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 found myself for the very first time verbalizing the horrifying tale about my Great Grandmother, Clementina Ciucci.

At first, I didn’t even realize I was telling the story. Sarah, an extraordinary massage therapist, whose mission is always healing, 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 that I had been told in bits and pieces about my Great Grandmother Clementina. The first part of that story I had first learned from Clementina’s daughter, my dear Grandma Mish, who was a second mother to me during my early 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, please, 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 possibly imagine writing another novel. Maybe ever!”

**********
Mom was christened Clementina Dena Rotondo when she was born on March 30, 1926, named of course for her grandmother.

My mom and me during the 1990s

As she grew into adulthood, Mom realized more and more 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.

Without question, she put her foot down when it came to this matter of the name that would appear on her headstone.

*********

Besides being a gifted healer, Sarah Williams is also fluent in Italian. She majored in Italian at Mount Holyoke and spent her junior year in Florence. Later, she returned to Florence and continued living and working there for another six years. When she returned to the states, she worked for Berlitz in Boston, teaching Italian, and also taught at a college in Boston.

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 my Great Great Grandmother Filomena Scrivano’s heartbreaking love story, how she came to give birth to her son out of wedlock — a term I detest — in 1870 in Calabria, a southern region of Italy. Filomena Scrivano’s son, Pasquale Orzo, was my great grandfather.

His six daughters, the eldest of whom was my Grandma Albina Orzo Ricci, lived with enormous shame because of their father, their entire lives, to the point that they never breathed a word about his being illegitimate to any of their children.

Indeed, it wasn’t until all six of the sisters had passed that my enterprising first cousin, Donna Ricci, who did extensive research into the Orzo family genealogy discovered the photo of Filomena Scrivano in an old trunk handed down to her by our Great Aunt Lisette. That one photo — and especially the inscription on back — left no doubt that Great Grandpa Pasquale Orzo was indeed illegitimate — another word I detest.

To me, the word is loaded in a negative way, suggesting preposterously that somehow because his parents weren’t married, that somehow my Great Grandfather didn’t count. Or could never be good enough. Could never overcome the shame, the stigma of being, in the eyes of the law and the All-Powerful Catholic Church,

a bastard.

My grandmother’s shame was endless, and it was handed down to subsequent generations, including my own!

***********

Much of Finding Filomena, 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 am only now, learning to speak and THINK and write in Italian.

Voglio parlare e scrivere in italiano 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 began in March of 2020 to be exact. (Who knows if there is a connection, I certainly can’t come up one.)

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, while Mom conversed endlessly with her mother, Grandma Michelina “Mish” Caponi Rotondo, and her father, for whom I’m named, Claude “Pop” Rotondo. Dipping into this ancient well of Italian floating deep in my mind, I managed to eke out a few sentences as best I could.

Sarah was enthusiastic to read the book, and excited about helping me with the Italian. I was delighted to turn a copy of the manuscript over to her. She took great care and attention to read Finding Filomena; indeed, she was so thorough in her reading/editing of the novel that she corrected not only the Italian but even some of the English, as well as finding typos, etc. As you might expect, I was very very grateful for her help. She absolutely refused payment; I did my best to make it up to her taking her out for a lunch a couple times.

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 my husband and I escape the cold months in New England for sunnier and warmer Colorado, where we now have an extraordinary grandson named Monte (Italian for mountain.)

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 what I call a "dragonfly 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 then I will calmly ask my Mom — or my Grandma Michelina or whichever other ancestor wants to speak — to tell me the heartbreaking story of my Great Grandmother, whose full name is

Clementina Ciucci Caponi.

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