Advice for Italian Boys

by Anne Giardini

  “Aspirin? I don’t get you.” Joe twisted his head around to look at Massimo. “Aspirin’s for headaches, not for getting knocked up.”

  “It works.”

  “I never heard of that. How many they got to take?”

  “They don’t take them. They just hold them.” Massimo finished his coffee in one swallow and held his empty cup out toward Nonna, who hurried over with the espresso pot in her hand. “Between their knees.”

  The two men laughed while Joe repeated the punchline, savouring it, wondering how he could work it into the speech he was going to give at the wedding reception. “Between their knees. Yes. That’s good. Between the knees. Couldn’t hurt, eh?”

  Nicolo carried his toast, and his coffee which Nonna had diluted for him with milk heated in a small pan at the back of the stove, into the living room. He fell onto the sofa and switched on the TV with the remote. A wedge-shaped formation of women—three with blonde hair and three with dark—were demonstrating aerobic exercises to the rhythm of a thumping, repetitive soundtrack. The women kept broad lipsticked smiles fixed on their faces, and their six sets of eyes gazed into the camera, but none of them seemed to be getting any enjoyment from the workout. The manner in which they bounced and stretched and reached made exercise appear like a necessary evil, something to be concluded in as short a time as possible, perhaps so they could go and relax on the beach, of which a simulacrum could be seen in the distance behind them. Nicolo ran through the channels but ended up at the first program again. The pace of the music had slowed, the throbbing beat replaced by the breathy tootling of pan pipes against a background of rippling harp chords, and the women were now sitting in formation on pink and blue mats. Their legs were propped opened in wide leotarded Vs, and they reached and strained their torsos in synchronized arcs toward their toes. Nicolo winced at the way they forced their lean bodies and outstretched arms forward. The woman at the front, the only one with her hair cut short, was relentless, with the manner of a drill sergeant. “Four more! Three more!” she barked, and the women behind her complied cheerlessly, their glistening expressions undented, their arms and legs in perfect alignment. The sharp angles of their hard bodies glinted under the lights.

  Enzo came into the room, dropped heavily onto the couch next to Nicolo and reached to take a piece of toast from Nicolo’s plate. He stretched his legs out and let his shoulders fall back into the cushions.

  “You look like a wreck,” Nicolo said.

  Enzo didn’t answer. He chewed Nicolo’s toast and stared at the absurdly smiling women on the screen. He was unshaven and unshowered. His hair lay around his head in tufts and valleys and his expressionless face looked rumpled and colourless.

  “Coffee?” he grunted, without taking his eyes off the television screen.

  “I’ll check,” said Nicolo, but before he could get up from the sofa, Nonna appeared at the doorway carrying a cup for Enzo, a flowered, gold-edged cup with a saucer, taken from the cabinet of never-used best china in one corner of the dining room.

  “Sposa bagnata, sposa fortunata,” she announced, holding the coffee out to Enzo ceremoniously. A wet wedding is a fortunate wedding.

  Nicolo and Enzo turned their heads and looked out the window behind the couch. The clouds were breaking and scattering and had begun to surge southward like a defeated armada of ragged ships. Patches of blue-white sky were breaking through where the clouds were retreating. Thin streams of pale sunlight breached the gaps as they opened and light shone down onto the wet houses and hedges and cars of their street. Enzo shrugged and accepted the cup. Nonna gave a satisfied smile and headed back toward the kitchen. Soon she returned with a large piece of St. Honoré cake on a plate with a fork balanced beside it, the last remaining from the rehearsal dinner two nights before. She gave the plate and fork to Enzo. The women on the screen finished their toe stretches and switched to sitting cross-legged on their mats, breathing in and out in rhythm and rolling their heads from side to side as instructed by the leader, who held her own head high like a border collie’s and continued to call out commands. Enzo ate his cake, scraping the fork against the plate to get the last crumbs, and drank down his coffee.

  “Today’s the day,” Nicolo tried again.

  A grudging but unrevealing sound emerged from deep inside Enzo’s chest.

  “You’re all right with this?” asked Nicolo. “You’re okay with marrying her—Mima?”

  Enzo didn’t reply. Nicolo reached and pressed the button to turn off the TV.

  “Hey. Earth to Enzo,” Nicolo said into the silence, without turning his head.

