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The Size of the World

Page 21

by Joan Silber


  THE FIRST MONTHS, when I was waiting for Viana to come back, were very bad for me. I couldn’t stand it when Umberto gave her car to Gerry. Every day it hurt me to see it gone from the driveway. I closed up her room and I didn’t even clean it. But the worst was all the time passing. Anna’s youngest went to kindergarten, Gerry’s wife went back to school, Gerry was losing his hair, and Viana didn’t know about any of this.

  My daughter Anna always thought someone like me didn’t mind getting older because I was never what anyone here thought was glamorous. But when I saw myself in the mirror, a fattish woman with streaked hair, I saw a person who looked lost and not smart and whose youngest daughter might probably think she’d changed into a baggy, sad thing.

  It was a new cruelty when she sent us the pictures of her baby. The child looked like him—Viana was holding a tan baby with silky black hair. Later, when the girl was three or four, I thought (maybe because of the way they had her hair chopped) that she looked like my Uncle Turi, who was always called Turi Africa because he was dark. I looked at the pictures and I threw them away. Umberto wouldn’t look at them.

  I worried about the child getting sick and Viana too. Cholera, malaria, I knew what those were. Gerry said, “Her husband’s a doctor, and Bangkok’s a lot bigger than Hoboken.” Gerry thought she was living high off the hog—a doctor’s wife, with servants—no wonder she’d run away.

  I DIDN’T UNDERSTAND the message on our phone machine. It was a foreign woman with a light, peeping way of speaking, “Please to call back, very important, very.” Umberto was the one who called back. And while he spoke, I heard myself wailing, before Umberto could make me believe that Viana hadn’t been killed, only her husband had. I clapped my hands in joy when I understood we still had Viana, though I never wished her husband any harm.

  I NEVER WANTED to go to a place like Thailand. I did it for Umberto, who wouldn’t have known by himself how to watch over a five-year-old or how to talk to Viana again. We had to change planes twice, in places I never wanted to see—the airport shops made me dizzy and I would only sit at the gate and wait. When we got to Bangkok, the crowd of people from our plane, who mostly looked like us, went through a set of glass doors and were lost in a sea of Asians. “Stay by me,” Umberto said to me. Without each other, we could vanish.

  The heat outside was a wet smothering heat, not dry like the baking sun of Sicily, but the taxi was lovely and cool. We went over dingy highways and past patches of palm trees and square flat-roofed houses and along an overpass into city blocks of big whitish buildings streaked with soot. On the streets were thousands of people—small like Sicilians but skinnier—on their way to places whose names we couldn’t even say, chatting away about news we’d never heard of, laughing at jokes we’d never get.

  The driver might have taken us anywhere, but we reached the hotel. I had been in hotels before—once in the Poconos and once down the shore—but not as fancy as this, though this was cheaper. And I didn’t want to go out, once we were in our nice room. I lay on the quilted coverlet and I slept, suspended between the old suffering and the new one that waited for us.

  A very sweet woman came to take us to the hospital where Viana was. Her name was Toon, she was a friend of Viana’s, and we met her in the lobby of the hotel. “So glad you are here,” she said. “Much better you’re here.”

  The hospital was at the edge of Bangkok—an hour and a half away—and I didn’t see how we were going to talk to each other all that time in the car. Umberto’s eyes were hooded and he wasn’t saying a word. It was very possible that Viana was dying, whatever they said, and I was terrified to imagine going back on that sequence of airplanes with my girl’s body in a coffin, and how would we keep them from losing her? “You speak so well,” I said to the woman. “How did you get such good English? Better than mine!”

  Her husband was American. And I learned other things, while she drove. She had a boy and a girl. The girl had just gotten married, and the boy was a monk, for a long time now. A monk! It took a little while for me to understand she didn’t mean a Catholic monk. “Famous temple,” she said, when we passed a building with a cascade of peaked roofs, carved in filigree and covered with gilt. I’d never seen such a thing, glittering like a very elaborate dream, right on a modern street. “Look!” I said to Umberto. He gazed back at me with his mournful look.

