Solitaria

by Genni Gunn

  A new name, Donna Piera, and a new address.

  A new magistrate husband, a cook, and a housekeeper.

  New clothes, new acquaintances.

  Novels and poetry to read in the afternoons.

  Card games at night.

  Donna Piera, the townspeople whispered. Can you help us, Donna Piera? You are one of us, Donna Piera.

  And it was true. I was both one of them and not one of them. Clarissa avoided our house. “I’m not presentable,” she’d say, although I knew it was nothing to do with her appearance. Clarissa could have made a flour sack look like high fashion. Papà also outright refused to visit, although he was subtle about it, made excuses even when none were possible. It was as if they were ashamed of me. And what’s more, I felt Papà was going out of his way to embarrass me. For example, he would not go to church with Mamma, even though I asked him repeatedly.

  “I haven’t been to church before this,” he said. “Why should I go now?”

  “But Papà,” I pleaded. “What will people think?”

  “Let them think what they want,” he said. “They will anyway.”

  And the little ones — Mimí and Daniela. Yes, I thought of them often, because Mamma was so hopeless. Clarissa, who barely spoke to me, had quit her job, and now remained with Mamma until Mimí returned from school, then she took the afternoon train to Bari to continue her lessons. Already Mimí was acting much older than her eight years. Renato squandered his afternoons with a band of boys in the piazza, mooching cigarettes. He was transmuting into a dark, sultry young man, a younger version of Vito. Charismatic, he attracted both girls and boys, but I sensed the dark in him, a cunning that made me wary. Renato mocked me, and triggered my guilt. “Donna Piera,” he’d say, “in her big mansion while Mamma and Papà and all of us struggle in a two-room house with a dirt floor.” Of course, as soon as an appropriate time had elapsed, I intended to speak gently to Sandro, to arrange a proper house for my family.

  It is my nature to worry, especially about my loved ones. All my life, I’ve looked over their shoulders like a guardian angel; have tried to simplify everything for them. Why have they all turned against me?

  Sandro and I, in that first year. What do we talk about? What do we do? A year vanished from memory. Yet even now, over the phone, across continents, Clarissa is always eager to tell me what went wrong. “That marriage ruined you, Piera. You were indulged and babied. Sandro treated you like a pet, and you loved it. You slept to all hours of the day, and did absolutely nothing except scold everyone. There were housekeepers and cooks to manage the household, so all you did was lie around amusing yourself. You read a thousand books, and then began acting as if you knew everything.”

  But there is more. Sandro and I had a deep understanding. He adored me. Yes, he did spoil me, but not in the way Clarissa implies. I was constantly asking him for things for my family and yes, he accommodated my wishes. Where does Clarissa think the clothes and books for the children came from? Who took Renato to the optometrist to buy glasses? Who bought Mamma a sewing machine? Yes, I asked and Sandro indulged me. But I never asked for anything for myself.

  What did we do, Sandro and I? He taught me to play cards and on the good days, we played canasta with friends. Sandro was a very animated, charismatic man everyone wanted to surround. He made people laugh; he made everyone feel special. I don’t mind admitting that I was often a little afraid when we found ourselves in rooms of beautiful women who all thought him irresistible.

  On the bad days — and there were so many of these, I don’t want to remember — I closed myself in the bedroom, shutters down, head ready to explode. During these episodes, I didn’t want Sandro to go out by himself, even though I didn’t want him in the room with me either. Sometimes he went anyway, and when he returned, we fought horribly; other times he stayed home and moped, while I felt guilty for having kept him from his friends. We quarrelled horribly then too. The migraines continued and Sandro took me to a series of marvellous doctors who prescribed painkillers and tranquillizers. I took everything gratefully, if only so I could have a respite from pain.

  In late summer, Vito sent me a letter. I must see you. Papà won’t let me come home.

  I told Sandro I was going to visit my parents, and took the train — an hour — a box of meats and cheeses and fruits in my arms. I had not been there for months. I knocked at the open doorway, shy suddenly, as if I didn’t know whether to enter as I’d always done, whether I’d be welcome or not.

