by Susan M. Anderson

Dreaming of Elizabeth, a family saga, spans six generations of two extended Sicilian families beginning in 1827 in Trano Mare, a mythical village on the northern coast east of Palermo. It traces their immigration to America during the great European migration of the early twentieth century and their new life on Elizabeth Street, the “Sicilian street,” on the Lower East Side of Manhattan.

While it touches on historical and political events, the novel’s focus is on daily life. Characters interact with each other in ordinary time. Their perception of themselves and others, as well as how they live in and perceive time is as important as what happens to them.

The main story line is the migration of the Pandolfina family. Maria is a midwife in Sicily and continues her practice in America until the 1920s. She is also musically precocious, inheriting her talent from a paternal great aunt and in turn giving this talent to one of her seven children. Her husband, Teo, is the shoemaker in Trano Mare, like the twelve generations preceding him. In America he begins by selling shoes on the street and later opens a store on the Upper East Side. Their sons and daughters work or go to school and later in the story, their youngest child finds employment as a seamstress in the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory near Washington Square in Greenwich Village and is working there on March 25, 1911, the day of the fire.

Story’s timeline:

1. •1827 - Serafina Fidelio is born - Maria’s mother - larger than life
   

2. •1827 - Don Falco La Barbera is orphaned - head of Black Hand
   

3. •1843 - Serafina attends school of midwifery, Palermo
   

4. •1846 - Serafina convinces mother she should marry Giorgio
   

5. •1847 - Giorgio Fiori, apothecary, m. Serafina Fidelio
   

6. •1857 - Teo Pandolfina is born
   

7. •1858 - Maria Fiori is born
   

8. •1860 - Maria plays Aunt Giuseppina’s piano
   

9. •1860 - Serafina begins teaching Maria midwifery
   

10. •1865 - Maria studies piano and musical theory w/ Lorenzo Coco
    

11. •1870 - Maria  is presiding midwife when Countess delivers twins
    

12. •1875 - Maria meets Teo, by arrangement of two families
    

13. •1877 - Teo Pandolfina m. Maria Fiori, arranged marriage
    

14. •1887 - Angelo is born
    

15. •1893 - Tessa is born, youngest child
    

16. •1895 - Teo finds his brother’s body on Trano Mare shore
    

17. •1897 - Lorenzo Coco’s violin shop burns to the ground
    

18. •1901 - Teo emigrates with two of his sons
    

19. •1903 - Maria emigrates with the rest of the children
    

20. •1906 - Teo opens shoe store on Elizabeth Street
    

21. •1908 - Store burns
    

22. •1908 - Teo and the avenging angel
    

23. •1910 - Teo opens leather goods store on Madison Avenue
    

24. •1911 - Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire
    

25. •1918 - Angelo interrupts singing career to fight in WWI
    

26. •1926 - Angelo sings at the old Met
    

27. •1949 - Maria and Teo die
    

28. •1972 - Angelo Pandolfina dies
    

Wind as a metaphor for migration

The novel begins with a description of the Sirocco, a hot wind that blows up from Africa in early spring that can be both pleasant and foreboding and this one is the latter, filling Teo’s world with dust and mirroring the anxiety he feels at leaving the only world he knows. Wind blows throughout the novel and is a metaphor for migration.

Prelude: In The Stillness Of A Newborn World

March 1901

    The day Teo Pandolfina booked passage to America, a hot wind blew over from Africa. It crossed the sea and filled Teo’s small town with dust. The wind howled, the palm trees moaned and the dust touched everything.

    Grandma Colletti’s house faced the piazza. As she sat outside on her front chair, her small black eyes squinting above stuffed leather cheeks, she watched the fountain with its statue of St. Benedict – his mouth agape, his suppliant hands raised to heaven, kneeling in the same spot for over four centuries to the great Sicilian Baroque God – and saw his eye sockets and open mouth and stone garment folds filling with dust. She heard the soughing of the palms and the tolling of the church’s French cast iron bells, the braying of the mules in their stable. She saw the wind taking Fra Antonio’s biretta as he headed to say morning Mass, saw it puffing the lace sleeves of his alb as if he were a bird about to take flight. She saw Concetta whisking up her flats of drying tomatoes and running inside and Beppe the village idiot dancing and twirling and flinging his arms wide and high as the wind took up his wildness.

    With that Grandma Colletti thought of going inside and just in time, too, for it took her body several seconds to start moving after her brain had made its decision to do so, the dust just beginning to reach her, stroking the vast expanse of her capacious bosom tightly packed into a dress fading now from what was once shiny black to bilious green. She stood, turned, bent against its force and felt the wind lifting the back of her skirt so that she mooned, but did not mean to, the piazza and the statue and the mighty world as she knew it, even the sun and the planets in their orbit around the shimmering face of the universe. Then she escaped into the house, but not before the dusty suspiration swept her massive bottom.

    The wind slipped inside the town’s basilica with its arches and dome and statuary and marble inlay and gold filigree. It nipped at the skirts of the priest as he bowed before the altar. It snaked around the statue of the Virgin and the crucifix and the stained glass. And the wind kissed the body and blood of Christ as the old priest elevated chalice and host in his transparent fingers. And the wind took away the sound of the bells that the confused altar boy kept trying to ring at the consecration and again at the elevation. And the wind turned clear morning light into milky glaze.

    On the road to Palermo where he would later buy tickets in steerage for a strange land to which he did not want to go, Teo noticed the tops of ancient trees beginning to sway. Just ahead he saw swirls of dust spinning pebbles and twigs. Then he heard the wind cracking in earnest as it whipped across the hills. Pulling down his cap, he took the bandana from his neck and tied it around his mouth and nose.

    — Don’t worry, Largo. This will blow over soon.

    The storm thickened. The wind howled. The dust bit into his hands. Soon he could see nothing in front of him except the tips of two long ears.

    Then Largo stopped.

    Teo coaxed and kicked but the mule would not budge. He got off and pushed the mule’s rear. When Largo’s hind legs just missed kicking Teo’s genitals, he stepped aside, cursed, got down on his hands and knees and crawled around to Largo’s front. The dust seeped into his clothes and mouth and stung his eyes. He pulled at the tack.

