Solitaria

by Genni Gunn

  Clarissa smiles. Ageless, her beauty natural — the smooth olive skin, the large sparkling eyes, her full lips. She has her hair streaked to hide the grey, and is not an ounce above her normal weight. Of course, she also has a personal trainer, and a room full of cosmetics. “Sometimes,” she says. “Other times, I wish I could be anonymous.”

  The train pulls out of Roma Termini, crosses the city through backstreet railyards surrounded by graffitied walls and buildings: That’s Amore! Welcome To Romayork! A universal language of exaggerated puffy lettering, three-dimensional words crying out anti-everything slogans, gang signatures leaving their mark. Here and there, even advertisements are graffitied onto stone walls, an infiltration, like buying nose-rings at The Bay.

  “It’s changed,” Clarissa says, “yet still the same. I love this city. This country. Home.” She sighs. “This is your motherland.”

  David stares out at the Roman walls, the archways; ruins sweep past quicker than he can fathom. Six rows of pines, low buildings in yellows and reds, the roofs warm terracotta. Then suddenly, five minutes out of Rome, the city gives way to open fields, vineyards, olive groves, an expanse of green. He has no sense of Italy as a motherland or fatherland, although he spent many summers here as a child. “Your motherland, you mean,” he says.

  Clarissa waves her hand in circular motions, dismissing his statement. “Inside,” she says, tapping her chest, “don’t you feel the pull of your roots?”

  He smiles. Now that she’s here, Italy is home, though she hasn’t touched ground in this place herself for years. In Canada, her version of Italy is one of colours and shapes, one that lacks the stories of human interaction, the past being something she does not discuss. Clarissa lives in the present and the future. She ignores the past, not through any conscious denial, but simply through neglect. How is it possible that she had no feelings for all she left behind? How could she not speak about her own mother and father, her own brothers and sisters and friends in Italy? David used to wonder. How could she not think of his father — of the nebulous affair that produced David, and that she has always refused to discuss?

  “My roots are very shallow,” he says. He imagines them tangled around him, exposed.

  “How can you say that?” she says. “After all the summers you spent here. Zia Piera would die of heartbreak to hear you.”

  He shrugs. “I was a child.” A small guilt tugs at him, because she’s right. He thinks about those summers that began when he was three or four, and continued until his early teens. The large dark house, the inner garden, the walls that kept him in. Even then, already, Piera was solitary, demanding, a scrupulous guardian protecting him from imagined risk.

  “She loved you more than anything,” Clarissa says.

  A swarm of birds trail the sky.

  The oppressive heat of memory hangs between them. He does recall Piera’s devotion, her joy at seeing him, despite the rules, the strict codes of conduct, her love a large, encompassing burden. He pats Clarissa’s hand. “I know. It’s true,” he says. “I loved her too.”

  “I should have made you come more often,” she says. “I should have made you feel the earth in your bones. This is home.”

  He lets her words hover in the air. He stopped coming when, in his early teens, Zia Piera would not allow him to leave her house and garden unaccompanied. She didn’t want him spending time with his cousin Marco. Teresa’s son. Vito’s son. Marco the heartbreaker, who had already begun to gamble at fourteen. How attractive he seemed back then, with his easy laughter, his packs of cigarettes, his magazines of girls — all forbidden to David, who was twelve.

  “You are my home,” he says, and smiles.

  Clarissa sighs, but it’s a happy sigh. She settles back to nap.

  She did her best, David thinks. Her concession to the past was to enrol him in weekly Italian lessons so he could write letters to Zia Piera — letters at first dictated by Clarissa, then written in his own voice, and finally when he stopped visiting her in his teens, letters written by him in his mother’s voice. By then, Piera had receded in memory as people do when they’re absent too long. Her letters continued for a while, mawkish and too familiar for his comfort. By the time he completed his university degree, he had stopped writing to her altogether, except for Christmas and birthday cards.

