The Loving Touch of Piano Man

By Anna Cimini Guglietti

High atop a luxury condo overlooking Lake Ontario, Anna has a bird’s eye view of her world but not herself. She explores her life and the forces that shaped it.
She was born in the middle of Italy’s boot, in the middle of a hillside, in the middle of 1946. The war had just ended; it was the start of the baby boom, the start of mass immigration to North America, and the start of a transformative time for women. She would experience the joys of motherhood and career, as well as the pangs of divorce and addiction... and would overcome all by an improbable second act.
In this memoir, Anna journeys from convent to independence. Through indestructible force of will, she emerges from the middle – with its change, chaos, and confusion – to find happiness, harmony, and love.
From subversive to steamy ... from passionate to practical, The Loving Touch of Piano Man will make you stand up and cheer.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Anna Cimini Guglietti
• Release date: Apr 29, 2022
• ISBN: 9781777963316

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The Loving Touch of Piano Man

Anna Cimini Guglietti

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Copyright © Anna Guglietti, 2022

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations embodied in reviews.

LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION

This book is a memoir. It reflects the author’s present recollections of experiences over time. Some names and characteristics have been changed, some events have been compressed, and some dialogue has been recreated.

Print ISBN 978-1-7779633-0-9

EBook ISBN 978-1-7779633-1-6

Printed and bound in Canada

For my daughter, Vivian, and my granddaughters Julia, Christine and Sarah, so you may have a sense of your roots.

Part I: Abruzzo, Italy

The Middle of the Boot

I was planted in the middle of the boot, in the middle of a steep hill, in the middle of summer, in 1946.

I was a middle birth between two dead babies.

I didn’t understand my family—sembrava un po’ pazza [they seemed a little crazy]. They yelled, screamed, and gestured a lot with their hands. I could never grasp what they argued about or even some of the language they used. It was a confusing household for an only child, especially for an only girl growing up in a small town where folks learned and helped each other with their seasonal harvests and gossiped to pass the time.

Charitably put, Feudo is a small town. When I was a girl, it was a mere scattering of farmhouses throughout the land, with a cluster of half a dozen homes lumped together at the top of a steep and rocky hill, like a muffin-top or a top hat, overlooking those of us below.

My family seemed to be a favourite target for gossipers: my mother had brought shame to her family by eloping, and my paternal grandmother was an angry person who liked to drink wine.

Growing up with this background wasn’t much fun. It shaped me in ways that caused emotional turmoil for the rest of my life. But it also taught me resilience in the face of adversity.

After some thirty years of self-employment and a ten-year career in shopping centre marketing, I retired to care for the health of family members. I was eager to leave my life story for future generations so that they might have a window to peek through and see what it was like to live in the past. I wanted to give them a glimpse of their personal heritage and get to know me by the choices I made in family, love, and career as I broke away from tradition—something that shamed my father so deeply, he never forgave me.

As I started this new project, I found my conscious memory limiting. I signed up for a memoir writing class for guidance and feedback. As we shared our stories, my memory began to re-emerge, to come out of the fog. Oftentimes classmates burst into tears like children while they read, and I realised that I wasn’t the only one with a miserable childhood who had blocked out something that was too painful to carry forward.

As a child, I was an only and lonely girl living in a basic stone structure with seven adults on my father’s side. The only other children in the area were three boys who sometimes got rough, especially Roberto. I have scars on my body—on my leg, arm, and eyebrow—to remind me of him.

I was named after my father’s mother, as expected by tradition. To avoid confusion, they nicknamed me Ninella. I felt unworthy of having my own name.

As it was, I didn’t have an outlet: a sibling, a relative or friend who made me feel wanted. Folks were busy putting their devastated lives back together after the war, but as a child I didn’t understand their personal misery—I took it as rejection. No one seemed to like or even look at me, so confusion filled my mind.

I was so starved for affection then. I remember roaming around a lot, looking for food to bring home. I would find asparagus and bring it home. I would climb trees and look for any fruit remaining after the trees had been harvested. I felt desperate to bring home this food that would bring a smile and a hug from my mother.

A lot of old-fashioned nit-picking and blaming went on between the people in my family—my parents, aunt and uncle, grandparents, and a great uncle who totally disappeared from consciousness—I don’t remember him at all.

After I left Italy, I never looked back. I blocked out the people, times, and places. And there are no pictures to refresh my memory. I was almost twelve years old when I saw the first picture of me with my mother taken for our passport.

