Author: rivertonAdmin

by Anne Kruse

The little boy sat on the edge of the road playing with loose cobblestones, wobbling them back and forth, while his mother looked on indulgently. Having nothing better to do, a carabiniere who was watching from across the road puffed himself up, adjusted his uniform, crossed the road and stood over the boy who looked up to smile at him. But there was no smile from the carabiniere. He put on his most belligerent face, shook his fist, and shouted in Italian – a torrent of long words, very long words and short staccato words building to an extravagant crescendo before he turned and walked away.

‘What did he say?’ the mother asked the boy.

‘Oh, he just said to put the cobblestones back.’

This was one of my earliest memories of my life in Italy without Italian. I, the mother, had found the carabiniere’s Mussolini style uniform and his display of authority unnerving and my dismay at not understanding the actual words meant that I had listened too hard or perhaps did not really listen at all.

It had been the same the day before in the church. A stern priest had hurried down the aisle shaking his finger, whispering intensely in Italian.

‘He was telling me to be quiet in the church,’ the boy told her.

Both the carabiniere and the priest had given admirable performances and the little boy had intuitively realised that understanding the actual meaning of all the words was unnecessary when you were obviously getting into trouble. Whereas, while I understood the obvious reprimands (and there were many), I was not immersed in the moment, I was trying to ‘translate’.

‘Basta!’ the boy said dismissively to the Italian waiter who was sprinkling parmesan on his pasta while I was still struggling with the intricacies of an Italian menu.

But gradually some words came – not sentences, only words. Verbs were something that other people worried about. I eventually found the courage to say sono. ‘Sono stanco,’ I said to the shop assistant as I collapsed in a chair. ‘Stanca, signora’ he said, pleasantly but firmly.

‘Disperata’ I was told by a kind and amused woman who took me to a toilet after I had jigged up and down saying ‘desperato,’ but evidently I had given a satisfactory performance. There were memorable moments when emotion took over and some kind of pigeon Italian, combined with joy, fear or anger and the appropriate animation led to a successful result.

It was nearly 40 degrees in Piazza Santa Croce where we had bought tickets to watch a medieval football match. I stood in the heat with the boy on my hip, all the seats were taken including the ones I had booked. I was ignored. No one would move as I shook my tickets at them. Then something happened and the Gods of Italian maccheronica came down.
‘Io!’ ‘I shouted with appropriate gestures. Io! Una Mamma! Molto hot! Caldo! Una mamma with bambino!’ My performance as a distressed Mamma was accepted and people smiled as they made room for us.

I did resort to carrying a very small dictionary with me – just in case I needed a word – only nouns at first although I gradually added adjectives and the odd adverb. ‘Male!’ I said to this same little boy when he had knocked over some pots of geraniums. La padrona di casa was shocked ‘No Signora! No! Non male!’

I learnt from her reaction that male was a very serious word meaning evil, and no child could be guilty of that. ‘Cattivo’ she said, giving him a cuddle and ruffling his hair. I acquired those words along with vivaccio, another affectionate way of explaining any possible naughtiness.

Then there was his older brother who had a mop of blond curls. People approached me in the street exclaiming that he was un Angelo. He was old enough to respond to this attention by looking at his feet, while for me it was the beginnings of an understanding about the way art and life were so connected in Italy. The more paintings I saw in Florence the more I understood this. Faces in the paintings were recognizable in the faces in the street. The average passer-by in Florence did not have blonde curls but angels certainly did. These images were part of the collective consciousness. In his frescoes in the Medici chapel, Benozzo Gozzoli’s young Florentines, boys and girls, wear golden curls like angels. They were beautiful and wonderful but so were the large terracotta pots of lemon trees in the Palace Garden, the red tiled roofs of Florence, the church bells, the displays in the shop windows of lollies, gold jewellery, fine paperwork and tablecloths, the butcher on his pedestal in the market, and the austere grandeur of the Duomo where the two-year-old in his pusher would go into a peaceful trance as he stared up at Brunelleschi’s dome.

We were extremely fortunate, at first living in a cheap hotel around the corner from the Duomo where writers and academics rented a room by the month or year and prostitutes lived on the top floor. Or so I was told. I only ever heard the clatter of high-heeled shoes going up and down the stairs at night. We moved to a cheap student’s apartment in the Via degli Orti Oricellari with Biglietti Gratuiti, free tickets, to the art galleries and museums. I could drop into the Uffizi on my way home and leave my shopping bags in a locker near the postcards and souvenirs. The ten-year-old ‘angel’ would take himself off to the Bargello. He had a choice between Donatello’s David or a game of biliardino (table soccer) in the bar. There was no concern about him being alone.

There was so much to admire, to learn and enjoy in this world where, although I was outside the language, I was enveloped in the atmosphere and the culture. The language was like background music, mixed with car horns and church bells.

Perhaps I enjoyed being an outsider. I was too tall and the wrong shape to be an Italian and as EM Forster wrote, ‘… the barrier of language is sometimes a blessed barrier, which only lets pass what is good.’ And so, I didn’t try to ‘learn’ Italian. I suppose I thought it would become part of me as I felt such an affinity with the life around me. Now, I realise that I was living out the cliché of ‘the fatal charm of Italy’, but I was in good company with those from the past. Henry James, who I believe never conquered the Italian language, had exclaimed in Rome ‘At last, for the first time, I live!’ He had been ‘reeling and moaning thro’ the streets of Rome in a fever of enjoyment.’ Irrespective of his great novels set in Italy, he claimed that he remained an outsider.

I read Forster’s A Room with a View for the first time when I was in Florence, following the vacations of Lucy Honeychurch. I was wearing long denim hippy skirts at the time and tripped over the same sepulchral slab that the child had tripped over in Santa Croce in Chapter Two of ‘In Santa Croce with no Baedeker’. Lucy was coming from a very different time and perspective but, while I could never be mistaken for an Italian, I could enjoy moments when I had some sort of place in the English/Italian literary tradition.

