Once Upon a Time in West Toronto
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Once Upon a Time in West Toronto
ADVANCE PRAISE FOR ONCE UPON A TIME IN WEST TORONTO
Terri Favro’s novel Once Upon a Time in West Toronto is a brilliant follow-up to her award-winning novella The Proxy Bride. This novel dives into the lives of the endearing Ida, Marcello, and Bum Bum and vividly reveals their experiences of trying to redefine themselves and move from painful pasts to hopeful futures. Moments of joy and love collide with sadness and tragedy. With insight and boldness, Favro evokes the Italian experience from confessional boxes to the emotions accompanying new immigrants and the longing to move forward even when familial secrets and betrayals try to unravel new lives. Favro explores the themes of sexual desire, women’s solidarity, and family obligation and weaves the reader through mystical and hypnotic passages. Honest, moving, and gutsy, Favro’s dazzling novel drifts between flashbacks and compelling present scenes, providing deep empathy for the unforgettable characters. Favro’s craft and skill at storytelling shape Once Upon a Time in West Toronto into an engaging novel.
—Sonia Saikaley, author of The Lebanese Dishwasher
Ida and Marcello must run away from church, family, and the hoodlums that threaten their bodies and souls. Can they reinvent themselves and escape the bleakness of their respective pasts? Once Upon a Time in West Toronto is a hip, original take on the immigrant story, as well as a satisfying love story, a well told tale, and a slice of reality. Terri Favro’s witty, supple prose is a discovery and a delight.
—Caterina Edwards, author of The Sicilian Wife
A sinewy and sensuous modern tale complete with compelling characters—a few bad guys and several lost souls—a wonderful addition to the stories about Italian Canadians and the trials of immigration. Favro puts her writing gifts to great use here, holding up a mirror to the troublesome past and shining a light on the difficult truths with sharply skilled prose.
—Eufemia Fantetti, author of A Recipe For Disaster and Other Unlikely Tales of Love
Once Upon A Time in West Toronto is a story about the power of family—those we are born into and those we make. It is also a story about the power of place— the land we come from and the country we call home. But above all, it is a story about the irresistible, unrelenting, often treacherous, and ultimately transformative power of love. It is one of those rare novels that manage to be simultaneously epic and intimate, romantic and violent, tragic and hopeful.
—Ian French (IF The Poet), Canadian Individual Poetry Slam Championship Winner and World Cup of Slam Poetry Finalist
In Once Upon a Time in West Toronto, Terri Favro deftly weaves together multiple spellbinding narratives over the span of six decades, expertly covering the full spectrum of human experience from love and revenge to loyalty, honour, and forgiveness. Set during Toronto’s coming of age—against the political backdrop of the rise of feminism and the immigrant experience—Once Upon a Time in West Toronto is a novel filled with wry humour, unflinching honesty, and unforgettable characters. Terri Favro is a wonderful storyteller who knows how to wring every last drop of emotion from each sentence. Filled with action and suspense, as well as heartbreak and insight, this novel is a page-turning delight.
—Bianca Marais, author of Hum If You Don’t Know The Words
An utterly captivating and beautiful book. Ida, Marcello, and Bum Bum’s lives overlap, interconnect, and tangle in a way that will have you exclaiming in delight and weeping in sorrow. Few writers capture the complex Catholic experience as masterfully as Terri Favro, who paints a poignant picture of the complicated clash of religion and love. Mapping lives from 1969 to 2013, the story brings to life the women’s rights movement of the ’70s and the pain brought about by the emergence of AIDS in the ’80s. The story is also a love story to Toronto’s West End, and it is so wonderfully written that you can taste the Asagio and smell the freshly ground espressos. Favro’s writing is also so touching and funny that you will find yourself smiling at the originality of a perfect simile and graceful metaphor. This book is like the perfect snow globe of so many lives—lives we have lived, lives we are living, or might have lived. Tragedy meets the redemption of the human spirit and, as we move from Venice to Shipman’s Corners, from love to loss and back to love, we realize that, with all its ugliness and hardship, the world truly is a beautiful and mysterious place.
