The department headship was the last thing on my mind, yet the negative news coming as it does causes my held-back tears to erupt in an embarrassing display of emotion. I hear but hardly pay any attention to his explanation of the vote breakdown, as I try to wipe the flood of tears with my shirt sleeve. “Ultimately, I based my decision on Mike’s decision-making and leadership abilities….”
He stops when he looks up and sees me crying. “I’m sorry,” he says. “I didn’t think this was all that important to you. You even brought in your application a day late.”
I collect myself. “That’s fine, Mr. Champagne. Thank you for your consideration.”
As I turn to leave, I ask that Angie be allowed to come back to school for the Halloween party.
“Sure, it’s only a half day, anyway. Is her mother getting any better?”
“She’s the same,” I say and leave the office.
“Sorry,” Susan whispers as I pass by her desk.
I shrug my shoulders as I pick up a tissue from her desk and wipe my face. Being a department head had never seemed important to me until Bruce had urged me to apply, and now, I wish I hadn’t bothered.
Susan hands me a map to her country place, and a mimeographed invitation to her Halloween party.
“Thank you,” I say, “but I can’t come. I have a previous commitment.”
“Too bad,” Susan says lowering her voice. “I even convinced Bruce to come with me.”
“Oh?” I say.
“I don’t know if he’d call it a date, but we’re driving together and he might stay over if it gets late,” Susan says, a happy lilt to her voice. I start crying again as I walk away realizing that I’m still pretending to be together with Sean.
Once in class, I ask the students to move the chairs in a semicircle for a demonstration on hair colouring, and then I call the apartment and speak to Angie. I ask her about her hospital visit and if any of her family has spoken about the article I had shown her in the morning. Angie replies flatly: “What are they supposed to say?” Her voice sounds cold and confrontational, and I worry again about her being alone in the house.
The noise level in the class is unacceptable. The students haven’t seen the article on the Journal de Montreal yet, but they have a copy of Allô Police with front page coverage of Jack Russo’s nephew’s funeral, showing pictures of the hoard of people lined up outside the Notre Dame de la Defense Church and the dozens of flower-laden limousines that followed the funeral cortege. The article names Notre Dame de la Defense a Mafia church, because all of the Mafia-related funerals have been held there. The church and the fresco of Mussolini on its ceiling always get mentioned at every funeral of a known criminal. That the church has been witness to the great story of immigration in the community, and is where thousands of humble honest Italian immigrants have been married, christened, and laid to rest is of no consequence.
Students are preoccupied with the upcoming Costume Day and Halloween party.
“Are you dressing up, Miss?” Gina asks.
“Will you all be quiet and get ready for work?” I answer impatiently.
“Where’s your school spirit?” Gina responds.
I don’t reply. I disappear into the stockroom to look for the colour chart and products I need for the demonstration. I shut the door behind me and sit on a stool, eyes shut, unable to go on with the lesson. The allegations have brought up memories of past betrayals that had never been spoken about after Father’s death. I think of him and his unrealized dreams, and of my lingering resentments toward him. Everything is unravelling around me and I don’t know what to do. Nothing is what it seems. I have invested years in my relationship with Sean and, in my family’s eyes, my reputation. It has all been for nothing. I feel trapped. I don’t want to face the class or anyone else; but I can’t hide in the stockroom for the rest of the period. I take a few deep breadths and return to address the class. To their great bewilderment, I dismiss them early for the day.
Risking a reprimand from the principal, I also leave school early to check on Angie, but I find the apartment empty. The den is messier than usual. The piles of manuscripts that I had sorted and arranged on the weekend have been disturbed. Someone has rummaged through the old notebooks on the bottom shelf. The pages are not in the same order as I had left them. The story I have kept hidden at the very bottom of the pile is missing or possibly misplaced. I had thought that Angie would never have shown any interest in any type of reading, let alone deciphering my scribbles.