I had my hair cut in the Via Tournabuoni (the dollar was high) near the English book shop where I had bought the novel. This was before the film Room with a View and the overkill of Tuscan novels. There were still carts selling tripe in the centre of Florence, and slices of very cheap pizza, spread only with a tomato sauce and wrapped in paper, were available outside the bakery at lunch time. Once I had a turn-of-the-century flashback when I saw a woman with an Eton crop wearing a monocle as she strolled arm in arm through the Piazza with her companion.

I also had Mary McCarthy’s The Stones of Florence to keep me company – and she was such good company. A vivid and exciting mix of Florentine history, art and culture, with no index, no sense of laborious research and probably no ‘fact checking’. It made me want to know more and more and to escape from the mind set of tourism. The Stones of Florence is written with elegant stylishness always tempered with her sharp edgy wit and a constant undercurrent of humour. The connections she makes are extraordinary with outrageous, sometimes intimate, facts about the lives of artists such as the bowel habits of Pontormo (recorded in his diary) and how Il Rosso lived with a baboon on Borgo dei Tintori. It was first published in 1956 and it seemed strange that I could relate so strongly to it in the 70s. But the art in Florence had not changed. McCarthy was a challenging companion and gave me an insight into my fascination and amazement for the Early Mannerists.

I would move from the warmth of the supremely beautiful Madonnas and bambini and Botticelli’s Birth of Venus to il Rosso’s Madonna, Saints and Two Angels in which ‘a simpering, rouge idiot child sits on the Madonna’s lap. The eyeholes of the child, the Madonna and the red-winged Angels are circled by blackness, like melting mascara’.

These ‘sacred’ paintings of Il Rosso with their garish colour and ‘half-carnival atmosphere of an insane asylum, or a brothel during a police raid’ were a far cry from what McCarthy refers to as ‘a tooled leather idea of Florence as a dear bit of the old world’. It provided a glimpse into another layer of Italian culture which I had not seen, and probably would never see until I found my own connections through Pasolini and Fellini.

After a visit to the Uffizi, I would collect my shopping bags from the locker and go home to continue what I thought of as a conversation with McCarthy. As I was still at the stage of buon giorno/buona sera, bello, bambino, grazie, prego, and un mezzo kilo di patate, she fulfilled a need. And she was so sofisticata.

Of course, I was reading in English! I was unable to see the learning of the language as a way into what I was longing to part of. After all, I was a Mamma and that got me a lot of credit. Hadn’t I been to a splendid and enormous Communist rally in the Piazza Della Signoria where the red flags were flying, and even without understanding most of the words I found the speeches passionate and moving? Hadn’t I even cried as I cheered and applauded with the Italians?

It was all such a wonderful mixture of history – the remote past, the recent past and the present. Our simple student apartment was in the Via degli Orti Oricellari, opposite the gardens of the Palazzo Rucellai where the Florentine Neo Platonists used to stroll and hold intellectual discussions. I could not pronounce Oricellari, and the Neo Platonists were a mystery to me although accepted by the locals, who kept pointing out the gardens to me and I learnt ‘giardino’. I now know that these gardens surrounded the 15th century Palazzo Rucellai, designed by Alberti who was proclaiming the new ideas of Renaissance architecture as a statement of humanist clarity.

It was only a ten-minute walk from the Via degli Orti Oricellari to the Santa Maria Novella railway station which in the 1930s was considered a symbol of Fascist modernism and a masterpiece of Italian rationalism. It was there, on platform 16, in 1938, that Mussolini greeted Hitler when he stepped off the train from Rome. I have read that the Florentines were not impressed by this ‘uninvited tourist’ – the dictator with artistic pretensions who was being shown Italy’s unique artistic heritage.

It was at Santa Maria Novella Stazione, in the underground exits, that I saw a seedier side of Florence and one of the less endearing clichés of Italian tourism. As young female tourists arrived by train, young men, usually very handsome young men, hung around waiting, offering help with their luggage and … I saw the same men, or replicas, week after week, with the same smiles and gestures charming a turnover of exited young women. No need for words. The performances said it all.

But at the station I learnt: gabinetto, sala d’attesa, gettone (for the public telephone), zingari (there were many), sciopero, and of course CHIUSO! as the window to the ticket office was slammed shut. I had already learnt tè, zucchero, pompieri (but that’s another story), diarrhoea, uova alla coque, pacchetto di sigarette, accendino – not to be confused with ascensore.

Occasionally, when I stumbled through my shopping list in the fruit shop, I would get a round of applause from the Italian customers who had become an attentive audience. I avoided buying figs (ficchi) because I was frightened that I would say cunts (fiche) and in the butcher shop I developed an extravagant mime of a mincing machine because I could never remember carne macinata. And carne and cane were a problem – I might ask for minced dog. Most memorable was the time when I asked for an abitante, (an inhabitant) instead of a liver (fegato). It was a very small, inadequate dictionary that I kept in my pocket.

These first memories from the 1970s are so clear, so indelible but I suspect I am creating a narrative and not always telling the exact truth. I think of my Italian experiences as a serial with episodes taking place over many years. The episodes are scattered and out of order as are my attempts at unravelling my relationship with the Italian language. I must have understood more. Not in print but in real life. It seeped in and dribbled out when I wasn’t in the moment. My understanding seemed to be always connected to an emotion: embarrassment, compassion, amusement or feeling excited, sad, angry, happy.

