My Father Came From Italy

by Maria Coletta McLean

  A woman opens the door of the house and carefully steps outside, bringing a bucket of water and a long-handled ladle. She’s a little woman, dressed in black, with a white apron and white hair pulled back in a braid and twisted round her head. She speaks with my father for a moment or two, then offers us water from her bucket. The water’s cool, refreshing. As she climbs the rocks to water her flower garden we continue on our way.

  The passageway widens to accommodate a donkey carrying a bag of cement. It carries bags of cement from the piazza in front of San Nicola, where the road narrows and the cobblestone steps begin, to the stone house someone from Rome is renovating as a weekend home. My father knew its original owners, went to school with the son and daughter in the family though they were a few years older. Their father used this place to sleep when he collected the olives, but the rest of the family had lived with their grandfather in town. The foundation and one wall of the house remain from the 40s when it was bombed during the war. The older villagers are worried its history is bad luck and feel it is too high on the mountainside to be safe.

  Now, rock music blares from an upstairs window. A motor scooter leans against a doorway. A man comes out of the darkness of a cantina wearing a blood-stained apron and carrying a large knife. Behind him a ceramic bowl full of meat chunks and branches of rosemary sit on a table ready to be made into sausages. A leg of pork, or maybe lamb, hangs in the corner on a silver meat hook. Raising the knife, he shouts at us, “Bob! Remember me? I’m Rocco’s uncle. I meet you in Toronto, last year.”

  Bob shakes hands with the man and comments on the heat.

  “Thirty-four degrees,” replies Rocco’s uncle. “What we need is some peaches and white wine. Fresca. Come in. Come in.”

  My father is already inside the house. The Supinese cannot imagine an encounter that doesn’t call for wine, a little fruit, some cookies.... In the kitchen, the air is cool and a woman, I assume she is Rocco’s aunt, whisks the flowers off the table, replacing them with a bowl of peaches and three sweating green wine bottles. Without a word Rocco’s aunt collects an assortment of plates, fruit knives and clear glasses from her cupboards and distributes them.

  “The peach,” begins Rocco’s uncle, caressing its skin, “is silken in texture, immensely fragrant. Slice the peach,” he says as he slices the fruit and stuffs the pieces into a glass. “Then, pour a little wine on the top,” he continues, filling the glass to the brim. He stabs the knife into one of the peaches waiting in the bowl and hands it to my father.

  “My grandfather used to eat his peaches like this,” my father says. “Nonno was blind, but when he cut those peaches, perfect slices, every one exactly the same. Sometimes he poured red wine instead of white. Your aunt Angelina — she brought the wrong bottle. But your grandfather, he didn’t like red wine so much. He’d start to yell. She liked to tease the blind Nonno. She brings red wine on purpose, then she runs away.”

  Peaches and white wine: deceptively simple and quietly potent. After three or four glasses, my memory is as fuzzy as the fruit. Then Rocco’s aunt speaks, pointing her finger at each of us in turn, counting our heads as she circles the room, “Uno, due...sette.” She cracks one egg for each person into a bowl. One of the eggs has a little piece of straw still stuck to its side. Swirling the eggs with a wooden spoon she adds handfuls of flour until she has a soft ball of dough. She pulls the gingham cloth from the tabletop with one hand and dumps the dough onto the table with the other, reaches behind the kitchen door for the rolling pin. She stretches that ball of dough into a creamy yellow circle and sprinkles the dough with flour. Before the dust can settle she flips the circle, over and over, into a long roll. Using a sharp steel knife, she slices through the roll at exact intervals, lifting each section, opening out the noodles as if she is displaying an assortment of satin ribbons. With a slight rotation of her wrist, she places the noodles back on the table, nests of egg fettuccine.

  “Aspetta. Cinque minuti,” she says. “Wait. Five minutes.”

  As children we sat and ate these same noodles in Aunt Regina’s dining room, on Geoffrey Street, with the black-and-white photos of the Supino relatives hanging on the walls. They watched us eat.

