Moving to Italy: Phone call--Part 2

My sister’s sobbing spun me backwards five years.

My sister, my brother, and I heard the siren wail down our street. Then my mother stopped breathing. My sister knelt on the floor and sobbed as she watched our brother start mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. Panicked, I ran to yell at the firemen, “Oxygen, bring oxygen quickly!” Tall, muscular men in heavy black boots and clanking belts moved in slow motion to fill the bedroom and squeeze us out. When they wheeled the gurney through the front door a few minutes later, an oxygen mask wheezed over my mother’s face. But they could do nothing to bring her back. She was dead of a heart attack at fifty-three.

About a year after my mother died, I realized I was losing the visual image of her face. I could remember the bend of her nose, the dimple in her cheek, and the small gap in her teeth when she smiled, but I couldn’t pull it all together. Because looking at photographs of her could reduce me to tears, I had put them all away. I had been so intent on avoiding the pain of remembering her that I could no longer visualize clearly what she looked like. Worried, I pulled out the last pictures we had taken of her, spread them out on the kitchen table, and looked at them carefully—the black and white Christmas card picture and the colored ones taken under a tree outside. Relief and pain surged through me as I stared at her familiar face. I didn’t want to forget her, not just the way her cheek felt when I kissed her, or the way her voice rose when she laughed, but also the way her whole face shone as she smiled. My children would never know her, but I held in my hand physical evidence of her existence, photographs to go with the stories.  

I brought those photographs with me to Italy and placed them where we could see them as we fussed and laughed and worried through our days. We were being shaped by those days, by those moments that we lived at Gabi. But as we began that New Year, I kept those pictures nearby to remind us of our source.

 

Moving to Italy: New Years--Part 3

For our New Year's Day celebration, we had invited many of the relatives from both Rina and Marino’s sides of the family to repay the meals we had enjoyed with them. On Rina’s side: Her sister Dina and her husband, their son, Cousin Luigi and his wife; and their daughter, Cousin Rita, her husband, and mother-in-law from Vercelli. And of course, Marino’s brothers, Zio Remo and Zio Silvio.  

I was proud that I could prepare a beef roast, one of the few food items I cooked better than my in-laws. As more than twenty of us sat around two tables set end-to-end, eating, talking, and laughing, with a child or two on someone’s lap, it struck me that it looked like an Italian food scene from a movie—the first stereotype I had seen fulfilled! The food was good—antipasto, homemade ravioli, roast beef with multiple vegetables, and a salad—and the wine better than usual (Cousin Luigi had brought some of the good stuff!) I didn’t eat too much, accidentally missed the ravioli course and didn’t bother asking for the plate.  That way I felt just nice instead of bloated.  Finally, I had learned to control my food intake at an Italian table!

(l-r) Luigi's wife, his sister Rita, his mother and Cousin Luigi himself. Foreground left: Luigi's father. Foreground right: 3 balding Marca brothers: Remo, Silvio, and Marino.

Paul at New Years before the relatives' arrival

After everyone left in the early evening, we drove back to Montaldo with the children and tried to telephone my sister, but yet again the circuits were busy, and we couldn’t get through. The slow drive there and back was just as long and dangerous as the previous ones. The fog drifted around the hillside, obscuring the roads, the trees, and the buildings, and we felt as if we drove through a gray tunnel from the bar all the way back to our front door. I knew my sister would be doubly disappointed that we hadn’t been able to telephone her on either Christmas or New Years, but we decided to call her on January 8, her twenty-second birthday. Since it wasn’t a holiday, the circuits were less likely to be busy.  

Trying to make an overseas phone call from a phone booth in a remote area of Piedmont was an exercise in frustration, just like the previous year trying to establish ourselves in Italy. But we firmly believed if we just kept trying eventually it would all work out.

Moving to Italy: New Years, Part 2

I put on my best dress and some makeup, and George dusted off his suit and tie. At a time when we would normally be thinking about sleep, we drove down the hill to the bar where they had set up a large tent in the open field behind the main building. We entered to a blast of loud rock and roll music. The female lead, dressed in a silver hot pants outfit with fuzzed-out hair, screamed lyrics at the crowd flailing wildly around her on the temporary dance floor. The sides and top of the tent were strung with brightly-colored streamers, and a huge banner hung across the center sparkling with the numbers of the new year. As the music ended, the noisy, laughing crowd filled most of the tables circling the dance floor. I thought all the patrons would be young, but I was surprised to see adults of all ages. 

We scanned the faces of the crowd, but since we knew no one, we sat at a table set for four and wished my sister and her husband were with us. Earlier that day, we had again driven with the children through the foggy, damp hillside to Montaldo to telephone my sister, and again we were disappointed.  At the dance we bought a bottle of Spumante so we could toast them, and us at midnight. We were happy to be out enjoying ourselves for a change, and I even managed to persuade George to dance to a few slow numbers. In between, we watched the crowd, listened to the music, and waited. 

A drum roll began at three minutes to midnight. As the clock struck twelve, the trumpets blared and everyone cheered, kissed, threw streamers, popped champagne, and cut into their pannetone. Along with the noisy crowd around us, we popped our Spumante, toasted each other and wished ourselves a successful New Year. Then we raised our glasses to my sister and brother-in-law. In the open promise of a New Year, Italian or American, we all united in hope. 

For the next hour, the rock band switched to traditional polkas, and it seemed as if everyone danced. The old folks struggled to make it around the floor, but looked wonderful, smiling and nodding as their feet moved automatically to the old rhythms and long-practiced steps. The young people threw themselves into the music as they dashed about, laughing and calling to each other. The middle-aged couples were spryer than the older ones, but curiously, they didn’t smile as much as the older, or younger, people. Did they have to maintain their dignity because their children didn’t have any, and their parents didn’t care anymore? But smiling or not, they all participated in the traditional dances, defining themselves as part of the old and part of the new. Neither of us knew the steps to the polkas, and George didn’t want to make a fool of himself by trying, so we didn’t dance in the Italian tradition. Smiling, we watched and listened, part of the crowd, yet apart from the crowd.

Although the dance didn’t end until 4:30, we left around three o’clock while it was still going strong. Our children would be up before 7, and I had promised to roast a haunch of beef for our New Year’s celebration. As we drove slowly through the damp, cold night up the hill to Gabi, wiping the vapor from the windshield on the inside and steering through the fog on the outside, we reviewed the upheavals of the previous year—the dreams realized and the dreams thwarted. We wondered what the New Year would bring. We guessed it couldn’t be much more exciting than the one just ended.