“A Piccolo Paese”

In the summer of 1979, my husband Giorgio and I spent two months in Pizzo, a piccolo paese-his poor, provincial hometown on the coast of Calabria in Southern Italy. I hated almost every minute of it. Seventeen years later, I know why. And I know what I missed.

I had met Giorgio in Bermuda while on vacation in the fall of 1976. He was a crew member on the SS Doric, in port for a few days. After a night of slow dancing and soulful looks, he asked me to marry him.

I said, “No,” and instead began a long-distance courtship, undaunted by Giorgio’s tentative English and my meager Italian. I studied Italian, and we exchanged letters and phone calls. Each Saturday I took the train from New Haven to meet his ship when it docked in New York harbor.

We married on July 8, 1978. Giorgio had difficulty with English, couldn’t find a job, and had a hard time settling into life in New Haven. Each evening when I finished work, he wanted to go out. He had no American license, so I’d drive us around town, stopping at the ice cream parlor in the summer and at the movies when the weather grew cold.

I took it upon myself to find work for Giorgio, taking him to an interview for a dishwasher’s job at a restaurant owned by a friend. He walked out in a huff. “Are you trying to humiliate me?” he asked. Another friend got him a factory job in Waterbury. Six weeks later, his boss made a remark that offended him. Giorgio walked off the job.

Giorgio went to night school to learn English, but dropped out after one class. “I don’t have to learn English,” he told friends, “my wife has learned Italian.” But my Italian was rudimentary, so our conversations lacked grace, depth, or beauty.

Giorgio wanted to move to Italy, and we decided to try it for the summer of 1979. I took a leave of absence from my job, sublet our apartment, and off we went.

We arrived in Pizzo on a steamy July day. We carried heavy valises down narrow alleys and up crumbling steps to Giorgio’s house. His sister Maria wouldn’t let us in. Giorgio cajoled her through the heavy black door. When she finally opened it, Giorgio introduced me as his wife. Maria refused to believe him, relenting only after we showed her the wedding album we hastily pulled from our suitcase.

The flat itself was just two rooms, a kitchen and bedroom separated by a faded red curtain. Maria slept on a bed in the kitchen. The bathroom was a closet with a toilet.

We flushed the toilet with pails of water and bathed in a large, round bucket in what privacy we could fashion in a corner of the kitchen.

Maria never left the house. She dressed daily in a black sweater and skirt. Sitting on her narrow kitchen bed, she was by turns silent and talkative. She spoke to the sparrows that sometimes flew around the flat, and to herself, but never to me. Each morning before we arose, Maria combed her hair and dried her hands on a towel she’d take from our dresser. She repeated this ritual four or five times. Then she’d scream for Giorgio to get up and make her cappuccino.

When I complained, Giorgio dismissed me with a wave of his hand. “Dai, dai,” he said in his Calabrian dialect. “Go on, go on, leave.” I felt as if I’d been struck.

My dislike of Maria and my surroundings masked a more troubling conviction. I didn’t love my husband. Would our marriage survive the summer?

For many years, my memories of Giorgio colored my memories of Pizzo. Only recently have I begun to remember other moments-moments of humanity and sweetness.

I remember Zia Filomena. Each afternoon Aunt Filomena walked across town with a covered dish of homemade pasta or chicken for Maria’s dinner. (Maria was suspicious about what she ate and usually refused anything Giorgio or I fixed.) Maria never thanked her and Filomena never expected it.

Maria’s perversity disgusted me in those days. But I failed to note that Filomena’s loving impulse enabled her not only to tolerate Maria, but to serve her as well.

I remember Paolo and his dog, Benno. A striking widower in his eighties, Paolo zipped around town on a vintage German motorcycle, Benno in the sidecar next to him.

One hot afternoon, Benno eagerly consumed a large bowl of ice cream and promptly keeled over. A grieving Paolo posted death notices throughout Pizzo. Friends contributed to a funeral service. And the next day, wearing black armbands, we followed a tiny coffin to a hillside grave. Paolo prayed and cried and handed out, as mementos, pictures of Benno sitting obediently in the sidecar.

Back then, I mocked Paolo’s sentimentality and the town’s silliness. Today, the event seems an example of compassion on all sides.

I remember a little bakery on the outskirts of town where we’d buy fragrant bread fresh from the oven at two o’clock in the morning, take it home, slice it, spread it with oily tuna, and devour it. And a roadside fruit stand where we’d wake the sleeping proprietor in the wee hours for watermelon, and then sit, laughing, at sticky tables under the stars, melon juice dripping down our chins.

On cool nights in the piazza, it seemed all nine thousand Pizzo residents strolled purposefully up and down, up and down, arms linked in a friendly mating dance. Giorgio and I licked cool gelato and sipped inky espresso as we judged the outfits and attributes of our neighbors. Sometimes we’d get up from our table and join in the dance.

Giorgio and I returned to New Haven that September and continued our clumsy dance. He was unable to embrace life here. I was unable to span the cultural divide. When I filed for divorce the following September, he asked, “Who do you think you are, Marilyn Monroe?” Giorgio moved back to Pizzo.

Fourteen years later I remarried, and my thoughts of Giorgio and his home began to change. Today I remember a long-ago summer we shared. And for the first time, sorrow makes room for sweetness.