By Elvira Cordileone

ELVIE GIRL UNDER GLASS © 2023 by Elvira Cordileone. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations in critical articles and reviews. For more information, contact Renaissance Press.

The author expressly prohibits any entity from using this publication for purposes of training artificial intelligence (AI) technologies to generate text, including without limitation technologies that are capable of generating works in the same style or genre as this publication. The author reserves all rights to license uses of this work for generative AI training and development of machine learning language models. No part of this book or its cover art was generated by artificial intelligence.

First edition 2023

Cover and interior design by Nathan Fréchette. Edited by Drew Gilvary, Evan McKinley, and Allyson Hope.

Legal deposit, Library and Archives Canada, December 2023.

Paperback ISBN: 978-1-990086-51-9 - Ebook ISBN: 978-1-990086-62-5

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Renaissance acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts.

To my sister, Teri, who can't bring herself to read this memoir,

and to Dr. Rose Dymetryszyn for guiding me out of the darkness

CONTENT NOTE

The following memoir deals with themes of untreated mental illness, child abuse, and psychological violence. Reader discretion is advised.

Prologue

She was twelve years old when the recurring dream began: a girl standing behind a plate glass window with her hands pressed up against it, gazing out. The girl observed the activity beyond her, watched the people go by, living their lives. From time to time, she wished she could go out and walk alongside them, laugh with them. But, of course, she couldn’t. Her room had no door.

She didn’t mind, though. She had everything she needed. Besides, safety lay on the inside.

As the living girl grew to womanhood, the dream girl did not. Although her dream self didn’t age, her long isolation in the end caused her great anguish and she longed to escape. Now when the real woman woke from the dream she felt as though her heart would break and asked herself how much longer she could endure such pain.

One night as the dream girl stood with her hands pressed against the glass, a woman with short dark hair and a round face walked up to the window and smiled. It made the girl rear back in fright. No one had ever looked in her direction before, let alone approach the window, as though she’d been invisible.

The woman spoke but the girl couldn’t hear her through the thick glass, and she shook her head.

The woman rummaged inside her purse and brought out a notebook and a pen. She scribbled something, tore out the page and held it up for the girl to read.

The woman had written, Dream it.

The girl knew right away what the women meant and soon she dreamed a door for herself.

Chapter One

I was born in Italy, a village called Campochiaro, meaning clear field. The picturesque village clings to the slope of a mountain in the Apennine Mountain range some 800 metres above sea level in the south-central region known today as Molise, caught between the Adriatic and Tyrrhenian Seas, south of Rome and north of Naples.

Although born in Italy, my ancestral lineage is not Roman but Samnite, one of a number of Indo-Europeans who settled the Italian peninsula during the Iron Age. Samnites, a confederation of four, self-governing tribes that came together to fight Roman expansion, occupied what are today the provinces of Abruzzo, Molise and Campania along the Apennine mountains, which form Italy’s spine.  Not much is known about these Samnites except what later Roman historians wrote about the many wars between them, a hundred years or more after their subjugation.

In 90 BCE a rebellion by Italic tribes, including former Roman allies, fought for independence against Roman autocracy. The rebels had some successes and Rome, rather than fight on all fronts, offered political concessions, which pacified many of the tribes. But not the Samnites, who fought on and only ceding in 88 BCE when Sulla, the Roman general who headed the last Roman campaign, crushed them to near extinction. Ancient historian Strabo noted Sulla said he had realized from experience that a Roman could never live in peace so long as the Samnites held together as a separate people.  What Sulla ordered was on the scale of genocide, including razing their cities to the ground.

Today archeologists have begun to excavate what Rome buried more than two thousand years ago, hoping to learn more about how they lived and what they believed in. Temple and theater complexes have been unearthed in former Samnite territory, including a fourth century BCE compound dedicated to Hercules high above Campochiaro where I was born. Bronze tablets have come to light, written in Oscan—a language spoken by the Italic tribes of southern Italy similar to Latin—which lay out sacred rituals and municipal laws. Such artefacts begin to tell the story of a vanished culture. 

The emerging story of the Samnites, however, doesn’t suggest a culture rich in fine arts and literature. Not only were they physically and culturally isolated from the rest of the Mediterranean world, they were forced to devote their energies to the backbreaking work of: coaxing food out of the rocky soil, caring for the animals to clothe and feed themselves, scouring the mountainsides for wood with which to cook and keep warm and making preserves for winter.

