Once Upon a Time in West Toronto

by Terri Favro

  Lou says nothing. A dire la verità, Marcello may be smart as hell but when it came to picking a wife, he stopped thinking with his brains. Okay, Ida could be Miss Universe. But when does she ever put a hot meal on the table for Marcello? She’s a working woman, an Air Canada stewardess. And she’s a Venetian—not the warmest woman you’ve ever met. A woman should be soft and full of sweetness, like a ripe peach. To Lou’s way of thinking, Ida is more like one of those rock-hard lemons they overcharge you for at the IGA.

  The guys at Esposito’s social club refer to Ida as Miss Coffee, Tea, or Burn My Bra. They know better than say that to Marcello’s face, of course.

  And then there’s that funny accent. Lou’s never heard another Italian sound quite the way Ida does—not that he’s met a lot of Venetians, but it almost sounds as if Italian isn’t her mother tongue. Which would be crazy, since she came from Italy, right?

  Sometimes Lou wonders what Marcello’s parents think of Ida. He also wonders where his parents are. Marcello never mentions them, or any family members, or anything about their past. It’s as if Marcello and Ida live on a little island of their own in the sea of extended families that make up the neighbourhood. Lou sometimes has the feeling that something about the couple isn’t on the up-and-up, that there’s some type of problem, but Marcello is such a good kid, he doesn’t want to mention it. Trouble with the law, maybe. Lou has noticed that Marcello breaks out in a sweat any time a cop is around. Maybe, one day, he’ll come to trust Lou enough to explain what’s going on. Lou hopes so anyway.

  Lou Agnelli isn’t just Marcello’s boss, he’s his landlord. He and Lina own two semi-detached houses on Barrie Avenue, just north of St. Clair. Lou and Lina live on one side of the shared wall, Marcello and Ida on the other. The backyard of Marcello and Ida’s half offers just enough room for a latticework topia wide enough to grow a few tough-skinned blue grapes, a long-fingered mulberry tree, and a plot of earth. When they first moved in, Marcello picked up a handful of the sandy soil, sniffed it, and rolled it in his hands.

  “You look like an old nonno when you do that,” Ida laughed.

  “I was thinking of staking tomatoes, like all the other guys in the neighbourhood. You must have had a garden in the old country, Ida.”

  “In Venezia? Marcello, Venezia is all piazzas and canals and piers and buildings. We look to the sea, not the earth. My mamma grew herbs and flowers in the windows of our pensione, but that’s it.”

  It was one of the rare times she mentioned home. There wouldn’t be many others. Talking to Ida about her family almost always led to evasions, contradictions, or more often, a stubborn refusal to discuss them at all. “That is the past, Cello. All in the past. We are young and we should only think about the future, yes?”

  Marcello and Ida rent the main and second floors of the semi. A tiny attic flat is tenanted by a series of men who clatter up and down the fire escape at all hours. It usually takes about six months for a guy to save up enough to bring over his wife and kids from the old country, then move on to be replaced by another joosta-come. In the meantime, the men’s loneliness seeps through Marcello and Ida’s bedroom ceiling in the form of folk music and arias played on hi-fis. Marcello always wants to invite them downstairs to talk or share a meal but Ida will have none of it. “What if they start poking their noses in our business?” she demands.

  In Ida’s opinion, Marcello has already been too open about their business, especially with Lina Agnelli. When Marcello let it slip that Ida was a year older than him, and that he was only nineteen when he and Ida “got married,” Lina had laughed and said, “Ida, you rob the cradle!”

  Ida didn’t think this was funny. She went to a neighbourhood beauty salon and got a pixie cut to make herself look younger. “And you, Cello, you have to watch what you say. And grow a mustache to make yourself look older. Please do this immediately!”

  The mustache isn’t much of a disguise but it doesn’t hurt to look like every other guy in the neighbourhood, Marcello figures. Hiding behind the name Umbriaco was a good idea too, a legal name change requiring nothing more than some government paperwork and a little money. Easier than he imagined. At least he no longer carries the burden of “Trovato” for that buffone back at the candy store.

  If Senior or Stan come nosing around the neighbourhood, asking for a heavy-set guy named Marcello with black, curly hair, they’ll have a long line of candidates. As Lou likes to say, Toronto is home to more Italians than any city on earth save Rome. The Corso Italia, as St. Clair is called, is an easy place for Marcello to disappear in plain sight.

