Advice for Italian Boys

by Anne Giardini

  “It is very kind of them to include us,” his mother said. “This Angela must be a thoughtful girl.” She was leaning over Nicolo’s shoulder to look at the invitation as she spoke and in her voice was slightly more than a shade of a suggestion, a reminder that if there were one, then it was very likely that there were other thoughtful girls out there. This was, however, offered lightly, not as advice exactly, but with a reticence that happened to be the exact size and shape of the advice unspoken, and at the same time his mother touched just as lightly the whorl of hair that sprang up from the centre of the crown of Nicolo’s head. He is, she knows it, they all know it, the child that most fills her heart. I jirita de’ manu ’un su’ tutti guali—even the fingers of her hands are not the same. Not that she loves him more than she loves the others. Her love has no divisions or measures. It is just that her love for him affects her more profoundly. She is weaker in it, tender sometimes almost to the point of tears toward this middle child, this son who seemed just now unruddered, incomplete, when compared to his brothers. Lorenzo with his job and house and wife and two children already. Vincenzo with his studies and achievements and honours and gleaming prospects; Vincenzo would do well, would marry well, there was no doubt, perhaps would even become a judge one day. She delighted in having Nicolo still under the roof of the family home, but she was also concerned about him. She wondered from what direction the wind would come that would convey him forward. She was concerned about both Enzos too, but not so achingly. They seemed to her to have tougher shells, and in some way that she could not articulate, even to herself, less at stake. Most of all, she worried that Nicolo would end up alone. There was something in him that was sealed up, cautious, perhaps some lack of an understanding of his own worth, something that might hold him back from the kind of letting go or falling into trust that a relationship needed as a catalyst in order for it to kindle.

  “Who will you invite to the wedding?” she asked, dipping in close to his ear, so close that she felt Nicolo shrug his shoulders in response.

  She thought that she had spoken quietly enough so that only Nicolo could hear, but she saw from a small adjustment to the angle of Nonna’s head that she had heard the question too.

  This was a subject on which the two women disagreed entirely. Nonna had somehow concluded that Nicolo’s path would take him alone into a different life, one far from the family, and that this fate would have to be submitted to. This seemed to Paola to be wilful if not cruel. Wilful since even to imagine it would make it more likely to happen. Cruel because the prediction struck at Paola’s greatest fear, that one of her children would be lost to her. She had had no brother or sister, and few relatives apart from her parents, both dead before they were forty. Massimo and her sons, even Nonna, were her family in the way that few people understood. They were not her second family or simply the family she had married into, they were all she had and would ever have. She felt that Nicolo’s marriage to a girl close by, someone from one of the families of the neighbourhood, could be all that it would take to divert the possible course of Nicolo’s life away from Nonna’s prediction. This was one of the reasons Paola was dismayed at Nicolo’s decision to take a university course, foreseeing that this could expose him to possibilities that she might be unable to deflect. Although she had said nothing, she had begun to tidy away Nicolo’s textbook when he left it out, putting it in places in the house where it could not be easily found but could not exactly be said to have been mislaid.

  At the bakery on Saturday morning Nicolo brought up the subject of whether he should invite someone to Mario’s wedding. He had thought that he might invite Carla from his psychology class. Frank and Paul had other ideas. They mentioned women they all knew, single or newly single women, women they had met at school or through work or in the neighbourhood. “Laura Bartucci.” “Rita Tassone.” “Tina Fiorino.” “Lahoor-a,” Frank said, using the Italian pronunciation. “She’s the one. She’s a nurse now. I wouldn’t mind being her patient. That hair, those big eyes, those, you know—” Frank mimed Laura’s upper figure with his hands. “Kind of quiet.”

  “I don’t know about Laura,” Paul said. “I ran into her a while back. She’s got kind of heavy lately. You know how that happens? She’s on the way to getting a big butt. Remember, her mother’s big too. That’s what she’ll end up like, guaranteed. They always take after the mother, that’s what you have to watch for. Rita’s more fun, anyway. Not too serious. She’s a legal secretary downtown. Someone like us has to grab her before one of those downtown guys gets her.”

  Mario didn’t join in the discussion. His hands were busy, restlessly contorting a small rectangle of paper, the wrapper from a trio of sugar lumps, into a twisted red and white strand. “This stuff going on at the law school—what does your brother have to say about it?” he asked suddenly, changing the subject. He turned to look at Nicolo. His voice had taken on an odd tone.

  Nicolo was startled. “What do you mean?”

  “I saw something in the newspaper last night. A short article, you know, buried on page five or something like that,” Mario said. “It said that a couple of the students out at the law school are in some kind of trouble, were caught putting down fake grades on their resumés. They’re supposed to have given themselves As instead of Bs or Cs, something like that. And it said there are rumours other students might have been doing it too but haven’t been caught yet. There’s some kind of investigation going on about it. I just wondered, you know, if Enzo had mentioned it.”

