She observes the protector who was unable to provide.
Nonno Gennaro sauntered into our backyard through the side gate door. He’d emigrated at the insistence of his adult children after Nonna Femia died. He lived with Aunt Angelina until her family moved farther into the burbs of Mississauga, and then he settled in with Aunt Sofia’s family, ten houses down the street from us. He roamed the space between the two homes smoking, searching for a glass of wine and a Scopa player.
From under the shade offered by latticed grape vines, already wilting in the muggy August morning, I sat staring at the grass. I wore a long-sleeved T-shirt that came to my wrists and roomy joggers with elastic cuffs at the ankle. My arms and legs throbbed, covered in rainbow welts that varied from marbled yellow to deep purple and black. In the centre of multiple bruises, the skin had broken altogether: blood seeped through and had dried to form a copper hue. Every movement—sitting, standing, strolling, getting into bed, getting out of bed and getting dressed—caused waves of stinging pain.
Nonno evaluated the vegetable garden and examined my father’s handiwork before turning to scrutinize me. “Why are you dressed for cold weather in this heat?”
My father kept his gazed trained on the cucumbers and zucchini. He watered the greens and said nothing.
I balanced on the armrest of the chair to get up and give my grandfather a kiss.
“Why are you walking like a spider somebody stepped on?”
“I fell down.”
Nonno shook his head. “State attente.”
My father jerked his chin toward us. “So? Are we talking now? Like that, whenever it suits you?”
My dad and Nonno Gennaro had long been engaged in a fight. One that started in my father’s boyhood when he laboured hard, loaned out to villagers to till their wheat fields with a sickle and transporting wood daily to their homes while Nonno drank and racked up debt. The slings and arrows of an impoverished youth led to much chaos. Nonno juggled vices, failed at managing money and took a casual attitude toward work.
“One puffy cotton-ball cloud in a clear blue sky and Nonno decided it was an omen forecasting bad weather.” My father couldn’t hide the frustration in his voice when he spoke of the past.
Their own rented fields left largely untended, Nonno let his three children go hungry to feed his compulsive cravings; as a girl, my Aunt Angelina sold or traded eggs the siblings needed for nourishment for her father’s tobacco. At school, she once received the strap for not handing in her notebook of lessons at the end of the year. The book was destroyed when my grandfather used the pages as rolling paper. My father, turned away from mandatory army service at eighteen because he was deemed underweight and malnourished in his six-foot, 110-pound frame, struggled to contain his annoyance in front of me.
Nonno cleared his throat and spit. “Don’t soak the ground. Might rain.”
“You want to tell me how to grow plants? Because you did this work yourself and now you’re an expert.”
I hobbled away from them mid-argument and came back with homework Nonno had helped me complete in the last year of elementary school. I’d sketched a family tree on bristol board with leaves in shades of forest, emerald and lime green. On each leaf I wrote the names of coupled ancestors. For my mother’s family, the Colombos, I could fill in one row of great-grandparents and a few scattered names with question marks beside them. But with Nonno’s help, I’d extended the patriarchal line back five generations.
“Here.” I handed the rolled-up artwork to Nonno.
He removed the elastic and sat down. “Hold it open for me.” He reached for another cigarette.
My dad shut off the hose and joined us.
I had successfully brokered another temporary peace treaty.
“Tell me this story again.” I pointed to the top of the tree. “Your nonno’s nonno. My great-great-great grandfather.”
Ever ready to spin a yarn and be the centre of attention, he took a long drag and launched into the chronicle of Michelangelo-the-felon who evaded capture, a man who killed a captain for disrespecting his daughter-in-law.
“He was an expert hunter,” Nonno said. “Exceptional, the kind everyone knew about. Able to split a string from a distance.”
“A string? I thought it was a hair.” Certain elements of the tale were familiar because my father also loved repeating the story. A gallant murderer? Tough for any of us to resist.
Nonno hacked a cough, dislodging smoke-saturated phlegm in his throat. He spat again. “A hair? Who could see a strand of hair? That doesn’t make sense.”
I shrugged. If I interjected too often, he would refuse to talk.
“Each time he bagged a wild rabbit, he would send half to Captain Santoianni as a show of respect. His daughter-in-law would deliver the animal. She was young, beautiful and dutiful. One day she told her father-in-law, ‘You go. I don’t want to.’ He said to her, ‘What? Did the captain say something to you? Did he try something?’ because in those times, honour was honour.
“Early the next morning, at five, the mules loaded with plows and seeds, Michelangelo gave his son instructions and settled down to wait. He took care to ensure he had a prime spot, and shot the captain of the gendarmes as the man passed in front of the Church of San Nicola.”
