Sketches Of The Common Saints

By Vincent Oppedisano

Sketches Of The Common Saints is an audacious, funny, and wistful portrayal of a Southern Italian family and the genuine world they inhabit.  From the ominous beauty of Reggio Calabria, through the baroque cityscapes of Torino, to the promise and sometimes harsh reality of Toronto's working-class streets, these nine interrelated sketches are reflections of common folk and their journey towards a kind of sainthood in the culmination of a dream. 

 

Told from various perspectives, in clear and fast-paced prose that often dances with the poetic, each story is conveyed through an unfiltered lens of blunt realism imbued with imagery that evokes the common beauty of a working-class culture navigating the trials, tribulations, and triumphs of a willing and necessary diaspora. Steeped in a traditional world where the sanctity of the family and the suffocating beauty of the Catholic Church often intermingle with the dark doorways of iniquity and the unforgiving weight of burden; these people face the emptiness and the absurdity and the bounty of life, with a jaundiced eye and an unbridled passion, offering no apologies and putting on no airs. Taken on their own, or as a part of the larger narrative, the stories befit a boisterous Sunday table replete with heaping plates of pasta, carafes of homemade wine, and the fullness of life unfolding.
 

 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Alyriel Publishing
• Release date: Dec 20, 2023
• ISBN: 9798223290605

Vincent Oppedisano

The author has been writing for many years. Even as life has been happening and he's been busy making other plans, he has always been writing. Now he has finally decided, not only to write, but to be a Writer. He is a proponent of great literature and recommends reading Hemingway, Celine, Kerouac, Eliot, Dostoyevsky, and as many works of the Western canon as a life of reading will allow. He believes, with unwavering conviction, that just like great music and great art, great literature is great for a reason and it should be read with voracious audacity; detractors and decolonizers be damned. He currently lives outside of Toronto with his family and he writes.

Book preview

A Good and Beautiful Woman

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Lady of silences

Calm and distressed

Enza set the frying pan on the hot stovetop coil. She grabbed the bottle of homemade pure virgin olive oil, which had been sent to her in a care package from the old country. She poured a good amount onto the centre of the pan’s building heat above the coil’s orange glow. She waited. She listened for the heat of the oil to match the heat of the pan. She took hold of the handle and gave it a swirl so that the oil spread evenly across the gritty old skillet as it began its almost imperceptible bubbling. She introduced four links of hot Italian sausage, they immediately sizzled and steamed in the oil. She turned the sausage to get an even heat on all sides ensuring that it permeated into the pork filled casing with the tasty chunks of fat slowly melting their drippings within. She watched and listened closely. She always listened when she cooked. She believed with unwavering faith backed by empirical evidence that the flavour of food could be seen and heard, and sausage was no exception. In the same way the flavour of bacon could be seen and heard as it sizzled and curled to its crispy end; the flavour of sausage could be seen and heard as it whistled and bounced to where the casing gave way just enough so that some of the internal juices oozed out to help hasten the frying. She knew that the earliest sighting of the juice would be her cue to remove the sausage from the pan and set it aside. She never cheated too soon, she never slipped too late; it was an unrepeatable process of finely tuned perception. She finished chopping the sweet bell peppers and left them on the cutting board beside the already chopped onions and crushed garlic. She gave the sausage links another turn to keep them even. She waited, she listened, she watched.

The frying pan told stories as it sat on the burner dutifully doing the work. It was the same frying pan Enza brought with her from the old world cast iron darkness of Calabria; the same worn and scratched but solid and reliable frying pan that had served her well through endless tours of duty in the kitchens of her life. That simple and sturdy frying pan had seen all the complications and vulnerabilities of her world over time; so when Enza heard the back door open and slam shut and she saw her eldest boy, Salvatore, come stumbling into the kitchen looking and smelling as though he had just jumped off a playground spinner into a puddle of vodka, she gave her trusty sidekick a quick glance as if to say, ‘well old friend, history repeats’.

