by Terri Favro
“But I could be anybody!”
“You’re an attractive man. I want to go to bed with you. That’s really all there is to it.”
He opens and closes his mouth, as if struggling with how to tell her something. Finally, he says: “I’m sixty-three. Too old for a young woman like you.”
Lily laughs. “I’m forty-nine. I’d hardly call that young.”
“Lily, it’s flattering to…”
“Do you have condoms?” she interrupts.
Marcello shakes his head.
“That’s okay,” says Lily, rummaging in her purse. “I do.”
She places two Sheiks on the table.
Women have changed, Marcello thinks in awe. So have you, Ida reminds him.
Lily is lovely but she’s sfacciata, thinks Marcello. That’s the word Ida would use. Nervy.
I was nervy, too, says Ida. Or have you forgotten?
Marcello closes his eyes. I haven’t forgotten anything. That’s the problem.
Finally, something we agree on, replies Ida. He can almost hear the sarcasm in her voice.
His bed has been more or less empty since Ida’s death. A few relationships here and there, but the women always drifted away. One of them even said Marcello’s bed felt too crowded. When he asked what she meant, she said, “There’s you, there’s me, and there’s your dead wife lying between us—and I don’t think she cares for me very much.”
In fact, that wasn’t far wrong. But he senses that Ida wouldn’t mind him being with Lily.
You have a body, yes? she would say with her usual exasperation at Marcello’s cautious nature. So use it! Subito! What you waiting for?
Marcello moves next to Lily, close enough to pick up a flowery scent on her skin and something strangely sharp and clinical—an antiseptic, perhaps. He takes her hand. Lily moves it to her breast and kisses him. A puddle of clothing collects softly on the floor. Ambushed by desire, Marcello takes her hand and leads her to his bed.
Lily’s body surprises him: her muscles are hard as rock and she is almost completely hairless. He strokes and enters her, bringing her to climax, although his mind is unhappily aware that they’re having sex, not making love. An ugly Italian word pops into his head—gigolo—but he swats it away.
Marcello gentles her face with his hand, the gesture so unconsciously intimate that Lily recognizes it as muscle memory. His body thinks she’s someone else.
“Can I get you a sandwich? A glass of wine?”
“Thanks, no.” Lily suspects that Ida must have liked a little something after lovemaking.
“Just thought you might be hungry,” Marcello murmurs.
Lily yawns. Funny, how she can’t seem to put her body in motion. Is this an early symptom of Huntington’s? It takes a heartbeat to realize that she’s simply too comfortable to move her body away from his.
Maybe I should tell him about myself, she considers, then imagines the look on his face, the concerned tone of voice: You could get sick? Can they do a test? His eyes would brush her with pity, painting out the woman, sketching in a victim. It’s happened before.
She searches the covers for her bra. “Time for me to go, Marcello.”
He rubs his eyes. “Ah, I forgot. You don’t want to know me. Except in a Biblical sense.”
She’s hurt him, the last thing she wanted to do. Trying to lighten the mood, she says, “After what you just did in bed, I think you’d be wasted on the priesthood.”
Lily hopes for one of his embarrassed smiles. Instead he looks distressed. “You’re right. I’m not even a particularly good Catholic anymore.”
Lily shakes her head, confused. “Then why become a priest?”
Marcello’s hands try to pull an explanation out of the air. “Because I need to be forgiven.”
Lily turns on her side to look at Marcello.
“Forgiven for what?” she asks slowly, remembering that faintly alarmed look on his wife’s face in the wall portrait.
Marcello rubs his eyes. “For Ida.”
Lily feels time slow down as everything in the room—the bed, the discarded condom, even Lily herself—moves slightly out of true. What does she really know about this man? He claims to love his wife, yes, but now admits to doing something bad enough that he needs to take holy orders to be forgiven. Lily edges to the side of the bed and reaches down to pick up her panties from the floor, the hair on her neck prickling as she turns her back on Marcello.
