by Genni Gunn
“In the legend,” I said, “the villagers were both curious and wary of a church built overnight. Of course, they wanted the treasures. However, when the mass began, even the evil prince couldn’t defy God.”
“Piera —”
“You can imagine how the Devil felt, betrayed,” I said, taking a deep breath. “He made the church disappear, then sent whirling winds that dragged the bells of the church into the Canale del Rio. And do you know,” I said, trying to still the tremors, “that during storms even today, you can hear church bells pealing from the bottom of the sea?”
“Piera, did you hear me?”
I got out, and he followed. We walked up the gravel path to the church. I looked up at the tall, blunt structure, its octagonal shape, thinking of the sun, how it moves during the year so that its shadow delineates the apses, the altars, the statues and paintings, and how such power, like love, survives through millennia, through homes and prisons. One cannot divorce the sun.
“You’re my brother,” I said.
“You can’t deny what’s between us,” he said, touching my arm.
I moved away. “There’s nothing between us.”
His eyes narrowed. He shook his head. “You love me,” he said, his voice confident.
“You’re my brother,” I said again, my voice cool and controlled.
“We could go away where nobody knows us. We could live as husband and wife.”
“I already have a husband,” I said slowly.
“I can’t bear to think of that man touching you,” he said.
“That man has saved our family,” I said. “Who do you think paid all your foolish bills?” I turned away and walked back to the car. “Who do you think continues to pay the endless bills this family produces?” My voice was harsh. I got in and slammed the door. “You promised to leave me alone,” I said.
“You don’t love him,” he said, following me. He slid in the driver’s seat and started the engine.
“You’re wrong,” I said. “I do love him.”
He turned me to him, hands on my shoulders. “Say you don’t love me.”
I shook my head. How could he not understand the sacrifice I had made for him? How could he not see the misery he continued to cause us all? “I want to go back to the train station,” I said.
“Piera —” he began.
“Is it money you want?”
He flinched, as if I had slapped him. I reached into my purse and pulled out the envelope Sandro had prepared. Five hundred dollars. I slapped it onto the space between us. “Here,” I said. “Take it, and don’t ever threaten me again.”
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.
MYSTERIES
Vito Salvatore Santoro
Age: 29 (when he died)
Height: m. 1,78
Eyes: Green
Hair: Black
Found in: Fregene
Date of Discovery: July 12, 2002
Online since: July 17, 2002
August 31, 2002
Update
Forensics have determined Vito Salvatore Santoro died in the 1950s of gunshot wounds to the head. His family believed he had emigrated to Argentina.
If you have any information regarding the identity of this victim, as well as any information regarding the circumstances of his death, please call the number at the bottom of your screen.
6
Belisolano, Italy, August 5–6, 2002
The following morning when David goes out to the car, Oriana is leaning against the hood, in a white ruffled skirt and halter top. He is both pleased and surprised.
“Marco told me you were heading out,” she says. “Would you like some company?”
“Not for posterity,” he says.
She holds up her arms. “Where do you see a camcorder?”
He hesitates, because he wants to think things over, to put himself in Piera’s head and see the countryside as she has been describing it. He also wants Oriana beside him, her unsettling presence.
“I’ll be as quiet as a mouse,” she says. “You won’t even know I’m with you.”
He laughs. “Whoever made up that line never heard mice.”
They circle the town, the one-way narrow streets, while Oriana stares out the window. “Do you have a destination?” she asks.
“Locorotondo,” he says. The previous night, when he told Piera he was planning to be away the following day, she insisted he go there, where so many events and decisions altered all of their lives.
Oriana nods, and gives him directions. “I grew up here, you know,” she says. “When I was a child, Zia Piera took me to all these reliquaries — where, as Zio Aldo says, her dead tangle of memories sink and founder.” She stares dreamily out the window.
He thinks about Piera’s dead tangle of memories, carded and spun into herstory. Relics preserved like the bell-jar saints in her bedroom, the photos captured inside frames, forever young, forever eager. “Did she tell you the same stories then?” he asks.
“Some,” she says, “but not the ones she’s telling now, not about Zio Vito. She never spoke about Zio Vito. I grew up thinking that he had been banished to Argentina for some terrible crime. No one ever mentioned him and we didn’t ask out of some unspoken complicity.”
They stop at a railway crossing on the outskirts of Belisolano, when a train passes and the sound of its wheels on metal transports David to a time before his birth, to a night sky in Locorotondo, where from her room, Piera could watch the trains emerge and disappear into the railroad cutting in front of her parents’ house. Over the past week, David has heard stories told and retold by Piera so often that he has begun to appropriate them, saddened and laughing in all the right places, mouthing the words right along with her. He tries to explain this to Oriana, who nods, smiling in complete understanding.
They approach the town from the north, drive up into it, up, up past the school, past the overlook at the park where old men on benches stare at the sprawling valley below.