  It’s surprising to him that Clarissa is exhibiting this nostalgia. She is the consummate traveller, the woman whose home is everywhere and nowhere. She is rarely still, rarely what David calls contemplative. His childhood memories of her are fragmented, a series of departures and arrivals, marked by longing in between. Zia Piera was the constant, the bedrock, while Clarissa was unpredictable, unavailable.

  All around him on the train, people read newspapers and books, speak into cellphones, all disconnected from each other despite their proximity. He thinks of Bernette thousands of miles away; he thinks of his uncle Renato, who lives in Australia and never comes home; of his father, who knows nothing of his birth, who could be the man sitting in the next compartment; of his mother and himself in Canada. People Without Borders. We are all scattered, he thinks, our family like organic shrapnel blasted across continents.

  He assumes Zia Piera will have a bare-bones story to tell that will answer the question: why did you tell us your brother Vito was living in Argentina, when in fact he has been dead for almost fifty years?

  Roman aqueducts flit by, still in use now, two thousand years later. How different Italy is, how alien from Canada where things are built for planned obsolescence.

  During the 1960s, when it was very fashionable to modernize, square ugly buildings sprang up next to ones a thousand years old, their windows skeletal teeth in mock smiles. Roman roads laid with large near-white limestone blocks were concealed under black asphalt to facilitate the burgeoning travel of multiple-car families. Now, the Italians have declared all this a travesty, and are going about removing every blemish on their historical landscape. Many cities do not allow cars into their historic centres.

  He wonders how long it’ll be before anything close to this awareness of history will permeate North America. His own city, Vancouver, is in constant mutation, buildings rising and falling. From month to month, the cityscape altered, the old vanquished. Glass towers loom beyond the false fronts of old houses, beyond the fake town squares and church spires of malls.

  The train lurches around a corner, and he recalls spectacular train crashes on the evening news, and how they always occur on these fancy high-speed trains. A small town flits past, like a mirage or a marriage.

  They step off the train in Bari into a stifling furnace of forty-one degrees. The idling engines exacerbate the heat, and make it difficult to breathe.

  “Zia Clarissa!” A man steps forward and embraces her. “Marco. Teresa’s son.”

  “I know who you are,” Clarissa says. “It hasn’t been that long.” She holds him at arm’s length. “You haven’t changed a bit.”

  Marco laughs, and David is startled to hear his own laugh, to see himself reflected in his cousin’s angular face and deep-set green eyes.

  Marco turns to David and holds out his hand. “David.” He reaches for their bags. “Do you remember me?” He smiles. Marco is a couple of years older than David and a centimetre taller.

  “Of course.” Those early summers in the garden, two cousins playing marbles. And later, bicycle rides to the fields, cigarettes, Zia Piera’s disapproving eyes.

  They drive the freeway for most of the half-hour trip to Belisolano, a farming town of just over 10,000. Many small farmers in the Puglia region live in large urban centres and commute to their land. As a result, the countryside appears sparsely populated, a contradiction to the high-density population statistics.

  On the drive, Clarissa and Marco catch up on news. Clarissa has not seen Piera for sixteen years, not since their last heated quarrel over the propriety of marriage versus Clarissa’s single life dotted with lovers — an attitude Piera considered selfish and immoral.r />
  “She’s just the same,” Marco says now. “Fighting with everyone over everything.” He flashes a small sardonic smile.

  Once off the freeway, they skirt fields until Belisolano suddenly rises before them in nondescript houses and buildings erected in the late 1960s. Many of the towns here are circular, with concentric waves of ugly buildings emanating from walled historic centres, their growth like oil stains on tablecloths. They follow the curving one-way street on patched pavement, to the outer walls, past scaffolding that rises here and there around historic buildings, until they are in front of a gigantic archway called Porta Nuova, the “New Door” built in the eighteenth century. Through the portal, narrow medieval roads stretch in front of whitewashed stone buildings, under balconies overflowing with geraniums and hibiscus in vivid reds, pinks, purples. To the right of the portal is a small piazza with outdoor tables and chairs, where, at night, men congregate to play cards.

  “This is it,” Marco says, pointing to the building to the right of the gate.