Decades later, in our summertime backyard conversations when my mother and I often reminisced, Ma would ask, Why don’t you remember anything? Not even immediate relatives like your grandfather’s brother! We used to leave you with him when you were about three and a half, maybe four.… He was sick.… If something happened to him, you would run out to the fields to get us.

Back then, as I like to think of it, it was perfectly normal to put children to work at a very young age and to indoctrinate them in family beliefs and traditions. Families passed on what they knew—nothing changed from one generation to the next. My mom’s specialty was shame and guilt. My father’s specialty was fear. These methods of oppression were reinforced by the church, and they would keep me company for life.

To my dismay, in life and relationships, I learned through counselling that some childhood belly-aches, once planted, come back repeatedly, like weeds. As I dig deeper, I trace my troubles back to my roots—to my isolated childhood—midway up a rugged hill, in the region of Abruzzo, in central Italy, not far from two seas—sort of in the middle, between the Adriatic and the Mediterranean.

The middle position bears much significance. I’ve lived my life sandwiched between my father and my mother…between my mother and my daughter, between my daughter and her father, between alcohol and relationships—it has never ended.

In 1953 my father left for Canada. My mother, grandparents, and I moved about half a kilometre away from the rented farm to a shabby structure with one bedroom, a basic stone-age kitchen facility, and a shed. My mother’s family owned a storage space, like a shed or granary, which they cleared for us to live in. I cannot picture where we went to the bathroom or where we washed ourselves or how the fireplace was used to cook and to keep us warm in winter, but I am sure it was the latest in outdoor heating and plumbing. I can visualise the tent-like contraption that my mother placed in the middle of the bed with a pan of hot coal to warm it up before we went to sleep.

My mother earned our keep by working on her parents’ farm, and by doing some sewing. In addition, my father sent some money for us to live on.

In 1956, I was placed in a small Catholic convent at Canzano, a larger town that sat on top of an even steeper hill with the Apennines in the background. My mother told me that I was going there to get a better education, but I soon learned that I was there to become a nun.¹ I believe I was told this at the last minute before I was handed over. I cannot describe how ten-year-old me felt—it’s blocked out of consciousness—but even then, I knew the nuns were strict.

I spent a couple of years at the convent before my mother came back to tell me that we were leaving for Canada. Mother Superior was a strict disciplinarian, and her punishments filled my suitcase with demons before I left.

My lonely, unloved childhood affected me. It delayed my development as a woman, deprived me of self-esteem, made me resentful of authority, and caused me to wallow in self-pity. I struggled with relationships and depression—on and off throughout life.

I could lay blame. I could forgive.

In the process of forgiving, I would have to include: the nuns, the priests, the Pope, and the entire Catholic religion. I would have to forgive the political leaders, and my family, who lived under their spell.

I could also forgive myself by letting go of stuff. Not so easy! When I least expect it, I see images and hear verbiage, innuendos and mockery rooted back then. The triggers bring me pain, disguised in fear, guilt and shame. I ask myself: Why? What did I do to cause these feelings of wrongdoing, of condemnation? Whether it was out of fear or the fact that there was nothing that could get me in trouble, I was a good kid. Yet, the small-town insinuations of wrongdoing or sinfulness by the most unforgettable characters I will ever know—the vivid folks in my life that were my family, and the church that put conditions on God’s love—formed manacles that are impossible to break.

It’s mind-boggling to think that in an advanced country like Italy, which the Vatican has controlled for centuries, divorce and birth control are forbidden. Abortion is considered a mortal sin. And families like to keep their sons and daughters at home until they get married. Oftentimes the mother will still cook and do laundry for the new couple or for the sons, should they move out before fetching a wife or turn fifty.

While we moved far away, across the ocean to another continent, the main characters from Feudo and Canzano boarded the ship with me: to make sure I’d remain pure in the big city—and not continue the chain of shame within the family.

My father’s attitude towards women had no flexibility and it never changed. My mother accepted the cultural norm, or she would have had to face being stoned with shame and guilt.

My mother told me that her mother was embarrassed to show her face for a least a month after giving birth to another child. The presence of a baby was proof that she had had sex—a great shame. My father’s mother caused shame because she sought wine wherever she could get it. To top it off, my mother had eloped. Her parents would not approve of my father’s family.²

As I write my story, I look at a few pictures that my cousin Aldo sent me in the late 1900s. I see the remains of the farmhouse where I was born. From a distance it looks like a snail hugging a tree. I re-live my loneliness in the middle of the boot…in the middle of nowhere.

