3.2. MERCADO FERRETERO EN AREQUIPA
4.2.1. FERRETERÍAS DE LA ZONA DE LA MARISCAL CASTILLA
‘In the absence of “old-time” kitchens, their inhabitants, and the social relations of these domestic landscapes, the products acquired within economies of the “antique” provide comforting references’, writes Jean Duruz of the desirability of vintage-style commodities, affirming the appeal of Terroni’s stock and ambience, as well as the scene recounted of Mosè, in terms of homeliness and security.232 Yet, she goes on to caution, ‘as with those niggling fears about time-space compression, one needs to question whose remembering is at stake when one is mourning the woman at the wood stove or purchasing her symbolic products’.233 With this query, Duruz indicates how the appeal of such images conceals as much they celebrate. Accordingly, I would now like to look more closely at the role assigned to women in the sentimental recollections of Il pranzo di Mosè. In particular, I will examine the labour behind the creation of these happy scenes, questioning how far the ‘iconic figure of country woman, carrying out the rituals of the day or season’,234 becomes just that; an icon, a representative symbol or sign, significant only in as much as the signifier of the security and happiness of others.
The concept of the ‘feminist killjoy’ that sociologist Sara Ahmed has developed in response to, and rejection of, the enforced responsibility for the happiness of others, is useful here. For Ahmed, the feminist killjoy is the figure that points out problems and exposes contradictions to supposedly public joy. In doing so, the feminist killjoy becomes positioned as the cause of unhappiness (‘you cause unhappiness by revealing the causes of unhappiness’).235 Ahmed opposes the necessity of happiness ‘as an exclusion not just of unhappiness but of possibility’, on the grounds that unhappiness is always possible.236 She explains:
Happiness involves both reciprocal forms of aspiration (I am happy for you, I want you to be happy, I am happy if you are happy) and forms of
232 Jean Duruz, ‘Home Cooking, Nostalgia, and the Purchase of Tradition’, Traditional Dwellings and
Settlements Review,12.2 (2001), 21-32 (p. 24).
233 Ibid., p. 24. 234 Ibid., p. 24.
235 Sara Ahmed, ‘Killing Joy: Feminism and the History of Happiness’, Signs,35.3 (2010), 571-94 (p.
582 and p. 591).
coercion that are exercised and concealed by the very language of reciprocity, such that one person’s happiness is not only made conditional on another person’s happiness but on the willingness to be made happy by the same things.237
The mechanism Ahmed identifies resonates clearly with the role assigned to women as Agnello Hornby describes it in Il pranzo di Mosè. The author explains:
Il compito delle donne di famiglia era di badare al marito e ai figli, di essere brave padrone di casa e, quando si ricevevano visite, di occuparsi della felicità dell’ospite, dal momento in cui costui arrivava fino al commiato. 238
(The role of the women of the family was to look after their husband and children, to be good housekeepers and, when guests came, to take responsibility for their happiness, from the moment of their arrival up until they left.)
By applying Ahmed’s critique of happiness to Il pranzo di Mosè, we can recognise how the sense of security promoted by the text is one that depends on the public effacement of the specific subjecthood of the host in favour of her symbolic homeliness; the host is a happy figure, because she makes her happiness dependent on the happiness of the community she serves. Hers is the duty of effacing the contradictions that threaten to shatter an imagined community happiness; of silencing and self-silencing. Agnello Hornby’s pride as a young child in ‘playing host’ by remaining the tacit witness of a lively table discussion alludes to the significance of this self-effacement:
Avrebbero potuto evitare l’intera discussione se avessero chiesto fin dall’inizio che c’era in cucina; inoltre Raimondo aveva ragione: le melanzane a quaglia devono essere piccine. Non lo dissi perché avrei potuto sciupare il divertimento e, forse, la parvenza di riavvicinamento tra
237 Ahmed, p. 580.
marito e moglie: era noto che Raimondo aveva un’altra famiglia nascosta chissà dove.239
(They could have avoided the whole argument if they’d asked at the beginning what there actually was in the kitchen; and Raimondo was right; you need little aubergines to make melanzane a quaglia. I didn’t say anything because it would have ruined the fun and, perhaps, the hint of reconciliation between husband and wife: it was an open secret that Raimondo had another family hidden who knows where).
