Alarico’s Museum (Aquilonia, 2006)

Years before I ever step across the threshold, and onto the cement tiles of my two-room schoolhouse, I am enraptured with the mystery of that place of learning. When I am two, three, four and five, I wait in front of the school for the teachers, just to wave to them. Then, when they wave back, I run home to my mother, red-faced and out of breath. I can’t wait until my sixth birthday, when the wooden doors finally open for me and for my black apron with the starched white collar.

Before I know how to read and write, I am sure all my questions about the Universe can be answered. But when I get to school, my head gets filled up with more questions, and I don’t have time to get the answers. My parents, in search of a better life for us, one that will allow our family to stay together in one place, leave the mountains of southern Italy for the flatter land of southern Ontario. I don’t see my school again for forty years.

Forty years and two months, to be exact. On my first and on my last day in Aquilonia, it is the first structure I see when we round the curve of the only road into the town. It is painted a bright canary yellow instead of the blue-gray that I remember so well, but I recognize it right away. It is the same place, nothing added or subtracted, stuck at the crossroads between the valley where we lived, and the uphill of the mountain path that disappears into the clusters of ancient rooftops and crumbling castle ruins.

It is the first place I saw when I stood on tiptoes on my mother’s stone balcony. My mother’s stone balcony, from where I saw the swallows lined up on the roof of the school, and the chamomile growing wild near the front steps.

My mother’s stone balcony is the only thing left over from our tiny house.

When I tell Alarico, on my last day with him, that our school looks the same as it did when we were six, he laughs. He takes great pains to let me down gently.

“Really? To you, it looks the same? Many things have changed since you left. Right now, for instance, it’s empty. It wasn’t worth keeping open for a few children who could just as easily take the bus to the nearest town. Even in our year, there were only five of us, remember?”

I feel like the doors of the little school slam shut in my face. I ask Alarico why the school looks deceptively fresh and new from the outside. Why are there no signs of what the school was or had become? What is going on in there now?

“Nothing and everything,” he says. “When it first closed down, after Colombo and Fedora retired, everybody had their own plans for the school. The only thing they agreed on was to leave it standing. Nobody wanted a gaping hole in its place. Over the years, they used it for many things. A storage space for the travelling opera, a temporary refuge for the Holy Family while the church was being repaired, a butcher’s shop.”

The latest use for the school is as a medical supplies depot, the kind needed in an emergency when there is no doctor, no nurse, and no midwife available. It reminds me of a dream I have before returning to Aquilonia. I see my school turned into a world famous medical centre, and all the villagers, past and present, employed there in one capacity or another. Everyone is there, even my grandfather, who is the world-famous doctor he should have been if he had had the chance – the only doctor who could write prescriptions understood by everyone, because they are in his beautiful calligraphy.

When I share my dream with Alarico, he tells me he remembers my interest in grand designs, but I don’t recall that at all.

I remember myself in two parts: before and after March 17, 1966. Before, I am in a school with two rooms, studying World Geography and the Divine Comedy. After, I am in a school with three floors of classrooms, studying the ABCs in a language that has five more letters than I am used to. Before, I am running uphill and downhill and into the loving arms of my mother’s family. After, I am running on flat land, trying to grip the buttery ground with my feet, trying to steady my step while balancing my family on my head.

“The school has not fallen down like the castle,” Alarico says. “It has a different destiny. It will wake up the dead. It will be my museum.”

Alarico is a talented artist, true, but he sees himself more as an historian, or more accurately, as a preserver of history. Ever since he comes back into the village to stay, he wants to turn our elementary school into a museum. He is possessive of the school, even when no one seems to care about it. He wants to claim it for something important, something that will bring people back from overseas and reunite them with people left behind. Like a cosmic beacon, he imagines the school calling back Aquilonians and their successors. From the four corners of the world, they and their children will come like pilgrims, yearning for a home they have never seen, and learning that the sacrifices of their parents were not in vain.

Most of all, Alarico wants young people like his daughter and his future grandchildren to stay, inspired by the memories stored in the museum, enticed by the new life the museum will bring.

“See,” Alarico whispers to me, “this will not be any ordinary museum. Not the kind that takes antiquity from churches and streets and locks it up under glass, that’s for sure. People are free to see that any time in Italy.”

“True.”

“You remember how you and I used to take these finds for granted? Stuff that farmers found in the fields that was worth who knows what. Stuff from the castle … wrecks to fill ten museums.”

