Advice for Italian Boys

by Anne Giardini

  Nicolo walked the six blocks back to his parents’ house, taking long strides through the thin, cold air of the dark January night, his computer bag bumping like an awkward companion against his side. He could smell a mass of snow in the northeast, yellow-toothed, unwashed and unruly, and he could hear the coming force of the storm worrying already like an advance scout through the skeletal branches of the trees that bordered the street—maple, oak, ash, poplar, beech. The heavy branches of the trees swayed in the swelling wind and the few dry leaves and seed pods that remained from the fall were stirred and tossed together, whispering and rattling, the percussion section of a reedy orchestra warming up. Dried stalks of last summer’s grasses rustled and sighed near Nicolo’s striding feet. Beside the walkway, massed banks of shrubs huddled like dark sheep butting heads against the forward eddies of the wind. Every forty or fifty feet, a cement path led away from the sidewalk straight up past banked snow to a modest front door with a half-pie window inset at eye level. Some houses still had their Christmas lights up and lighted—white, red, green, one house done up in startling pink.

  Nicolo swung his arms and as he lengthened his stride had a sudden sense of how free he was, compared to the fixed immobility of the rooted plants and paths and houses and even compared to the frost-encased cars—domestic, worthy, faithful—parked along the quiet curb. He walked down the avenues, and brittle ice and rime cracked underfoot, smashed by the tread of his boots into islands and continents that would reform and refreeze all through the long hours of the night. He could feel his warm blood coursing in his swinging arms and hands, and his heart stir—every physical part of him weighted, tested, dependable—against the gravity and chill of the late, late evening. He heard and felt his own pulse throbbing to the steady metronome of his heart. He felt a sense of joy, of membership in, even a feeling of ownership over this still, northern slice of the city, these streets settled by people who had come from a sunny, dry, hot place, a new geography turned by their naive and faithful labours into something useful and enduring. He passed a small row of stores, paused, turned his head and blinked. The sign for Catanzaro Grocery was no longer lit. It had been turned upside-down in its frame, signalling the failure of the business, an unexpected reminder of the fragility of all human endeavours.

  When he reached the corner of Ross Avenue and Emerald Crescent, Nicolo stopped again. He could see his house toward the far end of the block. The hour was late. His parents had gone to bed. Their bedroom window was dark, the lights out, their curtains drawn. Enzo’s car was missing from the driveway; he would have come home from school, eaten dinner, got in a few hours of sleep or study, and then left for the factory where he worked three nights a week from eight in the evening until three in the morning. Nicolo let himself into the silent house, put his bag and keys on the desk in his bedroom, and went into the kitchen with his psych textbook under his arm, drawn by the dim glow of the yellow light that could just be seen through the small, fogged, heatetched glass window in the oven door. On the centre rack of the barely warm oven was a dinner plate covered with a damp linen towel, and under the towel was a plate of pasta with garlic and bread crumbs cooked in olive oil, fava beans and braised fennel. He turned off the oven and set the plate in the centre of a placemat that had been left out for him, with fork and knife, on the kitchen table. He sprinkled the pasta with several spoonfuls of grated cheese from a metal container in the fridge, and he read ahead into the next chapter while he ate his dinner, chewing slowly. Suddenly too tired even to let the water run cold, he filled a glass and drank and then he placed his dishes in the sink and went down the hall to clean his teeth. The furnace rumbled companion ably and warmed air rose silently from floor grates toward the ceiling. Food. Water. Shelter. A sense of belonging. What else would a person need to be able to climb from these up the steep slope to the apex of Professor Werner’s triangle?

  Inside her bed, down the hallway, Nonna is asleep and dreaming. Her dreams are liquid and lucid and they have the heavy weight and swelling undulations of the ocean. In her dream, her grandmother Rosa Catterina has died and the women of Arduino have laid out the thin old woman on the battered kitchen table dressed in her long white nightgown and with a blue knitted cap fitted around her head from which all the flesh seems already to have fallen away. They have borrowed four candelabras from the church and have placed them on the floor, one at each corner of the table to remind the mourners to keep their chairs well back in order to leave room for the unseen dead, who are known to be not so unlike us: they rush to visit the newly dead, to pay their own cold condolences and in hope of forming new alliances that might be useful in the afterworld. The flames redden the faces of the mourners, and cast the shadows of giants on the room’s four walls. The shadows stretch up to the ceiling and merge with a century of soot.