   — C’mon, Largo, you lazy beast. Let’s go.

    The animal brayed in Teo’s ear, shook its head and sat down.

    Teo slammed his hat to the ground. He took off the bandana, closed his eyes, raised his arms and put his face up to the roaring blackness. He did not care that his nostrils filled with dust or that the wind tore the sound out of his mouth. He only knew that his words were choking him and he needed to spit them out.

    — God what are you doing to me? First you made me fall in love with the daughter of that bleating hippo, Serafina, the mother-in-law who gave me a constant misery for over twenty years. Then you desolated our people who are now too poor to pay me for the shoes I make for them. Never mind that for twelve generations before me the Pandolfinas earned a good living. No, you waited until I took over the business to send the pestilence. You gave me children and no way to feed them. In desperation, I decided to look for work in America, an untamed country filled with cutthroats who stand on the pier sharpening their knives and waiting for unsuspecting immigrants to arrive. And today, when I am on the way to buy a ticket, what do you do? You send a storm to bury me alive in the dust of my own land while this good-for-nothing sterile animal sits in the middle of the road and my children die of hunger. God, are you listening to me? Have you EVER listened to me? God, if you are there?Then stop it.
STOP.

THIS.

WRET-CHED.

BLOW-ING.

    With that last scream, Teo had expelled all his words. He sank to the earth and rolled around, clearing his throat, cursing and moaning every time his body hit another rock.

    Suddenly the storm stopped. Startled at the silence around him except for his own mewling he closed his mouth, opened his eyes, turned his beaky nose upward and saw a cobalt sky in the stillness of a newborn world.

    Then Teo rose, dusted himself off, shrugged, grinned, patted Largo’s neck and continued on his way, refreshed.

The Mother-In-Law He Hesitates To Love

This is Serafina’s story. I call her My Serafina for she is larger than life. In a sense she is my creative blast at Hollywood’s version of the Sicilian woman, a docile mafia wife cowering behind closed doors. This passage, a standalone short story, is called “Serafina And The Pinnacle Of Delight.”

1  Serafina

    Maria had a mother, Serafina, who although dead, chose not to depart completely. Instead she hovered above her body as it lay in state and peering down with rueful smile on what we call life, carried on with the mourners, even prayed with the priest, but declined to hurl dirt onto the casket.

    A few months after the funeral, Crocifisa Abatti, a local peasant whose twelve children Serafina delivered, thought she saw a figure resembling the deceased walking through the fountain centering the piazza and up the steps of the Duomo, then disappearing through its heavy copper doors. The entire church was searched but not a trace of Fina was found, the apparition attributed to Crocifisa’s addled brain as a result of the recent loss of her oldest son killed by one of Don Falco’s thugs.

    Serafina continued to counsel Maria in most matters, appearing nightly to her grief-stricken and sleepless daughter. She stood by her side as Maria practiced midwifery, helping mothers in labor bear their pain or turning the fetus just in the nick of time or aiding blue and congested newborns to breathe. And truth to tell, officials marveled at the low infant mortality rate in Trano Mare, even after Serafina’s death until the time Maria left for America. While infants and mothers in surrounding towns died by the dozens in childbirth, Trano Mare enjoyed a healthy, bouncing population boom.

    Call her apparition, call her imagination, call her devil or angel or ghost, Serafina and her prodigious talents were not to be undone by death.

    When she was young and quite the raving beauty, tall, with thick flowing ginger hair, enormous firm breasts, straight white teeth surrounded by full red lips and low-lidded smoldering green eyes, a gift it was rumored from Neptune himself, Serafina Fidelio had both the physical gifts and the mental tenacity to move in all the right places.

    Hers was a beauty which alas was no deeper than the quick flames of fleeting desire it fed, a mere insurance of progeny, nothing less, nothing more, Fina could attest to that, teeth starting to fall and fat starting to build soon after her thirty-fifth year, the sleek lines and generous curves of her voluptuous body giving way to rolls of flesh, aging all too soon it seemed to her. But oh well, no matter, she still had her compensating charms, good for a furtive hungry look from the grizzled set who lined the piazza each evening. Or more. Then a sullen slackness started at forty and soon after, the wrinkled shriveling began.

    From the time she was five, Serafina went with her mother to watch and gradually to help and so to learn midwifery, falling into the work for which she was perfectly suited, she being fit and strong and not bothered at all by blood, screaming, or the pain of others. Serafina’s placid assurance born of fearless living was a great gift to women writhing in the agony of childbirth.

    Like her mother, she showed so much talent and at such an early age that even the women who frequented Trano Mare’s piazzas and who had an opinion about an event before it happened, considering themselves the judicial branch of the community and in a sense they were – black shawled, wizened, toothless crones seldom seen singly but consulting and cackling in groups of two or three, lurking in corners or swept up and swirling like withered leaves in the alcoves and narrow passageways of the town – even they agreed that she should earn a certificate.

    And so she was sent to Palermo to live with her maiden aunt Giuseppina while attending the university’s school of midwifery.

    Giuseppina was her father’s sister, large-boned, lanky, with a prominent nose and long fingers. She was bookish and odd like her brother, but with a watchful gaze and an unbounded love for music.

    Giuseppina Fidelio, unmarried and living alone, now there was something almost sinister about that. She played in the Palermo Symphony, supplementing the meager income of second harpist with money earned from God knows where. She had enough musical muscle to play two instruments – the cello for love and the harp for money, having played both while studying theory and composition at the Naples Conservatory. Knowing that because she was a woman she could not get a job as cellist in any orchestra, she contented herself with being second harpist. And together with three of her friends, formed a quartet, her one but consuming indulgence. In addition to her cello, there was a piano, viola and a violin. They met every Wednesday evening without fail for forty years in Giuseppina’s modest living quarters, never concertizing, each more dedicated to music than the other, the ensemble lasting long enough to play the Brahms Werther. They agreed their performance of this newly-published piano quartet was stellar and thought the composer must have had a group like theirs in mind when he wrote it. “Such a pity Brahms himself cannot hear us play,” Giuseppina said wistfully to her fellow musicians.

