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WORKSHOP TWO

figures who are the real pillars of the household. They support unbalanced husbands,
sons, brothers, uncles looking for an identity, struggling between stereotypes (as a boy,
Valerio’s father “punched a classmate who made fun of his real name, Nunzio” - 21), and
the burning desire to be completely accepted, embodied, for instance, by “Lucy,” the
blond American woman from Halifax that Valerio’s father would have married if little
Anthony had not been conceived with another “dark, stained” (13) Italian American.

In Valerio’s book, the figure of “the mother” becomes an icon: the writer’s uncles live
“within five blocks of their mother. Each day they make a pilgrimage to her” (39). It is
not by chance that the first chapter of the book is devoted to the author’s mother, de-
scribed as a “dutiful woman” (11), as “the first to awaken” (12) every day, as somebody
completely absorbed into her “role” (her personal name is never revealed), as her “motto”
seems to imply: “our individual life and differences matter little when compared to our
duties” (11). After her husband’s falling on his head and his subsequent retaining only a
small portion of his consciousness, “she breathes life into him, creates a semblance of a
life for him. She points him to where he must go; after breakfast she directs him to his
office in the basement; at twelve o’clock she signals him to come up for lunch by giving
him three buzzes, at one o’clock she directs him downstairs again” (22), thus giving him
a new life, thus performing again her generative role as a woman. Valerio’s mother can
cook, “she would make pizza for the whole world” (47) for the sake of her husband, and
she herself becomes ritual food, when her daughter is born:

I stopped crying when my sister was born long enough to watch my mother breast-feed her. The
feeding was ceremonious; the bedroom was quiet as a church; neither my father nor I spoke. My
mother sat in a chair at the entrance to her bedroom and gazed down the hallway, through the
kitchen and into the parlor. (…) My mother’s breasts were free. (29)

Later on in the same chapter devoted to Valerio’s sister, the reader gathers that,
growing up, the girl “inherit[s] [her] mother’s breasts” (29) and that, when her own child
is born (not by chance another female, a daughter), when she herself turns into the icon
of a mother, she is begged by Valerio to breast-feed the baby, thus performing again and
again the same ritual. The writer seems to push the discourse even further by unveiling a
possible connection between the stream of milk flowing from his sister’s generous breasts,
the same blood running through their veins and his desire to take their mother back
from the dead, to keep the family together, by sexually joining to his sister, who has
replaced their mother in her matriarchal role: “I would like [my sister] to touch me now
for I need her, the same blood runs through our veins, we must share the same view of
the world. When her daughter was born, I begged her to breast-feed the child. Then I
begged her to be the child’s godfather” (30).

The perception of the Mediterranean as identified with feminine figures, especially
with the mother, seems to be confirmed by the double mention of the actual Mediterra-
nean Sea only in the very chapter dedicated to Valerio’s mother. At first the writer informs

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