  Nonna is a girl again, three years old, and small and bony as a kid goat. She is not yet Nonna, but Filomena. Her mother calls her Mina-mia—the mother who will die in childbirth in another two months, a stillborn daughter stuck fast behind the bones of her pelvis which will refuse to soften to grant the insistent infant passage. Filomena has crept unseen underneath the table. Looking up, she can see the rough underside, on which the marks of her grandfather’s axe are visible, and, extending from one end, toward the fire, her grandmother’s feet, narrow and as icy blue as the surface of winter milk. She stretches up one hand to touch her grandmother’s foot. She wants to know if the toes are as cold as they look. Why have they left the poor woman’s feet bare, with no shoes or stockings? Reaching, she strikes her forehead on the underside of the hard table and bursts into startled tears.

  “Hear how the little one mourns,” the women all exclaim, a collective, indivisible sound like the throaty, fluttering coos of doves roosting warmly together.

  “Poverina. Look. See how she grieves. Such a good and loving child.”

  Nonna’s girl-heart swells in protest—no one has remembered to feed her her dinner, no one has come to comfort her, no one understands her. They are confusing her with their praise. Forlorn and misunderstood, she cries harder. Hands reach down all around her, from all sides of the table, offering her consolation in the form of biscotti and sugared almonds and dusky black figs that have been soaked in wine, like small, tough dried hearts reconstituted, and even thumb-sized glasses of limoncello.

  “Leave off crying,” the women say. “A ciancere ’u muortu, su’ lacrime perse.” Tears for the dead are wasted. “Dopo il dolce vien l’amaro.” There will be time for bitterness after the sweets are finished.

  But even in the thick cloud of her dream, Nonna understands that this dream must be one of her mind’s senseless and random excursions and not a true memory. Dopo il dolce vien I’amaro is a real proverbo, but it doesn’t belong in this story. It is something that might instead be said to a young girl at risk of falling for her sweetheart’s pressing flattery, at risk of the rancour that will almost certainly follow if she falls for his too-urgently pressed and sweetly fleeting love.

  CHAPTER NINE

  As it happened, everyone in Nicolo’s family went out after dinner on Tuesday night the following week. Massimo played bocce at the Colombo Lodge in one of its five raked basement lanes on Tuesday evenings. Enzo had been called in to work to cover for someone who had phoned in sick with the flu. Nicolo had decided to sign up for Sue Hopewell’s cooking classes along with Monica; the classes were starting that night and would run for the next six weeks. Paola surprised everyone by announcing at the dinner table that she had decided to go to a public open house to be held that evening at the community centre to discuss the future of the landfill a kilometre east of the house. She would take Nonna with her.

  “An outing,” Paola said firmly. “She doesn’t get out enough, especially in winter. She’s in the house all day. She should be able to understand what’s going on in the community, in the city, some of it, anyway. What goes on affects her as well as the rest of us. She lives here too.”

  Nonna
nodded severely and folded her hands in her lap. Before dinner, she had put on her second-best dress and the black shoes that she wore to funerals. Paola had explained to her that they were going out and that they might even have a chance to state their minds. After years of promises that the nearby landfill would be permanently closed, the neighbourhood was humming with rumours that the garbage dump might instead be expanded. Paola’s eyes narrowed at the thought.

  “It’s not just our trash,” she pointed out at the dinner table, gesturing with her fork. “The whole city brings its garbage up here, dumps it and then turns around and forgets about it. It suits them perfectly. Out of sight, out of mind. But we’ve done our part. It’s time for some other community to take its turn. Marissa Stefanio down the street was saying that what we should do is take over the highway and force all those trucks to turn around and dump it all on the grass in front of city hall for a few days, and see how they like it when they have to live on top of it like we do.” She speared a meatball and pointed it toward Massimo. “It’s not right. You know it isn’t. But no one’s doing anything about it.”

