Zia Adriana: from one strega to another

Zia Adriana. The aunt who gave me the moniker “strega.” I can’t remember when she started calling me that. I think it was when I was a girl of six or seven. It seemed natural to me at the time; I assumed she called all little girls by that name. It only occurred to me to question that assumption a few years ago when I took an evening class here in Berkeley, California called— typical to this hippy area of the world—“Conscious Menopause.” With other women transitioning from “womanhood” to “cronehood” I began thinking about how to go about turning into a witch, and hopefully a good one. Then I remembered that my dear aunt Adriana had tagged me with that epithet decades ago. I decided to ask my Italian cousins about it. Myretta said no, Adriana had never called her “strega.” I asked Marina, certain I’d heard Adriana calling her that. Marina only laughed and said, “No, no, she reserved that for you!” Why, I’ll never know. I wish I could ask her. Perhaps she saw something in me I don’t even know about myself.

Zia Adriana was a deep, and a bit mysterious, person. She was one of those of whom one says “still waters run deep.” It wasn’t easy to read her. But she was also a wryly smiling person with a dry, and very funny, sense of humor. Growing up—when my family would travel every summer from Boston to visit my father’s (her brother’s) relatives in Assisi and Perugia in the summers—I liked her refinement, gentleness, erudition and calm. When you went to Zia Adriana and Zio Ivo’s house everything was in order, books lined the walls literally from floor to ceiling, and it was cool inside even if it was blisteringly hot outside. She could be playful, with a wicked twinkle in her eye; like when she would tease me and Marina about doing “vasche” up and down the Corso Vannucci. She rightly thought that was an inane use of our time, while still understanding that it was an adolescent rite of passage. She was less gentle when she reprimanded me sharply if I made errors in speaking Italian. I remember those corrections smarting. But, after all, she was a teacher by profession.

When I lived with Adriana, Ivo and Marina for three months during a year of work and travel I took before starting university, I loved making her laugh with my descriptions of my professors and other colorful characters at the Università per Stranieri where I was studying. She cooked exquisitely, though never vaunted her abilities. Meals both in the kitchen and the more formal dining room were delicious, while not extravagant, and always accompanied by intelligent conversation about history, politics, literature, or music. There was never anything uncouth that went on at via Fiorenzo di Lorenzo, 11. Conversations were never vulgar or base or lowbrow, like they could be occasionally in my home growing up with her oldest sibling and only brother—a highly educated physician with a colorful and rich sense of humor—and my mother and brothers. I liked the combination of lowbrow and highbrow in my home. I found it to be the marriage of the somewhat contained, cerebral (albeit fabulous) atmosphere at Zia Adriana’s house and the boisterous, chaotic, unruly (also fabulous) atmosphere at my Zia Emma’s house. I couldn’t live with just one. I needed both.

When Zia Adriana was diagnosed with breast cancer just months after my father was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, it set her on a journey of self-examination and self-liberation that was inspiring to watch. Like Adriana herself, it wasn’t done in huge, bold, exaggerated strokes. It was refined, understated but also deep, powerful and life-changing for her. She began to express anger more, which was startling but also made my pulse quicken in fear and admiration. She was badass! She no longer had that almost exclusively even-keeled, low-voiced demeanor. Now and then she erupted with a louder, throatier complaint or refusal—say, if she became tired of someone yet again asking something of her. She VOICED it! It was exhilarating, though scary, to witness and even scarier to be on the receiving end of it. It felt to me that what she was voicing was maybe just the tip of the iceberg of something she had been containing for years before cancer and therapy freed her.

One instance I remember in particular was in the last year or two of her life, when she had been living with metastatic cancer for several years. The process of living more authentically was in full flower for her. I think I had just seen Marina perform in Paris and then had traveled to Umbria to visit my relatives. I remember being alone with Adriana in her living room. I was happy to be with her in her gracious, welcoming, refined presence. I was chattering dumbly and enthusiastically about my life in answer to her prompting questions. I told her how wonderful Marina had been in the performance, saying something like “She was by far the best in the show.” I meant to make Adriana feel good by praising her daughter so extravagantly. Adriana shot me a piercing look and said “That’s nonsense. She’s not the best in the show. Don’t say stupidities.” (It’s better in Italian: “Non dire stupidaggini.”) That stung! And this was coming from a woman who adored her only child, Marina, and was over the moon about her musical gifts. But Adriana was right. She wanted to cut through the polite, fatuous niceties of social interaction, even amongst family. She didn’t want bullshit, either spoken to her or to speak it.

I have only started to deeply understand this imperative to live authentically in the last few years, following Zia Adriana’s death in 2006 and the death from breast cancer of two other dear and influential women in my life—although the urge to do so began in earnest after my own diagnosis of breast cancer in 2000, when I was 35 years old and the mother of a daughter only a little over a year old. My husband Michael and I had named our daughter Adriana as a gift and homage to my beloved, keen aunt; to show her that though she was looking at her death approaching we would keep her alive in the life of this new child. I cherish the photos of a trip we took to Umbria to baptize little Adriana; particularly the photos of Zia Adriana tenderly holding three-month-old Adriana in her arms and smiling at her with that oh-so-sweet smile she had. I have learned much from being in the same club with Adriana and other family members and friends, a club of which one would really rather not be a member: the cancer club. From what I learned watching Zia Adriana, from my father’s death shortly after I graduated from university, from close friends who have died, and from my own experience facing death I try to live as fully and authentically as I can. A major part of that journey is parenting my two daughters, Adriana and Nora, in addition to finding time to express myself in writing or filmmaking when it’s possible. Every day the word Adriana crosses my lips scores of times as I try to be an involved and present mother to my daughters. I can see already that this Adriana has the insight, humor, intelligence and strength of her great-aunt. Maybe she will be a little strega in her own right.

Originally published at https://myralabravastrega.com on November 20, 2018.