LOOMING

Sculpture in honour of immigrants, "Ai nostri emigrati" on Corso Garibaldi, Maierato, Calabria, © D Pietropaolo

When we undertake the pilgrimage, it’s not just to escape the
tyranny at home but also to reach to the depths of our souls. The
day arrives when the guilty must return to save those who could
not find the courage to leave
.”

― Orhan Pamuk, Snow

ON THIS FIRST NIGHT SLEEPING IN MY CHILDHOOD BED, the tolling of the church bells startles me awake. Rumbling gloriously over the village rooftops on its way down the valley to the river and the hills beyond, the joyful sound reminds me that today, Maierato, the village to which I have been returning after decades away, celebrates the feast of Saint Rocco, a patron saint whose tribal call has the power to bring all Maieratani back to their ancestral home. A reverse diaspora. A nostos that resonates with the clarity of the church bells summoning children to school, the faithful to prayer, and the dead to their resting place. On these return journeys to my childhood home, I make sure to arrive late in the evening. My wish is to wake up the following morning at dawn to the sounds of the village coming to life. The six-hour train ride from Rome is a perfect buffer between my two worlds: the little house on the hill in this farming village where time stands still, and my New World home in Toronto’s Little Italy. The comforting rhythm of the train rolling on its tracks to the deep south overcomes my resistance to sleep. In my dreams the sounds of the village coming to life at break of day bubble up like a clatter of children playing in the narrow alleyways. The sound of Cummari Vittoria working on her loom a few steps away reverberates in my restless sleep in the house on the hill.

It is just after matins. I am standing on the balcony overlooking the valley. The haze is so thick that familiar villages across the river, San Nicola da Crissa, Monterosso, Filadelfia, have melted into the thick air, swallowed up by the slow-moving fog snaking its way along the Angitola valley. The mid-August sun, the solleone, has already baked the wrought iron railings on the balcony to such a degree that I dare not rest my hand on it. An early memory, I must have been five years old, brings up the image of my father attempting to rest his bare arm on it only to pull it away in searing pain, but not before it had branded him. Later when he was working for a paving company in the early days of our immigrant life in Toronto, hot tar splashed on his forearm, causing a third-degree burn, serious enough to consider amputation to prevent gangrene from setting in. Many months later, his arm was saved, but a large purplish velvety scar had marked him, forever. When he told his grandchildren about these events from his working life, he made sure to let them know that he wore the scars that branded him as an immigrant with pride. His shiny sinewy upper hand proved to be irresistible to the children, and in a game of dares he challenged them to run their fingers over the scarred tissue. Only the bravest among them ventured into that mystery.

Swarms of swallows preparing to emigrate at summer’s end have stopped their restless fluttering and choral chirping to take refuge from the heat under the eaves, where they perch on a tattered laundry line, a leftover relic from the time before we left the village.

I walk down the steps from the house on the chianu di Parisi, the hilltop plateau in the heart of the village named after a local doctor, towards the Caffè Valotta in the piazzetta for my usual cappuccino and croissant. On my way to the bar I am struck, once again, by the absence of the gurgling sound of the little cast iron fountain that stood in the corner, happily gushing spring water for the daily needs of the village, and bearing witness to the ritual recurrence of the cycles of life; baptisms, funerals, weddings, processional celebrations of feast days, and, for over a decade following the end of the Second World War, the tearful leave-taking of emigrants heading for lamerica.

***

BEFORE PUBLIC PLUMBING BROUGHT WATER INTO OUR HOME, one of my daily chores as the oldest of four children was to fetch fresh water for my mother from the funtanedha da piazzetta. On laundry days and on soap-making days, several trips were necessary, but this was a task I looked forward to. If it was my lucky day, as I waited my turn to fill up the gozza, the two-handed clay amphora whose shape has remained the same since the ancient Greeks came to live here, I might catch a glimpse of the girl called Lucia and she would wave to me from her balcony above the olive oil press building with its impressive blue metal doors.

In our grade five class we were beginning to read the poems of Giacomo Leopardi. Like every pubescent boy in the first throes of longing, I had memorized his poem “A Silvia,” an ode to the memory of a dying girl whose song, as she toiled daily at her loom, still haunts Leopardi’s tormented soul. In my own young heart, in a sacramental metamorphosis of the word made flesh, the dead Silvia had been reborn into the girl called Lucia.

Veins of rust have etched rivulets on the blue doors, like highlights in an old woman’s hair longing after her lost youth, meandering sediments of the river rust of time. The fountain is no more. Its joyful gurgling has fallen silent. In its place an automatic cigarette dispensing machine is ready to serve young and old alike, returning emigrants as well as the few locals who never left. Like the fountain that it has replaced Smoke Point stands ready, twenty-four seven, flashing its garish electric smile, inviting all to retrieve their chosen poison from its dark entrails.

