Waterfall in the Heavens: Growing Up in Rural Sicily in the 1940's

By Mario D'Arrigo

Poverty is relative and when growing up in a village in which most of the people you know are in similar economic circumstances, no one is poor – that's just life. And so it was with young Mario growing up on the foothills of Mount Etna, Sicily in the 1940's. He tells the first person account of a place and time frozen in the middle ages, of the customs and traditions of a bygone era, of pride in and strength of the family, of reverence for one's progenitors, of bombardment during a passing War and its aftermath, of trips up Mount Etna to tend crops on its slopes and gather wood for the cooking fire, of a river of lava that threatens a village, of summer days exploring vineyards and fruit groves, of found money and stone fights and witches and werewolves and ghosts and Catholicism and miracles and hypocrisy and ignorance and kindness and intended and unintended cruelty.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Feb 28, 2018
• ISBN: 9781543966015

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Copyright Mario D’Arrigo 2017, 2018

ISBN: 9781543966015

In the first day or two following the eruption of Mount Etna, the flow was not easily visible during the day from Passopisciaro, but at night we could see a twisted ribbon of orange-red, breaking the darkness like a glowing waterfall in the heavens…

Table of Contents

PREFACE

INTRODUCTION

RETURN

DISPLACEMENT

AFTERMATH

ABISSINIA

EDUCATION

FREEDOM

BLOODSPORT

ETNA

SANCTIMONY

BICYCLE

POLITICS

FESTIVAL

FASCIA

DEPARTURE

EPILOGUE

GLOSSARY OF SICILIAN TERMS

PREFACE

I should have sat down separately with my Mother and Father when they were young and recorded their life stories, and those of their parents and siblings, the places they roamed, the people they knew and the kind of life they had. Of course, I never did and it’s now decades too late. When we’re young we don’t think about ancestry or the individual lives who make up the genetic line that culminates in the person that we are. We’re too busy wrapped up in our own lives and in raising our own families. But with most of us there comes a time when we begin to question who we are and where we come from. And so it was with me fifteen or twenty years ago.

I recognized that it was too late for me to obtain my parents’ stories, but it wasn’t too late for me to tell my own story for my three children and now six grandchildren ranging in ages from 20 to five. As I got into it so long ago, I struggled with the form my story should take. I was also still working full time in my legal practice (I’ve slowed down some recently) and the time I had to devote to writing the story was limited. But the urge to tell it, and the encouragement I received from my family, egged me on and eventually the story began to take shape. As suggested by Lewis Carroll, I went with the obvious of beginning at the beginning and proceeded chronologically as best as I could remember, until I came to the end.

Although I’m the voice, my parents are the central characters of my story, both of whom grew up on the foothills of Mount Etna in Sicily, married and had four sons during the first half of the 20th Century. My Mother was the force in our lives that pushed us forward in her never-ending pursuit of coming to America by taking advantage of the fact that she was born in West Virginia before returning to Sicily as a three-year-old. My Father was a kind and loving man who was happy to have my Mother be in charge of day-to-day matters while he struggled to make a living for us during the hard times of the post-World War II 1940’s.

My purpose in telling this story is to try and convey to my children and grandchildren what it was like to grow up in Sicily in the 1940’s, to introduce them to and acquaint them with my Father and Mother, and to better acquaint them with the person I have become by portraying the person that I was. And so I dedicate this memoir to my firstborn daughter Michelle and her husband Rob Cote, and my two grandchildren, John (third year at Wesleyan University) and Jane (a freshman at Franklin and Marshall College), to my daughter Melissa and her husband Cameron Gale, and my two grandchildren, Anne (third year at Cazenovia H.S.) and Connor (sixth grade, Cazenovia Middle School), and to my son Michael and his wife Barbara (Charlie) Hudson and my two youngest grandchildren, Dylan (first grade, Fayetteville-Manlius school) and Leonardo (nursery school).

I wish to acknowledge the love and support I received from my wife, Elena, over the many years it took me to get to this point. I also wish to acknowledge the valuable help I received from my daughters, Michelle, Melissa and Charlie, and from our friend, Janette Hudson, in editing my words and making them flow better.

