My Father Came From Italy

by Maria Coletta McLean

  As the increasing numbers of villagers joining the debate added their voices, the conversations grew louder and faster and we were left out of the argument. The noise level escalated. The discussion switched from using the found door to how to grade the yard. The backyard is about 10 feet long, before it plunges down the ravine, so Sam was going to dig out the earth, starting at the back wall of the house, and push the excess soil down the hill. How many steps did we want from the door down to the yard? The lower Sam dug the earth the more steps we’d need to get into the yard. The more earth Sam dug out, the longer the yard would be. The backhoe was poised, in the narrow driveway, ready to dig.

  I walked 10 steps, yelling out the numbers, “Uno, due, tre… dieci,” and slapped my hand on the wall of the house and shouted, “See this white line? Ten feet. Our house is 10 feet wide, so the backyard is 10 feet wide too.” I marched toward the ravine, to where I had stuck the dead tree branch into the earth. I stamped my foot. “Right here. Dieci e dieci. That’s the yard. Eccola.”

  But signor Mario reminded us that we needed a foot or two extra for flowers and Enrico suggested we should build a low wall because the flowers could go in pots and Joe declared, “No flowers, you can’t eat flowers.” He claimed he was bringing a cutting from his grapevine to grow over a lattice roof he planned to make from branches and twigs and Francesca said no grapevine, it would make too much shade and Angela reminded us we’d be happy to have the shade when August came around and Bob looked at me and shrugged his shoulders and asked, “Lunch?” and we headed down to the restaurant in the woods and no one missed us. During an early lunch at the outdoor restaurant I told Bob my plan for our backyard. “Picture this — red impatiens that I can plant every summer and wild yellow buttercups that will appear each spring and Joe’s grapevine, the shade will be good in the summer when we get the afternoon sun, a terracotta patio....”

  We timed our return to Via Condotto Vecchio for after two o’clock when we knew everyone would be home, eating pasta and drinking wine. The backhoe still sat in the driveway of Sam’s house next door where our woodshed used to be. All was quiet on the street. Bob opened the front door and we were met with a blast of sunlight. Instead of a kitchen window there was monstrous hole in the back wall and a panoramic view of the ravine behind our house. Wall to wall. Bright yellow-green trees, the kind you see only in the early spring before the heat and the dust of summer powder the leaves, anchored in a base of yellow buttercups.

  “Good grief,” I exclaimed. “Why would they knock out so much of the wall to put in one door?”

  Joe’s voice, from his garage across the street, answered, “The neighbours — they can’t agree. Where you going to put the door? Pietro makes the doorway in the corner. Out of the way there. But Enzo, he thinks right in the centre looks better. So, we make the hole a little bigger. Then Mario says beside the fireplace, in line with the front door, to catch the breeze. It seems like a good idea. Then Angela calls, it’s time for lunch, so....”

  *****

  Guido surprised me one Sunday with a knock on the door and the news that he had moved from Roma to Supino for the summer. I didn’t have wine, or coffee, or even a chair to sit on. I dug around in my knapsack, produced a package of cherry Lifesavers and offered him one of those.

  “What’s this?” he asked sweeping his arm across the area where the back wall used to be.

  “New door,” explained Bob.

  “The hole — she’s too big.”

  Guido held a rectangular cardboard carton whose contents rattled and clinked. It was a light fixture with a long silver chain and the whole apparatus unfolded to three tiers of cut-glass crystals, candle-shaped lightbulbs and silver beads. It was elegant. It was beautiful. It was enormous. We thanked him profusely and then, because Guido wasted no time, he told us he needed a ladder as he was walking out the door, down the stairs, on his way to the cantina. Bob followed with the key. The villagers kept wine in their cantinas. Ours contained the water tank, a woodpile and some waiting construction supplies. The cantina was at street level and there was no space between the door of the cantina and the street itself, so if a car was passing, you had to wait a few seconds before you could get the key into the lock and open the door. This has two purposes: it saves you from getting brushed by a car and it gives the neighbours time to come over and see what’s going on. Bob unlocked the cantina door and Joe came hurrying across the street. After the introductions, Joe and Guido chatted rapidly in Italian, while Bob searched for a ladder.

