He continues pensively. “When Lucia came to see me, it looked as if she had finally woken up and wanted to make a new start. I can’t really understand the dynamics of her relationship with the hawk … don’t know how consensual the relationship was. Some women—vulnerable, lonely women—are drawn to dark characters … or are too passive to say no to them, but Lucia told me she wanted a new life; she wanted out of her marriage and to be done with the past. Maybe he was stalking her.”
“Why didn’t you tell the police? You told the papers everything else.”
“I was trying to gather as much information as possible. Pasquale’s letters will certainly corroborate everything. I sure hope Angie’s disappearance has nothing to do with the arguments her parents had with Alfonso that night, or with Nicodemo.”
At that thought I panic. “I wish you had taken Angie’s call for help seriously,” I yell. “You just used her and sent her off … like you brushed off her mother. Why didn’t you help them when you had the chance to do so, instead of just thinking of building up a case against your enemies?”
“I take offence at your tone,” he says, standing up. “What could I have done differently?”
“You’ve triggered a lot of this. Lucia may have still held some hope for you, especially now that you’re single again. Didn’t you have any feelings for Angie and her mother? I wish you had done more for them when you had the chance, Antonio. Just think … Angie could be your daughter, too, you know.”
“That’s nonsense,” he says. “She wasn’t … isn’t. Even her brother thought otherwise.”
“But we don’t know for sure. Unless Lucia wakes up, we may never find out. You have to take some of the blame.”
He looks squarely at me, speaking in a low voice. “Caterina, I don’t know where you’ve been all night, or what you’ve been up to, but now you’re clearly hallucinating. You’re blaming me for what’s happened?”
“Just think of all the years during which Lucia was totally ignored and neglected—by you. You have to take some blame for what Lucia became after you abandoned her.”
“I am not responsible for other people’s choices.”
“Yes, but I find it curious that all at once you’re interested in helping her daughter with her homework. Why? Why didn’t you speak to me about what Angie told you? We were supposed to be collaborating. I could have tried to get her some counselling at school … help her unburden herself of what she saw, if what you say is correct.”
“I didn’t expect her to run away. She didn’t look as if she cared about anything really.”
“Angie ran away because of situations you helped create. She probably couldn’t make sense of her life—or of her mother’s life.” I shout, “You ruined both their lives!”
He raises his voice. “You have no right to blame me for whatever happened between Lucia and me. You know there were circumstances I couldn’t control—of a political, philosophical, ethical nature…”
“Sure, you let those circumstances control you a little too easily, I thought. You cared more about appearances than about love. Even when I was little, when I travelled with her on the ship and read about the other Lucia, I remember wondering why you did nothing to stop her from marrying Pasquale. You gave up too quickly, Antonio.” I sit down in my chair and continue, “You took to your bed with a fever, like a Don Abbondio. No one dares to strive for ideals anymore.”
Antonio walks around the desk and places his hands on my shoulders. He shakes me. “Caterina, please, calm down. You’re an intelligent girl, but you’ve totally lost your mind. Don’t bring Manzoni into this discussion. Get him out of your head once and for all! This is 1980! Let’s not pretend we can do the impossible—fix things that we ourselves have shattered beyond any hope of repair. You know there was nothing I could do. Marrying Lucia was just never in the cards.”
“Lucia may have been silenced forever. And for what? A chance to dance again with you … le Grand Antoine, the Great Antonio … and her daughter has disappeared, maybe fearing for her life.”
Antonio speaks quietly, “I agree. Angie and Lucia are tragic figures—one has no past to support her, the other no future to look forward to. There is nothing anyone can do for them, least of all me.”
“So, you have no intentions of ever owning up to your responsibilities to Lucia, or to Angie?”
“Our chance was over years ago,” he says. “It’s part of the past.”
“But why did you lead her on, time and time again? You continually gave her false hope.”
“How would you know that?”