‘Non lo dissi’, ‘I didn’t say anything’: the young protagonist is a good host because she knows not to reveal a truth which would threaten the precarious happiness of the home. In this way, we can read the security promised by the culinary rituals recorded in Il pranzo di Mosè and interpreted in the type of past that Terroni offers up in material display as reliant on a hierarchy of happiness, because they rest on the suppression of contradiction to the perception of the happiness of the group situated at the top of that hierarchy. Though on the one hand we can read the nostalgia associated with these visions as one that upholds elsewhere as space of belonging - what is lost, through the passing of time or in the movement from one place to another, is the security of position in a community - the myth of the happiness of this secure community of belonging is also one that effaces the personal sacrifice behind their creation. Nostalgia therefore obscures the uncomfortable notion that happiness can be coercion, that the veneer of a smiling community is preserved by the sacrifice of the happiness - and the subjectivity - of others.
Whilst the example of Simonetta’s silence is a trivial one, it is indicative of the coercive force of happiness. Olive Besagni’s collection of oral histories, A Better Life
- as discussed in the previous chapter, significant in that it is the primary reference point for the history of Italians in London - illustrates the more destructive consequences of happiness as oppression of selfhood. Besagni introduces this collection of personal stories and photographs with an explanation of the evolution of the Italian community from the early nineteenth century, detailing the construction of the Church, the annual procession for Our Lady of Mount Carmel, and the impact
of two World Wars. She stresses the spirit of community in both daily life and in times of grave adversity. In the section, ‘A Better Life’, she describes the improvements the area underwent from the 1930s onwards, the increasing respectability enjoyed by the Italians and the sociality of their culture, acknowledging the difference in attitude towards gender as follows:
The boys would go quite far afield for their dancing, to Covent Garden, the Paramount in Tottenham Court Road or Beale’s in Holloway Road. The girls were allowed much less licence. A very close watch was kept on them to maintain their respectability (i.e. virginity). If a young girl became pregnant, whether or not with her consent (lodgers in the house would sometimes take advantage of an innocent daughter of the household) the family shame would be such that they would disown the daughter or send her back to Italy. The only way out was a shotgun wedding. As a result, many girls entered into unhappy marriages, but generally they would endure it. Once married, the family would accept them again.240
The literal parenthesizing of sexual abuse and rape within the collective narrative of triumph of the Italian community hints at the power of nostalgia to disguise the very shadows it casts. In nostalgic visions, the community of ‘elsewhere’ is romanticised as a collective in which each person has their place, and is happy in it. The few lines Besagni dedicates to this trauma, together with the principle of the acceptance of the girls’ pregnancies only in the context of a forced, unhappy marriage once again hints at this happiness hierarchy. And fitting neighbour of the site of these unhappy unions, we find another young girl who bears out the contrast between the selective reification of the past and the opacities this process creates. The bright blue-and- yellow De Cecco pasta plaque on the exterior wall of Terroni features a Southern Italian peasant girl. Arms brimming with a plentiful corn harvest, and suggestively rosy-cheeked in a provocatively gaping blouse, she exemplifies Duruz’s iconic country woman. If, on closer inspection, there seems to be a trace of weariness in her expression, it only serves to reinforce the implicit coercive power of happiness: a visual testament to the labour and sacrifice obscured by nostalgia
De Cecco Pasta sign outside Terroni.