    While she lived with her aunt, Serafina took classes and studied and delivered babies and more babies, always with strength and placid assurance. Charged to be her guardian, Giuseppina’s gaze was watchful and Serafina had no opportunity for diversion. She was a certified midwife in two years.

    When she arrived in Palermo, the city was too big, too noisy, strange. When she returned to Trano Mare, the village was too small, too quiet, strange. The year was 1845. Serafina was eighteen and still a virgin. She thought, the best is yet to come.

    Although her father had from her early childhood chosen the son of a fellow revolutionary for her husband, Serafina was able to reshape destiny for she was nothing if not fearless with an astonishing ability to persuade the powerful – in this case, her mother, her father being too busy with his books and his dreams of Risorgimento – that Giorgio Fiori despite his swagger and his wandering eyes, a large fleshy mole on his left cheek – the Fiori mole, Giorgio called it, a sign of the family’s powers of thought – and a growing paunch even at twenty-four was the right mate for her. Giorgio was the apothecary’s oldest son, you see and Fina knew that just as babies will be born in good times and in bad, so will people need poultices and other things medicinal in good times and in bad. And God and Serafina knew that the times were going to be dismal for many years.

    And so Serafina Fidelio and Giorgio Baldassare Fiori, fulfilling the wishes of her activist father, were wed in the Church of the Holy Spirit in Palermo on March 30, 1847, five hundred sixty-five years to the date when, with a sudden ferocious ringing of the church’s iron bells, the pent-up anger of a downtrodden land conquered again and again by the many armies that marched across its fertile soil unleashed itself and the glorious insurrection began, Sicilian Vespers being a definite if distant precursor to Risorgimento, her father the dreamer told her. His words made her dizzy as she stood there listening to him, her constitution a bulwark against heady convolution. Too many words mask the truth, she thought. Her father, his books, his dreams: what had they changed? But no matter, she had won the right to marry her Giorgio, and the date would be a mark for their marriage, her father went on, a symbol and a foretelling. Never mind that the church was ugly and old, thought Serafina, who had seen it when her aunt took her touring one day on the outskirts of Palermo, standing there in unrelieved Norman austerity. In a cemetery, of all places. She nodded and with an empty smile and vacant eyes said, yes, Papa, having long ago stopped listening.

    The marriage was a success, not so much because it lacked the financial turmoil that plagued so many other households, their monetary security, although meager compared to that of prior generations, contributing its share to conjugal peace, but because she and Giorgio understood one another. For Fina had learned the lesson without having been taught that there were times during the course of a marriage when one partner must look the other way for the sake of, for the sake of what, the thought was not even carried that far, but if anything for the sake of the family. So she said nothing not even to herself when Giorgio had his divertimentos. Although he had predilection aplenty for the sudden squeeze, the ecstasy of hot passion’s piercing moment – just five minutes with me, please, the doleful hungry eyes pleading, please, oh please, only five minutes behind the storeroom door – Serafina and life in a stark land squelched opportunity. But the marriage was a success most of all because Serafina and Giorgio drew closer through the years, both being alike, friends, really, yet complementing one another – Giorgio the thinker rubbing his large fleshy mole with forefinger, and Serafina the woman of fearless prescience and decisive action. They spent their time outside the pale of history, nationalism and the life of the mind being dreams for madmen, fools and her father.

    First she bore Giorgio a son, a remarkably healthy and plump baby for being two months premature, and then went on to bear five more children. No matter their gender, but to set the record straight, four daughters and one more son, each daughter of redoubtable marriageability – Serafina made sure of that – and the sons too good for any woman Serafina had met – or, more to the point – knew she would ever meet.

    Having four daughters was a burden for anyone other than Serafina, but she knew she had special powers, so the possibility of failing to find them a suitable match, well, but that never crossed Serafina’s mind. It was unthinkable, no darkness in Serafina’s inner life.

    You see, she was blessed with not one whisper of foreboding. Not one “what if” crinkled her placid brow, not one moment of hesitation, so that her existence – we are not talking about her existence now, mind you, for life after death, she realizes, is something else, a life, if one may call it that, lived on a different plane, in a different space and in an exhilarating timelessness. But while she lived and moved on earth in what we call existence, her days were one long continuum played on a smooth surface marred not by one ripple of panic or timidity or apprehension.

    Now this is not to say that Serafina did not feel for herself or for others, but rather that her feelings were all the more pure for not being contaminated by cowardice or suspicion or doubt.

    As midwife, Serafina knew the comings and goings in Trano Mare. Was she not out in the piazza almost daily meeting, talking, listening. It was her duty. She must first of all find suitable marriages for her offspring, you see, and being the neighborhood midwife, well, there was not much that happened, anything of any consequence, that is, that Serafina did not know. Or was not told. And her favor was cultivated. More than that, she was almost revered. Her importance in time grew close to the Godhead, having long ago surpassed that of the priest, the mayor, the king, almost approaching Don Falco and his lazy thugs in the piazza or Garibaldi and his Red Shirts. But, no, not that high – the Godhead, yes, but not Don Falco or Garibaldi. So to show their esteem the townspeople called her ‘Donna Fina.’ She figured prominently in the life of Trano Mare, carrying each baby she delivered in baptismal procession as was the custom in this part of Sicily, presenting the child to its godfather at the foot of the Duomo’s baptismal font.

    Oh bother with the banter of priests or the talk of insurrection or Risorgimento, Serafina stayed close to the things in life that mattered. She believed in her family, in the future, in her oldest daughter’s cooking, in plenty of sex and wine, in the earthy scent of spring. She knew a strong baby when he was in his mother’s womb, his strength confirmed by his cry and the way he suckled at his mother’s breast. But most of all, she believed in herself. No one could accuse her, Serafina Fidelio Fiori, of cowering in the shadows.

2  The Birth of Teo

Trano Mare, April 1, 1857

    It was close to 3 a.m. when Filippo banged his fist on the Fiori’s door.

