by Nino Ricci
But Belli seemed embarrassed less for himself than for my father.
“Dai, Mario, it’s nothing, we can cut a window in there in five minutes,” he said quickly, then issued terse instructions to his men in a clipped, precise English.
“He hasn’t changed a bit,” I heard one of the men say afterwards. “I still remember the fights he used to have with his father, you could hear them half way across the valley.”
But it struck me as strange that people talked about my father’s temper as if it defined him, reduced him to it when what seemed more important, more true, was the shame that came over him afterwards, the way now, for instance, he avoided the work site for several days and spoke to Belli with a gloomy thick-tongued awkwardness.
But then as the work progressed some weight seemed to lift from him. It was a gradual thing, like the slow, unthinking relief of escaping a punishment, the realization that nothing would go wrong, that he had called this new work into being and could allow himself now to take pleasure in it. I noticed a new deference in the workers, the subtle acknowledgement of his enterprise, then the way my father responded to it with an almost tangible warmth, a bodily ease like the first pleasant relinquishment of drunkenness. It was as if some sense of well-being that had always lain just beneath the surface of him had finally reached the moment of its incarnation. Yet something seemed dulled in him as well, some perceptiveness: I had the sense that he’d ceased to see the world clearly, could only project himself onto it, had become with his too-loud voice and his too-hard laughter as blind and self-willed as Tsi’Umberto. I was surprised that others were taken in by him, missed this falseness, this easy forgetting of what he had been, something I myself couldn’t forgive in him.
When the main structure of the boiler room was nearly complete, the large work crews gave way to groups of two or three, carpenters, plumbers, electricians. In the sudden lull of activity our world seemed to become small again, unpeopled, all our projects resolving themselves finally into merely private things; and I was secretly pleased then to see a tension arising between my father and uncle, their exchanges marked more and more by the familiar parsimoniousness of emotion, by their unthinking need to blame, to contradict, to dismiss, to hold themselves forever hard against the other as against some uncertain insult or threat. Already the deforming pressure of habit was weighing down on us again, the lines being drawn, something in me feeling vindicated in this reversion as though it were my deep monstrous wish now to see our family destroyed, to watch its slow fuse burn to some pure and final violence.
To help with the work on the greenhouses we’d rehired Vito, the Portuguese man who had worked for us a few years before. The others condescended to him, seeming to see in him merely the person he presented himself as, still unmarried after all these years, still working his seasonal odd jobs, still speaking his rapid mix of English and Italian and Portuguese. But there was more to him, what he saw, what he held back, the way he worked himself invisibly around our moods and schisms. He’d told my father about a woman, Maria, whom he wanted to bring over from Portugal to marry, about a greenhouse farm on the 4th Concession he hoped to buy; and though he’d joke with my father about these plans as if he himself didn’t take himself seriously, when the two of us were working alone together he’d talk about the future sometimes with such fond boyish hope that I knew he held a vision of it whole and clear in his mind, that for all his rambling and clowning he was possessed finally of a sure, quiet strength of purpose.
He drove a car now, a low-slung Impala that sat back on its rear axle like a great lizard sunning itself. After work he’d let me drive it from time to time, never seeming to imagine there was anything reckless in this, as if his simply wanting me to learn, expecting me to, ensured that I would; and sometimes he’d lean back into the room-sized intimacy of the front seat to roll a cigarette or veer off into some anecdote as if he’d forgotten entirely that he was teaching me, that I was merely a child, the two of us rolling up and down the concession roads then like travellers, through a landscape made strange by the falling dark. There was always the instant pulling away from a stop that seemed a kind of magic, the surge of the engine as I eased my foot down on the accelerator and then the car’s slow heaviness giving way finally to effortless, weightless flight.
It was Vito who discovered one day while we were weeding tomatoes in the back field what must have been the wasting remnant of Lassie’s carcass, impressing a hollow for itself amidst a patch of nettles and Queen Anne’s lace like something that had stretched out secretly in a field to sleep. Vito grimaced at the sight of it as at some unexpected ill fortune.
“I think it’s the dog my father shot,” I said. “Because it used to kill the chickens.”
