Growing up in Youngstown, Ohio

La Madonna of Elberen Street

By Álvaro Ramírez
                                                   I
 
Signora Tattaglia sat in her small wooden porch waiting for the newspaper that she wasn't going to read. I walked up the steps and smiled as she greeted me in Italian: ‘Buon pomeriggio.’ I nodded my head to acknowledge her greeting and handed her the paper. She then asked me to sit down on the plastic folding chair across from her and handed me a sandwich. This time it was meatballs with red sauce. ‘Mangia, mangia,’ said Signora Tattaglia. And I took a big bite of that wonderfully delicious food.

Her green side-paneled house was on the lower part of Elberen Street where the Italians had bought just about every house. With the exception of Beep-Beep and his mom, Jumbo's family and Mr. West, a black man who lived at the bottom of the street, on the corner with Waverley, everyone else on Elberen Street was a De Chellis, Lalama, Tattaglia, Naples. Proud descendants of the Romans from the south of Italy and Sicily, they had traded forging iron swords for the production of steel that built the cities of the American Empire. 

I ran into some of their sons and daughters at Chaney High School. Many of the boys excelled in sports especially American football, though this fact baffled me. Italy was a perennial powerhouse in soccer and had recently lost the World Cup final to Brazil in Mexico City, yet none of these Italiano boys played soccer! They would rather run around with a ball in their hands into walls of people than handle the ball gracefully with their feet. Their women were beautiful, but off limits to us non-Italians. We knew that well and never went near them. Fruta prohibida, if you know what I mean. Elberen Street was a super Catholic enclave where you felt the presence of the Pope. Saint Joseph was always hovering watching over everyone, even me, the Mexican paperboy. For abstaining from those beautiful pasta-fed Italian girls, He rewarded me with lots of great newspaper customers in that small replica of Italy.
 
                                                 II
 
Signora Tattaglia waited in silence while I ate the meatball sandwich. Through the front screen door I could make out vague sounds of an afternoon television show. She seemed to enjoy watching me eat. The questions were on the tip of her tongue. I took a sip of the lemonade and she said: ‘Tua madre, come sta?’ ‘Bien,’ I answered. ‘Tuo padre, labora?’ ‘Sí.’

The questions and answers flowed easily, almost naturally. The kinship between our languages was a pleasant discovery we had made the first time she asked me to sit with her to rest on the porch of her house on a hot smoggy afternoon. ‘Siediti, perfavore,’ she said making a gesture with her hand. Her voice sounded like a gentle melody I somehow understood and gladly dropped the heavy burlap bag full of newspapers I had been carrying. ‘Gracias,’ I said seated in the chair that would come to know well my scrawny butt. She must have felt pity for me when she saw me walking in the searing heat trudging up to her porch to deliver the afternoon paper. I was bathed in sweat, my T-shirt sticking to my boney ribs.

She and I sat there in a friendly silence looking at melting cars pass by on the infernal street. ‘Aspetta un minuto,’ she said, and I heard ‘Espera un minuto.’ She went inside the house and I waited in the warm shade of her porch, the rattle and hum of the steel mills in the far background. A hummingbird was rummaging through the bushes and plants pecking here and there, searching for nectar in wilting flowers.

Presently, she returned with a large cold glass of lemonade and handed it to me. ‘Gracias,’ I said cordially. She sat down and leaned a bit toward me. I looked into her gleaming eyes, small mirrors reflecting tiny images. She asked me slowly: ‘Come ti chiama?’ She repeated the question, and I got the sense she was asking my name. ‘Álvaro,’ I responded. She repeated my name. It sounded strange as she stressed the wrong syllable. No big deal to me. It's still my name, I thought, but in Italian. The lemonade felt like a piece of paradise in my stomach and lifted my spirits. ‘Alvaro, io sono Signora Luciana Tattaglia,’ she said, pointing an index finger toward herself. ‘Mucho gusto, señora.’ I drank another draught of the dreamy, sweet lemonade and I felt her kind soft gaze on me. ‘Dove vive la tua famiglia?’ I told her we lived on the corner of Salt Springs Road and Broadview Street. Then, there was a barrage of simple questions in Italian that I understood with some effort: your country, your father, your mother, sisters, brothers? And my brief answers in Spanish: México, works in the railroad, my mom at home, eight brothers and sisters. She approved each of my responses with ‘bene, bene,’ and a nod of her head. Finally, there was a pause. I stood up and handed her the empty glass and told her I needed to go finish my route. ‘Gracias por la limonada.’ I heard one more ‘bene’ and her wonderful smile sent me off.
 
