The Muse in the Yellow Kitchen: Joseph Luzzi's Mother as Storyteller

By Daniel Okafor

Joseph Luzzi signed the contract for My Two Italies in 2011. The manuscript's working title, per the contract itself, was "untitled." That's how little anyone knew what the book would become — including its author.

Luzzi, a literature scholar whose earlier work was academic, had planned a cultural history of Italy ending with the Berlusconi era. He had the material. He lacked what he calls the "engine" that could move the bulk of information along. Weeks passed. Then months.

Where did the breakthrough come from?

A library nap. Luzzi fell asleep at Bard College's Stevenson Library and dreamed his way back into his childhood home, where his mother was boiling cow stomach — tripe — in two large black cauldrons. The smell that once nauseated him became the book's trigger. He writes that he smelled the sources as much as remembered them, invoking Proust's madeleine as comparison. For Luzzi, the Prime Mover was "the lowly tripe."

The plan crystallized: reproduce the smells, sounds and stories of a childhood caught between Calabrian lore and American consumer culture. All he needed, he writes, was a muse.

Who was the muse?

Not Dante's Beatrice. Not Petrarch's Laura. It was Yolanda Luzzi, his eighty-something mother, who had worn mournful black since his father's death in 1995. Her stage was the yellow kitchen, or a picnic table under a backyard oak in summer. Her repertoire included:

• How Luzzi's father trapped her inside her house at fourteen to force a marriage
• Arriving in America alone in her twenties, without husband or four children
• Losing her domineering husband after fifty years of "difficult, devoted love"

In the suspended space of her stories, Luzzi writes, his mother "ceased being the one thing that had defined her life since age seventeen and her first child: a mother." She performed the frightened girl, the determined immigrant, the widow with flashing eyes.

Dinner supplied the props: heirloom tomatoes from her garden, homemade bread, hand-rolled fusilli cranked out with a thin iron rod. She generally refused wine — old Calabrian gender protocols allowed men to drink "in industrial quantities" — but accepted a glass of the family's Calabrian red, made in her late husband's honor, while narrating.

What does the filmed interview reveal?

After publication, Luzzi filmed a conversation with his mother. Asked why she came to America, she answered: "Siamo venuti ca per campare più buono perchè c'era la fatiga" — "We came here to live better because there was work here." Her word for work was fatigare, "to tire oneself," the precise term for a man like Pasquale Luzzi, born in Acri in 1923, who signed his name into the family's cement steps and passed out from exhaustion at the dinner table.

Asked what she missed about Italy, Yolanda answered in broken English: "To tell you the truth, I no miss it…my husband miss, not me."

Luzzi notes she looks bored, uncomfortable, even annoyed in the video. Under the oak tree she had been a storyteller; on camera she was answering an interrogation. There's a lesson there for anyone who interviews elders. The storyteller needs to speak, not respond.

Yolanda Luzzi never wrote anything down. Her son calls her summertime tales her "lone work and her masterpiece, the Book of Life" — oral history as authorship, now preserved in his prose.

The Innocents of Florence: The Renaissance Discovery of Childhood by Joseph Luzzi is available from W.W. Norton & Company.