My Father Came From Italy

by Maria Coletta McLean

  Before I know what’s happening there’s a noise behind me, the soft sound of footfall on gravel and a man beside the table holding out his hand who says, “Vuoi ballare?”

  We dance among dark shadows, join hands and match our steps to theirs. There is laughter at every table, hands clapping, feet anxious to spin and whirl upon the gravel dance floor. When we leave the restaurant that evening, we float down the hill to the sound of guitar strings. By the time we reach the archway of slender beechnut trees, the air is silent.

  *****

  Angela stands in the doorway of our house. She has a small bowl of eggs in one hand and a basket of plum tomatoes in the other. Out of the pocket of her apron hangs a bouquet of fresh basil, tied with twine. We take these gifts to Sunday lunch at Guido’s, passing a dozen villagers as we walk down the hill calling, “Buon giorno, buon giorno” to people pushing strollers, walking arm in arm, carrying gifts. We pass the Bar Italia, where the flower shop man is playing cards with Bruno, so my father waves his bouquet of basil leaves, a bandleader waving his baton as we all march down the street.

  The pastry shop is crowded with people standing in the doorway, talking, joking amid the warm sugary aroma of fresh baking. As the church bell begins to swing, the villagers look at their watches. Parcels of pastries, with golden curls of ribbon hanging down the sides, appear overhead, passed from hand to hand, from the front counter to the doorway of the shop. Folded lire are passed in the other direction. Then, as the bells subside, the bakery crowd disperses and the street is deserted, except for the baker calling from behind the counter, “Buon pranzo. Buon pranzo.”

  Guido looks up from the table outside his house, where he’s grating a piece of parmesan cheese. He covers the plate with a tea towel and comes to undo the latch on the gate. He shakes hands with my father, kisses him and says, “Buon giorno, zio. Would you like to see the garden?”

  Luigina is in the garden. She wipes her hands on her apron before she greets us and acknowledges my father first, although she’s never met him. She keeps her arm on his shoulder as Guido hustles a brown leather armchair and sets it near the corner of the house. Luigina dusts the polished seat with the corner of her apron before saying, “Sit. Sit. Lunch is almost ready.”

  At the side of the house, beneath a long arbour of grapevines, several tables are pushed together. They’re covered with tablecloths: linen, gingham, one faded pink damask. In the centre of each table is a row of crusty Italian bread rolls. The tables are set with mismatched plates and glasses and large cotton napkins. I do a quick count: 17 places.

  “Tutta la famiglia?” asks my father.

  “Sí. Certo,” responds Guido. “They all come.”

  Guido’s four sons and their families live in Rome, Frosinone and Morolo, but every Sunday they come home to Supino for lunch. They take the train to the Ferentino station, the bus to the Kennedy Bar and then they walk up the hill to this little three-room house. By one o’clock, there’s a bouquet of red roses on one table, a box of chocolates on another and two trays of pastries on the kitchen windowsill, waiting. Our bouquet is hanging upside down on the side of the kitchen cupboard. Guido opens two gallons of home-made wine, one red and one white. Soon the air is full of voices. By the time the empty trays of antipasto leave the table and the fresh egg noodles arrive, my father is animated, in the arms of his family.

  When my father came to Canada, he left behind a girlfriend. She lived at the end of his street. He didn’t tell me her name, only that she had “capelli d’oro,” golden curls like my daughter Kathryn’s, and brown eyes, “shiny as chestnuts.” He said, “If she sees me walking down the path, even after all these years, she’ll run and throw her arms around me. She’ll be that happy to see me.”

  When we had said goodbye to my mother in Toronto she had said, “Take him and don’t bring him back. You’re wasting your money. Everyone he knew is dead. You’ll see. You’ll be sorry.” My mother stood in the doorway, arms crossed, her face wrinkled in a permanent frown. My father shrugged his shoulders, tried to speak, choked a little on the words. If he’d stayed in Supino, married the girl near his house, would he be like Guido, have a family like this one?

