Advice for Italian Boys

by Anne Giardini

  At dinner one evening Nicolo described his problems with Patrick to his parents and Nonna. Enzo had eaten early and had already gone to work. His father got up from the table to return to his basement workroom.

  “What can you do?” he shrugged as he departed.

  “Cosa pensi, Nonna?” Nicolo said. His mother stood up and began to clear the table. What do you think?

  “Chine è natu quatru ’un po’ morire tunnu,” she said.

  “Yeah,” Nicolo said. He nodded once, slowly, and then again. “Yeah, I know that, Nonna. What is born a circle won’t die a square.”

  CHAPTER FIVE

  On Saturday morning, Nicolo drove to Vaughan Bakery with his new psychology textbook beside him on the passenger seat of his car. He carried the book into the wide, bright store, which sold Italian groceries and small household goods as well as coffee and bread and pastries, and he propped it on the table up against the blue fluted bowl filled with paper-wrapped sugar cubes behind his cup of cappuccino with its monk’s hood of chocolate-flecked foam. He read through a page while cracking three packages of sugar lumps against the side of his cup so that the sugar cubes spilled like dice into his coffee, and he continued to read while stirring the froth and coffee and hot milk and sugary grit together.

  Nicolo came to the bakery every Saturday morning a half hour before the ten o’clock time that he and the others had agreed on. He liked to watch the customers as they flowed through the doors and carried out an efficient series of straightforward and gratifying transactions. Each Saturday morning, Nicolo bought a dozen ricotta-filled cannoli, and he and Frank, Mario and Paul would eat three each directly from the pastry box, balancing them over their coffee cups. If someone didn’t show up, as happened occasionally, Nicolo took the extras home for Enzo and his father. The bakery had served for years as a meeting place for Italians in the area. As well as breads and sweets, it sold brands of tomato sauce, pasta, meats and cheeses that were difficult to find in the regular stores and it was a useful source for news and rumours—who was marrying or having another child, who to vote for or against in the upcoming municipal elections, the degree to which the region’s plans to close the landfill were advancing or stalled.

  Marietta, the owners’ granddaughter, who had played around the counters and tables as a child, and who now served pastries and sometimes prepared the coffee in the enormous red sighing Gaggia with its banks of stainless steel valves and indicators and black dials and intermittent blasts of steam, had grown up observing Nicolo and the other three every Saturday, among the stream of customers and visitors. Nicolo has become aware of her gaze. What he cannot know, however, is how Marietta sees them: Mario foremost, the handsomest of the group, with his thick head of hair that cascaded across his forehead in shiny black rings like carved, coiled snakes, his dark skin, with, on Saturday mornings, a beard in threatened eruption around his long jaw, his wide, brown, swimming eyes, his dark lashes, thick and curled at the outer edges like a woman’s, his strong, straight nose, his cleft chin, his thick neck. Mario wears clothes that are neither new nor old, but the exact right place in between—black jeans, a close-fitting white T-shirt, a jacket cut from soft, cinnamon-coloured calfskin. He smells—she has occasionally manoeuvred herself close enough to him to take in his scent—like starch and musk, with a slightly acrid edge of tangy male-ness. Even the memory of his scent makes her mouth water. He moves through her yearning vision as if under water, like a great fish, slowly and with a surfeit of grace and without any evident consciousness of the way he refracts the light. He is as without flaw and as remote as a cloud or mountain or god. It makes Marietta weak to gaze at Mario for longer than a moment, and she tests herself every Saturday. Standing behind a wire shelf with its display of pasta and canned Roma tomatoes, she stares at Mario until she feels the tips of her fingers begin to tingle. Then she rests her eyes on the dark blue boxes of Barilla penne rigate, which she pretends to straighten on the shelf although they are almost always already in perfect order. She has, in this manner, memorized every word on the Barilla box, and the phrases printed on the box have taken on a deep, Mario-tinted significance: COTTURA 11 MINUTI. N° 1 IN ITALIA. There are for Marietta no words more charged with romance in any language of the world than these. COTTURA 11 MINUTI. N° 1 IN ITALIA.

  Once Marietta has soaked up as much of Mario as she feels she can bear, and if she is not too busy serving other customers, she might watch Paul for a while, since he is infallibly splendid, although not nearly as good looking as Mario. Paul’s jeans and colourfully striped button-down shirts are always crisply ironed, his boots polished, his black leather jacket stiffly assertive, his belt buckle almost aggressively large and glistening. He sometimes wears a black cashmere scarf loosely knotted around his neck. Marietta has sometimes thought that if Mario were to dress as Paul does, he would be too much to endure, and she is grateful that Mario sticks, on Saturday mornings, to jeans and T-shirts.

  Marietta pays no attention to Frank, who is shaped like her father—short, with a mild face, rounded torso, and a humble walk with no bravado or swagger. Frank works on Saturdays, and comes in for coffee during his break, dressed for work in blue canvas overalls with the name CORELLI’S AUTO BODY stamped on the breast pocket. She hasn’t ever seen Italian paintings or sculpture, and so doesn’t know that Frank has a classic, slanting Roman profile, the profile of a nobleman, a silhouette surely intended for coins and for marble busts rather than the muddy, greasy undersides of cars.

