by Keith Weaver
“I think we should go say hello to Giuseppe first, make our way down to the harbour, look at the galleon, take a bus tour, and then see about some lunch.”
“Who’s Giuseppe?”
“That’s Giuseppe Garibaldi. I’ll tell you about him.”
And they set off along Via Cairoli, heading for the statue of Garibaldi in Piazza de Ferrari. All the way, Sanford explained what he knew about Italian history, and he was surprised at how much came back to him. Ever since he had read, years ago, a couple of books by Denis Mack Smith, he had been hooked, well and truly, on the details of nineteenth century Italian history. Sanford’s enthusiasm was evidently finding a more-than-willing ear in Julia, as he related swashbuckling tales of Garibaldi in South America, sailing to the Orient, and the whole astonishing story of his “Thousand” in Sicily.
They walked around the statue of Garibaldi mounted on his horse. The large fountain hissed and spattered in the piazza, and Julia rattled off to Sanford a whole raft of questions about Garibaldi.
“What was he like?”
“Where did he live?”
“Was he ever in Toronto?”
“Will I be able to learn about him when I go to school?”
“Did he like blue shorts?”
Sanford’s head snapped quickly around to Julia when he heard the last question, and he realized that he had been had by a five-year-old.
“You little scamp!” he exclaimed ruffling her hair, and they both broke into giggles. Sanford spent some time pointing out the buildings that surrounded them, focusing on their visual appeal rather than more local history baggage. They passed along Via XXV Aprile, walked up part of the hugely appealing slope of Via Roma, then cut through smaller streets circling back to Via Garibaldi. The morning sunlight flooded through the street toward them.
“Let’s go to the harbour”, Sanford suggested. They navigated more small streets, descending some fairly steep slopes, until suddenly they broke from deep shade into Piazza Caricamento and were struck by the smell of the sea. Their gaze was drawn naturally along the broad sweeping arc of the harbour that extended to their right.
Neptune, the Spanish galleon facsimile, drew an immediate squeal of delight, as it unveiled one vision of the seventeenth century before their eyes. It was an instant hit. They clambered over the ship, up and down stairs, and leaned over trying to see Neptune himself as the figurehead. They spent about an hour in the aquarium, but Sanford cut it short, promising they would return at least once. Outside, the little mock train offering a one-hour tour wouldn’t leave for another half-hour, and Sanford convinced a slightly crestfallen Julia to settle for, instead, one of the large buses that would leave in ten minutes, knowing from past experience that the little trains were rough and noisy, and the commentary could be hard to hear. While the large bus could not cut through narrow passageways, areas that Sanford felt should be done on foot in any case, the tall windows and raised position in the seats gave them clear views of everything.
By this time, Julia was pretty clearly beginning to suffer from overload, so Sanford directed their steps back to a restaurant located in a small courtyard not far from their hotel. The quiet was relative, since the sounds of engaged Italian lives being lived spilled down onto them from the buildings all around.
Julia looked briefly at the menu, which meant nothing to her.
“Can we have spaghetti and meatballs?”
“No, not here. We’ll have that somewhere else. Here we need to have pasta and seafood.”
Sanford worked through the menu quickly. Julia had trouble deciding, but then agreed when Sanford suggested two plates of one of his favourites. Their food arrived, they tucked in, and Julia chattered away happily, oblivious to the red and pink stains that began appearing almost immediately on her white top. What the hell, Sanford said to himself, we’re on holiday. In Julia’s exuberance he recognized the signs of a hyper-charged youngster who was soon going to collapse. Just to be sure, he suggested a nice generous chunk of Genoese sponge cake for dessert. Even before they had finished their bottles of water, Julia was showing signs of fading.
After Sanford paid, he said “I think we’ll go back to the hotel now and have a nice long nap.” A quiet nod was her reply.
The hotel was a short distance away, but even so by the time they reached it Julia was beginning to pull heavily on Sanford’s hand.
