Where She Has Gone

by Nino Ricci

  INTERNATIONAL ACCLAIM FOR

  Where She Has Gone

  “Elegantly written.… Where She Has Gone casts a spell of its own, a spell of fierce beauty and tragic loss.”

  – Financial Post

  “Ricci’s poetic prose and fluid plot create a tense and beautiful story whose sad ironies achieve resolution in a haunting conclusion.”

  – Publishers Weekly

  “[His] wisdom lies in the trust he has put in his characters: the world is explained in their terms.”

  – Ottawa Citizen

  “The novel’s nuances of plot and self-discovery have a way of sneaking up on the reader from behind – elusive at first, then grand in their claims on the imagination and consciousness.”

  – London Free Press

  “Ricci’s work is the search for the fine lines, the borders which define truth and fiction, the imagined and the real, the soul and the body where one creeps ‘inches’ into the other like the invading roots of a chestnut tree causing ‘a gnawing … like hunger.’ … Bravo.”

  – Winnipeg Free Press

  “His gentle, hands-off touch works beautifully. The full verisimilitude of Ricci’s world flourishes anew.… [A] brilliant study of the way shame is passed down through generations.”

  – Boston Globe

  “Ricci’s prose flows smoothly and conjures vivid images.… [He] is a skilled craftsman.”

  – Regina Leader-Post

  BOOKS BY NINO RICCI

  Lives of the Saints (1990)

  In a Glass House (1993)

  Where She Has Gone (1997)

  Testament (2002)

  Copyright © 1997 by Nino Ricci

  Cloth edition published 1997

  Trade paperback edition first published 1999

  All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, or stored in a retrieval system, without the prior written consent of the publisher – or, in case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, a licence from the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency – is an infringement of the copyright law.

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Ricci, Nino, 1959-

  Where she has gone / Nino Ricci.

  ISBN 0-7710-7504-9 (Emblem Editions)

  eBook ISBN 978-0-7710-7656-5

  I. Title.

  PS8585.I126W43 2004   C813′.54   C2004-905542-9

  We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program and that of the Government of Ontario through the Ontario Media Development Corporation’s Ontario Book Initiative. We further acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council for our publishing program.

  The English translation of lines 5–10 from the poem “Antico inverno” (“Ancient Winter”), by Salvatore Quasimodo, © Luciano Rebay, are taken from Introduction to Italian Poetry, ed. Luciano Rebay. Reprinted by permission of Luciano Rebay.

  SERIES EDITOR: ELLEN SELIGMAN

  Cover design: Terri Nimmo

  Cover image: © Nancy Landin / Millennium Images, UK

  EMBLEM EDITIONS

  McClelland & Stewart Ltd.

  The Canadian Publishers

  481 University Avenue

  Toronto, Ontario

  M5G 2E9

  www.mcclelland.com/emblem

  v3.1

  for Erika

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Chapter I

  Chapter II

  Chapter III

  Chapter IV

  Chapter V

  Chapter VI

  Chapter VII

  Chapter VIII

  Chapter IX

  Chapter X

  Chapter XI

  Chapter XII

  Chapter XIII

  Chapter XIV

  Chapter XV

  Chapter XVI

  Chapter XVII

  Chapter XVIII

  Chapter XIX

  Chapter XX

  Chapter XXI

  Chapter XXII

  Chapter XXIII

  Chapter XXIV

  Chapter XXV

  Chapter XXVI

  Chapter XXVII

  Chapter XXVIII

  Chapter XXIX

  Chapter XXX

  Chapter XXXI

  Chapter XXXII

  Chapter XXXIII

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  The birds were looking for millet

  And were suddenly of snow;

  So with words:

  A bit of sun, an angel’s halo

  And then the mist; and the trees,

  And ourselves made of air in the morning.

  – SALVATORE QUASIMODO

  “Ancient Winter”

  In another order of things, less fraught, she might have said, Tell me a story, the way people did around a fire late at night. And I would have told her this: Back before you were born, before any of this had begun, a mother and son lived alone in a stony village overlooking a valley. Just outside the village stood an old chestnut tree where it was said that someone, some criminal or wounded lover, had hanged himself. The other villagers kept their distance from it, and wouldn’t gather up the nuts it dropped, with their spiny husks, in the fall. But the mother was not so particular, gathering the nuts up in her apron and bringing them home to roast them. Afterwards, when things turned out as they did, when a daughter was born though there had been no father to make her, when the mother had died giving her life, the son had a dream in which a tree was growing up out of his belly, a great blossoming thing whose inconvenience to him, however, was only in the slight gnawing he felt in his stomach like hunger because of the roots inching into him.

  Was I the tree? she might have asked then. Was I the daughter? And I would have said, It doesn’t matter, it was only a dream, it was only a story.

