My Father Came From Italy

by Maria Coletta McLean

  I saw some crayon drawings, with bright yellow suns in the corners, then studied a few spelling test results. The children crowded around Bob, showing him their math books. Bob took his clue from the teacher’s red stamp and repeated, “Bravo! Bravo!” Then the room grew silent again.

  The house was warm with the aroma of coffee brewing and beechnut logs burning in the fireplace. From the firewood came a low whispering and sometimes a spark to break the silence. I fidgeted, struggling to think of words to string together to pass for conversation. The men smoked cigarettes, the women set out espresso cups, arranged cookies on a tray. I tried to speak to them, but my Italian was halting and uncertain. I relied on my Italian-English dictionary and various hand gestures.

  “It’s okay,” reassured Guido. “Mangia il tuo biscotto. Eat your biscuit.”

  Outside the kitchen window, the starless sky stood in contrast to a faint curved line that was the peak of Santa Serena. A tightness grew in my throat as I looked around the kitchen. Had my father sat like this with his parents and his brothers and sisters, watching the fire on a cool November evening? Guido put his hands on his knees, got up slowly. He looked at me, his head tipped slightly to one side. He raised his shoulders, turned up the palms of his hands. His eyes were the same clear, watery blue as my father’s. It was time to go. I held my dictionary in my hand, felt the slippery plastic cover and knew the words I wanted to express could not be found inside its pages. I wished my father were with us. He could have spoken to them; the silences wouldn’t have bothered him. I removed the Canada pin from my lapel and attached it to Antonio’s sweater. Slipping off my earrings, tiny amber droplets of stained glass wrapped in gold, I put them in the hand of Dina. Bob pinned Canada pins on everyone as they kissed him on both cheeks and pumped his hand. He gave paper flags to the children. They held them solemnly, the youngest child waving his flag smoothly, like a silent metronome. Moving quickly from one to another, I shook hands, kissed cheeks. There were tears in my cousins’ eyes, but I didn’t allow myself to see them.

  I waved to the two rows of adults and children standing in the driveway — every relative with an arm around another — until the van began its downward spiral through the narrow streets of Supino.

  *****

  The next day we toured the Basilica of Collemaggio in L’Aquila. Our guide pointed out architectural details, gave the history of paintings and statues. We went to the San Filippo Theatre as well, sitting in the front row as guests of honour at a children’s play. Students from a nearby school tromped in, their cheeks rosy, stuffed knapsacks beneath their seats as they settled down to watch the puppets on stage. When the Nutcracker fought with the mice, the children cheered his every move, calling, “Bravo! Bravo!” During the lunch at the Cogefar company cafeteria and the Duca Abruzzi Hotel press conference and the Centi Palace meeting with the premier of the Abruzzo region, I thought of Supino and my father. I saw images of my father everywhere: a man walking across a field with his hand in his pocket had his same steady pace. A man in a blue work shirt fixing a fence reached into his pocket and pulled out a small penknife. It had a yellowed mother-of-pearl handle like my father’s.

  *****

  These memories accompanied me to Toronto. When friends asked about our trip to Italy, I spoke only about Supino, a village of perhaps 1,000 people, without a cinema, restaurant, theatre. Not even a bocce court.

  I knew from Rocco’s descriptions that every day the old men gather at the piazza beside the Church of Santa Maria Maggiore to read the newspaper, drink small cups of strong black coffee, argue politics and soccer. As the months passed, and the sun grew weaker, the length of the buildings’ shadows grew longer and the old men moved down the steep hill to the square in front of San Sebastiano to continue their conversations. The villagers still walked up the cobblestone street each day to collect cold spring water from the fountain at the base of the mountain. The stream passed underground, heading down Via Condotto Vecchio to the corner at Via D’Italia where neighbours stood on summer evenings in the path of the cooling breeze. Fresca. On the outskirts of town, families built sprawling pastel-coloured villas with arches and elaborate wrought-iron fences. In the corners stood the original structures of their parents’ homes. It is Supino law that you can build on, but you cannot tear down, existing buildings, so every new Supinese home is technically an addition to an existing one. The new home represented the villagers’ prosperity while also acknowledging their origins. “Success built with humility.” Rocco had told me all of this while we waited at Leonardo da Vinci Airport for our return flight.

