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III
BEFORE AND AFTER TINFOIL:
THE BECCE FAMILY
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The Anarchist Bastard
Vito Becce, un' anarchista, my grandfather, a primo figlio, a first-born male child, imbued with and accorded a potentate's sense of privilege, had the exacting certainty that such a figure knows. Among the subjects under his rule, along with his wife and children, were the usual strisciliat', mess of animals: rabbits, chickens, goats, sheep, cows, horses, asses kept on a farm. One scorching hot summer day when the smell of the manure floated across the rocky hills like a limp rotting flag, a particularly unruly ciucio, an ass, pulled against the relentless toil my grandfather insisted he'd have from the ciucio. The ciucio decided to be just like my grandfather and he became an anarchista, too. He dug his hooves in and refused to be ruled. The mule wouldn't move. “Faccia tosta!” my grandfather screamed at the beast and beat it but the creature brayed back just as loudly, pulling its head to one side, then the other. Grampa beat the ciucio harder. Two furious animals, nose to nose. Tutt'e due, tutt' insiem', che faccia brute, faccia tosta, capo tosta.
Which was more stubborn, on that sticky summer day, as Grampa tried to get the ass to haul a load of stones to the barn behind the house? Grampa, enraged that the creature would defy him, beat the ass even more than usual that day. Just as capo tost', the ass kicked until he landed one on Grampa. Grampa was so mad he grabbed the ass by his ears and bit him so hard he tore a hole in his ear.
Ciucio commanda ciucio: the adults found it hilarious when one of us kids tried to tell another what to do. One ass commands the other, they'd say. Their faces floated above us laughing as they made clear the absurdity of any insignificant trying out its authority on another insignificant. Aunt Rose, Grampa's teenage sister, a lively, nervy girl, only recently brought over from “the other side,” happened to walk up through the garden as he pulled out the ass hairs caught in his teeth.
“Vitucci'!” she bent over laughing. He didn't think it was funny and screamed in a rage, “Manag' a diavol'! Ammazati! Damn the devil! I'll kill you!”
After that, the ciucio kicked the anarchist more savagely every time he went near him, so Grampa had to sell ma sonna ma beech. “Hey, my father had to have it done yesterday, not today,” my mother says, “And here this ciucio not doing his work. Can you imagine?” Her voice pitched in disbelief when she told this story.
“So when the buyer came to look at the ciucio, my father said—oh he was a tricky devil, my father was—,‘I'm going to tell you something. This ciucio is so calm and I'm going to prove to you just how calm he is. La figliola viena ca', show the man how calm le bestia is.’ ” My mother always laughed at her father's outrageous trick when she told her version of this story eighty years later, “So when Mama went to the barn to bring the ciucio my father told her to make sure she led the ass directly away from him.
“Don't bring him anywhere near where I'm standing,” my tricky grandfather told his wife.
“That way the man,” my mother continued, “would see how calm the ciucio was, so calm that his young wife could easily manage this beast.” The ass, as wily as grampa, left the farm with its new owner.
Once Grampa had sold the ciucio, it was turned into a family story. Eventually he even allowed his sister to tell her part, laughing with her when it was safely in the past and someone who wasn't him had clearly been bested.
Grampa's eyes always gleamed as he pounded the edge of the chipped white enamel table whenever he filled the kitchen with this story. We threw back our heads and roared our approval, heehaw laughing at our wild outrageous patriarch. Being facciadosta, capodoste, was who we were: We never gave in.
Vito Becce ruled his fiefdom with all the tyranny of the minor feudal lord he was—the anarchista despot. He believed that every form of regulation or government is immoral and that the restraint of one person (particularly himself) by another (anyone else on earth), is a form of evil that must be destroyed. Anarchism comes from the Greek, meaning without government. Like so many first-born males in Italy, what he most deeply believed was that he should be the only form of governance: he answered to no rule but his own. All his subjects, however, answered to him.
Vito was given to bouts of fury at the all and sundry “sonna ma beech bastards”; this included the priests, the government, even the traffic lights on the streets, anyone or anything that thwarted his wild propulsion forward into America. A pig farmer, he befriended the mayor of Waterbury, all the local politicians, brought them home to eat at his table, played poker with them down at City Hall, by virtue of his very gregarious nature and by way of making his way in America as a decent capitalist. I wonder how he explained this to himself. I have no idea. It was never discussed.