  With the appearance of another platter of food and the smell of the roasted chicken and rosemary and the scent of the lemons all the way from Sorrento and the sound of the knife slicing through coarse Italian bread, my father tells a story.

  “Guido. Do you remember pazzo Lorenzo?” Crazy Larry was the town hermit, walked with a limp and lived in the woods behind my father’s farm. “He only came into the village to steal things — chickens, grapes. Once he took a ricotta right out of my mother’s pan. Wouldn’t listen to anyone, except my father. Of course, my father shot him in the leg. Just that one time. Didn’t kill him. Just slowed him down a little.”

  After lunch a woman joins us. White curls bounce beneath a black beret and her eyes are very bright. My father runs to meet her and for a long time after they sit together in the corner, not talking much, but leaning; her head toward his, as if she doesn’t want to miss a word. No wedding band. Just a silver locket around her neck.

  *****

  The next morning as we walk down Via D’Italia to the Bar Italia, we get almost to the house where the parrot calls out “Ciao,” when Rocco salutes, “Mezzabotte. How are you?” Bob and I go into the bar, order our cappuccini and bring my father’s outside to him. All the tables and chairs are still stacked inside the bar. Rocco pushes through the crowd, a chair held high in the air. He sets the chair in the centre of the patio in the heart of a gathering crowd.

  Rocco emerges from the crowd, leans his foot against the wall and begins, “Some fool at City Hall went to Toronto for a conference. He came back with a Canadian idea. Apparently, in Toronto, there is a fee for using patio space. The cafe owner has to pay for the use of the outdoor area, correct?” Bob nods yes; Rocco shakes his head. “So,” he continues, “the fool brings the idea to Supino. The Council agree to try it. They passed a motion that bar owners must pay a fee to use the patio space. Why would you pay a fee to sit outside?”

  Supino’s all-purpose blue truck, with the official emblem painted in gold on the side, drives quickly up the street and turns wildly onto the side street behind the Bar Italia. The passenger, in dark glasses with his cap pulled low over his head, tosses a paper out the window and the car speeds up the street and out of sight.

  “Vigliaccheria!” calls someone from the crowd. “Coward,” translates Rocco as he grabs the paper, glances at it quickly and calls for Bruno.

  The fine. Already I hear them arguing about the young police officer, his father would have ripped the fine into shreds and thrown it on the floor of the municipio. Someone calls out to the green grocer next door and he laughs and tosses a lemon into the crowd. In a moment, the paper’s back in Rocco’s hand, only now it’s tied around a lemon, held on with a couple of elastic bands. The blue truck comes barrelling down the street again and as it curves around the telephone booth, Rocco tosses the lemon into the sunroof. The crowd laughs.

  “I think by Thursday, Friday at the latest, they repeal the law.”

  The crowd begins to scatter, the villagers going about their daily chores.

  Before we go Rocco tells us that the scaffolding across the street came from another American idea. “Joe from Quattro Strade emigrated to Detroit. 1954. Last year, he comes back. He bought a little farm down there, grows some good grapes. He had this idea to give a gift to the town, so he put some money up to make a house for pensioners, a retirement home. It’s an American idea to put old people in a special house, no? By the time they put up the scaffolding, they ran out of money. It’s crazy anyway. No one in Supino would put their parents in a home. Their parents have their own houses.”

  *****

  The day before we went to the cemetery, I checked with Rocco, who, as usual, assured me, “No problem, Maria. There’s a man there every morning, except Sunday, between 10:00 a.m. and 1:00 p.m. — maybe,
12:30 p.m. if it’s a hot day. His name is Maurizio. He’s been there a long time, since 1940, or maybe ’41. Anyway, Maurizio’s got all the records. He knows everything. Write down the name of your grandparents, the date of death and show him the paper. He’ll take you right to the grave.”

  We drive through the laneway of trees that marks the end of Supino Centro and stop for directions at the first house we see. An elderly man sits in his wheelchair on the cement verandah of a fairly modern-looking home. He’s digging in a planter box. At the top of the stairway lies a thick tree branch on an angle, to keep the wheelchair and the man from rolling down the stairs.

