The Girls of Piazza D'Amore (5 page)

On the first day of school, he asked us to bring him the last year's composition notebooks and, when he saw they were mostly blank, he told us that from then on, we'd have to write a composition assignment every week. He also arranged for my class to correspond with another fourth-grade class from his home town, Alessandria, so now we all had pen pals with whom to exchange letters and pictures.

Both these new tasks pleased me. They gave me the idea to fill notebooks with the tidbits of information about people and events in the village I had been collecting in my head all summer. I wrote them down as if I were talking to my pen pal in Piemonte, who knew nothing of our village. For years afterwards, in Montreal, I would pretend to be speaking to my pen pal,
as if needing to explain to her the place I lived in and the things I did.

“The Flat, Fertile Farmlands of the Po Valley” was the heading of a magazine article that our new teacher passed around one day, with pictures of gigantic sprinklers used for irrigation. This lesson remains imprinted in my memory, particularly because when I read about the large sprinklers they seemed unreal to me. I had never even seen a small one. Also, I had a first-hand account of someone from another region of Italy, which seemed like a foreign country.

After the lesson, our teacher gave us time to write a composition on Mulirena and the farmlands around it. We would be sending the compositions to our new pen pals so that they in turn would learn about our region.

This is what I wrote:

Dear Maria Rosa,

My baptismal name is Caterina. I'm Catarina or Catarí to my family and Catarinella to older friends and relatives, who use it as a term of endearment. We don't like using our Italian names between us. The one vowel change turns the name into dialect and makes it sound less pretentious.

I don't particularly like my name or its variations, and I especially dislike being called Caterinuccia by our neighbour,
Donna Rachele, and by the ladies who work at church and pretend to speak a better Italian than anyone else. I've recently asked my friends to call me Rina, short for Caterina and the original name of my village, Migliarina.

The farmlands around Mulirena are far from fertile or flat. The village itself is a huge hill surrounded by other hills. Except for the potted plants on balconies, there is very little greenery in the village itself. It seems that every inch of space has been covered in stone by the village's
muratori
, stones that shine white in the summer sun, and burn your feet, but turn grey and damp in winter. Mulirena is one huge house. In fact, there are no lawns or fences separating one home from the other. Each house is attached to the others and, because of the elevation, the roofs of some homes are at the same level as the front entrances of others. If ever anyone forgets a key, all we have to do is jump from a neighbour's rooftop onto a balcony and a window.

In Mulirena, my world centers on the school and the parish church. Walking uphill from this church, one reaches the upper outskirts of the village. The wide dirt road, flanked by rows of tall cypresses, leads to the Calvario, a hill with three crosses, the cemetery, and the aqueduct. Because the aqueduct is at the centre of a large grassy field, the kindergarten kids and the summer day-campers often go there on picnics, walking in neat rows, all wearing blue cotton uniforms and starched white caps and singing songs in unison.

This is also the road that leads to the only piece of land that belongs to my mother, a small portion of the highest mountain in the area, dense with chestnut trees – ancient trees so tall they seem to touch the sky. In the summer, the walk to the mountain is a hot trek. But once we arrive, it's the shadiest, coolest, and most peaceful place on earth. On our way up to this land, we always stop by the brook to splash cool water on our faces. Then, while Mother picks chestnuts, gathers kindling, or looks for mushrooms, my brother and I play out the clashes between Roman gladiators and Christians that we've watched in Quo Vadis.

Besides the chestnuts, which are the area's most plentiful produce, and the prized mushrooms, not much else grows on the mountain itself. On its steep sides, some farmers manage to hoe little plots, but irrigation is next to impossible. In the flatter farms that have a shallow river, a Fiumara, flowing through or nearby, they use a very rudimentary system of irrigation. The river water, when it is not dried out in the summer, is diverted, channelled, and contained in huge cement vats. The water from these vats is distributed sparingly, when necessary, through furrows in the soil, and directed toward the orchards. I often watch how carefully my Nanna unblocks a hole in the vat to let out the water, and then guides it lovingly through the furrows, as though she were spoon feeding a feverishly thirsty child.