  Marietta knows Nicolo best, in fact Nicolo is the only one of the four she has ever spoken to, since she often takes his orders, but he has always treated her like a child—she is sixteen—and so she assigned him many years ago to the category of adult. As a result, she now perceives him to be middle-aged and therefore entirely beyond any possible romantic significance.

  That Saturday morning, Frank was the next to arrive at the bakery. He slid into the chair across from Nicolo, the seat closest to the high glass counter with a good view of the parking lot, his usual place because it allowed him to keep an eye on his car, a sherbet-yellow 1988 Corvette, to make sure no one placed a foot on its bumper or leaned on its hood or came too close to its recently waxed surface in manoeuvring through the constricted parking lot.

  “Hey,” he said to Nicolo. “Whatcha doing?”

  “Reading,” Nicolo replied. He folded the covers of the heavy book closed. “It’s for a class I’m starting.”

  “Look at our good wittle Nicolo, weading his book.” Paul had arrived. Except for Mario, who had recently completed a real estate course, none of them had studied after high school; they had all fallen into work that they liked well enough and that provided the advantage of reliable pay without requiring diplomas or degrees.

  “Yeah,” Frank said, mugging, widening his eyes and mouth into an expression of foolishness. “You know, now that I think about it, I remember I read a book once too. It was red, about this size. Some kinda title. Fulla big words. Didja ever read it?”

  “Yeah, yeah,” said Paul. He sat down and shot his cuffs. “Yeah, sure, I remember that one. Red cover, real thick. You gotta like a book that’s got lotsa pages, ’cause then you really get your money’s worth. That’s the most important thing with books; you gotta make sure you get your value.”

  “A short book,” Frank said. “A short book is hardly worth your while. You might as well not even bother with a short book. You’re done before you’ve even started. Two covers, a couple of pages, a few words in the middle. Nothing to it. Sneeze and you’ve missed the whole plot. Where’s the challenge? A book for girls. Now this, this here is a book.” Frank seized Nicolo’s psychology text and held it up. “You could kill someone with this thing. You know? It’s more of a heavy, blunt object than a book. And the beauty of it is, is you can carry it around right out in the open without even you gotta get a licence. Could come in useful, if you get me, eh? In a certain kind of situation.”

  “Idiots.” Nicolo removed his book from F
rank’s hands and placed in on the floor beside his chair.

  The glass door of the bakery opened and Mario came in on the heels of an older couple. Nicolo watched the little Gerussi girl slip away from the counter and take up her usual spying post on the far side of the pasta aisle. Two boxes of penne rigate were moved a finger’s width apart and he saw a slow-blinking brown and glistening eye appear between them.

  The four of them ran through their usual topics of conversation: soccer or baseball or hockey, depending on the season, work, cars, family, neighbours, anyone who had done something unusual or of interest, bought a house, moved, married, separated, divorced, gone bankrupt, met with unexpected fortune or success. Nothing unusual that Saturday at all, except that, after they had drained the last of their coffees, set the cups with their grainy residue of sugar askew in their saucers, as they were rising to leave, Mario held up his right hand in a signal for the others to wait for a minute before heading off into the rest of their Saturdays; he had something to say.

  “We decided. Well, Angie decided. No, we both did. The other night after, um, dinner. We both decided that we should ask you guys to help us out. At the wedding. I need to have six whatdyacallem, best men or attendants or something, because Angie wants six bridesmaids, her two sisters and a bunch of her friends. So can you do it? The first Saturday in June. We’re going to ask Angie’s brother Joe and her cousins from Vancouver, Nick and Guido, as well, and with her brother and with you guys that makes six. Okay?”

  This was the first Nicolo or any of the others had heard of a wedding.

  “Yeah, sure,” they all told him, clapping him on the shoulder, leaving overlapping powdered cannoli sugar outlines of their hands on his jacket.

  “We’ll be there, man. We’re there for you,” said Paul.

  Nicolo slipped a glance to the little Gerussi girl behind the pasta, but the brown eye had been withdrawn. Poor Marietta was on her bottom on the floor. COTTURA 11 MINUTI. N° 1 IN ITALIA floated in the sparkling blackness that swirled in front of her blinking eyes. COTTURA 11 MINUTI. N° 1 IN ITALIA. She twisted and tugged the silver ring that she wore on the fourth finger of her left hand as a place-holder, but it resisted her efforts; it twisted and dug into her plumply upholstered knuckle and, unlike her tender pink heart, refused to be moved.

  Mario had parked his cosseted Mustang beside Nicolo’s black Civic, and Nicolo felt that the few moments when they were walking together across the lot toward their cars should include some acknowledgment of Mario’s announcement.

  “So,” he said. “Angie, eh? She seems like a good kid.” Nicolo had met Angie once or twice. He thought he remembered that her family lived in one of the suburbs to the west of the city, Brampton, or maybe Rexdale, not as far out as Oakville. She was thin, large busted, with thick blonde hair teased and sprayed into a curling mass. She wore several jangling bracelets on each arm, and large gold hoops swung from her ears. Not a calm woman. Quick moving. Quick talking. Take charge. Smart.

