The Girls of Piazza D'Amore (10 page)

“Where are you going at this time, alone?” he asked.

I told him I had gone for water and forgotten my jug at the Timpa.

“Didn't Lucia come with you? Where did she go?”

Before I had time to finish saying what Lucia had told me to say, Alfonso scooped me up, sat me behind the scooter and, in a flash, dropped me at the Timpa. He spotted Lucia's jug next to mine and, cursing San Francesco and other saints, got back on the scooter, turned his head towards me and yelled, “
Wait for me. I know where they're hiding. I saw the jerk's car parked on the road.”

I crunched against the side of the mount and, to ease my fright, I closed my eyes and wished I was dreaming. Within a few minutes the scooter again broke the silence. I opened my eyes as a crying Lucia fell on the ground in front of me.

“I'm not coming home,” Lucia screamed as she got up. “I'm running away from this stinking village.”

Alfonso jumped from the scooter, towards us, as if to strike Lucia. Instead, he took my water jug and hit it against a stone, smashing it to pieces. The cold spring water splashing on my legs made me jump.

“This is your last
passeggiata
to the Funtanella – you have to forget this place once and for all.” He grabbed Lucia by the arm and looked directly in her eyes as he spoke, “You're going to America and you're never going to drink this water again. Do you understand? You're going to America, whether in one piece or not. You won't say a word about this to anyone, or I'll smash your head like this.” He released her, pitched the second water jug against the rocks, then took Lucia by the hair and hurled her back on the ground. As he jumped back onto his scooter, he kept on talking. “If the
signurinu l'Amatise
had any balls, he would have come out of his hiding place. He can't be far away. I'm going to find him and smash his face to the ground where he belongs.” Then, before taking off, he leaned his face down toward me and said slowly and firmly, “Caterinè, don't say a word to anyone about this. Make sure the
puttana
gets back home.”

I felt as shattered as my broken jug, which my grandfather had bought for me at the fair years before. I picked up a couple of shards, as if trying to put the jug back together again. Then I cried uncontrollably.

“I'll get you a new one,” Lucia said, sobbing.

“Don't you know we're both leaving? What will we do with a jug in America?” I wailed.

Lucia kept on sobbing and made no move to walk back home.

“Aren't we going home?” I pleaded.

“You go. I'll wait a few more minutes. Maybe Totu will change his mind and come back for me.”

I was too scared to walk alone. “I'll wait with you,” I said. I felt guilty, as if this were all my fault. Had I not forgotten my jug, I might have made it back to the village on time without being seen, and Lucia and Totu could have eloped.

“What happened to Totu?”
I asked. “I don't understand anything,” she said. “Everything happened so fast. He left.”

The last outbursts of fireworks at Amato filled the skies with a machine-gun succession of shots, and then complete stillness followed. It was only when the first chattering of people walking back home to Mulirena could be heard across the ravine that Lucia got up. “Let's go before everyone sees us like this. He won't be coming any more,” she mumbled, and we set off for home, both sobbing.

Half way home, Alfonso came back for us, motioned to his sister to get on the back seat of the scooter. She sat me on her lap. Before setting off, Alfonso yelled, “What a good-for-nothing coward! And you wanted to run away with him?”

When I arrived home without my jug, I had to tell my worried Mother what had happened. She was upset, but mostly at Lucia. “How can she be so
fessa?
Doesn't she know by now that he's been taking her for a ride? Totu will never marry her, or he'd have done something by now. I hope to God she changes her head in the next couple of months, or she'll be left with nothing.”

The day after, Mother talked about Totu only with Giovanna, and in whispered tones, even though no one else was at the shop. The story Giovanna heard was that, while Mulirena was deserted because of the celebrations in Amato, Totu and Lucia were supposed to spend some time alone at the farm hut that belonged to Totu's family, on the outskirts of Amato, next to the cemetery. His two friends were to keep Alfonso occupied and drunk at the
osteria
, so he wouldn't realize his sister was not home till late into the night. By that time, after all the revelers in Amato had also gone home, Totu was to drive Lucia to his friend's home in Amato and spend the night. In the morning the couple and two witnesses would present themselves to the municipal office and ask to be married in a civil ceremony, after which neither side of the family could do anything to stop them from being together again. Even if the civil marriage did not go through, the two had spent the night together and were as good as married in everyone's eyes. Alfonso would have to deal with Pasquale's brothers, who would certainly reclaim the scooter and whatever money Pasquale had paid for. Lucia's honour would be saved by marriage.

