She muses on the sacred role of fate—affairs of future souls depend on decisions made at the intersection of chance and choice.
Nonno Gennaro suggested the marriage between his son, thirty-year-old Michelantonio, and my mother-to-be, eighteen-year-old Lucia. My mother’s family was in favour of the match; they wanted to offload their troubled daughter. She had brought scandal onto the clan by cavorting with a group of zingari and nearly running off with one when she was seventeen.
My father had been living in Canada for three years, working in a meat factory, saving money, learning to drive and strolling through Toronto’s Little Italy at night. He hung out in billiard bars and played Scopa for candy. He drank wine and espresso and drove to Niagara Falls every chance he could. He got up early in the mornings without an alarm and went to work as a butcher in a building instead of tilling a field or coaxing a donkey uphill.
Thirty and unmarried, in 1965 Italy, people must have crossed themselves when my father walked by. “Whatever that guy has, O Dio, don’t let anyone in my family catch it. Give it to my neighbour, the brute.”
Thirty was much too old to be single. Canadian living showered him with comfort and cash, but no wife, no life—the classic unspoken motto of his background meant wedding bells had to sound soon. He’d returned to Bonefro for a three-month visit, and in his dwindling days, anxious mothers paraded two teenagers across his path. He didn’t fancy either of them. Too young: the generation gap in rural Italy could mean the difference between a feast or famine childhood, the opportunity for an education or illiteracy.
My grandfather stepped up the pressure. As the son, custom demanded that my father produce an heir. My mother came from a wealthy family. Her father was nicknamed the Baron, based on an apocryphal tale that a villager saw him counting all his money in the window one day—making sure everyone could see how well off he was. As if anyone courted envy in a place like Molise where everyone needed to dodge malocchio.
Dad finally bowed to familial pressure and picked one, so my grandmother went to visit her cousin, my mother’s father.
This gets complicated, I know.
Trust me: after tasked with making a family tree in fifth grade, the one Nonno helped fill in, I created multiple flow charts of all my relatives to understand the many connections myself. Essentially, my folks were already blood before a branch was grafted back onto the same oak. The villagers considered the union a good match because my mother’s side had money.
I assume my maternal grandparents greeted my father’s parents with wine, salami, provolone and the muted cheer that passed for joyful countenance in people with hardened dispositions. My father says, “They put something in my caffè.” Nevertheless, the scheduled marriage ceremony would occur four weeks before the end of my father’s trip.
On a clear-sky morning in March, he walked with his mother to his fiancée’s home where they collected a procession of paesani and relatives to continue on to Santa Maria Delle Rose Church. My grandmothers, Femia and Sapooch, retreated to prepare the post-ceremony feast. Given what I know now, that must have been terrible for the former, and possibly an opportunity for the latter to plant the seeds of poison that would eventually kill Femia.
So the story goes.
On their honeymoon in Campobasso, the capital of mountainous Molise, Carabinieri—a member of the Italian military police—pulled them over. He asked for my father’s autograph, convinced he’d netted the singing sensation Bobby Solo and my mother was a soon-to-be-famous starlet. My father insisted he wasn’t the famous crooner. The officer remained doubtful as he studied my dad’s chiselled features and scanned the casual glamour of my mom’s flawless complexion and wavy chestnut locks.
From Bonefro, my father took my mother on the path that he and many other Molisans had followed. They made their way back to Canada, where the streets were paved with asphalt.
They landed together in Toronto in April 1968, and moved into my Aunt Angelina’s duplex. Four families had lived there together when my father first relocated to Toronto: Aunt Angie, her husband and their two boys; my father’s older married sister, Sofia, her husband and their two boys; my dad, who slept on a cot in the kitchen; and another family who rented the top floor of the tiny home. The folks upstairs left, and the dwelling remained decidedly less crowded with six adults and four kids.
I appeared, swaddled in pink, before their first anniversary: the only girl in the family, the only daughter of the only son. No matter how often I asked, no brother or sister followed.
Nonno Gennaro voiced his displeasure at the end of his family line. “That’s it for us then,” he would lament to anyone who’d listen. He grieved and said so long to the dynasty with no dominion. “The Fantettis are finished.”
My father told him to shut his blabbering mouth.