    Donna Fina hearing the knock, sat up in bed fully awake although she had been in a deep sleep. She knew what it signaled, so she was up in a flash, moving like a stealthy cat with supple, sleek, quick and quiet movements surprising for all her bulk, careful not to wake Giorgio or the children, not difficult since by now they were used to and slept through sudden nocturnal visits. She covered Giorgio’s naked rump with the blanket, crossed the room, put on her clothes and shoes, then glided down the stairs in less than five minutes.

    On her way to the front door she grabbed her shawl and two figs, dipped them in honey, opened the latch and hugged Filippo, enfolding him in her quieting arms while sticking the figs in his mouth. She told him to sit a moment while she gathered up her bag and vials of herbs and bottle of special medicine, mostly brandy. The medicine was Giorgio’s formula, an aid to mothers writhing in the pain of giving birth and it did take some of the sting out of the agony, God’s painful gift to women, all the while telling him he was going to have another brother, “Another beautiful brother, don’t you worry, Donna Fina tells you so and tells you not to worry,” talking softly to him, soothing him, this seven-year-old child with the sleep still in his face.

    Filippo looked at her while his mouth worked hard at chewing the figs. With messy hair and spindly legs sticking out of short baggy-seated pantaloons, he was smudged still from playing soccer yesterday evening. He had run to fetch Donna Fina for what or why, he was only dimly aware.

    “Papa said ‘Hurry, get Donna Fina,’ so I ran.”

    “Good boy,” Fina said as she opened the shutters, peered outside, spied Beppe with his wild eyes and pointed shoes at the end of the block near the fountain in the piazza, his usual spot. He had been waiting for her call ever since she forewarned him the other day, knowing that Pandolfina babies always have big heads and this one not yet turned, telling him, “There may be work for you soon.” And Beppe although the village idiot knew that he must eat and that Donna Fina was his best bet for finding work.

    Now she summoned him in her stage whisper, “Beppe, run for the priest. Tell him to come at once to the Pandolfina’s house. Then go straight to Dottore Falcone. Give him the same message. Graziella is having her baby.”

    After Beppe ran off, she looked appraisingly at Filippo as she reached for candles, then lighting them said, “Don’t worry, child, all will be well.”

    Filippo stared at Donna Fina, in control of his family’s destiny he sensed and despite the ancient misgivings coursing through his blood, accepted the lit candle Serafina offered. With his other hand, he took hers and the two silent figures, their faces soft in the warm light, set off across the dark piazza. They might have been two falling stars shooting through the black firmament.

    At the Pandolfina home, Graziella’s daughters, sisters, mother, cousins, anticipating Serafina’s commands, performed tasks meted out to them according to an unwritten but nonetheless strict order determined by their position in the family. They had been through a birth many times before and were busy fetching sheets, heating water, arranging furniture or praying in front of the Virgin’s statue placed in a corner of the living room while Graziella contracted and moaned in her bed upstairs. Her mother held her hand, whispering in her ear, mopping her brow.

    She was the first one to see him, Serafina loved to remind Teo years later when he was her son-in-law. But on this April morning in 1857 a large head coming out of the birth canal, traveling slowly and painfully was a miracle. Graziella, like all her predecessors relaxed into her work when Donna Fina arrived, so the baby turned and the water broke and the birth began in earnest.

    Dottore Falcone tipped his hat to Donna Fina who had worked yet another feat of wonder or perhaps it was Giorgio’s special concoction, who knew, or maybe it was the confidence that women giving birth had, just seeing this large aging beauty, some of her front teeth already missing, strands of graying ginger hair sticking out from beneath her midwife’s bandana or plastered against her forehead – like Neptune’s wife, Dottore Falcone thought or like a great becalming sea giving peace to all who swam in its waters.

    “More towels, Francesca,” Fina said, her eyes riveted on the birth canal, “Yes, yes, that is perfect, Signora Graziella, you do so well now, breathe deeply.

    “Wipe her forehead, Concetta, hold her shoulders, steady her legs a little more now, Maria.

    “Signora, push when I tell you.” Silence, except for Graziella’s stifled moans. Then, “Now. Push.” And again, “Push,” Donna Fina’s words barely audible but obeyed as if thundered from the lips of God.

    And again, silence, except for Donna Fina’s rhythmical, whispered commands, Graziella sweating and holding her lower lip with her teeth.

    The women continued with their work, each committed to the event as if she were giving birth to her own child, disagreements or hurt feelings forgotten on this wondrous night.

    Downstairs some of the old men sat mute around the table with the priest, arms folded or thumbs hitched in their pants, dozing beneath a pulled-down cap. Others sat in a corner playing cards, at times yelling, gesticulating, laughing.

    The younger men stayed outside with the small children who, wide-eyed at first, dressed quickly when awakened, but grew restless. Oh why is it taking so long they kept asking the men, They ran back and forth from the house to the fountain in the piazza, quickly returning once when they spied Beppe’s form creeping behind a statue. Filippo, self-contained and silent, kept to himself. The men sat or stood or braced themselves against a wall, talking fast and loud, laughing at their own jokes, their cigarettes making small pinpoints of light in this damp and moonless time before dawn.

    Graziella’s room was still bathed in candlelight when they heard the scream, high pitched, other worldly.

3  Maria Is Conceived

Trano Mare, April 1, 1857

    A beautiful cry, Fina thought, distinctive, piercing, memorable, all the while directing, “Now, Maddalena, where are you? – time to begin the cleanup, girls, more towels, take those sheets, do not let the men see them, they are such useless innocents, soak them, then go to the well, Nicola, take Anna with you, fill the big bucket with water, then boil them, hurry dears before first light.”

    Graziella’s women scurried and did as they were told. The mood had changed and instead of anxious whispers, they stood in clusters to laugh and talk, casting moving shadows on the wall. Graziella’s mother held the baby up and called out to her sister in a magpie cackle, joking about the size of her grandson, proud of him already, eyes sparkling with mirth and candlelight, this toothless beldam, bent like a question mark, cheeks sunken like pockets on the moon. Together with her younger daughter she began the final job of the evening, bathing Graziella, clothing her in a freshly laundered nightgown, plaiting her hair, stroking her forehead, soothing her to sleep.