  “In a little time we’ll be there,” she said. “Not too long.”

  I thanked her for taking us. “No trouble. Nothing to thank,” she said.

  WHEN WE SAW VIANA, she was propped up in bed. She was pale, with bruises on one cheek and a gauze pad taped to her forehead and dark, woeful shadows under her eyes. She saw us as soon as we saw her. I watched as she took us in—we were yet another exhausting part of her fate unrolling before her. I said, “Cara,” and I could see her struggling to be equal to the task of being with us again.

  “We’re here,” I said. “Here we are.” She looked older, thicker in the chin.

  “Yes,” she said. She was trying to remember how to care who was there.

  “How are you?” Umberto said. “Are you all right?”

  Viana made a wry face and said, “I’m hunky-dory.”

  “Soon you’ll be better,” I said. “Do you want some water?”

  “Soon,” Umberto said.

  “Your friend says you’ll be fine,” I said. “Your friend Toon who’s a nurse. She says you’ll be out of the hospital soon.”

  They had put her in a pale green gown, like a prisoner. Viana looked down at the bedsheets and she looked up at us. “How was your flight?” she said.

  How hard she was working, my girl. “Very nice,” I said.

  “They fed us too much,” Umberto said.

  “They gave everybody a package with slippers and a little toothbrush,” I said.

  “Good,” she said.

  “Don’t you want some water?” I said.

  “Sure,” she said.

  There was a pitcher at her bedside, which was why I’d thought of it. “You have to drink a lot of water,” I said. I poured her a glass and she took it from my hand, and a line of radiance went through me, to see her swallow.

  A nurse came into the room and said something that Viana understood. While she was taking my daughter’s pulse, I could tell Viana was introducing us. Then the nurse put her palms together under her chin, as if she were praying, and made a little bow to us. What had Viana told her? Umberto was wincing and nodding.

  “They’re very nice here,” I said when the nurse left.

  “Don’t you want to see Rosa?” she said.

  HER FRIEND TOON, who’d left us alone with Viana, was our guide to the children’s ward, where Rosa was. Umberto was trailing behind us like a slow old dog.

  I didn’t even know which one Rosa was, among all the children in their rows of beds. But she knew Toon—she was the girl waving like mad to Toon. She had eyes like her father’s and her hair had turned wavy like Beddu’s—she was fidgeting on her bed and calling out to Toon in Thai. That was her voice, that reedy little hoarse sound. When I heard it, my heart cracked and bled. She was little for five, light-bodied and small-headed, an elf of a girl. She had no idea who we were, or perhaps she had an idea and was chewing it over in her mind. She was smoothing back her hair, with the careful pride of little girls, tossing her head. Why hadn’t we brought her toys? I had missed knowing what she liked. She must have liked dolls, we could have brought a doll. I’d given birth to two daughters and I didn’t know that? I was sorry for myself then and sick for the war we’d made, sick for the shame and stupidity of war. I could hardly speak, for shame.

  AND SHE WAS A little scared of us, you could see that. “Your grandparents,” Toon said in English, “came a very long way to see you.”

  And then Rosa made a prayer-bow to us!

  I felt like a fraud, a criminal disguised as a fancy royal person.

  “She is maybe a little shy,” Toon said.

  Rosa said, “My moth
er doesn’t like the food here. Can you get some food for my mother?” Her English was fine.

  THE FOOD WAS actually not the problem. Rosa herself had decided that was why her mother was so glazed when they brought Rosa in to see her, which they did once a day. I was worried about Viana too. Even in Sicily when I was young, there were people who never got up, once they’d been hit as hard as life can hit. I didn’t think Viana was one of those, but nobody ever thinks that. She had great stubbornness, but stubbornness could go either way.

