In a Glass House

by Nino Ricci

  The coop was crammed with all manner of refuse, busted packing crates, hoops of thick wire, old farm implements with decayed leather harnesses, rolls of rusted chicken wire. My father would give me a few terse instructions, sullen and precise, when he left me there in the morning, but then as soon as he’d gone everything he had said became a haze. When he came back to check on me he’d see my mistakes at once.

  “I told you to pile those crates against the other wall, where they’d be out of the way.” And in fifteen minutes of swift, silent work he’d redo what I’d spent a whole morning on.

  After the barn he set me to work collecting broken glass in the alleys between the greenhouses. But it seemed now that it was exactly the mistakes he warned me about in advance that I invariably fell into.

  “Don’t fill the wheelbarrow too full,” he said, “or you’ll spill it.”

  But I did pile it too full; and even feeling its weight begin to lean as I lifted its handles, already seeing in my mind how it would spill, watching the image unfurl there like a premonition, still I tried to push it forward. There was a tremendous crash when it tilted, the glass splintering through the wall of one of the greenhouses. In a moment my father was standing over me, his face flushed.

  “Gesù Crist’ e Maria.” It was the first time I had seen his anger so plain and uncurbed, so ice-hard. “Is it possible you can’t do anything the way I tell you?”

  I had steeled myself instinctively against a blow. But the blow didn’t come, and afterwards, when he bent quick and silent to pick up the glass I had spilled, he seemed chastened by his outburst as if he had been the one who had suffered some humiliation.

  He left me less on my own from then on, often keeping me beside him to be his helper. He’d make comments sometimes while he worked, or curse some problem in a way that was strangely intimate and frank, as if he’d forgotten I was merely a child. But usually he was silent, the work taking him over, bringing out in him a hard-edged concentration that seemed somehow to free me from him even though it was exactly then that I was most aware of him, the tawny muscles of his arms and neck, the patches of sweat on his clothes, his ghostly familiarity then like a mirror I looked into.

  At noon he’d send me home ahead of him to put soup on the stove or set the water heating for pasta for our lunch. If we ran out of the food Gelsomina had left he’d fry up onion and eggs, scraping the eggs onto our plates with a casual violence, a mash of grease and broken yolks and scorched whites, though I preferred them to the porcelain-smooth ones Gelsomina used to prepare. He listened to the radio while we ate, odd music at first and then a voice, the same one every day, my father turning the volume up when it came on.

  “Mbeh,” he’d say afterwards, “maybe we’ll get a little more sun after all, if you can believe all the stupidities they say on that thing.”

  Once when we were hoeing beans in the front field someone came to visit us, a grey-haired man in a checked suit and dark glasses. He pulled up in the courtyard in a large blue car and came toward us smiling broadly, his hand outstretched.

  “Mario,” he said. “Mario, Mario, como stai, paesano?”

  But after his greeting he and my father began to speak in what must have been English. They talked for a long time, and it seemed from the way my father was laughing and smiling that speaking in English brought out some different person in him, one more relaxed and good-humoured. But then when the man had gone my father grew canny.

  “That was the guy I bought the farm from,” he said. “Those Germans – paesano this, paesano that, everyone’s a paesano. But the old bastard just wanted to make sure I don’t forget to pay him.”

  But he was smiling – the old man’s visit seemed to have heartened him somehow.

  He took me into town with him that night to a sort of bar, a long gloomy room with a counter on one side and a row of rickety tables on the other. There were several men talking around one of the tables at the back, a few wearing the striped grey-and-white uniform that my father had worn when he’d worked at the factory. My father nodded in greeting toward them, but his good mood seemed to pass from him suddenly. He ordered an ice cream and a coffee from the man behind the counter; but one of the men at the table had turned to him.

  “Dai, Mario, let’s get a game going. We need a fourth, these others here are too afraid to put a little money on the table.”

  My father stared into his coffee.

  “Maybe they’re the smart ones,” he said. “Nobody gives you something for nothing.”

  “What are you saying, for the fifty cents we play for you couldn’t even buy a whore in Detroit.”

  The other men laughed.

  “Sì, fifty cents,” my father said, still talking into his coffee though his energy seemed drawn to the men now. “It took half a day to make that, when I came here –”

  “Oh, always the same story! Dai, sit down, you’ll be a rich man soon, when the cheques start coming in from the farm.”

  “The farm, at least what I made before I could put in my pocket. Now I’m just working for the bank. And then that damned German, still worried about the four cents I owe him –”

  “What does he have to do with it? Didn’t he get his money from the Farm Credit?”

  My father had turned to face them. With the mention of the German his good humour seemed to be returning.

  “Mbeh, we kept a little back because of all the work that had to be done, he’d left the place to rot like that. So today he comes around, in his suit and his new car, still thinking about those few pennies, though the contract says he doesn’t see another cent until October –”

  “Che scostumat’. What did you tell him?”

  “Don’t think he was stupid enough to say a word about the money. You know how they are, always smiling, amico, paesano. But the whole time he was looking around, checking to see how things were, asking about the crop, about the prices. So I smiled too. I told him if he wanted to see how the crop was, he could come back in July and I’d give him a bushel of beans.”