Salvatore walked what he thought was a straight line past his mother, hoping she wouldn’t notice, although it would have been virtually impossible not to. Even in the aromatic splendour of the sausage cooking, it was clear that Salvatore reeked of alcohol and cigarettes; he was only eleven. Enza was not going to let this pass; she could not let this pass.

Eh you, come here, she called out to her guilty looking young son.

Me? Why? I have to go do my homework. Salvatore tried to weasel out of it by pretending something virtuous. He rarely did homework.

Ah you do your homework later, now you come here.

But...I really...

Come here I say...now!

Ok Ma, he said, sealing his fate. Salvatore shuffled towards his mother but in one last attempt to escape the inevitable he held his breath, somehow hoping this action would remove all the vice that permeated his hair, his clothes, his being.

She leaned closer to make sure she wasn’t imagining things, and mid-lean, her nose confirmed what was already quite clear. She stood up straight and with lightning quick precision gave him a crisp uncontested slap across his face. Salvatore offered no resistance. He had seen it coming, it was obvious it was coming, but he quickly made the calculation that accepting the slap and moving on was the best course of action; if she knew the whole story there would have been a severe escalation of hostilities.

Salvatore didn’t cry, his mamma had taught him not to cry, crying never solved anything she always said; sometimes you couldn’t help it though, sometimes emotions went that way, but never let anybody make you cry, never let anybody make you. He didn’t cry; he just sulked away to get himself clean and sober. Enza went back to her cooking with no remorse. It was her job as his mother to keep him in line, and though she usually used her words her parables her aphorisms her cautionary tales; for this she had no words; this one called for violence, plain and simple. She knew it would not stop him from doing stupid things, but she knew he had to know there were consequences; they could come in any form, but they always came. Her hope was that enough variations in the justice she served would teach her children that the universe would not be so kind when it meted out its own. 

Enza watched and listened to the hypnotic hiss and sizzle of the oil scorching the casing of the sausage, imposing itself, making the sausage pop and move in the intensity of its heat. The singed pork meat and slowly liquefying fat sent up an aroma cutting through the smoke, besotting the senses, and filling the room with memory. She remembered sausage and peppers frying in her mamma’s kitchen and how the small and poorly ventilated space they lived in, with no interior walls to even give the illusion of more than one contiguous misery, filled with smoke that settled from the initial pleasant aroma of her mamma’s cooking into a greasy distillate of pork meat and oil, falling like a heavy cloud in the aftermath, sticking to the floor and the furniture and their clothes and their hair. That memory meandered to where time present and time past coalesced in the recollection of her youngest brother, Eugenio, coming home reeking of alcohol and tobacco. She remembered her mamma, insane with anger, grabbing hold of the frying pan hanging from a hook in the concrete wall over the cast iron stove and administering a beating that spared no accessible bone in Eugenio’s body. An assault that ended when she landed a wallop square on his head, snapping the handle from the pan. She remembered the hollow clang of the pan connecting with Eugenio’s skull. She remembered Eugenio going to the ground with what must have been a concussion, then, not realizing the pan was broken and the attack was over, jumping up on wobbly legs and managing to find the doorway and never looking back. She remembered her mamma being horrified that her delinquent son might cause others to question her ability as a mother. She remembered her mamma being upset about the travesty of her only frying pan breaking over her delinquent son’s hard head. There was no concern about his head, she knew his thick skull could withstand more than a frying pan. It was the frying pan she was concerned about. It would have to be repaired, anything that broke would have to be repaired, there was little replacing done in those times, there was no money to replace things. Enza remembered borrowing a frying pan from her aunt in the meantime. It was a very good frying pan, cast iron and sturdy. It served the family well even after they had the broken one repaired. It remained with the family because a confluence of events, and the vicissitudes of life, left it to them, forgotten and unclaimed and unreturned and eventually making its way across the ocean with Enza.