No one knew exactly how or why Totu disappeared in the night. Alfonso never said anything to anyone for fear that his sister's future in-laws would hear about it. Lucia shut herself up in her house and didn't talk to anyone. Totu didn't give anyone an explanation either, as he took the first train to Rome without saying goodbye to any of his friends.

“I still don't understand what kind of fish he is,” Mother said to Giovanna.

After that night, Lucia stopped coming out in the evening with me. She became more quiet and glum, even as she prepared a new wardrobe.

Part IV

The deceptions and subterfuges that women were forced to use in those villages of Calabria! If the morals of the women there were above reproach, why was there so much gossip about illicit affairs, love triangles, cuckolded husbands, and out-of-wedlock births? Even though the price paid by pregnant, unmarried girls was most often to leave the village and go work as maids in the cities, such cases were known to happen. The men bragged all the time about their love conquests, so with whom did they have these amorous adventures? Women were criticized for so much as speaking to a man who was not a close friend or relative. Something didn't line up. I could not believe that the intelligent, spirited women I knew suffered this repression in silence without questioning it.

“Why did you put up with it?” I'd like to confront my mother.

I know her answer already; I've heard it many times before. “The world is made like that. It's the way things were, there, at the time.”

My mother never looked back at the village with rose-tinted glasses, and she never suffered from nostalgia for what she left behind. When we landed in Halifax, she made the sign of the cross and told herself she would never make the crossing again. Yet, she, like other women of her generation, brought the village with them. In the early years, she held on to its medieval mores with a tenacity that brought me to tears over and over again as a teenager in Montreal.

“You can only straighten a tree when it's very young,” she told me after one of our many arguments.

She mellowed with the years, once she was assured that her young shoot had developed strong roots. But the inconsistency of her both shunning the malice of village politics and yielding to the tyranny of its demands used to exasperate me.

“
Whatever is destined, will happen. You can't fight destiny,” she often said. That resignation also drove me wild.

I still cannot quite understand what to make of the concept of destiny. It's like a mystery of faith: one believes it without needing to understand it. Do Italians make more of it than other people? My father referred to it as
la forza del destino,
the force of destiny, after his favourite Verdi opera. I can't decide whether the women's blind belief in destiny is what gave them their courage and quiet strength, or whether it was the cop-out that kept them submissive to the harsh demands imposed on them.

“You still worry about what people say,” I'd shout, when my mother forbade me to do what other girls my age did.

“And you only think about yourself,” she'd holler back.

The constant tug-of-war with my mother eventually created a wall between us that made it hard to discuss matters of the heart and especially of the body. I'll never know what destiny really meant for her as a woman, though her great generosity of spirit towards family comes quickly to mind, and perhaps family was what made her invoke destiny as often as she did.

As I look back at the events that led to Lucia's engagement, I remember the comments I heard spoken gravely and in acquiescence at the seamstress's shop. “She has three brothers to think about,” a heavy responsibility for a sixteen-year-old girl, torn not only by family feuds, but also by the expectation that she should be a help to her family.

Lucia married by proxy at the end of August. I wore my white, first communion dress as I walked behind her holding her long, white veil. Lucia could have chosen to go through a civil ceremony at the town hall and celebrate the religious wedding in Montreal, as many other proxy brides had done, but she insisted on carrying out the full event in Mulirena. “I know no one in Montreal,” she said. “It had been promised that I would marry here, and I'm marrying here.”