When she was four or five years old one of my cousins stayed at the farm during the day while her mother was working. She told me later, “Everybody was running around to get everything just right, everything ready for lunch. Then the trucks would come thundering up in front of the house and you'd just wait in terror. You never knew what might start him off. He'd come in looking to find fault: if something had been left in the dish rack, that might set him off. Or he'd come in jolly, singing and laughing, and have a story to tell and the whole atmosphere on the farm would change. It was so confusing. Do you remember that Grandma would never answer the phone? I was there one day when Grandma took an order from New York on the phone and she got it wrong. They fought so bad. Everything was in Italian. Everyone would be screaming by then. I didn't know what they were saying. She'd come back at him. He started hitting her. I used to run and hide under the dining room table.”
My mother, his second child and favorite daughter, claimed: “Before my baby brother drowned in the lake he wasn't like that. I remember him singing all the time. But after Pasquale died, I remember the first time he came down from the pigs like that, mad, and I thought, this isn't like my father. I was only a little girl, but I knew he had changed. Oh, it was terrible. He wasn't the same after that. You can't imagine.”
Other times, she'd say: “We got beatings for nothing, just for looking at Papa the wrong way. When he came home from collecting the garbage he would be furious sometimes, and if you just looked at him the wrong way you really got it. If Papa told us to go bring in the water from the well and it could be freezing outside—you had to throw a stone down into the well to break the ice so that the bucket could bring up the water—if we didn't move fast enough, that would be enough. We'd get his big hand right across the face and then he would really beat us. I mean really beat us. My sister Toni got it the worst. She always answered back. She could never keep her mouth shut. She'd mutter under her breath and Papa would come after her terrible. Papa would take anything he could find, a stick, a broom, whatever he could lay his hands on and he'd go after her good. Really beat her. We'd want to run and hide. We knew someone was going to get it good. Toni used to hide in the shed where the bread oven was then, behind the oven. She got it worse than anyone. Rocky, too, because he was the boy, but we all got it, believe me. Bad!
“We made sure that everything was on the table just the way he liked when he walked in for dinner at noon. If the salt and pepper shaker wasn't right by his dish on the table he'd throw a fit. Il Martello [The Hammer, the anarchist newspaper] had to be waiting for him next to his dish. He'd have a fit. If he didn't like the way something tasted—it didn't have enough salt—he'd take the whole dish and throw the food in the sink.
“Another time my mother bought secondhand dishes to save money and the dish didn't sit on the table right. It wobbled when he went to eat his macaroni—he picked up the dish and threw it on the floor—then he picked up every dish on the table one at a time and broke them all on the floor. That was my father.
“I loved my mother so much and she would get so upset. That day, Mama said she was going to leave him. ‘Get my hat,’ she said.
“I went to my father and I said, ‘Papa, Mama's going to leave. Talk to her, don't let her leave.’
“ ‘Ah, let her go,’ he said. That wasn't right at all. She worked so hard for him. Mama loved him so much. He was mean.
“Oh you can't imagine the beatings we'd get. My mother, too. He'd use his hands on her. Bad. She'd fight back, too; they fought like cats and dogs.”
Just as angry, we'd hear my grandmother answer him back, “May the rats eat your blood.”
“One thing we didn't agree with my father about was him being a communist or an anarchist, whatever he was. He was always holding meetings at our house. This big guy, one of the big shots would come from New York all the time for these meetings. And we had to serve them. They'd all sit around the table and talk for hours. Our house was the meeting place for all of Connecticut. We didn't know what they were talking about. One very big guy, I think his name was Trotta [does she mean Tresca?] used to come all the time. My father hated when the government did something wrong. ‘See where they put 'em?’ he'd say about an article in the newspaper that buried some important piece of information about the government. ‘Goddamn crukadah [crooked] bastards.’
“We didn't think it was right. The way they were running people down. They were talking against the government. Communists weren't supposed to be nice people. They were talking against America. We didn't know what to think. Not that we'd dare say a word against him. We'd get our rear ends handed to us if we did.
“Don't get me wrong. Your grandfather loved America. He hated the old ways of Italy, the way the priests cheated the people. The way they didn't do anything for the people.”
My Aunt Toni told me this story very recently. “My grandmother, you know Grampa's mother, had been staying with us. She came a lot from New York. I was going to go back with her for a vacation. I was so excited. She was a very religious person. He said to his mother, before she took me, ‘Don't you dare take her to church and have her baptized. Do you hear me? Don't you dare!’ And then he took me out on the sun porch and pointed down below, ‘You see that saw out there?’—it was the table where they cut the logs—‘If you let my mother take you to church to be baptized, if you walk into a church even once, I'm going put you there and cut your legs off so you'll never walk anywhere again.’ I'll never forget that. It was so cruel of him to say that to me. He had reason to hate the church but …”
My mother explained to me, “Papa's family owned land in Tolve: they planted wheat, harvested the wheat and brought it to town and milled it. They had olive groves and made their own oil. But then they had a bad crop of wheat one year and then another year and they got into debt. Then the church called in their debt. There was some nice property in Italy. They couldn't survive so my father came to America with his father and his brother Dan. They didn't want to lose their land. They'd work and mail the money home so the church couldn't take what was left.
