Belonging II

TO A SPECIFIC STREET IN A SPECIFIC TOWN

When I got married, we moved to a specific street, in a specific town, in a specific part of Italy. It was not simply a village but a real town with several thousand inhabitants and I discovered that it was the people with whom I identified more than with the age-old buildings. People who had been born or grown up here and were inescapably connected with what turned out to be one of the several enclaves of which the town was comprised. One of these centered around the cathedral and the museums. Another around the transportation hub. Still another around the market place. As newcomers, “stranieri”, continued to come in and settle, they also began to form a conclave of their own. But that was not till later for I was one of the first “stranieri” to come here.

The street that had reached out and captured the souls of those who had lived there, whether they were aware of it or not, ran down behind the bank. It was where later my children made their first friends, first learned about sex and discovered signs of the distant past in the medieval sherds they dug up in the fields below the house. You could mention a name and they would know who it was, visualize that person and what they did.

It was a time and a place inhabited by people who knew each other. There was the middle-aged woman who helped the 80-year old cardinal’s sister, our landlady, wash the sheets, piling them up in the courtyard to be bleached with ashes and boiling water, as I discovered to my surprise one morning. The young woman who did the housework for our landlady was named Antenisca. When I returned from work in Rome one afternoon she and our landlady had been feeding my infant son cherries. I could only hope they had been pitted. It seems not to have caused any problem though. The little boy from down the street who later came to do his homework with my son was Anacleto. Unusual names and one wondered where their parents had found them.

My kitchen window overlooked the roof of the house next door, that of an elderly artisan iron worker who was delighted that I had classical music going all day, with symphonies and arias of Verdi and Donizetti. Across the way there was the scrap metal dealer nicknamed Triocco, whose son would eventually take over his trade and go rumbling around in his jalopy of a truck. Now, that kid

sometimes got his friends together for a never-ending noisy jam session until the police were called in to tell them to cut it out. The building used to be a grade school and long before that a home for impoverished spinsters. In those days it was the more affluent ladies of the town who took over the task of seeing to those in need, one of the welfare organizations of the times.

The oven up the street was the realm of Bruno and his live-wire wife, Antonietta. You could buy a bag of flour and he would make bread for you, keeping a small percentage of flour as his fee. He was also the man who roasted the weekly porchetta or whole pig for the week-end market. After firing up the brick-lined oven, the pig, stuffed with garlic and wild fennel, would be introduced to begin its eight-hour transformation into a luscious roast with a golden crackling crust. Sundays, when I took my chicken, smothered in potatoes and rosemary, to the oven, Bruno would add a dollop of fat from the roasting pig. Now that was a flavor that certainly kept you tied to the town. His skinny wife was always cheerful and always on the go, continuously berating their no-good son Gianni– at least that’s what she called him – to get a move on, as his father, the baker, moved slowly along the wall, upon which he leaned for support. He might have had Parkinsons. This was also where at Easter the housewives would come with their Easter breads, balanced on a board on their heads, after having been up most of the night to make sure the traditional cheese or cinnamon breads had risen properly.

Memories can be individual or can be shared. One year I sent my two sons out to get a Christmas tree and they returned with a little limping dog they had found abandoned. No tree however. Or the time we rescued a baby bat from the jaws of our cat and put it in a cage where it could hang upside down. We fed it milk until one day it was ready to fly away. There were also misunderstandings due to language where waking up at night and telling my husband that I thought there was a rat in the stairs going down to the storage space below, to my surprise he started pulling on his trousers. He thought I had said our guest Giorgio (and not topo) was not well and was gnawing on something on the stairs.

Births, deaths, baptisms, weddings. Landmarks in the life of the individual. Memories. Each enclave, each village in the surrounding hills, has a story of its own. The priest might come once a week, roaring in on his motorcycle, like our local priest who when in town would engage in heated discussions with my archaeologist husband as to the interpretation of the Etruscan ruins beneath the church of Sant’ Andrea, which he spoke of as his bride. He was also a connoisseur of wine and had his own vineyard. The country doctor might still be learning the ropes as he had to find his way to some remote village or farmhouse in his precinct. A friend of ours, his diploma fresh in his doctor’s bag, received a call from a family out in the country where the woman was in labor. As he was driving his little Fiat Cinquecento along the country roads, he leafed through his manual for he had never had to assist a birth and comforted himself with the fact that the midwife would also be there. Turned out it was the midwife’s first delivery too. The woman successfully gave birth and then he and his assistant were slightly perplexed for there seemed to be something else about to emerge and they thought it might be the afterbirth. Lo and behold it was another child. They had just witnessed the birth of twins. The classic triumvirate of important people in these isolated communities in addition to the priest and doctor included the schoolteacher, struggling to teach a class that encompassed five different grades as well as helping the illiterate parents of his wards understand some obscure (to them) document.

There were funerals and baptisms, as the population would diminish but soon reach its previous numbers unless some of its members emigrated elsewhere. There were weddings when the bride, dressed in her bridal gown, fit for a queen, bore witness to the fact that her family had made it. Surrounded by friends and family, she processed along the village streets from her father’s home to the church, passing from the tutelage of her family to that of her husband. Yes, it was still basically a patriarchy.

The rites of passage that mark the lives of its members become part of the story of the community. No one lives in isolation and their stories are intertwined with ours, with yours, a net you cannot escape even if you try. Even if you move elsewhere, or months or years may pass. We all belong to the larger net that is the world. No one is alone.