But Vito didn’t feel it was right to leave the corpse there in the weeds, said it was bad luck. He sent me up to the barn for a spade, and when he’d dug a makeshift grave and buried the corpse in it he made me scratch Lassie’s name across the humped surface of it.
“But the rain will just wash it away,” I said.
“It doesn’t matter,” he said, made mysterious now with his peculiar rites, “the dirt will remember.”
My father and I came home from church one Sunday to find an unfamiliar car in the courtyard. There was a man sitting waiting at our kitchen table, tired, middle-aged, vaguely familiar. When my father caught sight of him from the doorway he nodded darkly and stepped outside again, the screen door banging behind him.
Aunt Teresa had set out a cup of coffee, stood silent against the kitchen counter.
“Hello, Vittorio,” the man said, sombre, but speaking as if no chasm of years had ever separated us. I strained to remember what he was to me: one of my mother’s cousins, a twin, Virginio or Pastore, I didn’t know which. I’d never seen him in Canada, hadn’t even known that he’d come.
I stood across the table from him, not knowing if I should kiss him in greeting.
“È morto nonnote,” he said finally.
My grandfather. I tried to call up an image of him, to feel now the news of his death, could remember only his narrow room, his pale withered limbs. His death seemed an anachronism, unduly delayed, the abstraction of an absence already long complete. I bowed my head, trying to feign emotion, afraid of betraying my lack of it.
But when my cousin spoke again it was to Aunt Teresa.
“They said there were some things in the will, for Vittorio, some property –”
I thought of the medals my grandfather had given me: I’d misplaced them years before, had hidden them away at some point in Aunt Teresa’s dresser but then had lost all track of them.
“You can’t really expect him to go back for a few acres of vineyards,” my aunt said, oddly peremptory. But then, relenting: “Anyway we can look after these things later, now isn’t the time.”
But no mention was made to me afterwards of my grandfather’s death; there was only the others’ silent deference to me, the solemnity it forced on me for a time, not so different finally from my usual exclusion from things. And yet his death remained with me, the irreducible lump of it: I seemed dirtied by it somehow, by its imperfection, the insufficiency of my response. I thought of the funerals in Valle del Sole, the keening processions to the grave, the desolation of them, and felt chilled somehow to think of the life still going on there without me.
The summer rolled on toward its end. The new greenhouses had taken skeletal form, the trusses raised and Rocco and Domenic and Vito and me working in teams to clamp the rafters in place, making our way like tree animals through a glinting angular forest of purlins and braces and girders; the boiler room, cavernous and imposing, was nearly complete, all straight lines and concrete and steel, a great Cleaver Brooks boiler, a massive cylinder of gun-metal blue, presiding over it like its god. Yet oddly now when the work was nearly done it seemed instead most provisional, still the hills of dirt to be levelled, the greenhouse roofs to be covered, the steam pipes to be laid; and then all the small intricat
e work to be done, the starting from scratch, and beyond that only endless work still. It would go on like that, year after year, and this would be our lives; already Tsi’Umberto had decided Rocco wouldn’t be returning to school in the fall, drawing him into this vortex as its next logical victim.
Sunday afternoons I roamed the farm sometimes in aimless exploration. Searching once amidst the rubble that had been dumped down the bank of the pond from our old boiler room I discovered the remnants of the desk that had sat in my father’s office, jammed beneath a ragged section of scorched wall and a slab of uprooted concrete floor. One side of it was charred and smashed but the other was almost intact, the top warped and discoloured but showing familiar scratches and stains, the drawers battered but whole and in place in their slots. The top one opened easily though it seemed a tiny storm had whipped through it, its inside a chaos of pens and old fuses and swollen envelopes and curled stamps; at the back still sat the pile of photographs Gelsomina and I had once looked through, but ruined now, clotted into an uneven lump as if they’d remained fixed as we had left them years before.