There is a prominent contrast between this image and the paratext of Il pranzo di Mosè, however, which requests further attention. The cover of Il pranzo di Mosè
features a full-cover close-up of the slightly sullen black-and-white formal portrait of an elegant young woman; ‘Elena Giudice, madre di Simonetta e Chiara Agnello’ (‘Elena Giudice: mother of Simonetta and Chiara Agnello’) - not quite the happy, anonymous symbol of domesticity that we might expect. Turning the first page, we find the hand-written recipe notes that we learn are from the notebook of Agnello Hornby’s maternal grandmother, Nonna Maria. Portraits of family members from various periods up until the present day appear throughout, including reproductions from scenes of the book’s corresponding television series.241 Agnello Hornby fuses past and present, public and private: the memories of the rituals of Mosè are interleaved in her London life, and the jottings of her grandmother’s recipe book are available in bookshops internationally. This is not a ‘lost’ anonymous past, then, but one very much present, which contains the possibility of a more constructive interpretation of the nostalgic home as a gendered space.
241 ‘Il pranzo di Mosè’, RealTime, 11 September 2014 – 13 December 2014.
Front Cover of Il pranzo di Mosè. Image source: <http://www.giunti.it/libri/narrativa/il- pranzo-di-mose/>.
Scholarship from a variety of disciplines has highlighted modernity’s association of the private and the home with the feminine and the public and the global with the masculine.242 Sharon Haar and Christopher Reed cite the examples of Gaston Bachelard and Emmanuel Levinas as exemplary of phenomenological discourse on the home in which the ‘perspective on the relations of domesticity, dwelling, childhood and memory is “the prerogative of men, positioned as the beneficiaries of domestic nurturance”’.243 In offering a sentimental reconstruction of homely environments which foregrounds feminine subjectivity, we might read Agnello Hornby’s texts as contributions to a broader recognition of home as site of both work and satisfaction. Such an understanding is privileged in the fifth chapter of Il pranzo di Mosè, pointedly titled ‘Mentre lavoro in cucina’ (‘As I work in the kitchen’),in which
242 See David Morley, ‘The Gender of Home’, HomeTerritories: Media, Mobility and Identity (Oxford
and New York: Routledge, 2000), pp. 56-85 for a comprehensive review of scholarship on the home as a gendered space.
243 Sharon Haar and Christopher Reed, ‘Coming Home: A Postscript on Postmodernism’, in Not at
Home: The Supression of Domesticity in Modern Art and Architecture, ed. by Christopher Reed (London: Thames and Hudson, 1996), pp. 253-73 (p. 258), cited in Morley, p. 59.
Agnello Hornby compares the time-consuming preparation of melanzane alla parmigiana to the work of modern artists, ‘dispongo le fette fritte a disegni geometrici, a zigzag, a spina di pesce, verso la salsa di pomodoro come stendessi pennellate di tempera’ (‘I arrange the fried slices of aubergine in geometric patterns, as a zigzag, or in a herringbone shape, I add the tomato sauce in brushstrokes, as if it were tempera’).244 ‘Il lavoro umile’ (‘the humble task’) of cleaning vegetables may be a social moment when shared with friends,245 or an opportunity for reflection: ‘compiango coloro che non cucinano e che non sanno cucinare. Perdono piaceri e occasioni di riflessione molto belle’ (‘I feel sorry for people who don’t cook and don’t know how to cook. They miss out on beautiful pleasures and moments of contemplation’).246
Let me return to the ritual of caffè d’u parrinu to expand upon this depiction of the home as a site of toil and pleasure. A recurring motif in Agnello Hornby’s texts, as mentioned previously, the special caffè d’u parrinu is stressed as a ritual which ‘legava le donne della famiglia di mamma a quelle della famiglia di Rosalia, che da sette generazioni abitava a Mosè,’ (bound together the women of Mamma’s family and those of Rosalia’s, who had lived at Mosè for seven generations’).247 It is an explicitly feminine tradition through which care and provision for kin is emphasized simultaneously as skilled labour and a source of gratification. A case in point is the admiring wonder with which Rosalia is described when, in Un filo d’olio, the author recounts eventually daring to ask her for the recipe for caffè d’u parrinu:
Le labbra ormai sottili increspate dallo stesso sorriso limpido, e tuttora bella, Rosalia non disse né sì, né no. Mi elencò i sette ingredienti e spiegò che il caffè d’u parrinu, fatto come si doveva, richiedeva una lunga preparazione, ribollitura, ‘e poi deve arripusari’. Non mi diede la ricetta, ma per il resto del mio soggiorno a Mosè me ne portò una caffettiera intera a metà mattina, ogni giorno. Ricetta niente. Sua figlia Antonia mi disse anni dopo che la madre, benché avida lettrice di libri e riviste di argomento religioso, scriveva di rado: tutte le sue ricette le sapeva a
244Il pranzo di Mosè, p. 52. 245 Ibid., pp. 50-52.
