Una Orfana
In the summer of 1925, at the age of sixteen, Eunice Larkin could read la lingua italiana at the level of a university undergraduate, write it as well as a bright student at liceo, but she spoke the language come una orfana—like an orphan. Eunice secretly wondered whether a miserable child in an Italian orphanage had it any worse than the eight Larkin sisters crowded into two bedrooms in Dubuque, but she kept her bocca shut and accepted the assessment of her abilities. She had no choice: the double-edged evaluation came from the only person in the world with whom she communicated in italiano: her teacher, La Signora Caporicci.
La Signora was primarily a piano teacher—at least that was her profession in Dubuque. No one knew how or why she had come to Iowa, or what had happened to Signor Caporicci, who was rumored to have been an impresario, or an anarchist, or a charlatan. La Signora had moved into the neighborhood four years before, taking the apartment above the butcher shop, just around the corner from the Larkins’ narrow frame house. (Some people said the butcher was the piano teacher’s cousin; others, that he was her servant’s cousin.) All the children of the neighborhood watched as the movers built a rigging tower and took out a double set of window frames so they could lift La Signora’s piano into the apartment. The piano, an immense upright, swayed dangerously on the ropes—the scene was like a motion picture comedy, except that the piano never dropped, to the great disappointment of the boys.
The eyes of the twelve-year-old Eunice were fixed upon La Signora herself, who supervised the event with an authority at once kindly and utterly unbending. Eunice had never seen a woman with such style and confidence. While the piano was still aloft, Eunice decided that she absolutely had to take piano lessons. When her mother, busy with a baby’s fever, told her that they could never afford such a thing, Eunice went to the butcher shop, climbed the back stairs, and knocked on La Signora’s kitchen door. La Signora, smoking a cigarette, opened the door, and Eunice blurted out a proposal: she would barter housework for piano lessons. After only a moment’s reflection, La Signora accepted.
Eunice’s father roared with fury when he learned that his own daughter was mopping floors for an Italian. He was a foreman at a slaughterhouse, and to him, Italians were almost the lowest of the low. But Eunice, just as she expected, soon prevailed over her parents’ objections because, one, she was determined, two, it wouldn’t cost them anything, and three, they were too damn busy to worry much about any one child, let alone a healthy twelve-year-old.
La Signora’s English, while perfectly adequate for commanding a team of workmen, apparently did not extend to the contents of her apartment. Eunice soon found herself cleaning lo specchio, dusting dietro il divano, and scrubbing la vasca da bagno. Within a few months, all discussions of housework at La Signora’s, as well as the weekly session at the piano, were conducted in Italian. After one year, however, La Signora sat Eunice down on il divano, and told her that she was forbidden to touch the piano or any other musical instrument ever again, for her fingers were the enemies of all sweet sounds. Eunice, for a moment, felt she was drowning, not because she had any illusions about her musical talent, but because she thought she was being banished from La Signora’s apartment. But then La Signora told her that she could continue doing the housework, at which she was passably skilled, in exchange for formal lessons in the Italian language, for which she had a certain undeniable gift.
For the next three years, Eunice voraciously consumed whatever La Signora Caporicci offered in the way of unsystematic language instruction. The article about Matilda of Canossa was typical of her assignments. Clipped from a Catholic magazine in Firenze, it had been posted to America by one of La Signora’s mysterious correspondents, about whom Eunice had learned never to inquire. Eunice was expected to read the article, comprehend it, write a short summary, and be ready to discuss it at the next lesson. That summer, Eunice did most of her Italian homework at a long wooden desk at the Carnegie-Stout Library in the center of Dubuque, where the ceilings were high, the air seemed cooler, and no little sisters tugged at your skirt. The article, written by a Franciscan brother, described the growing cult of devotion to Matilda among the small towns of Tuscany, and made the case for Matilda’s beatification, with special reference to her achievements on the battlefield, her loyalty to the Pope, and her devotion to her ailing mother. When Eunice began to write her summary, something unusual happened: it was as if she saw Matilda’s life entire in all its glory, and she felt a need to tell the story from the beginning. She began writing, and filled her exercise book in less than an hour. In the story of Matilda’s life, Eunice had reached only as far as the falconry lessons with Matilda’s handsome father, Count Bonifacio. Eunice went to the stationery shop, bought a dozen more exercise books on La Signora’s credit, returned to the library, and over the next two days filled them all with her tale.
Her next visit to the Caporicci apartment was for housework, not a lesson, and Eunice was surprised when La Signora asked what she thought of the article about Matilda—normally, La Signora maintained a strict separation between the two sides of their relationship. When Eunice told her that she had been working very hard on it, La Signora laughed and said she hoped Eunice wasn’t wasting too much time on that assurdità, and that she really should have given her both halves of the assignment at once. Then she handed Eunice a second article, clipped from a different magazine.
That evening, in her bedroom at the Larkin house, surrounded by squealing sisters, Eunice read the second article. From a left-wing magazine in Bologna, it denounced the first article as the most despicable kind of Catholic propaganda—indeed, as a betrayal of the Church’s own morality. It accused a small group of Franciscan friars of trying to outflank the Fascists at their own game—the adulation of violence and power. To do so, the friars had exhumed the memory of an obscure medieval figure, Matilda of Canossa, previously infamous only for her ruthlessness on the battlefield—and for being the mistress of Pope Gregory VII. The Franciscans had made Matilda into a heroine of Catholic militarism, promoted her cult among the ignorant villagers of Tuscany, and now they were trying to set her on the road to sainthood.
Eunice lifted her eyes from the article, and knew with instant certainty that its claims were true: that violence could never be holy, that a woman could be a warlord, as brutal and treacherous as any man, and that Matilda therefore was no heroine suitable for young girls. With bitter clarity she saw that the Franciscan friars who campaigned for Matilda were callous and calculating liars and that she, Eunice Larkin of faraway Dubuque, was their chump. She looked at the stack of exercise books she had filled only the day before with tales of bold battles, chaste love, and prayerful evenings, and her eyes swam with anger and shame.
Forty-seven years later, in the back seat of an Oldsmobile, the eyes of Sister Eunice Larkin remained quite dry as she remembered that painful moment. The Oldsmobile was waiting in line, with about a dozen other cars, to pay the toll for the bridge, the same rickety old bridge that had spanned the Mississippi since she was a child. Sister Eunice hardly noticed the bridge or the river or the cars or the sky. She was looking through her old tears, trying to go back a few days further, trying to read what she had written in that stack of exercise books.
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