  We’d flown all the way across the world to pull her to her feet, but what was that? That was just love. She had Rosa for that, Rosa squirming and kissing and trying to climb over her bed. (We saw all this later.) She needed love—she would have fallen far deeper into the pit without all of us calling out to her. But in the realm where she was—I knew from when Piddu died—she could barely hear us, we were nothing. I’d had God to think about (I didn’t imagine He thought about me), but what did Viana have? All her talk about how all religions were the same. Did that let her slip away at all? Did that let her leap for a few seconds out of the unbearable cage of herself? What I thought was: Whoever God is, it’s better not to take your own hellish troubles personally, because (this is what the Virgin knows) what’s happened to you keeps happening over and over. I couldn’t have explained why this was a consoling opinion. And who could say what thoughts were in the head of the Viana I didn’t know, what views she had? Whatever they were, she needed them now.

  WE WERE IN BANGKOK for six days. Several times Toon’s husband came to take us to the hospital, a pink-faced man named Toby in his early fifties—it was always a relief to be with an American. He’d say, “This isn’t bad weather,” or “It’s a very good hospital,” and we believed him. He’d leave us there for the whole day, which gave us a different sort of time with Viana. I would bathe her neck and arms with a cool wet cloth, I’d tell her what the other grandchildren were up to. She hardly talked but I saw that she was putting on lipstick for our visits. And Rosa began to get used to us. She made us watch tricks she could do with her toes, she demanded candy. Umberto told her Superman lived in New York and he’d met him several times.

  At midday there was no place nearby for us to eat except from the vendors in the street. I was afraid of what they would feed us or charge us, but Umberto pointed and held up fingers and women scooped up hot stews from vats in their carts and young boys fished out skewers of fruit from under glass counters on wheels. I didn’t want to eat the food, but people meant well. They’d gesture to say, Good, yes? Each lunch was nerve-wracking and made me homesick.

  Once, when we came back into the hospital, Viana was talking Thai in her room with two women friends from work. It was always startling to hear Viana making those sounds! Umberto and I backed away and left while they were having their conversation. The women looked solemn and touched Viana’s hand. They had known Niwet too. And where was his family?

  “It seems so long since they were here,” Viana said later. “Since his father came with his brothers to take Niwet’s body home.”

  “The funeral was already?”

  “Oh,” she said, “they have to have it right away.”

  She looked as if I were on the edge of affronting her. Her face had closed into its own outrage of grief.

  “I said goodbye to them then,” she sighed. And that was the first we had reason to think that she was coming back with us.

  In the evenings I stayed inside the hotel. There was a restaurant in the lobby that had food we could eat, and after Umberto had his coffee we could go back to the room. We could make the room as cool as we wanted, and Umberto sat up in a chair and read his paper and did some kind of puzzles in a book. If I didn’t fall asleep, I watched the movies they had in English on the TV. A few times Umberto went down and walked around the block. Whatever he saw didn’t make much of an impression. “Noisy,” he said.

  We were sealed in with air-conditioning, but once, when Umberto was asleep, I got up and opened the one window that would move, to listen to that noise. How could so many people still be out? There was the streaming hum of cars and voices calling out their twanged and clipped syllables. People were laughing and yelling and insisting about something. It humbled me, this noise that had nothing to do with us. I saw that I had been vainer than I’d known. Who would want to know that? I felt corrected, and I let the massed sounds wash over me, the unsleeping street.

  ON THE LONG PLANE journey home, Viana slept most of the way, but Rosa could hardly keep still. She was very excited. Did they have every kind of ice cream in America? Did they have Game Boy? What other games did they have? “Will you sleep?” Viana said. Rosa did collapse, eventually, in a curled lump settled in her mother’s armpit. “It’s good she’s so curious,” I said.

  “She thinks her father is waiting in America,” Viana said. “She knows better, but she has her ideas.”

  “Everything looks so familiar,” Viana said, not happily, as we were driving from Newark airport. It was a rainy April afternoon. “Everything looks the same.” She was blaming the buildings for this.

  Hoboken itself had changed a lot, as Umberto tried to point out, but she didn’t care. Her arrival was marked by the weight of her discouragement at finding herself back at this spot again. Rosa, of course, had her own disappointments. “Why do the trees look like that?” she said.

