In a Glass House

by Nino Ricci

  A photo toward the end of the book showed the sleek new public library that had replaced the more august one, an old white-pillared and white-corniced building in stately Renaissance style, torn down to make way for it. It took me an instant to realize what the photo left out: the fountain that the Italians had had constructed in the library’s triangle of front lawn as part of their own observance of the centennial, no doubt not yet begun at the time the photo had been taken though it stood now, just across the road from the new municipal hall, like the town’s centrepiece, perhaps not so much a sign of the Italians’ contribution to the town as simply a monument to their irrefutable presence there. The Lebanese, too, had built their monument, a great shrine to the Virgin that towered over their club at the town’s outskirts, its cone of concrete spiralling up three or four stories to the light-haloed figure at its peak like a beacon at the town gates; and somehow these things seemed part of a different story, discontinuous, as much removed from the carriage works and the fire brigades and the town councils that formed Mersea’s founding mythologies as these had been from the Indian history they’d erased. It was as if a new, more subtle colonization was taking place, self-contained and self-protective, not so much replacing the dynasties of the town’s grey-bearded fathers as slowly rendering them irrelevant.

  Yet the story was not so dissimilar after all: the town’s first settlers had had the same unillustrious roots, had fled the same hardships, been thrust into the same foreignness that they’d forever held themselves hard against; and perhaps the motive to tell it now was also not dissimilar, the desire not so much to reclaim the past as to redeem it, all its meanness and ignominy, to recast it as the ennobled source of the present’s happily-ever-after.

  I met with Professor Mariani in the small, steamy office of the newspaper he ran, Il lavoratore, The Worker. He pored over our list of questions from behind a tiny desk piled high with files and old newspapers, his jacket draped haphazardly over a chair, his tie loose, his sleeves rolled; he seemed a cliché, a caricature of himself, the socialist professor toiling in the dingy office of his socialist paper.

  “This is great, Victor, perfect!” Yet always there was a surprising genuineness in his enthusiasm, a true generosity. “Everything’s there, the whole story, beginning to end, the war, discrimination. Don’t be shy when you ask them these things, dig, dig, get down underneath. Ask them everything, about their mortgages, how much they make, how much they own. That’s the amazing thing, this incredible wealth in a single generation. Do you know how many hundreds of years they lived exactly the same, with their few little plots of land and a few goats?”

  We started our interviews, beginning with the half-dozen or so men who’d come over in the 1920s. They were a mixed lot but I sensed among them all the more fundamental rupture they’d lived through, that in their years alone in Canada they’d been forced to remake themselves in a way that later Italians, more secure in their own little worlds, never had. Yet there was a spirit in them that drew me, an entrepreneurial largesse: most Italians slaved for years simply to pour all their savings in the end into the needless extravagances of their houses, but these earlier ones had been more expansive in their ambitions, had built up businesses, dynasties, enterprises. One had turned his greenhouse farm into a tourist attraction, sold flowers and tropical plants, had a petting zoo with sheep and rabbits and deer, pony rides, a llama, a yak, had built a domed conservatory that served fast food beneath palms and orange trees.

  “People back home, they said it was just bush out here. ‘Don’t go out there,’ they said, ‘you’ll die out there!’ But I had to do it. I’ll tell you the truth, the only reason I stopped here was because it was close to the border, I thought I would sneak across some night the way people did then. But now it’s the other way, the Americans come up here to see my sheep.”

  But then almost at once we ran into a snag: we had assumed from the outset we’d simply transcribe every interview and reuse the cassettes, but five hours into my first transcription I was less than halfway through the tape. I met with Colomba, our liaison with the committee.

  “At this rate we’ll only have a few dozen interviews done by the end of the summer. The best thing would just be to save the cassettes.”

  “There’s no money for that.”

  “What about the club?”

  But I’d sensed from the start that the club wasn’t behind this project.

  “It’s too compli-cate with the club,” she said, “it’s all politics. The board this year, anything Dino Mancini he’s involved in, the board doesn’t like it. Already they say I spend too much time with the book when it’s not the club’s business. I’m not saying your father’s like that, but the other ones.”

  But I hadn’t known that my father was on the board that year.

  “Call the professor,” Colomba said. “Maybe you can just make a summary instead of to write the whole thing.”

  The professor, though, seemed surprised that we hadn’t been planning to save the cassettes all along.

  “Do you realize what a historical record that is? It would be a sacrilege to erase them, it’s absolutely out of the question.”

  “Maybe you should explain that to them.”

  “Okay, tell them this, tell them I can’t possibly do the book without those recordings. It’s true, those are source documents, without them the book would be meaningless.”

  I met with Colomba again.

  “We’ll have to go the club,” she said. “Try to make up some kind of report to give the board, why we need it, how much it’s gonna cost.”

