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: Christmas morning

On Christmas Eve George and I stuffed four of his socks with little gifts for the children and the usual mini-snacks: this time a tangerine, banana, and foil-wrapped soft cheese. When they were fully asleep we placed these stockings at the foot of their beds, following the tradition of my English family. The next morning we could hear them rummaging around in their stockings and knew that the toys and fruit and cheese would be enough to keep them from invading our early morning lie-in.

Christmas at Gabi was quiet, but with plenty of gifts for the children from my sister, my aunt, their grandparents, and us. Our gifts were modest, just a book each and a small toy—cars for the boys and puzzles for the twins. They were delighted with everything, as children of that age usually are. They were excited just with the act of opening the colorfully wrapped packages. We had spent much of the previous day helping my in-laws make ravioli for our Christmas dinner. Zio Silvio and Zio Remo joined us at the appointed time, around 1pm.  We ate, we drank, and we sent good thoughts to those not with us.

We had tried to call my sister and her husband on Christmas Eve late in the afternoon.  We had dressed the children warmly and driven to Montaldo along the back road. It was a dirt track that was fine during the dry summer, but since there was a fifty-foot drop on one side and a hillside on the other, it was dangerous in the fog. I was very nervous as we crept along, barely able to see the road in front of the car. When we got to the café/bar we entered the telephone booth and placed our call. The operator said that we would have to wait because the circuits were very busy. I had warned my sister we would call, and I knew she’d be expecting it. We waited for over two hours, sipping soft drinks and trying to keep the children happy, but we could not get through. At dinnertime, with the fog getting thicker, we cancelled the call. On Christmas Day we tried again after the family meal, with the same results. I was disappointed and I knew that she would be too, but we decided to try again at New Years.  

Margaret Ann eating her cheese

Matthew trying to open the foil on his cheese

James digging through his stocking

Paul playing with a car from the stocking

The boys attacking the presents under our tree

Marino showing the ravioli he and Rina had made and cooked for our Christmas dinner

 

Moving to Italy: Winter Evenings--Part 2

When we watched our old Super 8 movies at Gabi, they became an important part of our winter evenings. Without television, they provided a diversion, as well as a connection to the life we had left behind. 

 The flickering images showed us the babies at around nine months in our back yard in California. Dressed only in diapers, Matthew hangs precariously at the edge of James’ green metal car, knees bending and straightening as he practices standing. In another scene Margaret Ann sits with a bone hanging half way out of her mouth, and her toothless gums mash up and down.  It looks like a small chicken bone. I didn’t let them chew on chicken bones! Or did I? We laughed as I wondered again where on earth she found it. Sitting on the grass, she bobs up and down, and my mother-in-law, not a constant fixture in our lives then, but just visiting for the afternoon, pushes a lock of blonde curls out of Margaret Ann’s eyes. In the background, Paul and James race about pedaling the cars they had to leave behind in California, flashes of light and dark behind the babies. Then four-year-old Paul dances for the camera on the patio, a crazy, loose-limbed explosion of knees and elbows that mirrors his exuberance. James, then two and a half, rushes to join him in a clumsy imitation. They both have bare feet, something not possible outside on the farm. 

Paul and James with pedal car and block wall fence

The movie jumps a couple of months, and the camera pans the back yard. We see the expanse of patio freshly hosed down, so different from the muddy courtyard at Gabi. The flowers that I plant each year bloom in the midst of dark brown bark that controls the weeds. From my Italian perspective, the bark seemed ludicrous when weeds ran wild in the fields around us. Matthew, dressed only in a diaper and a T-shirt, is older now and he has learned to walk, a little stiff, but with confidence. He sobs up at the camera as he crosses the bark in bare feet. He wants comfort, and whoever holds the camera points it down at him as he continues across the grass, still crying, looking up. A flash, and Paul walks out of the back door alone, across the patio, around the grass, and back inside the house. James does the same. They have a long string to pull down on the handle to open the screen door. I had forgotten that string. And I had forgotten screen doors, and screen windows, not yet available for the farm where all summer we were plagued by flies and mosquitoes.

In another movie we see our going-away party hosted by my sister and her husband. It is cool that day in early May, and we are wearing light jackets and sweaters. My aunt—my mother’s sister—my cousins, and their families, gather in a small park near our house to say goodbye. In our living room at Gabi, we called out their names as we watched them ride the see-saw, kick a ball, and run around. A little cousin points at his chipped tooth. My aunt, his grandmother, looks inside his mouth, the soft curls of her short hair brushed by the breeze. No one looks sad.  They are there to wish us well in our adventure, and we look forward to an exciting new life.  Except for my sister’s husband, every adult there is an immigrant. They have known what it means to leave their home and familiar surroundings to travel to a distant land. They know some of the problems we will encounter, but they have confidence we will succeed. And so do we.

When George screened the California movies against our living-room wall at Gabi that winter, the only sound was our exclamations and laughter as we watched our younger selves. In those silent movies we could not hear sirens in the distance, traffic roar past our front door, nor war protestors of that time chant: “Hell No, We Won’t Go.” Nowhere did we hear angry voices tell immigrants, “Go back where you came from!” And there was no slow pan of bumper stickers that declare: “America: Love it or Leave it.”

All of those memories lay dormant as we continued to see what we wanted to see: a happy family in a sunny climate with few worries. We watched the movies over and over, and they kept those memories fresh. They reminded us of the house where we used to live, the people we had left behind, and the independence we had once enjoyed. But they portrayed an image that was circumscribed, scaled down to the viewfinder of the camera. Gradually the off-camera scenes and sounds and feelings faded from our minds, and those happy fragments of flickering light were the images of California we retained. The ground outside our door is washed clean of dust, and leaves, and bird droppings. Our patch of grass shines green under small, bare feet that yield to uneven ground, strengthening arches and tendons. The block wall around the playing children contains them and bars unwanted intrusion. Their silent laughter, reflected on the white paint of our living room wall at Gabi, seduced us all and scattered the seeds of homesickness.

Paul with Matthew and James with Margaret Ann, taken in our California back yard.