  “Sorry, Guido. No ladder — no scala.”

  “Bob, what’s a matter with you?” asked Joe. “The ladder is right there, on top of the woodpile,” and he grasped a thick branch of wood in each hand and lifted five sturdy logs strapped to long poles of hardwood.

  At the house, Joe propped up the ladder and Guido installed the light fixture. I flicked the switch, but only to show Guido that the hydro was not connected.

  “No wall and no elettricitá? Mamma mia.”

  Then Guido told Bob he’d found a car for us to buy. I think his exact words were, “Una macchina — perfetta e cheap-o.” Before Bob had a chance to respond, Angela was tapping on the door, carrying a tray with coffee and biscuits. I flipped over the cardboard box to act as a table. Bob brought the two plastic pails from the balcony and the other pail from the backyard. As hosts, we sat on the hard marble steps, with the cardboard table holding the coffee tray in the centre. We laughed and drank and ate together, as happily as if we were sitting at the finest restaurant in Rome.

  Bob asked, “How much is the car? Quanto costa?”

  “Five millioni lire.”

  “Guido,” I said, “we’re only here five or six weeks of the year. We don’t need to spend $5,000 for a car. Most of the time it will just sit in the cantina. It doesn’t make sense.”

  But Bob argued, “Look at it this way. Every time we come here we rent a car. It works out to $1,000 a trip — more if we stay longer than two weeks. In a couple of years, we’ll have spent $5,000 and we won’t have anything to show for it. If we spend $5,000 now we’ll have the car for years. Joe can use the car while we’re in Canada. It’ll be good for the car to have someone drive it now and again. Joe can come and pick us up at the airport. He’d be doing us a favour by driving it.”

  The car would be a way to pay Joe back for all his help negotiating house renovations. Joe wouldn’t take money.

  Guido reassured me, “No hurry, Maria. My son doesn’t bring the car until dopo il pranzo — how do you say? After lunch. Mia moglie waits for us. You eat lunch at my house.”

  The villagers’ concept of invitation did not include the idea of choice. There were a few excuses that were acceptable: a wedding, baptism, First Communion, lunch at a mother’s or mother-in-law’s. But Guido’s my only relative in Italy, except for the second cousins who live in the big house beside my father’s farm. Guido is my oldest relative in Supino. Guido is my first cousin. Therefore, we were eating lunch at Guido’s house today.

  Just past the Bar Italia is a flower shop. Usually the store is locked and if you want to buy flowers you go up the hill to the bar, where the owner is playing cards with the man from the dry goods store. But today was Sunday; the store was open. The traditional hostess gift is flowers, a tray of pastries, or a box of chocolates. The stores that sold these items were usually open Sunday morning, because the villagers were definitely going to take a gift when they went to someone’s house for Sunday lunch, but they weren’t going to spend their money a day before they had to.

  The hostess would always object, chastise us for bringing anything at all, but then display the flowers in a big vase that was waiting on the dining room table and show them to every neighbour who dropped in for coffee, every day, for the next week. If I brought candies they’d go into her best crystal bowl and they too would be displayed, usually on the sideboard. After everyone had taken one, they waited on the sideboard for the neighbours to admire and share. If I brought past
ries the shopkeeper would have already arranged them on a foil-covered cardboard tray and they’d become part of the dessert.

  Today, I chose a pot of yellow flowers that looked like chrysanthemums. I took the pot inside the store to pay for it and the owner said, “No.” At first I thought I’d offered the wrong amount of money, but the owner took the money and put the pot of yellow flowers back outside. Then he selected a dozen velvety red roses and several sprigs of baby’s breath from a large plastic bucket beside the counter. He slipped the bouquet into clear plastic and tied the whole thing up with a few yards of white crinkle ribbon. He presented it to me, the ribbon hanging down in curls and the flowers upside-down.

  I accepted the bouquet and said, “Grazie.” The flower man responded with an expression I’d never heard before, and when I translated it, I was glad I hadn’t made a fuss. He said, “Buon pranzo.” Good lunch. The walk to Guido’s house was a long and winding route uphill. We stopped several times to greet neighbours; all the women looked at the bouquet and commented, “Bella.”

