“It is a mistake to confuse quietness with weakness,” someone once said, and this was certainly true of Carla Capobianco. She was in eighty-one when I interviewed her, a gentle, soft-spoken woman who seemed to prefer the background, yet when given the chance to tell her story her own way, she described a violent rebellion in her youth and a life-long struggle for recognition of her worth from her husband and family.
     Carla envisioned her life as a love story. To me it resembles an opera, with the young woman held captive in her home and taking desperate actions to liberate herself, risking reputation and life to follow a man she barely knew halfway around the world. From listening to her I came to understand that the affinity of Italians for the opera has something to do with the striking resemblance of that art form with everyday life in their native country, not the metaphor I had thought it to be. In Sicily near the turn of the century (as remains the case for women in many countries of the world today), Carla had few options. Since her parents refused to educate her, her only chance to escape the fate they had in mind for her was through marriage to a man her parents disapproved. While she speaks of being in love with the man she ran away with, one can’t help concluding that what drew her to him was that he embodied what she yearned for—he defied the social norms of the day and this made it seem that with him she might gain greater control over her own destiny.

CARLA CAPOBIANCO
Carnival—Part 1

In Italy when I was a girl you learned early that your place was inside the house. When I was very young, my life was nice, I could play, I could go outside, but really, that time was very short. When I was only nine years old, my sister Piera turned thirteen, and one day all of a sudden my mother said to her, “Now you’re a big girl. You can’t go out and play any more. You’re going to stay home!” My sister said, “What about Carla?” My mother said, “Carla won’t go out anymore!” And she made me stay home too. My sister was older than me, but when the blow came, it came for both of us. We had to go inside at the same time. Neither of us could go out anymore.
     In Italy at that time, girls didn’t have the freedom they do here. When you reached eleven, twelve years, you stayed home. Girls didn’t go any place. Not even shopping. The mother did the shopping. Girls stayed inside the house and did housework. That’s how strict it was. Girls weren’t allowed to take too much air. So from the time you were small, you knew your place was in the house. That’s why they could keep girls home when they were seventeen and eighteen, because we learned early to stay there. The only time I could go out was when my mother was talking outside with people from the town. Then I used to sneak out and go across the street to see my girlfriend. As soon as my mother noticed I was out, she’d send me back inside.
     Those were the years when I learned to do housework. We used to work and play at the same time. We’d make up a game, whoever finished their job first could go down one step. Whoever got to the bottom first was the winner. The winner got nothing. No prize. Just win. On days when we didn’t have housework to do, I learned to knit, to crochet, to do embroidery. We had to learn how to make stockings. There were no stores where you could buy stockings, all these things we made by hand.
     My mother got up early. After she finished the outside work, she called me, and I got up and we did all the work inside the house. I learned to make bread in the oven with hay, to make macaroni. Every Sunday afternoon my mother prepared macaroni, enough for the family and guests staying in the hotel for the whole week. I learned how to make tomato paste and sauce, she taught me how to dry tomatoes and figs. And after I was thirteen or fourteen, I had to help her in the hotel. I remember how I used to stay near the window and watch the grownups outside and all the boys, and wonder why I had to stay inside.
     I was born October 27, 1906, in a small town in Sicily. To get to my town today from Palermo takes about three hours by car. My mother named after my grandfather, her father. The only story people told about my birth was that I was a surprise. All her married life, my mother had a baby every two years. But three years passed between my sister and me, and so my mother wasn’t expecting me. She was thinking, “Thank God, no more children.” And then I appeared, and I came to think she was mad.

     I wasn’t the first in my family to go to America. A brother of mine was the first to break away from the family. On the day of my christening my parents had a little party to celebrate, and right afterwards he left. My family had a talent for spoiling a celebration. My children inherited that gift. My brother left for the same reason I did later on. He was in love with somebody my parents didn’t like. My parents’ marriage was arranged by their parents, and they arranged the marriage for my older sister, and they were mad when my brother and I chose for ourselves. My brother was small, like me, and the girl he loved was very tall. That’s why my parents objected to her. They said to my brother, “You look like you want a mother, not a wife.” My brother was nineteen when he left, and, believe it or not, when he wrote home once after being away for twelve years, he asked if that girl was still single. Twelve years had passed, and he was still in love with that girl.

