Authors: Nino Ricci
“Tell me the truth, Vittorio, you bought it for her, didn’t you, you took the money from my purse.
Dai
, I won’t say anything to your father.”
But the thing had got so out of hand now that I burst into tears.
“What a crazy thing, did you think we’d let her go naked?” she said, and took me in her arms, the first time in years she’d done such a thing. Yet I didn’t understand this forgiveness in her, the unreasonableness of it, felt robbed by it somehow of whatever had been right and true, had been defiantly my own, in what I had done.
From then on Aunt Teresa began to pay more attention to Rita, coming for her in the morning to look after her, taking her out with her when she went to work. But though this was what I’d thought I’d wanted, now I resented the implication that we hadn’t managed all right without her. She got me to bring children’s books home from the school library, sitting with Rita at the kitchen table sometimes after supper and sounding out their stories to her in her awkward, ill-sounding English; and Rita would sit silent and still, the patient student, staring up wide-eyed at the pictures my aunt showed her or watching her face to see how lips formed around words. There seemed an element of subterfuge in Rita’s attentiveness, a careful stifling of herself as if she’d understood that my aunt’s ministrations were a kind of performance she had to be grateful for; and I cherished this small resistance in her, glad that I saw it when Aunt Teresa did not, simply forged on with her lessons until she herself grew tired or bored. But then gradually some more instinctive bond began to take shape between them. I’d come into the greenhouses sometimes after school to find Aunt Teresa silently at work while Rita played at the end of her row, the two of them lost in their own thoughts but still seeming always aware in some animal way of each other’s presence; and I felt cheated then by Rita’s not seeing how easy it was for Aunt Teresa to be
kind to her, how little she risked, began to look always for the small oversight or cruelty in my aunt that would betray the fragile trust Rita had begun to show in her, hated that meanness in me but knew with the stubborn sureness of childhood that Rita was the only thing that truly belonged to me.
But in the end even when my aunt’s small betrayals did come, her fits of irritation, her inattentiveness, her beginning to treat Rita as if she were any normal child, there was no atonement in them for me. I’d watch Rita’s spirits fall at some refusal or reprimand, Aunt Teresa simply carrying on oblivious, though for Rita, who had experience neither of scolding nor of forgiveness, each of these little slights was like a catastrophe. But she’d be inconsolable then if I tried to reach her, warding me off in her stubborn silence as if even the slender, precarious love of Aunt Teresa was worth more to her than the whole of my own.
When by the winter the new greenhouse was finally built and planted, my father seemed to give in at last to a grudging satisfaction, relaxing into his accomplishment now that the threat of it had passed.
“You’re a big shot now,” Tsi’Alfredo said.
“
Sì
, a big shot, when the bank owns even the screwdrivers I used to put the damn thing together.”
But I saw how he’d look up and down the greenhouse with an air of ownership, contented and grave, how he’d fiddle with valves and switches to make sure everything was perfect.
As part of his new expansiveness he bought a television, at long last bringing us into modernity, a squat, peg-legged General Electric we set in a corner of the living room. It seemed to shift the house’s whole centre of gravity, always there as a presence, full of potential, holding more life in its tiny screen than all the empty rooms it ruled over. Within a matter of weeks it was already hard to imagine what we’d done without it, how we’d ever managed to fill in the hours between supper and bed;
and in the new window it provided on the world we seemed at once brought out of ourselves and yet made more intimate, gathering around it every night as around a fire, sealed off in the living room’s sheltered space as if nothing existed beyond us, or was real.
My father exercised an unthinking tyranny over what we watched, seeming to use the television simply as a kind of soporific to ease himself into sleep after work yet showing an odd discretion in his choice of programs. Some logic governed these choices but one that appeared to have little to do with the shows’ storylines, was more a matter of their tone or of the certain colouring they gave things, the police shows with their grim seriousness, the westerns with their laconic gunmen and their spare, remote worlds. Often he’d come into a show half-way through or fall asleep before the end of it as if attracted merely to its flow of images, like a cat to a moving object; but then the following week he’d have me search it out for him again, already seeing special value in it simply because it was familiar. Gradually each night of the week took on its schedule, its inevitability, one that within a few months had begun to order our time as tightly and precisely as the bells that marked out the day at St. Michael’s.
