A Recently Discovered Bell: Artifact,Metaphor,Secrets,and Identity in an Italian American Family

I have always felt so keenly that I am part of a larger structure, a DNA web that I am entangled in, where I live among both the physical, mental, and spiritual reverberations of those in my blood line who have come before me. I have engaged in, for as long as I can remember, what I call “digging,” and “excavating” family narratives, feeding my intense desire for the deepest meanings and understandings of the history of my father’s family. I was looking for remnants, and in fact, still am, of my family members before me, who stare at me from faded sepia-toned and black and white photographs. Do they see me? No object connected with my family is too big nor none too small for me to revere its presence in my life. I remain in a state of wonder and awe at what we leave behind. T. S. Eliot biographer, Sigg (2009), reminds us “it is only in a world of objects that we have time and space and selves” (p. 49). These are talismans to me, proof that others lived as I do now. It is the small, day to day items, totally unremarkable in their countenance that I find most poignant, stunned as I am, so often, that unremarkable objects get to outlive their owners, and remain, instead, to illuminate their essence to us if we can look at and listen to them with patience. The poet Wislawa Szymborska (2015). once stated “you can find an entire cosmos in the least remarkable objects.” This is something I believe to be very true (p. 87).

My father’s only sister, who, for research purposes, I will call, “The Rose,” along with her best friend and I were having lunch one Saturday afternoon, when she placed a small plastic bag, the kind used to carry groceries, on the table. She put her hand inside and pulled out a bell, perhaps the size of a fist. It was brass, old, and broken in a few spots. She tells me it belonged to her father, my grandfather—a Sicilian immigrant and a man I have written about many times in an attempt to explicate his secretive life and his abusive nature. I was both astonished and delighted that after all of this time, a gentle prodding to look for and share anything that she owned of his was rewarded by the presence of this object she set before me. Muncey (2005) writes of “artefacts” [sic] that represent powerful agents and how they help to stimulate the imagination. While my aunt did not want to part with the bell, I took a photo of it and meditated on it. I wrote a short poem about what it represented to me:

First, In his hands

then hidden away;

dilapidation encroaches

even on inanimate objects.

Even the strong can break.

Listen close: feel the vibration,

hear the plaintive peals.

OPEN IN VIEWER

Bell

Bells are fascinating objects and hold great meaning in different cultures and religions. The Japanese have a word, yoin (yoh-EEN), which exemplifies the literal meaning of reverberations that continue to resound long after a well cast bell is struck. Or rung as the case may be. While the stimulus has ended, the reverberation(s) have continued. When I think of this bell in my grandfather’s possession, I think of how his unhappiness at having to flee Sicily and his subsequent marriage and creation of a family, perhaps from family pressure, was contrary to what he wanted for himself, because for all intents and purposes, he lived very much like a single man, which in and of itself, was done at the neglect of his family. He inflicted physical and psychological pain as well, the effects of which can still be seen in my father and his siblings, and has affected our family system in a variety of ways.

My grandfather, a short but physically powerful man, was guarded and given to many secrets. I can still see him in a fedora looking dapper, the intensity of his eyes like a laser, as though he were looking right into you. The reason for his having to flee Sicily, hastily, could very well be apocryphal but, after so many years, we would have no way of knowing. That he had no relatives to speak of was something he stood by, which I found out to be untrue. Both his middle and last name were not what he said they were, and though upon his marriage, he still retained his father’s cognome (last name), he changed it a few months later with impunity and seemingly no curiosity as to why he did so among his family and friends. That my father and his siblings have a half sister who most likely they have been in the company of, or passed by on the street, unbeknown to all of them, is characteristic of what they have had to endure. This is perhaps the biggest “open” secret of all. For many years, I scanned faces in my hometown, looking for the characteristic strong jaw line and intense gaze some of us inherited from him, and felt very really pain, knowing that she—a girl, now a woman, perhaps no longer among the living—was not only cast aside, but unacknowledged in any way.

A bell cannot be unrung.

Place your hand on its curve

to silence its sound

but know it is the nature

of the bell to ring.

Bakhtin states that “objects have their own history,” and so I want to try to understand the history of this bell, but first, I am struck by the way the object had been discovered. Weeks after my aunt showed me the bell, I had a lot of questions. Why did he have the bell? What did he do with it? Where did it come from? But most of all, why did he hide, deep within the recesses of the house, an object so ordinary in every way?

Like so many other mysteries in our family, there are no answers. One might wonder why the presence of a bell would be such a big deal. Where is the mystery? Why even bother to wonder? My aunt told me that when my grandfather went into a nursing home, an event that proved to be extremely taxing to those who cared for him there (neither age nor physical decline failing to mellow him on any level), a woman with whom she worked with bought his house, a small structure on the same street in which I was born and raised. This woman was both a lover and collector of bells. My aunt received a call one day from her, alerting her to the presence of a bell that she found in the home. Her honesty was touching, to my Aunt.

In fact, the bell had been hidden in the basement of the home, a place where, much like many Italian immigrants, my grandfather had made a second home—there, the kitchen was central and it was the place in which family and close friends were entertained. I have puzzled over the idea of an ordinary object being secreted away like that, so hidden, in fact, that while clearing the house for sale, my aunt never discovered it.

The bell is tolling. I can hear it. It reverberates in and around me. I am under its dome and I can feel its vibrations in my chest and through my heart. I think of how private I can be; some would call me, perhaps, secretive. Sometimes I worry and wonder if those aspects of my grandfather have been passed along to me, along with the strange penchant he had for clipping: cutting photos out of magazines, things that intrigued him. I share that with him, as well. But I don’t want to keep secrets. The toxicity has been felt by all of us and still resonates, seeping into how we feel about ourselves in relation to others. Is it a particular Italian American attribute, this penchant for secrets?

