Two key economic concepts

Legend says there were no poor people in Prester John’s vast empire, but there were quite a few in our Italian enclave of the South Bronx in the ’50s. In those days, Italian immigrants who didn’t want to stay poor were thrifty with the few dollars left in their pockets after the monthly bills were paid.

Humble as their dwellings in Italy might have been, they considered apartment living in America a distasteful expedient, especially since the apartments they could afford were often located in tenements. Almost all our Italian neighbors were saving to buy their own homes and, given their paltry earnings, this entailed frugality.

Misers, however, were scorned. A proverb I heard while growing up was “I soldi dell’avaro se li frega lo scialacquatore.” (The miser’s money is pissed away by the spendthrift.) Even more to the point was the expression “L’avaro è come il porco — è buono dopo morto.” (A miser is like a pig — he’s good after he’s dead.)

The ideal was a golden mean between the extremes of throwing money away by being a “fanatico” about one’s home furnishings, clothes, car, and other forms of conspicuous consumption and, on the other hand, consistently making a mala (or brutta) figura — a miserable showing. This involved the failure to recognize the minimal standards of spending needed to maintain a respectable, if sometimes shabby, genteel poverty.

Key concepts in attaining this balance were shparagna’ and arrangia’ (in standard Italian: risparmiare and arrangiarsi). While one tried to make a bella figura (a splendid showing) on the occasions that warranted a generous outlay — a wedding, funeral, baptism or First Communion party at home — the rest of the time, one had to shparagna’. Depending on the situation, this could mean scrimp and save, cut corners, get the best possible deal, shun waste (“I don’t work for the power company!” my father reminded me if I forgot a light on), settle for second best (or even third), do without altogether, and so on.

The related notion of arrangia’ meant to adapt spending to a realistic appraisal of one’s station in life. This involved making do, getting by, skimping, managing with what one had, and even drastically curtailing expenditures when necessary — without borrowing.

Lucky for us, jobs were plentiful in the ’50s, especially in the line of work of my father, an uncle, and many of my friends’ fathers: construction. Laborers in that field worked hard for modest pay, which they supplemented whenever they could by working overtime and on Saturdays, when the time-and-a-half hourly rate began to add up. Still, working with their arms 52 weeks a year, sometimes finding themselves 100 feet below street level on vast excavation projects, warming themselves with oil drum fires in the wintertime and drenching their heads with pails of water in summertime, these were the Italian workers who had most reason to complain “Mannaggia l’America!” — “Damn this country!”

Even more industrious were the Italian men holding down full-time jobs as construction workers who also signed on as janitors of their tenements. Though their rent was free, the families of some of these men had to live in subterranean apartments in the bowels of the building, and most of them shoveled coal into gargantuan furnaces, collected the garbage on each floor landing every night and then incinerated it, dragged a dozen trash pails in and out of the cellar every few days for collection, mopped the landings, staircase, vestibule, and front steps, kept the cellar areas clean, shoveled snow from the stoop and sidewalk, handled resident complaints and made all but the most complicated plumbing, electrical, and carpentry repairs for 20, 30, or more families.

The Italian men who had their own businesses — like an uncle of mine who was a shoemaker, or the grocers, butchers, liquor store owners, and other merchants — usually earned more than the laborer/janitors and considerably more than the mere laborers like my father, who avoided business ventures because they meant goodbye to the cherished evening meal with his wife and two children. I should mention too that, though my mother didn’t work outside the home, many Italian women in our circle did clothing factory piecework or similar jobs for supplementing their family income.

Food was fairly cheap back then, and we always had more than enough to eat, but regarding other things we sometimes felt as if, according to the Italian expression, we were living “with two feet crammed into one shoe.” Whenever my parents could patch or mend or repair or refurbish or jerry-rig something, they did so. Whenever they could do something themselves instead of paying someone, they did it. They usually deferred purchases — especially appliances or furniture, much less a car — as long as they could. Household furnishings weren’t replaced when they went out of style, but only when they stopped working or fell apart.

I remember when a friend of mine asked his father if he could have some toy that, he claimed, cost “only a dollar.” The response he received was a rustically graphic Italian expression meaning, “Hey, that’s not just donkey-dung!”