Authors: Nino Ricci
I’d decided to spend the summer in Mersea. Michael came by the residence in his car to help me carry my things to the train station.
“A lot of stuff,” he said. But I had been pleased at how little I’d thought I’d accumulated.
After we’d checked my things we had a coffee in the station coffee shop.
“So we never had much of a chance to talk about this Africa thing,” Michael said. “Maybe this is some kind of Catholic thing coming up in you, all that propaganda they used to feed us about missionaries. I remember they used to collect plastic bags from us to ship to Africa for people to put their rice in, bread bags and that. My mother would leave the crumbs in them so there’d be a little extra.”
“I dunno, I’m just going over for the weather,” I said.
“No, seriously, I know you were into that group for a while, I know you’re serious about this kind of thing. I just don’t know if this is the way. These groups always want to change people, make them think we’re better than they are. I’m not kidding, my mother used to leave the crumbs, that was her idea of charity. She thought they were animals or something.”
“Whatever she thought, the bags probably helped.”
“That’s not the point, Victor, it’s the attitude people have. All this development work, it doesn’t change anything if people don’t change how they think. You can’t do that on a big scale.”
I felt my anger rise but said nothing. He’d often talked himself about going abroad but had never managed to, seemed simply to be rationalizing now his own lack of enterprise.
We paid for our coffees and walked toward the departure gates. I moved to join the line that had begun to form for my train but Michael suggested we wait in the seating area.
“There’s plenty of time, these trains are always late.”
We sat. Michael lit up a cigarette though a No Smoking sign was posted nearby.
“Vic, I know it’s a little late but there’s something I need to get off my chest.”
I had feared this, Michael’s need to make some gesture. I expected a sort of apology, some expression of feeling though underhanded somehow, twisted into a proof of his own deep nature. But even yet I hadn’t understood him, was still awaiting some capitulation from him as if my own point of view was the only possible one.
“I dunno how to put it, Vic. I guess I’ve never really had the feeling there was some sort of two-way thing going on with us. It’s just little things, I don’t want to seem petty. Like back there
at the coffee shop, you could have offered to pay for the coffee at least, just a little token like that.”
It was true: he’d driven me to the station, had been willing to be here for my departure, and yet I’d felt no spirit of generosity toward him.
“Even that time when Gus stayed with you, I dunno, maybe it’s just a different way of looking at things.”
But now I was truly confused.
“What are you talking about?”
“Just the way you made it seem like such a big deal and all that. I mean the guy was in pretty rough shape, it’s just basic hospitality.”
“He didn’t look like he was in very rough shape to me.”
“Come on, you know what he’s like. He was covering himself, that’s all, he thought you were laughing at him. And then the little stuff, how you always put your food at the back of the fridge to give him a message or something. I don’t want to get into the nitty gritty of it, it’s just a feeling, that’s all, a way of dealing with people.”
We sat in silence. I wanted to mount some defence but the gap between how we saw matters had left me dumbfounded.
“Maybe it’s an Italian thing,” Michael said finally. “A kind of reverse prejudice, you-like-us-you-don’t kind of thing, trying to work out some stuff from your childhood or something.”
“I don’t even think of you guys as Italian.”
“I dunno, maybe that’s the point.”
The line had begun to move forward; Michael and I joined the end of it.
“Look, Vic, I don’t want it to seem like I’ve been holding all these grudges against you, it’s not that. I just wish we could have been closer, that’s all.”
On the train I felt grim. I found an empty seat, setting my shoulder bag on the place next to me to discourage anyone from sitting there but then feeling despondent at my mean-spiritedness.
“You’ll have to take that bag off the seat, son, we’ve got other passengers coming on.”
At Oakville I received my punishment: a drunk, the very caricature of loutishness, hulking and bearded and leather-jacketed.
“Hey, buddy.”
Heads turned, energy homing in on us from the seats around us. A woman across the aisle smiled at me conspiratorially.
“Just going down to London, eh, got a call from the fuckin’ old lady, she’s in some kind of shit.”
He seemed willing to talk to the air, unfocused, yet I could feel him ready to turn on me if I closed him out.
