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 second part. It took place in Lucania in the 1950s. We hope you will enjoy reading it.

[...] "People did not emigrate just because they were in need of bread. On the contrary, the youngest often left to pursue their ideals of freedom, to set them free from their patriarchal society, to come to that "other" life they had not always truly been told about by films, novels and tales by those who had already been in America.

It must be remembered that in lands such as the under-developed South and the poor country showing love in personal relationship was choked back, it was considered a weakness to hide except for in weddings and funerals. I do not remember anything special about baptisms, maybe birth was not important because there was nothing deliberate in it. Being born does not happen, it just comes as good weather in summer and cold in winter do. Actually, in our dialect the verb to be born was used only in the impersonal form, like to rain and to snow.

That boy was also different because he seemed to come out of a good film where people love each other and say it to each other, without been sugary, but they say it.

My grandmother’s love for him lay under ancient forms. “My breath, my breath” she called for him when I went to see her to open, read and answer his letters. I liked these words, they seemed to me thick, old-time and full of flavor like sauce, our tomato puree, cotted in the sun. I thought they expressed one mother’s love at its best. I just found them very sad. They reminded me the rituals of Lent and of Our Lady of Sorrow.

I was the only grandchild “to have an education” so the scribe’s task was unquestionably mine, but it was not a burden to me. My grandmother was as moved as she confused me with her son but I was happy to be overlapped. I used to read his letters to her thrice making a short break after one slow reading and the next one and trying to change expression somehow. However, when she often asked me explanation about some sentences I did it even a fourth time and a fifth one.

In those letters language was clear and essential, words were things.

- I am fine. I have found a house. I have a lot of friends. I earn well. The weather is fine. And yet, in the end she always asked me: “Then, is he fine?”. Yes, sure, I answered her and I was sorry about my lacking words, my being unable to enrich them with some lightly baroque translations making her dreams extend and open to new spaces.

However, I got even with my answers. I told my uncle about every passing cloud above our village, every slightest event about my relatives, every egg from the neighbors’ hens and every fancy crossing me. Indeed, when right nothing happened, I invented shamelessly. I was sure that my uncle would understand and make out my secret messages. Sometimes he gave me reply making my understood that everything was good with him, really good.

I had stocked treasures of beautiful and unlikely stories through which every time I filled up three or four pages and I think that Medieval chronicles were an example of historiographic rigor in comparison with the odd contents of those ancient writings of mine.

"Does he say when he comes back?" she asked me in a low voice, "No, not here" I answered her. I drawled my voice on the lie of “heeere” and she was thankful to me. After my reading I carefully unstuck the ugly, very gummy stamps - I know the set of Brazilian governments of those days better than the Italian one - by steaming them over a little pan which I brought to boil when I arrived. At last, I gave her the letter that she had entrusted me. With trust, but for necessity and with anxiety. She kissed it as priests kiss missals and kept it, but I am sure that afterwards she looked at it again many other times waiting for faith to reveal her the secret of reading.

This ritual has been repeated more or less in the same way for several years. As soon as my grandmother received a letter she sent for me and I went to her place in the afternoon. That was the only task of mine which I did at the right time and my mother reproached me with it a little.

One day, a particular letter arrived including some press cuttings advertising a workshop, Magistro workshop... in S. Paulo.

We came into play, too. We entered History, too, even if through a workshop rolling shutter. News was spread in a flash among our relatives and friends, that is to say throughout the whole village and my grandmother became unbelievably loquacious, and higher, so it seemed to me.

On the next days home atmosphere was not very quiet. My father wanted all of us to move to Brazil. My mother opposed passive but steady and indifferent resistance against all the sparklings of the Brazilian treasures that we were loosing if not leaving.

"The air", the air was not good. For us children. Particularly for Maria. My mother was absolutely sure about it. I have never understood why she thought Maria was the unfittest among her three children for the climate of the coffee country. On those days air was very important, the polished stated that the air of the Tower, the old part of the village, was different from that of the Gipsy’s Road, which was so called because the sons of the wind quartered there. Certainly, these two areas were five hundred meters far from each other with a drop of twenty meters about. Is not a mere nothing, is not it?

The old country world used to neglect some things, as already said about the short attitude to purification, but on the other hand it used to give other things a total and a little bit mad importance.

I have heard tell of cancelled engagements because of the air incompatibility between two lanes, of never born loves because the girl was accustomed to the water from a certain fountain and she could have never lived in another village with a different water. I have heard tell of friendships lasting for generations which were broken because of arguments about the lesser or greater quality of wine, tomatoes, pumpkins from one land rather than the other one of the village countryside. No joke on these things and it was foolish not to understand them, considering the sprouting sybarite subtleties on the genuine people’s tough hide, the tough and pure representatives of the country world were so called, - it can be approximately translated into "the authentic", but dealing with a religion, even if a lesser one, maybe it is more correct to talk of "the orthodox".

Already in the sixties, the air matter had been loosing importance and now I hope that someone will still remember it to give comfort to this memory of mine. I would not be considered odd if I talk about it.

Anyway, the Brazilian air was not good for Maria so my family did not leave to Brazil. It is her fault if even now I cannot dance, wear light clothes and I have become fat and pale. On the contrary, an aunt of mine went there with her husband and their five children. They sold all what they owned, just a few things, and they left.

We used to make a sort of farewell party, before leaving, if we just had the chance of. The atmosphere of those situations was something unreal, something between laughing and crying, a wedding lunch and a funeral one. It was a party for those who, by leaving, were going to renounce their own family, break those one thousand threads which had kept them tied until then to their beloved-hated village. On their departure, they left a few poor things to their friends. There were women’s presents and men’s ones: a salt mortar, a board to knead, a quilt, an axe, a pruning knife. They received something else in exchange, usually food, some sausages, some scamorza cheese. Something to eat during the journey. For this reason, too, our emigrants’ bags were so odd and folkloric.

They preferred to expose themselves to ridicule before the more highly-civilized travelers rather than to dislike Master Pasquale, cousin Francesca, neighbor Filomena by leaving their caciotta cheese at home.

Comfort presents exchanged, relatives were given a kind of severe prayer or an order overflowing with love, I do not know.

"Keep you strong"

That was the ritual formula.

Before the spreading violence of history sending people off under far-away skies, people did not give up reminding everybody the principle of personal responsibility which makes a man man. Such words mean a way of thinking according to which just those who fight successfully and deserve succeed in standing. Good health is something one must get for oneself.

Keep one strong, it depends on one only." [...to be continued]

If you wish to receive the first part of this short story please email us at genealogy@myitalianfamily.com or go to www.myitalianfamily.com and click on "Visit our Archives" at the bottom of the page.

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