The south end of the muffin-top (or top hat) drops into a valley that abuts a steep cliff of reddish earth rising about fifteen stories high. Far into the east, a few farmhouses dot the land. At the top of the hill is the small cluster of homes where the three boys lived. To the west, there was and still is the maternal home and farmland where my mother and ten of her siblings were born.

All that I recall ever doing in that household is going out to pastures with Nonna and her flock of sheep.

The total population of Feudo was about fifty—if we count my grandfather’s cows.

My maternal grandfather, Biagio, was probably the happiest and richest man in the area. He had the biggest farm, with the biggest house and the most kids to work the land and preserve the harvests—canning, drying, pickling and fermenting different crops. Today, an even bigger home, more like a villa, houses an aunt, cousins, and second cousins… And they still work the land when they come home from their day job or profession in nearby cities. It’s fitting to note that none of my cousins or relatives ever divorced.

On reflection, I have never met anyone who did not have some issue with their family or childhood. I know that we come from parents who themselves come from hurt. I have my share of scars—both physical and emotional. The physical ones I can grin at. But the invisible ones present a different story. Religious indoctrinations, feelings, and emotions etched deeply in my mind have brought me to a few psychiatric couches over the years. But the determination, courage, and strength growing up in harsh surroundings made me a survivor as strong as the rock itself.

My heart has been broken more times than I care to remember, but I never stopped believing in love.

In my mid-fifties, I met my soulmate. His loving touch rounded out my life and changed the shape of my heart.

My Father's Hand

In 2008, when my father was on his deathbed, I visited him every day. We didn’t talk much. I just asked him the usual questions, "Come ti senti? Ti serve qualche cosa?" [How do you feel? Do you need anything?]

I did a lot of thinking... a lot of reflecting as I sat at his bedside at Lakeside Lodge. I thought about forgiving and about making peace. I wanted to understand, and to find some reconciliation in a father-daughter relationship that never was.

My eyes were often drawn to his right hand resting on the bed beside my chair. I wanted to touch it... to connect with it... to comfort it.

I could not do it. I could not touch my father’s hand. A deep fear held me back. How could I be afraid of his hand when it simply rested there, lifeless?

Was I a child all over again?

Day by day I dug a little further into the past, trying to connect some dots, and formulate yet another theory—another speculation—about my resistance towards my father. Whenever I came close to him—unless it was for a practical reason: to help him walk or to shave him—I felt a big knot tighten in my belly.

I transported myself back to what little memory I had of the village of Feudo where Fiorindo Cimini was born March 6, 1922.

I thought about the surroundings that would have affected him, the same surroundings that affected me when I was born soon after he returned from the war.

Early in life we pick up intuitions about our parents and primary caregivers, but we have no words for these feelings. They are fragments: puzzles created by the people in our life. Some of those images follow us like shadows. I carried my share of puzzlements, confusion, and hurt rooted in childhood with my father.

As a child, naturally I was not able to put a name to the feelings I had towards my father. As a seventy-two-year-old writing this story, I still cannot put words to the innermost feelings I’ve carried and how I formed those feelings and attitudes.

I spent a lifetime craving my father’s love and acceptance and never getting it.

As time passed, I drew away from him, losing myself in a world full of different clouds. I was never good at the things that mattered to him. I was not good enough to deserve a look, a smile or, God forbid, a few words of encouragement or praise. Compliments were not part of my father’s vocabulary, nor were compliments part of the local language or household culture either. It was said, "Vanno alla testa" [they go to one’s head].

The old-fashioned mentality about compliments going to one’s head may seem ludicrous, yet it is generally as prevalent today in other parts of the world as it was in that scattered little village where I was born. It wouldn’t surprise me if it originated within the Catholic Church as a form of discipline to quash vanity. And it wouldn’t surprise me if the same belief, with all its hypocrisy, would continue for the next two thousand years.

Lilian, my Estonian writing friend, tells me, It was not just about your father or the Catholic Church. My father, who was a very kind man, also believed that if you praise your children too much it will make them ‘big headed’…full of themselves.

