by Nino Ricci
For the rest of the afternoon Gelsomina kept the baby quiet with feedings of sugar water, but toward evening she began to grow restive. The liquid seemed to pass straight through her: by nightfall she had wet her diapers several times, and Gelsomina had begun to replace them with ones still damp from the wash. With the constant wet the baby’s thighs grew chafed and red, as evening wore on her sporadic crying merging into an almost constant wail. Gelsomina left her crying in the bedroom while we ate what remained in the house of the bread and meat normally used for my father’s sandwiches; but afterwards the baby wouldn’t take to its bottle at all.
“Stop it, for the love of Christ!” But the baby only cried louder. One of her fists shot out against the bottle and knocked it from Gelsomina’s hand onto the bed.
“Oh! Basta!”
She cracked a hand hard against the baby’s cheek.
In an instant the baby’s wails had grown so intense they were almost soundless, her chest heaving so wildly it seemed she had emptied her lungs with her cries and was unable now to refill them.
“Addíu, what have I done,” Gelsomina said, and she had begun to cry as well. She clutched the baby to her and sobbed into her shoulder, her body seeming to melt suddenly, to lose all its straight-backed authority and brazenness. For the first time it occurred to me that perhaps she couldn’t take care of us, that she didn’t always know the right thing to do.
“E niend’, it’s nothing,” she kept saying, like a chant, “èniend’, poveretta. È niend’.”
But when we were awakened the next morning by a call from Gelsomina’s father, Gelsomina made it seem as if nothing was wrong.
“Tsi’Mario’s not in the house,” she said. “I think he went out to the boiler room.”
Her father’s voice crackled briefly from the other end.
“He doesn’t go to the factory any more,” Gelsomina said, after a pause. Then her father’s voice again, louder; Gelsomina grew defensive.
“How should I know why? Maybe he has too much work to do on the farm. He’s always in the boiler room.”
Before long Tsi’Alfredo’s truck pulled up in the drive. He stopped first at the boiler room but emerged alone a few minutes later and drove around to the back door, coming into the house red-faced with anger.
“Where is he?”
“Isn’t he in the boiler room?” Gelsomina said.
Tsi’Alfredo struck her hard against the back of her head.
“Stronza! Couldn’t you see that his truck is gone?”
Tsi’Alfredo made us get into his truck. The baby had been crying all morning, Tsi’Alfredo grimacing in irritation now as he pulled the truck onto the road.
“Can’t you keep that thing quiet?”
Tsi’Alfredo lived on the town line just beneath the Ridge, a trip of several miles along backroads and highway before the sudden slope his own road dipped into, from the top of it the lake briefly visible in the distance like a mirage. His house, narrow and weathered and tall, was covered in the same false brick as our boiler room; but his own boiler room was built in concrete, and his greenhouses in frames of metal. Gelsomina had taken me inside them once, the plants there filling the space like a fairy-tale forest with their prickled cucumbers and yellowing flowers, the air alive with the hum of bees and the smell of earth.
Tsia Maria was waiting for us at the back door. I noticed that the fields around the greenhouses had been planted since the last time I had been there, pencil-thin rows of green stretching away toward a distant line of trees.
“And Mario?” Tsia Maria said.
“Ah, sì, and Mario. That idiot, your daughter –”
Tsi’Alfredo’s son Gino had come out beside his mother, towering over her in his oversize adolescent mannishness, his face still puffy from sleep and his hair falling in unruly tufts across his forehead. Tsi’Alfredo made him get in the truck when Gelsomina and I were out, then drove off back toward the highway.
Tsia Maria had taken the baby from Gelsomina.
“Why is she crying? Didn’t you feed her?”
We had gone into the kitchen, drabber than the one in my father’s house, the tiles worn away in spots to the wood beneath and the walls yellowed with grime. There was a washtub now in one corner with clothes soaking in it and a pot of sauce cooking on the stove, its smell filling the room.
Tsia Maria handed the baby back to Gelsomina and began to prepare a bottle.
“Why was your father angry?” she said. “What happened to your uncle?”
