Camille Cusumano

Of Gods and Fathers appeared in Far From Home, ed. Wendy Knight; 2004, Seal Press.

Of Gods and Fathers
By Camille Cusumano

We would be nothing but for our blood. It’s a debatable point, but one on which my father and I agree. That we share any hardwiring–let alone blood–always gives me pause. My father is a man who is given to remorseless outbursts of misogyny. He yells at the TV’s female announcers to “go home and have babies.” He makes no bones about his belief that with women in the workplace the world is in a downward spiral.

“I’m sorry, I can’t change the way I feel,” is his summary dismissal of any argument. Except for a rare lapse in restraint, I no longer argue with him.

I was preparing for my third trip to Sicily from which my blood flows, on both maternal and paternal sides, when my oldest brother, Jim, said, “Take Dad and Mom.”

It was a sound request. My father could recite Sicilian history, chapter and verse, yet neither he nor my mother had set foot on the birth soil of their parents. He needed to see Sicily before he died, but hadn’t I become a world traveler in part to escape my father and his constricting views? As I pondered the prospect of being abroad with my father, Jim, known affectionately as Numero Uno, added resolutely, “Spare no expense, I’ll pay.” Done deal.

It’s one thing to visit a Greek temple. It’s another tothink that maybe one of your very own ancestors built that spectacular rise of well-proportioned stone. Fanciful as it is, that’s the thought that has often flashed through my mind during my trips to Sicily. Unbeknownst to Americans, Sicily has more temples than Greece, having been part of the Roman, Greek and Byzantine empires. Ask a Sicilian about this, however, and you will learn that the great mathematician Archimedes was born in Siracusa. Ask my father and you will hear that Dante was enchanted by the polyglot Sicilian language and that God planted the Garden of Eden there.

My father’s relentless boasting of Sicily’s undervalued greatness inspired my first trip to the island in 1976. Panicky about meeting my father’s cousins, I made a pilgrimage of sorts to the Valley of the Temples in Agrigento where four of these monuments stand in a harmonious line on a ridge overlooking the Mediterranean. I had no idea how to invoke the support of the temples’ gods– Castor and Pollux, the patrons of sailors, the mighty Hercules, and the moody Hera, but I left feeling fortified.

More than 20 years later, I was there again, with Dad and Mom in tow. We found the same pink and gold maritime light suffusing the shrines where divine auguries transpired 25 centuries before. The irony that the cult of the Great Mother was responsible for many of these stone relics may have escaped my father, but it gave me silent pleasure.

A softer patriarch at age 78, my father sat on a ledge in the scant shade of an acacia tree and said his rosary. He needed to rest the weak heart and lungs that lay behind a serpentlike scar down his chest. Twice he has had his rib cage cracked open, like a crab, so doctors could reposition vessels and tubes to keep his heart pumping properly. During one episode, his heart stopped beating for a few minutes. (“He’s got more bypasses than L.A. has freeways,” my siblings and I have joked.) He has come back from the brink more than once, with part of him inexorably tough as nails.

Leaving him to pray, my mother and I slowly climbed the ridge to pay homage to the gods and goddesses of our ancestors. As she and I rested in the long shadow of the 34 fluted columns of the Temple of Concordia, I thought about my father. Weak and vulnerable and in need of my navigating strength, both physical and mental, he was once as invincible and almighty as any Greek god.

When I was growing up, the fifth of his ten kids, our family of twelve sat down to supper together every evening. The routine was as familiar to each of us as church liturgy. My mother, by Dad’s decree, served us kids first, him last, then sat at his right side. We remained silent until we had bowed our heads as one to say grace. At the height of the Cold War, we tacked on a prayer for peace to the Blessed Virgin Mary, the Memorare. No one conversed until our father, who sat at the head of the rectangular Formica table, gave the word and sometimes he didn’t. As we ate every morsel of food on our plates, Dad’s forbidding dark eyes glanced around to make sure each one was eating a hunk of bread, the better to fill so many bellies. No one dared think of leaving the table until we were all done and then only with express permission: “Dad, may I please be excused?”