  The other men laughed.

  “And he’ll be back for those beans, too,” one of them said.

  My father stayed to play cards.

  “You can be my banker,” he said, pulling up a chair for me beside him.

  “That means every time he wins,” one of the others said, “you take five per cent.”

  “And if he loses he gives you the farm.”

  They played until late, making laconic conversation at first but then becoming more and more involved in the game. At the end my father gave me some change from the money he’d won.

  “What are you doing, Mario,” one of the men said, “you want to spoil him? That’s half a day’s wages.”

  A few days later Tsi’Alfredo’s truck was parked in the courtyard when we came in from work, Tsi’Alfredo waiting for us at the kitchen table while Tsia Maria prepared supper.

  “So? Are you keeping out of trouble?” But his good humour seemed forced, as if he’d come to bring bad news.

  There was a sound from the bedroom, and then Gelsomina emerged with the baby in her arms. I felt a kind of outrage well up in me – it didn’t seem right that the baby should be in the house again. I thought someone, Tsi’Alfredo or my father, would stop Gelsomina from bringing her into the kitchen, but there was only an awkward silence when she came in.

  “She’s been an angel all day,” Gelsomina said.

  Tsi’Alfredo turned to her red-faced.

  “Is that how you come into a room? And your uncle, stronza, did you think to say hello to him?”

  Tsi’Alfredo and Tsia Maria left after supper, but Gelsomina and the baby stayed behind. The group of us sat unmoving a moment in the lull left behind by Tsi’Alfredo’s departure, till finally my father got up without speaking and went into his room. Afterwards Gelsomina began to prepare a feeding, humming to herself as she moved about the kitchen. But her gaiety seemed put on, couldn’t hide the familiar gloom that had settled over the house agai
n.

  In bed that night Gelsomina was distant and cool, adult.

  “I shouldn’t be sleeping in the same bed as you,” she said. “It’s not as if I was your mother.”

  She’d grown more moody and unpredictable during her absence. Around my father she talked to me only to reprimand me, grown-up and brusque, seeming to imply some new understanding between the two of them, asking him questions about the farm in an informed, offhand way, lingering a strange instant beside his chair when she served him. But then if my father was out she might sneak a deck of cards from his room to play with me on the living-room floor, sitting cross-legged there with her dress tucked indecorously between her legs and shrieking girlishly every time she took a trick. If the baby cried then she’d drag herself up from the floor with an exaggerated look of exhaustion.

  “Everyone says he should find another family that wants it,” she said. “That’s how they do it here, not like in Italy – the inglesi do it all the time, they don’t care for their children the way Italians do. But my mother says if someone tells your father to do something he always has to do the opposite. It’s his own fault then if people laugh at him.”

  But she made little effort any more to hide the baby away from him, somehow taking her own re-entry into the house as a kind of licence, feeding the baby in the kitchen while we ate, making faces at her to get her to smile, seeming to treat her like any normal child. There appeared something provocative in this, and yet my father continued simply to blot the baby from his mind, never referring to her in any way, as if he saw in her place only an irrelevant shadow or blur.

  We were well into summer now and there was much work to be done on the farm, the beans to be picked, the tomatoes to be hoed, the days seeming to blend into each other without distinction. I thought the work couldn’t go on like that, without stopping, but every morning Gelsomina would wake me at dawn and it would continue. In the first hours there’d be the morning breeze at least, the air seeming laden with some uncertain promise and the plants crisp with dew; but by noon the fields would be smothered in a wet, oppressive heat, all the world unnaturally dead and still for as far as the eye could see.

  My father seldom worked with me any more, moving shadowy through his other mysterious projects and obligations. When the beans began Gelsomina came out to the fields sometimes in the afternoons, leaving the baby in a bean crate for a crib; the time passed more quickly then, Gelsomina forever criticizing my work but helping me to keep up with her and afterwards lying in my favour to my father about how many crates we’d picked, attributing to me some of her own. But usually now I worked with the people my father brought out to the field each morning on the back of his truck – matronly, dark-eyed women in black, mainly, with aquiline noses and wiry hair tied back in kerchiefs. They hung together in a tight group, talking constantly in a harsh, guttural language but swift at their work, picking three or four rows while I finished one. They’d offer me fruit from their lunchboxes sometimes or pieces of strong white cheese, trying to joke with me in their strange speech. But often my father would argue with them, coming behind them in their rows to point out plants they had damaged or picking half-rotten beans from their crates.

  “Make sure you count all the crates you pick,” he said to me. “Those damn Lebanese will rob you blind if you don’t watch them.”

  After that I stopped accepting the food the women offered me, watching them while they worked hoping to catch one of them out in some deception. But when once I told my father that one of my crates seemed to be missing he was oddly dismissive.

  “Did you see them taking it?” he said.

  “No.”

  “You probably just counted wrong.”