     My mother had nine children, but only four lived. Three boys and one girl got sick and died before they were nine months old. One, a little girl named Piera, died in a terrible accident. My mother never went to school. She grew up in the country, and because she would have had to walk fifteen or twenty minutes to reach the school, or use a mule or donkey, she never went. She didn’t know how to read or write. For some reason, I don’t know why, my parents were staying with my grandmother. After a couple of weeks or couple of months there, my father wanted to leave because he had nothing to do. He couldn’t work because his own land was too far away, so they decided to go back home. At that time, they had a sick mule. A man who knew how to help animals—not a veterinarian, but a local man who had the skill—gave them a salve. During the journey Piera got sick. She was about two or three years old. She had a sore throat. My mother had some gel that she was supposed to rub on the baby’s throat, but my poor mother, she couldn’t read, and she made a terrible mistake. She took the medicine for the mule and rubbed it on the baby’s throat, and instead of getting better, the baby’s throat swelled and she choked to death. Nobody arrested my mother, but she kept saying that she had killed her own child. She was heart-broken because of what she did. That was a terrible thing to happen to my mother, and it all happened because she couldn’t read and she had to move from one place to the other. When you move things get confused, and because she couldn’t read, she used the wrong medicine on the baby girl.
     At Christmas time the church always had a lottery. For eight or nine days people in the town went to church at six o’clock in the morning, and every day there was a lottery, and the prize was a little baby Jesus. On the last day, the day of Christmas eve, the prize was a big Jesus, about the size of a real baby. That morning, the morning of Christmas eve, my father went over to the church and bought tickets, one in the name of each of his children. When he came home, my mother said to him, “Did you get a ticket in the names of all the children?” He said “Yes.” She said, “Did you get one for Piera?” He said, “No, she’s dead.” She said, “What? She’s not your child just because she’s dead?” So my father went back to the church and bought a ticket in Piera’s name, and that ticket won and the baby Jesus came to my mother. And after that, everything started to get better for my parents. Before the lottery, everything was going wrong. The mule died, the baby died. They had some other troubles I can’t remem-ber. But after the baby Jesus came inside the house, everything went back to normal. Later, my mother had another baby girl and they gave her the same name as the baby who died—Piera.

     My parents owned a small hotel in the town, like what people call a pensione now. And my father also owned land outside the town, in four or five different places, an acre here, a half-acre someplace else, and every day he left to work on his land—one day he worked one piece, the next day he went to work on another. We also had a small vineyard that my mother had inherited.

     Before I turned nine years old, I was happy. We owned land, we had good food, good house, enough of every-thing. And there was family love. My sister Piera had to take care of me. She used to take me by the hand, and we would go to a street where some of our relatives lived, where there was a big hill with a narrow passage through it. The hill was high, and sometimes the passage was so dark. A bunch of kids used to play there; some-body would put on a red sweater and somebody else would say that person was the devil or a witch. Everybody would shriek, “Owww, the witch is coming, the witch is coming!” And everybody ran. There was no danger. Somebody was just making fun. They scared you. But Piera never let go of my hand, because if she had and something had happened to me, my mother would have killed her! I used to trip, I would fall down, but Piera would never let go of my hand. I remember even until this day how my sister would run and how tight she would hold my hand and pull me.

     My mother was a small woman, about my size. When I look in the mirror now, I think I see her face. I have her eyes. My hands are shaped like hers. She was almost like I am now—quiet. She used to like to laugh, but not to make other people laugh. She was a good worker, clean.
     When I was little, my mother let me sleep until eight o’clock, she didn’t push me to get up, to help her do this, do that. She did many small things for me. She’d take a dish of macaroni and put on a little extra cheese and she’d give it to me. You remember things like that. Still, I was afraid of my mother. We had to obey her. I don’t know why, but it’s always the same between mother and daughter—if I was downstairs, she went upstairs. Mother and daughter always try not to be too much together. I never confided in my mother. I always knew that if I got into any trouble, my mother and my father would break my neck.
     Another thing about me when I was a girl, I believed I would never marry but I didn’t know why I felt that way. Really, I wanted to be a dancer. I loved to dance, to sing. Believe it or not, I used to love to dance. I never saw a dancer in a theater. In my town, there was no radio, no stage, no television. I used to make music and dance by myself, go around by myself. And when we used to go to Carnival, and to weddings, sometimes the girls would start to dance with each other. We didn’t wait for a man to come and ask us to dance. Two girls would start to dance. Usually a man would come and separate us.
     Every year we had Carnival. Carnival was like Mardi Gras. For three days before Lent you could eat meat, so we used to eat meat for breakfast, eat meat in the night. After that came Lent and you couldn’t dance or sing or eat meat. Every family celebrated Carnival. Every house had a celebration, and in the night everybody went out into the street and there was dancing. Everybody dressed up, like Halloween, and people tried to scare each other. A few times I dressed up too. Believe it or not, I chose to dress like a man. You believe that? I did. I dressed like a man.