“You saw Lucia many times after she was married, in 1967 for example. It’s in my poem.”
“You made that up. It was part of your fiction writing fantasy.”
“No, I didn’t make that up. I saw you get in a car with her that day, after we came back from the park, after you threw me on the grass and made out with me.”
“You were confused. You couldn’t even find your way back. You imagined it all.”
“And what about the summer of 1964 and the shot in the leg? Did I also imagine that? It coincides with Angie’s conception. Why do you think Angie came to you? She read my stories, and probably wanted to see you up close, but instead of reaching out to her, you exploited the situation for your own motives. In 1964, Lucia spent the whole summer at her farmhouse and you spent every afternoon in the country. I have a good memory.”
“Memory! Is there anything more fickle than memory? I’m certainly questioning yours.”
“Well, you remembered the hawk from a story I gave you in 1967, yet you never bothered to comment to me on it. And why didn’t you ever get back to me about my prose poem? Instead, you manipulated Angie into incorporating it into her composition.”
“Maybe it’s because I never took your writing seriously…”
“You’re such a snob, and you’re full of hot air!”
“And you’re full of naïve and romantic ideas about writing, and you can’t face reality. A real writer stands back from what is thrown at her by circumstances and looks at things rationally, while you have turned hysterical.”
“Well, you have finally expressed what you think of my writing. And to think I wasted so much time looking for your approval. You’re a phony, Totu! A pompous, stuffy, anal-retentive fart, a coward and a fraud. All your essays on social justice, your work in the Communist party, your own writing—it’s all nothing but a pose. You won’t ever own up to your responsibilities.”
I get up to leave. Antonio takes me by the wrist. “You know I’ve been a victim in all of this too.”
“Yes, you have a limp to show for it, but Lucia is in a coma and Angie has disappeared.”
“Why do you blame me?”
“I blame you for your indifference. It can be as numbing as any blow to the head.”
I walk out of the door, then turn back after I hear him say, “Goodbye, Rina.”
I stare at him for an instant, “Yes, goodbye Rina,” I respond and run out.
59. ANGIE’S HALLOWEEN PARTY
IN THE LATE AFTERNOON OF Friday, October 31, as the sun’s last rays faded into the dimming shadowy sky, Angie, wearing a Jason Voorhees mask, climbed the overpass that connects Saint-Roch Street with Jarry Park—not to cross safely from one side to the other, but to find a secluded spot to sit. No one else bothered to use the overpass; she was alone and she liked it that way.
Her head had been spinning since she had first donned the heavy leather jacket that morning. Wearing it, she’d had to play up to the hard, cold-hearted defiance that the jacket with the metal studs required. And just as she was getting used to it, she switched with Eddie into the Friday the 13th horror movie costume.
Angie realized how much she hated following rules of any kind. She sat cross-legged, high on the overpass landing, looking down at the tracks, the park, and the student
s parading back and forth through the hole in the chain-link fence below.
She wouldn’t be meeting her uncle after school as she had told Cathy. She had just pretended to talk to her aunt on the phone. Lying to Cathy had been easy enough. The woman had been too preoccupied with admiring herself and her jewelled turban in the mirror to care.
But the day was not turning out as she had expected. She had wanted badly to go to the club with Gina, Linda, and especially Eddie, but Eddie had backed off. “Those people are not friends of my friends,” he told them at lunch. Sporting a Jason mask and wearing a heavy flannel shirt over his usual Sex Pistols T-shirt, he had generously shared his joint with them. He wanted to hang around the park and school until the dance was over.
“That bitch Cathy!” Angie said. “She wouldn’t cover for me tonight.”
“What’s the big deal?” Gina said. “Italian girls lie to their families all the time. I bet when she was our age, she must have done it hundreds of times herself.”
“You … you can ha … have my mask,” Eddie told Angie. “Your un ….un … ncle will ne … ne … ever know you were at the club.”