Failing to show up for this sacrosanct meal without prior excuse or even arriving a few minutes late could mean a whipping with his belt (sons and daughters both). He was unswervingly strict and adherent to corporal punishment.

That tyrant is all but gone, I thought, as I drove my parents around the isle of our forebears, remembering the good ties that bound us, too, like our shared reverence for a fine repast. We strolled Palermo’s Vucciria market purchasing olives, sesame seeded bread, asiago, fresh figs, and tomatoes for a picnic lunch. My father and I were entranced by the city’s ancient sites-the Cathedral, the Royal Palace with its Palatine Chapel, and Monreale with its glittering mosaics. My mother hung back, distracted or bored, but he and I absorbed the awesome message of the architecture-an Arab arch or Moorish dome here, a Norman steeple or Roman façade there. The unusual mix bespoke centuries of cultural one-upmanship. How much historical grief over all the trampling infused our own blood?

Driving to Taormina, the aristocratic jewel over the Ionian Sea, my mother sat quietly in the backseat, a place she has known intimately in deference to my father for more than 60 years of marriage. We stopped often in tiny villages to appease my father’s restroom needs. At each stop, he found some friendly stranger happy to listen to him recall his first tongue. “Mi chiamo Calogero, no parlo Italiano, parlo Sicilian’ antica.” (My name is Calogero-his baptismal name, changed by his first school teacher to Charles-I don’t speak Italian, I speak old Sicilian.) Leaning on his cane, waxing proud on his heritage, my father fit right in with his audience of aging, bent villagers.

Through the sun-drenched countryside we traveled, my father frequently breaking into songs, some of which he had made up decades ago. In his younger days, his moods could turn on a dime. His dark ones were hellish, but when they were good, all was right with the world. Then he would express his love for us kids and my mother, often with hyperbole—he “loved us more than life itself.” He told the little kids funny stories (“the world will end when there are no more Popsicle sticks.”) and led us through sing-alongs (Oh Marie! and Bill Grogan’s Goat were some of his favorites). He wrote love songs to my mother (after he had tested her good nature by being demanding).

In Taormina, his charismatic side was fully engaged. As my mother perused the art in a gallery, he and the artist, Giolini, entertained patrons with a folksong, Quel Mazzolin dei fiori. At the ancient Greek Theater, he admonished a guard, “Stop whistling and sing through your mouth!” They broke into Faniculi, fanicula. His antics continued through dinner. The waiters all but kissed the ground he stood on addressed him as Padrino, as he bragged of his ten kids and thirty three grand- and great-grandkids. When he pretended that the perfectly cooked veal parmigiana was only so-so, the headwaiter said, “I will kill the cook.”

On the other hand, the drivers, especially those in Palermo who have zero tolerance for floundering tourists, awakened a shadow of my father’s former hair-trigger road rage. As I drove, he blurted out, “G’head, you ham ‘n egger, you couldn’t give us break . . . Ah, cryin’ out loud, blow your horn out the other end. . . that’s right, cut in front like the gavun’ you are. . . ”

I let him chatter away, perhaps still harboring the little girl who feared him. The first eighteen years of my life I was my father’s obedient daughter, before I went on to flout his flags to God, country, and family: I didn’t marry or bear children, practiced Zen Buddhism and dropped Catholicism, and demonstrated against wars–all of which he believes are right and just.

Between 13th-century stone walls in Cammarata, my paternal grandfather’s village, came a defining moment. I was tense negotiating a narrow cobble-stone alley built in the Middle Ages for hoofed beasts, which now passed as a road for motor vehicles. The ocher-colored feudal dwellings closed in, not even inches from either side of the shiny purple Opal. Suddenly, a loud clap resounded in the car-the side-view mirror banged shut as I got too close to the wall. My father had been trying to guide me on his side but I preferred my own animal instinct. I muttered the F word under my breath, a word I hadn’t ever used in his presence. He sensed my disapproval. “I was just trying to help,” he said wistfully.

