Summers in Supino

by Maria Coletta McLean

  The moment I met Bob McLean, my heart began to beat more joyously, and over the years this has never changed, so this book’s for you, Bob: ti amo, per sempre.

  The news of my father’s death came flying over the ocean and sped down the autostrada until it reached the blue sign pointing to Supino, his village. Here it slowed, as it climbed the curves and hills, weaving through the beech trees that arched over the roadway leading to the ancient church of San Sebastiano. The melancholy news rang from the bell tower. It arrived in wicker baskets along with the winter vegetables, it unfolded from the January news, and was carried in patched pockets jingling among the coins to be exchanged at the market and the bakery and the tabacchi store. In the January dusk, the wind carried his name beyond the village and up the mountain path to Santa Serena, where the cows stopped momentarily to listen before they lowered their bony heads and continued grazing on the wild sage. High above the mountaintops, his name, Loreto, put down roots among the clouds.

  Every activity had lost its appeal since my father’s death and I’d been hesitant about returning to our little house in Supino. We’d spent 10 sunny days there with my father last August. But since he had died in the winter of 1992, I was worried that our future visits to his village would remain in the shadow of sorrow.

  When I explained my concerns to Bob, he said Supino was our village too, and we had a lifetime to make new memories there. “As soon as we drive up the main street, you’ll get excited to be back,” Bob said. “Supino’s always good for you.”

  He called our neighbour, Joe, who lived across the street on via condotto vecchio. Joe and his wife, Angela, looked after our house when we weren’t there. I overheard Bob confirming our plans: “Sì, July. Sì, Sunday. Sì, afternoon. Sì, rental car.” At the end of the conversation, Bob’s voice grew uncertain even though he kept repeating, “Sì, sì,” and finally, “Arrivederci.”

  He put down the phone. “It’s all set.”

  “Everything’s okay?”

  “Sure. In fact, Joe has a surprise for you. He said to tell you that he repainted the house.”

  It took me a moment to realize that Joe meant our house. I thought about our next-door neighbour Peppe. He’d painted his house orange last summer. Said it was a warm colour.

  “Did he mention the colour?”

  “He talked mostly about his son, Marco — he got a job at a factory outside Supino on that road that runs parallel to the autostrada.”

  “He didn’t say he painted it orange, did he?”

  “No. The government divided half the jobs among workers from the South and half from the North. So a few Northerners are boarding at the pensione just outside of the village.”

  “Do you think he repainted it white? Just to freshen it up?”

  “He didn’t say. Let me finish. When Joe found out how much the workers were paying to stay at the pensione, he said that Angela could feed them better for half the price and . . . well . . . here’s the thing — the workers are boarding at our house.”

  “At our house? Bob, for heaven’s sake. What did you say?”

  “What could I say?”

  Bob was right. Whatever he said, Joe would have said, “Don’t worry about it.” If there was one thing we’d learned about owning a little house in my father’s village of Supino, it was that it was always better to go along with the villagers and their traditions. Joe could speak English and he looked after our house when we weren’t there. “I keep an eye,” was how Joe explained it; that meant he kept the house and its contents and the tiny backyard the way he liked it. So what if our furniture was often rearranged to suit his wife’s taste? So what if odd bits of furnishings, like a wardrobe, a folding table, and a stool with a broken leg, found their way into our house? So what if our tiny back garden was full of Joe’s brother’s plants?

  The important thing was that when we called each summer to say we were coming to Supino, our house was always spotless. When we left, we simply gathered our bed sheets and towels and left them for Angela, along with an envelope of euros on the kitchen table, and when we returned everything was washed and dried and folded in wooden crates that Joe had gathered for us to use as a linen closet. If something went wrong at the house, like the water pump wouldn’t work, we told Joe and he fixed it or brought in someone who could, and another envelope of euros would change hands.

  Joe knew everything that was going on in the village, he knew everyone who lived in the village, he carried the keys for all four churches in Supino in his pocket — so our house key was safe among them.

