by Nino Ricci
But my father seemed unwilling to recover from the first drugged stupor of his operation, remaining for days in the same state of restless half-sleep, fading in and out of awareness and mumbling odd imprecations like someone gripped in the delirium of a fever. Aunt Teresa condescended to him as to a child, impatient, overloud.
“What, Mario, what is it?”
He complained vaguely of headaches, of stomach pains; then when he was taken off his intravenous he refused to eat, and had to be put on it again. As his stay in hospital dragged on a quality of shame began to attach to it, our visits growing increasingly more strained and subdued. Nurses would come by to check on him, administering pills and making quick notations on the clipboard that hung at the foot of his bed, their grim smiles revealing nothing.
“Just something to help him sleep.”
“It’s the same story,” Aunt Teresa said. “The doctor says there’s nothing wrong, who knows what to believe.”
In the meantime we’d begun to have problems in the greenhouses. Some of the plants had contracted mosaic disease – Tsi’Alfredo noticed a patch of it when he came by one day, the upper leaves of half a dozen or so plants coming up gnarled and rough like lizards’ skin. Tsi’Alfredo was livid.
“Is it possible no one noticed anything till now? You’ve probably spread it to half the crop already.”
Other patches began to appear, small islands of plants here and there with heads stunted as if by frost. We had to mark off the infected areas and wash our hands and change our clothes after we worked in them. Since the disease affected only new growth it could be checked by clipping the heads off infected plants, thereby saving at least the few sets of fruit the plants had already put out. But every day new cases appeared, within a couple of weeks the greenhouses become a disconcerting patchwork of gaps as the healthy plants dwarfed the diseased ones. Our work was marked by a growing sense of futility: with no new growth to keep them thriving the infected plants had soon begun to look sickly and old, their remaining fruit maturing wrinkled and small and our production already beginning to fall off though we were not yet in mid-season.
It was over a month after his operation before my father returned home. He was visibly shrunken, seemed to have shed a layer of himself like a suit of clothes. For several days he stayed in the house, still in a fog, shuffling out stoop-shouldered to the sink to take a handful of coloured pills, shuffling back to his room. Then the Saturday after his return he finally came out to work.
“What happened with those plants?” But he’d remained dim and morose with fatigue like someone resisting being roused from sleep.
“Disease,” Aunt Teresa said. “You can see for yourself.”
And afterwards she had to sort through the tomatoes he’d picked to remove those he’d picked too green.
Sunday morning he prepared for church. A look passed between us, seeming to contain in it his sulky determination that things would go on as before, my visits to the Amhersts, his martyr’s hurt; yet the whole time of his illness I’d not been to see them, felt the resistance rise in me now at this drugged stubbornness in him, at being forced to choose.
He waited for me in the car while I finished dressing. The instant we’d set out I could see he shouldn’t be driving, the whole of him seeming mired in a dreamy slow-limbed torpor. Yet somehow I couldn’t bring myself to stop him, to try to reach him, took instead a strange angry pleasure at the danger he was exposing us to. Then at the town’s four corners he failed to stop at the light.
“Papà, there’s a car –”
We were into the intersection. There was a screech of tires, a horn, a dark blur of motion beyond my father’s window; and then miraculously my father had wheeled through to the cross-street and pulled to a stop at the curb. The other car was sitting in the middle of the intersection, aslant from its sudden stop, the driver already jumped from it and coming toward us red-faced and seething. But the sight of my father seemed to sour his anger.
“Asshole!” he shouted out, then climbed back into his car and sped away.
The whole thing was over in a matter of seconds, and in a minute more the few other cars that might have seen what had happened had driven on their way and the intersection had assumed again its Sunday languor; but in the becalmed silence that opened up then, my father and I still stalled there at the curbside, my heart still pounding, it seemed we’d just come through some prolonged ordeal, a chasm dividing the moment when the crash had seemed inevitable, the terror and the hope then that my father would die, from this awkward moment afterwards.
