The Girls of Piazza D'Amore

The Girls of
Piazza d'Amore

Copyright © 2013 Connie Guzzo-McParland

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No part of this book may be reproduced, for any reason or by any means without permission in writing from the publisher.

Cover design: Debbie Geltner

Cover image: Connie Guzzo-McParland

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WildElement.ca

Author photo: Magenta Photo Studio

LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION

Guzzo-McParland, Connie, 1947-, author
        The girls of Piazza d'Amore / Connie Guzzo-McParland.

Issued in print and electronic formats.
ISBN 978-1-927535-19-6 (pbk.)
ISBN 978-1-927535-20-2 (html)
ISBN 978-1-927535-22-6 (pdf)

     I. Title.

PS8613.U99G57 2013 C813'.6 C2013-902011-X C2013-902012-8

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et Bibliothèque et Archives nationales du Québec

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.ll.
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The Girls of
Piazza d'Amore

A short novel

Connie Guzzo-McParland

.ll.

Dedicated to my late mother
Felicia Anania Guzzo
and all the generous women of Calabria

these are the women
who were born to give birth

they breathe only
leftover air
and speak only
when deeper voices
have fallen aslee
p

Gianna Patriarca
Italian Women and Other Tragedies

Table of Contents

Prologue

Part I

Part II

Part III

Part IV

Part V

Acknowledgements

Prologue

As I stepped out from the lily-scented church where I had just received Communion, the soft April wind made my new organza dress flutter above my knees. It made me think of butterflies and of the feathery wings of the cherubs painted on the sky-blue church ceiling. I felt light and airy. My father clutched my free hand. His was a mason's hand, used to handling stones and gritty mortar, and it felt coarse. In my other hand, I held up my blessed palm, a large olive branch that Comare Rosaria had brought from the country the day before.

Sundays were always special in Mulirena. Palm Sunday was a child's dream. The olive branches children brought to be blessed at Mass were heavy with homemade
cullarielli,
hard doughnut-shaped cookies glazed with white sugar and tied to the branches with ribbons. My mother even managed to attach a few store-bought candies to the slender olive leaves. The branch had to be held up firmly, without tilting.

Practically all the villagers had been at this morning's Mass wearing new spring clothes. The peasant families who lived on the farms came to the village for this special occasion. The women and children sat in the pews, men circulated in the back and along the sides, girls compared new dresses, boys eyed each others' goodies, young men ogled the girls.

Men who worked in the cities were in the village for Easter. My father was home from Milan, where he worked all year long. It was the last Easter my family would spend together in Mulirena. He had come to finalize the paperwork for his visa to emigrate to Canada.

Father's thick hand kept me well anchored, as we waited for my mother and brother to make their way out of the crowded church. My family as well as my aunts, uncles, and cousins were expected for a late lunch at the home of my paternal grandparents. The day had all the prospect of a never-ending feast. And, at the end of the day, I would not feel let down, for there would still be a full week of preparations to look forward to before Easter.

Palm Sunday held the promise of Easter. In this morning's sermon, Don Raffaele had spoken about Christ's exaltation through the streets of Jerusalem. It was Christ's most joyous day, the priest had said, his one day of celebration before the anguish of Gethsemane, the pain of Calvary, and the glory of the Resurrection. The priest went on and on about the meaning of the Resurrection, but I lost interest in that part of the story. Holy pictures of a resurrected Christ flying to heaven in a cloudburst seemed odd to me, and not as real as a crowd of villagers carrying Jesus on their shoulders, cheering him on, and waving olive branches in the air. I wanted to know more about why things had changed so quickly for the worse for Jesus after that day and why Judas betrayed his best friend for only a few pennies. And I wished we would be told more about Mary Magdalene, who truly loved Jesus and followed him everywhere.

My mother finally made it through the throng of parishioners bottlenecked at the narrow door. She stopped below the steps to adjust her
pacchiana,
regional costume. First, she lowered her black velvet
mancale,
her shawl, from her head to her back, fluffing the festive ribbons dangling from the shoulders of her vest, and then she straightened out the
mandile
– a satiny, rectangular head-covering, bordered with lace, held up by pins over two braided buns on top of the head. She lifted the floor-length pleated skirt by the hem. This heavy wool skirt was let down at church and at funerals, but ordinarily the women gathered it up and then crunched and tied it into a knot at the back, creating a bustle. Underneath her skirt, she revealed two other layers of clothes: a red flannel garment wrapped tightly around a long, white underskirt. It was a colourful but cumbersome costume that swaddled and obscured the natural contours of her young body.