  Six months after my father’s death, on a hot July afternoon, we arrived in Supino. Outside the Kennedy Bar, men were playing cards as usual, scaffolding still surrounded the proposed Supino old folks home, the Bar Italia was closed, and an ice cream truck was parked in the middle of the street, blocking the corner of via d’Italia and via condotto vecchio. We stopped our rental car, and Cristina, from the tabacchi store, opened the passenger door.

  “Mi dispiace,” she said, reaching in to hug me. I was to hear that phrase, “I’m sorry,” over and over during the next few days. Every villager we passed repeated those words to us until I thought I couldn’t bear to hear them anymore.

  Up the hill to number 10 via condotto vecchio, we climbed, with a suitcase in each hand, saying, “Buongiorno,” to every face at every window, while I wondered what colour Joe had painted our house and how many factory workers might be living there.

  But the house was still white, and no strangers lounged on our verandah. However, the front door was wide open and rock music blared from a radio inside. Peering into our doorway, we saw a stranger’s sweater hung over the back of our chair, a package of Marlboro cigarettes and a tangle of keys waiting on our table. We set our bags down and followed the music up the newly washed stairs.

  “You come already,” declared Angela from the second floor. “Marco, hurry up. Move the broom. Shut that noise. Sorry. Scusa. Bob, Maria, mi dispiace. Your father — a good man.”

  We looked around for signs of the factory workers, but there was only Angela and her son, Marco.

  “Marco,” said Bob, “your dad tells me you’re working.”

  “No more. Finished last week.”

  “Marco,” said Angela, “hurry up. Let Bob and Maria rest. Get out of the way. Go. Take that noise with you. Go, go.”

  Two minutes later, our house was empty, just the echo of Angela’s voice as she called up the stairs, “Come later to eat. Sleep now.”

  When Bob carried up our suitcases, he held an envelope of euros in his hand. “Our share of the boarders’ rent money,” he explained. “And by the way, someone’s drunk all the brandy from the wooden cabinet.”

  We lay down on sheets that smelled like fresh air and sunshine, and there above the bed, on the freshly painted ceiling, was the chandelier from the living room. Joe must have moved it. I thought about going down to see what light fixture he’d hung downstairs, but, really, what was the point? I closed my eyes and slept.

  I dreamt the same dream I’d had since my father’s death six months before. It was the day of my aunt Reg and uncle Fidel’s 50th wedding anniversary. The celebration was in September, just a week after we’d returned from Supino with my father. Dad had lined up at the buffet table and piled his dish high with all the foods my mother said he wasn’t allowed to eat. When my mother objected, he’d dismissed her complaints with a wave of his hand: “It’s a party. I eat what I want tonight.” Everyone said how good Dad looked; he’d gained 10 pounds and a lot of his confidence during our 10 days in Supino. My dad and I had danced together that night, laughing as he wove me in and out
between the other couples, circling around the floor, breathless by the time the music stopped. I’d forgotten what a good dancer my father was, so light on his feet, so sure of his steps.

  In December, my dad suffered a burst aneurysm. Bob called an ambulance and on the way to the hospital I phoned my brother and sister. Within the hour we were in the emergency waiting room. I gave my father’s name, Loreto Coletta, and the nurse said, “They’re preparing him for surgery.”

  When my father had first been diagnosed with the aneurysm a few months earlier, the doctor had advised him that if he didn’t have the operation, the aneurysm would continue to grow and eventually it would burst; surgery at that point would be less successful. My father had said, “I’ll take my chances.”

  We talked about the emergency surgery, reassuring each other that the doctors could repair the aneurysm. Then the doctor arrived. “There’s a problem,” he said. “We’ve prepared your father for surgery. We can repair the aneurysm but we don’t think he’ll survive the operation. What do you want to do? Every minute we wait decreases his chances of survival. He’s paralyzed and can’t speak for himself.”