There are hundreds of ways to invite misfortune, and talk reigned as one of the easiest.
At home, I pestered both parents to tell me a story. My mother knew a few doozies she could recite with flourish. I’d sit at the kitchen table, legs swinging, eating my favourite lunch of diced tomatoes mixed with beaten egg batter, a delicious dish I could eat with my hands. Ripped slices of crusty round bread were used as spoons. I’d scoop the warm sauce directly from the bowl in the middle of the table while offering suggestions: “Tell me the one about the cats who ran the kingdom again. Or the one about the good girl and her bad sister who grew a donkey tail on her forehead.”
Or the one my mother preferred:
“A woodcutter marries a woman from a village nearby—a woman he hardly knows. She is a stranger to him, but she is beautiful and quiet. The woodcutter is not a man of many words. He wants a silent wife. A month after the wedding, everything seems settled for the newlyweds; they are content. The woodcutter always goes to bed before his wife because he has to get up early to chop wood. She stays up late cleaning the hearth, mending his clothes, washing and drying the dishes—doing the chores a good woman must do.”
The characters in my mother’s tales would always pause to offer an aside on what it took to be a respectable woman and a good wife. Sometimes, lost in a forest at night, a peasant girl with the heart of a princess would muse that no one would want her if she couldn’t keep a tidy home, sew a button on a shirt or embroider a tablecloth.
“One morning the woodcutter goes out with his axe to fell more trees and gather firewood for the oncoming winter. There’s a chill in the air as he sets out from his little cottage. While he’s out in the forest, he’s attacked by an enormous grey wolf. The woodcutter manages to cut off one of the wolf’s front paws. The wolf retreats, running off, disappearing into the forest.”
“How can he run without a paw?”
“The wolf manages to run off limping and crying.”
“Howling. Wolves can’t cry.”
“Do you want me to finish? The wolf runs away. The woodcutter retrieves the paw, wraps it in burlap cloth and throws it into his sack. The injured woodcutter hurries back to his cottage. He finds his wife sitting by the fire, preparing his lunch. He doesn’t want to scare her, so he doesn’t tell her what happened. Better she doesn’t know there’s a wolf nearby. She thinks he should lie down, but the man sits at the table, shaken and visibly upset. His wife asks why he’s home so early in the day. He tells her he had an accident. You need to be careful, says the young wife. She puts his lunch in front of him—and the woodcutter notices his wife’s left hand is wrapped in a dirty dish towel, a mappina.
“He asks, ‘What happened to you?’ and she answers, ‘I burned my hand this morning,’ but this upsets the woodcutter. No one wants a clumsy woman in the kitchen. She goes back to stoking the fire, turning her back to him. The woodcutter reaches into his bag and pulls out the cloth. He unwraps it and finds a human hand where he expected to see a wolf paw. He shouts and drops the hand on the table. His wife whirls around, her face all white. He looks closer at the hand. It’s a female hand. Then he notices the wedding band on the ring finger: he recognises the band.
“His wife says nothing. She tends the embers, keeping her burned hand hidden. He reaches for her arm and pulls off the dish towel, sees instantly that she is missing her hand. He grabs his axe and strikes her dead with one blow.
“People,” Mamma would end with conviction, “are not who you think they are, so you have to be careful.”
I wore my father down with a repeated request for a story. He maintained he knew one outside of Aesop’s Fables.
“A young woman wants to marry, and she has two young men interested in her. She likes both men. She needs to find a way to make a decision. She tells both men she’s going on a trip and to meet her at the airport to say goodbye. One guy comes dressed in a nice suit. Showered, clean, nice aftershave. Looks very nice. The second man came straight from work. He was in his mechanic’s uniform, with dirt and oil from engine on his pants. Which man she should marry?”
“The man in the suit.”
“No. Pay attention. He doesn’t have a job.” My dad shook his head. “That’s why he has time to prepare his ‘so long, see you later,’ he doesn’t have anything else to do.”
No castles. No felines with the gift of gab. No wizened old women asking for a drink of water at a well, ready to bestow treasures for a simple show of compassion.
“That’s not a story. That’s a puzzle for an awful situation. Where did you hear that?”
“You asked for story, I told you a story. If you don’t like, you don’t like. Nothing I can do.”