by Genni Gunn
Aldo picks up one of the newspapers on the ground beside him, opens it, and begins reading.
“Zia Piera feels misunderstood,” David says.
“Misunderstood,” Clarissa says, mocking. “There’s nothing to misunderstand. She has lived a spoiled life doing nothing.”
“What do you mean by ‘misunderstood’?” Oriana asks, aiming the camcorder at David.
“Point of view,” David says, bewildered by the contrasting versions: everyone hostile towards Piera, interpreting her actions as destructive and self-serving, while Piera considers herself a matriarch, the daughter who saved the family. “Zia Piera did what she thought best for others. Sometimes, this translated into misery. But think about it. Mom, you wouldn’t have had your career had Zia Piera let you marry Sandro.”
“And how do you know I even wanted that career? Or whether or not Sandro might have nurtured it? You can’t know.” She pauses.
“Not that it would have made a whole lot of difference,” Mimí says. “When Sandro died, you would have been, what? Twenty-five? You were destined to be single. The only difference is you might have been called a widow.” She laughs.
“Laugh all you like.” Clarissa shakes her head. “The fact is that Piera tortured that poor wonderful man.” She pulls her chair closer to the table. “I’m not regretting staying single, you understand?” she says, “but if I’d married Sandro as was intended, we’d all have had different lives.”
Different lives, David thinks. He looks at his mother. In her different life, she would not have had an affair, and he would not have been born. Is this what she’s wishing for? He wants to ask her about his father, where she met him. Was he kind, cruel, tall, short, did he love her? Is it possible that David is running in front of his house? That he is brushing elbows with him in the tobacconist shop? Buying prosciutto or cheese or wine from him? Could he be the choirmaster of the local church? The priest himself? He wants to know the details, the possibilities of a different life that might have awaited him.
“Is that what we want then?” Oriana says, setting her camcorder down. “Different lives?” She reaches into her back jean pocket and produces a tiny tube of sunscreen, which she applies to her lips and shoulders with the tips of her fingers. David watches her, imagining her shoulders and lips under his fingers.
“I could definitely use a different life,” Teresa says, “Any life without Piera would be a blessing.”
“This is your life right now,” Aldo says, without looking up from his paper. “Instead of wishing for other lives, make this one meaningful.”
Oriana continues to stroke her shoulders, obviously fully aware that David is watching her. Now and then, she sends him coy glances. He plays along, stares openly at her, until she looks up and holds the tube towards him. “Want some?” she whispers, her eyes mischievous.
“Sunscreen or a different life?” he whispers back. He reaches for the tube, and their fingers touch for a few moments longer than necessary.
“What good is all this?” Fazio says. “It’s all in the past.”
“Yes, it’s in the past, but in a different past Vito would still be here with us.” Clarissa chokes back a sob. “Piera was a monster!”
“Clarissa, calm down,” Aldo says, looking up from his newspaper. “There’s no point getting into a state.”
“Did she tell you that she forbade even Mamma and Papà from going to the wedding?” Clarissa continues. “What kind of selfish person does that?”
“Zio Sandro arranged it, didn’t he? And weren’t you terribly poor?” Marco says.
“My father had land,” Clarissa says sharply. “And we were proud. He worked for us all his life.”
David waits, because these are more words than his mother has ever uttered about her family. He realizes now her evasion was much more complex and required his complicity. In Canada, anxious to divorce himself from what he had not experienced with his mother, David was more than happy to ignore the past. Years later, when in one of her letters Zia Piera recounted the story of his return to Canada after one of his summers with her, he saw himself as a mirror image of Clarissa. When they arrived at the airport in Rome, where he was entrusted to a family travelling to Canada, Zia Piera told him, she bought him paper and coloured pencils to distract him during the flight. He was so delighted by the paper and pencils, he hardly said goodbye, and neither looked back nor waved to her as he went through the gate.
Because this is not one of David’s memories, he can’t dispute its veracity. But, he wonders, could he have been so heartless? Or was he simply so excited about returning home that when he boarded the plane, the past became terra firma, while he flew towards a hopeful unpredictable future called Clarissa?
