The Girls of Piazza D'Amore

by Connie Guzzo-Mcparland

  The deceptions and subterfuges that women were forced to use in those villages of Calabria! If the morals of the women there were above reproach, why was there so much gossip about illicit affairs, love triangles, cuckolded husbands, and out-of-wedlock births? Even though the price paid by pregnant, unmarried girls was most often to leave the village and go work as maids in the cities, such cases were known to happen. The men bragged all the time about their love conquests, so with whom did they have these amorous adventures? Women were criticized for so much as speaking to a man who was not a close friend or relative. Something didn’t line up. I could not believe that the intelligent, spirited women I knew suffered this repression in silence without questioning it.

  “Why did you put up with it?” I’d like to confront my mother.

  I know her answer already; I’ve heard it many times before. “The world is made like that. It’s the way things were, there, at the time.”

  My mother never looked back at the village with rose-tinted glasses, and she never suffered from nostalgia for what she left behind. When we landed in Halifax, she made the sign of the cross and told herself she would never make the crossing again. Yet, she, like other women of her generation, brought the village with them. In the early years, she held on to its medieval mores with a tenacity that brought me to tears over and over again as a teenager in Montreal.

  “You can only straighten a tree when it’s very young,” she told me after one of our many arguments.

  She mellowed with the years, once she was assured that her young shoot had developed strong roots. But the inconsistency of her both shunning the malice of village politics and yielding to the tyranny of its demands used to exasperate me.

  “Whatever is destined, will happen. You can’t fight destiny,” she often said. That resignation also drove me wild.

  I still cannot quite understand what to make of the concept of destiny. It’s like a mystery of faith: one believes it without needing to understand it. Do Italians make more of it than other people? My father referred to it as la forza del destino, the force of destiny, after his favourite Verdi opera. I can’t decide whether the women’s blind belief in destiny is what gave them their courage and quiet strength, or whether it was the cop-out that kept them submissive to the harsh demands imposed on them.

  “You still worry about what people say,” I’d shout, when my mother forbade me to do what other girls my age did.

  “And you only think about yourself,” she’d holler back.

  The constant tug-of-war with my mother eventually created a wall between us that made it hard to discuss matters of the heart and especially of the body. I’ll never know what destiny really meant for her as a woman, though her great generosity of spirit towards family comes quickly to mind, and perhaps family was what made her invoke destiny as often as she did.

  As I look back at the events that led to Lucia’s engagement, I remember the comments I heard spoken gravely and in acquiescence at the seamstress’s shop. “She has three brothers to think about,” a heavy responsibility for a sixteen-year-old girl, torn not only by family feuds, but also by the expectation that she should be a help to her family.

  Lucia married by proxy at the end of August. I wore my white, first communion dress as I walked behind her holding her long, white veil. Lucia could have chosen to go through a civil ceremony at the town hall and celebrate the religious wedding in Montreal, as many other proxy brides had done, but she insisted on carrying out the full event in Mulirena. “I know no one in Montreal,” she said. “It had been promised that I would marry here, and I’m marrying here.”

  She planned the whole event as though Pasquale were present. He paid for it all – the food, drinks, her dress, shoes, and flowers. She wanted to have the best wedding that Mulirena had ever seen. Giovanna sewed a slim white satin gown and spent hours covering by hand the tiny buttons that went all the way from her neckline down to below her waist. She had copied the dress from the wedding picture of the Duchess of Wales in a magazine. Lucia carried a bouquet of orange blossoms and had the longest veil I had ever seen.

  When Lucia tried the dress on a week before the wedding, at her house, I saw her cry. She held her tears as long as her mother was in the room, but when Comare Rosaria left, Lucia broke down, and I didn’t know what to say, as I held the long veil off the floor.

  “I have no other choice,” she said, sobbing, after she wiped her eyes with the hem of her white dress. “I’ll pretend to be happy for my family. That’s all we women are expected to do – pretend we’re happy and live for our families.” I never saw her cry again.

  Comare Rosaria worked all week baking cookies and frying three types of braciole, croquettes made with meat, potato and rice. Pasquale’s family arrived a day earlier than planned and took over the whole house.