The old pan on the stovetop sizzled and hissed louder; the sausages had spilled enough of their juice, it was time to remove them. She sliced the links into two inch pieces then set them aside. She pushed in the onions and garlic and then the red and yellow peppers from her cutting board, always stirring beneath the smoke rising. She listened for the crackling dissonance of the onions and the peppers, waiting for desistance as they blended into one unified and colourful contorno getting ready for the sausage. She stirred until the vegetables stopped crackling. She reintroduced the two inch slices of the near golden brown sausage. She let it sit. The melange of pork, onions, and peppers yielded an aria of sound, colour, and smoke that leapt from the trusty old frying pan out into the airspace over the aging stove flowing from the kitchen to the rest of the world. Enza was just getting started. She had raised the curtain on her dinner concerto and it promised to be exquisite; dinner was when she truly shone. If her breakfast was Brahms, her lunch Beethoven, then her dinner was clearly Mozart; Bach was always reserved for Sundays.

Enza was a true student of the gastronomic arts; not some polished chef stepping out of a culinary school with a clean white apron and an air of pretention, but a pure artist taught by her mother in a baptism of wood fire in modest rural kitchens perpetuating the tradition of all pastoral Southern Italian women who came before. It was a rite of passage, a crossing of the threshold from little girl to young woman, but a young woman capable of running a household. Each dish was a memory handed down, passed forward through experience, and rendered with a deep and lasting sentiment that traced the sweep of time from its infancy on the bronze shores of antiquity. Some recipes may have been written down but the majority were simply rote and every dish was a revelation no matter how many times it was prepared.

While the frying pan played in perfect harmony with everything else on the stove, Enza stepped back from the performance, removed her apron temporarily, fixed her hair, dabbed the perspiration off her brow with a paper towel, adjusted her skirt and her sweater, and like a proud conductor gave her stovetop orchestra a glance of approbation before summoning her daughters, Tessa and Romina, to set the table so she could finish patching two pairs of jeans where the two boys, Salvatore and Giovanni, had torn the knees to shreds from the outside rambunctiousness of boys.

"Tessa, Romina, consati u tavolo, put the plates and glasses. U papá coming soon and soon we eat." Six o’clock on the nose, that was always the time without exception.

Ok Ma, we’re coming soon.

"No, you come now. We going to eat soon, u papá arriva."

"Papá, why do you care so much what he thinks?" Tessa said as she gathered the table cloth from the cupboard.

Ya, why are you so worried about what he thinks? echoed Romina.

Enza ignored the reclamations and headed to the basement where she kept her sewing machine. She expertly patched the boys’ jeans in a matter of minutes and was back upstairs before the girls had finished setting the table.

Eh, come on gelles, you move too slow.

Ma don’t you know we are in the middle of the Women’s Liberation Movement? Women don’t have to cook and clean and set the table and worry about what the man wants, Tessa said, channelling the voices of the movement.

"Huh, what is...Ma chi dici?"

What I’m saying is that you don’t have to do what your husband says, you are a strong woman and you can be independent.

"That’se stupidaginé...the strong woman take care of her family, the husband part of the family. I control, no your father, you juste consa u tavolo."

Enza didn’t trust movements. She was aware of the developing praxis but she rejected it. She was not a feminist. In fact she scoffed at feminists. She accepted the patriarchal tilt, she understood its utility, and she used every square inch of what was available to her in that realm.

You could get a job and have your own money and then you don’t have to always worry about asking him for money, Tessa said, unable to let it go.

Yeah Ma, you could have your own money and buy whatever you want and you could leave him if you wanted to, he’s not always nice to you, said Romina, probably taking it too far. It was her unfiltered nature, sometimes Romina took it too far.

People no always nice, said Enza with the weight of her cross to bear fully in her voice, You make the best as you can...now both shut upe and sete the table.

Enza had rare moments of reverie when a prince would come to take up her cross and lessen her burden. But those were only moments and those were rare and Rocco wasn’t a reverie. He was a man of his time and station, a man who could not express himself in ways that allowed a woman to put down her cross. He was a good man flawed and sometimes lost to the visceral pantomimes that flirted with destruction; yet in the hard silence of regret, his heart was full. Enza knew that, she knew him.

"Well it’s not fair that he comes home and dinner is ready