  Or I might have said this: On our farm in Canada, there was a chestnut tree that someone had planted behind the barn. Every year my father threatened to cut it down, because in all our time on the farm it had never once produced any flowers or fruit. But finally one spring, already long after you’d left us, it sent out a profusion of small white buds that turned to nuts in the fall. It was as if the tree had understood how tenuous its existence was, and had gathered up all its resources to hold out to us this offering, this bit of hope.

  She would have asked, Was there really a tree? Did it happen that way? And I would have said, That was one way it could have happened. And the yes and the no, the precision things took on in the plain world, would not have mattered so much, only the story, that bit of hope.

  I

  I saw Rita again toward mid-September, in Toronto. Autumn was just settling over the city then, the light giving itself over to September’s peculiar half-tones and the trees that lined the city’s sidestreets showing the first tinctures of russet and gold. In little more than a month the autumn colours would already have given way to the grey-limbed monotony of winter; but now the whole city seemed on the brink of some revelation, some last redemptive sigh before the winter’s cold and snow.

  Rita had started school at the university downtown and was living on campus with Elena, their residence tucked away at the heart of the ivied island of quiet the campus formed in the city centre. It was early evening the first time I went by for her, sunset lighting fires in the leaded panes of the residence windows. Inside, trim young men in blue jeans and young women
in cardigans and pleated skirts came and went, the air electric with the first tense promise of the beginning of term.

  The door to Rita’s room was open. At my knock she turned from the mirror she’d been staring into, the gold shaft of a lipstick bright in one hand.

  “Hi, stranger,” she said.

  She looked indistinguishable from the young women I’d passed in the halls, fresh-faced and blithe, her hair pulled back in a ponytail to set off the red of her lips, the blue of her eyes, like tiny gifts. Outside the oppressive familiarity of our home town, what had kept us children there, all our sibling confusions seemed made small.

  “So you finally made it up to the big city,” I said.

  “We haven’t really had much of a chance to see it yet. With orientation and all that.”

  The room had already been arranged like a mirror of the one that she and Elena had shared in the Amhersts’ house back home in Mersea, pink comforters covering the beds, small knick-knacks set out on bookshelves and sills. I remembered the visits I’d made to her at the Amhersts’ after she’d left us, how the prim domesticity of her and Elena’s room, its careful pretence that they were sisters, that they were daughters, had always instead seemed the reminder that they didn’t quite belong there, were both only adopted, like orphans taken in by some strict but benevolent home in a Victorian story. Now, though, seeing this replica before me, I had the sense they’d been infiltrated, that what had been merely imposed had slowly become part of them. The room’s lone discordant element was a Dali print Scotch-taped above a dresser, of a naked Leda and swan against a background of sea, its Raphaelite contours and hues seeming at once an embodiment of the room’s tidy femininity and a mockery of it.

  I’d remained standing at the doorway as Rita finished her preparations, uneasy somehow at the intimacy of going inside.

  “Elena’s not around?” I said.

  “She went down to the caf.” But I sensed Rita was covering for her. “She said to say hi.”

  “I make her nervous.”

  “Why would you say that?”

  “Oh, you know. The gloomy half-brother always lurking in the wings.”

  “You’re not her brother.”

  “Maybe that’s the point.”

  We walked the short distance from the campus to Chinatown. Dusk had settled in and the streets there were awash in neon like in some gambling town or resort. I watched Rita taking things in, the tiny shops, the unknown vegetables and fruits arrayed outside, and seemed to understand for the first time that she was here in front of me, felt a flutter like a traveller in a foreign city seeing a familiar face in a crowd.

  “My place is just around the corner from here,” I said. “About a five-minute walk from your residence, actually.”

  “That’s great.” There was just the smallest bit of distance in her voice, the old self-protectiveness, the unsureness of what we were to each other. “We can see each other all the time then.”

  We had supper at a restaurant I’d begun to frequent in the neighbourhood, just an unmarked door at street level leading down to a small basement room whose walls were covered with chalkboard menus. The place’s few rickety tables were already nearly filled when we arrived.

  “This place is wild,” Rita said.

  We sat at a tiny table for two in an alcove at the back. For a moment the intimacy of being crammed like that into such a narrow space made us shy.

  “So are you settling in all right?” I said.

  “It’s okay. I feel like a bumpkin half the time – everyone’s parents are president of this or that or an ambassador or something. But it’s good having Elena around. There isn’t much that fazes her.”

  We talked about school, about leaving home. I could feel a niggling sense of obligation between us to bring up the subject of my father; but the more we skirted it, the more it seemed inessential. Though only a few months had passed since his death, already it felt like an eternity: there’d been the first torpor and shame afterwards but then a lifting, the thought, Now it is over.