I certainly understood the story told to me by the man in a dark suit on a Sunday afternoon by the fountain in the Boboli Gardens. I watched him making little boats from twigs for the children to float on the water. He told me, in Italian, that his wife and children had been killed in a motor accident and every Sunday he came to the gardens to watch the children with their families. He always wore his best suit. One could sense his tenderness and sadness, the children were delighted with his boats and there was a sense of shared pleasure. How could I have understood? There were no extravagant Italian gestures from this quiet man. The only word I took from this experience was barca.

It is the essentially Italian images and the feelings that have remained with me – the hot sun, the white pebbles on the ground that caught in the wheels of the pusher and in my sandals, the beautiful Renaissance fountain, the Italian chatter of the children and the man in his black suit. But not the words.

I think my contentment and happiness got in the way. Why muddy the waters ‘working’ at learning language when I was learning so much every day?

Riverton Press first found that Anne Kruse is a talented writer at the Italian classes attended with our author Vittoria Pasquini. Anne has written many fantasy mini-fictions over the years while fulfilling homework requirements. The piece we present today is not fantasy, but also has its origins in tasks set for our Italian homework. Anne relates the end of World War II as she lived it.

Harakiri, August 15, 1945, Melbourne, Victoria

by Anne Kruse

The girls were summoned by the school bell to assemble on the Big Lawn. It wasn’t a very big lawn, just the back garden of what had been the largest old house in the street that had become a school for young ‘ladies.’ And they weren’t even embryonic ladies, just a mixed bunch of young girls and only some of them would vividly remember this historic, memorable day. The big lawn, once the site of relays, egg-and-spoon, three-legged and sack races, had been dug into lines of trenches which had never been put to use. Normal life went on around them. The forbidden-to-climb magnolia tree with the great, leathery white flowers was still there from the original garden and the patch of sharp, scratchy sword grass which, if one were captured by Snowy Fowler and her gang, could be a place of torture.

For our first-year primary school girl the ‘war’ was a murky cloud that hung in the air; it was a feeling rather than an understanding. Before the war things had been ‘possible’, things had been ‘available’ things had been ‘better’.  Her aunt still talked about the wonderful submarine toy that her son had played with in the bath in the ‘before’ days and her mother had a pottery water jug with matching glasses that had been ‘made in Japan’. This was considered remarkable.

But the girl was mostly aware that she was frightened in the dark because of the blackouts, there were things called ration cards, so it was important not to use too much butter, search lights were on at the local beach after dark, and her father was cross at dinner because he had been made to work for the government. He had gone to that ‘other’ war when he was young but never talked about, although he sometimes wore a khaki uniform because he belonged to a sort of army at home. There was a lot of serious listening to the radio by her mother and father, little entertainment except for the extravagant performances of the neighbour who had become boss of the blackouts and used to knock on the door and shout aggressively if there was a chink of light.

The girl occasionally had nightmares in which she fell down a deep hole and a group of men, gabbling in a foreign language, stared down at her. There had been one unforgettable moment that was puzzling and disturbing. The newspaper arrived one morning and when her parents saw the photo on the front page her mother immediately snatched it away saying to her father, ‘Don’t let her see it.’ But she did. It appeared to be crowd of people looking at a dead man hanging upside down from a large hook. It was nasty and unsettling, and as they sat down to breakfast, she sensed from the atmosphere that it was better not to say anything.  But her day-to-day images of Australian soldiers and the Japanese came mostly from Bluey and Curley comics and were humorous rather than frightening or threatening.

This day, the headmistress stood under the magnolia tree to make her announcement. She didn’t use her severe authoritative voice but spoke quietly and gently. She seemed to be saying they could all go home. The war was over.

The girl left to go home alone.  Usually she was high spirited, laughing and joking with her friends but that day it didn’t seem right. It seemed necessary to feel sad for she had her own perceptions about this war that was now over. People, usually men, were killed in wars. There was a good side and a bad side. She was part of the ‘good’ side, and the others were ‘enemies’. She knew a bit about that because of the gang in the sword grass. There were things called ‘dog fights’ that had nothing to do with dogs but aeroplanes, and men called fuzzy-wuzzy angels who were on the good side. They carried Australian soldiers on stretchers through the jungle and put a lighted cigarette in their mouths as they were dying. She had seen that on a Newsreel.

As she walked towards the main street, she realised she was stepping on chalk drawings on the pavement. They were some kind of angry message. That she knew. The ugly distorted faces with narrow eyes had strange names scrawled underneath. One name, to her surprise, she recognised. TOJO. She had heard it said over and over again and had thought of it as TOE JOE – such an odd name, but easily remembered.

It was strangely quiet in the shopping street and then she saw a large crowd gathering outside the RSL club. The RSL, in an old Tudor-style house, was little more than a meeting place – only for men – where her father sometimes went after work for a drink with his friends who had been to that ‘other’ war.  There had been times when he came home with a spring onion sticking out of his back pocket which seemed to mean he’d had a good time.

She hung back on the edge of the noisy crowd.  There was cheering as they made way for a man on a horse. The man, dressed in a peculiar coat stretched tightly over an enormous swollen stomach, was shouting and laughing as he waved a sword over his head. The crowd was excited as was the horse who was being reined in to keep it in control. The man stood high in his stirrups uttering a strange dramatic cry, pointed the blade of the sword at his stomach and ripped the coat open.  Strings of sausages and red frankfurts tumbled out falling at the feet of those nearest in the crowd. It was as though his belly had exploded. Shouting ‘Harikari’, he fell forward, stretched over the neck of the frightened horse. The girl was frozen, her heart racing as she watched the crowd, some crying, others screaming,  many laughing. Then she ran. She ran past the closed shops, over the railway bridge across the highway lined with flowering gums marking the plaques of remembrance for the fallen Australian soldiers in Gallipoli and as she ran, she thought of the newspaper photo of the crowd staring at the man hanging upside down. She ignored Mrs Bunting, the neighbour, who was jumping up and down in the middle of the street with her dog Skeeta in her arms. Through the back gate she ran bursting into the house which, at first, felt empty and quiet and then she heard a man’s voice from the dining room. Her mother was alone, sitting in a high-backed chair in front of the tall radio listening to the news. She turned to her daughter and attempting to wipe away her tears and sadness she smiled.

