Moving to our new and definitive house was the pivotal moment of my childhood. My parents had been saving for as long as I could remember and the moving process ended up being long and complicated. What was supposed to be a summer move dragged all the way to December–just in time for Santa Lucia! But that is a story for another time…
One of the main allures of the new house was that it would have a vegetable garden. Or, to be more specific, a vegetable garden that my mom could walk barefoot in. That was the dream. And have a garden we did, quite small at first and growing bigger over the years.
However central the garden had been to the whole concept of the “new house”, though, it always occupied a peripheral position in my awareness. As a matter of fact, it was my grandfather who took care of it for at least ten years; my parents’ dream clashing with the reality of four young children to take care of and no time to tend a garden. He would bike over almost daily in the spring and summer, toll away in the scorching sun for several hours, perhaps accept a glass of water on his way out, then leave as quietly as he had arrived.
For me and my siblings, the garden was just one more chore and the source of an endless flow of overgrown zucchini that were served to us in different guises (pasta with zucchini, stuffed zucchini, grilled zucchini, frittata with zucchini, and so on) but were, at the end of the day, always zucchini. To this day, I can only take moderate amounts of that veg.
My father did eventually take over the garden, but only after I’d moved out, so that the garden is forever associated with my nonno Carlo. Since leaving my tiny, rural hometown in the province of Bergamo, I have always lived in a city and never had a garden. That is, until this summer.
Needless to say, the garden no longer occupies a peripheral spot in my awareness: it is very much front and center. Not a day goes by without wondering whether or not it’ll rain, why are squirrels so ruthless and bunnies such methodical dill-munchers, will the lavender make it, and how come this cabbage over here is twice the size of that cabbage over there, even if they are identical twins planted on the same day?
What amazes me the most, though, is the soil. The rich, dark, fluffy American soil has nothing in common with the reddish, hard, sticky clay soil of my hometown. If in Italy we hoed hard for days to break up the clods, here we had a truckload of the finest compost delivered straight to our yard. I mean, such urban gardeners, am I right?
A soil so rich shouldn’t but produce oversized American veggies like the ones in the masterpiece Nuovomondo (The Golden Door). It is a movie I love deeply for its poetic and somehow muted portrayal of intense and raw desire: the yearning for a new life that’s already imbued with nostalgia for the old, the excitement mixed with fear of an unknown land, the stubborn clinging onto one’s humanity in the face of a dehumanizing selection process.
From the movie Nuovomondo: Italian immigrants with huge fruits and veggies, a symbol of much-desired prosperity.
All these feelings were powerfully brought back to me by a single signature.
I was working on a jure sanguinis citizenship application and found myself imagining the life of a young man who left Italy at the beginning of the past century with his newly-wed and pregnant wife. What was it like to cross the vast ocean aboard a ship – the SS Liguria, the papers tell me – while carrying your first baby? Were they dreaming of giant carrots and rivers of milk, or were they more realistic in their dreams for a new life?
The man and his family went on to settle in Pennsylvania and have many children. The wife passed away before the man, and he eventually applied for American citizenship in his late fifties. This is the story that a one-page document can tell, in even more detail. I am no graphologist but I am pretty certain that his naturalization papers were filled out by a third party. Except for his beautiful signature.
This man’s education probably didn’t go beyond the first grades of grammar school, as we can see that he signs his name in the same trembling cursive that a first- or second-grader might have produced. Yet how powerful this signature is, it contains all the yearning and the desire and the nostalgia and the pride of a man who came with nothing and managed to build a life for himself and his family.
And I am far from being a fan of the American Dream rhetoric, so don’t get me wrong. But the longer I live away from my home country, the more deeply I understand what courage it took to leave everything behind and sail towards the unknown, to grow roots in a new land. I am not new to this kind of musing as I work on seemingly sterile papers, either, but for some reason this one story stood out to me as encapsulated in a man signing his first and last name, and I wanted to tell it.
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