Because this water has to travel through different farmlands, some fierce battles are fought over the right to use it. Relatives, even brothers and sisters who often share connecting farms, have been known to come to blows and even kill each other over this precious lifeline.

I wish that one day we, too, will have the same gigantic sprinklers with the gyrating flow of water that will keep our farmlands dewy and nourished like the rich green farmlands of Lombardia and Piemonte.

Your new friend,

Caterina/Rina

I had decided to change my name after hearing the story of how Mulirena got its name. Where did the founders get enough sand to build a village, I wondered. The few times I had gone down to the river with my mother, its bed was dry and rocky. The only sandy area I could think of was at the Timpa, but its sand was more like a fine dust that blew over the ravine and dispersed into the air. I tried to imagine teams of women in sixteenth-century costumes – for surely it was the women who were relegated to this chore – trying to gather the fine grains of sand and contain them in sacks to carry away on their donkeys or their heads for men to make stones.

My friends made a feeble attempt at calling me Rina, but not enough for the new name to catch on.

I understood the concept of Signor Gavano's sprinklers only later, when, during my first summer in Montreal, I first saw those crazy little grass sprinklers that turned wildly, spewing water on the lawns around my neighbourhood.

One of Signor Gavano's accomplishments was to research the history of the village's early development, with the help of the village priest. They painstakingly searched the church registers, inventories, records of visits by bishops, and the diocese archives in Nicastro. Years later, they published all this information in a book entitled
The Two Bell Towers of Mulirena,
which was sent to all the Mulerinesi who had left. When my mother received her copy in Montreal, I remember reading it from cover to cover, imagining my teacher from Piemonte and Don Raffaele poring over old papers to piece together a fascinating story that tied the village to Spanish kings and Sicilian counts. The book was then relegated to the old trunk on one of our many moves, and remained there until now.

As the book states, a more political and social perspective to the village's history is unfortunately unavailable, as a suspicious fire at the town hall in July 1933 destroyed many important documents. This would make a fine story at some other time. If told, it might reveal the power that some old families still maintained in the village at that turbulent turning-point in the history of modern Italy.

As far back as 1595, Bishop Pietro Montuoro, after a visit to the area, wrote five lines in Latin that refer to Mulirena, then named Migliarina, as a
casale
, an enclave of rustic farm homes.

In casale Migliarinae una tantum parochialis ecclesia non consecrata sub Sanctue Luciae invocatione invenitur. Eius parochus de Fatio, curatus solus ibi est presbiter. Incolentes 570.

This report confirms that, at the time, there existed one parish church non-consecrated with the name of Santa Lucia, that the pastor's name was de Fabio, and that the village inhabitants totalled 570.

Early church documents included censuses of people and houses. Three classes of people are mentioned: titled
dons
of aristocratic families,
mastri
or tradespeople, and peasants called
villani.
This last term for the proletariat had disparaging connotations even at the time.

Isolated from the rest of the world by geography and the lack of good roads, Mulirena functioned largely in the feudal-like system of its early origins until the Second World War. The territory was owned by absentee landlords from the Kingdom of Naples. In 1601, Mulirena, along with the surrounding territory of present-day Tiriolo and Gimigliano, were sold to Count Carlo Cicala, of Genovese origin and living in Messina, Sicily, for 80,000 ducats. In 1630, he was given the title of Prince of Tiriolo by King Ferdinand IV of Naples. Prince Carlo was succeeded by his son Giovanbattista, who in turn had two sons: Carlo, who died without descendents, and Cesare, whose son Giovanbattista had a son Carlo, who had a son Cesare, and so on and so on.

Feudalism in the kingdom of Naples would only be abolished by law in August, 1806. The name of a descendent of Prince Carlo-Luigi Cicala, seventh Prince of Tiriolo and Duke of Gimigliano – appears in the official documents of the period.