  “Piera, come in out of the sun,” Mamma said in her normal voice.

  I sighed, put the box on the table, and hugged her. Mamma didn’t move away exactly, but her muscles tensed slightly. “I’ve brought some things,” I said.

  Mamma nodded, but didn’t open the box. She appeared to be more present, perhaps due to being forced to resume her mother role. Papà was bent over, pouring olive oil from a large cask into bottles, and didn’t even turn around and say hello. Only Daniela was her former self, running toward me, arms open. I held her tight, so tight she squirmed out of my grasp.

  “Is Clarissa at home?” I asked Mamma, who shook her head. “Is everybody studying?” I said brightly to Mimí and Renato.

  “Yes, yes,” Mimí said, “I’ll show you.” She went to get her school book. Renato leaned back in the chair, and watched me. He raised his hand, pointed his index finger at me, and mock shot.

  “Papà,” I said. “Is everything all right?” I waited, but he was still bent over the oil. An immense migraine began in my head. I closed my eyes and pressed my fingers against my temples. “Papà?” I said again.

  He turned then and looked at me. “Of course everything’s all right,” he said, his tone hard. “Do you think life stops just because you’re gone?”

  “I didn’t mean anything,” I said. “I was just…”

  “I have always provided for my family,” Papà said.

  Mimí returned with her book, and I listened to her read while Renato chased Daniela around the room, shooting hundreds of imaginary bullets into us.

  When I left, they all appeared sullen and no one had opened the box or thanked me.

  I walked up the hill towards the railway station. I had arranged to meet Vito halfway, in the abandoned house at the side of the steps leading up to the school. I had not had an opportunity to speak to Mamma about Vito, about letting him come home. Papà’s words swirled in my head. He might think he can manage, I thought, but look at them: the mound of mending, the mouse-foraged cheese hanging from the rafters, Clarissa gone who-knows-where, Mimí’s hair uncombed, and Renato and Daniela like savages in that room. Mamma distracted, her eye cast only towards Papà ever since the incident with Agata. Papà was a very sexual man, you see. And she understood this, and no longer trusted him. And so, when he went to work in the field, she was anxious, distracted, and would go out, unexpectedly, in the middle of the afternoon, leaving behind the children in benevolent neglect, as if certain to catch Papà in a compromising position.

  The closer I got to the abandoned house, the more lightheaded I felt, as if the altitude had changed.

  The house was in various states of decay. Among the stones, lichen and grasses had taken root; three-quarters of one wall had been dismantled and taken away; someone had built a crude fire-pit in front of the door, black stones and ash.

  Vito emerged from the dark as I approached the house, moved towards me. I stepped back, my heart hammering.

  He stopped in the doorway. “You look well,” he said.

  “You too,” I said, staring at his anxious face. He wore a pale yellow short-sleeved shirt and black trousers. We stood for a moment, then I said, “I tried to speak to Mamma, but Papà was there…”

  “It doesn’t matter,” he said.

  “I’ll have Sandro speak to him. Maybe Papà will listen —”

  “I had to see you,” he said.

  I stepped back, the words themselves a threat. Kept my voice light. “It’s good to see you too —�
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  “Piera,” he began, his hands on my shoulders.

  I took a deep breath and pushed him away. “I’m sure Mamma will speak to Papà and he’ll agree,” I said.

  The summer sky abruptly darkened. I looked up. Smoky dense clouds stretched across the horizon, momentarily hiding the sun.

  “A storm,” I said.

  “You know how I feel about you,” he said.

  “You must never write to me again. I am a married woman. If my husband ever found out…” I faced away from him, staring up at the quickly forming clouds in the sky. “Promise me you’ll stay away.”

  “I can’t,” he said, circling my waist with his arms, his lips at my neck.

  I leaned against him for a moment. His hands pressed into my ribs, and I clasped them in mine, and faced him. “Please,” I said. “Don’t make this any more difficult than it is.” I bit my lip. “If you care at all about me,” I said, “you’ll promise.”

  He bent towards me, but I quickly turned my face away.