  “Poor Comare Rosaria,” Mother said. “She has to shoulder all that work by herself.” The woman had to cook for and accommodate over a dozen people while getting everything ready for the wedding feast, with little help from the rest of the family.

  The morning of the wedding, the house was filled with guests, who were served coffee, biscotti, Vermouth, Anice, Strega, and Mille Fiori. The bride’s father couldn’t walk all the way to the church, so Lucia was accompanied by Alfonso. They were followed, procession-like, by the best man, the groom’s older brother, and his wife, by Comare Rosaria and her younger son, by Pasquale’s parents and other members of his family, and all the other guests. Mother and the older women wore their own wedding costumes, with the long skirt, bodice and ribbons of pastel-coloured satin, with their white mancale. It was one of the few occasions they had to wear it. It would be the last time Mother ever wore hers.

  As the procession advanced slowly towards the church, from their balconies people threw rice at the bride – a symbol of good luck, prosperity and fertility. Family members threw confetti. Children ran along the side of the road, trying to catch as many of the white candy-coated almonds as possible. As the bride approached the church, the altar boys pulled the ropes of the church bells with all of their strength, making them ring incessantly and joyfully.

  Don Raffaele celebrated the Mass and blessed the bride. Her brother, Alfonso, and new brother-in-law, Matteo, signed the register as witnesses. Lucia’s veil was raised from her face and she walked out the church with Matteo, who stood in for Pasquale.

  At the reception, guests were served the croquettes, trays of amaretti, and glasses of sparkling wine with slices of a white wedding cake. The guests received a bomboniera, a pretty porcelain bowl that held more confetti, wrapped in white tulle.

  “Comare Rosaria prepared a beautiful feast,” Mother told U Grancu the following day from our balcony. “Nothing was spared.”

  “Except for a plate of pasta and a groom in the bed,” U Grancu spurted out.

  “Be quiet,” Mother said, afraid that Comare Rosaria would hear. “They’ll have time, soon enough, for both.”

  Later, she said, “Some men can only think of two things, their stomachs and bed.”

  “Don Cesare made a big mistake when he sent Totu to Rome the first time,” was Giovanna’s verdict about the sad ending of Lucia’s love story with Totu. “Maybe it would have all turned differently if Totu had never gone to Rome. Rome ruined many men.”

  I still couldn’t understand what must have gone through Totu’s head. I had seen him look up Lucia’s balcony with wistful eyes, cry like a puppy when she received her visa papers, and drive away with her on the last night of their encounter. According to the women at Giovanna’s shop, he was as much to blame for the turn of events as Alfonso and Don Cesare.

  I first saw Rome as a child when father had to get his visa. The city overwhelmed me with its grandeur. What must it have been like for Totu and the young men of Mulirena who went to Rome for the first time, hardly out of boyhood? What was it about Rome that made the three men dispose of the
ir childhood sweethearts so easily? On my second visit to Rome, accompanied by my mother’s brother, Zio Pietro, we spent time alone with Totu and he finally confessed, sort of.

  The city came on to me loud, brash, and in constant motion. After a bumpy six-hour ride on the train, my first sight of the city outside Stazione Termini overcame me with a sense of confusion close to vertigo. The year before we had come to Rome with Father for his visa, and the noise of the traffic had given both Mother and me a headache. This time it seemed that there were even more cars and motor scooters speeding by, honking their loud horns in a cacophony of city noise unlike anything heard in the village, where the occasional herd of sheep, one car, one small truck, and one motor scooter would upset the quiet.

  My mother’s cousin Tommaso picked us up and walked us to the palazzo on Via Merulana where he lived with his brother Santo and Michele. Totu had lived with them the first time he went to Rome, but this time, Tommaso said, he had gone to live with a friend from university. Tommaso took me by the hand, but even with him there, we had to wait forever to cross the wide piazzas; the drivers rarely relented to pedestrians. I was paralyzed by fear. How would I ever be able to cross the streets if I were alone?

  Zio Pietro asked Tommaso about Totu. Had he seen him?

