distress. In the evening when the children were finally asleep he would try to talk to her:
‘Maria, cara, come ti senti?’
‘Oh, Alfonso, I am too afraid to feel. I pray and pray so that I can’t hear myself think. But I wonder if there is any point. How can any God take a child away like that?’