As they entered their suite, Sanford said “I have to go out for a short while, Julia, but I’ll make sure the door is locked. Okay?”
Julia nodded tiredly, washed her face and hands distractedly, changed into pyjamas, and was asleep under just a sheet in less than fifteen seconds.
Sanford closed the bedroom door, pulled out his cellphone, moved to the far end of the suite, and retrieved the stored number he had entered into the phone from Joe’s address book, hoping that it was still correct.
“Pronto.”
“Hello Maria? This is Jim Sanford.”
There was a long silence, and for a moment Sanford thought that maybe he had misjudged the thing entirely, that this woman, if she was Maria, had no idea who someone called Sanford was, that he would have to apologize for disturbing her and hang up, or that perhaps she had already disconnected.
“Hallo Gianni”, she said in a quavery voice, and then burst into tears.
Twenty-six
Sanford was taken aback. He didn’t know quite what to say, neither to the crying woman, nor to the name Gianni, which seemed to be directed at him. Had he got the wrong person entirely? Had he got his wires dreadfully crossed and she thought he was somebody else? Was she just confused? Sanford began to doubt the entire project, but decided to forge ahead.
“I had hoped that we could meet, Maria”, he ventured. “There are things we probably should talk about.”
She didn’t hang up. She didn’t demand to know who was calling her. She was evidently bringing herself under control, and said, in English that was surprisingly free of accent, and through some suppressed sniffling “Yes.” More sniffling. “When?”
“Right now is fine for me, Maria, if it’s okay for you. Can I come and collect you in a taxi?” Although they had got this far, Sanford still had misgivings. It isn’t every day that one is called by a stranger who hails from a distant city and says “We must meet”. It still would not surprise him if she refused.
“A taxi? Oh. Yes”, and she gave him her address. “I wait for you next to Ristorante Vittorio al Mare. I am wearing a green and white dress.”
This sounded more promising. Sanford quickly consulted his large city map. “Good. I’ll be there in about twenty minutes, Maria.”
The taxi ride was a kaleidoscope of Genoese city scenes, each of which flitted past before Sanford had a chance to form anything other than a retinal impression of it, and soon they were on the Corso Italia. The taxi driver began rattling away in too rapid Italian for Sanford, once he learned that Sanford was from Toronto. The cabbie explained, Sanford was fairly sure, that he – the taxi driver – was originally from Calabria, and that he had two cousins in Toronto.
“Molto ricchi! Molto freddo!”
The only answer Sanford could come up with was “Non oggi”.
The driver seemed suddenly alarmed. “Cosa?”
Sanford realized that he might have implied that financial disaster had just struck Toronto and that the cabbie’s cousins were rich no longer.
“Oggi non fa freddo a Toronto. Oggi fa caldo. Trenta gradi.” But Sanford was by no means sure that he had said what he meant to, or even that what he had said made any sense at all.
The driver smiled in his mirror and waved a hand through the air in what was probably only one of a thousand possible hand signals. He continued to rattle on, as though he and this Torontonian had bonded for life.
They flew along the coast, and just when Sanford began to have doubts about where he was being driven, the driver wheeled off the Corso, and within a few seconds stopped next to an elegant-looking restaurant. A f
airly tall, stylish, dark-haired woman, wearing a green and white dress, and carrying a tastefully matched handbag, stood waiting. She was trim, appeared to be about sixty, give or take, and her face bore a set of mature and rather attractive lines, reflecting what had probably been a reasonably happy life, rather than one battered by misfortune. Her dark eyes, pleasant mouth, good facial bone structure, Mediterranean colouring, and a smile that surfaced readily made her look very simpatica. She seemed vaguely familiar, but Sanford realized this had to be a “type” look since he knew nothing about her, except that there was some connection to Joe, and he certainly had never met her before.
Sanford asked the taxi driver to wait just a minute, and climbed out of the car.
“Would you mind coming now to my hotel, Maria? There’s someone I want you to meet.”
She looked puzzled, but agreed readily enough.
