Bitter Almonds by Mary Taylor Simeti

Author:Mary Taylor Simeti
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781504026253
Publisher: Open Road Distribution

The first time that I got leave to go out from the San Carlo was after I’d been in there four years. Leave to go home for the day, that is, to my house at Erice. For after my father died, first my mother went to stay at Chiesanuova, to be near her mother. Then after my sister Pina was born, her uncles advised her to move: ‘Why don’t you go up to Erice? What are all these children going to do here? Up there they’ll have a better chance to find work.’ So Mamma rented a house in Erice. ‘I want to be near my daughters,’ she said. And she would come almost every other day to see us, behind the grate, it’s true, but she got to see us. And when we were bigger she was allowed to come inside sometimes, or else sometimes she’d cook something for us at home and bring it to us.

So she came up to Erice, and my brother Berto went to work after school for the tobacconist, who had a bar; Berto delivered coffee and things, and was paid 500 lire a day. Three hundred he’d give to my mother to buy bread, to buy pasta. And he went to school as well. Berto came after my sister Angela, he must have been about seven or eight when they moved to Erice. Then there was my brother Fanino and my sister Pina: my mother put them into the nursery school at San Pietro, where they gave them something to eat and kept them until four o’clock. And my mother went out to work as a washerwoman. She went out to do laundry, tubs of laundry! And they’d pay her 500 lire, 600 lire, something like that. Or they’d give her a half-kilo of pasta, a kilo of bread. And at four o’clock she’d come back because she had to go get the children at the nursery.

My mother had to come and ask the nuns for permission for me to go out, otherwise I couldn’t. Not just to go home for Christmas Day or something like that: it had to be something important, like my cousin’s wedding.

When I finally did leave the San Carlo, it was in order to go to Catania, and then I never went back again. I thought I had the vocation to become a nun, and I went to Catania where there was a cloistered order, a convent of Carmelite nuns. I entered, but not as a novice, only to see what it was like, and I got sick. I got something that I’d already had before, all my nerves went soft and I could only move one arm. I was an invalid. I woke up one morning and I couldn’t feel my legs or anything. Maybe because I was unhappy that I’d gone there …

They called the doctor when it didn’t go away, and he said that it was a nervous collapse due to a decline of the organism: I was wasting away.

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