Authors: Nino Ricci
“Who’s going to take care of the baby when I go?”
My father’s eyes lit with what looked like anger but also something else, a sudden flash of interest – it seemed the first time he’d ever really noticed Gelsomina, hadn’t taken her for granted like a part of the house’s furnishings.
“
Che scema
,” he said, strangely mocking. “You’ll have your own too, don’t worry about other people’s.”
Gelsomina seemed put out for the rest of the evening. Then at bedtime she behaved queerly: instead of changing in the bathroom she flicked off the bedroom light and began to undress in front of me. I tried not to watch but she seemed to be willing me to look at her, stood for a moment completely naked in the window’s moonlight like an awkward statue, all stiff angles and knobby protrusions. Her breasts, small and vulnerable and pale, were capped with dark circles the size of 500
lire
coins.
“Do you think I’m beautiful?” she whispered, fierce, daring
me to contradict her though I felt only the shame of seeing her like that.
Headlights flashed past the window: my father, returning from bringing a load into the factory. In an instant Gelsomina was cowering in a corner, arms clutched over her breasts.
“If you tell anyone about this,” she said, “I’ll cut your little bird off.”
Three days later Gelsomina had gone, my Aunt Teresa come from Italy to replace her. I knew nothing of her coming until I actually saw her descend from my father’s truck one evening at the back of the house, simply there like an apparition, suitcase in hand, picking her way inexpertly across the courtyard in her high heels; in the moment of recognizing her I had the sense for an instant that I myself had somehow brought her magically into being, that an image from memory had leapt across some chasm to suddenly take solid shape before me.
“
Ciao
, Vittorio! Look at the little man you are! Were you waiting up for me? What’s the matter, don’t you remember me? Mario,” turning now to my father, “didn’t you tell Vittorio I was coming? Look at him, you’d think he’d seen a ghost!”
I had last seen Tsia Teresa at my grandfather’s funeral service in Castilucci, when she’d been the only one of my father’s siblings who’d come over to greet my mother and me. On the rare occasions when my mother and I had gone to visit my father’s family back then, Tsia Teresa would take me to the square and tease a few
lire
from the young men at the bar to buy me candy or walk with me in the pastures near town, taking my arm in hers and joking that she was my girlfriend. She’d seemed from a different family then, the coddled youngest daughter, the only one who’d been allowed to go on in school; and she’d been
pretty, an angular, sharp-boned prettiness, with her pale skin and her dark eyes, that she’d parade at once brash and awkward before the men in the square like a prize she wasn’t yet sure was hers to award.
But now her energy had nothing tentative about it, seeming to spread out around her like heat from a fire. In a few minutes she had finished a tour of the house, coming out of my bedroom finally with the baby in her arms.
“
Ma com’è bella!
She was lying there wide awake, quiet as a mouse. What’s her name?”
But no one had thought to name her yet.
“Mario, don’t tell me you haven’t given her a name! You can’t treat her like an animal.”
I felt embarrassed for her, thought she had misunderstood how things were with the baby, expected some sign from my father that would put her right; but my father’s silence, this shutting down in him when the baby was around, seemed lost on her.
“We’ll call her Margherita,” she decided finally. She held the baby close and pronounced the name slowly, offering it to her like a gift. “Mar-ghe-ri-ta. That’s the saint all the mothers pray to when they’re going to have a baby. You say it: Mar-ghe-ri-ta. Look, she’s smiling, see how she understands?”
With my aunt’s arrival things began to change, the mood of the house, the careful eggshell order that had established itself. I thought the household couldn’t bear her blind energy, that it must shatter, and yet somehow it shifted to accommodate her. She referred to the baby as my sister, a strange thing, so intimate; what had been unthinkable before, these plain declarations of what we all were to each other, seemed in her to become merely commonplace. It was odd to have someone in the house
who didn’t simply capitulate to its gloom, who so openly carved a space for herself there. Within a few days she had moved me out from the bedroom to the couch, within a few more had asked for a crib for the baby.
“I don’t think I can go another night in the same bed,” she said. “It makes me think of what we used to do when the pigs had babies, remember that, how we had to make a little house for them in the stall or the mother would roll over and crush them.”
