by Angela Long
This fact became evident every Sunday lunch. I didn’t speak more than a few dozen words of the language, and these were mostly limited to what I saw on my plate. I didn’t wear pointy boots with heels. I didn’t know the names of the characters on Vivere.
Giuseppe assured me that none of this was important; his parents didn’t care about such things. But I knew he was just being polite. Of course they cared; they were Italian. To make matters worse, they were Sicilian. They were from an island where traditionally la famiglia was worth killing for. And Giuseppe was their youngest. The one they’d been so patient with. The one they’d let study jazz in Boston, work as a musician on cruise ships, volunteer at a Buddhist retreat centre in India. He was their last chance for a four-hundred-guest wedding. For grandchildren.
I’d caught his mother examining my boots on the mat at the front door, scraping the toe with her pinkie nail to test if they were real leather. She had pulled me aside, examining the frayed stitching of a shirt collar, insisting I change while she mended it. She clucked when I walked barefoot through the garden. She sighed when I let Bricciola jump onto my lap, speckling my jeans with tiny paw-prints.
I knew they wondered why their son had chosen to bring home a scrawny, strawberry blonde with no fashion sense who had never eaten a fresh artichoke before. Sometimes, I wondered exactly the same thing. The longer I lived in this place, the more I wished I were Italian. Who wouldn’t? They lived amidst carved cornices, soaring archways, and white marble staircases. They grew things like persimmons and passionfruit. They greeted one another with kisses on both cheeks and words that sounded like libretti. Mothers wearing stilettos pushed baby strollers. Every afternoon everything closed for three hours so people could eat a four-course lunch, then take a nap. And every week, after Sunday lunch, families walked arm-in-arm through the piazza beneath frescoes painted during the Renaissance.
But I learned that Giuseppe’s family didn’t go to the piazza. We sat back down at our places around the table and did what I dreaded most – talked. They asked questions. Giuseppe translated: “How many brothers do you have? What do they do? What does your father do? What does your family grow in their garden?” Giuseppe tried to find the words for nuclear power plant and car manufacturing industry. Retired school principal and mega-box chain store. “They don’t have a garden?” the father asked, puzzled, looking at his son. I nodded, as saddened as he by this discovery. Soon they began to look at me with pity rather than disappointment. We downed another round of espressos. We cracked walnuts open and popped them into our mouths.
After a few weeks, when my vocabulary began to expand beyond the border of my plate, I asked: “Why did you leave Sicily?” I’d realized that although they’d lived in the North for almost 30 years, far from African breezes and lemon trees, Sicily was still home. Via Scapardini 9 was filled with all things Sicilian: sheep’s ricotta, cannoli shells, olive oil, pistachios, a thick sweet wine called Zibibbo, reserved for special occasions. The wine was kept on a side rack in the fridge. Unlabelled.
“Don’t drink it,” Giuseppe warned when a glass was presented to me on All Saints’ Day. But of course I’d learned to accept whatever was placed in front of me.
“Salute!” I said and took a sip. It tasted heavenly. “Ambrosia of the gods,” I attempted to say while they all looked at me, confused.
“It’s really strong,” Giuseppe warned again as I took another sip. And it was. It made my head buzz in a way espresso could never dream of. The father smiled. I smiled back. I understood I was tasting where he came from. The essence of the place. The sweetness of sun, sea, wind, soil. I tasted what the North could never replace.
“Why did you leave?” I asked again. The mother opened the drawer where the tea towels were kept and unfolded a square of white linen printed with a map of Sicily. It was illustrated with orange blossoms, dancing peasant girls, Grecian urns. She pointed to a dot nestled in green hills, a centimetre away from the Mediterranean Sea.
“Boom!” she said. “Boom!”
“There was an earthquake,” Giuseppe translated. “They lost everything. They had to move North where there was work.”