  There were too many kinds of trees in the world; I was mad at God for making everything so complicated. Too much variety, more than any single human could take in. What had He been thinking? I knew by now (if not now, when?) that such a question was not helpful and would get me nowhere.

  “They’re nice trees,” I said.

  VIANA COULD HARDLY see her way across the room, those first months. She greeted her friends warmly, but when they left, she barely spoke to us. She was especially sullen with Umberto and Gerry. We kept Rosa busy. We had her playing with her cousins, we let her watch videos, we fed her thrilling delicacies. When she heard Umberto say, “Ammuni”—let’s go, in Sicilian—she ran around saying it to everyone. I knew this imitation meant she liked us.

  When Rosa went to day camp in the summer, Viana moped at home. She had no intention of feeling better. I’d grown up with widows who wore black their whole lives, so I saw her point and the truth of it, but it was not an American point. And in the tenderness of her loyalty to the dead, she was as furious at us as if we’d had her husband killed.

  She never said a word about getting a job all the next year. She took Rosa to kindergarten and she helped me with the house, but she didn’t want to do much of anything else. So I was very excited the next summer—I could hardly believe it—when she took up with Mike, her old boyfriend. How fresh she looked, all of a sudden, how much more like herself. What I didn’t understand was that she would leave us then and take Rosa with her.

  WHY DID ANYONE need Indiana? I though that Mike might want to come back to Hoboken now, but Viana said, how could he, his kids were with the wife. I had a son-in-law anyone would envy me for, but I had been double-crossed by good luck. Every week we talked to our Rosa on the phone, but she chattered about people we’d never met and she was a little older each time we saw her on holidays.

  All the same I was very glad—I still said prayers of thanks—at the way Viana’s life had turned out. She seemed to me to be proof that mistakes can be made good again, roads rolled up back to the start. I never forgot to be grateful that she was returned to us, home safe, after I’d lost any hope of seeing her again in this world.

  FOR ALL THAT WE were back as a family, Viana was never the same toward Umberto—she gave him respect but she kept her distance and she didn’t ever agree with him—and maybe that was why we weren’t told right away when the FBI came and took her to jail. I had to hear about it from Mike’s mother, who thought I knew. “What is this crap with arresting everybody?” she said.

  By the time she said this, Viana was home safe—out of jail, fine, fine, not to worry. I had t
o be reassured, over my wails and my repeating every sentence—I couldn’t take any of it in, except by reciting and asking over and over if that was right. Umberto heard me from across the room. I’d never seen him so clenched, so grim and red in the face. We had a daughter who’d been in jail.

  “What the hell’s the matter with this president?” Mike’s mother said.

  VIANA WAS SLEEPING when we called Indiana, but we did get Mike on the phone.

  “The FBI is nuts,” he said. “We’re a Fascist state now.”

  “And how’s Rosa?”

  “Rosa,” Mike said, “remembers the Thai relatives better than you’d think.”

  “Of course,” I said.

  “It’s a mess over there, a nasty little civil war,” Mike said. “There was always a group in the south that wanted to separate from the rest of Thailand.”

  We’d had separatists in Sicily too, before we left. Giuseppe White-Head had punched Giuseppe Sneaky in the nose because one of them was a separatist and one wasn’t.

  “It’s very bloody,” Mike said. “First the police managed to suffocate seventy-eight Muslims when they were transporting them, then some Buddhist villagers were beheaded in retaliation, then—this was really bad—Buddhist monks were slashed to death while they were out collecting food offerings.”

  “Enough. Don’t tell me,” I said.

  “Schoolteachers were killed,” Mike said. “Because of the language laws. More keeps happening.”

  He was interested in the history of it, he explained too much. I didn’t want to know. I didn’t see why history, even now, refused to leave us alone.

  UMBERTO SAID, “Who told her to write those letters?”

  “The police aren’t supposed to read e-mail,” I said. We both knew the police could do whatever they wanted.

  “They came to her own house and took her away,” I said.

 

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