  “Pesto is the poetry of the fields,” informs Rocco’s uncle. “For a classic poem, you must pick the best words, arrange them perfectly. The same with pesto. Instead of words, we use ingredients from the fields: basil, garlic, olive oil. They must be of the finest quality to create the finest poetry. You understand? Look at this basil plant. It grows in the window facing the Mediterranean Sea. The wind carries its salty breezes across the mountains to this house. My wife tells me her cousin in Detroit makes pesto in a blender. Automatico. Absolutely unacceptable. You must use a marble mortar to release the fragrance. The pesto requires circular motion....

  A fragrance fills the room. I lose myself in the scent, the aroma, too squisito to describe. There are ancient trees in Supino, with bark as black and wrinkled as a burnt log, with leaves, grey and slender, like a weeping willow. The olives have been plucked from these trees, the oil gently extracted from the first press. And the wine. Not the clear, light white wine we’ve been drinking all morning, but red wine: woody, rich, full bodied. It slides down my throat with the coolness of November twilight on the mountain, and the warmth of the noon Supino sun. Five minutes later, we’re ready to eat.

  *****

  En route to the Kennedy Bar, still in search of Mille Fiori, we pause beside a three-story yellow stucco building outlined with golden trim. It has new windows with aluminum frames and flower boxes made of wrought iron. It’s the only building I’ve seen in Supino that has an indoor courtyard. Across the arched doorway there’s an ornate iron fence painted coal black with a locked gate. Beyond that gate is a cobblestone square with large potted palm trees and a curved marble stairway climbing to upper floors. Bar Centrale is on the first floor. Despite this, my father informs me this is the priest’s house.

  “The priest’s family lived in Rome, but they owned a few buildings in Supino. They came in the summer time, when it’s too hot in Rome. Like a cottage. His brother had the bar. No, maybe it was a cousin. I don’t remember. The priest didn’t own it,” he assures me. “He just had a drink there, in the evening, you know, after mass.”

  There’s a war monument in the piazza outside the bar, a young soldier, standing proud with the Italian flag clutched in his hand. At the base of the statue, etched into the marble, are the names of the soldiers from Supino. There’s one section for the First World War and three sections for the Second World War. Giacomo was my father’s oldest brother, a gentle man who would have preferred to stay on the farm with his family, his grapes and his dog Nero, but the war came and Giacomo left. My father was only nine when Giacomo went to fight. One day, months after Giacomo had left, my father and his friend Antonio were playing war and fashioning guns with some branches they’d cut, when his mother came rushing out of the house. She grabbed the stick from my father’s hand, and broke it over her knee. “You think war is a game?” she asked, but before he could say a word, she’d gone back in the house, crying. My father said it was the only time she’d ever raised her voice at him, the only time he’d ever seen her truly angry. Giacomo couldn’t write, but it didn’t matter anyway. His mama couldn’t read. All she could do was wait.

  Every day, inside the house, his mother waited while Nero waited outside by the gate. By the time the war was over, they had eaten all but three of their chickens and Nero had grey hairs in his black coat, his face thin and drawn. Then, one evening, when the family was inside eating supper, a strange dog barked. My grandfather went for his gun. There’d been a lot of rabid foxes in the area and he didn’t trust strays. It was Nero barking. Suddenly, a tall, slim figure appeared at the gate, bending to pat the dog. My grandfather called out to the stranger to be careful, the dog was rabid, but the man called back, “É Giacomo, Papa.” My grandmother flew from the house, down the grapevine path and into the arms of her son. They r
oasted a chicken that night and Nero never barked again.

  There’s a small grocery store tucked in behind the Bar Centrale and from the upstairs window comes the sound of someone’s radio. In the thin strip of shade produced by the laundry baking on the clothesline lies a mangy old dog, panting in the afternoon heat. At the top of the hill is a broken cement square, with chicory plants poking through its cracks, their purple flowers faded in the August sunshine.

  “This is it,” says my father, pointing to the wrought iron bars of an old stone cantina attached to a tall building. “This is the house where I was born. I wasn’t born at the farm because my mother was on her way to the cantina to cook lunch for the priest when she got frightened by a dog. I was the result.”

