In Love With Emilia Read online

The women wear scarves tied piously over heads, cardigans perfectly buttoned over their only Sunday best blouse, skirts neatly smoothed to knee, not above, and not below. Legs hairy, piano legs, bowed legs, stick legs, shapely legs, muscled calves, feet stuck into black church shoes, ankles overflowing, standing the pain in these perfectly polished torture traps, just for the Virgin Mary. God Bless Her.

  The men in their groups, talking men stuff, the women fussing like hens trying to get them into church, in place, and in time for the mass, just as they have been doing for hundreds of year. And the men, their heads topped with fedoras, ignoring the clucking hens just as they have done for hundreds of years. Frayed shirt collars buttoned to the neck, no tie, with best Sunday suit threadbare but pressed to perfection. Of course Francesco had to check the tractor first and Marietta will kill him when she sees his oily handprints stamped across his rump. And she will not wait until they are home. She will berate him in front of the whole village. If he is really lucky he will escape into mass before she spots the oily backside, some respite at least from that raucous voice.

  Entering the church, ladies to the right, men to the left. Take your pews please, and prepare your knees for the assaults of up-down, up-down, up-down. As the priest downs his third goblet of Christ’s blood this morning even his cheeks are looking like rosy apples. As Luigi was at the church for his yearly visit, I decided to join him. The bone hard pews and what I perceived to be total dullness were worth enduring if I could gaze around this sweet little church. I thought about our leather hassocks at Sunday school when I was a child, as my bony knees found no comfort on the wooden kneeling boards attached to the back of each pew. Pleasure was to be found in the beauty of the old church, the cracking frescoes, the marble figures at the tops of the pillars, huge oil paintings of the Madonna and Jesus, and of Saint Peter. Even in this semi-poverty there is real beauty, feelings of peace emanate from the walls, the ceiling, as the incense wafts across the congregation.

  After the solemn service, the joyous exit is wonderful as the church disgorges its contents into the sunny piazza. Is this the same somber crowd that assembled here an hour ago? There is much smiling, many toothless grins, and laughter. Huge voices out-shouting each other as if in argument, but simply trying as always to be heard above the rest. The men continue to discuss the problems, but in a more lighthearted manner now, after all it is Sunday. One old codger says, “How can we make a living off the land? No one wants to buy our hay, our milk”.

  “Well, the local government is to blame for everything” says another, “some of us now have only one or two cows. What is the point of herding them all the way to the fields every day? We leave them tethered in their stalls.”

  Old Alberto says, “Well it is the new animal rights’ laws. They say we cannot keep animals without light and fresh air, so we are just waiting for them to die.”

  “Yes”, says Franco, “and did you hear that you are only allowed to keep a certain number of birds in a cage depending on its size, and so many fish per tank? What’s this country coming to?”

  “And those rich folk coming up from the city at weekends. They just bring trouble and noise with those kids roaring around on dirt bikes”, complains another, “And I don’t like that woman up there, either. Don’t talk to her. I saw her talking to a polizia de finanza. I know she’s looking for our receipts in the waste bins”.

  But through it all they manage to come out laughing and smiling, the weight of their sins lifted from their shoulders for another week.

  Having dutifully made the appropriate farewells for today at least, I wandered back up to the cemetery to say hello to Nona and to freshen her flowers, leaving Luigi gossiping with the villagers. Cemeteries are places of great interest to me. Provided with little glimpses into the past, I always come away with a resolve to experience more, to see more, but never to end up in a hole in the ground, or in a box in a wall. I would want to be free and can imagine my ashes, my soul, flying away over the Emilian hills. As usual, attempting to improve my knowledge about family lines and connections, I wandered around the cemetery of Rovinaglia, this crooked old piece of ground, covered with leaning head stones, some stacked against the walls, bones long since removed, people, families forgotten. I see Ferraris and Doras, Castalottis, and Di Vincenzos; I see tiny faded photographs stuck to headstones with eyes still peering out into the world. Dates that reach back into history adorn headstones, telling of ancient, tough old men who saw their second century, of boys who went off to war and never came back, of women who toiled away their lives, of children who succumbed to influenza, and of babies who hardly took their first breaths. It is all here. Years of living and dying wrapped in the old rock walls, rocks hewn from the same earth to which these souls have been consigned. Luigi’s grandmother Carolina Castelotti, and grandfather Luigi Dora, the man who built the family home on the ruins of a previous house, now rest in this lovely peaceful place.

