Authors: Nino Ricci
There was no certain moment that marked Rita’s departure from us, only her lengthening visits to the Amhersts, Aunt Teresa’s silent complicity in them, supportive or submissive, I was never sure which. But then finally one of her absences stretched on a week, then two, until all our house still held of her, her lingering smell on her pillow, her few remaining clothes, seemed merely remnants, no longer able to hold the shape of some impending return.
My father came back from Detroit for good in early May. The day after his return Aunt Teresa enlisted Tsi’Alfredo to come by to tell him what had happened. The task seemed to irk him, set as he always was on keeping problems within the family.
“They want to keep her,” he said. He referred to Rita as “
cchella catrara
,” “that girl,” never by name. “I don’t know, maybe it’s the best thing.”
Aunt Teresa kept silent. My father showed Tsi’Alfredo a respect he would never show Aunt Teresa or Tsi’Umberto, seeming to see in him the closest thing he had in his life to a friend.
“I wish to God she and her mother before her had died and rotted in the womb.”
But he seemed so tired suddenly, so worn out with remembered pain.
He went through a sort of grieving afterwards, going about his work on the farm hunched like a sojourner, seeming made fragile by this unexpected resolution of things. I’d expected
anger, a sense of betrayal; but some childishness in him seemed to have fallen away, his fraught, complex need for blame and recrimination. Perhaps all along he had wanted no more than to do the right thing, had always held out for that though it was the very thing that was impossible for him, that he could never see his way clear to.
Yet it seemed no real decision was ever made about Rita, by him or by any of us, that we’d merely given ourselves over to what had happened as to an act of fate, never daring, in our immigrant helplessness, to question what rules such matters were governed by here; and now that she was gone we seemed to fold ourselves over her absence like water rushing to fill a gap, the only proof she’d ever been with us our guilty silence and then the small evidences of her left scattered through the house like pricks of conscience, the clothes in my closet, a tooth-brush, an old pair of shoes left greying with dust on the basement shoe rack. At school she seemed by now a stranger, someone I had no claim to: she made a pretence for a time of ignoring me, childishly, hurtfully obvious, turning loudly away to her friends if I passed or staring through me as if I weren’t there; but then even this language between us began to falter, grow strange, giving way finally to simple awkwardness and then to silence.
The end of the school year was approaching, our grade-eight class preparing for confirmation. But it was as if some veil had been stripped from my eyes over the previous weeks, everything I had taken for granted till then seeming suddenly called into question. At confession I couldn’t get beyond the first ritual phrase, lapsing after it into hot, awkward silence.
“You know, son,” the priest said finally, “it’s a mortal sin to receive a sacrament while your soul is unclean.”
But there seemed no place inside me to speak from, no word in me that was true. I couldn’t understand how the world had come down to this, this futility in things, what mistake I had made.
“Perhaps you can do your own confession,” the priest said.
Then finally school was over, my last year at St. Michael’s. People lingered at the front entrance when we were let out, drifting into their cliques. I saw Rita and Elena come out and huddle secretively a few minutes with a group of their friends, Rita’s laughter suddenly ringing out from among them falsely childish and exuberant.
“Kooky, kooky!” she said. “You’re a kook!”
But when our glances met, her exuberance melted from her, only that message passing between us, our instinctive sibling shame and then our turning away.
At home whatever unease remained over Rita’s departure was layered over now by a wave of new activity, the farm beginning to undergo a great transformation. The ruins of the old boiler room were finally cleared away, the old greenhouses repaired and extended to the road; and work was begun on a new boiler room, back beyond the garage, and on two new greenhouses to come off it, stretching from the road nearly as far as the creek. It seemed almost miraculous, this transformation, this new farm rising phoenix-like from the ruins of the old; and yet in a sense we’d merely returned to the old order, Tsi’Umberto gone into partnership again with my father as if the past several years had been merely a digression, a slow excising of the flaw at the centre of us that had kept us from being a family.
We’d contracted the work on the boiler room to a man from Castilucci, Tony Belli. He and his men seemed a second family
to us, with their noise and activity, their constant presence. We joined them for breaks sometimes, the coffee and sweets Aunt Teresa brought out, the slices of cheese and meat, the men pulling up crates and sawhorses and overturned wheelbarrows for seats, jocular, rugged with work.