The mask was the smartest idea ever. She could look straight into anyone’s face and remain invisible.
Linda and Gina went to the club early, but Angie wanted to hang out with Eddie. He was the first boy who had ever shown any interest in her. Though they didn’t talk much when together, she could tell that he knew much more than he led on, including people that hung around Bar à Go-Go. Then Eddie went to talk to some students, and she lost sight of him. Disappointed, she returned to school, but there was no sign of him anywhere at the dance either.
She then stood alone in a dark corner of the cafeteria waiting for something to happen. Nothing had. The only event of interest had been watching Cathy in her glittering caftan walk around the cafeteria like the Queen of Sheba. Something must have been up if she ditched the Marie Antoinette costume. Bruce followed her around like a little dog. Neither one of them had recognized Angie in her mask as she walked aimlessly along the tracks smoking her joint through a hole in the mask. She passed right by them as Bruce held Cathy by the shoulders and seemed to want to kiss her right there. She watched them and they never even noticed. Cathy could pull the wool over other people’s eyes, but Angie saw right through her.
Angie first began looking into Cathy’s notebooks to make fun of the teacher with her friends.
“Do you think she fooled around before shacking up with her English boyfriend?” Linda had asked her once.
“She keeps diaries. I’ll find out,” she told her.
Angie couldn’t spell for beans, but with her new glasses, she could read well enough to understand the drift of a sentence. She brought one of the juiciest stories to school and shared it with Eddie. He helped her better decipher the scribbled handwriting. Halfway through the pile, a light went off in Angie’s head.
“I bet she’s been writing about my family too,” she told Eddie.
“Let’s find out.” He was as curious as she was.
“She’s a fucking liar,” she said to Eddie. “I can’t tell if what she writes is true or make-believe.”
Then Cathy showed her the story about her father published in the paper. Angie ran straight home and called Eddie. Together they raided the notes, looking for clues about Angie’s mother, her father, or whoever her father was supposed to be. She went crazy trying to dig into the writing as well as into her own head to put pieces of the puzzle together. Who was this journalist who wrote about her father in the papers, and who seemed to know so much about her family? She had never seen her mother get as excited as she did when they had gone to see him at his office.
“Come see me if ever you have a problem,” the journalist had said. Then he had gone ahead and splattered her father’s story all over the papers. Was he her friend or enemy?
According to the notes, Nicodemo, who became Nick Demon, had been a close friend of the family, but if he had ever been at her house, she had never paid any attention to the man. Now with all the news in the papers, Eddie kept on asking questions about him.
The Lucia who was married by proxy to an older man had to be her mother, but had her mother ever been as pretty and vivacious as the Lucia of the notebooks? Her mother slept all day long and kept the windows shut on summer days to keep sunlight out of the house. In their home in Laval, you could never tell whether it was summer or winter outside. Her mother never took her skating, swimming, or to dance classes like the French mothers at school, and all Angie did at home was watch TV by herself. On Friday nights, her father drove her to her grandmother’s house to keep her company, and that’s how she spent her weekends.
Of all the people around her, Angie liked her grandmother best. They both liked watching TV together, especially The Price is Right and figure-skating competitions. Angie wished she could dance and move as lightly as those slim skaters who seemed to be made out of air, instead of skin, bones, and fat like she was. Angie moved like a lump of cement. In high school, her father had refused to allow her to take ballet lessons. He said that he didn’t want to pay to make a ballerina out of his daughter, so that she could go dancing every Saturday night in clubs.
Her father still spoke as if he had just gotten off the boat, and when her mother did go to school on parents’ night, Angie was ashamed of Lucia’s broken French. Could this same person—who walked around like a zombie, who was in a time warp most of the time, who seemed to care about no one, not even herself—have been a carefree young woman once, sneaking out to see her boyfriend and standing up to her brother?