  He stepped back then, our hands still clasped.

  “Say it.”

  “I promise,” he replied.

  I drew my hands out of his and quickly ran up the path to the station, without looking back, terrified I’d change my mind. The train was late, and I waited, anxious, weepy, trying to compose myself. Thunder sounded, and I looked up again: white towers, flat-based mounds with cauliflower tops suspended in the eerie violet light. Hail. As if motivated by some inexplicable force, all the children on the platform burst into cries.

  I ran back down the hill as pellets of ice began to drop from the sky, bounce off roofs, walls, the ground like a bed of lice.

  Mamma stood in the doorway, staring out. “We must help Papà. Ovidio! Ovidio!” she called.

  “Papà,” I said. “Papà.” We ran full-force to the field.

  The storm lasted only fifteen minutes, enough to split the grapes, to drain them into the earth, the year’s harvest destroyed. Papà sat on the ground and cried.

  “What more could happen to us?” he whispered. “What have we done to deserve all this bad luck?”

  In the distance, the shriek of train brakes.

  “Oh!” Mamma said, touching her throat.

  Papa raised his head. “Mamma, where’s Daniela?”

  Mamma looked around, shielding her eyes from an imaginary sun. “With Piera,” she said.

  Papà and I looked at each other and began running.

  Daniela’s death was instant and silent. On seeing the bloody mass at the side of the tracks, Mamma passed out.

  When she awakened, Mamma lay paralyzed on the left side, but still lucid. She looked at me and gave me a lovely, careless smile. “See, see that plant, Piera? It’s about to flower. I planted it for you. Take it. Take it.”

  After a while, we sent Renato for the doctor. Why did we wait? We were so stupid, all of us. But those were different times. There were no TV programs to explain the workings of our bodies, there were no magazines with instructions on nutrition or preventative medicine. As well, we had barely survived during the war, and proper diets seemed a luxury aimed at movie stars and the wealthy.

  We waited, Papà pacing at the foot of the bed, Mamma lying there, unconcerned. I looked around, bewildered by the old furniture, the mound of mending, the round of cheese hanging from a rafter. How had they gotten to this state? Or perhaps they were simply living as they always had, and I, blessed with comforts, now could see the desperation in their lives. Only a few months before had I realized that Mamma and Papà had no heater, so I had bought them a cast iron wood stove that they could cook on and heat the house with.

  The doctor arrived, took Mamma’s temperature, listened to her breathing, and squeezed her hand, though it lay inanimate on the bed beside her. He gave her a blood thinner and called a specialist.

  We waited. Mamma began to cry. Papà held her hand and murmured sweet words in her ear. A new doctor came and said, “But it’s a knife that cuts both ways: if we give her blood thinners, she could have a heart attack; if we don’t, she could have another stroke.”

  And so, we did nothing. At noon, she went into a coma. When I retell this now, it sounds as if we were negligent, incompetent. We spent a week, waiting, while Mamma slowly resurfaced. We spoke to her to encourage her, but she did not respond except to Papà’s sweet words. “My dearest,” he would say. “Everything will be fine, my darling.”

  She could no longer understand everything. Some moments, if we closed our eyes, she would almost sound like herself; other times, she babbled incoherently. It was heartbreaking to see her change so completely. We were all despairing, thinking that she might die.

  One morning, after seventeen days, Mamma woke up and started to sing as she used to before the weight of us all silenced her. In between, she would say, “I want to get up. I want to get up. I want to go out.”

  So we picked her up, dressed her, and set her down at the table. She was reborn into a second life, a tranquil state — Eden — the sweetness and happiness of being.

  Daniela’s death and Mamma’s stroke so close together created a monumental grief none of us could surmount. The children dispersed, unwilling or unable to face the silent house, the tracks which now forever symbolized a severing. Renato stayed out long hours with his friends, Clarissa took Mimí with her to Bari, and Papà, grief-stricken, sat beside Mamma all day, stroking her hands and back, murmuring encouragements. He was totally defeated, his back curved, his eyes perpetually moist.