‘It’s over’, she said.

*

The girl found out that evening what had been happening while her mother sat alone in front of the radio.  Her father was not one of the crowd at the RSL. He had put down his tools and opened a bottle of beer with his work mates. Her older sister had been celebrating in the city streets of Melbourne.  There was a photo of her in the paper kissing a sailor.

When she grew up she remembered the painting, Whistler’s Mother, hanging over the teacher’s desk in her classroom. The girls didn’t think much of it; just an old woman staring forward in contemplation. But the image, bleak and still, came back to her when she thought of her mother that night, alone with her thoughts, as she listened to the news.

Later she discovered such things as: agit prop, Bertolt Brecht, street theatre and Fellini. And she never forgot the photo of the upside-down man hanging from a hook or the exploding belly of the man on the horse and the jeers of the crowd.

Note from Anne:

Harakiri, also known as seppuku, is a form of ritual suicide by disembowelment, historically practised by samurai in Japan. It was a way to die with honour, often as an alternative to capture, disgrace, or execution. The term harakiri literally translates to “belly-cutting” in Japanese, while seppuku emphasises the ritualistic aspect of the act.

 

People die. We die all the time. We know this. But recently several friends died over a period of a few weeks, and it seems… we must consider death.

In July, Mario Licón died, he was a poet from Mexico. Apart from writing his own poetry, he translated many contemporary Australian poets into Spanish. He had been an actor and a puppeteer, and because he was losing his sight (macular degeneration), he would recite his poetry from memory. This is always such a more powerful delivery than that provided by those of us who read our lines.

Mario was also a photographer, carpenter, cobbler, and potter, amongst other occupations in his 76 years. He reached that age a few days before he died, and posted in fb:

When I turned 25 I wanted only to get to 40, when I got there I was in Huejotzingo (in Puebla State, Mexico) with a group of puppeteers and eating mixiotes (meat wrapped in agave leaf, spiced, baked in a pit) and I only wanted to get to 50. When I got to 50, I was just back in Sydney from Barcelona and Karin and I, and I don’t remember who else, went to the Fishmarket to eat tiger prawns and drink beers Negra Modelo, and I quietly said to myself, I only want to get to 70. Today I’m six years past that point, and I only want to get to 97, and I know that when I get there, I will want to go to Isla Negra and live to 104, and visit Nicanor Parra’s tomb (if it’s still there), open a bottle of Castillo del Diablo, recite some of my verses, and some of don Nicanor’s, as well as some by a young poet whom I obviously haven’t met yet.

Salud! he concluded, cheers with Shiraz for Mahmud Darwish and for Hafiz, poets of the resistance and of love.

In August, Richard Barnard died. He was a musician, doctor, psychiatrist, lover of birds and grandchildren, enthusiast for life, for knowledge, for questions. He participated for many years with his wife Helen in an Italian class, where they were known as Riccardo and Elena. Of the two, he was the one who talked, she was the quiet supporter. He had been an opera singer in Europe, he practised psychiatry, he went bush, bird watching, he read fiction, non-fiction, science, history.

In September, Adrienne Leonard died, a few weeks before her 87^th birthday. She was a physiotherapist, a Feldenkrais practitioner and teacher. She spoke Italian, having lived in Italy. We met when we visited detainees in the Villawood Detention Centre in the early days of the 21^st century, days of “children overboard” and the Tampa ship fiasco. She was well loved by one particular Mandean family (three children with their parents), not least because they recorded her as the visitor who most visited them. When the family was released after three years in detention, Adrienne invited them to her home and gave a great welcome party.

Sydney-based English teacher, singer and Italiano-phile Valerie Long died suddenly in Scotland. Film critic David Stratton died.

As I think of these five people who meant something to me, I think of the grief in Palestine, where each of more than 60,000 people killed there since October 2023 have their stories and those who miss them. I think of the 250 media workers, the 1,500 health workers, the 19,000 children among those dead. I cannot think broadly enough to encompass all of the death and displacement and destruction ongoing with the grief.

Because Mario was a poet, I assembled a wee zine of poem extracts for his grieving partner Karin, some in English, some in Spanish, with even a few words in German. Soon after, I came to the Brahms Requiem. Philharmonia Choirs director Brett Weymark says Brahms’ Requiem is somehow for the living, and he quotes Walt Whitman, “those who remain suffer…”

Because Mario was a cobbler, I remember the story of some shoes he made in 1987 for Camilla, musician and member of the visiting Women’s Circus in Tepoztlán, Morelos. Here is the poem I wrote about those shoes in 2019.

 

And what were those German words included in the zine for Karin?

Hiersein ist herrlich.

I’ve taken these words to mean: To be here, is wonderful. Karin told me that herrlich means something more sublime, more divine, than what we currently understand by our perhaps over-used word wonderful. Another translation: To be here at all is a glory.

We’ve reached another theme of which I cannot think broadly enough: Rainer Maria Rilke, The Duino Elegies.

By Vittoria Pasquini, English version by Gino Moliterno

 

The idea of writing “The Legend of Busby” came to me immediately after having sold my beautiful house, or rather “the sand castle” as we used to call it in admiration of its thick sandstone walls.

In part out of nostalgia, because I was sorry to have left it and I didn’t want to forget it; in part it was out of regret, I already thought I had made a mistake in selling it and I wanted to try, pen in hand, to understand what had happened, what had led me to that decision.

It took several years to bring this memoir to fruition, more than ten years with various interruptions, the most tragic and glaring being the death of my son, Valerio. For him I coordinated the publication of his two diaries; for him I created a non-profit association; for him I despaired and so, clearly, no longer concerned myself with my memoir, considering it irrelevant in the face of the drama I was experiencing.