“Zia Piera said there was no money for clothes,” David says, uneasy, as if he’s betraying his aunt.
“And did she also tell you that Papà used every blanket, every piece of useable material to have fancy clothes made for her?”
“Like Gone With the Wind,” Mimí says. “Remember the green velvet curtains?”
“Our lives were a far stretch from Gone With the Wind,” Clarissa says. “In those days, ‘gone with the wind’ would have meant a swarm of locusts or a bad harvest.”
“I was being ironic,” Mimí says, rolling her eyes. “Don’t you think I remember how it was?”
“Did she really forbid your parents to go to her wedding?” David asks.
“You mustn’t believe everything she tells you,” Clarissa says. “You know how she is.”
But David doesn’t know how Piera is at all. Oh yes, in the past few days, he’s heard the family stories. If he were to begin a character sketch of Piera based on these stories, it would go something like this:
Donna Piera — La Solitaria, as she is referred to by the townspeople — is not docile or senile, ill or still. She rarely goes out of her house, yet people of her generation cross themselves when they hear her name — either as a protection against her or as a benediction towards her. She is not bedridden, penniless, or feeble. She interacts with the world outside her house through the telephone, with a tongue so sharp and barbed, people inspect their ears after a call, looking for puncture marks.
On Clarissa’s finger, one of the earrings given to her by Piera when David was born. Clarissa had the earring set into an extravagant ring that is often mistaken for a rosette of zirconia. She wears it as an amulet, she has told David: a stony concretion that will counteract the poisonous effects of any of Piera’s words.
“And really,” Teresa says, spooning soup into their bowls, “is she implying that Vito was trying to seduce her? What nonsense! Vito could barely stand the sight of her. If anything, she was the one lusting after him. Shameless!” She flits around them, citing a litany of good deeds she has done for Piera. “She’s saying all this to spite me. She’s always trying to spite me.” She slaps her napkin on the table, and everyone winces. “I have spent my life serving that ungrateful witch,” she says. “Even while she tells everyone I’m lazy.”
“Oh, I’m sure she wouldn’t say that,” David says.
“How do you know?” she says sharply. “Do you think it’s easy holding my head up in town, knowing what she has told people about me?” Her eyes fill with tears.
“Mamma, please,” Marco says, “don’t upset yourself. Here, sit down. Sit down.”
“Teresa, really —” Clarissa begins.
“You don’t understand,” Teresa says, her voice rising. “No one does. Piera… it’s too much. It’s too much. I can’t take any more.” And she begins weeping. “And now this — about Vito. This is her way of punishing me,” she says, wiping tears off her face, “as if I haven’t been punished enough by God just by being near her.”
“Mom, Dad loved you,” Marco says, but the words sound condescending, as if he doesn’t totally believe them either.
“Does Piera really think that none of us will remember anything?” Clarissa says. “We were there. Vito treated us all
with the same neglect. He was charming, oh so charming. That’s why people trusted him, and that’s why he could so easily swindle them all.”
“He didn’t swindle them on purpose,” Teresa says, her voice tight. “He was kind and generous. He never kept any money for himself. He’d buy drinks and food for everyone.”
“However he used it, he used it until it was gone.” Clarissa says. “And it wasn’t his money to use.”
“I heard he gambled,” Mimí added.
“Zio Aldo,” Oriana says, pointing the camcorder in his direction. “What do you think about all this? You were there. How much of this is true?”
Aldo looks up and raises his eyebrows. He has been reading two sets of papers, apparently uninterested in their autopsy of Piera’s words. He slowly folds one of the newspapers into fours and sets it on the table beside him. “Do you mean ‘true’ versus ‘false’? or ‘true’ versus ‘fake’ or ‘insincere’?”
“Just because Piera believes it to be true, doesn’t make it so,” Mimí says.
“Does what she says correspond to the way things were?” Oriana asks.