  Massimo nodded. He had learned as a barber the art of signalling support, even encouragement, without himself committing either way to whatever cause was under discussion.

  Sue’s class was held on familiar territory, in Nicolo’s old high school, in the large tiled room with its six home-ec kitchens where in grade ten Nicolo had learned how to make chicken soup and spaghetti Bolognese and tea biscuits. Thirty or so students perched on stools in the lecture area, men and women in their early twenties or a bit older, roughly the same number of each. Many of them showed evidence of a lifetime of generous eating; they balanced and shifted on their stools with varying degrees of awkward self-consciousness. Nicolo took one of the few remaining places, near the front of the classroom. Sue was already standing behind the demonstration counter. She smiled at Nicolo.

  “Great to see a familiar face,” she said.

  Nicolo ducked his head and nodded.

  Sue glanced at the clock and then walked briskly around to the back of the room to close the door. Monica dashed in just as it was about to close. She hurried to the front of the room and sat down beside Nicolo.

  “I couldn’t get the kids to settle,” she whispered hoarsely. “What’d I miss?”

  “Nothing so far,” Nicolo reassured her.

  Sue had returned to the front of the room. She cleared her throat and began to speak. “As I am certain you all know, there are many ways to pack on weight,” she began. “Unfortunately, there’s only one way to lose it and that is to adopt a healthy diet and lifestyle, one that will, over time, ensure we attain and then maintain an ideal weight. This is more sustainable than the kind of get-thin-quick schemes that advertisers spin, the ones that tell us all we need to do is modify what we eat drastically but temporarily so that we shed weight rapidly, only to have it all come back as soon as we go off the diet. How many of you have had that happen, lost weight on a diet, and then gained it back again as soon as you revert to your old, evil ways?”

  Many hands were raised, and then lowered, Monica’s among them.

  “Can anyone name a diet they’ve been on that had this effect?” Sue prompted.

  No one spoke.

  “Anyone?”

  “The grapefruit diet,” someone volunteered. There was a ripple of laughter.

  Sue turned and wrote GRAPEFRUIT with a marker on a portable whiteboard that she had wheeled to the front of the room.

  “The hard-boiled egg diet.”

  Sue wrote HARD-BOILED EGG on the board.

  “The South Beach diet,” someone said.

  “The Scarsdale diet.”

  “Fasting.”

  “Bingeing and purging.”

  Sue wrinkled her forehead. She did not write this one on the board.

  “Dr. Atkins.”

  “The Hollywood Miracle diet.”

  “G.I. diet.”

  “Jenny Craig.”

  “Weight Watchers.”

  “The caveman diet; you can only eat what you’re willing to kill yourself with your bare hands.”

  Everyone laughed.

  Sue wrote these suggestions on her whiteboard.

  “What we are going to try to do is forget about diets and focus instead on eating properly by preparing a few wholesome meals together,” she said. With her marker, she made a circular motion, a gathering lasso in the air, as if pulling everyone in the classroom together. Sue picked up a stack of photocopied pages and began to hand them around the room.

  “Here are today’s recipes. You’ll see that we’re going to make cheese and vegetable—stuffed tortillas, peach-blueberry crisp, apricot-ricotta muffins, and decaf mocha lattes—the kinds of foods and drinks that you might make for a break-fast or brunch with a few of your friends on a weekend gettogether. Please divide yourselves into groups of four or five at a workstation, and you will be able to follow along with me as I demonstrate. You’ll find all the ingredients and other materials already set out for you. Everything should be labelled, just in case you’ve never seen a manual egg-beater before.” Sue held one up and spun its handle vigorously. “If you are missing anything, any equipment or ingredient, or have any questions or run into trouble, just call out and I’ll come over to your workstation.”