  The front door of the house was propped open with a pot of flowers: yellow margheritas. Guido’s wife, Luigina, hurried into the yard, kissed us and hustled us toward the house. She clucked at us along the way as if we were a small group of chickens late for dinner. She was a tiny, energetic woman with curly hair. She wore a flowered dress and, of course, an apron. She smelled of tomato sauce, basilico and the scent of fresh air and sunshine. In the dining room there was a china cabinet, a big wooden table and many chairs. I gave Luigina the flowers and she crushed a rose petal under her nose and pronounced the bouquet, “Bellissimo.”

  “Grazie. Grazie mille,” she said as she kissed me again. Guido pulled out a crystal vase from under a dining room chair and filled the vase with water. He put the bouquet on the dining room window ledge where they blocked the view. The fragrance of roses, the scent from the egg noodles, the herbs, the spices, the woody red wine: it was indeed buon pranzo.

  We were sipping espresso, thick and sugary sweet, when a horn tooted. Guido rushed out to open the gate; Luigina hurried into the kitchen to bring out a fresh plate of fettuccine.

  I peeked out the dining room window, making a little space between two roses. “Bob. A taxi’s here. And there’s no one in it.”

  “It must be Peppe, Guido’s son, the one who’s bringing our car.”

  “Yes, but he’s driving a taxi. Bob, Guido’s son is driving a taxi, not a car, Bob, a taxi. Look at it. See the sign on the roof? It says Taxi and it’s yellow. The taxi is yellow, Bob. And look how big it is. Never mind that. Look how old it is. I don’t believe it. We’re buying a taxi. We’re not....”

  “Grazie. Grazie,” said Peppe as he shook Bob’s hand. “Thank you from my wife, from my children. Already I have picked a new taxi. I am just waiting for someone to buy this one. And you buy it! Bob, my Canadian cousin. Perfetto. Grazie. Grazie.” He stopped to kiss Bob on both cheeks, “You are a good man, a good cousin. Grazie molto.”

  Guido was taking a silver tray with shot glasses and a bottle of whiskey from the china cabinet. I knew he’d been saving that bottle for a special occasion. I could see it in his smile, in the way he lovingly broke the seal on the whiskey bottle with his thumbnail. Luigina was standing at the table with her hand on her son’s shoulder.

  “Auguri,” I said to Bob. “Congratulations. We just bought a taxi.”

  *****

  When we drove the taxi back to the house later that afternoon we were met by Joe and a new set of problems.

  “You see this cantina, Bob?” asked Joe.

  “Of course.”

  “You see the taxi you bought?”

  “Of course.”

  “You see a problem, Bob? Grande problema?”

  “The car won’t fit in the cantina?”

  “Of course.”

  “We just make the door of the cantina a little wider,” I said confidently.

  “Maria. Look at the arch. 1926. This arch is history. You can’t knock it out. We have a law in Supino, remember? Bob, you remember the guy who owns the house next door? The two-room house with the good door. That guy — thinks he’s a bigga shot. Likes everything big. All show. No sense, that guy. Rents in Roma, when the house he owns in Supino sits empty. Mamma mia. He’d buy this car. Only one problem. That guy — he’s got no money.”

  “Joe. That is a problem. Un grande problema.”

  “Bob, what’s the matter with you? We make a trade. The big shot and me. The empty two-room house and the door!” exclaimed Joe.

  “Wait a minute. Joe, you can’t trade a taxi for a house. That just makes more problems. If you take the door off the little house, Pietro, or someone, has to fill it in with cement. Someone has to knock out the wall between the houses, so we can get back and forth. Then Vincenzo has to paint the place. And the floor will need to be patched. It’s crazy — all that work for a house we don’t need.”

  “Why you worry so much, Maria?”

