My Mother Is a River

By Donatella Di Pietrantonio and Franca Scurti Simpson

The sensitive and powerful story of the love between a mother and her daughter, a love “gone wrong from the start”. When Esperia exhibits the symptoms of dementia, her daughter takes care of her and help her to rebuild her disintegrating identity. Day after day we learn about the characters of the extended family, the small village still without running water or electricity, in a “bright and harsh” Abruzzo.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Calisi Press
• Release date: Nov 4, 2015
• ISBN: 9780993238017

Donatella Di Pietrantonio

Born in Teramo Province, Abruzzo, Donatella Di Pietrantonio completed her studies in the provincial capital, Aquila, and now lives in Penne. Her short fiction has been published by Granta Italy, and her novel, Bella mia, was nominated for the Strega Prize and won the Brancati Prize. A Girl Returned, her third novel, won the Campiello Prize.

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Table of Contents

My Mother Is a River

Acknowledgements

Donatella Di Pietrantonio

My Mother Is a River

Translated from the Italian

By Franca Scurti Simpson

Published by Calisi Press in the United Kingdom 2015

Calisi Press, 100 Somerset Road, Folkestone CT19 4NW

www.calisipress.com

[e-mail]

ISBN 978-0-9932380-1-7

First published under the original title:

MIA MADRE È UN FIUME

by Elliot Edizioni, Rome 2011

Copyright © 2010 Elliot Edizioni s.r.l.

Translation Copyright © Franca Scurti Simpson, 2015

The moral right of Donatella Di Pietrantonio to be identified as author of this work and of Franca Scurti Simpson to be identified as the translator of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. This book is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publisher, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s, translator’s and publisher’s rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

Cover and book design by:

Charlotte Mouncey, Bookstyle (http://www.bookstyle.co.uk)

This book has been translated thanks to the contribution of a translation grant awarded by the Italian Ministry for Foreign Affairs

Questo libro è stato tradotto grazie ad un contributo alla traduzione assegnato dal Ministero degli Affari Esteri Italiano

When I came across My Mother Is a River for the first time, I loved its simple yet powerful story so much that it prompted me to launch Calisi Press to publish it.

I could also recognise the difficulty and frustration of dealing with the devastating disease that dementia is. I know many people who have been deeply affected by this, including some in my immediate family. For this reason I decided that Calisi Press would help raise funds for the Alzheimer’s Society and we will donate 50p for every copy of this book sold, at least for a time.

I would like to thank our sponsors -

The Italian Connection, LPA Services and

Terracotta Restaurant - for making this possible.

Franca Simpson

Publisher

To Tommaso and Giacomo,

my two different loves

Some days the illness eats away at her emotions too. The body is listless, it leaks the emptiness that drains it. It loses the ability to feel. It doesn’t suffer, it doesn’t live, not then.

The check-ups are for my benefit. They reassure me; it wasn’t I who made her sick and the progression is slow. Some abilities are partially preserved. I go with her, I look after her, I am a good enough daughter.

The promenade is deserted at this time, and the waves rumble darkly as they break and retreat, grinding up sand and shells. I’ve parked some way back so that we can walk together a while. My mother walks on her own, but she has slowed down. I link my arm through hers; I can smell the Adriatic Sea on the sleeve of her jacket. On the opposite shore Fioravante, the prisoner, starved on one boiled potato per day.

She relaxes, we fall into step together. I ask her if she likes the smell of the sea. She says, sort of, but she was born in the mountains, she prefers the smell of grass and flowers. She has never stretched out on a beach. It would’ve been good for her bones, I observe. She laughs. It’s too late now, she’d never wear a swimming costume now.

On the other side of the road, the twinkling lights of the restaurants. I suggest a surprise to close our day: let’s stop somewhere and eat some fish. No, better not, we’re expected for dinner. Another time, I promise.

Your name is Esperia Viola, known as Esperina.

Like a violet, you were born on 25th March 1942, in a house on the border between the districts of Colledara and Tossicia. It was the last house before the mountains, a little stone that had rolled down accidentally on the eastern side of the Abruzzi Apennines.

It belonged to your paternal grandparents, and the families of their two sons were raised there.

Fioravante, the elder, was short, with a large and flat chest, strong arms, a little bow-legged. Look at the photographs. A solid body, made for working the land, or perhaps the land had shaped him so because he had toiled on it since he was a child. What do you think?

