Clara and Cosimo finally reached Via Plebiscito number 80, the intersecting street name Via Daniele written in cobalt blue on a yellow-ochre wall directly in front of them. Clara felt a sense of arrival. They turned left and walked down to the grey metal gate that closed off a narrow courtyard flanked by grey and red-ochre homes. Clara realized that the courtyard, the object of her search, was a side lane of Via Daniele. The archway at the end of the courtyard was central to her childhood memory – a cavity, a hollow, a kind of carved-out cave where she and Giustino and all the courtyard children played, the cave a constant presence.
A woman looked out of a low-lying wide window.
“Potete aprire il portone, per favore,” Clara called out to the woman, asking if she could please open the gate.
The woman sensed that a woman in a touristy sunhat and a young robust man in a flat cap were a safe bet to let in, perhaps relatives of a family who lived in the courtyard. She moved to the side of the window and opened the gate remotely, a mechanical click sounding in the afternoon silence. Clara pushed open the metal gate, and both she and Cosimo entered the courtyard.
Clara walked down to the end of the courtyard and found the house, a few metres away from the arched cave. The door was a metallic green facing a concrete landing and two concrete steps. She remembered the door was green and wooden, not metallic, as a child of five or six banging on the green wooden door with her little hands, crying loudly with a child’s anguish for her mother, “Mamma! Mamma!” The door was locked. Where was her mother? Why had she left? Why she had left Clara in the care of a woman neighbour, who tried to assuage her anguish and crying to no avail?
“This is the door… This is where we lived,” Clara said to Cosimo.
Cosimo didn’t know how to respond as he stood beside his mother in his red Adidas shorts, blue polo shirt, white Adidas runners, and a newly-acquired pale blue flat cap. He was a North American used to houses with verandas and tree-lined streets. An old grey-walled home with a green metallic door in an old long narrow courtyard seemed foreign to him, belonging to his mother’s past. But he was going to take it all in, an old corner of the Old World.
“This is where we played,” Clara continued, pointing to the ground in front of the house. Whenever Clara and her brother Giustino returned home from boarding school, they attracted all the other children in the courtyard like magnets. They would all congregate in front of their doorstep and play their children’s games like spinning tops, hopscotch, hide-and-seek in the cave, noisy and boisterous, much to the consternation of the women neighbours, who would then complain to Clara’s mother.
The woman who had opened the gate for Clara reappeared at the window. She was in her late sixties and gave the impression of being house-bound, cooking and cleaning and attending to her domestic chores daily.
“Signorina, mi scusi. Who are you looking for?” she enquired.
“I used to live here…at this door…a long time ago…” explained Clara. “Do you remember a Signora Adelina?”
Just then a stocky woman of the same age in a house dress, the standard print dress for older housewives, looked out from her open window, which was the upper part of the door.
“Signora Tina, what’s happening?” she asked her neighbour.
“They want to know if a Signora Adelina lived here a long time ago.”
The stocky woman, her white hair pinned down with bobby pins, furrowed her eyebrows in thought.
“Ah… sì, sì… But the family moved away…a long time ago…”
“I lived here with my family,” said Clara, pointing to the green metallic door.
It was a one-room home, with a backroom that served both as kitchen and bathroom, except there was no bathtub. Clara’s mother bathed her in the trough sink where she washed the dishes and linens. Whenever she came back from boarding school for a short holiday, she often hid by placing a chair upside down at one end of the sofa and encasing herself in it, her hiding place, and her observation point from which to observe her mother. Away from her mother for long periods of time at boarding school, she had developed a sort of mute detachment from her, observing her, and wondering who this woman might be, this small woman with Gina Lollobrigida hair, her fine features, her full bosom, calling her to come out of her hiding place because it was time for lunch. Sometimes, on special occasions, the table was placed near the front door: Clara had written a Christmas letter to her parents at boarding school with a pre-decorated Nativity scene. She loved that lined letter-card with sparkles on the Christ Child, the Three Magi, the shooting star, and the palm tree. Because it was Christmas, she had wanted to surprise her father by placing it under his cloth napkin where he would readily see it when picking up the napkin – her father whom she rarely saw and felt shy in his presence, whom she wanted to please, and who would take delight in her thoughtful gift and her childish cursive.
Then, out of the blue, came her little baby brother. She had come home again from boarding school and saw a pram in the middle of the room. She walked around it and saw a baby tucked neatly inside a white blanket. She had no idea who the baby was and where it had come from, but the baby responded immediately to her, waving its hands and kicking up its feet, its eyes shiny and focused on her. She thought she would play with it. She retrieved her little pouch of play jewels from underneath the sofa seat – another of her hiding places – and proceeded to cover the baby’s face and blanket with rubies, sapphires, emeralds, and crystals, much to the baby’s continued excitement of waving hands and kicking feet.
