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Paper Fish
by Tina De Rosa: An Appreciation In 1980, when Tina De
Rosa’s Paper Fish was first
published, I was just beginning my first novel, Casting Off. My heroine, like me, was in her late thirties, and
coming apart—“Thirty-seven,” I wrote, “is the unraveling time.” My heroine,
though, unlike me, wasn’t Italian American. Her name was Helen MacIntyre. She
was Irish Italian American. As close as I could get to my experience without
getting too close. The truth is, in 1980, I was too afraid of/removed
from/ashamed of/perplexed by/fed up with my life as an Italian-American woman
in a culture that seemed as shocked and puzzled by who I was as I was to write
from my own experience. Though I learned to read when I was three, and though
I had been reading voraciously my whole life, I hadn’t yet read a novel
written by an Italian-American woman about an Italian-American woman. There
were no books like Paper Fish (or
Helen Barolini’s Umbertina and The Dream Book) that I knew about. If
I could have read a novel like Paper
Fish when I was a girl, how would I have responded to it? Surely, I would
have learned that my experience as the daughter of an immigrant Italian-American
family could be transmuted into art instead of thinking, for years, that I
had nothing in my life worth writing about, that if I wanted to write, I
should write about important writers, rather than try to become a writer
myself. As Helen Barolini expressed it in her Preface to The Dream Book, Italian-American women “stand alone, seemingly
unconnected to any body of literature or group of writers—anomalies, freak occurrences,
nonrepeaters, ephemera” (x). And, as Alice Walker has phrased it in her blurb
for The Dream Book, “For years I
have wanted to hear the voice(s) of the Italian American woman. Who is she?” Certainly, no book by
an Italian-American woman writer had been taught in any class I had taken;
none had been named in any article I had read about how women’s work had been
silenced. The truth is, I didn’t realize that more silence surrounded the experience
of Italian-American women than—say—that of African-American women, Latina
women, Native-American women, or Chinese-American women, whose work had begun
to find its audience, to command critical attention, to be taught. Since reading Paper Fish, I have often asked myself
what would have happened if this novel (which I consider a work of genius)
had been written, not by an Italian-American woman, but by a woman from a
more visible so-called minority. Would it have been more noticed? Would it
have been “lost”? I realize that this is not altogether a fair question, for
there are many other women from these more visible “minorities” whose work is
brilliant yet whose work has either never been published or has gone out of
print. Still it is the question to which I return. For I believe it’s fair to
say that, for whatever reason, Italian-American women writers haven’t been
well-served by publishers and media in the United States. So, as I was saying,
in 1980, when Paper Fish was first
published, I lacked a model for what an Italian-American novel written by a
woman might look like. As Virginia Woolf so rightly claimed, novels are not
single births: they are written in the context of a tradition. If there is no
tradition, there will be no (or few) novels. For not everyone has the courage
that Tina De Rosa possesses: the courage to be a pioneer. I, for example,
didn’t have the courage to recognize that my experience was valuable, and to
invent both the form for containing this experience and the language
appropriate for it without the force of tradition behind me. “We think back
through our mothers if we are women.” Virginia Woolf’s famous phrase. So in
1980, I started to write a good novel, not a great novel, which was
eventually published in England as Casting
Off. In it, there are glimmers of the Italian-American woman I am but
there are places where it is clear I am trying to think of my literary mother
as Virginia Woolf. Now, I like to imagine what would have been possible for
me as a novelist had I had Paper Fish
on my bookshelf to dip into daily, to gather courage, to convince myself that
the life I had experienced would be, not forgotten or ignored or ridiculed
but, instead, cast into art. Every great work of
art gives you back something that you have lost but that you hadn’t realized
you had lost. When I first read Tina De Rosa’s great novel, Paper Fish, it gave me back my old
Italian-American, working-class neighborhood in Hoboken, New Jersey, and the
life I lived there, the memory of my Italian grandmother who lived next door
to us, and my Italian-American father’s thwarted desire to become an opera singer. Unlike the Chicago
neighborhood smashed down by wrecking cranes in Paper Fish, my old neighborhood in Hoboken, New Jersey, is still
intact, still very much as it was when I grew up there in the 40s, during the
war years. Reading Paper Fish
brought a flood of memories, for De Rosa’s precise descriptions of where
Carmolina and her family live—a neighborhood very much like where I lived,
but that I never before saw described in fiction—brought back the place that
is my heart’s home—its sounds, sights, smells, its silences, its significance
and, for the first time, I could understand it as my place of origin, and
write about it in my memoir Vertigo. De Rosa gives us “old
women with the cloth shopping bags, up before the sun and waiting for the
vegetable wagons” (11), alleyways, pumpkin seeds drying in the sun, “red
peppers . . . hanging . . . out to dry in the sun,
between the bedsheets” (21), “horses standing in their own dung flattened
like yellow pancakes and drawing flies” (11), wooden clothespins, cold-water
flats with far too many people, the swollen purple flesh of an old woman’s
feet, the cemetery and its small framed pictures of the dead, the kitchen
table, the icebox, the watermelon stand, “the deathless call of children
