Buried Caesars, and Other Secrets of Italian American Writing

3. Il caso della casa: Stories of Houses in Italian America

CHAPTER 3 Il caso della casa Stories of Houses in Italian America Il caso della casa—“The Case of the House”—suggests a murder mystery , a crime, something formidable and stunning. “Stories of Houses in Italian America” is more relaxed, less formal: perhaps you will read about the seven-bedroom brick colonial that my cousin once owned in Westchester County, New york. The doubled and redoubled titles mean to suggest two self-conflicted and mutually conflicting attitudes that come into play as one turns the conversation to the question of Italian territory in the United States. On the one hand, when Italian Americans speak of houses, they often tell a history of passion. I might tell about the house my grandmother almost bought after fifteen years of saving but did not because my grandfather got into a terrible bloody fight and the lawyer and the judge took all the money. On the other hand, this passion for houses is not merely a passion for passion’s sake. Instead, it is a passion for stability . Italians have been pursuing and building houses—case in the medieval sense where house means family and family means house—for more than a century in Italian America, and doing so with stunning dedication. Indeed, the Italian American passion for real estate requires some attention: and precisely because it is passion, one’s examination of it might well aim to be a little cool, a little distant. So I will offer no stories of my own but will instead sketch a theory that will allow us to examine some stories that other writers have told, where the intensity of the enterprise reveals itself most openly. The theory is simple. Contrary to the testimony of familiar maps, there is such a place as Italian America. It is not a contiguous territory, 59 although Italian communities certainly still exist; rather, it is a series of locations. Italian America is most frequently, most easily, to be found in Italian houses in America. In these places, the house is in one of several possible senses the old country itself. This chapter will isolate and exemplify four ways that this can be so. The house may be a shrine, a villa, a palazzo, or an embassy.1 And any house may be all four of these at the same time, for these nouns must clear name purposes, and a house can serve many purposes at once. Shrine Lares and penates—the Roman names for household gods—are what make an American house Italian American, and here we may choose from innumerable examples. For anything that bears the mark of Italy can become a household god in Italian America. This extends from obvious artifacts such as the statue of Santa Rosalia or the panorama of the Golfo di Napoli to the subtle but all-enveloping atmosphere of cookery. Indeed, Mario Puzo goes so far as to identify house with family and family with food: I had every desire to go wrong but I never had a chance. The Italian family structure was too formidable. I never came home to an empty house; there was always the smell of supper cooking. . . . Many years later as [a] guest of a millionaire’s club, I realized that our poor family on home relief ate better than some of the richest people in America. My mother would never dream of using anything but the finest imported olive oil, the best Italian cheeses.2 And so on. Puzo, like many other Italian American storytellers, employs as a standard trope the catalogue of the items of la cucina casalinga. And always, as here, the stress falls on the power, usually presented as a form of magic, that floats in the aromas of provolone and ragù. What is that power? Certainly in the passage cited it has some of the features of guilt, and one thinks quickly enough of Freud’s comparison of religion with obsessional neurosis. Reading Puzo, one often encounters the son who returns home precisely because he wishes to go wrong: his returns, that is, assure him that his “faithlessness” to the family has been avoided, while the home that he returns to is saturated in the glamour of taboos violated. By seeming to give himself up to the 60 BURIED CAESARS strictures of the “family structure,” the son can in fact luxuriate in an unbridled orgy of self-indulgent fantasy. It is not...