Grade five in Maierato, courtesy D Pietropaolo

On this feast day the small piazza is festooned with luminaries, decorations and large posters welcoming all to la festa dell’emigrante. Despite the heat, the piazza is brimming over with life and laughter. Children dressed in their Sunday best dart in and out of the gathered families sharing the traditional aperitivo as they wait to join the procession. Fluttering in the breeze, richly hued, blood-red Calabrian silk damask coverlets, embroidered with delicate floral arabesques in gold and silver thread, have been draped over the balcony railings, to welcome the saint, to light his way on his journey to what remains of the Dominican monastery on the hill. In a rich artisanal tradition going back centuries, these coverlets were woven on local looms by the women of the village for personal use and as part of bridal trousseaus. A traditional bride’s trousseau – even for those of humble origins – consisted mainly of silk. Women wore silk gowns to significant events and ritual passages. Among the people gathered in the piazzetta waiting for Saint Rocco to round the corner and make his entrance, an older woman, a ghostly presence among the younger women wearing the latest, scantiest summer fashions, flaunts her traditional pacchiana: a multi-layered costume as old as the Calabrian silk trade. A family heirloom, the pacchiana was passed on through the generations from mother to daughter. A floor length panno rosso (red cloth) made of the finest silk, layered over an underskirt of embroidered white linen, lets everyone know her social status as a married woman.

***

SINCE THE SILKWORM WAS INTRODUCED TO THE MULBERRY-RICH CALABRIAN FARMLANDS in the twelfth century by the Byzantines who ruled the area, silk production and weaving skills were passed on through the generations. Even the poorest family in the village had silkworms to care for. In some cases, this called for drastic measures. As the worms grew quickly into their precious cocoon stage in the springtime, nighttime chills could make it difficult for them to survive. On these chilly evenings women kept warm by sitting around the brazier, whiling away the time by storytelling and embroidering. They would keep the silkworms happily warm by placing them between their breasts, much like mother hens brooded their chicks.

The city of Catanzaro grew to be known as the capital of silk and the hub of a Calabrian silk route that connected the ancient Ionian world to the Tyrrhenian. The precious silk, much sought after by fashionable courtiers, made its way to the royal houses of France, and from there to the rest of Europe.

My grandmother was fond of saying that when she was a little girl learning to work on the family loom, before villagers left in droves in pursuit of their dreams of a better life in lamerica, only the tolling church bells could drown out the singing and the swoosh of cloth and clacking of wood against wood, as women worked their shuttle looms. My mother, a skilled weaver of doweries for young brides, had vocalized the rhythm into a syncopated lullaby she sang to us at bedtime… tattu na tattu na ta… tattu na…tattu na ta…tattu nata…

Today, this artisanal tradition has almost vanished. Cummari Vittoria is the last in a long line of weavers with deep roots in the Byzantine world. Hers is the only loom left to compete with the tolling of the church bells calling the faithful to matins. In early September, when the summer heat has abated, she sits comfortably in her loom demonstrating to me the various techniques required to achieve the perfect balance of color and texture in a current silk weaving project. She points out, with pride and pleasure, the shimmering play of sunlight on the shawl she has been weaving. She was keen to remind me of the hard labour involved in the creation of such beauty: from the harvesting of the mulberry leaves, to ensuring the survival of the silkworm as it grew to its cocoon stage, to the preparation of the silk thread. Her fame as a skilled weaver spread far and wide. The University of Calabria offered to buy her loom for a museum they are planning on the artisanal heritage of Calabria, but Cummari Vittoria made it clear that her loom would be with her until her death. Once again, she wants to share with me the beauty of her work. She drapes the shawl on her arm and lets it flutter in the breeze like a shimmering veil: “non c’è cosa più bella del lavorare con la seta.”

On our way to realizing the dream that brought us to Toronto – a large house on Euclid Avenue, four children in university on their way to careers which they could only have dreamed of in Maiearto – my mother missed her loom. In the eerie silence of our dark Victorian home, she found some solace by humming her favourite hymn to St Rocco. Often, she would sing while gazing at the images of her first two children who died in their infancy. Tattered photographs of her dead babies in their baptismal silk robes had been wedged between the glass and the frame of her kitchen sideboard. Over the years the sideboard had become a kind of family crypt for dead and departed relatives. A figurine of St Rocco watched over them.

Figure of Saint Rocco, patron saint of pilgrims and victims of the plague, courtesy D Pietropaolo

Santu Roccu fu statu carceratu,
stetti cinc’anni a li carciari scuri.
Di l’amici e di li parenti abbanmdunatu,
di la Toscana fu perseguitatu
di ddhu tirannu ‘mpamu e traditori
dicendu ca la pesti ‘ndi portau.
Santu Roccu ‘nci arrispundìu
ch’ è mandatu dill’ altu Ddiu,
ca pe sanari tutti li malati
tutta la pesti mi la cogghju jeu.

The patron saint of pilgrims and victims of the plague brandishes a bubonic wound on his thigh. Born into a noble family in Montpellier, he chose to follow in the footsteps of Saint Francis, distributing all his worldly goods to the poor before embarking on a pilgrimage through plague-ridden Italy, tending to its victims, curing them with prayer and the sign of the cross.