October 15, 2017

Mario D’Arrigo

First Revision

This memoir was first self-published at the end of February 2018 after extensive editing. Nevertheless, as I reread the memoir, I found that I wasn’t very happy with the way I expressed certain thoughts here and there. There were also sentences that could have been written better and more clearly. So, I undertook to re-edit the book from as fresh a perspective as I could muster, and this is the result.

I also decided to change the cover artwork, but not because I didn’t like the stylized Mount Etna with my little village in its shadow and workers in the field. Rather, it was because I came to believe that an old family photograph taken in 1942 (as best as I can make it out), is more representative of the character of the memoir.

February 15, 2019

Mario D’Arrigo

INTRODUCTION

I’ve carried some vivid memories in my head for seventy plus years, ever since I was about four years old living on the foothills of Europe’s most active volcano, Mount Etna, in the 1940’s. I’ve forgotten some names and I only have vague impressions of conversations, but my memories of the geography of my village, Passopisciaro, and the places over which I roamed, of the people with whom I interacted, of the impressions I formed of some events, and most importantly, of the emotions seared in my brain by the events, seem as clear to me now as those of yesterday.

I believe most lasting memories record emotions, with places, events, and people forming a backdrop for the memory. It is the smell, the taste, the feel, the joy, the sorrow, the love, the hate, the kindness, the cruelty, the shame, the guilt, the fear, the terror, of the event that we remember. And in most cases, we bury our memories as we go about our daily lives and give them little thought. We need a reason for opening the drawer within which our memories are locked, to bring them forth and examine them in the light of day and relive the events and the emotions engendered by them. My reason for opening the drawer was to record names and places for my family and progeny, to offer them a trip in time and space to another century, another place, another culture, to give them a sense not only of who I was and have become, but also to paint a portrait of my parents, grandparent and other extended family members, with perhaps a level of arrogance in the belief that my stories of growing up in Sicily may be of interest to them and possibly others.

I have found that when one examines a particular memory in detail, the emotions which created it come rushing through and we relive the event all over again, for good or ill. In that sense, writing this book over a period of some fifteen or twenty years has been cathartic for me. I’ve learned a bit about myself and who I am, and I’ve learned to appreciate the love my parents had for me and my three brothers, and the hard and dreary life they were forced to endure, made more difficult by the responsibility of four boys.

I’ve tried to remain true to the memories I retell, without embellishment. Details are added by necessity, but I’ve tried to make them consistent with the memory described and the emotion invoked. The dialog is mostly made up and is used to convey the feel and impressions I remember of the recorded events. The chronology of the events is close but not guaranteed. Time is amorphous and memories disconnected vignettes that need some event to anchor them on the arc of time, and therefore subject to interpretation. The commentary that runs through the book comes from the perspective of a life lived fully.

The events in this book are limited to the time I spent in Sicily until my embarkment for America in 1949. It’s not that my memories stopped when I got on the boat, but rather that embarkment seemed a logical place to end the story consistent with the subtitle of the book. Still, questions have been raised as to what happened in America to my family, close and extended, and to that end, I’ve included a short epilogue using as a backdrop my Father’s death in 1975.

Grief affects all of us differently and I had always thought that losing a parent as an adult must be easier to bear. After all, the children need the love, security and protection of parents, not adults disconnected from parents and dealing with their own families. But in my case, that could not have been further from the truth and I’ve tried to convey to the reader the depth of grief I felt when my Father died, without judgment of others in the manner of grieving, or the depth of grief which they may feel in the loss of a loved one.

I.

RETURN

I opened the front door and saw a stranger in uniform standing on the sidewalk, smiling. It must have been midmorning because his left side was lit by the sun in sharp contrast to the dark, windowless front room of our home. He had his army garrison hat in his hand, black boots that reached just below his knees, pants tucked in with a slight hang over the top of the boots, and brass buttons and decorations on his dark brown shirt. A duffel bag rested on the sidewalk to his right.