  In his group, Nicolo was assigned the task of grating cheddar cheese, slicing dried apricots, measuring rice and grinding coffee beans. He tried to imagine his mother or Nonna making any of Sue’s colourful, balanced, up-to-the-minute recipes, but he could not. Would he be preparing food like this—wholesome meals in modest portions, meant to be quickly made and swiftly eaten—if he was living on his own, or married? he wondered. Both possibilities were blanks in his imagination, at best vague and generic, not unpleasantly imprecise but mysteriously evasive.

  Several blocks away, at the Future of Our Community Landfill meeting, Paola and her mother-in-law were also, as it happens, watching a kind of cooking lesson. A brisk woman with her hair in a ponytail and a matching swinging, jaunty manner—she had something of Sue’s upbeat energy, but tuned to a higher pitch—had just introduced herself as “Cara Cooper, Certified General Public and Government Relations Consultant.”

  Cara started by inviting the fifteen “interested citizen participants” who were gathered in rows in folding chairs to take turns introducing themselves. When each of them stated his or her name, Cara wrote it on a name tag with a bright blue border preprinted with “Hello! My name is——,” and then she pressed the sticky tag onto the citizen’s chest. “Paula” she wrote on Paola’s name tag, and then turned to Nonna.

  “Mrs. Pavone,” Nonna said.

  Cara hesitated, but capitulated without argument. She wrote “Mrs. Pavoney” on the tag. Nonna took the tag from her and applied it firmly upside-down on the sagging front of the black cardigan that she had put on over her dress.

  After ensuring that everyone had a name tag, Cara went to stand behind a large table covered with bowls and bags and packages. “Next,” she said. “I thought it might be useful to provide you with an overview of what a landfill actually is and the way in which it is put together. I think you will find that this little demonstration will answer many, many of the questions you might have had.”

  Cara reached into one of several large plastic shopping bags.

  “We have here all that we need to make our very own working landfill demonstration model. One pre-made pie crust. Four pudding cups, two caramel, two vanilla. One bottle of chocolate syrup. A bag of licorice twists. Spearmint candy sticks. A package of chocolate cookies that I’ve already crushed into crumbs. A bag of green sprinkles.” Cara assembled these on a table.

  Paola exchanged glances with her mother-in-law. She was baffled herself, not sure where this was all leading, and curious as to what Nonna was making of this.

  Nonna nodded toward Cara, stiff-necked, and reset her shoulders almost imperceptibly. Her name tag began to curl inward from the top e
dges.

  “Now, we will have to use our imaginations here just a little bit. We are all going to try to think of the pie shell as representing the bottom of the area where the brand-new landfill will go. Specially trained engineers, graduates from top universities around the world, prepare the entire area carefully, and then they line it with clay in a process that is a bit like when you put a pie shell into a pan in your own home.” Cara placed the pie shell in a glass pan. She pressed it down on all sides.

  “So that any groundwater underneath our new landfill will be safely protected, the engineers line the clay shell with a special thick layer of heavy plastic. I am going to cover our crust with this chocolate syrup and that will represent this special impermeable plastic liner.”

  Paola glanced sideways at Nonna, who leaned back in her chair and folded her arms across her chest while Cara squirted chocolate noisily out of the bottle into the pie pan.

  Nonna’s name tag peeled away from her sweater, rolled itself into a sticky cylinder on her lap, and then fell to the floor. Better without it, thought Nonna, who noticed more than most people believed. Names should not be shared before trust, only afterward.

  “As material is added to a landfill, a kind of juice is created as rain and moisture percolates through the deposits of material inside. This liquid has a special name: leachate. Leachate can’t get through the plastic liner or the clay, but it has to go somewhere, so pipes are put in by our team of engineers and these pipes collect and pump the leachate to the surface, where it can be whisked away in special container trucks. As you can see, these black licorice sticks that I’ve brought are hollow inside. They can be our collection pipes.” Cara snipped the licorice into shorter sections with a sharp pair of scissors, and arranged the pieces on end inside the pie plate.