Only then does she notice the clatter of sleet against the window. Marcello swings his legs over the side of the bed and twitches the curtains aside. Under a streetlight across the street, her car glitters inside a thick coating of ice.
As she stands at the window, an explosive sound shivers the panes. A flash illuminates the bedroom as the streetlights fizzle out. The hum of the bedside clock radio stops dead. All the ambient electronic sounds in the room vanish. The only thing Lily can hear is a muffled buzz in her ears.
“Transformer must’ve blown nearby,” says Marcello, turning from Lily to rummage in the bedside table.
“I’d better leave before it gets worse,” she says, scanning the darkness of the bedroom for the rest of her clothes.
“You can’t go home in this. Driving will be treacherous.”
She looks out the window again. Across the street, a dangling power line sends a zip-line of sparks across the roadway. Toronto is turning into a city of fire and ice. If something happened to her on the way home tonight, who would go to the nursing home to check on Mamére tomorrow?
Marcello sweeps the bedroom floor with the flashlight. When he finds a crumpled robe, he picks it up and sniffs it.
“Pretty sure it’s clean,” he says, wrapping it around Lily and belting it tightly. He scrounges under the bed and pulls out a pair of crumpled jeans and a sweatshirt.
Marcello’s lack of self-consciousness fascinates her. Unlike Lily, he’s confident in his body, the heavy muscles of his shoulders, the unfashionable tangle of hair travelling from a crosshatch of scars on his chest, down a belly softening with age, finally nesting around his dangling cock. It’s a body he’s at peace with. Does the job, she can imagine him saying with a shrug.
He opens the bedroom door. A noticeable chill has settled into the living room. Marcello hands the flashlight to Lily, motioning for her to light the way.
As Marcello builds a fire in the hearth, Lily tries to call the nursing home. Her mobile phone is dead. She tries Marcello’s landline and finds it dead too.
“You trying to reach anyone important?” he asks, too casually.
Lily can tell that he’s wondering about the possibility of a husband or boyfriend out there in the city somewhere, worrying about where Lily might be. “My mother. I wanted to see if the power is still on at the place where she lives.”
She can read the relief on Marcello’s face.
Bundled in the thick robe, perched on a stool by the fire, Lily watches the rhythm of Marcello’s hands as he prepares food by candlelight.
“So, are you going to tell me?”
“About what?”
“About Ida. What happened to her? And why you need forgiveness so badly?”
Marcello lets Lily’s question hang in the air for a moment. “Do you know what a proxy bride is?” he asks.
She nods. “Like a mail order bride, except that she was married to her husband before she met him.”
“That’s right,” says Marcello. “Ida was married by proxy to my father.”
“How did she end up with you?”
Marcello says nothing for a moment, as if trying to figure out how to put together an explanation. “I guess you could say that I stole her from him.” Filling juice glasses with wine, he continues: “My mother died when I was a kid. When I was nineteen, Pop married Ida by proxy. His uncle stood up for him in Italy and had her s
ent to Shipman’s Corners, where we lived. Ida was twenty. Beautiful, like you, Lily. I fell in love the moment I saw her. I tried to stay away, even slept in my car. But she kept calling me in for meals—you know how it was in those days. Women cooked, men ate. Every time I sat across the table from her, I fell more deeply in love.”
“Did your father know?”
“All Pop saw was the soup in front of his nose. Ida had told him, ‘Give me a month to get settled, then I’ll share your bed.’ She never did. Instead, the two of us became lovers. We’d sneak out at night in my car. Park in the farmers’ fields. Eventually we ran away together.” Marcello stops to stare disapprovingly at Lily’s untouched plate. “Mangia, Lily, that’s good cheese!”
To appease Marcello, Lily nibbles on a chunk of asiago. She can feel a chill coming off the window behind her, the clatter of freezing rain only inches away from this cozy space. Marcello’s story is hazily familiar. As if she’d seen it a movie or read it somewhere, long ago. Or dreamed it.
No, not a dream, but a bedtime story that started as Mamére’s gentle explanation for two friends who had lived for a time at the Seahorse. Eventually, she turned their story into a fairy tale she called Dreamboat and the Proxy Bride.