With the arrival of Covid, time had passed and a lot of time and solitude were available to me to rethink myself and my life. So The Legend of Busby magically resurrected itself from the drawers in which I had confined it. Having dusted it off, I began to reread the little I had written, to think about it and to try to start writing again.

At that point, however, the enormity of what had happened, namely the death of my son, weighed like a boulder on my memory, obfuscating it. I couldn’t remember what had happened before the annus horribilis; my life at Busby seemed shrouded in a heavy blanket of fog, everything seemed insignificant compared to the Great Tragedy.

It took a lot for me to reconnect with the Vittoria who was living, working, feeling and writing before the disappearance of her beloved son. It was a long process, and yet, the attempt to remember, among other things, the time when Valerio was still small, then a teenager and finally a young man, the wonderful and unforgettable time when he was still alive, became a process of treating and healing my broken heart. Little by little, year after year, the memoir took shape and I re-embraced my past, the memories giving me joy and enthusiasm for writing.

That’s how the Legend of Busby was born.

The book moves through various intersecting levels (I love complications):

the main character is the castle, which is described in all its smallest details: each place has a different energy, each place evokes memories of something else.

In the first part of the book the castle falls to pieces. It should have been renovated but the sudden unexpected lack of money forces the inhabitants to live there as it is; charm and decadence remaining its major characteristics. In the second part the castle is renovated and is again described in all its new features.

The second level is the story of the family who begins to live in Busby when the man/father is already gravely ill. This is the short Prologue, followed immediately after by The Return: mother and son leave Canberra, where she worked for six years at the Australian National University after the premature death of her husband, and return to Sydney where her daughter has remained in the castle with a family friend. The daughter’s boyfriend joins them shortly after.

Thus begins the life together of this small group, a sort of community linked by affection.

The third level consists of the “Voices Off “, the numerous friends and acquaintances who come and go from the house, some stopping for a coffee or a meal, others staying for a weekend, others for longer.

This chorus of multiple voices appears four times in the book and narrates the desires, the dreams and the reasons why many Italian expatriates decided to settle in Australia in the early 1980s, the ups and downs of their sojourn Down Under and the influence that the politics of the time had on their decisions to stay or return to their homeland.

The last level is that of memory, a sort of “stream of consciousness” that emerges here and there in connection with various situations, images, some odours, the particular light of a room. Memories of the narrator’s (the woman/the mother/she) other lives in Rome, her political activity, her feminist involvement, her other work as a photographer, the other houses in which she lived in Kenya, in the USA, in Algeria.

The book is written in the third person, I have always written like this, I find that this choice allows me to distance myself from myself and in this way I can be quite objective.

The woman describes what happens in the house, in the family, inside her, her many mistakes, her insecurities, her difficulties in being a good mother with two children and two absent fathers. At the beginning of the memoir she carries out a lot of self-criticism, then, little by little, as she deepens her reflections, she begins to understand herself and understands the reasons for being who she is, and in the end she is able to look at herself with a certain tenderness.

The style of the memoir alternates concise descriptions of what happens in the house and in the lives of the main characters with flows of emotions, memories, dreams and thoughts, in long paragraphs with minimal punctuation to give the reader space to choose when to stop and catch her breath.

Vittoria Pasquini

 

M’è venuto in mente di scrivere “La leggenda di Busby” subito dopo averla venduta Busby, la mia bella casa, anzi “il castello si sabbia” come la chiamavamo ammirando le sue spesse pareti di pietra arenaria.

In parte per nostalgia, mi dispiaceva averla lasciata e non volevo dimenticarla, in parte per rimpianto, già pensavo di aver fatto un errore a venderla e volevo cercare, penna alla mano, di capire cosa era successo, cosa mi aveva portato a quella decisione.

Ci sono voluti vari anni per portare a compimento questo memoir, più di 10 anni con varie interruzioni, la morte di mio figlio Valerio la più tragica ed eclatante, per lui ho coordinato la pubblicazione dei suoi due diari, per lui ho creato un’associazione no profit, per lui mi sono disperata e ovviamente non mi sono più occupata del mio memoir, considerato irrilevante di fronte al dramma che stavo vivendo.

Con l’arrivo del Covid, tempo era passato e molto tempo e solitudine erano presenti a mia disposizione per ripensare a me stessa e alla mia vita. Così La Leggenda di Busby è risuscitata magicamente dai cassetti in cui l’avevo rinchiusa, tolta la polvere ho cominciato a rileggere quel po’ che avevo scritto, a pensarci e a cercare di ricominciare a scrivere.

A quel punto però, l’enormità di ciò che era accaduto, la morte di mio figlio cioè, pesava come un macigno sulla mia memoria, l’offuscava, non potevo ricordare ciò che era successo prima dell’annus horribilis, la mia vita a Busby appariva avvolta da una coltre pesante di nebbia, tutto sembrava insignificante rispetto alla Grande Tragedia.

C’è voluto molto per riconnettermi con la Vittoria che viveva, lavorava, provava emozioni, scriveva prima della scomparsa del suo amato figliolo. È stato un lungo processo, eppure, il cercare di ricordare, tra le altre cose, il tempo in cui Valerio era ancora piccolo, poi adolescente e finalmente un giovane uomo, il tempo meraviglioso e indimenticabile in cui lui era ancora vivo, è diventato un processo di cura e guarigione per il mio cuore spezzato.

Piano piano, anno dopo anno, il memoir ha preso forma e io ho riabbracciato il mio passato, i ricordi mi hanno dato gioia ed entusiasmo per la scrittura.

Così è nata La Leggenda di Busby.