Gelsomina’s two sisters had huddled around her at the table, silently staring at me as if I’d become a kind of curiosity.
“How should I know what happened to him?” Gelsomina said sulkily. “He wasn’t there, that’s all.”
“Is it possible you couldn’t see that something was wrong? Why didn’t you call us? Half the town knew he’d lost his job at the factory, and like fools nobody thought to tell us. And with me and your father working every night to finish the planting, and then the greenhouses –”
But I didn’t sense any anger from her. She seemed always outside of the way other people were thinking or feeling, as if the world didn’t impress itself as deeply on her as it did on others; yet I took a kind of comfort from her easy ramblings, so even-tempered, so devoid of any sudden swells or crags, that they made the world of events seem a wide plain where nothing stood out as more important than anything else, as more grave or portentous.
When she’d finished preparing the bottle she took the baby back from Gelsomina to feed her.
“And then this baby,” she said. “If that woman her mother had never set foot on the earth she would have made everyone’s life easier.”
“Mamma –” Gelsomina said.
“Ah?” Tsia Maria glanced toward me. “He doesn’t know what I’m talking about, eh, Vittorio? When you’re older you’ll understand what your father had to put up with.”
When Tsi’Alfredo returned later that morning he was alone. But the back of his truck was laden with trays of young plants, their leaves forming a carpet of green that shimmered and waved in the wind like water. Tsi’Alfredo made us all get into the cab, only Tsia Maria and the baby left behind, and in a few minutes we were at my father’s farm again, bumping down the lane that led to the back field. There were cars parked in the lane between the barn and the pond, and then in the field itself more than a dozen people were already at work, men unloading trays of plants from a trailer that Gino was slowly guiding across the field with my father’s tractor, while others, mainly women, followed behind on hands and knees, setting the plants into the furrows that had been dug for them. But my father wasn’t among them.
“The holiday’s over,” Tsi’Alfredo said. “You’ll have enough work now to keep you out of trouble for a while.”
He showed me how to plant. Getting down on his haunches he scooped a handful of dirt out of a furrow and lifted a plant into the hole he’d prepared. The plants were held in sleeves of thin wood, open at the bottom, that had to be torn away.
“Like this,” Tsi’Alfredo said, sticking two fingers of each hand into the sleeve on adjacent sides and giving a quick tug. The sleeve came apart neatly at the corner, a square of wet earth still intact around the plant’s roots.
“It should look exactly like that when you’re finished. If you let the dirt come off the roots the plant will be dead in half an hour.”
With a swift circular motion of his hands he levelled the ridges of dirt that flanked the furrow so that finally the plant sat firmly embedded in the earth.
“Don’t leave it at the bottom of a valley – just a little down, the way I did it, and fill up the space between each plant as you go. Understand?”
“Sì.”
He went through the process again a few times, using a short stick to measure out the distance between each plant. His hands moved swiftly, each plant finding its place with the same smooth precision. Still on his haunches he watched me as I tried to imitate him, Gelsomina a
nd her sisters, already at work in the rows next to me, stopping to watch as well. But I couldn’t get the wooden sleeves to tear apart neatly as Tsi’Alfredo’s had, with each failure Tsi’Alfredo reaching over impatiently to finish the job himself, grimacing at my awkwardness.
“Like that. No one taught you how to work back in Valle del Sole, eh?”
But when he saw that I couldn’t get it right he sent me up to the barn for a bucket and then set me following behind the women to collect the wooden sleeves they left discarded in their rows as they planted.
“Oh, Vittò! Look at the way he’s dragging that bucket, you’d think he had all the sins of the world inside it!”
“You never saw fields like this back in Italy, eh, so flat? You can plough a field like this in the morning, and plant it in the afternoon. Not like there.”
“What does he know about it? When did the children have to go out and work in the fields the way they do here? At harvest, maybe, that’s all. But here men, women, children, it’s all the same – if it’s not the fields it’s the greenhouses, if it’s not the greenhouses it’s the factory.”
