Advice for Italian Boys

by Anne Giardini

  “Cold,” he said. “I’m an idiot. Everything hurts.”

  Nicolo couldn’t think of anything else that he could do for him. He carried the bottle of scotch back to the dining room cabinet, rinsed the glasses and left them in the sink, and went back down the hall to his own bed. It seemed to him that he fell asleep the same instant that he pulled his heavy blankets up around his chest.

  Down the hall, Nonna is dreaming again and in this dream she is flying over Arduino. Although it is night and she is high above the houses, there is something different about her eyes. She can see in almost every direction. With such vision, perhaps she is a hawk, but more likely she is an angel, since she can see through the rooftops, as if they were made of rippled old-fashioned glass instead of tile and stone. Her gaze takes in whole families who are sleeping, one, two or more to a bed, and a few in the town who are awake. Three sleepless older women drink warm milk, each alone in her house, each one beside her own banked hearth, her feet near the soft, livid ashes. If only they each knew that the others were awake they could gather and chat companionably until dawn. They need the company more than they need the milk. One man, his clothes rumpled and torn, huddles outside the bar under a crumbling archway scrawled with graffiti; his companions had been too soused to bear him home. Nonna glides down low. She comes close enough that she can smell the stale tobacco smoke and grappa in the creases of his clothes and she marvels for a moment—she is certain that never before has a dream included details such as this rich, rank odour. This dream is so much like waking life, but more concentrated, more intense. She moves on and sees through a low window another man, lean and long and dry as a walking stick, who is dying in his bed beside his round and soundly sleeping wife. His breaths are irregular, becoming shallower and further apart. A cancer has weakened him and is hurrying to finish its task under tender darkness, before the sun breaches the crest of the hill to the east. He hasn’t complained, this fading man, of his daily pains and loss of vigour—there was too much work to do each day, and there was always a hope that the doctor in Cozenza, consulted in secret, had been wrong, although he had been left uneasy by the fact that the doctor frowned so deeply and refused resolutely to be paid. At the very least, he has thought in these last days, “na bona morte tutta ‘na vita unura”—a good death will reflect honour on his entire life. On the next day after this one dawning, Nonna knows, her sight extending ahead through the hours yet to unscroll—on that day his sons will place a stoppered bottle of water, a piece of two-day-old bread and a tattered ten-lire note into his coffin before the top is nailed down. Thus, on his trip to heaven, the expired man will have ten lire to give to a poor man in the path, who will step aside and let him pass. He will then meet a hungry dog, which the thick wedge of bread is meant to mollify. His last encounter before paradise will be with a thirsty pilgrim with whom he will share his cool flagon of water and who in gratitude will accompany him on the final leg of that final journey. The two travellers will match their pace so that they step together across the threshold into God’s great villa, where food and wine and fragrant tobacco and soft feather beds await. Bonita, the good man’s wife, will be lonely, and so will marry again after a widow’s year. This confuses Nonna in the midst of her dream—which man will Bonita be reunited with in heaven when her time comes? And then her confusion lifts, and she understands that God has planned for this too. Bonita will be multiplied and magnified in death, as will all good people, so that in heaven they can be children to their parents, parents to their children, wives to their husbands and husbands to their wives.

  Beneath the eaves of the closely set houses of Arduino, red and black and golden hens roost fatly, contentedly; they shift, settle and sigh. Many of them are almost ready to be plucked and roasted; between feathers and skin is a nicely built-up layer of fortifying fat intended to crown the soup pot. Carrots swell crisp and cool in the soil of the sloping fields, wheat stirs, its millions of sharp heads rattling companionably in the thin night breeze; goats nestle in a single, undifferentiated heap of bones and wiry hair and moist noses and sharp horns and hooves; cows shift from haunch to haunch and sway their tails like pendulums counting out the seconds until their owners will come to relieve them of their increasing encumbrance of milk; children breathe deeply, their lips fluttering and their eyelids quivering with the emergent drama of their own dreams; dogs twitch against the furtive bites of fleas; moss creeps, slowly enfolding stones and fallen logs; mould burrows a maze of blue veins through linenwrapped cheeses that are as round and yellow as the moon; earthworms root through the soil and rise to the surface to expel their elegant castings.

