The Girls of Piazza D'Amore

by Connie Guzzo-Mcparland

  Don Cesare and Don Mario only spoke to each other at political speeches, and only to throw insults at each other. Luckily, Don Cesare was hardly ever at home, and Don Mario, half paralyzed since the war, rarely went out of the house.

  During one heated speech, Don Cesare, red in the face with rage, with outstretched arms, shouted from the balcony of the town hall balcony, waving his white handkerchief as he spoke. “They forced themselves into our homes at night, shoved castor oil down my father’s throat. They pulled off his whiskers until his skin bled raw.”

  The political animosity between Don Cesare and Rosaria’s husband, Don Mario, only widened an already existing rift between the two families.

  Though lands and ancestral houses were generally bequeathed to sons, wealthier families often used parcels of lands as dowries to secure good husbands for their daughters. At marriage, Rosaria Abiusi had inherited a small but prized piece of property from her family. The ownership of this small piece of flat land near the river, the Fiumarella, had caused fighting between Don Cesare’s and Rosaria’s families for generations, because the water from the river had to pass through this property to get to the larger orchards inherited by Don Cesare.

  Before the war, Don Cesare’s father had used families of indentured labourers to look after his lands, while Don Cesare studied in Bologna and became a pharmacist. The pharmacy hardly gave Don Cesare enough to live on. As more peasants abandoned the land to emigrate, Don Cesare became drawn to farming, and only worked at the pharmacy on call. He married a woman from Amato, Donna Rachele Scalise, whose family had also fallen on hard times before the war. She brought with her a brother, Gennaro, and his son, Antonio, to live in a wing of the mansion. The transposed family was rarely called by their proper names but nicknamed I l’Amatisi, the people from Amato, and they were treated like foreigners. I don’t remember anyone, including his own family, referring to Antonio by any other name but Totu, the dialect diminutive of his given name.

  His father, who was always called U l’Amatise, was a tall, quiet, educated man whose wife died of tuberculosis when Totu was an infant. He became totally devoted to Don Cesare and his land, and was hardly ever seen in the village; he slept in the casale. Together with Don Cesare he found more modern means of managing the olive groves. They installed large nets under every olive tree, which meant they needed fewer labourers to pick olives, and they paid those who worked in cash rather than with a few jugs of oil, while the Abiusi’s olives rotted on the ground. They also found a market for the remnants of the dried-up, crushed olives and pits, which came out of the press looking like large cartwheels of cork. U l’Amatise was directly responsible for developing this profitable part of the olive oil business. He sold the by-product in the cities, where it was processed and used for fuel. While he worked tirelessly for Don Cesare, Totu was pampered by Donna Rachele and Don Cesare, who were childless.

  Don Cesare made money in whatever way he could and did not let pride get in the way. He used the small truck he drove around the village as a taxi service. He charged a minimal amount to drive people to the city when he had to go there for his own dealings. Each summer, he bought out fruit trees from those families who had abandoned them and sold the fruit to vendors in Catanzaro. He planned on doing the same with the fresh vegetables grown in his orchards, but the sharing of the water with the Abiusi family created constant conflict. Since none of the Abiusi children worked the land, and Rosaria only maintained a small vegetable patch, Don Cesare offered to buy out their unused plots, just so he could get to the water, but Alfonso, the eldest son, said he’d rather starve than give up the rights to the water and the land for the benefit of the l’Amatisi.

  The jealousy between Don Cesare and his cousin’s son, Alfonso, could be traced back to their fathers and to the incident that created an unbridgeable chasm in the village: the fire at the town hall.

  “The arrogant bullies who set the fire are still with us, and won’t accept the fact they lost the war.” That’s how Don Cesare spoke about it during his political speeches, which would always end with the sentence, “They shoved castor oil down my father’s throat and plucked his whiskers until his skin bled raw.”

  Don Cesare’s father had consistently refused to get a membership card for the Fascist party. Don Mario Abiusi was one of the mayor’s men who went around at night and forced castor oil down the throats of those who still resisted the Fascist movement – and who reported any hint of criticism of the party.