  Still, the neighbourhood took getting used to. His hometown of Shipman’s Corners was a mix of many nationalities, mostly Poles, Ukrainians, and other Eastern Europeans. Not since leaving Italy as a baby had Marcello lived among so many Italians. He could recite in his head like a nursery rhyme the sing-songy Latin names fronting the businesses on St. Clair: Esposito (Café), Bertinelli (Groceteria), Di Marco (Shoes), Ricci (Music), Di Pietro (Monuments), Bagazolli (Heating and Air Conditioning), Ciccone (Ladies Wear), Marconi (Radio and TV), Ferrara (Religious Statues and Devotional Items). Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. The storefronts marched confidently westward, interspersed with coffee bars and restaurants, the menus heavy on spaghetti with meatballs and veal scallopini.

  Ida complained that the neighbourhood was a mish-mash of dialects and customs that were already dying out in Italy. To her way of thinking, the neighbours’ notion of home was a lost dream of a country that they didn’t want to admit no longer existed. Besides, she said, the Corso Italia was too old-fashioned and religious. Too uptight, compared to Italy. But unlike other parts of Toronto, there was plenty of street life, a little too much for the liking of the police who regularly cruised past the pizzerias, trattorias, and social clubs to make sure no one was drinking alcohol on the sidewalks, a grave sin as far as the authorities were concerned. The café owners shrugged, waited for the cruisers to disappear, and filled their customers’ glasses in the bright sunshine as God intended.

  Missing the homemade cabbage rolls and perogies he knew in Shipman’s Corners, Marcello went hunting for the restaurants run by Poles, Ukrainians, and Lithuanians, and found a few further west in Roncesvalles and High Park. Eventually, he discovered the Jewish diners on Spadina, where he enjoyed blintzes and the occasional chess game with old men from Poland or Hungary.

  Once, at the United Dairy Restaurant, a middle-aged waitress pushed up her sleeves to take Ida’s order, exposing a numbered tattoo on the inside of her arm. When she left the table, Ida wiped tears from her eyes with a paper serviette. “I hope the monster who did that to her is dead, or worse. In Venezia, during the war, they took hundreds out of the Jewish Ghetto to the camps.”

  “At least you can feel proud that your father fought with the Partisans,” pointed out Marcello.

  Ida looked at Marcello with a puzzled expression; then, as if suddenly remembering a forgotten conversation, she said, “Oh, yes, of course. He did fight with the Partisans. But in the mountains, not Venezia.”

  Marcello notices that every time Ida talks about her father, he has a different profession. Over the past five years, she’s called him a soldier, a sailor, a businessman, a horse trainer, and a lawyer. Of course, the man might have managed to be all these things, but Marcello suspects that Ida has many different fathers, one for every day of the week, each one freshly minted by her imagination. Marcello never voices his suspicions because he senses that doing so would cause Ida to stop talking about her past at all.

  At least Ida mentions her father, if rarely. About her mother, she never says a word.

  On weekends, they head to Yorkville or Yonge Street for movies and music, or simply to be part of what people liked to call the scene. One evening on Yonge Street, to celebrate his graduation from night school and acceptance at university, Marcello took Ida to The Godfather, amazed that anyone would bother to make a movie
about Italian immigrants. “I’ve been to weddings just like this one, when I lived with the Andolinis. We even sang the same songs!” he whispered to her during the opening scenes.

  When Michael Corleone’s Sicilian bride, Apollonia, died in a booby-trapped car, Marcello seized Ida’s hand. He felt his heart breaking: what will Michael do now? What would he do, if someone blew up his Chevy with Ida in it?

  Ida sat through the movie silently, lips pressed together. As they left the theatre, she shook her head: “Beh! What a fairy tale! You think it is romantic, the Mafia? You think these men are heroic? They were killers!”

  “I think the movie was trying to say more about families than the Mafia,” suggested Marcello.

  “Oh, yes? You want a family like that one?”

  I was raised by a family a little like that one, thought Marcello, but he kept this to himself.

