The old woman was terribly spoiled. She had been born into a family of faded nobility and absorbed all the formal cruelties of her class. Chief among them: the certainty that WE, the few, are refined and right; the OTHERS, the many, are coarse and wrong.
Her beliefs about domestic servants—the HELP—formed a particular chapter of her truth.
Her truth rested, like so much else, on "holy" citations.
"Saint Peter cursed them, and that's enough!" she would say. This convenient curse came from an apocryphal gospel she had embellished, imagining that on the night of the Passion, when a servant's treacherous question had pushed Peter to deny his beloved master, he had cursed her in return. Therefore, all the particular failings, suffering, and humiliations endured by these poor creatures were simply the inevitable consequences of their original sin: being SERVANTS cursed by Saint Peter. I told her that, morality aside, Peter's curse was a lie: it wasn't in the gospel.
"What are you saying?!"
I would bring her a gospel so she could see for herself.
"Well, my mother always said so!" she would end the matter, with this supreme guarantee of truth—the same authority by which she held as revealed truth the names Gaspar, Melchior, and Balthasar attached to the Magi.
The old woman had lived a necessarily busy life in a family with five children, though in comfortable circumstances that had always allowed for domestic staff in the house. She'd had good relationships with many of them, curse of Saint Peter notwithstanding.
Left a comfortable widow, in her eighties her physical strength declined. Her children launched "Operation Caregiver."
It is terribly hard to accept dependency on others for everything.
Every time a caregiver was mentioned, the old woman gave increasingly irritable responses that all boiled down to: Nonsense! Don't be ridiculous! And we only have one bathroom! Just as regularly, her children seized every opportunity to praise a caregiver's virtues: A live-in housekeeper who's also a companion, at home, exactly as you've always wanted! Think how well you'd get on!
After months of persuasion—and months of the old woman's growing refusal to stay home alone for even a few hours—came the day of introduction: just a trial! If it doesn't work out, she can leave!
Marija was thirty, with two children, separated from a husband who drank, soon to be widowed. Naturally, she was undocumented. She came from a region of Ukraine where everything requires payment plus a bribe: school places, documents, hospital care. Her journey, as is the rule for the world's poor, had cost a fortune. On paper it was a group tour by coach. As such it was required to include tourist visits and hotel stays in three cities—Hungary, Austria, Switzerland—before entering Italy, where all the "tourists" simply disappeared into the fog of undocumented status. For this journey as a well-to-do tourist, Marija had accumulated serious debt.
Now here she was, small and sturdy, with a lovely smile, in the old woman's living room. In the end, the old woman said yes: let's try.
The following week the new caregiver moved in.
Despite her initial agreement, the old woman took it badly. She stopped doing anything for herself, refusing even to stand up from her chair. The image of the Servant dominated her mind. She called for Marija constantly. She believed that by paying her, she owned Marija twenty-four hours a day. Every few days I was called for an outburst—often with curses and tears—whose message was always the same: I don't want her! Sometimes came the variation: I can't find such-and-such thing. The implication hung in the air: she took it, she goes through my things!
But as weeks passed, Marija—despite the occasional tears from the woman's rudeness—gradually became accepted. She was lively, quick, affectionate without pretense. Three months in, she was settled: she called the old woman "nonna," joked with her, gave her a goodnight kiss.
In 2003 came the regularization. Marija could finally shed the anxiety of being stopped and sent back before she'd earned enough to buy a house and send her children to school—they had stayed with a problematic uncle for substantial payment.
Many other undocumented workers remained in the limbo of the rightless, their employers unwilling to regularize them despite benefiting from the usual abuse of making the undocumented worker pay all costs. One happy effect of this "emergence"—the word, for once without irony, captures the suffocation of being undocumented—was that Marija could return home to see her children after three years apart. The undocumented cannot risk such visits; the clandestine reentry into wealthy Europe is too costly in hardship, bullying, and theft.
The old woman reacted badly to the news of Marija's vacation in Ukraine: How will I manage?
I reassured her: You've never been alone; come to the mountains with us.
She accepted without much enthusiasm—the elderly are usually unsettled by any change in their surroundings.
Marija returned bearing more Ukrainian gifts than a Ukrainian Santa: colorful porcelain, small pictures bristling with lights, mysterious salamis certainly laced with garlic, Cyrillic chocolates.
The old woman was visibly delighted at her return.
But a complication was brewing, in the slim form of a young countryman Marija had met—wouldn't you know it—in Italy. Nicola wanted to marry Marija and have at least one child. Marija was deeply doubtful: her first marriage had been poisoned by alcohol, and the thought of motherhood again, thirteen years after her second child was born, frightened her.
Finally—after obtaining ironclad guarantees against drinking—Marija made her decision. Their two passports were sent to Ukraine, a modest bribe of a few hundred euros changed hands, and they were declared husband and wife!
But where would they live?
The old woman could never tolerate a change of caregiver.
On the other hand, hiring Marija part-time from outside the house would require two additional caregivers and a cost the family couldn't bear. The old woman accepted Nicola's moving in with surprising ease: helped greatly by the fact that "a man in the house is necessary," and because Nicola was affectionate too, always greeting "nonna" when he came home from work.
Last March Marija confided to my wife that she was feeling nauseous... and then that her period had stopped!!
Four months later the old woman noticed that Marija was "getting heavier." It must be "that food they eat: smell what's coming from the kitchen!"
Now came the moment to share the new "good news."
The method had already worked for other "good news."
"I have good news and bad news. Which do you want first?"
"Good grief! What happened?"
"My cat threw up on your rug."
"So what! You nearly gave me a heart attack! Clean it up. Now, what's the good news?"
"Marija is having a baby! Think how lovely: a little one in the house! You're always complaining how little your granddaughters bring theirs!"
Well! It went well! After the emotional pressure: "You decide—if you don't want her, we'll send her away and find someone else." And after some reassuring answers to "How will it work?" "How will Marija take care of me?"
Marija was called in: embraces, kisses, tears... The old woman even made a theatrical caress on the belly where the baby was: a gesture she would repeat several times afterward, with genuine affection.
Then came the traditional questions: "When is the baby due? Do you know if it's a boy or girl?"
"A boy." "Toward the end of December."
What a thing it would be if Marija's baby were born on the 24th, around midnight!
But we don't know that yet.
Sergio Sciascia, 2006