—Lisa de Nikolits, author of The Nearly Girl and No Fury Like That
Once Upon a Time in West Toronto
a novel by
Terri Favro
INANNA PUBLICATIONS AND EDUCATION INC.
TORONTO, CANADA
Copyright © 2017 Terri Favro
Except for the use of short passages for review purposes, no part of this book may be reproduced, in part or in whole, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronically or mechanically, including photocopying, recording, or any information or storage retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher or a licence from the Canadian Copyright Collective Agency (Access Copyright).
We gratefully acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council for our publishing program. We also acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada.
Cover design: Val Fullard
eBook: tikaebooks.com
Once Upon a Time in West Toronto is a work of fiction. All the characters, situations, and locations portrayed in this book are fictitious and any resemblance to persons living or dead, or actual locations, is purely coincidental.
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Favro, Terri, author
Once upon a time in West Toronto / a novel by Terri Favro.
(Inanna poetry & fiction series)
Companion to: The proxy bride.
Issued in print and electronic formats.
ISBN 978-1-77133-417-4 (softcover).— ISBN 978-1-77133-418-1 (epub).—
ISBN 978-1-77133-419-8 (Kindle).— ISBN 978-1-77133-420-4 (pdf)
I. Title. II. Series: Inanna poetry and fiction series
PS8611.A93O53 2017 C813’.6 C2017-905373-6
C2017-905374-4
Printed and bound in Canada
Inanna Publications and Education Inc.
210 Founders College, York University
4700 Keele Street, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M3J 1P3
Telephone: (416) 736-5356 Fax: (416) 736-5765
Email: inanna.publications@inanna.ca Website: www.inanna.ca
The adventures of
Ida, a liberated Proxy Bride
her lover, Marcello, a Ditch Digger;
Bum Bum, a Virtuous Thief;
and assorted Villains, Hustlers, and Whores.
ALSO BY TERRI FAVRO
Sputnik’s Children
The Proxy Bride
For Ron
I can’t see America any other way than with a European’s eyes. It fascinates me and terrifies me at the same time.
—Sergio Leone, filmmaker
Lookin’ back is a bad habit.
—Charles Portis, True Grit
CONTENTS
1. Genesis
2. Spaghetti Western
3. Escape from Love Canal
4. The Peach and the Ditch Digger
5. The Old Gods Are Dying
6. Immigrant Song
7. Zoo Story
8. Nobody’s Baby
9. Ride Into Darkness
10. Half-Cocked
11. Ambush
12. A Brief History of Letters
13. Terminal
Velocity
14. Test
15. Amor and Psyche
16. Showdown in Shipman’s Corners
17. A Shout from God
18. Even Venetian Cowgirls Get the Blues
Acknowledgements
1. GENESIS
CHURCH OF ST. ROCCO, VENICE, MAY 1952
ZARA SAILS INTO Ca’San Rocco carrying her pregnancy like the prow of a ship, the click-click-click of her heels on the marble floor panicking the pigeons in the rafters. Ferragamo pumps are too dressy for a Saturday afternoon, but Zara is a firm believer in la bella figura. Always look good, especially when under attack. Tugging two-year-old Riccardo by the hand, she clatters past Tintoretto masterpieces so grimy with smoke that you can no longer tell San Rocco from the plague victims he’s curing.
In a back pew kneels Leona Bellini, her righteous black curls bobbing over her rosary beads. Barely twenty years old, she has already turned herself into a respectable housewife. She comes to confession once a week to scrub her pristine soul as spotless as her kitchen floor. You could eat off either one.
Refusing to give this sanctimonious bitch the satisfaction of shaming her, Zara stands next to the pew where Leona pretends to be concentrating on her Hail Marys. “Signora Bellini, you are a good Catholic.” Zara is careful to address Leona in proper Italian rather than the crude Veneziano dialect. She doesn’t want to sound untutored.
