Scarpe Tutte Rotte

Cristina Politano

We would repeat this story like biblical apocrypha, like some codex of the Nag Hammadi surfaced when the dust settled, the wars ended. Nonna and her poverty—her voyage to the New World—would take on dimensions so legendary, so vital, we were convinced they belong in Scripture alongside the Passion. Sunday church would find us flipping through the Bible, searching for the passage on Maria and her feet. At her funeral, the eulogy was based around the shoes. 

The story goes that Nonna was rushed to the port and boarded the boat in such a hurry she forgot her shoes. As the coastline receded, as the ocean liner left the bay of Naples, Nonna less her new shoes stood despondent on the deck. But lo! A small yet mighty skiff coasted bravely to the ship, and up they hoisted the pair of shoes that her brother Pasquale had ferried out to her. Before the liner reached rougher waters and continued out to high sea. She would never see Pasquale again. This was his farewell gift, his parting lesson. You must face the New World—the new life that you were destined to eke out for yourself on distant and inhospitable shores—with a modicum of dignity. With freshly-cobbled leather buckled tightly to your child's feet.

I was young at her funeral, so young that my own shoes had been chosen by my mother. They hung above the ground from the bench where I sat in the first row of pews. They scraped against the linoleum tile of the church floor when I moved to genuflect. That front pew in the chapel was reserved for the cousins. Rosario and Enzo were both almost thirty. Angelo and Nella must have been older still. It is strange to consider that it was the last time we would all be together. 

Nella took the pulpit and delivered the eulogy with uncommon poise. We are a Mediterranean people, and we struggle through the crosswinds of strong emotions. Grief, for one, leaves us unmoored. And then that dark, unnamed vortex of feeling that the stages of grief oblige us to confront. But Nella tames the darkness to speak about the moment of immigration—Nonna’s heritage, her legacy—to deliver the message of the ferry and the shoes. 

The candles flicker. The flowers surrounding the altar and the casket seem to sigh. As Nella concludes, the pastor asks us all to rise. He exhorts us to bow our heads and pray for God’s blessing. We stand and face our own shoes, and contemplate the feet that occupy them: the debt we owe these feet for carrying us on our earthly journey. Nonna in her casket wears shoes we can’t see.

In the parlor of her sitting room, Nonna hung a print of El Greco’s “The Burial of the Count of Orgaz.” Saint Stephen and Saint Augustine attend to the earthly body of the count, while a host of angel lift his spirit to the heavenly stratum above. I imagine Nonna traveling on those grey clouds upwards towards the Virgin and her son, surrounded by the saints and apostles. These images are reflected in the stained-glass rendering of the Passion in the chancel window. The recessional hymn blares from the organ. Rosario and Enzo join the pallbearers lifting the casket down the aisle. Nella takes my hand. We stand outside and receive condolences, prayer cards; we hug distant relatives, pile into cars, and follow the hearse to the mausoleum. 

I was nearly thirty when I learned that Rosario had died. My mother called me to tell me that he was found in the street. Her voice choked and she hurried off the phone. I called my father to fill in the gaps. Grief made him indignant. He asked me to use my brain. How did I think a healthy forty-something man had died in the street? Keeled over on the side of the service road off the interstate. An international corridor for fentanyl traffic. 

I called Enzo. I called Nella. We cousins speak infrequently, and when we do we are prone to excess. To oversharing, and then withdrawing into ourselves, embarrassed. Resuming our silence. There are things we elide, some tacit agreement telegraphing the need to gloss over what shouldn’t be mentioned. 

For example, we all knew that Rosario was an addict. We all watched him nod out over Sunday dinner, olive oil, red sauce staining his shirtsleeves. For decades he had cheated death, we all acknowledged with an ambivalent sense of admiration. We all shook our heads when he was jailed for possession, back in ’94. When he stole Nonna’s silverware, and then the costume jewelry he mistook for diamonds. Sold drugs over the rotary phone in Nonna’s basement, dealt drugs out of Nonna’s garage. We all lacked the requisite ignorance to feign shock convincingly—we were all there, we had known all along and our expressions of regret trailed off into thoughtful, self-centered ellipses.  

What sort of shoes do you wear to shoot up on the side of the road? Where does your gaze fall when you nod out, eyes glazed, on the pavement? Where do your thoughts fall when you realize that you messed up your dose, that you took too much and the safety line on your sense of lucidity starts slipping? Where does your mind go when you realize you’re sinking too far below the line of an invisible event horizon? How do you cope when you realize you’re dying? 

I was invited to Rosario’s memorial, but I was living abroad so I did not attend. I suppose that his remains were cremated. No shoes for the coffin, no smartly worded eulogy. No Saint Augustine attending his terrestrial body, no host of cherubim escorting his soul into the great beyond. I sat in my home in a different country, flipping through old photographs and trying not to picture Rosario dead in the street. All through that summer I sat wondering, how was this ending a part of the story, Nonna's story, that started on the liner in the bay of Naples?