  If she were to awaken from this dream, and had to hand an enormous sheet of paper and a set of coloured pencils, Nonna could sketch every stone and inhabitant of Arduino, every crevice in every rock, every hair on every head and every fold on every brow. No more than God himself can she protect them, but, godlike, she can inventory and treasure every atom, every breath. She rises now and soars above the village so the air spills around her like water, and the village shimmers beneath her like a painting or scene in a play.

  “Ah,” she thinks. “So this is what it feels like to have wings. Lucky birds. Fortunate angels.”

  Both Enzo and Nicolo awoke to the usual Sunday morning swell of music from the dining room—a waltz that began modestly with an upward sweep of violins, like curtains sliding on iron rings along a rod when they are pulled apart to let in the light, and then a trill of piano notes like running water, with the time marked by shy cello and discreet and sombre viola—and to the sharp, insistent smell of Nonna’s bitter coffee heating in the pot at the back of the stove. These pulled Nicolo out of bed and into a shower, and drove Enzo deeper under his nonna’s blanket, which smelled to him, now that he was partially, uncomfortably awake and all of his senses switched to high, intensely of her.

  Enzo turned on to his back and tried to solve the problem of what to do with his cramped legs by hanging his feet over the arm of the couch, but this made his knees ache. Contrary to Nonna’s often-cited promise that la notte porta consigli, the night had not, he thought dully through a headache that was swelling, mushroom-like, from the front of his forehead into his temples and sinuses, brought him fresh counsel. He felt stale and thick and slow; his brain, which usually so reliably clicked and pinged along like a continuous game of pinball with its thoughts and ideas and strategies, felt unplugged. He heard next from inside the dim and echoing cave of a half-sleep the abrupt bleat of the telephone ringing, and he struggled to sit, suffused with a sense of culpability, of being caught out, his heart constricting and expanding inside his aching chest like the fist of a pugilist preparing for battle; but someone else answered the telephone, and after a long minute of anxious immobility, he fell backward, curled his legs and arms inside the random folds of Nonna’s blanket, and found brief oblivion again in a shallow, open-mouthed, drooling doze.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  It was Nonna who answered the phone and she passed the receiver to Nicolo without comment. The caller was Pietro Salvatore, one of the community’s four most prominent citizens (along with Giulia Crudo, a federal member of Parliament, Angelo Santanove, a Superior Court judge, and Carmine Falucci, who had founded and operated a thriving factory that made modern-style furniture in glass and black lacquer for restaurants and hotels). The idea of consulting Salvatore had come to Nicolo toward the end of his Saturday basketball game yesterday. A scuffle had broken out, a high elbow jab responded to with a sharp jostle, met in turn with a leg sweep, and then the two players fell heavily toward each other, trading insults and each struggling to keep a safe distance from the fists of the other and place blows in any spot that might be vulnerable. They were yanked apart, and then pulled to opposite ends of the court by their respective teammates. Nicolo, observing his own team’s combatant, thought of a young boxer slumped in his corner of the ring, shaking his head to clear it so that he could take in the urgent blasts of counsel from his coac
h. Enzo, it occurred to him, needed someone like that, someone quick on his feet and with a store of strategies and tactics, someone greyhaired, sharp, experienced in the topography of troubles and the ways that a person could be extricated from them.

  He found Pietro listed in the phone book (he was surprised at this; he had imagined that someone so illustrious would be harder to track down), dialled and was directed by a recorded voice to leave a message. In a few careful sentences, Nicolo laid out what he understood of the trouble that Enzo might be up against, and left his home number, not expecting to hear from the famous lawyer at ten o’clock the next day, on a Sunday morning.

