by Genni Gunn
She opens her eyes. The pines have become a shadowed forest, dense, savage. Everything unfamiliar. She thinks she must have come to the wrong city. The young man is watching her, a small frown pleated between his eyebrows. “Zia Piera, you all right?” he repeats.
Piera’s legs tremble, ready to buckle. She nods. David takes her arm all the same, and walks her to a bench.
“You must be hungry,” he says and pats her hand. “I’m sorry. I don’t know where the time’s gone. It’s almost eight o’clock.”
“I’m fine, really,” Piera says, but her voice is meek. “We must go to the house.”
“We’ll go right after we eat.” David stands and peers up and down the road. “Come,” he says. “I see restaurants further along the beach.” He helps Piera to her feet, and together they walk the two blocks toward the water, while Piera names plants and flowers: date palms, white, pink and red oleanders, poppies, yellow marguerites, eucalyptus, broom, and fragrant white jasmine in wild hedges along the road.
They cross the street and enter Lido, one of the beach establishments. Pay the fee. Once, all the townspeople had access to the beaches, but in the thirties, the fascists privatized everything and leased the beach to stabilimenti, who built parking lots and restaurants surrounded by high wire fences. Now there is hardly any spot where one can reach the water without buying a ticket.
“I’m fine now,” Piera says, once she’s seated and has her breath back.
David looks a little doubtful. “Do we have a plan?” he says.
Piera nods. “We have to do this my way. I will tell you everything in due course.”
After supper, when they step outside, Piera is startled by the near dark. She fumbles in her purse until she finds her old travel alarm — yellowed white, with thick phosphorescent numbers. She bought it when she suffered from insomnia, so she could watch time in the middle of the night, the moment eternally elusive. It was better than worrying, better than trying to solve her daylight problems which stretched endlessly into the present, even when they had occurred years before. 9:34 p.m. It’s late, she thinks. Late.
“Davide, don’t waste your life,” she says.
“I’m certainly not trying to,” he says, startled.
“Poor Sandro,” she says.
They head along the beach, a few more steps. David walks beside her, his hand under her elbow. He is quiet, as though he can hear her heart hammering in her chest. The night is dark enough to disappear into. Up ahead, they surprise a couple entwined on a blanket at the edge of the deserted beach. The man reluctantly withdraws his lips from those of a woman whose hair is unruly with vibrant sensuality. They turn their heads, mumble “Sorry,” though Piera is not. She can imagine herself lying here, mouth parted, dress unbuttoned, breasts exposed.
They walk on, feet plowing the sand, their shoes filling, until she says, “Here it is.” She stands in the lozenge of light emanating through the curtains of the downstairs windows. She imagines Aldo on the couch, or maybe at his desk, his fingers ever busy, but no, that was a different place, a different time… she closes her eyes and wishes herself into a distant decade, that time with Vito, an open car and her hands fluttering like butterflies.
“Are you sure?” David says beside her. “It doesn’t look like the one on TV.”
When she opens her eyes, she sees it is not Aldo’s house after all, but another establishment.
“You’re right,” she says. “I’ve confused it. It’s somewhere here.”
They turn and walk on, searching for the house, for that place so vivid in Piera’s memory, until they come to the gate, the yellow police tape.
“Here it is,” Piera says, although it’s in such a state of entropy, were it not for the TV program, she would never have recognized it. On the windows, heavy iron grates lean at odd angles. “You climb the gate first, and help me over it.”
He looks at it, skeptical. “I don’t know if this is a good idea, Zia Piera. Not only is it dangerous, but we’re trespassing.”
“Don’t tell me you’re so fearful. All you Americans worry about is how dangerous everything is.”
“Canadian,” David says.
“Canadian, whatever. It’s a continent. America.”
He climbs up onto the gate, and holds out his hand to help her over. She struggles a bit, but she’s amazingly agile. He jumps down to the other side and holds out his arms to catch her.
“Be careful, Zia Piera,” David says, his hand holding her arm. “They’ve been doing demolition. It’s dangerous here.”
“I’ve seen worse,” she says, smiling. Opens her purse and takes out a flashlight. “And I’m well prepared. See?” she says, and flicks it on. The house looms in front of them, doors and windows open, walls cracked.
“It’s creepy,” David says, thinking about Vito’s murder.
“No, not to me.” She steps towards the house. “Come on.”
“I don’t think we should go inside. It’s not safe,” he says. “What are we doing here, exactly?”