246Ibid., p. 49.
memoria e temeva di non riuscire a scriverle per bene. Antonia e, ora, Chiara lo preparano esattamente come lei. Ma il loro caffè d’u parrinu, benché ottimo, non è la stessa cosa – manca il tocco magico di Rosalia.248 (Her lips, by that time thinned, were pursed by the same clear smile and, still beautiful, Rosalia said neither yes nor no. She listed the seven ingredients and explained that caffè d’u parrinu, made properly, required a lengthy preparation process, boiling, and then had to ‘settle a wee while’. She did not give me the recipe, but for the rest of my stay at Mosè she brought me a full coffee-pot mid-morning, every day. No recipe. Her daughter Antonia told me years later that her mother, though an avid reader of books and magazines on religion, rarely wrote: she knew all her recipes by heart and was afraid of not being able to write them accurately. Antonia and now, Chiara, prepare caffè d’u parrinu in exactly the same way she did. But theirs, though excellent, is not quite the same thing - it lacks Rosalia’s magic touch).
This passage makes clear how Agnello Hornby’s culinary memoirs inscribe the effort and skill of the practical tasks of homemaking, but also the possibility of deriving meaning therein; a use-value of traditional practices. The concept of ‘kin work’ that Micaela di Leonardo uses in her ethnography of Italian-American families is useful here. Mapping the significance of kin ties in terms of social capital,249 di Leonardo rejects readings of the ‘conception, maintenance, and ritual celebration’ of kinship as a superficial activity, suggesting that:
Maintaining these contacts, this sense of family, takes time, intention, and skill. We tend to think of human social and kin networks as the epiphenomena of production and reproduction: the social traces created by our material lives. Or, in the neoclassical tradition, we see them as part of leisure activities, outside an economic purview except insofar as they involve consumption behaviour. But the creation and maintenance of kin
248Un filo d’olio, p. 32.
249 Micaela di Leonardo, ‘The Female World of Cards and Holidays: Women, Families, and the Work
and quasi-kin networks in advanced industrial societies is work; and moreover, it is largely women’s work.250
Without underestimating the ‘happiness hierarchy’ discussed previously, a failure to recognise these tasks as both labour and a source of pleasure merely reinforces the position of women as signifiers and agents of the happiness and opportunities of others, rather than as subjects capable of producing (and entitled to) gratification in their own right. Building on di Leonardo’s findings, Terry Lovell has argued for recognition of the domestic domain as ‘not only an area in which unpaid labour must be undertaken, but also a realm in which one may attempt to gain human satisfactions - and power - not available in the labour market’.251 Agnello Hornby’s culinary memoirs, as narratives centred around such kin work, thus perform an important function by presenting the home concurrently as a place of labour through which quotidian meaning and pleasure is derived. In this sense, Il pranzo di Mosè
may be most productively read in the context of a renewed understanding of working- class femininity as a text which creates space for reflection on the practicalities, and celebration of the significance, of work in the home.