    Donna Fina moved with measured grace, smiling, taking off her gloves and apron, straightening her kerchief. The women gathered around and began kissing her goodbye. She took her bag, went down the stairs. The old men rose as she entered the room, doffed their caps in salute. Rodolfo opened the door for her with a bow.

    “You have a beautiful boy, Don Rodolfo. With a majestic set of lungs.”

    “Thanks to you, Donna Fina.” He kissed her right hand and pressed money into the left. She smiled.

    Outside the lemon light of early morning touches the buildings flanking Trano Mare’s piazza, grazing the baroque statue of St. Benedict. It sparkles around the fountain and the glass of store fronts and bounces off Donna Fina’s golden earrings that jiggle along with everything else when she walks.

    Serafina hears shards of words as people greet one another or yell their wares in the straw market, hears children laughing on their way to school, the clop of donkeys pulling carts out of the village or to work. She smells the pungent dung of animals, the mud of the potter’s wheel, the musty tang of wet straw. She sees Pandolfina’s shop still shuttered, of course, maybe he will not open today, thinking it is a pity no children old enough yet to take it over, but soon, Rodolfo, that young one with the memorable cry will comfort your old age.

    As she passes his shop, Giuffré the baker appears and Fina breathing the warm comforting smell of baking bread and yells his name. She buys a round loaf. He wipes his hands on the green apron around his fat belly, looks slowly, appreciatively at her full figure and smiling with pursed lips, thinks, oh for one glorious moment inside those delicious thighs. Instead he breaks off a piece of bread and stuffs it into her mouth and winks. Beads of perspiration travel down his face and lose themselves in his graying whiskers, one drip hanging off the tip of his nose.

    “Graziella had her baby, a boy,” she tells him.

    “I heard.”

    “What a wonderful cry.”

    “Rodolfo is lucky. Two boys.”

    With that she is off, not one for gossip especially when she has important work to do. The two friends nod goodbye as the Duomo’s bells begin their change ringing before Mass. Streets now are beginning to fill with people as she nears Giorgio’s apothecary shop.

    She hears music coming from Lorenzo the violin maker’s shop next door. A cellist, he tries in vain year after year to gain a position in the Palermo Symphony, but never mind, when not making stringed instruments he will teach. And so he does, having more students at times in his shop than instruments, the half-made, empty-pegged violins and violas suspended from the ceiling in unfinished solitude. This morning they struggle through a movement from The Four Seasons.

    Hearing their screeching Serafina thinks, I wonder how Giorgio stands all the noise from next door. My unexpected visit will be a diversion.

    Giorgio’s boy, Luca, bows to Donna Fina and opens the door for her, picks up his books and runs off to school. Inside Giorgio is having his morning coffee behind the counter along with a large slice of sweetened bread brushed with strawberry condiments dipped in golden honey.

    “Graziella had a beautiful baby boy,” Fina tells her husband.

    He smiles, his mouth full of food, jam and honey drizzling out of the corners of his mouth and onto his beard. He swallows noisily and clears his throat. “I heard,” running the sleeve of a freshly-laundered shirt over his forehead, wiping his hands on his apron.

    Fina is thinking, a good man, my husband. She smiles.

    He grunts.

    “A powerful scream he had. Right from the beginning. One day he will make some woman a very good husband. And their offspring, our family, will flourish.”

    “From your lips, Fina.”

    “Yes, I know these things. I see it all, Sicily, America, our family, one people, the past and future joined. We should make one more daughter. And we will.”

    He looks at her, muddled, brain stammering, brows furrowed, yet never doubting her quick grasp of life. But right now he does not quite understand what she is up to, just that for sure she must be up to something. For Fina’s stove, he knows, is always cooking, while in the beginning he struggles to comprehend. Don’t mistake what I say: Giorgio is capable of profound thought – after all, he has the large Fiori mole on the left side of his face, remember. But it takes him time to unravel the puzzling and mysterious, the complex causal relationships of life and history, time past and time future, the seemingly disparate elements that come together so magically for his wife, fitting to perfection in her mind.

    Why, he asks himself, are there roses in her cheeks, his Fina, working most of the night and stinking now from the birthing room. How he loves her still, the deepness in her eyes that he knows he tries in vain to fathom, her moist fleshy upper arms, her full breasts – these he understands – he could almost, but, no, careful, there might be customers, ah, but, really, it is early enough. He walks quickly to close and bolt the door and pull the shade.

    Five minutes later their youngest child, Maria is conceived in the storeroom of Trano Mare’s apothecary shop accompanied by Lorenzo’s wheezing orchestra and the soft jiggling of medicinal vials rocking back and forth on their shelves, moved by husband and wife as they make love in utter and fearless bliss.

    In that brief backroom activity, Serafina’s joy of achievement merges with the ecstasy of physical release, a moment she remembers even now long after her death as the pinnacle of her earthly delight, life’s triumphal blast, the spirit’s warm breath forever upon its sublime creation, Maria, the perfect wife for Teo – their family, a fitting gift to a New World.

Time In The Novel

The characters experience time just like we do – in two ways, neither of which is voluntary. Either they are immersed in every day ordinary time — the days, months, years, John Donne’s “rags of time” – or as extraordinary, timeless time, a switch that happens in the mind suddenly and involuntarily: we cannot just order up a dish of timeless time, like the ‘I’ll have what she’s having’ scene in “When Harry Met Sally.”

Take, for instance, Serafina. In the following passage, she’s just heard that Maria has been charmed by the music coming from Lorenzo’s violin store. To Serafina, this is a sign that her child is making a significant choice. Serafina’s reaction is to be momentarily (and involuntarily) transported. Her experience of time becomes cyclical and timeless:

    Serafina smiling still, looked into middle distance. For an instant she saw it all, past, present, future, Sicily, America, the generations mixed together. Images shuffled, one on top of the other and out of order, at times transparent so that a  former event overlaid or even interacted with a more recent occurrence – the expression of a child so like her aunt, or the gait of her father remembered when glimpsed briefly in her son, or her youngest child sharing a story with her grandmother, dead long before Maria was born. Scenes floating past as if in a dream like pages turning in a book. Fragments of future lives mingled with those of her ancestors, in and out of love and pity, of striving and of desolation, of war and of peace, of boredom and of greed, her family on the move and in the making, in the bearing and in the living, in the dying and in the grieving – past and future joined in a kaleidoscopic wonder of humanity.