  “Can’t speak . . .” I began.

  The doctor said, “You can speak to him. He’ll hear you.”

  We discussed the options. Our father was a fighter but he was also 83. He might die on the operating table. And if we didn’t do anything, he’d die. What would he want us to do? We asked the doctor what Dad’s chances were.

  “Not good,” he said. “There’s his age, and he’s already lost a lot of blood. What do you want to do?”

  “He wouldn’t want to die on the operating table,” I said. “He’d want his family around him.”

  So we said no to the operation and left the waiting room to sit with our father. A nurse pulled the white curtain around his bed.

  Dad’s pale blue eyes were bright, but his colour had faded away. I could hear his breath coming slower and slower. As I stood beside his bed, his cool hand in mine, I did not speak about the burst aneurysm or the surgery. I said, “We’re here, Dad. We’re all here with you.

  “In Supino,” I added, repeating the words my father had told me all my life, “it’s wintertime, but there’s no snow. Just cold. Your mother would be knitting woolen caps and socks for Christmas. Your father would have saved some filberts from the autumn harvest to roast along with the chestnuts for the Christmas Eve feast. There’d be figs stuffed with walnuts and rolled in honey . . .”

  My father died on the first night of December. The Toronto streets were illuminated with festive lights, the store windows decorated for the holidays. When I saw them, I was a little surprised the holidays hadn’t been cancelled.

  That Christmas, Bob gave me a small box as dark as a blue Supino sky. Gold letters spelled out the name of the jewellery store in my father’s village. Inside was a pair of gold earrings. “Your dad helped me pick them out last summer,” said Bob.

  From here on, our lives would always be divided by that December, by the days before my father died and the days after.

  In Supino, we always started our day with a walk down our street to the Bar Italia for cappuccino. Last year, when my father was with us, we came to the Bar Italia on the first morning and sat outside on the little patio and drank cappuccino. Bob and Dad, who both had a sweet tooth, ate croissants or cornettos, little tubes of flaky pastry filled with cream. But when Bob went to pay, Bianca, the owner, shook her head. As Bob double-checked the bills to be sure he was giving the right amount, my father explained that Bianca wouldn’t accept payment because it was our first day in the village. Bob tried to insist, but my father said, “Think of it as a welcome-home gift.”

  By the second day, the news of my father’s return had circulated throughout the village, and after that, people from his past joined us every morning. Old school friends, neighbours, distant relatives, and the curious: they all stopped by to say hello and welcome us back, and inevitably when Bob went to pay, someone else had already done so. My father had an expression I’d heard all my life — “That’s the way it is.” And I came to understand its meaning in Supino. There was no arguing — well, you could if you wanted to, but it wouldn’t make any difference. This is how things are done in Supino and, therefore, “That’s the way it is.”

  Today, as we walked to the bar, Bob carried a road map of Italy tucked under his arm. I wanted to drive down to Vietri sul Mare, a small village in southern Italy where the artisans specialized in hand-painted ceramics. I planned to buy some new tiles for the kitchen of our Supino house. Joe had plastered some spare maroon tiles behind the kitchen sink, but he was short a couple so he’d filled the last corner with a few small black-and-white tiles that were left over from a bathroom renovation. “All free,” Joe had pointed out as he polished off the dusty grout.

  Like my father, Joe saw no need to spend money for new if you could use what you already had. I was going to buy some bright and beautiful tiles from Vietri sul Mare and figure out how to rationalize the expense to Joe once I had them in hand. I’d stress that the tiles were from my mother’s province of Campania. “Sentiment might override economics just this once,” I told Bob, and he told me I was kidding myself. When I’d mentioned to Rocco, our Toronto travel agent, that we planned to buy some ceramics, he had told us to contact his partner, Pietro, in Supino for directions to Vietri sul Mare. Apparently Pietro had a cousin who owned a shop there.

  “Go to the Kennedy Bar on Sunday morning, about 11,” Rocco told us. “Pietro will be there.”

