The Size of the World

by Joan Silber

  “Hey, she got married by a priest,” I said. “A regular Catholic person in a white collar. The nice fat man from my brother’s parish who didn’t care who was divorced. Remember, guys? You were there.”

  “I wore pink,” Rosa said. “My dress was pink.”

  “Remember, Viana?” Aaron said.

  IT WASN’T UNTIL her second year of school that I began to worry about Viana. In bed she had become what I would call compliant. She never turned her back, she never refused me, and when I questioned her she always claimed enthusiasm. But I knew. She was a poor liar. The fancier I got, the more determined I was in my attentions, the more unconvincing she was.

  I didn’t know (how could I?) whether she might have liked any other man better. After Annabel and I broke up, I used to ask myself: What if a person only gets one great love in this life? I didn’t really believe that, and people in my place and time generally didn’t. But I thought Viana might be the sort of woman who loved only once—his for always, simple as that. A heroine. Whose valor was now being mangled.

  THE NIGHT PATTANI was on the TV news, Viana got very upset. “Look what they’ve done!” she kept saying. “They” were the Thai police, who’d killed a hundred and eight Muslims in the capital of Pattani. Bands of Islamist youth with machetes had attacked police stations and checkpoints trying to steal firearms. (What a crazy idea, who’d thought that one up, the ungunned trying to rob guns.) Special forces, who’d been tipped off, opened fire, and those left standing took refuge in a sixteenth century mosque; when the cops couldn’t get a surrender, they killed everyone inside. The TV showed a marble floor gouged by grenades and a Koran covered in blood. “This won’t help,” Viana said. “Do they think this helps anything?”

  I thought she sounded like Rodney King asking why we all can’t get along. The oldest of all questions. “It’s a beautiful mosque,” Viana said. “You can’t see in the pictures. It was never finished, because of a curse. It’s very famous.”

  “The whole world will be rubble soon,” I said.

  “You’ve never seen it. It’s a real place. I know it’s not real to you.”

  “It is to you. More than here.”

  “You have no idea. You’ve never been anywhere so you can’t imagine.”

  “I can imagine,” I said. “Do you think all the time of going back? You want to go back.”

  “People are dead. What are you talking about?” she said. “What’s the matter with you?”

  “I’m not dead,” I said, but even I knew I sounded pathetic.

  IT WAS A STUPID DISCUSSION, and what it did (I should have known this, I taught about this) was inspire a deeper loyalty in her to the bloodied mosque, the bullet-pitted brick, the local mourning, her old life. Not a political loyalty, worse than that, a familial one. I couldn’t stop either.

  “I know you don’t like winter here,” I’d say. “You wish Indiana was the tropics, don’t you?”

  “What if I do?” she’d say. “What then?”

  “Half the time you don’t even know you’re here.”

  “What if I don’t? Whose business is that?”

  Unlike Annabel, Viana was not much of a quarreler, but the rhetorical questions she fended me off with had threats of separation as their answers. A shadow of possibility had entered the house, though we went on as if it had not. A mere shadow can be lived with. That was what I thought.

  ONE FRIDAY VIANA was out when I came home and she wasn’t back in time for dinner, though her car was in the driveway. By six all four boys were there, with Rosa, and we waited. I thought maybe her hours had changed at the hospital—a friend might have picked her up—and she’d forgotten to tell me. She was training on the pediatrics ward, which was very high-stress, but how could she forget us? I gave the kids some food, and I called the hospital. The head nurse said crisply that Viana LoBianco was not on duty till Sunday.

  My first thought was to hope the head nurse hadn’t known I was the husband. In my mortification, I could hardly look at the kids when I hung up the phone. Hadn’t I seen the signs? I had, this time. How did it happen that I was a man that two women chose to leave? What had I done? Rosa said, “She better get here soon.”

  Then I was ashamed of not worrying that something had happened to her, even on the safe streets of Bloomington. She wouldn’t just leave Rosa, that was very unlikely. I didn’t want to alarm the kids, so I sounded friendly and sheepish when I called the police, who had no news, and then I called patient admissions at Viana’s hospital and another nearby. No Viana anywhere, no matter how many times I spelled both her names. By this time Rosa and Aaron were in tears, and Alex was braying at them, “She’s okay! She’s really okay!” Nicholas had the idea that we should just cruise around checking the streets and the back roads, and I let the older two go off while I stayed with the others.

