The Women of Saturn

by Connie Guzzo-Mcparland

  “What a silly question,” Antonio answers, moving back behind his desk. He adds gravely, “People have already been hurt. I can’t change that.”

  “It has taken you a long time to finally act. And what do you do? Use people’s tragedies for your own political motives, for your fifteen minutes of journalistic glory … snitch on people who can’t defend themselves, like Angie.”

  “That thing about Angie being an illegal student … someone else picked up on that, I swear.” Antonio places his hand on his chest.

  “You have to accept your share of blame,” I say. “You’re playing with this story, at Angie’s expense.”

  “I don’t know what you mean by blame, but when did you become so outspoken, Caterinella? You were always so quiet.…” His voice trails off, as if he were sorry to have brought up the subject.

  “Yes, maybe too quiet and … agreeable,” I answer.

  Antonio looks down at his desk for a few seconds before speaking. “Caterina,” he says slowly, as though searching for words. “Is there something you want to get off your chest, something of a more personal nature?”

  “Yes. There’s some unfinished business between us.” I look directly into his eyes.

  “I know, Caterina. I never got back to you about your writing. I’m sorry, but I was overwhelmed by … circumstances. Now that you’re an adult, I can admit that … that the day at La Ronde … it felt very awkward. I didn’t know how to handle it … and by nature, I avoid anything I can’t handle.”

  “I was hurt that you assumed I wouldn’t know how to handle it. You gave me so little credit. You treated me like a child.”

  “You were a child,” he says gravely. He pulls out a manila envelope from his desk. “I believe this is yours,” he says, and hands it to me. “Now, you tell me who is playing with the truth.”

  I open the envelope gingerly, puzzled. It’s the missing stories from the pile of notebooks in my den, including the prose poem that had caused me so much pain to write. “How did you get these?”

  “Lucia’s daughter brought them to me … to confront me.”

  “I wrote these a long time ago. They weren’t meant to be read by anyone. Angie had no right to give them to you.”

  He raises his voice. “Angie is a very confused young lady. She’s trying to figure out who her father is, and do you blame her with all that has been going on? She seems to think your stories may hold the clue as to who her real father is, and I’m one of the suspects.”

  “Well, aren’t you?” I feel like asking but I hold my tongue.

  He continues. “Caterina, being a writer is not child’s play. It’s serious business. Don’t you understand the heavy responsibility in putting things down on paper, especially when writing fiction? People read whatever they want to read into it.”

  “I understand that,” I manage to say.

  “You really don’t know anything about Lucia’s life here in Montreal … the people around her.…” he says.

  I nod my head. “I would really like to know more about it—”

  He cuts me short. “Angie tells me you’re still writing. You haven’t given up, have you? What are you writing about now?” he says, sounding annoyed.

  I hesitate, but then blurt out. “The past, the present … my own immigrant journey.”

  “Ah, the immigrant experience! You too?”

  “I’ve decided to write a novel around all that I remember and all that is going on.”

  “A novel? You don’t kid around. I thought you were writing a memoir.”

  “In 1967 you told me to go out and use my imagination, to invent, remember? But then you completely ignored me. I was very hurt by your silence.”

  “I’ve already apologized for that. But you have slandered me by your writing. Angie wishes so badly to find a father figure after Pasquale’s statements, that she’ll believe anything she reads. You have put me in a very awkward position with her.”

  “Well, certain facts point to you.” I point to his foot. “No one believed your story of the hunting accident. Why won’t you admit that you and Lucia were together in 1964, nine months before Angie was born? It’s all very plausible.”

  His face becomes stern. “That’s a nasty thing to bring up. Plausible doesn’t make it real. Being seen with Lucia doesn’t make me Angie’s father, just like being seen with Aurora, years ago in Mulirena, didn’t make me her lover either. You should know better, Caterina. You’re on the wrong track here.”

  “Well, then,” I say, “more reason to research the story. This time I’m not going to stop writing. It’s too important to me.”

  “And so is finding the truth important to me.”

  “I understand,” I say thoughtfully. “If you’re concerned about the truth, instead of pulling in different directions, why don’t we help each other?”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Of all people, you may be the key I’ve been looking for. I’m having a hard time getting started, and remembering things … filling the gaps. Sure, one can invent, but I still want the invention to be grounded on truth, to write something that is worth telling. Something that pays due respect to places and people.”

  He shakes his head. “Caterina, I still don’t understand what you want from me. It’s hard enough to write about one’s memories; imagine trying to synchronize them with someone else’s. I don’t even want to think about it. You’re treading on black ice—it’s more slippery than it seems. Why do you think I hold the key to your writing puzzle?”

  “You also hold the key for its ending. I want to find a fitting ending.”

  “That’s a tall order, Caterina. What’s a fitting ending? You’re worried about the ending when you can’t even get started? I don’t think you realize the absurdity of tying it all together in this day and age.”

  “This isn’t only about the writing. There are real people involved … who have been living in limbo for years … in fact are still in a coma. Maybe, finding the right ending will make it seem worthwhile having lived the story.”

  I point to the manila envelope on his desk. “We can work together if you … we can come to grips with the roles we each played in the past.”