The mother rushed into the dining room and returned with a vase that, before I moved to Italy, I would have considered tacky. It was curvy and ornate, hand-painted with the scene of a cypress and a white-washed villa. The sky was pink. The glaze, a pearly opalescence. The mother held the vase aloft by its golden handles. “Real gold,” she said. “It’s all that survived.” I looked at the vase as the light shifted and everything – sky, cypress, villa – began to shimmer. I sensed all those years preserved beneath the glaze.
“Take it,” the mother said placing the vase in front of me. For the first time I refused something I was offered at Via Scapardini 9. “Take it,” she said again, looking at me, not at my clothing or shoes or hairstyle. And I looked at her too. Something in her eyes told me I’d been wrong all this time – I’d been family from the moment I took my seat beside the radiator even though I was a straniero. I’d been family, not because I was living with her son, but because this was Italy. This was Sunday lunch.
“Thank you,” I said, touching the golden handles.
The Hybrids
Katy leaned out her window again. The one overlooking the terrace. She opened it every time she heard me out there, anxious, I thought, to speak our mother tongue. “We’re hybrids!” she yelled down. I pinned a T-shirt onto the clothesline, taking a second to admire the medieval castle wall jutting up into the blue sky, then turned, craning my neck to look up at her. She was wearing curlers in her hair and a white silk nightgown. French silk, she’d told me on another occasion. “We’re hybrids,” she repeated, winding a stray tendril of grey. “There’s no escaping it.”
Katy from New Zealand and Angela from Canada. Passports made it sound so simple. But Katy was right. We were hybrids. Our friends used pencil to record our latest address. We shape-shifted to fit the demands of the day – scarves draped to hide hair, or tossed around necks into French twists. We lived in Cairo or Dublin, Paris or Panajachel. We’d seen the Mona Lisa and the Last Supper, visited Yellowstone and the Nile. We’d ridden elephants and danced the tango.
We were the translators, waitresses, cooks, English teachers, musicians, farm workers, writers. Some of us had married Egyptian engineers and been transferred to Italy. Some of us had fallen in love with Italian jazz musicians and been invited to live in villas beside medieval castles. Some of us had become neighbours, borrowing electrical converters instead of cups of sugar. Hanging out windows for chats in our own language.
It all sounded so glamorous, until you knew what we’d done to get there.
There were the tables we’d waited on, the potatoes we’d dug, the industrial texts on vacuum maintenance we’d translated. The boxes we’d packed and crammed into our parents’ attics. The plants we’d given away. The hand-made pottery too fragile to ship. The baggage. Which blouse was the most wrinkle-prone? Which favourite sweater too heavy? There were the planes. The jetlag. The long waits in airport lounges and customs line-ups. The queries of border guards. The complications of living a life between the lines. Of visas and health-care and taxation. The bureaucracy of being a foreigner everywhere we went, even our own country.
“Where are you from?” a customer once asked as I’d served his pint of Keith’s.
“Here,” I’d answered, gesturing towards a grey Vancouver sky.
“But you have an accent,” he insisted. “Irish, French?” I’m a hybrid, I might have said if I’d known it at the time. But how would he have understood?
Who but a fellow hybrid understood what it meant to speak the survival lingo of ten languages, to know the inner workings of a Mexican bus station? Who but a hybrid understood the art of riding a bus for eight hours without a pee break, wedged between a holy man smeared in ash and an overweight Sikh schoolteacher?
Who el
se understood the feeling of arriving, again and again, in a new place for the first time? The thrill. The loneliness. The stripped-bare feeling of a room empty of any pretext of you. Wondering who had existed before the potted plant was set on the sill and book placed by the bedside? Who understood venturing out into the New World and asking the baker for a loaf of bread? Pointing, shyly, towards the loaf topped with sesame seeds. No, not the one with a slash down the middle. No, not the one the baker placed in the bag. Who paid anyway simply because they knew no word of protest?
Not many understood that these things required sensitivity, strength, intelligence, finesse.