playing in the summer heat, the chew of roller skates against cement, the
stink” (13). And so I could recall Hoboken, where my memory has found a place
to live, and to revisit. Hoboken, which hasn’t changed much, where the old
women who put pillows on the window sills to rest their beefy arms still lean
out the window to watch what’s happening on the block. Where the housewives
still pop out of their apartments wearing aprons to pick up a thing or two
from Fiore’s for supper while their sauce cooks down on the stove. Where a
mother still stands in the street, craning her neck backwards, to talk to her
friend at an open window five flights up, and she doesn’t move when a car
pulls up and blows the horn because, after all, this is her street, not his,
and she’s entitled to do anything she wants here. Where a little kid in a
Catholic school uniform still hops up and down the steps of a stoop on one
foot. And where an old guy wearing a beat-up hat with a crushed brim still
sits, backwards, on a folding chair, in the street, very close to the curb;
an outsider might wonder what he is doing there, but I know that he is saving
a parking space in front of his apartment for his son-in-law who is coming to
visit him from Brooklyn and that he will sit there for hours, if he must,
because doing this is important. Reading Paper Fish, too, gave me back the
memory of my Italian grandmother who, like Carmolina’s, lived right next
door, who too saved the emotional life of a very little girl whose parents
were worn out. Worn out by work, by ridicule, and by their unacknowledged
anger at their failure to realize the American dream (they blamed themselves,
I’m sure, and not their circumstances or the prejudice against their
ethnicity that made it easy for them to be cops, garbage men, or construction
workers, but next to impossible for them to realize their heart’s desire).
And, through reading Marco’s life in Paper
Fish, I got back the memory of my Italian-American father’s thwarted
desire to become an opera singer. Marco’s hands, De
Rosa says, “are long, are fine. The fingers are straight, are perfect. They
are pianist’s fingers, carving wood (like his maternal grandfather, years
before in Italy). They are fingers that were intended to know the skin of the
piano” (8). But, Carmolina tells us, “My father will never play the piano” (8).
Instead, Marco becomes a tough Italian-American cop (thought to be,
therefore, “stupid” [10] by his fellow cops), a man who is “not comfortable
in his policeman’s uniform” (10). But, we are told, a man with a musician’s
soul, one who buys “records of classical music to which he listened
repeatedly alone in the living room” (14), one who (for awhile) tries to
drown his sadness in the fleshy body of his wife. And so, Carmolina grows
“with music in her head” (25), but it is not her father who makes the music. Marco doesn’t
completely give up his wish to make something beautiful, but he channels it,
instead, into carving wood, into making something practical and useful.
Marco, who spends the last day of his all-too-young life, not in the concert
hall playing—and what would Marco be playing—a piano concerto by
Rachmaninoff? by Beethoven?—but in the garage—doing what? carving? or, more
probably, if he was anything like my father, he would be working on his car,
saving money by changing the oil, bleeding the brakes, adjusting the
carburetor, his long, fine pianist’s fingers blackened with grease. Marco’s heart attack
is, to me, no mystery. Prejudice kills. Ridicule kills. Stress kills. Never
being safe kills. Being tough when you’re gentle kills. Knowing that you have
been lied to about life’s possibilities kills. Not giving your family what
you believe you should provide kills. And unrealized heartfelt dreams have a
way of destroying the heart. My father, like
Marco, I remembered, as I read Paper
Fish, had a musician’s soul. He had a spectacular untrained tenor voice
and he wanted to become an opera singer—he had the raw talent, and the
temperament to become a star. But (like with Marco) money was scarce, and he
couldn’t afford lessons. Besides, he didn’t have sufficient schooling; as the
only son in a large family, he had to stop school in the seventh or eighth
grade to earn money. My father, too, has heart disease (two massive heart attacks,
one coronary bypass) though, blessedly, he’s still alive. And my father’s
desires, like Marco’s, have been thwarted, though I’m not sure he would see
it that way, for he has the capacity to find joy in whatever comes his way,
to engage with life, and to be voraciously curious in learning about how
things work. My father worked hard as a machinist until he turned eighty,
though he listened, always listened to opera. (At the Metropolitan Opera
House, no one, including me, liked to sit near him because he couldn’t
control himself from singing along, and loudly, with the arias he had started
to memorize when he was just a boy stealing copper tubing from construction
sights to try to help his family pay the bills. Like Marco, too, he built
things—a desk for me, and ship models. But he sang in choruses for much of
his adult life and he often got to perform, though in scruffy auditoriums and
not in resplendent concert halls where I always believed he belonged. “You can hear
grandpa’s voice above all the other singers,” my sons were proud to observe. “That’s because he’s
really a soloist and he should be singing at the Met,” I would tell them.) Paper Fish
treats so many, many important issues in an intensely imagistic multiple
viewpoint style that shatters and refracts and reassembles the experiences
it describes as we see how each member of this complex, deeply-connected
family processes experience. It treats the condition of childhood. Growing up
in a home with a disabled child. What it feels like to be that disabled
child. The unrelenting hard labor, the impossible dreams of working-class
women (the postcard Sarah keeps of Miami is, to me, a heartbreaking moment).
