Nino Ricci
WHILE MY OWN ENTRY into Canada was by that most traumatic of emigrations, birth, my parents, who arrived here a few years ahead of me, in 1954, apparently had a much easier time of it, cruising into Halifax’s Pier 21 aboard the well-appointed passenger liner Saturnia. To hear them tell it, they had the time of their lives on the crossing, dining and dancing and living it up, giving the lie to those images we were all raised on of the poor immigrant masses stumbling out of the darkened holds of rat-infested, cholera-infected death ships. By the 1950s, it seems, the days of lightless steerage berths and of fatal island quarantines had passed, and for about three hundred dollars—roughly what you could save in a year—any two-bit peasant or labourer could book a fairly comfortable passage to the New World.
For my parents, that passage had its origins in my father’s year of army service, when, stationed in northern Italy far from the mountains of his native Molise, he gazed for the first time on the beautiful flat green fields of the Po Valley. The sight made him wonder why he and his family had been wasting their time on the few craggy acres of hillside they scrabbled a living from back home; it seems it had never occurred to him before then that elsewhere things might be different. Not long afterwards the chance arose to come to Canada, and he was quick to take it. The flat fields that greeted his arrival here, however, were a far cry from those of the Po: windswept and snow-covered and bleak, they seemed the last out-reaches of the habitable world. Coming from Italy, where even the dog houses had walls of foot-thick stone, he and my mother were made somewhat concerned by the rickety wooden shacks that seemed to form the primary residences here, and by the tiny, even more rickety ones out back that they feared might be the workers’ quarters, though one whiff of them would quickly have explained their function.
As it happened, my parents’ first home in Canada, in the small farming town of Leamington, Ontario, was not so far removed from those rickety outhouses: set off the barn of a farmer who had sponsored them for their first year of work here, it was essentially a refurbished chicken coop. A couple of my brothers were born there, and afterwards my parents remembered the place fondly enough; and indeed an uncle of mine, Luigi, subsequently took it over, and stayed on for the next thirty years working at the local Heinz factory and living the bachelor life before finally returning to Italy to the wife and son he’d left behind there. We used to visit him sometimes Sunday mornings after mass and he always seemed so settled and self-sufficient and in his element in that elfin habitation, with his army-sized cot and his stoop-shouldered Kelvinator fridge and the little shot glasses he’d bring out for a glass of Tia Maria or anisette. It was a kind of shock to me as I grew older to learn that he had this completely other life across the sea that he would be returning to, and that everything here—his blackened espresso pot, his tiny sloped-ceilinged rooms—was merely provisional, a way station. I had not quite understood then this dual-sidedness of immigration, how there was always an absent reference point that the present stood against, and that could make the present’s nuts-and-bolts everydayness and permanence suddenly appear the merest shadow.
By the time I was born—the fifth of seven children, though one, a girl, had died as an infant back in Italy—my parents had purchased a small farm and our household had burgeoned to include a set of grandparents and my father’s two unmarried sisters. In some important respects, the world I arrived into was not so different from the one my parents had left behind: the language we spoke was the dialect my parents had brought with them; the festivals we celebrated were the local ones of their hometowns; the people we saw were my parents’ siblings and cousins and neighbours from back home. My mother’s hometown of Villa Canale, which had a population of about a thousand just after the war, eventually, in a kind of mitosis, lost some half of these to Leamington; and so it might have been true to claim that those who left ended up no less at home than those who stayed behind. Indeed, I often heard it said that fellow villagers got along much better in Canada than they ever had in their hometowns, where they’d had centuries of feuds and old land disputes and the like to divide them, and where everyone had been careful not to let their neighbours know their business. In Canada, on the other hand, at planting time, every paesan and third cousin from back home would show up in your field to help you out. Some of my best memories from early childhood are of those days in the fields, the jugs of Kool-Aid I’d lug around to people while they worked and the mid-morning breaks we’d take with coffee and biscuits and slabs of cheese and salted pork passed around on the tip of someone’s jackknife.
