MY GRANDFATHER SHOT A MAN over my grandmother. My father told me the story on that first trip together to Calabria. He and I have always been close, but that trip brought back to my father a rush of memories that he felt compelled to share.The evening we spent in Catanzaro, the day before we took the train to Gimigliano, he and I had walked the passeggiata along Corso Mazzini, which ends as the road skirts the edge of the cliff. A railing was the only thing that separated you from the sheer drop to the valley.
My father and I got gelato cones, sat on a bench, and looked out over the Ionian Sea.
“I gotta tell you,” he said. “Days would go by when there was absolutely nothing to do. No movies, no streets to cruise—hardly any cars. I remember one day I got so bored that I joined a few guys—they were about my age, twenty-one or even younger—on a walk, and we ended up raiding some farmers’ fields.
“Of course we didn’t destroy anything, and we took only what
we could eat. But at the end of the afternoon we sat down in the woods, opened a bottle of wine, and ate fresh figs and the sweetest peas.”
Swallows flew above us as we crunched into our cones.
“I never told you the story about Grandpa, did I?” my father asked.
He didn’t need a response because he knew he had never told me.
“It was in 1958, I guess,” my father began. “I had just met your mother, but my mother was going back to Italy and insisted that I come along as her escort.”
He was twenty-one; it was Grandma’s first visit back since she had emigrated in 1936. Upon their arrival by steamer in Naples, they realized some of their luggage had been misplaced. They were told the luggage would be forwarded to Catanzaro in a week; then they took the train—probably along the same tracks that my grandmother traveled when she first left Calabria—down through Campania, Basilicata, and Lamezia, where they changed again for Catanzaro and finally Gimigliano.
The entire family greeted them at the station and brought them to Gimigliano Inferiore; they would spend the next three months with my grandmother’s older sister, Caterina, whose house rested on the highest point of Inferiore’s plateau, just before the mountain rose farther to Superiore. The steep mule path that connected Inferiore with Superiore cut directly in front of their doorway
They were given the top floor of the house, with a patio overlooking the rest of Inferiore as well as the valley below and the mountains directly across. My father stood on the edge and breathed in the cool mountain air. He had just been discharged from the navy, where he served almost five years on a battleship. He was lucky to have missed the Korean War. His military haircut had grown out into a pompadour, but his arms still displayed their tight sinews of muscle. He had just met an eighteen-year-old girl named Murielle La Fontaine working at a five-and-dime in Danbury and was eager to find his first job out of the service. He looked out at the view, at
the village below him. He saw fields of grapes, olives, and figs. His first thought was, What the hell am I doing here?
It occurred to me, as he was telling the story, that I had brought him to Calabria for my own reasons, just as Grandma had done, and that he had come along more out of obligation than desire.
Shortly after they arrived, Caterina, who had been cooking all of the day before and most of the morning, began placing a banquet on the table. It seemed as if the entire village squeezed its way around the dining room table, all shouting questions at Grandma and my father. The women cupped my grandmother’s cheeks and grabbed her arms; they were all amazed at how large Angelina had become. Her face had always been smooth and beautiful, but twenty years of Americanized Italian food had rounded her jowls.
She smiled and began to speak. From a person who could barely speak a word of English, her first words to her relatives were “So, howa issa evvabody?”
The room went silent. Her brothers and sisters all stared at her.
“Ma,” my father said, “what’s wrong? Parla italiano!”
“Joey, I’ma sorry, but I forgotta alla my Italian.” After twenty years of living in the United States—and missing Gimigliano every day—she wanted to show off her English.
After the siesta my father and Grandma took a walk through the village’s tiny piazza.
“Ma, what are you doing?” my father asked. “Why didn’t you speak Italian? You write to them every month in Italian, but suddenly you don’t remember it?”
“It just comes and goes,” my grandma responded in Italian.
“You’re back for the first time since you left and you’re not going to speak in Italian?”
My grandma changed the subject. “Well, tomorrow we are going to have dinner with—”
“Angelina, is that you?” a voice to the side of them called out. A man who must have been in his late seventies stood up from the bench he was sitting on. “How are you, Angelina?”
“Non c’è male,” my grandmother said—not bad. “How are you, Pino?”
“You know, the same,” Pino answered, looking at a point just above my father and his mother.
