Tag Archives: small towns Italy

Maria’s story

Maria   (as I will call her here )   is one of my oldest acquaintances and one of my dearest friends.  She has been coming to help me clean my floors, keep things dust-free and tidy, and save me hours of housework  for as long as I have  been here.  She saw my children born and watched them grow up as we all matured together.  She struck me from the start  with her easy and genuine smile, her positive outlook and caring demeanor.   This is a rare commodity in these hill towns where diffidence,  legitimately-earned  owing to centuries  of foreign invasions, is the rule.  She is scrupulously honest with her friends, and can be diabolical with her enemies.   If there is anything you want to know, any information about anyone that isn’t official, she will know about it.  Her version may turn out to be larger than the truth, but I can count on getting any gossipy tidbits from her, before they  go to press.  She often says that she would love to be alone, free from constant scrutiny, and yet she could never live without her small town.  She is an integral part of it.  I am very fond of her.

“Family  Landscape”   mixed media

Maria’s life has not been an easy one.  She lives in community housing with her mother and father, an although she would like to have a place of her own, she is aware that her parents depend on her for support, both economic and emotional.   Ours is a small town, and modest  unsavory deeds  shine brightly in  this overcast atmosphere of shared knowledge.  Families provide one’s identity, and if one member has committed a sin, all will be tainted by association.  Once committed to communal memory, an unfortunate incident is rarely, if ever,  forgotten.

Her parents are an interesting couple, her mother an intelligent  foul-mouthed  and  iron-fisted  busybody who still applies heavy make-up and peroxide at sixty-five.  She is one of those women who understands that her control of the situation depends upon her playing her cards close to her chest.  I like her!   Her father is mouse-like, a reserved and hesitant cultivator of a small plot of land, an ex-drinker.  Maria confided to me that as a child, after each episode of  drunkenness and predictably despicable behavior, her father would wake them all up to require that they  eat the compensatory ice cream he brought home to them.    She told me that recently she tried, yet again,  to eat some ice cream. She was not surprised to be overwhelmed by nausea, just like the times before.

She was one of five siblings, now four.  One beloved brother was lost to a drug overdose.   Working in Germany, trying to make some money to send home, he died  in isolation and was discovered  after many days.  They brought him back for his funeral service, where the presiding priest chose to lecture the congregation on the evils of drug use.  This  provided Maria with her final reason to cut herself loose from the overweening and proprietarial hypocrisy of the local church.  Judgments given  so easily require the addition of a smidgen of empathy before they are applied to a family, one already reeling under the weight of  tragedy.

Her oldest  brother is known as one of those people who cannot be trusted, and many a finger has been wagged in his direction when something of value disappears.  He is an opportunist, someone who is up and about in the wee hours.  He is  a gatherer of available merchandise, some of it already the property of others.  He supplies firewood, and therefore he  is a wood-chopper, a cross-cultural category which implies unsavory traits.  Opportunities  present themselves in special ways for him.   He sued a friend of mine who ran a small gas station, because his teenage daughter (walking along looking at her phone) stepped into the open manhole where my friend was refilling his tanks.   She was only slightly injured, but thanks to her father’s adept legal  maneuvers, her sore ankle supplied the family with extra funds for a year. My friend, who had four small children, was given only the opportunity to worry.

Maria’s sister has many children, a hard-working husband with serious heart trouble, and a house which  she imagines is running hard in an  imaginary “Joneses”  derby.    Her character  does not shine for its altruism.   If given a gift, it will be immediately rated  according to brand and selling  value.  Home-made gifts or donations of time and effort are rarely appreciated.  She often begs for  free babysitting from her sister when Maria has time off from her work.  She always has a favorite child, chosen serially on her good days,  and the others jockey for position as her “pet” in order to profit from the associated perks.

Another brother is a collector of metal scrap, and he possesses an honest heart, even if he may be persuaded to behave to  the contrary on occasion.  He has a garage  in the Centro Storico which is stacked to the ceiling with interesting antiques,  and a wife from Naples who has just given birth to their first son.  They live over their small store which stocks  a few paper flower arrangements, souvenir postcards,  lightbulbs and assorted sundries.  They do a brisk business at Christmas in artificial trees and figurines for  presepi.* 

 Maria is tainted by a reputation which is not of her own making.   It doesn’t matter really what she does, as she is part of a clan which is known for its less-than-exemplary behavior.  This, I imagine, has been her lifelong motivation to behave as she does;  she is scrupulously honest, excellent at her job,  and demonstrates a punctuality which is almost scandalous in this part of the world.   She has had to deal with people who would not pay her for her work, a recurring theme which , each time it occurs, causes me to cringe.  Humanity, empathy, recognition of   merit;  all seem to be lacking in regard to those who aren’t high in the pecking order.    Money, for many, occupies the highest rung on the motivational ladder,  just  above  familial love  and the Pope.

She is  assumed to be an “easy” woman, an ignorant woman, a person of little moral integrity.  All these things are not true, and yet  these things will define her as long as she remains in the same small town where her family is known.   I believe that Maria is an uncomfortable presence for many, a kind of moral thermometer which measures the extent of their  mediocrity.  Most people prefer to stand next to someone who doesn’t illuminate their flaws so clearly.  And yet she shines on brightly,  and it is clear for all to see.

I wish her a long and happy life;  she deserves it.

“Morning”  pencil on paper

*presepi:  traditional  Christmas creches

What did you say?

