Amalia Apicella

Tramonti, 1920

She was born on the sixth of July 1920, in Tramonti, in the hills above the coast. The Great War had ended twenty months before and had taken a great many of the men of that generation out of villages exactly like hers; the influenza that followed it had taken more. She arrives at the front edge of the recovery, in a place of lemon terraces and chestnut, twenty-three years before the man her daughter would marry was born in the same village.

Her daughter

She had a daughter, Gelsomina, born in Maiori in 1944 — down on the water, not up in the hills. That move, from Tramonti to Maiori, is a fact hiding in these two dates and nobody has explained it: whether she married down to the coast, whether the family moved, whether Maiori was simply where the hospital was.

Everything else

There is nothing else. Not her husband's trade, not her own, not the house, not how long she lived.

She is on this table because her daughter's leaf named her, which is how most women of her generation survive into a family record at all: as a line in someone else's entry. Correcting that is not sentimentality, it is accuracy — she was a person for as long as she lived and the record currently gives her two dates and a role.

The record has her as a mother. She was that for some of the time.