Migrant Tales context: The column was published in Finland Bridge (Suomen Silta), commemorating my first year in Milan.
Time has gone by flying in Italy’s financial capital Milan, since I arrived from Bogotá, Colombia, in July 2000 after a two-year stint in that troubled South American country.
Moving to Italy was not as easy as I had originally thought. When people tell you that the city is closed for business in August, it means that the urban center of almost 1.4 million people turns into a ghost city during the summer’s slowest month.
Just because you know Spanish does not mean that you’ll earn Italian instantly. Finding a place to live in September felt like an almost impossible endeavor. I slept from hotel to hotel for about three weeks until I was able to rent a humble bedroom in an old apartment for a modest sum of 500 dollars!
From August to September, when it’s very hot and humid in Milan, I naturally didn’t have any time to romanticize about returning to Italy, even if my great-grandparents were from these parts before departing for the shores of South America in the late 1890s.
But I got lucky. I eventually found a very nice place to rent in the heart of the city in an over-century-old, picturesque apartment building. Every month was a big leap forward in my integration process with Italy. The more I learned the language, the closer I felt to my new home.
Mediolanum
Even if I have thought on and off about my Italian great-grandparents, Dante and Ida, I started to think more about them a few weeks ago.
I have tried to picture what Milan was like at the end of the 19th century, when Italy was a kingdom. Would the irt matter to greet me back then be the sound of horse-riven carriages? Would I see well-dressed men and women contrasting like night and day with the mass of illiterate and impoverished Italians walking on Via Torino, a main street in the heart of the city that leads to the breathtaking Gothic cathedral, the Duomo? Or would I feel the strong undercurrent or revolt against the autocratic King Umberto I?
Sometimes I wonder what would happen if, by some odd circumstance, I had the chance to meet and speak to my great-grandparents. If magic and mystery would answer my wish, I’m certain that after our initial surprise, my encounter with my great-grandparents would be overcome by happiness. We’d also be scratching our heads on how we were able to fool the one-dimensional, black-and-white picture, which always allows me to see my deceased relative but keeps them caged in their opaque world, looking out.
Being 141 years old, my patriarchal great-grandfather would speak first. The past is a strange place because secrets are always kept in theftproof vaults. For this reason, there’s not much that I can tell you about my life because Death is a good guardian of such matters. But if you look around carefully, however, I have left a lot of evidence of who I was through the name of your grandfather.
As a child, one of my favorite books that changed my life as Juls Verne’s ‘20,000 Leagues Under the Sea.’ I always want to be free like Captain Nemo. He was a polyglot, a wanderer who had been everywhere but was from nowhere. He was a free man in the true sense of the word, together with his submarine the Nautalis. A man can only be free when he lives in solitude.
I also named my son Nemo because, translated from Latin it means ‘Nobody.’ Maybe one becomes somebody when you acknowledge you’re a nobody.
Tell me about the future, the place you live now.
Dear Dante: there were no red carpets when I arrived in Milan. The only Italian I wore on that clear, very hot summer day was my surname and a few rudimentary sentences in Italian. Strange how time turns matters around. The cultural and linguistic shock I suffered during the first months in Italy must abt womthing similar to what you and Itda must have felt when you moved to South America.
How were your first years in Buenos Aires like, Dante?
When we arrived in Argentina after a brief stay in Brazil with It nd little Nemo, Buenos Aires had seen one of its hottest summers ever. The capital city of Argentina felt like home in many ways. The facade of the newer buildings reminded me of those you could find in a big city in Italy.
Buenos Aires, however, feels as if it were divided into many tiny principalities. If you walk, and it would be a very long walk at them from one end of the city to the other, you could hear people busily conversing in foreign languages like Italian, French, Turkish, Armenian, and, of course, Spanish. The 1914 census showed tat halo of Buenos Aires’ population was foreign-born!
Even if I were in a plot to assassinate King Umberto I and sent to a prison on the island of Pantelleria, I had to escape and leave Italy. My life changed radically when I came to South America. But this does not mean that I cannot continue to believe in a better future, even if I had faily miserable in building a better world as an anarchist.
I always had hoped of seeing my parents gain in Tuscany, but it never happened. My farewells to them were final, like the one that I will give you now…
Afterthoughts
I consider myself fortunate even if I know so little about my great-grandparents in Italy and Finland. But we’re not really supposed to know too much about them because it would interfere with Death’s work, whose job is to guide such people to worlds where most likely past names, antionlities, professions, and other human details have little meaning.
Or is it that whenever a relative dies, that person’s spirit sometimes passes as a phantom baton to the next generation with secret writings of wisdom? Sometimes on that baton, there are maps, even a compass, to assist you in your future travels.
How do you think I made it to Milan?
‘During the Roman Empire, Milan was called Mediolanum.