Solitaria

by Genni Gunn

  “Signorina Santoro,” Sandro said, his hands out to take mine. “What a pleasure.”

  I gave him my hand. He led me into his office, a dark-panelled room, with floor-to-ceiling bookshelves filled with thick hardback books. An enormous desk separated him from clients. I stood across from him, waiting.

  “I need to speak to you about two matters of great importance,” he said, gesturing me into a chair. He came and sat beside me. He appeared nervous, which surprised me.

  I said nothing, and stared at the hands on my lap.

  “One is about your brother, Vito,” he said.

  “What about him?” I cried. “Has something happened? Is he all right?” I pressed my hand against my chest.

  “Please, Signorina, do not worry. Your brother is perfectly all right. However,” he said, and paused, as if reluctant to continue.

  “What is it? What’s happened?” I asked, moving forward in my chair.

  “I’m afraid your brother has misplaced a large sum of money,” he said, flushing.

  I sat stiffly. Misplaced, I thought. A euphemism for the sake of courtesy. I didn’t know what to say.

  “How much is this large sum of money?” I asked.

  “Over five thousand dollars,” he said, and went on to explain that Vito had gathered the money from the townspeople as deposits for the air conditioners, but had managed to spend it all, with nothing to show for it.

  I sank into the chair, ice spreading in my chest. We’re ruined, I thought. Our whole family disgraced. Poor Papà. What had he ever done to deserve this? I closed my eyes, and breathed deeply.

  “I believe I may be able to help, Signorina,” Sandro said quietly. “And perhaps to accomplish the goal with the utmost discretion.”

  I looked up at him. “What do you mean?” I asked.

  I could see he was extremely agitated, his cheeks flushed. He reached for my hand, and held it awkwardly. “I would be very honoured if you would agree to be my wife,” he said.

  I drew in my breath.

  “You need not reply immediately,” he said quickly. “Think about it for a few days. If you agree, only your father need know about your brother. I will arrange a job for Vito in Milan.”

  I let the tears fall, for Papà, for Clarissa who loved Sandro, for Vito who could swindle a town without a thought for us, and for myself, because I could save us all. Sandro sat beside me, stroking my hand.

  Finally, when I had composed myself, I said, “I am indebted to you, Professore.”

  Within days, Papà announced that I would marry Sandro. The family honour saved.

  “Whatever you say, Papà,” I said, demurely.

  “Vito has duped us all,” Papà said, falling into a chair, his head in his hands. “He’s a disgrace, with no regard for any of us.” His brow was furrowed, and his shoulders sagged. “Disgraziato!” He banged his fist on the table.

  Mamma sat, silent and dejected, darning the elbow in a sweater of Papà’s. She was slowly turning into a Mamma we did not recognize: not the Mamma who laughed and held our family together, not the Mamma who used to sing us beautiful arias. Ever since her breakdown after Daniela’s birth, she had stopped singing. “Papà,” she said. “Don’t get yourself worked up.”

  “Papà’s fine, Mamma,” I said. “Everything’s fine.” I stood near her, and patted her back.

  “What has Sandro to do with this?” Clarissa asked. She had been standing by, quiet.

  “Sandro has offered his help,” Papà said. “That saint of a man. Meanwhile, if your brother shows his face here, I’ll kill him.”

  Clarissa blanched at the news. “You can’t marry Sandro,” she said to me when we were alone, upstairs in bed. “You know that I’m in love with him.” She looked so young, so vulnerable.

  “Has he spoken to you? Has he made a promise?” I asked.

  “No, not exactly, but I’m sure —” Then, “but you don’t love him!”

  “He is a decent man,” I said.

  “I hate you! I hate you!” Clarissa said, and fell, sobbing, on the bed.

  Two weeks before the wedding, Sandro sent me money and a note instructing me to go to Bari to buy a navy blue hat adorned with feathers.

  I had never seen a hat with feathers on it, and thought the idea absurd. Feathers belonged on birds, not on people’s heads. However, I boarded the train for the thirty miles to Bari, a city that frightened me with its vibrancy, its elegant men and women, its night clubs and restaurants, its American and British soldiers riding their jeeps along the lungomare. While we in Locorotondo were starving, in Bari there could well be women wearing feathered hats, even during the war, women who might have been past lovers of the man I was to marry.