  I plied them with late-night snacks, but no one was hungry and Rosa wept into her chocolate milk. Don’t do this to them, I thought, a prayer in the form of an argument. They were asleep in front of the TV when the older boys came back at two a.m., having found nothing. I was thinking, after I got everyone settled in bed, that if I’d known life was going to be like this I wouldn’t have bothered with any of it.

  The phone call came at nine the next morning. All the kids were in the kitchen and I could hardly hear Viana’s breathy voice. She was in a detention facility for women in Indianapolis, where the FBI had taken her, after questioning her for hours about her e-mails to the relatives in Pattani. “What?” I said. “What?” My poor girl, she had to repeat it before I promised to call a lawyer. “Kisses,” I said to her, dumbly, as her quarter ran out. I told the kids she would be home soon.

  IT TOOK THREE DAYS to get her out, which the lawyer said was much, much better than he had feared. When the lawyer and I went to pick her up, she looked wispy and blowsy and spent, but at home in front of the kids she perked up. “It’s over,” she sang, and perhaps that was true.

  “Your father got me out of there,” she told Rosa. When she put her hand on my shoulder, I saw she meant me.

  For a week, she had no interest at all in leaving our apartment—she said it looked like the world’s coziest nest to her. I wondered that she felt safe there, since it was from this living room that the FBI (a man and a woman) had taken her. She said she just wanted to sleep now. Her questioners had gone at her without letting her sleep very much. They had repeated the same questions in many different ways, and they had done their best to scare her out of her wits. Did she like this jail, would she like to stay here a lot longer? They understood how loyal she might feel to her former relatives, but did she know how serious it was to keep back information? Was it fair to her daughter not to give full answers?

  Our lawyer had expressed some surprise that they hadn’t questioned me too, and there was nothing at all to keep them from coming back. I thought about the men’s jail, worse than the women’s. I kept this fear to myself, since airing it would only have given Viana more dread, to no purpose. I’d spent my whole adult life reading prison memoirs, prison poems, letters from prison—Nelson Mandela, Cesare Pavese, Martin Luther King. I hadn’t thought that history was going to come get me of all people in this of all ways.

  Small noises in the apartment made me jumpy—a phone call at an odd time, a branch hitting the window. But I didn’t want to walk around quaking in my own home; I didn’t want to quail before those fuckheads, or act as if I were not equal to what my wife had just gone through, or get Rosa more spooked than she was. Fear was not a good idea here, but I had my hands full being the steady guy.

  In the week that Viana stayed indoors and slept, she liked me to nap with her. Or—she asked—would I just lie next to her until she nodded off? Would I phone her from school later to please wake her up? We held hands over dinner, like a dating couple. She saw me freshly as her rescuer, which was a little ridiculous. Rosa was clingy again too; she would lay her head on my chest while I was still eating dessert. I liked all this, I li
ked this time. Perhaps it was not such a bad time for Viana either.

  I DID NOT EXPECT the delicate intensity of these days to last, once Viana went back to nursing school and became again the overworked woman in white. But something of the generous and melancholic fondness of that time did stay; a shift had been made. For good, it seemed. I could hardly believe this turn of the wheel. It was strange to profit from the scare tactics of a marauding arm of the government, but the oddness of it didn’t keep me from being glad.

  In public Viana and I were together more too, talking to journalists, addressing rallies, lined up in a delegation to our congressperson, making as much of a fuss as we could. We’d coach each other before and rehash all of it afterward. Early on, to the kids’ great astonishment, we were on a local TV station, for about two seconds. When I saw the tape, I was a little startled at how old we looked. Well, Viana looked better; she was the dark-haired expert on regions whose names she pronounced with rippling exactness, while I, her barking professor of a husband, looked on.

  Viana was shy under this glaring attention, but her indignation was deep and she was too modern, shy or not, to just let me speak. Underneath her wincing she was proud. After someone wrote about us in the Herald-Times, I saw her e-mailing the article to friends in New Jersey.

  “So what do they think in Hoboken?” I asked later.