They did have, however, have a rich oral storytelling tradition. Maybe that was why I heard so many wonderful stories as a child. All the adults had a roster of them, from fairy stories to the supernatural to stories of heroic brigands who roamed the mountains fighting for justice against evil feudal lords.

What traits have I inherited from such people? Stubborn pride? Suspicion of strangers? Blind resistance to authority? Love of a good story? Practicality?  Maybe all of them.

My mother, Adelina Donata Carmina, nee Pittarelli, told me her labour started one hot morning, a month premature, as she worked in the fields. I came into the world the following afternoon, July 6, 1949. A midwife delivered me in my parents’ stone-clad house. 

This early arrival, as though I wouldn’t endure one more minute of confinement, characterized the rest of my life.

"Dio mio, she doesn’t look human," Mamma recalled saying to the midwife when she first held me in her arms. What should she make of this bag of bones, her first-born child?

Don’t worry, the midwife replied. She’ll fill out nicely. Before you know it, you’ll have the prettiest baby in the village.

While Mamma dealt with the pangs of childbirth, my father, Erminio Liberato Vincenze, had made himself scarce. Probably lying somewhere up the mountain smoking a cigarette, dreaming his big dreams. He should have been working in the fields like everybody else—but then he always was a lazy sort, Nonna recalled.

My father had reason to dream. He had already applied to immigrate to Canada and only waited for the day he could head out. In the mid-20th century, the village had a population of 1,500 souls, down from a high of 2,500 citizens in the mid-1800s. The devastation left by the Second World War, the hardscrabble existence of eking a livelihood out of a stingy mountainside gradually drained the population to the remaining six hundred today. Most left for Canada or the United States.

As for me, I did fill out rapidly. Mamma produced prodigious quantities of breast milk, so much so she wet-nursed other babies whose mothers didn’t have enough. Mamma loved having a baby at her breast, and I loved suckling, and the two of us kept at it for three years.

Both my parents were born in Campochiaro, as were their parents and their parents’ parents and many, many generations before them. Everyone born in Campochiaro had a close or distant blood relationship to everyone else. For the same reason, they shared a small number of family names, they had to identify each other by their clan names to distinguish people who had the same legal name. Paesani knew Mamma, Adelina Pittarelli, as Adelina Catarina, of the Catarina clan.

I know my parents’ fierce sense of loyalty has been bred in the bone; a function of tribal hard-won survival: immediate family first, extended family second, fellow villagers, paesani, third, people from their region, Abruzzo fourth, and other Italians last. As Southerners, they scorned Northern Italians for their arrogance while Northerners looked down on Southerners as scruffy, uneducated peasants.

I was born in Campochiaro but I was plucked from its soil and raised in a world where everything was different, from the weather to the language spoken. We immigrated to Montreal, Canada, when I was 3 years old. I grew up a hybrid, schooled in English, surrounded by a French-language culture, and prohibited by my family from fully participating in either.

They had come to Canada for economic opportunities but they wanted to hang on to their old ways. They still expected me to grow up to be like them and, as a girl, they tried their damnedest to make me live a medieval way of life.

I wouldn’t.

Chapter Two

An image flickers in my mind’s eye of myself as a very young child, something between two and three, sitting alone on a stone step warmed by an Italian sun. Holding a comb in one hand, I lustily mimic the sound of thundering church bells. It is my first memory, during the summer of 1952 before Mamma and I left Italy to join my father in Montreal. He’d gone ahead the previous year, as so many young village men had since the end of the Second World War. They left to find work and put some money aside before sending for their families.

My Canadian journey started in October 1952, three years, three months and 11 days after my birth. Between 1951 and 1961, almost 220,000 Italians settled in Canada. Most went to Ontario; Mamma and I numbered among the 55,000 of them who made our homes in Québec.

I had turned three when we went to Naples to board the T.S.S. Nea Hellas, a small ship that carried nearly four hundred passengers to Halifax, Nova Scotia.

How did Mamma feel when she left for a place she couldn't even imagine? When she left the village and her friends. Her sisters. Her parents and grandparents. Her beloved aunts? She never spoke of her feelings. I think she believed that as a woman and as a wife her wishes had no relevance. She did what her husband needed and what her family expected her to do.

The crossing, which took 11 days, remains a blank in my mind except for fragmentary images of wandering through the ship looking for amusement. Mamma, suffering from seasickness, spent most of the trip lying down. Even then I ignored her feeble entreaties to stay in her sight.

