July 27, 2008 Bill Scheller

July 27, 2008

The centuries end with the cleaning-out of an old house.

I am sitting on the back porch – little more than a stoop, really – of the house my grandparents built in Paterson, New Jersey in 1941. The fireflies are just coming out, as they did at this hour when I was a boy on the other side of this city fifty years ago. I’m back on this west side of Paterson, emptying the old family home, where my parents lived during the last decades of their lives.

My father is still alive, passing his days in the bosom of “assisted living,” more assisted than living, and my mother, who has passed beyond both assistance and living, rests scarcely more than a mile from here. True to their quotidian selves, they haunt this place in their separate ways – my Swiss father in a hundred jars of nuts and bolts, my mother in her diaries and cookbooks, and the scattered notes and photographs and memorabilia that kept her Italian heritage alive for her.

I chanced to find, today, the liveliest touchstone of that heritage – the words, in Italian, of the incantation her grandmother used to determine whether a person had been subject to the evil eye, and to exorcise that pagan curse. I remember seeing, in my great-grandmother’s kitchen, the bowl of water with the olive oil droplets in it that were used, along with the words, to tell if the malocchiowas at work. Some folklorists say that the oil had to disperse upon the water; some say it had to remain a single globule. No matter – the words were the same:

Occhio malocchio Corni in l’occhio Scatto la media Crebba malocchio

Finding my mother’s transcription of that ancient singsong verse, tucked in a notebook that contained a miscellany of recipes, addresses, and ephemeral nonsense about how best to exorcise the equally noxious demons in her computer, reminded me of how close I was to the countless generations of peasants who believed in the evil eye, in the power of spells and remedial incantations, and of the saints who supplanted – more properly simply renamed – the household gods of Rome, and of how I am the last who knew or cared about or understood any of it.

But no, those generations are not countless. They number, more or less, perhaps a hundred or so, dating to the dim past of southern Italy. What is more precise is the conclusion of that ancestral memory, in my own generation, and, more precisely still, in my own American person. Too practical and too preoccupied with the present world to care, my son and my nieces and nephew could never understand or even give an eyebrow-cocked acknowledgement of that bowl of oilsplotched water, those antique Italian words, or any supposition that one neighbor might lay a yawn or a headache or worse upon another.

As well they may not, which they probably can’t. But the knowledge of it all is the power, and the acceptance – the acceptance of all those centuries, all those peasant lives that led to the building of this little house in Paterson. It’s all over now, Samnites and Romans and Lombards, all dissipated in the rational New Jersey night, left only for the fireflies to suggest.

I’ll finish cleaning out the house this week, leaving it for a family whose own superstitions must have been formed out of Spain’s murderous impact on the Caribbean. But the story of my Italian family’s trajectory from the Old World to the New ends with me. With me goes the last memory of those centuries that carried the incantation of malocchio, of the dissolution of the old Rome and the triumph of a new one; of the transfer – however briefly – of the ancient realm of the Mediterranean, its gods and superstitions, to a world so hopeful, so far away, so limitless in its prospects and so relentless in its blind and inevitable eradications.

-- Bill Scheller