Entering Sicily¹

Darlene Madott

SOON AFTER WE ENTER SICILY, my grandmother’s story begins to inform what I see. I stare out the window at the slopes of hills as sensuous as the breasts of reclining women, hills planted at perilous inclines, with modern windmills now cresting these – not Nicolina Leone’s Sicily, at all. But I intuit from the walled estates, the outcropped single room dwellings which still offer respite from the midday sun, what it must have been to be the daughter of a padrone, the husbandman who oversaw the owner’s lands and labourers, in the absence of the titled owner in Palermo or Messina.

“I can still see my father’s house,” Nicolina said, the last time I saw her alive. She was feeling blindly for her piece of chicken on the plate. It would be my last visit with her and the aged aunt in whose home she then lived. Nicolina stared into the distance behind memory. “I see my father’s house ...”

What my grandmother described of her father’s house was of the young woman she must have been, once, serving food and wine with her stepmother, to the second storey, where only the men would eat at the long table.

“My lips never touched the glass.”

“Well, you’re never too old to learn,” I said. Astonishingly, my grandmother smiled and took a sip from the shot glass of wine I insisted on pouring for her and placing in her hand. She was one hundred and three. That day she ate with appetite.

“You don’t take photographs here, and you don’t ask questions about Leones, Spataforas, or anybody else,” Warren advises.

We are in Salemi – sister town to Vita, in Sicily. Warren has driven us out from Palermo, and we arrive in Salemi about 10:30 a.m. We head to a bar just off what seems to be the main square, and I order panini and due espressi, mindful of the time, to make it to Vita before the siesta.

“Do you think we stick out?” Warren asks, being facetious.

He is wearing a Red Wings’ hockey jacket from Canada and is of a weight and presence that towers above the diminutive men in the bar. I wear a brown leather jacket and blue jeans with zippered pockets. But it is more than our clothing. I am the only woman at the bar.

And we speak to each other, in English. We are stranieri.

As we eat our panini, the old men of Salemi stare at us, and we look back at them, looking back at us. Staring is an Italian sport. According to her own story, no one had ever loved Nicolina as much as her stepmother; nor had she ever loved another as much as that good woman. It wasn’t always so. The adored apple of her father’s eye, Nicolina looked upon the stepmother as usurper of her father’s attentions. Nicolina was only three when her mother died falling off a horse with the unborn twins twisted in her womb, when her father re-married. Initially, Nicolina would have none of the stepmother, gave her a tough time. Until the day the stepmother placed her firmly in a tub of water, and gave her a bath. While administering to Nicolina’s body, in soap and water to the elbows and on her knees, she made a deal with her three-year-old stepdaughter.

Your father will always prefer you to me, but he needs me to help him take care of you. This can either work well for us both, or it can go really hard. It’s your choice. Respect me, and I will love you, always. But if you choose to go against me, it will go very badly for us both. The choice is yours.;

How did she figure it out, in those days before psychologists, to position it thus before a rebellious, fiercely intelligent and manipulative three-year-old – to give Nicolina the choice?

“Think of the times,” I say to Warren, “what it must have been – a woman alone. You either married or you starved, and what a dangerous business it must have been in those days, keeping the love of a tough man.”

“That tastes good,” says Warren to the owner of the bakery we have entered in Salemi, to get directions to the sister town of Vita. The slender owner, comprehending, laughs with her mouth stuffed full of cannoli, and signals with her free hand toward her shelves, palm outstretched and welcoming, as if to say, please, help yourselves. While Warren delights his eyes with the fresh pastries, I am fascinated by the sculpted and lacquered breads in varying designs. I purchase two clusters of bread grapes – one for my mother back in Canada, one for my own harvest table.

Nicolina sings to me, clapping the hands of my then infant son ...;

 

Batti manini ca veni Papà 

porta cose e sinni va

porta nuci e cassateddi

pi manciari ai figghi beddi.

Porta mennuli e castagni

Pi accurdari a chiddi granni.

Here comes Papa, so clap these hands

He brings good things, all from the land

He brings you nuts and little cakes,

Melons and fruit to make you great.

Almonds and chestnuts, sweet cheese for this day

A kiss for Mama, and then he’s away.

“My little Vito,” keened Nicolina, “I see my Vito ...”

Don’t say it, I think, don’t tell me that story, not while holding the hands of my own infant son ...

“He used to run to me, and pound his little chest. I gave him life. I could not give him breath.”