Leona looks up suspiciously. “I’m on my knees cleansing my soul, aren’t I?”
“Giusto! That’s why I know you won’t mind looking after my little boy while Father Paolo dabs at my sins a little,” says Zara, failing to keep the sarcasm out of her voice. She pushes the boy into the pew beside her odious, but trustworthy, neighbour. “Here, Rico, go say your prayers with Signora Bellini.”
Riccardo, a heartbreaker with eyes as blue as the Adriatic and a bush of white curls covered by a cowboy hat, offers the woman a broad grin before scooting into the dust beneath the pew.
“Well, I…” Leona starts to object, but Zara has already pushed aside the velvet curtain. The box is dark and stuffy; the dust makes her sneeze, which has the desired effect of causing the interior door to slide open and the priest to begin mumbling a Latin blessing through the grillwork.
“Doesn’t anyone ever clean in here?” she complains.
The blessing stops.
“Zara?” asks the deep voice. “Is Rico in there with you?”
“He’s in the church with Bellini the Busybody.”
“You are well?”
Zara shifts her weight on the rock-hard kneeler; the baby is starting to kick, hammering its tiny heels against her bladder. This pregnancy is very different than her first, the baby objecting strenuously every time Zara gets down on her knees. Probably a little heretic. She feels an intense desire to urinate.
“I’m well enough,” Zara allows.
Silence. “Have you come to confess?”
Zara snuffles a bit, trying not to sneeze again. “I’ve come for absolution, but I don’t need to confess. You already know everything. Just give me my penance and be done with it.”
A deep sigh. “You have to say your sins out loud so they reach God’s ear.”
Zara feels a sudden annoyance with the priest; she’s tempted to storm out, but who wants the worry of going into labour with a sin on her soul? More than one of the girls at Ca’Rosa has been carried off by childbed fever to purgatory or worse, because a priest didn’t want to give last rites in a brothel, even one officially sanctioned by the government.
“God is everywhere, no? He already knows my sin. And yours. Am I supposed to confess for us both?” Zara pauses. “You were a nicer man when you were a seminarian, Paolo.”
The priest clears his throat. “When I’m in here, I’m not ‘Paolo.’ In fact, I’m not a man at all. I’m God’s ears and God’s mouth. And Zara, God is telling you to leave this child at the front gate of the foundling home.”
Zara is astonished. “Sitting alone in this box has hardened your heart. You want me to give Rico to the nuns, too?”
The priest gives a heavy sigh. “Of course not, but we must be careful. One child can be taken to the cinema or a sweet shop from time to time without arousing suspicion. Two, starts to look like a family outing. If you give this one to the Sisters, you could go back to running Ca’Rosa.”
“Just like you could go back to being a man,” points out Zara.
She can hear him shifting in his seat, checking the other door, nervous about being overheard. What a shame to shut up a man so young and beautiful in the darkness of a confessional. Zara fears that sitting in this stuffy box, listening to people’s filthy sins, has turned him into a testadura—a man hard of head and heart. When he speaks again, his tone has softened so that he sounds less authoritarian and more like the twenty-three-year-old he actually is.
“Zara, I have a calling.”
“So do I,” she points out.
“You call what you do at Ca’Rosa a calling?”
“I started out on my back; now I run the place. I’m a businesswoman. You don’t think that’s a calling?”
He pauses. “If I acknowledge the children, it would kill my mother.”
Allora! Now we get to the heart of the matter, thinks Zara. The child inside gives her another swift kick as if to say: Up off your knees, Mamma! Zara hoists herself unsteadily to her feet.
“Where are you going? I haven’t given you absolution yet!”
“Absolve yourself!” shoots back Zara, pushing aside the velvet curtain. Out in the church she can see Riccardo peering at her over the back of the pew. Leona has removed his cowboy hat and is trying to show him how to make the sign of the cross.