The obliteration of yet another Italian-American neighborhood and the
displacement of its inhabitants. But besides this
richness of meaning, Paper Fish,
too, is an important novel about that all-too-neglected topic—the relationship
between a grandmother and her granddaughter. (There are, too, Vita
Sackville-West’s All Passion Spent,
Cristina Garcia’s Dreaming in Cuban,
and Carole Maso’s Ghost Dance.) Grandma Doria BellaCasa,
whose “sight is fragile,” whose “heart is fragile” (22), whose feet are
“purple growths, soft as moss” (50) is nonetheless, to her granddaughter,
“the strongest woman in the world” (22). To me, Grandma Doria is the heart
and soul of Paper Fish. Her love,
care, and attention are why Carmolina doesn’t die inside. As she goes about her
work, cutting into green pepper, stringing red peppers on a thread, Grandma
Doria looks out her window, observes, judges (that something is wrong inside
her son’s house, that Marco isn’t home enough, that he doesn’t care for his
children the way he should, that Marco and Sarah no longer sleep together,
that something that the family has done, or not done, has caused Doriana’s
condition, that God is punishing them, that Doriana shouldn’t be sent away).
More important, she “mak[es] the world” (21) for Carmolina, through story
(about life in the small hill town of Italy near Naples, about her dream of
running away to the circus, about coming to Chicago, about death), and this
enables Carmolina, too, “to tell herself the stories her mind made up” (77).
She enriches Carmolina’s life through song (“O rosa! O rosa! O rosa gentillina!”), through laughter, through
food (the tomato-on-Italian bread sandwich that every Italian grandmother
has, I am sure, made for every Italian-American grandchild), and through
telling her she’s special (“you lucky. You have a magician,” she tells her [110]).
She tells Carmolina the truth, though it be painful, that she is dying. She
gives the kind of unconditional love that grandmothers can often provide
(even as Sarah slaps her for minor transgressions), the kind of love that can
rescue children like Carmolina. For it is only in Grandma Doria’s arms that
Carmolina feels herself inside a circle of sun that shines upon her (30).
And, when Carmolina looks at herself in the mirror, the face she sees
reflected back to her is partly her face, but also partly her grandmother’s. I always knew that,
as I always phrased it, my Italian grandmother, who lived next door to us,
and then with us, saved my life, much as Grandma Doria BellaCasa saves
Carmolina’s. She protected me when my father got angry; she gave me money
when I ran short (crumpled five dollar bills that she kept safety pinned
inside the lining of her winter coat so my mother wouldn’t find them); she
told me that I was smart, and that she knew I would amount to something,
though she might not live long enough to see it happen. She warned me to
watch out for my mother, whom she described as crazy. Before I read Paper Fish, though, I didn’t realize
how much I owed her, didn’t understand that it is her life, and mine with
her, that I must write about next. For me, then, the most important memories
Tina De Rosa’s Paper Fish have
unleashed for me are those of my own Italian grandmother. Libera Calabrese. Hunter College Works Cited Barolini, Helen, ed. The Dream Book. An Anthology of Writings
by Italian American Women. Introd. Helen Barolini. New York: Schocken,
1985. De Rosa, Tina, Paper Fish. Chicago, Wine P,
1980. |