  He gets up and starts moving around the room, visibly agitated. “I don’t follow you, Caterina. You say you want to write a novel and not a memoir, and now you talk of our own roles? There’s something skewed about your argument, Caterina, and I still don’t understand your motive.”

  I raise my hands and speak angrily: “My motive is to get to the truth whether I write a novel or memoir. I also question your intentions for using Pasquale’s story, and broadcasting it to everyone. Is it personal or purely for political reasons to help your PQ friends?”

  Antonio sits back behind his desk, and puts on his glasses. “Well, since you brought politics up, let me ask you some questions, Caterina. If you’re so keen on filling gaps, why are you so upset about me revealing what Pasquale has to say about Di Principe if not to protect your fiancé’s boss? You know there’s going to be an inquiry coming up sooner or later, and Di Principe and his Liberal cronies will be revealed for the scumbags that they are.”

  I make a move toward the door, open it, and then stop. I say calmly, “I don’t care about my fiancé’s friends; say what you want about them. I’m worried about Lucia and Angie, and … mostly, I’m afraid of unfairly representing the past, and I’d like the present to be worthy of the past … maybe to make up for it.”

  “Of course, the past, how could I forget? You came with a head full of romantic ideas. Yes, now I remember vaguely the story of the voyage—the love story of Renzo and Lucia overcoming all. But that was not your fault. You were ten, eleven years old then? Manzoni was inculcated in you and in everyone else in Italy at the time. But you’re a grown woman now. We’re living in a different world.”

  “I thoug
ht you hadn’t even read that story, that you had lost the manuscript,” I say.

  “I had looked at it quickly, before … misplacing it,” he says dismissively.

  “You could have mentioned it, in all these years.”

  He gets up again, next to me, put his two hands together, and shakes then up and down impatiently. “Caterina, Caterina, what can I say now? Write if you must, but forget about capturing an idyllic past or preserving old memories, or about tying it all neatly together. It’s as old-fashioned an idea as … yesterday’s hairstyles, for lack of a better example.”

  “Styles keep reappearing, in slightly different forms, but it’s the same old stuff coming up—gira e rigira….”

  “Okay, bad metaphor to have used on a hairstylist.”

  I get up to leave and take the prose poem from the manila envelope. “This was something I had to get off my chest at the time, and now, it needs closure, to be complete, to close the circle, so we can all go on with our lives. It’s the last thing I wrote, after our day at La Ronde.”

  “Ah, la Ronde! Yes, 1967, Montreal––a special time and place. What promises…”

  I push the manuscript into his hands. “Then respond to this once and for all. Tell me the rest of this story. The reasons for leading me on, for leading Lucia on, the reasons why people deceive one another, but especially themselves…. I want to understand why people do the things they do.”

  He pauses for a while before he answers, “I still don’t understand what you want from me, but I’ll reread this, if you promise there won’t be any more ill feelings between us.”

  “There won’t be as long as you acknowledge this. Tell me your own version, so I can understand.”

  He smiles and pats me on the cheek. “You’re an ace, Caterina. Come back in a couple of days. Don’t misunderstand all I’ve said. I’m happy to see you again.”

  Lost in a Cemetery

  We left the lookout on Mount Royal to explore the city forest, all fiery-red leaves shining like small fires in the moonlight, crackling under our feet. His voice mellow as we walked and talked until we stopped in a clearing and he embraced me. He kissed my face, and then his tongue moved up and down, past my opened blouse to my neck and my breasts, before returning to my lips, and to the inside of my mouth, until I completely forgot where I was. I found myself falling on the leaves, the world opening up to moist lips, tongue on tongue, warm hands on legs. I closed my eyes as he rose up and up, and then my body fell down next to him, and we lay quiet, as though asleep on a bed of leaves. It took us forever to retrace our steps to the lookout, picking leaves off each other’s clothes, getting lost in the mountain cemetery, in a maze of tombstones, while Saint Joseph’s Oratory loomed like a fat, disapproving chaperone ahead of us. “I’ll call you,” he said to me … to her. For many days, weeks, months, we waited for the sign that he would return us to life. We continued as if nothing had disrupted the monotony of our daily existence, but at times, the weight of the silence pressed so heavily on our fractured hearts and souls that we feared we might crack into a thousand bits and pieces. Sunlight dissolved into blankness as another Indian summer slid past us, leaving nothing ahead but another November and another death.

  50. THE HAIRDRESSING LESSON

  I WORKED FRANTICALLY OVER THE weekend to draft an outline of a novel to show Antonio, by incorporating the stories I had written recently while identifying the gaps in both the old stories and the new ones. At Sunday lunch with my family, I took the time to look through last month’s issues of Arte&Cultura and found the advertisement for the launch of Antonio’s last book at the Casa D’Italia. Was this the event Lucia attended a week before her beating? I’d have to ask Antonio. The thought of finally working with him both excites and intimidates me. But, I feel as if I must tread lightly, as he offered his help only halfheartedly.