  On these trips downtown, Marcello makes a point of giving spare change to panhandlers and hippies, especially young runaways playing battered acoustic guitars. Every once in a while he sees someone who reminds him of Bum Bum: skinny, dark-eyed, a little vacant, drunk or drugged-out, maybe. Once, Marcello surprised a kid sitting on a street corner by emptying all the money in his wallet into his hat. He often wonders how Bum Bum is doing at the Andolinis. Prima can be overbearing, but at least she’ll make sure he gets three squares a day and finishes high school.

  Ida mentions Bum Bum to him every once in a while, as if trying to weigh Marcello’s remaining burden of guilt. She suspects that he now feels he should never have left the boy behind with Prima. But Marcello can’t bring himself to talk to Ida about the boy, just as she doesn’t want to talk to him about her childhood in Italy.

  There’s a lot they aren’t talking about these days.

  When Marcello gets back from seeing the customer with Lou, he walks into the semi and calls, “Ida?” No answer. She must be working a late flight. Once again it’s up to Marcello to make himself a meal. Rooting around in a cupboard, he finds one of the cans of cream of mushroom soup he bought at a mangiacake supermarket, after seeing it advertised on TV as an ultra-modern ingredient that can be used to whip up any number of exciting dishes in minutes. There are even step-by-step recipes on the labels! “Space age food,” Marcello told a skeptical Ida. As she predicted, the resulting meals all tasted like salty glue. Convinced that processed foods are the wave of the future, Marcello persists in experimenting with ways to make them tastier; usually, he only manages to make them mushier.

  After dinner, he lies on the bed with Advanced Calculus, Edition VI. Despite his attempt to study, his eyes close and he drifts into a recurring dream of himself with his wrists in handcuffs, floating on his back in a limitless blue sea. The dream always ends with him sinking into the water and seeing someone or other from his past. Tonight, it’s Niagara Glen Kowalchuk, his face as white and bloated as a dead fish, yellow hair waving like seaweed, his lidless guys staring at Marcello as he floats past. I’ll never die, you know that, don’t you?

  Kowalchuk laughs as his body spasms, the way it did that night in 1969 with the candy store burning down around him. An accidental fire and electrocution, not a murder. A defensible act, but one Marcello has never answered for.

  When Marcello breaks through the surface of the dream, he feels as though a rock is resting on his chest speaking in a strange tongue that sounds like gravel clattering through a metal funnel. He reaches down: the rock is Ida’s head. Gently, he tries to move her head onto a pillow but knocks the textbook to the floor, waking her.

  “Che?” Ida asks vaguely, groping with her hand to see where Marcello is. He catches her fingers and kisses them.

  “Shhhh, go back to sleep,” he whispers, but can’t resist asking, “Did you eat the dinner I made?”

  “Un poco,” she yawns. “Cream of mush again.”

  “I got the recipe off the can. You should show me how to cook properly, like an Italian.”

  “You are the man! It’s not your job to cook,” murmurs Ida, her eyes still closed.

  “Whether it’s my job or not, I’m doing it,” points out Marcello, reaching over to scoop Ida’s body close to his. He presses his face into the back of her neck, where the short blonde hairs are musky with sweat and stale perfume and cigarette smoke from her shift on the plane. She curves her back, the birdlike bones along her spine pressing into his stomach and chest. He feels himself hardening, but Ida has already fallen back to sleep.

  Marcello sighs, then pulls himself up to sit on the edge of the bed and smooths Ida’s hair off her face. Maybe he’ll go back to the kitchen to dig up something to eat. He can always heat cream of mush in a saucepan and disguise the taste with grated parmesan from a box. When he finally returns to bed, he falls into a dreamless sleep, muscles preparing for a day digging in the dirt for Lou Agnelli.

  “Jesus, this is a real shithole, Lou. I can’t even straighten up.”

  “That’s why the customer wants the basimento dug out,” answers Lou, his plans spread out on the bumpy concrete of the basement floor. Someone did a half-assed renovation down here, which makes the process even worse; they have to undo the work of the previous owner before they can start digging. A rusty gas-line, capped off, sticks out of the middle of the floor. At the back of the basement, in front of the door of a root cellar, a wooden pillar has been jammed into place. The pillar has slipped a little to one side, bowing under pressure from the floor above.