  “Buon giorno,” Bob calls from the car window and the old man cups his hand around his ear. A younger man, dressed in blue jeans and a John Lennon T-shirt, jumps on his motor scooter and roars the few metres down his driveway to our car.

  “Americana?” he asked, addressing Kathryn, who is sitting in the back seat, while peering at her over his sunglass frames.

  “Canadese ,” she says. “Do you speak English?”

  “I get by with a little help from my friends.”

  “Can you give us directions to the cemetery?”

  “Il cimitero? The long and winding road,” he begins. Then he revs the engine of his motor scooter and motions us to follow him. Before we have a chance to respond, he’s pulled in front of our car and is roaring down the street. When we reach the cemetery our guide pulls up beside the window of the back seat and the young man turns to my father and speaks for a few minutes in Italian. He flashes a big smile, looks again at Kathryn and calls out, “Ciao bella,” before he roars off.

  “What’s that all about?” Bob asks.

  “There’s a concert tonight at San Sebastiano,” explains my father. “The boy wants Kathryn to go.”

  “What did you say?” ask Bob and Kathryn in unison.

  “Sure, might as well. Everybody goes. We all go.”

  At the cemetery entrance is a small office. Empty. The gate is open. Wildflowers grow among its iron bars and a vine, with pale moonflowers, has wrapped itself around the supporting post. We start down one path, reading the gravestones as we stroll along.

  “Here’s one,” calls Kathryn.

  It’s a marble stone with “Coletta” carved deeply across the top. It’s too new to be my grandparents, but it is the marker of my uncle Enrico Coletta. There’s even a photo of zio Enrico attached to the stone within some kind of plastic bubble. The stone has the date of birth carved on it, 1890, but no date of death.

  “Kathryn, when your great-grandmother was expecting her second baby, her husband went to America for two years to work. When he came back, Americo was already walking. He started to cry when he saw my father. He didn’t know who he was. My father got to calling him Americo, because he was born when Papa was in America. I never knew his name was Enrico until I saw his passport. Everybody in the village called him Americo, from the money he earned in America.”

  “Is that how your father bought the farm, from the money he earned in America?”

  “No, he bought it later, after I had come to Canada. Regina and I sent money home. When he died he left the farm to me. I own it.”

  Suddenly my father looks pale. His breathing, usually so slow and even, is hurried. I can hear him gasping in the hot, still air. His body sways a little in the heat as he rubs his hand over his eyes. I put out my hand to steady him. We walk over to a bench near some evergreen trees and sit down.

  “It’s not so good to see your name on a grave,” he declares. We sit in the silence of the cemetery, waiting and looking at each other. He runs his hand over his face, digs in his pocket for his handkerchief, blows his nose, but his eyes are rimmed with red when he looks at me.

  My father explains that he was thinking about Philip, my nephew, my brother Don’s youngest son. Philip had been killed three years ago in a welding accident at his job site. He was 23.

  I remember the smells of the funeral parlour, the stunned and sunburned faces of dozens of young people. There were white flowers everywhere.

  “That day your mother told me to get in the car and we drove up the highway. I must have fallen asleep, but all of a sudden I was standing in front of a tombstone. It said Coletta. I thought it was my tombstone,” he explains. “I thought I was dead. It should have been me,” he adds quietly, leaning forward, with his hands on his knees. “Philip should be here. I should be dead.”

  We never found my grandparents’ graves. We came across a section of stones, flat and worn near the juniper trees, moss growing on many of them, but names and dates had been worn away. Perhaps these were their markers; maybe I only needed to believe that they were.

  *****

  It’s almost eight o’clock and I am just closing the front door behind me as I leave when Angela calls across the street, “You’ll need a sweater. It’s cold when the sun goes down.” We file down the street and by the time we’ve reached the corner, grandmothers, children, young teens, dogs, everyone of every age is walking leisurely down the hill. At the Bar Italia, some of the crowd veer off to have a beer and a chat with friends who have walked down from Via Piagge or one of the other streets on the eastern side of town. The rest of us continue through the narrowest part of the street where all the shopkeepers are closing their doors, drawing heavy accordion grates across their display windows.