She planned the whole event as though Pasquale were present. He paid for it all – the food, drinks, her dress, shoes, and flowers. She wanted to have the best wedding that Mulirena had ever seen. Giovanna sewed a slim white satin gown and spent hours covering by hand the tiny buttons that went all the way from her neckline down to below her waist. She had copied the dress from the wedding picture of the Duchess of Wales in a magazine. Lucia carried a bouquet of orange blossoms and had the longest veil I had ever seen.

When Lucia tried the dress on a week before the wedding, at her house, I saw her cry. She held her tears as long as her mother was in the room, but when Comare Rosaria left, Lucia broke down, and I didn't know what to say, as I held the long veil off the floor.

“I have no other choice,” she said, sobbing, after she wiped her eyes with the hem of her white dress. “I'll pretend to be happy for my family. That's all we women are expected to do – pretend we're happy and live for our families.” I never saw her cry again.

Comare Rosaria worked all week baking cookies and frying three types of
braciole
, croquettes made with meat, potato and rice. Pasquale's family arrived a day earlier than planned and took over the whole house.

“Poor Comare Rosaria,” Mother said. “She has to shoulder all that work by herself.” The woman had to cook for and accommodate over a dozen people while getting everything ready for the wedding feast, with little help from the rest of the family.

The morning of the wedding, the house was filled with guests, who were served coffee,
biscotti
, Vermouth, Anice, Strega, and
Mille Fiori
. The bride's father couldn't walk all the way to the church, so Lucia was accompanied by Alfonso. They were followed, procession-like, by the best man, the groom's older brother, and his wife, by Comare Rosaria and her younger son, by Pasquale's parents and other members of his family, and all the other guests. Mother and the older women wore their own wedding costumes, with the long skirt, bodice and ribbons of pastel-coloured satin, with their white
mancale.
It was one of the few occasions they had to wear it. It would be the last time Mother ever wore hers.

As the procession advanced slowly towards the church, from their balconies people threw rice at the bride – a symbol of good luck, prosperity and fertility. Family members threw confetti. Children ran along the side of the road, trying to catch as many of the white candy-coated almonds as possible. As the bride approached the church, the altar boys pulled the ropes of the church bells with all of their strength, making them ring incessantly and joyfully.

Don Raffaele celebrated the Mass and blessed the bride. Her brother, Alfonso, and new brother-in-law, Matteo, signed the register as witnesses. Lucia's veil was raised from her face and she walked out the church with Matteo, who stood in for Pasquale.

At the reception, guests were served the croquettes, trays of
amaretti,
and glasses of sparkling wine with slices of a white wedding cake. The guests received a
bomboniera,
a pretty porcelain bowl that held more confetti, wrapped in white tulle.

“Comare Rosaria prepared a beautiful feast,” Mother told
U Grancu
the following day from our balcony. “Nothing was spared.”

“Except for a plate of pasta and a groom in the bed,”
U Grancu
spurted out.

“Be quiet,” Mother said, afraid that Comare Rosaria would hear. “They'll have time, soon enough, for both.”

Later, she said, “Some men can only think of two things, their stomachs and bed.”

“Don Cesare made a big mistake when he sent Totu to Rome the first time,” was Giovanna's verdict about the sad ending of Lucia's love story with Totu. “Maybe it would have all turned differently if Totu had never gone to Rome. Rome ruined many men.”

I still couldn't understand what must have gone through Totu's head. I had seen him look up Lucia's balcony with wistful eyes, cry like a puppy when she received her visa papers, and drive away with her on the last night of their encounter. According to the women at Giovanna's shop, he was as much to blame for the turn of events as Alfonso and Don Cesare.

I first saw Rome as a child when father had to get his visa. The city overwhelmed me with its grandeur. What must it have been like for Totu and the young men of Mulirena who went to Rome for the first time, hardly out of boyhood? What was it about Rome that made the three men dispose of their childhood sweethearts so easily? On my second visit to Rome, accompanied by my mother's brother, Zio Pietro, we spent time alone with Totu and he finally confessed, sort of.