  “You think they stuck this in here because they knocked down the load-bearing walls?” asks Marcello. His height makes it impossible to work in the basement without stooping.

  Lou runs his hand along a horizontal crack in the foundation. “Yeah, could be. This don’t look good. We’re gonna have to be real careful with this one. Four feet at a time, then we reinforce the foundation. Let’s dig around this spot before we take down the pillar.”

  “Am I going to be working down here alone?” Marcello doesn’t want to admit to Lou how uncomfortable he feels in this tight space. The low ceilings and lack of light make him feel as though he’s inside a coffin.

  “I hired a couple other guys to help, too.”

  The two other labourers, Vincenzo and Leo, turn out to be the latest joosta-come guys living in the attic flat over Ida and Marcello’s house. Marcello has heard their music from above, but with the hours they keep, no one has ever met face to face before.

  Lou assigns Vincenzo, also known as Enzo, to help Marcello shovel dirt onto a conveyer belt that runs from the basement floor to the outside through a tiny window. Enzo turns out to be a talker who explains that he’s saving to bring over his wife and kids from Puglia. When he hears Marcello’s name, he laughs and says, in Italian: “When I first come to Canada, I stay with my wife’s cousin in that little town on the other side of the lake. Shipman’s Corners. I hear this crazy story from her, about this kid named Marcello who kidnap his father’s wife.”

  Marcello tries to get his heart to stop racing. Kidnapping? After six years, they’re still saying this about him back home? That he took Ida by force?

  “Craziest damn story! Like something out of an opera!” Enzo goes on. “They said the wife was a real dish, know what I mean? The son, he tie her up one night and throw her in the trunk of his car and disappear. So the father, the real husband, he talk to a tough guy, some big Polack, I think, who’s, you know…” Here Enzo touches the side of his nose as if to indicate someone not entirely on the up-and-up. “Anyway, the son, he kill the tough guy and burn down the father’s store. The police no catch him. The father still wants to get he wife back and teach the son a lesson.”

  “Yeah?” says Marcello through gritted teeth, staring at the pile of dirt appearing at his feet. “Where they looking for them?”

  “Detroit, Buffalo, Fort Erie, Hamilton, here in Toronto down around College Street … that’s all I know, I left when the search was still going on.”


  Marcello drives the shovel into the earth with such force that he almost twists his arm out of its socket.

  Around noon, Leo sticks his head through the window. “Someone up here to see you, Cello. A real looker.”

  “That’s probably my wife,” says Marcello, throwing down his shovel.

  “She’s in some sort of uniform, what does she do, work on the planes?”

  Marcello doesn’t answer but climbs out of the basement on a ladder reaching to a door that now hangs in space, four feet off the ground. Up top, Ida is talking to Mr. Cake who’s dropped by to see how things are going. He’s in a baby blue leisure suit, his grey hair carefully blow-dried so that it floats over his scalp like a bird’s nest. Marcello notices that Mr. Cake is looking at Ida with interest, while Ida is smiling and chatting with him in a lively sort of way. She’s acting—what’s the right word?—vivaciously.

  When Ida notices him, she smiles. “Cello, ecco! I bring your lunch before I go to work.”

  “Thank you, cara,” he says, leaning down but before he can kiss her, Ida steps away: “Uffa, no, Cello, you are too dirty! You look like a beast!”

  Mr. Cake gives a little chuckle. “How’s the excavation going?”

  “We’re about four feet down. But there’s a pillar holding up the basement ceiling, doesn’t look stable. Lou wants to reinforce the foundation before we go any further.”

  “What! Why? Just knock down the pillar and dig like hell!”

  “If it’s holding up the house, the whole thing could come down on us,” answers Marcello, strongly suspecting that this guy doesn’t give a good goddamn.

  Mr. Cake snorts. “You guys are ditch diggers, not structural engineers. The house’ll just sag a bit! I would’ve thought you had more balls. You tell Lou to call me before there are any more delays.”

  Marcello is having a hard time convincing himself not to shove the guy, maybe muss up his hairdo, bloody his nice leisure suit. But he knows what will come of that: a visit from the police. As much as he doubts they’ll connect him with the Marcello Trovato wanted for questioning by Niagara Regional Police, he’d rather avoid having to deal with cops altogether. He takes one deep, slow breath, trying to calm himself.