  As I closed the old iron gates behind me and I walked down between the banks of lavender, I could not help but admire these people. A people who endured this difficult life, who lost children so young, whose lives were torn asunder by wars, by mans’ inhumanity to man, and still the pattern continues. My senses enveloped in the aroma of lavender, I thought about Carolina and Luigi. The light was fading when I began my walk home and I ran the gauntlet of “bat alley”. They swooped down screeching just a few inches above my head.

  The chef had been at work! We had dinner with a nice glass of wine, and we talked about the lives of Carolina and Luigi. Making the best life they were able for their children and themselves, glossing over the misery, it might have been a pleasurable way to live sometimes, but we could only imagine the backbreaking work involved in building the house.

  Chiseling the rock, hewing the huge chestnut beams, grasping and straining with rough worn hands to place the rocks just so, the huge corner stones at perfect right angles, all built above the cantina, constructed centuries ago with awesome arches and nooks and crannies for storage of wine, root vegetables, cheese, milk, and for animal stalls. When Luigi and Carolina began to have children, the need arose for a bigger house. He built another rock house with stables and cantina beneath, kitty corner to their first house. This was the house in which my husband was born, but much, much later fell to rack and ruin and became “the dump”. The dump is our piazza now.

  The original cantina beneath Nona’s house is now a place of darkness and of cobwebs and wood-wormy chestnut barrels, of huge cross beams, old farm tools, chains, iron pots, old furniture, demijohns with hand-hewn stoppers in hand woven baskets, and steamer trunks. I have stood and looked at these remnants of the past, and the steamer trunks particularly create an historic picture in my mind when the late 1800’s and early 1900’s the New World called.

  Farmers’ lives were packed in those trunks. Villagers left, in search of the good life, prosperity, jobs, and food. They went to London. They went to America. What a culture shock from fragrant meadows to concrete jungle. From red tiled roofs to red brick walkups with stinking hallways. They went from horse and cart and tractor, to trolleys, trams, cars, trucks and buses; from congenial gatherings in the piazza to the anonymity of one among the masses, to racial prejudice and rejection of immigrants. These tough and resilient, emotional people endured the trans-Atlantic passage in crowded, stinking ships, stuffed below deck, men and boys separated from the wives, moms and sisters. They were following the dream perpetuated by those who went before.

  In the 1950’s, times were hard on the northern Italian farmland. Luigi’s parents made the decision to emigrate to New York where his father, Lorenzo, had a brother, and other family members had gone some years before. The journey began with the train to Genoa and then transferring to the ship to take them on their adventure. For some reason they were not allowed to board the ship and had to wait for the next one. The cramped and uncomfortable crossing on the “Conte Biancomano” d
id not seem so awful when on landing in New York they heard the terrible news of the sinking of the “Andrea Doria”, the ship on which they were originally booked.

  As the great unwashed emerged from the bowels of the boat papers were issued, luckier people were received by anxious relatives, others went on their own lonely ways to boarding homes, struggling with little or no command of this new language. Life was very different for the immigrants. Most were able to adapt to the new, frantic way of life but some could not shake the bonds of the old country. Lorenzo was a quiet, peaceful person. Perhaps the rush and mayhem of New York was too overpowering for him. As family tension built to a crescendo he returned to Italy while Luigi and his mother went to stay with Nona’s other daughter in England who was established and married and living in a town not far from where my family lived.