  “What do you want me to say?” said Enzo. He shrugged, and his plate and fork and cup bounced and rattled on his stomach.

  “I want to know. What’s it like?” Nicolo persisted.

  “Well,” said Enzo. “If you want to know the truth, I don’t love her, if that’s what you mean. I don’t hate her, but I don’t love her. She reminds me of Ma a bit, you know? She’s bossy; she knows how to do things; she means well; she’s organized. She told me she couldn’t get pregnant, that she had taken care of things, but she hadn’t done anything at all. It’s hard not to feel like I’ve been made a fool of, you know?”

  “Does she love you?” Nicolo asked. He wasn’t sure where the question had come from, but, after all, wasn’t love supposed to go with marriage? He turned to look at Enzo. This conversation wasn’t one he had expected or planned for.

  “She says she does,” said Enzo, who was staring at his cup. “But she doesn’t, not really. I am the kind of person she wanted for a husband. That’s all. She wanted to get married young, like her mother did, and her sisters. Eat what you kill. That’s the Bonfiglio motto. The girls all figure it worked for their mother and it’ll work for them too. Mima wants to have lots of children. She wants a big house. She wants to cook. She doesn’t want to have to get a job or work. I fit into this picture she has of how things are supposed to be, and I’m going to be the one who supports it. Do you think I really wanted to quit university and sell car phones for a living?”

  “Are you going to be okay?” Nicolo asked again. He felt an intense need for the story of his brother to make sense, for his brother to love Mima, for Mima to love his brother, for their child not to be born because of random grapplings and guile but because he or she was destined to be born, of these two parents, at this time, in this place.

  “What would you do if I said no?” Enzo asked. Obstinacy had been one of his traits since early childhood.

  Nicolo considered. “I guess I wouldn’t know what to say,” he answered honestly. “I don’t know what choices you have, not now. A baby. It’s a big deal, you know. A big deal.” As he said this, it came to him for the first time that he would be an uncle. To a pink infant with eyes shut tight and its crooked thumb in its mouth. A fat toddler swaying on unready feet. A boy in striped shorts and yellow and black striped socks and scuffed shin pads kicking a soccer ball around a muddy field on a cold Saturday morning, or a girl with long dark curls and tiny gold earrings and a hand reaching up to his. Uncle Nicolo. Zio Nicolo. What wouldn’t he do for this child?

  Enzo turned suddenly so that he was looking directly at Nicolo. He spoke in an urgent, appealing tone. “Ma could raise it. Did you ever think of that? Mima wouldn’t have to if she didn’t want to. It might be a girl. It’s probably a girl. All her sisters have girls. Ma always wanted a daughter; you know that. She’s got a name picked out and everything. Pa told me once. It’s not impossible. It could be the right thing. For everyone.”

  Enzo gripped his hands into fists as if they might be of use, as if he could use his hands to keep hold of his independence, and his plans to finish a degree, and then, and then—he wasn’t sure, couldn’t be certain, but his mind’s focus shifted to a semi-transparent manifestation of his aspirations, a vision of his life to come as he had only half-imagined it so far. His goals and desires and acknowledged limitations spun and twisted inside his head and his heart like a cloud
before the arrival of a storm, and then they coalesced and were transformed, this vision, the one he had never quite been able to bring into focus, of his autonomous future. It took on a more concrete, but still not quite solid form, of a well-lit tunnel with encouraging markers and road signs, a tunnel that broadened generously at the far end where it was drenched in a warm and hope-inspiring light. He tried to describe it to Nicolo: he wanted…he wanted a job at a local business, light manufacturing or distribution, one that he did well at and that would lead over time to a solid position in middle management and then a business of his own. A successful business. And volunteer work. Membership in, and then an executive position on one of those semisecret clubs run by men much like him who once a year ran an appeal, some sort of “athon,” that raised money for an urgent cause—a wing for the children’s hospital, a cure for one of the more compelling diseases, support for a languishing segment of the highly deserving poor. And, after a few years, maybe a run at and then election to city council, as an alderman or reeve, isn’t that what they were called? A wife, of course, at his side, attractive, but definitely not Mima. A woman not remotely like Mima. His wife would be someone whose family had for generations owned a cottage in Muskoka furnished with battered antiques. Someone with a natural head of straight, mocha-blonde hair, deftly feathered at the tips. Someone with a wardrobe of sweaters made of that soft wool, merino or cashmere, and navy tailored pants that zipped up at the side and shoes made of the best leather, and smooth golden thighs. The Breck girl’s twin or cousin or next-door neighbour. Enzo poured out all of this, or as much as he could put into words, and then he groaned and with his teeth worried a loose scrap of skin at the edge of his thumbnail.

