Anne Marie Macari

I was weaned on stories. My grandmother would repeat tales of her childhood in Italy, of her prophetic sister who died there during the Spanish Flu epidemic, of their crossing in the winter of 1919 on the ship that almost sank in the middle of the Atlantic, of her early years in New York City. I was especially taken with the stories that described their lives in Settefrati, their town between Rome and Naples in the mountains, and the antics of her strange, deeply religious sister. I see now how those stories were mythic, that they were not simply narratives, they were tales that created an arc of meaning for her, connecting the poverty and desperation of her lost world, her childhood in Italy, and what she had made of her life since then. She, her mother, her brother and her sister Marietta, spent WWI in Italy while her father was in New York; separated by the war they could not cross the ocean in either direction. She said her sister was an angel on earth who had been predicting her own death. When all three children were in one bed with the deadly flu that ended up killing more people worldwide than the war had, the doctor pointed to my grandmother and said she was going to die. Hours later it was her sister who died instead. My grandmother would say that Marietta had taken her place. Marietta had been praying for months to die and in preparation had insisted on making a pilgrimage her last summer during the yearly celebration of the Virgin. This young child, not yet 10, had declared she was not made for this world and made her exit early.

Wanting to keep the stories and voices alive was, in part, what made me want to be a writer. In trying to preserve them, I have learned how complex stories are. They have layers, improbabilities, they leave us with questions. In their retelling they can become calcified or embellished, or they can morph. Even here I’m giving you only the shell of the story as I know it—so much is left out. But it was also language itself that interested me, the music of it, the spell that words make on the reader, the search for what’s beneath narrative and how to say what seems unsayable.

In 1988 I was pregnant. My husband and I planned a trip to Italy that spring. My grandmother had died the year before and I wanted to make a pilgrimage to her town. The day we were set to rent a car and drive from Rome to Settefrati (that was before Google Maps and the town was not on any map I could find—my father said, drive south to Sora and turn left), my husband delayed and we left three hours later than planned. After he got us out of Rome, I drove, jumping out to ask directions in my basic Italian while he slept in the car. We arrived mid-afternoon when most Italians are napping; the town was deserted. Across from the small piazza was a shuttered store with my name on it: Macari Alimentari. We strolled a bit and then I spotted an old woman walking her dog along the stone wall overlooking the valley. I went up to her and spoke as best I could.

I knew your grandmother, she answered in Italian, we used to play as children. She knew that my grandmother had died. She then led me to the mayor who led us along a path downhill to their old house. All the struggle of the day seemed to be leading to this moment when I would see the house I’d heard her describe over and over, with its steps out front, its yard where they’d kept chickens. It was as if I would find her, a part of her at least. But then we were standing in front of a prefabricated house and I was trying to understand what the mayor was saying.

The new owners let the old house fall to ruin and put this new house in front of it.

Behind the prefabricated house was a large pile of stone rubble, all that was left were the stairs rising to nowhere, no door, no hearth. It was then that the loss of my grandmother hit me. My grief rose up in me and seemed to fill my mouth. I could hardly speak. I was pregnant and hungry, and my grandmother was gone. There was no ancestral home. My husband was going on about living a simple life, why didn’t we live this way. And I had been catapulted into a different world, where myth and reality collided and echoed inside.

There are times when you know that you must break open the narrative you have made of your life, to question the things you believe and the direction you are going. Grief is a good sledgehammer; poems come out of the wreckage.