Angie had envied Cathy when she had first gone to live with her in her apartment, which wasn’t furnished with ornately carved furniture or with sofas covered up in plastic, like the other paesani. But she and her Canadian boyfriend were no different from her own mother and father. They hardly spoke to one other and slept in separate beds. Didn’t she think it was weird that her boyfriend spent more time with his male friend than with her?
The only thing she still envied was the fact that Cathy could write things down. With her new glasses, Angie could read but she still couldn’t spell. Bruce kept insisting that spelling didn’t matter, that she should write her thoughts down any way she could. Write about what you dream at night, he had said. Write the things you’re passionate about, the things that scare you the most. Where would she start?
But the week before Halloween, she had found a way out. While alone in the apartment, and with Eddie’s help, she took the story that she had laughed at and turned it into a composition for Mr. McLaughin on Halloween Fears and Terrors. Eddie had helped her change it around, so that it was not the usual kid’s stuff about ghosts and haunted houses, but a grownup story about Little Red Riding Hood and a big bad wolf. That would shake Bruce and the other people up at the school, make them take notice. Then, in the afternoon, Angie went to see the journalist on her own. She showed him Cathy’s stories to see how he’d react. She wanted to ask him, “Who are you? Are you my real father? Are you Cathy’s lover?” Instead he kept quizzing her about the night of October 2nd, the night her mother fell into a coma, as if he knew something about it.
“Come to see me if you need help,” he told her. While still home from school, she decided to go back to the journalist and show him her composition for Bruce’s class, and again check out his reaction. Not only did he correct the story, but after asking all kinds of questions, had helped her make it even scarier and more realistic.
On Halloween day, after watching the Fairy Queen holding on to Prince Charming along the tracks, Angie ran to puke behind the school. All the smoking on an empty stomach had made her feel nauseous. She leaned against the wall with her eyes closed until she felt better. She sat on the ground for another while, but then noticed her vomit and some dog shit next to her, and she sprang back to her feet in disgust. She looked up at the overpass and figured it wo
uld be a good place to get away from all of the garbage below.
The overhead lights in Jarry Park lit up just as the sky turned dark, and Angie could see the goings-on in the street below, as clear as day. The neighbourhood kids on Saint-Roch Street, all dressed up and masked, were scurrying excitedly from their houses, maybe toward the Town of Mount Royal, swinging their orange plastic bags and UNICEF boxes. Eddie had said he still went trick-or-treating in TMR. Maybe she’d meet him there later on.
Angie could hardly keep her eyes open. The cement landing felt cold on her bum. She decided to get up before she fell asleep. Some of the teachers supervising the dance were out having a smoke. There was Frank, with his usual big grin, chatting away with some of the older girls from the school. Frank was such a pervert. He’d told Linda she had bedroom eyes after he walked into the girls’ gym changing room. Everyone around her was such a hypocrite, especially Cathy.
Angie saw Cathy emerge from the school’s entrance. She looked as though she were searching for someone. Was Cathy looking for her? Then she saw Cathy run toward a car—Bruce’s car. What was up with those two? Imagine, telling her not to lie to her family, and then driving away with Bruce. Who did she think she was fooling with that stupid veil hiding her face?
There was so much confusion in Angie’s head, so many deceptions and lies around her. She didn’t have the heart to pretend to be as lighthearted as Gina and Linda on this Halloween night. They were the only friends she had, but all they thought about was dancing half-naked at the club.
What would her mother be thinking right now, in her comatose sleep? Bruce had told Angie to talk to her, that she might hear everything being said around her. Imagine hearing everything but being unable to answer. And her father in Italy, his family home had been taken away from him, and he had nowhere to go. And her grandmother? Poor woman. She had no one but Angie to watch TV with her.
Angie huddled against the overpass’s protective wire fence. One would have to climb over it in order to fly off into the air. She wished she could simply roll herself into a ball and let herself slip off the edge, and dissipate into the sky like a shooting star.
The Women of Saturn Page 33