She searches for answers.
As soon as I learned to read, I yearned for words, sentences and stories every day, an infatuation that turned into a full-blown, lifelong love.
At age five, in kindergarten, other Italian kids would translate the missing vocabulary until I got the gist of Inglese. My reading comprehension was faster than my speaking. I tripped over my tongue to switch a thought from Molisan to English that wouldn’t make people laugh at my pronunciation. The first difficult English word I learned to spell correctly was made up of three smaller ones: To + get + her. Our kindergarten teacher had spaced out the words, then she wrote the adverb out, conducting a symphony of characters on the chalkboard while I stared, spellbound by the letters as they appeared—one after another. We practiced sounding the syllables in unison one morning for a class on sharing playthings and playing fair. This was enchantment: the repetition was communion, the cursive letters of the alphabet combining and joining like they had always known each other and never wanted to be left alone—the whole stunning result a thrill for me; swiftly connecting definition to communicating ideas.
In grade one, I had grasped a thick red pencil and made crude attempts to recreate the alphabet. Our teacher instructed the class to copy her movements in majuscule and miniscule. The paper had multiple lines, similar to sheet music, to offer boundaries and direction for the curve in the lowercase b and the mid-cutting line of a small t. During these early attempts at composing letters, my own hand mesmerized me as its deliberate motions formed barely decipherable letters across a page, the giant E, the backward f and the malformed m of my name making a proclamation in primitive childish print: I am here.
In order to tell a true story—one that is still sorting itself out, still being lived—work with the Rule of Three: the principle that every tale must have a beginning, middle and an end. In Latin, omne trium perfectum—the idea that three is a complete set, three achieves perfection. Julius Caesar understood the triad of triumph when he wrote to the Roman Senate: veni, vidi, vici. The tenet of Three-fold Law exhorts that any energy, good or bad, an individual puts forth in the world is returned to her. Trios dominate. A trapped fairy grants three wishes. The Three Magi. The Holy Trinity. Mother, father, child. Birth, life and death. Blood, sweat and tears. Rock, paper, scissors. Three square meals a day. An appetizer, main course, dessert. Tricky business, finding an ending when part of the narrative is happening in real time, being lived one day to the next, the plot elusive: a mixed experience of minor revelations, repeated patterns of behaviour, and nudged memories. In our family, one crisis looked much the same as the previous and had the same basic qualities as the next.
I puzzled over the saga that wove through our history—when was the seed of our curse planted? Where did the family illness start?
Two million years ago, frost buried Europe and North America under miles of ice and drove half the animal species on both continents into extinction. All of our ancestors showed up during a time of inclement weather 300,000 years ago, venturing out of Africa to anywhere that beckoned with the promise of survival. According to a test I purchased online, the family ancients wandered east through Asia Minor and Arabia, possibly setting up house and tucking in for generations before moving north again to collect one percent of Neanderthal genetic material—45,000 years ago—approximately around the time those guys slid into disappearing, on the road to obsolescence. At some junction, prehistoric Scandinavians arrived, hunting, gathering, fishing and Viking into our Tree of Life.
Eventually, somebody decided to make a break for the boot-shaped landmass. I picture a long-gone relation creating that famous gesture for the first time: a hand under the chin and flipping the fingers outward to say he was fed up, finished with this frigid climate and fighting over scraps. Forget this lousy cold, I want my descendants to enjoy a cappuccino in about 10,000 years.
Around the same time, cows, chickens and sheep were domesticated in Southeast Asia and the Middle East. Every creature needed to sustain these carnivores was tamed, farmed or hunted, including goats, pigs and wild rabbits. Wheat they coaxed from the ground.
Roughly 5,000 years ago, writing systems appeared. Assyrians and Sumerians began recording the oldest known references to individuals who possessed supernatural skill, the power to wreak havoc. With one inadvertent glance, these people could cause complete ruination, disaster or death. Women, children and livestock were considered vulnerable and required amulets for protection, and cures contained saliva and various sundries. Spilled salt also vexed the Sumerians, and they started the custom of throwing the crystalline dust over their shoulders to ward off catastrophe.
Legend contends that 2,760-odd years ago, Rome was founded by a warmonger who killed his twin brother over a location, location, location dispute. Romulus engineered the abduction of Sabine women during a festival in honour of Neptune to acquire brides for his soldiers—men given salt rations, an allowance to purchase the mineral because they were worth their weight in salt.
The Sabine men returned to Samnium, our ancestral homeland, declared war on Rome and armed themselves for battle. At first the Romans faltered, losing a pivotal fight. When Romulus’s men gained the upper hand, the stolen women, now mothers of children born to Romans, braved the battlefield and rushed between their husbands and fathers, begging both sides to stop, beseeching the men to surrender and live in peace. This account—the Rape of the Sabine Women—repeatedly painted in oils and once carved in marble was considered an example of successful assimilation.
