“I WAS WONDERING when you were going to stop by,” my aunt Caterina said.“I know, I’m so sorry,” I said. Once again I felt terrible. I had seen Zia Caterina at Zia Angela’s house, but I hadn’t gotten around to visiting her before. I added feebly, “I have been traveling so much. I knew that you were in Catanzaro visiting your stepdaughter.” I didn’t mention that because she lived alone, I’d thought she wouldn’t want to have to cook for me.
“That was only three days,” she said. “You’ve been here a lot longer than that.”
She disappeared into the kitchen, and I looked around the dining room. Pictures of Caterina and her husband, who had died of a heart attack about ten years before, lined the shelves of a dark-brown china cabinet and matching sideboard. A potbellied stove, its black body and gold trim shining, filled one corner.
She returned with a huge pan of lasagna and poured us each a glass of red wine. I took a bite of the lasagna and tasted ground pork and sliced prosciutto.
Of all my relatives in Italy, Caterina most reminds me of my
grandmother. She has the same smooth, wrinkle-free skin, and the corners of her eyes turn down when she smiles, making her face seem sad even when she is happy. Caterina was born in 1925 to my grandmother’s eldest sister, Francesca. Twelve years Caterina’s senior, my grandmother, Angelina, had been born in 1912, the second youngest of twelve brothers and sisters. Her father, Francesco Critelli, was a severe man who had had six children with his first wife, who died giving birth to the sixth, then six more with a second wife. The eldest of this set was Francesca, Caterina’s mother, and the second to last was Angela, my grandmother, who was called Angelina. She was twelve when her sister gave birth to Caterina in 1925.
“My grandmother must have hated to leave this place,” I said. “When I was growing up, she always seemed so sad to have left her family behind.”
“We really missed her,” Caterina said. “But she was happy to leave here.”
“Happy?” I said. “I thought it was an arranged marriage, that she was dragged away from her family.”
Caterina took a sip of her wine. “It was arranged; her half brother Tommaso set her up. I can’t tell you how excited she was to leave, to have a husband. You see, Angelina’s mother had died in 1932, and her father had just died in 1935.”
Caterina remembered my great-grandfather, Francesco Critelli, as a strong, quiet man, six feet tall, with blue eyes and leathery skin. He was gone most of the year, working as a quarryman excavating white marble from Carrara, and when he was home, he spoke very little. When he was in his seventies, he broke his hip on the job, and after almost four years of lying in bed, he finally succumbed. When he died, Angelina felt the loneliness of the empty house. Soon afterward Caterina had moved in. “She was more like a sister to me than an aunt,” Caterina remembered.
It was an unusually warm day in March when Caterina heard a knock at the door. She opened it to find an older man standing there. He had the same harsh features as Angela’s father.
“I’ve come to see Angelina Critelli,” the man said. “My name is
Filippo Rotella.” He said he was a friend of Tommaso, Angelina’s brother, in Danbury, Connecticut.
Caterina judged by his accent that he was from Gimigliano Superiore.
“She’s in the fields. She’ll be here this afternoon.”
Filippo left an envelope for Angelina. “I’ll come back this afternoon.”
In her heart, Caterina knew that this man had come to take Angelina away.
At age twenty-four, Angelina was the only child in her family yet to marry In Calabrese families at that time, the responsibility of taking care of aging parents often fell to the last unmarried daughter. Now that Angelina’s parents had died, she was free to get married, free to leave. When Angelina came home that afternoon, Caterina was angry at her.
“An old man came by this afternoon,” Caterina said. “He was so old and ugly!”
Caterina paused in the middle of her story to duck into the kitchen. She reappeared with a platter of turkey breast sauteed in garlic and oil, a dish of baccalà, salt cod, baked with oil and lemon, and, as if she hadn’t brought out enough, a bowl of piping hot peas and garlic. Then she resumed her story.