  On Monday morning, in class, I read the bulletin on the upcoming Halloween dance, while the school technician installs the TV set and VCR I had ordered to show a film on colour harmony. The students gather their chairs, sit in a semicircle around the TV, and chatter about their planned costumes while I fidget with the VCR. The film provided by the tint company, L’Oreal, will serve as an introduction to my lessons on hair colouring.

  I distribute a diagram of a colour wheel—a circle with two intersecting triangles, which forms six smaller ones—and ask the students for a few minutes attention before I turn on the film.

  “No notes today,” they groan.

  “Come on, girls,” I say. “This is fun. Whether you’re painting a house, a canvas, or hair, you must understand the principle of colour harmony.” I then let the blonde and perky colourist in the film take over, as she holds the same diagram of a colour wheel I distributed.

  She tells the students that all colours on earth are a combination of three primary colours—red, blue, and yellow—and points to the three major points of the triangle. When these colors mix, they produce the secondary colours: green, orange and purple—all very useful in hair colouring.

  All hair, no matter how dark, has subtle shades of red, yellow, or gold pigmentation, which gives it its own distinctive shade or highlight, but the more red, gold, or yellow in the hair, the harder it is to produce the light cool blondes favoured by fake blondes everywhere.

  “This is where the secondary colours kick in,” she says as she moves her hands from the primary colours to their corresponding opposites. “They are used to neutralize the brassy reds, the oranges, and the yellow highlights.”

  I’ve watched this film for years, and for the first time I realize how dramatic the principle really is. A gooey slate-green concoction will remove any hint of warmth that nature imparts on hair. How ghastly, I think, when the rule is applied to other facets of life!

  I stare blankly at the colour wheel on the screen. With it, a thought emerges that has nothing to do with hair colouring, and I can’t wait to sit down and put it on paper.

  I take a blank colour wheel and I write “Cathy,” “Lucia” and “Angie” in bold letters next to the points of the triangle. I must make these three women the primary characters in my novel, the connecting glue that will hold it all together.

  I muse about which names will ring truest—Caterina or Cathy, Angelina or Angie? Is changing one’s birth name a selling out or a betrayal of one’s truest identity? I consider the question for a whilet. What is one’s identity if not the agglomeration of all the lives one has lived throughout the years? The name Caterina sounds right for the past, when there was no doubt about who she was. But then, she has been taken on a long journey, not fully of her own volition, and Cathy is who she has become. Is it fair to deny those years and that process of transformation? I don’t quite know the answer. The same applies for Angelina/Angie. Lucia has always remained Lucia, in and out of her coma. That is the way it happened, and there is no use forcing the issue.

  I see how, though different, the three women have something in common. In some way or other, they’ve been deceived and hurt by the men closest to them. In wanting so badly to find their true counterparts, to feel whole and complete, they have allowed themselves, passively, to be neutralized, subdued, silenced, and even neutered.

  After class, I’m emboldened to drive to Antonio’s office. I show him my outline but hold on to the colour wheel.

  “You’ve been busy,” he says while perusing my notes. “This will end up with more layers than a Calabrese lasagna.” He smiles and I’m not sure whether he’s mocking me or he’s pleasantly amused.

  “I’ve put these ideas down, but the material needs to be organized….”

  “Who said, ‘I have no plans, only material?’” he smiles, Then he adds, “Jokes aside, there are lots of compelling ideas here, but if you want me to read it, start on a word processor. Your handwriting is illegible.”

  “Did you read the prose poem?” I ask.

  “Sorry?” h
e says as if he didn’t hear me. I repeat the question. “Not yet. It’s been crazy these past days, with interviews and all,” he says.

  I change subject, “Tell me the truth, had you been seeing Lucia before the night she got hit?”

  “I hadn’t seen her for years, until she came to my office in the spring.” He put my notes down, ready to fill me in.

  He tells me that Lucia had shown up at his office with her daughter to inquire about flights to Italy and then brought up Angie’s problems at school. She had wanted to go to Mulirena with Angie that summer. She hoped the trip would be good for Angie who had been expelled from school. She was especially concerned about her daughter and felt guilty that she had neglected her.

  Lucia was finally getting medical help for a debilitating depression she had suffered for years. She seemed to have woken up and wanted to make necessary changes in her life.

  “And did you see her after that?”

  “A week later,” he says in a low voice.

  Before booking her for a trip to Italy, he’d felt it his duty to let her in on some stories he had heard, but, not wanting to discuss it in front of Angie, he’d invited Lucia for coffee and had a long chat with her then. She then cancelled her plans to go to Italy, called me about Angie, and moved out of her home.

  “Did you see her again?”

  “One last time. Maybe that turned out to have been a mistake.”

  She showed up at a cultural event that he was hosting, a fundraising banquet for his paper, at the Casa D’Italia, and the launch of his latest book.

  Finally my student’s comment about the dance and Lucia made sense to me.

  “I was surprised to see her. She came in all dressed up, with a new short haircut that made her look half her age. Maybe that, and the stories I had already told her incited the argument between her brother and husband.”

  “What stories?”

  “I told her about the farmhouse and 1964. I thought she’d have known all the details by now, but I was surprised that she had been left in the dark