Women who wore this outfit were known as
pacchiane.
Only women of my mother's generation still wore it daily, and it imposed on them a certain reserve and seriousness of demeanor – not to mention the weight of extra chores, such as gathering wood and picking olives and chestnuts, which the younger women were not expected to perform anymore. My thirty-three year old mother had been wearing it since the age of twelve – a symbol of her becoming a woman.

To go into the city, my mother borrowed clothes from one of the younger girls, changing back the minute she returned. She told me she felt naked and strange without the costume. When she sat on a doorstep, with her skirt tied at the back, sticking out like a tail, she looked like a fat hen hatching her eggs.

But coming out of church, Mother, slim and erect, looked regal. She beamed with pride as she joined us. My brother Luigi was nowhere to be seen. Mother shook her head and, with a resigned smile, said that there was no point in looking for him. He was probably home already. “He runs like a flash of lightning; you can't hold him down,” she said, and Father chuckled.

We made our way down the hilly road toward our neighbourhood, which in dialect we called
ruga
. Our next-door neighbour, Comare Rosaria, and her daughter, Lucia, joined us.

Father struck up a conversation with Amadeo, the village band director, who stopped walking whenever he wanted to emphasize a point. He complained that the young guys didn't want to know anything about
solfeggio
or the study of arias. “They only want to play tangos on their cheap, out-of-tune accordions,” he said, doing a little dance number and playing an imaginary accordion. Then he raised his hands in exasperation as we approached our
ruga
. A gramophone was blasting from the house of
U Grancu
.

Totu, a young man who courted Lucia, waved at me from
U Grancu
's window. Totu never resisted pinching my cheeks whenever he had a chance. His uncle, Don Cesare, who owned a small truck, a
furgoncino
, and often drove to Catanzaro, had bought him some new records. The season's favourite pop singer, Georgio Consolini, whined the popular
Terra Straniera
– a sweetly melodic, plaintive song that melted our hearts.

“With a voice like that…,” Amadeo said. “But he is wasting it on these
canzonette
.
Mah!
”

Then the song screeched to a stop and was replaced by another, sung in a woman's chirpy voice. The sound filled the neighbourhood. It was an infectious song, and it prompted the young girls to open their windows to the new sun, to new loves, and to their dreams. I had heard the song a couple of times already and knew all the words:

Aprite le finestre al nuovo sole,
È primavera, é primavera

Lasciate entrare un poco d'aria pura
Con il profumo dei giardini e prati in fior

Aprite le finestre ai nuovi sogni,
Bambine belle innamorate
È forse il più bel sogno che sognate

Sarà domani la felicità.

Part I

I was nine years old on that Palm Sunday in 1955, and I was certain that happiness was within reach of a window opened to the scent of gardens and orchards in bloom.

The tomorrow anticipated by the song has come and gone many times since then. Yet another spring has ended. In fact, it's close to summer in Montreal – the long weekend in May when gardeners in northern climates can plant their begonias without fear of frost. I'm sitting on my balcony with a coffee and a pile of yellowed composition notebooks, as contented as a lizard basking in the first warm day of the season. I don't have a garden to plant, but I do have the weekend all to myself, and I've promised myself to do nothing more than read and write. It's a well-deserved break. Yesterday evening, I succeeded in exchanging the winter clothes in my closet for summer wear stored in the basement locker, a banal ritual performed at the start of every new season that nonetheless gives me the illusion of restoring order in my life. This time I had another, more ambitious mission that had been on my mind for months. Buried at the very back of the locker, under boxes of used clothing and discarded furniture, was the rusty green metal trunk that had travelled with my family when we immigrated to Canada. I remembered its contents well – obsolete remnants of the old life that had been last aired out when my mother and I moved into this apartment years ago: a black velvet shawl and a lacy
mandile
that she bought over as a souvenir of her regional costume; embroidered sheets, pillowcases, and a damask bedspread that have never been used since they don't fit a Canadian standard double bed; yellowed letters and photographs; and various other trinkets that will never be used or displayed in my apartment. My mother no longer lives with me, but the old trunk has stayed in the locker. Discarding it would seem sacrilegious.

What I sought out last evening was on the very top of the memorabilia – some Italian books and the composition notebooks I had kept from my elementary school days in Mulirena. The notebooks are filled with notes and anecdotes of village life. I was especially interested in an unfinished manuscript – my very first attempt at writing. Over the years, I had often thought of the unwritten stories buried in the trunk, but never long enough to want to rummage around in the cluttered locker. I have rekindled my old passion for writing stories and have registered in a writing class. With the long weekend ahead of me, I finally hauled out the old trunk.