“They went to work in Pennsylvania in the coal mines. He was sixteen years old when they came with his father. But then he said, ‘Hey, I didn't come to America to be buried under the earth.’ After the mines they all set pins in bowling alleys in New York. ‘I'm going to let these fessa throw balls at me.’
“Mama was back in Tolve waiting for him. He didn't like it here in America. He'd come back as soon as he could pay off the debt. He promised her he'd come back. And finally he did and they got married and had my sister Ag. But the debt was still there so he went back to America. Mama waited and waited for him. She had the baby and she even built a house for them.
“Then he visited some friends in Waterbury and it reminded him of Italy with all its hills and winding streets. He got a job in a factory here in town. When he saw men losing fingers and hands he quit that job, too. Now he didn't want to go back to Italy anymore. But now he liked it here in America. My mother was still waiting for him to come back the way he had promised. But he wrote and said he wasn't going to come back anymore. Finally she had to give in and come to America. She didn't want to. But he wouldn't come back. That's the way he was. He did what he wanted and if you didn't like it, too bad for you.
“While my father was running the government down, he was buying up land around the farm. He built the first slaughterhouse in Connecticut. He made good money on that. When he saw that the Jewish people were butchering their animals in the woods, he went to the department of health in Hartford and petitioned the government to be allowed to build a slaughterhouse. He got money for every animal killed. We had to wash that slaughterhouse down. Whenever he found us playing, we had to go wash the slaughterhouse windows or the floor, or the blood off the walls. Once we had just washed them that morning and he found us playing with a doll. We'd found a doll's head in the garbage and we put a stick in the head and we made clothes for the doll; he was furious. ‘Bunch of fools, playing with a doll. I told you to wash the windows of the slaughterhouse. What are you? Stupid? Idiots? Stunada a vese? Go get some work done.’ ‘But Papa, we already washed the windows.’ ‘Fa'napol’. Go wash them, I said, or I'll kill you.' And we had to go back and wash them again.”
As head of his own state, Grampa made sure to have diplomatic relations with anyone in power. So he was friends with all the town aldermen. He stopped by the mayor's office to talk to him whenever he went down to City Hall. “Everybody knew my father,” my mother said. “He was always talking to somebody. He knew how to get around, my father did. He could be so charming when he wanted to be.”
“He was always downtown bullshitting,” my Uncle Rocco says. “And he'd leave me with all the work.”
“That's true,” my mother agrees in sympathy. “Then he bought that gas station downtown, too. That was a good investment. He made a lot of money. Later on when he went to Arizona in the cold weather for Mama's arthritis and he and my brother Rocky were fighting all the time, he made friends with Barry Goldwater so that he could bring over his relatives. Anarchista, mio nonno.
“Even when we were grown women we feared Papa,” my mother told me.
“Aunt Vicki got a beating twice when she was about seventeen, once because she talked to a friend of our family's who she had run into on the road up to the farm. What was she supposed to do, pretend she didn't see him?
“Another time my father came down from the pigs and Vito Capi was there. And Grampa came home and saw that Vicki had been in the kitchen with Vito Capi alone and he started to yell at her, ‘You didn't feed the chickens. I know you didn't feed the chickens because one of the chickens followed me down the path!’ He beat her all over the cellar.
“By this time my sister Toni was married. She came up to help Mama can the tomatoes and he beat her silly. My father gave her such a black eye. Who knows why? He was always looking for an excuse. Toni was so glad her husband Al didn't go and do anything silly. Like get in a fight with her father. ‘Oh, I was so relieved,’ Aunt Toni says. ‘You couldn't win with my father. Thank God! Who knows what he would have done to my husband?’
“Once he offered some of his subjects, all of his son-in-laws, a reward for following his dictum: He'd give fifty dollars to the first one who gave one of his daughters a black eye. Peter walked out in disgust but a few nights later, he and my father had such a fight about politics. Peter thought the government wasn't as bad as my father was saying. I told Peter, ‘You can't get that involved with my father. He's really not right on this subject. Just ignore him.’ ” With us, his grandchildren, his anarchism was simply never brought up. Never! Our parents, his children, were deeply embarrassed by this affiliation with its subversiv...
