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

If you wish to receive the first and second 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.

[...] "My aunt left, my scribe's task reduced, notwithstanding the correspondents had doubled and it deeply changed. In the meanwhile, my uncle began to write lesser happy contents less often and clearly. He engaged and sent us his girlfriend's photo. She was a big dark-haired woman who could have surely been brought up in the nearby village. It was a sea village whose Saracen towers could not manage to keep it clear. There lived dark-skinned loudmouth people, rowdy people who were always ready to show off beyond belief (and now press reported that Francis Ford Coppola's parents left from there, who stops them?) and whose names were all Gerardos or Berardinos at the most.
Our names were Rocco, Pietro, Giovanni, burning names like gunshot, serious names. Is the difference clear or not? What about now we are Pier Silvio and Gian Minchia, but in the nearby village they are Filiberto and Chantal, what fanatics. What a decadence this civilization!

I was already half disappointed by this girl's photo - I thought him with of one like Silvana Mangano, but also with some more ethereal types, like one Hepburn, for example - but it was my aunt's letter to seriously alarm us. This aunt of ours had grown adult, got married and had children without ever meeting any evil in her life. She used to tell everybody was such a good and kind person. Sometimes, my father spoke up and called her honey mouth. She laughed, very happily, answering that it was necessary to have a plum tree at least in that garden of bitter lemon trees such as her family. My father lightly smiled telling her that she was right too. In short, that aunt was optimism personified. Therefore we got worried when she wrote us that our future sister-in-law was good and kind, and moreover, had a very beautiful name, Tereza with zed, she particularly appealed to that, but that her family was a little bit, not so much, less good and kind.
Aunt Brunetta never talk bad of anybody, less than ever of a whole family. Suddenly I had to write her asking what she meant when saying Tereza's family was not good. Not good. I began to express myself like that, too, because aunt Brunetta's lessical Philadelphic spirit, her terrible verbal goodness were contagious.
Something magic, a family of "masciari", no news about what happened to Peppino that was what she answered. But she added not to get worried because uncle Raffaele, her husband, had been carabineer and he would have found out what was really going on.
We calmed down a little bit because uncle Raffaele was really a good and kind man deserving the trust of the whole world. Then, I thought that maybe a Lucan ex-carabineer could not do much in S. Paulo, out of his jurisdiction. I spoke to my mother who seemed to me the brightest and less involved in the event and she replied me: what is that got to do with it? A carbineer is always a carabineer, she stated. However, notwithstanding she had always been proud of the contrary, she was also mischievous somehow and added to say nothing to my father since he was already very worried about his brother.

What on earth the "masciari"? Everybody asked. Where, in America, did my uncle end up? Maybe he mistook direction and instead of going to America he ended up somewhere else.
It had already happened in History I instinctively rambled. I read it right in my book and also in the encyclopedia of the reading centre. Christopher Columbus went unawares to America, my uncle quite the reverse. It could be possible, maybe, the grown up said.
We clung to everything to escape an event which was going to be full of dangers. I soon regretted offering that bait to their hope. I knew I could prove through my stamps that my uncle was really in one American country, in Brazil, but I began to understand that knowing more things than the others was good, but keeping quiet was often better.
What "masciari", I wrote quickly and faithfully like a shorthand typist. What did it mean that there were "masciari" even there? Maybe it was the first time I followed what my grandmother dictated me without arbitrary mediations of mine but without betraying my scholar condition because, in those circumstances, before such a danger any language difference between my grandmother and me had fallen down. Yes, there were, my aunt replied, but there was nothing to get worried about. Being simple not to get worried...
Even so, my uncle married this big dark-haired Tereza whose family was not so good and he sent us one photo where it was already possible to see that his soul was oppressed by the magic of his wife's family.
Some months later he closed his workshop. It was because a new government arose, so he wrote, and I did not understand what was the connection between government and workshop. I pondered upon it: no, it was not a matter of government but of "candomblé" - that was the matter in hand, I had decided reading a book about Brazil in the reading centre of my village and thinking of the blood of slaughtered hens upon a press cutting advertising my uncle's workshop. For sure, to make him pay for the betrayals he was unabled to make to such Tereza-big dark-haired wife's moustache.
A year after their departure my aunt and her poor tribe, who had also been overcome with "condomblé", gathered their money left and returned to Italy. Not to the village. For two reasons: they were unable to earn their living there, but above all they did not feel up to face the shame of their unsuccessful project of new life. They felt almost like wrong-doers, including the young cousins, and even several years later when they economically recovered a little working like farm laborers in Alessandria's area, they kept on bearing that shadow of defeat.