“One bed was fine for three people,” my father said. “Now it’s not enough for one.”
“
Dai
, it won’t cost you a thing. Mauro’s wife has a crib they’re not using, I spoke to her on the telephone.”
But my father flushed with anger.
“I’m going to crack your skull with that phone, then you’ll learn to stop bothering other people with your stupidities.”
“Let her sleep with you then,” my aunt said, undaunted. “What a sight you’d make, I’ll bet you’ve never held a baby in your life!”
I thought my father would fling something at her, so furled did he seem with his anger; but then he faltered.
“
Sì, va bene
, everything’s a joke to you. Like a chicken. We’ll see if everything’s a joke.”
Already he seemed merely to be grumbling to himself, to have made some concession; and a few days later when we came in for lunch there was a van in the courtyard and a blond-haired man in overalls in my aunt’s bedroom putting together a small bed with high, barred sides.
“
All-set
,” he said when he’d finished.
I didn’t know what to make of my aunt, couldn’t understand what things looked like from inside her, how she missed their
gravity. And yet my father seemed diminished somehow since she’d come, his darkness become merely private and small, no longer taking the world in – around her he seemed to draw his anger back into himself as if to guard it from her, deferring it in his vague muttered threats to some uncertain final vindication. Tsia Teresa took to calling him Giovanni Battista, John the Baptist.
“As if every little thing was the end of the world.”
She spent her days in the house looking after the baby, but with an air of leisured repose like a town woman; outside now we were picking tomatoes every day, hardly able to keep up, but it never seemed to occur to her to come out and help us. Sometimes we’d come home at night and find her on the phone, and supper not ready, and the rage would seem to rise and fall again in my father, precipitous.
“You should spend less time working with your mouth and more with your hands.”
But my aunt always had an answer.
“I don’t think it’s right, that there’s people here I haven’t seen for five or six years and I shouldn’t even say hello to them.”
But what seemed to irk my father was not so much that she didn’t get things done as the languid air with which she did them, still managing despite it to make time for herself, for her phone calls, for her little projects. She had taken to listening to the radio, writing up lists of words from what she heard and repeating them over and over as if the sound of them might give up their meanings; but my father would darken with irritation at the sight of this.
“That’s all they taught you with all your years of school, how to waste your time on this nonsense.”
Then once when we’d fallen behind with the tomatoes my
father had us pick all day under a steady drizzle. But when Tsi’Alfredo and Gino came by the next day to help load we discovered that the tomatoes that had been picked in the rain had started to rot. We had to sort through the whole load bushel by bushel to pick out the bad ones, toward nightfall still hunched over our work in the courtyard.
“Why isn’t Teresa out here?” Tsi’Alfredo said finally.
My father sent me in to call her.
“You should have said something before,” she said, standing at the back door in her apron and slippers. “I’m just starting supper.”
“Forget about supper,” Tsi’Alfredo said. “If we don’t finish here nobody’s going to eat. These tomatoes have to be in by ten.”
“Can’t you bring them in tomorrow?”
“
Sì
, tomorrow. If he misses his turn tonight it’ll be three days before they let him bring in another load. And in three days you can make a nice sauce for the pigs with these tomatoes.”
“Well you’ll have to wait, I’ll be out in a few minutes.”
But by the time she’d come out we had almost finished, my father already gone to take the workers home.
“See, you didn’t need me after all. Anyway what do I know about this kind of thing?”
“You’ll learn,” Tsi’Alfredo said. “If you were my sister you’d have learned already.”
“It’s true, you’re worse even than Mario, I remember what you were like.”
When my father came home he left again at once to bring the load into the factory; he hadn’t returned yet by the time my aunt and I went to sleep. But when he woke me in the morning for work I could sense the rage still heavy in him from the previous
night. He was already on his way down the back steps when my aunt, her face still lax with sleep, came into the kitchen. Without a word he came up behind her as she bent to a cupboard and cracked a hand hard against the back of her head.
“Ecc’ la signorina principessa!”
“Oh!” My aunt had turned swiftly, alive suddenly, holding a pot slightly raised at her side like a weapon. “Have you gone crazy?”