Il libro si muove attraverso vari livelli intersecati (amo le complicazioni):

il personaggio principale è il castello, che viene descritto in tutti i suoi più piccoli dettagli, ogni luogo ha un’energia differente, ogni luogo evoca memorie di qualcosa d’altro.

Nella prima parte del libro il castello casca a pezzi. Avrebbe dovuto essere ristrutturato ma l’ improvvisa inaspettata mancanza di denaro costringe gli abitanti a viverci così com’è, fascino e decadenza rimangono la sua maggior caratteristica. Nella seconda parte il castello viene restaurato e descritto di nuovo nei suoi nuovi cambiamenti;

il secondo livello è la storia della famiglia che comincia a vivere a Busby quando il l’uomo/il padre è già gravemente malato. Questo è il breve Prologo seguito subito dopo da Il Ritorno: madre e figlio  lasciano Canberra dove lei ha lavorato per 6 anni alla Australian National University dopo la morte prematura del marito e ritornano a Sydney dove la figlia era rimasta nel castello con un’amica di famiglia. Il fidanzato della figlia si aggiunge a loro poco dopo.

Comincia così la vita insieme di questo piccolo gruppo, una sorta di comune legata dall’affetto;

il terzo livello sono le “Voci fuori Campo”, i numerosi amici e conoscenti che vanno e vengono dalla casa, alcuni si fermano per un caffè, un pranzo, altri per un fine settimana, altri più a lungo. Questo Coro di voci multiple compare quattro volte nel libro e narra i desideri, i sogni e le ragioni per cui molti italiani espatriati decidono di stabilirsi in Australia all’ inizio degli anni ’80, gli alti e bassi della loro permanenza Down Under e l’influenza che la politica del tempo ha nelle loro decisioni di stare o ritornare nella madrepatria;

l’ultimo livello è quello delle memorie, una sorta di “stream of consciousness” che sbuca qua e là in connessione con varie situazioni, immagini, alcuni odori, la luce particolare di una stanza. Memorie delle altre vite della narratrice (la donna/ la madre/ lei) a Roma, la sua attività politica, il suo coinvolgimento femminista, il suo altro lavoro di fotografa, le altre case in cui ha vissuto in Kenya, negli USA, in Algeria.

Il libro è scritto in terza persona, io ho sempre scritto così, trovo che questa scelta mi permette di distanziarmi da me stessa e in questo modo riesco a essere abbastanza oggettiva.

La donna descrive cosa succede nella casa, in famiglia, dentro di lei, i suoi tanti errori, le insicurezze, le difficoltà di essere una buona madre con due figli e due padri assenti. All’ inizio del memoir fa molta autocritica, poi man mano che approfondisce le riflessioni su se stessa, comincia a capirsi e a capire i perché del suo essere quella che è e alla fine può guardarsi con una certa tenerezza.

Lo stile del memoir alterna descrizioni concise di quello che succede nella casa e nelle vite dei personaggi principali a flussi di emozioni, di memorie, di sogni e pensieri attraverso lunghi paragrafi con punteggiatura minima per dare spazio alla lettrice di scegliere quando fermarsi e riprendere fiato.

 

By Nathalie Apouchtine

 

Every family has fascinating stories from the past. Unfortunately many of us do not become interested in them until it is too late and the relatives who could tell us those stories have passed away.

In exploring my family’s past for No Way Back I have been both unfortunate – and fortunate. I never knew my grandparents: three died before I was born, the fourth lived on another continent. But I have been lucky in that several relatives in my grandparents’ generation left behind accounts of their lives and times: diaries, memoirs, letters, photos… Not a replacement for being able to speak directly to my grandparents, but a treasure trove nonetheless.

I was able to interview members of my parents’ generation, in Canada, France and Russia. They described their own experiences and witnessing of historic events and they also told me more about their parents’ lives and experiences.

While wanting to know more about my predecessors, I have always wondered how people experience turbulent times – how they cope and survive. The twentieth century was not short of dramatic world developments and my relatives found themselves in the middle of some of these: world wars, revolutions, civil war, multiple migrations; in Russia, France – and eventually Canada and Australia.

I travelled to many of the locations where these events occurred to try to get a sense of places which held so much significance for my family.

My goal was to tell about what they lived through and saw through their words, to bring to life these major events. In my own reading of histories, I have always felt a greater understanding and connection to the events being described when there is personal involvement and reflection on what happened: how it played out, how it affected ordinary people, how they coped and moved on – and whether the impacts echoed down the generations.

Of course memory is fallible and often unreliable. Everyone remembers events in different ways. Besides, some record their memories with ulterior motives: to address their descendants specifically, to commemorate a place or time, or sometimes to try to justify their roles in the events. But their experiences and the impacts of them have a truth of their own.

If I occasionally questioned the “facts” in my relatives’ memoirs, I did not question the validity of their memories. At the same time, I wanted to place them firmly within the historical record. This meant searching archives and extensive research in historical texts. But then historians also often disagree – especially on the interpretation of events: why they happened, what they meant, their ongoing significance.

This can be particularly problematic where part of the past one is exploring is of a country where there has been systematic altering of history for propaganda purposes. Still, working in the post-Soviet era, I was able to access archives that had been closed for decades and to consult the work of Russian historians finally able to research more freely. They added to a broad range of sources in the West, on the Russian Revolution, Civil War and the birth of the Soviet Union.

Researching French history of the twentieth century had a different set of complications: the decades of re-examination and debate over events in the Second World War. French historians, and society more generally, have grappled with questions of collaboration, guilt, revenge and punishment – or non-punishment. The discovery of new information about the past, and analysis through the prism of the present, mean many issues in history are hard to put to rest.

I also conducted extensive research on the movements of people, whether as refugees or migrants. While the Russian exodus after the Revolution made up the first major refugee wave of the twentieth century, such mass migration is now something all too familiar, amid the political and social upheaval around the globe. The experiences of migrant countries like Canada and Australia over the twentieth century are part of my family’s story too.