  I prepared a report, careful to stress the professor’s involvement, that we’d be trying to interview all the Italians; there was no subterfuge in what we were doing, were no villains, and yet somehow I’d allowed myself to be pitted directly against my father again, had been drawn in on the wrong side of old rivalries and grudges as if it were ordained that he and I should be perpetually in conflict. But when I brought the matter up with him in private he seemed strangely unaccusing.

  “As far as I’m concerned I don’t care, if you think you need it. But I don’t know that the other guys are going to go along with it.”

  I hadn’t been prepared for this trust in me. For a few minutes there seemed a quiet solidarity between us.

  “Anyway, Dino’s hardly involved in the thing at this point,” I said. “I don’t see what everyone’s got against him.”

  “Oh, you know, all those old fights and things, stupid things, it’s always the people from Castilucci are one way and the ones from Valle del Sole are the other.”

  The board met; the funds were approved. I thought of my father closed up in the boardroom with the others, making my case.

  “So you got your money,” he said afterwards.

  “Yeah. Thanks.”

  And perhaps all along he’d wanted no more than this, the simple chance to show me he believed in me.

  All that remained now was the work, almost anticlimactic after the manoeuvring of getting going. With the time we’d lost there seemed no chance of finishing our interviews by the end of the summer. But Colomba was calm, reassuring.

  “Just do whatever you can, we’ll try again next year to finish it.” Beneath her brisk efficiency there was always this warmth, a kind of shambling physicality like some secret message her body gave. “Anyway you guys did the hardest part, to get it started.”

  We began our interviews in earnest, moving up chronologically by year of entry into the country. I was surprised now at how gruelling each interview seemed, precarious and never quite satisfactory, never quite seeming to break through to the truth of things; and then after the first dozen or so they began to take on a tiresome sameness, as if a single collective mentality governed the whole community, a single story had shaped their experience. Whatever eccentricity there might have been seemed levelled by our recorders – the mood changed at once when they clicked on, people putting on a stiff formality like a mask, distrustfu
l and impressed at this importance we granted them. The recorder itself became a presence, a silent official in the room that we were in collusion against. People would catch my eye sometimes trying to find a way to speak around it, to silently contradict, to seek approval that they’d said the proper thing. More sensitive questions had to be thrown out from the start, on the matter of finances for instance: at the first hint of this subject people seemed to gird themselves as for some expected humiliation, a reserve that struck me as odd at first, a Canadian trait, out of keeping with the ostentation Italians showed in their homes, their weddings, their cars; but the unease was too palpable to be an adopted one, might have gone back to the belief – as perhaps it did with Canadians, for all I knew – that numbering one’s possessions invited fate to take them away.

  There were three distinct groups among the people we interviewed, the molisani, my own group, still known as abruzzesi from when Abruzzo and Molise had formed a single region, and then the ciociari and the Sicilians; and with each year we moved up, the task of interviewing the molisani fell more and more to me since I spoke the dialect, English becoming less common among them the later they’d arrived and standard Italian bringing out in them a second level of strained formality. Even their dialect was so riddled now with unthinking anglicisms that it had perhaps lost any reference point outside the small colony they belonged to in Mersea; I imagined ethnographers in years to come going through our tapes to chart the contours of this new language, respecting it like a relic, but to me it seemed no language at all, merely the tattered, imprecise remnants of one, a gradual dimming of the world that words lit up until all that remained was the pinprick of consciousness their own community formed. But these interviews awakened memory in me like a prod, through the bone-familiar inflections of people’s speech, the lingering Samnite stolidity of their features. The small unease I’d felt since the start of the project grew more insistent: there was always now the moment of recognition, when people drew me like a witness into their pasts.

  “But you were born there, you remember what it was like.”

  But I wasn’t part of their pasts, I wanted to say, not the official ones they constructed for the machine, that left out somewhere the essentials, the flies, the heat, the colour of evening light, some texture of things that could hold what wasn’t spoken between us. Then one evening I interviewed an old couple from Valle del Sole who had come over only a year or so before I had.

  “I remember your mother,” the old man said, so ingenuously that for a moment I was certain he’d made a mistake. “She used to come around to get milk from us when she was little.”

  “It was a shame what happened,” his wife said, “cchella disgrazia. It was hard for your father, too, I remember that, but he did the best he could, no one can say anything against him.”

  I could hardly fathom what they were saying, couldn’t wrap my mind around the thought that all that had happened, the whole horizon of my past, could be reduced in others to such small innocuous observations, that people could be as simple-minded as that, as forgiving. Cchella disgrazia, that misfortune, that disgrace – the two seemed never far from each other in people’s minds, every tragedy a kind of humiliation, a punishment of the gods; and yet they’d brought up the matter so casually, had made it seem such a distant, manageable thing. Perhaps I was the one, after all, who had never seen the matter clearly, continuing to carry the thought of my mother’s crime and death with a seven-year-old’s sense of affliction when for others these things had long been made benign by the passage of time.

