IN THE HAZE, I couldn’t tell where Calabria ended and the mountains of Sicily began. We had taken off from Rome, and now the plane’s landing gear was being lowered. I was used to approaching Calabria from the ground, by way of a daylong train trip from Rome or Naples. This trip took less than an hour. For the first time, I saw Calabria’s jagged coast from the air. The mountains ended; then a larger set of mountains towered above them.“Is that Sicily?” I asked the man sitting next to me. He turned to me; his face was stern, but his eyes were warm. He wore a dark blue suit and was obviously returning home from business.
“No, it’s Calabria.”
“So far away?”
“It’s not so far.” He looked out the window again and began pointing out towns. “There’s Pizzo. On the other side of that peninsula is Tropea, and farther is Palmi.” When he turned to smile, he seemed immediately familiar, someone I’d known all my life but saw rarely.
“These are the mountains of Le Serre; those,” he said, pointing
to the tall dark range, “are the Aspromonte. Sicily is beyond, far beyond.”
We had descended through the haze, and I could now clearly see where the blue water met the beaches. I spotted villages that filled gorges and crevices in the mountains.
“Is this your first time in Calabria?”
“No, I’ve been here several times, but never arrived by air.”
“Are you from Rome?”
“No, I’m American. I’m visiting relatives in a little village outside Catanzaro.”
“Oh, really? Which village?”
“Gimigliano.”
He looked at me, shocked. “That’s where I’m from. Excuse me, what’s your name?”
“Rotella.”
“That’s my wife’s name. My name’s Ventura … Tonino.”
His tight mouth softened, and he searched my face, I was sure, for a hint of something familiar. I did the same, and thought I saw a family resemblance. Although he was short and thin, he had the sad eyes and downturned mouth of my uncle Tom, my father’s youngest brother, who still lives in Danbury.
He asked if he could give me a lift from the airport. I thanked him and told him that someone was picking me up.
“Then we’ll see each other in Gimigliano.”
Ours was the only plane on the tarmac. We faced the rust-colored airport. A dozen circular windows on top faced the sea. I imagined that the architects who had designed the building had intended for the airport to reflect the seaside setting, a ship with portals. It reminded me, though, of a building in a 1960s Jacques Tati film called Mon Oncle, in which a house had two large, circular windows that looked like eyes. I felt as if the eyes of Calabria were peering at me.
My bags were among the last to come off the conveyor belt. As I walked out of the baggage claim to the central terminal, I searched the terminal for Giuseppe. And just as I spotted him, he caught sight of me. He took a last sip of his caffé, left money on the bar, and casually walked over as if it had been two days, not two years, since
we’d last seen each other. As he greeted me with Italian double-cheek kisses, he took my bags, directed me to the bar, and ordered two more cups of caffé, demitasses of espresso.
“Have you been well?”
“Yes, thanks. And your family?”
“Non c’è male,” he said—not bad. It was a way that Calabresi answer; even if all is going well, you don’t want to jinx what is good in life.
“I hear you met Tonino,” Giuseppe said, smiling.
“How did you know?” I sipped the coffee; even here, in a tiny airport, it tasted better than anything in New York.
“I saw him on the way out. I think he’s a distant relative of yours,” he said, then asked: “Your father … when will he come again?”
“In two months,” I said. “I’ll bring Martha and my folks back for the festival.”
Giuseppe registered approval with a nod and a low, chesty “Bene.” To Giuseppe—and all my relatives—my father was the Calabrese son, returning from America. He held a fascination for them. I was simply the son of the prodigal son—more American than Calabrese, a blood relation but little more.
Giuseppe stopped at the newsstand to make sure that the owner had stocked enough of his postcards—and to pick up his monthly payment. On his way out he noticed an illustrated map of Calabria.
“No,” he said to himself. He turned to the owner and said, “Mimmo, this one is crude; look at the one I made.” He opened his briefcase and pulled out a map on heavyweight glossy paper, with illustrations of tourist attractions over the name of each city.
The proprietor looked at it, pursed his mouth approvingly, then shrugged his shoulders. They discussed price and quantity, and the store owner agreed to stock them when the ones he had ran out.
Puffs of cumulous clouds dotted Calabria’s great blue skies. We walked out the automatic doors, and the cool air hit us. I got goose bumps.
“Fa freddo oggi,” I said to Giuseppe.
“Sì, the cold air came in last night. It’s been warm here for months.”
“Is it usually this cold?” I asked.
“No, we should have had this cold last month when it was so hot. But in April you never know.”
I had decided to come to Calabria in April so as to be present during Easter, one of Italy’s biggest holidays, when everyone would be with family. While I knew that I wouldn’t feel the intense summer heat, I had assumed that spring would have begun to settle in, and I hoped that this cold was just passing.
Outside, I almost didn’t recognize Giuseppe’s dark gray sedan: the paint had dulled, the wheel covers were missing, and a large scrape ran along the driver’s side back door to the front door.
“What happened here?”
“A drunk driver hit me … about a month ago.”
Still, the Fiat’s heft and composition set it apart from the other smaller, cheaply built Fiat models in the parking lot.
“I want to show you something,” Giuseppe said, calling me around to the trunk. He lifted the lid and took out two cardboard envelopes, each about a foot long and six inches high. He opened the first and showed me galley proofs of a book he’d been working on, a book on Calabria. Each page displayed one of Giuseppe’s photos, with a description in Italian, German, French, and English below There were about sixty pages of beaches, Norman towers, excavations of Greek cities, Byzantine villages.
“It’s fortunate you came today because I have to send them back this afternoon. A day later, and you wouldn’t have seen them.”
