Mythology My mother and father met the day he tried to jump off the Sisto Bridge in Trastevere. It was a good place to jump-he was a fine swimmer, but once he hit the water, he'd be paralyzed, and the Tiber back then was already toxic and green. My mother always walked liked it was raining, head down, shoulders hunched, especially when she was alone, but that day she stopped on the bridge, and saw a boy straddling the rail. She came closer, laid her hand on his shoulder, to pull him back; maybe they scuffled. She persuaded him to calm down, breathe slowly, then they took a walk through the city, got drunk, and wound up at a hotel with stiff sheets that stank of ammonia. Before dawn, my mother put her clothes on and left. She had to get back to her boarding school and my father seemed so restless; she didn't even shake his shoulder to let him know she was going. The next day, she stepped outside the school with her girlfriends and saw him leaning against a car, his arms crossed, and right then, she knew she was doomed. I've always envied her mystical, woeful expression when she speaks of him at that moment; I've always been jealous of that apocalypse. That day in front of her school, my father wore tapered jeans, a blue shirt with the sleeves rolled up, and he was smoking a Marlboro Red-he smoked two packs a day. He'd come to pick her up in front of the state institute on Via Nomentana, and that's when their life together began. "How did he manage to find me?" she'd say. When I was little and she told me this story, she transformed my father into a mysterious wizard who could capture us anytime, anywhere, and I hugged her tight and didn't answer and wondered what it was like to be desired that way by a man. Then I grew up and started pointing out the obvious: "There was only one school for people like you in Rome. It couldn't have been all that hard." She'd nod, then shake her head: he found her because he had to. Though their marriage ended, she never regretted pulling him off that bridge: he was deaf, like her, and their relationship held something closer, something deeper, than love. My father and mother met the day he tried to save her from an assault in front of the Trastevere station. He'd stopped to buy cigarettes and was about to get back in his car when he noticed the sudden, erratic movements of two thieves; they were kicking a girl, trying to yank away her purse. After he threatened them and scared them off, he stopped to help my mother and persuaded her to go back home with him to wash up. He was still living with his parents: when they saw this girl-barely out of her teens, her dark skin, her hair wet from the shower-they thought she was an orphan. At age twenty, my mother had a wide, bawdy smile, smoker's teeth, straight black hair to her shoulders, not a good look on anyone; sometimes she pulled her hair back with a tortoiseshell barrette. She lived at boarding school but often stayed out at night; she studied sporadically. She took small jobs to supplement what her parents sent from America, but she rarely showed up to work on time. From the day he appeared, they started going out: they spoke the same language composed of gasps and words pronounced too loudly, but it was their behavior that drew looks on the street. They shoved past people as they walked, not turning to apologize, exuding difference: he had light brown hair, full lips, aristocratic features; she barely came to his shoulder and seemed to have stepped out of some guerrilla squad. Back then, my father would pop up out of nowhere: often, when she'd be leaving to see her family in America or disappearing for a few days, or much later, when they'd separated, and he showed up at the departures terminal at the exact right moment, or else appeared behind a glass door, or stepped off an elevator, or slammed the car door so she'd look up a moment. She recognized him from his slouched posture, the flicker of his cigarette. He'd find her like a wounded, bleeding hunter looking for his prey, when he has no other senses to rely on and must trust his own raging instincts. My father and mother divorced in 1990. They've seen each other only a few times since, but both will start their story off by saying they saved the other's life. Childhood My mother was born at the end of 1956, on a farm along the Agri river, in Basilicata. During the winter my maternal grandparents usually lodged in town, not out on this half-ruined farm, but that day they were caught in an unexpected snowstorm and so my mother was born in a stall surrounded by cats and bony farm animals. Her parents worked the fields and she spent a lot of time with her grandmothers. One of them was an accidental American, like me: she was born in Ohio, where her father was just passing through-we don't know anything about this nomad or perhaps mercenary soldier, only that he sparked a series of thoughtless migrations-and then she'd moved to Basilicata with her mother, turning into a reverse immigrant who abandoned the future to disintegrate into the past. (At age six I did the same: I moved from Brooklyn to a Lucanian village with more livestock than people.) In town she was treated like a mysterious stranger: though she never used her English, she always had odd products, denim clothes that didn't wear out and candles that burned for hours but never dripped. My mother's other grandmother was silent and vulnerable, her world defined by ashen ghosts in the sky, exorcisms performed with a silver spoon laid on a forehead; she walked barefoot in processions and was convinced she had special contact with the Madonna. When I was little, my mother would take me for walks along the river near where she was born, and it was hard for me to envision this as the mythic rushing water she'd been immersed in to lower her fever from meningitis when she was four years old. As soon as they realized she had a high temperature, they ran to dip her in the river, but according to the doctors and neighbors, that impulsive remedy was useless. The infection could make her go blind, crazy, deaf, even kill her, and all the women watching over her existence, praying beside the cot where she lay twisted and lifeless, voted for deafness. It would be hard, but at least she'd see the world, and find a way to make herself understood. My grandpa Vincenzo was short, dark, and a womanizer. When he and my grandma Maria immigrated to America in the sixties, they didn't go because they were poor-which they were-or because they needed a better job-which they did; they went because he'd chased after all the women in town, and this was painful for my grandmother. He played the accordion at weddings and parties, wore dark pants and rolled his sleeves to his elbows; not a trace of gray showed in his slicked-back hair. Theirs was an arranged marriage: they were first cousins, and sometimes, hearing the village gossip, it was this evil mixing of blood that made my uncles turn out short and my mother eventually go deaf. My grandparents may have violated the laws of proximity and been punished for it, but my mother lost her hearing because she contracted an infectious disease, and my uncles were short like many other