I tell Lilian, "I do not know what words of praise or acceptance from a father may sound like; I never heard them." Instead, my whole being is well-versed in oppressive sounds of criticism and judgement. Earlier in my life, they served me as a source of motivation to achieve more and more until I reached the breaking point of unhappiness. My therapist suggested that I stop trying to prove myself to my father. I was in my early fifties.

Perhaps I could not bear to touch my father’s right hand because of the physical discipline he meted out. But no, the truth is: My father never hit me. He never even punished me in softer ways—not directly, anyway. In his world, discipline was the mother’s job.

And my mother tried so hard to make sure I behaved. She didn’t want him to find reason to blame and criticise her for something that I might have done. "Fai la brava" [be good] was what she said over and over, like a prayer. How confusing! I was a good girl. There was nothing bad that I could possibly do in that rocky hill countryside where nothing ever happened... except chase black snakes. I didn’t have toys or a bicycle or books or crayons or anything to pass the time.

Perhaps I could not bear to touch my father’s right hand because I had learned this is the most highly esteemed position—for a son. Every week at church I recited the apostolic creed that Christ sits at the right hand of his father.

Would Papa have looked at me differently if I were a boy?

How often I’ve wondered, If the boy, his first-born, had lived, how different would my life and relationship with my father have been? The times were such that boys were the big "favour." They were needed all around: to work the farm, to rebuild the country, and to repopulate the military.

The year 2019 marked the seventy-fifth anniversary of D-Day, which represents the beginning of the end of World War II. In commemoration, I took out my father’s picture in military uniform and really studied it. He was handsome. It’s the first picture of him in existence. It was taken for his passport to go to war when he was barely eighteen years old. My eyes filled with tears.

There was something about those tears—they seemed to loosen the knot that resided within me. I was aware that my mellowing has moved like a turtle. Forgiveness doesn’t just happen; it’s fucking hard. And that’s how he would have expressed it: fucking hard. My father was bilingual with swear words. He said fuck as often as he said "vaffangulo or che cazzo."

The tears came to the forefront again this summer while I travelled in Germany. I was on a tour going up the steps to the Cologne Cathedral when the guide pointed out the thin strip of bronze railroad track which the artist had incorporated on the steps to serve as a subtle reminder of the atrocities of the war. My father never, ever spoke about his experiences in the war. That was the way it was then: soldiers came home from war, having seen and felt such horror, and they were discouraged from ever speaking about it again. Nowadays, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is better understood. It has a ripple effect on succeeding generations; I’m sure I am proof of that.

During this trip I also recalled all that my mother ever told me about the start of her relationship with Fiorindo. It was late 1939 or early 1940 when she ran away with him to his family farm. He was gone—taken away in a matter of days—before they could make it to the local municipality to be married. I can’t imagine how she felt... how he felt. How could Fiorindo talk Lucia into eloping with him? He was very good looking. He must have been an equally good charmer to talk her into going with him, even though she knew the risk—she would be disowned; her father was not one to fool with.

Lucia remained loyal and waited for Fiorindo over four years; all the while she worked the farm with a difficult family. On the other hand, what choice did she have but to endure it all?

Ma told me that one day, a normal day—if life could be seen as normal in war time—she was in the barn, maybe milking a cow. She was startled as she looked up. She did not recognise the man standing in front of her. As she put it, He was a skeleton—just skin and bone.

Fiorindo had returned from a German prison³ where he had been held for over three years after Italy changed allegiance.

I want to believe that Fiorindo hugged and kissed his bride without reservation. I say this because I never saw the two of them in close embrace. The stereotype of Italians is that they are huggy and loving, but it was not that way with my father. His generation did not show affection. Times were different: love and affection were not for display. People generally looked serious and severe; display of romantic gestures was condemned. I wouldn’t doubt it if the church was at the root; the nuns taught me modesty and decency must always prevail.

The church made it seem improper to show loving gestures between loved ones, especially between fathers and daughters. The following is a sad example of how this warps even the simplest expression of affection.

When Sarah, his great granddaughter, was a toddler learning to walk, she crawled to the La-Z-Boy recliner where my father sat. Beaming with pride in her new-found abilities, she tried to stand up.

He smirked as he extended his hand on top of her head—as though he might hit her. Sarah squatted down immediately, her smile gone.

My daughter Vivian witnessed the scene. She went to comfort Sarah and looked at me in disbelief. Mom, why did he do that? she asked.