                                                 III
 
It became common for me to make a brief stop at Signora Tattaglia's house whenever she was sitting on her porch. Always, she had a treat for me: a large slice of pizza, sandwiches filled with sausage or meatballs, and those wonderful glasses of lemonade. I feasted on all that food like a Mexican thinking he was a Roman god.

During these short visits we learned about each other's lives in bits and pieces that the familiarity of our languages allowed us to share. What I knew for sure was that she was from Calabria and her husband had been a steelworker at Sheet and Tube. She had a granddaughter and two grandsons, one of which I saw in school. ‘Tu lo conosci?’ Yes, I did know him, Sal, a shy, quiet boy who kept to himself. Despite the linguistic limitations, little by little I began to form a picture of her life in my head and, I suppose, she was also creating a picture of me with all the questions she asked about my hometown, my family, and our move to the United States. 

What seemed to interest her most was my life in Michoacán. I remember when she asked me what my father did in Messico and I told her that he worked in ‘el campo,’ a farmer that grew corn. ‘Poco, no mucho,’ I clarified to make sure she understood that we didn't own a hacienda or some Ponderosa Ranch like the family in ‘Bonanza,’ the TV show that she may have watched. She leaned forward, her face lit up with happiness, and told me her father also ‘laborava sul campo in Italia.’ And then she went off speaking in a fast and beautiful musical madness. I only half understood that it was in a small town, and there were mountains, and it was olives that he grew or harvested. She sat back with her hands clasped under her chin and smiled with wonder at me as if she had discovered something of great importance, a revelation. ‘Agricoltura,’ said Signora Tattaglia, nodding her head with an air of nostalgia. ‘Anche noi.’ I mirrored her warm campesino smile.
                                                                       
                                               IV
 
As I walked away that afternoon, I thought to myself: these Italians are farmers, country folk just like us. Why hadn't I thought of that before? Like all her neighbors, Signora Tattaglia's house had a lush green appendage: a vegetable garden that took up most of the space in the backyard. No playing football or soccer back there, that's for sure. It was a sacred spot that received the most tender care. Hell, I knew that. Every time we played baseball with the Broadview boys over on Billy's field, we made sure not to hit the ball into Bambina's garden next door. If we did, Mr. Bambina would march over like a Roman praetorian guard, retrieve the baseball among the tomatoes and peppers, and slice it up into pieces with a huge knife right before our eyes. You couldn't mess with their women and you couldn't mess with their gardens. Both were sacred to them.

I began to feel a tinge of regret. All those times I had joined with other mischievous friends to raid someone's Italian garden pushed by the dark boredom of summer nights. My conscience was suddenly uneasy. I hoped Saint Joseph would overlook those misdeeds and not take my customers away from me. I even thought of going to confession, though I walked that back when I realized I didn't know how to do the ritual in English! I would just have to change my evil ways on my own and hope it would atone for my past sins against my Italian paisanos.
 
                                                 V
 
The next time I saw Signora Tattaglia I still felt pangs of guilt in my conscience. As usual she asked me to sit and rest a bit, and gave me a piece of tasty pizza with an extra dose of garlic. She looked overly happy and eager to converse. When I finished the pizza, she handed me a picture: “Sono io,” she said, smiling peevishly. ‘Quatordici anni.’ In the flood of words she let loose on me, I heard Ellis Island, the Statue of Liberty, New York, and Mario. I looked intently at the black and white image I held in my hand. It was a picture of a young, beautiful Signora Tattaglia and a man whom I eventually figured out was her brother. They were just off the boat in New York City, staring at the camera lens as if looking into the unknown.    

“¿Es usted?” I asked while pointing with my finger to the picture and to her. I wanted to make sure I had understood her long explanation. “Si, sono io.” “‘Muy bonita,” I said, almost coquettishly. She smiled and specks of afternoon light glinted in her eyes. “¿Cuándo llegó aquí?” “Nell'anno dicianovi venti.” She had been in this country since 1920. A long time ago that was unfathomable to me. She had arrived before all the wars, Vietnam, Korea, World War II, even the Great Depression. All the new history I was being fed in school so I could be a good civic member of this country.  