  The need Nicolo felt to be fair to Mima, whom he had known all his life, together with his wish for a more or less logical unfolding of events, swamped his loyalty to Enzo. Nicolo felt as if he, perhaps alone, could picture it, how Enzo’s life would actually be, and the pattern of Enzo’s life began to come together in his mind and gather substance, like a hologram, in the air between the couch and the television. It was a vision that didn’t differ very much, in fact, from Enzo’s, except that Mima was central to it and there was no cottage or parson’s tables or sisters-in-law named Debbie and Becky. Nicolo almost believed that he could, by imagining it, call it into being for his brother—although at eighteen, he had no thought that any of this image might ever apply to himself. What he foresaw for his brother but could not have articulated was an early marriage to a clever and devoted wife, three or four children, hard work, watchful stewardship of a modest but steadily increasing store of resources, the acquisition of a small block of apartments in town that Mima could manage once the children were in school, no more than the usual number of disagreements, and the growth, like the twisting tendrils of vines, of an infinite number of bonds—thick and slender—and unspoken accommodations slowly maturing over months and years, all leading to a fiftieth anniversary party in a community hall or the ballroom of a suburban hotel, organized by their children and grandchildren, at which Enzo would speak briefly, white-haired, moist-eyed, moved by the genuine warmth and domestic harmony of all that he and Mima had engendered. A well-lived, useful life, better than most.

  Nicolo was overwhelmed by this vision. He had no means to express the way he felt. “No,” was all he said, speaking around Enzo’s moan. “This is your daughter. Or your son. And Mima’s. It isn’t Ma’s. It isn’t anyone else’s. So long as you’re the father, marrying Mima is the right thing to do. We know her. We know her family. I don’t think you two will have any worse chance than anyone else has starting out. Ma and Pa didn’t even meet until the day before they got married. They’ve worked it out. You guys will too. That’s what people do.”

  “You’re not the one who’s got to get married,” countered Enzo. He scowled and pushed his fist hard against his chin and rubbed the rough stubble until his knuckles hurt. The bright tunnel of his future was narrowing and darkening, finally, inexorably. There would be no burnished lights, no dinners on tastefully mismatched family china on reclaimed pine tables, no lakefront cottages with a collection of battered canoes and small sailboats in the boathouse, no civic honours or inherited riches or bursts of unearned glory.

  “What are you afraid of?”

  “It’s not what I expected,” said Enzo. “This wasn’t what I had planned.”

  “It will be different from what you expected,” said Nicolo. “But it could be better.”

  “It’ll be worse,” Enzo lamented. He rubbed his whiskery face hard once more and his elbow struck the remote control on the arm of the sofa.

  The television flared into life. The weather channel. A woman wearing a close-fitting, short-sleeved knitted top the colour of milky coffee, her light fine hair pulled smoothly away from the ledges of her cheekbones, was crisply announcing a sixty-percent chance of rain that afternoon. Enzo rested his elbows on his thighs. He leaned toward her, and Nicolo felt how keenly he longed to fall through the screen, so close, so transparent, so tantalizing, into another world. She was—Nicolo could see this—perfect, and as unattainable to Enzo as the sun and the moon and the stars. Nonna came into the room on her silent slippers with her coffee pot in one hand and the little pot of warm milk in the other and leaned over to refill their cups, first Enzo’s and then Nicolo’s.

  “Sposa bagnata,” she said, and pointed through the window to the skies in which the morning’s undecided clouds were gathering and thickening into grey, doughy mounds heavily weighted with the absolute certainty of coming rain.