While trying to reconcile differing accounts of the past is challenging, the variety of tellings means history is not frozen – the understanding of any period is dynamic. Keeping in mind the fluidity of history and the pitfalls of eyewitness accounts, I embarked on my task: to blend all these sources into a coherent account of major events in Russia and France in the first half of the twentieth century that would be informative and as accurate as possible. And engaging and interesting for the reader.

Researching and writing No Way Back has been a fascinating journey. I have learned more than I can quantify – both about my family and the crucial events through which they lived. I hope readers of the book find the results of my work equally fascinating.

Migration is the theme of our times. Migration and displacement. On the news daily, and central to the two books launched by Riverton Press earlier this year. In one case, the family members carried the title refugee, in the other, the protagonist is a voluntary migrant.

At the launch of Nathalie Apouchtine’s No Way Back, Revolution and Exile, Russia and Beyond, a member of the public questioned the author about the book title: is there really no way back?

Each migrant, each refugee, each traveller will have their own answer to this question, though a brief glance at world population patterns shows that there is rarely a way back.

Nathalie considered the question in the context of her family, who belonged to the group known as Russian émigrés, who left Russia after the 1917 Revolution. Some members of her family did go back to the Soviet Union, believing that the social experiment in the 1920s was worth contributing to, but for most, a return was probably not possible, for political reasons. New regimes are unforgiving, then as now.

Dodging politics, Nathalie replied: In theory, I suppose you can go back, but in practice, people are leading their new lives and have to concentrate on that daily life. And then there are the children born in the “new country”…

In any case (time travellers excepted), you can’t go back to the past.

In The Legend of Busby, Vittoria Pasquini also ponders the lives of migrants from Italy and other places, and their motivations for leaving their home country. While her book is a very personal memoir based around her sandstone “castle” and the life of a single mother, migration is part of her story, and the thought Could I? Should I? Go back? occurs occasionally.

She considers the migration stories of her friends:

(VOICES OFF)

… that they had left Italy because they had become disillusioned with the fractured dreams of revolution and wanted to venture to a place as far as possible from the place of political defeat, that they wanted to live in the natural wilderness and wanted to learn about Aboriginal culture and the Aborigines, that they had met their great Australian love somewhere … that Australia was less homophobic than their country, that they had come for work and then remained, that they felt free to do and be whatever they wanted …

At the launch, a friend of Vittoria’s, teacher Cesare Popoli, read – nay, declaimed – this segment, with the public slowly beginning to laugh as contrasts become more evident:

…that here it was easy to find work and a place to live … that the beaches were all free  … that here everyone, from the worker to the billionaire, went to the pub all together in thongs … that the dole was easy to get and enough to live on, if only modestly, that a city like Sydney, where the sea was pristine even with four million inhabitants, had parks available every few steps, public swimming pools cheaply accessed, always good weather even in winter, how wonderful it all was!

Vittoria’s book launch was held at the Italian Cultural Institute in Sydney and introduced by Institute Director Paolo Barlera. Translator Gino Moliterni spoke of how he loves Vittoria’s writing. As I didn’t take any notes, I’ll have to quote Italian editor, Oliviero Toscani, who read the Italian book, La Leggenda di Busby, and wrote:

“Vittoria Pasquini’s novel opens up a small world, almost an Australian Brideshead, with its own intensity and a warm gaze, attentive to colour, to small detail. She makes a strong choice in her style, almost a renunciation of a classic plot. We hear a voice with character…”

Nathalie Apouchtine’s launch was held at the NSW Writers Centre in Callan Park, and we enjoyed a Q&A session with her friend and fellow Russian-Canadian-Australian, Lucy Godoroja. Lucy is also an author and historian – she has written a history of buttons titled All Buttons Great and Small. They say their family stories have many parallels – and many differences.

Nathalie’s book examines varied migration stories, as she relates the experiences of many family members. She says that refugees often retain hope of going back to the place they fled – but in the end, that’s usually impossible.

When I was a child, I often heard the phrase “sitting on their suitcases” in reference to Russian refugees in France between the world wars. It was a strong image in my young mind: my relatives, most of whom I knew only from photos… sitting on bulging cases, ready to jump up at a moment’s notice and hurry back to the homeland they had fled …

The loss of nation they suffered was accompanied by loss of citizenship. Nathalie’s parents lived in France for many years, but were not granted something they would have liked: French citizenship. This was an important factor behind their decision to move to Canada. Nathalie (born in France) writes in the book:

When I was born, my papers identified me as a refugee. By the time I was old enough to have any inkling of what that meant… I was a Canadian – and my parents often reminded me to be grateful for this. After more than thirty years of not officially “belonging” anywhere, they had been granted citizenship… they never forgot that [Canada] had let them finally grasp that bit of paper taken for granted by so many, which signified they could stay as long as they wanted, that they had somewhere they could call “home”. 

Poet Colleen Keating says the book No Way Back is “a wonderfully traced family history, interweaving personal stories with world history in an engaging and captivating way. It is a scholarly work, personalised by memoirs, diaries, recorded interviews, eye-witness accounts, old photos, keepsakes, letters and postcards from throughout the 20th century and enriched by the author’s visits in the 1990s to trace the footsteps of her ancestors.”

Colleen continues: “Nathalie makes us, the readers, feel we are unravelling the story together, as she fulfils her father’s aim of being a citizen of the world.  No Way Back is a valuable addition to our Russian history.”

