by Genni Gunn
David stares at her, trying to decipher whether or not she’s telling the truth. He’d like her to stay, although she is wearing an indifferent mask now, as if without the camera, she is someone else. “What about your family documentary?” he says.
“That’s exactly why I’m here,” she says. She walks into the room, sets the camcorder on the table. “You’ll have to record the ending. Promise me you’ll record the ending.”
He shakes his head. “And if I don’t?”
“What are you afraid of?” she says, crossing her arms.
He raps his fingers on the table in a rhythmic pattern, his chest a mixture of longing and anxiety. “I could ask you the same question,” he says.
They stare at each other for a moment, then Oriana shrugs. “See you in Rome sometime, Canadian cousin.” She kisses Teresa on both cheeks, and touches David’s arm.
“Have a good trip,” he says unenthusiastically.
When the door closes, David feels as if the air has been taken out of the room. He sighs. Teresa wipes counters as if nothing has happened.
David fingers the camcorder, but he knows he’ll never use it. He is trying to get closer, not further away. He thinks about Zia Piera, her mode of escapes. “Where does Zia Piera get her tranquillizer drops?” he asks.
Teresa shrugs. “Her bedside table.”
“Where does she get them?” David asks. “Surely doctors don’t prescribe over the phone?”
Teresa laughs. “There isn’t a doctor in this town who’d come up here to see her. Of course, they prescribe whatever she wants over the phone. Keep her happy. Keep her quiet. Keep themselves calm.”
“That’s not right,” he says. “Why isn’t anyone trying to help her?”
Teresa leans in the doorway and eyes him. “You come in here for a couple of weeks and you think you know everything about her, huh? Well, let me tell you, you haven’t scratched the surface.” She crosses her arms. “What’s more,” she says, with an ironic smile, “if you stayed here long enough, she’d find your weak spots and humiliate you too. It’s the way she is.”
They watch the Chi L’Ha Visto broadcast, then David excuses himself and goes upstairs, where he surprises Piera in the kitchen.
“I was getting myself some soup,” she says. The television is on. “What can I get you?”
“Nothing.” David watches her, perplexed. It’s as if she has changed into someone else. She is pacing the kitchen, like the Zia Piera of his youth.
“Go get me a cigarette, would you?” she says, and when she sees his expression, she raises one eyebrow. “And don’t lecture me about it,” she says. “I’ve come this far and it hasn’t killed me yet.”
He goes to her room and returns with the pack. She slides one out and lights it, all the while pacing.
“Listen,” she says, standing still.
“What?”
“Exactly,” she says. “There’s no one. All my life for them, and now…” She dips a spoon into the soup bubbling on the stove, and stirs furiously.
“Why did you never remarry?” David asks.
“I couldn’t.”
“But you were young,” he says.
“There are so many things you don’t understand.” She sighs. “Sandro was a saint,” she says. “You never knew him. But you were there for his funeral. You and Clarissa. Do you remember?” She pours the soup into a bowl and sits across from him at the table.
He shakes his head. “Was I? When was this?”
“In the spring of 1958,” she says. “You were a baby. I remember it as if it were yesterday. Sandro had been complaining of shooting pains in his lower back and legs, and suddenly he died. We were disbelieving. How could this happen? I felt as if my heart would burst with all I hadn’t told him, all the kisses and caresses I hadn’t given him. All I could recall were my harsh words, or the moments I’d turned my back to his suffering. I couldn’t eat; I couldn’t sleep. I telegraphed Clarissa who, to her credit, immediately came home to be with me, and to help me with the funeral arrangements, which Domenica could not handle.
“Sandro was laid out in the middle of the living room. The entire town filed through our house, a concert of moans and wails, a commingling of tears. White lilies spilled out of vases in all the rooms, permeating the house with the sickly-sweet scent of death. My heart beat erratically. I leaned against a wall while strangers touched my hand, uttered sympathies, and in the midst of it, my old suitor, Cesare, who had never married, arrived to pay his respects. His face was sombre, tender. He murmured encouraging words. I watched his lips, and for a mad instant, I wanted to run out the door with him, into another life — the opposite of this one — where I would only experience happiness. Then he moved on, and another face appeared.
