MOTHERLINES
- THEY SAY
She died of a broken heart, they say. Michele, her firstborn, became an unwitting canary in a New World coal mine. Then her second son Vincenzo, $20 in his pocket, set sail from Napoli and buried his brother in a lonely Colorado cemetery. Vincenzo put up a tombstone on Michele’s grave and moved on, never looked back. And her youngest, Filomena, the daughter of her heart, her only daughter, is lost to the vastness of Brazil. All of them lost to her, all of them sacrificed. All because her husband Giovanni forgot his own, forgot her, forgot their children, forgot the hunger, la fame. Giovanni forgot to send money back home from the New World, forgot la miseria of their Calabrian life. She stayed behind, along with the rest of them, all those women who stayed behind weaving a life first without their men and then without their children. This Calabrian Penelope waits for the husband lost to L’America, for the sons who will never return, for the daughter raising her children alone, in another language, on another continent. An infinite ocean now separates them all and the Fates have decreed: she, the one forgotten by time and by God, the one who cannot forget, will not live to see her children again. And then the miracle, il miracolo: her Giovanni returns. The wanderer comes home and her heart rejoices. Then it is cleaved, split in two. The chorus of women intones the story as a single voice: she died of a broken heart, they say.
2. DONNE SACRIFICATE
Vincenzo knocks on the door. He is a long way from Colorado, even farther from Calabria. He has never looked back and fate has smiled on him here in Chicago. When Mary hears the dreaded knock, her blossoming body stiffens. She senses what is coming. She senses that life as she knows it is about to end. Her breathing becomes shallow and solidity gives way. A smarginatura sets in, a blurring of her self, and she feels that she is dissolving. She feels a cloud settling over her. In that moment she knows with gut-wrenching surety the power of words to upend a life. She reveals nothing, wrapping her Southern Italian fatalism around herself like a cloak. She is well-schooled in Sicilian stoicism, like her mother Maria, like all the Marias who have gone before her, like those who will come after her. Donne sacrificate. Sacrificed women. Mothers and daughters who come to know little of each other’s hearts over the years, who come to know little of their own hearts. Behind closed doors Mary overhears Vincenzo and her father Giacomo bargaining for her hand, for her life, sealing the deal. Mary feels her life seeping away and buries her heart for safekeeping in a place so hidden not even she will be able to find it.
3. THE FATES
Mary lies awake, gripped by a terror. This night is her last as nubile, an unmarried woman. The men have sealed the deal. Tonight, for one last night, she will feel the comfort and closeness of her grandmother and sister in the bed the three share. The rhythm of their intertwined breathing consoles her as Mary struggles to calm herself, barely keeping her panic at bay. She looks over at her grandmother, still asleep beside her. Nonna Gaetana. A woman who has lived this voiceless destiny, who resigned herself, who sat by silently as her life was handed over long ago from her father to her husband. And now it is Mary’s turn. Mary looks past her grandmother to the other side of the bed, spies tears glistening in her younger sister Gaetanina’s eyes. Mary and Gaetanina both know that once the new day dawns, nothing between them will ever be the same. The Fates have done their weaving. Like so many women who have come before and so many who will come after, Mary is powerless, her destiny inalterable. Tomorrow she will leave the ranks of nubile, become the bride of the old man.
4. VERGOGNA
Mary had read the script, played all the roles: dutiful daughter and wife and mother. She sacrificed her own life, for all of them, and it cost her dearly. It cost her all of the dreams she had for herself: the dream of finishing high school, of becoming a thoroughly modern American woman, of deciding her own destiny. But that was back when she could still dream, before all her dreams went underground, and she with them. And that was before her youngest daughter began dreaming and dreamed herself right out of Mary’s circumscribed world. This daughter. The one who veered off script, who has little regard for Mary’s vergogna, her shame. And now this. What race is the baby? Mary asks when she receives the call, hears her youngest daughter’s news. To skirt the vergogna, Mary carefully crafts a new story, tells it her way, recasts her daughter as good, a dutiful caretaker. Prende cura di questa bambina, she’s the child’s caretaker, Mary tells Comare Gennarina. God forbid Comare should think the unthinkable. The truth might be too much for her heart, might kill the Calabrian centenarian. Story rewritten, crisis averted, family shame, vergogna, kept at bay momentarily. But vergogna runs deep. Unspoken, the vergogna festers into resentment, Mary’s resentment of her daughter’s freedom, and becomes a wedge between them. But Mary’s new granddaughter is named after her, middle name Marie. How can she not love the child that bears her name? This child. Not blood of Mary’s blood. Not race of her race. Adopted. No father in the picture. A family of two. Fruit of a daughter’s audacity. The cultural script upended. Vergogna. And love.
5. THE SEER
Time passes and Mary forgets, mercifully. She forgets the sacrifices life exacted of her, forgets the vergogna, forgets who these people in her house are. Now she looks out the bedroom window and sees ghosts, young boys in the Italian stone pine her husband Vincenzo planted years ago in front of the house. At sundown Mary sees another apparition: her mother Maria sitting erect in the gold brocade slipper chair next to the bed. Mary’s youngest daughter watches her mother light up and throws out a line to reel Mary back in, to anchor her for a fleeting moment to that reality that masquerades as normalcy, as truth. See, Mom, there’s no one there, her daughter proclaims. To prove her rightness, she lowers herself into the slipper chair, displaces her grandmother Maria’s ghost, ignores the clairvoyance of the seer disguised as her mother. Soon after, Mary crosses over. From her new perch on the gold brocade slipper chair with her mother Maria, Mary haunts her daughter’s dreams, waking dreams filled with a longing to pierce the veil, to see beyond, to feel her mother’s cradling tenderness, to let herself sink gingerly into the gold brocade of the motherline’s ghostly embrace.
OVUNQUE SIAMO 