“In the middle of the journey of my life,” she says, as if reciting from memory, “I found myself in a darkened room, alone. There were no windows to let in light, no doors to show the way. That room, an omen of my life to come.”
He thinks it’s a loose paraphrase of the beginning of Dante’s Inferno, but he doesn’t say so.
“This is the end and the beginning of the story,” she says. “I need to be here.”
He sighs and follows her into the house, wondering if they’ll surprise rats or bats. The flashlight’s halo captures glimpses of wrought-iron banisters and polished marble tiles in whose cracks sprout tufts of weeds. A mouse scurries into a hole in the plaster. She takes his arm, and clicks off the flashlight.
“When Vito heard of my supposed suicide attempt,” she says in the darkness, “he tried to find me, but no one would tell him where I had gone. They were trying to protect me, because they thought that Vito’s constant debts had been responsible for my depression. Vito went to see Sandro, Aldo, and Mimí. He wrote to Clarissa and to Renato, as if Renato would know. He even snuck in to see Mamma one day when Papà went to buy a newspaper, but Mamma knew nothing. However, she did tell Papà that Vito had come looking for me. In the end, it was Teresa who told him where I was.”
“You were here with him when he died.”
She catches her breath. “I should have died,” she says. “My life has been a shadow of a life.”
They remain quiet and still for a moment longer, David intuiting something momentous. Then, she clicks on the flashlight, and they walk through the house slowly, while she delivers a monologue, “This was the living room where Clarissa, Aldo, and I would play cards; this was the study where I used to sit and read poetry; this was the kitchen, this was my bedroom,” as though it were important to reaffix a memory to a space.
They have just entered the dining room when a rumble begins. It’s a slow-motion moment, like a movie special effect, the earth trembling under their feet, all around them. And they’re falling, falling through the air, sucked down into the earth. Piera screams, imagining for a moment that God has opened up the pit of hell for her to fall into. Her wails echo back at her, mocking. Her hands scrabble at anything solid to break her fall, until she lands feet first, then tumbles to her side, her head crashing against stone. For a moment, she lies there, stunned, fully expecting an apparition — a devil, a phantasm, all the nightmares she’s ever had — to come pummelling down onto her. She waits for a scourge of fire to incinerate her. When none of this happens, she opens her eyes. “Davide?” she calls. “Davide?” her voice barely a whisper.
She feels as if she’s been beaten, lying on her side, the pain so intense she can barely move. She lifts her head and squints into the darkness. She’s in a large damp grotto, ten feet below the jagged edge of the house. Is this the end, then? she thinks. From upstairs, the flashlight sends an eerie obelisk of light into one corner of the grotto.
Then she sees h
im, lying in the shadows.
“Vito?” she whispers. It can’t be. But there he is. She slowly drags herself towards him, and every movement is agony. He is lying prone, still. She can’t see his face. All is deathly quiet. “Vito?” she calls again, then stifles a sob. But it can’t be. Not again. Perhaps I’m dead, she thinks. She slowly closes and opens her eyes, in a prolonged blink.
He is still there, beside her in the shadows. “Oh Vito, why did you come back?” she says.
Come back. Come back. The words swirl around in the air, bounce from the walls of the grotto, materialize in front of her face, mocking all the times she sent him away, when what she wanted was to call him to her. Come back. Come back. She conjures him out of the dark, tunnelling through time, until it all comes back: that autumn night, the concern on his face when she opened the door, her own surprise, his hands on her shoulders, his lips, his body on hers, both of them breathless.
“Everything I did, I did for love,” she says now, and her voice sounds pitiful.
A tremor chills her; she closes her eyes and drops her head on the damp, cold ground. Out of the darkness comes the faint drip of water. How fitting that she should be here now, amid the limestone slabs, the rubble of plaster walls, the cracked boulders, the black-and-white shattered tiles of the hall, the sinuous underwater spring, the two glorious days etched in memory, elusive fragments of happiness. If only she could die here beside Vito, her hands bloodied, cradling him in her arms.
“Papà, what have you done?” she whispers. She covers her face with her hands, the word honour looping in her head. Papà’s voice, my son, my son.
In front of her rise the massive walls of a convent. The wind shrieks and the moon carves through the dense pinery, between shadows. Leaves flicker in chiaroscuro on stone. She shivers and wraps her shawl tighter, waits for the door to open, for the cloaked nun to lead her through the dank, long cloister to the tiny Spartan room at the end. She shakes her head and claws her way back out of that darkness. In the scrapbook, the last memento is the photo of a newborn. I must tell him, she thinks, my son, Davide, beloved.