  One evening in July 1933, the town hall went up in flames. The church bells rang in alarm at about 10 p.m., and the whole village rushed to watch the building burn. The flames were uncontrollable and completely destroyed the building. The story told in our neighbourhood was that a group of women returning from the farms at dusk saw the mayor’s men walking around the building. The women later accused the men of dousing the building with gasoline, but this could never be proven. In the early morning hours, after everyone had gone to bed, those same men stormed into the homes of those who were considered enemies of the fascio and arrested them for having set the fire. Don Mario Abiusi was the witness who sent the men into exile for months. He declared that he had heard the stubborn man, Cicala, swear, “Italians should all burn their town halls in protest, if that cornuto of Mussolini doesn’t stop talking about war and raising our taxes.”

  Though over two decades had gone by since this incident, old wounds were reopened at every election period, with accounts of the fire and its consequences rehashed by all sides. The village split into two camps: the Christian Democrat mayor, supported by Don Cesare, and the former Fascist mayor, who flip-flopped between different parties. The Fascist party had been outlawed since the end of the war, and its members made convenient affiliations with any of the other lawful parties that opposed the Christian Democrats.

  Don Cesare was actively involved with the province’s Christian Democratic Party. He spoiled his nephew Totu as his own son. He paid for his studies and openly discussed his plans for a political career for the young man. Alfonso Abiusi, and to a lesser degree his younger brother, Giacomo, opposed with a passion that bordered on hatred whatever political aspirations Don Cesare harboured for himself or his wife’s nephew. Don Cesare’s business association with U l’Amatise also infuriated Alfonso. He couldn’t stomach that an upstart from Amato, whose family had had nothing before the war, now ran the land that was part of his family’s history, and was making money from it too. Out of spite, Alfonso ridiculed Totu whenever he could, referring to him scornfully as l’amatu signurinu l’amatise, the loved little lord from Amato, even though the gentle-mannered man had been his sister Lucia’s first and only boyfriend in Mulirena.

  Part II

  I have been exploring ideas for a love story. “Write what you know” is the usual recommendation in the books on writing I’ve consulted and the workshops I’ve attended. I want to set a story in a Calabrian village, a world both familiar to me and at the same time exotic to Canadian readers.

  Lucia and Totu’s story has never quite left me, but I witnessed it as a child and I don’t trust my memories. There are many missing pieces and gaps that need to be filled. I prod my mother. I speak to her as if she were still here, for her voice and words reverberate constantly in my mind.

  “In those villages, we fought like cats and dogs. We lived on top of each other. What could you expect?”

  It was like her to see the bigger picture, to look beyond what people did to explain why they did it.

  “I need to know more about Lucia and Totu, about their families, their thoughts,” I tell myself, “not the whole village.”

  “You can’t speak of one without the other.”

  She is right, as always.

  Tina’s boyfriend, Michele, left for Rome at the beginning of September to work as a tailor. Saverio, Aurora’s boyfriend, was called for his military service in Bari. Totu was the only one who remained in the village.
He had expected to go to university in Rome, but his uncle convinced him that it was more important to stay close to home and build up connections in the provincial city. In the end, Don Cesare believed it would be those friendships that would get Totu a position in Calabria, not the degree. Lucia said that Totu had agreed to become an accountant only for the sake of staying closer to her.

  Totu travelled back and forth between Mulirena and Catanzaro, where he studied, and helped his father with deliveries. Whenever he could, he walked by Lucia’s window during the day and joined his friend U Grancu at his house at night

  The girls didn’t go to the Funtanella as often because the water from the aqueduct was more plentiful, and the weather had become wet and drab.

  Before leaving, Michele had gone to Tina’s house to ask U Grancu, her older brother, for her hand. After her family in Montreal was informed of the visit, the two became officially engaged. With her boyfriend gone, Tina didn’t go out as frequently. It wasn’t considered proper for an engaged girl to go out on the passeggiate and be seen roaming around the village. Aurora had decided that she didn’t want to have anything more to do with Saverio.

  “You can’t go from one boyfriend to another,” Tina warned Aurora. “People are talking.”

  Aurora stopped sleeping at Don Cesare’s house in the fall after she returned from the hospital, and then the “voices” really started. I always found it curious that people referred to village gossip as “voices,” as though vicious rumours were started and spread by some faceless force from the sky. In the play, the voices that Bernadette claimed to hear came from the sky, and the villagers made fun of her.