“I guess I better drive,” I said finally.
I came round to the driver’s side. My father had slid across to slouch against the other door; with the movement his coat had hiked up his back like a child’s. He shifted beside me as I moved the mirrors and the seat, trying to arrange himself, an instant’s painful exertion.
“Maybe you should just turn around and go home,” he said. “You can go back on your own after.”
He seemed as close as he’d ever come to asking me to stop seeing the Amhersts.
“It doesn’t matter,” I said.
For a moment some more certain concession seemed possible, some way of reaching him that would take away from him the guilt of the visits I wouldn’t make, make a gift of them to him; but finally I simply swung onto the road in silence, turning up the next sidestreet to circle toward home.
XV
With the end of my visits to the Amhersts my father and I appeared to reach the point of a final silence between us. Some juncture had been crossed like the moment that passed between strangers when an overture was no longer possible; and then the longer the silence went on the more unbridgeable it seemed. Days went by, then weeks, when not so much as a word passed between us: it was as if we’d had a language once that had been slowly withdrawn from us to its last syllable, had left us now with only the animal sensing of impression and mood.
At school I’d become friends with a Sicilian, Vince Lasala. He’d come to Canada around the same time as I had, and had remained, like me, a year behind in school. At first he had played up these similarities with a kind of public camaraderie that seemed intended less to join us than to measure out some distance between us; yet in the end we’d become friends exactly through the pretence of that first forced gregariousness, through my going along with it till we’d slowly been propelled by it into the habit of each other’s company. Afterwards, when things were more taken for granted between us, this exaggerated Italianness began to seem merely a kind of mask he wore, exploiting it with his mafia jokes, his Sicilian swear words, but then quietly contemptuous when people were taken in by it. I walked home with him sometimes after school, expecting at first to discover some mark there of his being Sicilian, some cruder or more exotic version of Italianness, but finding instead a sedateness, his house nestled, with its low, brick modernity, its carpeted rooms and back patio, amidst a dozen like it in the quiet green of his subdivision, always the peculiar air of leisure there that came from not living on a farm. Sometimes I’d linger in his living room with a beer until it was too late to go back to school for the bus and I’d have to wait for Vince’s father to return from the fishery with the car, seeming then to try on Vince’s home like some more comfortable suit of clothes before returning to my own.
Weekends we went out with Vince’s friend Tony Peralta. I kept awaiting some change in my life then, some sudden, belated entry into adolescence; but our evenings quickly took on a predictable sameness, the endless cruising and cigarettes, the pinball games, the parties we crashed at the Italian club. For the first while Vince reserved a special deference for me, introducing me to the other friends of his we ran into like a new, honoured acquaintance. But then more and more it began to seem that both Tony and I were merely a sort of audience to him, to his small successes at the arcade, impressive and poised when his turn came to play, quietly conscious of seeming better than we were if others were watching, to his long aimless
conversations with other friends at the club while Tony and I stood by getting silently drunk. Sometimes he danced, ungainly and stiff with his narrow, immigrant’s body but still keeping up a kind of dignity, in the slower ones putting a hand on the small of the girl’s back and casually drawing her to him, now and then her smile opening over his shoulder at some comment he’d made in their whispering closeness. Tony and I would stand hardly speaking at the edge of the dance floor then like Vince’s attendants, me wondering at the ungrudging way Tony simply took Vince for granted, at this untroubled silence in him when we were left alone. At school sometimes Tony would pass me in the hall with merely a nod and a crooked half-smile as if in acknowledgement of some unspoken complicity between us, the only sign in him then of all the wasted hours in which our friendship with Vince had forced us together.
I grew to hate these evenings, their monotony, their frustrated expectation, the deadness in me when I was home again and in bed, numbed from liquor and cigarettes, the sense I had then that I’d found nothing else in my life to put against its other emptinesses. But nights when neither Vince nor I could get a car, or when Vince didn’t call, there’d be his stories to put up with on Monday, the other friends he and Tony had gone out with, the sense that his real life always happened apart from me.