children in Southern Italy years ago. Aristocrats and vampires paired off to mate, to preserve the species, while unscrupulous anthropologists insisted that various African tribes did so to avoid being cursed, when actually these tribes had precise codes to prevent lovers from being too close in blood; sometimes a girl couldn't even be promised to a boy with the same animal guide, and who knows, perhaps that's why love ended badly in my family, because of this meeting of irreconcilable ghosts and totems. My grandmother was a wife right out of a peasant novel, meek while he was dazzling, no-nonsense when he was evasive. She had pale skin, a wide mouth, thin lips. As a teenager, she was infatuated with another boy, shy like her, but my grandfather was the one all the girls wanted: she had no choice. Dismissing the jealousy of others-that's the real taboo in a small town. If someone made a mean remark, she'd shake her head or else tap the person's lips; she wasn't often angry. She didn't know how to defend her daughter when they called her "the mute" or said she was a "poor thing" and God should have paid closer attention. But truthfully, my mother could defend herself and had little tolerance for those who didn't understand her when she spoke: not long after she lost her hearing, she poured a cauldron of boiling water on a neighbor who was gossiping about her-she could tell by the woman's gestures and her pitying stare. Afterward, she stood at the window laughing, while her family secretly approved. The only ones she got along with were her brothers and her grandmothers, who spoke in dialect, lips barely parted; their labial sounds were impossible to decipher but gesturing was natural to them and they always touched her, like my mother has always touched me. The truth is, her brothers didn't believe she was deaf, and when they played hide-and-seek and counted out loud and left her all alone in the town's alleys, they didn't mean to exclude her; they just trusted she could find her way. To them, my mother wasn't a victim-she's never been special. Even now, with all of them living their separate lives, their Italian nearly forgotten after sixty years in the US, my uncles speak to her as if she can hear them, in the funny, out-of-sync exchanges typical of splintered families. She was a little girl brimming with energy and hostility. Her parents decided she needed discipline, so they sent her to the nuns at the boarding school for the deaf in Potenza. The teachers grew to know her by her brilliant smile; when not in her uniform, she wore a striped jersey, and she almost never carried a doll. At the boarding school, she was taught to express herself through torture. We never kept large kitchen knives at home because they reminded her of her years in school, when the nuns of the now closed Istituto Suore Maddalena di Canossa would hold a knife on her tongue and tell her to scream, to teach her how to draw sounds from her vocal cords, or made her touch live wires and told her to scream even louder. And so my mother came to recognize the sound of her voice. She was able to speak better than the other girls because after the meningitis she had some residual hearing that faded, then disappeared forever. At first she didn't live in a hyperbaric chamber of silence: her cochlea damage was irregular, so sounds came and went and the world was a place of nightmarish ghosts and sudden howls. She'll sometimes try to describe the terror a person feels when she's hard of hearing and suffers from constant headaches: it's like she lived with someone behind her, always trying to scare her. When we were little, my brother and I actually did this-we'd pop into a room, jumping on her back to startle her, hoping she'd laugh, but our attacks only brought on long periods of silence, and we'd regret our cruelty, though not enough to stop. The potential for ambush had transformed her body for good: it curved her back, made her unable to look people in the eye. At boarding school, my mother learned sign language. She used it with the nuns who were her teachers; with her deaf friends; later, with my father, though he detested signing; but she never used it with the hearing. She never asked her parents or her three brothers to learn it, and she never asked her children. For me, it's not so difficult to understand why she refused to impose her private language on others-I, too, was afraid to speak up, to express myself, for a long while-sign language is theatrical, visible, and you're always exposed. You're immediately disabled. But if you're not signing, you can just be a girl who's a bit shy, a bit distracted. Reading others' lips to decipher what they were saying until her eyes and nerves were shot, speaking loudly, her accent inconsistent, she just seemed like an immigrant with bad grammar, a foreigner. Sometimes when she took the bus and the driver asked if she was from Peru or Romania, she'd nod and provide no other explanation, almost flattered by this mistake. Along with her hearing, my mother lost other things: at boarding school, a friend, in the water. The girls had gone with the nuns to a summer camp by the sea; they wore emerald-green swimsuits and cloth swim caps tied under their chins. One girl went out too far, was unable to scream, and so she'd spun about in a silent spiral, swirling into the sea. It was traumatic for all the girls of the school, and the horror stories they exchanged about how they might die only grew worse: they told these tales at bedtime, these young girls who were all inadvertent dancers, always unsettled by movements and inner torments, and their stories resembled those in nineteenth-century feuilletons, complete with illustrations of pregnant, dead wives giving birth in their coffins-tabloid pieces of another era-only now there was a deaf girl who couldn't communicate and wound up buried because her heartbeat was so irregular, and when they reopened the coffin, her fingers were mangled from clawing at the wood, like Rosso Malpelo's fingers in the red sand mine. My mother told me the story of her dead friend, down to the last awful detail, and to this day, that story is the reason why she's afraid to get on an elevator alone and I'm afraid to go swimming. My mother came home to San Martino for summer vacation until her parents went to America and left her behind, along with her older brother, who was also at boarding school in Italy. My grandparents were about to become immigrants and had to conquer another language without really speaking their own. My mother was studying at a good school; there were good reasons for her to stay in Italy. While she acted out daily, she'd also grown fond of the nuns and got high grades. Actually, my grandmother did try to take her daughter along, but when she met with the girl's teachers, they said, "If she goes, she won't learn how to speak again-is that what you want? For her to feel all alone in a strange place? Can't she come later?" And my grandmother had no answer for them, partly because she was worried about this move herself. Excerpted from Strangers I Know: A Novel by Claudia Durastanti All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
