The Fireflies of Autumn

by Moreno Giovannoni

  The funeral would have been a bad one, especially for the father, although I say that knowing it would have been just as bad for the mother. I prefer not to think about it.

  Time passed, but not much.

  One very dark night in the Dolomites, under an overcast sky whose invisible clouds obscured the stars and the moon, Moses stood at the foot of the nearest mountain and spoke to God.

  ‘God, you gave me youthful physical strength and courage at the beginning of my life, and you gave me hope that I took with me to another country. And then you didn’t have mercy on me like you had on my wife, you didn’t make me noisy and interesting and confident, with good hearing. Although she is a good wife and I have nothing to complain about. You gave me a wonderful daughter who is like her mother, strong and interesting. You gave me a sick boy who took my heart and held it in his wheezy chest, where its beat followed the pattern of his breathing. Whenever he didn’t breathe my heart stopped until he started breathing again. So for all the years of his life he kept me alive by breathing.

  ‘My wife and daughter are strong and are made for living and I am not any longer and maybe never was. I’m tired, God, and I want to see my boy. He stopped breathing and now my heart no longer knows how to beat. I want to see my boy.’

  This all happened more than thirty years ago and has almost been forgotten. I hope God answered him from the top of the mountain. I hope God told him everything would be well.

  The Migrant’s Lament

  There was poverty in San Ginese. Worse than that. Life there was a misery.

  I’m old and my memory confuses me, but there are some things you can never forget.

  When they came back they didn’t often talk about their lives in Australia. Maybe just a word or two here and there. It was in the past, after all.

  The Australians took our names away. They turned Giovanni into John, Giuseppe into Joe, Marta into Martha, Anna into Anne, Raffaele into Ralph, so that we lost another small piece of ourselves.

  They couldn’t make friends, not even with their neighbours. They were lonely. Maybe because they didn’t have the language.

  The language was a problem we could not overcome. Italians opened shops and we Italians shopped in the Italian shops. This was inevitable when you remembered, for example, the food we ate in the village and the food available in Australia.

  They would write home saying there was a lot of work in Australia, but there is more to life than work. And anyway, it wasn’t as easy as they said. Even the photographs they sent were misleading. They sent back photographs of themselves standing in front of a fancy car that belonged to someone else.

  The lack of language meant we were lost. So many ways to get lost. Lose your language, lose your name, lose your village. Of course, we could always go back if we didn’t like it.

  All they knew was work, so all they did was work. The Australians thought they were stupid and laughed at them and their ridiculous customs behind their backs. The Australians mimicked their gestures and manner of speaking and told jokes about them.

  After we’d been back a few years, all evidence of our adventure in Australia had disappeared. We lost our passports, misplaced our medical records, burnt our ship’s tickets and the letters from the government through the local labour office. We made bonfires.

  No wonder that the Wandering Jew, a plant named for a people who didn’t have a home and whose life has often been a misery, is called miseria in Italian. When you leave your home, your life becomes a misery.

  It was a life like an animal’s. I wish I had never gone.

  Many men considered themselves unfortunate and caught up in some kind of ancient tragedy. Their children did not recognise them when they came back, and ran to hide in their mothers’ aprons. The men stood in the middle of the street and cried. Someone cried out: ‘Sono sfortunato!’ For years the children were wary around their fathers.

  Some of us made money, but it didn’t make up for the other things we lost.

  Some lost their health.

  We came back to what we knew. What we knew was familiar and therefore became repetitious and boring. So, after we had resettled, in a manner, we found the ocean acted as a filter for the misery of Australia and we missed it.

  They returned because wives forced them, threatened them, lost interest in them and told them so in their letters. One man returned because he hadn’t slept for five years.

  I was neither fish nor fowl.

  Others came back because Australia was too far away. As if, had Australia been just down the road, they would have stayed there. As for those who did not return, with the passing of time they couldn’t remember why they had left. All they knew was that they wanted to be back where they came from. But it was too late.

  From the ship sailing into Fremantle we saw the first Australian dawn. We could see Australia in the distance. A flat strip of land. Blue sky. A line of low clouds that looked like they were crushing the land.

  The Translator’s Tale

  There can be no remembering if there has been no forgetting first. Living needs forgetting. The burden of remembering is too much.