  We stop for a few minutes at the flower shop to help Fiore, the owner, carry several tropical plants across the street. He likes these plants to get the early morning sun, so he’s chiselled several ledges out of the stone opposite his store. Fiore nestles the clay pots in for the evening. In the early morning, their leaves will be misty with dew. By the time he has opened his shop for business the sunlight will have evaporated the dewdrops and left the leaves vibrant.

  The woman at the butcher’s shop tosses a bone to each of the dogs lined up in front of the store. We pass her and approach the crossroads at the side of the church of Santa Maria Maggiore. People from this vantage point can see other villagers as they come out of the church or the shops, or up from the small tunnel that runs between the jewellry store and the dry cleaners. There is always a chorus of greetings, accentuated by car horns and church bells. Tonight those sounds are joined by the murmurs from inside the church, the heavy doors propped open in the evening heat, as the parishioners recite the prayers of the rosary.

  “There’s a feast here in June, or maybe July, after the cherries have finished, but before the tomatoes and peppers turn red. Everyone who lives in Supino draws patterns on the pavement. Then they fill in the design with flower petals from the wildflowers on the mountain. There’s a mass at San Cataldo and then the priest and the altar boys walk down the hill to this church and up the hill to San Nicola. My mother used to make special cookies for this festa. If there are fireworks left over from the feast of San Cataldo, they shoot them off. Mama never let Regina and I stay in town for the fireworks. She said it was too late. We had to sneak out the window and climb up onto the roof to see them.”

  Down at the end of the roadway, the tables and chairs from the Kennedy Bar take over most of the street. Along the sidewalk, swerving between couples and strollers and tooting his horn, comes the young man who gave us the directions to the cemetery this morning. Carlo. He parks his motor scooter and reaches out his hand to my father. “Buona sera, signor,” he says as he motions us across the street to join the group of villagers heading toward a set of stairs cut out of a steep hill. We climb the stairs with everyone else, strollers lifted between couples, young people with their arms tucked into the arm of their grandparent, kids who run up four or five stairs, then down two, then up again. At the top of the stairs, rows of white plastic patio chairs are set up on the grass with extra seating around the perimeter in the form of planks and overturned plastic pop crates. At the far end a stage made of scaffolding boards is propped on a foundation of cement blocks. In the corner are two metal playground slides with a rope stretched between them and beds
preads clothes-pegged around their frame to create a sort of impromptu dressing room. On the other side of the stage is an engraved wooden lectern.

  “Gelato?” asks the young man before he dashes off, returning with his hands full of lemons and his pockets full of plastic spoons. The lemons have been hollowed out and filled with lemon sherbet. Children chase each other in the dark, racing in and out of the rows of chairs, and old men lean on their canes, talking. From somewhere near the back of the crowd, a cheer erupts and applause flutters into the night. Rocco moves to the lectern and says a few quick sentences in Italian and raises his hand as if the concert will begin, but then glances toward us and says, “Scusa. Le Canadese . Sorry, allow me to translate for you, our Canadian visitors. We have a folkloric group from Veroli, a small town just past Frosinone; we have a band of musicians from Morolo; and we have a film for children, ‘Topo Gigio.’” From behind the bedspreads comes a lively little band, led by a man playing the organetto. The band, outfitted in white shirts with red vests, moves through the crowd working its way to the stage, the villagers clapping along with the music. At intermission Bob and Carlo order pizza — margherita, napoli, bianca — while my father, Kathryn, and I sit on the marble step of the jewellry store. After the intermission, the children’s film is shown on the makeshift bedspread screen and though there’s a soundtrack, the children are so involved in sharing the storyline with each other and yelling out advice and encouragement for the cartoon characters that it’s very difficult to actually hear it. Some of the babies and toddlers in the crowd have fallen asleep on the shoulders of adults or curled up on makeshift beds made from facing chairs.