I gazed at the picture intently, drawn by the reality that was there, a moment of her long life in my hands, captured, as they say, in an instant and frozen forever. “Estaba muy joven,” I murmured, still looking at the image. Hell, I thought, she was my age, an Italian teenager. A lot of questions were swelling inside my head, too many to ask. I probably would only catch bits and pieces of the story if I asked them. I raised my eyes and noticed Signora Tattaglia smiling, gazing at me with tenderness that I could feel reciprocated in me. It was a far-away look of a woman coming face to face with the realm of memories. I felt enveloped in her nostalgia. Presently, I remembered my paper route. I gave her back the picture. We didn't say good-by. We just smiled at each other as two people who know they share a wonderful secret.
 
                                               VI
 
The picture got a hold of me real good. For days it floated in my mind, wouldn't go away, and soon it began to distill a story dripping slowly from my imagination: the story of Signora Tattaglia. I put together a string of images in my head. I saw the young woman and her brother leaving a rustic mountain Italian village; madre e padre, relatives, friends, the town priest, all together for the last hugs and blessings; baggage filled with clothes and memories, the grief of departure; the last look at the familiar world, the mountains and valleys bathed in sad sun morning light. Weeks on a crowded boat, the blue Mediterranean and Atlantic. Slowly drifting by the awesome Statue of Liberty, the tumultuous line of people and mazes of authority at Ellis Island. Anxiety and trepidation alternating as she made her way through the concrete heart of New York, the glistening skyscrapers tearing into the blue skies of the new country. Finally, the trip by train she and her brother made to the Mahoning Valley where jobs awaited the men in the steel mills and railroads of America.

Signora Tattaglia knew every picture tells a story. You don't need words to tell it. She was right about that. All roads didn't lead to Rome. Histories converged in unexpected places. We had traveled similar paths from different countries that led to the same destination. My journey had been with a family of ten, in crowded, smelly buses, jumping like in a hopscotch game from city to city in Mexico. The watery crossing hadn't been as spectacular as hers, just the dirty waters of the Río Bravo, which the gringos insisted in calling the Río Grande. No welcoming statues with poetic words in hand greeted us, or an Ellis Island. Only the gray Greyhound bus station in Laredo, Texas, that assaulted all the senses accustomed to a different environment, natural not artificial. Strange smells, odd sounds, and the mixture of Spanish and English wafting over the air while we waited to board a bus with an image of a long thin dog running on its silvery side, a bus that slowly meandered its way into the heart of the Midwest cutting its way through mysterious, enigmatic vistas of deserts, prairies, and thick forests of green, as my Mexican world and language receded into the background.

I wished I had a picture of my brothers and sisters in the bus station in Laredo to commemorate the moment when we crossed into the Promised Land, a magical image that eternalized the moment of arrival. But I had nothing. No pictures of my hometown, the voyage, la migra checking our papers. It was frustrating that I couldn't share any of that with Signora Tattaglia, the way she had shared it with me. I soon realized it wasn't really necessary. It didn't matter. After all, in some way her picture included my story as well. 
 
                                              VII
 
I accompanied Signora Tattaglia on her bilingual porch again on the warm days of summer. We repeated the same social ritual, the same brief questions and answers and the food and lemonade interspersed with moments of silence. Sometimes Sal or his sister came out to the porch and joined us for an awkward minute, then went back into the house. I'm sure it was a bit odd to them that their grandmother liked to sit in silence with a Mexican kid with whom she didn't have much in common.

They had no idea their grandma and I were joined by a bond of experience they would never have. Half a century earlier, she had left her home to start a new life in a land far from her patria. Now she saw me replicating that pivotal moment of her past that she had ensconced away in her memories, which time now rekindled by way of a Mexican paperboy at the beginning of the same journey. Nostalgia of the crossing had come down like the Holy Spirit and thrust Signora Tattaglia in a game of reflecting mirrors. The more you looked the more the images multiplied.