Forty years later Serafina’s daughter Maria and her children are on a ship about to arrive in the port of New York. As Tessa, Maria’s youngest daughter views the Statue of Liberty, she moves between the two kinds of time:

    Surrounded by her family, Tessa pressed through the crowd with the help of Tirisio pushing them all to to a spot near the rail where they could see. They were excited, busy ducking and laughing as they caught some of the sea’s spray, so the suddenness of the statue’s presence was a shock, one that would reverberate throughout Tessa’s life.

    “There is the lady. Remember her,” Tirisio whispered. “She will give you strength when life is hard.” His good eye was the color of the ocean on a misty day. It glinted in the bright sun like a pearl.

    For an instant the air was still. Sea and ship were motionless. The statue seemed to exist outside of time, as if in a dream. People held their breath, the crowd was silent. Then the horns sounded mournful and insistent, the stack belched smoke, the sea roiled and the ship leaned into the deep currents before righting itself and moving on, joined now by squawking gulls overhead and the bleating of the tugs guiding them into port.

    Adults embraced, cried aloud, or were hushed. Some crossed themselves as if praying to the goddess. Small children clung to their mothers’ skirts, pointed to the statue or held hands while older siblings skipped for joy, or oblivious, continued their games. Men and women impatiently brushed away tears as they strained for a better view.

    Tessa often thought of that day and her first glimpse of America. The memory gave her courage when she needed it – her first job interview, the depression after losing Dominic, going through the labor of each birth, the death of her second child.

    As she lay dying, Tessa for the last time felt the wind on her face and smelled the salt breath of the sea. Her ship, straining on one side by the weight of two thousand eyes gazing at a figure in the water, listed toward America and the Statue of Liberty “as if we knelt in her presence,” she used to tell her grandchildren. Tessa felt the excitement of that moment again and saw the sea, – where was she now, in Trano Mare or in America or everywhere – the sea was the same, life slipping away, the calling of the birds, the shining energy of a new land. Someone or something, she was not sure, the figure indistinct but familiar, called to her and smiled. It was her last thought, a flash, sudden, the meaning of life made clear, fleeting, fading, merging now into the brilliance of another light.

By contrast Teo is a character wrapped up in the quotidian, one whom life has dealt a fair amount of twos and threes. So by nature he is cynical. Here is his take on arriving in New York:

    Teo hunched his shoulders and scowled. “That’s not what you told me three years ago when you came back. You said the air in steerage is thick with smoke, the stench of urine curls your hair, they make you eat a foul-tasting gruel, the beds are full of lice and the crew doesn’t allow passengers on deck until right before the ship docks and then if you push and shove hard enough to get close to the rail, you maybe catch a glimpse of the green lady. And you’re lucky if you don’t run into pirates on the high seas or get cholera or both. And when you arrive at whatever the name of that damn island is, there are lines outside that snake around the buildings five times, and once you’re inside, mean guards and doctors who make you show them what’s inside your pants and then stick long needles into your arms, the nurses are pretty though, but watch out for being marked with an X because then they lock you up for a month and send you back on a filthier boat than the one that brought you.”

    Tirisio grinned. “You remembered everything I said,” thinking, I may have exaggerated the difficulties of my last voyage somewhat, but only to make it more believable to Teo, a man whom life has taught to expect little and to trust less.

Falco Does His Best To Divert

Born in a brothel on the outskirts of Trano Mare, he claimed to have remembered his mother, but this is doubtful. She left him on the steps of Guardian Angel shortly after his birth, wrapped in a shawl belonging to an aging prostitute who had died earlier that night, it is said, in the saddle. No goodbyes were exchanged, no tears shed.

On door duty, Sister Teresa found the infant when his screams filled the air on that cold March morning. As she stooped to pick him up, she wondered what would soothe him, hoping to find some leftover milk in a bottle or in a bowl, or perhaps, what does Grandma C say — infants dropped off on the front stoop in the middle of the night not being an unusual occurrence at Guardian Angel – a drop of honey in warm water until I arrive and if that will not calm, then a drop of wine mixed with honey and water, church wine will do, put it on the tip of your finger and rub his gums with the liquid. It was too early to call Grandma, but this baby, still sticky from the womb and wrapped in a strange-smelling blanket, had extraordinary lungs.

“Stop it now you little mite or you’ll wake us all. Oh, will you be quiet, oh, drat, qwhat a smelly bit of bother he turned out to be.”

Sister Teresa thought his cries signaled hunger. She never suspected that Falco, the name Father Corelli gave him later that morning when he was unceremoniously baptized, was born with the world’s sorrow filling his heart and brain and bones, an unassuageable grief that would soon turn to rage, its reverberations mocking and beating an unsuspecting world.

First she went to the kitchen for a bowl where she met Beata, a thin myopic seven-year-old who, having heard the wailing, grabbed her dress, ran out of the room she shared with twelve other orphans and down the wooden steps leading to the kitchen, all the while buttoning her dress and straightening her smock, tripping as she tied her laces. Strands of thick black hair fell into her face and stung her eyes. She stopped when she met Sister Teresa, the nun struggling with the kicking squirming infant.

“Oh drat. Look at you, Beata, you’re hair’s a mess. Didn’t you wash your face this morning? And fix your boots. They’re on the wrong feet.”

Beata did not hear. She grabbed Falco from the nun, “Give him here, Sister T,” and kissed him and rocked him and sang to him.

“Sister T, we need water. Get some while I hold the baby. Now. Oh, c’mon, I’ll go with you. Take the bowl.”

Beata led the way to the well in wrong-footed boots, all the while talking to the churning bundle. Sister Teresa, obeying Beata, lowered and filled a bucket. Then she ladled water reflecting frosty stars into the bowl. Soon Falco’s cries diminished to a restless mewling.