I sit on the den’s sofa bed, stunned and confused at the disorder in the room, when I gaze at an even more incongruous item on the floor—a copy of Le Journal de Montreal folded to the article I just read at Mr. Champagne’s office. I spring up and run out the door.
It’s finally time to visit my paesano, the journalist, the editor and publisher, the travel agent, the PQ supporter, the know-it-all Roman pope as I’ve sometimes thought of him, le Grand Antoine, née Antonio Scalise, Totu for short in the village.
I have my own score to settle with him.
PART VIII
TOTU, 1964-1967
46. THE ITALIAN TOUR, 1964
IN THE SIXTIES, CHARTERED FLIGHTS and youth fares made air travel to Europe affordable. Mother longed to visit my father’s grave and I happily agreed to pay for the trip.
After my father’s death, we had moved from Tenth Avenue to a cheaper and smaller apartment in central-east Montreal. As feared, Aménagement Ville Verte went bankrupt and we had monthly loan payments to honour on my mother’s salary. Di Principe promised that once all was settled we might get some money back, but Mother didn’t count on it. After completing ninth grade, I attended a hairdressing school in the seediest part of town, Saint-Laurent and Sainte-Catherine. I had not been allowed to visit my girlfriend in Sainte-Michel, but I travelled unenthusiastically each day through areas with strip clubs, X-rated movie theatres, and dubious rooming houses to get to the school.
I desperately wanted to keep a grasp on the sense of wonder and joy that I associated with my happy childhood in Mulirena. After working as an assistant hairdresser for a year, I saved enough money on tips for two plane tickets to Rome and train tickets to Calabria.
Rome’s Stazione Termini was as bustling and as crowded as I remembered it, with the south-bound train jammed with ferie travellers, short-tempered from the excessive heat and lack of empty seats. The train sped swiftly through the sun-drenched cities and towns. It passed the same pastel-coloured apartment buildings with peeling stucco and lines of laundry flying in the air that were imprinted in my memory. I looked for small boys in short pants and sandals, kicking soccer balls and waving at the speeding train, but I could hardly see through the windows. We stood, sardine-like, in the train corridor, unable to move for fear of losing the few inches of space we had secured. At each stop, people swore at those of us who were blocking the cabin entrances, while vendors pushed stuffed panini and bottles of mineral water up through the windows.
Once we passed Naples, the train thinned out, and we found seats in a cabin. The conversation I overheard between two women from Milan on their way to a beach resort near Naples stunned me.
“They have ruined Italy,” one of them said, pointing to a family, clearly southerners returning to their homes for the summer, sitting on their suitcases outside the cabin’s doors. “We give them bathtubs and bidets and they use them to grow tomatoes.”
My mother and I kept quiet until the two women got off at the next station.
The more we sped south, the more the landscape became unfamiliar to me. Had the mountains always been so arid and barren, the trees so craggy and sparse? After a six-hour train ride, we reached Lamezia Terme station, where Zio Pietro was waiting for us.
“Why didn’t Luigi come too?” was the first thing he asked. Then he maneuvered his little Fiat 500 up and up the steep mountain roads, honking at every turn.
“In these roads you never know whether you’ll hit a donkey, a herd of goats, or a motor scooter,” he laughed.
I wondered what inspired the village founders to settle in these out-of-the-way mountains. As we rose higher and higher, a smattering of other villages became visible below us, and before we knew it, we had reached the town of Amato, and Mulirena appeared across the ravine.
Once in the village, I noticed the cobblestone streets had been resurfaced in dark asphalt. The town piazza and the streets looked a lot narrower and greyer than I remembered, and the flies were a real nuisance. It’s funny how I had never once remembered the abundance of flies in all my reminiscences.