  Supino was almost medieval, a village stopped in time. Unreal. I framed the photo of my father’s home and put it on the mantle next to the piece of rock I had taken from its foundation. In quiet moments, just before I fell asleep, I thought I could hear Supino calling me. The cool wind that came down from the Santa Serena, used my Italian name: Maria.

  I thought of myself as Canadian. I’d always said, “My father came from Italy, but I was born here.” Since I’d been to Supino, I felt differently. My father came by himself in February 1927. He was almost 19. The day he had left Supino was the last time he saw his parents. His father had said to him, “Don’t forget. Send money.” His mother said nothing. She just cried.

  When the Marloch docked in Sydney, Nova Scotia and my father disembarked it was the first time he had seen snow. And it was cold. He had on only a woollen jacket, with a passport and three dollars in his pocket. He didn’t speak any English. My father took the train from Halifax to Union Station in Toronto where Regina met him. My father lived with my aunt Regina and uncle Lawrence in their house on Dundas Avenue. It had a fruit and vegetable store in the living room and a bicycle in the shed out the back. Every morning, Lawrence would pedal down to the Food Terminal on the Lakeshore and return with a day’s supply of produce that Regina sold while watching their daughter Rose. My father got a job with a construction company, driving a truck. This pattern continued for two years until Regina had a second daughter, Cecilia. They gave up the store and the whole family moved to a larger house on Geoffrey Street. My father lived there for the next 12 years in the third-floor attic. He cooked in the summer and froze in the winter and bumped his head on the angled ceiling all year long. His years there were happy ones, visiting with friends on the weekends, playing cards, going to the movies, entertaining his nieces.

  Eventually my father switched from driving a truck for the construction company to driving a truck for Toronto Macaroni. Here, he met my mother; she was working in the office. They went out on a bet. My mother’s girlfriends dared her to go out with him, an immigrant and a truck driver. My mother had wanted to make her current boyfriend jealous because it was wartime and he wanted to wait until after the war to marry. My mother was 25, my father was 34. He offered her an engagement ring and she took it. A marriage built on spite.

  My father continued to drive a truck for Toronto Macaroni, delivering boxes of pasta to Italian supermarkets all over Ontario. Before my mother turned 30, she had my brother Don, my sister Linda and me. He was gone before we got up for school and often not home for dinner.

  I remember the sound of his black metal lunch box as he sat it on the kitchen counter, the slight scrape of the chair as he pulled it up to the mother-of-pearl Arborite table, the way he slipped some vegetables off my sister’s plate onto his own because she hated to eat them. Sometimes he’d tell us about his trip to Sudbury, Thunder Bay, Sault Ste. Marie. The boss always gave him money for meals and a motel on these long trips, but he took his lunches, skipped the comfort of a motel whenever he could and drove straight through. That’s how he managed, sometimes, to make it home for dinner the next day.

  One Saturday afternoon when my older brother, Don, was at the movies with his friends and my mother had gone shopping, my father took my sister Linda and me to the factory. We drove into its gravel parking lot and before my father was out of the car, a man with a bushy moustache called out to him. “L
oreto,” the man shouted, a greeting and an announcement. My father held our hands and introduced us to the moustached man who bowed while we scuffed our shoes on the pavement. In his boss’ office — a crowded little room with a desk piled with invoices, a glass ashtray and a crucifix — another man shook hands with us and gave us a candy from his desk drawer. The telephone kept ringing and he kept answering it, saying, “Aspetta.” He’d talk for a minute, everything in Italian, hang up and the phone would ring again.