“Does anyone live here now?” asked Clara.
“Yes, but nobody’s home now,” answered the woman.
The one-room home that had once been animated by Clara’s family was now occupied by others’ lives. The closed door was silent, though for Clara it was animated with memories of the past. She looked up at the window above the arch of the dug-out cave. That was where her childhood friend Ninetta had lived. Next to her old home, she recognized the open doorway that led directly to Ninetta’s house. Clara and Ninetta had been playmates, both five or six years of age.
Clara entered the open doorway and climbed up to very top step. She stepped onto an abandoned terrace. The door to Ninetta’s house was closed. Along the white concrete ledge sat a variety of potted cactus plants, dried from lack of rain or watering, but withstanding the constant sun. Beyond the rooftop were big chunks of lava rock, past flows of molten lava spewed by Mt. Etna, held in place with steel wire meshing from which grew spindly dried plants. Clara was moved to be finally standing on Ninetta’s terrace, a place of sacred childhood recaptured, where they had played under the sun, playing house, eating the pulpy little leaves of pigweed that grew in terracotta pots. Sometimes she spent evenings with Ninetta and her family in their dining room watching Carosello, a TV show that featured comedy sketches, cartoons, and a puppet mouse called Topo Gigio. Ninetta’s family had a TV, whereas Clara’s family didn’t have a TV, nor a fridge, nor a phone.
“Buona sera,” said a man, who had come out of a side door at the top of the stairway. He was tall and slender, wearing shorts and a white ribbed undershirt, and sporting a few days’ dark stubble on his face.
“I heard from below…that you used to live here,” he said. “Mi scusi… I’m Giovanni,” he introduced himself. “I live in the apartment at the top step.”
“Buona sera,” replied Clara, and introduced herself in turn. “I used to play on this terrace with Ninetta, when I was a child.”
“She left for Australia with her family a long time ago. Nobody lives here now, except for an old relative that comes to check on things once in a while.”
Giovanni looked at Clara with widened eyes and interest, this stranger with a striped turquoise summer hat, who obviously wasn’t a local and spoke Italian with a foreign accent, who seemed to be in a trance-like state of elation, a capturing of the distant past, which was never lost, but only waiting for retrieval.
Clara was surprised to hear that Ninetta’s family had also emigrated, both playmates destined to emmigrate to other lands, although Ninetta’s family was better off. Clara then remembered Ninetta taking her into a secret room full of toys – credenza shelves filled with miniature doll-house furniture and dolls, the beams of sunlight filtering through the lace curtains in a hushed rose-painted room.
The front door, half wood and half glass, looked as if it had been locked closed for a long time. Sometimes when Clara had come up in the evening to watch Carosello, she fell asleep seated at the dining table, her head slumped on her folded arms. Then Giuseppe, Ninetta’s twelve-year-old brother, would lift her into his arms and carry her down the concrete stairs to her house at courtyard level. She was in love with Giuseppe…to be in his arms and carried down in the late evening, half-asleep…
Cosimo then appeared at the top of the stairs. Clara was glad that he had finally caught up with her. She told him the terrace was where she had played with a childhood friend who lived at the brown door with glass panes so that he could conjure a vision of his mother’s childhood in a terrace full of sun, plants on the ledge, a terrace abandoned over the years, overshadowed by lava rock and piles of construction debris in the adjoining terrace.
Giovanni and Cosimo both greeted and introduced each other. “Would you like to come in?” asked Giovanni, inviting them to his apartment on the landing at the top of the stairway, offering them a respite from the sun.
“Grazie,” replied Clara, “but we must go now.”
“Grazie a te,” rejoined Giovanni. “Thank you for letting me be part of your… homecoming,” he continued, smiling, visibly moved, a bystander, as if he were a member of a chorus in an ancient Greek play.
Clara and Cosimo climbed down the stairway. The two women of the courtyard were sitting on chairs, facing each other and chatting. Potted basil and cactus plants were lined up on the ground against the old, faded ochre walls. The sun was at its peak, but the courtyard, shielded from the road beyond the gate, escaped the intensity of the sun. Clara sat down on the concrete landing of what was once her home with all her memories locked inside it. Cosimo snapped a picture of her with his cellphone.
From The Garden of Kolymbethra and Other Poems and Stories about Sicily (Legas, 2024).
Silvia Falsaperla grew up in Toronto, where she graduated from the University of Toronto. Her poetry and prose has been published in Canadian and American literary journals and anthologies. She lives and works in Toronto.