“A foot chase ensued, shocked officers in pursuit of our ancestor while people in the piazza screamed: ‘Michelangelo Fantetti shot Captain Santoianni! Captain Santoianni is dead!’ They caught up to the marksman who said, ‘You all have children as do I. I would be sorry if you left your children in the middle of a road, stranded without a father in this life, but you’ll leave them there this morning if you pursue me. Resign yourselves and go. You won’t take me.’ The officers, who all knew the story of his sharpshooter aim and the string struck from a fair distance, walked away.”
“And he didn’t go to jail.” I knew this was a favourite part of the story for both my dad and Nonno.
“For eighteen years, he lived in a cave and dodged the law—eighteen years, the police came to the village once a week from the capital city, and his friends would tell him to hide out in a cave bordering his farm.
“One day, tired of hiding, he stepped out into the piazza on an official police business day. He was spotted by a young officer who didn’t know that this gracious, likeable fugitive from justice had been kept safe by another officer of the gendarmes; someone who admired Michelangelo and understood this ‘family honour is the only honour’ business. The young man shouted, ‘There he is!’ and fired a fatal blow.
“His family took him back to the farm to die next to the land he’d worked hard to maintain. His cop friend arrived and said, ‘What were you doing? I told you to stay out of town today.’
“Michelangelo responded, ‘Knives fair, knives different.’”
“Or possibly “Knives proud, knives shamed,” my father interrupted. With dramatic flourish, dad finished the story. “What it means is: ‘I killed a man. A man had to kill me. This is the death I was meant to have.’”
Nonno frowned, his finale stolen.
My father broke the awkward silence that followed. “You want a beer?” he asked, and without waiting for a response, he went indoors to get a couple.
While he was inside, my mother came through the gate, home from Mass. She spotted Nonno.
“What are you doing here, old goat?” Sounding suspicious in a way that made my breath catch, “What are you two talking about? He can’t stay for lunch, so better if you stop talking to him now.”
“Me’ne vie. I was leaving.” Nonno leaned over and squeezed my knee.
I winced. My eyes welled.
He stared.
“What are you waiting for? You were leaving.”
“Papa’s here,” I said. “He’s inside.” She wouldn’t dare dismiss Nonno in front of his son.
She glared at me and stomped past us into the house, the screen door slamming like a rifle shot behind her. Moments later she shouted, broadcasting her misery to the neighbourhood; fed up with her lot in life, she bellowed at God to grant her the strength needed to put up with our idiocy before she lay in a coffin, slain by the circle of stupidity that surrounded her. “Auite, Dio, m’auite. O Dio, damma a forze. Questi scemi m’uccidano.”
My father joined in her cacophony: “O per l’amore di Dio. He can’t hear you, beast. God doesn’t help the devil. Didn’t they teach you that in church this morning?”
Nonno tried again. “Ch’è te success? Why do you walk like a broken creature?”
“Niende. Ho cadut.”
He frowned. “Stat’e attente.”
Many years later as an adult, decades after Nonno died, I revisited the story of Michelangelo with my father. I took notes, transcribing the cinematic moments of my long-ago ancestor’s death. The history and the details became an obsession. I filled a few notebooks, and then a few more, adding a sentence, quibbling with my dad over exact wording and occasionally giving up when the accurate term couldn’t be determined.
Some say ancestors need to be placated. During yoga classes, teachers said, “This practice heals up to seven generations back.” Lying on a mat in Savasana, the corpse pose, one of the hardest to master, my thoughts would drift to my maternal and paternal grandparents: the good, the bad and all the ugly that passed between them. Time travelled in two directions though: seven generations back and forward. One mild sunny day in January, weeks after working on the translation with my dad, I woke with a voracious craving for a cigarette. My thirst for a drag was inexplicable—in a room with smokers, my throat constricted and eyes watered. I’d cough and move away. Other than a brief failed attempt to be cool at sixteen, I’d never smoked. I couldn’t even approximate realistic smoking for the role I played as a pregnant bridesmaid in Tony ‘n’ Tina’s Wedding. The cast and audience thought I did a wretched job of faking it, and several actors tried to teach me how to appear to puff like a pro. Casual and cool. I never pulled it off.
The hunger, the hankering wouldn’t quit. I walked to the corner store and asked for cigarettes. The clerk said I needed to be specific.
“A pack of the smallest amount you sell.”
“Which brand?”
“The one with an image of a camel.”
Nonno Gennaro was a walking air freshener for Camels. The Turkish tobacco blended with American clung to his old blazer. I wasn’t thinking about him. I wasn’t writing about him. Then he made his presence known, and I did my best to honour his request despite the health risk. I lit one up at home and, after a couple of drags, put it out and kept the half-smoked cigarette on my table.
Alone in my apartment, I spoke aloud to the man who’d been dead for twenty-six years. “I’ve missed you, Nonno, but ask for tea with lemon when you want to stop by.”
I gave the rest of the cigarettes away to a friend. I reasoned if Nonno visited him seeking the comfort of his earthly habit, my Canadian pal wouldn’t understand the dialect.
Then maybe everybody could be happy.