“I thought about calling you, eh, but it was kind of a last-minute thing.”
I saw through these stories he’d have ready and not, saw how even our own evenings out seemed unrecognizable in his retelling of them, in the aura of significance he’d imbue them with. Yet still I felt a kind of rage at my exclusion, at his power to wound me when I wanted to think of myself as somehow his better.
We spent our lunch hours at the arcade. At that time of day it was nearly deserted, sometimes only the two of us there with the run of the machines, George, the Portuguese man who looked after it, cooking up greasy hamburgers for our lunch on his tiny grill while his attention flitted to the small television he kept near the cash.
“You boys, you’re good boys, you never make any trouble for me.”
Without other people around Vince seemed diminished somehow, all his other friends, his other possibilities, coming down then to only the two of us, our friendship seeming then merely a kind of shared aloneness, promising nothing more than itself, the cigarettes we shared, the laconic conversations, the mute tense endless games of pinball. Yet there was a sort of intimacy in these lunch-hour excursions, the silent walks together down the gloomy sidestreet that led from the school, the air sickly sweet with the smell our cigarettes made in the cold, the sense the arcade gave in its dingy spareness of a covert delinquency, of a world set apart from the normal routine of our lives. Something fell away from us then, our tangled need to best one another, the two of us together in our small common enterprise while George sat hunched shadowy in the background before his TV like our silent guardian. What I felt most then was simply the fear that I disappointed Vince somehow, not casual enough, not sure, not able to enter the world of unthinking poise he seemed to inhabit; but afterwards he’d still find stories to tell of our time together, not lies so much as a subtle heightening, the different mood things seemed to have happened in, perhaps how he really saw things though nothing we did then ever seemed to me much more than simply killing time.
In the spring the arcade grew more popular, groups of boys beginning to drift in from the high school, slowly taking it over with their noisy playing and talk. Some understanding between Vince and me seemed to break, Vince growing canny again, conscious once more of an audience, always finding his subtle means of drawing attention to himself, seeming to create at each instant the person he wanted to be seen as. His confidence then was like a weapon, something I could only stand in the shadow of, like his stories a kind of pretence yet still working for him, winning people over, enviable not so much for its truth as for his ability to carry it off.
At some point Johnny Elias began to come into the arcade, my old nemesis from St. Michael’s, he and his friends playing pool for four dollars a game at the table at back, Johnny dressed always in the same slim jeans and the same boots with their three-inch heels, his hair grown out to an Afro now to crown the long lean trunk of his body like an exotic bush.
“Vic-tore, my son, how’s the zubbrah.”
But he seemed to invest no special energy in me, only his usual offhand indifference.
He came over once after he’d finished a game to where Vince and I were playing pinball, casual, seeking distraction, propping his pool cue against a machine to watch me play.
“Victor, my boy, you’ve gotta put more English on the ball.” Almost friendly, paternal. But he began to jiggle the machine as I played, trying to force the ball up to the extra-points hole at the top.
“Come on, Vic, push it up there.”
The ball dropped in.
“All right, rack ’em up there, buddy,” Vince said.
The scoreboard clicked upward and the ball popped back into play, Johnny beginning to work the machine again.
“Just leave it,” I said.
“Come on, buddy, we’re hot.”
It seemed for an instant that things could go either way, that if I could just bring myself to go along then what was happening could almost pass as if there were no humiliation in it.
“I said just leave it.”
I’d made the choice; Johnny gave the machine a final shove and tilted it.
“Too bad, my son, game over.”
Vince was still standing to one side of me. I expected some sign from him but he seemed perfectly neutral, unreadable.
“Fucking asshole,” I said, under my breath.
“Eh, buddy?” Johnny flicked the back of his hand hard against my cheek. “Did you say something?”