  There was also the codicil to his will that I hadn’t told her about, his wish that I use my inheritance to help provide for her if she should need me to. He had neither fathered Rita nor been a father to her, had never really forgiven her for the betrayal she was the product of; but he’d carried the guilt of her to the grave. I ought to have brought the matter up now and made an end of it.

  “Are you doing okay for money?” I said.

  “I think so.”

  “I suppose the Amhersts are looking after school and all that.”

  I still couldn’t bring myself to refer to them as her parents even though they had been that to her for the better part of her life.

  “Mostly. Dad had some problems with the store for a while but I think it’s all right now.”

  “Well, if you ever need anything –”

  “Thanks.”

  The meal was served in a brusque onrush of sizzling meat and steaming vegetables. There were no forks; I expected Rita to struggle with her chopsticks but she handled them with an unthinking expertise. Always I felt this disjunction with her, the expectation of her innocence and then her instinctive at-homeness in the world like a reproof.

  We talked a bit about her plans for the future. There was an uneasiness in me whenever conversation came around to the general shape of her life, the fear that some seismic injury would be revealed, some fault line leading back to her years with us on my father’s farm. But she seemed like any healthy young woman her age, exploring her options, not quite certain what the future held but not afraid of it.

  “Maybe I’ll just live like you do,” she said. “Travelling. Doing what I want.”

  “I wouldn’t exactly think of myself as a role model,” I said.

  The room was a steamy bustle now of serving and eating and talk. Rita had pulled the band off her ponytail, her hair falling silky black to the shoulders of the sweater she wore. She seemed resplendent somehow in her unquestioning calm, in the anonymity of seeing her here in this world of strangers. It was a kind of wonder to be with her like this, without ambivalence: we seemed released suddenly into the miracle of our lives, to do with as we wished.

  When we were walking home I invited her to stop by my apartment.

  “I don’t know. Maybe not tonight.” I could see that she wanted to come, that she was thinking of Elena. “There’s a pub crawl or something we’re supposed to go on.”

  “Maybe some other time, then. I’ll have you over for supper.”

  “I’d like that.”

  I left her at the door of her residence.

  “It’s good to see you again,” I said. “Maybe things can be a little more normal between us now than they used to be.”

  “They weren’t so bad before.”

  There was an instant’s awkwardness and then we kissed.

  “Goodnight, then.”

  I stopped off for cigarettes on the way home at the variety store on the ground floor of my building. The owner, a canny Korean man who went by the unlikely name of Andrew, drew a Kleenex from a box as I came up the counter and reached out to wipe a smudge of lipstick from my cheek. I expected some joke from him but he merely winked, rapid and mocking.

  “My sister,” I said.

  “Ah.”

  It was the first time in the weeks I’d been frequenting his store that he’d been so familiar with me. He had a little ritual of goodwill with some of his regular customers, offering them a free selection from the display of penny candies he kept on the counter. Now, finally, he extended the gesture to me, waving a hand over the display with a casual flourish like some smiling tempter offering the world.

  II

  I’d rented an apartment in an old brown-brick low-rise at the corner of Huron and College, the building flanked by a rusting metal fire escape that people often used in lieu of the main entrance. Across the road was an institute for psychiatric research: at night, sometimes, from the sealed windows of the upper fl
oors, where the inmates were held, came muted bellowings or sudden shouts or screams like distant jungle sounds; but during the day, amidst the noise of College Street, there was nothing in the building’s blank façade to betray what it was. A few minutes’ walk from my place and I was in the heart of Chinatown, with its restaurants and shops, its smell of spices and rotting vegetables, its broken packing crates forever stacked at the curbsides; a few minutes more, to the west, past Bathurst, and I was in Little Italy, though perhaps out of an instinctive devaluing of the familiar I seldom ventured there, aware of it only as something known and therefore inconsequential.

  Despite the income from my inheritance I was sparing with my money, my apartment ample but slightly ramshackle, my furnishings scoured from second-hand shops. With school it was the same: because I’d been offered a scholarship I had accepted a place in a Master’s program at my old alma mater, Centennial, on the city’s barren outskirts, though when I’d left there to teach in Africa three years before I’d thought I’d shaken the dust of the place from my feet. Four days a week now I made the drive out to the campus in the car I’d inherited from my father, a cobalt-blue Olds, my one indulgence. Amid the tiny imports plying the roads now, the car seemed in its seventies extravagance already an anachronism, from another era, hulking and ghostly and huge like some prehistoric thing stumbled out from reptilian sleep.

  I had dinner one night with a friend from my undergraduate years, Michael Iacobelli. He had married since I’d last seen him, and had a son, the family living just west of the Centennial campus in a house Michael rented from his father. The floor of his entrance hall was littered with baby’s toys when I arrived.