  “Yeah,” said Mario. His breath puffed thin and blue into the cold morning air. “She’s got a good job at the bank, management track even, it looks like, and now that I have my licence, we thought, you know, get a house and some proper furniture of our own, maybe think about beginning a family even, start to live like grown-ups. You know?”

  “Yeah,” Nicolo replied. “Big wedding too. That’s good. I’m really happy for you. For the both of you.”

  “She’s okay, Angie,” Mario said. He stopped and turned toward Nicolo.

  Nicolo could hear more than a trace of self-persuasion in Mario’s voice. Which was only natural, he thought. Getting married. What could be bigger than that? He wondered too what would make someone take that leap, commit to someone else for the rest of his life. It would be like deciding to go on an uncertain trip with a stranger instead of staying safely at home.

  Nicolo and Mario stood for another half-minute, facing each other but not talking. Nicolo kept his gaze near Mario’s shoulder, which he thought about punching lightly, but that seemed not quite right. Nicolo stubbed a booted toe against a ridge of ice on the pavement. A companionable silence, easy as breathing, was broken finally when Mario said, “I guess I should be…” and Nicolo said at the same time, “So, I’ll be seeing you around…” Nicolo threw his book into the front seat of his car and they each slammed their car doors and drove away in separate directions, their quick minds already moving on to the next thing that the day held and the next thing after that.

  CHAPTER SIX

  After Jessica, Nicolo successfully avoided even the possibility of romantic humiliation for two full years. He had decided after several weeks’ deliberation that he needed to be wiser, more attuned, more fully on his guard before he could hope to be able to engage with women on anything like equal terms. His mother may have known more than she let on about the humiliations of his graduation dinner and dance, because she didn’t mention Jessica Santacroce again, even in passing. And it wasn’t much longer before the family was overtaken by the need to make wedding plans for Nicolo’s older brother Enzo and his girlfriend Mima. Mima’s family, the Bonfiglios, had six daughters, of which Mima was the third, as well as the third in four years to have disclosed during her last year of high school that she needed to get married. Enzo, who was twenty, wasn’t given much choice in the matter; as far as Nicolo could tell, no one had even asked Enzo how he felt about a marriage. Instead, immediately after Enzo and Mima had disclosed the situation to their two sets of parents, the mothers had taken over; they hurried the young pair in for an urgent talk with the priests from the families’ churches, and then took turns telephoning around to the local banquet halls to ask about cancellations. Within three days, a small wedding was scheduled and planned for early August, and printed invitations were ready to go out to two hundred guests.

  “What are you going to do?” Nicolo overheard Mima’s father, Joe Bonfiglio, say to Nicolo’s father at about ten o’clock in the morning on the day of the quickly organized wedding, his voice an aural shrug of fatalism. Nicolo walked into the kitchen and saw Joe sitting with his back straight as a plank of wood in a chair that had been pulled back from the kitchen table. He had one of Paola’s aprons, which was printed with deep purple poppies on olive-coloured sway-backed stems on a black and yellow background, tied around his wide, red neck, and his head was tipped forward so that his chin was cushioned by a folded band of rosy flesh at the top of his wide chest. He spoke carefully from one side of his mouth, avoiding any unnecessary movement. Massimo was standing behind him in the small space between the table and the refrigerator, scraping errant hairs from Joe’s neckline with an ancient and freshly honed straight razor. Nonna had prepared espresso in a battered wasp-waisted pot, and from time to time one or the other of the two fathers sighed, contemplating his scapegrace son or daughter, and then brought his cup close to his lips, blew short cooling breaths across the dark surface rimmed with minute white bubbles, and took a small sip. Nonna set the blue-flowered sugar bowl on the table and then turned to slice one of the heavy, crusty loaves of bread that she had made the day before. She placed two of the slices carefully into the toaster, which she did not trust. It had once given her a shock that coursed like a serpente up her arm from her fingertips to her shoulder when she used a fork to try to free a piece of bread that had been cut too thin and had curled in the heat and got caught in the wires. Nicolo reached over and pressed the lever down for her, while she rummaged inside the refrigerator for a jar of the blackberry jam she made every August, each jar kept this side of too sweet with a fat paring of lemon peel.

  “Kids these days. They got too much time on their hands. They flock around each other like flies and honey. And the way they dress. Boys and girls both. Tattoos. Earrings everywhere, even in their noses and stomachs. Tight jeans. Those little shirts. Legs and arms and boobs and belly all out for everyone to eyeball like the vegetables outside of a grocery store. Nothing left for the imagination. No wonder they get themselves into
trouble—who wouldn’t? But, then I think to myself, after all, I mean, we got to remember that they would be married by now already if we were still living back in the old country.” Joe reached out to take a noisy slurp from his cup. “And anyways, you can’t lock them up any more or we’d be up on charges for child abuse.”

  “Aspirin,” said Massimo, snipping his scissors for emphasis in the empty air above Joe’s ear. “We should of gotten them to take aspirin. That’s my advice.”