Often enough the cheese and pork would be of our own vintage; we used to hang them to cure from the rafters of our barn, with shields fashioned from Unico Vegetable Oil tins positioned above them to keep off the pigeon droppings. The pork came from the hog that we slaughtered every year in mid-winter: it would show up in our basement one day grunting and heaving, live and primal and real, and be sausage and tripe by the following night. This yearly slaughter, which had always to be during the waxing moon or the meat would go bad, was accompanied by a party, for which the relatives were invited over and sheets of plywood were laid on sawhorses in the living room for tables, the windows fogging up with the heat of cooking and talk. All of these things, of course—the pigs in the basement, the parties, even the Unico tins in the barn—seemed perfectly normal and inevitable to me when I was small, not because they recalled customs my parents had had in Italy, which in any event I knew nothing of, but simply because, not unlike my father back in Molise, I had never realized that elsewhere things might be different.
When I started school, however, a lot of what we did suddenly began to seem not so normal. There was the homemade bread my mother used for our sandwiches, thick-crusted, spongy stuff that she’d fashioned baking pans for from those same all-purpose Unico tins and that did not resemble in the least the white, perfect, store-bought bread of the other kids; there was the patched, old-fashioned, hand-me-down look of our clothes. It was as if I too had set out on a ship and arrived in another country, where people did things differently, so that suddenly everything about my own little domain, the closed autonomous world I’d been raised in until then, seemed makeshift and shabby and low. This, then, perhaps, was my true passage to Canada, out of innocence and sameness into difference, and like any child, I did not like the experience of difference one bit, and sought every means to mitigate it. Thus all things Italian became anathema, and the two worlds I lived in, at home and at school, were kept cleanly separate and distinct, so that the former should not in any way compromise my standing in the latter. In this way I sailed more or less happily towards assimilation, which seemed the good and proper course for someone of my clearly questionable origins.
In the summer of 1971, I made my first visit to Italy, as part of a family trip that lasted six weeks and took us to every corner of the country. That trip transformed my relationship to my parents’ homeland: from an Italianness that had meant shabby clothes and spongy bread, I discovered one that included instead such marvels as the Colosseum and Saint Mark’s Square, which even the callow twelve-year-old I was then could not help but be impressed by. Indeed, Italy, in its excess, seemed precisely designed for twelve-year-olds, since every sort of wonder could be found there, from skeleton-filled catacombs to vast marble monuments and endless miles of sand-brimmed sea; and I immediately fell hopelessly in love with the place, with exactly that achy, adolescent intensity I had begun to feel by then towards the opposite sex. The Italy I fell in love with, however, was not the one my parents had left behind. In fact, in most of the places we visited they were as much tourists as I was, and were laying eyes on them for the first time. Thus what we were discovering together was precisely the Italy that my parents had always been excluded from, coming as they had from the barbarous south, where feudalism hadn’t been abolished until the 1850s and where Mussolini, who had been the first to introduce there such extravagances as hospitals and schools, was still considered a hero.
It was a bit of a shock to me, then, to arrive at this other Italy, that of my parents’ little mountain villages, and to find there an entirely different world, of abandoned houses and questionable plumbing and animal shit in the roads. What in the rest of Italy had seemed venerable and ancient here seemed merely backward, and my first reaction was a wish to flee back to the elegant apartment blocks and terraced inner courtyards of my sophisticated Roman cousins. I remember the supper we had our first evening in my grandfather’s house in Villa Canale, the flies everywhere and the stable stink from outside, the gobs of spit on the hearth where my grandfather had hawked towards the cooking fire and missed. We had penne with tomato sauce for supper, but I could not eat a bite of them, so much did the place turn my stomach. Seeing the bathroom, a crude addition to the place from the early sixties, when indoor plumbing had apparently still been a great novelty, I was relieved to learn that one of my uncles had recently built a new home down the street with somewhat more updated facilities, including the luxury of a water heater and a bathtub.