I always think it is incredible when someone asks me if I speak Italian, forgetting that they might not know that I have been here for  thirty years.   Of course I speak Italian; I had to learn it to get along when I first stayed behind in 1982 after the excavations group flew back to the States without me.  And then I remember that there are people living here, people who claim to adore the local culture and society, who after almost as many years still do not speak the language.

How can you live in a place and not learn the language?   I know the answer.  You form your own small comfortable ghetto comprised of people just like you and continue to live in the bubble.  The culture “outside” is a cinematic illusion, to be sampled on outings, a kind of  resident tourism.  You are able to conserve your romantic views of the culture without getting your hands dirty, and without truly understanding what the hell is going on around you.  Good luck with that.

“Castello di Oriolo, Isolato” pencil and metallic pigment on paper

Down where we live, they proudly speak a dialect.  “V’rnallese” is its name, or “Bernaldese” in Italian.  It is one of hundreds, each uniquely-evolved on top of  crowded hilltops  in tiny anthill-like communities over three thousand years or more.  And yet these dialects are sprung from common roots:  Greek of course, as this area was Magna Graecia after all,  and Arabic.  Neopolitan, the “real”  Italian language, not that flat and colorless version spoken in Florence, which, thanks to television and the Republic, is today considered the standard version.  And smatterings of other languages as well.  Near us there are towns which conserve their Albanian language, including their street signs.  There are also towns which still have strong Aramaic roots in their dialect.  French, Spanish, even recent English contributions: In Bari they say “celery” for the Italian sedano, I am sure because of the second world war and the number of American servicemen there.   In Bernalda there are many oldsters who are known as “Shoomak” which reflects their experience as emigrants to the USA where they worked at making and repairing shoes to survive.   All these cultural contributions are smudged together in each small town to create a particular version unique to that town.

My learning curve was a little steep, because all my friends here typically spoke this dialect among themselves, although they could be prevailed upon to translate for me into Italian. If I had known Italian at that point I would have had it made!   However I spent many an evening laughing along with the group in utter ignorance of what was going on.  But I can be perceptive, and this saved me on many occasions in following the gist of things by observing body language and context in order to muddle through.   In the 1980’s, being young and blonde, it wasn’t hard to get along on nods and  smiles.

Notice I said “they” speak a dialect.  This is to say, while I understand almost everything (although I still encounter an obscure term every few days or so, and have to learn it) I do NOT speak it.  I think it.  So my cerebral routing procedure is as follows:  English to dialect, dialect to Italian.  The reason I don’t speak dialect I suppose comes from a sense of pride in my almost-perfect Italian pronunciation (people may or may not know that I am “not from around here”)…and it is also because I don’t relish the smirks and ironic comments which so often greeted my attempts at formulating thoughts in dialect.  OK, I learn.  In my mind, I speak it acceptably, but I still trust my Italian interlocutor to express my ideas.  And that Italian, in my case, is heavily-inflected with the southern accent of these parts, of which I am proud.  I ignore smirks from northerners as well.

I have spoken American English to my kids ever since they were in the womb.  They had to deal with the two most important people in their lives speaking entirely different languages to them at all times.  The conversations between myself and my husband are invariably in Italian, unless we are in the USA and he is required to use English, in which case he may surprise us all with his ability.   My kids and I speak English to each other, and they speak Italian with my husband.  It can get interesting at times, as we lapse into a strange patois  without realizing it!  “Ma!   Puozz’mangnia’ some of those biscuott’ you bought stamattina dal forno over by the ufficio postale?” *    The upshot is that my kids are truly native speakers, and by that I mean indistinguishable from natives, in both languages.  Of course we hope that this brain re-wiring will do us all good in some way.  We are flexible, and sometimes we are also confused!

I have my favorite examples, of course, of the incredible disparity between classic Italian and our jealously-preserved dialect.  My spellings are the best I can do to approach a phonetic  definition.  I enjoy following the town discussions on Facebook, where people’s attempts to write in dialect can be quite amusing.  Traditionally it has not been a written language, although scholarly types have published a couple of books on it recently.

Directly from the Greek is the orange, or arancia, which is the portaialla in Pisticci, the next town over, and l’ammaranch’ in Bernalda.   Need some wine, or vino?  Ask for “na zicca d’mieeruh.”  A napkin, or tovagliolo,  is “ooh shtiavruccula.”    Snails, or lumache?        “Cozzaiuffula.” 

Over in Pisticci, they came up with a relatively new expression–in the last century– to designate the mirage which sometimes forms over  asphalt, and I absolutely love it.   “Ooh marawall” means, roughly translating into Italian and English, “uguale al mare” which is, poetically, “the same as the sea.”    And it is!

In Italian, to ask, “If you are ready to go, let’s go, and if you’re not, we’ll stay” you might say, “Se dobbiamo andare, andiamo.  Se no, non ce ne andiamo piu‘.    In Vrnallese:  “Se ‘na ma shee, sha ma nneen.  Se nun a ma shee, nunn’ a shiamma shenn.”  It really does roll  musically off the tongue.

It is important to know which day you are speaking about, so “today,”  or “oggi”,  is ” iosh‘.”

Tomorrow, or “domani,” is “cra.”

The day after tomorrow, “dopo domani,”  is “p’scra,” and the day after that is “p’screedd.”     (The double consonant indicates a firmer pressure of the tongue against the palate.)

And the day after that?   “P’scruofula!”

What (She Says) He Said oil on canvas

*”Mom, can I eat some of the cookies you bought this morning from the bakery near the post office?”