  I tried on several hats before the shopkeeper said, “This is the one, Signorina.”

  I stared at the hat — it framed my face well, turning my skin white and translucent — but I frowned at the single blue feather hardly visible against the felt. Hadn’t Sandro specifically told me to buy a hat with feathers? I hesitated, but the shopgirl was busy folding tissue paper into a blue velvet hatbox, gold papered on the inside. She slipped in the hat, and passed me the gold braid handle which I held gingerly, because I had never owned a purse this extravagant, let alone a hatbox. When I arrived home, Mamma covered it in paper and hung it from a nail in a ceiling rafter, so that neither the children nor any animal might disturb it.

  A week before the wedding, while we sat outside in the shadows, Sandro presented me with a black-and-gold hand-painted jewelry box. “This is your bridal gift,” he said.

  “But you’ve already given me so much,” I protested, worried that I would be expected to reciprocate with a precious gift that Mamma and Papà could not afford.

  “This is something special,” he said. “Open it.”

  I pressed the clasp, and when the lid sprang up, drew in my breath. Inside were earrings: two diamond clusters the size of large buttons. I had never seen diamonds close up. For a moment, I felt like Cinderella at the end of the story, and I closed my eyes.

  “They belonged to my grandmother,” he whispered. “She passed them down to my mother. Now they belong to you.” He touched my earlobes.

  When I went inside, all the children and Mamma and Papà gathered around to touch the earrings. They gasped and sighed, and I was proud.

  “I guess you won’t be talking to us any more once you put those on,” Papà joked.

  Mimí cried, “Who will look after me?” Although seven, she could be as babyish as Daniela, who was barely two.

  Renato slapped her on the back. “Don’t be ridiculous,” he said, his tone much harder than it needed to be. “Papà was joking. Of course Piera will speak to us. In fact, she might sell those earrings instead of wearing them, so we can buy a house.”

  “These earrings,” I said, shocked by the bitterness in his words, the unveiled envy, “are family heirlooms. They are not for me to sell.”

  Renato shrugged, and curled his lips into a jaded smile. More and more lately, I was uncomfortable around him. There was something in his manner, an aloofness that worried me. He had a way of keeping us all off guard with his snide remarks and his incisive criticisms, which he always shrugged off as jokes, while we all knew he was serious.

  Mamma stepped in, took the box out of Renato’s hands, and snapped shut the lid. “I’ll keep these safe until the wedding.”

  The next day, we went to the address of a woman who would pierce my ears for a reasonable sum. Her door was open, exposing a dirt floor and a small house very much like our own. I hesitated, and Mamma said, “What’s the matter?”

  “I thought we were going to a shop,” I said.

  “What shop?” Mamma said. “What do you think you’re going to buy? Holes?”

  My cheeks burned. “But how will she do it?” Truthfully, I was worried about what she would use in a place so dark and dirty, but I didn’t want to say this to Mamma, who might have taken it as a personal criticism.

  “Oh Pi
era, don’t be ridiculous. She’ll take a needle and put it through your ear lobe. She’s done most of the women in the village.” Mamma walked into the house, knocking as she went.

  Inside, a woman rose from her chair. She was Mamma’s age, and wore a flowered apron over a long black dress. When Mamma explained why we were here, she scrutinized me, and I squirmed, keeping my gaze fixed on the floor. She probably already knew all about my engagement because Sandro was known to everyone. Mamma reached into the front of her dress, pulled out the jewelry box, and flipped open the lid. Even in the dark of that room, the earrings sparkled.

  “Madre Dio!” the woman said, and reached for one. They placed the earrings on the backs of their fingers like rings, held them up to their ears in front of a hand-mirror. I watched them, an unbearable shame creeping up my body to think that Mamma had never owned anything so precious.

  A scruffy boy burst through the doorway, breaking the spell.

  “Get out!” the woman shrieked at the boy, who ran out, startled or frightened by her intensity.

  Mamma replaced the earrings in the satin-lined box. She stuffed the box down her bra.

