Pedretti Diary of Giovanni Vener

An Immigrant's Journey to the Heart of America
1. Auflage 2020
ISBN: 978-1-0983-0277-1
Verlag: BookBaby
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: Adobe DRM (»Systemvoraussetzungen)

E-Book, Englisch, 224 Seiten

It's 1899. John Venner, born Giovanni Vener, has just been committed to the Vernon County Insane Asylum. When one of the nurses hands him a pen and a pad, his suppressed need to write surfaces and he scribbles about his experience the night before. By the third day he is making diary entries addressed to Maddie, the love of his life who had died just a few months earlier. John looks back at a life that was good to him, but one that never allowed him the leisure time to create, to fulfill his desire to put in writing his insights and thoughts. But now all responsibility had been taken away and he can reflect on his life - his life as a budding artist, immigrant, farmer, husband and father, and community leader. John tells us of his journey to America, his struggles to obtain and maintain his farms, re-experiencing his past, and talking sweet thoughts to Maddie, his wife. He tells Maddie (and us) why he emigrated from Campodolcino in northern Italy to Bad Ax, Wisconsin. He relives with her many moments from their life and their struggles to eke a living out of the bluffs and coulees in Genoa, a small Wisconsin town located on the banks of the Mississippi river. Many entries are bold and naked love songs to Maddie. He also tells her of his days struggling with reality since her death. Giovanni is left an original copy of Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass and develops a love hate relationship with Whitman and his poems. Homer appears in a dream and challenges him to write the great modern epic that will straighten out the errors that he, Virgil, Milton and Dante made. They celebrated war & quest, chauvinism, evil & despair, and fear. Homer challenges John to set it right -to tell the story of family, gentleness, creativity, charity, and peace. John believes he is too old for that, so he concentrates on making diary entries that depict his life with Maddie as fruitful immigrants each day making life a little better for themselves, their neighbors and the world.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Pedretti, Michael

