The Story of Clementina

or in Italian, "La Storia de Mi Nonna," the very sad story of my Great Grandmother

I was lying on Sarah William’s massage table in Lenox, MA, one day last September, when I first found myself verbalizing the horrifying tale about my Great grandmother, Clementina Ciucci.

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I didn’t even realize I was telling the story. Sarah, an extraordinary massage therapist, had casually asked me how my health was and, sunk deep into a massage-induced trance, I replied that I was fine.

“Oh, well, but I do keep having those horrible urinary infections,” I whispered.

Sarah very very calmly encouraged me to talk about what was going on.

“Well I think it might be genetic because my mom and my Grandma Mish both were plagued with UTIs,” I said.

“Oh is that so?” she said, her expert hands making the muscles of my arms flow like water.

Before I knew it, out of my mouth tumbled the story I had been told about my Great Grandmother Clementina, a story I learned piecemeal during my childhood.

The next thing I knew Sarah had stopped rubbing my right arm with lavender-scented lotion and she announced without the least bit of humor in her voice, “Claudia this is your next novel.”

At that moment I surfaced from my trance and I laughed, quite dismissively. “Oh Sarah, I haven’t even finished writing about Great Great Grandma Filomena Scrivano, my father’s great grandmother. Right now, I have my hands full. I cannot imagine writing another novel. Maybe ever!”

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Mom was christened Clementina Dena Rotondo

My mom and me during the 1990s

in March of 1926 and as she grew into adulthood, she realized how much she detested her first name. She hated it so much that she actually went to court sometime during the 1990s to have her name officially changed to C. Dena Ricci.

“I don’t want to think about that awful name Clementina on my gravestone,” Mom would say, quite frequently, and very matter-of-factly. My mom was as gentle a soul as you will find, an angel really, except every now and then, she would get enraged and put her foot down about something.

She put her foot down on this matter of her name on her headstone.

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Besides being a gifted healer, Sarah Williams also is fluent in Italian. She majored in Italian at Mount Holyoke and studied and then worked for seven years in Florence. So it made perfect sense to me last fall that I would ask her to read and correct the Italian in my new novel, Finding Filomena.

Finding Filomena tells the story of how my Great Great Grandmother Filomena Scrivano gave birth to her son out of wedlock in 1870 in southern Italy. Filomena Scrivano’s son, Pasquale Orzo, was my father’s grandfather.

Much of this novel, I am only a little embarrassed to say, I wrote with the assistance of Google translator. I am not too embarrassed because I was so desperate to write this book about my ancestor, and I don’t -- yet -- have the capability of speaking and writing in Italian.

Voglio parlare e scrivere in Italian ma…

I have felt an irrepressible need to speak and to write and to hear Italian spoken for about five years now, ever since the pandemic to be exact. But I was much too busy writing this new novel to enroll in language classes.

So I relied on Google, along with the patchwork of Italian I know from sitting at the dining room table in Canton, Connecticut, and listening endlessly to my Mom converse with her mother, Grandma Michelina “Mish” Caponi Rotondo, and her father, for whom I’m named, Claude “Pop” Rotondo. I eked out the Italian as best I could.

When Sarah turned her attention to reading Finding Filomena, she was so thorough in her edit of the novel that she corrected not only the Italian but even some of the English, along with finding typos, etc.

My mother, C. Dena Ricci, and me, Claudia Ricci, age three or four.

*******

I haven’t had a massage with Sarah since last September, as I escape the cold months in New England for sunnier and warmer Colorado.

But two days ago, out of the blue, I texted Sarah and told her that I needed to speak to her right away. She was free that morning, so I phoned. Almost as soon as we began speaking, I told her that my mom and dad, who had been the wind in my sails steering me to write Finding Filomena, are now pushing me to write my mother’s forsaken namesake’s story.

Sarah was shocked. She hadn’t forgotten about the story that she unlocked from me last September, but she was surprised that, after telling her I might never write another novel, I was now, ten months later, telling her that I had to write the book about Clementina, right away, as in, yesterday.

I told her I was feeling scared. I wrote Finding Filomena with my parents vaguely floating all around me. But now they were making themselves known in more direct, pressing ways. It was, in short, kind of spooking me out.

"Sarah, I don't feel ready to meet with ghosts or with dead people, even if those dead people happen to be my beloved parents."

She didn’t miss a beat. She spoke softly but firmly, the way she always speaks. “Just ask your mom and dad

My parents, Dena Rotondo Ricci and Richard Louis Ricci, in their engagement photos in 1949. Rose painting is by Fawn Frome, my brother Ric Ricci's wife.

to approach you with caution when they appear. Just tell them to go slow,” Sarah said, her gentle voice pouring over me as if I am a baby and my mother is pouring over me my first warm bathwater. I closed my eyes while she spoke.

I found myself calming down right away. I told her that the way I relax these days is by shutting off my phone, and sitting quietly, doing absolutely nothing at all.

Sometimes, I said, I stare out at the glorious meadow, and the dancing willow trees, or the dazzling flower gardens in a rainbow of colors. Sometimes I lay in the pool in a "dead woman’s float," going limp and looking up at the cloud patterns in the deep blue sky.

Sarah strongly encouraged me to keep shutting off my phone, and also, my computer if necessary. “Just give in to relaxation,” she said. “Feel your body. Listen to your body. Stay grounded in your body.”

So I am now going to shut off my phone.

To breathe. And to feel my body. Maybe, just maybe, a little later on today, I will go back into my study and just sit quietly at my desk. Or maybe I will kneel at my meditation table.

I will speak very carefully, very slowly, to my mom and to my dad, whose extraordinary photos stare at me over my computer.

I will breathe in and out a few times, and I will ask Mom to tell me the heartbreaking story of her grandmother, Clementina.

My great grandmother, Clementina Ciucci, and my mother’s first cousin, Frank Cialfi.