For our first lunch in
Italy the cousins had brought cold cuts and rolls, and they cooked pasta, beef
cutlets, and added a salad. The children ate some of the cold cuts and a little
pasta, but they skipped the rest. I wasn’t too concerned. When I was able to
prepare some of their usual food in the next few days, I was sure they would
make up the missing calories. After
lunch, the cousins cleared away the dishes but refused my offer of help. I heard them say something about "bambini," and then they pointed out leftover
meat that they had placed in a small refrigerator. Through hand gestures, I
gathered they told me to go and take care of the children, and that there was food for
the next day. I smiled and said "Grazie," something I repeated a lot that
day.
As they prepared to wash the dishes, I noticed that the sink had only one
tap, the tap that was connected to the tank on the roof. One of the cousins carried a large cooking
pot into the bathroom to fetch hot water from the tank over the bath. I had known that there was no washing machine
or dryer in the house, but when I saw only one source for hot water, I realized
that our life on the farm in Italy would be very different from our life in the
city in America.
As dusk fell everyone
went away, the cousins back to Turin, and the uncles back to their houses. As we unpacked our clothes and prepared for
our first night at Gabi, the two huge bedrooms echoed with our voices. Our room
dwarfed the king-sized bed and the wardrobe, a luxurious change from our tract
home in California. I thought it odd that it was almost twice the size of the
living room downstairs, the opposite of what I expected. However, its cavernous
feel left me anxious I wouldn't hear the children's cries in the night, so I made
sure to open the door adjoining our rooms. The two cribs my father-in-law had
ordered from the local furniture store had been set up in the second bedroom,
equally huge. The cribs were not like the usual wooden-slatted ones we had left
behind, but were shorter, web-sided beds that just fit Margaret Ann and
Matthew. Paul and James would sleep near them in the old-fashioned matching twin
beds that belonged to my in-laws.
We stripped the plastic
off the mattresses and made up the beds with sheets we found in the
wardrobe. When she had left two years
earlier, my mother-in-law had packed them carefully in mothballs, along with
the blankets. The fireplace in each room had been bricked in, so we took the
chill off the bedroom with a portable oil heater we had found in the garage
downstairs, then covered the sheets with camphor-smelling woolen blankets. I
was leery of the camphor fumes. Would they damage the children’s brains? Who
knew? But I had to take the chance. There was no other way of keeping them warm
in the cold, damp bedrooms except for the portable heater. If we left that on and one of the boys knocked
it over in the dark, the oil would surely catch fire. I opted for camphor fumes.
The
children were sleepy early and not very hungry for the leftovers, so we bathed
them two at a time, bending over the shortened tub, then dried them with towels
that we found in the cupboard, towels that also smelled faintly of mothballs.
Before we slipped them into their beds, we held the four of them close and sang
their familiar lullabies. Exhausted after that day of new sights and sounds,
they fell asleep almost instantly.
Not long
afterwards, we pulled the dank sheets over our own tired bodies, but I was
restless. We were truly far away from everything that was familiar. The farmhouse
was definitely not the villa of my imagination. The outside showed its years:
it needed fresh stucco and several layers of paint. The rooms inside were large
and cold, and sparsely furnished, and they also needed paint. And danger for
the children seemed to lurk everywhere. In spite of my home-study course, I had
not understood much of the Italian that the relatives had spoken, and even
though George had done a valiant job of translating, I had felt isolated as we
ate with them. In the darkness it was hard to dispel my doubts. My last
conscious thought was, "What have we done?"
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| The bath--many years later, but still the same as on that day. |
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| Matthew in his crib. Margaret Ann to the left. |
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