He was intelligent and passionate. Look, here you can see his deep black eyes. He was a brawler when he was young. He liked to tell of that time he knifed his neighbour for stealing two fat heifers from the summer pasture. Fioravante then went into hiding for months, hoping the thief wouldn’t kick the bucket. He would come down from the woods in the dead of night, and help himself to the bread and cheese his mother had wrapped in a white dishcloth with a blue stripe and left for him on the table before going to bed. He’d breathe in the smell of home and open the bedroom door a crack to reassure himself there were two sleeping outlines in the darkness broken by the starlit window. Then he’d be off again with his mule for company, along the safe paths known only to himself.

He was a hothead, was Fioravante.

You are the daughter of his first leave as a soldier in the war. He came back three times in all. He had married Serafina in October and in February he was already leaving for the front. A fine heifer, he would say to flatter her. Tall, slim and solid, she would stand up straight and graceful in spite of the hard work on the land, with the animals and the housework. And with the girls, later. From the time she had been a little girl she had practised carrying on her head the basket with lunch for the family, digging or harvesting the fields far away. She’d challenge herself to keep it balanced without using her hands when walking on broken ground. You did the same, later on. Your sisters too. There were hardly any mishaps, God help you otherwise. Serafina used to tell the story of how she had once tripped and spilled the macaroni on the grass. She picked everything up and said nothing. Nobody noticed a thing.

Only age eventually forced her into a stoop, sudden and severe, as if all the burdens of her life had descended on her at once, from a great height. It pained her deeply; I think she died of shame. Not just of that, of course, there were a lot of things. But becoming crooked was the final blow to her dignity, always guarded and protected, and reflected in her posture.

You want to know why I’m laughing? Because your mother walked like a model, but if she had to pee outdoors she’d just hike up her skirt, pull her underwear to one side and do it there and then, with her legs apart. Standing up, like a mare. I saw her, I did, really I did. I know she never did that later, but I remember her when she was younger. She understood, later.

Having tracked down the reservist Fioravante to his hiding place and sent him to war, Italy granted him and Serafina, both barely able to read and write, the gift of a postal service. She wrote to him that she was well, and pregnant with a Scialomè, the nickname his family was known by. The real surname didn’t count for much, it was only for documents.

Serafina never failed in predicting the sex of her daughters. She just knew. Even with that first boy, she knew, and had cried the whole time, knowing she would lose it. Her womb was a curse for boys. It would welcome them, but wouldn’t nurture them for long, and would let them die inside her once they already looked like little boys. She miscarried another after the third girl, and another one after the sixth. Her pregnancies were like that, symmetrical.

How she managed not to perish herself, one of those times, is a mystery. She’d start to bleed, and feel the labour pains come on, then the contractions would expel a nameless and listless tiny body from a womb that was not meant for him. For a few days Serafina would lose appetite and speech, and drink nothing but water and mallow tea, to make up for the tears she’d shed. Then she’d get up and go back to work - that is, she’d get on with life.

To his wife’s letter the soldier Fioravante replied with one bearing only a name. She laughed and accepted. Esperia was the gypsy-haired coal woman who, years before, had come for the firing with her brothers and charmed your grandfather’s woods with the voice of a sylvan siren. She could bewitch anyone listening, including Fioravante. With that name, he bestowed all that beauty onto his daughter, and you’ve always sung and whistled the soundtrack to your own life.

You would perform in front of your sisters singing traditional songs, like Fly Away and All the Fountains are Dry. You can only remember a few verses of Fly Away. No, it’s not because you’ve lost your memory, you didn’t like the other song, you found it too sad. I can look up the lyrics, if you like. We might even sing a duet, but I’m not as good as you are.

The radio was the second thing to transform your life. I’ll tell you about the first another time.

It came when you were sixteen or seventeen, because Fioravante was a shepherd on the foothills of the Apennines and he was poor, but also earnest about Progress. He talked about it all the time, always with a capital ‘P’.

He sold some animals and bought it, a battery-operated one at first and then a larger model with a record player. It was pale yellow and brown, with dials on the front and a turntable for the LPs on top, protected by a lid. The world burst into your home. Your own home by now, no longer with grandparents, uncle and aunt and cousins. Too many arguments. Your home, two kilometres away. The radio filled it with whistling and buzzing, and harsh voices, Slavic, Austrian. It was difficult to tune into Italian voices, you had to turn the dials this way and that, ever so slowly, and the next time, the station would be gone. Here were singers and lyrics, you’d learn a song by heart right away and sing it cheerfully. Can you remember any names? Yes, today you can. Luciano Tajoli, Nilla Pizzi, and then Claudio Villa, Domenico Modugno. You loved the Sanremo music festival,