With British Vidal Sassoon setting up a shop in downtown Montreal, hairstyling became as sleek and trendy as a Mary Quant tunic. On my return from the Italian tour, I found my first job as a full-fledged hairstylist at a small neighbourhood salon in Little Italy. This job gave me the opportunity to speak and practice my Italian, as well as listen to the stories that my clients told about their lives, about their voyage from Italy, and about their first years in Montreal. In many ways their stories were like mine, but somehow, in each there was something that made them different. I often thought of Lucia and our days on the ship, though the memories became hazier and hazier. When I tried to incorporate some of my clients’ accounts into my stories, I felt guilty. I was afraid this would seem like lying or, worse still, like abusing their confidence in me.
It was during those hours of undisturbed reflection that I started thinking of life as broken up into bits and pieces of what and who we become as time passes. It seemed that, at every stage, I could look back at who I had been before, and see someone different.
It was during this time that my name changed to Cathy, though I don’t recall a specific moment when this occurred. My non-Italian clients often mispronounced my name as Catterrina, so my boss took to introducing me as Cathy. They in turn started asking for me by that name. I had entertained the idea of changing my name to the shorter Rina, but that seemed confusing after everyone had already started calling me Cathy. I had also changed the way I looked. I spent a lot of time playing with make-up and different hairstyles. Wigs had become fashionable and I had fun changing my hair colour and length according to my moods.
How was it, I often wondered while I sat alone in the salon, that, of all the things I had wanted to be, I had become destined to spend my days styling other people’s hair and being known, of all things, as Cathy, the hairdresser?
By the time Expo 67 opened, my brother and I had succeeded in setting up our own beauty salon in the city’s west end. Our clientele was made up mainly of well-to-do matrons from Westmount, Snowdon, and Hampstead; of nurses and office workers from the area’s two hospitals; and, of the cocktail waitresses from the Crazy Horse Saloon on Côte-des-Neiges Road.
To maintain my Italian language, I enrolled in evening courses in Italian literature. I listened attentively to the stories of my new clients. Many of them were first-generation Jewish immigrants from northern Europe and survivors of Nazi persecution. When I washed their hair, I often spotted stamped numbers on their arms, which made my own arm hairs stand on end. Not all of them liked talking about their war experiences, and they lived in wealthier neighbourhoods than ours, but I felt we had something in common because we had all made a trip across the ocean.
The wave of immigrants from Italy had stopped. Italy was enjoying an economic boom, and many Italians we knew in Montreal started making trips back home, with the intention of remaining there permanently. The majority of those who tried to resettle in Italy came back in less than a year. They said they were unable to find their bearings in Italy anymore—their home country had changed and become more alien to them than Canada.
“Montreal is such an exciting cosmopolitan city,” said my paesano, Totu, when he visited. “It seems less like America, and more like Europe.”
He showed up at our apartment one evening to pay his respects to my mother. It had been three years since our trip to Italy, but no other man that I met or had courted me since could measure up to him or intrigue me more. His surprise visit exhilarated me. He had been staying with friends, and said he’d fallen in love with the city. He’d decided to prolong his stay, and even hoped to look for work. He was really impressed by how well my brother and I were doing with our new business. Before he left our house, I pulled out my Italian books, and spoke to him about the Italian literature courses I was taking.
“So you know three languages? I’m amazed,” he said.
I flushed with pleasure, and added, “Yes, I can write better than I can speak, though, in all three languages.” Then I told him how much I liked writing.
“Oh, do you write poetry?” he asked.
“No, I’m not much good at poetry. I like to write stories, stories about the past, about Mulirena,” I replied.
“Why Mulirena? Four houses and four cats; what’s there to write about?”
I had always remembered him by the languid look of his dark eyes. Being finally so close to him, I knew I could easily lose myself in those eyes. I wished I could spend more time talking to him about all the things I wanted to write about, though I found it difficult to explain exactly why I wanted so badly to do so. So I just mumbled, “I want to preserve my memories.”
Then I was mortified to hear him reply, “The only thing worth preserving is giardiniera, and even then, if kept too long, it becomes soft and rancid.” Maybe he noticed that his remark had put me ill at ease, and he added, “My English is not very good, but I’d like to read one of your stories.” He had studied English and could read it, he explained, but he spoke better French. That is why he liked Montreal so much.
I left him with Mother to run to my room and find a piece I had written about my fourth-grade teacher, Signor Gavano. I quickly tore it out of my notebook and gave it to him. As he left, I invited him to attend Italian Day at Expo, which was coming up soon and during which I would be working as a hostess at the Italian pavilion.
At Expo 67, each nation had its own day set aside for celebrating its ethnic character. All at once, it seemed chic to show off one’s heritage, and every nation tried to outdo the others in pageantry and folkloric displays. I had been recruited by the Italian Consulate to work as a volunteer at the Italian pavilion for the day. When I saw Totu and two friends walk toward me, my heart skipped a beat. He introduced me to Franco, whom I recognized as the editor of one of the local Italian newspapers, and Chantale, a tall Quebecois woman with stringy hair, no make-up, and gold-rimmed glasses.