  “They think we look like Sonny and Cher,” she said. “Just kidding. They’re pissed off on our behalf, they can’t believe it. In Thailand they’re always afraid the cops want money but I told them it’s a different problem here.”

  “You sent the article to Thailand?” I tried not to sound infuriated and shrill with foreboding. I was worried for Rosa. I was worried for me.

  “I did,” she said. “I thought about it. I did ask Winai not to tell my mother-in-law—she gets upset, she’s been through a lot—but I couldn’t really keep it from them. You know?”

  I didn’t know a thing.

  “You don’t think I should write to them?”

  She already had. How often did she send these notes to them? Every week, every minute? More now than before? She gazed up from her computer while she waited for me to answer. I waited too. She had her eyes trained on me, trying to see what I thought, and a terrible expression crossed her face, a look of pained surprise. Was she alone in this after all? Her chin took on its fallen, defeated angle.

  “Mike?” she said. I could hardly stand to see her like that.

  “Yes,” I said. I had principles. A person had a right to send e-mail wherever the hell she wanted. Any jerk could tell her that much, couldn’t he? “Of course you should. Are you kidding?”

  Viana looked at me happily, though it was not my happiest moment.

  And I thought about those photos of us (Sonny and Cher indeed) going out into the world as bright pixels emanating from our kitchen table. I’d never exactly understood cyberspace. But here I was, swimming in it—sink or swim—floating on a lake as big as I ever could imagine, bigger. Look what love has done to me, I thought, but it was too small an idea for where I was.

  LOYALTY

  Annunziata

  NOBODY TALKS ABOUT IT NOW, but I hated Americans when I was young. We lived in a town in the mountains south of Palermo. Half the kids in our part of town were my cousins. Giuseppe Sneaky across the street was my uncle’s sister-in-law’s son, Giuseppe White-Head (who got called that because his hair was sort of light brown) had the same aunt, and every night the boys hung out in the piazza with my brother, whose name was also Giuseppe but who was called Piddu to keep things straight. Piddu was the smartest of my brothers—he could get anybody to do anything—and he kept the cousins from bullying me. “Pick on an ugly girl instead,” he said. Our father ran a store that sold anything that didn’t have to be fresh—sugar, rice in sacks, bars of laundry soap, powdered bullion, shoes, candles, salted anchovies from barrels, and sometimes toys around Christmas. All of us helped in the store, but only Piddu, once he was old enough, got to ride the train to Palermo to buy supplies. My father didn’t like to make the trip himself and he decided no one could cheat Piddu. Piddu brought me back very good souvenirs—a set of paper dolls, a postcard of the Virgin Mary (I was a religious girl), and once a tiny, beautiful peach made of marzipan.

  I have to say: we all liked Mussolini then. We weren’t wild devotees—the man was not Sicilian—but he was less of a joke than most politicians, my father said. My brothers were avanguardisti in the Fascist youth group and they got to wear black shirts and black fezzes with long tassels while they marched around the schoolyard on Saturdays. My mother heard the government had built very nice apartments somewhere for old pensioners. And we weren’t immune to the idea of glory. In school we had to sing rousing hymns about hailing the people of heroes, hailing our immortal fatherland, and I liked the singing.

  Piddu was the second oldest of us, after my sister Vincenzina, and he was the first to go to war. I laughed when I saw Piddu in uniform—our Piddu in those boots! He said, “Don’t worry, Nunzia, I’m going to Africa, where the people wear white sheets and don’t even have guns.” I was fourteen by then and not sure if he meant this. When I saw that he was teasing me, I was frightened. But I pulled myself together and waved because I didn’t want to be a fool.

  The first weeks he was away, I kept thinking I’d forgotten to do something—take the coffee off the flame? lock the cash box?—and then I’d realize it was the lack of Piddu that made everything feel like an unfinished sentence. My mother had a little stone altar in a corner of the house with a plaster statue of the Virgin, and I put flowers there every day for my brother, chrysanthemums in the fall or branches of waxy red berries in winter. The few times I forgot to do this I was seized with dread. At night, in the room I shared with my sister, I prayed over and over with a mental chanting of his name. We all felt better when we got a letter—he was in a base on the mainland, being taught to do push-ups, he said, by an officer with a mustache like pubic hair.