“They didn’t teach you how to work in Italy, ah? I’ll teach you how to work, by God, even if I have to stand behind you every day with a whip!”
But my aunt held her ground.
“If you ever lay another hand on me I’ll break your skull, I swear it.”
“
Dai
, try it! We’ll see if you’ll always have things your own way. Not in this house, by Christ, not if you want to live under my roof!”
“Ah,
grazie!
Do you think I asked to come here, to this goddamned America? To wash your dirty clothes like a servant, to take care of a baby you wish your wife had taken with her to the grave? I had my life there, did you think about that when you called me here? What life do I have now, tell me! What life will you give me?”
For days afterwards they didn’t speak. The house assumed again its familiar gloomy silence – even my aunt seemed unable this time to bring us out of it, had defeated my father but went about the house irritable and brooding as if burdened now by her victory.
She began to grow impatient with the baby, perfunctory, almost clumsy. Perhaps she had always been, had merely hidden this awkwardness beneath her glow of good humour; but now
suddenly everything she did for the baby seemed flawed somehow. When she made up a feeding, with the powder we used now, her measurements seemed more haphazard than Gelsomina’s had been; when she gave her bottled food she seemed to stop before the baby had had her fill; when she held her she seemed unable to settle her comfortably against her, struggling with her as with some bulky inanimate thing. These signs of deficiency in her disturbed me, made her seem to lack something crucial in her character, some important instinct, like the sows who’d roll over and crush their own newborn.
Then once when I was helping with a change, the old diaper came away stained with a small patch of dried blood.
“The head broke on the pin, it must have pricked her,” my aunt said. But she slipped the pin into the pocket of her apron before I could see it.
I began to watch her more closely after that.
“Look how curious he is,” my aunt said. “As if he’d never seen a baby before.”
But she seemed to understand now that some contest was going on between us. As if to put me in my place she turned the baby over to me one evening for a feeding, mockingly, indulgent; but I could tell she was quietly impressed then with my small, careful efficiency.
“You learned all that just by watching me?”
“Gelsomina taught me.”
“Not bad,” she said, but she seemed put out. “She did a good job.”
She began to come out to the fields suddenly, diffident at first, prying carefully among the vines as if not to dirty her hands, but then growing quickly more expert, some new resolve taking shape in her. She left the baby at first in a playpen of bushels at
the end of her row, sending me now and then to check on her; and then gradually more and more of the care of her began to devolve upon me, till finally I was being left alone in the house the entire afternoon to tend to her while my aunt was out in the fields, my father silently acquiescing to this new arrangement as to something he neither approved of nor could oppose. I’d come to call my aunt still for feedings and changes, not certain yet what I was allowed, how far my dominion extended. But as my aunt saw I could manage these things on my own her interest in the baby seemed day by day to diminish.
“
Dai
, you don’t have to come running to me for every little thing, you know how to do it.”
What I never told my aunt was the agony for me of these afternoons alone. There was something so unreasonable in the baby then, the dangerous awkward weight of her, her obliviousness. I was never free of her, her sweaty heat, her spit, her smell, seemed not to exist at all, become merely the thinking extension of her animal need. She’d cry and cry inconsolable sometimes, make me hate her, make me wish for her death – the world seemed reduced then to her cries, the brawling chaos of them. But then when they had died into sleep I would see her curled in her crib and feel solemn with responsibility for her, understanding that she was mine in some way, that that had been decided now, and wondering then at the strangeness of her, the soft feathery feel of her skull, vulnerable as a melon, her tiny fingers and toes.
The household seemed to shift again, its shadowy intricate web of alliances and emotion. The tension between my father and aunt had quietly become something new, an understanding: there was a rhythm now in how they spoke to each other, my aunt with her authority, her belligerence, my father with his
sullen condescension, that seemed hermetic, almost intimate, a delicate weaving of their stubbornnesses into a kind of collusion that excluded me. I was aligned not with them but with the baby, who didn’t belong in our house, was awkward and unnatural there like the baby goats that farmers in Valle del Sole put with their ewes if they’d bought them before they’d been weaned.