Advice for Italian Boys
Anne Giardini
For my husband
‘A fantasia ’i l’omu esti chhjù povara assai d’ ’a verità
Imagination is only the poor relative of truth
The café, renamed Café Fratelli,
Thoughts on Writing, Advice, Freight Cars and Clotheslines by Anne Giardini
I
truoni ’e marzu risbìglianu i cursùni,”
Nicolo’s nonna often said to him. The rumbling thunder of March awakens the snakes. This is one of her more enigmatic, impenetrable sayings, and she delivers it in that way she has, leaning forward, intimate but oblique, with her head inclined to give emphasis to the words’ precautionary rhythm, and with a slanting gleam in her eye. Nicolo has always understood this to mean that there are times when a warning or threat may be needed to ensure that we stay on the proper path.
Nicolo’s nonna, Filomena Giuseppina Pavone—born Filomena Giuseppina Spina in the larger of two rooms at the back of a cold stone house in Arduino, Calabria, in late April 1930, twelve days after the date the midwife had
advised her parents that she should be expected to arrive—had dozens, perhaps hundreds of these aphorisms, small, quasi-medicinal admonitions that she had carried with her from the old country when she came out to join her son Massimo twenty-six years ago in the early spring of 1975. She brought with her Paola Bisceglia, Massimo’s seven-teen-year-old promised bride—a girl of tractable temperament, neat and silent and watchful, still in mourning for her parents—and very little else: a change of clothes, a tin that her neighbour Rudolfo Sasso had soldered shut that held several litres of olive oil that sloshed at her side on the journey like a small green fragrant ocean, and the papers that evidenced her right to passage on the
Colombo I
pinned inside the deep pocket of her gathered skirt.
Although she knows that
i sogni su’ menzogni
—all dreams are lies—Nicolo’s nonna dreams often of Arduino, and over the years the Arduino of her dreams has become how she now remembers it—its white-yellow sun that so saturated the air that the streets and fields seemed as heavy and as textured as the brushstrokes of an oil painting, with light and shadows of varying depths and intensities; its people and animals and vegetation, all constructed sturdy and close to the ground, made from and for dust and labour; its houses pressed up close to each other like huddled sheep and folded against the ridge of the hills that breach ever higher toward the east, becoming, at the horizon, a corrugated rise of mountains; its stones of all sizes, from the minutest flecks of basalt in the thin soil that the farmers work at with their few, often-mended tools to worry out a harvest, to massy boulders that would be too large to roll through the cathedral doors in
Catanzaro if anyone had ever attempted such a thing; its rich summer scent of dry earth and lavender. She dreams of all of these, but she never dreams of the single long journey of her life. She was terrified every second of the voyage and during the three-day train ride that followed, but she hid from Paola her certainty that they would be wrecked or would perish or suffer in some other unimaginably worse way, and so this is a memory that has been so completely submerged that it finds no outlet, even in the untidy nighttime images that her brain concocts from almost everything else in her history.
Nonna referred to her store of lozenge-like adages as
proverbi,
but Nicolo, the quietest of her three grandsons, understands them to be the old timers’ way of administering advice, like a poultice applied in advance against trouble. After all,
“uomu avvisatu mienzu sarvatu.”
A man advised is already half-saved. It is easy for Nicolo to imagine them, all the nonne and nonni before her, generations of them, reaching back to the days long before the Romans first set out, remaking the world in their image—the grandparents dressed in their homespun trousers and aprons, at rest at last after decades of unceasing work, sitting on wooden chairs or on stone benches set in a spot shaded from the scouring sun in a piazza in the middle of town, watching the young people go by (heedless that they too one day will be old), and passing their
proverbi
back and forth in much the same way that Nicolo and his brothers used to share a wad of chewing gum when they were small. The brothers weren’t even certain themselves, back when they were growing up, that they weren’t all somehow the same boy. They looked so much alike—black haired, quick limbed, brown eyed—and were
always entangled in games or challenges and were treated interchangeably by their parents and by Nonna; they would all be punished for the crime of one, to save the energy and time that a proper investigation would have required and to make sure that the vice, whatever it had been, didn’t spread.