I cannot call up now what I had thought my parents’ birthplace would actually be like, based on the mythologizing anecdotes and commentaries I’d heard from them until then. But surely I had not imagined it as anything quite so unsettling and strange, so real, as what actually confronted me. There was so much texture to the place, so much taste and sight and smell, that it seemed an affront—the hot days and cold nights, the smell of animals and smoke, the dwarfish aunts with rotted teeth and the grandmother who did not rise the long day from her chair and who did not speak, so that the flies made a home in the folds of her copious overgarments and shawls and I could not have told if she was living or dead. Every morning my mother used to send me across town to buy a jug of milk from a woman who kept a cow there, which now, of course, conjures up images of the pure peasant wholesomeness of things fresh from the source; but at the time, fetching that milk still frothy and warm from the cow like that, in a stable that smelled like one and that was thick with those ubiquitous flies, I could hardly bring myself to drink the stuff.
What I had thus discovered was that at age twelve I was already well confirmed in my bias towards such modern values as hygiene and pasteurization and hot baths, and did not find it pleasant to be deprived of them. I counted it as hopeless backwardness, for instance—even though later I remembered these things as the mark of a great quaintness and charm—that Villa Canale boasted at the time only a single telephone, at the local bar and general store, and a single TV, which the owner would kindly set out on his balcony above the village square every evening for communal viewing. Back then I thought of this side of myself, the one that felt horrified at the prospect of several weeks without the familiar trappings of modern living, as my Canadian side, since at home I had always taken such things as hot water and TVs utterly for granted. But in fact this love of amenity was rather more universal than that. Italy itself, after all, was no stranger to modernity: it was there, in the bathroom of an expressway service station, that three decades ago I first came across what has only in recent years become standard issue in Canada, the automatic water faucet. So while I thought that my parents’ villages had helped make me aware of that part of me that was irreducibly Canadian—ironically, just at the point when I was learning to love my Italianness—what they really did was uncover in me more or less the same instinct that had led my parents to emigrate, namely, the desire for a more comfortable life. Perhaps my parents could not have named so precisely what it was they were after, the exact kitchen appliance or brand of TV; and yet it was the general siren call of such things, of the whole luxurious modern world, that drew them away, and that even still meant that the young in these villages left for the cities the minute they were able. It should not have been a surprise to me, then, how in Canada the new homes of Italians, fitted with every modern convenience, became their symbols of success, and how within them the bathrooms in particular represented a special apotheosis, so much so that there was usually one bathroom, complete with every fixture and frill and decked out in the finest Italian marble, that was absolutely off limits except to special visitors, and stood as a kind of shrine to having arrived.
Back in Villa Canale, however, a strange thing had begun to happen to me: with each day that passed, the place got more and more under my skin, not so much that I could have said I was actually growing to like it, but certainly so that I could not ignore it. For instance there was a boy that I met there, Peppino, twelve like me, who, however, smoked and drank and walked around in a man’s corduroy cap and suspenders, and who knew one word of English, fock, which he gave me to believe he understood something of from first-hand experience. He led me up to his uncle’s place once and we sat in the cellar there drinking wine together, which his uncle poured off for us as if it were nothing unusual for a couple of twelve-year-olds to stop in of an afternoon for a taste of his latest vintage. I do not remember much of the rest of that day except how much stranger still Villa Canale seemed to me when it was spinning around at great speed, and when even the cobblestones beneath my feet could not keep from shifting and seething with each step. Then there were my cousins, my father’s nieces, who lived just beyond my father’s hometown of Poggio Sannita in the Valley of the Pigs: four girls who ranged in age from eleven to eighteen, and all of whom made my breath go short with their sheer earthy loveliness and perfection. The eldest, Marisa, would walk with me arm in arm sometimes through the pastures and promise to marry me, and it was all I could do then not to keep my heart from bursting from the wish that such a hopeless thing were possible.