We docked at Pier 21 in Halifax on October 28, 1952 and stood for hours to get through Canadian immigration. We boarded a train for Montreal, sitting on wooden benches for two days as the train clattered and swayed westward.

Montreal’s Central Station teemed with people, which excited me. Mamma must have asked herself if she’d ever adapt to such crowding, to the noise and languages she didn’t understand. She was only twenty-five, a mountain girl who had no experience beyond her home in Campochiaro.

We waited in the cavernous hall, Mamma’s weary grey eyes searching the crowd for her husband. All at once she smiled, waving at a man pushing his way to us through the throng. My father.

Did the sight of his pale-faced wife and dark-haired daughter, cranky from lack of sleep, please him when he caught sight of us? Or did he regret his loss of freedom?

Look, there’s your father!

The word father meant little to me, for I had no memory of him.

Suddenly he stood before us, a short, stocky man wearing a baggy pair of trousers, a matching jacket, and a coat over one shoulder. I scooted behind Mamma's skirt, shy and a little frightened by the square-jawed face and the flash of dark eyes. My parents hugged and kissed, then my father turned his attention to me.

Elvie, he said, softly, causing me to bury myself deeper into the folds of Mamma’s skirt. He got down on one knee. Let me see, Elvie. I’ve waited such a long time to look into your sweet face.

I didn’t budge, despite Mamma’s encouraging words. She had talked to me about seeing my Papà and I’d mimicked her eagerness to see him. But now when he stood within touching distance, I was afraid. My father reached into the pocket of his coat and took out a small brown bag. I brought you something, he said.

I peeked from behind the skirt, saw the bag, and looked up at Mamma, who nodded and smiled. Without leaving the sanctuary of her body, my arm reached out to take the small bag, which I hoped contained candy.

Brava, he said. We left the station.

My father had rented and furnished a flat prior to our arrival in Montreal’s downtown, downmarket east side. Until then, he’d boarded with his cousin, Guilio, who’d sponsored his application to live in Canada. At the time, Montreal was the nation’s economic centre, and growing. Employers were hungry for labourers, and my father soon found work.

I stared in wonder as a car, maybe a taxi, drove us along broad city streets crowded with other cars and the odd horse-drawn wagon. And oh, how very tall the buildings were, so high above the car I couldn’t see their tops.

We moved into a cold-water flat on the second and top floor of a row house on Rue Saint-Christophe. No gardens or patches of lawn led up to them to relieve the expanse of red-brick surfaces. We climbed half a dozen steps from the sidewalk to a verandah with four doors painted forest green. My father opened the second door on the right and led us up a steep interior staircase. I have a vague memory of darkness, of extreme narrowness leading to the top floor.

We reached a small landing with doors to either side. My father unlocked the one on the left and we entered a flat filled with people, paesani, ex-pat villagers who’d come to welcome us. Mamma cried with happiness at the sight of friends and distant relatives she hadn’t laid eyes on for years. They welcomed us with food and drink, of course, and they ate, drank and talked their fill.

The flat had three rooms which included a small kitchen equipped with a gas cooking stove and an icebox, a good-size living room and a bedroom with a window looking out onto Saint-Christophe. There was also a tiny water closet with a toilet, but no tub or shower. Nevertheless, it was a big step up from the village we’d come from where the toilet was a hole in the ground at the back of the house. The apartment also had running water, another we hadn’t had in Campochiaro.

In winter we used an oil burning stove to heat the flat but poor insulation and draughty windows meant the place never, ever got warm. An oilman came regularly to fill a tank in the shed behind the kitchen.

My parents washed in the kitchen using a soapy washcloth and bowl filled with water heated on the kitchen stove. They also concocted a makeshift bidet for personal cleansing by setting a bowl filled with warm water that fit inside the toilet to wash their private parts. For my baths, Mamma used an oval, white-enamelled tub which she placed on the kitchen table and plunked me in it.

Mamma loved the icebox, a big improvement from an earthen cellar. Twice a week, an iceman made deliveries in a horse-drawn wagon. He used a grappling hook to pull out a massive block of ice from the back of his wagon, hoisted it onto his shoulders, hauled it up the stairs and slid it into the top compartment of the icebox. Meanwhile, the horse waited patiently, all the while dropping smelly mounds of poop. In the scorching summer heat, the iceman gave kids ice chips to suck on.

That first night, I had the first unpleasant surprise when we prepared for bed. No longer could I sleep next to Mamma, as I had done ever since I could remember. My parents took the bedroom and expected me to sleep on the couch in the living room, alone in the dark.

