“Sicilians kept their eyes open and their mouths shut”

“Sicilians kept their eyes open and their mouths shut” is a saying Ma recalls from her father, Domenico Onofrio Tempesta. It gives a compact expression to his habit of guarding what he knew about his past, but its meaning is unsettled by his late attempt to put his life into words. In the family history Dominick Birdsey inherits, the maxim describes a practiced silence even as the manuscript becomes evidence that silence was not the whole story.

Meaning and Context

Ma recalls the saying while explaining how difficult it was to draw her father into conversation about the Old Country: his parents, the village where he grew up, and the past he claimed not to remember. When she asked, he might dismiss those questions by saying that Sicilians kept their eyes open and their mouths shut. The maxim therefore joins vigilance to reticence: one watches, but does not disclose. Ma presents it as characteristic of a man who had been private about nearly everything, not as a general rule whose application the narrative independently verifies.

The saying also has a particular force as Ma recounts it to Dominick Birdsey. It is a remembered explanation, filtered through a daughter’s account of her father, rather than a formal declaration by him in the present. That recollection makes the phrase part of the family’s way of describing what could not readily be asked or known about the past.

The Saying and the Life Story

The maxim acquires a striking counterpoint in the summer Domenico Onofrio Tempesta died. He began dictating his life story, which Ma later identified as a manuscript in Italian. Its surviving pages were mixed: the first ten or fifteen were typewritten originals and carbon copies, while the rest were written by hand in blue fountain-pen ink. A small coverless dictionary was stored with the papers, an object that underscores the work of making a life legible across language as well as across generations.

The effort to record that life was itself unsettled. Domenico arranged for a stenographer and a Dictaphone, with separate rooms for the person dictating and the person taking dictation, but the system lasted about a week. A misunderstanding over the rental charge helped bring it to an end: he had expected to pay eight dollars a week, then learned the charge was eight dollars a day. He sent the company away, and the machines remained on the front porch for two days before they were collected. He then returned to dictating directly to Angelo Nardi, but Ma says that attempt did not go better than the first.

Secrecy, Distress, and the Unfinished Record

Ma describes the writing as an intensely private undertaking. She did not dare approach the parlor while her father was speaking into the Dictaphone; she later remembered hearing him cry alone in the backyard. On the morning he suffered a stroke, he told her he was nearly finished, although he had not previously given her a direct progress report. Asked what he would do with the completed work, he said he might throw it into the ash barrel and set it alight. The stated possibility of destroying the manuscript sits uneasily beside the trouble he had taken to produce it.

Later that day, Ma found him slumped over the table. Pages had blown or scattered into the hedges and against the chicken coop. The physical disorder of the papers gives the account of his guardedness a concrete ending: the attempt to preserve a life story nearly disappears into the yard, while the daughter who had been kept at a distance becomes the person who remembers how it was made and what her father considered doing with it.

Narrative Significance

The maxim does not simply explain why Domenico’s past remained obscure. Its recurrence in Ma’s recollection sets his reluctance to discuss the Old Country against his decision to dictate a history, and his declared willingness to burn that history against the act of preserving it. The manuscript is neither a transparent record nor a finished book that resolves the family’s unanswered questions; it survives as a partial, materially vulnerable account whose creation Ma witnessed only from the margins.

Ma died without reading her father’s history. In remembering his saying and recounting the manuscript’s difficult production to Dominick, she transmits both the silence and the evidence of an effort to break it. The phrase thus becomes more than an inherited maxim: it marks the boundary between what the family could say openly and what its surviving stories allow later generations to approach.