  Nicolo turned his head and saw that Enzo had tears in his eyes.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Every Sunday, Nicolo’s mother and father get up and go together to the earliest Mass at St. Francis of Assisi parish church over on Stevens Street at the corner where it crosses Lyon Avenue, the break-of-dawn Mass for the few most fervent, die-hard congregants. Nicolo’s mother is out of bed first. Yawning in her once-white terry slippers and with her ancient pink quilted housecoat with the pilling cuffs and fraying hem belted snugly around her waist, Paola pads to the kitchen and makes coffee for the two of them, Canadian coffee, measured with a brown plastic cone-shaped scoop from a large red and green tin with a snap-on plastic lid. She uses the electric plug-in coffee maker that sees service only on this one morning of the week. This is the start of the weekend for Nicolo’s father; he switches off the twirling red, white and blue pole outside of his barbershop on Saturday evenings, and on Tuesday mornings he starts it up again, giving a polish to the chrome knobs at the top and bottom with a chamois rag. On Sundays Massimo wears his good pants—the crease pressed crisply during the week by his mother, who wields the iron like a weapon—a clean undershirt and suspenders. He pushes his feet into the rubber boots that he keeps just inside the side door, and carries his mug of coffee, which Paola has splashed with cream, outside where he conducts his weekly survey of the perimeter of the house. He checks, depending on the season, for an accumulation of leaves in the gutters, for flaking paint, for snow packed into the basement window wells, for any sign of incursions by weather, mice, rats, raccoons, or neighbours’ children or pets, anything that is or soon may be in need of his ministrations. He hitches his pants fractionally upward with his free hand as he rounds each corner of the house, and his gait is stiff, such is his swell of pride in his welltended domain—his fruit trees planted on the south side of the house blanketed at the roots with rich mulch, his eight staked garden plots, two rows of four, or four rows of two, depending on how you count them, his sweet compost pile steamily rotting and caving in on itself, his tightly lapped pressure-treated siding without open knots or warp or wane, his sturdy garage with its two sash windows, one to the west and one to the east (he cleans the panes weekly with vinegar and handfuls of crumpled newspaper), his padlocked garden shed, in which his tools hang on a pegboard, waiting for his hand, and, on a wide workbench that he made himself out of the discarded boards of a fence torn down by a neighbo
ur, rows of nails and screws and other bits and pieces sorted by size and function and stored in the red and green coffee tins that Paola passes on to him when empty, his neatly stacked woodpile, a half-cord or slightly more of wood that he buys from a place north of the city from species that burn well without too much spark or smoke or ash—maple, beech, ash and larch—wood that has been cut and trimmed and split by his three strong, grown sons, his lawn and the ancient push mower that keeps the grass in submission.

  His own father had nothing compared to this, had only fettered and entailed title to a small stone house pitched on the dark side of the road that ran uphill into the mountains, two rooms, unheated, no water, a privy over a fetid hole out back—there was nowhere left to dig that hadn’t been used and reused for generations—two ancient iron pots, a patched tin pan and a half-dozen chipped, mismatched dishes, ropestrung bed frames for the two beds, a few rusted tools, a patch of rocky earth to till a kilometre away by foot, often no shoes or boots or else a pair or two to be patched, shared and handed down, a bitter morning drink made with ground and roasted chicory roots and consumed on the doorstep in the thin early morning sun while the smell of real espresso imported from Brazil drifted over from the Gagliardis’ expansive three-level house two doors up and across the street; the village had been too small for the rich to keep themselves separate from the poor.

  Nonna sleeps in on Sundays and her snores contain a rattle of reproach against her ostensibly devout son and daughter-in-law. She had a noisy breach with the priest at St. Francis of Assisi ten years ago and in its aftermath stopped going to Mass as a matter of pride and principle. “Preti e cauci ’nculu, vijatu chi ni tena,” she said. Priests and kicks in the backside, blessed is he who has neither one. And “Piscia chiarru e ’ncuuo a lu miericu!”—one of her proverbi that has no possible translation, but having the sense, roughly, of the expression “piss off” directed in particular toward one’s so-called betters. She made exceptions only for weddings, funerals—especially funerals—and baptisms, although she hedges against the potential peril to her eternal soul by sending Nicolo twice a year to make an anonymous donation of five ten-dollar bills drawn from her tiny war widow’s pension. She has managed to convey to Nicolo as she silently counts out the money into his palm that although he is not to mention her name, he is to leave the priest (the third successor to the role since the one whose reproach about Nicolo’s younger brother Enzo’s non-attendance led to Nonna’s dramatic departure) in no doubt about the identity of the donor.