Memoria da Carmine per Memorial Day

The last night my father, Carmine, whose first name graces this guesthouse and last name graces my Italian passport, spent on this earth, he bolted up ramrod straight in his wheelchair and blurted,

"You know what today is?"

It startled me. Bolting was no mean feat for someone in the final stages of mesothelioma. The energy and speed of his movement upended my concentration on the episode of "Judge Judy" we were watching, an activity we did so often it somnamulized me. All I could do was bark a clipped

"No, what?" 

"It's sixty years ago today I was shot."

Although I had seen the crater of scar tissue on the inside of my father's knee, he had never spoken about it. 

"You mean, when you were wounded in the army?"

"Yeah. In the Pacific. A sniper."

"Did it hurt?" was the first follow up that came to mind.

Carmine looked at me as though my marbles were spilling out of my head and rolling under the couch. 

"Did it hurt? It hurt like a sonofabitch!" 

I decided to ask something a little less reminiscent of a kindergarten show and tell.

"How did it happen?"

For the first time in the 55 years I'd known him, he told me.

He was on night patrol. On a Pacific Island - Sampei is the name I remember although I could be making that up because it sounds like something he said which I don't remember. He liked it there. It was tropical - warm. He liked warm weather, the warmer the better, a trait he passed on to me. He 

always wanted to go back when there was no war. After a turn-around to enable him to make another 

pass on his patrol path, he heard a shot, felt a sting "like a bad bee sting" in his leg, and fell to the 

ground.

"I screamed like hell. Two of my buddies ran out and dragged me back to cover."

"Then what?" I asked.

He shrugged. "Then I went home." 

He was quiet for a moment. Then he said, 

"I was lucky. I don't know why he missed hitting me where he'd kill me. Too much sake, maybe. Got my buddy the night before. He died in my arms."

That was it. He went back to Judge Judy. 

The next day he was gone. The sniper - his disease - got him in the night.

  

This is my sixth Memorial Day in Italy. It is strange to be in a country in which it is a weekend like any other weekend. Especially a country which, for the better part of my father's army career, was on the opposite side of his army. I wonder how my grandfather felt sending four boys off to fight against the country of his birth? I wonder what my Italian friends and neighbors would think about my 
celebrating my dad's service ? I know that among Italians there are mixed feelings

about American activity in World War II. One of my Italian friends, from Pisa, has grandparents on opposite sides of the fence. Her grandfather resented the Americans because they bombed his neighborhood. Her grandmother, who lived close to Campo dei Miracoli and the Leaning Tower, where bombing was off limits, loved having Americans in her neighborhood. They gave her chocolate.

Regardless, it seems there is little doubt that Americans were vital in bringing about an end to a difficult era for the Italian Republic.
A few years ago, I had the front of Casa da Carmine refinished and repainted. When I went to the
"geometra" - a combination surveyor/architect - to complete the paperwork, there was a photo of him with the American gangster Lucky Luciano on the wall. My eyes gaped at it.
"Oh, yes", the geometra said, "He used to visit this part of Italy. You know how he got to be a free man?"
I shook my head.
"His mafia connections. He used the ones he had in Sicily to clear the way for the Americans to land.
He helped turn the war around. So the American government let him go. No jail for his crimes."
I looked sideways at him and tilted my head. He opened his hands, palms out, arms spread and nodded.
"True!" He said.
I wonder what my father would say if he knew that an Italian-American gangster and the Mafia helped him win the war? I think he'd laugh.
Thank you for your service, Dad.
Grazie mille per il tuo servicio, babbo.

Carmine and Me

Putting the Pieces Together

The little blue Lancia Y I bought four years ago to help me get to know Abruzzo jostles down a mountain road. My body absorbs the bounce from potholes, rocks with the dizzying curves, rolls left or right in sync with the "Blue Dolphin" as I call it to avoid the "frana (rock slides), and comes to a slight pause with it before continuing ahead when the road narrows to a sliver of a lane with a sheer drop to one side. I smile. The rhythms are familiar and welcome. They let me know I'm really back.  Really most sincerely back. My customary frenetic, all-doing-all -the-time rhythm has automatically reset itself. To Abruzzo pace.
 I stop half a dozen times on the way to the grocery store - still referred to by the locals a "il forno (the oven)" because it started out as just a bakery. I stop to talk to the umteenth person who calls out to me "Ben tornata! (welcome back, but literally- well returned). I learn that Donatella , the owner of the fruit and vegetable shop just below the house, has had a baby! Maria Vittoria, now three months old. I stop for a cappuccino at La Lanterna bar and tease Emidio that it has to be his best since it is my first one since arriving last night. He loads it with an extra coating of powdered cocoa. I stop to watch one of the town's ubiquitous older men - retired now, but still dressing daily in crisply pressed trousers, an almost glowingly white dress shirt, dark tie, and dark blue sport jacket. His hair lies in two precisely shaped fluffs of blue-grey separated by a thin, straight part on the left side. His aftershave makes his walnut toned skin glisten. It reminds me of my father's face just after he shaved in the morning. My sense memory takes in the scent of his after shave. The man ambles down the quiet street, bis hands clasped behind him, eyes straight ahead, seeing with the ingrained knowledge of this place, but looking inward at some distant or unfamiliar landscape. He doesn't greet me and I let him go by, continuing undisturbed on his inward journey.
I arrive home to make soup for dinner. Home. It seems odd to refer to a somewhere in which you spend only 3 months a year as "home". Don't I already have a full time home? But more than coming home to a "where", I come home to a "who". To a me that exists only here. Try as I might to replicate the conditions in my other home that coaxes out that other being, I fail. There is a brittleness that sets in, a crusty over-baked shell that subtly closes me in. I never understand it. I never consciously
choose the different me's. I just know there is a difference. The pieces of me just fit together differently here.
Last night, no sooner had I walked inside the front door of my Casa da Carmine - smelly, fatigue-drunk, feet throbbing red pulps, back and legs screaming "I HATE YOU!!!", than my doorbell rang. When I opened it, my neighbor Manola wrapped me in a sturdy hug. Then she stood me at arms length and locked on my bleary eyes.
"Hai mangiato", she asked. (Have you eaten?)
"Si. Un pannino qalche ore fa." (Yes, a sandwich a few hours ago.)
Manola did that thing Italians do with their hands that looks like they're covering your BS with fresh dirt - waving them back and forth horizontally, palms up.
"No!" she said, then swept me into her house.
I sat in her kitchen for nearly two hours, mumbling, forgetting the simplest Italian words, at times staring blankly at Manola as she whipped up a dinner of pasta with oil, garlic, sautéed breadcrumbs
(she ground them fresh from a loaf on the table), and hot pepper flakes. She served it to me with
cheese, wine, and shelled fava beans, which her husband, Angelo, showed me how to peel with my
teeth. Dessert was waffles with powdered sugar. It was not what I'd envisioned eating after 24 hours of moving in cars, planes, busses, and on my own sorry feet, lugging a suitcase, a backpack and a messenger bag filled with electronic devices in/on/off all but the plane. I thought all I could ask my body to process were a few lettuce leaves. I thought my body couldn't do anything more strenuous. But Manola's meal, far from taxing me further, soothed me, settled me. Let me know I had arrived. The other "me" was homing in.