  After the beans there were the greenhouses to be planted and then the tomatoes again, another weeding and then the first pick. The rows there stretched so long I couldn’t finish one on my own in a day. All day long I worked in counterpoint to the sun, measuring out the hours by its slow movement – midmorning break, when Gelsomina would bring out a jug of water, then lunch, then another break in mid-afternoon. The afternoons were the hardest – the other workers would be far ahead of me by that point and I’d be left alone in the silent heat, the sky so endless and blue above me it hurt my eyes to look at it. I couldn’t bear the thought then of all the work that still had to be done; if no one was around I’d stretch out in my row sometimes and close my eyes, letting myself drift a few moments near dreamy sleep. Toward evening I’d get a second wind, knowing the day was almost over, pleased at the long string of red-filled bushels stretching out behind me in the setting sun; and then the dead fatigue at night, back to our house’s strained silence with only sleep to look forward to and then work again.

  Then as the end of summer approached Gelsomina told me she would be going back to the factory soon.

  “Is the baby going away too?” I said.

  “Don’t be an idiot, where is she going to go?”

  “Who’s going to take care of her?”

  “How should I know? Maybe your father’s going to sell her to the gypsies.”

  “Maybe I’ll have to take care of her.”

  “You?” she said. “She’d be dead in a week. Anyway you have to go to school.”

  All the same, in the next days Gelsomina began a sort of clandestine instruction, turning jobs over to me whenever my father was out.

  “You don’t have to be afraid of her. There, like that, keep the pins in your mouth so you have both your hands free.”

  She made me do things over and over till I got them right, standing by unflinching though the baby was crying and I myself was close to tears. Then other times, unpredictably, she’d lose all patience.

  “Dai, you’ll never learn how to do it, idiot. Maledetti both you and your father, who thinks he can leave one baby to look after another.”

  Then at supper one evening she somehow mustered the courage to confront my father.

  “Who’s going to take care of the baby when I go?”

  My father’s eyes lit with what looked like anger but also something else, a sudden flash of interest – it seemed the first time he’d ever really noticed Gelsomina, hadn’t taken her for granted like a part of the house’s furnishings.

  “Che scema,” he said, strangely mocking. “You’ll have your own too, don’t worry about other people’s.”

  Gelsomina seemed put out for the rest of the evening. Then at bedtime she behaved queerly: instead of changing in the bathroom she flicked off the bedroom light and began to undress in front of me. I tried not to watch but she seemed to be willing me to look at her, stood for a moment completely naked in the window’s moonlight like an awkward statue, all stiff angles and knobby protrusions. Her breasts, small and vulnerable and pale, were capped with dark circles the size of 500 lire coins.

  “Do you think I’m beautiful?” she whispered, fierce, daring me to contradict her though I felt only the shame of seeing her like that.

  Headlights flashed past the window: my father, returning from bringing a load into the factory. In an instant Gelsomina was cowering in a corner, arms clutched over her breasts.

  “If you tell anyone about this,” she said, “I’ll cut your little bird off.”

  Three days later Gelsomina had gone, my Aunt Teresa come from Italy to replace her. I knew nothing of her coming until I actually saw her descend from my father’s truck one evening at the back of the house, simply there like an apparition, suitcase in hand, picking her way inexpertly across the courtyard in her high heels; in the moment of recognizing her I had the sense for an instant that I myself had somehow brought her magically into being, that an image from memory had leapt across some chasm to suddenly take solid shape before me.

  “Ciao, Vittorio! Look at the little man you are! Were you waiting up for me? What’s the matter, don’t you remember me? Mario,” turning now to my father, “didn’t you tell Vittorio I was coming? Look at him, you’d think he’d seen a ghost!”

  I had last
seen Tsia Teresa at my grandfather’s funeral service in Castilucci, when she’d been the only one of my father’s siblings who’d come over to greet my mother and me. On the rare occasions when my mother and I had gone to visit my father’s family back then, Tsia Teresa would take me to the square and tease a few lire from the young men at the bar to buy me candy or walk with me in the pastures near town, taking my arm in hers and joking that she was my girlfriend. She’d seemed from a different family then, the coddled youngest daughter, the only one who’d been allowed to go on in school; and she’d been pretty, an angular, sharp-boned prettiness, with her pale skin and her dark eyes, that she’d parade at once brash and awkward before the men in the square like a prize she wasn’t yet sure was hers to award.

  But now her energy had nothing tentative about it, seeming to spread out around her like heat from a fire. In a few minutes she had finished a tour of the house, coming out of my bedroom finally with the baby in her arms.

  “Ma com’è bella! She was lying there wide awake, quiet as a mouse. What’s her name?”

  But no one had thought to name her yet.

  “Mario, don’t tell me you haven’t given her a name! You can’t treat her like an animal.”

  I felt embarrassed for her, thought she had misunderstood how things were with the baby, expected some sign from my father that would put her right; but my father’s silence, this shutting down in him when the baby was around, seemed lost on her.

  “We’ll call her Margherita,” she decided finally. She held the baby close and pronounced the name slowly, offering it to her like a gift. “Mar-ghe-ri-ta. That’s the saint all the mothers pray to when they’re going to have a baby. You say it: Mar-ghe-ri-ta. Look, she’s smiling, see how she understands?”