“Domenica sat in a chair beside Sandro, her eyes dry, her head bowed, praying. She had been there since he died, refusing all food. I moved to stand near him, incapable of sitting down, incapable of standing still. I couldn’t stop crying, although I’d injected myself a couple of times to try to dull the searing pain in my heart. And there, across the room, was Clarissa flirting with Cesare, completely oblivious to my suffering.
“I fainted, and when I came to, I was lying in my own bed, and Clarissa was hovering in the room around me, acting as if nothing had happened. Cruel, cruel Clarissa.
“I told her I’d seen her, asked her to act honourably and responsibly. ‘This is a wake for my beloved Sandro,’ I said, ‘not an opportunity for a new lover. What kind of mother are you?’
“Clarissa stared hard at me. ‘Don’t you ever follow your heart?”
“‘I follow my duty,’ I said. ‘Everything I do, I do for love.’
“‘You’re like a broken record,’ she said, reached over me to the bedside table, and took a cigarette out of my pack. ‘This great love you do everything for — is it you?’
“I glared at her, then drew a cigarette out myself and lit both of ours. ‘I don’t want to argue with you, Clarissa. But I won’t have you dishonouring us.’
“‘You’re just jealous,’ she said. ‘You’ve always been jealous of me, because your boyfriends chose me over you. I didn’t take them away, you know. I didn’t have to. They ran to me to get away from you!’ She laughed an ugly sound. ‘Are you worried I’ve come back to take others away from you? Is that it?’
“I reached across to slap her, but she easily moved aside. I felt myself trembling with rage, but I kept my voice steady. ‘May I remind you,’ I said, ‘that Sandro is lying in the next room.’
“‘Piera, you’re only twenty-eight,’ Clarissa said, her voice softening. ‘Don’t bury yourself unnecessarily. Why will you not allow yourself some happiness?’
“A gigantic lump swelled in my throat. I swallowed several times. Clarissa sat with me on the bed, her arm around me. Her hair smelled of peaches, her throat of intoxicating perfume. I stared at her beautiful manicured hands, the crimson nail polish that matched her lips, marvelling how different we were. We sat like that for a few moments, silent.
“Then I repeated, ‘Everything I do, I do for love.’”
“You know,” she says now, “all this — everything I’m telling you — it’s the truth. Do you understand? Not a truth, not my truth, but the truth.”
He says nothing.
“I’m serious about this.” She pushes the soup aside, and lights another cigarette.
David stares out the window. The construction has stopped and a new house is perched above the old one. Already, clothes lines run the length of the roof, and large stone pots are filled with date palms.
“I have to leave soon,” David tells her. “Term begins in September.”
“We’re almost done,” she says, dropping her head into her hands and closing her eyes.
He lets her rest like that, sensing a dull despair. Then he, too, closes his eyes.
They sneak out in early morning before anyone is awake. Drive Marco’s car to the station and leave it there. David will phone him
later to tell him where it is.
In the train, Piera chooses a window seat, although she knows that the Italian name for this train, Il Pendolino, means “to be suspended” and thus, to rock. Her stomach is queasy; the espresso swishes from one side to the other. She could trade seats with David, move to an aisle seat, but she wants to gaze out the window at the vast areas of verdant slopes, the plowed fields which sprawl to every horizon, the aqueducts, the stone remains of Roman roads, houses, and walls that, here and there, protrude out of the green, and everywhere, stones, arranged into fences, heaps, walls, roofs. It’s been years since she left Belisolano, and she wants to remember everything.
David has been very quiet. He’s rereading the last section of that scrapbook, which he insisted on bringing. Now and then, he asks her a question. He seems to understand her need to take this physical journey now that the other is almost finished.
