She travels to the source and considers the power of bitter roots.
When I was eleven, we packed our bags for Bonefro again. My father, fed up and hellbent on finding an antidote for my mother’s ongoing nasty streak and fatiguing delusions, wanted his in-laws, the Colombos, to talk sense into their daughter. He thought Italy could provide a remedy, or perhaps medical help, at the insistence of family. The village, without the buffer of my beloved grandmother, was the loneliest place on Earth. I was an outsider, almost an outcast.
Nonno Gennaro had decamped six months before, bored beyond measure in Canada. He missed the natural splendour of the village. Even my reunion with him couldn’t lessen my sorrow. The summer sun, the southern heat, the patchwork olive and jade greens of the surrounding land—I wished to experience it all with Femia.
Across from the house lived fourteen-year-old twins who befriended me. Their friendship meant putting up with harsh criticism and light bullying. Nicknamed L’Americana, I accepted my status as a target. Openly mocked for my accent, my comfortable Canadian existence without farm chores and my hair, recently chopped by mother into a hideous bob: my everything. One night, I stepped out onto the balcony off the upstairs room to gawk at the star-filled sky. Hundreds twinkled against the midnight blue curtain, a breathtaking sight for a kid from the suburb of a sizable metropolis. The next day, the twins told everyone about spotting me in my full-length nightgown, hanging out on the tiny ledge.
One girl jeered, “Were you looking for Romeo? This is no place for romantics, Juliet.”
My mother’s older sister, Gina, showed up from Belgium on this visit; the first time I met my maternal aunt. After the exchange of cheek kisses and pleasantries—“Femia’s namesake resembles her so much”—she said, “Your mother was fine before she had you.”
Throughout our Italian vacation, my mother’s parents and siblings commented that Mamma had been absolutely fine before she’d left the village. In front of us, they debated the factors:
a) The move to another country and breathing in the crisp Canadian air
b) Marriage to my father, himself a descendant of that wasteful dad—Gennaro
c) Motherhood: babies are absurdly demanding; I must have been more taxing than most
d) All of the above contributed to her psychotic break
They insisted we treat my mother, the baby in the family, with maximal kindness, compassion and consideration—the three qualities she never expressed toward us.
I accepted the Colombos’ mixed up memories as truth. I believed I could never have children or bedlam would ensue. I internalized every comment as if it were a fact. And I wanted nothing to do with these people.
A spectacular disaster awaited us at the first appointment with an Italian specialist.
Recommended by someone who knew someone who knew someone who’d heard of someone else’s troubled wife, another poor soul who found the transition from village life to urban living a trial, the doctor-slash-mayor of Campomarino—a small town forty kilometres northeast of Bonefro—assured my dad that he’d cured many women of hysteria. He exuded the arrogance of a man who bathed daily in the cheap, pungent cologne of his own self-importance.
When mom declined to enter the medical office that doubled as headquarters for civic planning, Nonna Sapooch attacked. She shoved her daughter against an exterior rock wall in the open courtyard and wrapped both hands around mom’s neck. Sapooch pressed her thumbs into my mother’s throat and squeezed, cutting off air. Sapooch choked her in full view of the street and passersby.
A mini-riot ensued.
Mom wriggled like an insect pinned to a board. She clawed at Sapooch’s fingers, her face turning a ghostly white tinged with blue.
Dad shouted, “Ma che cazzo—lascia, lasciala—” He leapt to his feet, forcibly restraining his mother-in-law, pulling her back and holding one arm behind her while she struggled to slap and kick her daughter. “Mannagia—la stai soffocando, fermeti—”
I pulled on Sapooch’s other arm. “Mammanon, no! Ferma—” I tugged at the fabric of her sleeve. She flailed to dislodge me and shake off my father. I tumbled backward, scraping palms to catch my fall.
Nonno Baron made a pathetic attempt to control his wife. “Now, now. Let’s not make a fuss.” He stood to the side, one hand patting Sapooch’s shoulder as she wrestled to get at my mother.
In the midst of the melee, one clear thought rang through me, pealing like the church bells of Bonefro: we were doomed.
