Lessons of Survival: My Sicilian Grandmother

A chapter from my memoir

                                The Lessons of Survival: My Sicilian Grandmother
                                                By Maria R. Burgio

It was during the formative years that my grandmother shaped me. She was the maker of my success and the ravisher of my love life. She did not deserve the loving salutation �nonna� but that she was. She tolerated me. I was a reminder of her child, my mother, gone bad. �Look at her, just look at that nose of a monkey,� she�d say in disgust.
�Let her alone. Just wait and see what a beauty she�ll be when she grows up,� my red-headed grandfather protected me, his voice so low either because he whispered or had retired into a timidity that made him and his voice disappear. Innocently, I looked at her face as she demeaned me, and I would later know the meaning of that expression which as a child of five already made me feel embarrassed and alone.
        My mother had to immigrate from our hometown of Lentini, Sicily, to come to America, the land of opportunity to many in her country, to escape the constant chastisement of having eloped with my father. She believed that my father�s family was not good enough for her. Uncle Anthony, the oldest, left for Argentina several years before. My mother was next in the line of exodus. My grandmother, grandfather, and the last of their seven children, Theresa, Stephano, Angelino and Mariella, would immigrate with them to Kensington, Connecticut, about 5 years later.
        When my mother decided to leave for New York City, she entrusted my care and that of my baby sister to my grandmother, but my Aunt Theresa became our �saving grace.� My aunt slept with us and gave us this lukewarm affection, an unaffected affection which seemed like basking in the sun compared to my grandmother�s cold hardness and my grandfather�s invisibility. All of this was a daily reminder that I was unwanted by her.
        I remember my grandmother as cold, mean and industrious. She rose before the sun and stayed up late to mend socks and tend to late night house cleaning. In the early morning hours, she used a pail to haul water from the local well to fill her porcelain tub, water she used for cooking and washing. Then she started the charcoal fire for the cast iron stove. She spent her entire day cleaning and cooking, her boney torso a small manikin for a loose floral house dress.
The memory of life on the Mediterranean in the beautiful ancient Province of Syracuse is benign, but it is the memory of her quick wiry body and her ever present anger that remain indelible today. The laser perfect planning with which she ran the house, the finances, and the people around her to the exclusion of their emotional needs was her modus operandi and she was proud of it. I recall her strength of conviction about everything from who would eat the egg laid by the hen that morning to those selected for us to interact with. All this and more were sanctioned by her. She was the last word.
I never understood her rampant contempt and why she exalted herself. It could have been the knowledge of her ancestry, gentle, well-educated folks from Messina, fine-featured aristocratic people whose likeness and character she absolutely she did not share. She stood a scrawny 4 feet 11 inches, dark-complexioned, her prominent nose hanging low, casting a shadow over her thin lips, which made her rather homely as it took up most of her small oval face. The other outstanding feature was her arrogance which never ceased to amaze.
Her property in Lentini was a two-story stucco house with a terrace and adjoining land. It was built shortly after she married my grandfather. I wonder now if the property was part of her dowry. I lived there from my father�s untimely death when I was two and one half years old until I was six and a half years old, at which time my grandfather took me and my younger sister to the Bay of Palermo where we boarded one of the last luxury liners, the Christopher Columbus, bound for New York.
I learned to survive her rejection, and then I survived because of her. As I was abandoned again, entrusted to the captain of the ship, a man unknown to me, I had to occupy myself and behave for 15 days without any real adult supervision. For 15 nights, my sister and I were contained in a claustrophobia inducing berth. She cried and vomited from seasickness. Pounding on the door and yelling for help did not work. I was responsible for my baby sister, then a pathetic little toddler whose tiny doll size fingers clasped mine as though I was big and strong. Ever present, my grandmother�s pursed lips symbolized persistence and endurance. I had learned that. During my greatest fear, I stood stock still, swallowed my terror and put on a self-possessed demeanor which surprised people who later praised my maturity. To the present day, I imagine that my intellectual prowess increased because survival in the jungle of my grandmother�s house prepared me for cold, fierce strategizing during the frightening journey. I learned to assess the potential dangers of unknown adults to my and sister�s welfare, and I watched her like a hawk. A split second decision to grab my little sister�s foot as she unknowingly climbed the ship�s banister saved her from falling overboard. To this day, I remember the sound of her little shoe as it fell on the deck and how she cried that I had pre-empted her monkey bar expedition by yanking on her.
My reason for recording my memories of my grandmother is to come to terms with the belief (and my almost daily reflection) that I am like her in some way. Both a scary thought and an enigma, this belief continues to affect my life. If I am assertive with a disrespectful banker, I believe that watching her haggle with the high price at market taught me the value of money. If I coolly maintain my composure as I seethe inside planning some victory, I think of her doing the same thing. When I am unrelenting in achieving some goal, I recall her tenacity about making money and buying property. For sure, with every property I have bought, I believe that through the four year osmosis, I became this land hungry, respect wanting, property owner. I was a property owner, I think even now, basking in the knowledge of my achievement. Surely, this was her achievement. And I got it from her.