  He was twelve years old when they took him back to San Ginese, the village where he was born. The boy soon realised that there were things he had forgotten, so he talked to his mother to find out what they were. He discovered he had forgotten things he knew nothing about and that both the quantity and the quality of his forgetting was large.

  He had forgotten all the people and all the places. He had forgotten the houses and the stables, the vineyards and the olive groves, the willow plantations and the fields, the roads and walking tracks between the villages, the drained swamp that became cultivated farmland, the long low hill to whose flanks the villages clung loosely. He had forgotten the names of places: Centoni, Montanari, Castello, Francesconi, Preti, Colognora, Pierini, Il Picchio, Cecchini, Marchetti, Lecci. He had forgotten Le Servette, the hairpin bends on the hill near Lecci, so steep he could not ride his bicycle up them. He had forgotten the church at the top of the hill, the same hill where the baronial mansion – il Maggiorello – stood, where his grandfather owned the best vineyard in San Ginese, where his father considered buying a piece of land to build a new family home. He was baptised in that church, and his godparents were Rodi, who died at fifty, and Pia, Rodi’s wife. He had forgotten them. He had forgotten the old cemetery and the view from the church square of the wide plain stretching out below in the distance to the smokestacks of Porcari and beyond, with picture-postcard-pretty Montecatini on the side of the distant hills. He had forgotten Viareggio, the seaside resort where after his father left for Australia his mother took him in the summer of 1957 because salty sea air was a good disinfectant for a little boy’s lungs. To help him remember at least this there were black-and-white photographs of a two-year-old boy holding a giant beach ball on the sand and posing beside Donald Duck. He had forgotten four great-grandparents, four grandparents, four uncles, one aunt and one hundred and twenty neighbours who had followed his progress for the first two years and four months of his life. He had forgotten the bed and the room where he was born and the stairs from the floor below street level in his father’s house, which he had also more generally forgotten.

  When he returned, people asked him if he really could not remember anything from before, and he would shake his head and sense their wonderment at so much forgetting. Being young, he was puzzled by their reaction but also genuinely interested, and he asked himself what there was to remember. The people in the village remembered him but he couldn’t remember them. For a while this made him feel strong – he possessed an absence of remembering about which everyone asked and at which they marvelled. He was the centre of attention for his prodigious memory loss. They wanted something from him, and he could see the yearning for it in their eyes. It was his remembering that they longed for. They sought confirmation that their memories were real and did not know what to make of this forgetting, which they took almost as an insult.
Remembering likes company, after all. He wondered whether one day he would remember all he had forgotten or if it would stay forgotten.

  ‘Ma davvero ’un ti riordi nulla?’ his grandfather asked. ‘Don’t you really remember anything? Eh, eri piccolo. You were little.’

  The old man’s voice would trail off and he would roll his tongue around to reposition the cigar in his toothless mouth. And his mother’s aunt would ask, ‘Ma ’un te lo riordi quando …? Don’t you remember when … ?’

  And she would describe a memorable event in his young life: his mother feeding him stewed pears as he stood at the high end of his grandfather’s hay cart in the courtyard, and he fell and split open his forehead and needed stitches.

  That day the doctor, who must have weighed one hundred and fifty kilograms, was called to tend to him, but the road up the hill was covered in ice and the tyres of the car were not gaining any traction. Five men ran over from the fields to offer assistance, but after much pushing and grunting had barely taken the car a further ten metres. They got the doctor out of the car so he could walk, but he started slipping on the ice and could make no progress. Finally, three of the men positioned themselves behind him and pushed while the other two tied a rope around his waist and pulled from the front. In this way he made it to the patient’s bedside.

  When the doctor was paid, the boy went about the village repeating to anyone who asked, ‘Cento lire,’ feigning the same disgust his grandfather had displayed when handing over one hundred lire to Dottor Venturini.

  His father told him this, but he had forgotten it all, so when asked if he remembered, he would shake his head and say, ‘No.’ He had forgotten all that there was to remember.

  If they had sailed from Genoa just two months later, he might have remembered something of Villora, but instead his first memories were of 374 Rae Street in North Fitzroy and playing in the street and going to the corner shop to get milk – two months after leaving, after one month of a sea voyage and one month of living in Rae Street. So remembering was a question of two months. There is a razor’s edge before which there is remembering and beyond which there is forgetting. Rae Street was as close as he ever came to remembering San Ginese.