She searches for the circular structures — specchie — large mounds of stones as high as eighteen metres, with circular or elliptical bases, dating around the second millennium BC. They’re cryptic, their name derived from the Latin speculae — to observe, to spy. She would like to show David one, to focus him. But she cannot see one, though they are prominent here in Puglia. She wants to show him something mysterious, something whose function is unknown. She wants David to know all about her; she wants to tell him all the mysteries of her life, all the deeds she has performed whose function now escape her. She wants to decipher herself, to speculate on what she might have done, on who she might have been.
Green hills roll past her window. Hidden specchie, perhaps, tombs or lookouts.
Trains are inextricably linked to Piera’s past. When thinking of her family, instead of a family tree, its branches and roots, Piera imagines them all positioned along miles of track, in small caselli with large numbers painted on their sides. From Lecce to Bari, Piera can pinpoint them on a map — her memories apportioned to this casello or that, this isolated field, that hillock, this stairway, that church — which to an outsider might appear as an erratic journey with no destination.
Hills roll past; viridian fields and farmhouses; the railway caselli loom suddenly, large, inches from the tracks, then disappear. Towns slowly rise and recede. A time-release photo, past, present, and future all visible in a moment of clarity. It makes her feel inconsequential, as if all the energy she has expended on everyone’s behalf has been a futile exercise, a menial intervention in a predetermined course. She closes her eyes and thinks of Mamma and Papà, her childhood, Vito, Clarissa, Mimí, and Teresa, the hard cold mountain of whatever lies ahead. It’s not true. She has been able to alter the course of their lives, although not always with the desired result. The weight of something dark heaves inches from her.
Vito’s face swims up before her eyes, like an apparition out of hell. Vito, her brother who could do monstrous things, despite their parents’ teachings. Sorrow swells in her throat. She swallows and stares out the window once more.
“Zia, are you all right?” David asks.
She pats his hand. “Fine, fine.”
A train blurs past, in the opposite direction — a phantom surfacing — then blue sky, and the green meadows of her youth. She can almost see her father bent over a field, Papà, who rose at first light, gathered tobacco leaves, and stacked them into a corner of their two-room house, before going to his job clearing the railroad. She can almost see herself threading the leaves into long garlands that Mamma hung out to dry in the sun. How little they had, yet how marvellous their life seems now, so long after.
In Rome, Piera insists that they go to the Church of Santa Maria in Cosmedin. “I want to show you the Bocca Della Verità,” she tells David.
And soon they’re standing in front of the Mouth of Truth, and Piera raises her hand and slips it in. “I never meant to hurt anyone,” she says. “Everything I’ve done, I’ve done for love.” She retrieves her hand and smiles at David. “You see? The Bocca never lies.”
“Actually,” David says, “the Bocca doesn’t work any more. It hasn’t bitten off anyone’s hand for centuries.”
“Really?” Piera’s eyebrows rise.
“I have a story to tell you for a change,” he says, and proceeds to tells her that once upon a time, there was a jealous husband who believed his wife was being unfaithful. He decided to test her: He gathered a large number of spectators, and asked her to put her hand into the open mouth of the mask and say that she had never been touched by anyone but her husband. Before the wife could do anything, a man leapt out of the crowd and started kissing and embracing the wife. This man was quickly apprehended, but because he was obviously crazy, they let him go. In reality, he was the wife’s lover. Thus, when she put her hand in the mouth of justice she said that she had been touched by no one, except her husband and this crazy man. “And so,” he concludes, “her hand was not bitten off, but the Mouth of Truth felt so badly treated that it refused to work any longer.”
Piera smiles. “A story made up by someone who doesn’t believe in magic,” she says.
A young couple approaches, laden with cameras and backpacks, their faces determined, she unfurling a map while he flips through the pages of a guide book, as if they are afraid to trust their eyes. They look at David, then at Piera, curious. Rude, rude people, she thinks, averting her eyes. No one has any manners any more. She steps back and veers, unsteady, lightheaded, as if she has just stumbled off a carnival ride. Outside in the piazza, the temperature is thirty-seven degrees and rising. David senses her distress, and steers her into the church’s cool cavernous air.
