Solitaria

by Genni Gunn

  “What exactly are we looking for?” David says.

  “Come on,” she says. “We have to go down there to see it.”

  They scramble down the bank, hand in hand, running shoes slipping here and there, among leathery, broad-leaved shrubs, gnarly olives and fig trees, laurels and mints, and stop finally in the shade of an old oak. “Look,” Clarissa says, turning David to face the road which now is high above them.

  The road crosses the top of an ancient Roman bridge which spans the entire gulley. “See those arches?” Clarissa says, pointing to the four openings large enough for a car to drive through. “At one time, water would come rushing down here. This was a river during the rainy season.” She smiles at him. “You see? This past interests me.”

  “It seems so… deserted,” David says, thinking that in Canada, a small piece of a Roman bridge would be preserved in a museum, garner oohs and aaaahs and admission fees for viewing. Here, the past exists with the present. No glass between them.

  “There’s something else,” Clarissa says. “A secret.”

  They walk to the stone walls, blackened by lichen, pockmarked by centuries of rain and wind. David imagines water rushing toward them, unexpected. It reminds him of a time years before, when, fleeing a short-term romance, he drove south from Vancouver into Nevada and took a rafting expedition on the Colorado River. He loves the desert, the burnished landscape, yellow and red, the sagebrush bristling between stones, the air hot, like here. He feels at home inside the wide expanse of nothing. The guide drove him down a ribbon of road to the water’s edge where the raft awaited in the shadow of the Hoover Dam. David caught his breath at the magnitude of the concrete structure restraining a lake. He wondered how quickly he’d drown if the gates opened unexpectedly. Clarissa is examining the edges of the arches, her hands sliding across the stone structure, her face excited.

  “Here!” she says. “Look.”

  He bends down to where her fingers point to SV + CS incised inside a heart, stone edges rounded by wind and water. “Zio Sandro,” he says. “I don’t understand. Had he declared himself to you, then? Why wouldn’t he have asked for your hand in marriage? Did you have an affair with him? Is that what you’re trying to tell me?” Every pore in his body is open; hair tingles at the nape of his neck, as if he were about to be deluged.

  “He didn’t carve this. I did.” Clarissa slides her hand across his forearm, and tells him how, when she heard the news of Piera’s upcoming wedding, she dispatched Renato to Sandro’s house, with a note asking Sandro to meet her here. She takes a deep breath, strokes the stippled stone, as if to recall the moment through touch. “I declared myself to him,” she says. “I was in love with him.” She sighs, flushing, as though embarrassed at the memory. “Oh, he was gentle in his rejection, of course. But he wanted Piera….”

  David has never seen her look so exposed. He swallows against the lump forming in his throat. “Oh, Mom, I’m sorry,” he says, uncertain how to respond, what to do. All the yearning for her disclosures dissipates in his confusion. She is supposed to be the impenetrable mother, not someone sharing her secrets.

  She shakes her head, and he can see her face hardening. “Don’t get sentimental on me,” she says. “It’s nothing. A schoolgirl crush.” She kicks the stone arch repeatedly, as if to remove the yellow dust from her shoes.

  “Why have you never brought me here?” he says.

  She turns to him, surprised.

  “I don’t mean here, I mean Italy, the family. Why?” He thinks of rushing water.

  Clarissa shakes her head, shrugs. “You can see how your aunt is.”

  “What does that mean?” he says. “What’s happened between you?”

  Clarissa sighs. Tears form in her eyes. “You only see this side of her — the sad, abandoned Piera.” She wipes her sleeve across her eyes. “You don’t understand anything.”

  “How can I if you won’t tell me anything?” he says.

  “We are a family of thwarted desires,” she says, passionately. “Look at Piera, Teresa, Marco, Mimí, Fazio. Listen to the current of their frustrations. Look at me,” she says, and grasps his shoulders. “Even in Canada, Piera’s voice is constantly in my head, refuting what I say at every opportunity. But the truth is that we have all lived how others wanted us to; the choices we made were not our own, though we made them nonetheless.” She gives him a little shake, then drops her hands.

