Giardini - Advice For Italian Boys

I truoni e marzu risbglianu i cursni, Nicolos nonna often said to him. The rumbling thunder of March awakens the snakes. This is one of her more enigmatic, impenetrable sayings, and she delivers it in that way she has, leaning forward, intimate but oblique, with her head inclined to give emphasis to the words precautionary rhythm, and with a slanting gleam in her eye. Nicolo has always understood this to mean that there are times when a warning or threat may be needed to ensure that we stay on the proper path.

Nicolos nonna, Filomena Giuseppina Pavoneborn Filomena Giuseppina Spina in the larger of two rooms at the back of a cold stone house in Arduino, Calabria, in late April 1930, twelve days after the date the midwife had advised her parents that she should be expected to arrivehad dozens, perhaps hundreds of these aphorisms, small, quasi-medicinal admonitions that she had carried with her from the old country when she came out to join her son Massimo twenty-six years ago in the early spring of 1975. She brought with her Paola Bisceglia, Massimos seven-teen-year-old promised bridea girl of tractable temperament, neat and silent and watchful, still in mourning for her parentsand very little else: a change of clothes, a tin that her neighbour Rudolfo Sasso had soldered shut that held several litres of olive oil that sloshed at her side on the journey like a small green fragrant ocean, and the papers that evidenced her right to passage on the Colombo I pinned inside the deep pocket of her gathered skirt.

Although she knows that i sogni su menzogniall dreams are liesNicolos nonna dreams often of Arduino, and over the years the Arduino of her dreams has become how she now remembers itits white-yellow sun that so saturated the air that the streets and fields seemed as heavy and as textured as the brushstrokes of an oil painting, with light and shadows of varying depths and intensities; its people and animals and vegetation, all constructed sturdy and close to the ground, made from and for dust and labour; its houses pressed up close to each other like huddled sheep and folded against the ridge of the hills that breach ever higher toward the east, becoming, at the horizon, a corrugated rise of mountains; its stones of all sizes, from the minutest flecks of basalt in the thin soil that the farmers work at with their few, often-mended tools to worry out a harvest, to massy boulders that would be too large to roll through the cathedral doors in Catanzaro if anyone had ever attempted such a thing; its rich summer scent of dry earth and lavender. She dreams of all of these, but she never dreams of the single long journey of her life. She was terrified every second of the voyage and during the three-day train ride that followed, but she hid from Paola her certainty that they would be wrecked or would perish or suffer in some other unimaginably worse way, and so this is a memory that has been so completely submerged that it finds no outlet, even in the untidy nighttime images that her brain concocts from almost everything else in her history.

Nonna referred to her store of lozenge-like adages as proverbi, but Nicolo, the quietest of her three grandsons, understands them to be the old timers way of administering advice, like a poultice applied in advance against trouble. After all, uomu avvisatu mienzu sarvatu. A man advised is already half-saved. It is easy for Nicolo to imagine them, all the nonne and nonni before her, generations of them, reaching back to the days long before the Romans first set out, remaking the world in their imagethe grandparents dressed in their homespun trousers and aprons, at rest at last after decades of unceasing work, sitting on wooden chairs or on stone benches set in a spot shaded from the scouring sun in a piazza in the middle of town, watching the young people go by (heedless that they too one day will be old), and passing their proverbi back and forth in much the same way that Nicolo and his brothers used to share a wad of chewing gum when they were small. The brothers werent even certain themselves, back when they were growing up, that they werent all somehow the same boy. They looked so much alikeblack haired, quick limbed, brown eyedand were always entangled in games or challenges and were treated interchangeably by their parents and by Nonna; they would all be punished for the crime of one, to save the energy and time that a proper investigation would have required and to make sure that the vice, whatever it had been, didnt spread.

Nicolo has an older brother Enzo and a younger brother Enzo, both two years removed. His older brother (a modest enough man, but hopes have always been banked in him like fervid coals) is named Lorenzo Marco, although their mother, Paola, perhaps sensing his ambitions, sometimes calls him Lorenzo il Magnifico. His whip-smart youngest brothers full name is Vincenzo Serafino and his mother alone calls him Vince. Their father, Massimo, says eh, guagli (which sounds, by chance, almost exactly like hey, all you) when he talks to all three of his sons. Everyone else, even Nonna, has always called both of Nicolos brothers Enzo. Which Enzo is meant is usually made clear either by inflection or by context, if clarity is necessary.

Nicolo has always tried to pay attention to Nonna, even though she is sometimes hard to understand, especially when she slips mid-sentence into the old dialect, one that almost no one speaks any more, which has in it vestiges of the languages of the many populations that colonized Calabria in the pastLatin, Greek, Arabic and Albanian, and who knows what else. She speaks the dialect thickly in the roof of her mouth, and her words resound with clattering us and abruptly shortened consonants that are thrown up from the back of her throat so that her sentences sound more like an engine sputtering along than the kind of language a mother might coo to settle a restless child. Nicolo is often the only one who hears her.

Nicolos older brother Enzo moved out of the house on the afternoon of the day that he got married to Mima. His brilliant younger brother Enzo was still living at home in the first wintery days of 2001, but he was in his first year of law school and paying for his tuition and books by working part time at a factory that made packaged mixes for cakes, bread and cookies. His mother doesnt listen to Nonna any more. Shes outlived my patience, she has said about her mother-in-law when Nonna isnt nearby, and sometimes when she is. Nicolos father finishes the proverbi for his mother when he hears her start on one, to get it over with faster. He knows them all forward and backward and he recites them with his hands rising in the air, his square palms turned up to the sky in a gesture that appears to entreat the old, capricious, personal gods.

Many of the proverbi made sense even here, thousands of kilometres from where Nicolos nonna grew up in the mountains of southern Italy. Cunti allu spissu, amicizia alla longa. If you keep your stories short, youll be more likely to keep your friends for a long time. Or chi simmina spini si pungi li pedi. If you sow thorns, they are bound to pierce your feet. But some of them are much more difficult to follow. A gente senza figli nun chiedere nu sordi n cunsigli means dont ask for either money or advice from someone who hasnt had children. Nicolo could see the reasoning behind the part about advice, but wouldnt someone without children be more likely to have money to lend? Nonna only produced her thinnest smile and patted his cheek when he asked her to explain.

You will understand in time, she said, and she assumed that inward-turning expression that she has so often, as if she knows more than she is saying although he sometimes perceives that this might be her way of avoiding having to admit to the many things she doesnt know. She had only three years of school, after all; in the early part of the century, when she was a girl, that was all that Arduino had to offer unless fees were paid and uniforms that would need to be washed and ironed and starched were purchased. Nicolo believed for a long time, for many years longer than his brothers did, that his grandmother knew and saw and understood everything there was to know about the doings and wrongdoings of the world and the people in it. Only recently has he appreciated even a part of what she gave up to come herenot only her country but her language and her godsand how widely she has had to cast her handful of