“My great-grandfather had to be tough, or he would have starved. They all would have starved along with him.” And Nicolina’s father was tougher than most – a padrone of another’s lands.

The stepmother, herself widowed, came to the marriage with a son, Paolo, with whom Nicolina later fell in love when her time came to discover love. Her father forbade this love, married her instead to the Spatafora who would eventually take her to Canada –breaking three hearts in the process – four, if you included his own.

From the hilltop town of Salemi, I see a vineyard of Nero d’Avola grapes, and wonder if this might have been part of the very lands my great-grandfather oversaw?

I must have heard it at my aunt’s table – the aunt who was taking care of my aged grandmother. My grandmother was only sixteen at the time when my great-grandfather forced her to marry the man who would become my grandfather – Rosario Spatafora. In those days, when a man wept for weeks without explanation, he was put into a mental institution. Nicolina had to wait until she was of legal age, before she could sign him out – her sensitive young husband – the man who had crossed the ocean four times, the man her father had forced her to marry. Rosario’s fifth crossing would be his last – with Nicolina, then twenty-one. He would never return again.

“Yolked to a sick man ... On my wedding night they gave me a bowl of water and vinegar, with a cloth. O Dio, married to a sick man ...”

“Why didn’t you tell me that my grandfather had a nervous breakdown?” I challenge my mother, when I first learn of my grandfather’s incarceration in a mental institution.

“What difference would it have made?” “It would have helped explain.” “Explain what?”

Explain why Nicolina had no children, the first five years of her marriage, why they all came afterward – in Canada. Explain me, possibly, to myself. Explain that motion sickness of the soul, what happens when you lose your centre of gravity, travel too many distances too many times, too far from home – the unbearable suffering of the displaced person. Explain how I myself had felt, after Vancouver, the panic attacks – the most recent of these in Agrigento, in the Valle dei Templi – as Warren slept through the siesta and I clung to his breathing body, as if to home.

“So when the guys back at the coffee shop ask me how I spent my vacation, I’ll tell them I wandered around graveyards.” The coffee shop to which my Warren refers is Messina Bakery in Toronto. The coffee shop in Salemi was called Extra Bar.

The names: Spatafora, Leone, Agueci, Caradonna, Gandolfo, Pedone, Boscaglia, Gucciardi, Pace – vaguely familiar – names heard in my parents’ stories of growing up around Clinton and College, in Toronto.

Spatafora. Of those who remained, they must have done all right for themselves, because there is a Spatafora mausoleum, in the newest part of the Vita graveyard.

None of the graves are old enough to be recognized by my parents as contemporaries of Nicolina, though the names are shared. She arrived in Canada just at the turn of the century, in 1906. Still, I take pictures.

 

GUCCIARDI MARIA

VED. SPATAFORA

*26-9-1881 + 2-12-1974

 

SPATAFORA MICHELE

FU GIUSEPPE

*25-10-1872 + 14-9-1958

Nicolina Leone returned to Vita in Sicily only once, for the death and burial of her father. She stayed almost a year, accompanied by her two small children, infants under five. She returned to keep vigil over her dying father and then, upon his death, remained for some time longer to be of comfort to her stepmother. And when Nicolina left Vita that final time – after having seen her father honoured with the tomb built with the money she had inherited from him – she left in a carretto tirato da un cavallo, her stepmother walk-running at the wagon’s side. For miles, the stepmother accompanied them on foot. And Nicolina would stop the driver and get down and embrace the old woman, and the old woman would embrace Nicolina and the children she was certain never to see again. And for as many miles as Nicolina could bear, it went on like this, with the old woman beside the cart, weeping, and the cart stopping and everyone getting out, embracing, weeping, and back in again – struggling to say goodbye in a way the adult women knew to be final. Until at last, the old woman stood still in the dusty road and watched, as they passed out of sight on the road direzione Palermo, from there to Naples, to the boat that would take them across the ocean, forever.

Forever. Never again. Not ever, in this lifetime. How do you do that – part – when you know you will never, ever, see the object of your love, again?

“How many churches can there be in a town this size?”

The one church I am seeking – the one where my grandmother caused to have a plaque made in honour of her father’s memory, I cannot find. It was probably bombed during the war, or lost in an earthquake. The only church we do find, and this before the siesta, is closed. The founding dates on the plaque outside its central door are beyond the dates of my grandmother’s story.

“She was running after her nephew,” my mother says. “I think her name was Anna, my real grandmother, the one who died, falling from a horse.”

“What do you mean, running after?”