  “It can’t be Enzo’s class,” Nicolo said. “They haven’t even got any marks yet. The first-year students don’t write their exams until April.” However, a tentacle of concern began to probe at something in the recesses of Nicolo’s mind, a memory from an early morning back at the beginning of December, the sky still dark outside, cold pressing hard against the windows of the house, of coming across Enzo sitting at the kitchen table, studying in that way he had, wholly absorbed, his hands sheltering his brow, under the bright light that hung from the kitchen ceiling—for an exam or important test, it must have been, for that level of intensity. Something must have been at stake. Enzo, who left nothing to chance, reviewed every possible detail before his exams. He tried to remember how Enzo had been behaving lately, but they had been keeping different hours, and it had been several days since they had spoken.

  Nicolo looked for Enzo when he arrived home, but Enzo had gone out and his mother wasn’t sure where he had gone and didn’t know when he would be back. Nicolo had a few free hours before he was due to meet up with friends for a basketball game and he decided to see if he could track Enzo down. He tried the local library first, since that’s where Enzo went to study, and found his brother in a study carrel on the second floor, near the collection of bound federal and provincial legislation, peering into the screen of his computer and tapping slowly on the keyboard.

  “Hey,” Nicolo said.

  “Hey,” Enzo echoed, glancing up. His expression of surprise at seeing Nicolo transformed almost instantly into anxiety. He half-rose from his chair. “Is everybody okay? Ma?”

  “No, no, everything’s fine. I needed to find a book for my course and I thought, why not check to see if you were here and wanted to go for a coffee with me.”

  Enzo glanced at Nicolo’s empty hands. “Didn’t you find your book? And don’t you have a game?”

  “It’s not until later. Come on. I can get the book anytime. Can’t you spare half an hour to spend with your own brother?” He knocked Enzo’s shoulder lightly with his fist.

  “I’m kind of in the middle of something,” Enzo said. He sat down and turned his back to Nicolo, fixed his eyes on the glowing screen of his laptop. “I’ll probably be home for dinner tonight, though. Okay?”

  “Come on,” Nicolo urged. “I need to ask you about something.” It seemed to him that Enzo was being unnecessarily difficult.

  “You can ask me here.”

  “No. I can’t.”

  “Why
not?”

  “You know.” Nicolo tipped his head to indicate the people who were sitting in chairs and other carrels nearby. One or two of them glanced back, signalling early-stage irritation and an implied suggestion that the two of them take their whispered conversation farther away.

  “Oh.” Enzo hesitated, but then he reached to snap his computer shut. He unplugged the electric cord and coiled it neatly into a figure-eight secured at its middle with two taut wraps of the cord. He put the computer into his briefcase, zipped the case closed and followed Nicolo downstairs, out the front doors and into the café next door to the library.

  “What’s up?” Enzo asked once they had made their way through the queue, picked up their cardboard cups of coffee and found seats outside at one of the café’s small tables in a sheltered spot that was only slightly warmed by a thin latewinter sun. He fidgeted. He rolled his shoulders, rattled his plastic stir-stick against the inside of his cup, shifted on his chair and squeezed his cup.

  “What were you working on just now?” Nicolo asked. It was difficult to read Enzo’s demeanour. He wasn’t sure how to start a conversation about a news article he hadn’t read about troubles that probably had nothing to do with Enzo.

  “Nothing. Things. Studying.”

  “How’s it going at school?”

  “What do you mean, how’s it going? It’s going fine.”

  “We haven’t had much time to talk lately.”

  “You know, you’re making me nervous. Enzo came and found me like this a few years ago, and that’s when he told me about Mima being pregnant. He wanted me to help him break the news to Ma and Pop.”

  Nicolo stirred another packet of sugar into his cup and then raised it and took a sip. The coffee tasted like syrup. He looked down and saw that his hands had created a pile of empty sugar packages, six at least. He set the coffee down again and cracked his knuckles—an old habit, one that his mother had bribed him out of the summer he was sixteen by promising him a new pair of hockey skates. Paola had not been able to break one of Enzo’s habits, which he was engaged in now, tugging at the long hair above his brow.

  “I wanted to ask you about this thing that’s going on out at the law school,” Nicolo said, feeling as if he was plunging into cold water. He ripped open another sachet of sugar and dumped it into his cup.

  Enzo had not yet tasted his own coffee. His hands were raised in a teepee above his cup. He pushed his lips forward and knit his fingers together. “What about it?” he asked, breathing steadily over his entangled knuckles.

  “I heard that some of the students had been caught changing their marks on resumés, or something like that. I heard it second hand, though. It’s probably just one of those rumours.”

  Enzo didn’t answer.

  “And I heard that there might be others.” Nicolo experienced an odd sensation of dislocation, an almost physical shift in the ground under their table. He wrapped his hands tightly around his cup. He had never been his younger brother’s confessor or adviser.

  Enzo still didn’t say anything. He dropped his forehead onto his fingertips and massaged his brow into deep folds. Nicolo noticed for the first time that his younger brother’s hair had begun to recede, and he felt a small bolt of pity and concern.

  “Well?” Nicolo said at last. “What’s going on? You can’t be involved in this, if it’s even happening. You haven’t had any grades yet.”