“We played with it, like it was trash.”

“Now, instead of trash, it’s called antichità.”

Alarico is a smart man. He is not interested in what is dug up from the castle, or what the farmers find under their soil. He is interested in what farmers used to dig up the relics. For many years, he collects hoes, pitchforks, shovels, pickaxes, and every other discarded farm implement he finds in old barns. The more primitive the instrument, the more it has succumbed to the years, the more priceless it is to him.

“I like them so much better when they are imperfect,” he says. “More for me to do.”

He cleans each instrument, cures it of rust, replaces nuts and bolts, re-creates missing teeth or limbs, then wraps white canvass around it to protect it from the elements. He keeps them neatly dressed like mummies, propped up on a wall of his old house, across from his oil paintings of violets and poppies. He shows them to me and tells me of his dream.

“Li, this will be the real treasure of Alarico, not the one in the legend that the ancient Viking buried under the bridge of old Cosenza, but a real treasure. Thousands of people will see it with their own eyes. They’ll run to Aquilonia when they hear that there is nothing like it anywhere else.”

I am skeptical, but I don’t say anything. I remember another farmer, my mother’s father, who toiled all his life, on land that he could never hope to own. Unlike Alarico’s smooth, gleaming instruments, my grandfather’s were scarred and opaque, even when he cleaned them at the end of the day. My grandfather was always repairing his farming implements because he often broke them, either by accident, or by design. When he broke them by accident, it was the result of a tug-of-war between him and a thickly-tentacled root. When he broke them on purpose, it was because he was maddened by some injustice or other. He said he abhorred violence, but he regularly took out his righteous anger against his closest helpers.

I remember seeing him throw picks into the air, before they fell into the highest branches of trees where we needed ladders and three people to get them down. I saw him take shovels and bang their backsides until they looked like curled spoons in the hands of an alchemist. I saw him stomp on buckets of sulfate until the blue rocks were smashed into fine dust and the wind, conveniently going the right way, carried the blue dust along the grape vines, with no help from my wild grandfather.

He is the same grandfather who, upon hearing the news that his daughter and her family were immigrating to Canada, ran into his fields, out of sight of everybody, and savaged at least three of his precious farming tools. Anybody would think he was against our leaving, but it was he, my aunts told me, who insisted that a better life be found for me and my brother. It was he who commanded another son, already settled in Canada, to call for his sister’s family. It was he who told one of his daughters that sending me away was like ripping out his own eyes.

“And the people here, what do they think of your idea?” I ask Alarico.

“Unnu sacciu, I don’t know,” he says, using the language of the older villagers. “Your grandfather was a farmer. What do you think he would say?”

I think that Giacomo Rondinella would find the idea of a museum for farm tools wrong-headed and backward. He was a philosopher and a lover of history, but he also had a practical side. He wanted peasants like him to benefit from progress. He wanted his life and theirs to be less painful.

He would say, “Why cry over things that have been thrown out for good reason?”

But even as I think of how my grandfather might find the idea ridiculous, I want to defend Alarico, the same as when he got into trouble with our teacher, Signora Colombo. There is an earnestness in his eyes that takes me back.

He has that same look as when we chased frogs or read Superhero comics. It was that look that made me feel invincible a few days before we left Aquilonia for Toronto, in 1966.

The last time I saw him, he said, “It’s a good thing you’re going to America. That’s where Superman and the others come from.”

This time though, he says, “I resent America,” in a voice I don’t remember. “It has stolen too many of our people, and when you went, you took my best with you.”

“But our family had to leave so we could be together. If we had stayed, my father could not come home.”

Alarico knows what it is to lose a father.

“Alarì, what will you call your museum?”

“It will be named after my brother, Maddalena’s real son. Since I can remember, I wanted to save Amedeo from Limbo. I wanted to live a pious life so that God would take pity on my brother and take him up to Heaven. Then, the church declared that Limbo no longer exists. Just like that. Limbo was here one minute, gone the next. After that, I lost my own belief.”

“So, now, where do you think Amedeo is?”

“I don’t know where he is, but I do know he needs a home. He has been in that cemetery – nameless – for so long. The museum will be called L’Archivio di Amedeo.”

“Beautiful … but why do this here, in Aquilonia?”

“My place is here,” he says. “É statu sempri cà. It has always been here.” Then, almost as an afterthought, he adds, “This is your home, too. You are always welcome here.”