“So what’s that you’re reading there, you some kind of teacher or something?”
A sort of conversation started up between us, mainly his drunken ramblings and my noncommittal attention.
“The name’s Ace, that’s the name I took in the can.” He held a huge hand out to me with drunken aggression. “Aces up!”
And afterwards he kept coming back to that phrase like a kind of mantra.
“I don’t want any shit, eh, but the old lady called and I gotta go. I said to myself just three days on the wagon, that’s all you’ve gotta do. Then halfway to the station I’m already shitting bricks.”
The conductor came collecting tickets. Ace took a moment to register what was happening, began to fumble through pockets.
“Hurry it up there, I’ve got a whole train waiting behind you.”
“Just hold your fuckin’ horses, sir,” Ace said, baitingly good-humoured, “I’ve got it here somewhere.”
Heads turned again.
“What was that?”
Ace found the ticket, held it out grinning.
“Here it is, sir, got it right here.”
“You watch your language, buddy, or I’ll have you off this train faster than you can spit.”
“Whatever you say, sir,” Ace said, still grinning. “I don’t want any trouble.”
“Fucking a-hole,” he said when the conductor had gone. “Then he’s the type you get a few beers in him he’s swearing up a blue streak.”
When the conductor passed back a few minutes later, Ace’s leg was stretched out in the aisle. The conductor stopped, seeming to be willing another confrontation.
“You mind pulling your leg in there.”
“No fuckin’ problem, sir.”
“No, I think there is a problem here, you clean up your mouth or you’re out of here. You got that?”
I could sense the anger rising in Ace, his helplessness in the face of it.
“Give me a break, man, you’re the one trying to bust my ass.”
“I don’t think I’m getting through to you. These people paid for their tickets just like you did, they don’t have to put up with this kind of trash.”
“You’re the only one seems to have a problem with it so why don’t you just go fuck yourself?”
The hatred between them seemed close to violence now.
“As far as I’m concerned you’re out of here.”
The conductor headed back down the aisle, returning a few
minutes later with another uniformed man, large and broad-shouldered and calm.
“Why don’t you just come along with us.”
But Ace was subdued now, rising up with an air of tired defeat.
“See you around, man.”
The whole episode had been so unnecessary: I ought to have interceded somehow, tried to pull Ace back. I resolved to speak to the conductor, feeling the falseness in this belated solidarity though still I made my way through the train, coming finally to a car empty except for four uniformed staff in a booth at the front and then Ace staring out a window toward the back. He caught my glance as I came in, nodded slightly but seemed either wary or confused, had perhaps already forgotten me.
“Can we help you with something?”
It was the conductor who’d argued with Ace, though he showed no recognition of me.
“I was just wondering what you were going to do with that guy.”
Immediately he grew imperious.
“What’s it to you? A friend of yours?”
“I just wanted to say I thought he’d be all right.” I glanced toward Ace, wanting him to hear me and not, afraid I would betray him somehow; but he was still staring oblivious out the window. “I mean he’s just a little drunk, that’s all. I don’t think he needs to be in any trouble right now.”
“Don’t worry, buddy, we’ll look after him. Why don’t you just go on back to your seat.”
I’d accomplished nothing. But when I searched the platform at Woodstock to see if Ace had been put off the train I couldn’t make out any sign of him.
I went back to my reading and gradually drifted into sleep, the panicky sleep of trains, its half-awareness of the world as of something left unsettled. I dreamt that someone was being put off the train, a woman perhaps, my mother or my aunt, even from within it the dream’s meaning seeming strangely obvious; then something shifted and it appeared I’d made a mistake, that the woman was a stranger or I’d somehow entered the wrong dream, that while my attention was turned some more significant thing had happened elsewhere. But when I awoke I felt strangely elated, what had happened with Michael, with Ace, already fallen away: what seemed important about these things now was that there was no one I needed to share them with, distort the truth of them for, that they were simply incidents in a life that was truly mine.
