Colloquy, Volume 14 #5

Heaven and My Father's Secret Drawer

When I was a child, I once asked my father to tell me about heaven. He had always been quick to respond to my incessant stream of questions, but that time he put down his Corriere Canadese and eyed me with a bemused expression.

"Well," he said at last, "I think heaven is a place where you get to tell the people you love the things you were either too scared, embarrassed, or never got the chance to say when you were alive." He thought a moment. "But you know, God does not want us to arrive in heaven with a lot of emotional baggage because that means we have not made the best of the life he gave us. That is why it is important to always say what is in your heart."

I was satisfied with that answer, even though I didn't fully grasp his meaning. Sadly, it took his death, many years later, to infuse his words with the meaning that had been so elusive in my youth.

Like too many children, I took my father for granted. He was simply that stern, moralistic, naïve guy who was always giving me a hard time. And although my attitude towards him softened considerably when I reached maturity, I was so preoccupied with the often bewildering realities of adulthood that our relationship remained stuck in neutral.

Alessandro Volpentesta was born in 1912 in a village in southern Calabria. He served in the Italian army and spent almost fifteen years in Africa, first during the fighting in Ethiopia, then in a British POW camp in South Africa. He returned to Italy in the spring of 1947 and married in 1948. I was born in 1950 and soon afterward we emigrated to Canada. As the years passed, my father worked hard to improve the family's situation, until at age sixty-five he was forced to retire. For a man whose work ethic had defined his life, this was the beginning of the end.

His heart attack in 1989 came as no surprise. Weakened by rheumatic fever in childhood and strained by a lifetime of backbreaking work, his heart had been beating on borrowed time. His subsequent deterioration was rapid and unrelenting. He suffered from angina, shortness of breath and general debilitation, accepting it all with the grace and stoic dignity that came from his abiding faith in God. In January 1990, the end finally came.

A few weeks later, going through the desk that contained my father's personal effects, I accidentally pulled a side drawer all the way out. Behind it was a hidden compartment containing two packets of papers. Slipping the elastic band off the first packet, I carefully unfolded the top sheet and immediately recognized my father's handwriting. To my amazement, I realized I was looking at a poem. Although I knew he was a literate man, I had always assumed it was a facility used only for his prodigious letter-writing.

A quick scan confirmed that all the papers contained poems. I read a few of them and discovered they had all been penned during his time in Africa. Some dealt with the futility of war; others, the most powerful, were about the bittersweet joy of childhood, evoking warm, vivid images of his home, his family and the innocent simplicity of rural life. The discovery that my father was a closet poet gave me tremendous pleasure because it provided a connection between us, a sort of validation of my own literary pretensions.

The second packet contained a batch of yellowed letters. Pulling one out of the pile, I was surprised to find that it had originated in Ethiopia, but was written in perfect Italian. Stapled to the bottom was a photograph of a young black girl. Intrigued, I began to read.

I learned the girl was the daughter of an Italian soldier, a friend of my father's who had been killed during the war. My father had remained in touch with his Ethiopian widow, even sending her occasional small sums of money. When she died in 1962, her daughter Carmela, then in her late teens, took up the correspondence. I was deeply moved by the obvious affection that had developed between two such disparate people during their lengthy long-distance relationship. Although orphaned at a young age, Carmela had gone to university, mastered four languages and ended up holding an important job with her country's national airline.

Awash in a sea of conflicting emotions, I carefully rebundled the letters and placed everything back in the hidden compartment.

For the next week or so, I was plunged into a melancholy torpor during which I felt a great deal of guilt, partly for having intruded into my father's privacy, but mostly for having been so ignorant about the remarkable life he had led. It filled me with a sense of irrevocable loss. It was then I realized that neither of us had paid enough heed to those words of wisdom he had uttered such a long time ago.

Since reaching adulthood, I hadn't given much thought to the notion of a heaven. But now I find myself fervently hoping it really does exist, because my father and I have an awful lot to talk about.