Eufemia Fantetti - My Father, Fortune-Tellers, & Me

MOTHER TONGUE PUBLISHING LIMITED

290 Fulford-Ganges Road, Salt Spring Island, B.C. V8K 2K6 Canada

www.mothertonguepublishing.com

Represented in North America by Heritage Group Distribution.

Copyright 2019 Eufemia Fantetti. All Rights Reserved. The use of any part of this publication reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, or stored in a retrieval system, without the prior written consent of the publisheror, in case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, a licence from Access Copyright, the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency, is an infringement of the copyright law.

Book Design by Mark Hand.

Wedding photo, p.9, March 16, 1968, Bonefro, Italy.

Photo Booth image on cover, 1974, Toronto, Canada.

Both photos found in the ruins of authors fathers home during a trip to Italy in August 2016. The house was damaged during the 2002 Molise earthquake.

Rider-Waite-Smith tarot deck images from The Pictorial Key to the Tarot (1910) (www.elfindog.sakura.ne.jp/pktset1922.htm)

Typefaces used: Cochin and Avenir

Printed on Antique Natural, FSC-Recycled.

Printed and bound in Canada.

Mother Tongue Publishing gratefully acknowledges the assistance of the Province of British Columbia through the B.C. Arts Council and the support of the Canada Council for the Arts, which last year invested $157 million in writing and publishing throughout Canada. Nous remercions de son soutien le Conseil des Arts du Canada, qui a investi 157$ millions de dollars lan dernier dans les lettres et ldition travers le Canada.

LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION

Title: My father, fortune-tellers & me: a memoir / Eufemia Fantetti.

Other titles: My father, fortune-tellers and me

Names: Fantetti, Eufemia, 1969- author.

Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 20190141115 | Canadiana (ebook) 20190141123 | ISBN 9781896949758 (softcover) | ISBN 9781896949772 (PDF)

Subjects: LCSH: Fantetti, Eufemia, 1969- | LCSH: Fantetti, Eufemia, 1969- Family. | CSH: Authors, Canadian (English)21st centuryBiography | LCSH: OccultistsCanadaTBiography. | CSH: Italian CanadiansTBiography. | LCSH: Children of the mentally illCanadaBiography. | LCSH: Fathers and daughtersCanada. | LCGFT: Autobiographies.

Classification: LCC PS8611.A56 Z46 2019 | DDC C813/.6dc23

for Cathy Sostad

sister soul

There was a star danced, and under that was I born.

Shakespeare

Write what should not be forgotten.

Isabel Allende

Search the darkness, dont run from it
The moon appears for night travelers,
be watchful when the moon is full.

Rumi

Tarot first appeared in Italy during the Middle Ages as a card game called tarocchi. The rules have been lost to history. At some point, the tarot deck transitioned into a tool for divination. Of the seventy-eight cards, twenty-two belong to the Major Arcana, (trumps, from the Latin for triumph, trionfi). These represent the tale of a souls progress, The Fools Journeya path with as many pressures as any heros jaunt, but with a less prestigious name. The tarot, forged in medieval society with Western hierarchies and ideals, replicates our movement through life: spirits are born and swathed in innocence. We set out as wayfarers on a voyage strewn with trials, tribulations and triumphs. The search for meaning, the connections, the chaos, the disillusionment, the delights, the gratitude, the reckonings and the mercies, every fleeting epiphany of an examined lifethe vast world of tarot contains them all.

The querent acts on instinct and sets out on a journey.

My father likes to say he was lucky, that God held both his hands and stopped him from killing my mother. Even Job, he notes, would have lost his infamous patience.

Imagine if you had one parent in the jail, and another one under the ground. Whenever he muses on this, his Italian-accented English elongates every vowel in the first word to sound like hes pronouncing the name Imogene. He made the case for Divine Intervention again over the phone while I sorted through piles of clothes to pack.

I cradled the receiver against my shoulder and sighed. Papa, please, thats a terrible example of good luck.

There is magical thinking involved here. He believes Jesus stepped in and worked behind the scenes as consummate theatre stage manager, ensuring we all played our parts, shielded from critics in the audience. This is the type of luck that led to rabbits having their feet amputated and used as accessories for keychains in the 1980s of my youth. The Step right up and try your luck of the carnival barker with guaranteed entertainment but no discernible winner. Everyone-quit-complaining-about-inequities-and-grab-a-bootstrap luck. Stop-looking-at-the-stars-while-lying-in-the-gutter and get-back-in-the-game luck. The luck of the draw, not the luck one could count onwhich I once overheard aptly described at a billiard bar: If not for bad luck, thered be no luck at all.

Luck, from the late Middle English lucke, absorbed from the German. People bounce back faster from disappointment, roll with lifes sucker punches better when they think they are favoured by chance. Lady Luckthe Roman goddess of fate and opportunity known as Fortunararely smiled on my folks. She grimaced during their fast courtship (two weeks) and winced through their thirty-six-year acrimonious arranged marriage. Maybe she wiped her hands of them at the wedding, threw her hands up in the air in that classic southern Italian gesture: What do you want from me?

Id venture to guess the only way she acted as benefactor for my parents union at all was through their theme song: O Fortuna, the opening and closing movement from Carl Orffs composition. Every time I hear the dramatic score in a film, from the first warning plea of the choir through to the steady whispering beat that builds to a frightening crescendo of cymbals and drums, I suspect that this song reverberated through my paternal grandmother Femias heart as my future parents made their way through the village with a procession and got hitched.

My dad insists that the Lord watched out for himis certain the biblical sky dignitary dealt the cards for the game of Scopa my father played throughout his life.

And if I didnt marry the woman who ruined my life, I wouldnt have you. I got what I wanted in this world: someone I could talk to. I prayed for someone reasonable and I got you.

Honestly, I think you could have held out for more, and it wouldnt have appeared greedy.

Ive worried about my father for so long, permanent wrinkles have etched into my middle-aged forehead. The first nightmare I ever had, as a seven-year-old growing up in the west Toronto suburb of Etobicoke, was about my father in life-threatening danger. My parents had settled in the municipality of Alderwood, a sprawling working-class neighbourhood of carbon-copy bungalows. A smattering of trees dotted the cookie-cutter landscape of Thirtieth Street bordered by factories, highways and strip malls. In the strange setting created by my child psyche, my dad sat at a kitchen table on the lawn of a classmates home, a girl who terrified me in elementary school. My father sat calm and serene, unmoving, as a gang of cartoon aliens attacked himall replicas of the Great Gazoo from