  I look at the dusty cement window frame, barred with iron rods and spider webs. With a stick, I gather some of the webs to one side and peer in the open space. It’s a low room with cement walls and a mud floor. In one corner is a small stack of kindling, in another corner is a rusted cement mixer. The outside wall has dark streaks on it, where the smoke from the fire smudged the grey cement as it spiralled upward.

  “The priest owned this house. He let my mother use it for cooking and sometimes when Papa and Giacomo and Americo worked late in the fields behind the church, they came here to sleep. They weren’t supposed to, but you know.... The day I was born, he wasn’t too happy. He didn’t get his lunch that day.”

  We continue en route and get as far as the Bar Italia, where Rocco calls out, “Mezzabotte, come! I have a surprise for you. Look, it’s your old friend, Angelo.”

  Angelo wears blue jeans, a T-shirt, a baseball cap and a big smile. He’s the same height as my father. Angelo and my father begin to catch up, hands flying, memories bursting into the August heat. Then my father starts to laugh so hard he spews his beer across the metal table. Reaching for his hanky, he wipes his mouth then starts roaring all over again. His face is red by the time he’s gained control.

  “It’s the engagement picture,” he says to me, shaking his head. “I wish your aunt Regina was here. She was the one who said we had to send that picture.”

  He was 34 years old when he and my mother got engaged. They had gone to a photographer on Dundas Street, not Italian, but with a nice studio with a fancy velvet chair and Roman pillars. The photographer took the picture and they paid and arranged for the photographer to send the picture to his parents in Supino.

  “Now, Angelo tells me the picture caused a scandal in Supino. Scandalo. In the photo your mother was sitting beside me, like this.” He reaches over and puts his right hand on top of mine. “You see?” he says. In those days, you were not supposed to be touching a woman before you were married. Here he was touching her and sending a photo for everyone to see.

  Before we leave the bar we promise to go to Angelo’s house for lunch the next day. I am thinking how nice it was of Rocco to set up a meeting with Angelo and my father, when my father says with a chuckle, “I don’t know this guy Angelo. Never saw him before in my life.”

  *****

  Early the next morning, Bob and I go for a walk and discover a small sanctuary about the size of a telephone booth. Beneath a grotto shell made of plaster is a statue of the Virgin Mary surrounded by several vases of carnations and four rows of votive candles. The sign stuck in the ground beside the sanctuary says: MADONNA DI LORETO.

  Later, at the Bar Italia, Rocco says, “Madonna di Loreto? I tell you all the facts. Years ago, a man left Supino and went to Detroit. Every letter he writes he tells about snow and gangsters. Then, suddenly, the man gets sick. We hear nothing more. After many months a poster goes up in front of the municipal building, announcing that the politicians are bringing a statue from Loreto. It’s after the war and there is no money for bread, let alone statues. The Supinese cast curses on the heads of the politicians. Curses as steady as rain.

  “Eventually we hear the explanation. One evening, as the man from Detroit lay dying in the hospital, the Madonna di Loreto came to visit him. It was December. In Detroit, people were shovelling snow, but in Italy the villagers from Loreto were setting the bonfires to light the way for the Holy Family and the sacred house. The man from Detroit begs for the Madonna’s help. The Virgin nods. The man gets better. He’s back in his own bed before the new year arrives. He sends money to the municipio to bring a statue from Loreto to Supino as a thank-you to the Madonna for saving his life. Now every December we build bonfires on the road from Morolo to Supino and over to the autostrada to show the Holy Family the way to their house.”

  My father’s brother, Americo, 13 years older, “stole” his wife Giovanna from Morolo when the woman’s affluent parents refused to allow their daughter to marry a poor Coletta. When she was taken, presumably against her will, they had no choice but to marry her as quickly as possible to avoid scandal. Americo was the same brother who asked his new wife to hold out her apron under the cherry tree while he dropped the fruit into the white canopy below. They called out endearments to each other and were teased by their younger siblings, but Americo confided later to my father in private that, “It’s better to have a good woman to sleep with than a cow.”

