Talking for my father.

Talking for my father.

Please click on the thumbnails to get a full-size image.

Him, with his sister and his mother in Italy. He is about 38 years old.
In the late forties, one had to emigrate, since there was no work in Italy, and their family was poor. So him, his brother and his half-brother went to a far end of the garden, and drew straws . A whole life conditioned by a little straw. You, who did not emigrate, can't know the pain it is to be obliged to leave a beloved country. From this moment to his death, my father will go back to Italy twice. He will not be able to visit his mother before she dies.
Years after, his sister will be a true nightmare for us.

My father as a builder.
The second photograph shows him on a rail roadworks It's the end of the day. The overalls are on his shoulder, the tools are in his handmade toolbox.

I know he told my father that his son would never become a handworker, even if skilled. He was believing in social progress. But I have always kept a secret friendship with the working class, to which my father has belonged.

Even if he did not manage my scholl years, being in hospital, I remember that the rare times he was back home, he has always had a look to my notebooks. I remember his perplexity with math. He had learned arithmetic sums, the maths that were useful for his work. And I was learning ... the bases conversion. I was less than ten and our teacher was making us play with the decimal, the hexadecimal, the binary, the n-base systems. France, for that, I will never forgive your blindness, your pretentiousness. For that, I hate teachers.

Him and my mother, visiting the site of the school. Years after, I'll be a schoolboy in this school. I remember, he was nearly dead. He had wanted to pick me up after school, but he had arrived half an hour lead, and sat on a bench in the school yard. My teacher, who had seen a shadow through the opaque window panes of the classroom had opened the window and asked my father what he was doing there. My father replied that he was waiting for me to get out.. My teacher then closed the window and went on teaching us. But this unusual event had spread some laughter in the classroom, and I had been ashamed of my father, for he was ill, weak, mentally uncertain, hardly French speaking.

I remember an evening, I was very young, may be 4. My father was not very ill yet, and I can't recall clearly whether he was back from work or from hospital, but I think it was from hospital, or from a recovery house. He vas wearing a beret (my father was found of hats), and a kind of satchel, the same kind that the one on the photograph. This bag was cylindrical, tartan-patterned, with a closing lace that was also used as a sling.
It was the evening, and he had brought us gifts : sweets and little plastic planes, advertising gliders.

My father with his 125 cc motorcycle. He was calling it : "my little horse". My uncle broke the gearbox. My father did never have another little horse again.
Years after, only the headlight and the seat will remain, I don't know why. I will ask my father for the speedometer to put it on my bike. All of my friends were having car speedometers on their bicycles. He will tell me to go biking for a while, and when I will come back, he will not have succeeded in removing it from the headlight, and will scold me, half crying. He was quite very ill, and had began to drink.

On the side of the pond in which my parents were used to go fishing or to go for a walk. These two photographs are very representative. The one with my father is mould-stained. On the one with both of them, the main character seems to be the dead tree bending over the unhealthy pond.

Again on the side of the pond, with my father.
Clearly, I was crying, and my father was a bit sad.
To fish, he was using a seven-spiked trident (now it is absolutely forbidden).
He was making his baskets himself.
I remember that he taught me how to, but I don't know if I'd be able to now.

With me in Italy, the last time my father was visiting his fatherland. He will never come back. My mother was pregnant of my sister. At that time, only the tourists were having baby carriages.

With me. Almost ten years after, I will be crying, embrassing Mirka, my father's she-dog, saying that nobody loves me excepted her, for my mother had scolded me.

It was a really gentle dog. I don't know why my father had given her a Slavic name, but the area he was from in Italy, is very close to Yugoslavia.

The dog will be killed, using a spade, by a neighbour, while my father was in hospital. Don't try to understand why. There is no explanation.

With me and with my sister.

He has never changed his nationality : he has stayed an Italian his life long. In those times, a foreigner had to go to the police station once a week to have his residence permit stamped by the authorities. His writing and conversation was a mix of French and Italian.

Ma petit surii gespere che tu fas pa de misere ni a mama et ni a m... e qu tu sua tugiur sagè ? Se tu la vo che un giur je rivine avec vu? gie ne sai pa can ma petite suri Bon Giur Pappà.

Ma petite souris, j'espère que tu ne fais pas de misère ni à maman, ni à M... et que tu est toujours sage. Tu veux qu'un jour je reviennne avec vous ? Je ne sais pas quand, ma petite souris. Au revoir. Papa.

My little mouse, I hope you don't make any troubles to mum nor to M..., and that you are always a good child. You want me some days to go back home with you. I don't know when, my little mouse. See you. Dad.

The last photograph.
He is in a recovery house dedicated to alcohol-addicted people. Please do not judge him bad : you would probably go mad knowing you will die from the incurable desease you are suffering from.
He is forty-seven years old. My mother is forty-seven, my sister is ten, I am eleven.
Soon, he will be dead.

Just click [HERE] to get an enlarged detail,
to know to what looks like a dying man.

You may think that I'm sometimes a bit cynical. I've been psychoanalyzed for two years to get this result. Now I can talk about him. I can say how deeply I miss him, how I've always been missing him, in every step of my life, as a child, as a man, as a father. I've had to learn anything all by myself, and it hasn't been that easy.

Before, I was feeling pain whenever I heard a child call his father : "Dad !". I was suffering of this injustice. Two days ago, I've realized that I've been knowing my father-in-law for a longer time than my own father. As I'm father myself, I've become autonomous, but, still ...

So long dad, forgive me not to have been the quiet and gentle son a father would like to have. I've been ashamed all along my childhood that you was ill and miserable. I've been ashamed of our social position : none. I've been ashamed of our poor way of life. I've been ashamed not to have friends, nor fashionable clothes, nor expensive toys, nor new bicycle, nor to go in holidays, nor to go skiing, nor to have a color TV set, nor to travel by car. I've been ashamed to survive thanks to a junkyard, to fight Gipsies or other social wrecks for a copper chip or a crap.

The only thing I regret is not to have you now, to clasp you in my arms, and say you how you are important to me. Too late, too late.