I remember many conversations between my mother and father while growing up and the stern warnings that frightened and intimidated me and my siblings into a silence that I did not understand: nothing said in this house leaves this house. This did nothing for my extreme shyness that fueled the ever-present fear that if I spoke, I would reveal something forbidden that might hurt someone, or, in my young mind, worse, hurt me. I remember an often repeated story of the writer Mario Puzo and his mother’s response upon revealing to her the advance amount he received for his famous novel The Godfather: “don’t tell nobody,” she warned, in typical Italian American fashion, fearing that envy from others would bring misfortune upon her son.

I never sought to be such a private person, but the gaps of information in my father’s family and the outright “untruths” have imbued in me a sort of shame at times, for being who and what I am: that certain things are unknown means there was a compelling reason to hide them. Margaret McKay (2009) asserts, “secrets serve a particular function in families” and “disrupt the formation . . . of [children] growing up in those families.” I seek answers that may throw bright light on aspects of our family that have remained in the shadows, but I remain disappointed and perplexed at those who do not want knowledge of this, to whom the past, they think, no longer affects them in any way or has any relevance to their lives.

My ongoing narratives about my Italian American family helps me to construct meaning from events, situations, and emotions that otherwise would trouble and confound me. My aunt told me the bell remains a mystery and that she could not have imagined that her father would have purchased such a thing for himself. My father felt that he probably took it from nonna, my grandfather’s mother, without her knowledge. In other words, perhaps he stole the bell. I would like to think that upon fleeing his beloved Sicily, destined for a life in a culture that would always feel alien to him, he took the bell that hung on his beloved village home, in Blufi, a small hamlet in the Madonie Mountains, the highest point in Sicily. I am also cognizant of the fact that I am projecting my own wishes, my own mythology, on his life in Sicily, a life that I have little knowledge of. I was applying sentimentality to his actions, ones that I’d never seen any evidence of while he was living. This is the opposite of truth and I reprimand myself for engaging in it.

In many ways, I feel that I have “passed over,” in relation to my father’s family. John S. Dunne (1978) refers to this as a “method of entering sympathetically into another’s autobiographical standpoint, seeing the whole world anew as that person sees it, and then coming back enriched to one’s own standpoint and to a new understanding of one’s own life” (p. 53). It is difficult not to judge; even more difficult to understand. I have engaged in both, but seek further clarity. This often means that I spend time with the ghosts of the past, despite all modern and persistent admonitions to “Live in the present,” “Move forward!” and the well-intentioned, and clichéd, warning that the “past is the past.” For me, the past is very present, eerily so, in fact. I have spent time with the photos of my father’s family, his father, and his father’s visage keeping me company as I attempt to excavate the nature of who they were and what their lives’ must have been like. I do this with intentionality, but also of course with the knowledge humans are essentially unknowable in that respect; the dead, perhaps even more so.

In myself I feel fear

for what I cannot know

for what cannot adequately be expressed.

The years that pass take me

further and further from them

the present like a plastic overlay

on the lives I struggle to know.

When I walk the streets of my small town, I am in awe that my grandfather and great-grandfather walked them as well. I am in awe that everything around me is, in some way, an artifact of their existence. My eyes rest upon, essentially, the same buildings, some of the same trees, the same tiled foyer of the old shop on the main street, a shop that existed 40 years before my birth. This seems nearly miraculous to me, which amuses those to whom I tell. When I touch the red brick of a storefront, feeling the at once rough and smooth texture, I wonder at the irony of our existence: that inanimate objects outlive us, that buildings and trees stand long after those who have built or planted them are gone, but their presence serves as witness, becomes a touchstone, and a link to the past, a past that nurtures me in many ways. I have walked past my grandfather’s old house many times, the one in which he left to go into the nursing home and I summon up memories of him there, and how I felt, from the time that I was a young girl, the aura of something that I still cannot formulate in my mind, something I have no language for because it is a kind of knowing. The words of Gaston Bachelard (1994) have helped me to understand what I am feeling:

If we have retained an element of dream in our memories, if we have gone beyond merely assembling exact recollections, bit by bit the house that was lost in the mists of time will appear from out the shadow. We do nothing to reorganize it; with intimacy it recovers its entity, in the mellowness and imprecision of the inner life.

While my recollections of details are sharp, my feelings about my father’s family and my grandfather are what keep me chasing ghosts. So then, the bell, while a tangible object is also a symbol of the decisions my grandfather made, the transgressions he committed, along with the deep secrets he kept, and a metaphor for how those decisions keep ringing and reverberating through our lives’, generation after generation, whether we realize it or not. My father and his siblings are my only entrée into the inscrutable life of a man I have never understood. I keep in mind C. Margaret Hall’s (2013) assertion that “identity can be created and nurtured most effectively by considering who each person is in relation to several generations of family members” (p. 59). I often fear that I will wear my father and his siblings down with the weight of my probing questions, awakening feelings they’d rather suppress and forget, however, they are honest, good, and extremely loving people committed to understanding the truth no matter how painful. But my probing and my writing feel as though they will never reach the end—that the desire to know and understand is a place in which I will never fully arrive. Flyvbjerg (2001) writes of how art, literature, and narrative reach where science cannot—and that they help us “comprehend the reality in which we live.” I would also add to that, the past in which we often dwell.

They light the way for me.

Their encouragement,

like the reverberations of a bell,

thrums a persistent echo

in both the heart and mind.

I exist because of him;

the bell reminds me why.