Beata, with Sister Teresa following, carried Falco back into the kitchen. The nun found a little leftover church wine in the corner of a cupboard, the bottle dusty and the contents by now probably vinegar, but no matter, good enough for this forlorn creature. She mixed a splash of wine with a dollop of honey and put a drop to his lips. It made her fingers sticky and seemed to work at first, puzzling him, stopping his crying long enough for a slip of a tongue to dart in and out several times, his brows furrowed, his eyes not yet opened. Then he screamed and raised his fists.

Again she dipped a forefinger into the mixture and put it to his lips. This time, silence for several seconds as he tasted the liquid, forehead wrinkled, the corners of his mouth slowly turning down, his lower lip protruding before he let out a piercing howl.

With that, Mother entered the room in time to hear Beata, “Basta, Sister T. Can’t you see he doesn’t like it?”

She turned her back to Sister Teresa, Falco still in her arms and as she rocked him and sang to him and brushed her soft cheek against his purple one, his cries changed to whimpers.

Mother sent for Grandma Colletti, “Go fetch her, Teresa. Tell her to come at once. We have another one of God’s forlorn in need of milk.”

By now the whole house was awake. Roused by Falco’s wails, the nuns came out of their cells their faces smeared with sleep but fully clothed, carrying candles and casting ghostly shadows on the walls. Their wooden rosaries made muffled beady sounds against the folds of their habits.

The children sat on the stairs leading to the kitchen, hushed in the early morning dark, rubbing their hands and feet together for warmth — boys in yellowing shirts and pantaloons, girls in dresses and smocks — silent, shoeless, expectant. They were enjoying this moment, life being brutal in The Kingdom of the Two Sicilies in 1827 for peasants and prostitutes and orphans. And these children starved for joy found an unexpected sliver of delight in Falco’s first nocturnal diversion, the sole gift Falco from the very beginning of his life consistently gave to the world.

Soon Grandma Colletti arrived, long before her usual hour — bleary-eyed but dripping with milk — and stuck her lactating breast into Falco’s mouth.

Rosalia Colletti had been feeding babies since the age of sixteen when one morning her husband pinched her bottom, stroked her breast, winked and said he had found a job in the north. He left by midday. He did not write or send money and never returned.

Six months from the first shock of his leaving, her hair fell out and grew back white, but she being temperamentally strong and physically well-endowed and living close to the orphanage, walked to its gates, very pregnant by this time with her second and carrying her first, still an unweaned child and said to Mother Concetta who opened the door, “I will either have to give my children to you, the one you see at my breast and the other I am about to have any day, or help with the care and feeding of your orphans.”

Mother, who solved most of life’s predicaments with brisk comedy said, “You’d better come inside, then, Grandma. You can start right away.” And the moniker stuck.

Grandma Colletti nursed Guardian Angel’s young and the nuns paid her with food and prayers and just enough money to raise her children. In time she made a name for herself and obtained paid work in town, hired by mothers whose milk had dried up or by fathers whose wives died in giving them children. In a few years she moved closer to the piazza and the bulk of her work. But her loyalty remained to the orphanage in gratitude for their kindness so long ago and to which she came at a moment’s notice, infants often arriving unannounced at inauspicious times on moonless nights. No matter the hour, Grandma welcomed work, especially when business was slack, for although she had neither the opportunity nor the inclination to read or write, yet she knew with the sure-footedness of scholars that she must lactate to live.

After she arrived quiet returned. Most of the children forgot about Falco except for Beata who when she was not doing her chores hung about the nursery waiting for a glimpse, begging Grandma Colletti for a chance to hold him.

“Please Grandma C. Give him here.”

“Look at you, Beata. You’re too small to be holding the likes of him. Always squirming and screaming. Me teats is drained what with his keen hunger. He’s a greedy one, he is, and getting heavier by the minute.  He’ll break those twiggy arms of your.”

“No he won’t. Please. Please, Grandma C. I held him first. Except for Sister T, but she doesn’t count. Not really. I’m big enough. Really I am. Please, Grandma.”

Grandma Colletti sat still, ignoring Beata, her massive stony figure unmoving while Falco finished his meal, asleep but from time to time sucking on her ample breast.

But Beata persisted so after she burped him and changed his diapers, the wet nurse finally relented.

“Here you go, then. He’s had his fill, at least for now. That one sure can eat. And bite? — Oh, he’s a taker, that one is.”

Beata held him and talked to him, rocked him, and soon his lids grew heavy and he slept for over four hours.

From then on Grandma Colletti let Beata hold Falco after she returned from school and finished her chores.

Beata helped to care for him for most of his early life, at times losing her grip on the growing infant, having to squat on the floor to refold his blanket. Then Falco’s thick fingers yanked the black braids brushing his face and pulled her by the hair closer to him and stared at her.

Their relationship worked on a simple formula: Beata gave, Falco took. And the more she gave, the less she pleased. Yet without her, unless being fed by Grandma Colletti, his sorrow changed to darkness, the color of his face turning from crimson to purple, his black hair, wet with infant emotion, plastered against his skull, his hands forming fists, his cries filling the orphanage.

One day as a treat, she sang to him — a song sung in school, about a butterfly, beautiful and white, flying, flying here, flying there but returning to its father: “Farfallina bella bianca/ Vola, vola mai si stanca/ Gira di qua, gira di la/ Fin che 'posa su Papà.”

She made flying movements with her fingers, like the nuns taught her to do, her hands finally winding up on his stomach, creeping up his chest to his face.

She thought it would make him smile. She loved it when he smiled, she saw him do it once, his broad face brightening, his cheeks and chin dimpled. And best of all, stars in his eyes. Instead a sudden darkness came over him. Falco peered at her with wrinkled brow and cold penetrating eyes while the forefinger of his left hand rubbed his thumb. Abruptly he turned his head to the wall and would not look at her.

After that she hung back, afraid of him, barely speaking to Falco until he was older, fearing that he had seen beyond her flesh to what she knew was inside – a mar, a deep gashing flaw, hidden but fundamental and incurable. She could not name it, but knew it marked her: damaged goods. Falco must have seen it, he sees everything. Powerful and devouring it was, like the beasts she sometimes saw in her dreams. She was certain that her inner unsightliness must be the reason why they brought her here in the first place.