My mother explains: “Her husband’s brother had a son, Vito. I guess he was a young boy, and his father used to beat him. They were tough customers, in those days.”

“Who, my great-grandfather?”

“No, his brother. But they were both tough customers. Vito ran away. Your great-grandmother, Anna, I think her name was, she got on a horse and chased after him, to bring him home. But she was pregnant, and fell off the horse, and that’s how she died.”

The town of Vita feels dead. It is more alive in the graveyard, above the town, where at least there are the pictures of its former inhabitants. With its rows of mausoleums, the Vita graveyard mimics the society of the town below, but on a miniature scale. And what hard faces stare out of these stones – as if not a single life had been happy.

Survivors of Vita Bascaglia have planted roses. Three buds burst pink, red and salmon to adorn her tombstone – monument of a life lived from 1898 to 1973. I think of the profusion of roses that bloomed around Nicolina’s porch – the scent of summer so heady I’d feel drunk on my tea and my grandmother’s porch stories.

“I do not feel her spirit here,” I say to Warren. “She has gone from this place, entirely. My cousin said she felt Nicolina here. She found the town closed, and also came to a graveyard. She said she felt our grandmother’s spirit. I feel nothing.”

“Did you expect your grandmother to hang around in a place like this forever?”

I have told him, of course, the story of Nicolina’s death – how the aged aunt took my grandmother and herself to an old folks’ home. The aunt stayed in the assisted living wing, while my grandmother was put in with the really decrepit – those with dementia and Alzheimer’s, and those who couldn’t “do for themselves.” Nicolina, although blind and deaf, had all her mental faculties. She protested in not-so-subtle ways. “Perché sono qui?” “Why am I here?” she would proclaim at the dinner table, where her dinner companions were strapped to their wheelchairs and stared, disinterested, at their Canadian food. Ever an elegant woman, whose father had returned from Palermo with parasols and bolts of fabric she turned into the fashions of the day, Nicolina would break wind at this last dinner table, to lend emphasis to her protest. There was no one here with whom to make a deal. At night, she called out names – of those she had loved, or who had loved her. Sadly, my mother’s name was not among them.

Three days before she died, Nicolina had her last bowel movement. She washed her private parts – never permitting anyone to touch these. She lay on her bed, and folded her hands neatly across her chest. She summoned Aunt Vitina to shave her – Vitina, named after the town and the dead little boy, Vito, who had come and gone before her. Nicolina willed her own death. The vanity with which she had lived her life ensured her face would be hairless in its final display. In fact, Nicolina had looked resplendent in death.

“Don’t worry,” Warren says to me, in the car, just outside the graveyard of Vita. “I will find someone to shave you.”

“Forget the shave. It’s about the picture on my grave ...”

Tough. They were all tough – tough as in hanging two loads of laundry while in labour with your first child.

Tough, as in being forced to marry your father’s choice.

Tough, as in burying your child – named after a town in Sicily that means “life.”

Tough, as in pretending not to recognize your youngest child, my mother, your daughter, while she was washing your face during those final three days – “Francesca? Who?” When you well knew who she was – lucid to the last moment. Because love did not exist in your vocabulary, then, not ever again, after your tough father married you to the Spatafora who took you to Canada, not ever again after your stepmother died.

Forever. Never again. Not ever, in this lifetime. How do you do that – part – when you know you will never, ever, see the object of your love, again?

“Ma, if it came to a choice between hearing it from my mother and hearing it from my own child, I’d rather hear it from my child” – words I said to my mother after Nicolina’s death, when my mother could not get over her grief, that Nicolina had died without acknowledging her – whose hand it was that held the wash cloth: “I love you, Ma, I love you.”

Vito. Vita. Vitina.

Names on stones. Lifetimes reduced to a single story line: “Anna, I think her name was. She died falling off a horse, the unborn twins twisted in her womb.” Names on stones. Names, ultimately, that identify nothing – a slow relentless vanishing ...

“Take a picture,” Warren says, as we leave Vita. Obediently, I turn around in the car, and stick my camera out the window, backwards. The sign is rusted, and bears the symbol for “no horns.” The sign says:

VITA

BENVENUTI A

WELCOME TO

BIENVENUE A

WILLKOMMEN IN

VITA

I make my Warren toot the horn, in defiance and affirmation. As always, he obliges me. He has no idea why I ask him to honk it, looks at me, surprised and uncomprehending. Yes, blow it – again – hard. Lean on that horn! Sound the horn for those who can no longer hear it. Yes, sound it, for me.