  To avoid another thwarted decision Bob and I jumped in the car and drove to Santa Serena, a mountain rooted in Supino, but with its head in the clouds. “Serena” means clear, but to me it also meant serenity, escape. After a few hours basking in its views and sunlight we headed home. Partway down the mountain, a herd of sheep climbed out of the pasture and crowded onto the road. Beside the road was a stone building and a man painting at his easel. He put down his paintbrush and walked to our car.

  “Lost?” he asked, looking at the licence plate.

  “No,” I assured him. “I belong here.”

  I asked him about his work. Immediately he revived and offered to show us his studio. He painted ceramic wall tiles using the colours of the coast: white sand, blue sky, yellow sun and, sometimes, a splash of red. Propped on the windowsill were samples of his work. I asked if I could buy two.

  “Two tiles? I give them to you.” The man clicked on the light, wiped a brushstroke on one tile, swirled a circle on the other. The numbers looked like melted sunshine. We arrived home at twilight, but even in the shadows, we could see no more work had been done. We left our two ceramic tiles, wrapped carefully in brown paper in the attic, and drove to the pensione to pack for our return trip.

  The plain brown paper wrapper held more than our new ceramic house numbers. It represented my faith in our neighbour who speaks English, in the workers who would finish the renovations on our house by August and in my ability to bring my father back to his birthplace. On Santa Serena earlier that day I had prayed to the Saint of Special Favours that I was not asking too much.

  THE SAINT OF SPECIAL FAVOURS

  As soon as I arrived in Toronto, I went to visit my father at the drop-in centre. While we were away he’d withdrawn even further. He was spending too much time there, alone. He had never really been comfortable there anyway. His English was good enough, but he didn’t join in activities. He needed pocket money for the bingo cards and the nickel a game they charged for darts, so I used to put loonies on the bookshelf, reminding him they were there if he wanted anything, but he never used them. I had bought him a deck of Italian cards and put them on the bookshelf too, but no one at the centre knew how to play, except Luigi the janitor, and he was working. Sometimes, at lunch, Luigi would play a couple of hands with him or my daughter Kathryn would have a game, as the centre was close to her high school, but these games were slower because Kathryn was a beginner. He always let her win.

  That day he was sitting in the corner, head down, shoulders slumped, pulling at a loose thread on his sweater. The sweater he wore was too big for him despite a dresser full of others, gifts from his children and grandchildren. Other seniors sat reading the paper, drinking coffee, and discussing the day’s news. My father can’t read without his glasses, kept at home in his dresser drawer, and he hadn’t been given money for coffee. “He has coffee at home,” my mother would say. “Why does he need money to buy coffee?” When I greet him, it takes him a few seconds to remember who I am.

  “Can I
buy you a coffee?” I ask him.

  A moment passes, then he smiles, “Sure. Want a candy?” He reaches into his shirt pocket and pulls out a half roll of cherry Lifesavers. “Kathryn was here today. She came on her lunch hour.”

  I take a Lifesaver, not because I want it, but because I don’t want him to have any left in his pocket when he walks home this afternoon. My mother will tell Kathryn not to give him candy.

  “There’s a bingo game this afternoon. Three o’clock,” he says. “Your aunt Regina used to play bingo. She won a lamp one time. Your mother says, ‘Why do you want to waste money on bingo? A nickel a card.’”

  I give him money, but I know he’ll put the money in his pocket, take it home, give it to my mother. It reminds him of the days when he was working at Toronto Macaroni, bringing home his salary. “Bob booked the tickets for Italy today.”

  “Did you get one for me?” he asks.

  “Of course.”

  “Don’t tell your mother, yet.” He reaches for a book on the bookshelf, opens it to the last page, brings out a piece of paper. It’s been folded many times. “The nurse who takes my blood pressure told me I need a new passport,” he begins as he unfolds the paper. “I walked down to the post office and they gave me the form. I already signed, but it says here I need a passport photo.”

  “Do you want to get your photo taken now?”

  “Might as well,” he replies, folding the paper and giving it to me. We walk to the photo shop and wait while the photographer switches on his lights and adjusts his camera lens. My father sits carefully on the edge of the chair, his hands gripping the seat, his head down, his shoulders slumped.

  “Look over here,” instructs the photographer, “and lift your head up. Where are you travelling to, sir?”