No, you can’t sleep in my bed anymore. Besides, I’m just a few feet away, she said, as she made up the couch for me.

But why can’t I?

Back and forth we went like that as she coaxed me to get between the sheets. Fed up, my father came into the room. "I don’t want another word out of you, Elvie. Get into bed right now or else botte, blows."

I knew full well what botte meant. Mamma, my grandmothers and my aunts had often threatened me with the word when I had misbehaved. Now I looked to Mamma for help when this stranger threatened me but saw no sympathy in her face. Why was she allowing this man to take charge?   

Mamma tucked me in and left the room, turning off the light on the way out. I sobbed for hours, convinced she had abandoned me. I sobbed for so long she finally came to me, lay beside me and stayed until I fell asleep. The next night when I cried for Mamma, she did not come. I blamed it on the man in whose bed she now slept—without me—for keeping her from me. That second night I wept until I exhausted myself. The same thing happened the following night.

The next night when I called for Mamma, he came instead. He bent over me, his face a scary black shape While behind him, weak moonlight slipped over him through the windowpane.

"Shatatte 'zitta! Keep quiet. Do you hear me? Otherwise, I'll give you something real to cry about." The anger in his voice frightened me.

I whimpered. In Italy adults yelled at kids all the time, I’d earned quite a few slaps myself for misbehaviour but no one had ever terrified me the way this man did.

I’m warning you. If I have to come back, you’ll be sorry.

After that night I stopped counting on Mamma to make the darkness and the unfamiliar sounds of the night less scary. In time, I also accepted I could no longer claim Mamma’s full attention. In addition, I had lost all the aunts and cousins and the friends I’d played with in Campochiaro. My world had shrunk to just the three of us, except during weekends when we socialized with our own kind. During those first months my parents enjoyed a busy social life.

By then almost half of Campochiaro had moved to Montreal, using each other as ballast in an alien world. Paesani visited us; we visited them. Children always participated. The men played a card game called briscola, playing for beers with the loser paying the shot after each round. Women gathered in another room or outside, weather permitting, to exchange news and gossip about mutual acquaintances. They did not, however, reveal hints of discord in their own families, lest they lose face.

We children were let loose, given our head, as though playing on the streets of Montreal were no different from chasing each other in Campochiaro’s piazza. We played until we dropped from exhaustion. I was often the last to give up, the last kid to crawl onto Mamma’s lap where I’d fall asleep lulled by the vibration of her voice and warmth from the pillow of her soft, yielding body.

During weekdays at home, however, boredom drew me to the playground where I made friends and acquired enough street French to make myself understood. When November bled into December, appalling cold and snow kept me indoors. I spent hours at my parents’ bedroom window, which faced Saint-Christophe, watching the kids come and go from the elementary school the street and marvelling at a whirlwind of snowflakes falling from the sky.

Christmas came and went with loads of food and lots of visiting. But days after we celebrated 1953’s arrival came the first of many blows that cracked the fresh foundations of my young life.

Chapter Three

Weeks and months elapsed but I didn’t warm to the man who slept in Mamma’s bed. A few months after our arrival I witnessed an altercation between my parents, the first of many, only cemented my distrust of the man. When I think of it now, I become a child again, a small, quivering animal whose instincts scream Danger! but stands helpless in the face of threat.

The incident happened at home on a Saturday night after we got home from a visit to my father’s cousin, Guilio, and his family. Mother had put me to bed and when I heard raised voices coming from my parents’ bedroom. I lay in the dark, clamping a corner of the blanket between my teeth, hearing my father’s menacing growl, Mamma’s frightened, high-pitched responses.

When she cried out in pain I sat up. Ma! But the words slipped out too softly for her—or him—to hear. I hadn’t forgotten his warning about crying out for her during the night. When she cried out again, I threw my legs over the side of my makeshift bed. My warm feet hit the ice-cold linoleum and, shivering with dread, I tiptoed to my parents’ room.

Their door stood ajar. I couldn’t see them but now I could hear what they said. I stood out of view, trying to build courage to push open the door.  My father scared me at the best of times but now the threat in his voice reaching me from their bedroom had me frozen to the spot. If I showed myself, I knew my presence would infuriate him and he would beat me with his belt as he’d already threatened to do once or twice before when I’d misbehaved.

You were making eyes at Tony, I saw you. You can’t deny it, my father said.

I didn’t! I didn’t go near him; I didn’t even speak to him. 

