Umberto quieted Julio’s fears and made him sit down in a wonderfully wrought chair that my father later painted white and put on the Pesci porch, where it remained until his house was sold after my mother had died. That chair had cradled all my uncles and aunts, as they sat on the porch talking up a storm – This was before the advent of television, which destroyed interpersonal communication – later moving into the kitchen, where they played cards until midnight and beyond. My bedroom wall and the kitchen wall were the same. I recall leaning my cheek against the cool plaster wall, straining to make out what was being said, but the plaster and the lathes behind it captured and muffled the sound, so that it reached me on the other side of the wall as an indistinct angelic murmuring in which I could hear the laughter of my aunts nesting in the baritone voices of my uncles. Ever since that time, I have been consoled by the sound of the human voice.
Julio trembled. Had he done something wrong? My grandfather
was a big man for his time, five foot nine, with powerful arms. Tenderly, he
loosened and pulled away from Julio's twisted foot the right shoe –
if such a mess of burlap and leather could be called a shoe. Julio turned his face away in
embarrassment. Umberto bathed his misshapen foot. When Julio several times
struggled to pull his foot away, Umberto gently told him to be still.
“I am going to make you a shoe that fits.”
There was something else the matter with Julio that did not
come through the story told by my father as he sat in the very chair that years
earlier had held Julio prisoner to his father’s kindness. Was Julio also dumb?
Could he have been simple-minded? Or was he just one of those poor souls that
life had clawed and clawed and frightened to his frozen bones?
Umberto made a cast of Julio’s misshapen foot, from which he
made a boot. A few days later, he chased Julio up Main Street, caught him in
front of a pub and steered him back to his shop, where he fitted the new boot
on Julio’s foot. Before he left the store, Julio, who was poor and could not
afford new boots, pulled out of his pocket what little money he had, which he
pressed into Umberto’s bear claw. He bowed three times and ran – HE RAN – up
the street.
Both my father and his father paid special attention in
their devotions to the Blessed Virgin Mary. I remember them often around Christmas
time, and it is in memory of them that here, just before God kissed the earth
and flowers bloomed in the desert, I offer Andrea Bocelli’s beautiful rendition
of Schubert’s “Ave Maria .”
You say, the dead are dead and cannot hear. But truly, love
has a voice that will wake the dead. That is why Umberto made his shoe for
Julio – when the world slept and there was none to witness his kindness but the
one who gave birth to the Word of God, faithful always to his Father’s promises.
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