“We’ll see you later, Pino,” my grandmother said.
“Sì, si.”
My father realized that the man, looking now beyond them, was blind and had recognized my grandmother by her voice.
The next day, when my father and his mother came down to Caterina’s kitchen for lunch, four people they had never seen before sat along one side of the dining table: two middle-aged adults, a young man my father’s age, and a girl of sixteen, who was blushing. The two men rose to shake my father’s hand, and one introduced my father to his daughter, Maria.
The family had brought cakes and nuts, bowls of figs and strawberries, and bottles of homemade wine. Caterina served dinner—chicken, which was saved for special occasions. Throughout the meal Maria kept looking at my father and turned away whenever he looked at her. At the end of the meal they all agreed to take a walk through the village.
It didn’t take long for my father to realize that he and Maria were walking about twenty feet ahead of everyone else. He turned back to see that the dinner group had swelled to about two dozen people; old ladies all mumbled intently to one another as Grandma smiled knowingly.
My father decided to break the ice—and to give the old ladies some excitement.
“Where do you live?” my father asked.
“Not too far away,” Maria answered. “Over on the other side of the mountain, in Tiriolo.”
“Do you like music?” he asked.
She nodded a tentative yes.
“What kind of music? Rock and roll?”
She lightly shrugged her shoulders.
At the end of the night, when Maria and her family had gone home, my father walked into his mother’s room as she was getting ready for bed.
“Ma, what are you doing?”
“Whatta you mean, Joey? I no doohah nothin. They justa show up.”
Every night for the next week a new family would arrive, bringing food and yet another daughter. And every night my father, not wanting to appear rude, played along. Besides stealing fruit with his young cousins (which my father explained they did almost every afternoon while everyone else was taking a siesta), these late-afternoon strolls were my father’s only diversion in the tiny medieval village.
Then, one late afternoon, a man showed up in a three-wheeled APE—a cross between a motorcycle and a small pickup truck—to drive my father to Catanzaro to retrieve the lost baggage. His face was thick with creases and covered with two-day-old bristles; without breaking a smile, he motioned for my father to get in. My father squeezed in and closed the flimsy door. The man reached in front of my father and took the handlebar, in effect locking my father in place.
They drove for two hours, up through the mountains and down to the coast. With every turn and bump the man’s elbow ground into my father’s chest. Wondering why the man didn’t use his other hand to steer, my father glanced at his left arm and saw that he, in fact, had no left arm.
They reached Catanzaro in silence, loaded the baggage onto the bed of the truck, and set back out to Gimigliano as the sun dropped behind the mountains. The sky darkened; my father often lost sight of the edge of the road.
“We’ll pull over to eat,” the man said, some of the first words he spoke.
He slowed the APE as they crested a hill and pulled over to a wide section of the shoulder. It had become cold. He made a fire and sat down to watch the embers burn. The light from the fire cast shadows on his rough face, exaggerating the crevices.
“Do you know what happened to my arm?”
“No,” my father said. “Was it in the war? A farming accident?”
“No,” the man said, his eyes narrowing. “Your father shot me.”
My father froze. This is it, he thought. The vendetta.
“It was back before the Second World War, well before the war,” the man explained. “Most Italian boys were in Ethiopia.”
From hunting together in the woods in Connecticut, my father knew how perfect Grandpa’s aim was. And he knew that Grandpa, not wanting to kill this man, had undoubtedly intentionally shot him in the arm. “What happened? Did you go to the police?”
The man grinned. “No, no. It was my fault. I knew that your mother was engaged to someone back in l’America. But I loved your mother, and I thought she loved me.
“I was wrong … and your father had no choice. He had to save face,” the man went on, shrugging as if my grandfather’s response were the most logical action. He looked back down at the flames, then offered my father a sandwich of hard sheep’s cheese, onion, and tomato.
And so they ate and talked about the Calabria of long ago.
My earliest impression of old Calabria is a memory of a time before I was born. It is a memory of my father’s, told to me so often and so vividly that it has become my own.
On Sundays my father would awaken to the aroma of garlic, olive oil, and tomatoes. His mother would send him and his four brothers and sisters off to church, while she would prepare dinner. Most of the time when they returned, the table would be set for just my father and his parents and siblings. Sometimes my grandmother would set a buffet for relatives and friends.
