Grandma Nedjeljka, papa told me that a group of tourists speaking a Slavic language climbed aboard the minibus he was driving back from Scopello yesterday. There were several women and men with five or six children. Papa asked them what language they were speaking and they told him it was Slovenian. They added that they had come to Castellammare for a one-week trip and they were enchanted by Scopello. You remember, we went there once, too; just think, only once, in our car, before papa began driving the “Russo” minibuses. Isn’t it strange—people who visit Sicily as tourists simply must visit Scopello, but those of us who live here go just once in our lives and that’s it; take papa, for example; he drives a minibus but he never goes anywhere himself.
You know, I read an interesting statistic a little while ago in La Repubblica: the residents of a city, or even a whole country, rarely visit local museums unless they’re taken there on a school trip, and that is, in fact, the point of school trips: to give the people who live in a city, or a country, the chance to visit their own national landmarks at least while they’re in school, because once they finish their education it never occurs to them to visit any of the museums they pass every day as they hurry about their daily routines. The journalist who conducted the survey even provided a few specific examples: a fifty-year-old woman, born in Florence, had been working for twenty-five years in a law office near the Florence Cathedral, Santa Maria del Fiore, and even though she passed the cathedral every day on her way to and from work, even though she had smoked in front of the building for the past several years, eyes staring directly at the cathedral, she had never actually gone inside, and whenever she thought about going in, there were too many tourists at the entrance, so she’d say to herself, “OK, maybe next time,” and that’s how her situation continues. The journalist cited similar examples in Paris, London, Madrid, as well as in smaller places with famous landmarks; it’s nearly the same everywhere. I thought about this because papa told me that the Slovenian tourists didn’t go just once to Scopello, which they did immediately the day after they arrived in Castellammare del Golfo, but they liked the town so much they went again yesterday before leaving Sicily, this time on an outing organized by the snorkeling center, and they explored the rocks that jut up from the water and are so famous that people knew about Scopello even in Slovenia. Twice to Scopello in seven days! Papa was on the minibus shift yesterday when they were returning from their second visit, enchanted once again by the buildings, and even more so by the view of the sea and the rocks. Picture this: he told them he understood a few words in their language, and in a mixture of English and Croatian he told them that his mother, you, was from Split, from Spalato; they were surprised and they smiled, repeating the word Split, yes, Split, Croatia, Yugoslavia. As he drove them to Castellammare del Golfo, he told them about you and our family, and about me as well, talking the whole time in a mix of English and Italian with an occasional Croatian word thrown in. He told them my name was Nedjeljka, the same as yours, and that I knew Croatian, the only one in the whole family, and they wondered what my name sounded like in Sicilian, and papa said, “We all call her Neda, just like we called her Grandma Neda, but all her official documents say Nedjeljka.” They understood that you came to Castellammare del Golfo in 1947 because of grandpa, and that at that time the Mafia ruled the city, which papa explained by repeating “boom, boom, boom” several times. “So, what’s it like now?” one of them asked. “Now life is peaceful, beautiful,” he told them; “there’s no more Mafia.” And then he went back to talking about you, how it was hard for you here as a foreigner, and how you visited Split only two times, and when you were about to go for what would have been the third time, you left the airplane ticket in the drawer because grandpa died. He even told them that. I can imagine that he was excited meeting them and he spoke quickly so he could tell them all the things he wouldn’t say a word about to anyone but us, but we know the story by heart; he could tell they understood him and nodded, one of the women even got up from her seat and moved up near him, holding tight to the handles at every curve; she wanted to hear the whole story; she asked a bunch of questions and papa told me, “The way she was listening to me, she must be a journalist, maybe she’ll even write something about it, I’m talking and she’s swallowing the words, her eyes dancing, I’ve never seen anything like it.” When they reached the city entrance, he didn’t leave them at the stop there, but took them downhill close to the market because they wanted to buy some fruit, and everyone shook his hand. There were no more passengers in the minibus; he looked at them once more before returning to the bus station and that was the end. Why didn’t he tell me yesterday so I could bring them here? I might have learned who the woman was who seemed so interested and why she was so excited when she heard our story. But now they’re already back home in Ljubljana, that’s what they said anyway, although I thought I saw a large group of adults and children that looked like them. When I walked past the “Rio Bar” I noticed some people drinking coffee on the terrace, and on the quay a few children were flying blue balloons. It struck me as a little odd that they were all holding the same color balloons and the wind was trying to pull them but the children were running around laughing, music was pouring from the restaurants, and I couldn’t hear what language they were shouting. It’s too bad. I’ve always wanted people from your part of the world to come to Castellammare del Golfo, and now, when people really did come who understand your language, the language that, thank God, I learned from you, I didn’t get a chance to meet them.