We worked for what seemed a long time. Tsi’Alfredo’s truck came and went, carrying more loads of plants. I made piles of wooden sleeves at intervals along the edge of the laneway that flanked the field, trying to measure the time by the spaces between them. But then Tsi’Alfredo saw what I was doing.
“You don’t have to make so many small piles like that, what were you thinking?”
We ate lunch at the edge of the field. It was warm now in the noon sun, though the air had a crispness like the spring air in Valle del Sole. Tsi’Alfredo had brought water and wine, a few loaves of bread, some meat and some cheese. The women sat on the ground or on overturned plant trays; the men leaned against Tsi’Alfredo’s truck or sat on its tailgate. Gelsomina sat away from me, with the women, seemed not to want to be seen as one of the children. One of the men cut slices of cheese and meat with a jackknife he pulled from his pocket, offering the slices around to the rest of us on the knife’s blackened tip.
“And Mario?” one of the men said to Tsi’Alfredo.
“Nothing.”
“Mbeh, maybe he just took a little trip,” one of the women said. “To clear his head.”
“Sì, a trip, what are you saying?” someone else said. “And his fields not planted yet at the end of May.”
“Anyway he would have had to leave the factory, sooner or later. With the farm and no one else to look after it –”
“He would have left when he wanted to,” Tsi’Alfredo said, red-faced. “Those damned foremen there, when it’s one of their own they look the other way, but one of ours, for every little thing –”
Later, when we were working again, I overheard some of the women talking.
“Someone told me they let him go because he fell asleep.”
“Ah, sì, fell asleep, does that sound like Mario? Now if you told me he broke someone’s skull –”
Tsi’Alfredo kept carrying trays of plants, and by mid-afternoon the men setting them out had reached the line of trees that marked the end of the field. They went back with the tractor and trailer to collect the empty trays left behind by the planters, driving up to the barn to unload each time the trailer was full. But Tsi’Alfredo had gone away again in his truck, and hadn’t returned by the time the men caught up to where we were planting.
“And now?” one of the men said. “What do we do, senza boss?”
He gave the word “boss” an extra energy, as if making a joke.
“Mbeh, when lu boss is away,” another said, “you stretch out under a tree and have a nice sleep.”
But this time when they came back from the barn from unloading, the tractor was pulling a narrow trailer that I’d seen before buried in weeds at the edge of the pond. The trailer was stacked high with long silver pipes that the men began to set out in rows along the field, each pipe ending with a tall T that looked like the head and neck of a strange bird. While they were working, Tsi’Alfredo came back in his truck and stopped to help them, and before nightfall they had again reached to where we were planting.
It had begun to turn cold. The men got down on their knees to help plant, doubling up in rows that had already been started; but Tsi’Alfredo drove back down the lane in his truck, Gino following on the tractor. Some minutes later an engine echoed to life from the direction of the barn, sputtered and died, then started again, building this time to a steady roar and then faltering suddenly like a bus grinding up a hill. A hissing sound rose up from the pipes laid out along the field, and then gradually the heads on the T’s started to twirl until finally long jets of water had begun to shoot out from them, filling the air all along the field with splaying arcs that glinted like silver in the dying light.
By the time we stopped work it was truly dark. Tsi’Alfredo and Gino had come back, their clothes drenched from walking up and down the rows of pipes to check them. About a third of the field still remained to be planted.
“So, Alfrè,” one of the men said. “What’ll it be in the morning, church or the fields? It’s the same to me, either way I’ll be on my knees.”
“We can finish up ourselves.”
Gelsomina and I went back to Tsi’Alfredo’s for the night. I rode with Gino on the back of the truck – he didn’t seem to mind the wind, sitting in the brunt of it on one of the wheel humps, his scruffy hair blown back and his damp clothes billowing and cracking like laundry. But I had huddled up against the cab with the cold, my muscles aching as if from fever. I nodded off for a moment, imagined that I was back on the ship that had brought me to Canada, reliving the dreamy roll and swell of the storm we’d passed through. Then a sudden jolt of the truck woke me. Gino was grinning.
“Tired, eh?” he said, shouting to be heard above the wind. But his voice had no sympathy in it.