In laboring South there is no pity for those trying to part from that world but failing. There is no room for prodigal sons in hopeless poor country. That is the way it is, that is the way it was, the rest is poetry.
Uncle Peppino had not been writing for many months after his sisters' return to Italy with her family. Was he overwhelmed with remorse for exposing his sister to ruin because he had been completely clouded by "candomblé" magic? Or worse...?
My grandmother spoke no more. She had really not been saying a word for several years. She had always been very small, my uncle's third part, but then almost suddenly, she began getting smaller and wrinkled like an apple in winter. When I went to see her, she embraced me tightly. She cried without sobbing and stared in my eyes. Even if I well knew what hardness and anger my generation, between archaism and modernity, had run into, I sometimes could not prevent myself from crying.
Real pain, if it exists, concentrated into this prehistoric little statue making it withering more and more. Her neighbors cuddled her in all manners, trying to make her speak and saying: Marfaela (Maria Raffaella) do you remember this? Do you remember that? She lightly smiled to her old friends and that was all. They seemed happy to entertain her a little and show their love.

On a windy day - it was an oddly and almost spring cold, the air was clear, the sea was shining towards the hills of the village - it is an easy day to remember, in early March 1964, my uncle returned to the village.
We felt like when a bad dream of ours suddenly changes in the end and we wake up happy because we realized that an event which seemed to be unchangeable might follow an unexpected course.
My grandmother lived again, I know no different way to express that incredible thing. When I flied to her place to greet my uncle, I stared at them both thinking about Lazarus. She took us by hand holding to her temples one on one hand and one on the other hand.
A month later my uncle left to Germany to join my father who had emigrated to Frankfurt a year before. He had been working for some time with him as building worker, then he worked as turner in another town. They loved each other a lot but they could not live together. They represented two incompatible worlds.
For sure he had run away from Tereza and her family of magicians, but a few days after his departure to Germany, the big dark-haired woman came to my grandmother's.
I thought that our village existed just for us living there and for a few other people.
I thought that the mule tracks getting there were known just by the regular farm workers coming back from farms every fortnight and the farmers from the nearby villages arriving for the fair on 15 August. I thought that the carriage road course was a secret except for the coach driver of the prize-winning musical band of Lanciano amusing us on Saint Rocco's Day who had been revealed it by the patronal festivals committee.

No one has never known how she came to our village. But, she settled herself by my grandmother's and never moved until her prey came back. Then I seldom went to my grandmother's. Tereza and I hated each other and I could not hide it. I did not even understand why my grandmother was kind to her.
Anyway, the family's council had ordained that Tereza was right. He had married her so he could not leave her. Even so, nor at the village neither with his family's help. If he had succeeded in getting rid of her in the vast world, much good might it do him, his family would not have disliked it. There is even no need to say it. Actually, it was not said.
My uncle sadly left again to Germany and then to Brazil, without a great exchange of greetings. My grandmother grew more and more gloomy. He seldom wrote formal letters, more and more seldom, and I replied as usual also because different passions and worries were hanging over me.

On a day, we received a parcel. A coffee parcel, of course. We were not accustomed to use it, yet. It was kept for me because that year I had my school-leaving examination and I used it practically alone.
At last, I tried to study, but it was as to run to the railway station knowing that the train I should have take had already got to its far-away destination.
I did not know what starting with. My gaps were really black holes I tried hard to keep distant from my thoughts for fear of being swallowed. The virgin areas of my knowledge were unexplored continents, nightmarish mountains making me literraly dizzy.
I concentrated on Verga, Decadentism, Gottfried Benn, a nazified poet whose book I met with, the Communist Manifesto, Heiddeger, the history of Fascism. I knew nothing else and the subjects I was preparing had not mostly been even touched on in the programs. I used to drink a cup of coffee and some sour-cherry juice my mother used to prepare in large quantity right for my school-leaving examination. I used to smoke impudently before her, by then, but I could not get to sleep. My readings were getting crazier and crazier and I piled fragments of ideas up to myself to put into my Italian composition.
Whatever the trace.
I could not leave this theme off because it had to justify all the sacrifices my parents had done and keep a horizon split and a future break open. Moment of truth approaching, my headache was getting more and more acute. When pain became unbearable, the only effective escape was thinking about Brazil. Brazil was also for me.
If all had gone wrong: Brazil really was, I was drinking its coffee.
t went well, coffee lasted for about the two months of my desperate studying and thanks to my composition I finished my school-leaving examination with dignity.
Luckily, no member of my examining board checked my odd quotations which I had spread my composition with, referring to authors and works I had hardly picked up. What good it was with them ,too!

In the meanwhile, we did not hear from my uncle anymore. He did not answer two or three letters of ours and we decided not to write him anymore. There were these absurd ways of pride making us suddenly breaking off with who did not correspond.
We were always thinking about him but there was an agreement according to which just on important festivals it was allowed to talk about it to ask where he might have been.
On a Christmas Day, in the seventies, my father received a rather well written greeting telegram causing great sensation among us. My father burted out sobbing unrestrainedly. It happened for the first time and we were all afraid of. I said that by this time my uncle should have come back. It was not so bad here and we all together could have helped him to start a new life. He could even come back to big dark-haired Tereza...
I wrote to the Italian Consulate in S. Paulo, the Foreign Ministry, a newspaper of S. Paolo. No answer. About five years ago we gave someone somehow introduced into the embassy circle the task to investigate. The Consulate of S. Paolo answered that there were no news about the above mentioned man.
I owed to the above mentioned man this reconstruction at least in order to be able to dream about him again in a more peaceful situation...

If you wish to receive the first and second 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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