This is uncannily similar to the story about the beginnings of Bonefro—a village situated on a hilltop in Molise, one of the modern names for the ancient territory known as Samnium, a place that boasts a Lombard era castle, a sign that people fought and defended the region over 1,000 years ago. Here’s the yarn: swap the epic Roman army for a small band of peasants on a pilgrimage to visit the sanctuary of Archangel Michael. Journeying with the group were three couples who wanted to consecrate their union. The hapless travelers camped for a night in the woods near Bonefro. Local shepherds kidnapped the women. Tra-a-a-dition. The distraught husbands, heard lamenting as far as the Heavens, were turned into boulders to cope with the pain and placed in a river named The Wailing Women. The wives wept so intensely their tears formed a new spring, another freshwater source, under the town. The Heavens took pity on the seized lovers and transformed them into three white doves. In other versions, the women stay human, and give birth to the first Bonefranis.
A bedtime story for the ages: amore, an arduous journey, and atrocity. If you’re going to plagiarize an origin myth, you might as well choose the founding of the Eternal City.
Another fabrication: Gaius Pontius, a Samnite General, was the great-great-great-keep-counting grandfather of Pontius Pilate, the Roman procurator of Judea who ordered the crucifixion of Jesus of Nazareth to placate a mob. Those Romans: such crowd pleasers. Some say this historical begetter cursed the village descendants when he killed the Son of God.
But with everyone naming their children after themselves (a practice that continued—everybody has a brother/cousin/uncle called Tony), the name Gaius was common, and more than one Pontius clan proliferated through old Italy, like the surname Smith in the English-speaking world. My mother’s equally plain maiden name—Colombo—can be found all over the Apennine range. She shares the patronymic of that famous Cristoforo, the man who bungled his way into discovering unknown lands and bullied his way to devastating Indigenous populations.
Three hundred and fifty-seven years ago, my father’s surname shows up in the Bonefrani record books with the death of a thirty-year-old man, Don Giovanni Vincenzo Fantetti. So many options: the moniker could be the diminutive of the first name Fante, or may have started off as Fantetta, and could have been shortened to Fante. In Bonefro, two lines of the family emerge as distinct: the pious line bearing priests, and my father’s ancestors—the bandits.
My dad is proud of this heritage: “These weren’t bad persons. Not just go around shooting the people bang-bang for no purpose. They were bandits of honour. Men who turn away from the government because of corruption, because of poverty, and prejudice. Men who fought injustice because their families were starving.”
Eighty-six years ago, a toddler, the first child born to my paternal grandparents, died the victim of stregheria—witchcraft. She developed a fever and faded until she was gone. Their second child, my eldest aunt, Sofia, also fell ill, her forehead and cheeks flush with heat. They found a woman who could perform the ceremony to remove the curse and rid Sofia of the affliction. She became my aunt’s godmother, her protector. As an adult, my aunt will learn the treatment to eliminate malocchio, the evil eye, and use this antiquated remedy on me when I am six months old, cranky, fussy and hexed. With a bowl of water and several drops of olive oil, my aunt diagnosed and cured the malediction: irritable baby syndrome.
Eighty-one summers ago, when the sun was in Cancer, the sign of family, and the moon was in Leo (the lionhearted), my father, Michelantonio Fantetti, was born under a Fascist regime to poor parents. Prized by his grandfather, baptized with a blacksmith for a godfather, and touched by God’s grace, he will survive the devastation on the horizon: another world war.
At six, he was nearly slaughtered along with his mother, aunt, cousin and grandmother by a group of retreating German soldiers. One frantically waved a rifle, ready to execute the women and boys until a comrade intervened.
At eight, his life was saved by the family dog, a German Shepherd, when it sprang forward and intercepted a viper about to strike.
What else should I tell about this rock, this North Star? He will pay off all his father’s debts and put money in the bank. He will support the past and future generation through the grueling work of butchery, though he dreamt of becoming an engineer. A teacher will note his talent with numbers and ideas, and label him a born philosopher. He will model generosity and compassion when faced with envy and animosity. He will offer brief arithmetic lessons in the bracing air of the meat and poultry section of the supermarket.
He will convince child-me that he is capable of performing magic and stealing the nose off my face, until I spot his thumbnail. He will write cheques to purchase books through a Scholastic in the Schools program and never deny me a trip to a busy shopping mall bookstore. He will be a martyr in marriage and dawdle in despair where others would have sought a divorce.
He will keep a Ziploc bag full of salt taped to the door of his bachelor apartment to avert evil. He will give this advice often when I’m down on myself, “You should go look in the mirror and say to yourself ‘Maybe I’m no the best, but I can’t be the worst in the world’ and then you feels better.” He will provide this pep talk when I’m battling depression: “You no stealing. You no hurt nobody on the purpose. You no cheats the people. You no was kill nobody.”
Setting the bar low works wonders.