  It was just this once that my mother was mentioned to me, though perhaps only because of the distance I instinctively took on now with people who knew me. But all summer long she seemed the spectre that haunted me, the unremembered thing in the memories my interviews stirred, what inserted itself like a shadow between people’s predictable stories and some uncertain admission or truth I wanted to prise from them. Then once, interviewing a young woman just recently brought back from Italy as a bride, some casual gesture of hers suddenly brought my mother back to me with a sharp fleeting clarity, not merely a ghostly notion of what she might have been but someone for an instant as solid and as real as the woman before me in the present moment. And yet what I felt most strongly in that instant was a sense of loss, the sudden realization that all the rest I knew of her, what I’d somehow imagined still lay whole and intact in me, vivid as life itself, had long ago faded away to mere shadow.

  XXV

  As the end of summer approached a small euphoria began to take me over, the relinquishing that came at the end of things. I drove around to my interviews pleased with the world, Mersea seeming spread out sun-filled and simple and benign like a town from some old television show. It was as if I was creating for myself a stranger’s memory of the place: this was what the town was, would have been, without me in it, a place without pain or humiliation or threat.

  One of my final interviews was with an old man from Castilucci who lived with his son along the lakeshore. The house was set back from the road like a Roman villa, and seemed to aspire, with its pillared entrance and arching balustrade, to the pretensions of one; I had seen a hundred variations of it over the summer, this confusion of flourishes, intended somehow to recall Italy though they had nothing to do with the plain stone dwellings people had lived in there. Behind the house long rows of greenhouses stretched toward the lake, blocking a view of it though it seemed held in the sky’s hollowness like a reflection, a breeze wafting in from it laced with subtleties of texture and smell like forgotten words.

  A small boy answered the door, curly-haired and elfin and stern, staring up at me in silent appraisal.

  “Chi è, Car-men?” An older voice from inside, faltering against the truncated English sounds of the boy’s name. “Chi è?”

  “It’s a man.”

  Coming from the boy the judgement sounded oddly solemn and complete.

  The old man had come into view.

  “Vieni, vieni, you must be the one from the book, aren’t you the one I spoke to? Mario’s son, I remember, I used to chase him out of my grapes down in the Valley of the Pigs.”

  Inside, the air was distilled to a comfortable coolness. There was a large family room, surprisingly tasteful and inviting, off the side entrance, but the old man led me instead up a few steps into the kitchen. The boy followed behind, still gazing at me circumspectly, trying to fit me into whatever order of things my arrival had momentarily fractured.

  “Your grandson?” I said.

  “My grandson’s son! They bring him over sometimes to keep me company. We get along well – with my five words of English and his five words of Italian we never argue.”

  He invited me to sit.

  “So. What can I offer you? A beer, a glass of wine?”

  “Please, nothing, thank you.”

  “Well I’ll have one for myself then.”

  He went to the fridge and tremblingly withdrew a bottle of wine from it, tremblingly poured himself a glass.

  “The young and old,” he said, “they always get left behind. One in a crib and the other in a casket. My son already bought a place for me, up there on the highway so I can see the lake. Just next to my wife. She died five years ago now, maybe you remember the funeral. Your father was there.”

  He was dressed as my grandfather might have been for a trip to Di Lucci’s bar, cuffed corduroy trousers wrinkled tight at the waist by his belt and a white dress shirt whose sleeves were held up by silver armbands, his body shrunken and stooped with age but seeming to hold in itself an old dignity like a memory. But there amidst the kitchen’s gleaming modernity he appeared an anachronism, made merely quaint, nothing in his surroundings reflecting back who he was. Little Carmen, who’d retreated to the front entrance hall, seated on the marble floor there amidst a cornucopia of toys, at home again and content, would never know this man: there in his plenty he seemed the final oblivion in a slow forgetting, taking this world, this house, this
luxury, utterly for granted.

  I began to set up my recorder.

  “Do you mind if I use this?”

  “Suit yourself. The truth is the truth, whether you record it or not it doesn’t make any difference.”

  It came out that he and one of his sons had lived in Abyssinia briefly in the thirties, settling there after the Italian conquest.

  “Not that I wanted to go off into the bush, mind you, I wanted to go to America like everyone else. But in those days you couldn’t even cross the road without the government’s permission, so I said I’d go wherever they sent me. Then we found out the land they’d given us was even worse than what we’d left behind.”

  I told him about my own upcoming trip to Africa.

  “Well, maybe for a young man like yourself it’s all right. But I already had one toe in the grave by the time I got there, I had nothing but bad luck there from the start. We farmed a bit, did this and that, tried to send a little money home; but then the war started up again and my son was killed. I could understand that, he was a soldier. But my other son, my youngest, when I came back to Italy, that was hard for me. It was a little thing – some of the boys found a plane that had fallen and started to play with the guns, and a bullet got him. I thought I couldn’t go on after that. But it was hard for everyone then.”