Zara feels a warm trickle down her leg. Uh-oh, she thinks. My bladder is too weak for all this kneeling. That’s when the trickle turns into a gush. There’s a gentle plop in her underwear as the mucous plug inside her womb lets go. Even in the dim light she can see blood dripping onto the five-hundred-year-old marble floor. The first stab of pain comes, doubling her over.
Zara seizes the curtain to steady herself. The little heretic is on its way.
2. SPAGHETTI WESTERN
TORONTO, LAKESHORE RD. AT GARDINER EXPRESSWAY, JULY 1975
IDA CROUCHES IN THE FIELD, paring knife in one hand, battered metal bowl in the other. Resting her elbows on the knees of her sagging pedal pushers, she digs around the base of the plant, yanking the stem and roots out of the ground; it’s easier to take the whole weed and clean it later, even though all she needs are the leaves. Traffic flies overhead, thickening the air with exhaust fumes and the sounds of brakes and engines blurring into car radios: Tie a yellow ribbon Angie you’re so ten-fifty CHUM rainy night in Georgia scorcher again today in the golden horseshoe war what is it good for absolutely nothing a thousand yellow ribbons round the old oak tree.
Lily crouches next to her. She’s wearing two different tennis shoes—one blue, one pink. Only the pink shoe has laces.
“Why are you digging up the dandelions?” Lily asks, picking a scab off one knee.
“I make an insalata for my husband to eat.”
Ida stumbles over huz-BAND, the consonants grinding against each other like hard cheese on a rasp. Like many English words, she finds husband a little harsh. It could use a few more vowels. Hus-a-band. Husa-banda. My husabanda, Marcello.
She also stumbles over husband because it’s a bald-faced lie—what Marcello calls “a smokescreen”—to cover up the fact that she has another husband—well, not another, she can only have one: Marcello’s father, Senior. Unless the old man grants her an annulment or dies, Marcello can never be her husabanda, a mildly incestuous situation that is scandalous even by the slackening moral standards of 1974.
Inamorato is the correct word for what Marcello is to Ida, but it makes him sound like a dashing Renaissance prince ra
ther than a melancholic muscle-bound ditch digger who spends most of his time down manholes. He reminds her of a line from a favourite old film, Mezzogiorno di Fuoco—in English, High Noon: You’re a good-looking boy: you’ve big, broad shoulders. But it takes more than big, broad shoulders to make a man.
Per dire la veritá, thinks Ida, yanking dandelions out of the cracked, rain-starved earth, Marcello has the looks to play the romantic hero. Ida catches other women (and some men) gazing at him with a certain interest, almost a hunger, very unusual in this chilly country where nothing seems to ignite passion except hockey.
She’s not sure whether they’re more excited by the unlikely coupling of Marcello’s angelic face with his workhorse of a body, or the air of tragic nobility that clings to him like cheap cologne.
Marcello is a Southern Ontario Orpheus, a lover of opera and mathematics, forced by shameful circumstances to grub around in Toronto’s underworld of subway tunnels and sewers. He plays his part stoically because, after all, he’s sacrificed his life to Ida. Just like that inglese King Such-and-Such from the 1930s giving up the throne for the woman he loves. Heartbreaking, is it not? No wonder women are drawn to Marcello despite his ditch digger status.
But Ida knows something about him that these women can’t see. Marcello likes to suffer. Enjoys it. That’s why he rubs himself raw with frustration and guilt over Ida being married to his father. They came back to Ontario so he could find a way to break the legal bonds of Ida’s unconsummated proxy marriage to Senior and make Ida his own—in the eyes of the State, the Church, His Holiness Pope Paul, and all the Angels and Saints in Heaven, for all Ida knows. Sometimes, the tragedia gets on a girl’s nerves.
“I can’t believe you’re feeding Dreamboat weeds,” says Lily, frowning at the growing pile of dirty dandelions in Ida’s bowl. “Aren’t you afraid you’ll poison him?”