Filippo Rotella and Angelina Critelli were married almost two months later, at the Santa Maria Assunta in Gimigliano Inferiore. Then Filippo went back to Connecticut to earn money for my grandmother’s passage to join him. My grandmother’s brothers Giuseppe and Tommaso were living there, so she would have family, a husband, and with luck a family of her own. Within a month after Filippo’s return to the United States, however, Angelina got word that Giuseppe had died, so she would have one fewer family member in America.
My grandmother boarded the SS Conte di Savoia in Naples on November 5, 1936. Two weeks later, Filippo met her in New York City with the news that Tommaso, too, had died. So now she had left a place where everyone knew everyone to go where she knew no one and no one knew her.
A year almost to the day after she arrived, my grandmother gave birth to my father, Giuseppe, named after Filippo’s father, followed by Francesco, Tommaso, Rosa, and Saveria. Although my grandmother never learned English during the sixty years she lived in Connecticut, she had given her children American names: Joseph, Frank, Tom, and Rose; only the youngest daughter, Saveria, received an Italian name.
My family knew her as a sad woman, never content with anything, always wanting more for her family. But Caterina recalled her differently. “I remember,” she said, “your grandmother always, always smiled.”
Caterina offered to take me to see Zio Giuseppe, the widower of Grandma’s sister, also named Caterina. My aunt guided me along Via Assunta and stopped in front of a plain-looking house, one of the least charming in the alley. It had almost no ornamentation, not even flowers in the windows, but in the afternoon the front windows got sunlight at least.
“This was where your grandmother was born, where that old, ugly man appeared one day,” Caterina said. “But like so many of the houses here, it’s abandoned.”
“Who owns it?” I asked
“It’s still owned by the Critelli family.”
A couple of alleys beyond was Zio Giuseppe’s house. Inside, he sat in a wheelchair, wearing a knit cap and two heavy sweaters. Two five-year-old boys babbled next to him. He could do very little but smile. Nearing one hundred, he’d outlived almost everyone.
“Are those two boys his great-grandsons?” I asked
“No.” Caterina sighed. “They are the children of the couple hired to care for him.”
“Doesn’t he have anyone else?”
Caterina shook her head and puckered her mouth. “It’s a shame. No, his children live in the north, and they have hired this family to care for him.”
My father and grandma had stayed here when they visited the
village forty years ago. Zio Giuseppe had been away in Canada, so my father never got to meet him. But he and his mother stayed with Grandma’s sister, Zio Giuseppe’s wife.
My father had told me how on the morning of the Festa della Madonna di Porto he decided to lie out in the sun on the patio and drink his coffee and eat his brioche. He heard women’s voices scolding and young girls giggling below him. He looked down over the railings at the tiny piazza below, where about twenty older women, all in the Gimiglianese black skirts and vests and white lacy blouses, formed a circle around just as many teenage girls by raising their skirts and joining hands with the women on either side. The young girls, giggling more from excitement than embarrassment, stood in the middle of the older women and stripped off their daily clothing to change into their festival costumes.
My father, who was twenty-two years old and just out of the navy, decided to put to use his brand-new palm-size 16-millimeter camera. He lay down flat on the deck behind a row of potted plants, held the camera just over the balcony, and began filming away
“Che cosa? What’s that sound?” a woman said. The camera clicked away. Another woman noticed. Then the talking stopped, and my father lifted his finger from the button. The talking resumed, then the singing, and my father filmed the singing and the undressing. After a few more minutes he stopped filming and went back inside, wondering how he would ever get the film developed. When he set the camera down, he saw a roll of film on the table. He had forgotten to load the camera.
Zio Giuseppe looked at me with delighted consternation.
“Zio Giuseppe, quest’ u figliu di Angelina,” Caterina said to him. “Ricordu Angelina?”
The old man nodded his head. He remembered my grandmother. Then he said something in dialect and pointed to the wall.
“He says that this is your grandmother’s father,” Caterina said in Italian. She pointed to a photograph on the wall, framed in oval rosewood. I had seen this picture in my grandparents’ house. The man in the photo stared into the room, his clear eyes seeming to sear through the photo, an impression heightened by strong cheekbones
and a handlebar mustache. Then I noticed something else. I looked closely, thinking maybe it was only a hole in the faded photo.
