Passages: Welcome Home to Canada (23 page)

It was a bit of a shock to me, then, to arrive at this other Italy, that of my parents’ little mountain villages, and to find there an entirely different world, of abandoned houses and questionable plumbing and animal shit in the roads. What in the rest of Italy had seemed venerable and ancient here seemed merely backward, and my first reaction was a wish to flee back to the elegant apartment blocks and terraced inner courtyards of my sophisticated Roman cousins. I remember the supper we had our first evening in my grandfather’s house in Villa Canale, the flies everywhere and the stable stink from outside, the gobs of spit on the hearth where my grandfather had hawked towards the cooking fire and missed. We had penne with tomato sauce for supper, but I could not eat a bite of them, so much did the place turn my stomach. Seeing the bathroom, a crude addition to the place from the early sixties, when indoor plumbing had apparently still been a great novelty, I was relieved to learn that one of my uncles had recently built a new home down the street with somewhat more updated facilities, including the luxury of a water heater and a bathtub.

I cannot call up now what I had thought my parents’ birthplace would actually be like, based on the mythologizing anecdotes and commentaries I’d heard
from them until then. But surely I had not imagined it as anything quite so unsettling and strange, so real, as what actually confronted me. There was so much texture to the place, so much taste and sight and smell, that it seemed an affront—the hot days and cold nights, the smell of animals and smoke, the dwarfish aunts with rotted teeth and the grandmother who did not rise the long day from her chair and who did not speak, so that the flies made a home in the folds of her copious overgarments and shawls and I could not have told if she was living or dead. Every morning my mother used to send me across town to buy a jug of milk from a woman who kept a cow there, which now, of course, conjures up images of the pure peasant wholesomeness of things fresh from the source; but at the time, fetching that milk still frothy and warm from the cow like that, in a stable that smelled like one and that was thick with those ubiquitous flies, I could hardly bring myself to drink the stuff.

What I had thus discovered was that at age twelve I was already well confirmed in my bias towards such modern values as hygiene and pasteurization and hot baths, and did not find it pleasant to be deprived of them. I counted it as hopeless backwardness, for instance—even though later I remembered
these things as the mark of a great quaintness and charm—that Villa Canale boasted at the time only a single telephone, at the local bar and general store, and a single TV, which the owner would kindly set out on his balcony above the village square every evening for communal viewing. Back then I thought of this side of myself, the one that felt horrified at the prospect of several weeks without the familiar trappings of modern living, as my Canadian side, since at home I had always taken such things as hot water and TVs utterly for granted. But in fact this love of amenity was rather more universal than that. Italy itself, after all, was no stranger to modernity: it was there, in the bathroom of an expressway service station, that three decades ago I first came across what has only in recent years become standard issue in Canada, the automatic water faucet. So while I thought that my parents’ villages had helped make me aware of that part of me that was irreducibly Canadian—ironically, just at the point when I was learning to love my Italianness—what they really did was uncover in me more or less the same instinct that had led my parents to emigrate, namely, the desire for a more comfortable life. Perhaps my parents could not have named so precisely what it was they were after, the exact kitchen appliance or brand
of TV; and yet it was the general siren call of such things, of the whole luxurious modern world, that drew them away, and that even still meant that the young in these villages left for the cities the minute they were able. It should not have been a surprise to me, then, how in Canada the new homes of Italians, fitted with every modern convenience, became their symbols of success, and how within them the bathrooms in particular represented a special apotheosis, so much so that there was usually one bathroom, complete with every fixture and frill and decked out in the finest Italian marble, that was absolutely off limits except to special visitors, and stood as a kind of shrine to having arrived.

Back in Villa Canale, however, a strange thing had begun to happen to me: with each day that passed, the place got more and more under my skin, not so much that I could have said I was actually growing to like it, but certainly so that I could not ignore it. For instance there was a boy that I met there, Peppino, twelve like me, who, however, smoked and drank and walked around in a man’s corduroy cap and suspenders, and who knew one word of English,
fock
, which he gave me to believe he understood something of from first-hand experience. He led me up to his uncle’s place once and we sat in
the cellar there drinking wine together, which his uncle poured off for us as if it were nothing unusual for a couple of twelve-year-olds to stop in of an afternoon for a taste of his latest vintage. I do not remember much of the rest of that day except how much stranger still Villa Canale seemed to me when it was spinning around at great speed, and when even the cobblestones beneath my feet could not keep from shifting and seething with each step. Then there were my cousins, my father’s nieces, who lived just beyond my father’s hometown of Poggio Sannita in the Valley of the Pigs: four girls who ranged in age from eleven to eighteen, and all of whom made my breath go short with their sheer earthy loveliness and perfection. The eldest, Marisa, would walk with me arm in arm sometimes through the pastures and promise to marry me, and it was all I could do then not to keep my heart from bursting from the wish that such a hopeless thing were possible.