Still there were people who asked, “How was your trip?” – as if we’d done nothing but return evenly tanned from an all-inclusive resort. Hybrids did not take trips. We lived somewhere. We learned the language and ate the food. We took the bus, walked, hitchhiked if we had to. We worked if there was work and volunteered if there wasn’t. We talked to our neighbours. We immersed ourselves in the tastes, smells, sights, and sounds of streets wandered and people met.
We answered the “How was your trip?” question every time, but rarely did anyone want to listen beyond the part about the weather, the food, the amusing anecdote – a near- kidnapping by a blue-robed Bedouin tribe, a Ladakhi bank manager who advised, “You must eat yak butter,” before stamping a travellers cheque.
Eyes glazed over when we talked about the family in Guatemala living seven to a room in a tin-roofed shack. When we expounded upon the virtues of cultures different from our own. On the merits of European markets bursting with local produce and stores that closed from one to four p.m. On feeling safer in an Indian city of five million than in Toronto. On people who knew how to bathe with two cups of water. On mothers whose children were content to make kites from tissue paper and string.
This is when we realized that no matter how hard we tried, we would never fit in again. We could never be Katy from New Zealand or Angela from Canada. The lines had blurred too much; we’d shape-shifted one too many times. We were destined to wander desolately through the ethnic foods section at Safeway, to speak with accents that weren’t our own.
We could never just go back home and hang out like we used to. Family and friends would notice, eventually, that something had changed. They’d guess that we’d tasted, smelled, seen, and heard too much. It could be a piece of unusual jewellry that gave us away, a tinkly laugh, an unusual answer to a straightforward question.
It could be that our eyes glazed over when others talked about Junior’s first step, mortgage payments, curtain rods.
It could be that all those hours on planes, trains, buses, boats – all those invisible distances we’d travelled – revealed themselves somehow, like a comet’s tail, resplendent, but too bright for the naked eye. People would become uncomfortable around us. We’d become the hippy, the bohemian. We’d become the eccentric, the thirty-something spinster. The crazy aunt. But no matter what they called us, we’d keep moving.
Our Expiration Date
“Doesn’t he know he’ll miss out on sex and chocolate?” a friend asked.
“Is he gay?” my father asked.
It had become some kind of a joke, the decision Giuseppe had made to become a Buddhist monk. The fact that he was Italian didn’t help matters, or that he was a talented jazz musician trained at famous music schools in Milan and Boston.
“And he’s going to give all that up?” they asked.
Yes, he was. His mother’s lasagna. Tiramisù. The sterling silver flute and the saxophone from 1940s New York. And me.
He was going to give it all up and go to a monastery in northeast Thailand infamous for its poisonous snakes and stifling monsoon heat. There he would shave his head and wear saffron-coloured robes. There he would wake at three a.m., eat one meal a day, and meditate.
In retrospect, I wished I had kept my mouth shut. In my haste to seek comforting words, I’d forgotten that family and friends sometimes weren’t as open-minded and understanding as we perceived them to be. Walls adorned with images of Buddhist temples, floors strewn with meditation cushions, and bookshelves spilling the beliefs of major world religions didn’t imply anyone would sympathize with your boyfriend’s decision to become a monk. Such objects had become commodities, as secular as kitchen appliances.
But it was too late now. The cat was out of the bag. One friend with an Om symbol tattooed on the base of her spine had even stopped talking to me. I had a feeling she thought I’d lost my edge, that my brain had become addled by living with a practicing Buddhist. It was true I rarely swore now, and didn’t guzzle red wine every Friday night. “Please don’t get all spiritual and boring on me,” she’d warned months ago.
These reactions alarmed me. I understood it wasn’t every day an Italian jazz musician chose to become a Buddhist monk. I understood it was almost impossible not to give a little chuckle, to wonder at the incredulity of it all.
But now that the laughter had died down, now that his flight was booked and possessions were being sold off, people’s reactions had changed: “Well, there must be something he’s trying to escape,” they said, or, “It’s just not natural to give up sex.”
Why such opposition? What did Giuseppe’s decision have to do with them? Everything. He was checking out. He was checking out of this world of career, marriage, house, children. He was giving up everything my friends and family held dear. And he was giving it up voluntarily.