But she was careful never to speak of it, not even to Father Corelli in confession. For there was always the chance lurking in the corners of life, the grim possibility suddenly waking her in the middle of the night that a new playmate tomorrow or next week or in a month or two, by then her best friend and with whom in a moment of weakness she shared her secret, might take her measure and turn away too. Or Mother Concetta would find out and place her in a new home and then where would she be? Disfigured, uncovered, abandoned — an abyss too deep to cross. So wariness surrounded her soul like a desiccated cocoon.

Bells ruled the orphans’ lives. They might have been dwarf monks or nuns, waking with the morning gong, washing and dressing in the dark. At the sound of another bell, they prayed. The meal bell rang and they ate. Chimes summoned them to their chores and they ran to the laundry or kitchen or barn or gardens or latrines. When finished, those old enough ran to catch the wagon for school, the younger children meeting in the library where three nuns headed by jolly Sister Beatrice fed them and read to them and napped them.

And in this fashion time passed, one day flowed into another, clustering soon into months and then into years — except when Barco’s circus appeared in the large field over the hill, the tents barely visible from the top floor of Guardian Angel. Then time and the world turned.

Ave Maria dusting windows in the nursery upstairs looked out and saw the flags on top of the main tent. Running down the stairs, she called out, “The circus, the circus, the circus” because she took pride in her brightness and in seeing everything first.

Children stopped what they were doing. Even the nuns and Ziupippine the caretaker ran up the stairs to find a front-facing window. Children pressed their faces against the glass — four or five to a pane, — straining to see clowns or dancing bears or painted elephants or fire-eating scantily-clad men or roaring lions or wild horses neighing and bucking and kicking up dust.

“Every year it’s the same. We can’t see nothin’ but Barco’s stupid flags.”

“‘We can’t see anything’ you mean, Ave,” Sister Agata said.

Ave hung her head.

Falco, seeing her bare neck, pinched it. Hard. It left an angry bruise. He smirked when she cried.

Falco had been busy earlier in the week.

Each day Beata – now old enough to leave but considered by Mother to be indispensable because of her way with the mute and helpless – tended Guardian Angel’s fowls, visiting the chicken coop at least twice daily, gathering eggs, cleaning cages, raking the soil, replenishing nests with fresh straw, scooping out feed into bowls and filling metal cups with drinking water.

“Roosters are important, but so is hen happiness. See to it, Beata. Keep the hen house clean. Keep them well-fed. They will be content and perform for us.”

Beata took care with her world and soon saw success. Ever since she began tending the coop, the egg and chicken count had increased tenfold and Guardian Angel no longer depended on surrounding farms to augment their food supply. Sister Rosalia cooked chicken stew at least once a week, introduced omelets on Sunday mornings after Mass and as a new treat, everyone had egg custard tarts for dessert on feast days.

On Tuesday before she left for school, Beata took Falco with her to show him the chicks. The newborns were still with their mothers, but the babies were in a small cage Ziupippine made at her request.

“See, Falco, how they run around and follow the oldest. There are so many this year. And look at the color and silkiness of their feathers, especially the yellow ones.”

“I like the dark ones better, like that one, with the black and white feathers. And red nose.”

“Those are beaks.”

“Those are noses. I want this one in the corner.” Falco grabbed the chick.

“You can’t have it. Put it down. Now, Falco. Falco, you’re too rough. They don’t like you. Stop. Put it down.”

Falco pulled the wing of the speckled chicken.

“Falco, stop. Basta.” She began swatting him and tugging at his sweater, reaching for the creature. He jabbed her with his elbow freeing himself.

As he did so, the bird pecked his hand drawing blood. Falco yowled, dropped the chicken, shook his bloody hand in the air. His face congested and became purple. He scooped the bird up and began squeezing it.

“No, Falco! Basta così! What are you doing?”

She was crying now and whipping him with her hands. Falco whirled around, then stopped, threw the bird down and glared at Beata.

“Don’t tell me what to do. Ever.” The words seeped through his teeth like hemorrhaged blood. He fixed her with his cold eyes.

That afternoon he returned alone, walking passed the chapel and the refectory to the back door. He lifted the shade, peered through the window, staring at the chicken coop for several minutes.

He entered softly, snatched the smallest birds from their mothers and gathered them into the crate with the others, not hearing the hens’ disturbed clucking. Then he sat down near Ziupippine’s cage and looked at them.

First he grabbed the smallest bird and squeezed it until its neck and head fell to the side. Then he placed it on the ground and took another. He squeezed all the small ones until their bodies became limp, stacking them into neat piles, one on top of the other. The larger birds he buried alive by digging a hole in the ground and covering their heads , watching while their wings flapped and their bodies twitched, waiting for the movement to stop.

Walking through the coop on his way to the barn, Ziupippine saw Falco covering the last creature’s head, its exposed body convulsing and softly beating the earth.

The caretaker yelled. Falco ran, overturning two cages, motes of dust and feathers suspended in shafts of light, hens clucking and flapping their wings while the old man chased Falco up one aisle and down the next upsetting more nests and crates, spilling straw and slurry and discarded feathers. In the end he caught the boy by the neck, pinned his arms behind is back, grabbed him by one ear, dragged him out of the hen house and down the hall just as the older children were returning from school.

Beata saw the pair on her way to do afternoon chores, Falco kicking, throwing punches in the air and baring his teeth at Ziupippine. Years later as she sat by Falco’s body in a strange land and touched his grimacing face, oblivious to the shouts and the cold and the faint odor of gunshot, she remembered this moment, the first time she noticed how white his teeth were, like a leopard’s fangs against purple flesh.

She ran to the coop. As she opened the door, she heard the hens clucking and beating their wings. Before her eyes could adjust to the dimness in the room, she stumbled on an overturned nest and slipped on a clump of blood-soaked straw. The air, disturbed with dust, choked her. Feathers caught in the thick strands of her hair.

When she saw the dead birds, she knew with certainty what had happened and a stone settled in her heart.

Soon the knowledge would overwhelm her and she would banish it forever, shoving it into the black hole inside her brain. But now she sat on the ground next to the neat pile of dead birds and stroked their warm feathers and talked to them.

Links

To meet some more characters in the novel, click here.

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