You didn’t have to. I saw the look that passed between you across the room.

Fear for myself vanished when Mamma let out a scream. I pushed the door and, wailing, I went into the room wanting to crawl on her lap and have her put her arms around me.

I saw Mamma perched on the edge of their bed, arms wrapped around her head for protection, my father standing over her, his right arm raised to strike her with a thin metal rod. Weak incandescent light from the ceiling fixture bathed them in a yellowish glow.

"Aiutami, tu, Dio mio. Help me, God," Mamma shouted.

Mammaaaaa! Something bitter and hot coated my tongue as the sound left my mouth..

My father, frozen in mid-strike, turned his head towards me but his eyes but his eyes looked strange, as if he didn’t see me at all and that scared me more.

I was sobbing now, trembling all over and snot running out of my nose, Mamma.

Something shifted in my father’s eyes, as though a light came on, and all at once he looked like himself again. The rod clattered to the floor. Mamma ran to my side, scooped me up and carried me back to bed. She lay down beside me and drew over us the weighty wool blankets she'd brought from Italy. In the dark we clung to each other.

Mamma, I want to go home!

She hugged me closer. "Go to sleep, pulchinella." 

I heard my father crying in the other room. Fathers weren’t supposed to cry, were they? But he’d been bad, had hurt Mamma, and probably he was afraid Mamma would be mad at him.

Mamma slept next to me all through the night. But the next morning, we went back to our usual ways, as though nothing had happened while I still wanted to go back to Campochiaro. But she had nothing more to say.

Mamma could no more have returned to Italy than I, a 3-year-old, could have moved back on my own. My father controlled all our comings and goings and approved or rejected every cent Mamma wanted to spend. Besides, Mamma’s parents wouldn’t have welcomed us home since a woman leaving her husband brought shame to the family.

Nevertheless, when my father was out at work and Mamma and I were alone, I badgered her about going home for many months.

As I learned from Mamma years later, domestic violence was nothing new to her. Her father drank, and combined with jealous, controlling nature, she witnessed time and again her own mother trying to protect herself from the blows that came with his bursts of rage. To her, living with an abusive husband, while unpleasant, must have seemed normal.

Neither could Mamma have asked for help from Montreal paesani. Wife battering, while ostensibly frowned upon, was not uncommon in the community. But battered women hid the fact, a family’s dirty little secret, because a good wife protected the façade of a thriving, happy family. Face trumped everything, even a woman’s torment, even her life.

In the days after the occurrence, my father’s subdued demeanour carried him as close to an apology as he ever would get.

By soon after, Mamma’s sister joined her in Montreal and that brought her a measure of consolation, for a while, at least, until things went awry between Papà and my aunt. Zia Carmelina was the second of four sisters, Mamma the eldest, Zia Maria Teresa—known as Tresa—the third and Zia Antonietta, the youngest. They were born two years apart to a father who’d longed for a son and blamed his wife for not providing one.

Zia Carmela arrived in Montreal in 1953. Antonietta, known as ‘Ndunetta, made the crossing the following year and Zia Tresa joined them in 1959.

Zia Carmelina lived with her husband and his parents on the ground floor of a duplex on des Ecores in a newer, nicer part of the city than the one we lived in. The two sisters had always been close but Zia Carmelina and my father despised each other. My father tried his best to prevent Mamma from seeing her sister, including forbidding Zia from crossing our threshold but failed to keep them apart. On this score, Mamma would not budge and one way or another the two sisters managed to visit each other regularly, sometimes in secret.

Decades later when I asked Zia Carmelina what had caused the rift, she told me my father had made a pass at her in our flat one day when she’d come to visit. She threatened to tell Mamma if he ever again even looked at her in a suggestive way—and he never did but he got back at her by accusing her husband of molesting Mamma.

My father and my aunt never reconciled.

In February of 1953 Mamma found a job as a sewing machine operator in a garment factory. She didn’t mind. Most of the women from Campochiaro worked in factories. A good life in Canada meant owning property and if the women worked, along with making sure they spent no more than absolutely necessary, they could own their own houses in time.

  But what to do with me while Mamma was at work? With no friends or relatives close by to make day care feasible, they sent me to board weekdays with a paesani. They dropped me off on Sunday nights and picked me up five days later. Every Sunday I clung to Mamma when they took me there. But I’d settled in when they came to pick me up on Fridays after work and I didn’t want to leave.

The family took me in for about a year. They had a daughter a year my junior. And