This morning, with the warm sun drawing me outdoors, I spread all this material out on the patio table. A blank postcard of the Rock of Gibraltar sticks out of the familiar copy of a thick novel,
I Promessi Sposi
, by Alessandro Manzoni, a book I received as a gift on my last day in Mulirena. A Roman steward had given me the card as a souvenir of the trip. With the novel are a prayer book with a mother-of-pearl cover, a manual on masonry that my father had brought from Milan, and a book on the history of Mulirena which was sent to us a few years after we left. The cover shows a photograph of the village.

Mulirena was built on a hill, so we were forever walking up and down. Approaching it from nearby Amato, the village looked like a pyramid of whitewashed houses with red roofs, with the bell-tower of one church forming its peak and another church squatting at the lower edge. A visiting bishop once compared the village, in his sermon, to a large family living in a multilevel house with many rooms, held together by the two churches. What the bishop may not have realized was that the two churches were called not by their proper names, but by
a ghiesa e supra,
the church at the top, and
a ghiesa e sutta,
the church at the bottom, and that they kept the villagers apart rather than uniting them. The main parish church, Santa Lucia, the one on the hill, was frequented by the Christian Democrats, the well-to-do, and friends of the only priest in the village. The other church, Madonna del Rosario, was favoured by those who opposed the Democrats and the priest. At election time, functions held at either church were boycotted by half the village.

What brought early inhabitants to settle in this part of the Appenines, which is not particularly fertile, seems to have been the fine sand from its rocky soil. Legend has it that the village's original name, Migliarina, is derived from
megghia rina
, best sand. This early name might have changed to Mulirena over the years in reference to the mules or
muli e rina
used to cart the sand from the riverbed and up the mountain roads to the village proper. The sand also provided the raw material for making stone. The men of the village developed a reputation as fine stonemasons,
muratori
– builders of walls.

Amato was no further away than the length of a soccer field, but the villages faced each other across a deep ravine. The road that led to Mulirena from Amato – and from the rest of the world – was the shape of a horseshoe. It ran along the ravine on the Amato side for about a kilometre, turned sharply across a bridge, and then sharply again toward Mulirena.

A kilometre off the road on the Amato side, just before the bridge, stood the Timpa, a low, wide mountain that had been quarried for as long as anyone could remember. This was the furthest we could walk before feeling we were entering Amato territory. The residents of Amato considered us
cafoni,
uncouth mountain peasants, while the Mulerinesi snickered at the Amatesi for being pretentious snobs while dying of hunger,
muarti e hhame.
The two villages were like Siamese twins joined together at the neck but wanting badly to keep their distance from each other. If one village sneezed, the other, jolted by the vibrations, would sneeze back harder.

We girls never ventured as far as the Timpa alone. It was a place for boys to meet at night, to sneak a smoke, and find privacy. During the day at the Timpa, there was always a cloud of dust swirling around the beaten-up trucks that regularly drove in from Amato, loaded the dusty crop of rocks and gravel, and then drove off to Marcellinara and its freight trains. No one ever asked what the stones were used for. Every afternoon, sirens went off to warn people to go indoors. That's when the mountain was dynamited and rocks burst up like fireworks into the sky. It was only logical to use the Timpa for real fireworks on the feast of Santa Lucia. Then, everyone gathered across the ravine to watch and applaud as the mountain exploded with lights.

The bridge at the bend of the horseshoe was built high over a cleared section of the ravine. Immediately after the bridge, the road turned toward Mulirena, and, from it, one could see the top of a long, stone staircase that gradually descended into the gorge. At its base lay the Funtanella, the village's communal fountains and everyone's favourite meeting place. My grandfather liked to claim that this structure had been built by the Romans, but the village was in fact founded in the sixteenth century. And why would the Romans have bothered to build anything so deep into the mountains? At the centre of the structure was a long, carved wall. Water flowed from the mouths of its gargoyles and chubby-cheeked faces and into a shallow, waist-high basin. The water jugs were placed in the basin to be filled with spring water, which was renowned for its clarity and coolness, and which was preferred to the water from the aqueduct. From the two sides of the fountain wall ran a system of long furrows, all along the sides of the ravine, into which the water overflowed. Some of the water fell into low troughs for watering animals. Most of it was channeled into a more recent addition: a large, cement basin separated into four smaller ones that were used by the women for washing clothes.

