Instead she slowly made her way down the overpass, walked to Park Avenue, waited for a bus, and entered the Bar à Go-Go, all by herself.
She ran away in terror when she recognized the hawk from the photos on the wall.
60. GIROTONDO
I’M SURPRISED TO FIND SEAN is still in the apartment. In all my wanderings through the night and day, I never thought to call him for help. Nor does it seem he has worried much about me. We’re not even good roommates anymore, I think.
“Call your mother,” he says, “She’s worried sick about you.”
Except for my mother’s insistent calls, no one has called with any news about Angie. I don’t want to speak to anyone. I ask Sean to call my brother and tell him I’m home but have no news. I’ll call them later, after I’ve had a short rest.
“Why aren’t you back at the hotel?” I ask Sean.
“I’ve been paying half the rent. This is also my apartment. I have no intention to move before the elections. I’m sure we can work things out after, one way or the other, but please let’s keep cool heads till then.”
I’m too tired to answer or to care, but I call Bruce. “Please tell the police about the composition.”
In the bedroom, the boxes of new furniture are still unopened. Some are serving as night tables next to the mattress on the floor. Others hold Sean’s clothes and books. All I want to do is crash on a bed and sleep, but I can’t bring myself to do it on the mattress in the bedroom, and Sean has taken over the living room.
We’d have a marriage built out of cardboard boxes, I think. I retire to the den, close the door and open up the sofa bed. The sheets smell of Angie.
I toss and turn but can’t find a comfortable position to sleep. I find myself walking through a maze of cardboard boxes—huge boxes towering over me. Some are gift-wrapped and I’m anxious to see what’s in them, but I have nothing to open them with. I tear at them with all of my strength, and hundreds of pieces of wood, bolts, and screws rain down all over me. I’m floating in a sea of mismatched furniture pieces. I hold on to the biggest piece of wood for dear life.
It’s unbearably hot, and the smell is nauseating. A sickening feeling overtakes me just thinking of the hundreds of furniture pieces that need assembly. And how will I face the world after failing so miserably with Angie? Will I find her in time for her father’s funeral? Will there be a funeral, and who would show up for it? Poor man, I cry as I fall back to sleep. Imagine dying so unloved and unmissed!
I see Angie playing ring around the rosie on a street that is all done up in Halloween decorations. A profusion of orange chrysanthemums covers the rock gardens of each mansion. While I watch the children play, a man makes love to me on a grassy field. “Your insides are as soft as silk,” he says to me, in a voice that is as smooth as liquid gold.
When I turn my head to look at the view, I see arms and legs sprouting from the leaf-covered grass. I get up to read the inscriptions on the tombstones to look for names I recognize. Along the way, the man picks a bouquet from the flowers scattered around the tombstones, and hands it to me. I hide the flowers in my purse. They are made of plastic and I’m embarrassed to show them. Is that all I ever get? The manicured lawns of the mansions have been turned into cemeteries for children to play in. White ghosts flutter from trees; skeletons rattle in the wind, a large grey parrot with bright red tail feathers screeches in a cage swinging from a portico. I watch Angie turn round and round with the kids at a dizzying pace. All I can see of her is her made-up face, without eyes, nose, or mouth—a fluorescent, lifeless mask—turned toward the sky.
“Giro giro tondo, com’e’ bello il mondo,” the children sing, over and over. “Ring around the rosie….”
This is my song, I think, and I am happy to have finally found her. I join the kids and swing round and round with them. I raise my eyes and an unsmiling woman waves at me from her balcony. She points at the balcony next to hers, and I catch sight of my father sitting on a chair, teetering on its front legs, and leaning against the railing for support.
“Why did you leave me?” I yell at him. He smiles and puts his hands to one ear, as if to say he can’t hear. I scream louder. “Why did you have to die before I could sing in the play?” He throws his arm down at me, as if giving up.
“It was only a play. It’s kid’s stuff. Will you ever let it be?” he says.
The balcony railing lets go and everything dissolves into the sky before I have a chance to reply. I’m alone in the night, in front of a strange house lit up with fluorescent orange lights. Sounds of fireworks in the distance, the ring of a telephone.
I wonder where I am, and wish I could get up and go home … if only I knew where home was.
“I’ve made some calls,” Bruce says on the phone. “Sergeant Provost, the one that spoke at our school meeting, is ready to help us look for Angie. We must give him as many leads as possible. Can you meet us at the police station?”
“I think I know where Angie went after TMR,” I say
“Really? Have you spoken to someone else?”
“No, but the answer is in the writing. Remember the last sentence of her composition? ‘The weird thing is, cemeteries are still my favourite places.’ Let’s check the cemetery.”
With Sergent Provost and his men we search the grounds of the Cotes des Neiges Cemetery until we find a group of teens slumped asleep by tombstones, with crowns of chrysanthemums on their heads and flower petals scattered all around them. I spot Angie from far away by her spiked hair, pouty lips and her face as pale as the white mask beside her. As we get close, I notice a bloody wrist, and I panic.
“Angie,” I yell and shake her shoulders. She opens her eyes and recognizes me.
“I want to go to the police,” she says weakly. “I want to tell them everything I know.”