The city came on to me loud, brash, and in constant motion. After a bumpy six-hour ride on the train, my first sight of the city outside Stazione Termini overcame me with a sense of confusion close to vertigo. The year before we had come to Rome with Father for his visa, and the noise of the traffic had given both Mother and me a headache. This time it seemed that there were even more cars and motor scooters speeding by, honking their loud horns in a cacophony of city noise unlike anything heard in the village, where the occasional herd of sheep, one car, one small truck, and one motor scooter would upset the quiet.

My mother's cousin Tommaso picked us up and walked us to the palazzo on Via Merulana where he lived with his brother Santo and Michele. Totu had lived with them the first time he went to Rome, but this time, Tommaso said, he had gone to live with a friend from university. Tommaso took me by the hand, but even with him there, we had to wait forever to cross the wide piazzas; the drivers rarely relented to pedestrians. I was paralyzed by fear. How would I ever be able to cross the streets if I were alone?

Zio Pietro asked Tommaso about Totu. Had he seen him?

“Yes. He'll come by to see you later, but don't talk about Lucia. He's a bit confused, but he did well to return here,” Tommaso said. “Once you live in Rome, you can't live in the village anymore. Just ask Michele and Santo if they want to come back.”

The two young tailors were in Rome because of Tommaso, who had come a few years before, having heard that good tailors were in high demand. Most men from Mulirena went to Milan, where they found jobs as stonemasons, carpenters, or just plain labourers. To save money, the men lived together in makeshift quarters on the periphery of the city and returned home only for holidays. Because of the exorbitant cost of decent housing, few could hope to bring their families there, which is how it became a commonly acceptable way of life for married couples to live apart for years, and to see each other only at Christmas, Easter and the summer holidays.

Because of the roughness of their work, and because of their speech and peasant manners, southerners were nicknamed
terroni
– of the earth – by the northerners in Milan. Most of these southerners dreamed only of making enough money to feed and clothe their families and to buy a new suit for themselves with which to impress the
paesani
on their visits to the village.

Those who went to Rome were of a different class. They were skilled artisans, mostly tailors. Their long apprenticeships in tailor shops and their years of painstaking needlework served them well in a city that favoured custom tailoring. Tommaso found a job and a place to stay near the train station and had a following of loyal clients who appreciated his meticulous workmanship, not only for men's suits, but for ladies'
tailleurs
as well. Tailored ladies' suits were very popular at the time and coordinated well with the short
alla maschietta
haircuts of the fashionable Romane.

Tommaso had spoken of his good fortune in Rome to his friends during his visits to Mulirena. After only a few months of working there, he befriended a fifty-year-old widow. She offered Tommaso a room in her large apartment, and he accepted on condition that he could bring his brother and set up his own shop there.

The apartment on the second floor of the palazzo faced Santa Maria Maggiore. Tommaso had described the place in so much detail that, when we arrived the first time, it was as though I had already lived there. It was reached by an open elevator with wrought-iron doors; it had a large foyer with gilt mirrors, a hanging chandelier, and a dining room with heavy, ornate furniture. A small kitchen, a bathroom, and four bedrooms opened off a dark corridor. Tommaso behaved as if the apartment on Via Merulana belonged to him, and wouldn't dream of going back to live in Mulirena.

The widow who owned the apartment and her twenty-year-old daughter Loredana joined us for dinner. It was Loredana, Tommaso told us, who introduced the group of young men to her circle of friends. She had also helped Totu find his way around the university's bureaucracy the first time he was sent to Rome by his uncle. I imagined and envied the young men and Loredana's friends going out in groups, taking rides on motor scooters, going to the cinema and the beach in Ostia. No wonder, I thought, the men took to the new Roman life so quickly. I also felt a tinge of resentment. While the young men lived in the carefree world of the movie
Le Ragazze di Piazza di Spagna
that I had daydreamed about, the girls of Piazza d'Amore had been jilted and left behind to their silent tears, destined to a life of duty and unfulfilled yearnings.

“In the
paese
, you can only talk to girls in sign language,” Michele told us, to justify himself for breaking his engagement to Tina. “You get a chance to touch a woman only after you marry. And what if there's nothing worth touching?”