Mothers and Daughters

He lay on the bed with his hands clasped behind his head, the trouble still in his eyes. She watched him, wanting to touch him, aware of his trouble and disturbed by it, and still frightened by what she had seen and heard from the balcony of the Palazzo Venezia.

“My grandfather was a tailor in Naples,” Renato said, “when I was a little boy, before we moved to Rome.” He did not turn to look at her. He kept his hands clasped behind his head, his eyes on the ceiling, troubled. The thin smile was on his mouth, not a smile of remembrance, not the smile he usually wore when talking of his family.

“He was a very tall man with white hair and a white mustache, very respected in the city, a good tailor. He would always wear a suit to work each morning. He lived just outside the Via Roma in a terrible slum, but he was a proud man and when he walked to work each morning, the people in the streets would say, ‘Buon giorno, Signor Cristo,’ never Giovanni, but always Signor, always Mister Cristo. He was greatly respected, Julia, and I loved him a great deal. I can remember how hurt he was when my father told him he did not want to be a tailor, he wanted to leave Naples to work the earth. I can remember the pain in my grandfather’s eyes. Tailoring was an art to him, a very noble profession. He made all my clothes when I was a boy. I was the best-dressed boy in all Naples, though I lived in a slum.

“He would walk to work each morning and be gone until lunch time when he returned home. My grandmother, Cristina, would have lunch ready for him, and then there would be a little nap, you know, it is still the same today. Then he would go back to the tailor shop and not return home until eight at night, sometimes later, and they would have a small meal, the noontime meal is the big Italian meal, you know that. My grandmother was a very superstitious woman, and she would sometimes do the malocchio for the women of the neighborhood. You don’t know what this means? Favorita, my grandmother would put water into a dish, and into the water she would put a drop of oil, and she could tell by the way the oil divided whether or not someone in the neighborhood had put an evil eye on a sick child or caused a man to lose his job. Nonsense, yes. All nonsense. But she practiced it like a witch — and always when my grandfather was away at his shop.

“She would also perform feats with il tavolo a tre gambe, the three-legged table. This, too, was a fake, Julia. She used the table to call up the dead, you see. A number of women would sit around the table, and my grandmother would mutter her incantations and then call upon a dead person, and he would answer ‘yes’ or ‘no’ to her questions by causing the table to knock on the floor either once or twice. It was considered a sin to call upon the dead, but my grandmother was not a very religious woman, and she used the table quite often, even though my grandfather finally heard about it and warned her to stop. You see, the table gave my grandmother a certain notoriety in the slum behind the Via Roma, a popularity — in fact, I suppose, a sense of power. The women would go to her because they hoped to solve their current ills by consulting with the dead, who were beyond feeling or pain, and my grandmother was the one with the answers, my grandmother could work the table.

“Well, one day, my grandfather could not get home for lunch because he was working on a rush order of army uniforms, very important work, and so he ate a little bread and cheese at the shop and sent a boy home to tell Cristina he expected a big supper that night. He did not get home until nine P.M., starving, and hoping to find supper on the table. There was no supper on the table. Instead, there were three women and Cristina sitting around the table with their hands touching, and at least two dozen other women standing around the room, listening to my grandmother as she recited the words to summon the dead. My grandfather stopped in the doorway of the apartment, unseen by any of the women, and listened. He was really a little curious at first. It wasn’t until later that he got angry. Standing in the doorway, he could see his supper boiling in a huge pot on the wood stove. He was very hungry, but he stood in the doorway and listened to my grandmother’s incantation and then heard her say, ‘Can you hear us, Carlo Stefano? If you can hear us, will you knock once?’

“Well, the table knocked once, and a large ‘ahhhhhh’ of approval went up from the assembled ladies, all except one who said to my grandmother, ‘How do we know this is really Carlo Stefano knocking the table, and not you or one of the other ladies sitting around it?’ This pleased my grandfather immensely because it was exactly what he was thinking as he stood in the doorway. But Cristina had handled scoffers before, and was ready to deal with this one.