The return trip was accompanied by a continuing narrative from the driver, and appearing to try to decipher this flow helped Sanford mask the slightly uncomfortable feeling he had during the trip. It was probably fair enough. This woman Maria was a stranger to him, a complete stranger, the only link being through Joe. But Sanford had no idea what all that meant to her now, whether this meeting would turn out to be just one of those uncomfortable once-off duty visits that everyone is always pleased to see over. He looked across surreptitiously at Maria. Up close, her face spoke of strength and intelligence, a face that at one time, now decades past, likely would have radiated youthful beauty.
They arrived at the hotel soon enough, Sanford paid the driver, and they stepped out of the taxi.
“Can I buy you a cup of coffee, Maria?”
She smiled and said yes, and they moved toward a small café a couple of doors from the hotel, where there were several small tables in the street.
When they were settled, Sanford fussed a bit, not really knowing where to begin.
“I’m sorry I had to inform you of Joe’s death in such an abrupt and impersonal way. I’m afraid that my letter to you must have been a shock.”
“Yes. It was, a bit.” She fiddled with her paper napkin, and a silence that was long, but felt quite natural, slowly extended between them.
“Could you tell me something about you and Joe?” Even as Sanford finished this question, he realized that only the few sentences in his letter to Maria told her anything about himself. He decided to rectify that later, since she seemed to have little hesitation in answering his questions.
She smiled, nodded once, and began fishing for something in her handbag.
The story came out easily. She and Joe had met in Rome. He was as green as they come, but there was a mutual attraction right away. His uncomplicated good looks, his apparent ability to pick up Italian at a ferocious rate, and his sense of humour that refused to remain stuck behind a linguistic barrier, made her realize that she wanted to know more about him. She and Joe had talked, and the discussion had stretched into lunchtime. They ate at a small café. Lunch had ended up lasting almost three hours. Between Maria’s little bit of English, and Joe’s little bit of Italian, they had got to know something of each other. From his sense of considerable doubt not half an hour ago, Sanford was now amazed that she was forthcoming with so much candour.
Maria had been talking to the middle distance for almost twenty minutes. She stopped and looked for a long time into Sanford’s face.
“By the end of that day, I knew I was in love.”
Here was indeed a new connection to Joe. Amid all the confusion and hurt that had entered Sanford’s relationship to Joe since Joe had died, here was something fresh and positive.
Among the questions Sanford had that were crowding to get out, only the trivial ones passed the post first.
“What was Joe doing here? Where did he live? Was he just passing through Rome?”
She said that Joe had described himself then as an “innocent abroad”, but said that she didn’t really know how to interpret that until much later. “He wasn’t doing anything here. He was a visitor. He wanted to see ruins. He wanted to get to know Rome.”
There was another pause here.
She had pulled a picture out of her handbag, and as she laid it on the table now, her face melted into one of the most heartfelt and tender smiles Sanford had ever seen, but a smile tinged by great longing.
It was a picture of Joe. And Sanford had seen a picture very similar to it, very recently.
“He was twenty-three”, Maria was saying. “He was the kindest, most gentle, and most intelligent man I had ever met. Nothing like most of the Italian boys I knew, boys who didn’t grew up.” A different kind of smile swept across her face. “My English is not good now”, she said.
“Not true”, Sanford objected. “Your English is very good. Where did you learn it?”
“Joe taught me English. It was one of his many gifts to me. A great gift for my working life.”
“And I guess you taught Joe Italian?”
She shook her head. “No. Joe learned Italian himself, very quickly. Joe soon was able to speak Italian, how you say, correntemente.”
“Oh. Yes. Fluently”, Sanford said as the meaning of the Italian word suddenly became evident to him.
“Where you learn Italian?”
Sanford laughed. “I can’t speak Italian. I know only a few phrases.”
“Maybe”, she said. “But I think you know the meaning here”, and she pressed the knuckles of her right hand to her chest.
