Don't Sing at the Table Read Online Free PDF

to Schilapario myself, decades later. A single narrow, winding road cuts through the mountain, with hefty ceilings of stone overhead, only to sweep out from the underpass and create a harrowing path on the edge of the mountain itself. The road weaves in and out in this fashion all the way to the top, past Val de Scalve and up to Schilpario, where villages are carved out in the hills as if in relief.
    High in the Alps, the vistas are majestic. Towering trees form a swirling skyline against a swath of deep blue. At night the full moon looks like a sugar cookie, and seems so close, you might reach up and break off a piece of it. By day, the colors of the landscape are painterly in the light, a waxy green palette of wide, deep fields with clusters of bright yellow and dark purple from local flowers like edelweiss. At sundown, the Alpine sky turns a deep inky blue, and the stars over northern Italy shimmer like flecks of gold.
    As heavenly as it is to look from the curves up to the peaks, it’s utterly terrifying to look down. The gorges between the steep mountain walls are so deep, it is impossible to see the bottom. Great shards of rock stick out from the valley walls like teeth.
    I imagined a horse and buggy on that mountain, in the snow and rain, and wondered how Marco survived. From the distance of decades, I could appreciate his notoriously stern demeanor. Lucia’s father worked in a state of constant anxiety, and his wife’s was probably worse.
    Circumstances became so terrible for the Spada family that by 1917, Lucia volunteered to go to the United States with her father to find work. The plan was to send the money they made home to Schilpario, and then, when they had saved enough, Marco and Lucia would return and buy a house so that the family would be, at long last, secure. The plan was made quickly as they always are when a situation is dire. The Spadas had a cousin in Hoboken, New Jersey, who would put them up and help them find work. This begins the story of Lucia, who, once in United States, insisted upon being called Lucy, the American version of her name. She had a clear mission, and her goal was to see it through, until her family was secure.
    Once Lucy and Marco arrived in New York City, after a journey where Lucia became so ill she would never board a ship again, she settled in with her cousins and got a job in a Hoboken mill as a sewing machine operator making children’s clothes for $2.00 a week.
    Lucy told me that she made quick work of learning English, because on the first day, the foreman came by and hollered, “Faster, Lucy. Faster .” She didn’t understand what he was saying, so she vowed to learn English so she could keep her job and understand what was required of her.
    Soon after Lucy was settled in New Jersey, her father decided to travel to find work that paid a decent wage. Marco left Hoboken for nearly two years, working around the world and saving his pay. He went to Canada, then to Argentina, on to Australia, then back to the States.
    In the meantime, Lucy had fallen in love with my grandfather, Carlo Bonicelli, who was, surprisingly enough, from Vilminore, a neighboring village to Schilpario only five miles away. Though they had never met in Italy, they were bonded by their dialect, work ethic, and utter attraction for one another. There was something instantly familiar about Carlo for Lucy, they were simpatico and their similarities reassured her. Carlo Augustus Bonicelli was romantic and funny. His square jaw showed determination, as his soft brown eyes showed his emotional and sensitive nature.
    Lucy told me years later that when she was young, a woman rarely chose her own husband; that duty was left to the family, who arranged the marriages and “made a match.” But, she said with great pride, she and Carlo had chosen one another; it was a marriage based on love.
    This was so important to her that she reiterated it in the last conversation I had with