I returned home from Centennial as from a kind of initiation or exile, the graduate now, some special seal set on my difference that made it a thing at once nameable and thoroughly arcane. For several days the question of what I planned to do next seemed to hang like a suspicion between my father and me, but then when my father finally came round to it there seemed no way of putting things to him in all their complexity.
“Africa?” He seemed truly uncomprehending, balking as at some outrageous whim. “I can’t believe there aren’t any jobs around here for teachers that you have to go to Africa.”
“It’s not that. It’s a kind of volunteer thing. Anyway I’m hot really qualified to teach here, I’d have to go back to school again.”
But already I’d put things badly.
“If you need to go back to school I don’t see why you don’t finish now. I can’t see how it can help you to go to Africa.”
It might have taken so little to win him over, the single word from me that could have brought him into the meaning of what
I was doing, allayed his sense of betrayal, at my withholding from him, at my leaving, at my refusal to offer any pattern to my life he could make easy sense of, going off now to another country like an immigrant, accepting that humiliation when no logic compelled it. But there seemed no language between us that wasn’t infected somehow with misunderstanding.
“It’s just something I want to do. Anyway it’s only for two years.”
He had planned a graduation party for me but the pleasure of it seemed lost for him now in this confusion over my future. For several days he appeared to brood over the question, till finally Tsi’Alfredo offered to hold the party in the rec room of the new house he’d recently built.
“If I was his age I’d be doing the same thing,” he said of my plans. Since he’d built his house a new sense of well-being seemed to have come over him. “Look at us, all our lives shedding blood in those damn greenhouses, we’ve never been farther than Niagara Falls.”
“
Sì
,” my father said, “we broke our backs and now they take it all for granted.”
But he needed only to see there was no shame in what I was doing to begin to relent, seemed almost ready to take some pride in me, to admit whatever unrealized part of himself, his own lost freedom, he saw taking vicarious shape in me now.
Tsi’Alfredo’s house had been built in the preferred style of Mersea’s Italians, long and white-bricked and ornate, sitting raised on a small knoll of bulldozed earth next to his old one, where his son Gino now lived with his wife, as in some before and after picture in a tale of immigrant success. Upstairs the house was a mausoleum of useless rooms, unlived-in, the walls left unpainted while the plaster set, and the sparse new furnishings,
with their islands of sudden extravagance, seeming lost in the house’s immensity. But the rec room was a clash of old and new, with a built-in bar at one end and a full kitchen all in gleaming ceramic but then aging furnishings brought over from the other house like a re-creation of it, the old fridge and gas stove, the sagging old couch and armchair, the old black-and-white TV. It was as if this part of the house had been saved as the truer refuge against which the upstairs remained merely the idea of what was possible, the promise we held out to ourselves while continuing on with our in-between lives.
Tables had been set up at one end of the room for the meal, dense now with cutlery and dishes and glass. People showed me an odd good-humoured deference, handing me envelopes stuffed with cash, seeming ready to believe that some sort of transformation had taken place in me. At the beginning of the meal Tsi’Alfredo proposed a toast to me, making some suggestive allusion in dialect about African women that I couldn’t quite follow.
“Anyway he’s spent half his life in the jungle working in his father’s greenhouses so I guess he should be all right in Africa.”
I had the sense briefly of what it might mean to be accepted by these people, these half-strangers, my family, how it might feel to see myself as the flourishing of their collective will, the one their hopes resided in, instead of being so far from them, going out from their alienness now as toward some return to my truer self.
“Maybe when you come back you can bring some of that sunshine with you,” Tsi’Umberto said.
But I didn’t think of myself as ever really coming back, ever being held again within the sphere of their static world.
Then after my few minutes of their attention people settled back into their usual languid incuriousness. I was sitting next to
Tsi’Alfredo’s daughter Nina, remembered watching her when I was younger whenever we’d worked together, the curve of her body against her clothes, the mist of sweat at her temples in the greenhouse heat, remembered the small hatred in me toward her then for her air of normalcy and disdain when she wasn’t so unlike me. But now she might have belonged to a different generation, unquestioningly in her place here, still enviable in a way in this at-homeness though I could hardly understand any more how my blood had quickened once at the sight of her.