When I think about death I think about eulogies, and eulogies remind me of shoes. From time to time, I still wonder about Nonna’s shoes. Who taught her how to lace them? On the deck of an ocean liner, pitching at sea. It took what felt like years to learn to tie my own shoes properly, fumbling with bunny ears until my motor skills crystallized. Someone must have shown her how to make a knot. And yet I never saw her in laces. She was always partial to clogs and mules, shoes she could easily slip on and off of her feet. 

At some point, I began to challenge the ferry story, if only in my own mind. How much embellishment is layered on otherwise unremarkable stories of separation, abandonment, dissolution, heartbreak? How much of these family tellings and re-tellings of origin stories amounts to self-mythologization, an attempt to rewrite history on the project of migration, teasing a coherent plotline from a series of lives too messy to be narrated? I call Nella with the intention to unpack these questions, but we speak of other things—happier memories, future plans—before we hurry off the phone, returning once more to our atomized lives. 

I wish I could say there was a time when we would talk more intimately, but this may be another error of memory, of projecting a desired closeness on relationships that were always only ever tangential, fragile. I do know for certain there was a time when we would all spend Christmas together. When Nonna was alive, we were shielded by the love of a common matriarch. We trimmed the Christmas tree and cracked walnuts from a crystal serving dish. Nonna told the grandkids stories about Christmas in the Old World, and the Christmas witch who visits on the Epiphany. La Beffana vien di notte, con le scarpe tutte rotte. The witch comes by night, with completely broken shoes. You need to leave your shoes out and the Beffana brings you gifts, tokens and fruits and little toys that fit inside the sole of a child’s shoe. 

There is a strange duality in this tradition, between the shoes you leave out as receptacle for gifts, and the shoes of the Beffana, which are completely broken. Le scarpe tutte rotte: these words I often puzzled over, moved around in my mind like letters in a cryptogram. As a child, my Italian was rudimentary, confined to orality, dialect. Later in life I studied standard Italian, became a translator, and I would sift through all the meanings of a given term, distilling foreign words and phrases into coherent English. This phrase still gives me pause. 

Rotte, feminine plural of the adjective rotto, meaning broken. Broken, cracked, busted, inoperative. On the fritz. Scarpe tutte rotte—the shoes are entirely broken. Ripped. I always picture busted seams, socks exposed. For a long time, not knowing how to picture her, I think of the Beffana as two large broken shoes. After all, there is no Normal Rockwell prototype impressing the image of the Italian Christmas witch on the collective psyche. El Greco painted the Magdalene, but never the Beffana.  

If the image of the Christmas witch eludes us, it is because she is an outlaw, an outcast, some vestige of pre-Christian Europe whose traditions die hard. She has no iconographer; she never factors in the stained-glass windows on our chapel walls. But the specificity of her description in the nursery rhyme still begs the question: why does she need to wear shoes that are broken? If she can fly across all of Italy, delivering presents to the shoes of well-behaved children, why can't she fix her own shoes? Or conjure a new pair. 

Perhaps the Beffana retains these trappings of poverty to signal her outsider status, to remind children that the magic of their Christmas gifts comes at the expense of something unfamiliar, dangerous, uncouth—a witch of untidy appearance. But perhaps her broken shoes represent a sort of industry, a commitment to an ethic of thrift that defies traditional notions of civility and decorum. The Scarpe Tutte Rotte are a marker of authenticity that boldly declares her commitment to nothing beyond charity, the happiness of the children she serves; she who has broken shoes has nothing to prove. 

The lessons of the Christmas witch bring Nonna’s eulogy, and the ferry story, into sharp relief. It is an error of collective memory, of intergenerational wisdom, to place undue emphasis on these fabled moments of transformation and growth, moments that reduce our personal dignity to the quality of material objects, appearances, shoes. There are messages we misread, distort like a game of telephone as the gap of time between our arrival in the New World and our understanding of the significance of that arrival widens. What if we viewed immigration, not as a colossal, episodic break in the continuity of our legacy, our heritage, but as the moment when the broken soles of our old shoes touch new ground, as confident in the sense of who we are and where we came from as we are in our ability to become something new?  

Of course, it is possible that I read too much significance into the symbol of the shoes, that I too am guilty of extrapolating meaning and narrative from disjointed episodes of imperfectly lived lives. I cannot think of Nonna ascending into heaven without also imagining Rosario on the side of the road. I cannot recall the stories we tell and retell of our glorious entry into this new land of hope and promise without returning to all the memories, the moments of shame we guard in stubborn silence. Our lives allow but one opportunity to be summarized and celebrated in eulogy, and alongside our fables and our myths, these unspoken memories converge and remind us that the substance of the lives we live go beyond the ways we choose to cover our feet.