When I first set out to write what I thought of as one of my first 'serious' novels, I did not know what sort of story I was going to uncover, exactly. Like I always did, I went into the story blindfolded, with just a basic theme: it was going to be set in World War Two, and it was going to be set in Italy.
I was going to use a cast of American GI's , and see where they brought me. I really had no idea beyond that what would happen. I'm not even sure if I thought any Italians would actually make their way into the tale. After all, being from the tri state USA, I had never known any "actual" Italians intimately, and I wasn't sure I would be able to paint them properly. I didn't know any Italian references, and I saw this very quickly. And so for the first half of the story or so, I basically just worked with the American soldiers as best as I could, trying to see what I could do with them, often having them shoot down a lot of Italians ...since they were the enemy in that war. Then something funny happened, however, when the first friendly Italian entered into the tale, and what happened -- I'll never forget this --- is that I actually, and my reader might not believe this, but I actually began to get a story sent to me via this Italian female character, named Donnetta, that I had never, in all my American life, heard of before. It began inside my novel as a sort of subplot, I remember, but one that I became so engrossed in that I largely forgot the original World War Two plot I had been aiming for.
The story was the tale of Donnettas mother that had been revealed via some conversation or other with the main American GI : It turned out that she had run away to America when Donnetta was still very young, and she had, it was said, "gotten horrifically lost and trapped there". At some point, you see, Donnetta had invited the soldier into her house (in one bombed out italian city or other) and she proceeded to show him old dusty letters the mother had written to her from America , before abruptly one day ceasing to send any. I can still vividly remember writing many of the letters (myself of course!) in a sort of frenzied panic of inspiration, all of them pouring out of me almost effortlessly, and helping me to get through huge chunks of a story that, at the time, wasn't at all easy for me to write. And again what was in the letters was a story that is really never told here: the tale of an immigrant who had come here, and then turned around and absolutely hated the fact that they had ever come, and despised their decision to no end. The mother in my story, named Chiara Moretti, did not feel like we are told, very sternly, immigrants feel here, especially those of us in the 3rd or 4th generations. Chiara did not feel contented that she had come. She did not feel accomplished. She did not feel like she had done anything even remotely good. She instesd felt almost like a murderer, it seemed, who had committed an egregious and disgusting mortal sin, who wished above all things that she could have just gone back in time and never gotten on the boat at all. It was her biggest regret, the most foolish decision she had ever made. She couldn't fathom how she made the decision; and of course all of the letters she wrote were filled and boiling over with the most intense love & longing for Italy, to which she wanted nothing more than to return. But she couldn't.
She was trapped in a frightening and massive city that she didn't understand ...far poorer than she had ever been in Italy. That was the striking part to me really: the fact that many of the last letters Chiara 'wrote' were frantic and desperate letters expressing how she badly wanted to get back to Italy, but she couldn't. Many Americans might think that the immigrants just had an automatic in and out here or something. It's easy to see that. They got here quickly enough; and certainly they could leave just as quick too. This wasn't really the case, however, and this character- as I imagined what had happened to her-- taught me that. She simply couldn't afford the tickets back, and something was going on with the boats...there weren't as many anymore, or maybe there weren't even any at all. The prices had shot insanely high and she was barely scrapping by as it was; and so she was trapped. An American very much against her will.
And I cannot explain to my reader how utterly shocked I myself was, at the time, by what had come from my own pen. It's been awhile now since I wrote that tale, but even now thinking of it I can still feel the pure shock I felt as I contemplated, within my story, this strange tale of the "regretful immigrant" . It seems so simple doesn't it?
A regretful immigrant. Of course they exist, just like anything else. And yet, from an American perspective, it's literally almost mind blowing in some way, considering the story we are fed here, to think that anyone at all has ever, a single time, regretted the decision to come here. But of course, considering all the millions of people who have poured in here, it's only all too obvious that some people have definitely regretted their decision to come. Still it is never said here, and no one likes it when you do say it, because it makes everything seem....well, very very sad, and very very strange. It changes the story of the country when one gives thrmselves over to the tale of the sad eyed & regretful immigrant, and it makes one realize what the United States has always really been: a place sad people are escaping to in hopes that their sadness will be cured, but where, if I have my say as a scrittore, I'll tell you i now believe it almost never is.
Alas, like I said: Most people I have found tend to prefer that the tale of the regretful immigrant is never told. Try to mention to people some time randomly even just the idea that someone in their long back family line might have regretted coming here in a really serious way, and you will probably see what I mean. It's a touchy tooic and people get angry. It's like burning the flag in a way. The story is despised and its despised throughout all circles , I've found. No one says it. Conservatives, liberals, libertarians, independents, apolitical - next to no one says it. Everyone must focus instead on this tale that everything has only improved for all the familial lines who have ever arrived here. And not only improved but improved dramatically, the idea being that with each new generation born, the gloripous American blood drips thicker and gets further away from what is, believe it or not, actually very much interpreted as "dirry blood" in a way.
For a story teller of course, this sort of banishment of a particular tale and point of view Is a big problem, especially when you consider that my story just so happened to wind up being that sort of story exactly -- even when I had not set out to make it that. I realized this as I was writing of course, that this plot would find no love in this close minded culture, and strangely enough, something else that was very curious began to happen after I met the story of old Donnetta from the 1940s, and her mother from even earlier: I found a strange and very old, nearly broken down bridge of sorts, and that bridge led me into the modern day Italy, and then into Europe at large. I took the bridge, I'll admit, the moment I could, pushing the centuries old leaves out of my way as I walked it, clearing the old hardly visible path, and when I came out on the other side , in Europe, somewhere in between Naples and Rome, what I learned was something even stranger: the story I had mysteriously written in my own mind of the regretful immigrant , whilst having never met myself a single actual European or Italian, was in a great abundance in Europe itself. In fact, if you look closely, it almost seems to be the dominant tale. And it was then I realized that the regret and sadness Donnetta & the mother Chiara Moretti felt was, really, just my sadness all along.
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