AT THE BAR, Maria was wearing a neat gray skirt and a beautiful knitted black sweater. She had put on mascara and added color to her high cheekbones, but her eyes were sad. She placed the cappuccino in front of me, then opened the silver sugar dish for easy access to the spoon. These silver dishes are ubiquitous throughout Italy, and the welcome gesture of opening the dish usually accompanies the caffè when the bartender is not too busy.I smiled at Maria and furrowed my eyebrows inquisitively. “Buona Pasqua,” I said.
“This is always a hard holiday,” she said.
I was about to ask her why when the door swung open and a well-dressed gray-haired man walked in. He was tan and wore a beige camel-hair sport coat and nicely tailored pants. A wide Windsor knot separated his lapels, and a dark blue wool coat was draped over his shoulders. This was Maria’s husband, Ciccio Paonessa.
He shook my hand, and with a sincere buona Pasqua, he motioned to Maria to pour me a drink. Three more men came in, dressed in jackets and ties. Maria set two glasses of brandy in front of us.
“No, I can’t,” I said. “Too early in the morning.”
“Too early?” Ciccio said. “It’s Easter!”
Everyone laughed. I sipped a glass of anisette, a licorice liqueur, that Maria had set down instead. It was a cold, damp morning, and all the men were huddled in the local bar drinking and telling stories. This is what it must feel like to be in Ireland—except there I’d be drinking whiskey rather than a sweet liqueur.
I offered to buy the next round, but Maria’s husband, Ciccio, stepped back with his hands in the air. “What are you doing? You’re a guest here. You can’t pay.”
The wine maker who had taken me up to Superiore the day before bought the bar a round of his wine.
After that was drunk, Maria’s husband leaned over and said, “Have you ever had amaro?”
“No,” I said. “What is it?”
“It’s a special Calabrese liqueur, made from herbs over in Tropea.”
Maria poured us each a shot. The drink warmed me as it went down. It was slightly medicinal but had a sweet aftertaste. There was no food in my stomach; my head felt light, and my body tingled. It was nine-twenty Easter mass was to begin in ten minutes.
Mimmo Mercante, a tall man with a gentle face and a goatee, brought in his clarinet. He, like Gino Cantafio, with whom I had walked the procession two nights before, teaches music to high school students in Catanzaro. Another man, in his late thirties like Mimmo, brought out a guitar. In the back of the room, cutting through the sound of chatter and playing through the smoke, the two musicians broke into a Calabrese folk song. Mimmo’s friend sang in a raspy voice that strained to keep the high notes from disappearing in his throat.
I ordered another caffè. Ciccio, smiling, held a hand up to Maria and insisted I have another drink instead.
“No, I really shouldn’t. I’m going to Easter mass.”
“Even better reason for another drink,” Ciccio said. Clearly none of these men would be going to mass. While their wives worshiped, they would stick around and drink, decamping for the church toward
the end of the service. Even so, they wore their Sunday best; church or no church, Easter in Calabria was still a holiday.
Myself, I was my grandmother and grandfather combined. I was dutifully going to mass but not before having a quick drink with my friends.
“I just ordered a coffee,” I said, shrugging my shoulders as if to say, “Oh, well, maybe next time.”
“Aaah, but this will make the coffee go down that much better.” Maria’s husband poured a shot of anisette into the caffè and patted my shoulder: I had no choice but to drink it down.
Maria smiled at me as if I were a lost child.
I smiled back. “Are you going to mass?”
She nodded. “But then my husband and I will go to the cemetery and leave flowers for my parents.” She paused and ran a wet rag along the counter. “This is a hard time of year,” she repeated.
I stepped out into the cool air and began a wobbly descent as the last church bells rang. The sun broke through the clouds for the first time in days.
I entered the church just as the doors were closing and found a spot behind a group of teenage boys in the back. I knew I must have reeked of cigarette smoke and sweet alcohol.
From the corner of my eye, I saw someone waving. It was Elena, Giuseppe’s wife, who had brought her mother to mass. Obviously, Giuseppe and the his sons had decided to stay home.
I waved back, thankful that she wasn’t any closer.
The church felt alive with energy. The yellow stucco walls seemed even brighter than the week before. Above the altar, in this church as well, Christ took a back seat to the Virgin. I focused my eyes on the statue of the Virgin Mary; the angels floating around her came to life.