“Is that an earring he’s wearing?” I asked Aunt Caterina.
She squinted at the photo again and smiled. “Ah, yes,” she said. “He always wore an earring.”
“Why, was it fashionable then?”
“Well, some men did wear them, but it was to help his hearing.”
“How did it help his hearing?”
“Well, it was thought—this was before there were doctors here—it was thought that the gold ring would attract sound to the ear.”
During my father’s visit in 1962, he had developed a boil on his right forearm. It grew larger each day until his uncle took him to the local doctor, who was playing scopa, a card game, in a bar connected to his office. The doctor, who had just dealt, told my father to wait in his office. My father sat in a stiff-backed chair. On a tray on the table next to him was a metal trough that held a couple of scalpels and other metal tools, all of which were beginning to show signs of rust.
About fifteen minutes later the doctor walked in, cigar in mouth, reeking of wine. He examined my father’s arm, then picked up one of the rusty scalpels. My father yanked his arm away “You’re using that?”
“What else do you want me to do?”
My father thanked the doctor and walked out of the office. Over the next few days the boil swelled to the size of a golf ball, and my father developed a fever. There was talk of taking him to Catanzaro. Then one evening my grandmother brought in three old women—the local witches, my father called them.
They began reciting the Ave Maria, then broke into some chants in a dialect my father didn’t recognize. In Calabria, Catholicism had long since assimilated the older pagan beliefs and rituals. And in the absence of good doctors, the Calabresi trusted these wisewomen more than any professional.
Then one of the women slathered a mudlike substance on my father’s arm. The next day another of the women brought a bowl of wild herbs. She stuck a wad of them into her toothless mouth and
gummed them down to a wet, fibrous mass, which she pressed to my father’s forearm. It was warm and gooey She repeated this for three nights. On the fourth day, just before lunch, my father felt an ooze down his arm. The boil had finally burst, leaving an inch-long scar that he has to this day.
Caterina and I were about to leave Zio Giuseppe’s when another photo caught my eye. It was of a good-looking young man in a three-button suit with wide lapels, standing against a stone structure. He had a pencil-thin mustache and was holding a walking stick. Tucked into the bottom of the frame were photos of three other men.
“These men are all your grandmother’s brothers,” Caterina said. She explained that they were memorial photos.
“And who’s that?” I asked, mesmerized by the larger photo.
“That’s your grandmother’s youngest brother, Salvatore.” Caterina crossed herself. “He died in Africa in 1942 in an English prisoner of war camp. His death affected your grandmother more than anyone’s.”
I know that my grandmother had asked for me, her eldest grandson, to be named Salvatore when I was born in 1967. But she probably knew that, by this time, my father wanted nothing more than to be fully American. And my mother, who came from Montreal when she was ten years old and whose first language was French, probably wanted the same. In the end, my parents gave me as American a name as they could find, down to the hard k.
I kissed Zio Giuseppe on both cheeks and said goodbye. The kids followed us out.
“I remembered when your grandmother died,” Caterina said. “She died in February, but I didn’t hear until August. I suspected, because I didn’t hear from her. I telephoned and left a message, but no one called back, or there was no one there to return my call. It was awful. I felt like I should have been there with her.”
When I told Zia Angela, Zio Mimmo, and my cousins that I’d be leaving a couple of days early, they seemed hurt. “On your last night we were all going to take you back to 11 Semaforo after the beach,” Luisa said. The weather had finally gotten warm enough, and the day before my scheduled departure was May Day, a holiday
Instead, on my last night Sabrina and Masimo invited to dinner everyone who had been together during the Pasquetta in the Sila. Sabrina served another amazing meal, and Masino brought out jugs of his father’s wine.
They raised their glasses to send me off, wishing me a good flight and a speedy return.
Masino turned to me and shook his head. “Cazzo americano!”
You American dickhead.