  My father says now, “Sometimes when I walked home from the market in Frosinone or Morolo and I was too tired to climb the hill to the farmhouse, I’d stay with Americo. His kids were young, but Americo let them stay up late sitting around the fire listening to ghost stories. Sometimes you could hear the werewolves howling in the night. Their voices weren’t as sweet as his wife’s, who sang beautifully. Americo liked to buy song sheets for Giovanna at fairs in the neighbouring villages. Then, she’d sing for all of us.”

  *****

  The next day, while we were at the bar for morning coffee, a navy Mercedes stops out front and a man dressed in Armani and carrying a Louis Vuitton briefcase emerges. The workers offer him a chair, a coffee, but he waves their polite gestures aside. Instead, he pulls out papers from his briefcase and instructs the workers. He speaks arrogantly. He is the official representative of the Lazio tourist office coordinating and funding the feast of San Antonio.

  He slides his sunglasses down the bridge of his sun-tanned nose, appraises me and in a husky voice full of innuendo, murmurs, “Allow me to present you with my card, Madam.” His manicured fingers catch my hand. “And you are?”

  “My wife,” replies Bob.

  The workers finally smile. Returning to the table, the stranger gives a few instructions. The villagers all nod their heads and say, “Sí. Sí.” Then the stranger returns to his car, drives off and the tension dissolves like exhaust fumes. The workers have humoured him, listened to his plans, but the lights and the ribbons will be put up the same way they have always been. The decorations are made of light balsam wood and cut into the shape of tulips, doves and water fountains. The ornaments are as wide as the street. The window workers secure the wooden shapes with pieces of blue nylon rope, tying them to shutters, or metal pipes, or whatever’s handy.

  An older woman appears at the open window. I can barely see her head above the ledge, but I can hear her voice, “No. I had that one last year. Give me the water fountain. I don’t care. Take it down if you have to. You’re Graziella’s son, no? Listen to me, bigga shot.” Then, there’s a loud bang, like the old lady has slammed her walking stick onto the floor. “On the head of San Antonio, I swear, if I have to come down there....” There’s a quick shuffle and the water fountain is handed up to her window. Tiny lights edge its wooden frame.

  We walk past the pizza shop where a line is forming, customers shouting “Duemila” to order 2,000 lire worth of pizza. The baker stops to wipe his forehead and when he looks up he sees my father.

  “Mezzabotte. Mezzabotte,” he calls. “So, it is true. You have returned. Wait. I call my wife.” By the time his wife comes out of the hot, steamy kitchen, there is bedlam in the Supino bakery. The butcher from across the street yells over that we’re from Toronto. A woman walking past stops to ask if we know her cousin, who
lives in Woodbridge. The sun’s high in the sky by the time we leave the bakery. I have a pizza in my hand, Bob has a six-pack of aranciata drinks, my father has the address of the bakery people in his back pocket. We’re going there for lunch tomorrow.

  We bump into men hanging posters by the church that announce there’s a concert tonight in honour of the feast of San Antonio, but the date stated is a week old. Despite this lack of logic my father assures us, “Everyone knows the date. It’s the same every year. The procession, the celebrations, all the same. So the poster, it’s not so important except that it’s a very fine portrait of San Antonio.”

  Inside a side door to the church vestibule is a sheer white lace curtain, a small mahogany table with curved and spindly legs, a lamp, a guest book and a fountain pen lying ready.

  A priest appears from behind the curtain and welcomes us. “This display exhibits handiwork from the beginning of the century. All of these pieces were donated to the church and preserved in their original form. Please feel free to look around and sign the guest book.”

  I touch the white crocheted altar cloth, turning under the edge to read the name: Corsi, Filomena Maria, 1926. Did my grandmother make this? It’s a narrow cloth, the material a little rough with small loops and imperfections in the weave. Along the edges are scallops, like the petals of a wild rose. A silver thread sparkles in the light, winking in and out of the hem.