Sanford looked down again at the picture of a very young Joe, and suddenly he made the connection.
“Joe had a picture just like this. It was of you, wasn’t it?”
Maria’s face lit up. “He kept it!”
After a short delay, she continued. “Joe had a cheap camera. We took pictures of each other. It was one day at the Altare della Patria.” She hesitated at the expression of incomprehension on Sanford’s face. “Oh! Yes. He called it something different.”
A pause.
A name came to Sanford, without him really knowing how. “Was it The Victor Emmanuel Monument?”
“Yes! You must be in Rome before”, she said.
“Twice. On business. Three days altogether.”
The waiter stopped as he was passing the table and said something to Sanford, in rapid Italian that was incomprehensible to him. Maria responded immediately, the waiter nodded, looked briefly at Sanford, then moved off. A moment later, the bill was set in front of him.
Although Sanford paid right away, they continued to sit at the table for a few minutes. It was a slack time and nobody appeared to mind.
“Where are you going after Genoa?” she asked, in neutral curiosity.
“Well, we’re going to a number of other places, but all in Italy.”
“We? You travel with your wife?”
From her expression, which suddenly clouded, Sanford realized that his face must have just telegraphed to her something unpleasant. “No Maria. My ex-wife died three weeks ago.”
A hand went involuntarily to her mouth. “Oh! I’m sorry.”
Sanford nodded without saying anything and tried to clear the sombre expression from his face.
“No. I’m here with my daughter.” Even as he said it, he could feel the smile forming on his lips, but his frisson of happiness was quickly replaced by a sense of concern.
Maria’s eyes were suddenly full of tears. But, in contrast to what Sanford took initially to be signs of grief, her face was radiant. She reached across the small table, and gripped both Sanford’s hands tightly in hers.
“Oh Gianni! I didn’t know I was a grandmother!”
Twenty-seven
Sanford would look back on that scene later as one of the defining moments of his life.
The tenuous moorings his existence had regained in the past few weeks were suddenly cut again, and once more, he was far from a familiar anchorage.
Although the unwelcome senses of confusion and disorientation had returned in force, behind this t
here was something else. Huge blocks of puzzle were falling into place, each coming to rest with a thud, and generating personal seismic shocks as they did so. But these were shocks that precede stability, as when a five-ton keystone is dropped into the slot intended for it, and it fits like a glove, locking the entire arch into place and signalling, by an authoritative tremor, that an event of finality has indeed occurred.
Aileen.
The woman who had raised him. The woman who had showered onto him every last ounce of her love. The woman who could have no children. The woman he had known as his mother. Sanford realized now the context within which she had devoted her life to his upbringing, his welfare, his path into the world.
Maria.
His mother. The woman who bore him but for some reason had to give him up, and then stand aside in silence. Why this was, he had no idea, but he was certain that within the next few hours it would become clear.
Joe.
The person who had been Sanford’s best friend. And the man who had been, the strong awareness just dawning on Sanford, his father. The man who had to keep all this a secret. Heart-rending thoughts rose within Sanford. Oh, Joe! If only I had known! If only we could have spoken, even though it might have been late in the game! If only! But he recognized now what Joe had done for him, what Joe had sacrificed. Sanford could feel tears running down his cheeks, tears of unbearable sadness, but also of unutterable joy.
“Maria”, Sanford said in an unsteady voice. He looked at her kindly face through new eyes, they both rose from their chairs, he walked over to her, and enfolded her in a tight embrace.
Maria broke away first. “I have someone to meet”, she said with determination. They both wiped their eyes, uttered pressure-relieving laughter, and turned toward the hotel.
They decided not to let Julia in on the entire story just yet, in fact they weren’t going to let her in on any of it right away. Sanford would tell Julia that Maria was a good friend of Joe’s and wanted to spend some time with Sanford and Julia, and talk a bit about Joe. She also would take them by the hand and lead them through the streets of Genoa, words that would acquire a new and much more personal meaning for Sanford.