According to Piera, their Casello Ferrovia #72 — the trackman’s hut — is situated next to a railway crossing, the tracks of which wind below the hill, two kilometres from Locorotondo — round place, as the name suggests. It is one of numerous medieval towns found all over southern Italy, built on the tops of hills, wonderfully preserved and fortified by high walls and towers. When Piera’s family lived there all those years ago, however, they knew nothing of castles or monuments, didn’t realize those oaks were 800 years old. All they saw was a pervading green, stone walls built without mortar, fields of red poppies and yellow daisies. And at night, outside their window, the town appeared suspended in darkness.
It takes several tries before they can decipher how to reach the casello. Twice they return to the lookout, so David can fix his memory — Piera’s memory — on the green on green, forget the new developments, the villas and the asphalt roads which cut through the valley, and concentrate on the wild brush, the faint chugging of a steam engine in his head. Finally, Oriana spies a small path that circles to the right, and following it, they soon find themselves in Piera’s youth, surrounded by the small limestone walls covered in lichen, fields of forage swaying, and bunches of red poppies growing amongst the rock. They follow the railway tracks directly to the casello, which stands exactly as it did when Piera was young — red, its number plainly visible.
David parks the car and he and Oriana walk on the two-foot path beside the tracks, around the circular waist-high wall to the front. They walk in silent reverence, as if listening to memory, searching the relics of their own roots. “On these paths,” David says, “Piera’s father rode his bicycle to work, and each morning, the children walked to the station more than a kilometre away to catch the train for school.” On this path, he thinks, in the cutting which rises high above his head, Vito learned about the earth, about r
ocks, stratification, about fossils visible in the limestone. David is surprised by how narrow these paths are, not at all as Piera describes them —wide, welcoming, these paths which led them into the world outside the family, paths which in memory have expanded both in size and significance.
The casello itself is changed and yet the same. David contrasts it to the blueprint of Piera’s words. One of the windows has been bricked in, and against the wooden door is a padlocked steel grate. At the back, he leans his head toward the oven and breathes in, imagining the children’s mouths watering, the distant scent of Mamma’s bread on Mondays. They were allowed only one slice a day, “until the war ends,” their father said, and the children dreamt of loaves of bread. They had so little, even their dreams were small.
Oriana follows him silently, around the small circular yard surrounded by stone where, for one summer, Piera’s father grew tomatoes, zucchini, eggplant, potatoes, and onions, where Piera planted geraniums between the rocks.
“It’s melancholic,” Oriana says, watching him. “I can’t imagine living here, all those children, the hunger…”
“Those are the heightened times of life,” he says. “When you’re most strained, when survival requires such effort.” He pauses, closes his eyes, and sees them here — Mamma, Papà, Vito, Aldo, Piera, Clarissa, Renato, Mimí, Daniela — seated in the evening, under a sky fiery with stars, the air charged with longing. This place, a pivot in all their lives. He opens his eyes, but all he sees is the earth reclaimed by nature’s wild grasses and flowers, everything dwarfed by age, the perfect happiness constructed inside Piera’s head vivid with their nine lives.
“Let’s go find those stone steps and the abandoned house she talked about,” Oriana says.
They cross the tracks and follow a small road that leads up and over a rise, past an abandoned trulli house, past a carrozzeria — a fairly recent car graveyard surrounded by a chain-link fence, past wild trees of cherry, almond, fig, and hazelnut, past the sprawling sculptures of flowering cactuses, where David imagines the taste of fichi d’India of his own childhood visits to Italy here, past swishing biada and gold lichen on the white white walls, heading for the end of the road, until they come to the stairway, cracked stone hidden among brush.
“I suppose no one uses it nowadays,” Oriana says. “Come on.”
They climb until they reach the abandoned house. Half the roof has collapsed, as has one of the walls. What’s left is the entrance — a threshold through which they step into a dusky room. On the floor, the remains of a campfire, softdrink cans, candy wrappers strewn about. David walks to the window, and stares at the valley below. How quickly time passes, he thinks, everything altered. Where has his life gone? He yearns for connection: to be bound to this country, his family, not rootless and grasping at the tendrils of their memory to link him to a nostalgic past. He feels strange, as if engulfed, ready to weep. A train horn. In the distance, the casello resembles a ruin.
“They should have had sex,” Oriana says. “Zia Piera and Uncle Vito. Then they could have gotten on with their lives. Imagine wasting your life over a fuck.”
David prickles. “Zia Piera’s life is much more than that. And it wasn’t about a fuck anyway,” he says slowly. “They loved each other.”
“Love, shmove,” Oriana says. “From what I understand, Zio Vito laid everything in sight. If he really did torture Zia Piera with words of love, it was to torture himself. To live in desire.”
He steps outside, confused by the mixture of his own desire and anger between which he’s now vacillating. He takes a deep breath. “Are you coming?” he asks.
“Don’t be mad, romantic Canadian cousin,” she says, teasing. “Don’t spoil a lovely moment.”
He wants to say that she’s the one who spoiled the lovely moment, but he shrugs instead. She falls in beside him, and they climb down the stairs towards the waiting car.
“She was a monster, you know,” Oriana says. “She’s only telling you about her childhood. Her Cinderella story. But apparently, after Sandro died, when she was suddenly in control of the money, oh, how she changed!”
“In what way?” he asks.