  It’s as David recalls it: a three-storey, stone, square building, two centuries old, occupying a full block. The first floor contains a conservatory, lush with tropical plants maintained both by artificial light and by the sun, which streams through glass doors. Beyond the doors is a natural garden, its perimeter marked by ten-foot stone walls. It’s the only building in Belisolano that nears the height of the Cathedral. The other two storeys have been renovated and converted to two separate apartments. Piera lives on the top floor, and Teresa and Marco below her.

  When they step out of the car, the tobacco merchant across the road rushes out of his shop, nodding and smiling at Clarissa. He kisses her hand, shakes David’s, asks how they are. A crowd of neighbours materializes, all laughing and welcoming them. It’s more than Clarissa’s fame, it’s how people are in small towns, David thinks. They love the ones who got away.

  Soon, Clarissa and David disengage themselves and follow Marco up the stairs. As they round the second floor, Teresa opens the door, as if she has been standing there, waiting to hear their footsteps. She and Clarissa embrace enthusiastically, like long-lost friends.

  “You look wonderful!” Teresa says. “Younger every time I see you. How do you do it?”

  Clarissa laughs. “Good genes,” she says. She kisses Teresa on both cheeks, then lets her go.

  “And you look just the same, Zia Teresa,” David says, although he hardly remembers her.

  Teresa smiles and envelops him in a hug. “I can’t believe this is the same boy,” she says. “How are you? How are you?”

  He answers, his tongue awkward around Italian words.

  “Good. You still speak Italian,” Teresa says, holding him at arm’s length for a better look.

  He smiles. “You can thank my mother for that.” In his teens, he continued to study Latin and Italian so he could read Virgil and Ovid, Boccaccio and Dante — with the aid of several dictionaries sent to him by Piera. He felt a great affinity with the myths, with the telling of stories, with the view that lives exist always in a universal context. He imagined himself in every god’s suffering, in every heroic overcoming of evil. Already The Inferno had weaselled itself into his imagination. He affected a morose disposition that the girls at school found extremely attractive. He wore black, smoked pot, and carried weighty books such as The Decameron or The Metamorphoses under his arm or in his satchel. He listened to Leonard Cohen, recited poetry, and adopted irony. He was never without a girlfriend.

  “David is a professor and a translator,” Clarissa says. “He has even translated several librettos. You know, they put up surtitles these days in America.”

  “Really?” Teresa says, looking at him with new approval.

  David doesn’t consider translating librettos much of an accomplishment, not compared to his translation of Vladimiro Lisiani’s Good-bye Trieste — his PhD thesis in Comparative Literature, and various translations of classic Italian texts. He also considers himself a writer, but he hasn’t written anything anyone will recognize because he’s a ghost writer. He’s the author’s name one won’t see in books such as Thirty Years of Riding Trains, or The Greatest Little Hairhouse in Town — A Stylist’s Story, or the memoirs of civil servants and minor politicians. Despite this prostitution, as he considers his ghost career, language is his first love. He’s intrigued by the varied sensibilities conveyed by different languages, and is constantly trying to comprehend beyond the surface meaning of words, trying to enter into their molten core.

  Clarissa takes Teresa’s arm. “Are you all right?” she asks as they continue up to the next floor, their voices hushed, confidential. “This must be very difficult.”

  David follows.

  “I’m as well as can be,” Teresa says. “Given the circumstance.”

  “And Piera?”

  Teresa shakes her head and shrugs. “Stubborn as always. But this time, she’s gone too far… Ever since the find… she won’t explain…” Teresa stops and touches Clarissa’s arm. “How can she have lied all these years? Vito was my husband.” She points to Marco. “His father.”

  “It’s all a misunderstanding, I’m sure,” Clarissa says, patting Teresa’s back. “We’ll get it out of her. You’ll see.”

  “But is Zia Piera all right?” David asks, confused. “I thought she was locked in her room. Hasn’t it been over a week already? She must be near hospitalization.”

  “Hospitalization? Piera? Pfffff! Don’t let her fool you. She just wants attention,” Teresa says.

  “What about food?”