Even before compiling the book with these historical facts, Signor Gavano had provided enough preliminary information in class to let my own imagination soar. It was especially fascinating for me to make the connection between the name of our square and Don Cesare Cicala, our pharmacist and a descendent of the sixteenth-century landlord, Prince Carlo Cicala. The hostility between Lucia's and Don Cesare's family felt even more intriguing once I knew that both were descendants of a prince.

Lucia's mother, Rosaria Abiusi, was a first cousin to Don Cesare. The resemblance between the two cousins was striking; she was short and stout, with curly reddish-brown hair and flushed cheeks, a feminine version of Don Cesare, who was only slightly taller and whose wiry hair was redder than hers. I always remember her fanning her face with an embroidered cotton handkerchief. Don Cesare also always carried a white handkerchief to wipe his sweaty forehead.

The resemblance was only physical; she was far from enjoying the same wealth and prestige he did. Her house still belonged to Don Cesare, and Rosaria had to pay a small yearly rent. Ancestral houses were generally inherited by first-born sons. Daughters, and especially daughters of daughters, were destined to be short-changed.

The relationship between the cousins had been strained for as long as I could remember. Don Mario Abiusi, Rosaria's husband, had been welcomed into the family because of his title, though his family had become impoverished by the time of his marriage. He became a thorn in the Cicala family's side because he changed his political leanings before the war. The Cicala family and all of Piazza Don Carlo and the upper part of the village had traditionally been staunch Christian Democrats; Don Mario had aligned himself with the ruling Fascist Party and became one of the leaders of a clique of henchmen who were considered thugs by his Christian Democrat in-laws.

Don Cesare and Don Mario only spoke to each other at political speeches, and only to throw insults at each other. Luckily, Don Cesare was hardly ever at home, and Don Mario, half paralyzed since the war, rarely went out of the house.

During one heated speech, Don Cesare, red in the face with rage, with outstretched arms, shouted from the balcony of the town hall balcony, waving his white handkerchief as he spoke. “They forced themselves into our homes at night, shoved castor oil down my father's throat. They pulled off his whiskers until his skin bled raw.”

The political animosity between Don Cesare and Rosaria's husband, Don Mario, only widened an already existing rift between the two families.

Though lands and ancestral houses were generally bequeathed to sons, wealthier families often used parcels of lands as dowries to secure good husbands for their daughters. At marriage, Rosaria Abiusi had inherited a small but prized piece of property from her family. The ownership of this small piece of flat land near the river, the
Fiumarella
, had caused fighting between Don Cesare's and Rosaria's families for generations, because the water from the river had to pass through this property to get to the larger orchards inherited by Don Cesare.

Before the war, Don Cesare's father had used families of indentured labourers to look after his lands, while Don Cesare studied in Bologna and became a pharmacist. The pharmacy hardly gave Don Cesare enough to live on. As more peasants abandoned the land to emigrate, Don Cesare became drawn to farming, and only worked at the pharmacy on call. He married a woman from Amato, Donna Rachele Scalise, whose family had also fallen on hard times before the war. She brought with her a brother, Gennaro, and his son, Antonio, to live in a wing of the mansion. The transposed family was rarely called by their proper names but nicknamed
I l'Amatisi
, the people from Amato, and they were treated like foreigners. I don't remember anyone, including his own family, referring to Antonio by any other name but Totu, the dialect diminutive of his given name.

His father, who was always called
U l'Amatise
, was a tall, quiet, educated man whose wife died of tuberculosis when Totu was an infant. He became totally devoted to Don Cesare and his land, and was hardly ever seen in the village; he slept in the
casale.
Together with Don Cesare he found more modern means of managing the olive groves. They installed large nets under every olive tree, which meant they needed fewer labourers to pick olives, and they paid those who worked in cash rather than with a few jugs of oil, while the Abiusi's olives rotted on the ground. They also found a market for the remnants of the dried-up, crushed olives and pits, which came out of the press looking like large cartwheels of cork.
U l'Amatise
was directly responsible for developing this profitable part of the olive oil business. He sold the by-product in the cities, where it was processed and used for fuel. While he worked tirelessly for Don Cesare, Totu was pampered by Donna Rachele and Don Cesare, who were childless.