My World is One Block Long…

My world is one block long and two blocks wide. In inter-city Toronto in the fifties it is still possible to live on a street where English is rarely spoken.

I am four years old and I live on this street with my Mamma and Papa. Although I was born in this city, I cannot speak or understand English as my parents have only been in the country for five years. In this neighbourhood, Italian is the language of the grocery store, the language of gossip and the language of the church. There is yet no need to learn English.

We live in a house with a family who has three children. Nine people share the only bathroom. On the second floor of this house we rent two rooms, a kitchen and a bedroom. The kitchen strains to contain a table, four chairs and a hutch. It is where we eat and where we entertain friends, the chairs often overflowing into the hallway. Down the hall there is a bedroom which holds our beds, two dressers and my mother’s Singer sewing machine. It is a pedal powered sewing machine positioned in front of the bedroom window to take advantage of the natural light.

In each of our two rooms there is a large picture of a blonde little boy holding a ball. His name is spoken in hushed reverence of a life ended too soon. My brother Renato, who I never knew, died the year I was born. His death paralyzed my Mamma with grief until she realized she was pregnant and had a new life to live for.

The sewing machine is right next to the head of my bed. At Christmas we always have a real tree and it sits precariously on top of the sewing machine. We decorate it with glass ornaments my Mamma brought gingerly from Italy in a steamer trunk. The ornaments were the only things to arrive unbroken after that harrowing ten day trip across the ocean with a sick little child. They were a reminder of her first Christmas as a bride back in Italy and the loss of the other things in that trunk was easily forgotten. We adorn the tree with a string of brightly coloured bulbs and paper icicles that catch the light as they move about. At night, when I go to bed, I gaze up at the tree from below it and feel somewhat like a Christmas present. In a year that had known so much grief, Mamma said I was a gift, born on Christmas day.

My neighbourhood smells like an Italian kitchen, the scent of tomato sauce simmering on the stove drifting out of the open windows into the street. Occasionally a cellar window is open and in the fall you can smell the wine fermenting in the giant oak barrels. In the summer I play on the sidewalk outside our home, hopscotch or when someone is lucky enough to have a skipping rope, games of double-dutch. Between each sidewalk square the tar bubbles up in the summer heat and I take my sandals off and pop the bubbles with my toes invariably covering them in tar. Mamma will not be pleased as she scrapes the tar off my feet.

My Papa is tired when he comes home from work. Long hours of working in the sun and rain have made him much older than his thirty-three years and his face is deeply tanned. I wait on the sidewalk and watch for his familiar shape and gait in the distance as he draws closer, swinging his lunch pail. When he bends to hug me, he smells of sweat and cement, the dust clings to his clothes and face. He disappears downstairs to the basement to change out of his work clothes emerging as the Papa I recognize, in his favourite plaid shirt and no longer wearing the construction hat that hides his wavy hair.

Mamma stays home to care for me. In that cramped kitchen, she cooks marvellous meals. Dishes our English neighbours would never have known; osso bucco (stewed veal shank), polenta (cornmeal) and baccala (salty stewed fish). She sews magic with her sewing machine, taking second hand clothes bought at church rummage sales, and turning them into nearly-new looking dresses for me. Some days, as a treat, she takes me to the park where she pushes me on the swing, or gazes anxiously as I climb the monkey bars, inevitably falling and scraping my leg.

One day, when we go to visit family friends, I am left behind with no explanation. Time seems to be suspended, the few weeks that I actually spend there. I feel lost, confused and voiceless to express my feelings. Why am I here? Where have my parents gone? The couple, Maria and Gino, close friends of my parents, have a little girl my age. They live in big house, with a yard full of flowers the likes of which I have never seen. I am inconsolable. Their house in unfamiliar to me, with many doors, most of them closed. I am frightened by a cuckoo clock in the hall which loudly sounds the hours while the little bird jumps in and out of his little house. Each time I walk by I pray it won’t ring. Too young to be able to read the clock face, I can’t predict the next time the little bird will come out and the clanging will begin, so I try to avoid the hallway or scurry past it.

Eventually I am returned to my home, but something has changed. Grief hangs in the air and my Mamma is very sick. She never leaves her bed, unable to walk on her own. Each morning, after breakfast, I pull the kitchen chair to the sink and wash the breakfast dishes as best as I can, trying to be helpful. I make my way down the hall to the bedroom and spend my day sitting on the carpet at the foot of Mamma’s bed playing with my doll, carefully changing her in and out of the only cotton sundress she has and pretending she is my little baby. The days turn into weeks. Mamma cannot take me to the park, yet I am content.

For now, my world in one block long and two blocks wide.

* * *
With time, Mamma will regain her strength and walk again. It will be many years before I understand what happened. That Mamma had gone to the hospital to deliver the twin boys she had carried for nine months, only to lose them both during delivery. I will be an only child for two more years before my sister Anna is born and it will take six more years after that before our brother Paolo arrives.