There, to the sound of metal scraping stone, I realized that he feared me more than I feared him. In that instant, I felt sorry for him. Not for the first time. I had felt sorrow that both his father and his mother died minutes before he reached their deathbeds; that he had been injured in World War II and sent home with a bad back for life. He had come stateside on a Friday and showed up for work on a Monday, having no transition period to civilian life. He was edgy after returning and given to slapping his one-and-a-half-year old son, born in his absence, for slamming doors. He was haunted for years by the gore of war in the South Pacific, of which he spoke freely, especially during his drinking career. After taking an early retirement for the back injury, he became in mid-life a full-fledged alcoholic and only went into recovery at age 58 after several stunning spectacles.

Exiting from the tight 13th-century walls onto an open
piazza, we faced the modern four-story home of my father’s first cousin, Nicola Tuzzolino. Ten years my father’s junior, Nicola, with dark features and swarthy skin like his American cousin, was my father’s alter ego He and his wife, Concetta, live on the top floor of their hillside dwelling. Their three sons and one daughter reside with spouses and children on the floors beneath. Nicola seemed as bereft of demons as my father was rich in them.

The two cousins hit if off well and we spent days over sumptuous Sicilian meals of pasta, farm-raised lamb, and homemade wine, talking family, laughing, discovering uncanny coincidences-like both their firstborn sons are chemists. One afternoon my mother recounted the story of my first visit to Sicily, during which Nicola called my parents in Pennsylvania, not realizing that it was three in the morning there. My mother, half asleep, yelled into the phone, “Hello!”

Nicola would reply, “Pronto!” Hellos and prontos went back and forth across the Atlantic several times until my mother woke up my father, saying, “It’s Mussolini, he’s calling collect from Sicily.”

Nicola’s offspring, all college educated, worked as professionals, while Nicola farmed several hundred acres of land including a parcel left behind by my father’s father. Throughout our first week there, my father pestered Nicola to take him to see the farm. Nicola put it off, until, at last, one afternoon we drove the ten kilometers to see this fertile irrigated family land.

We spent hours touring the farm as Nicola proudly showed us the many crops that he had cultivated: pears, oranges, and apricots. We picked apples, persimmons, and small white and red grapes; we gathered tomatoes, eggplants, cucuzza, zucchini. Nicola’s nephew Toto picked up runner vines and tied them to the wire fence and I picked a blade of wheat to take back to America. The land, golden in the scorching summer sun, stretched clean and clear for acres as far as the eye could see and in my depths I felt a sweetness and an unspoken grief. In America, my father’s progeny have fared well materially, but relative to the Tuzzolino clan, we are decidedly land-poor.

Perhaps it was this grief that led to the misunderstanding. “Where was my father’s land?” my father innocently asked Nicola who was rankled and suspicious that we had come to reclaim what was once my grandfather’s. Nicola defensively repeated the story we already knew–that my grandfather’s mother had returned to Sicily after World War I and given Nicola’s family the land in exchange for being taken care of until her death.
“No, no,” my father winsomely protested, “you don’t understand, it is your land, I don’t want it. I only want to see where my father worked.”

I understood what Nicola never could. My father wanted to harvest stories, salve a wound, not abscond with land. He wanted to understand another side of his titan of a father, the tough immigrant who let America’s work ethic do him in by age 51. He wanted to imagine the youth who herded sheep, watered plants, slept on a hillock, chewed a blade of grass, bathed naked in the stream. My father was only nineteen when his father died, too young to down-size the god to human.

As Nicola shrugged and pointed off in some undefined distance, my father retreated from the subject. In no time, they were back on an even keel, Nicola back-slapping my father whom he respected deeply, not least of all for siring a passel of bambini. My parents enjoyed the remainder of their visit, attending many festive celebrations, including the Feast of San Calogero in Naro and the Feast of Jesus of Nazarene in San Giovanni-Gemini. And my father even deigned to visit the grotto of Santa Rosalia in San Stefano. A beautiful but uppity woman of the Middle Ages, she resisted men’s advances in favor of a hermit’s contemplative life. Visitors must go down on bended knees to see her shrine. They must crawl through a narrow opening to pray at her altar. Even my father did this.

Say what you want about the guy, he has come a long way.