The bottom drawer, a double one, was locked or jammed shut, refusing to yield. I banged at the frame around it with a chunk of concrete to free it, then realized I had only to pull out the drawer above to be able to reach into it. Inside, jumbled into a heap, were a dozen or so bundles of paper tied round with string, my father’s erratic system of filing; like the photos they’d been reduced to a solid mass, heavy and mildewed with moisture. I began to sort through them, coming at the bottom to a smaller bundle of what seemed like letters. As I peeled away its rotting outer layers I discovered an old Italian stamp decaying on an envelope’s corner and then the ghost of a familiar script, urging memory on me like a smell: my mother’s script, its long spidery loops, though in the instant I recognized it it seemed to lose all its nuance, become only itself, these pale watery scrawls of fading ink on rotting paper.
I brought the letters home. They were too damp for me to be able to pull the envelopes safely apart, to pry out from them whatever thin slips of paper might be folded inside. But instead of leaving them out in the open air to dry I hid them in a shoebox that I then tucked into a box of old clothes at the back of my closet. For several days the thought of them lingered at the edges of my awareness like some put-off obligation: they seemed a kind of wealth I’d accumulated but that I didn’t know how to spend. Then when finally I took them out again, my mind strangely blank, empty of expectation, they remained clotted still with damp; I could make out only the blurred faces here and there of envelopes, my father’s name on them and his old address, R. R. 1, the careful block capitals of CANADA at the bottom. But I couldn’t attach these things to a person, to a hand writing them out, to a room and a place in the past where it may have been possible to conceive them.
I hid the letters away again, thinking I might dry them in the oven at some point when my father and aunt were out. But later that week I noticed that Rita’s remaining clothes had been taken out of the closet, then that the box of old clothes at the back had been taken as well.
“It was just rags,” Aunt Teresa said when I asked about it. “I put them in the trunk in the basement.”
I found the clothes box empty beside the trunk, found the clothes piled neatly inside, but no shoebox.
“There was another box,” I said. “With papers.”
“Oh, that,” my aunt said, suspiciously casual. “I threw them out, I thought they were garbage.”
She said she couldn’t remember where she’d thrown them. I looked for them in the garbage pit between the apple trees, then in the drum nearby where we put garbage to burn, then along the bank of the pond. But my search for them lacked conviction: I felt only the guilty relief of being free of them, of their uncertain burden, was left again with the sense that something crucial was missing in me, normal human emotion, the way I reacted to things with only this emptiness at the centre of me.
I dreamt sometimes of Rita. She appeared obliquely, palely inert, as if under water or under glass, an icon the dreams seemed to circle but not involve. I dreamt of her once in a field, simply there at a distance: I was picking some fruit, yellowish-orange, pulpy and bloated and frail, found a robin’s nest under a vine, its still-warm pastel-blue eggs. I dreamt of her on a beach, for once simply a child like any other, turned from her imagining the shore would taper off to a trailing spit though it merely went on and on without end. When I awoke from these dreams I’d feel a lingering sense of incompletion, of some task not attended to, some duty not fulfilled. But then in the light of day I felt only a blankness where the thought of Rita should have been, couldn’t have called up now any certain feeling for her except the familiar deadness in me, and beneath that the small guilty thought that her leaving us was simply what I’d wished for all along.
XII
I entered into high school as into a limbo, no sudden making over there as I’d hoped, no stepping out of the darkness I’d fallen into, merely a sort of perpetual furtive waiting without promise or purpose. The school, a citadel of pink brick amidst the old stone and clapboard homes of Talbot West, seemed a labyrinth after St. Michael’s, with its wings and outbuildings, its dizzying symmetry, its unfixed world, the thousand nameless faces that moved unconnected through its dozen halls. I had dreams of wandering lost in it, of being late for some crucial test and then discovering it was in a language I couldn’t decipher, all senseless hieroglyphs and scrawls.