In Rita this control my father had seemed to become the focus of some hard, child’s resentment. She had quickly developed a proprietary attachment to the TV, settling in front of it after breakfast and still there before it when I returned from school, ignoring me then as if to make the point that she had something of her own now, didn’t need me; and then in the evening she’d hover in the living room in silent protest, stubbornly protecting her claim against my father’s temporary usurpation.
Sunday afternoons, though, Rita and I had the television to ourselves, my aunt and my father usually out and the two of us
settling furtive in my father’s recliner to watch it, the afternoon stretching before us in dead Sunday repose. I took a guilty pleasure in these afternoons, some wariness between me and Rita seeming briefly to fall away then, the television a sort of point of neutral contact that brought us together exactly by freeing us of each other, Rita beside me neither affectionate nor not, simply there in her small unmindfulness. We watched the afternoon movies on Channel 4, tearjerkers mainly, with always some wrenching parting or separation, an accident, a death; Rita followed them with a quiet absorption yet remained also canny somehow, merely curious, even when my own throat was tight with suppressed tears seeming always outside the emotion of them as if she’d understood better than I had that the things we were watching weren’t real.
These movies led on into the first shows of Sunday evening, “Lassie,” “The World of Disney”; but there was always the tension then of my father’s imminent return from the club. We’d hear his truck come up the drive, hear the back door slam, his footfall on the steps; then in the kitchen he’d linger absently a moment watching Aunt Teresa preparing supper, make some gruff, perhaps almost good-humoured criticism or complaint, his way of greeting her. But since Aunt Teresa usually simply ignored him or made some dismissive response he’d turn finally toward the living room, his air of tired contentment at once falling away because Rita was there; and then with the same instinctiveness with which he drew around himself his sudden grimness he’d have me change the channel, seeming thus to empty us from the room, to reclaim it from us.
Rita would sit in silent resistance during all this, shutting out my father as surely as he did her. But then once he’d come
something would crumble in her and she’d withdraw into her hurt as into a tiny fortress. All evening then I’d be aware of her sullen aloofness, its rebuke of me for my own failure to prevail against my father in some way. She seemed to understand how I betrayed her: I wanted to think of my father as someone who could not be opposed, whose will would forge on against any resistance from me like a juggernaut; but it was my resistance that wasn’t sure enough, that was blunted every time I saw the grimness that came over him in Rita’s presence, some part of me then always siding with him over Rita.
In the end it was Rita who prevailed against him, simply pressing herself up against the television one Sunday when my father told me to change the channel. By the time I’d understood that I ought to have pulled her away at once, made her invisible, it seemed her presence there had already become too undeniable.
“What’s the matter with her?” my father said.
But he seemed to regard her with an odd detachment: she might have been merely some strange inanimate thing that had blown up against the television by chance.
“She wants to watch ‘Lassie,’ ” I said, emptying my voice of commitment. “It’s a story about a dog.”
“
Dai
, change it, she has all day to watch television.”
But Rita held her ground, her shoulder pressed into the dials and her back to us in sulky stubbornness, closing us out. She seemed so vulnerable there in her child’s gargantuan wilfulness, so pathetic, that I couldn’t bring myself to oppose her. For an instant we seemed suspended as in a dream, all possibilities open.
“
Mbeh
, tell her to get out of the way then, we can’t see anything like that.”
This was as far as he’d ever come to ceding anything to her yet he seemed to relax into his concession as though some threat in her had been diminished by it.
“What a stupid thing,” he said afterwards. “That a dog can do all that.”
But Rita had won her point: he’d been forced to see her, to react, and yet the world hadn’t come apart.
“Always that damn dog on the television,” he’d say coming in now. But then he’d settle into his chair and watch the show through with us to the end, boyish there in his masked sceptical absorption.
“You’re worse than the kids, glued to that damn thing,” my aunt said. “And then you complain that the supper’s cold.”