  He is startled into silence. Not once has it occurred to him that his mother would do anything she didn’t want to do. He wonders if she’s being overly dramatic, the whole family starting to fray his nerves. “Mom—” he begins.

  “I’ve been a terrible mother,” she says, and when he tries to protest, she holds her hand up, like a traffic cop, arresting him in his tracks. Then she turns and walks away.

  By the time they’ve climbed the bank and reached the road, Clarissa’s emotions are safely restrained, her face serene, untroubled. David thinks of flash floods and warning signs. He hates to admit it, even to himself, but he’s relieved; he’s never been comfortable with lavish emotional displays. They both sit on an outcrop of rock, take off their shoes, and pick off the burrs accumulated from various nettles.

  He wants to ask her about his father, but instead he says, “Tell me about Marco. Isn’t he a little old to be living with his mother?”

  “Marco and Teresa have a symbiotic relationship,” Clarissa says. “Like so many people, really.” She slides her feet back into her shoes and does up the laces. “Marco acts as man of the house; Teresa probably supports him on some level.”

  “Doesn’t he work?” David asks, surprised.

  “He works part-time jobs, that kind of thing,” Clarissa says vaguely. “But I gather he spends more than he makes.” She pauses. “Maybe gambles a little too.”

  “Now I understand!” David says. “That’s why Zia Piera doesn’t like him.”

  “It’s not that she doesn’t like him,” Clarissa says. “It’s that he’s too much like his father, and for this, Piera will not forgive him.”

  “Poor Marco,” David says. He puts his running shoes back on and laces them up.

  Clarissa laughs. “Don’t feel too sorry for him. He always has a girlfriend or two on the go, a little money — even if it’s Teresa’s — and a mother to do everything for him. It’s the ideal life.”

  “Maybe,” David says dubiously. He can’t imagine living with Clarissa, taking her money. He’s thinking like a Canadian now. Men here live with their mothers well into their thirties. He needs to better familiarize himself with the culture of his roots, he thinks. Familiarize. Familiar eyes.

  At four o’clock, the shops roll up their aluminum shutters, unlock their plate-glass doors, and let in customers for the brisk evening business. Clarissa and David arrive in the midst of the bustle. Shopkeepers emerge to greet Clarissa. They’re shy behind their aprons and delighted smiles. “My parents knew your father,” they say, or “I heard your Violetta. Unparalleled!” Some bring CD covers for her to sign. “Will you sing for us, Signorina Santoro?” The town is abuzz with her name. It takes Clarissa and David a half hour to get back to Zia Piera’s, where they find the Chi L’Ha Visto van parked outside. The announcer and cameraman scramble out, trying to speak to Clarissa, who waves them away. “I need a moment to collect myself,” she says, and firmly shuts the door behind her and David.

  “Whew!” David says, as they climb to the third floor. “I can see why you haven’t been out. That must be exhausting.”

  “It’s all right,” Clarissa says. “Don’t forget they consider me from here. And there’s the whole scandal with Vito. They have a right to speak to us, to find out what’s going on.” She runs a hand through her hair. “I shouldn’t have gone out. It’s my own fault. I forgot the interview was today.”

  “I’m glad you did,” David says, and smiles.

  When she returns twenty minutes later, she looks cool and calm in a turquoise silk dress with three-quarter sleeves, s
ilver earrings and strappy turquoise sandals.

  She shows the crew to the garden where they set up and do the interview. David watches from above. His mother looks gorgeous and composed. He wonders what she could possibly be saying that they don’t already know. Most likely, he thinks, it’s her face, her fame they want. Higher ratings.

  6. Visiting Card

  “Here is my visiting card from those days. Donna Piera Valente. I remember how alien the name looked to me when the cards were first delivered. Sandro helped me choose the style and the appropriate lettering. In truth, I had my own sense of style, even though I had no money to indulge it. I have always had a very good aesthetic sense. Notice that on the back of the card, I’ve copied a quotation of John Desmond Bernal’s:

  ‘There are two futures, the future of desire and the future of fate, and man’s reason has never learned to separate them.’”