  The woman scowled at me, then motioned me into a chair. From her sewing box, she chose a needle so large I almost fainted. Mamma bent down and patted my shoulder, murmuring, “It’s fine. You won’t feel a thing. Don’t look at the needle.”

  But of course, all I could do was to follow the needle from the woman’s hand, to the end of a pair of rusty pliers, to the flame on the stove where the tip turned black.

  “How are you going to make it so it doesn’t hurt?” I asked her, my voice tremulous.

  “It’ll hurt,” she said, “but only for a moment.” She narrowed her eyes. “You’re not the first girl to have her ears pierced,” she said.

  I bit my lip. Mamma kept a hand on my shoulder, and when the woman advanced with her blackened needle, I closed my eyes. The pain was sudden, quick. Tears surged up and out onto my cheeks. Poor Mamma was so distressed to see me cry, she pat-patted my arm. When the woman approached the other ear, I cried harder.

  The woman laughed. “What do you think you are?” she said. “A princess?” She slipped a round metal ring into each hole and clasped it at the back.

  She didn’t tell me to disinfect the holes with alcohol. The piercings soon swelled, reddened, and secreted pus. I fingered my sore lobes and cried until my eyes, too, reddened and swelled.

  Later I realized that woman must have been incensed that a seventeen-year-old trackman’s daughter should need to have her ears pierced, let alone to plug the holes with more diamonds than half the town’s women were likely ever to see, and out of spite, she made the holes crooked. I would be forced to wear the mark of her disapproval forever.

  On the morning of the wedding, instead of a celebration there was brooding and sobbing, because Sandro had opted for a private ceremony and arranged everything. He had sent me a suit of his dead mother’s to wear, and had arranged for a white organza blouse to be tailored out of fabric belonging to his twin sister Domenica. The holes in my earlobes had not yet healed and were itchy and weeping.

  I was trying to be happy, grappling with my conscience while Clarissa wailed upstairs, her heart broken; trying to ignore the flutter in my stomach at the thought of Sandro’s hands on my body; trying to suppress my pride for the new life ahead of me. I repeated to myself that this was a marriage of convenience, and I, a virtuous martyr sacrificing myself for Vito’s wrongdoings. We were all in various stages of agitation. Renato had climbed a tree and refused to come down no matter how much I coaxed him. Mimí, poor child, put on her best dress, thinking she was going to be the flower girl. Daniela walked around in my shoes and hat, mimicking Mimi’s “Who will look after me?” Aldo, home for the occasion, watched me warily, and only once whispered, “Are you sure about this? He’s a smart man, but so old.” Papà, while pleased for me, for the whole family, was furious that none of them were invited to the wedding. Only Mamma was spirited, but not with happiness. She pulled me aside and spilled out a story of her own marriage, how she met Papà when she was only fourteen, and that although she liked him, she was dreaming of another man, one who would take her to Milan, where she could sing in the opera house. Mamma could have had a career like Clarissa; she had a spectacular singing voice.

  Papà did what men in his situation were accustomed to doing when a young woman was being difficult. He coaxed her to the outskirts of town, a little at a time, offering small gifts, candy, inventing a game for her. He had her sing arias for him, while he manoeuvred her to a secluded spot, then he kissed her and stroked her and, overriding her objections, he forced himself into her body. Mamma, who until that moment had not really known what was happening, began to cry, and Papà shushed her, and kissed each tear as it splashed onto her cheek, murmuring, “It’s all right. We’ll get married. I love you,” and so on. She found herself married before her fifteenth birthday, convinced by Papà that she had led him on, had seduced him, and that it was her fault.

  After she told me this story, her eyes glistened. “Sandro hasn’t touched you, has he?” she said.

  I hugged her and kissed her on the cheek, saying, “No, Mamma. Don’t worry.” Then I went out in the yard where six scrawny chickens pecked at the ground. I plucked three feathers from the whitest one, and tucked them into the band of my new felt hat, next to the blue one.

