Twenty-Three
I DON’T KNOW what it is about nostalgia and the past that can make you feel so depressed, yet so drawn to it. Nonna seems obsessed with it. She’ll talk about it constantly. Maybe when I’m her age I’ll speak about my past constantly. I know that when I’m with my friends all we seem to say is “Remember this and remember that.”
I guess it’s the photos that I’m really drawn to. Mama always says that if we ever had a fire the first things she’d grab would be me and our photo albums. Because photos are a testimony that someone did live. A reminder of a past we may have loved or hated. A piece of our lives.
Nonna’s photo of Marcus Sandford fascinates me. That look about him.
The 1940s Australian look. That he could today have wrinkles and be old seems unbelievable.
“He was in love wit me,” Nonna told me quietly on Wednesday afternoon.
She didn’t boast about it. Neither did she giggle.
I looked at her and nodded. “Were you in love with him?”
“Don’t be silly, Jozzie. I was married.”
“It’s funny that this man in the photo exists more to me than Nonno Francesco did. I feel as if I know Marcus Sandford more.”
“I did see him again after Robertino died,” she said quietly.
“It was when Zia Patrizia and Zio Ricardo and the children moved to Sydney and during my last Christmas in Queensland. Zio found a building job. He was doing so well for himself that he wrote to Nonno and asked him to come down to work wit him. That way Patrizia and I could be together.
Nonno had bought half of a sugarcane farm by then, and a lot more Italians and Europeans were being allowed into the country, so North Queensland
was full of Italians. I had no children, so I could work. I was secretary for the Italian cane cutters’ organization.”
“Did many Italian women work?”
“No, not really. Francesco left in November to go to work on a farm farther north so we would have enough money to settle in Sydney, and he came back in February and we went straight down. I was alone for four months.”
“You were alone for Christmas?” I asked horrified.
She nodded.
“Francesco couldn’t afford to come home and then go away again. It was a very busy time. I was sad without Patrizia and the kids.”
“But you had Marcus as a friend.”
“But, Jozzie, it is not like friends of today that you can have over and nobody talks. Oh no. You could not be friends wit Australian men. Not even Italian men. Women were friends wit women,” she said with a definite nod of her head.
“One woman,” she whispered (Italians are so used to bitching about people that they tend to whisper a lot even when the person is one thousand miles away or even dead), “they talked about so much that she killed herself.”
I looked at her disbelievingly and she nodded solemnly.
“Just because of a bit of talk?”
“Talk could break you, Jozzie.”
“I wonder if those people who talk and mind other people’s business go to hell,” I said.
She shrugged.
“He came to see me, though. He said it would break his heart if I would leave. I could see it in his eyes. But I knew that if I stayed I would break my heart.”
“That’s so romantic. I wonder if he ever married.”
She shrugged and told me more.
It was the time of the proxy brides. A number of Italians were married by proxy back then. Some to sweethearts they had left behind and wanted to bring out to Australia, and others to people they didn’t know. Nonna told me horrible stories of men who sent their photos over to Italy and then when the girls got off the ship they would find themselves married to much older men who had deceived them with younger photos of themselves. Or else the Italian proxy wife would have too much fun on the ship coming over and arrive lacking something very important to the old-fashioned Italian male.
The stories, like most of the things Nonna has told me in the last couple of months, are really interesting. Stories of another way of life. Stories of another person who I know but I don’t know. Katia Alibrandi, what happened to you?
Just sitting there patiently listening to her made me realize how much I had changed. I would have been bored by it all a year ago, and because of my past feelings toward her, I would have ignored every word she said.
Whereas I’m beginning to realize that my feelings are changing and we’re establishing quite a good relationship. I like that a lot.
So Nonna found that the world had grown smaller. She moved to Sydney and lived with Zia Patrizia and the kids, but after a while they bought a house in Leichhardt and that’s where my father’s family comes into it.
Leichhardt was at its prime in the 1950s. The gates of immigration had opened and relatives and friends from the same Italian towns found themselves bumping into each other in the streets of Sydney.
Communities started up: the Italians in Leichhardt spreading to Haberfield and Five Dock. The Greeks went to Newtown and Marrickville.
A different Australia emerged in the 1950s. A multicultural one, and thirty years on we’re still trying to fit in as ethnics and we’re still trying to fit the ethnics in as Australians.
I think my family has come a long way. The sad thing is that so many haven’t. So many have stayed in their own little world. Some because they don’t want to leave it, others because the world around them won’t let them in.
All this information I’ve gathered from Nonna and Mama, who was a child of the sixties, I’m going to try to remember it.
So one day I can tell my children. And so that one day my granddaughter can try to understand me, like I’m trying to understand Nonna.