  It was at this time in 1964, after several more wonderful family camping holidays and dreams of Italy still on our minds, my sister and I decided to visit the International Club in a town nearby. Designed to host the Greeks, Italians, Spaniards and foreigners working mostly in the service trades, it was a meeting place where the workers could connect with home. I spied a handsome, shy young man at the club, but being shy myself, I was not about to go and talk to him. The next day I made sure to be at the El Toucan coffee bar, where some of these handsome fellows met and there he was in the corner, protected it seemed by several others. This went on for a few weeks until I heard via the grapevine that he wanted to ask me out. Looking back, I cannot imagine from where I drew the courage to approach him and ask if he would like to go to a movie with me, but I did. The romance progressed. I remember being on the bus with my mother and passing Luigi strolling along, I turned to her and said, so she tells me, “There’s the man I’m going to marry”. Perhaps she remembers it so distinctly because she and my father were not at that time aware of our relationship. English people loved to take their daughters for holidays in Italy but they certainly did not want their daughters to marry foreigners. I endured the wrath of my father but slowly, I am sure after my mother’s advice, he began to accept the idea of our relationship.

  We were married in 1966 and planned to move into a new flat with Luigi’s mother, Angelina. I discovered that my mother-in-law was a very strong person in character and I was not at liberty to make any decisions regarding our home. I became frustrated, she did, I nagged Luigi, he nagged his mother, she nagged me. It was a wild, miserable time for me. Luigi was more rattled than I knew—one day he burned his pay packet in the fire without realizing he had not extracted the money. Tough week that one! My parents had rented our house and gone off on a trip round Europe and North Africa. I had no one to confide in but my poor husband. Then, a stroke of luck!

  At that time in England, Canada was advertising heavily for immigrants. “We need you, we want you, ifyou can work hard you will make a great living in a wonderful country. You can own your own home, you can have a car and a summer cottage in the country.” All this sounded so wonderfully tempting. The gold at the end of the rainbow! We were both keen on discovering more, so off we went to Canada House in London. Six months later we were boarding a flight from Heathrow to Montreal and to our new life. Time has been good to us, having finally settled in British Columbia (we left Quebec after five years because of the political unrest, which prompted the FLQ crisis, a movement working toward the separation of Quebec from Canada). Finally, after two children, working like demons, even achieving ownership of a summer cottage, moving hither and thither round the Province because of Luigi’s work, and becoming total workaholics we seemed to fall apart with stress. Luigi had a mental breakdown and I was diagnosed with metastatic breast cancer, these crises occurring within the same month, January, 1995. It took time but eventually we sat back with huge sighs and contemplated life as sick retirees. The void of having nowhere to rush off to at eight o’clock each morning did not take long to overcome. The lack of constant beeping of Luigi’s pager even when he was in the bathroom was never missed. We were actually surviving. The situation improved, we contemplated travel, the gym, cross-country skiing—there was so much to enjoy.

  We had often talked about going back to Europe and now was our opportunity to take a leisurely trip as opposed to rushing stressfully through a two or three-week vacation break from the office. Knowing one does not have to return to the frantic workday makes a holiday far more enjoyable.

  Angelina, the strong old Italian matriarch whom we thought would live forever because of her ability to fight back from yearly influenza and pneumonia, had died a number of years prior to our retirement. A rift had occurred between her two daughters, Meri and Lena, of which we were unaware. Squabbling had been going on for some time between them regarding Angelina’s property, her land, her house. Luigi was slowly drawn into the melee as first one sister would call him and then the other, with their complaints about each other. We both realized that he did not appear anyway in the equation. We wondered why? During her lifetime, Nona had made verbal requests and bequeathments regarding her property and possessions, but had not drawn up a will, nothing was on paper. As the sisters continued their battle, Luigi realized he did have “a say” in matters upon discovering that Nona wanted him to have her house, No. 17, Rovinaglia. It was quite apparent that obtaining legal advice would be the only way to achieve resolution.

  And so began the saga of establishing legal ownership of the land, the house, barns, crumbling sheds and falling-down cottages. Passed down through the generations by word of mouth, huge areas of meadows and woodlands had been carved down into smaller parcels and these were in contention also.