We entered my grandmother’s house through what had once been the family’s grocery store. It was here that I used to come every day after school to meet my mother, who helped bake the bread they sold at the store. The shelves were now empty, but the heavy wooden counter with the old-fashioned scales had been left behind. My uncle had moved to the city of Catanzaro to open a bigger, more modern store. But the smell of the burlap bags and flour seemed to have seeped into the old cement cracks, and I could almost taste the fragrant, freshly-baked bread and the provolone cheese that my mother used to have ready for me as a snack. The empty store was the coolest spot in the house and my grandmother still sat there in the afternoons to do her crocheting and to hold court with the neighbourhood ladies. As soon as they saw the car and the suitcases, they all rushed to greet us.
We hadn’t slept properly for over twenty-four hours, but we were unable to lie down. People kept trickling in and out. Comare Rosaria came in with a basket of fruit. Her husband had died and her daughter, Lucia, was in town. Her son, Alfonso, was expected to come for a few days to sell his home and prepare for his mother to fly to Montreal in the fall. Lucia had been coming for a month every summer, but kept to herself. Comare Rosaria apologetically told us that Lucia spent most of her afternoons in the country and never visited anyone. She wanted to eventually refinish the farmhouse, so that she’d have a place to come to if she ever returned to Mulirena now that the house in the village was being sold.
Maybe it was the fatigue, or the jet lag, but from the moment I set foot in the store on Thursday afternoon until the following Monday morning, I moved around as if I were in a stupor, and in strange and alien surroundings.
On Sunday we attended a wedding and had a chance to visit with most of the paesani I hadn’t seen yet. It was a simple ceremony and reception. A gramophone played some dancing music and a few young men asked me to dance. They were very polite and proper. Even Totu, on a holiday from Rome, tall, elegant, and speaking a flawless Italian, had danced and chatted with me. He asked me many questions about Montreal, and was fascinated by the fact that French was spoken there, a language he had studied, and said he hoped to take a trip to the city someday. He knew a lot more about Canada and Quebec than anyone else I had met in Italy.
I secretly hoped I’d see more of him during my stay, but he was going back to Rome the following week, and told me he’d give me a tour of that city whenever I passed through. I noticed good-looking men eyeing me as I walked through the village, but Totu was the one who intrigued me the most. When I was a child, he had seemed so much older than me, but now the age difference hardly showed. All I could think of was meeting Totu somewhere in a Roman café to explore the wonders of Rome with him all over again. Years earlier, he had played guide to my family and me when we travelled to Rome to get our visas.
At the wedding, I also spoke to a couple visiting from Brooklyn. They were planning a bus tour of Italy’s major cities, starting in Naples, and invited me to join them. The trip would be the perfect opportunity for me to do some sightseeing, and meet up with Totu in Rome, unencumbered by my mother’s presence. My grandmother and uncle balked at my plans. They told me that one of the young men I had danced with was interested in sending his brother to the house, the first step in arranging a match.
“I don’t like these set-ups,” I told my mother that evening. “I’m going to Rome on Friday.”
“Don’t be so stubborn. We’ve just arrived. There will be other opportunities to go sightseeing,” Mother pleaded with me. Grandmother maintained that the interested party came from a good family, was one of the most level-headed young men in town, and was probably the best opportunity I would ever get.
I didn’t dislike the young man. In fact I found him handsome and gentle looking, but the prospect of his brother and my uncle mapping out my life and my future while I sat on the sidelines scared me.
“Do what you want, but we’re only thinking of your welfare,” my uncle said, disappointed, “But after this, I’m not going to speak up for you with anyone in town.” I told them I wasn’t interested and prepared a suitcase for my sightseeing trip on the weekend.
Two days before I was to leave for Rome, the town was hit by a torrential rainstorm. Comare Rosaria came to my grandmother’s store, worried about her daughter, who had gone to the country with a young relative with no umbrellas. “She’ll get sick with pneumonia,” she said.
Two older neighbourhood children, armed with umbrellas, volunteered to assist Lucia. They came back a few hours later breathless and agitated by what they had witnessed. They had walked as far as the farmhouse and found Old Micu with a hunting rifle sitting mute on the kitchen floor.