  Even before the play, Aurora had begun to develop a reputation as being too “free,” and Alfonso kept on spreading the gossip that she spent too much time at U Grancu’s house late at night, especially when Totu was there, and who knew what she and Totu did when Aurora slept at Don Cesare’s house as a child. Tina defended Aurora, confirming that the girl had only gone to her house to deliver fruit and vegetables from the farm, but Alfonso didn’t believe her. Alfonso also claimed that Totu and Aurora spent too much time together at Don Cesare’s farm. After that, there were many angry looks and words exchanged from the balcony between Lucia and Totu, and many exchanges of letters.

  In his letters, Totu assured Lucia that there was nothing between him and Aurora, and even Aurora swore to Lucia on the head of her youngest brother that she had always considered Totu as another brother, and Totu only went to the farm on account of his uncle’s business. Things cooled between Lucia and Aurora, but they were still speaking to each other. Then Aurora was suddenly removed from the Saint Bernadette play, and she did something that had the whole village talking. Who could stop the voices then?

  After Mass, on a Sunday, Aurora raided Don Cesare’s medicine cabinet and swallowed a bottle of pills. A hysterical Donna Rachele alarmed the whole neighbourhood when she found Aurora in a daze and the empty pill bottle on the floor. Don Cesare made Aurora vomit and carried her like a rag doll down to the piazza and into his truck. When she returned home from the city’s hospital, looking pale and gaunt, the story that came out was that she had been found to be pregnant, and that Don Cesare had arranged for an abortion.

  Two days after her return, her father, on a drinking binge, was heard yelling outside the osteria. “My hunting rifle is ready for U Grancu and his lazy, good-for-nothing friends.”

  That same week, Totu suddenly left for Rome to enroll at the university, even though he had started classes in Catanzaro a month earlier. I saw the note Totu sent to Lucia. “You’re as much of a cretin as the others to believe these malicious rumours,” it said. Lucia tore the note to shreds. She couldn’t understand the sudden departure, and what she found most suspicious was that, if Aurora had really been pregnant, she had never told her two friends. They were still close, and they used to tell each other everything – especially Aurora, who was so frank and open. When Aurora came back from the hospital, she never denied anything.

  “If she did it,” Lucia said, “she did it out of envy, and if she didn’t do it, she refuses to deny it out of envy too.” After Totu’s departure, the girls never spoke again.

  With Totu in Rome, Don Cesare went back and forth between Aurora’s and her former boyfriend’s parents, negotiating as only he could. Aurora’s former boyfriend, Saverio, was still in Bari when all this happened but, by the end of the month, he came home on leave, and he and Aurora were married in a subdued and quiet wedding early on a Sunday morning before Mass. The priest wouldn’t marry Aurora in a white dress, and her family didn’t insist on it – proof to everyone that the stories about her pregnancy were true. She wore the little yellow suit she had worn at Easter with a white shawl over it. Don Cesare, Donna Rachele, and Signor Gavano were the only ones to attend the wedding ceremony aside from the two families. Don Cesare and Signor Gavano signed the marriage register as witnesses and then went home. The bride and groom had Sunday lunch with their families at Aurora’s house. After lunch, Domenico went back to work at the oil press, and Aurora, Saverio, and his family walked to the far end of the village where they lived. The next day, the groom went back to complete his military service, while the bride remained with his family.

  Another commotion was created at Tina’s house a few weeks later when Michele wrote from Rome to break their engagement. He said he felt too young to be engaged, that he had to think of his future first.

  “It’s all excuses,” Mother said. “He found himself a Romana.”

  “But we were engaged,” Tina cried.

  Luckily there had never been any reproaches about Tina’s behaviour with Michele, so it was likely that she would find another boyfriend in Mulirena, but, just the same, the break-up, after the official engagement, felt like a blow to the family’s honour. Tina would be better off immigrating to Montreal to start afresh. Her elderly parents didn’t work and they were dependent on her older brother there, but he didn’t yet have enough money to sponsor her.

  “How could someone change so quickly?” Tina asked Lucia.

