by Nino Ricci
I signed documents and waivers; I opened a current account; I sorted my father’s papers, what ought to be kept, what could be destroyed. Then finally nothing remained to be done: there was only my father’s absence, my life, the freedom stretching before me blank as the sea.
XXXIII
I prepared for my departure, going through the house to shore up what was mine. Boxes of my things had begun to arrive from Nigeria, sporadically, one or two every week; I thought of Richard carefully packing them in the mouldy damp of my house at the edge of the bush, placing this thing here, that knick-knack, these books. He’d included things that weren’t mine, that I’d found in the house when I’d arrived; but there were a few I wasn’t sure of, an old tie-dyed shirt, a Hemingway reader, had to search my mind to place them as if reconstructing out of arte-facts some other person I’d once been.
I went through my father’s belongings. He’d had so little finally, so little that was truly his, his clothes, an electric razor, an old watch. I found a shoebox in a drawer in his bedroom filled with black-bordered funeral cards, small glossy sheets with prayers on one side and grainy photos on the other. There was some jewellery there, a gold chain and cross, two rings, one an unadorned gold band – his wedding ring. I tried it, found a finger it fit and left it there.
I went down to the pond, for the first time. There was no sign there of anything, of any breach, the banks grown thick with saplings and weeds, the water thick with algae. I threw a stone and the algae briefly retreated to let it through and then reformed, the water heaving an instant beneath its blanket of green, then stilled.
The torpor among us that had followed my father’s death had begun to pass. Rocco, I found out, had been engaged for some time to a local Italian girl; the wedding had been put off but now already quiet plans were being made again, a date chosen, bridesmaids and ushers picked out. To allow them to live in our old house after the marriage Aunt Teresa decided to continue on with a more modest version of the new one for herself; and already it seemed that the family had begun to shift to accommodate my father’s absence, to fold themselves over it. There was no one to mourn him really, no one whose world had crumbled with his death – without the blemish of him the aspect our family presented seemed more one of soundness than of affliction. I thought of Tsi’Umberto’s daughter Flora, in teachers’ college now, a young woman, affable and respectful, with her mother’s dark heaviness but attractive in her way, the attractiveness of being unremarkable: she seemed such a miracle now though I’d so long disliked her, content and unrebellious and on her path, the ideal immigrant’s child. There was no explaining her, how she’d emerged from our family so undamaged by it, become truly her namesake, the flower now of what had appeared merely a slow desolation.
I left home for Toronto in the last week of August, a Sunday, my birthday, anxious now simply to be alone again, to be away. I was to take my father’s car: in the contamination of his death it had sat in the garage unused the whole summer. I felt the ghost of him still there when I got into it in the position of mirrors, of the seat, the place arranged to hold him, felt a strange sensation as I altered things as if erasing him.
Then I had loaded my few belongings and was gone. Home, the farm, fell away in the anonymity of the road, its first pleasant moments of suspension when it seemed possible never to have to arrive. It was a brilliant day, the air crisped with the intimation of autumn, in its glassy clarity the landscape seeming charmed, the tidy white farmhouses, the silos and fields, the clusters of trees in the distance. As a child, remembering some story I’d heard, I’d sometimes imagined those endless clusters of trees as flying islands, wondrous and grand, quietly touched down there in that flat countryside in their beckoning magic; things then had still harboured secrets about themselves, like the first strangeness of my father’s farm, the promise and the threat of unknown things before they turned mundane.
Past Chatham I saw an amazing thing, fantastic like some trick of sunlight: a field full of hot-air balloons, dozens of them, blooming in the distance like a strange fairy-tale crop, still and multicoloured and huge. I pulled over to the shoulder, still uncertain whether I’d understood – some sort of festival seemed to be in progress, the field alive with movement, cars and concessions, people, strains of music. Then as I watched, the balloons began to lift off, one or two at first like tests and then more, a slow growing flurry of them, elephantine and graceful, drifting their weightless way with a languorous patience, goodbye, goodbye, until they filled the horizon. For an instant it seemed the world could not bear the magnificence of them, must suddenly make itself over, become childlike and bright and unreal as they were to hold them; and then slowly they began to disperse and fade, small dots of colour like candy against the realer, stranger hue of the sky.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
For their contributions to this book I am grateful to the following: Lee Robinson, for her ongoing advice and encouragement; Janet Irving and Peter Robinson, for their patience and support; Peter Day, Jan Geddes, and Greg Kelly, for their helpful suggestions; Veronique Naster for her expertise in childrearing; Alex Schultz, for his scrupulous eye; and Ellen Seligman, for editorial assistance above and beyond the call of duty.
I would also like to thank Mary Di Menna, Rosella Mattei, Lily Policella, and Elizabeth Puglia, with whom I worked in 1979 researching the history of the Italian community in the Leamington, Ontario, area, and Professor Walter Temelini, who oversaw that research and from whose writings I drew one of this book’s epigraphs.
The epigraph from Crime and Punishment follows the Constance Garnett translation (Modern Library).
For their financial support over the seven years in which this book and the trilogy it forms part of have been taking shape I thank the Explorations Program of the Canada Council, the Multiculturalism Directorate of the Secretary of State, the Ontario Arts Council, and the Arts Award Service of the Canada Council.
Nino Ricci’s first novel, Lives of the Saints, won international acclaim. In Canada it was the winner of the Governor Generali’s Literary Award for Fiction and the Smithbooks/Books in Canada First Novel Award and in England of the Betty Trask Award and the Winifred Holtby Prize. A longtime bestseller, it formed the first volume of a trilogy that was adapted as a miniseries starring Sophia Loren. Ricci is also the author of the bestsellers Testament, winner of the Trillium Book Award, and The Origin of Species, which earned him his second Governor General’s Award as well as the Canadian Authors Association Award for Fiction. He lives in Toronto.