  Pietro asked Nicolo to bring Enzo to see him right away. He would be waiting for them in an hour on the sidewalk at the front door of his office building on Yonge Street, so that he could let them in.

  Nicolo felt sorry for Enzo, who protested resentfully at being forced awake and out of the house into the cold air. A snowstorm in the small hours of the morning had dropped a layer of heavy, wet snow on the city. The sky was dreary, the colour of cold dishwater, and the streets were slick with a coating of dirty ice and silver-brown slush. Nicolo drove slowly, careful not to jar Enzo more than necessary. He was uncertain whether he would have been able to persuade his brother to go to the appointment if Enzo’s resolve and independence hadn’t been weakened by drink and a miserable night’s sleep. He had cajoled Enzo into a shower and then into clothes, an old pair of jeans and a sweater, and had forced him to swallow a cup of Nonna’s coffee. Enzo would accept nothing more; he glared sourly at the toast and sliced cheese that he was offered and he swung his head from side to side, cautiously but categorically. He climbed into the passenger seat of Nicolo’s car, and swayed more than the slight motion of the car warranted as Nicolo steered through the night’s new snowfall to Salvatore’s office.

  Pietro was there already. He was clearing the sidewalk in front of the building with a shovel that had a broad, shiny silver blade and long straight wooden handle. He wore a knee-length tweed coat with a fur collar, a Russian-style fur hat with the flaps turned up and tied at the top, gauntlet-like fur-lined leather gloves and sturdy boots tied with leather laces. He wielded his shovel skilfully, taking short, rapid thrusts, and lifting and neatly tossing uniform loads of snow away from the sidewalk. Pietro nodded to Nicolo and Enzo as they approached, and accelerated his pace slightly. He had completed the span of sidewalk in front of the building by the time they reached him. He straightened then, raised his bright shovel in the air, and sent it plunging blade first into a pile of displaced snow, where it quivered for several moments and then came to rest upright and still. The face that he turned to them was larger than average including his nose, which was prominent and round at the end like a loaf of French bread. He raised his dark, dense eyebrows and then brought them closer together as he turned his gaze first to Nicolo and then to Enzo.

  “Well, which one of you is it, then?” he asked.

  Enzo didn’t answer and Nicolo didn’t want to appear to accuse his brother, so a stretch of silence elapsed. Enzo stood still, arms crossed on his chest, head downturned. Nicolo looked upward, swung his arms, brought his hands together and then slid them back into his pockets.

  “You, is it then, eh?” Pietro asked. He turned his head to look at Enzo.

  “Yes, sir,” Enzo answered, raising his head.

  Another silence settled over the three men. Nicolo could see that both Enzo and Pietro were breathing heavily; Pietro’s breath billowed out around his head like the clouds ringing the peak of a mountain, and Enzo’s settled near his lips, forming a fog dense enough to obscure his expression.

  “Well, you might as well come upstairs to my office, both of you, and we’ll see what it is we can do about all of this.”

  Salvatore turned. As he unlocked and pulled open the heavy front door of the building, an alarm emitted a warning. When they were all inside, he turned and relocked the door behind them, and then moved quickly halfway down the dim hall. He opened a metal panel and punched in a code that switched off the alarm system, and then Nicolo and Enzo followed him up two flights of stairs—Pietro took them two at a time. They waited, side by side, while he unlocked his office door, disabled a second alarm, and dialled a number on the telephone that activated the overhead lights. Inside, they were directed to sit in two chairs in front of Pietro’s broad desk. The tables and cabinets around the office were stacked with papers, and with photographs, some of which showed the lawyer shaking hands with politicians and others both famous and near famous. They waited while he switched on his computer and entered a series of passwords and commands. At last, Salvatore turned toward them, and allowed a long minute to pass.

  “You may find this surprising,” he said. “But I am not going to need you to tell me what happened. What I am going to do instead is to offer a series of propositions to you, and all you need to do—and here, I mean Enzo only—is tell me whether you can agree to them. You understand me? If you can’t or don’t agree, you only need to indicate that you don’t agree. I am not looking at present for details or for an explanation. Is this clear? You don’t need to elaborate or do anything more than provide a response.”