  The letters took away some of my fright and bit by bit I began to get used to his being gone. And I had an interest in a boy from the next street who always looked back at me when he biked by. I was done with going to school by then, and our store wasn’t so busy that I couldn’t watch out the window or stand in the door. The boy, whose name was Umberto, had a maroon-colored bike and his hair was cut so the top of it flopped in the wind.

  When they sent my brother Piddu to North Africa, we didn’t get any more letters. We wrote to him anyway, jokey messages from everyone in the family, dull news of what sold in the store. My sister Vincenzina’s fidanzato was going into the army too, and she wanted to marry him before he left. So then we were all very busy with the wedding, sewing my sister’s dress and making up the little bags of sugared almonds for favors. Enrico played the mandolin, and I danced with my father. My sister’s wedding night was the last night before her new husband went off. His house was on a street with stone steps built into it, and all the way up his friends had pasted signs: GO, ANTONELLO! TAKE IT ALL THE WAY, ANTONELLO! AIM STRAIGHT!—these were wishes for his victories in bed, not on the battlefield. I could scarcely stop thinking about what they meant. The next day he left for his unit, and my sister came back to us.

  I was more restless after the wedding. I’d wake every night from the scandal of my dreams, with only the sound of my sister’s breathing in the room. My dreams were my own, but it made me feel odd to have Vincenzina so near after what had transpired in my sleep. The room was like a cave, damp with our breath and the smell of stone. In the mornings I woke up earlier than I had before, and I came into the dark kitchen and made the fire in the stove. There was more to do these days, with Piddu gone, and they were teaching me to keep the store’s accounts too, since my brother Enrico was going soon.

  When my mother came into the kitchen in the morning, she was never in a good mood. Sometimes I could clown her out of it—I’d sweep over her feet with the broom, or I’d tuck oranges in my bodice as a fake boso
m—and on Sundays, when we all went to Mass, she was better. I was too. Did we all believe that God was taking care of Piddu? Who knew what “taking care” meant to someone like God, Whose eye saw dying every day?

  I had the lacquered wood rosary that I had been given at my confirmation, but since Piddu’s leaving I didn’t bother to use it for prayers when I was alone. Part of me wanted to promise and plead, to reason with God about how much we needed Piddu. Then I would think, Oh, He knows that, and I would try to think of all He knew, and I saw God’s awareness spreading over the sands of North Africa. I wanted so much to feel His presence right in the room; I wanted what probably only saints get to feel. But the thought of His attention like a haze in the desert was some comfort to me.

  Enrico left in the spring. We knew from the newspaper that the Italian and German armies had been busy for a long time fighting the British in Egypt. I had the idea that the British were timid, skinny people but I also knew that any soldier with a gun was not a comedy. In the fall we heard on the radio that the Americans were in Africa all of a sudden—they waded onto the shore, trying not to get their guns wet—but our forces gathered together and shot at all of them. My father told me that someone like my brother, who could always get people to do things, was not in the front lines anyway. “He gave cigarettes to the right person, he sent a girl in to the colonel. He’s Piddu.”

  GIUSEPPE SNEAKY TOLD me that Sicilians could adapt easily to North Africa because Saracens, who were Arabs, had lived for more than two hundred years in Sicily and left their blood in us. So, for instance, an Arab mosquito today might give a disease to a European but not to a Sicilian. “The Americans will die of malaria,” he said. My father said, yes, he had seen mosquitoes wearing little black Fascist badges. The mosquitoes were all singing songs to Il Duce.

  I had Umberto, the boy from the next street, always, always in my mind, but my mother had only her misery. We had snow that winter, a beautiful light sprinkling on the mountains, and my mother would not even go out to look at it. She kept inside all the time, blinking at customers from a stool in the store. People were short on money and in winter they had nothing to trade but oranges or knobs of kohlrabi, and they’d walk back and forth in front of the sacks and barrels. My mother didn’t believe in giving anyone credit and made stock cheaper only when it was stale or broken. (People waited for my father, but I never saw him lower a price either.) At home she swept and mopped and rubbed, as though the table and floor might speak if they were beckoned fully and say something better than we could.