She is alone, shaking with cold, her limbs stiff. She curls into a ball, and mercifully drifts back into unconsciousness.
Then David and a stranger are lifting her onto a stretcher, and she is carefully pulled up, up, out of the grotto, into the cool night air. She winces in pain.
David is right beside her, holding on to her hand, saying, “It’s ok. Everything will be ok.”
She shakes her head. “The scrapbook,” she says. “It’s all I have left.”
“It’s right here. Don’t worry,” he says.
“It’s for you. I made it for you.” She’s tired. Her face is wet, her body damp. Every movement is a knife blade twisting in her leg. An ambulance awaits, lights flashing, and a TV crew follows them, filming. On the side of the van, the familiar logo Chi L’Ha Visto?
“Ms. Valente,” the show’s anchorwoman says, approaching, microphone in hand, lights blinding. “Can you tell us why you came here today? Was this an accident? What do you know about your brother’s death?”
Piera holds her arms up, to shield her face from the cameras.
David steps between them. “Get away,” he says. “Our lives are not for your entertainment.” He helps push the stretcher into the ambulance, and climbs in with her. “Are you all right?” he asks when the doors are shut.
Piera squeezes his hand in the dark. “I’m sorry,” she says. “What happened?”
“Shhhh,” David says. “We fell, that’s all. I was out for a bit, then I went for help.”
“But did I tell you the end? Vito and me?”
“Yes,” he says. “Yes, I understand.”
“Do you?” she whispers, and closes her eyes. “A grand passion.”
He holds her hand, tries to reconcile the stories of the past ten days. Vito, my father. Zia Piera, my mother. Marco, brother. Clarissa, aunt. Blood connections. He clutches the scrapbook against his chest, wants to reread it now through this new perspective. The father he will never know, his birth mother. Mother. No, he thinks, Clarissa is Mother, she is the one who nurtured me, no matter how little or how often.
“I’m sorry I never really knew you,” he says, recalling his childish letters, the anguish he must have caused her when he quit writing altogether. He thinks about his summer visits here, when he was a small boy. Should he have known? Should he have sensed something?
“We can’t undo the past,” she says. “You know now.” And then, she whispers the rest: Sandro took care of everything. Protected Papà, arranged for her convent stay to have the baby, for Clarissa to take him to America.
“I begged Sandro to let me keep you, to pretend you were his son,” Piera says, “but he couldn’t bear the thought of Vito and me…” Her voice trails off.
“But after Sandro died?” David says, the unasked question heavy in the air.
“I couldn’t claim you,” Piera says. “Sandro made sure of that.” She pauses. “I would have been penniless. I wouldn’t have been able to look after you.” She looks at him, beseeching. “Now maybe women have opportunities… back then, I had no choice.” She sighs. “If only I had been able to keep you…”
If only, he thinks, an alternate universe. The words swell to contain all he has left undone, all he has not loved, stalled between longing and action. He sees, suddenly, his own passive life, the waiting, always waiting, fuelling desire until there is nothing to wait for, until the waiting becomes the destination.
The siren wails, a strident pulse. Here, in the dark, Piera’s and his hands are joined. They are both holding on tight, as if everything depends on it.
About the Author
Genni Gunn is a writer, musician and translator. Born in Trieste, she came to Canada when she was eleven. She has published eight books: two novels—Tracing Iris and Thrice Upon a Time, two short story collections—Hungers and On The Road, two poetry collections— Faceless and Mating in Captivity. She has translated from the Italian two collections of poems, and two of her books have been translated into Italian. Her novel Tracing Iris is also being made into a feature film. Her opera, Alternate Visions premiered in Montreal in 2007 and was projected in a simulcast at The Western Front in Vancouver.
Before she turned to writing full-time, Genni toured Canada extensively with a variety of bands (bass guitar, piano and vocals). Since then, she has performed at hundreds of readings and writers’ festivals. She lives in Vancouver, where she teaches at Kwantlen Polytechnic University.
Also by Genni Gunn
FICTION
Hungers
Tracing Iris
On The Road
Thrice Upon A Time
POETRY
Faceless
Mating In Captivity
OPERA (Libretto)
Alternate Visions
POETRY TRANSLATIONS
In The Gait of a Fox
Devour Me Too