  “Yes. He’ll come by to see you later, but don’t talk about Lucia. He’s a bit confused, but he did well to return here,” Tommaso said. “Once you live in Rome, you can’t live in the village anymore. Just ask Michele and Santo if they want to come back.”

  The two young tailors were in Rome because of Tommaso, who had come a few years before, having heard that good tailors were in high demand. Most men from Mulirena went to Milan, where they found jobs as stonemasons, carpenters, or just plain labourers. To save money, the men lived together in makeshift quarters on the periphery of the city and returned home only for holidays. Because of the exorbitant cost of decent housing, few could hope to bring their families there, which is how it became a commonly acceptable way of life for married couples to live apart for years, and to see each other only at Christmas, Easter and the summer holidays.

  Because of the roughness of their work, and because of their speech and peasant manners, southerners were nicknamed terroni – of the earth – by the northerners in Milan. Most of these southerners dreamed only of making enough money to feed and clothe their families and to buy a new suit for themselves with which to impress the paesani on their visits to the village.

  Those who went to Rome were of a different class. They were skilled artisans, mostly tailors. Their long apprenticeships in tailor shops and their years of painstaking needlework served them well in a city that favoured custom tailoring. Tommaso found a job and a place to stay near the train station and had a following of loyal clients who appreciated his meticulous workmanship, not only for men’s suits, but for ladies’ tailleurs as well. Tailored ladies’ suits were very popular at the time and coordinated well with the short alla maschietta haircuts of the fashionable Romane.

  Tommaso had spoken of his good fortune in Rome to his friends during his visits to Mulirena. After only a few months of working there, he befriended a fifty-year-old widow. She offered Tommaso a room in her large apartment, and he accepted on condition that he could bring his brother and set up his own shop there.

  The apartment on the second floor of the palazzo faced Santa Maria Maggiore. Tommaso had described the place in so much detail that, when we arrived the first time, it was as though I had already lived there. It was reached by an open elevator with wrought-iron doors; it had a large foyer with gilt mirrors, a hanging chandelier, and a dining room with heavy, ornate furniture. A small kitchen, a bathroom, and four bedrooms opened off a dark corridor. Tommaso behaved as if the apartment on Via Merulana belonged to him, and wouldn’t dream of going back to live in Mulirena.

  The widow who owned the apartment and her twenty-year-old daughter Loredana joined us for dinner. It was Loredana, Tommaso told us, who introduced the group of young men to her circle of friends. She had also helped Totu find his way around the university’s bureaucracy the first time he was sent to Rome by his uncle. I imagined and envied the young men and Loredana’s friends going out in groups, taking rides on motor scooters, going to the cinema and the beach in Ostia. No wonder, I thought, the men took to the new Roman life so quickly. I also felt a tinge of resentment. While the young men lived in the carefree world of the movie Le Ragazze di Piazza di Spagna that I had daydreamed about, the girls of Piazza d’Amore had been jilted and left behind to their silent tears, destined to a life of duty and unfulfilled yearnings.

  “In the paese, you can only talk to girls in sign language,” Michele told us, to justify himself for breaking his engagement to Tina. “You get a chance to touch a woman only after you marry. And what if there’s nothing worth touching?”

  To lie on a beach in Ostia, next to a semi-nude Roman girl, and to be caressed by one, must have been a heady experience for Michele. He said he felt that the most honourable thing to do was to leave Tina as soon as possible. Other men with similar experiences chose to keep and marry their village girlfriends, while continuing to enjoy the favours of the more liberated city women.

  He added, “Here you can breathe. Rome is something else!”

  “And the women!” Tommaso said, winking at Michele. “Ask Michele about the women, and the conquests he’s made already.”

  Michele grinned in response. He looked slimmer and wore his hair differently than in the village – a long chunk of wavy hair falling on his eyes. He looked like a movie star.

  “I want a future in Rome,” he said, “like Tommaso.”

  “Eh,” Tommaso added. “Rome will always be Rome!”

  Just then Totu appeared, unannounced, and chimed in, “Rome was, is, and probably always will be a city built as a monument to the egos of conquerors. But Michele and I are thinking of different conquests, eh Michele?” Then he sheepishly shook hands and kissed all of us. “Welcome to Rome,” he said while pinching me on the cheek.