“Marco!” came a voice that was something between a whisper and a yell. “Marco!” It was Luisa’s son Francesco, in the very front pew. Now he strode down the center aisle where the priest stood, awaiting the music for his procession to the altar.
“Marco, vieni,” Francesco said, beckoning me with a cupped hand.
I pointed to the pew “It’s okay, I’ll stay here.”
He furrowed his eyebrows and frowned. I pointed to the priest and shook my head as a way of saying, “But it’s too late.”
Now the priest glanced back at me. I was sure he could smell the alcohol. I nodded deferentially, put on a dopey smile, and stumbled up the aisle. Francesco took my hand and walked me to the pew, where he put a program in my hand and gave me a hymnal opened to the correct page. As the procession began, I turned around and saw, a few pews behind me, Luisa and Sabrina and Zia Caterina and her friends; they waved, excited to see me there: a man at mass and in the very first pew.
After mass, Luisa and Francesco led me back to Zia Angela’s house, where Sabrina and Masino had been waiting. The women busied themselves setting the table for the paschal feast. There were tagliatelle with tomato sauce and sliced hot green peppers; sausage frittata; sauteed fennel; and finally, the freshly slaughtered, perfectly roasted lamb with baby potatoes.
During the course of my stay my cousins had been curious about my role at home. Luisa and Sabrina marveled at my skills as a husband. I cooked, did laundry—and here in Italy I offered to help set the table for Easter dinner.
Whenever I mentioned the work I did around the house—cooking, cleaning, laundry—Masino and Tommaso looked on in disbelief, while Luisa and Sabrina nodded approvingly, praising me in front of their husbands. But no matter how much Luisa and Sabrina complimented me, I couldn’t help thinking that they considered me just as much a candy-ass as did Tommaso and Masino.
“Here men don’t do anything,” Sabrina said. “They’re lazy.”
Tommaso wished me a buoua Pasqua, then sniffed. “Marco, have you been drinking?”
I cringed and softly admitted that I had had a drink or two at the café.
“A drink or two.” Tommaso turned to Masino and tilted a thumb sprouting from a cup-formed hand back to his mouth.
Just then we sat down for dinner.
“Make sure you pile up Marco’s plate,” Tommaso said.
“Why more than usual?” Luisa asked.
Masino stifled a laugh and added, “He needs the fortification.”
“He needs what?” Sabrina asked.
“Yes, he needs food badly or else he’s going to have a headache,” said Tommaso.
“What’s this?” Zia Angela said, serving me a double portion.
Tommaso feigned incredulity. “I can’t believe it, that on Easter our American friend Marco has gotten drunk!”
“What? When?” all three women demanded.
Masino and Tommaso could barely contain themselves. I could tell they wanted to exploit my faults, especially after hearing how enlightened I was.
“They just kept offering,” I tried to explain.
Sabrina cut me off. “Oh, yes, that’s always the case with men. It’s never their fault.”
We finished the meal with apples, nuts, and lupini beans, and finally, caffè and a torta di nocciola, hazelnut cake, by which time I was drunk no more.
After dinner and a brief rest, I walked through the village by myself. The smell of wood fires filled the air. With everyone inside napping or spending time with their families I felt alone, and the usually comforting scent of woodsmoke made me want to be back in New York with my wife.
Gradually people emerged from their Easter afternoon slumber; the passeggiata swelled. I poked my head inside a large bar on the piazza in Gimigliano Superiore, where I immediately spotted Giacomino and another young man named Giuseppe. I joined them.
A discussion on Calabria’s economy led to a conversation on finding work in the north, which then turned into one on the self-image of the Calabresi.
“They’re hypocrites,” said Giuseppe, who, in his twenties, was an accounting student at the university in Catanzaro.
“Hypocrites? Why?” I asked.
“The Calabresi are proud to be known as kind, warm, and open. It’s a nice self-image to have,” Giuseppe said, pushing his glasses farther up on his nose. He was one of the few men my age who wore glasses; in a country where looking good is an art form, most men and women wear contacts. “But while they help their own families and friends, they are arrogant toward others.”
“Is that hypocrisy? Or is that just a stereotype that they enjoy?” I asked.
“It is a stereotype, but it’s hypocrisy because they want everyone to believe it. The Calabresi are calculating, they are proud”—Giuseppe paused for a minute—“and they know exactly what they are doing. We are not just a bunch of stubborn, smiling fools.”