Nicolo has an older brother Enzo and a younger brother Enzo, both two years removed. His older brother (a modest enough man, but hopes have always been banked in him like fervid coals) is named Lorenzo Marco, although their mother, Paola, perhaps sensing his ambitions, sometimes calls him
Lorenzo il Magnifico.
His whip-smart youngest brother’s full name is Vincenzo Serafino and his mother alone calls him Vince. Their father, Massimo, says
“eh, guagliù”
(which sounds, by chance, almost exactly like “hey, all you”) when he talks to all three of his sons. Everyone else, even Nonna, has always called both of Nicolo’s brothers Enzo. Which Enzo is meant is usually made clear either by inflection or by context, if clarity is necessary.
Nicolo has always tried to pay attention to Nonna, even though she is sometimes hard to understand, especially when she slips mid-sentence into the old dialect, one that almost no one speaks any more, which has in it vestiges of the languages of the many populations that colonized Calabria in the past—Latin, Greek, Arabic and Albanian, and who knows what else. She speaks the dialect thickly in the roof of her mouth, and her words resound with clattering
u
’s and abruptly shortened consonants that are thrown up from the back of her throat so that her sentences sound more like an engine sputtering along than the kind of language a mother might coo to settle a restless child. Nicolo is often the only one who hears her.
Nicolo’s older brother Enzo moved out of the house on the afternoon of the day that he got married to Mima. His brilliant younger brother Enzo was still living at home in the first wintery days of 2001, but he was in his first year of law school and paying for his tuition and books by working part time at a factory that made packaged mixes for cakes, bread and cookies. His mother doesn’t listen to Nonna any more. “She’s outlived my patience,” she has said about her mother-in-law when Nonna isn’t nearby, and sometimes when she is. Nicolo’s father finishes the
proverbi
for his mother when he hears her start on one, to get it over with faster. He knows them all forward and backward and he recites them with his hands rising in the air, his square palms turned up to the sky in a gesture that appears to entreat the old, capricious, personal gods.
Many of the
proverbi
made sense even here, thousands of kilometres from where Nicolo’s nonna grew up in the mountains of southern Italy.
Cunti allu spissu, amicizia alla longa.
If you keep your stories short, you’ll be more likely to keep your friends for a long time. Or
chi simmina spini si pungi li pedi.
If you sow thorns, they are bound to pierce your feet. But some of them are much more difficult to follow.
“A gente senza figli nun chiedere nu sordi né cunsigli’
means don’t ask for either money or advice from someone who hasn’t had children. Nicolo could see the reasoning behind the part about advice, but wouldn’t someone without children be more likely to have money to lend? Nonna only produced her thinnest smile and patted his cheek when he asked her to explain.
“You will understand in time,” she said, and she assumed that inward-turning expression that she has so often, as if
she knows more than she is saying although he sometimes perceives that this might be her way of avoiding having to admit to the many things she doesn’t know. She had only three years of school, after all; in the early part of the century, when she was a girl, that was all that Arduino had to offer unless fees were paid and uniforms that would need to be washed and ironed and starched were purchased. Nicolo believed for a long time, for many years longer than his brothers did, that his grandmother knew and saw and understood everything there was to know about the doings and wrongdoings of the world and the people in it. Only recently has he appreciated even a part of what she gave up to come here—not only her country but her language and her gods—and how widely she has had to cast her handful of
proverbi,
like the weights attached to a fishing net, trying to encompass a world for which they were never intended.
Nicolo was working in midtown at Caruso’s Gym, a bustling and thriving, half-modernized enterprise that occupied the entire long, fir-floored, high-ceilinged top level of a three-storey building that had been built a hundred years earlier of bright yellow brick, with leased stores on the main floor (Vera’s Women’s Fashions, Alberto’s Cigar and Novelty, Cross-Town GroceryMart, Avondale Gifts & Stationery), and with Talbot’s School of Business, Accountancy and Computing on the second. Nicolo had started out at Caruso’s during the summer after his last year of high school, around
the time that old Battisto Caruso’s astute daughter Serena finished her MBA and perceived that it might be possible to reinvent the old men-only gym, open it up to younger men, and to women, and provide the new clients with a range of classes beyond boxing and weightlifting. Nicolo’s first role was as a sub for another instructor when he went on holiday. Serena noticed almost immediately that Nicolo had a knack for it, a skill for engaging his students’ interest, making them work harder, take greater interest, and he was soon given classes of his own to teach. He had been working full time now for just under five years. He began with the basics—aerobics and stretch and fit classes—but after a year he branched out into power yoga and kick-boxing and core strength training. Then, in the last year, he had begun to provide one-on-one training sessions. That was enough, thought Nicolo, on top of the classes he was teaching, his basketball and softball and hockey games, his obligations to his family, and his plan to take an evening course at the new distance-learning branch campus that had opened up in a low, stuccoed building around the corner from the Vaughan Bakery where Nicolo met his friends Paul, Mario and Frank for coffee every Saturday morning.