“Oh, Vittorio, how’s
la gallufriend
?”
But my father seemed wary of them, grim still with inchoate emotion, hovering furtive around their work as if awaiting some expiation, some disaster. Then when building up one of the outside walls one of the masons forgot a window. My father was livid.
“Is it possible you couldn’t notice a thing like that? A child could see it!”
But Belli seemed embarrassed less for himself than for my father.
“
Dai
, Mario, it’s nothing, we can cut a window in there in five minutes,” he said quickly, then issued terse instructions to his men in a clipped, precise English.
“He hasn’t changed a bit,” I heard one of the men say afterwards. “I still remember the fights he used to have with his father, you could hear them half way across the valley.”
But it struck me as strange that people talked about my father’s temper as if it defined him, reduced him to it when what seemed more important, more true, was the shame that came over him afterwards, the way now, for instance, he avoided the work site for several days and spoke to Belli with a gloomy thick-tongued awkwardness.
But then as the work progressed some weight seemed to lift from him. It was a gradual thing, like the slow, unthinking relief of escaping a punishment, the realization that nothing would go wrong, that he had called this new work into being and could
allow himself now to take pleasure in it. I noticed a new deference in the workers, the subtle acknowledgement of his enterprise, then the way my father responded to it with an almost tangible warmth, a bodily ease like the first pleasant relinquishment of drunkenness. It was as if some sense of well-being that had always lain just beneath the surface of him had finally reached the moment of its incarnation. Yet something seemed dulled in him as well, some perceptiveness: I had the sense that he’d ceased to see the world clearly, could only project himself onto it, had become with his too-loud voice and his too-hard laughter as blind and self-willed as Tsi’Umberto. I was surprised that others were taken in by him, missed this falseness, this easy forgetting of what he had been, something I myself couldn’t forgive in him.
When the main structure of the boiler room was nearly complete, the large work crews gave way to groups of two or three, carpenters, plumbers, electricians. In the sudden lull of activity our world seemed to become small again, unpeopled, all our projects resolving themselves finally into merely private things; and I was secretly pleased then to see a tension arising between my father and uncle, their exchanges marked more and more by the familiar parsimoniousness of emotion, by their unthinking need to blame, to contradict, to dismiss, to hold themselves forever hard against the other as against some uncertain insult or threat. Already the deforming pressure of habit was weighing down on us again, the lines being drawn, something in me feeling vindicated in this reversion as though it were my deep monstrous wish now to see our family destroyed, to watch its slow fuse burn to some pure and final violence.
To help with the work on the greenhouses we’d rehired Vito, the Portuguese man who had worked for us a few years before.
The others condescended to him, seeming to see in him merely the person he presented himself as, still unmarried after all these years, still working his seasonal odd jobs, still speaking his rapid mix of English and Italian and Portuguese. But there was more to him, what he saw, what he held back, the way he worked himself invisibly around our moods and schisms. He’d told my father about a woman, Maria, whom he wanted to bring over from Portugal to marry, about a greenhouse farm on the 4th Concession he hoped to buy; and though he’d joke with my father about these plans as if he himself didn’t take himself seriously, when the two of us were working alone together he’d talk about the future sometimes with such fond boyish hope that I knew he held a vision of it whole and clear in his mind, that for all his rambling and clowning he was possessed finally of a sure, quiet strength of purpose.
He drove a car now, a low-slung Impala that sat back on its rear axle like a great lizard sunning itself. After work he’d let me drive it from time to time, never seeming to imagine there was anything reckless in this, as if his simply wanting me to learn, expecting me to, ensured that I would; and sometimes he’d lean back into the room-sized intimacy of the front seat to roll a cigarette or veer off into some anecdote as if he’d forgotten entirely that he was teaching me, that I was merely a child, the two of us rolling up and down the concession roads then like travellers, through a landscape made strange by the falling dark. There was always the instant pulling away from a stop that seemed a kind of magic, the surge of the engine as I eased my foot down on the accelerator and then the car’s slow heaviness giving way finally to effortless, weightless flight.