“The police are right here,” I say and point her to Provost.
“We’ll have to go to the station for that, but not before looking after that wrist,” says Provost.
Angie’s sobbing revelations at the clinic while waiting to have her wrist bandaged, and then her more detailed version to the police, are shocking but not altogether surprising to me. I had witnessed an act of uncontrolled violence toward Lucia in the remote past that had provoked frightful dreams, and had left its mark on my psyche, but nothing compared to what Angie must have suffered in the last month.
On the evening of October 2nd, Angie was in the basement, watching The Price is Right as she did every night with her grandmother. Her mother, father, and uncle argued loudly in the upstairs kitchen as they often did. Her grandmother was away at her son Pietro’s home.
Angie couldn’t take the yelling anymore. She left halfway through The Price is Right, the TV still on, to take a walk to the park, just around the corner of the house. She saw a man sitting in a big car on the curb. He looked scary and suspicious. When she reached the park, she sat on a swing and watched the goings on at the front of the house. After a few minutes, her father left and the man in the car went in. After half an hour or so she saw the man leave alone. She walked back home, through the back door and straight to the basement. The news was on, but the upstairs was unusually quiet. She went upstairs to get something to eat, and that’s when she saw her mother; her face and head were bloodied and she was lying unconscious on the floor. Her uncle sat quietly by the kitchen table. He had called the police who soon arrived. The other man was no longer there. Her uncle didn’t mention him to the police and neither did she.
Everyone blamed her father for the assault and she believed them at first. When questioned by the police, she declared categorically that she had been away the whole evening and had seen nothing.
One day at the hospital, she heard her grandmother and uncle discuss the phone call that Lucia had made to her that evening to ask about their lands. Her uncle ordered her not to say anything about the call, that the police alread
y knew what they needed to know. After the visit to the journalist, when he quizzed her about the people she had seen and the time of her leaving and returning to the house, she turned suspicious.
Angie asked her grandmother if she remembered the time of her mother’s call. Her grandmother didn’t remember but she said that The Price is Right had just finished, and the news was on. This information, as well as other revelations from her father in Italy, alerted Angie that things did not add up. If her mother had called her grandmother at the start of the news, and her father left the house before the end of The Price is Right, then Lucia had to have been beaten later by someone else, and the only men Angie saw enter and leave the house were her uncle and his friend whom she recognized as Nick Demon, the wrestler, when she went to the club and ran away in fear.
I hug Angie when she comes out of the officer’s office, “You’ll be fine,” I tell her. “You’re strong.”
The officer explains their plan to place Angie in a teen home where she’ll receive the support she needs until her family situation stabilizes. I offer all of my help.
“I’ll stay close to you,” I tell Angie.
From there we drive to the hospital to see her mother.
61. THE LULLABYE
COMARE ROSARIA SITS BY THE bed on the edge of her chair, eyes closed with a rosary in her hands, moaning quietly. I stand there for a while before she notices me, but she doesn’t say anything, rocking herself as if in a trance. Angie is slumped on the bed, crying, one arm across her comatose mother, her wrist bandaged.
I catch snippets of phrases from Comare Rosaria: “Tutti i nudari venanu a ru piettene—all the knots come to the comb … Pasquale was a piece of bread … went to Italy for grace and found justice….”
She has heard about Pasquale’s death and so has Angie.
Comare Rosaria is venting out her pain, like women did at funerals in the old villages, lamenting while narrating details of the life of their loved departed one, her voice alternating between shrill cries and whispered moans. The old woman, for whom time has stood still, speaks in archaic expressions of an archaic dialect, full of proverbs, sayings, metaphors. She seems to be saying that sooner or later your deeds will catch up to you. Pasquale was a good man. Like a medieval vassal that bows to his feudal lord begging for grace, Pasquale went to his hometown thinking he’d find a home and understanding, only to find punishment.
I can hardly stand on my feet. I get close to the bed and tap Angie on the arm to let her know I’m here.
Comare Rosaria looks up at me and grasps my hands. She keeps on repeating, “…All the knots come to the comb…” and moans, “O higlia mia, chi te capitau a ttie.”
I close my eyes and I’m transported to another time and place, listening to a lullaby:
O ninna ninna, o ninnarella
U lupu se mangiau la piacurella
O piacurella mia cumu facisti
Quandu intra vucca de lu lupu ghisti?
Oh, lullabye, oh little lullabye
The wolf swallowed the sheep
Oh, my sweet sheep, what did you do
When into the mouth of the wolf you had to go?
PART XII
NOVEMBER 2, 1980
62. A NEW BEGINNING
IT IS THE DAY OF THE DEAD, the day after All Saints’ Day. I wake up early on the sofa bed in my den. The room, its blinds opened, is awash with sunlight. For the past month, characters from my early years have stubbornly re-entered my life to disrupt an already tenuous tranquility. Twenty-four hours earlier, on Halloween night, a whirlwind of events took me unaware, playing tricks on me, and I went through the night and following day without any sleep and with little food, searching for Angie. Angie had been with me only for a short time, yet it was as though she had been part of me forever. The girl, and her mother, had turned into ghosts. Exhausted and sleep deprived, I blamed my journalist friend, Antonio, for the tragedy. This morning I do not feel so adamant. Can one man alone be blamed for the years of neglect and indifference that brought these women to this end?
