The Saga of Natalio

Even after three tri-lingual conversations, I can't exactly trace the family tree from Natalio Villella to myself.  What I gather is that Gaetano, my great-great-grandfather, was Natalio's uncle.  Whether that makes us fourth cousins or fifth cousins twice removed or something else entirely, I'm not sure.

Gaetano Villella, along with his brothers Paolo and Natale, had come to the States at the turn of the century, and all of them had kept touch with their Italian brothers and sisters in Catanzaro, Italy (a town which, if Italy were a foot, would be located on the anterior tibial tendon).  When the second World War ended, a few Villella families decided to leave Italy.  Natalio was sixteen, though he remembers being younger.  His father had planned to move to Pennsylvania to join Gaetano, but at the end of the war, the uncle---my Italian forefather---died of old age.  The Pennsylvania branch of Villellas, second and third generation by then, had already begun to lose touch with their Mediterranean relatives, and Natalio's father knew no one in America except Gaetano.  At the same time, G.I.s were taking back both blue and white collar jobs.  Argentina, Natalio says, had more jobs to offer an Italian immigrant.

That choice makes me wonder at the family's former politics.  Perón had taken civilian office as President of Argentina three days before Gaetano's death, establishing populist fascism in this country.  The Villellas who left had waited until after the Axis defeat to emigrate, following the same route across the Atlantic that so many Nazi survivors had taken.  Of course, I didn't ask Natalio any of this.  At the start of the war, he was nine years old.  He isn't a fascist any more than I'm a neo-con.

Natalio has three sons and a daughter who lives in the coastal town of Mar del Plata.  He has owned and operated a label-printing business, located in the first floor of his house in the Flores barrio, for decades.  They service big clients--Quilmes beer, Bols Cocktails, and others--and their success shows.  Two of the three sons have apartments in Natalio's house, which, if being etymologically accurate, is a three-apartment building with a large workspace in a separate building in the back and the label factory and garage below that.  Natalio drives an angular, sporty sedan that stills smells new.  His granddaughter Johanna, who is now at the university studying to be a lawyer, had an extravagant fifteenth birthday party a few years ago, more expensive than most weddings judging by the professional photos I saw, a party which I imagine Natalio bankrolled.   He has a larger house in Mar del Plata, which he visits often to see the beach, to tend to his garden, and to stay close to his daughter and her children.  He prefers beer to wine, farm eggs to those at the supermarket, and smokes any brand of available cigarettes.  He never mentions his wife, a short and thorny Italian woman who is still alive.

Natalio speaks only Italian and Spanish--usually a lazy mix of both--and I speak only the barest scraps of Spanish, so the particulars of his biography have been filtered through MTJ, Jess, Amanda--whose grasp on his amalgam language has been shaky, owing not only to its Italian words but also to his habit of mumbling and his mis-remembering of facts (ex. he told Jess and Amanda he was 10 years old when he arrived in Buenos Aires in 1946 and that he is 80 now).  The biography is patchy, but I don't mind.  I know enough.  And the long-lost family, despite everything I know, still retains its mystery.

Another of Natalio's habits is showing up spontaneously at the front door.  The first day he did this, the day he received my letter in December, it was endearing and flattering---he had been so moved by the prospect of contact with distant family (me) that he had set off in his car from Flores, a thirty minute drive, to meet me that very day.  He stayed two hours, drinking beer and speaking Italian to MTJ, while our dinner grew cold in the kitchen.  It was uncomfortable--we were supposed to be meeting for the writing group, and I was unable to communicate at all with my relative, relying on Michael to do all the translating (which, it seemed, he was enjoying).  But it was fascinating to be meeting this man, family in a place I'd almost randomly picked from the South American map.  When he finally left, I was still excited to go to his New Year's Eve party the following day.  I wanted to know more.

The second time, Paola was making a Peruvian dinner for all of the roommates.  It was one of Amanda's last days in the house, and all of us were drinking on the terrace, drifting in easy conversation and the dim sounds of hip-hop on someone's iPod.  Then the buzzer buzzed, and Jess, with her Natalio-sense, guessed who was at the door without even looking.  We invited him up and offered him beer.  Andrew shared a few cigarettes.  Paola spoke with him in Spanish a while, but she had food to make, and it fell on Amanda and Andrew to entertain the old man---Amanda's Spanish is pretty strong, Andrew is studying at one of Buenos Aires' language schools.  Conversation was halted and disjointed.  The rest of us, English speakers, would converse half in English before someone would feel guilty and translate or Natalio himself would interrupt with a different topic.  He insisted that Jess and I go to his house in Mar del Plata for a week at the end of February, just before our flight back to the USA.  When we tried to politely decline, he came up with new ideas to route our excuses---just a weekend, take the bus.  He stayed for dinner.  In fact, he stayed until nearly one a.m., a five-hour visit.  At some point in the night, he obtained Amanda and Paola's cell phone numbers, and in the following days he called them to arrange Mar del Plata and dinners for all of us at his house.  In one day alone, he called Amanda nearly 10 times.

The third time, I didn't answer the door.  We saw his obvious silhouette through the clouded glass of the front door and stayed quiet on the terrace as the buzzer rang in five-minute intervals.  When Paola came home from work, he was still there.  He must have stayed there more than half an hour. She didn't invite him up, but she was surprised to see me in the house.  She told him, at the front door, that I wasn't home, that I was in Lujan and would talk to him soon.  As she said this, I was laughing at something Andrew said on the back terrace---and the laugh carried.  There was a moment of awkward silence, which Paola filled with an urgent description of how muy linda Lujan is this time of year.  He said he was leaving for Mar del Plata in two days and had wanted to say good-bye.  I still haven't sent a letter thanking him for his hospitality, his answering of my my letter.  I was childishly selfish, unwilling to interrupt my night to say good-bye to the old man, whom I will probably never see again.  Afraid of a repeat of Peruvian Night and exhausted from a contentious writing group meeting, I wanted to relax with a glass of wine, with my friends, without the bother of Natalio and his unending visits.

I still feel guilty.  I owe him thanks, though I can't apologize---to apologize would be to admit what I did, that I had willfully ignored him.  February will pass without my going to Mar del Plata, and then I will board my flight to Chicago, leaving Buenos Aires and my Argentine family behind, no connection made, just another event to be posted in a photo album.