There would be an antipasto platter of cheeses from the milk of sheep and cows, soppressata, capicola, and salame. Grandma would then serve homemade fettuccine and ragù (which she called “maccheroni and gravy”) simmered with pepperoni and her version of braciole (which she pronounced rah-zhol’), oblong meatballs infused with herbs and cheese. The men would pour themselves wine that Grandpa had made.
For the next course, Grandma would pull out of the oven a
roasted chicken or rabbit on a bed of sliced potatoes. Bowls of sauteed spinach, dandelion greens, broccoli rabe, or zucchini would follow. She would place in the center of the table a dish of hot Italian peppers, which only she and my grandfather would eat, along with any other Calabrese adults who were present. They would either slice them onto the maccheroni and gravy or nibble on them between bites. (My grandmother once told my father that when she was pregnant with him, she craved hot peppers.)
This was a typical Calabrese dinner—eaten in Danbury, Connecticut.
After those dinners with the extended family members, people would migrate outside to the picnic table under the grape arbor. Grandpa would bring out his concertina and play folk songs as the older relatives joined in singing.
My grandfather, Filippo Rotella, was almost a quarter century older than my grandmother and had lived in America from the time he was eighteen. He was quiet, and he worked hard; although he spoke several languages, English was the one he knew least.
I knew Grandpa as a retired Stetson milliner who had once worked as a gravedigger and stonemason. The community records in Gimigliano seemed to end with him. His mother had died when he was two; his sister had married young and moved north to Milan. His father had moved to America and, many years later, died in Danbury. But almost everything else remains a mystery to me. Even when I went back to Gimigliano, no one could recall him or his family. He had outlived all his friends and relatives in Danbury, leaving only one person, my father’s uncle Frank Critelli (a nephew of Grandma’s, who was nevertheless older than she), who was old enough to remember Grandpa as a young man. As my father was growing up, Frank Critelli would narrate pieces of the life of my dad’s father.
After emigrating, my grandfather first lived in Niagara Falls, where, at twenty-two years old, he enlisted in the army during World War I. During his twenties and into the Depression, he was a rumrunner who, working for the Irish mob, supplied cities from Buffalo down to New York with booze. We have pictures of my
grandfather dressed in well-tailored suits and nicely polished shoes, a fedora on his head mischievously tilted to one side. I remember my father often saying, “The only difference between my old man and John Kennedy’s was that his was a more successful bootlegger.” Story has it that at one point my grandfather was chased by police coming out of Canada. He wrecked his car off the side of the road, crawled out, and found his way to a Seneca Indian reservation, where he hid out for several months.
My grandfather taught my father how to grow tomatoes and vegetables, cultivate grapes and make wine, raise rabbits and chickens. My father learned how to slaughter pigs, as well as the rabbits and chickens he had raised. Whatever he learned, his father had taught him the old Calabrese way.
My father was eleven years old the first time he killed a rabbit for Sunday dinner. He had seen his father do it many times before. Suspending the rabbit by the hind legs, his father would give a single swift chop to the back of the neck. A clean kill. With his father standing by, my father picked up a rabbit by the hind legs. At first the rabbit was still, but sensing my father’s nervousness, it began to squirm. After my father gave it a hesitant blow to the back of the neck, the rabbit squealed like a baby. My father hit the rabbit again. It continued to squeal and writhe. His own father looked on patiently.
Flustered, my father let go of the rabbit, which fell to the ground in a shocked lump. He reached for the thing closest to him, a shovel leaning against the garage, and whacked the rabbit over the head. The deed was done; my father’s heart sank at having just killed the rabbit he had raised.
After Sunday dinner under the grape arbor, the music from my grandfather’s concertina got everyone talking, singing, dancing. With a pipe in his mouth, hat cocked to the side, my grandfather would start off with a fast tarantella. By dusk the exhausted guests would relax, stretching out on the grass, or settling into their chairs under the grape arbor. The music slowed to a lament. As Grandpa caressed the buttons and depressed the bellows, he would hum along, his pipe poking out of the side of his mouth. The music became
softer, the conversation quieter. At some point my grandfather would fall asleep. One of his daughters would take his hat off and ease the concertina out of his hands. But the pipe would remain clenched between his teeth.
My father and his siblings were the last people in the family to experience old Calabria.