“She and her brother will never set foot in this farmhouse again,” he hollered at them when they asked about Lucia. He sounded clearly inebriated. Frightened, the boys ran away. They hadn’t bumped into Lucia on the way up, so they feared that something terrible might have happened. They decided to check the nearby farmhouse in Don Cesare’s property through a shortcut. There they found Totu also sitting on the floor but with a bloodied leg raised on a chair and bandaged with a woman’s scarf. He had been hit by a stray bullet. Old Micu had been hunting on the grounds before the rain started, he told them, and shot him by accident. One of the kids stayed behind with Totu while the other ran to alert Don Cesare so he could drive as close as possible to the farmhouse and get Totu to a hospital. On the way, they came upon Lucia running, drenched and visibly in distress, yet she didn’t seem to appreciate their offer of an umbrella.
Totu lost a lot of blood, but was expected to recover. The whole town was abuzz with conjecture about the shooting. Micu had had a bone to pick with both Totu and his father from way back, so it was plausible that in a drunken stupor he tried to shoot him and pass it off as an accident. Yet the story told by Totu didn’t line up, grandmother and her women friends affirmed. The young relative that had accompanied Lucia was not with her when the kids caught up with her. If Lucia had come directly from her farmhouse, they would have met her on the way there. Why did Micu say that Lucia and Alfonso would never set foot at the farmhouse that belonged to them? The peasant and his wife had complained for years that Alfonso had never compensated them fairly for their work on the farm. Did Totu catch the shot meant for Lucia or Alfonso? What was he doing at Lucia’s farm? Neither Totu nor his uncle laid any charges against Micu, an unusual lack of action for both of them.
Displeased by the turn of events, I kept my word and left with the Americans. The tour by bus was a seven-day, sight-seeing marathon. The dizzying viewing of so much art in such a short period of time made me immune to its beauty. In Rome, I searched for a public phone and called my uncle’s home and asked for news about Totu. He was out of danger and back in the village with a cast. Had I been able to meet him in Rome, I had planned on skipping the tour to Florence and catching up with the group a few days later in Naples. In the haste to find a phone between stops, my wallet went missing, with my travel documents and traveller’s cheques, and I had to borrow money from the Americans. Back in Mulirena, I was mortified to ask Zio to call authorities so I could get my papers in order before returning to Montreal.
Alfonso had been in town while I was away, settled his business without seeing anyone,
and left right away. The shooting incident remained the main topic of conversation in my grandmother’s store.
The town was full of the visitors who worked in the cities during the rest of the year. They looked so full of themselves in their fine clothes and speaking in proper Italian, but the conversation of the two Milan women on the train made me realize that an imaginary border, somewhere around Naples, still separated Italy into two very distinctive worlds that even the Italian Economic Miracle had not managed to erase.
I didn’t see much of Totu, as the crutches clearly made his movements around the hilly village difficult. He spent time organizing a group of young communists, antagonizing half of the town as well as his uncle.
I tried to weigh all possible explanations for Totu’s shot leg, but I didn’t speculate aloud for fear I’d reveal my newly-found, and ever-intensifying infatuation with him. I also had my own problems of the stolen documents to worry about. If we hadn’t flown charter, I would have tried to return home earlier.
47. OF MEN AND HIS WORLDS
THE YEAR 1967 WAS THE most exciting time to be living in Montreal. To mark Canada’s centennial, the city hosted a world fair, Expo 67, and opened its doors to visitors from all over the world. The Fair provided the illusion of travel, and a vision of the world containing different worlds. Tickets to the fair sites and newly built amusement park, La Ronde, were sold as passports. We could skip and jump from pavilion to pavilion—from Canada, to Russia, to France, to Ethiopia, and back to Canada—as often as we wanted.
Along the waterfront, at Cité-du-Havre, they built Habitat 67, a unique apartment building structure. It resembled a Mediterranean village perched atop a mountain. The logo for Expo 67, called Man and His World, was a circle of men with outstretched hands.
The Women of Saturn Page 24