I stayed silent. As usual, I did not want to stir up any conversation that would spoil the nice Sunday lunch my mother was making. I never quite forgot the incident. I don’t believe Sarah ever went towards him again as freely as she had.

The hand gesture would have had no consequence had he had done it in a smiling, playful way or if he was the type to kid around. But he wasn’t a playful person, nor was he one who could show affection. He never held my hand or my daughter’s or granddaughter’s. He never carried me or played with me or put me on his lap... nor did he do so with my girls. Maybe in his world girls were not to be touched—likely another church interference especially prevalent within poor communities where folks are weak and vulnerable towards authority.

What I saw that day with Sarah was serendipitous but remembering and processing what I witnessed became an ongoing theme.

He did have a habit of raising a hand to scare kids, but I had never conceptualised its impact: the fear a child would experience from such an action. He would have done that with me when I was a toddler. I was probably about three years old when I gave up going close to my father.

And so I grew up, feeling unworthy of his love. He talked to me only when he needed me to do something that he could not resolve because of the language barrier. If I didn’t jump to the task, he’d be quick to criticise my mother and me.

I was about thirteen, still learning to speak English, when he was purchasing his first home in Toronto. He asked me to translate the mortgage papers. You can imagine the kind of words on those papers: interest, principal, collateral, prepayment, fixed-rate, variable-rate… What thirteen-year-old has a concept of mortgages? I was not confident in doing so. He said, "Ma che si stupida? Vi alla scuola... e non capisci?" [Are you stupid? You go to school, why don’t you understand?]

Are you stupid? That question stayed with me for the rest of my life. The self-doubt is poisonous.

One morning, while on the cross trainer at the gym, I chatted with Wayne Mhyre who was on the treadmill beside me. Wayne is a retired United Church minister. He took pleasure in sharing the news that his mother Olive had just turned one hundred. I talked a bit about my relationship with my father. He said, It’s too bad your father did not realise that when we put fear in people’s hearts, we take love away.

Wow! How simple... how powerful. How beautiful life might have been if only my father and others like him—the priests and nuns—could have shown a little love.

I have remorse. Too many things have been left unsaid between my father and me.

In his mind, his form of discipline was fear. It’s what he knew... what he experienced... and is what he eventually passed on.

I pulled away from emotional connection with Papa early on. It was the beginning of a long and frost-bound journey.

If he had stayed in his homeland, he might have had a chance at overcoming that closed-mindedness along with his compatriots. As it was, the immigrant experience was yet another tough undertaking for him. As a member of the uneducated, low socio-economic group, he never softened that testa dura [hard head], as my mother called it.

He did have a strong will and strong hands. It helped him make it through life’s severe circumstances: an angry mother who sought wine… four years at war (three of them as a prisoner)… two dead babies... setting sail for Canada without adequate money or language… working on the railroad. And by the time he thought he could relax in his older years, and he felt disgraced by a daughter who left her marriage when it was unheard of to do so within his world.

In the spirit of forgiveness and peace-making, I think about how differently our relationship might have been if only we could have gotten to know each other as human beings—and supported each other as father and daughter.

I can only cherish the valuable qualities I inherited from the hand I could not touch. His determination, courage, and strength have helped me to overcome countless business and personal obstacles.

Lucia

I love the name Lucia. It’s light. It’s happy! It has a musical cadence like Maria or Sophia. Above all: it was my mother’s name.

When I think Lucia I remember my mother’s smile: a simple smile welcoming me with open arms. She’s the only person I’ve known with the name, other than Lucy, the English version.

I keep my mother close to me. I type her name each morning as security verification to open my day-trading account. As I key in Lucia, a bit of sunshine lights up my face.

Just to the left of my computer, I have a picture of her holding a bouquet of roses. She looks cheerful. I captured it on her eightieth birthday celebration with the family and the paesanos at Luigi’s Fine Dining on Eglinton Avenue.⁴

Lucia was born a couple of years after World War I, on January 25, 1920, in Feudo, a rural farming community in the middle of the boot. She was the sixth child in a family of eleven. She was named Lucia Ersilia Pasqua Di Croce. How special is that—to be graced with three unusual given names? I have only one, as did my father and most of my other relatives.

My cousin Massimo, her sister’s son, had the family ancestry researched through the municipality of Castellalto, where she was born.

Records indicate that the family name Di Croce dates back to 1684 in this area—to Marco Di Croce and Virginia Di Domenico.