  The ship sailed from the ancient seaport of Genoa, gliding past the old lighthouse, on the third of March 1958, and there was nothing before then. It was his mother who took him away to Australia. She held him tight and tore him away from the people and places he loved and that he would soon forget. She staunched the bleeding of memories with her stories but bequeathed him a deep, slow-burning homesickness that brought an ache into his bones that never eased and the source of which he did not comprehend until he was old.

  Dramatis Personae

  The line of Ugo

  Genesius (Ginese) Giovannoni (who married Angelina), great-grandfather of Ugo. Tista’s house in the Aia dei Mattei, the Mattei Courtyard, was inherited by Vitale, who was the last of the male line to occupy it.

  Giovan Battista (‘Tista’) Giovannoni (who married Ancilla), grandfather of Ugo. Giovan Battista did well enough in America to pay off the family’s debts.

  Vitale, father of Ugo, who married Irma Del Prete, mother of Ugo. Vitale made his fortune in America and lost it in the great economic disaster that struck the world.

  Ugo, who married Morena and emigrated to Australia.

  Sucker (of the Flat Thumb), hothead son, brother of Ugo. Married the Adulteress. Emigrated to Australia for three years and made enough money to build a house in San Ginese.

  Lida, sister of Ugo, whose first-born died of diphtheria. She was then widowed and subsequently almost became a saint.

  Irmo, brother of Ugo, the Young One, who was conceived when the war ended because Irma, who thought her time had passed, allowed Vitale an intimacy.

  Gino Giovannoni, Ugo’s cousin.

  Alfonsina Dal Porto, Gino’s wife, who wrote a long poem about her love for Gino, then cleaned and cleaned the house until she died.

  Neva Giovannoni, their daughter, who never married.

  The line of Morena

  Paternal line

  Giuseppe Giovannoni (‘Nonnon’), wife unknown, paternal great-grandfather of Morena.

  Paolino Giovannoni (who married Teresa), son of Giuseppe, paternal grandfather of Morena.

  Giuseppe (known as ‘Bucchione’), father of Morena, who married Iose the Flour-Eater, mother of Morena. Bucchione’s family lived in Beàno, a pocket of Villora.

  Morena, who married Ugo and emigrated to Australia.

  Paolo, who stayed in San Ginese.

  Gemma, Bucchione’s spinster sister, who raised his children and did the housework and was almost canonised as a saint.

  Orsolina, who married and moved to Pieve San Paolo, to her husband’s house, as was proper.

  Maternal line

  Giuseppe Dal Porto, Derì’s father, Morena’s maternal grandfather, who went to America twice and was successful.

  Carolina, Derì’s mother, Morena’s maternal grandmother, who suffered an exploding vein.

  Derì Dal Porto, Morena’s uncle, whose heart literally broke.

  Giuseppe Dal Porto (Barba because he had a beard), Derì’s son, who sold handbags.

  Other characters

  (including some who are barely mentioned or don’t appear at all)

  Ginetta Giovannoni, Gino’s daughter, who married.

  Lucio Giovannoni, Gino’s brother, who emigrated to California and married a fat woman who was too embarrassed to be seen by his Italian relatives. She refused to visit Italy and would not let him visit either. He waited until she died, then visited every year for ten years, and then he died too.

  Renato Catani, a bigamist opera singer who holidayed every year in San Ginese to ‘take the grapes’, the way people would ‘take the waters’. The grape cure was popular with city dwellers who went to the country to eat nothing but grapes for a week. He toured Argentina with his small singing troupe and never came back. Spent the rest of his life on the verandah of his new wife’s hacienda drinking Mendoza Malbec.

  Beo, Bucchione’s nervous, toothless friend, who had been to America. Pale and skinny like a worm (a beo), his real name was Vincenzo.

  Bruna, of the plump buttocks, much admired by Beo.

  Folaino, who lived in the house on the corner at Il Porto and subsisted comfortably on the money he stole from Tommaso.

  Giorgia, the village prostitute.

  Il Baroni, married to Ada. When away at the war he addressed his letters to Ada this way: Ada, Sotto le case, vicino a Zabino, Villora (Ada, Below the houses, near Zabino, Villora).

  Il Bertuccelli, a shoemaker.

  Il Chioccino, a chaplain with a small dog.

  Il Pechini, a fascist acolyte who was bashed within an inch of his life after the war.

  Julio the Orphan, who wore thick glasses, a brown coat and emigrated to Argentina. On returning he adopted the Hispanic spelling of his given name.

