My grandfather once told me, in his scattered tongue, that for the longest time he would look into the mirror each morning and think he was twenty-four. Intellectually, of course, he knew he was no longer twenty-four. But the mirror image looked back at him, and although he was really twenty-five, or twenty-seven, or thirty, he thought of himself as twenty-four. Until suddenly he was thirty-four. I don’t know why he fixed on twenty-four as the start of his temporary amnesia concerning the aging process. I suspect it was because he already had two children by then, with another on the way, and perhaps he recognized that raising a family in this new land was a threat to his dream of returning to the old country. Whenever he told me stories of those years following his marriage to Teresa, he would invariably begin by saying, “When I wassa twenna-four, Ignazio.” It was some time before I realized that the event he was describing might have taken place anytime during a ten-year span.
When he wassa twenna-four, for example, the wine barrel broke in the front room. The owner of the tenement in which the Di Lorenzos lived refused to allow my grandfather space in the basement for the making of wine unless he paid an additional two dollars a month rent. Francesco flatly refused. He had finally paid off his debt to Pietro Bardoni, and he’d be damned if he was going to pay another tithe to another bandit. He set aside an area of the front room overlooking First Avenue, and it was there that he pressed his grapes, and set up his wine barrels, and allowed his wine to ferment without any two-dollar-a-month surcharge. When he was twenty-four, then (1905? 1906?), he was sitting in the kitchen of the apartment on First Avenue, playing la morra with Pino, and Rafaelo the butcher, and Giovanni the iceman, when the catastrophe happened with the wine barrel in the front room.
The Italian word for “to play” is giocare, followed by the preposition a, as in giocare a scacchi (literally “to play at chess”). When I was a kid and heard the men saying, “Giochiamo a morra,” I thought they were saying, “We’re playing amore,” and wondered why the Italian word for “love” was used to label what I considered a particularly vicious little game.
La morra is similar to choosing up sides by tossing fingers from a closed fist, except that it does not operate on the odds-or-evens principle. Not unlike a game played in France (the basis of a novel titled La Loi, which resonates with all sorts of Mediterranean undertones), the idea is to call out a number aloud while simultaneously showing anywhere from no fingers (a clenched fist) to five fingers. Your opponent similarly shouts a number and throws some fingers, and the winner of that round is the man who calls the number exactly matching the total number of fingers showing. “Morra!” is what you shout if the number you’re calling is zero. If you shout “Morra!” and both you and your opponent throw clenched fists, you are again a winner. After a number of elimination rounds, the two men who’ve won up to that point square off, shout their prognostications, toss their fingers or fists, and eventually there’s a single grand winner. This man is called bossa, an Italian bastardization of the word “boss.” He promptly appoints a partner, usually his closest friend, and the partner is called sotto bossa, or “underboss.” There is naturally a lot of yelling during the actual competition, which sometimes lasts for hours, but eventually there’s a boss, and he chooses his underboss, and then the real fun begins.
The fun involves a five-gallon jug of wine. The boss, by dint of his having eliminated all competition in fair and strenuous play, is boss of nothing but the wine. It is he who determines who will be allowed to drink the wine. If he wants to drink all the wine himself, that is his right and his privilege. If he wishes to share the jug only with his underboss, that too is his prerogative. If he wants to give the entire jug to some shlepper who is a perennial loser, and who will gratefully accept glass after glass of strong red wine until he’s consumed the full five gallons and fallen flat on his face, the boss can do that as well. The boss has absolute power concerning that jug of wine.
On the day of the catastrophe (when Francesco was twenty-four), he beat all the men at la morra and became bossa.
“Pino,” he said, “would you like to be sotto bossa?”
“I would consider it a great honor,” Pino said, and grinned.
“In that case, Pino, we will need a pitcher of wine and some glasses, please.”
Pino went to where the five-gallon jug was standing on a chair near the kitchen table, and he poured a pitcher full to the brim and brought it back to the table together with four glasses. Francesco filled two of the glasses as the other men watched.
“Pino?” he said, and offered him one of the glasses. “I drink to our homeland,” he said, and raised his glass.
“Salute,” Pino said, and both men drank.
“Ahhh,” Francesco said. “Excellent wine.”
“Excellent,” Pino said.
The other men watched. They were very thirsty after nearly forty minutes of throwing fingers and fists and shouting numbers.
“I think our homeland deserves more than one toast,” Francesco said.
“I think so, too.”
“Should we have another drink, sotto bossa?”
“Yes, bossa.”
“Do you think it is fitting that we should have another drink while these men, who I’m sure are thirsty, sit and watch us?”
“Whatever you wish, bossa.”
“I think it is fitting,” Francesco said, and poured two more glassfuls of wine. “Pino?” He raised his glass. “I drink to the beautiful village of Fiormonte in the province of Potenza, and I drink to the good health of our families and friends there.”
“Salute,” Pino said, and both men again drank.
“Ahhh,” Francesco said. “Beautiful wine.”
“Splendid,” Pino said.
“But I feel we do a discourtesy to our homeland if you and I are the only ones drinking and toasting. We should have more than two drinkers, don’t you agree, Pino?”
“I agree,” Pino said. “If that is your wish, bossa.”