It’s all there: the mysterious young wife. The young man, eaten alive by a forbidden love. The cuckolded father. Lily feels as though she’s fallen into an opera. Perhaps, a temporary distraction from the misery of Mamére’s illness. She’s owed at least one night of forgetfulness, isn’t she?
In the distance, she can hear the zing-pop-bang of another exploding transformer, as the city’s electrical grid collapses under the downpour of ice.
Lily says, “Even if the storm lets up, I’ll stay here tonight and listen to your story in exchange for another glass of wine. Deal?”
“Deal,” agrees Marcello. “But wine on its own is bad for the digestion. You have to eat, Lily. I have a beautiful artisanal cheese and Calabrese bread.”
Nibbling an olive, Lily watches Marcello’s face in the candlelight, trying to turn him back into the young man whose photo sits in a portfolio on the back seat of her ice-coated car. He pours more wine and settles in to tell Lily about him and Ida.
She senses that she could be here listening to their story for a very long time.
18. EVEN VENETIAN COWGIRLS GET THE BLUES
CHIESA SAN ROCCO, VENEZIA, JUNE 30, 1969
FROM THE OTHER SIDE of the door, Ida hears the hoarse whispers of a man unburdening himself. She tries not to listen; his sins are usually boring anyway. He’s moaning now, his tears stimulated by his recounting of his filthy lustful act. She’s in the box often enough to know that there’s a point at which this man likes to cry out, sometimes in despair, occasionally in anger or frustration. That’s the reason the man comes every Saturday: to have a priest clean away the one very bad sin he’s not sorry he commits every Friday between 10:00 and 10:30 a.m. in his neighbour’s flat. Certainly, he fears dying with a mortal sin on his soul; what would happen if a block and tackle collapsed over him on his walk home from work, a grand piano being winched into the second floor of a palazzo hurtling down on his head like in one of the American cartoons? Better to sin and confess and be forgiven, knowing you’ll sin again, than to go to hell for the sake of a little fun.
He can’t be bothered confessing small sins like taking the name of the Lord in vain or the occasional eye cast at thy neighbour’s wife. Now, taking thy neighbour’s wife, legs in the air under her gold brocade counterpane while the old man’s away at work, that’s a different story. Then, boom, the two of them head to San Rocco for confession. Sometimes the adulterers even sit at opposite ends of the same pew, tempting one another with their guilty, smouldering glances. It’s all part of the seduction, according to Zara, who says she has seen everything in her line of work.
What phonies, thinks Ida in disgust.
She’s already decided that she will never let herself be ruled by passion, neither a man’s nor her own. She will never allow herself to fall senselessly in love, the way Zara did. She will be free, a woman of the world, a cowgirl riding the range with a palomino and a six-shooter like her heroine, Dale Evans—or better yet, like Blondie, the man played by Clint Eastwood in her favourite film, Il Buono, Il Brutto, Il Cattivo. At seventeen, her heart has never been touched, not once. Occasionally, yes, her hand or her leg and even, once, her breast when some old ubriacone who used to come to the Gilt Rose in the old days mistook her for a cortigiana. Zara gave him a smack in the face for that!
The Church claimed Zara’s business was immoral. In 1958, they successfully pressured the government to close down La Rosa D’Oro and all the other brothels in the country. Not that switching from servicing men to the tourist trade has been bad for Ida’s family; the americani and the inglesi get a thrill thinking about what scandalous things used to go on in these rooms eleven years earlier. Zara occasionally unlocks a closet full of special furniture and devices from the old days for the appreciation of paying customers. One of the favourites is a ciuladura, a specially designed velvet chair that helped old men with bad backs finish their business in comfort.