  We went up a narrow set of stairs and, since we were wearing our Sunday dresses from Regina, we held our crinoline skirts close to our legs so we wouldn’t get them dirty. We entered a large warm room, full of the moist smell of eggs, flour dust dancing in the sunlight streaming through the windows. Spaghetti, linguine, and their fatter cousin fettuccine hung over wooden dowelling in row after row, up and down the length of the room. My father explained that this was the drying room and when the spaghetti was ready, they’d whack it with a flat stick to break it into lengths, then slide it into packages. Downstairs at the loading dock my father shook hands with all his co-workers and then lifted us into the cab of his truck to let us pretend we were driving.

  The years passed. My father continued to drive for the Toronto Macaroni factory and the year Don started Weston Collegiate, we moved to the town of Weston. Don and Linda and I spent our teenage years there and our parents’ lives faded into the background as we graduated and married and began families of our own. The year my father turned 65, the Toronto Macaroni factory retired him, presenting him with an engraved silver tray: Loreto Coletta. But my father continued driving, delivering flowers for his nephew Joe until he had a stroke. A few years later, my parents bought the little bungalow next door to our house on King Street and that October our youngest daughter, Kathryn, was born.

  By the spring, my father had recovered enough to help Bob build an addition to our house and to make a path of cement stones from our front door to theirs. It was my father, perhaps with some urging from our older children, who bought four giant cement foot prints at the garden centre and lay two at the bottom of his verandah pointing toward our house and placed the other two at the end of our path pointing back to theirs. All of the grandchildren would, in turn, position their small sneakered feet on the giant footprints and as my father called, “Go,” hop back and forth between homes on one foot. When they grew tired of this, my father assisted them in the building of a human pyramid, positioning the oldest four cousins in a row on their hands and knees, three smaller cousins on their backs, then two more on a third tier and finally baby Kathryn on top.

  That summer my father, Don and Bob turned under most of the back lawn of my father’s house to make a vegetable garden. Every time my father went to visit one of his nephews, he’d return with vegetable seeds tucked inside an old envelope or a basket full of drooping plants. The next day we’d find space between the rows for cantaloupe seeds or garlic plants or a few acorn squash. We spent long mornings planting tomato and pepper seedlings, weeding the lettuce, onion and spinach rows. Kathryn passed those mornings in her playpen under the shade of the peach tree as my father told us the stories of his boyhood. These he repeated time and again so as to re-live the memories. All I had to do was listen and laugh in the right spots.

  We spent half a dozen summers in this way. My father hung a rope in the sturdy branches of the flowering crab-apple tree, notched two triangular pieces from a scrap of two-by-four and made a swing for Kathryn. As he pushed her he led her in a song he’d create on the spot. Every day the words changed, but the last line was always, “because I love you.”

  By the time Kathryn started school, my father was showing the usual signs of age, preferring to sit on a lawn chair while Linda and I gardened. Each year we added a strip of sod to the vegetable garden making it a little smaller and I started planting a row of flowers here and there among the vegetables. My father never liked the flowers. “You can’t eat flowers,” he’d remind me and I’d say, “These marigolds keep the aphids away from the tomato plants.” He’d just shake his head.

  The last year we had the garden Kathryn’s kindergarten class was studying vegetables. Her class visited our garden because some of the children had never seen vegetables, except in the grocery store, and wanted to pick a ripe tomato or pull a carrot. Linda and I weeded the garden carefully and I planted a few yellow chrysanthemums to fill in some of the spaces left by harvested lettuce and peas. My father shook his head again, but planted some surprises of his own in any case: a row of lollipops to trick the children.

  I was remembering this as I sat with my father at the seniors’ drop-in centre one dreary February day a few years after his stroke and a few months after we had returned from Italy.

  He said, “If I was home, the flowers would just be coming out on the mountain.” Whenever my father spoke of home I knew he didn’t mean Toronto, he meant Supino.

  “Already?” I asked. “It’s only February.”

  “Sure. Soon as the sun shines on that side of the mountain, the blue flowers pop up everywhere. I used to bring them to my mother.”

  “Was it the first sign of spring?”