La Leggenda di Busby and The Legend of Busby by Vittoria Pasquini and No Way Back, Revolution and Exile, Russia and Beyond by Nathalie Apouchtine are available in print and electronic formats through usual retail outlets. You may also contact Riverton Press at info@rivertonpress.com

The shipping image is from the National Migration Museum https://digital-classroom.nma.gov.au/sites/default/files/2020-07/Yr10_MigrationExperiences_4.jpg

We arrive, we thought to lunch, but instead of tables and chairs we see just chairs in two sets of rows, facing each other in a long wide oval. We mill around, we sit, we see the musicians who wait, like us. For someone to arrive. In due course, the musicians begin, and they play with each theatrical presentation of each dish.

Two sisters speak in Arabic and English about making bread. They sit by a doorway. Talk is part of bread making for women as they form and pound the dough, talk about the kids, the neighbours, and beating harder when they complain about their husbands. “Careful, you’re beating my bread, not your husband!”

Alissar speaks of Za’atar, she paces along the centre and hands out some of the herb, then works with a mallet-sized wooden pestle to grind some. She tells us the wild herb that grows among rocks was declared “protected” by the Zionist colonialist project in the 1970s. Possession of za’atar effectively became illegal. Yes, a wild herb, verboten!

We are served small squares/rectangles of toasty folded bread with za’atar, salt and oil. Several volunteers carry large trays, and we wait as they go back and forth to the kitchen. We wait, and I think of recent TV images: groups of people in Gaza waiting for food handouts because their homes and economies have been destroyed, because aid trucks can’t get in. People who have always put their own food on their tables, now forced to hold out an empty saucepan in the jostling hungry crowd.

Waraq zanab, stuffed vine leaves. The sisters are now behind the kitchen bench, laughing about technical problems with microphones amid accusations of going off script to say things about Mum. For their cooking is all about what they learned from Mum.

Maqloubeh, Miriam speaks at length and with love and smiles in Arabic about this dish, and though we are given what seems like a very short translation, I am charmed by Miriam. The dish is baked, the baking dishes are overturned on a table placed in the centre for us to see each baked rice and eggplant dish come out cleanly. Some are vegetarian, some have chicken, they are served with yoghurt and roasted nuts. Delicious, it’s all yummy.

The violinist speaks to us about the stealing of culture by the Zionist invasion, for instance, Palestinian songs are taken, translated and sung in Hebrew, with no acknowledgement of their Palestinian origins. He plays a beautiful violin solo for us.

Two of the three sisters of the 3Tomatoes Café are back in the kitchen, this time talking of Fattoush. They tell us how their mum made them help in the kitchen, how they hated that as kids, how grateful they are now. Fattoush is a salad with tomatoes, cucumber, radish, herbs and spices and crumbed bread.

We are given a final gift, Kamouneh, a spice mix with rose petals. Everyone is given a small jar, it’s a scent for calming the nerves, for strengthening the spirit. Paula tells us that women used to go out even during military curfews to find the ingredients.

Then the musicians perform Ya Bahriyeh, a song by Lebanese oud player Marcel Khalife that, we are told, has come to represent resistance, and we dance. Some of the Palestinian women had danced earlier, but this time we dare to join them. And we sing too, as we had been given copies of the text, and we manage at least the chorus.

Riverton Press was very fortunate to attend this excellent RedSeeds and Third Space Production of food, theatre, music and dance, presented by chefs, cooks, story tellers and musicians at the Community Refugee Welcome Centre in Callan Park, Sydney.

Today, images of Gazan people trying to return to what might be left of their homes in northern Gaza impose themselves upon similar images from 1948, when they fled during the Nakba, and from 2023, when again, they were forcibly displaced.

Photo, 1948, from the Middle East Institute http://www.mei.edu/sites/default/files/2021-05/Palestinian%20refugees%20fleeing%20their%20homes%20near%20Haifa%2C%20June%201948%20Credit_%20Corbis.png

Palestinians fleeing northern Gaza walk towards the south. Photo, Reuters, November 2023. https://i.tribune.com.pk/media/images/image_2023-11-09_21_58_191699549216-0/image_2023-11-09_21_58_191699549216-0.png

And today, people who left northern Gaza after October 7, 2023, heading back there:

Photo, Reuters, 27 January 2025.

Throughout the year of 2024, Riverton Press has been thinking about Rome and Russia, migration and exile. Both our upcoming books speak of migration. Sure, people have always moved around the planet, but today we have unprecedented levels of displacement. Mostly due of course to the same four old horsemen. (Do they never tire?)

Our two new books are very different, one the result of deep family history research, the other a personal memoir that examines the self through life in a “sandstone castle”. Both books are written by women born in Europe who have migrated to Australia, one via France and Canada, one via Italy and Kenya.

No Way Back, Revolution and Exile: Russia and Beyond by Nathalie Apouchtine spans three generations, three continents and more than 100 years. Her family left Russia following the 1917 Revolution, some travelled alone, some in groups, many lived in France, very few of them ever return to Russia.

Apouchtine has written a wonderful family history, including her own stories of the research process. Based on recollections, interviews, letters and travel, the book vividly illustrates the impacts of national histories on personal lives. Much of this story of course was made in other languages, mainly in Russian and French. The book includes 16 pages of photos of her family members.

The Legend of Busby by Vittoria Pasquini is also published as La Leggenda di Busby.

Yes! Riverton Press is releasing the books in two languages, the English version has been translated from the Italian by Gino Moliterno.

Pasquini’s memoir, written in the third person, is a journey inward, a journey through the rooms of the sandstone house, a non-linear telling of life experiences. We move around Rome, Nairobi, Sydney and Canberra via the table of family and guests, an unloved laundry, a shared bathtub. It’s a generous table. As Filippo la Porta says in his introduction, “a cosmopolitan space where diversity is fraternally welcomed”.

The Busby Legend and Leggenda will be released in late November, with a launch in Bondi. No Way Back will be released soon after.

The covers of the books are stories in themselves, the illustration of the Busby house and legend was made by one of Pasquini’s young granddaughters.