Antonio provided the authorities with enough leads to feed the daily newspapers’ hunger for news of the crime and corruption that plague all levels of society. To me, he had said that the Lucia and Angie were tragic characters, one without a past to support her; the other deprived of the future she had wished for herself. But he was wrong about Angie. We all have a past, and how we confront it will determine our future. Angie will not live by deception, will not be silenced, and she will survive despite the hand life has dealt her. Her mother’s prognosis is not as auspicious. I see that the morning paper has already covered the news of Angie’s courageous statements to authorities, on what she witnessed the night her mother was savagely struck. Speculation regarding the motives and ancient passions that led to the deed—jealousy, personal revenge, greed—will also keep the journalists’ word processors hot for days, until the next newsworthy story.
Fears and nightmares haunted me last night, until I woke up and looked out at the moon. Its eternal cycle has remained undisturbed by the turmoil of this past month, I thought, and I returned to bed in peace with myself. I have woken up rested. I make a pot of coffee, sit back on the sofa bed and, serenely, plan my day.
Sean, my ex-fiancé, will be sound asleep until noon, on a mattress in what used to be our bedroom, surrounded by unassembled furniture still in boxes. I will not disrupt his plans. He can stay in the apartment till it suits him. On Monday, I will call the Danish House to return the furniture I bought a few days before, but have had neither the time nor the heart to put together. The prints, lamps, accessories, and dishes that Sean and I bought together, I don’t want. Sean can take whatever he likes, or leave it all behind with the rest of the furniture for some other gypsy-minded couple to call their own.
I will have to come back for the old trunk that contains the embroidered linens from my mother’s trousseau, as well as other keepsakes that travelled with my family almost fifty years earlier when we crossed the ocean to settle in Canada. Lucia, a teenager then, almost the same age as Angie is now, had travelled with us. Her story is contained in the notebooks I now pack together with a few clothes and my school textbooks before I turn and walk away. A diagram of an unfinished mandala lies on the kitchen table. I put that in my purse.
Then I stare at the wall-to-wall shelves of books in the den, and I realize that I cannot leave those behind. They are my most valuable possessions. In case Sean gets the notion that part of the library is his, I decide to pack the books into my car before he gets up. Before even washing up and changing, I start sorting books into the order I would like to take them. First, I choose all the literature books. It feels good to handle the old, worn-out tomes—From Shakespeare to Shaw, Blake’s Poems and Prophesies, Tom Jones, The Stories of Anton Tchekov—with handwritten notes in the margins. I resolve to someday take the time to read and study the poetry, the classic novels, and short stories contained within them. I use a plastic laundry basket to carry the books to the car, and then pile them onto the floor of the back seat.
Next I choose and carry the writings of Saint Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, Socrates, Hegel, Sartre, Thoreau, de Beauvoir, Marx, and Churchill, and stack them on the seats. The basket feels heavier and heavier with each trip down the stairs to the car, but I am determined to take as many of the books as possible with me. One day I might regret not having them. The books on music and art I will give to my brother, for his own inspiration.
After the back seat of the car is stuffed to capacity, I pack the trunk. Except for Sean’s books, the shelves are now bare. I am amused that I have made over twenty trips up and down the stairs still wearing my housecoat.
Finally, I take my copy of I Promessi Sposi and, before placing it carefully into my tote bag along with my notebooks, I open it to the last page and read:
Man, as long as he is in this world, is like an invalid lying on a mor
e-or-less-uncomfortable bed, who sees other beds around him which look outwardly smooth, level, and better made, and imagines he would be very happy on them. But if he succeeds in changing, scarcely is he lying on the new bed than he begins, as his weight sinks in, to feel a piece of flax pricking into him here and a lump pressing into him there; so that, in fact, he is more or less back where he started.
I remember that I first read this book as a child. I have to reread it again, to look at it with new eyes. On the final trip, I quietly move the standing mirror from the bedroom into the kitchen. It is lighter than I thought and I consider taking it to the car as well. The mirror will be a trusty reminder of who I am from day to day—someone different from the person I was the day before, or who I will become the day after. My stories, too, need rewriting.
My hands are dirty and feel grimy from handling the old, dusty books. I shower, wash and dry my hair, and put basic toiletries into my tote bag. I stuff some underwear and a few of my favourite clothes in a garbage bag for the upcoming days. The rest I leave behind together with the mirror. I am afraid it will crack.
It is almost one o’clock and Sean is still sleeping. Life is going on as if nothing has happened. My mother, brother, and sister-in-law will still be sitting for their Sunday lunch. When I join them, they will be discussing the events of the last few days, the funeral mass they will be attending, and the engagement and wedding not taking place as planned.
“As long as you’re well…” my mother will say.
“Cheer up. You have your full life ahead of you, and lots of stories to write,” Luigi will say.
If I leave now, I will be in time for coffee—though my mother will insist that I eat a plate of leftover pasta.
The Women of Saturn Page 34