What friendships I’d had at St. Michael’s seemed to fall away. It was the disconnectedness I couldn’t bear, being with people yet having nothing to say to them, not finding the simplest word that was true, exposed to them then in their uncertain threat. There were the other Italians at the school, the shadowy self-contained world they formed, Domenic and his friends from St. Michael’s, others from Our Blessed Virgin, lingering in their groups in the high-ceilinged gloom of the technical wing. But with them it was the same, whatever relationship I had with them through the various Italian gatherings over the years seeming somehow suspended at school, only the dark nod of recognition if we passed each other and then we moved on. I began to search out circuitous routes from class to class to avoid the groups that formed outside classroom doorways between periods; I took to sitting alone during lunch. In the minutes then that I sat in hunched silence over my meal the cafeteria took on a painful clarity, every sound and image magnified, the clatter of plates, the bright flash of a dress or blouse, the dull, excruciating monotone of conversation; and then afterwards there was the great dead stretch of time to fill before the next period. I took to closing myself in a cubicle in the washroom to await the bell, sat staring at its scratched walls trying to blot out my thoughts, be nothing, not wanting the time I spent there, the shame of it, to be part of any memory of myself. Groups of boys would filter in, joking, mock-wrestling, thin slices of them flickering past the door slits.
“That kid must be a regular,” one said once, and stooped suddenly as if to look under my door.
Then two boys from one of my classes began to be friendly with me, sitting beside me one day at lunch, seeming to pick me out in the room like some project they’d decided to take on. But in the aloneness I’d retreated into by then my first response was only a resistance at their intrusion, at having to work now to present some acceptable version of myself.
“It must get kind of lonely sitting by yourself every day.”
“It’s all right I guess.”
Already they seemed diminished somehow, coming to me when my humiliation lay so plain on me; and each persistence in them, their seeking me out between classes, their coming over every day now at lunch, seemed to diminish them further. There was an innocence to them that made me feel I had to protect them from me somehow, to hide at all costs who I was, how I saw them. This was true especially of one of them, Terry, with his blind too-insistent good nature, his corny humour like a family sitcom’s, his body bulging girlishly at his thighs to give him a slightly r
idiculous air. The other, Mark, stylishly long-haired and slender and tall, was more canny, bland and unblemished like some new thing still fresh from its wrappings but seeming able to shift to fit in with whomever he was with as if he had quietly, undetectably willed his normalcy into being; and there was something familiar in this that made me feel sometimes that I was merely his deformed underside, capable perhaps of some simple transformation that would make me as flawless as he was, as inconspicuous.
The two of them formed part of a group called the One Way Challenge. I went along with them to one of the meetings, had got the sense from their explanations of a social club of some sort but then had to grope as the meeting unfolded to find what focus held it together, the oddly private revelations, the oblique, sudden references to religion and Christ. Four or five people spoke in turn, volunteering themselves at once tentative and sure, a girl who talked about the death of her father, a boy who’d spent two years in reform school. The last to speak, an older boy, his neck mottled with blood-coloured blotches like hickeys, spoke about a group he’d belonged to when he’d lived up north.
“We used to get drunk or stoned and then sit around in a circle staring at a candle. After a while you’d forget about everything except the flame, that’s all you’d have in your mind, and the feeling would get so strong you couldn’t take your eyes away even if you wanted to. I guess it shows how powerful Satan can be when you let yourself be taken in by him.”
But in each case the stories were told in tones so plain and matter-of-fact and the group was so staid in its response, so quietly accepting, that I thought I’d misunderstood them, couldn’t reconcile their easy explaining away with what seemed the cryptic underside of things that had been revealed in them, what one might imagine existing but never actually being talked about or lived through.
Within a few weeks I’d begun to attend these meetings regularly. It was never clear to me what had drawn me into them, perhaps the uncertain allure of those first stories I’d heard, the hope of crossing over into their strange, familiar territory, perhaps simply the petty fear of not going along with Terry and Mark, of losing them, of having nothing else to fill the blank space my life seemed then. But even when the meetings had become predictable, suspect, the testimonials and their inevitable conclusion, the acceptance of Christ, even when the rebellion at this bright, forced certainty had grown large in me, still something brought me back to them. It struck me how wilful and hard-won religion seemed in these meetings, how transforming, wasn’t merely a given as it had always been in my life, pervasive and unquestioned as air – I felt something truthful in this, defiant, the group of us seeming hidden away in our upstairs classroom like early Christians in the catacombs.