Leseproben

A cold day in September I think it is now September.   September 18, 1899 Momma used to say, “Always ask yourself before acting, ‘Is the reward worth the cost; is the cost worth the reward?’” Momma, life was not worth the cost. The cost was by far too high. You never gave me the chance to ask.   September 19, 1899 Dearest Maddie, Maddie, I miss you so much. Just now, I was staring at the overgrown cornfield and I thought how you and I and Nellie would never have let it go to the devil like that. But the thought of you made me long to be with you to talk with you. I know I can’t do that, but I have this paper and this pencil and I can write to you, so from now on I will write you a letter every day. I am in a nuthouse. Can you believe it? Giovanni Venner, Mr. Thinker, Mr. Strong Man, Mr. Giv’em hell Johnny, Mr. I Can Do It - locked up in a loony bin like a helpless puppy having his dinner presented, taken for a walk every day, told what to do, talked to as if he did not understand. I understand just fine. I understand they are the ones that are nuts. Every one of them is as crazy as a peach orchard boar. Maddie, come get me. Save me from this insane place. Come play with me. You are why I woke up in the morning, why I could look in a mirror without disgust, my angel, my goddess, my breath, my field friend, my concerned confidant. Grandma, the wisest person I ever knew, told me we all needed to have three loves in our life. She called the first love one of infatuation – love at first sight. A joyous love but one filled with pain and angst. The feeling of having heart strings woven into one when your love is in sight and the feeling of being ripped apart in separation. Dominated by possession and jealously, the ability to move inside this restraint is not possible. Our second great love is one of lust – intense physical intercourse that seems to obliterate all else. Grandma said if we were lucky enough not to marry the object of one of those loves, we stood a chance to find happiness in marriage where communion, creation and playfulness were possible. Grandma encouraged me to have and terminate the first two so that the third would become possible. When challenged, she did admit it may be possible that the three stages could be had with the same person and that happiness was possible if the couple waited until they reached the third level before consummating their relationship. But she added, “Yes it is possible, and it is also possible you will become Pope.” Oh Grandma, I never became Pope, but I did become the Pope of Lovers, finding all three stages of love in one woman and she in me. Maddie, for the longest time I thought I would become Mr. Bachelor, the man with it all who in the end had nothing for he would grow old in his victory as lone man without love, without care, dying alone in dirty clothes, rotting on the floor of his little mansion found many days maybe weeks after I died of emptiness. I looked and looked for the woman that would spin my heart into passion. Not to be had. A woman that would make me lust seemed not possible. I first saw you, as a woman that is, with tears in your eyes as you observed death in your Grandmother. Your beauty shone in your compassion, your loss, your strength, your spirit joining as one with your grand-mom. You were so young, yet so old. I was smitten, and I understood for the first time what my grandma called infatuation. And so I watched you from a safe distance, enthralled on one hand but feeling like a dirty old man on the other. As your grip over me released, time again became possible. I see it now like it was this morning. The virgin, in blue, the sun behind you, the sun in my face, our eyes meeting along the creek where you had come to gather walnuts and I to find Belina who had strayed from the herd. I had put you out of my mind, had known from the beginning that you were too young, I too old. Later, you told me that you had developed a schoolgirl crush on me but had giggled to yourself how Mr. Old and Miss Young would make Mr. & Mrs. Odd. Before that moment standing in the dew of the morning, we had carried our secrets then buried our feelings deep in our hearts. I don’t know what you saw, but I saw Mona Lisa glowing with freshness, alive, wanting, looking into my eyes as if I were. The stillness was celestial. I said, “I better find Belina. She’s been gone from the herd for too long.” and moved to leave. You replied, “John, you never know what might happen.” No moment stands so vivid in my mind. The next morning when you came to collect the day’s harvest of walnuts, I was waiting. We both knew what we wanted, but we also knew we had to wait. And so we did. As you approached your 17th birthday, you told me your dad was arranging a marriage between you and George Beffa. I spoke with your father, whom I had known as a boy when we both grew up in Campodolcino, but he told me he was determined to marry you off to the Beffa boy and that I was too old for his Madeline. You swore you would not marry anyone but me. “Then we must marry.” “I am ready” you said with the tenacity of a woman who had come of age. Your determination was taxed when your dad did everything he could to stop our marriage, but in the end he walked you to the altar and we wed; two virgins never more crazed to deflower each other. Our lust erupted as the crops waited, the cows barely got milked, and the weeds flourished. Yet it is not that time I remember so much as our moments together, walking to the field hand in hand, laughing at dinner, planting and harvesting as a team, tending a sick cow, butchering a chicken, finding some time each day to play together and with our children before the evenings descended into darkness. I recall ever so vividly the day when Father Wirtz preached you had to work at marriage and after the service you said, “No Father, by the time you have to work at marriage it is too late, you have to play at marriage.” And it was that playfulness with which we did everything that made life with you so perfect. Even in planting and harvesting season when there were never enough hours in the day to complete the tasks at hand and you worked side by side with me to complete as much as possible, we never “worked” at it. Come, Maddie, play with me. It is in the playing that we found life, ourselves and each other. Come now, play with me.     September 22, 1899 “I haven’t seen you before,” I said to the stranger in the mess hall. I noticed that the wrinkled old man I was looking at moved when I did. I stuck out my tongue at him. He returned the favor. I moved left, he moved right. I lifted my finger he was right with me. Then I realized he was me. “When did I get that old? My god.” I did not recognize myself. I looked so old. I mean really timeworn. I went for a walk. Had to prove to myself I could still walk; that I was not that dilapidated old man I had seen in the mirror. The walk did not help. What would help is if they would let me die. There is no reason to live to tomorrow. What’s here – four walls, a bunch of mean crazies, stench, cold, it is a hell hole. I am going to rot. There is only one thing to look forward to. That is to join you, Maddie. Why don’t you come and take me? Maybe you ain’t there either. Maybe there is no there. I don’t think there is. I don’t mind – nothingness would be so much better than this. I want to be with you, but if there is no there, I can’t miss you, can I? Here, longing for you, being treated like a dirt child, it is only knowing that soon it will end that keeps me going. Ironic is it not? Maddie, whisk me away. Please.   October 2 Dear Maddie, Father Mono came back for his little book. Guess it took him a couple of months to get up the courage. He looked so pathetic, I was nice to him. Told him I was having a bad day when he came by. Told me his congregation included Rising Sun and all of Viroqua which included the nut house [to be fair, he did not call it a nut house]. Then he starts up on the Jesus stuff and how I need to read the bible and he has one in his office and he will go get it for me. I tell him to shove it. He handed me back the little book, “John, I’m going to leave this here. Read it if you want.” Read it if you want? What was he thinking, who has time to read, there are fields to plow, seeds to plant, hay to make, horses to feed, cows to milk, don’t have time to read the newspaper let alone some stupid book. “Giovanni,” I said to myself - sometimes I call myself Giovanni. “Giovanni,” I said, “you got no hay to make, there are no horses here to feed, no cows to milk, there is just you and four walls and a door they keep locked with bars on the window. You got plenty a time to read.” I thought, John, you haven’t read a book since you left Prestone. I recalled reading Alessandro Manzoni’s I Promessi Sposi for school. Pretty damn good book. Dante? Oh my Dante. I hadn’t thought about Dante since, geez I don’t remember. I had not read one word of Dante since the ship. Not since the ship, when that crazy German bastard threw my Commedia overboard. Just grabbed my copy from me and tossed it overboard like he thought it was the devil. Must have thought books were the work of the devil. Now there was a guy who needed to be locked up in an asylum for the chronic insane. Why didn’t ole Mono bring me Dante? Yea I could read some Dante. Especially the inferno part; I been to hell but not back. I wish I had the Inferno here. I...