  “How will we know him?”

  Rocco shrugged, made a circular motion with his hand, like swiftly sweeping crumbs toward himself from an invisible table. “Look around,” he said.

  After our cappuccino, and after Bob had spread the map on the metal table and traced the route from Supino to Vietri sul Mare, he said, “It’s almost 11. We’d better head down to the Kennedy Bar and look for Pietro.”

  “I think Rocco used the expression around 11, which probably means sometime about noon. We’ll just be standing there for an hour.”

  “So, I’ll buy you an ice cream.”

  “What’s the word for strawberry?” Bob asked as we stood in front of the ice cream counter at the Kennedy Bar.

  A voice from the crowd responded, “Ahh, you speak English,” and a man in a coal-black suit stepped forward and stretched out his hand to shake ours.

  “Hello, I’m Bob McLean.”

  “And I’m Maria Coletta . . .”

  “Ahh, the family of Mezzabotte,” he said, using the family nickname. “How is your father, Maria?”

  I stopped, mouth open, frozen. Tears jumped to my eyelids.

  Bob said, “He died in December.”

  “I’m so sorry. Mi dispiace . . .”

  It was as if I was hearing it all again for the first time. The doctors in the emergency room saying, “Sorry, he’s dead.” The ambulance driver telling me, “Sorry.” The nurse, the priest, the orderlies: “Sorry, sorry, sorry.” I was angry at them all, angry at death. I was even angry with this stranger for not knowing.

  “I didn’t hear. I’ve been travelling — tours to France, to . . . But excuse me. Permit me to introduce myself. I am Pietro, partner of Rocco, your travel agent.”

  Pietro listened to our plan to travel down the Amalfi Coast, nodding his head to everything we said.

  “When do you want to go?”

  “We thought we’d head down there tomorrow,” I said.

  “Impossible. Just this moment I was talking to Franco, who tells me his father-in-law is here from Toronto, so of course, I will take you to Franco’s house for lunch tomorrow.”

  “I don’t . . .”

  “Don’t worry, Maria. They all speak English.”

  “I don’t know Franco —”

  “Your cousin Suzy’s husband, Johnny, grew up in that same section of
Supino as Franco. They went to school together. There used to be a butcher shop near the corner, right beside the fruit store and . . .”

  Later, I said to Bob, “We have to be careful about these invitations. I know Pietro means well, inviting us to his friend’s house to meet his friend’s wife’s father or whatever, but that can easily lead to another invitation to another dinner with some other friend, and before you know it, our vacation will be over and we won’t have had time to do anything but go from one house to another to eat a meal.”

  “What’s wrong with that?” said Bob. “We have to eat anyway.”

  Bob had grown up in a family of four; his parents ran a little grocery store six days a week and the family had gone out for the traditional roast beef dinner every Sunday night to give his mother a break from cooking. Even after they sold the grocery store on Caledonia Road, moved to the town of Weston, and bought a coffee-roasting plant where Bob had been working for the past three years, they continued to go out for dinner on the weekends. My family never went to a restaurant. On Sunday, we might go to a relative’s house where there’d be a raft of other relatives and we’d all be crammed around tables talking, laughing, and eating. Or some relatives would come to our house.

  The first time I invited Bob to come for Sunday dinner, he brought flowers for my mother. We didn’t have a vase; my aunt had to go downstairs to her place and find one, and there was a discussion about whether to cut the ends off the flowers or just put them in the way they were. While that debate was going on in the kitchen, I took Bob into the living room and introduced him around: my dad, my brother, my sister-in-law, my nephew, my sister, my sister’s boyfriend, my cousins . . . Partway around the room, we had to detour around the dining room table, which had been pulled out to its full length and now protruded into the living room like a small peninsula. Bob stuck a couple of fingers underneath his shirt collar and wiggled it a little.

  I said, “Don’t worry. You don’t have to remember everyone’s name.”