Sapooch swore to kill my mother if she didn’t stop destroying their family’s good reputation with outrageous behaviour.
“Good reputation? She’s crazy like her mother and her grandmother before her,” my father said.
Sapooch loosened her grip. She whirled around to face off with him. “What?”
Mom bent over; hacking and gulping for air, she rubbed her throat. Pink stripes the shape of my grandmother’s fingers curled around her neck.
I rocked on my heels, and then moved away to the farthest corner of the courtyard, witness to the legacy of a vicious temper.
The doctor quickly ushered my parents into his office to interview them. I edged away from my grandparents as we waited for my folks to return. The doctor prescribed a sedative for my mother.
“What about treatment for him?” Sapooch thrust her thumb at my father. “What if there’s something wrong with him?”
Dad threw his hands up in frustration. “Gesù Cristo—”
“No, Signora. He’s not the problem.”
A nervous laugh escaped me, and I spoke in English, “Holy cow, like that’s not obvious to anybody with eyeballs in their head.”
Sapooch scowled. “What did you say? Say it again. Say it so I can understand you.”
“Nothing.”
Dad moved between us. “Let’s take the prescription to the pharmacy. It can be filled while we eat lunch.”
I hung close, bumping into him as we walked to avoid my grandmother’s stony-faced glare.
Back in Bonefro, we parted company with Sapooch and the Baron near the piazza and made our way home uphill along the cobbled road of Via Rosello, where, in late afternoon, the row of linked houses offered shade from the June sun. Nonno Gennaro waved at me when we came into view. He sat by the balcony door in the seat Femia used to occupy.
My mother took her first dose and went upstairs for a nap.
“Allora? Che te ditte u dottore?”
“He prescribed a sedative. We’ll see if it works, or we’ll go back.”
Nonno put out his cigarette and scratched his chest. “Watch the moon. Both of you. Pay attention to the phases of the moon, and stay out of her way when it’s full.”
A warning. An attempt to predict my mother’s lapses into lunacy by tracking the orbit of Earth’s satellite. Ancient advice: a step above reading goat entrails.
Down the narrow road in front of my grandmother’s house lived an old woman named Carmella who spoke in garbled speech. Her skin was wrinkled tree bark with intersecting lines woven across her forehead and cheeks. I tried not to stare at her gaping mouth. One part of her face had been paralyzed when she was five, and never healed properly, so that she could never fully close her lips. The top of her mouth was caved in, as with people missing all their top teeth. When she first walked up to greet me, the top of her body swayed slightly side to side like a metronome as she limped over.
She bent to examine me closely. I reached for her hand, clasped it and greeted her with two kisses, one on each cheek.
Her lips, covered in spittle, quivered. She brushed her eyes with the back of her hand, like a child might to stop tears. She uttered a series of vowel sounds with no glottal stops. I turned to my dad.
“She thinks you look exactly like your grandmother did at your age. She says you’re nice like your Nonna Femia. She was born the same year, they grew up together, and she misses your grandmother.”
The next day, while I sat near the French doors of the balcony in my grandmother’s old chair, I heard the twins yelling. I looked out to see them shouting at Carmella, right behind her. Amalia gesticulated rudely that Carmella should make herself scarce; she looked like she might shove the senior. Anna Maria spat at Carmella’s feet.
I ran down the stairs and put myself between the twins and Carmella. “What are you doing? Are you crazy? Leave her alone.”
“This is none of your concern, Americana. Go back where you came from.” Anna Maria scowled.
“She’s an old lady. Stop it.”
“She’s a thief. She steals eggs from our chicken.”
“Maybe she’s hungry. What is the matter with you?”
“Maybe she’s hungry,” mimicked Amalia. “L’Americana thinks she knows hunger.”
Anna Maria and Amalia’s mother appeared on their stoop. “Eufemia, fatti fatte tuoi. Mind your own business. This doesn’t concern you at all.” The twins’ mother scolded Carmella, shouting that the old hag was asking for a beating.
I stood on the road in the heat of the noonday sun and stared, open mouthed.
Anna Maria snickered. “Close your mouth before you give mosquitos a new home. Before you end up with the same problem.”