  ‡ 1947–1951. Belisolano / Locorotondo, Italy. I have always perceived my life as a move towards a particular end, a destiny. Not that I knew or envisioned the future detailed state of my life, but rather its broad contours, the texture of my experience, the scope of possibility. Before my marriage, for example, I used to imagine all my siblings educated and settled into their own trajectories of success, everyone living nearby, intimate as we were in childhood. I had not understood the true dimensions of time and space — their proximity and distance during those years — all of us living in a narrow world defined by hunger, war, by Mamma’s neglect and the capricious nature of Papà’s will. I was driven by this future of desire where all my siblings’ potential was realized, even if it meant giving up my own. I should have paid more attention to nature, perhaps, to fate, given how close we were to it. Poppies, for example, grow wild in fields or between the stones of small walls, their seeds biologically destined to become other poppies, although the wind might carry them to unsuitable ground, birds might scoop down and eat them, a young woman might pick them for a centrepiece, or bake them into a cake. No desire can alter these fates.

  This part I’ve never told anyone, although I’ve played and replayed it in my head, looking, perhaps, for an aperture I might slide a key into, and with a flick, alter my past and future.

  How different things look from this distance. I see myself after the wedding, a seventeen-year-old, naïve, half-frightened by my own determination. We drove to Belisolano, to Sandro’s home, to this home. I followed him up the stairs and into the sala d’ingresso, recalling the last time I had come. No people waited today, and his office door was closed. I crossed the threshold into this new life I had chosen, walked past the portraits on the wall, their miserable faces, the hard set of the mouths, the narrowing eyes, the arms crossed tight over hearts.

  The wedding guests — all thirteen of them — tramping up the stairs, laughing and talking. Two of them had come from Argentina, where they were now living. I could hardly imagine enough money to travel so far for a wedding. I swallowed and concentrated on Sandro’s hand which held my wrist and pulled me forward.

  I had never been in a house so grand, with floors of polished gold-speckled white marble, in a living room with crystal chandeliers, an antique harpsichord, a gold brocade sofa, a yellow silk chaise lounge with its intricately carved wooden wing, a Queen Anne secretary desk, and two small tables of displays: on one, black-and-white portraits inside pewter frames; and on the other, small exquisite silver filigree boxes.

  “Welcome, welcome.” A woman skittered into the room, and pressed my hands in hers, eyes downcast. This was my first introduction to Sandro’s twin sister, Domenica. She was a tall, thin woman, with no womanly curves, so that she resembled a giant child. She fluttered to a straight-back chair and sat, hands folded within her long black dress. Now and then, she reached out and tugged the sides of her dress lower, as though it were indecent to expose her ankles.

  With her waist-long hair parted in the middle into two braids that wound around her head twice, she looked like a wistful, melancholy saint. Domenica had always lived in this house, first under the care of her parents until they drowned in a freak accident when Domenica was eighteen, and now under Sandro’s guardianship. She had consecrated herself to God, and spent her days in prayer.

  One of the guests, a cousin of Sandro’s, played Mozart on the harpsichord, while I fidgeted, awkwardly trying to communicate with my new relatives, unsure of what to say, unsure what they thought of me. Later, I’d understand that everyone believed Sandro, twenty-five years my senior, had seduced me, and his sister had convinced him to marry me.

  When all the guests had either departed or retired to a guest room, Sandro lingering with one of them in the hallway, I sat down and sighed. My earlobes were itchy and inflamed, the holes weighed open by the diamond clusters, an oxymoron of oozing opulence.

  Domenica reached out and pushed the hair away from my cheeks, her brow furrowed as she examined my swollen earlobes. “Come,” she said, and led me into the washroom. She shook two aspirins out of a small bottle and handed them to me. I turned on the tap and filled my hand with water, then swallowed the pills. Then Domenica lifted the lid of a glass jar and tore off a thick wad of cotton. She unscrewed the cap of a bottle of rubbing alcohol and poured some onto a cotton ball. “You have to disinfect them,” she whispered, as if it were a secret I was supposed to have known. She undid one earring and slid it out slowly, then pressed the cotton ball around my earlobe. I nearly fainted. Domenica uttered small words of encouragement while she slid out the other earring and repeated the procedure. Involuntary tears streamed down my cheeks. “Hold these in place,” Domenica said, “I’ll be right back.”

