MiPOesias Magazine

Grace Cavalieri

Grace Cavalieri has won the Allen Ginsberg Award for poetry, the Pen-Syndicated Fiction Award for short story, the Bordighera Poetry Award, and a Paterson Prize for Poetry. She holds the Silver Medal from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Awards are also from The Witter Bynner Foundation for Poetry, The National Endowment for the Arts, The National Commission on Working Women, and The American Association of University Women. She has enjoyed several state arts and humanities council awards and fellowships. She received the inaugural Columbia Award from the Folger Shakespeare Library Poetry Committee for “significant contribution to poetry.” Read more at her web site www.gracecavalieri.com.
Photo by Kenneth Flynn

In Search of My Grandfather

When my Uncle Emil visited us, after my father's death, he spoke of the painful life of his father, the old Jew. He was shocked about our ignorance of Rafael's life in Italy, and of my father's shame. Why shame? Why didn't my father embrace his Jewish heritage? Why denounce the age-old culture and the religion born from Sephardic times. Was it my father's humiliation of his poverty in this new country? Was the poison of rejection inherited from my grandfather to his oldest son? I guess his father's disinheritance was the stain my father Angelo could not bear. It spoke of doing something wrong—ethics—a new country that wanted no cast-offs.

It was my father, Angelo, who accompanied his father, Rafael Cavalieri, to America on the first crossing. Angelo, the first-born son, age 12 in 1910, came by ocean liner, the Cunard line. Grandfather had friends in high places. First class accommodations across the ocean where Angelo learned to tell time by virtue of a patient Englishwoman. When he reached our shores, the young Italian boy would ask, "What o'clock is it?" He was given chewing gum for the first time, and delighted in chewing and swallowing the whole pack at once. He must have thought these new customs strange to digest.

Rafael, an agronomist, had invented the first gasoline-driven tractor, suitable for riding the hillsides, for cultivating Italy's grape country. Ford Motors took the patent away and won over its production. Surely a gambler, bon-vivant, a poet did not build a strong stall in the marketplace, yet California invited him to America to oversee its new grape culture and vineyards. A gentleman, a scholar, a European authority on growing the precious crop, inventor Raphael Cavalieri was a desirable emigrant. At least the invitation was authentic. At least in the beginning.

Communication. We cannot know at this present time in history—when space and geography are compressed by a single touch of a button on the computer—what it must have been like in the early part of the 20th century. But imagine my grandfather, with limited resources, attempting to find unfamiliar phantom names across the country in a place called California, across an entire continent from New York. The Embassy was mute and uninterested. They had more pressing problems with immigrants. The California connection never materialized. But what was Raphael to do now? His wife was home, packing. Better to tell her when she arrived in the states. Something would work out. Always a gambler, Grandfather played his highest card. Giuditta (Judith) would not be told. Something may turn up. And besides—repudiated by his family—torn from his Jewish roots, he could not go back defeated.

Father, When I see the 1900's walk by in early frock coat from a former time, I see you in grey and brown like New York, its cold cement, small canisters of milk carried downstairs by children who could not speak the language; I hear the chicken freezing In your yard, let loose so you could eat that night. And of the pack of you, squabbling and squawking in the comer …no regard is given by your Queen Mother sitting in the chair, embroidering her dream of Florence where there were stables, the town apartment in Venice, the fields to the North around Pisa, sewing the colors she knew on fine silk. When I think of your father, the professor, coming home, without money, paid once more In love and adulation by the crowds; and how he died with pennies on his eyelids, the secret note speaking of his failures to you, my father, the eldest, did you know where to go with that pain?

My grandmother Giuditta was from aristocracy. (James Joyce said, "All our uncles were kings in Ireland") and she never loved Rafael, family lore has it. She was in love with his best friend who died as a young college student; and, soon after she married Rafael ... Why? Some semblance of love association? A moment of energy moved by grief? There were seven children to come from this cold relationship, my father, the first-born, bearing the brunt of it.

