How A Croissant Led Me To My Unknown Family: Part 2/4
You know that children’s book, Roses for Anna? Where all the girl (Anna) wants to do is get a flower for her mom? But in order to get that flower, she has to get the shears from her neighbor but of course that neighbor has lent her shears to another neighbor and that neighbor needs Anna to run an errand which leads to another errand for another neighbor and so on and so forth until Anna has completed a million tasks without a flower to show for them.
That’s the kind of trajectory I anticipate when the men at the bar push me toward the Marineo City Hall. I spend my walk preparing myself for a wild goose chase of half-answers leading to more half-answers leading to people and places that aren’t where they’re supposed to be. Nothing is going to be this easy; there has to be a catch.
But for the first time in Sicily, I find something resembling order. The secretary nods patiently as I fumble through my rehearsed sentences of Italian and seems to understand what I am doing and what I need. He brings me in the elevator, up two floors, and down a hallway. The room is small with musty walls and rows of filing cabinets. A petite woman looks up from her desk.
After I explain who I am, she begins rifling through the cabinets until she procures a folder labeled with the letter S. She flips through it until she gets to the ST’s. I’ve never met anyone with my last name before yet her folder contains enough Staropolis to fill a new one.
“His name was Charles,” I say, trying to be helpful. “Ciro, I mean.”
“Ciro,” she murmurs, examining the files one by one. She drops the ones with other names on the counter: Giuseppe Staropoli, Giovanni Staropoli, Antonio Staropoli. There is no Ciro.
“We don’t have him,” she says, flopping the whole folder on the desk. She looks at me as though it is my fault. I contemplate cutting my losses and going about my day as I’d intended. There is a mountain I want to see. There is still so much town to explore.
But I think about my interactions at the bar and all those people confident I could find something I didn’t even set out to find. Emboldened by their enthusiasm, I think maybe there is something more, and even though a piece of paper verifying my grandfather’s origins won’t tell me anything new, it’s worth looking for.
“You have to,” I say. I try to give her some context for my grandfather, some sort of information that could be a possible clue, but I find that I don’t know enough about his family. I can’t remember his parents’ names and as it is the middle of the night in America, my family can’t give me the names either.
“Sorry,” the woman says. “He’s not here. He must not have been born in Marineo.”
I reach for the files on the table before she can stop me. “Can I?” I ask, already looking. “I’m positive he’s in here.”
And I am positive, mostly because the absence of his file would mean that something got mistranslated years ago which would lead me to a dead end; if he’s not from Marineo where else would he be from and, more importantly, how would I even figure that out? As far as I know, none of his relatives are still alive. Those that are include my father, aunt and grandmother, none of whom talked to him about his time in Italy, none of whom know anything more than what I can tell this lady at this moment.
The woman doesn’t roll her eyes but gives me a look indicative of an eye roll. Still she concedes, looking over my shoulder.
I find nothing in the first two forms but I pause when I get to the one that reads Guiseppe Staropoli. Guiseppe. Guiseppe. Guiseppe? Joseph? Is that even the proper translation? Was there a Joseph in my family? The name sounds familiar but then again, my grandfather lived in an Italian neighborhood in Brooklyn; Joseph could have been any guy on his block.
Still, I open Guiseppe’s file and look at the names. Giuseppe Staropoli, son of Maria Rosa, whose last name I can’t make out from the looping script. Giuseppe’s father’s name was Ciro, his wife Carmela Ribisi. Carmela. Millie?
I keep reading. Guiseppe Staropoli and Carmela Ribisi bore two children: Antonio Staropoli, born in Marineo, and Ciro Staropoli, born not in Marineo but in Palermo.
“Ahh,” the woman says. “He was born in Palermo. HIs file has to be in Palermo.”
I think of the two months I’ve already spent in Palermo, assuming I was close to my grandfather’s origins but not quite touching them. It is only fitting that he was born there and I didn’t even know. It makes things poetic, somehow, like they’ve come full circle in a way that isn’t forced.
“That’s impossible,” I say. “I was always told he’s from Marineo.”
“No. Palermo,” she says, like she’s known this all along.
Turning to her computer, she begins asking me about my family, opening up a new document to fill in the gaps. She wants to know my father’s name and my aunt’s name and whether Antonio had any children. I tell her I’m not sure. I knew my grandfather had a brother, though I didn’t know his name. My father has never mentioned him. Apparently he and my grandfather had a falling out years ago. When the woman asks if he’s still alive, I don’t have an answer for her.
When the woman tries to put the documents away, I ask if I can snap a picture. She furrows her eyebrows, still, somehow, confused as to why I would want a picture as though we didn't just go through all that sorting to find the documents in the first place.
“Thank you so much,” I say, bubbling with the sense of accomplishment in the form of names and birthdays. There’s nothing I can do with this information but finding it renders me a historian digging through primary sources. Only instead of learning anything applicable that elucidates my family, I can now fill in the gaps of a past that matters to no one but me. Sometimes just understanding something more of something that once was is enough.
As I reflect to myself, the woman holds out her hand. “Dieci Euro.” Ten Euro.
Of course. The shears.
Only after I fish through my pockets for the few coins I brought with me does the woman become all the chattier, bringing me to the filing cabinet in the hallway. Papers and brochures fly out and suddenly my arms are filled with everything I could have ever needed to know about Marineo: pamphlets on local fruits, object history, native plants, the castle. I take solace in thinking I am holding 10 Euros worth of brochures. At least I’ve gotten my money’s worth.
Now that she’s been paid, the woman seems to care about what happens to me. I ask her about hiking around here as I can see the peak of the mountain through the windows. She says there are lots of beautiful trails but all are too dangerous to risk trying in the rain. I’ll have to come back.
“We’ll go together when you come back,” she tells me, leading me outside. “Go to the restaurant by the castle for lunch.”
***
It’s barely 10 a.m. so I don’t go to the restaurant by the castle but I do go to the castle. If there’s any spot in this town that my grandfather is sure to have visited, it’s the castle that’s been here since the 16th century.
As I approach the castle, I meet Katarina: an elderly woman who, like the castle, very well could have been here when my grandfather was. She is a woman who pauses my personal quest, synthesizing my attempts to understand Marineo as it was once was with how it now stands, making me question whether this town grew at all in the years since my grandfather lived here, making me think that maybe this place is confined to the same past, present, and future all because of the futility of those who will always live here.
I wrote about Katarina’s story in this post and while not directly related to my search for family, this interaction singlehandedly encompasses the hard truths about villages like Marineo. It serves as a stark reminder of the kind of lives people in these kinds of places often cannot escape. While I love Sicily, I’m trying to be careful not to glamorize it. Interactions like these make me grateful that my grandfather left years ago so I am in a position to reflect on hopelessness rather than experiencing it for myself.