  Enzo and Nicolo nodded, without, in Nicolo’s case at least, fully understanding what it was that Pietro had proposed.

  “I am going to start with an example only, so we can make sure you have the hang of it, all right?”

  Enzo gave another shallow nod and widened his eyes to signal readiness.

  “Do you have the time, by the way?”

  “Yes, sir. It’s twenty to one.”

  “No. The right answer is yes. You do have the time. I need you to give me no more of a response and no less than I ask. Do you see?”

  Enzo brought his head down and clenched his jaw.

  “Several students enhanced their marks.”

  Enzo hesitated but looked up again. “Yes. I believe so, yes.”

  “In fact, many did.”

  “I don’t know,” Enzo said apologetically. “I think at least a dozen, maybe twenty. Maybe more. Not less than a dozen. I think more—”

  Pietro held up his hand signalling that no more explanation was wanted.

  “Yours is not a large class. This is a sizable percentage.”

  “Yes, at least…”

  “A meaningful percentage.”

  “Yes…”

  “This is not one or two renegades.”

  “No.”

  “This is serious, but widespread.”

  “You could say that.”

  “This is not a case of one or two individuals making a bad decision. This is systemic.”

  “Yes.”

  “This is serious and pervasive.”

  “Yes.”

  “There is something wrong with the system.”

  “I believe so, yes.”

  “There would have to be something wrong with the system if between, say, ten and twenty-five percent of first-year students took this single opportunity to increase their grades.”

  “Yes, sir. I believe that would be correct.”

  “If the law school took the trouble to issue official transcripts, none of this would have happened.”

  “No, sir.”

  “If the law school had provided students and prospective employers with official transcripts, it would have been impossible for this to happen.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “You prepared your applications on a laptop, I expect. An older model perhaps.”

  “It’s three years old.”

  “The screen is neither large nor bright.”

  “No.”

  “You work as well in places that are not particularly well lit.”

  “That’s true. Mostly either in my bedroom or in the back corner of the library.”

  “You had no transcript or summary, official or otherwise, to refer to.”

  “No, sir.”

  “You relied on your memory.”

  “I
did, sir.”

  “There are strict deadlines to apply for the summer positions that are open to first-year students.”

  “Yes, very strict.”

  “And the process to get those positions is highly competitive.”

  “Yes. It is.”

  “It is fair to say that you may well have been rushed, in order not to miss the deadlines.”

  “Rushed. Yes. I did rush. Especially toward the end.”

  “There was a deadline.”

  “Yes.”

  Nicolo felt as if he were watching an acrobatic performance. Enzo would start to slip, and every time, without fail, Pietro would hold him. It even seemed sometimes that Pietro was letting his brother fall, or even pushing him, just a bit, in order to be able to catch him seconds later. Enzo had always been the one in the family most capable of this kind of acrobatics; he could set arguments spinning like plates in the air above all of their heads, and then resolve them all neatly, presenting ingenious solutions like a bouquet plucked from a magician’s sleeve. Nicolo had never seen Enzo in a situation like this, with someone else keeping several deft paces ahead. Pietro kept at it for another two hours, making statements and eliciting responses from Enzo. When he wasn’t content with a response, he rephrased the question, refining the words, trying different angles and approaches, until Enzo was able to answer satisfactorily. Every now and then Enzo shook his head violently, as if he were trying to rearrange by force the details of what had happened, of what he had done.

  Finally, the counsellor seemed to have finished. He placed his hands flat on the desk and settled back in his chair.

  “This will be a challenge, but there is reason to be somewhat optimistic,” he said. “I will take your case on. I will send you a retainer letter. If payment is an issue, we can come up with some agreed terms. In any case, you will find that my rate for members of the community, in particular for younger members of the community who may find themselves in some degree of difficulty, is very fair.”