“If you’re asking ‘Was there poverty?’ the answer is yes. If you’re asking ‘Did the events unfold as Piera tells them?’ the answer is maybe, some of them.”
“Appropriately vague,” Oriana says. “Ah. The nature of truth.”
“I have a version of the truth that none of you know about,” Aldo says. “A bit of Vito’s past.”
Everyone turns attentively. Oriana settles herself directly in front of him. “A monologue,” she says. “Perfect. You should all do monologues. Multiple truths.” She winks at David.
“We were at war,” Aldo begins, “yet, as you may have noticed, all Piera recounts are family narratives, the quotidian exalted. She has lived such a tiny life, she has elaborated on it, over and over — with both recall and invention — until she has transformed the minutiae into drama.
“No, Piera didn’t see Vito in his other self, wasn’t perhaps, even curious. Her memories stress arrivals and departures, but nothing in between, as if he didn’t exist away from us. But of course, he did.
“For example, would it surprise you to know that Vito was never in Malta, nor was he part of any British Intelligence, as Piera claims? That story was simply one of many he used to charm women.
“Perhaps Piera didn’t want to know what drove Vito to steal from Mamma’s purse, to take her gold confirmation ring and sell it. Can you imagine a son doing this? And Vito didn’t steal and sell to buy necessities. No, he used the money for gambling, and to buy cigarettes, or gifts for women. He liked cards, but he was unlucky — or maybe unskilled. In any case, he lost more money than he had, and he promised what he didn’t own. Despite this, he was more careless than evil. People forgave him, lent him money, let him live in their houses, and tried to reform him. He continued to swindle them, to seduce their sisters and daughters, all the while charming them all. He had memorized volumes of poetry, and would, at the most opportune moments, endear himself to all with recitations. Who could be angry at a poet? Who could insist he repay a debt after hearing an entire Canto of Dante’s Inferno intoned mournfully? (Of course, Vito always avoided the Cantos to do with the Treacherous. The Ninth Circle, Cocytus, the coldest place in Hell, where rivers and blood and guilt drain to form a sheet of ice solidified around the sinners.) Oh, Vito was charming indeed. No wonder Piera sees him through rose-coloured glasses.
“Did you know, for example, that after Vito swindled the town and Sandro bailed him out — this much is true — he didn’t (as Piera believes) go to Milan to work? You see how easily truth is distorted. Vito and I, being the oldest boys, had always followed politics and discussed them with Papà, who we understood had been an anti-fascist when it wasn’t fashionable to be one. We considered communism the only viable alternative, and daydreamed ourselves in Yugoslavia helping to create an utopia. After Vito swindled the town, and Sandro wanted to send him to Milan to work, Vito decided to join the Yugoslav communist party and the community of volunteers who would build Tito’s railway from Samac to Sarajevo. He was smuggled across the border under barbed wire, at night, the Iron Curtain already in place. How distant yet familiar those days and ideologies appear today.
“I can see by the surprise in your faces that not only had you no idea of this, but that the Vito I’m describing is a totally different brother from the one in Piera’s story, and perhaps in each of your stories. The Vito of my youth is idealistic, though impractical. A thrill-seeker. Finding himself in self-imposed financial ruin, he chose a greater danger. This was Vito. He thrived in a trajectory of peril, always searching that place between Scylla and Charybdis.
“Sandro knew where Vito had gone, but did not tell anyone. Papà had forbidden us all to speak to him or about him. As well, there was an absurd rumour that the Yugoslavs captured Italians and turned them into canned meat, or put them into concentration camps. Superstitions. The madness of ignorance. Perhaps, too, Sandro hoped that through this experience, Vito would change his character. And it was a life-altering experience. I can tell you all this, because I followed him there. Yes, while Papà thought I was studying at the university, I went with Vito, because I wanted to change the world, to believe in a greater cause; I could not live without an ideal.
“Vito and I worked side by side, digging the earth with our hands, using wheelbarrows to transport it place to place. We had no bulldozers, no fancy machinery, only the determination and vision of youth — 350,000 volunteers from all parts of the world — united in one cause. It was beautiful, beautiful. One of the most marvellous periods of my life.