     In the First World War the fighting was all in northern Italy. In Sicily we hardly knew there was a war, except a lot of the fellows from my town went away. My brother was away for four years. I have no memory of him before he went to the service, but I remember when he came back because there was singing, there was dancing in the streets. I was a young girl, twelve.
     There were so many boys after me and my sister. They used to come almost every Sunday. That’s what men did then. They came to the house—the boy and his family—they said they wanted to meet your father, but they came just to look over the daughters. Piera and I knew why they were coming, and we used to hide.
     In Italy at that time, after the war, Mussolini came in. I don’t know why he went bad, but at the beginning Mussolini did a lot of good things. He wanted more teachers, he wanted more people to be educated, and most everybody in my town started to go to college.
     I wanted to go to college. I was a better student than Piera. We both went to school, but in the evening I had to help my mother while Piera got to study. She had trouble learning and she read her lessons out loud, and by listening to her while I worked, I would learn. Next day at school, I knew the answers and Piera couldn’t remember. She said to me, “How can it be? You don’t study, but you know the answers.” My teachers wanted me to go to college to be a teacher. They encouraged my parents to send me. I begged my parents to send me to college, but they said no. Instead, they sent Piera.
     Then I realized what they had in their minds for me. I saw that they loved Piera more than they did me, and that Piera was going to be educated and become a teacher, and I was supposed to stay home and be the maid. I think maybe then it came in the back of my mind to leave. But when you’re not allowed to go anyplace by yourself, when you don’t even know the roads near the place where you live, when you never leave your village, the mind can’t imagine what to do. You’re just unhappy.

     After a war there’s always change. Children don’t want to obey their parents anymore. They say, “Look what you did. You made a war. You don’t know all the answers.” My brother picked the girl he wanted to marry. My parents were mad, they didn’t like the girl. I don’t know why it happens, but children always choose somebody their parents don’t like. You always go the other way. I did that myself.
     When my brother got married, we had a big wedding in our house. A pig was killed and roasted, we made macaroni and had a big dinner. My brother was married in the morning at ten or eleven o’clock, and the celebration lasted until five o’clock in the evening. That was the tradition. My brother and his wife didn’t go on a honeymoon. They had no place to go. They just stayed home in our house.

     A few months later my brother and his wife started to build their own house. This is the way a house was made: first men put up two by fours, and then the beams went in, and after that the roof was made with cane. When the time came to put on the cane, Marco Capobianco was hired to help. That’s how I met him. One day I walked over with my parents to see the house, and Marco was walking on the roof from beam to beam. I never saw anybody do that before, and I got scared that he would fall. Somebody told me that he wouldn’t fall, that he was a master and his work was building houses. That was the first time I saw him. I was thirteen. He was twenty-one.
     Right away I was in a fight with my family. Marco talked to me that day, he was going around me, and my family didn’t like it. First, I was young, and second, my family wanted me to marry somebody who had a few possessions. Marco’s family had nothing almost. They had just a business. His half-brother was a butcher.
     It wasn’t that my family objected so much to the difference between the two families. Marco’s family was all right. They criticized Marco because he didn’t like to work. He liked to dance, to sing, to drink on Saturday night, to play cards.
     Marco was born in 1898 in America, but while he was still very young his family returned to Italy. His mother died of anemia when he was a boy. She was only twenty-eight. Marco’s stepmother’s had taken care of his mother before she died, and afterwards she kept on taking care of the kids because Marco’s father went back to America where he worked in a restaurant as a cook. About a year later the father went back to Italy and he married Maria, and then he went back and forth, he’d get her pregnant and go to America, come back a couple years later and do again. Maria took care of her three stepchildren, and three of her own children. She was not a friendly woman. She kept to herself, and she called Marco names whenever he didn’t want to work, but if anybody else complained, she defended him.
     Marco loved music. He taught himself to play the guitar. He broke his leg and while he was recuperating, he sent for a guitar to help him pass the time. A book came with the instrument, and he learned from the book. When Marco’s father saw how much his son liked music, he wanted to break that guitar.
     My family wouldn’t let me see Marco or talk with him. They never let me go out. They kept me inside the house unless I was with my mother or my father. I was thirteen when I met Marco and for three years I saw him only from the window. I would hide in back of the window and watch for him to pass by in the street.
     When I told my family I loved him, they yelled at me, they hit me. They told me he could lose his shirt playing cards. They said, “How can he support a wife if he doesn’t like to go to work?”
     My older sister tried to warn me too. She said that if I married so young I would have a lot of children. I said, “So what? You have your children, I’ll get mine.”
     Marco wrote a song for me. A song about love. And that song became popular in the little towns around where we lived. People were singing it and dancing to it. When my parents heard about that song, they were really mad.
     Once they called a relative to the house, a cousin of my mother’s, and they were all talking against Marco. I said to them, “I love him. If I don’t see him in the day, I see him in the night because always I dream of him.” After the relative went away, my family hollered at me. They said, “You have no shame.” They hit me.

     That Carnival I was sixteen. I danced with Marco. When you dance, you can talk too. My sister Piera was still away at college in Petrolia where she lived with a family, but she was coming home for Carnival. My mother kept threatening me with my sister. She kept saying there was going to be a fight between me and Piera. She kept saying, “Oh, just you wait until your sister comes, when your sister comes.” Piera was three years older and she was supposed to get married before me. Piera was not soft like me, she was harder. I was afraid my family would start to hit me again, because over there they hit you whenever they don’t want you to say or do something. I got so frightened that when I was dancing with Marco at Carnival, I said to him, “Well, if you want to marry me, you better take me now.”
Yes, I did that. I proposed to Marco. And after three days he said yes.

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