When I think of that day, even all these days into the future, I can still feel the sun on my face, the tingling burn that seeped through the layers of my skin. And the yearning that churned from a dark corner inside me, reaching through my ribs, circling my heart, a swirling shame that I couldn’t protect Carmella. I couldn’t protect my dad. I couldn’t save anyone.
I pulled out the unique tool I had to make the girls feel inept. I spoke English, clipping my consonants with the smugness of someone who knew her second language offered a host of opportunities. “The sooner we leave this stupid place, the better.” I turned back to the house.
I threw myself into the role of the Good Samaritan, calling a greeting to Carmella morning, noon and night.
Carmella continued to slobber speech that I couldn’t make out. Until one day, when I stood playing alone with a bouncy ball against the front wall of the house. She lurched toward me, and I stopped, concentrated on her sounds.
She pointed to my rainbow halter top and velour lavender shorts. “Cover yourself up. You’re dressed like a putana.”
Excited, I ran inside to tell my father I’d understood the woman everyone called the Mute, realising mid-stride that she’d called me a whore.
My dad laughed. “Don’t be upset, Chickpea. She’s had a hard life.”
The night before our scheduled return to Toronto, the house filled with cousins coming to say goodbye. My father’s suitcase lay packed and ready. The one I shared with my mother hadn’t been touched.
“I’m going upstairs to pack,” I announced to everyone around me.
My father grabbed my wrist and pulled me to his side. “You’re not coming. You and your mom are staying here a little longer.”
“Che? Ma per che?” My tongue was having trouble forming anything longer than one syllable in Italian, the signals from my brain getting stuck. I trembled. My hands shook. I yanked my arm out of his grasp, almost pulling him from his seat. “No, no, no. No! No way I’m staying here.”
I looked over at my mother. She stared at the wall with her head bobbing drowsily. On meds, her movements simulated those of a zombie: she knew. Nonno Gennaro avoided eye contact: he knew. The other guests, they knew.
I turned back to face my dad and hit him full force across his chest. “No!”
He grabbed my arms and held them at my sides. “Don’t make like a crybaby in front of everybody. Ti de sta qua. You have to stay. Your mother needs to be here and keep taking medicine.”
“That’s not my fault. Let her stay. Let her live here. She loves it here.”
His expression hardened; his lips flattened like they would right before he’d yell at my mother.
I ran upstairs and hid behind my cot. Six more weeks of summer. Six more weeks of the twins. Six more weeks of the bullying that passed for teasing in a rural poverty-stricken place. Six weeks of being alone with my mother. I chewed the inside of my mouth, clenched my jaw until it ached. Downstairs, the party of goodbyes continued. I tried to block out the sound of boisterous voices punctuated with raucous laughter by covering my ears.
My dad didn’t come upstairs, didn’t come looking for me.
I was devastated. After an hour, I reached into my purse, took markers and a notepad. I drew a rose and wrote my father a note: Dad, don’t worry. I’ll look after mom.
I stuck the slip underneath his shirts. What I wanted to write was: Please come back. Don’t leave me here.
I lay down on the cot and prayed that when I woke in the morning, this would have been a bad dream. That I would go to the airport in Rome and travel to my real home in Toronto—the city where I could wear whatever I wanted. The city where no one knew me or my family—where the bandits, the fake barons, meant nothing. The city where I could get lost in a crowd rather than be watched, judged and deemed unworthy.
Mom and I stayed put even though her parents argued we needed to move in with them. I refused, and my mother made a show of pleading with me in front of her brother. She didn’t want to stay with her folks either, but she wouldn’t own up to it and shifted the blame to me. My grandparents and uncle countered that I was a selfish spoiled brat. As if my mother could ever be convinced to do anything other than exactly what she wanted. I heard her lie to her parents and make me the culprit.
“Meh tu pense che i’ nen’de capisce?” Astonished at her attempted deception, I interrupted her incriminating monologue. I would have called her a liar except I had no allies.
She pinched my arm and hurried us back to the house.
We ate all our meals with my mother’s parents. A day after my dad left, my mother stopped taking the meds that slowed her rages and made her sluggish, but she hadn’t pummeled me, and instead she seemed delighted to bask in the careful attention of her own bitter, malicious mother.