It was also in this time that I finally met Uncle Luigi’s wife, my mother’s sister Maria. Small and bright-eyed and bluntly, unceremoniously generous and open-handed, she seemed not so much a good match for Uncle Luigi as literally his other half, living out for him here that portion of his life he had left behind. The house she lived in had been built
with the money he had sent over from Canada, complete with a winery and cold house out back; but he himself had yet to lay eyes on it. For my own part, I felt as if I were looking inside Uncle Luigi’s head, seeing there his dream of return, that part of him that was always elsewhere.

Indeed, the entire village had this sense to it of somehow doubling over all my experience in Canada, since I could not step from my grandfather’s door without seeing some face that was the exact duplicate of one back home or some way of doing things that mirrored our own, as if everyone who had gone had left behind here this secret other life that had continued unabated after they had set out. I might have said that they’d left here the ghosts of themselves, and of their former lives, had it not rather begun to seem by then that this was the life that was visceral and real and the one in Canada the ghostly one, merely this one’s pale imitation. It seemed a strange kind of haunting, these two worlds so distant and complete in themselves and yet each of which seemed the other’s shadow, as if I might round a corner and what was strange would suddenly become familiar as day, and it would be time to slaughter the pig and set out the sawhorses or to bring the bread and cheese to the fields for the morning merenda.

Years later, when I came to write my first novel, I was somewhat surprised to find myself going back for my material to that first visit to my parents’ villages. Apparently they had lodged themselves much more deeply in my psyche than I had imagined; and the story they eventually gave rise to came upon me practically unawares, so that characters and settings and scenes sprang out of me almost fully formed, as if they had simply been awaiting the moment that I would set them free. Curiously, there was almost nothing in the novel of the tourist’s Italy I had been so enamoured of as a child, and that indeed I had continued to love; rather it was the world of stables and flies that my imagination had been fired by, as if the more sophisticated Italy of monuments and automatic water faucets had been merely the back door for my entry into my own proper Italy, the one my beautiful cousins lived in and my diminutive, no-nonsense aunts. That first novel ended with a sea journey aboard a ship called
Saturnia;
and now, in retrospect, it almost seems to me that my real passage to Canada came exactly in that fictive voyage, at the point when I was finally able to fully imagine the place I needed to set out from, since without a point of departure there could be no arrival.

Towards the end of my stay in Villa Canale I took a walk with my sister one day down to the river that wound its way through the valley that the village overlooked. The trip was much longer than we had judged, down steep, winding goat paths that passed through vineyards and wheat fields and rocky pasture; and once we had arrived and had wandered for a ways along the river, we looked around us and suddenly realized we were hopelessly, utterly lost, some shift in the landscape having erased every landmark that might have pointed us back to Villa Canale. We finally stumbled upon a crooked byroad that looked as if it might lead in the proper direction and started up it, beneath a relentless mid-afternoon sun; but each twist in the road seemed only to further disorient us, and take us into increasing eeriness and unfamiliarity. We passed tiny villages where dogs barked furiously from courtyards but not a soul stirred; we heard the cicadas screech at us from the roadside weeds; we saw a snake slither across our path and into a gully. Our legs by then were beyond tired, but we dared not stop for fear we could not continue again. Our throats were beyond parched, but there was not a fountain to be seen, and the one hole-in-the-wall village shop we eventually passed was boarded up for the afternoon closing. And so we trudged on, ready to perish there
in the Molisan wilderness, two hapless
americani
who had foolishly wandered too far from home.

Then suddenly we crested a hill and found ourselves on the high road into Villa Canale. A young woman of the village, one of several I had worshipped from afar, was just coming in from the fields and instantly recognized us.

“You’ve been to the river,” she said, and it was all I could do to nod agreement, so relieved was I to see a familiar face.

“You want to be careful down there,” she said. “They’re not civilized like we are up here in the hills.”

Then she took my arm in hers and led us back into Villa Canale, and we passed the cellar where I’d got drunk, the post office and the bar, the balcony where the TV was set out every night, and the village seemed no longer a foreign place I was visiting but a familiar one I was returning to. In fact it had always been, but I hadn’t seen that, the shadow at the back of our lives that had always dogged us, now finally brought to the light of day.

The Dominion Institute would like to thank an outstanding group of civic-minded individuals and organizations for facilitating the publication of this book. Initial funding for
Passages to Canada
was provided by the Ministry of Citizenship and Immigration Canada. Westwood Creative Artists was instrumental in bringing together a phenomenal group of authors to contribute their stories. Richard Addis and Simon Beck of
The Globe and Mail
were responsible for printing the first iteration of this collection. And finally, thanks to Doubleday Canada and Maya Mavjee, who expertly saw this book through to publication.

For more information on the Passages to Canada project including free, bilingual teaching resources, visit
www.passagestocanada.com
.