storia

Chapter ii. Beginnings, fear   

Allow me to come back to myself. To write for me. For even if I don’t know the shape this piece will take, I know one thing I want, for it to be a personal keepsake.

I agonized over beginnings, where I’d start it, where the arc dawns. Forgive intermittent broad grabs. This all begins with a man and his fear, I believe.

It may have been fear that drove him from home, that gave him into flight, but I know it was fear that seized him in the undersea of a cargo boat forging the Atlantic Ocean when he went. My grandfather, all of his 17 years, must have felt nature’s fury as waves leapt up the hull of the boat. He survived on scraps, and arrived in Baltimore after 29 days without seeing light, soon to be processed into prison on Ellis Island for breaking the country’s border.

I imagine he could count those first days on new soil, uno, due, tre, quattro, cinque, sei, until one day, he must have lost count. The fear must have still lived, but perhaps its grip began to let. These beginnings elude all of us, his progeny, ours the lives of suburbia in New York, short school days and soccer practice, security and calm, even if we do not realize it as such.

The old man I knew didn’t much talk of it, but we didn’t know where to begin with questions. I’ve now heard accounts from his brothers and sister in Italy, his nephews and nieces who are our connection to his place of birth, but I am no less disconnected from the circumstances that might take a 17-year-old across the world.

And still my connection to him is fierce. Only at his end did I think of these beginnings, and my understanding of him and our connection took meaning. The meaning, you see, always stood, but I began to see it better, a veil lifted, a lingual problem translated.

We went to his house in the mountains after we lost him. My father didn’t need to explain why he and his boys had to go. We passed time in that space, sitting comfortably on how we always knew him and talked of him. This house of his wouldn’t draw many; it was built of steel, cold in texture, bone-cool until a blazing fire was lit. 

The silence there, and the dark, draped over you, perhaps disarmed you. I know the stoic man thrived there. My father, normally early to bed, rearranged his father’s bedroom deep into the night, moving boxes for no real reason. Not that he needed one.

I sat behind my grandfather’s desk, on the first floor, and I wrote that word, “fear,” scratching at paper to make some sense of it, find some meaning in it. I don’t know that I thought of the circle then, but I might have seen the beginnings of some shape, my story now carrying his with me.

I understood part of him there, at that wooden desk, and I perceived the world of experience between us and still the simplest things we share. We shared many dinners together, many Sundays, many quiet moments. The more people that were around him, the more the old man withdrew, I believe contented to observe. He perceived more about me than you’d imagine, a man of his age looking upon a boy of mine.

How is it that these woods – wide beyond your eyes, filling the sky above, running deeper than you can see – brought him comfort? The terror of the ocean, I think, worked him as a blacksmith manipulates steel. Yet he chose the ocean, he chose America, he chose the risk of it. Under the sea, he could hear only the ocean tempest and perhaps no voices; as far as I know, he was alone.

Above ground, only the life of that place, in those woods, would have filled his head. Then he must have come back to this kitchen, to eat, and then he’d have sat at this desk. It could have been a space only for his thoughts, for the old man never knew how to read or write. But his grandson did. And I wrote for hours that night, for the first time letting his fear settle in me, and thinking of all of mine.

My grandfather’s mother tongue was of Napoli, that Mediterranean city in the south of Italy. It is still spoken in kitchens and the most personal of spaces, between a mother and a daughter, certainly a grandson and his grandfather. In schools and places of business, the Italian ushered by Dante Alighieri and unified in Rome by the nation’s founders is the common tongue. It’s the language I learned, and its Latin grammar and tenor would have been music to my grandfather’s ears.

He knew no language in its full flesh; his formal education lasted until the second grade, when he was sent away to work as a cattle shepherd. He would have known nothing of language’s ability to help us know, to make in our heads meaning of that which we sensed. He vaguely understood its power, though, enough to tell me, in his later years, that I ought to “write down a book.” Americans, he pointed out, will spend a whole day reading one. It wasn’t so much an outrage to him as a mystery that they wouldn’t be more interested in practical things, like mixing cement or working the garden or fixing dinner.

Once I remember he observed some relatives argue over politics after Thanksgiving dinner. All the children had fled, but I lingered, listened, beside my grandfather, the two of us the least versed in political language. I later learned he was watching me, how I perked, how, in a lull, I asked a pointed question, the crafty sort, with an agenda of its own. He beamed, taken by how I’d listened more than I spoke, and when I did have something to say, it was smart.

In the strangest way, he was a philosopher, because he lived a life of thought without meddle. He was a teacher because there was real authority and wisdom in his every word to me. He had a comment on everything, which, from my time in the academy, I can appreciate.

I understood from him at an early age that intelligence was so much more than study. It was instincts and attention and discipline and sharpness. We called it “street smarts” and we knew grandpa had it – as we understood, from experience.

Its counterpart, “book smarts,” became a devotion of mine, yet I can see the limits in the words I read, even in those I write. Their place on pages preserves them, even helps them flourish, but they do not stare down crises, and they did not offer refuge from my grandfather’s station in 1949 in Ottaviano, Italy.

Still I feel a circle closed here, a great symmetry achieved, for my grandfather told me to study, wanted me to learn, and he knew that he simply didn’t know the great power in it. But he wanted it for us, the fulfillment of him.

I don’t imagine he had any idea that the only book I’d know how to write would begin with him. He’s the deepest root I know. His name, his blood, and his soil are all romantic things, nice tokens to carry. They have come to take their value, some meaning in my head, only after I have ventured to know them, coming to Italy for some clarity.