It sure as hell was ironic that I was in school with Sal but it was his grandmother with whom I felt so much alike. Our stories entwined and comingled like the wine grape vines hanging on the fences separating the backyards in the Italian neighborhood. If followed  the vines back long enough, you would discover that the root of our experience, the source of our need to wander was the same.   
                                                           
                                            VIII
 
On one afternoon, I posed a question we had never discussed: “¿Signora, usted visita Calabria?”’ I made rudimentary gestures with my hand, as if I were playing a game of charade, to get the meaning across to her. “¿Ha regresado a su pueblo?” She fell silent for a moment. The question had come out of left field and she needed time to think, to weigh her memories and sort them out. A slight breeze was pushing the afternoon light down the street.  She emerged from her thoughts, gained her composure and as usual leaned a bit toward me and said with direct soft words: “Alvaro, la mia vita è qui”’ She opened up her arms slightly to emphasize her words: “Il mio mondo è qui.” She leaned back into the chair as a gust of wind came into the porch and made a whirlwind. Two birds chirping away flew over the green hedge by the side of the porch; they hesitated an instant and turned up the street.   

The answer should have been obvious to me. She had never returned to her hometown. Who could blame her? After all, Italy wasn't just on the other side of Pennsylvania. What’s more, the gamble she had taken as a teenager had paid off far beyond her dreams. In Ohio, Signora Tattaglia had recreated her world shaped by her memories of joy and sorrow of Italy, where she raised a new breed of proud Italians despite the distance that separated them from la madre patria. But make no mistake about it, they were also Americans who wore on their sleeve their faith and loyalty to the new country.

Signora Tattaglia had learned how to cross boundaries and succeed. In a word, she had cut off the national umbilical cord and survived. You had to admire her for that. Did a similar future await me? I had my doubts. My cord was still intact. Mexico was close, real close. If I wanted, I could easily return to the Mexican womb. Still, I did wonder if fifty years down the line, I would be repeating the cycle, caught in the hall of mirrors, watching myself in another fresh, young immigrant starting anew in the United Immigrant States of America.
 
                                                 IX
 
Time moved on and I found myself traveling in Italy. I had received a scholarship to study in Spain in a summer program from the University of Southern California. After finishing my literary studies, I journeyed by train to many of the free countries of Europe, harvesting new experiences and memories. None of these places was as meaningful to me as when I arrived in Italy.

As I wandered south by train through mountainous region, I took a break from Virgil's Aeneid, which I had been reading to pass the time from station to station. I was quiet and pensive, looking at the beautiful Italian countryside. Words from sporadic conversations in the train compartment flew out an open window never to be heard again. Images of the past were flipping in my head like the pages of a calendar in reverse. I was returning to the realm of memories.

“What are you thinking about?” asked Jim, an American from Indiana I had met a few hours before when we boarded the train in Rome. “Newspapers,” I said and he laughed at my strange answer. I faded back into the mountains out in the distance. The picture of Signora Tattaglia and her brother Mario flickered in the landscape. I wondered if the town from where they had set out on their voyage to America was one of those towns I saw elegantly attached on the side of the mountains like swallows’ nests. The thought brought a smile to my face. Then, it suddenly hit me. Swallows sometimes leave and never return. It was the enigma of people changing countries. I felt a tinge of sadness.
‘Mangia, Alvaro, mangia.’ Her soft melodious voice rang in my head and I saw the green house on Elberen Street, the balmy porch, pizza, sandwiches, lemonade, and Signora Tattaglia sitting on her plastic chair smiling like a saintly Madonna who had learned how to make ends meet in a country far from her swallow's nest.
​

Álvaro Ramírez is from Michoacán, México. He taught at various institutions including the University of Southern California, Occidental College, and California State University, Long Beach, before joining Saint Mary’s College of California where he is Emeritus Professor in the Department of World Languages and Cultures and teaches Latin American Literature as well as Mexican and Latino Cultural Studies. His collection of short stories, Los norteados (2016) which portrays the transnational experience of Mexican immigrants, won Honorable Mention at the 2017 International Latino Book Awards. In 2020, he also published a book of short essays on Mexican history, politics, and culture, which won the Victor Villaseñor Bronze Award at the 2021 International Latino Book Awards. He has edited five online publications of Conference Proceedings titled: Imágenes de postlatinoamérica as well as published articles on Don Quixote, Mexican film, and Chicano Studies in several academic journals. His articles have also appeared in Cultura Colectiva, a popular Mexican online magazine, and Somos en escrito Magazine.

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