  It strikes me now that we were pathetically innocent as we jumped into the churning depths of Luigi’s family. We had no idea of how much effort we would have to make just to reason with his sister, let alone arrive at an amicable solution. Much diplomacy and patience was demanded of Luigi when he was boiling inside about nonsensical details that threatened to pull all asunder. Frustration was my enemy. With so little knowledge of the language I was often left hanging, puzzled, confused.

  This day was to be one of negotiations. I really did not want anything to do with the meetings but I felt Luigi needed some moral support so I would go with him. Today it went on and on, like a ricocheting ball, from one person to another, back and forth. I might have been at a tennis match as my eyes went from side to side to side. Enough, I thought, they are all mad. I left quickly and returned to the house.

  I scrubbed and cleaned and swept, and lit the fire in the old Aga to fend off the winds as they flew over the hills from Tuscany with a vengeance. It appeared those Tuscan war lords were angry, the sky blackened, it roiled and boiled its billowing mass of clouds, the distant rumbles and a far off flash heralded what was to come. The wind screamed through the rafters, throwing tiles around as if they were leaves, woof-ing under the door and through the cracks. My God, this was worse than winter in Canada, and it was already June. Global warming and changing weather patterns aside, this was ridiculous!

  The house had, however, endured for centuries. Everything the elements could throw at it made no difference. With meter thick walls it was not going anywhere. Neither was I. Sitting outside with my coffee as long as I dared, I jumped out of my skin as a huge bang rocked the world directly overhead. Lightning carved up the sky like pieces of pie. The power failed. As the noise and light show abated God emptied his buckets. Down came the rain in driving sheets whipping this way and that in the ferocious wind. Lashing at the house and beating at the shutters, it squeezed its way through the slats and between the poor old window frames. It ran down the old plastered walls, feeling quite at home as it simply followed the same path worn through the different layers of plaster and paint from years of previous storms. Water collected in puddles on the warped old chestnut floor, dripping between the boards into the cantina below.

  I had forgotten to bring in my beautiful geraniums and begonias from the balcony. Lo
oking out of the kitchen door I could see their poor pathetic blossoms smashed to pulp. The line of washing hung in soggy, dripping fashion, begging to be rescued. It would have to stay outside. There was nowhere to hang it but on the back of wood-wormy chairs or on the poky steel rods sticking out around the chimney waiting to jab Canadian giants in the eye.

  Peace returned and the marine mist slithered over the hilltops like something from a Dracula movie, billowing, wafting, and swallowing the churches and villages whole, digesting, then spitting them out into spaces in the mist. It would continue now for two days. A pattern set perhaps at the beginning of time. A warming wind to follow, as the Mediterranean takes pity on the poor cold mountain villages, pushing its warm clear air over the hills.

  Everything will appear more colorful, fresher and crisper. The flowers will stand up to attention, the battered leaves will wave happily. The lizards will appear from between the rocks and bask, some tailless, their last basking not beyond the reach of the stray cats. Cats, lean and with voracious appetites, attacking with lightning speed often only to be rewarded with a wriggling tail that fools them just long enough, allowing the lizard to escape and grow a new defense mechanism. Out will come our sun chairs, the umbrella and picnic table. The hammock will soothe its occupant in a gentle sway between the walnut and apple tree. Paperbacks and newspapers will alternately be read and then lie on the grass as the Canadians snooze and the curious villagers will be reinforced in their thoughts of how odd we are.

  Ignoring the storm, the meeting in the garage had continued. However, now duly adjourned by Madam Chairwoman, Luigi had returned. His head cracking, frustrated, he’d had enough. “They have minds as narrow as yellow lines. You can’t reason with Meri. She’s like a brick wall. She will not give an inch. It is her way or no way”. On and on he goes, venting his frustration. Did we really believe we would have the paperwork signed, sealed and settled this year? We want to do things to renovate the house but dare not. What if we never have it? What if the powerful women in this family trample their polite brother? Wear him down until he no longer cares, until he wants no more to do with any of them. Nothing that we do is missed. The eyes are not evident, but they are there. Am I becoming totally paranoid?