This was the village's gift to the women. Before the basin, the women had had to carry the
lessiva,
the heavy straw baskets in which the dirty clothes had steeped in a mixture of water and ashes from the fireplaces, to the river, la Fiumara, which was a long way from the village. Now the weekly wash at la Funtanella had become a social event for the women, who chatted, laughed, and sometimes sang as they washed. The little girls went along and, propped up on a rock, were given small items to wash.

Coincidentally, or so it might seem, groups of men – especially single men – took their
passeggiata
at the same time as the women did their laundry or filled their jugs with drinking water. But everyone understood that the Funtanella was the place to see and to be seen by the opposite sex. The men would walk, arm in arm, sometimes speaking in whispers to one another as though talking about forbidden matters, and sometimes arguing loudly about politics. They always stopped on the bridge. The women would be scrubbing away on the concrete washboards below, trying to get the dirty laundry as white as possible – their husband's shirts, the baby's diapers, the long strips of white cotton used for swaddling babies like mummies, the heavy bed sheets, their own long white shirts, and those mysterious diaper-like squares of white cloth that they hid at the bottom of their baskets. No matter how hard they beat those
pezze,
or rubbed them over the hard slabs until their knuckles turned red and cracked from the cold water and the caustic homemade soap, the women could never get rid of the shadows of the stubborn, brownish-red stains.

From the bridge, the men smoked, joked, argued and pretended indifference to what was going on below, but, depending on who was there, their gazes would dart down to the watery women's domain, down the winding steps to a floor made of ancient stones that were round and smooth from years of wear, and that were also mossy, wet, and very slippery.

The line of homes along the road and the periphery of the village started at the bridge. Their long balconies overlooked the Timpa, the cypresses of the cemetery in Amato, and the ravine. The village's garbage and bedpans had been dumped into the ravine for ages; but, all one saw, looking over the edge, were the thick bushes and the trees growing at a slant over the precipice. Along the whole length of the ravine, a stone parapet, as high as a child's shoulders, provided some protection for the children and a favourite place for men to sit and cool off on hot summer nights. It was also a great spot to wait for people to come in and out of Amato.

The road continued into the main street, Via Roma, which went down toward the poorer part of the village in one direction, and, in the other, up a series of cobblestone steps to the upper church.

The main piazza, at Piano Valle, sprawled just below the cobblestone steps and was the dividing line between the upper and lower parts of the village. In this area stood the school, the town hall, and many shops. Peppino's bar was the centre of attraction for the men. They sat on the chairs outside, sipping coffee and talking politics all day long. During the heated election periods, from a balcony above the school, the Christian Democrats and their adversaries shouted their
comizi,
which incited applause, catcalls, and the occasional fistfights. In quieter times, during the major religious feasts, people brought chairs from home and sat around the piazza to watch the movies that Don Raffaele projected on a large open-air screen.

Via Roma ran like a herringbone all down the spine of the village, with narrow alleys projecting off either side and then breaking up into other smaller alleys. Here and there, along this main street, were little squares, not quite piazzas, of which there was only one, but little enclaves of houses built around flat common areas and drinking fountains. The people who drank from the same fountain were identified by these
rughe
. They helped each other during harvests, and in times of crisis, but also fought and argued with each other – much like brothers and sisters. On summer evenings, the women congregated around one of the doorsteps, reciting the rosary, gossiping and telling stories, while the kids counted stars and chased fireflies.

We called the
ruga
in which I lived Piazza Don Carlo, though the more archaic Piano Don Carlo was engraved on a stone tablet on the corner wall of Don Cesare's home. There were five families living in this square, opening up onto the main road and an alley. Our next door neighbours were Rosaria Abiusi and her family on one side, and Don Cesare, the wealthiest man in the village, on the other. Directly across from our house lived Nicola, known as
U Grancu
, the Crab, and his younger sister, Tina. The rest of his family had immigrated to Canada, but he had been refused a visa because of his disabilities. Besides being very short, almost a dwarf, he had a crooked spine, one hip higher than the other, and walked with a limp, moving his arms. Tina was engaged to be married, and had chosen to remain in Mulirena.
U Grancu
never set foot outside his home, but he knew everyone's business. He spent most of the money his parents sent him from Canada on books, magazines, and gramophone records. His house was a meeting place for all the unemployed young men.

Next to
U Grancu
, and diagonally across from my house, lived Anna,
a pazza
– the crazy one. Her house had seen better days. It had been bombed during the war and had never been repaired. The old woman and her husband made do with one room that was no better than a stable. She had not always been crazy – only since the war. Her son was one of a handful of men who had never returned. It was assumed he had been taken prisoner in Germany, but his death was never confirmed. The villagers were not too surprised by Anna's deterioration.