History On My Tongue
The fig tree has taken off and blocks the sun, but it feeds me dark-skinned juicy fruit. The low hanging ones make breakfast a treat. The higher fruits are out of reach, but I can’t complain about the tree’s generosity for ten days here in Calabria, under the roof of my ancestors. This home was a dowry for my grandmother in 1905, a building that was already 100 years old. Not sure if my great-grandfather or grandfather renovated it by adding a two-story section to the right side of the building, enclosing the outdoor staircase into an indoor one and adding an eat-in kitchen with a rustic kitchen attached. The rustic kitchen had a dirt floor and a tin roof that was used for slaughtering a pig in January, cooking in cauldrons on open fires what needed to be eaten immediately, such as, chocolate-flavored blood pudding. The intestines were washed and filled with ground meat and spices, making soppresatta (Calabrian dried sausage). They would hang to dry from the wooden beams. On shelves would be jarred tomatoes, fruits and vegetables preserved for the year. These messy jobs made a rustic kitchen necessary. Thanks to the foresight of my parents, the home remains in my family today. The rustic kitchen is now a sunny sitting room in this centuries-old home that shelters us with memories of our visits and hints of long-ago lives, captured in framed portraits on walls.
My first visit was in 1953. The floors were made of smooth worn stone which were replaced with tiles in1965. I was too young to hear in them the sounds of my father’s birth and those of his siblings. Wish my dad had kept the originals, but it was the sixties and he wanted his American creature comforts installed, serving him and my mom for annual visits for over forty years. We are the next generation who insisted on air conditioning and WIFI in 2013 and 2023 respectively, allowing me to write here comfortably as the sun heats up the garden into the 90s.
Beyond the sunny sitting room is a covered patio that is cool in mornings and evenings. Sometimes when I sit out there and savor the taste of figs, I can hear the voices of family and friends who passed through years ago, sharing stories of my dad’s youthful escapes. He was incorrigible, leaving his home every morning to follow the footpaths throughout the outer town limits with his friends who were too poor to have shoes. Wanting to be one of them, he’d hide his shoes after leaving the house and put them on when he returned. On many occasions he sneaked into the house, dropped his overalls on the floor and slipped into bed without his mother’s notice. She would complain to my grandfather that when he returned, she’d give “un couce in cullo,” a swift smack on his backside. When they found him in bed, pretending to be asleep, my grandfather insisted she not disturb him.
Dad’s troublesome reputation preceded him. He loved taking communion several times during mass, irritating the priest who threatened to hit him with a candelabra. The fact that he carved his initials in someone’s 1920 expensive car was nothing compared to the rock that he threw at the windshield of another visitor, cracking it with his sharp aim. The furious driver exited the car, threatening him with a rifle, but my great-grandfather interceded with his shotgun. Later he tied my dad to a tree, smacked him on his backside so hard that my dad claimed he got a headache.
The US has been generous to my whole family who immigrated from there, letting them live the American dream of hard work and success, but the stronger history that emerges with a bite into a fully ripe fig hides in nearly three-foot thick concrete walls and in the smiles from hanging portraits. It calls in the sound of the church bells from a centuries-old church named for the village patron, Saint Frances, and floats in warm winds that pass through the olive groves, blanketing the hills of Calabria, elevating me into timelessness.
A reminder of the feudal system that governed this village speaks in the tower of the Baron’s tomb. A Norman style square cut-stone structure rests outside the cemetery walls apart from the residents who farmed the land the gentry owned for several centuries and still do. The Baron’s palace, where the great grandson of the feudal lord lives today, takes up nearly a city block smack in the middle of the village. The giant doors open into an enormous court yard that once welcomed horses and carriages for the family. The present Baron owns acres and acres of land that are no longer cultivated by stooped over farmers whose families, including my dad, crossed the street when older Barons walked the village. Farmers have been replaced by wind turbines. No longer rich in property only, the present landowner gets the rental for each of the dozens of twirling wings on poles that dot the entire countryside. Modernism here speaks with churning blades on top of a parched worn countryside, in the many cars that are parked in the narrow corridors, and found in square air conditioning units attached to the outside walls of centuries-old homes. These accessories accentuate the passing of time in a land that does not knock down structures, replacing them with newer ones as we do in the US. They remind us how to hold onto irreplaceable foundations.
My current visit is short in days but long in history. May the experience stay with me until I yearn for figs and when I need to be reminded of who I am and where I came from.