Nonna Sapooch had groomed her youngest daughter to be a brutish gossipmonger. They shared a love of shredding women through sarcasm and barbed comments. I avoided drawing attention to myself as much as possible, in order to live with the fragile peace.
On the morning that the three of us—mom, Nonna Sapooch and I—took the bus to see the specialist near Termoli one last time, my mother and I walked out into the Adriatic at low tide. Above us the clouds rippled in a mackerel sky. I gasped; the Italian countryside dazzled—a museum painting come to life, but I’d been too overwhelmed to appreciate the beauty, distracted by the ornery undercurrent that ran like electricity through my mother and grandmother.
While my mom and Sapooch visited the doctor, I waited alone on the sizzling beach for what felt like hours, hot and thirsty, sitting hunched over to make myself invisible. A man older than my father ambled by and tried to engage me in conversation. Then another offered to buy ice cream. Sweat formed on my scalp, dribbled down my sides and pooled on my back. I ignored the men and stared at the horizon, steadily sifting sand through my fingers, ready to grab a fistful if anyone lingered too long.
“Come on. We’re leaving.” Sapooch appeared at the edge of my towel, dressed all in black, from stockings to her headkerchief, out of place among the bikini crowd. She shifted her weight from foot to foot, resembling a pudgy crow scavenging for scraps.
With sweaty armpits, my skin slick from fear and heat, I wiped the sand off my legs and scrambled to my feet.
I fell into step beside my mom as we trekked back to the bus terminal. “What did the doctor say?”
Sapooch swatted my backside. “She doesn’t need a doctor. There’s nothing wrong with her.”
That night, I dreamt we missed our flight, and I was doomed to dwell in Bonefro forever.
Four weeks later, my mother and I made our way through Canada Customs. The agent flagged us as a problem. My mother would have to pay duty on all the gold jewellery she had bought in Italy. In under a week, she had spent on pricey baubles all the money my father had left with her. The agent told me to go through the gate and return with my dad so he could pay the fine. I stepped through the sliding doors in Arrivals and heard my father shouting my name.
“O Dio! What happened? What’s happened to you?” My father measured my upper arm by squeezing index finger and thumb like a blood pressure test. “Didn’t they feed you?”
My appetite left and barely resurfaced that summer: I’d lost twelve pounds in six weeks. I hadn’t noticed until I put on my jeans for the plane ride home and had to keep tugging them up.
I shrugged, and led him back to my mother and the agent. Before my mother could say anything, my dad grabbed her by the throat.
The agent yelled for security while my mom clawed at his hands and wheezed.
I screamed and pulled on his shirt.
He shook me off. “Did you remember to feed her? Why is she a skeleton? What kind of a mother doesn’t provide for her own child?” He tugged on the gold necklace. Evidence of the money she’d blown. “You’re a disgrace—a beast I should have left behind in Bonefro.”
Two guards ran over. One held his palms up as he approached us. In a loud, firm voice, he chastised my dad, “Sir, you have to calm down. Calm down.” The other spoke into a crackling walkie-talkie.
I screamed again. “Ne ge niende, Papa! Niende.” It’s nothing. Nothing.
He let go and grasped my forearm again. His voice broke, “Ti si perse tropp sai pese.”
“Is everything going to be okay here, sir? Are you going to control yourself?”
I begged the men to leave us alone. “It’s not his fault. He’s upset.” I pointed to my waistline and held out the jeans. “It’s me. My fault. I didn’t eat enough. I lost weight. He’s an Italian dad. He thinks I should always be eating.”
The guards exchanged glances while I held my breath.
My mother cleared her throat and coughed. She looked from my father to me. I could see the distortion in her features again, pinched mouth, scrunched forehead and that unmerciful gaze with the glimmer of defiance in her eyes. A noxious mix of envy and entitlement. She was like the mad scientist from a low-grade sci-fi film—constantly performing experiments on us, unfailing in her research and also the tireless catalyst. She’d found a way to make my father pay for the necklace more than once. She’d figure out how to punish me for the ruckus.