He had spent years reflecting upon the life combo we were offered in this society and had concluded that none of it, not even sex or chocolate, truly made him happy. He had decided to look elsewhere for happiness – inside his own mind. A task that was difficult to achieve while playing the sax in a smoky nightclub to earn a buck. But I’d learned not to say this out loud. I just smiled and nodded now.
I smiled and nodded rather than suggest that Giuseppe’s decision reminded me that every situation was impermanent. There was nothing here to rely upon that wasn’t in a constant state of change. I just had to watch nature at work to know this. Or sit down for a few minutes, close my eyes and watch my mind scamper all over the place. Nothing remained fixed and permanent; if it did, we’d be dead.
These laws of nature weren’t so easy to accept. Even though there was the usual talk of eternity in the first days of our meeting, and of marriage, all of this talk had slipped away into something we called the past. Our relationship had an expiration date now.
I confess none of this had been easy to accept. I’d had six months of denial that Giuseppe didn’t really want to become a monk, that he wanted to drink cappuccino in the piazza with me and pretend it was enough. It took a three-day retreat at a Buddhist monastery on the outskirts of Rome to show me just how wrong I’d been. While there, I’d been annoyed by the resident monks, looking so content as they tended their herb gardens and ate my badly cooked pasta as though it were the most delicious thing they’d ever tasted. I’d kept my eyes open during the meditation sessions, watching Giuseppe as he sat so straight, his hands folded like a lotus. He’d looked at me at the train station in Rome and I knew what he was going to say. So I said it for him: “You still want to become a monk.” He nodded.
There was only the present left now. And the present wasn’t always a nice place to be. Anything could happen here, and it frightened us until we got used to it. No one wanted to admit that anything could take their loved ones away at any moment: a car accident, another woman, monkhood. The seemingly predictable life combo – career, marriage, house, children – was as unpredictable as the weather.
What was so wrong about seeking a stable core? Something so commonplace that it was said to exist inside each one of us, call it God, Buddha, or peace of mind.
What was so wrong about searching for it alone in a far-off jungle? Living simply in a hut, trying to do the least amount of harm in a world overrun by harming?
There was only the
present now. To try to love without future expectations or clinging to the past. To try to understand that learning about the contents of your mind was as valid a pursuit as learning how to play a tricky riff.
It wasn’t such a bad place, this present moment. I was learning a lot. In fact, even after Giuseppe’s flight took off from Milan, I thought I might just stay there.
Roma Ostiense to Alessandria
There is no room to sit and so we stand, pressed to the wall. We watch a family from Naples, closed in their glass compartment, eat crusty buns and prosciutto, drink red wine from white plastic cups. There was a time when I would have felt like screaming, like throwing something, or slamming a door. What else is there to do when your heart is yanked from your chest? But this is no place for all of that. This is a train. Every few minutes someone wants to get by to use the toilet, or buy an espresso, and I must press myself against the glass and face the dark pits of my eyes. I look like Death. And things are different now. You, for one thing, are different. You offer me pizza, or “Maybe some fruit juice?” You poke my shoulder when we’re passing the sea. The Mediterranean. You know how much I like the sea. And I realize, finally, that this might be love. This moment that I turn and feel your shoulder shift to let me rest in its clutch. This moment when we know that everything will end, but it will end softened by the wool of your sweater and the blue of the water pulsing from track to track, until the next station. Until I collect my bags, button my coat, and disembark.
Loneliness and Longing for Risotto
In aisle three of Delma’s Co-op, I began to cry. But I kept pushing my cart past the creamed corn and bags of dusty-looking lentils.
By the time I’d reached the snack foods, I’d calmed myself. It was only natural to feel overwhelmed in a grocery store with a soundtrack playing the chirping of songbirds. It was only natural to feel this way on an island an eight-hour ferry ride away from Prince Rupert, B.C. – the closest outpost with a movie theatre – on Canada’s Northwest coast.