At Tsi’Alfredo’s I heard the baby crying from some upstairs room.
“She’s been acting like the devil all day,” Tsia Maria said. “I spoke to Letizia down the road and she said it’s the milk, you can’t use it here, you have to buy a special powder or something. What do I know about it?”
We had a large supper but though I’d been hungry all day the first few bites seemed to fill me now. Afterwards we were sent directly to bed, Gino and I sharing a narrow cot in a small room off the kitchen. Gino fell asleep almost at once, but for a long time I lay in awkward wakefulness, pinned between Gino’s broad undershirted back and the wall. I could hear Tsi’Alfredo and Tsia Maria talking in the kitchen.
“Maybe you should call the police,” Tsia Maria said.
“Don’t talk nonsense, what are the police going to do?”
“Mbeh, who knows where he’s gotten to? Maybe he’s lying in some ditch with his head broken.”
“Grazie,” Tsi’Alfredo said. “And what are you going to tell the police when they ask you why he’s gone?”
“Tell them the truth, what’s happened.”
“Sì. We might as well just publish it in the newspaper, and then everyone will know.”
“Everyone knows as it is.”
“Don’t be an idiot. You know how they are here – every little thing they know about us, they make up some story. We’ll take care of our own problems.”
Later I heard Tsi’Alfredo’s truck drive away. I drifted into sleep, but was awakened again some time afterwards by Tsi’Alfredo’s voice from the kitchen.
“Enough with your stupid questions! Is it possible you can’t keep your mouth shut for even a minute?”
“And what will we do, then? If you’d done what I told you in the first place –”
“Ma chesta stronza –”
Some object hit a wall or cupboard with a crash.
“Have you gone crazy?”
Tsia Maria’s voice was strangely altered now, tense with a panic that made me want to close it out. A door slammed, and the house grew eerily calm; then from the kitchen came a sound of sweeping, the clink of broken
glass. I noticed suddenly that Gino was awake, was lying open-eyed beside me staring up at the ceiling; but he turned finally and hunched his shoulders away from me without a word.
It was barely dawn when Tsi’Alfredo brought his children and me back to my father’s farm to begin work again, the sun just a streak of orange along the horizon and the air frosty with cold. But someone had preceded us: my father’s truck was parked at the edge of the field, and already from a distance I saw him stooping in one of the rows, a small dark speck against the grey line of trees behind him. When we’d come even with him Tsi’Alfredo jumped from the cab.
“Where in Christ have you been?”
Tsi’Alfredo was moving toward him, stepping over empty trays in the row in long quick strides.
“Mario, for the love of Christ what got into your head?”
The rest of us had gathered in a group at the end of the row, watching now as Tsi’Alfredo came up to him. But my father remained hunched over his tray.
“Dai, Mario, what’s happened?” His voice carried strangely clear in the morning stillness. “It’s nothing, dai, don’t be like this.”
My father was crying. Tsi’Alfredo got down on his haunches beside him and put a hand awkwardly on his shoulder.
“It’s better to be dead than to live like this,” my father said; but his voice had the tremor of a child’s.
“Dai, what are you saying. È niend’, Mario, it’s nothing.”
III
For several weeks after the planting my father and I were alone on the farm, Gelsomina coming by on Saturdays to do laundry and cook up soup and sauce for the following week, and the baby staying at Tsi’Alfredo’s. But though we were together more often now, my father’s presence seemed still merely a kind of gloom that surrounded me, my body tensing against him like a single hard muscle when he was near, taking in only his animal scent and then the shape he cut like black space in a landscape.
For a week or so he had me clean out an old chicken coop in the barn, leaving me alone there the whole day in the barn’s dim mysteriousness. Bits of dust hung like gold in the slits of light that passed between the wallboards; from the shadows of the upper rafters came a constant cooing and flapping of wings. In the chicken coop there was a nest of some hard clayish substance against one of the ceiling beams, and every morning a swallow would swoop out from it in a swift arc when I came in, slashing a quick hieroglyph in the air like a secret signal before disappearing in the branches of a mulberry tree across the lane.