  As soon as she was gone, I stared into the mirror. My eyes were ringed in pink, and my cheeks were blotchy. My hair was pushed behind my ears, and my lobes, which I uncovered, appeared like bulbous orbs. I pressed the cotton balls around them once more, and shut my eyes tight.

  Domenica soon returned with a pair of tiny gold hoops which she pushed into the holes, despite my wails. “They’ll close over,” she kept repeating, in a pleading voice. Finally, when both hoops were in, she took my hand and squeezed it. “You must use the alcohol every morning and night,” she said, showing me how to turn the hoops to keep them from sticking to the inside of the ear holes. I nodded, and Domenica touched my cheek before she left.

  I collected myself, washed my face and combed my hair. The throbbing in my earlobes was subsiding. I took a deep breath and went back out, nervous, not knowing what to expect. Domenica must have told Sandro what had occurred, because he was waiting patiently, his face in a very sympathetic expression. He took my hand and led me down a hallway to the master bedroom — a room larger than our whole casello, with open balcony doors, and pale yellow curtains billowing in the humid air. I drew in my breath, overcome, because I had never seen a bedroom such as this, made for privacy, a space in which one could think without interruptions. Across from the balcony, the bed’s four posters rose to the ceiling, where they ended under a canopy of the same delicate fabric as that of the curtains.

  Sandro pressed his hand against my back, urged me towards the bed, towards the zephyr nightgown that was spread on the coverlet like a wanton woman. He smiled, and backed out of the room. Instead of undressing, I closed the balcony doors, pulled down the shutters, and sat on the bed, disappointed. I had imagined a scene from a romantic novel — my new husband gathering me in his arms, passionate kisses. Sandro was a good man, a kind man. I thought of my mother and father, of Clarissa and the others back at the casello. Vito, I thought. Life. I was doing this for him, to pay his bills. For the family, to protect their honour. For Clarissa, to liberate her to pursue her career. To save them all, but also to save myself. Vito. I began to weep, and once started, I could not stop.

  “What’s this?” Sandro said, coming into the shuttered room. “Are you crying? What’s wrong?”

  I shook my head.

  He took my hands and pulled me up against him. “Come now,” he said. “Don’t be frigh
tened. You’re such a beautiful child.” And he began to unbutton my blouse.

  I let him undress me, standing passive, until I was down to my slip, weeping softly, despite his murmurs. He turned out the light, and removed my slip, bra, and panties. He helped me into the nightgown and urged me onto the bed.

  I lay against the crisp cool sheets, eyes closed, embarrassed, mortified, while he embraced me gingerly, patting my back and caressing my shoulders in such a respectful manner that I cried all the harder. There must be something wrong with me, I thought. I’m not attractive enough. I had heard myriad stories of Sandro’s legendary sexual prowess, and being ignorant in such matters, I wondered whether it were possible that he had used it up. This set me sobbing anew, and soon Sandro, too, began to sob with me, asking, “What have I done? What have I done?”

  I closed my eyes, hands curled into fists at my side.

  “You need not be frightened,” Sandro said, sighing. “I won’t hurt you.” He lay on his side and gently stroked my face, my hair.

  I lay rigid, until I felt him turning onto his back, away from me. I concentrated on Vito, his face, his eyes, on Papà all those years ago, between the legs of that woman, Vito beside me watching.

  By morning, we still hadn’t consummated our marriage, and I had cried until sparkling flashes of light flitted across the room, my feet tingled, and one of my arms was filled with pins and needles. Beside me, the cliff-face of Sandro’s back, the irregular rhythm of his breathing. A zigzag line bolted across the room. Lightning. Thunder in my ears. I was married now. Saved from myself.

  This scene repeated not one, two, three nights, but more, a month, two, more, much more. A virgin wife. Everyone envious of my supposed bliss. I was ashamed to go out, afraid everyone would see that I had married half a man. And through it all, I worried that the housekeeper would not have seen the blood on the sheets. I didn’t realize that everyone thought Sandro and I were already lovers. All I could think of was that I must maintain appearances. Fare la bella figura — the words themselves explaining the concept — to display the proper guise — to make a good impression. I have lived my whole life worrying about what others think of me.