It was Vito who discovered one day while we were weeding tomatoes in the back field what must have been the wasting
remnant of Lassie’s carcass, impressing a hollow for itself amidst a patch of nettles and Queen Anne’s lace like something that had stretched out secretly in a field to sleep. Vito grimaced at the sight of it as at some unexpected ill fortune.
“I think it’s the dog my father shot,” I said. “Because it used to kill the chickens.”
But Vito didn’t feel it was right to leave the corpse there in the weeds, said it was bad luck. He sent me up to the barn for a spade, and when he’d dug a makeshift grave and buried the corpse in it he made me scratch Lassie’s name across the humped surface of it.
“But the rain will just wash it away,” I said.
“It doesn’t matter,” he said, made mysterious now with his peculiar rites, “the dirt will remember.”
My father and I came home from church one Sunday to find an unfamiliar car in the courtyard. There was a man sitting waiting at our kitchen table, tired, middle-aged, vaguely familiar. When my father caught sight of him from the doorway he nodded darkly and stepped outside again, the screen door banging behind him.
Aunt Teresa had set out a cup of coffee, stood silent against the kitchen counter.
“Hello, Vittorio,” the man said, sombre, but speaking as if no chasm of years had ever separated us. I strained to remember what he was to me: one of my mother’s cousins, a twin, Virginio or Pastore, I didn’t know which. I’d never seen him in Canada, hadn’t even known that he’d come.
I stood across the table from him, not knowing if I should kiss him in greeting.
“
È morto nonnote
,” he said finally.
My grandfather. I tried to call up an image of him, to feel now the news of his death, could remember only his narrow room, his pale withered limbs. His death seemed an anachronism, unduly delayed, the abstraction of an absence already long complete. I bowed my head, trying to feign emotion, afraid of betraying my lack of it.
But when my cousin spoke again it was to Aunt Teresa.
“They said there were some things in the will, for Vittorio, some property –”
I thought of the medals my grandfather had given me: I’d misplaced them years before, had hidden them away at some point in Aunt Teresa’s dresser but then had lost all track of them.
“You can’t really expect him to go back for a few acres of vineyards,” my aunt said, oddly peremptory. But then, relenting: “Anyway we can look after these things later, now isn’t the time.”
But no mention was made to me afterwards of my grandfather’s death; there was only the others’ silent deference to me, the solemnity it forced on me for a time, not so different finally from my usual exclusion from things. And yet his death remained with me, the irreducible lump of it: I seemed dirtied by it somehow, by its imperfection, the insufficiency of my response. I thought of the funerals in Valle del Sole, the keening processions to the grave, the desolation of them, and felt chilled somehow to think of the life still going on there without me.
The summer rolled on toward its end. The new greenhouses had taken skeletal form, the trusses raised and Rocco and Domenic and Vito and me working in teams to clamp the rafters in place, making our way like tree animals through a glinting angular forest of purlins and braces and girders; the boiler room, cavernous and imposing, was nearly complete, all straight lines and concrete and steel, a great Cleaver Brooks boiler, a
massive cylinder of gun-metal blue, presiding over it like its god. Yet oddly now when the work was nearly done it seemed instead most provisional, still the hills of dirt to be levelled, the greenhouse roofs to be covered, the steam pipes to be laid; and then all the small intricate work to be done, the starting from scratch, and beyond that only endless work still. It would go on like that, year after year, and this would be our lives; already Tsi’Umberto had decided Rocco wouldn’t be returning to school in the fall, drawing him into this vortex as its next logical victim.
Sunday afternoons I roamed the farm sometimes in aimless exploration. Searching once amidst the rubble that had been dumped down the bank of the pond from our old boiler room I discovered the remnants of the desk that had sat in my father’s office, jammed beneath a ragged section of scorched wall and a slab of uprooted concrete floor. One side of it was charred and smashed but the other was almost intact, the top warped and discoloured but showing familiar scratches and stains, the drawers battered but whole and in place in their slots. The top one opened easily though it seemed a tiny storm had whipped through it, its inside a chaos of pens and old fuses and swollen envelopes and curled stamps; at the back still sat the pile of photographs Gelsomina and I had once looked through, but ruined now, clotted into an uneven lump as if they’d remained fixed as we had left them years before.