My grandfather Biagio was born in 1887. He married Marina Di Paolo in 1912. They continued to work the land, grow a sustainable farm and, much to my grandfather’s appetite, they had a family of eleven kids to work and help accumulate more land and more animals.

Very little is known about Marina or Marinuccia as they called her. From the age of two, Marina was brought up by an aunt at Poggio San Vittorino, a nearby village in the province of Teramo. No one (including my mother) was ever able to tell me what happened to her parents or siblings—or even if she had any.

I knew my maternal grandparents as a child. They were reserved… quiet… kept unto themselves: at least that’s how they were with me, and I never felt comfortable, liked, or wanted. They just looked away from me, like I didn’t exist. Their sons and daughters—my aunts and uncles—were equally cold and detached. But those were the times; it’s comforting to blame it on the times rather than the people whose hearts could not humble and break away from the rigidity of their past.

Between 1912, when Biagio and Marina married, and 1920, when Lucia was born, Marina gave birth five times while World War l devastated the world around her. I cannot even imagine how terrifying it would have been. No wonder she didn’t have any loving or nurturing ability left by the time I came along, even if I was her first grandchild.

It’s sad to accept the reality that I did not have a relationship with them—not with my grandparents, aunts, uncles or other relatives. I did not stay in touch after I left in 1958. My mother was the go-between source of news, which I mostly ignored; my memories were not conducive to loving experiences.

Growing up, my mother walked in shoes similar to mine. She told me that, as a child, she followed her father behind a plough pulled by working animals, hoping he would turn around just to look at her. My eyes got watery when she said, He never turned around.

Like most rural folk at that time, Lucia had precious little opportunity to be educated. Grade Three was all she got. What does a Grade Three education give you? Printing, rudimentary arithmetic, and no science or geography. Imagine trying to live in the modern world when you don’t have the reading level for a newspaper. She told me she liked sewing and, unlike her sisters, she managed to obtain some tailoring experience which served her well all her life, both at home and later at Ideal Fur Company on Spadina Avenue in Toronto.

Lucia did not have an easy life.

Her wounds ran deeper than the water-well at the edge of the farm. She secretly fell in love with Fiorindo, who lived on the same sunny side of the big rock, no more than 300 metres away. Her parents would not give her permission to marry the man she loved. They discriminated against his family.

How did she muster the courage to elope at age twenty, in 1940 … knowing that she would be disowned? She told me, There was no other way. I was scared. My father was bull-headed… my mother had no say, although she, too, showed discrimination. I had no choice but to run away and withstand the family separation with all its traumas and consequences.

It made me cry years later when my mother told me her story. She was still full of guilt and shame: as though she had sinned gravely. The Catholic religion has rules. If the rules are broken, family honour is broken; guilt and shame prevail in matters of love and marriage—something I learned the hard way.

Immediately after Lucia made her escape to Fiorindo’s place, living with his family, he was taken away to war in a matter of days. They couldn’t even run off to the local municipality to be married before he left. There she was, twenty years old and having to cope with a new, strange family: his parents, a brother and sister-in-law, a great-uncle, and massive responsibilities on a rented farm. Nor was there any money or much of anything to live on.

She told me how hard it was. Fiorindo’s mother liked wine and tried to get it however she could. His father was nice, but without courage. He stayed out of everybody’s way—oftentimes he could not be found; he would actually hide.

Meanwhile, the war raged around them. During World War II, Abruzzo was on the Gustav Line, part of Germany’s Winter Line. One of the most brutal battles was the Battle of Ortona, in the adjoining province. In that battle, over a thousand civilians died. Civilian deaths are especially unfair: these people are unarmed and untrained; they’re just trying to live their lives.

Life was terrifying and painful all those years from 1940 to early 1945, but thank God, when all is lost, the strength of the human spirit soars. God was by Lucia’s side; how else could a young, pretty woman endure life? She had no family support, no love and no affection in a world full of terror.

They hid their food in cave-like dug-outs so the German soldiers wouldn’t find it. She did not say, and I did not ask, but when I watch war-time movies, I think of her, and I wonder how scared of being raped she might have been. It wouldn’t surprise me if both she and her sister-in-law, Lilla, had crawled underground with their belongings whenever they got wind that the soldiers were scouting the area.

My mother is an inspiration. When I am faced with problems that seem insurmountable, I think about Lucia, and I don’t feel so bad. If she could work up the determination to go on with all the devastation in front of her, I too can endure— her blood courses through my veins.