I am sitting here by her grave and I’m telling her all this and I know that she’s listening attentively to me and that she’s waiting for me to fall silent and then she’ll say something back. We talk like this every day—I stay silent awhile, then I talk aloud, so long as I’m sure no one will suddenly come out of the house into the garden. Who knows how—but I hear Grandma Nedjeljka answer me, her voice sounds the same as when she was healthy and alive. Sometimes she’ll talk about various things and then she’ll be silent for days. Quite frankly, no one wanted to hear the same things a hundred times, except me, and papa of course, but when he was really tired after driving the minibus, he simply wanted to nap, and not listen to grandma talk yet again about the war, about Split, or even about Sicily. As for Margherita, ever since she was little she had developed a protective mechanism against grandma’s stories—whenever grandma started in, Margherita simply put her hands over her ears, closed her eyes, and made a loud hissing sound through her teeth: “s-s-s-s-s-sh.” I don’t know what annoyed mama more, Margherita’s shushing or grandma’s chattering, but she would keep muttering as she was leaving the room, “Out of spite.” That’s how grandma had only me to tell her stories to about the time before, during, and after the war. First she spoke in Italian, then later, after grandpa died, she began teaching me Croatian, and after six months she said to me, “This is the last time I’m going to speak Italian with you, you know enough of my language for it to be yours as well.” She talked to me, I was interested in swallowing up new words, which seemed to me more funny than difficult, and when I got home from school I did almost nothing else except listen to Grandma Nedjeljka talk and talk. And the more I understood what grandma was telling me, the more I felt she belonged to me and the less ashamed I was of the name Nedjeljka. That’s why I’m glad we buried her in the garden behind the house. Just like she wanted, just like she told us while she was still alive and alert: “Now don’t you go burying me in the cemetery! I don’t plan to be among strangers again when I die. Bury me wherever you want, but not with other dead people.” We sometimes laughed at her request. Papa once even asked her, “You don’t want to be next to my papa?” Mama, doubling over with laughter, would leave the room and I’m sure would whisper to herself, as she always did in such situations, “Out of spite!” “Carlo and I no longer understand each other,” grandma replied. “He doesn’t say anything and I talk.” Once she whispered to me, “He speaks one language, I speak another.” And when she died, papa firmly announced that under no circumstance were we going to bury her in the cemetery. “Either we take her back to Split or we’ll bury her here at home.” Then Mama said to me, “Go ask around and find out how much it would cost to send a body to Split.” “Where?” I asked her. “I don’t know, here, or call someone in Split, or maybe the Croatian Embassy in Rome, you can speak Croatian, your grandma didn’t teach it to you for nothing.” There was a small note of irony in her voice, but her eyes were red, so I forgave her. When we found out that a burial like that would cost three times papa’s salary as a driver for the “Russo” bus company, mama said, “She wouldn’t even want us to bury her in Split. Who would go visit her grave there? Her brother? That old dumbbell with his broken finger? Or that daughter of his who didn’t try even once to contact her in her entire life? And so, in fact, it was mama who somehow persuaded us to bury her here in the yard, under the orange tree. In the same place where the rope swing used to be that grandpa had tied there for papa and my uncles, the same spot where, years later, papa had put a real wooden swing for Margherita and me. Grandma never pushed us on the swing—it was an unwritten rule that that was grandpa’s job, but often when we got back from school we found her sitting on the swing, without making the slightest movement, like a photograph of a woman frozen on a swing—though I don’t know if anyone ever captured such an image or made such a sculpture.
And now, now that you are in that world beyond everything that was part of life and you are once again under this tree—our most beloved orange tree that makes our garden beautiful all through the year—perhaps your memory has returned to you. Perhaps in your death the memory of everything that papa quickly told the tourists has returned to you. Perhaps you again know where you were born and where you lived before you moved here. Do you remember Split? The war? Your mother and father? Your brother? Us? Me, your namesake?