Of course Rafael (we called "Nonno") could not find employment in New York City where he spoke Italian close to its Latin roots. He did not understand the dialect of the workers building the subway tunnels of New York at that time. He did what he knew best. He talked; and, sparkling with wit, made occasional money moving among the Italian intelligentsia of the day as a professional "after dinner speaker."

I cannot bear the thought of the stories my father told me. My grandfather would be invited to soirees on the east side, Sunday afternoons, events with opera singers, notables of the day. And, of course, dinner would always be served. My father was hungry. Although his father was a respected guest, looked successful, and wore a velvet frock-coat brought from the old country, the family lived on very little. When plates of pasta were handed around the table, my grandfather kicked his son in the shins so he would not eat very much. One should not show hunger. I remember a story where Robert Frost told a friend that he had chain marks on his shins where his father beat him. This flashes through my mind when I think of my father on a Sunday afternoon, at 12 or 14 years of age accompanying his charming father, and leaving a festive gathering as hungry as before.

And so when did their family eat well? Once my grandfather's friend allowed the family to stay in Long Island to—we would now say—"house sit" his home. There were chickens being raised on the property. My father said they would actually allow one out each night in the freezing weather and then cook it up splendidly the next day.

No wonder my grandmother (Nonna) who came from wealth, moves through my memories like a sad ghost. She was the ice queen. She never held a child, it was said, or sat one on her lap. My aunts told me she never kissed her children. I am sure this cannot be true but so it is said. Giuditta sat in the corner doing her fine stitching. And yet Rafael dressed up and went out at night to talk with the intellectuals that loved him.

Nonno started an Italian newspaper eventually. I have not completed the research for that part of his life. I do, however, have a copy of the patent for the first gasoline-driven tractor that would have made Rafael Cavalieri a millionaire but, instead helped make Ford Motor Company a profit center. A man of many gifts and no successes, it is no wonder—at the time of his death—a note was found from Rafael apologizing to his family.

In search of my grandfather, I meditate into his life before I knew him, before he was married to a life of disappointment. I see him in the fields around Pisa, perhaps on a Sunday afternoon when he rested from his studies. I enter his reverie. I think what he might think. I see what he might have seen at this time, maybe in October, the most beautiful part of the year in Tuscany. I meditate into Rafael, and this is how it looks:

Leaves blush and curl. One by one things fall away, everything but the sweet earth itself. Already this year he has watched the nest's careful brush of twigs lose a summer song. He leans his bicycle against the tree. Tuscany never changes, they say, but the mountains seem smaller, each season, as he goes north toward Pietrasanta. Only carciofi (artichokes) remain the same, clustered to the earth. Year after year, this time, the tough fruit is left for the last of those who want it. My grandfather picks them here; although he is not a farmer, he knows where on the stem to reach. A scholar, who saw the world as a work of art, he holds them like this, carries them back to his small apartment past the piazza, behind the University wall. Pisa. Can you see the dirt on his hands, as he cups them close, their hard skins, dusty particles beneath his nails.

What moved him to hunger, and when, that night we can't know, but that he ate carciofi, the diary reveals; a plant flavored with olive oil. Maybe after the lamp was lit, a tiny flask of oil was brought out, pressings from a vat near Granoia,. Adding salt from a bowl, the mineral makes a fragrance rise, enough to move him to open the small window and, by luck, hear a nightingale.

Later he will lean over his drawings. But right now he puts the finished leaves in a bowl. This is the man who imagined the gas-driven tractor, which would someday ride the fields of uneven ground. Tonight there is only the vision of a vehicle in his head, for he feels refreshed after dining. How strange to rest, brushing his hand across the linen, smudging it, without thought.

il paese della meraviglia. (the country of enchantment.) He will visit the farmer again, take from his fields, But for now the mind feasts on what the eye has seen, villas with ochre walls, pink terra cotta roofs, factories with old doors, the ride out of town pedaling past olive groves, apple trees pinned against fences, pruned grape vines ready to burst, covers pulled taut over seeded ground, the sun traveling to the sea, peaceful snow on the mountains. Everywhere he looks, the land ready for a new way to harvest.