On tattered suitcases, on improvised parcels wrapped in rough linen cloth, departing emigrants made sure to sew an image of their saint, a sacred amulet, to protect them on their own pilgrimage into the unknown. On the piazzetta, facing the Caffè Valotta, stands a bronze sculpture immortalizing an emigrating family’s trunk containing all their worldly goods. On his journey to the monastery on the hill, the saint will pause to pay his respects. For as many years as migrants have set out on their pilgrimage to lamerica, Saint Rocco has journeyed with them, seeing them safely beyond the Pillars of Hercules on their way to Buenos Aires, to New York, to Pittsburgh, to Toronto, and as far away as the antipodes.

***

EVERY SUMMER IN MID-AUGUST MAIERATANI FROM ALL CORNERS of the world respond to the call of the wounded saint and set out on a return journey to the place where the absent gurgling of the funtanedha da piazzetta still resonates in their memory, still sounds like home.

As I step into the Caffè Valotta for my morning cappuccino I am surrounded by childhood friends. They offer me coffee, are attentive to my needs, ready to offer me anything to make me feel at home. I gladly accept the coffee because I know that this simple ritual sharing will unlock a torrent of memories of a childhood in a lost paradise. In the piazza in celebration, the present and the past meet, collide, intertwine, mix in a constellation of emotions that evokes the brutal reality of emigration, of exile and return; a reality that binds together those who left and those who were left behind into a nostalgia for a paradise that never was, a paradise that had to be invented so we could cope with its imagined loss. The before and after of emigration marks the border between the historical and the mythical sense of time. To emigrate is to be cast off, to be swept up into the inexorable march of history. In these ancient lands rocked by the waves of the Mediterranean, the ebb and flow of history has remained a Homeric longing for an eternal return. And Maierato, faithful Penelope at her loom, has been weaving the warp and weft of returning migrants into a tapestry that stretches across three continents.

Childhood in Maierato, Calabria, courtesy D Pietropaolo

In the piazzetta I meet many Maieratani who have made their own return journey from Canada. Awkwardly, and with the soul overflowing with fragments of memories of a childhood now frozen in time, I try in vain to focus on the face of this person, the name of this other. In vain I struggle with the pull of nostalgia for a past that is elusive, and the joy of returning to a country that, despite having evolved towards a modernity that we emigrants from 1959 would never have thought possible, is still haunted by the memory of a peasant culture now almost vanished, taking with it the ritual celebration of its ancient flavors, aromas, birdsong that marked the return of spring.

Leonardo, a childhood playmate and fellow apprentice at the local sartoria, tells me that the day we left, the little house on the chianu di parisi was full of people who had come to take their leave, to wish us Godspeed, a safe journey and good luck in the new world. “You wore a nice brown suit,” Leonardo tells me, “With a nice tie. It was a beautiful sunny day. For us children it was like a feast day. We envied you this adventure. Do you remember? You were so happy!” The painful clash of the present with the past becomes more acute. My memory, tinged by the first, very difficult Canadian experiences, is not of a happy departure. In the theater of memory, the people who crowded the house on the chianu di Parisi, I saw as an assembled cast waiting to perform a requiem. My only clear memory is of the long gaze of the girl called Lucia who smiled shyly and waved ciao with her hand.

I already felt the sense of expatriation, of abandonment, of loss. I had just turned twelve, the grown-up world was about to open its doors to me, to anchor me into this verdant valley.

***

THIS MORNING, IN THE BAR IN THE PIAZZETTA IN CELEBRATION, all the noises of the present – the murmur of the crowd, the brass band marking the rhythm of Saint Rocco’s slow climb to the monastery on the hill, the singing of the faithful, the tower of babel of various languages ​​spoken by returning emigrants, and behind it all the absent gurgling sound of the funtaneddha – vanish, leaving free space to the melody of the past. As if in a dream, the Caffè Valotta turns into a very small basement where my mother’s loom waited for her every morning. I watch her climb into the wooden structure. Crouched at her feet I gaze, enchanted, as weaver and loom become a single organism whose rhythm lulls me into the world of dreams.

The heat has abated. The evening sea breeze is making its way along the river to the village. The feast is coming to an end. A new generation of Maieratani has taken over: the rock concert, performed on the monastery steps, is in full swing: in the bar, the walls tremble, shaken by the amplification. The Smoke Point rattles in rhythm with the beat. Abandoned homes flanking the path to the monastery seem ready to collapse into a pile of rubble at the deafening noise of modernity. I am consoled by the thought that this music will be just an irritating ear worm. It will vanish into thin air at daybreak when the church bells call Cummari Vittoria to her loom… tattu na tattutattu na tattuna tattu…na tattu…

 

Damiano Pietropaolo is a producer/director, writer, translator, and educator. While he was working on a Phd in drama, his freelance life as actor, writer and stage director led him to join CBC Radio as a documentary and drama producer. His work has garnered a number of national and international awards.

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