The property she acquired with a vengeance made her the mistress of her home and her village. The villagers called her �Senora,� a title of respect given to those with property and an honorable name. To own a bit of that ancient venerable ground once a possession of the Greeks, and later of the Romans, was an honor in itself. She knew this instinctively and not from any actual education. My grandmother might have qualified as a dunce because she could not complete first grade, but she drew on her ancestry of the Sicilian gentry for energy and her street smarts. She believed herself to be respected and better than most of her neighbors. My pursuit of respect in America was actualized much the same way in the Brooklyn neighborhood where Sicilian immigrants bestowed the same kind respect as in the �old country.�
She was seen as self-sacrificing and as the force behind her family�s success by everyone who saw her outside her home. But all of us who lived with her knew that peace was tenuous and survival was the ability to stay apart, away from the toxicity of the angry driving force to acquire property so that she�d be better than everybody else while simultaneously defaming anybody who did not suit her. Gossip was a lethal weapon in a culture where family honor is everything.
Her pursuit of �respect� was incredible given her true character. She was the most egocentric, cruel, self-serving person I knew. Everything and everybody was subservient to her financial goals. Even the seven children were treated like obstacles. My mother, the oldest daughter, was made responsible for all the younger siblings as my grandmother�s workhorse mentality drove the family. My mother always said that being sick paid off because it was the only time my grandmother was attentive, being very particular about the care of the sick room. But everyday life was a series of tortures for each of them. She demanded strict obedience, and beatings were commonplace, especially if any child dared to embarrass her in public. All her children learned very early in life to stay �with two feet in one shoe,� as the old Sicilian adage would say. My grandmother warranted being rejected and hated; but because she �sacrificed� her life to the keeping of the house, her society bestowed her with respect. She was the matriarch and as a mother was supposed to love, but she was as devoid of love as any human I have ever known. Somehow she never learned the sanctity of a mother�s love; my mother said it was because she was unteachable. Worse than a dumb animal, she would say, the disgrace of her own parents.
Was I like her? The drive to become a scientist in a strange land, without family or role models was like my own private vendetta. The hurdles of language, culture, gender, isolation and the pain of having lost everything, including the home of darkness she provided, drove me to succeed. Her denigration of my existence drove me to rise above her negative expectations. I would show her, and the world, too.
Hers was the only place where one was fed and killed all at the same time. I guess she felt that once she�d done her duty, she had the right to say and do whatever her daily goals allowed. This could include denying second helpings of food which her budget did not allow. I remember my aunt sneaking the newly laid egg, her whisper to quickly drink it raw right there in the hen house forever intermingling food and fear.
Food and fear. Food meant love in any other normal family, but in her house food was the proof of sacrifice. The price of sacrifice meant obligation. Obligatory respect and unquestioning compliance were not given with my heart because the giver was also my source of deprivation. She was the only person who, in the long run, could have wrenched hatred from me.
It speaks to her character that a rejected grandchild remained her responsibility, one she undertook for fear of being shamed. I remember the summer that I left Lentini. I can recall the Mediterranean heat beginning shortly after daybreak. I suffered with anemia, and she had arranged for painful intramuscular iron injections by the local midwife. Medical care at home signaled the status of her well-to-do family. It was a benefit of having money and property. I ran from the house down the steep street; she let me escape the pain as she qualified her attempt at doing the right thing by me.
Was my concept of love warped forever by the cold but consistent giver of sustenance and medical care? How did I translate the lessons of womanly love and make them my own? The woman cooks, cleans, belittles, degrades, ignores and then feeds. Not a logical evolution of emotions, but there it is.
I learned her way of conquering the world, but I also learned that I could not be loved. I did not know what love should look like. What I felt from her was mistaken for love all my life. I married a cruel man who swore his love to me in the same breath that he denigrated me. I left this for worse; selfish, dependent alcoholic men paraded in and out of my life. I would always say that men were either mean and successful, or kind and wimpy. My characterization of men was itself fallacious.
I simply could not separate love from need. When I was needed, I felt loved. I knew nothing about how respect should feel. Being needed felt safe. Then the needy man owns you, because you exist only to fulfill him. That�s not what love is. The dependency of an alcoholic is like the possession by a primitive infant clinging for survival sake, not love�s sake.
I often wonder what other transformations took place in me during the four years I lived with such a villain, the match of which brings to mind Dicken�s slimey character, Uriah Heep. There are still so many questions. Had I really learned how to survive from her? Is this merely the revised version of my past reinforced by my own cold angry mother? Had I learned stoicism in the face of tragedy from her or because of her? This survival thing which kicks in whenever life-threatening events jolt me? Was her legacy of obstinacy and success at any cost passed down to my own mother and even now to me?
For whatever reason, I choose to believe that my grandmother who unrelentingly clung onto life until she turned 100 was the cultivator of my successes in America and of my inability to find true love in any relationship. I frequently find myself holding to another adage in her memory: The good ones die young, the mean ones are afraid of death because they�ll finally have to face themselves.