It was also in this time that I finally met Uncle Luigi’s wife, my mother’s sister Maria. Small and bright-eyed and bluntly, unceremoniously generous and open-handed, she seemed not so much a good match for Uncle Luigi as literally his other half, living out for him here that portion of his life he had left behind. The house she lived in had been built with the money he had sent over from Canada, complete with a winery and cold house out back; but he himself had yet to lay eyes on it. For my own part, I felt as if I were looking inside Uncle Luigi’s head, seeing there his dream of return, that part of him that was always elsewhere.
Indeed, the entire village had this sense to it of somehow doubling over all my experience in Canada, since I could not step from my grandfather’s door without seeing some face that was the exact duplicate of one back home or some way of doing things that mirrored our own, as if everyone who had gone had left behind here this secret other life that had continued unabated after they had set out. I might have said that they’d left here the ghosts of themselves, and of their former lives, had it not rather begun to seem by then that this was the life that was visceral and real and the one in Canada the ghostly one, merely this one’s pale imitation. It seemed a strange kind of haunting, these two worlds so distant and complete in themselves and yet each of which seemed the other’s shadow, as if I might round a corner and what was strange would suddenly become familiar as day, and it would be time to slaughter the pig and set out the sawhorses or to bring the bread and cheese to the fields for the morning merenda.
Years later, when I came to write my first novel, I was somewhat surprised to find myself going back for my material to that first visit to my parents’ villages. Apparently they had lodged themselves much more deeply in my psyche than I had imagined; and the story they eventually gave rise to came upon me practically unawares, so that characters and settings and scenes sprang out of me almost fully formed, as if they had simply been awaiting the moment that I would set them free. Curiously, there was almost nothing in the novel of the tourist’s Italy I had been so enamoured of as a child, and that indeed I had continued to love; rather it was the world of stables and flies that my imagination had been fired by, as if the more sophisticated Italy of monuments and automatic water faucets had been merely the back door for my entry into my own proper Italy, the one my beautiful cousins lived in and my diminutive, no-nonsense aunts. That first novel ended with a sea journey aboard a ship called Saturnia; and now, in retrospect, it almost seems to me that my real passage to Canada came exactly in that fictive voyage, at the point when I was finally able to fully imagine the place I needed to set out from, since without a point of departure there could be no arrival.
Towards the end of my stay in Villa Canale I took a walk with my sister one day down to the river that wound its way through the valley that the village overlooked. The trip was much longer than we had judged, down steep, winding goat paths that passed through vineyards and wheat fields and rocky pasture; and once we had arrived and had wandered for a ways along the river, we looked around us and suddenly realized we were hopelessly, utterly lost, some shift in the landscape having erased every landmark that might have pointed us back to Villa Canale. We finally stumbled upon a crooked byroad that looked as if it might lead in the proper direction and started up it, beneath a relentless mid-afternoon sun; but each twist in the road seemed only to further disorient us, and take us into increasing eeriness and unfamiliarity. We passed tiny villages where dogs barked furiously from courtyards but not a soul stirred; we heard the cicadas screech at us from the roadside weeds; we saw a snake slither across our path and into a gully. Our legs by then were beyond tired, but we dared not stop for fear we could not continue again. Our throats were beyond parched, but there was not a fountain to be seen, and the one hole-in-the-wall village shop we eventually passed was boarded up for the afternoon closing. And so we trudged on, ready to perish there in the Molisan wilderness, two hapless americani who had foolishly wandered too far from home.
Then suddenly we crested a hill and found ourselves on the high road into Villa Canale. A young woman of the village, one of several I had worshipped from afar, was just coming in from the fields and instantly recognized us.
“You’ve been to the river,” she said, and it was all I could do to nod agreement, so relieved was I to see a familiar face.
“You want to be careful down there,” she said. “They’re not civilized like we are up here in the hills.”
Then she took my arm in hers and led us back into Villa Canale, and we passed the cellar where I’d got drunk, the post office and the bar, the balcony where the TV was set out every night, and the village seemed no longer a foreign place I was visiting but a familiar one I was returning to. In fact it had always been, but I hadn’t seen that, the shadow at the back of our lives that had always dogged us, now finally brought to the light of day.
