I spoke to Sarah Williams a few minutes ago on the phone. Sarah, a massage therapist in Lenox, MA, who spent a year living in Florence during college, was the person I turned to last fall when it was time to let someone fluent in Italian read my new novel, Finding Filomena.
Finding Filomena tells the story of how my great great grandmother Filomena Scrivano gave birth to her son out of wedlock in 1870 in southern Italy.
Filomena Scrivano’s son, Pasquale Orzo, was my father’s grandfather.
Much of this new novel, I am only a little embarrassed to say, I wrote with the assistance of Google translator. I am not too embarrassed because I was so desperate to write this book about my ancestor, and I don’t -- yet -- have the capability of speaking and writing in Italian. Voglio parlare e scrivere en Italian ma…
I have felt an irrepressible need to speak and to write and to hear Italian spoken for about five years now, ever since the pandemic to be exact. But I was much too busy writing this new novel to enroll in language classes.
So I relied on Google, along with the patchwork of Italian I know from sitting at the dining room table in Canton, Connecticut and listening endlessly to my Mom converse with her mother, Grandma Michelina Caponi Rotondo, and her father, Claude “Pop” Rotondo. I eked out the Italian as best I could.
Sarah, who is a massage therapist, read Finding Filomena so carefully, she even edited some of the English, along with correcting the Italian. That's not surprising, considering the fact that she did after all attend Mount Holyoke College, majoring in Italian.
It was after I got off Sarah’s massage table last September that I handed her a box with a neat pile of paper, three inches high, which was the manuscript. I remember asking her why it doesn’t work to rely on Google translator to write a book. Her reply was simple.
“Well,” she said in her very patient and loving way. “People just don’t speak like that.”
It was also during that same massage last September that I first found myself verbalizing a horrifying story from my MOTHER’s side of the family. The story involves my mother’s grandmother, Clementina Ciucci.
I didn’t even realize I was telling the story until Sarah stopped rubbing my right arm with lavender-scented lotion and said, without the least bit of humor in her voice, “Claudia this is your next novel.”
At that moment I surfaced out of the massage-induced trance. I laughed, quite dismissively. “Oh Sarah, I haven’t even finished writing about Great Great Grandma Filomena Scrivano. Right now, I cannot imagine writing another novel. Maybe ever!”
*****
Mom was christened Clementina Dena Rotondo in March of 1926 and as she grew into adulthood, she realized how much she detested her first name. She hated it so much that she actually went to court sometime during the 1990s to have her name officially changed to C. Dena Ricci.
“I don’t want that awful name Clementina on my gravestone,” Mom said matter-of-factly. My mom was as gentle a soul as you will find, an angel really, except every now and then, she would get enraged and put her foot down about something.
She put her foot down on this matter of her headstone.
When I texted Sarah the other day, I told her I needed to speak to her right away. She told me she had some time this morning before noon. Almost as soon as we began speaking, I told her that my mom and dad, who were the wind in my sails, pushing me to write Finding Filomena, are now pushing me to write my mother’s namesake’s story.
Sarah was shocked. She hadn’t forgotten about the story that she unlocked from me last September, but she was surprised that after telling her I might never write another novel, I was now, ten months later, telling her that I had to write the book, as in, right away.
I told her I was feeling scared. I told her that I wrote Finding Filomena with my parents vaguely floating all around me. But now they were making themselves known in more direct ways. It was, in short, kind of spooking me out.
"Sarah, I don't feel ready to meet with dead people, even if those dead people happen to be my beloved parents."
She didn’t miss a beat. She spoke softly but firmly, the way she always speaks. “Just ask your mom and dad
to approach you with caution when they appear. Just tell them to go slow,” Sarah said, her gentle voice pouring over me as if I am a baby and my mother is pouring over me my first warm bathwater. I closed my eyes while she spoke.
I felt myself calming down right away. I told her that the way I relax these days is by shutting off my phone, and sitting quietly, doing absolutely nothing at all.
Sometimes, I said, I stare out at the glorious meadow, and the dancing willow trees, or the dazzling flower gardens in a rainbow of colors. Sometimes I lay in the pool in a "dead woman’s float," going limp and looking up at the cloud patterns in the deep blue sky.
Sarah endorsed relaxation above all else. She strongly encouraged me to keep shutting off my phone, and my computer if necessary. “Just give in to relaxation,” she said. “Feel your body. Listen to your body.”
So I am now going to shut off my phone.
To breathe. And maybe, just maybe, a little later on today, I will go back into my study and just sit quietly at my desk. Or maybe I will kneel at my meditation table.
I will speak very carefully, very slowly to my mom and to my dad, whose extraordinary photos stare at me over my computer.
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