  It took a long while for Enzo to speak, and when he finally did, his words came out in a rush. “First-year students do write exams in the middle of December, but the Christmas exams don’t count for anything. They’re supposed to be for practice only, to get you ready for the real exams in April, the ones that count, so you can get a feel for the way they work. You have to find the issues in the problems, and then pick them apart; that’s even more important than solving them. There’s a way of doing them, and it takes a while to get the hang of it. But then, the way it happens is, if you decide to apply for a summer job at a law firm after first year, the firms always ask you for your December grades. That’s all they have to go on, they say. It’s unfair, because the December tests are not supposed to mean anything. There are lots of people who don’t do very well and then go on to graduate at the top of their year.

  “A group of us were talking about it in class a few weeks ago and the prof asked if we had considered how easy it would be to subvert what the firms are doing. All we had to do, she said, was make a pact that we would give straight As or whatever marks we agreed on to the firms and this would send a message that we don’t think it’s right to insist on seeing marks that aren’t intended to have any meaning and in fact don’t mean anything. Because it isn’t right, what they’re doing; it isn’t fair. Then some of us got to talking about it afterward, after the class, and we agreed that there wouldn’t be any risk because the law school doesn’t give transcripts and they don’t give out the grades; they won’t even confirm or deny them. What you report is supposed to be based on the honour system, I guess. But I’ve heard that the truth of it is the honour system has been broken for years and the marks are often misreported and everyone knows it, even the administration knows it, but no one has ever done anything about it. They just let it go on.”

  “What did you do?” Nicolo wished that Enzo would look him in the eye, but Enzo’s gaze was fixed on the rim of his coffee cup.

  “I asked around about what the others were planning to do, but no one would commit one way or the other. I had got okay marks on the practice exams, better than most—an A, two Bs and the rest were C-pluses—not as good as some of the others got, but not bad either, pretty good in fact. I had already decided that I should apply for summer jobs at some of the medium-sized firms and maybe one or two larger ones just to see what happened. The jobs that pay the best, the ones that pay well, are the ones that want to see the grades. So, what I decided was, I decided that it would be wrong to give myself straight As or anything like that. Even if others did it, I couldn’t; it would be too misleading. But I couldn’t see how it would do any harm to anyone to make a very small adjustment, to change the C-pluses and put B-minuses instead. It’s a very small difference, a matter of a percentage point or two or three, well within the margin for error for the people who do the marking. I worked it out carefully, ran all the numbers. I didn’t want to do anything wrong, I just wanted to give myself the same chance as anyone else.”

  Overhead, a formation of clouds had made a slow passage across the sky and was gathering across the contracted orb of the dim sun. A sharp wind found its way around the corner of the building and crept across Nicolo’s scalp under his hair. Another fugitive breeze found a path under his jacket and along his back. He sipped his coffee again, for something to do, and then set his cup down and slid it to the side of the table. He leaned back, folded his arms across his chest and frowned.

  “I know. I know. You don’t need to say it. It was wrong. But it’s done.”

  Nicolo jammed his hands into the pockets of his jacket. “You mean you did it? You sent the marks out?”

  “Yes. The next day. To six firms.”

  “Have any of them got back to you? Your letters might not have been delivered yet. They could still be in the mail somewhere or in a pile on someone’s desk. We just need to figure out how to get them back.”

  “No, it’s too late now. I’ve already had one or two calls to set up interview times. One of the students did the same thing apparently, or something similar, and then he told a few people, one or two too many anyway, and someone ratted him out to the dean’s office. Then, all of a sudden there were memos posted around the law school on all the bulletin boards to say that anyone caught misrepresenting their grades could be expelled. They’re starting some kind of an investigation. Maybe it’s like Nonna says, you know, ‘Chi va ai al mulino s’infarina.’ When you go to a mill, you get covered in flour. Only this feels more like shit than flour. This system, it’s sick, all of it, rotten. It makes you rotten too, only it’s ha
rd to see that when you are in the middle of it. When you’re inside something like that—it’s hard to explain—it feels almost like just another problem that has been set and that has to be solved, like in the exams, and it feels like the smart students are the ones who catch on quickly, play the system, and the dumb ones, the losers, are the ones who don’t figure it out or think that they’re too good, too pure, to make the system work for them.”

  For the first time in his life, Nicolo wished that Enzo wasn’t so smart. Some systems, he thought, might not be worth figuring out if the result would be a temptation to beat them.

  “Pull the applications. You can get a summer job somewhere else, or keep working at the factory. I can always give you a loan if you need it. I have lots of money saved up. I’ll give you whatever you need. I know you’re a good investment. I totally believe in you. There are lots of ways to get through this. Loans, grants, the bank of Nicolo, and you still have your scholarships.”

  Enzo made a sound, a groan that seemed to rise up from deep inside his body, from the centre of his belly. “It isn’t that simple. These jobs aren’t only for the money, although the pay is a big part of it. It’s the fact that they’re the right kind of job. They take you places. Being a summer student at one of the better firms is the closest thing you can get to a guarantee. It’s like you’ve been approved, anointed. After that, assuming you don’t completely screw up, you’re on the inside.”