Miguel Bornaschella - The satisfaction of having achieved my aims

By coming back to the little particles that were the seeds of this story, the anecdotes have been appearing and accumulating in time with the same speed and the same unconsciousness as the years have gathered. My father used to tell me a lot of stories: of his, of his relatives and friends. I would listen to him, paid attention when he spoke amazed by the quantity! He always had a new story to tell … Once I told him about my astonishment and he replied that I would myself have a lot of things to tell in the future, he knew that since he had been able to see my personality. He also told me this was going to happen as soon as I was the appropriate age.

At this moment it happens to me that I do not want to gather more anecdotes. Watching everything from here and backwards, I can clearly see the guiding thread and I can imagine the story thoroughly finished. I will do my best to keep the chronological order and be quiet enough at the moment of showing emotions and feelings. But I cannot guarantee this.

Fortunately I have travelled through time connecting the suffering of learning new things with the time of applying the experience. In fact I will be giving myself my own testimony.

I would like to picture the life of the immigrant, but perhaps in a better way the life of the person who immigrated to Argentina as a life cut into two halves. This is a story of circular journeys. My immigration or my migration, depending on the side of the ocean people will read this, is like the story of so many people whose children-sons or daughters-have had to migrate. But even if this did not happen, the life of the immigrant is broken into two. Even still, as it happened in my case, this occurred at a very short age. A piece of your life remains in the other side of the ocean, wondering what would have happened if the exile had not taken place, expecting for the moments of meeting your relatives, and wondering as surely my father did, if that had been the right decision or, as my mother used to say, without being afraid of making a mistake, that had not been the right decision. Or if here or there things would have been easier or more difficult…

In fact, life was and goes on being circular. Growing up, losing, getting recovered, losing again but going on by standing up and suffering from endless tiredness, falling again but never getting depressed, crying enough in order to learn, laughing what was necessary to go on, being optimist by nature accepting the bad taste of hard experiences naturally, as an irremediable circumstance of life.

In this endless adventure, up to now, I have always remained at the sight of everybody, and though the consequences have been many times dreadful, I have never got hidden from anybody, neither to laugh nor to cry, things that have happened almost with the same frequency.

There have been a lot of lookers-on all through these years: faithful friends and others who did not believe in me. Some who have underestimated me, some others who have become glad of my successes and some who were waiting for my new failure. Some who would be ready to help me once more and others who would enjoy my misfortune.

“Doing” is difficult. Proposing your own aims, keeping certain order and shortening times seem to be easy, but soon the obstacles suddenly turn up, grow naturally and seem to be a joke of fate. On a more earthly plane and a bit more ungenerous, the economic policy has always injured with its claws and general policy has broken down most of the plans. Finally we suffer from their consequences, day after day and this makes our participation, the participation of ordinary people become less massive, less natural and less effective. This is also part of my testimony. Participation is necessary, essential to change our fate to end the way we deserve. If other people in other latitudes achieve what they are looking for, why we cannot do it? In those latitudes, with other climates, other grounds and other fortunes, there are equal human beings, with the same blood, the same sweat, the same tears, who have overcome themselves daily naturally, without crying or shouting and most of the times they can do it.

Shall we do it? Each of us will find the answer at the right time, in our interior, in privacy, from our own place, but what we should not do is being insincere with ourselves. From my place I would not be able to oblige anyone to think differently. The only thing, I think I can do is to put into words my own experience and all that I have learnt with it.

I hope to be able to be as clear as possible.

Almost seventy years later I go on repeating the same phrase to locate my birth place, my origin: “Between Nápoles and Rome, between the Adriático and the Mediterranean”. With these words I locate Montaquilla in the world and in Italy.

Montaquilla is a city in the Province of Isernia, in a region called Molisse, twenty-one kilometers far away from the capital city of the province and 464 meters high over the sea level, in the west side of the mountain range called Mainardi and in the south of the Meta mount. Montaquilla must have existed since the wind started to blow, but the first register that men have intervened can be found in some documents by the year 778. The first proximities to its name can be read by that year: Montem Aquilam, Montis Aquili in 1150, or Mons Aquilus in 1168. Some have translated it as Mount of Aquilone, referring to the northern wind. On the other hand the evidence which was given as valid indicates that these lands belonged to the vast Monastery of San Vincenzo of Volturno. Later, after different sales and some other donations these lands have been having different owners and heirs. Among them, Andrea d’Isernia, Giovanni Caracciolo and his brothers and Ugo di Rocca and his brothers. It is supposed that by the year 1305 Andrea d’Isernia was able to buy all the territories of Montaquilla joining the property that later was inherited by Landolfo, the youngest of his sons and who became the last owner between the years 1316 and 1325, when he died. The descent of Landolfo is uncertain, but it is supposed that in the second half of the XIV century Montaquilla became a fief of a family who finally adopted this surname. It is thought that it could have been the same family d’Isernia who used this name to adopt the noble title in order not to be involved with other genealogical branches of the family d’Isernia.

The first data of census of population was in 1561, when “fuochi” (chimneys) were counted, not people and there were 53 in that year, 50 in 1608 and 55 in 1669. In 1795, 590 inhabitants were counted, 790 in 1848, 1271 in 1861, 1706 in 1907, 1857 in 1911, being at present 2600 inhabitants, more or less the same quantity as when I was born on February the fifth in 1948.

As it was usual by those days, I was born inside my parents’ house which was the one that my mother had inherited from her own family. I was the last of four children that Giovanni Bornaschella and Filomena Ricci had decided to bring to this world. Though according to my mother –she told me once after I had grown up and in her natural way, without adding any other unnecessary phrases– my arrival had not been, let’s say, actually planned. But well… when I was born my other three siblings had already arrived, Angel of eleven years old, Livia aged six and Josefa of three.

Our house was built in 1853 and is still there, very well kept, in Via Piano 4 in Montaquila. The town had been built around the mountain. It is thought that it was strategically very well planned. It had aimed to defend the inhabitants since from the height people had a better view of those who would have wanted to invade them in remote times. Even more, the town had an enormous gate which was closed at night and people could no longer leave or enter the town after that. In the morning this gate was opened and the usual tasks started, basically farm work such as cultivation of the ground and breeding the animals.