I was trapped now, wished for some easy return to the dull normalcy of a few moments before but there was no going back.
“Tell me again what you said, buddy, I didn’t hear you.”
“Asshole,” I said.
He shoved me hard against the corner of a machine, my back crunching up against metal. But my eye had gone to his pool cue: I reached for it and wrapped my hands around it, all instinct suddenly, swung out. For an instant as the cue arced toward him, sank finally into the cushion of his hair as he tried to duck away from it, I felt a delicious power surge in me, the fullness of my anger, its drunken single-mindedness. But then the cue hit bone and all my will to fight seemed to drain from me like some stranger that had fled, and it was a kind of surprise afterwards to see Johnny loom up still large with his resolve, still intent on prosecuting this violence I’d given licence to by striking him. In an instant his foot had swung up hard into my groin; then the searing pain, its slow sudden blooming like an explosion in me. I fell, screaming perhaps, my mind emptied, felt another blow on my face like a dull aftershock and then voices, Vince’s and Johnny’s, George’s shouts.
“Bums! Get out of here, all of you. Like animals!”
Afterwards I found myself sitting on the toilet in the arcade’s tiny washroom, still dazed with the memory of pain. Vince was holding a bloodied paper towel to my nose, a warm trickle seeping into it almost pleasant somehow, reassuring.
“You all right?”
It took an instant to find my voice.
“I think so.”
“I guess you must’ve passed out.”
I took the towel from him and we remained a few moments in awkward silence, crammed close in the washroom’s smallness.
“Fucking asshole,” Vince said finally. “You got him good, though, that first hit.”
We skipped class for the rest of the day, wandering into town through spring sun and then down greening sidestreets to the lake. What had happened seemed strangely distant already, a kind of role I’d played, my mind emptied now as after a fever. I wanted only to guard the stillness in me, felt far from any sense of grievance or hurt but was content to let my silence encourage Vince’s solicitude.
“In Italy the water wou
ld be hot enough to swim in by now,” he said. It was the first time Italy had come up like this between us, had assumed a physical presence and shape. “Our place was right by the beach, eh – the people who stayed are making a shit-load now from the tourists, my old man would be rolling in it by now if we’d stayed there.”
I had an image of his village in Sicily, the fishing boats and narrow streets, the stone houses rolling down to the sea, of some other person he might have been there if he’d stayed, the incarnation somehow of his village’s sun-bleached familiarity.
“It was different there,” he added strangely. “Everyone knew each other. Here they’re just in their own little groups.”
We were walking along the beach, picking our way through the winter flotsam built up there, the reeds and driftwood and rotting fish. For an instant a single mood seemed to wash over us, pull back.
“I guess we better get going,” Vince said finally.
And it was only now that I began to regret my fight, what it would cost me, that our friendship wouldn’t be strong enough to erase the residue it would leave between us after these moments of grace though Vince was merely alone and vulnerable like I was, trying to make his own way.
It was odd that for all the hours Vince and I spent together in the elusive pursuit of our adolescence the times that most lingered with me were the ones at his home, after school or invited in if I came to pick him up for an evening out, left then with a beer to wait while he dressed, or simply sitting with him for a time in the placid intimacy of his living room. Some distance between us seemed clearer then, what our obligations were, what respect we owed each other; and I’d feel a quiet status settle around me there as a guest, his parents and brothers soberly attentive in the background, the whole house seeming to adjust itself to allow me a place in it. A different person came out in Vince then, adult, secure in his role, the eldest son, exercising an unthinking authority over his brothers, left free to smoke in the house; he might have been some aging gentleman inviting me into his home, his life, like a cherished friend, saying come, come, all things are possible between us here. What seemed to wreck us in the end was the world, our need to fit it, what we sought there and what we missed in the seeking, who we might have been to each other if we could have allowed in ourselves some unfolding of what seemed merely a waiting, these islanded moments alone, their small respectful calm.