The clientele at Ca’Rosa, like that of the old brothel, is, as Zara likes to sniff, high end: well-heeled American and British couples, anxious for the authentic Venetian experience. Yet many of them turn up at the door with their own tea bags, instant coffee, and other foodstuffs. Once, a couple from New England, a professor and his wife, insisted on something for breakfast called porridge; anticipating that such a delicacy didn’t exist in Italy, they brought their own, even coming into the kitchen to show Riccardo how to prepare it. Ida can still remember her brother, wide-eyed with disgust at the bubbling beige mess in his good iron saucepan, Signora Campbell showing him how to cook it while simultaneously admiring his muscular forearms. Like Ida herself, Rico is popular with guests of both sexes.
Signora and Signore Campbell were at the Ca’Rosa for an entire week, yet never came to understand that their hosts, young Ida included, understood every word they said. Once, when Ida was serving their coffee, Signore Campbell said, “Mornings must have been quite sybaritic when it was still a brothel! No wonder Peggy Guggenheim loves this place. Venice is all angels and whores, isn’t it?”
“Like this one,” agreed Signora Campbell, jerking her tightly-permed head at Ida. “No doubt there are a few Austrian captains of the guard in that family tree!”
She glared at the woman but kept her English to herself, instead offering a wide-eyed “Che?” when the Signora asked for their porridge.
Ida went into the kitchen where the steaming bowls sat waiting, Rico smoking over them with a grin on his face. They let the dog have a lick from Signora’s bowl before Ida brought it to the table.
On the other side of the box, the man is finishing up. She can hear the rhythms of his Act of Contrition and Paolo’s voice, deep and reassuring, as he mops up the man’s sins with a light penance: just two Our Fathers and one Glory Be to the Father for all that noisy guilt. Beh! If Ida were the priest, she’d give the man ten Hail Marys and a boot in the ass.
The velvet curtain and wooden walls are so bloated with the whispered sins of five hundred years that she can smell the guilt, she can taste it. But the confession box is the only place she’s allowed to talk freely to her father. Which, of course, is crazy. Just one of many reasons why she must leave this preposterous place for the green, rolling hills and open skies of America.
When the door finally slides open, the luminous dial of the priest’s wristwatch glows through the screen as he gives the opening blessing. Ida gets to her knees, the cracked leather snagging her nylons. She places her mouth close to the screen and whispers fiercely: “Bless me Father for I have sinned. But not half as much as you!”
The blessing stops.
“Ida?”
“I’ve come to say goodbye.”
A silence. “You’re reall
y going, then?”
Does she hear a note of regret in his voice? More like relief, she suspects. Once she gets on the plane to Toronto, Paolo can go back to his holy life without the inconvenience and embarrassment of an illegitimate, half-breed teenage daughter.
“Yes, I’m going to Canada. The part of America where they worship the Queen.”
“You are too headstrong. Is this wise, to marry a man you haven’t even spoken with?”
“Was it wise to fall in love with my mother, you a seminarian, and give her Rico and me? Was it wise to confess to that damn giornalista who just wanted a good story for his magazine about the old brothels? Besides, I am married already. I have my tickets. This time tomorrow I will be living on a ranch.”
Paolo gives a little cough. “Why must you torture me, Ida? I am to be punished for my admission of paternity. They’re sending me to the chaplaincy of a prison.”
“I didn’t know.”
“Well, now you know. I suffer too. As I’m sure your mother does. How is Zara?”
“Go ask her yourself,” suggests Ida meanly.
She wants to storm out of the box and go to where Paolo sits concealed in his role as God’s intermediary, throw open the door and pull him into the light. Our Father. Instead she stays on her knees and waits to see what he will do to prevent her from leaving.
He tries to calmly reason with her: “The airline … they’ll forget all about it in time. Everyone will forget. To them, it’s just a story in the paper. Tomorrow, they’re on to something else.”
“Oh yes? The airline says, because of all the publicity, I can’t fly again for a year, so that people have time to forget. One entire year! Another year at home with Zara and the old folks, fighting and fighting, another year of Signora Bellini yelling insults at me on the street, the other girls looking down at me, another year of coming here every week to talk to you in this damn box…”
“Ida,” says the priest by way of warning. “I am still your father. God hears you! Obey the second commandment!”