Giacomino went to the bar and returned with glasses of wine for the three of us.
“It’s almost insulting to say that we Calabresi are simply warm,” Giuseppe continued. “We are just as warm as anyone else; we are just as calculating as anyone else. We are really not so different.”
“Do you know what they call us up north?” Giacomino interrupted. “They call us terrone.” His face crunched together and turned red as he enunciated each syllable, spitting out the word with all the hatred he felt.
Terrone translates as “of the earth.” It carries the same impact, the same anger and disgust, as the word “nigger.” Many northern Italians regard southerners—anyone south of Rome (or south of the Po River, according to extremists)—with much the same contempt as white Americans long bestowed upon blacks.
However, as immigrants—Albanians, Moroccans, Africans, Russians, Ukrainians—have arrived in Italy, the younger generation of southern Italians faces less prejudice than their forebears did. Prejudice now is directed at the immigrants—especially Albanians, Moroccans, and black Africans. Meanwhile, southerners call those north of Rome polentoni, or polenta heads, for their love of polenta, cakes of fried or baked cornmeal. But to me this term simply doesn’t carry
the same weight; it is akin to a black man’s calling a white person a cracker.
Debora and Rosanna, two of the women I had met on Good Friday, came in smoking cigarettes, along with Stefano, Debora’s younger brother. Stefano was in his final year of high school, where he studied the French horn and the trumpet. His dark curly hair framed a pleasantly inquisitive face.
“I visited America once,” Stefano said in broken English.
“Where?” I asked in English, and when he looked puzzled: “Dove?”
“Ah, yes. Toronto,” he answered.
“Oh, in Canada?”
“Yes, Canada. My relatives live there,” he said, and we spoke of geography, as I explained to him that Niagara Falls, though in New York, is nowhere near New York City.
Thousands of Calabresi have settled in Niagara Falls and elsewhere in upstate New York, all along the Erie Canal, as well as throughout eastern Canada. When Calabresi think of America, their image is often of Canada. Just about everyone who emigrated from Gimigliano went to Niagara Falls, Toronto, or Danbury, and the Festa della Madonna di Porto is celebrated even in Toronto.
Giacomino put his arm around me. To me, he was like a gentle giant, though I suspected he was capable of exploding when provoked.
He handed me a book. “I know you are a writer, so I feel safe showing you this. I know you’ll understand. I mean, not many people here do,” he said. The title was The Boss Is Alone; the endpaper showed a flow chart of hierarchy within the mafia.
“You should read this so you can understand the mentality of people here,” he said. However terrifying the mafia was, there was nevertheless a sense of pride in knowing that your countrymen were capable of influencing not just local politics but the entire government. I was surprised by how similar this complicated sentiment was to that in the States: while many Italian-Americans cry out against their stereotypical, derogatory portrayal in movies that glorify the mafia, just as many revel in the power the mafia dons wield.
“What effect does the mafia have here in Calabria?” I asked. Giacomino shrugged. “The mafia isn’t as strong now—Calabria isn’t as isolated from the rest of Italy—but people are still cautious. It’s just woven into society.” I felt that he didn’t actually know much about the mafia—in Calabria or in general—and definitely hadn’t felt its influence firsthand. With another glance at the book, I realized it was about the Cosa Nostra in Sicily, not the ’ndrangheta in Calabria.
He opened the book to the middle, where a sheet of paper had been folded and tucked away. “But this is really what I wanted to show you.”
He looked up at everyone to make sure that no one else was looking—everybody was busy talking—and carefully uncreased it with his large hands and presented it to me. Three short poems had been printed by hand on the lined page.
“Thank you,” I said. I was genuinely touched—and happy to meet another writer. The Calabresi-Italians, for that matter—consider writing, along with reading, an antisocial activity
“Figurati, Marco,” Giacomino said—it’s nothing. Then he averted his eyes. “This is really embarrassing. I mean, it’s personal, but then again, it’s not.”
At that moment Rosanna swooped down and plucked the paper out of his hands. “What’s this? Is it poetry?”
“Rosanna, please,” Giacomino said.
“Giacomino, is this yours?”
“Yes, but, Rosanna, I want Marco’s professional eyes to read it.”
“But poetry is meant to be read aloud.”
“Rosanna,” Giacomino said testily, then settled back in his chair, resigned.