  Requiem Mass for Vito Santoro

  The choir will perform

  Verdi’s Requiem

  Featuring Mr. Santoro’s sister

  Clarissa Santoro

  Saturday, August 3

  8:00 p.m.

  World-famous soprano Clarissa Santoro has returned home after a sixteen-year absence, to bury her brother, Vito, whose body was recently discovered in Fregene. Our sympathies with the family.

  May they find peace in God’s love.

  5

  Belisolano, Italy, August 3, 2002

  While everyone is at the requiem mass for Vito, Piera sits in bed, her memento box on her lap. Instead of listening to Clarissa’s singing and the priest’s droning voice, she has spent the last two hours crying over Two Women, Moravia’s film about a mother and daughter raped by Germans during the war. It makes her yearn for her own mother. She reaches inside the box and pulls out a fragile roll of paper, which she gingerly unravels. Inside lie two fragments of a rusted embroidery needle her mother kept to neutralize bad luck. See a needle and let it lie, sure to rue it by and by. According to her mother, sewing utensils — especially needles, pins, and scissors — were endowed with dangerous properties. One could not give a friend a packet of needles without removing one needle and pricking the recipient; a broken needle presaged a friendship in jeopardy; when not being used for sewing, scissors were to be hung on a nail to keep them out of harm’s way and to ensure the house was protected from evil spirits; one must never walk by a pin without retrieving it. As a child, Piera believed these superstitions because Mamma could give specific examples of the misery that had befallen those who had not heeded the warnings.

  In the memento box, a small green book bulges with remedies, not only for physical ailments, but also for malocchio — the evil eye. Mamma’s world was populated by spirits and devils and angels and saints and gods and everything in between. She believed in the possibility of everything. For her, curses and miracles were not charming folklore, but dynamic forces that determined her family’s paths. Piera longed for a return to these times, when she was blessed with faith, when anything was possible.

  Mamma’s miracles were all-inclusive of everything good, and by extension, implied that the world was evil and dangerous: her miracles included good weather and health, Papà’s job, wild dandelions, or peas, easy births, and so on. She was thankful for everything, as if it had been bestowed on her not by chance or worth, but by divine intervention.

 
; Piera takes the sharpest of the two needle fragments, and pricks her arm. A droplet of blood surfaces. She licks it off. Then, she rewraps the embroidery needle and sets it in the box beside her bed. She uncaps a small bottle and squeezes a few drops on her tongue, then lies back and waits for divine intervention.

  A light breeze puffs up the bottom of the flimsy curtain across her balcony door. She closes her eyes, and her room fills with the sounds of laughter and talk, car horns and tires on pavement. Where has everyone gone? She is not thinking of her siblings now, but of all the people she has loved and cared for… Mamma, Papà, Vito, Aldo, Clarissa, Renato, Mimí, Daniela. She takes a piece of paper from her bedside table and writes their names in a circle. There. There, she thinks. Mamma, Papà, Vito, Aldo, Clarissa, Renato, Mimí, Daniela.

  The repetition of the names becomes a mantra, a mandala, her mother and father and brothers and sisters spinning on the page, waiting. She pauses at each name, closes her eyes and imagines each one’s features not as they are now, but as they were when she was a child — their innocent eyes, their smiling mouths. Piera, she writes on the page, in the centre of the mandala. She is the heart, surrounded by her family’s names. Or maybe she is held there captive. Constrained.

  She gets up, rummages through the top drawer of her bureau, and pulls out a delicate folded white handkerchief with a red poppy embroidered in the corner. She closes her eyes, holds it against her face, and imagines the scent of her mother as she cut and hemmed and embroidered this handkerchief by the light of a kerosene lamp, and later the Mamma of 1964, when Piera is driving between hospitals — Mamma in one, Papà in the other. And for a moment, they’re still alive. She has an immense migraine, hasn’t eaten all day. Papà is in the hospital in Noicattaro with yet another bout of bronchitis; Mamma has had a second stroke, and they’ve put her in a hospital in Conversano. They don’t tell Papà for a week or so, until she gets worse. Piera is crazy with worry.