He slid the proof pages back into their cardboard casing—the same one that had been sent to him—taped it shut, scratched out his address, then readdressed the package to the publisher in Milan.
He opened another cardboard box about the same size and pulled out more proofs, photos of small lifelike figures carved from clay. Each figure, dressed in nineteenth-century costume, represented an artisan working an individual craft. There were wine makers, farmers, weavers, and cobblers, each one set against a detailed backdrop. One image was of a woman kneading dough; behind her was a brick oven in a field of olive trees.
“This was life here last century … and even the beginning of this century,” Giuseppe said. “And tomorrow we are going to the country to do this,” he said, pointing to the image of the bread maker.
He turned to the center of the book to a heading that read “The Museum of Science and Industry.” There was a photo of a three-foot model ship enclosed in a glass case. “All of this was designed and built by a man who lives in Tropea, but his family is from Gimigliano,” Giuseppe said.
“Can we visit him?”
Giuseppe flashed a smile. “We will.”
Lamezia Terme is a coastal plain that begins at the Tyrrhenian Sea and stretches between the foothills of two mountain ranges, the Sila and the Aspromonte. Three villages make up the region: Nicastro, with thirty-five thousand people; Sambiase, with nineteen thousand; and Sant’Eufemia Lamezia, a village of about four thousand. It is on the shores of Lamezia that many believe Odysseus washed up and was greeted by Nausicaa, a mesmerizing girl from a village where Tiriolo, the sister city of Gimigliano, now stands.
We drove up a small hill, into the tiniest village, Sant’Eufemia Lamezia, which has a few hotels and the region’s two most important hubs of transportation—the airport and train station. Apartment buildings constructed in the 1970s lined the streets. These newer buildings looked older, more worn than the few older ones scattered throughout the village. Tiny stores filled the first floors of these buildings. Lining the gently sloping street below us, the buildings parted and the sea opened up.
“Do you mind if I stop off at two places for work?” Giuseppe asked me.
I said I didn’t, and Giuseppe stopped the car and went into a store. Through the window I could see toys displayed, as well as a couple of racks of postcards. A small hotel abutted the card store. Within a few minutes, Giuseppe returned. The half smile on his face belied anger, but in typical Calabrese fashion, he said nothing. I remember
my father once telling me, “Never let them know what you’re thinking. Never let them know what you’re feeling.” It was sound advice, but I was always too emotional to follow it.
Giuseppe got in the car, closed his door lightly, and started his engine. He put his car into gear, paused, turned to me, and said, “They never have enough money. They sell the postcards but claim to have already spent the money, that they have made no profits.”
“How often does this happen?” I asked.
“More often than not. You have to come the right time of month.”
We drove to what seemed to be the outskirts of Sant’Eufemia, along a strip of garages and storefronts with their metal gates pulled down. Giuseppe pulled off the side of the road across the street from a store whose front windows had been papered over.
“Last year two people were killed here in Lamezia,” Giuseppe said. “And it was Christmas.”
“Who’s doing the killing?”
“Mostly the mafia. They kill themselves.”
Inside, two young men in their twenties sat at a desk; one guy set down his cell phone, the other stopped clicking on an old computer, as Giuseppe announced himself.
“I told Signore Biamonte to meet me here at two.”
The man at the computer, annoyed to have been walked in on, shrugged his shoulders. “He’s in the other warehouse.”
“Please call him and tell him I’m here.”
The man reached out to the other man for the phone.
The narrow room went deep. Boxes were stacked up on shelves along the walls, and two hydraulic hand trucks, left in mid-job, were parked in the center of the room. It was a shipping warehouse for toys and gifts and, I assumed, postcards.
“He’ll be here in ten minutes,” the young man said.
Giuseppe nodded and crossed his arms. I did likewise. There we stood, halfway between the desk and front door, looking around the room in silence.
“Are those your postcards?” I asked him, pointing to a stack of cards on the table next to the phone.
Giuseppe shook his head. I took his cue that we were to stand impassively.
Cheap gifts filled the shelves of the front room. There were stuffed bears wearing the colors of Juventus and AC Milan soccer teams; shrink-wrapped bow and arrow sets—complete with the suction cup and cheap string of the kind any American kid who grew up in the sixties would remember—covered the shelf. New York street-cop sets lay in neat rows on another shelf; each set included a badge, handcuffs, a flashlight, and a black plastic gun, the kind that’s illegal in New York because it’s often been mistaken for a real one. On the cardboard packaging was a cheap color drawing of a New York cop in action—though it looked more like a character from Adam 12.
My first day back in Calabria, and I was acting as muscle for Giuseppe. When he said business, I had envisioned a congenial swap of postcards for a check.
Giuseppe cleared his throat. “Excuse me, boys, but it has now been fifteen minutes.”
The two young men looked at the phone on the counter and turned to Giuseppe. “He said he would be here, but he’s with another client.”
“Yes, but the client with whom he had an appointment twenty minutes ago is here now”
The white-shirted man lifted his palms and glanced around the room as if searching for answers. The other man looked down at his feet as his toe tapped from side to side.
“Tell him I came by and that I will stop by again tomorrow.”
As we walked out, Giuseppe rolled his eyes. “Nothing, nothing I do will make them come out of hiding. No one has money to pay me for my postcards! … Are you hungry?” he asked.
I nodded.
“Good, let’s get something to eat!”
In Calabria, your expectations are never met head-on. You can’t expect to just fly into Calabria and settle into your hotel. Something is bound to interrupt the flow; something will catch you off guard.
I decided then to simply let Giuseppe show me his Calabria.