“Ooh, this is juicy,” Rosanna said.
She read the first poem, which was about ten lines long. She giggled at the outset, as did everyone else, but soon the laughter subsided. The poet was content to die upon merely breathing in the sweet scent of his beloved’s skin.
“This is all so erotic, isn’t it?” Rosanna teased. “Let’s read the next one! It’s titled ‘Virginity.’”
“Let’s read that one,” Debora said.
Giacomino stood up and swiped the poems from her hand. “Rosanna, when you’re able to understand poetry, you can read it.”
We finished our drinks and headed out into the cold evening. Rosanna and Debora went home; Stefano, Giacomino, Giuseppe, and I went up to the Millennium for pizza and more wine.
“Marco, now for something even more personal,” Giacomino said once we had settled in and removed our coats. “Can I ask a favor of you?”
“Of course. What is it?” I wondered what could be more personal than sharing one’s poems.
“Do you like boxing?” he asked.
“Yes, I do,” I said. I was a fight fan back home.
“Me, too. Who’s your favorite fighter?”
“Roy Jones, Jr.,” I said, naming a quick, powerful middleweight from Florida. “I didn’t think Italians liked the fights.”
“Not many. That’s why it’s embarrassing,” he said. “And my favorite is Mike Tyson.”
“Now that is embarrassing. He was great at one time, but now he’s just a circus act.”
“Yes, I know,” he said. “But he’s big and powerful. I was hoping that when you come back, you could bring a poster.”
I said it might be hard to find such a poster in the States. “Boxing isn’t as popular as it once was.”
“I know, I know. It’s too much to ask of you. Forgive me.”
I told him I would do my best. Then I ordered another liter of wine.
“You know, I used to live abroad,” Giacomino said, returning to our earlier conversation. When southerners talk about going abroad—all’estero—to work, they usually mean to northern Italy. “I tried to find work in Milan,” Giacomino continued. “I wanted to do good, to make a living. But it’s tough. I got involved with the wrong people.” He waved his hand to dismiss the thought. “There’s no work here, and only work for northerners in the north.”
Stefano nodded in a way that suggested he sympathized with Giacomino’s experience but thought there was more to the story. When
Giacomino got up to find the waiter, Stefano leaned over the table and said softly, “It’s not like that everywhere. Some people feel it; some don’t. I think Giacomino feels it more than others.”
“And you, do you think you’ll go north?”
“I don’t know If I can play French horn down here, I’ll stay Maybe I’ll go to Toronto. Maybe I’ll go with my sister to Rome to study.” Debora was in her third year at the University of Rome.
“I’ll leave,” Giuseppe said, with a tone of disgust.
It was getting late. We drank the wine, paid the tab, then walked out once again into the cold, wet night.
“I could use some coffee,” Giacomino said.
On the other side of the piazza we ran into Gatto and Vincenzo, who decided to come with us to a small dark café along Corso America. The only other people in the place were some rough-looking guys about our age, who had clearly passed the evening drinking.
When we walked in, one of them was talking about a woman he knew, whom he described as a slut. Giacomino turned to the speaker, a wiry man in a leather jacket and with a couple of days’ beard, and said, “I don’t think you should say that.”
“What the fuck do you care?” he said with a shrug. “She’s not your girlfriend; you hardly even know her.”
Giacomino drew closer to the man. “I just don’t think you should say that, especially a pig like you.”
Before I could even take a sip of my coffee, the two began swinging at each other, and everyone else squared off, with each fighter’s friends halfheartedly trying to break up the fight. I had the impression this was a ritual that each group was tiring of. Finally the combatants were separated, and Vincenzo and Gatto led a struggling Giacomino outside.
I had witnessed many tense situations, many arguments in Italy, but I had never seen Italians come to blows. I had always thought that for Italians, the verbal assault was enough, a pressure valve that allowed them to let off steam instead of completely blowing up. But Giacomino’s pressure valve seemed to have popped off long ago.
I paid for our undrunk demitasses of caffè and walked out along
the alley. I found Giacomino and the others huddled in the shadows of a building, their hands in their pockets, their breath visible in the cold air.
Stefano offered to take me home.
Giacomino came up to me and put a hand on my shoulder. “I’m so sorry. Forgive me. I was an asshole. I didn’t want you to see that.”
“Figurati,” I said. After all, the Calabresi, like Italians in general, are known for their passion.