“Did Vito’s character change through this unorthodox education? I wish I could say it had. Vito worked, but that didn’t stop him from other activities. I don’t know how or where he got money, but he always had cigarettes and card games. He seduced young peasant women along the track, promising them marriage, then moving on without a thought about their reputations, about their ruined lives. There were plenty of brothers and fathers who would have happily shot Vito, and I wouldn’t be surprised if this is exactly what happened to him. Sandro might have told some story to Piera, to keep her quiet and happy. Those were such different times, you have no idea, in your modern world, and your virtual universes.
“Those days, we lived a harsh reality, a frightening hunger, fear a close companion. In the end, Vito and I had to escape in late September, 1948 after the USSR unilaterally annulled its treaty with Yugoslavia. For me, one of the principal tenets of communism was internationalism — a world in which everyone would be equal, a world without borders, without war. When Vito and I realized that the Yugoslavian communist party was in conflict with this ideal, we voted against them, and so were expelled from the party. What irony that the Yugoslav communist party didn’t want to be under the authoritative rule of the Soviets, yet they employed authoritarianism within their own party.
“We found ourselves suddenly persecuted; many dissidents were arrested, charged, condemned to years in jail; and many sent into concentration camps. All this in 1948. Vito and I were so intoxicated with the leftist movement that we decided to go to the Hungarian border to join the Soviets. We learned, however, that it was virtually impossible to cross into Hungary because the guards shot people on sight, and so in the end, we decided we’d better return home.
“This was not easily accomplished, you understand. Vito and I were hiding in the house of a sympathizer, and we had no papers with which to leave the country. Despite the danger, one night Vito took the train to Zagreb, and through his charm and his ways and his contacts, he managed to get us repatriation papers and visas, which I’m sure Sandro ended up paying dearly for. We crossed the border into Italy, worried that we might be shot as others had, papers or no papers. However, we experienced only a long delay — a couple of anxious hours in view of the Italian police.
“Sandro arranged everything — my return to the university, Vito’s job in Milan — and we resu
med our lives, having emerged from behind the Iron Curtain, both with experience and confidence and knowledge so different from others’. We had been protagonists while others watched or did nothing.”
After lunch, they all retreat upstairs for an afternoon rest. Clarissa stops in the hall between her door and David’s, her hand on his arm. “I can’t get used to this napping in the middle of the afternoon,” she says. “Do you want to go for a walk?”
He smiles in complete agreement. “Much healthier for us, that’s for sure. I wondered when you’d want to wander out and see your childhood haunts.”
“I have no tolerance for nostalgia,” she says. “Besides, I don’t think of this town as any more particular than any of the others we lived in or around when I was a child. By the time we moved here, I was spending most of my days in Bari, taking voice lessons.”
Downstairs, they cross the street and head towards the highway, which leads out of town, and beyond which lie olive groves and vineyards. The sun is high, shop fronts rolled up, and the street nearly deserted. Now and then, someone emerges from a home to press Clarissa’s hands, to welcome her back into a past she refuses to own. How warm they are, David thinks, even to someone who has abandoned them. “Piacere, piacere,” she says, smiling. A pleasure.
They walk along the narrow cobbled sidewalks, dust rising in their faces. When they reach the edge of town, Clarissa stops, takes off her hat, and fans herself. “I’d forgotten how hot it is. No wonder everyone sleeps.”
“Do you want to go back?” David asks.
“No, no. I want to show you something.” She puts on her hat, and points to the road ahead.
They continue walking until buildings and villas recede and they are surrounded by fields. The air is still, and the sun brilliant. At either side of the road, steep banks lead down into a wide gulley of wild undergrowth and stunted trees. “This is the Lama S. Giorgio,” Clarissa says. “It’s a protected nature reserve.” She stops and frowns. “At least, I think it’s here.” She slips off her hat again, and wipes her brow.