“Self-important. Critical. Controlling. I remember that first-hand. She criticized everything I did when I was a child. I pity my mother. The stories she tells.” She pauses. “Have you never wondered why all her siblings live in other cities?”
“But didn’t she help them all in one way or another?”
“Zia Piera only loves small uncomplicated things: pets, children, people who do not have any critical thinking skills. As soon as they show any independent thought, she dislikes them, and criticizes them. What she loves is being in complete control of others. Ironic, isn’t it? For someone whose stories are all about others being in control.”
“And you? What does she want for you?”
“I’ve satisfied her with education. But I paid for that myself. And now, she’s proud of the docs I make, though she often calls to tell me exactly what’s wrong with them.” She sighs. “I feel bad, talking about her like this, because her influence opened doors for us all. Her money bought educations, houses, paid bills. And she never spent any on herself. She could have had whatever she wanted, but she wanted nothing for herself.” She pauses. “We should all be indebted to her, and yet…”
“I wonder why she never remarried,” David says. “She was only — what, twenty-eight?—when Sandro died.”
“My mom thinks Zio Sandro must have left her penniless unless she lived, unmarried, with his sister — Domenica, another poor old soul Zia Piera tortured… but no one knows for sure.”
David wonders what it must have been like for Piera, her life controlled from beyond the grave — if Sandro had really done that.
At the bottom, they walk back to the casello along the railway tracks, past the country chapel that, with the exception of a locked iron gate, has remained exactly as Piera described it.
They hear a train and quickly move off the tracks, David experiencing a small moment of fear, like Piera must have — worried about the children, overly sensitive, overly morbid, always searching for the dark side.
The train is a pathetic old thing, four wagons only, all dirty and graffitied. David watches it turn the bend in the cutting, thinking how unlike what Piera remembers, this decrepit train hobbling along, anachronistic in the wealthy landscape, the villas and superhighways nearby. How sad Papà would have felt to witness this, for surely it would have diminished him to see its uselessness. And he thinks of Piera, and for a moment, feels the depth of her sorrow, her premonition that everything is gone, and that her memories are merely a string of disillusionments that populate her life.
Later, they arrive home to an atmosphere charged with expectation, everyone trying to look busy, upstairs in Piera’s apartment. Aldo has called from the airport to say he and Renato are on the way. David goes to his room and checks his email. He finds an apologetic e-card from Bernette, which fills him with a mixture of irritation and guilt. She thanks him for the flowers. Would he reconsider having her come to Italy, she asks. Faulty logic, he thinks, kicking himself for sending the bouquet. A second email from Julia with an update on the class sinks him momentarily into the dread of essay-marking and committee meetings. He daydreams an improbable decampment. Like Renato, a vanishing into an Australian landscape.
In all his years away in Australia, Renato has not corresponded with anyone but Aldo. Through distance and time, Renato slowly receded into a nebulous past, until the family no longer asked about him. It’s unclear whether even Aldo has continued to write to him regularly.
Although they’re trying to disguise it, they’re all watching Teresa, wondering if she’s thinking about Renato and the possibility of rekindling their first love. It’s all absurd, David thinks, but he, too, would like to imagine that second chances are feasible.
Oriana has returned, traded her skirt for jeans, and now wields her camcorder like a mask. She’s setting up a tripod so
that when Renato arrives, she’ll get it all on film. Only Piera is missing. David knocks at her door. “Renato is about to arrive,” he says. “Why don’t you come out?” But Piera does not answer.
Footsteps on the stairs. Teresa hangs back, her hands trembling. Mimí comes forward and opens the door. “Renato!” she says, about to embrace him, then stops herself.
Renato is wearing a priest’s habit.
He opens his arms. “Mimí.” He hugs her, his eyes searching the others.
They’re all overcome, their eyes glossy, as each of them embraces him. There are introductions — Fazio, Oriana, Marco, David. Renato greets them all with the same warmth, the same pacific expression. Teresa is last, and the rest move away, to give her and Renato this moment alone. Oriana positions herself down the hall and uses her telephoto lens to film.
“Per carità, Oriana,” Fazio says, his hand covering her lens. “Is nothing sacred?”
She continues to film, and David thinks about the resulting sequence of a palm, its lifelines and semi-circles. She’ll probably weave that into her film.
“Let me be, Papà,” she says. “Besides, there’s no sound.”
Teresa and Renato are standing close together, speaking softly, staring intently at one another. First love, David thinks, casting his mind to his own when he was thirteen. She was the daughter of a mezzo-soprano who sang the role of Flora to his mother’s Violetta in La Traviata. They met backstage, and he recalls three weeks of stolen kisses and tortured bliss before they both moved on to the next country, the next city, the next rehearsal. They exchanged fervent letters, daily at first, then weekly, then monthly, until they lapsed into birthdays and Christmases, and finally, silence.
He steps in front of Oriana’s camcorder. “Give them some space,” he says.
She blinks at him, amused, keeps filming.
Teresa and Renato turn, as if suddenly aware they’re not alone. She whispers something. He takes her elbow, and they leave together.
“Now see what you’ve done,” Oriana says. She sets the camcorder on the telephone table in the hall and gives him a disapproving look.