My Mother was directly behind me as I gazed at the stranger before me. She wore a worn dress down to her calves, no shoes and an ever-present apron which she untied with a quick move of her hands behind her back and placed on the dresser to her right. With tears streaming down her cheeks she slowly moved toward the light of the open door as he stepped in toward her. They met, hugged, and for a moment they seemed to become one. For me it had been a lifetime of absence. For my Mother, it must have felt like an eternity of raising three young boys without a father; of struggling to put food on the table for three hungry mouths, of worrying herself sick that he would return from the War maimed or not return at all. They stood entwined as my Mother wept for the moment, or perhaps for the time lost or the time gained. At last they released each other and my Father picked me up and hugged me.

"This couldn’t be my little Mariuzzu I left behind, could it?"

My given name was Mariano, after my Mother’s father, but ever since I can remember I have gone by Mario (Mariu in Sicilian), which had a couple of Sicilian variations: Mariddu and Mariuzzu, the latter being the diminutive of Mariu. My two brothers, Vincenzo, (in Sicilian, Vicenzu) three years older than I and seven at the time, and Antonio (Antonino was the diminutive, shortened to Ninu in Sicilian), two years younger and two at the time, were in the courtyard when our Father walked in. Vicenzu was old enough to remember our Father when he was drafted to fight in the Italian Army during World War II, but Ninu, like me, simply saw a stranger.

The day Papá came home, my Mother retrieved several eggs, saved for a special occasion, from the top drawer of the dresser by the front door. Eggs, when she could get them by trade of goods or work, were not for eating but a necessary ingredient for baking biscotti, a generic term we used for any kind of baked sweets. Biscotti were always a treat because it was so seldom that she had the ingredients to bake them. But today was a special occasion. That evening we celebrated my Father’s return with biscotti and stories from a faraway place called Sardegna, of comradery with fellow soldiers and the harsh conditions under which they lived, told with warmth and humor as he would a fairytale.

The love my Parents had for each other was transparent and lasted a lifetime. This was made the more remarkable by the fact that their marriage was arranged by their parents, a common practice which still lingered in Sicily in the first half of the 20th century. To be fair, in most cases such arranged marriages were subject to the approval of the parties. And so it was with my parents. Their parents suggested the marriage, then they met (with chaperones), decided on each other and entered a period of chaperoned courtship which culminated in marriage in 1935.

My Father, Carmelo (Carmelu in Sicilian; we called him Papá, with the emphasis on the second syllable) was released from the Italian army in the Summer of 1943. I was four. As he told it, he was a mule skinner stationed in Sardegna, the Italian Island off the knee part of the boot. He was fortunate enough to have avoided the front lines and returned home physically whole, and by all appearances, emotionally unscarred by the War. Home was a rented two room (front room and back room) apartment in Passopisciaro, Sicily, on the main street that circled Mount Etna at about a thousand meters above sea level.

Papá was a man of small physical stature, slightly shorter than my Mother (we called her Ma; she simply was not a warm and fuzzy Mamma). He was proportionately built, wiry and strong from years of physical labor. His skin was a light olive color with fine facial features, brown eyes and slightly balding in the front. His hands were calloused from years of hard labor. He had a ready smile, a gentle manner, reserved demeanor (almost shy) and an air of kindness which seemed to radiate from him. He was one of five children, a brother and three sisters, born in Solecchiata, some four kilometers to the east on the same road that circled the Mountain.

The Sicily I knew had two kinds of men, those who were family oriented, kind and gentle toward their wives, children, friends and strangers, like Papá, and men who were mean and beat their wives and children for any or no reason, who were all too common in my world.

Papá started working in the fields at a very early age and never finished first grade. He knew enough of the alphabet to learn to sign his name and was otherwise illiterate. He learned early in life the class distinctions between the rich landed gentry (patroni) and the vast majority of us at the bottom of the economic ladder, and hence, the social ladder. He learned to take his hat off and bow to the patroni who might be on horseback and were addressed as cavaliere; he learned to accept the authority of those in the higher classes and not to talk back; he learned to