Marriage, Kidneys, and Other Dark Organs

Venera Di Bella Barles maps the tempestuous life journey she embarks on with her Italian immigrant parents.  When she is four, an indelible sea voyage taken from America to Italy in 1937, plants her firmly in her family’s Italian traditions.  As the firstborn, first-generation American raised in New York State, her parents’ expectations are high.  Venera internalizes her primary impressions with their underlying messages of “rights and wrongs”.  Do not fail.  Keep a good image at all cost, even if you have to make believe.  Peace at any price.  Her father, Salvatore, with one foot still in Italy, rules the home with a heavy hand, insisting on strict old-country ways for his wife and two children.  His massive dose of fathering fills her very being.  Up to the age of ten, Venera is his favored “son” until her brother Nicholas is born, then all of Salvatore’s dreams shift to the long-awaited heir.  She learns a confusing role for womanhood by watching her inept mother, Antonietta, follow passively and childlike.  Her relationship with her mother is distant and wanting.  Her mother suffers, as all abused women do, the all-consuming battle of survival, leaving little time for nurturing her children.  They all bow to Salvatore’s will.  Venera is taught well as a little girl.  The subtle hidden messages are clear between the strict Catholic Church and her unyielding, oppressive, family.  With this formula, Venera learns about love and how unsteady an article of trade it is.  She gains power as the mediator of her parents’ difficult marriage.  Venera spends most of her energy either loving or hating her father.

With tongue-in-cheek humor, she writes, in “If You Get to Heaven Before I Do, Just Cut a Hole and Pull Me Through” how religion has much to say about her views.  “To Love or Not to Love”, recalls her late teens and her first encounters with love.  At nineteen, she elopes with a young man six years her senior, Edward Barles.  The marriage guarantees to stir the already volatile pot.  “The Tell Tale Hat”, relates how her parents discover her elopement plot.  She writes, “If only their skills at parenting could match their detective skills.”  Her stories also describe her colorful, idiosyncratic Russian-Jewish in-laws.  She tells of her husband’s Uncle Sam, a maverick among men, a man fighting to keep his soul from being squashed.  Sam survives by his immeasurable labor, wit, and cynicism.

In “La Vita Dolce Piccante:  More of the Sweet and Bitter Life”, Venera provides memories of her children, husband, and friends.  Edward, her husband, gives her much fodder for her tales.  A week on a large houseboat, with her unskilled mate and family, leaves her wondering where common sense ends and idiocy begins.  There’s the time, Ed imports into their lives fifteen feral cats.  Or the night Ed takes her out for a special date in his new three-piece white leisure suit.

Along with amusing stories, a few teach Venera lessons.  During her long marriage, she continues to experience unhappiness with her parents, making many attempts to patch the lifeless relationship.  She finally lets go of the animosity after years of therapy.  Toward the end of their parents’ lives, Venera and her brother make another effort to pull the families together after a seventeen-year separation.  Aged, Salvatore and Antonietta finally decide to return to America.  But fate plays the upper hand for Venera, and her brother.  They are cheated, literally by days, with the sudden death of their father.  In the end, Venera makes peace with the woman she had mothered as a young girl.  But it is a short-lived, bittersweet reunion.

Venera Di Bella Barles was born during the depression in upstate New York to Italian immigrant parents.  She encounters a difficult pathway from the hot-blooded upbringing with her authoritarian father, who had one foot in Italy and one in America.  The childhood tribulations chewed directly into her spirit.  The residue was overpowering.  Marriage, Kidneys, and Other Dark Organs reveals, with sadness and wit, her tricky path to maturity.

Di Bella Barles spent long years in search of answers to her fears, using humor to cover difficult circumstances; years to take responsibility for her own life; years to allay the anger in having to forfeit her childhood as the family referee; years before she understood her parents and replaced bitterness with forgiveness; years to find the love in all this disorder; years to recognize that the legacy that made her a peacemaker was not always a benefit.  Peace at any price.

Woven amidst her long-term marriage and two children, were a number of diverse work experiences, which added much to her ‘school of hard knocks’ education.

Venera continues to write.  She lives on Bainbridge Island in Washington with her husband, Edward, and a Wire-Hair Fox terrier, Oliver.