Longing for the Bells of the Old Village Church
There are longings that live in the eyes. Others dwell in the hands, recalling the weight of a hoe or the caress of a beloved face. But there exists a longing still more silent and more cruel: the one that hides in sounds. Few realise that a man can cross an entire ocean carrying a bell within his soul. Not a bronze bell of the kind that hangs in ancient towers, but its echo, repeating itself ceaselessly in memory, as if God had decided that certain recollections would never know rest.
When Giuseppe disembarked in Rio Grande do Sul in 1880, he brought little more than a change of clothes, a rosary worn by his mother’s hands, and a courage that was, in truth, only another name for despair. He had come from a small village in a lost valley among the hills of northern Italy, where all the houses seemed to spring up around the church, like children protected by the same mother. From there he knew every stone of the square, every shadow cast by the cypresses and, above all, he knew the voice of the bells.
Throughout his childhood he had never needed to look at a clock. It was the bells that woke the village before sunrise. It was they that announced the Angelus at midday, that called to Sunday Mass, that silenced the men when a funeral passed through the narrow streets. The bells celebrated weddings, mourned deaths, warned of fires, greeted the feast of the patron saint and seemed to converse with the wind that descended from the mountains. Time, in that land, did not pass by the hands of a clock; it passed through bronze.
In Brazil, however, he found another calendar. The mornings began with the cry of the azure jays, the crackling of the pines in the minuano wind and the rhythmic blow of axes opening clearings in the dense forest. The forest was majestic, yet it knew nothing of the language of men. Its silence was immense. Beautiful, perhaps. Consoling, never.
In the first months, Giuseppe still awoke before dawn expecting to hear, in the distance, the old belfry of his village. He would remain for a few seconds motionless on the wooden cot, smiling without realising it. Then he understood where he was. And the silence fell upon him like a second night.
The years came. The forest gave way to vineyards. The house of boards became a solid construction of basalt stone. Children arrived, then grandchildren. He learned to laugh again, to sing at the grape harvests, to give thanks for good yields. He became a respected man in the colony. Anyone who saw him walking among the vines would have believed they had found someone fully reconciled with his fate.
But no one ever truly knows the life hidden inside another man.
On cold winter afternoons, when the mist slowly descended the slopes of the range and the wind made the pine branches creak, Giuseppe would interrupt his work for no apparent reason. He would raise his head and remain gazing at an invisible point on the horizon. His children imagined he was watching the weather, calculating the arrival of rain. His wife, wiser, simply continued spinning the wool. She knew that gaze did not see the sky of Brazil.
It saw another.
It was at that moment that the bells returned.
They did not come through the ears, but through memory. They rang slowly, deeply, exactly as in that small church of pale stones that stood at the top of the Italian village. The first stroke seemed to cross the entire Atlantic. Then came the others, filling the heart with a sweetness impossible to explain and a still greater sadness. Each peal carried a piece of childhood, the smell of bread baking in the communal oven, the firm voice of the old parish priest, the dark dresses of the women leaving Mass, the laughter of the boys running across the square while the pigeons took flight before the tower.
He never told anyone.
How could one explain that a man might hear what did not exist?
How could one tell his Brazilian children that the bells of a distant church continued to mark the hours of his soul?
They belonged to that new land. For them the world had always had the scent of the araucaria and the red earth. They would not understand that their father still lived, in part, in a village separated from there by an ocean and by an entire lifetime.
One morning, many years later, they inaugurated the little church of the colony. A new bell was hoisted up to the modest wooden tower. The whole community gathered to watch. When the priest pulled the rope for the first time, the sound spread through the valleys with a joy that set children running and old people crossing themselves.
Giuseppe smiled.
It was a fine bell.
Strong. Clear. Full of promise.
But it was not his.
He realised then that certain sounds can never be replaced. Just as one does not replace a mother’s voice, the smell of the house where one was born or the light that crossed the window of childhood, neither does one exchange the bell that taught a boy to recognise the hours of God and of men.
That night, sitting before the door of his house, he gazed for a long time at the stars. They were almost the same ones that shone over Italy. Perhaps they were exactly the same. He thought that the old belfry of his village might already have another bell. Perhaps the tower had been restored. Perhaps it no longer existed at all. Perhaps no one had spoken his name for decades.
But that no longer mattered.
Because certain places continue to exist as long as someone is still able to hear them.
And it was then that he understood the most delicate of the truths of immigration: a man never completely abandons his land. Part of it crosses the ocean hidden inside the chest. Sometimes it travels in the yellowed photograph of a family. Other times, in the rosary inherited from the mother. And for a few, it travels in the invisible form of a bell that no one else hears. A bell that continues to ring, softly, among the mountains of memory, calling to a Mass that never ends.
Author’s Note
Few words in the Portuguese language possess the human density of the word saudade. In the case of the Italian immigrants who arrived in Rio Grande do Sul in the final decades of the nineteenth century, it acquired an even deeper meaning, for it represented not only the distance from the native land, but the loss of an entire universe of references built since childhood.
When they left the small communes of the Veneto, Lombardy, Trentino, Friuli and so many other regions of Italy, those men and women did not abandon merely their stone houses, the vines, the wheat fields or the faces of relatives. Left behind were the smells of bread freshly drawn from the communal ovens, the processions of the patron saint, the markets in the square, the murmur of the fountains and, above all, the sounds that organised daily life.
In rural nineteenth-century Europe, the church bell was far more than a religious symbol. It was the voice of the community. It called to Mass, marked the Angelus, announced weddings, mourned funerals, warned of fires, celebrated the great solemnities and, for a people who rarely owned clocks, taught the very rhythm of time. Each peal was a memory shared by entire generations.
Upon arriving in the dense forests of the Serra Gaúcha, the immigrants found a grandiose nature, yet silent with regard to what was most familiar to them. The axe replaced the bell. The song of the birds took the place of the voices of the square. The wind among the araucarias came to occupy the space where, throughout their lives, the bronze of the old church tower of the village had echoed.
That absence became an invisible form of saudade. Many built new chapels, raised belfries and cast new bells, but none of them possessed exactly the timbre of the one that had accompanied the first steps of childhood. Certain memories do not belong to places; they belong to the heart. They travel with those who leave and continue resonating long after the world around has changed.
Perhaps that is why so many descendants still feel, without knowing how to explain it, such an intense bond with the land of their ancestors. Memory is not transmitted only through surnames, photographs or family recipes. It also travels invisible paths, made of sounds, of emotions and of silences. Among all of them, few have been as persistent as the echo of the bells of the small Italian churches, which continued to ring, for decades, inside the souls of those who crossed the Atlantic in search of a better future.
That saudade, however, never prevented the immigrants from building a new life in Brazil. On the contrary, it was precisely that which gave them the strength to raise churches, open roads, plant vines and found communities among the araucarias of the Serra Gaúcha. In every chapel erected, in every bell that began to ring again in the colonies, there was the attempt to make reborn, on Brazilian soil, a small fragment of the old Italian village. Because those who emigrate may change their homeland, but they never entirely leave the land where they learned to hear the first bells of life.
Dr. Luiz Carlos B. Piazzetta
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