  Teresa laughs. “She gets up at night, bolts the outside door, and cooks and eats to her heart’s content. You don’t know her. She can fake death, I swear. Last year, when Piera slipped and broke her ankle, she was in her glory,” Teresa says, “lying tragically in the ambulance, a spectacle driven through town, victorious in showing everyone that her own family had deserted her.” She stops in front of the door, and turns to David. “But it’s not true, you know. It doesn’t matter what we do anymore. It’s never enough. I don’t know what else we could possibly do to pacify her.” She opens the door to the third floor with her key, and they follow her inside, down the long hallway to the bedroom on the left.

  “Piera, open the door,” Teresa says. “Clarissa has come from Canada to see you.”

  “Go away,” Piera says, her voice pathetically hoarse.

  A lump forms in David’s throat, a sudden recall of his summers spent here. He closes his eyes and sees a small woman, barely five feet tall, trim body, black liquid eyes, always in motion, cigarette in hand, barking out instructions to everyone in her path. But not to David. She had only tenderness for him.

  “Piera, stop this childishness,” Clarissa says. “This is serious. Open the door.”

  “I didn’t ask you to come,” Piera says.

  “We’re not leaving until we get some answers.” Clarissa stamps her foot.

  “I don’t want to see anyone,” Piera says. “Go away, all of you.”

  “See what I mean?” Teresa rolls her eyes. “It’s no use. Leave her be. When Aldo gets here, he’ll talk some sense into her. She listens to him, you know.” She turns away. “Come, let’s get you unpacked. I’ve prepared minestrone. You must be destroyed after that long trip.” She heads down the hall. Clarissa shrugs at David and follows her.

  When they are both gone, he raps softly on the door again. “Zia Piera? It’s me, David.”

  A pause. Then she whispers, “God has answered my prayers.”

  “Actually, Mom is the one who told me you would only speak to me,” he says. “God had nothing to do with it.” He recalls his aunt’s sense of humour — how in the midst of melancholy she can burst into absurdity and laughter.

  “You think it’s a joke,” she says. “but they hate me. All of them.”

  “Of course they don’t. They’re upset,” David says.

  “He was my brother!”

  “He was their brother too.”

  The
key turns in the lock, and she is in front of him, hair dishevelled.

  “Davide,” she says, making his name Italian. “Come in.” Her voice is rough, low, a rusty instrument. The weight of her pleasure plunges him into his childhood, smothers him.

  He takes her hand — long-fingered, manicured — and leans in to kiss her cheek. Her hair is thin, her arms pale under the short-sleeved nightgown. She is much smaller than David recalls, shrunk into herself, not the larger-than-life aunt from David’s childhood visits, who commanded attention and respect, who reigned over the household like a benevolent dictator.

  She pulls him into the room and closes the door. The television is on, but muted, its blue haze eerie. It is as if he has entered a tight dark cave, a small oppressive life. Her younger voice reproaches him: I’ve been too lenient with you. I shouldn’t have allowed this friendship to continue. He stares at the wooden shutters across the window, at the bookshelf of brown leather-bound classics bought in Milan, at her blue shawl draped over one of the four posts of the iron bed, at her round table full of medicines, paper, pens, phone cards, tubes of ointments, glasses, TV schedules, phone numbers, at the shadow slats across the ceiling. You’re too easily influenced. What had he done, but lost his small allowance in a game with Marco? You need to spend some time alone, and reflect on your behaviour. He sees a small barefoot boy in the garden below, feet immersed in the fountain, longing for home. “Zia Piera,” he says, and embraces her. The years dissolve between them; her ferocious love beats against his chest.

  Beyond the door, a corridor of empty, empty space. How different from what David remembers, the bustling household, the maids and housekeepers and cooks, the hushed reverence when Piera entered. She was a gyre of nervous energy who unsettled everyone with her constant needs, demands, and mercurial nature, an empress. Donna Piera. Ghosts flutter out of reach.

  “Zia Piera,” he says, after he has helped her back to bed. “It’s not healthy, this not eating all day, you know.”