“Why don’t you just make it earlier, you know they always watch that show. Six o’clock is when other people have supper – there’s no reason we have to eat in the middle of the night on Sundays.”
“Who, other people? I think that television is starting to rot your brain.”
All the same she took him at his word, spitefully scrupulous, calling him at the club now if he wasn’t home by six. It was an unheard-of hour for us, the sun then still out when we sat down to eat – after years of living by its rhythms there seemed something oddly luxurious in resisting it, some shedding of our habitual immigrant unrefinement.
We seemed to enter then for a few months, on through that fall and into the winter, a period of uncommon stability in the family, a kind of attenuation or truce as if after years of holding ourselves in rigid defence it was no longer clear what enemy we faced. On the surface nothing much had changed – we had our habits by then, the careful balancing of avoidance and engagement, our
ways of talking, the things that were never said; and yet something had gone, some sense of threat. There was a calm in us that seemed to reach a kind of pinnacle on Sunday evenings, our early suppers, the long evening of television that stretched before us, and I had a sense then that perhaps things could be all right with us, that we could live in a kind of protective normalcy like a television family. It was almost possible to ignore in all this how Rita still hovered at the edges of us, more accepted now and yet for that perhaps more truly forgotten, for the moment claiming no special attention from us and yet seeming thus to be merely continuing some silent protest against us.
Rita turned six in the spring. It was a kind of shock to think of her aging, having to go to school, requiring things outside us like any regular child.
Then one day not long after her birthday I returned from school to find her playing with a collie on the front lawn, a ghostly double of Lassie like a gift some fairy had brought.
“Where did it come from?”
“A man brought her in his truck.”
“What man?”
“A man with glasses. He said I could keep her.”
But the story sounded so improbable I thought Rita had made it up, that the dog had simply strayed from a neighbouring farm.
My father thought someone must have been trying to get rid of it. That was the usual way of getting rid of a dog, by driving it out to some distant concession road and abandoning it there.
“Oh,
Leh-sie
!” he said when he saw it. He checked to make sure it was male – he didn’t like females because of the trouble with litters.
“
Mbeh
, we’ll see how long he sticks around.”
But Lassie showed no signs of wanting to leave us. His first days with us he slept right up against the back door, as if afraid we might try to steal away from him in the night; and then in the mornings he’d be waiting for us there when we came out, manic after his long deprivation, bursting with his need for us. When it grew clear that he planned to stay my father finally built a doghouse for him from some scraps of old plywood, even took the trouble to paint it and to cover the roof with some shingles he found in the barn. He set the house in the courtyard against the back wall of the kiln, where it looked, with its fresh white walls and shingled roof, like a tiny mirror image of our own.
We all seemed to expect some crucial flaw to reveal itself in Lassie to explain his abandonment. Yet he took to the farm as if he’d been born to it, understood at once where he was allowed and where not, didn’t bother the chickens or the cats, didn’t chase cars or burrow in the fields or get in our way when we worked, his sudden appearance like a kind of miracle, as if he’d somehow leapt from the television into life. Only Rita seemed to see nothing unlikely in his having come, taking to him with a child’s unthinking acceptance that what was normal was simply whatever happened.
“Did you see the man who brought him? What did he say to you?”
“I don’t remember.”
Then when Lassie had been with us only a few weeks he was hit by a truck. From the boiler room I heard the long hard blare of a horn, a screech of brakes, came out to see Rita racing from across the road toward our lawn and Lassie a blur of motion behind her. The truck caught Lassie broadside and flung him a good dozen feet into the grass at the side of the road, where he
lay unmoving, his head twisted unnaturally to one side. For an instant we seemed to remain frozen where we were, Rita on the lawn, me at the boiler-room door, the truck at its odd angle on the road; and then finally the truck’s driver climbed down from the cab. He was an enormous man, the fat layered so thickly around his belly and thighs he swayed like a water-filled balloon when he moved. He came over to Lassie and shook his head slowly, one hand wiping sweat from the back of his neck with a dirty handkerchief.