Not that this was what Nicolo had planned.
Nicolo’s father Massimo had wanted all three of his sons to go to university, to study hard, and to rise up in this new world to become professionals—
maestri.
But Enzo and Mima got pregnant over the Thanksgiving weekend when Enzo was in his second year at North Bay College and Mima was in grade twelve, and that put an end to any possibility of further study for Nicolo’s older brother, who considered his options,
which were limited, and went to work in an electronics store at one end of a strip mall three blocks southwest of Nicolo’s parents’ house, where he sold cell phones and home security systems, both of them cheap enough up front, but with pricy monthly maintenance fees. That was where the money was made. He was second to the sub-manager now, but the work was unsatisfying and sometimes dispiriting. At least half of the buyers didn’t really know what they were getting into when they filled out and signed their contracts in triplicate.
Only Nicolo’s younger brother, the accomplished Enzo, the family’s ascendant star, seemed likely to fulfill or even exceed his father’s hopes. Enzo’s marks had kept him on the honours list at Our Lady of Perpetual Help Catholic High School. His atheism, which he announced with blunt assurance when he was nearing the end of grade eleven, was viewed by the school’s principal, Father D’Onofrio, as more of an experiment or adolescent bid for attention than a firmly settled state, and so Enzo made a ready transition to university, first completing a degree in political science aided by several of Our Lady’s more generous scholarships, and then starting first-year law school. Enzo was invited back every September to speak to those of the Our Lady graduating class who were considering higher studies, to urge them to strive as he had done to bring honour to their family, community and school. He did this in an appropriately semi-humorous, self-deprecating way, attributing his own success not to personal qualities but to good luck and support from his family and community.
Nicolo had higher than average marks in almost all of his high school classes as well, which was surprising because he
was not generally forthcoming about his views and he didn’t often participate in class unless singled out. In fact, during those years Nicolo wasn’t confident that he
had
any opinions of his own. His older brother Enzo had a few fixed, unshake-able ideas and a gift for dogged industry, like a reliable, well-built family vehicle. Younger Enzo was more of a sports car, nimble, with excess power under the hood; he could size up and analyze pretty well any situation quickly, with no more than a glance at the facts and people involved. Nicolo couldn’t think what kind of car he himself might resemble, except, perhaps, one still under construction. Even grown, working, semi-independent, he sometimes felt himself to be as unformed as ricotta, and open to persuasion on most matters.
As a teenager, Nicolo played every sport that he could—basketball (although he wasn’t tall), volleyball, soccer, hockey, rugby, even badminton and table tennis. He was something of a star in track and field, especially in the hammer, discus and shot put, and had gone to the provincials in three of his high school years and brought home several shelves-worth of medals, gilded statuettes and acrylic trophies that were kept in the basement and dusted semi-monthly by his nonna. Nicolo had learned from his younger brother Enzo the trick of paying close attention in class, and writing down what was said with fidelity—you’re there anyway, was what Enzo told him, so you might as well make it worthwhile—and so he was able to absorb most of what he needed to know without having to put in many additional hours studying. An evening’s review of his notes and the textbook at the kitchen table before a test or exam was usually enough to ensure an A or the better sort of B. He and younger Enzo
both had a knack for writing out what they had learned in their exams and essays, staying close enough to the material to be accurate, but using their own words and with something of a spin, evidence that what had been learned had also been understood, to demonstrate, but without any flash, the sturdy, capable machinery of their minds.