  After barely a month of living in Rome, Totu also sent Lucia a letter. She read and reread it out loud, trying to understand what it really meant: “I still love you,” it said. “But the gods are not with us right now. I need to give my studies my fullest attention.”

  “Does that mean he’s leaving me for good?” she asked crying. Then he stopped writing.

  Mother was in a foul mood when she heard the news about Totu and Lucia. “You’d think these men have never seen women when they go away, and get bamboozled by the first city zingara they meet.”

  The passeggiate, the love letters, the stolen glances, the whispered promises turned into memories. It seemed as if suddenly all the men had either broken their pledges or given up on them. They had all but disappeared from our lives. The rain that started pouring from the grey November skies drenched the air of the Piazza of Love with the sadness of the women’s tears.

  December would have been a dismal month in Mulirena if it hadn’t been for the feast of Santa Lucia. It was celebrated on the thirteenth with a three-day fair during which the village was overrun by pilgrims, merchants and gypsies. The piazza outside the upper church, which was named after Santa Lucia, was transformed into a market with stalls selling everything from pots and pans and earthenware to ribbons and special sweets. The market ran all the way up to the Calvario, where farmers met to sell and buy livestock. The squeals of pink piglets being held tightly around the waist as they were carried home were heard throughout the three days, since almost everyone in the village bought a baby hog to fatten and slaughter the following February. People waited all year for the fair to buy new braziers, copper pots, clay water jugs, and hard biscuits – mustaccioli and susumelle – to eat at Christmas.

  A few people came to show their devotion to the Saint, to repay graces received, or to make special vows, especially if they suf
fered from eye problems, as Santa Lucia is the patron saint of eyes and light. The story we learned in Catechism class was that Lucia of Syracuse, an early Christian, had vowed her life to Christ. She rejected an arranged marriage to a pagan bridegroom and, for this reason, she was arrested and persecuted. First, they tried forcing her into prostitution, but when the guards went to get her, they couldn’t move her – not even with a team of oxen. They tried lighting a fire around her, but the fire would not catch. They finally succeeded in killing her by stabbing her in the throat with a dagger, after tearing her eyes out of their sockets. But the legend has it that her eyesight was restored just before her death. In statues and holy pictures she is shown carrying two eyeballs on a small platter in her left hand, while in her right, she holds up an olive branch. Santa Lucia is venerated as both a virgin and a martyr.

  December started out wet and blustery, and then turned cold. It snowed a few days before the feast. The water in the drainpipes crystallized into icicles around the houses. A light blanket of snow covered the rooftops. Mother reached over Comare Rosaria’s rooftop from our kitchen window and filled a bowl with snow. She sprinkled sugar and cold coffee over it to make scirubetta for me, Luigi, and my desk-friend, Bettina, who came over every afternoon to do homework with me. Signor Gavano gave us lots of homework.

  Mortified and inconsolable since their boyfriends abandoned them, Lucia and Tina rarely went out anymore. Tina blamed and cursed Rome for her misfortune; Lucia blamed Mulirena and its wagging tongues.

  A caravan of vendors came into the village a few days before the fair to set up their stalls. They had to be accommodated in homes since there were no inns. The church remained open for people who had nowhere else to sleep. Many vendors had established friendships in the village over the years, and made sleeping arrangements there. A family of merchants, two brothers and their mother, from Serra San Pietro, a village located high in the mountains, stayed at Lucia’s house. They sold aluminum pots and pans, and their dialect was rough and their manners unpolished, despite the fact that the brothers had lived in America before the War. They had made some money before returning to Italy to set up their businesses. They had bought olive oil from the Abiusi, and Alfonso had had other dealings with them. A third brother, Pasquale, had remained in Canada and, according to them, was making a fortune as a contractor in Montreal. He was still single, in his early thirties. His mother told Comare Rosaria that Pasquale didn’t want to have anything to do with the girls there; even the Italian girls who had settled in Montreal were too modern for him. Moglie e buoi dai paesi tuoi was an old saying in Italy; it meant that wives and oxen are best chosen in one’s own village. On their first evening in the village, Alfonso was seen arguing and negotiating with the two brothers at the local osteria until late at night, his usual style of conducting business.