“Let’s sit for a moment,” he says, sliding into a pew.
She sits down beside him and sighs. Saints and angels stare back at her, their stony eyes accusing. She closes her eyes and sees them all clearly — her brothers and sisters, her mother and father, friends, neighbours, strangers, God — all pointing fingers at her. She imagines herself bloated with sins, banished to a mountaintop, hollow horns glistening in the sunlight. If only it were that simple.
All around, tourists come and go, frantically clicking their cameras in an effort to capture beauty, history. She watches their casual indifference. What will they see when they return home? Marble saints and gods on pedestals? The epitome of suffering? Will they even recall the towns and cities they’ve tracked through? The cathedrals and basilicas and chapels that cover half of Italy, their monumental significance to those who live here, whose lives unfold, whose rituals occur inside them, from baptism to death? Click. Click. Click. A procession of eyes unseeing.
A priest emerges from a tall narrow door at the side of the altar, a lit candle in his hand. Piera crosses herself and motions to David. They walk out, without turning back. In the portico, Piera stops and slides her hand through the open mouth once more.
“Everything I’ve done, I’ve done for love,” she says again.
“Are you trying to convince me or you?” David asks.
Piera shakes her head. “You don’t understand,” she says. She withdraws her hand intact. Sins disperse like dust motes in the air. She wants her version told, though knows that too often, the good turns bad in the retelling, and the bad turns comical, so that memory is reduced to trivial sentiment — black-and-white and devoid of the subtle shadings of the human heart.
They take a taxi to the Lepanto Metro, and while they wait for their bus, they stop at a small pizzeria for lunch. David phones Marco to tell him the car is parked at the station.
Then Teresa is on the line. “Piera? For the love of God, where are you?” she says, her voice high-pitched.
“It’s David. We’re fine. Don’t worry.”
“You must come home,” Teresa says. “This has gone far enough! I’m going to go to the police.”
“Please, Teresa, calm down,” David says. “There’s no need for the police. I promise we’ll be back tomorrow night.”
The bus is late. The early morning, the long train ride, and the anticipation are manifesting
in Piera’s legs. They sit in a corner café and wait. It’s late afternoon, and still the heat is dense, sweltering.
Fregene is only an hour’s bus ride away, a coastal city north of the Tiber. Once on the bus, they each turn to their private thoughts. Piera thinks of the marvellous weeks she spent here with Sandro and Aldo and Clarissa, so long ago. Her stomach feels queasy, as if she were on the edge of something — joy perhaps, or sorrow. Once they turn off the freeway, everything is both familiar and strange, in the way that memory plays tricks — she recognizes the road meandering through green countryside, dotted with yellow broom, but doesn’t recall the tall fences; the rickety wooden bridge that flaps and creaks under their weight is a bridge she remembers made of stone; and the thick pinewoods that date to Roman times are now reduced to a ribbon of green that thins out as they near the town, until the pines become a straggle edging the road.
Gone are the open fields, the modest cottages. In their place, a quadrant of pink and white villas rise like an architect’s rendition, precise, landscaped, fenced, and gated; the former glorious breadth of underbrush morphed into an ugly, barren cityscape.
They step off the bus and look around.
Piera searches through memory: a church, a square of green — the Public Pinery — that summer week, the scent of cones. Simple pleasures. Clarissa and Aldo beside her, ambling amidst the tall, tall pines, surrounded by purple mallow, turtle doves questioning the air with their who who who, the ground a depression, the sky immense, a turquoise sea shimmering behind wispy forage swaying in the breeze. But the pinery, too, is fenced now, an unnatural division of nature, and she thinks about boundaries and for a moment, can’t recall why she’s here. She hesitates, the heat thick in her lungs, and when she closes her eyes, sounds swirl in her head: a stubborn car engine turning over, a woman repeating a child’s name, two young girls’ laughter, a ball bouncing on the sidewalk, the bells of the church pealing the hour, her own breath raspy and laboured.
“Are you all right?” David says close to her ear.
Papà? Aldo? The voice both familiar and strange.