  Tommaso and Zio Pietro convinced Mother to prolong our stay by a couple of days, after spending the entire next day at the Canadian Embassy to get our visa.

  “When will you and the kids get the chance to see Rome again?” Zio said.

  The next day, Totu took us to explore Rome. As we walked past grey stone buildings, fountains, and statues built to the scale of giants and gods, I understood Rome’s reputation for things colossal and eternal. I could not help but feel my own smallness. I felt a real sense of physical fright when I stood in front of the larger-than-life statues in St. Peter’s Basilica.

  Totu made us observe how each epoch had left its landmark structure on the city: the arc of Augustus, the Coliseum, Castel Santangelo, St. Peter’s. When we stood in front of the Monument to the Fatherland in Piazza Venezia, he said to Zio Pietro, “Remember, Mussolini’s humiliation – his hanging head down while people spat in his face and kicked his shins – was made into a public spectacle, not in Rome, but in Milan. Is it not significant?”

  “He deserved what he got,” Zio said, “in Milan or Rome.”

  “Yes, but the image that has remained of Il Duce in Rome is that of the young proud leader who stood on that balcony in 1922 and called to his countrymen to follow him.” We all gazed at the all-white marble building, layered like a wedding cake, which overpowers the square with its bulk and was built, Totu said, just in time for Mussolini’s March on Rome.

  “Just think, Pietro. Twenty-six thousand people gathered in the square to cheer him on that day, and millions of Italians at home and abroad believed they had found the man to return them to the glory of ancient Rome. It’s mind-boggling. Now it’s the so-called Democrats who are herding in people like sheep.”

  “Let’s not start talking politics here,” Zio said. He was a staunch Christian Democrat, and Totu knew it.

  But Totu was in a talkative mood. Over pa
nini eaten on a park bench at Villa Borghese, the conversation turned to Mulirena, and Totu talked non-stop, as if wanting to unburden himself.

  He started by saying that the quarrels he had left behind seemed by now as insignificant as the squabbles between the pigeons in the gardens around us. The first time he ran away, he had felt like a ragged marionnette pulled by the strings of petty village politics, with both his uncle and Lucia badgering him with one angry letter after another. Then he was new to the city and trying to make his way in university.

  “That first year was very difficult, and no one in Mulirena understood that,” he said. His uncle had wanted him to enter law school, but he barely managed to get admitted to the university in literature. Even at that, he had to struggle to keep up with the other university students, whose language proficiency was far superior to his. At first, he said, he partook in the outings and activities of the group headed by Loredana and Santo, who had become a couple. After his initial curiosity, though, Totu found her and most of her friends insipid and shallow, and he became bored with their company. He joined them only when they went to the cinema. His studies took up much of his free time. For spending money, he had to count on his uncle, who infuriated him with news of provincial politics and expected Totu to make new connections in Rome.

  “This is not Catanzaro, where we know everyone and everyone knows us,” he said. “My uncle never understood this.”

  Lucia also insisted on a commitment from him, especially after Michele broke his engagement to her friend, Tina. “She thought I had fallen for a Roman woman.”

  I remember the note he sent her at the time. “Rome is full of beautiful and available women, but my mind and heart are taken up by other interests and concerns that you cannot understand. I want to end the story with you and all of Mulirena.”

  Ending his relationship with Lucia that first time, he explained, was the first step out of the inertia he wanted badly to escape. In time he connected with a group of Political Science students and started attending discussion meetings with them. A nucleus formed. They met regularly after classes and late into the night. Totu experienced a sense of belonging with this community of intellectuals that he had never felt before. They read and studied the writings of Antonio Gramsci. He tried to explain to Zio about Gramsci’s ideals of creating an alliance between the peasants of the south and the workers of the north. As a student, he said, his role was clearly identified by Gramsci: “An elite of ‘organic intellectuals’ who would bring about a new social order in post-Fascist Italy.” He spoke with passion. “In the south, you have all become puppets of Rome and care little about the proletariat.”