Are you interested in learning how your Ancestors used to live? Here is a short story that you will be able to read in three separate emails. This is the first part. It took place in Lucania in the 1950s. We hope you will enjoy reading it.

"Maybe childhood really begins to end when something extraordinary compels you to realize that time does not stop at nothing. A child would expect a suspension, a slowing down before what he does not understand. On the contrary, the ribbon of time continues indifferent to roll on. Turning his head he remains to stare wide-eyed at that event, while other things whose meaning he cannot grasp happen. A child is like Charlot at the assembly line: he is absolutely willing to do, to be in the world, but he is quite unable to join reality, he is confusedly puzzled.

Grief comes when he understands that in its twists and turns, time will not return any more where that thing occurred and therefore it is necessary to put a signal, a ragged flag, something which even many years later will indicate that this thing really happened.

In 1957, when I was eight, I set up my first flag in my small field of memories and even now that I have become a big landowner, that is the one standing out and shaking more among the others.

It was December and that evening my father had not come from the country, yet even if it had already darkened some time ago. When the wind dropped down in the road, it seemed it was going to snow. The lamp, dancing and creaking awkwardly, lighted now one side of the road then the other one. Feeling my mother torn by anxiety and struggling to prevent her from telling me to go and wait my father at the entrance of the village made me restless. She had already done it once meeting with still bigger worries besides reproaches.

Not anymore only got her husband lost in the well of time, but also her son did while she was getting more and more imprisoned by her waiting!

I had promptly executed it maybe wrong-footing her. Probably, she had told it just to say something, for sure in that case she would have liked me to put up resistance and disobey her, as I used to. However, then, I changed my behavior unexpectedly and obeyed out of spite.

Moreover, how could she know that in those days his son was fighting to improve his heroic virtues quite by himself right against Darkness, strong night Wind and, if it had chanced, Snowfall in the dark?

The route I was following to improve my heroic virtues expected me to do it, but she knew nothing about my wars.

Therefore, I went to the fountain which in the evening when it was lit by the last lamp, indicated the visual boundary with the country on that side of the village - by daylight the frontier between civilization and wilderness was different, like the nature of the fence. There I waited for my father coming out of darkness, on his horseback, as he almost returned to the world of living people. When, at last, he arrived and saw me wrapped up right under the lamp, he was not happy to find me there, but he saddled me up. At home, my mother was struck dumb by his words and this once she replied nothing.

Well, that evening the situation was going to fall headlong down the slippery side of pointless actions which are uselessly repeated, when my uncle Peppino, my fathers’ younger brother came to save our family - my mother, one little sister of four years old, the other one who was three months old and me.

It was always Easter Day, Christmas Day or Saint Rocco’s Day when he came. I was secretly, in order not to arouse my other relatives’ jealousy, infinitely proud of this uncle of mine. In my imagination he represented what my father, too could have been - he was his elder brother, was he? - but he prevented himself from showing, like a fairy tale king, because of all his worries and difficulties in supporting his family. I had understood that my father’s sad face was a duty, a weapon against worries helping him to hold them off, and maybe defeat them.

Anyway, then my uncle was the only one among the adults to know children’s language and to really talk with them. There was an extraordinary rhythm in his words, his gestures, his laughing. No moment ran without his filling it in with jokes and laughs and waits for other jokes, laughs and funny thoughts.

Actually, he also was just a little bit older than a boy; he shall have been nineteen years old. I do not know because even now I refuse to estimate his right age... But I have been keeping this image of him until the last time I saw him, when he was already about forty, and also in my terrible dream of a year ago which made me realize that by this time it was useless to find him...

At last, in my dream I could find this uncle of mine, with his hands in his pockets, a cigarette hanging by the corner of his mouth, with his melancholy smile, his rebel forelock, like in the photo, like in my myth.

James Dean, in comparison, is a miserable, fat and pustulous altar boy.

Leaning his shoulders and a foot on the white and scraped wall of a building in a large and empty street in an unknown town, he was reproachfully looking my hurrying towards him for being late. I was running with outstretched arms, but I was not able to burn my wait as I wished to. When, at last, I was going to join him, another uncle I well knew in my dream that he died long time ago, tried to interpose himself by saying not to touch him because it was useless, I would have been disappointed. In the meanwhile, however, I touched him and he slipped from my arms.

Then, at last, I know it.

I run too much, again and I am straight at the end.

Forty-three years have gone since then and I think it is difficult to tell an event that I keep on refusing. And yet, people say, things must be said: to get rid of them, to understand them, people say. As understanding was everything. I just would like something to happen on that evening to stop the sequence of this bad neorealistic film. If, for example, my father should have come and said, opening his knapsack and pouring his golden coins with all their music and light: “Today, while I was digging a hole to plant an olive tree I have found a treasure. Now we are rich and we shall live all together happily ever after in our fairy tale”. My father was able to create sentences stressing in a few words surprising, unexpected and solving realities, tales hanging on the edge of truth. If only had he invented such a story.

I regret my planting that flag in my map of time, but it is useless to wander again...

That uncle arrives, he plays with my little sister in arms, he brings her up like a small bundle with his arms of a basketball player. My mother says no, but she, too is happy and laughs. He continues with the other young niece who looks like a rose little ball of four years old, he throws her up to the ceiling and catches again among our hoos!

He tells me: listen, you who are grown-up. Tomorrow, I will leave, to Brazil. I will build a big beautiful house for us all. Then you will come and see me.

I understand and I do not. I do not know where Brazil is, but I know that I will not go anymore to the Bradano with him to bathe with a rope around my waist, making me swear to tell nothing to my mother. Yes, of course because he was accustomed to go and bathe into the river between May and October and he often brought me with; for companionship, to satisfy my wish of adventure, for education.

Actually, he insisted much also with me that people must wash themselves. He was a revolutionary of soap, with due respect. Under this aspect, too he was a rara avis, since, honestly, in that country of peasant heroism, people would not wash themselves very much. No water at home, for sure, but what was lacking was the thought of. Taking a bath made people run the risk to loose their identity, mist temporarily their own image. When it was heard that someone took a real, complete bath in the washtub, it was good manners to ask the bather if he feels fine, if he has recovered.

Meanwhile, we hear our mule clatter along the road. My father is coming. He goes down to help him unsaddle, then they go up. My uncle undertakes the task which I am in charge of when my father comes back from the country. He brings his knapsack. They hard talk each other for a while. Then after some minutes of embarrassment, my uncle says: “Then... “ he kisses us children, embraces my mother, and looks at my father. He answers him by holding a hand on his shoulder for a few seconds. He tells him that when he was his age he left to the war and it was unclear if to comfort him, but my uncle did not need, or to resettle the most important sacrifice that elder brothers undertake.

I feel bad hearing these things and time which was once suspended dripped now embarrassed, strained by fila, as the snot of a sick old man without hope.

That is all, but after his brother’s leaving, my father’s face is drawn. After a while he goes away and when he comes back there is one spark more of rage and sadness in his eyes.

My uncle’s kindness was uncommon in those years, in those villages, in country families. My father, when he was bitter, used to call him a square-walker and he used to tell him that when he was born he should have been delivered here by mistake, he should have been brought to the prince’s house." [...to be continued]

Copyright Information

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of My Italian Family LLC.

If you are interested in authorizing a research project in your Ancestral town, go to: http://www.myitalianfamily.com/research/home_research.htm or call us direct at 1-888-472-0171. If you are interested in traveling to your Ancestral town, go to: http://www.myitalianfamily.com/trips/ or call us direct at 1-888-472-0171. Send this e-mail to a Friend!