his evening meals alone in the kitchen, served by his wife precisely at seven o’clock, and without any commotion or conversation coming from the children with whom he never learned to communicate.
Part of his problem was language itself. Rosso insisted on speaking his brand of south Italian dialect in the home, a dialect that his children never fully understood, or wanted to understand, for in their ignorance of his words they more easily avoided the responsibility of dealing with him directly. What was clearly needed in this family was someone to serve as an interpreter between the children and their parents, and also to translate for Rosso certain business letters or documents that, because written in formalized English, were beyond his comprehension.
Since Rosso would not trust an outsider to perform this function, and since none of his children would voluntarily do it, he ordered my more obedient mother one day to assume the role of his interpreter and intermediary with the English-speaking world. She had learned to speak and write English perfectly in primary school, and now, after returning home each afternoon from high school, she would be tutored in Italian by a white-bearded language professor who had been born in Maida but lived in the neighborhood.
Within a year, my mother spoke and read Italian with sufficient competence to clarify all the family problems of communication, if not to solve the problems themselves. One interesting result of this experience for her, however, was that in becoming her father’s domestic secretary and confidante, in dealing with him each day in his own dialect, my mother began to understand this contentious and estranged individual. From her perusal of his old letters, foreign documents, and mementos—and from what he occasionally told her during uncharacteristically candid moments—he emerged as a wounded, vulnerable man who was much more of an escapist than she: he was a fugitive from some dark center in his soul, a helpless misanthrope who had fled the austere foundling home into which he had been placed by vaguely remembered relatives.
As a teenager he joined a boatload of illegal aliens and was employedas a laborer’s apprentice in Brazil, but he loathed the life in South America and returned to Italy two years later with enough savings to purchase two horses and begin working as a teamster and carriage driver. The economy of southern Italy was then at a starvation level, however, and most of his passengers in the 1880s were men abandoning the dry soil and horizonless hills, bearing heavy valises made of wood: they were en route to the rail terminal to await the Naples-bound train that would take them to the trans-Atlantic ships headed for the promised land of the United States.
In the town square of Maida, as in villages throughout the peninsula, there were billboards declaring that good jobs awaited healthy, hardworking men in America. The signs noted that steamship tickets would be paid in advance by American employers, who would later be recompensed by deductions drawn from the workers’ salaries.
And so from the hill towns and fishing villages of Italy, young men planned their departures, and Rosso carried many of them in his wagon along the dusty roads away from aging parents and newly wed brides and small children who waved until the wagon faded from view. Rosso heard their final words, saw their tears, observed their embraces and kisses, but, a stranger to intimacy, he had no idea how they truly felt during these parting moments. He knew only that when he returned to the village, life seemed to be changing.
There was one change in particular that he watched with mixed pleasure each Sunday in the town square. This had always been a male preserve, a place where the village men gathered (while their wives attended Mass or were occupied at home) to drink liquored coffee and argue over local politics, or to stroll around, arm in arm, showing off their best suits,
Part of his problem was language itself. Rosso insisted on speaking his brand of south Italian dialect in the home, a dialect that his children never fully understood, or wanted to understand, for in their ignorance of his words they more easily avoided the responsibility of dealing with him directly. What was clearly needed in this family was someone to serve as an interpreter between the children and their parents, and also to translate for Rosso certain business letters or documents that, because written in formalized English, were beyond his comprehension.
Since Rosso would not trust an outsider to perform this function, and since none of his children would voluntarily do it, he ordered my more obedient mother one day to assume the role of his interpreter and intermediary with the English-speaking world. She had learned to speak and write English perfectly in primary school, and now, after returning home each afternoon from high school, she would be tutored in Italian by a white-bearded language professor who had been born in Maida but lived in the neighborhood.
Within a year, my mother spoke and read Italian with sufficient competence to clarify all the family problems of communication, if not to solve the problems themselves. One interesting result of this experience for her, however, was that in becoming her father’s domestic secretary and confidante, in dealing with him each day in his own dialect, my mother began to understand this contentious and estranged individual. From her perusal of his old letters, foreign documents, and mementos—and from what he occasionally told her during uncharacteristically candid moments—he emerged as a wounded, vulnerable man who was much more of an escapist than she: he was a fugitive from some dark center in his soul, a helpless misanthrope who had fled the austere foundling home into which he had been placed by vaguely remembered relatives.
As a teenager he joined a boatload of illegal aliens and was employedas a laborer’s apprentice in Brazil, but he loathed the life in South America and returned to Italy two years later with enough savings to purchase two horses and begin working as a teamster and carriage driver. The economy of southern Italy was then at a starvation level, however, and most of his passengers in the 1880s were men abandoning the dry soil and horizonless hills, bearing heavy valises made of wood: they were en route to the rail terminal to await the Naples-bound train that would take them to the trans-Atlantic ships headed for the promised land of the United States.
In the town square of Maida, as in villages throughout the peninsula, there were billboards declaring that good jobs awaited healthy, hardworking men in America. The signs noted that steamship tickets would be paid in advance by American employers, who would later be recompensed by deductions drawn from the workers’ salaries.
And so from the hill towns and fishing villages of Italy, young men planned their departures, and Rosso carried many of them in his wagon along the dusty roads away from aging parents and newly wed brides and small children who waved until the wagon faded from view. Rosso heard their final words, saw their tears, observed their embraces and kisses, but, a stranger to intimacy, he had no idea how they truly felt during these parting moments. He knew only that when he returned to the village, life seemed to be changing.
There was one change in particular that he watched with mixed pleasure each Sunday in the town square. This had always been a male preserve, a place where the village men gathered (while their wives attended Mass or were occupied at home) to drink liquored coffee and argue over local politics, or to stroll around, arm in arm, showing off their best suits,
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