And not only did she find the spirit to go on during such harrowing times, but she also adapted and managed life in ways that are inconceivable to me. She toiled as an all-around farmhand like a menial labourer. What I find incredible is her ability to learn to grow and make everything she needed, the most impressive of which is the process of growing cotton and linen—from field to fabric—to make clothes.

Yet Lucia, with her modesty, would never boast or show confidence in her achievements—not in all the years that I knew her.

When Fiorindo miraculously came home, released from a prisoner-of-war camp, wasted to skin and bone (as she put it), he was intact physically, but how was he mentally? Emotionally? Would he recover from the trauma in combat—the shell shock as it was referred to then?

Lucia conceived immediately after his return. I imagine they married first, although I do not know that date; they never celebrated an anniversary.

Their first child was a boy. He was baptised but died on the way home from church. I was born after him. Another girl came after me; she, too, died right after baptism.

How low would her life go? How did my mother reconcile the loss of two babies? I experienced losing a girl. I have never forgotten the guilt-ridden anguish—as though it were my fault. I was doing extensive house-cleaning and I blamed myself for causing the waters to break, prematurely.

As a baby, I would have experienced my share of emotions awaiting my mother’s breast. As a toddler, I looked for her out of fear, for protection from my angry grandmother, who watched me, who terrorised me.

As I learned to walk and talk, my mother and I formed a bond. I looked to her for warmth; she did the same; she needed comfort and nurturing as much as I did. She was a strong woman who cried a lot on my shoulder, even when my shoulders were too little to hold up the weight. I developed watchful and protective eyes for her, for life.

Growing up, it made me sad when my father spoke rudely to my mother. How often I’d swallow fear and anguish… and I hated him for taking away her smile, for making her sad. I saw her look defeated more times than I care to remember. But as females at that time and in that culture, we were oppressed and victimised. We were made to feel small. She was a strong woman who could move mountains if she had to… yet, she had a helpless side that captured my heart. I felt her pain, her sorrow; I wanted to protect her—God only knows how I tried, even when I was old enough to realise the futility of my efforts.

On reflection, I lamented for my mother a lot, yet I could never truly share my feelings with her. She confided the grief my father caused her, but I could not talk about mine. When I said how Papa made me feel, she made excuses for him and I felt denied, rejected, as if my feelings didn’t count.

I was her friend, confidant, and emotional outlet. But it did not work both ways.

She also had a close friend that she called on often. She talked to Jesus all the time. "Gesu, aiutaci… Dacci la pace." [Jesus help us…give us peace]

I believe that God’s spirit was her saviour, her comfort, and her rock. And prayer kept her going. My god son, from the time I was sixteen, Pietro (Peter) Gentile, a documentary film maker said to me, I remember your mom well. She always had about her a calm, peaceful, elegant aura. That was Lucia, all right.

Maybe there is a special meaning in a name—in a Biblical name.

Did her baptismal names bless her soul with precious endurance and resilience—to help her make it through life’s unbearable times?

When I started this story, I had a hard time settling on a theme and then it hit me: call it Lucia. As I neared the end, I decided to do a search.

My fondness for, and premonition about, the name was not by coincidence.

Lucia means peaceful light.

Ersilia with an H in front means saint and Pasqua means Easter. I always knew that Di Croce means of the Cross.

If there’s a heaven or paradise after death, I hope my mother’s soul is there, having all the fun she missed out on during her life in a dangerous world and a marriage relationship that only the heart of a saint could withstand.

Mother Superior

It was a sunny and hot summer’s day in 1957 when my mother and I arrived at the gates of purgatory.

As we walked along the dirt road and up the steep hill, Ma seemed sad, remorseful. We didn’t talk or look at each other; if our eyes had met, I would have burst into tears. She, too, might have done the same if she could have seen how sick-at-heart I was. Her eyes did shine when she glanced my way, trying to find words to explain things to me.

The convent will be good for you; you will get a better education with the nuns, she said. If they ask, ‘Do you want to become a nun and serve Jesus?’ say ‘yes,’ otherwise they won’t let you stay.

Given how little there was in that isolated farming community, she believed that the nunnery was the best thing, and this was her way of explaining it to ten-year-old me.

To be clear, this was not a boarding school. It took in only girls who wanted to become nuns—hence, it was free. I