  “As soon as the flowers bloomed, we were allowed

  to sleep outside.” My father stretched his arms, as if remembering the freedom of sleeping in the backyard instead of cramped in the farmhouse. But I had seen the backyard of that farmhouse.

  “Where did you sleep?”

  “You saw the farm,” said my father. “Three brothers, three trees.”

  I remembered those ancient olive trees and tried to picture three brothers fashioning beds in their branches. I thought back to the night we left my cousin’s house in Supino. When the driver had stopped beside the Bar Italia, the headlights of the van illuminated an open doorway across the street. A cobbler sat at his workbench, mending a work boot under a single lightbulb. His hair was perfectly white, like my father’s.

  “There’s an old shoemaker in Supino, near the Bar Italia.”

  “That’s Antonio, or maybe his brother Primo.”

  “I thought he might have made the shoes for you and your brothers and sisters when you lived in Supino.”

  “Nonno made our shoes.”

  “Your grandfather? I thought he was blind.”

  “Well sure, but he could carve. He carved the soles from wood and put leather straps on them.”

  “Like sandals?” I asked. “What about the winter?”

  “We wore wool socks. My mother knit them. If it was really cold, we wore two pair. We liked to play a trick on him in the fall, when the grape leaves withered and fell from the vine. We’d find a brown leaf curled good and tight and your aunt Regina would give it to Nonno saying it was a cigar. Then we’d run away as fast as we could. Nonno was blind, but if he could reach us he’d still cuff us on the head. After he died we missed playing the trick on him — all we could do was crunch the grape leaves under our shoes. It wasn’t the same.”

  I began to see that there was more to these stories and to Supino and to my father than I had ever known. I began to imagine a scheme in which I brought my father to Supino, bought the farmhouse where he was born; we could stay there when we visited. The trip would be for my father, but I would also own a piece of the old country, my country. I knew this was completely unreasonable, but I hadn’t made the decision with my mind; I had made it with my heart.

  *****

  “This idea’s going to sound crazy at first,” I said to Bob, “but why don’t we buy my father’s house in Supino? Just a minute. Let me finish. The house is empty. We could leave it the way it is on the outside and have the inside divided into a couple of rooms. We could take him back there for a visit. It would be like a cottage — a cottage in Italy.”

  Bob didn’t say any of the things I expected him to say. He said, “I’ll call Rocco and see what he can do.”

  Bob asked Rocco to approach the people who owned my father’s farm and ask if they would sell. A few weeks pass
ed and then Rocco reported that the owners wouldn’t sell no matter how much we offered them. I said to tell them we wanted the farm because it belonged to my grandparents, because my father was born in that house, because he left 64 years ago and was still tied to that soil, because I was Supinese. But the owners still said no. I said we only needed to buy the house, they could still use the land with the grapevines and the olive trees. No.

  At the same time the Supino wind continued to call to me, more gently now. One afternoon, in early spring, there was a note on the kitchen counter with just a few words written hurriedly on the back of a used envelope: “How does a three-room, three-story house, near the water fountain, just up from the piazza sound?” Perhaps it blew in on the wind from the mountaintop.

  *****

  “How did you find out about this?” I asked Bob.

  “The barber told us.”

  “How does Peter the barber know about a house that’s for sale in Supino?”

  “Peter the barber was closed today,” Bob explained. “So, I took your father to a place up in Woodbridge. I thought he’d enjoy speaking Italian to Lorenzo, the owner. I left him there for an hour while I made some calls. When I came back to pick him up, Lorenzo had given your father all the details about a house in Supino. Its owner is Supinese but he lives here.”

  Lorenzo came from Supino as well. After the Second World War many of Supino’s villagers emigrated to Canada. Brothers and sisters from one family married siblings from another so that if they traced their origins, eventually they’d find that everyone in the village was related. My father knew Lorenzo’s family, who had lived close to the Church of Santa Maria Maggiore. Lorenzo knew of a house for sale between there and the Church of San Nicola. I could picture the house: a grapevine growing in the backyard and fragrant red roses climbing up a balcony.