  Liduina and Mariella, two starving imbeciles, who lived next to Tommaso the Killer in le case di sopra.

  Lilì, Bucchione’s neighbour, a wise woman.

  Lo Zena, Bucchione’s neighbour, with whom he feuded for forty years. Played the mandolin and the accordion. Carpenter.

  Nedo, bar owner, son of Nedo and grandson of Nedo (all bar owners are called Nedo).

  Il Pallone, a cobbler.

  Sandrino Cenci, from the neighbouring village of San Leonardo, who went to Australia and had much bad luck. Ancilla sold her house to Sandrino’s father, who then sold it to Bucchione. Buried in the Kilmore cemetery, where plots were cheap. Family sparpagliata, scattered to the winds.

  Santin, an anti-fascist who died from a bashing or from a bout of diarrhoea brought on by fear of bashing.

  The Mute, a pilgrim who for several months was given food and shelter by Tista.

  Tommaso the Killer, who lived across the road from Tista’s house, in le case di sopra. He killed Folaino, who had stolen his money in California.

  Zabin
o, who boiled meat to make broth and threw the meat away. During the war he learned to eat the meat.

  Acknowledgements

  My thanks to all the people who read my work and gave me advice. They say it takes a village.

  In particular, big hugs to the Inklettes, meeting in the underground vault in Swanston Street: Andy Summons, Ailsa Wild, Honeytree Thomas, Merryon Ryall and Craig Madden.

  Thank you too to Antoni Jach’s masterclass participants, meeting in the beautiful boardroom at the Wheeler Centre: Emily Bitto, Jane Sullivan, Penni Russon, Elisa Evers, Rob Hely, Ellie Nielsen, Jacinta Halloran, Lyndel Caffrey, Mick McCoy, Rosalie Ham, Yvette Harvey, Sarah Schmidt, Lawrence McMahon, Jennifer Green, Leigh Redhead, Janine Mikosza, Clive Wansbrough, Patsy Poppenbeek, Anne Connor, Anne Myers, Susan Paterson, Evelyn Tsitas, Glen Thomson, Karen McKnight, Tiffany Plummer, Lyn Yeowart, Mark Baker, Stella Glorie, Jane Leonard, Nick Gadd, Enza Gandolfo, Toby McCorkell, Kathryn O’Connor, Sue Robertson, Pauline Luke, Deborah Wardle and Heather Gallagher.

  At RMIT University thanks to Megan Rogers, Lisa Dethridge and Christine Balint. Also, Rachel Matthews, my very first writing teacher.

  Most of the images contained in The Fireflies of Autumn were sourced from my own collection. I am grateful to the Ames Historical Society in Iowa for the photo of the Percheron (page 8), the National Archives at Atlanta for my grandfather Vitale Giovannoni’s World War I draft registration card (page 9), the New York State Archives for the photo of a logging cabin (page 12), to John Bland/Wikimedia Commons for the image of a bucket (page 18), to Iynea/Shutterstock for the illustration of a pig (page 191), to the Italian Institute for the cover of Salvatore Andreucci’s monograph (216), and to Wollongong City Libraries and the Illawarra Historical Society for the photo of Port Kembla (page 231).

  Early versions of ‘The Percheron’, ‘The Bones of Genesius’, and ‘The Fireflies of Autumn’ were first published in Southerly. The words sung by Cosetta in ‘The Enchanted Glade and the Babbling Brook’ on the night of the dance are my translation of lyrics from the 1928 song ‘Il tango delle capinere’ by Bixio-Cherubini. In ‘The Dinner of the Pig’, the words to the song Derì loves are my translation of lyrics from the 1931 song ‘Signorinella’ by Bovio-Valente. ‘La Storia di San Ginese’ draws on material from Santo Stefano di Villora: la primitiva Pieve del Compitese oggi scomparsa, a monograph by Salvatore Andreucci, published in 1964 by the Istituto Internazionale Di Studi Liguri, Centro Nino Lamboglia in Bordighera, Italy. I’m grateful to the Institute for supplying a copy of the monograph’s cover (page 216). I also wish to acknowledge that ‘The Migrant’s Lament’ was inspired by and adapted with permission from Archimede Fusillo’s report for the Italian Services Institute of Australia on migrants who have returned to Italy, The Future in Their Past, published by the International Specialised Skills Institute in Melbourne in 2015.