  We were to have a private wedding in Conversano, and I did not mind, because since our engagement, I had begun to feel a little ashamed of my family. What once was normal now seemed unpleasant. Why did the children throw olive pits on the floor? Why hadn’t we installed screens on the windows to keep the geckoes out? Why must Papà go about town in a cart pulled by a donkey? I felt guilty thinking this, knew that with Aldo and Vito gone, and Mamma not herself, Papà worked for the railroad all day, then went to the field and toiled alone till dusk. Once I’m married, I thought, I’ll be able to assist them all.

  Sandro came to collect me — I am not superstitious and was not worried about seeing my fiancé before the wedding — and we rode the train to Conversano together, he in a black wool suit, me in his dead mother’s blue suit, his sister’s thirty-year-old white organza made into a blouse, diamond earrings in my festering earlobes, and three white chicken feathers in the band of my blue felt hat When I think about it now, I wonder why I didn’t insist that Papà walk me, his eldest daughter, down the aisle. Why didn’t I ask Sandro to buy Mamma a suit for the wedding? Money was not a problem. But I didn’t even think to ask, having been raised to be proud.

  When we arrived at the church, I was dismayed to see all Sandro’s relatives seated in the pews. All I could think of were the children whimpering because they had never been to a wedding, Clarissa miserable, and my mother and father bravely waving, knowing I was leaving home forever. Tears dripped onto the marble mosaic all the way up the centre aisle. Everyone thought I was crying for happiness, but I knew in my heart that I had betrayed my family.

  This program, via satellite, is seen simultaneously in all the countries of Europe and the Mediterranean basin.

  Our answering machine receives approximately 40,000 responses a year.

  August 3, 2002

  Web Update

  (Episode of July 17, 2002)

  On Aug 7th, watch our in-depth interview with Ms. Clarissa Santoro, world-famous soprano and sister of Vito Salvatore Santoro, whose remains were discovered in Fregene on July 12, 2002.

  Vito Salvatore Santoro’s murder remains a mystery.

  If you have any information regarding this victim, as well as any information regarding the circumstances of his death, please call the number at the bottom of your screen.

  4

  Belisolano, Italy, August 3, 2002

  After Piera has eaten a large bowl of stracciatella, she lies down for her afternoon nap. She appears stronger, David thinks, as if confessing her secrets has unburdened her, now that he has become her reliquary. He tiptoes out, locks t
he door, goes to his room and connects to the Internet. An email from Julia, updating him on the class, and a notification from E-cards.com with a link, which he follows to find a Love Candy greeting from Bernette.

  Downstairs, everyone has congregated outside for the midday meal. He watches them all for a moment, their faces half-hidden by a tapestry of thick shiny leaves. My family, he thinks, uncomfortable with the familiarity, the larger-than-life characters, their boisterous voices, their tears and accusations. He is accustomed to Clarissa’s antics, which never concern the past or the family or anything remotely emotional or troubling. Her inner life is exhibited only unwittingly through unconscious gestures and facial expressions.

  Oriana, dressed in dark skinny jeans and a long mint tank top that accentuates her tanned shoulders and arms, slowly orbits into his field of vision. Half-crouched, she stares at him from the other side of the glass. She holds up the camcorder, questioning. Her self-possession makes him feel inexplicably exposed. As soon as he opens the door, she springs forward, ponytail swishing across her back, to record his every gesture and inflection. He wonders what she’ll get out of all this. A documentary about family secrets isn’t exactly newsworthy.

  “You’ve been in there for hours,” Clarissa says, as if he has purposely locked them all out of the room. On the table, a feast awaits them: minestrone for the primo, poached trout, battered deep-fried eggplant, and sautéed beans for secondo, ending with an arugula salad, a variety of fruits — grapes, oranges, figs — and a lemon sorbetto.

  David sits down and updates them while Oriana ebbs and flows among them, shooting different angles. Sometimes, she sets the camcorder in front of David and has a few bites of her food. The rest listen quietly, without interrupting, until he is finished.

  “I can’t believe she’s still fooling herself,” Clarissa says.

  “She’s always the martyr, isn’t she? The one who wallows in misery so that we can have wonderful lives.” Mimí sighs, a bored expression on her face. She reaches for a crusty roll, breaks off a piece, sets both parts at the side of her plate.