“I still can’t get over how much you’ve changed; you’re a real signorina,” Totu said. He invited me for coffee at the Italian bar while his two friends checked out the pavilion.
He said he had made some connections in the Italian community, and Franco had offered him a position as a writer for his paper. I asked him if he had read my story.
“I looked it over,” he said casually. “It’s full of interesting anecdotes…. You have a natural ability to write, and are very observant—a good trait for a writer.”
I sipped nervously at my empty espresso cup.
“Maybe you should write a memoir,” he added. “After all your family has gone through. It could be therapeutic.”
Who would want to read my memoir? I thought. I didn’t think my life had been that interesting. “I don’t want to write about my life, but about the experiences that I have gone through and that are similar to others’. Do you know what I mean?” He seemed to be straining to understand me, so I raised my voice. “I want to write about others too. I want others to see themselves in what I see.”
“Ah! A little universalist,” he said, smiling and amused. “If that’s what you want, use your imagination then. Invent!” He spoke at length about the writing process while I soaked in everything he said with adoring eyes.
He reached his hand across the table, as if to stroke mine, then hugged me and kissed me on the cheek, just as Franco and Chantale returned. He moved to leave, but not before making plans to go sightseeing the following Sunday.
“Ciao, Totu, See you soon,” I waved cheerfully
“Totù, quel genre de nom est Totù? Allons-y, mon Grand Antoine,” Chantale said, as she slipped her arm in his.
“Allons-y,” he said, smiling. He looked back at me sheepishly.
I smiled back and shrugged. I didn’t really think a man like Totu would be interested in a type like Chantale—a serious bespectacled woman who smoked non-stop—or in a married woman like Lucia—with a baby and no cultural interes
ts—when there were so many available young women in Montreal.
Throughout the week, I reworked my story on the sea voyage and titled it “The Voyage.” I fretted about whether to keep all the details of Lucia cavorting with Armando and Nicodemo, but I couldn’t bring myself to cut them out and I even made up some of the dialogue. The story would not be the same without those parts.
I dared hope le Grand Antoine would agree.
48. THE ROLLER COASTER RIDE
I HAD NEVER ENJOYED ROLLER coaster rides until I spent an afternoon at La Ronde with Totu. It was a perfect Indian-summer day in late September. We had walked in old Montreal in the morning, and then left the car and rode the metro to Île-Notre-Dame. He held my hand as we walked. He squeezed it and said, “Let’s go for a ride.”
I had always been afraid of the height, the speed, the force of the wind on my face that took my breath away. But he dared me to go with him on the scariest ride in the park, and without batting an eye, I followed him.
Île-Sainte-Hélène’s flaming colours sparkled below us as the train ascended the steep rails to the top of the man-made steel mountain, and then dropped. It was like free falling into flight while holding hands with someone special. After the first drop, I looked forward to the next, and then the next, and I thought I could follow Totu to the highest precipice without fear.
We ate smoked meat sandwiches and Belgian waffles filled with ice cream. He talked non-stop about his love for Rome, his work in the Communist youth movement, and his decision to leave Italy when, at the same time, his dreams of social equality and of a career in journalism began to fade away. Montreal, he said, made him feel alive. He seemed genuinely amused by my hairdressing stories of fussy matrons wearing wigs and hairpieces, and laughed out loud when I told him some stories about fake-breasted waitresses from the Crazy Horse Saloon.
Walking next to him, I marvelled at how magical his unexpected reappearance into my life had been, and my imagination soared, thinking of all the things we could do together. He’d tutor me in my writing, discuss Italian literature with me, and open up a world of words to help me untwist my tongue so that I could claim the language I had never quite mastered.
It was late afternoon when we finally left La Ronde, and we drove to the lookout on Mount Royal, to see a panorama of Montreal by night. As the sun set, the city lights lit up slowly, casting shadows at the blazing mountain around us. It was too beautiful an evening not to take a walk on the treed path. We walked and walked and found ourselves in a cemetery.
There we found a clearing and sat on the grass, our legs lightly touching. When he brushed his lips against my cheeks, I felt myself sink into the circle of his arm. I closed my eyes and, for a time, I completely forgot where I was. When I reopened my eyes, dusk had already set. “We have to go,” Totu said. “I have an appointment to meet a friend in less than an hour.” I walked as if in a daze, disoriented and embarrassed. I couldn’t recognize any of the reference points we had passed earlier.
“There are no tall cypresses here to indicate the entrance, as in Italian cemeteries,” he said. “Who would have thought I’d be lost in a Montreal cemetery with you?”
As we walked, looking for the path back to the paved road, I wanted to remind him of the night I had sat alone in the twilight, across from another cemetery, while he and Lucia disappeared into a ravine, attempting to elope. Of the ominous vroom-vroom of Alfonso on his motorcycle, who saw me and discovered the tryst and caught up to them. About the shattering of water jugs on rocks and, finally, the dreadful emptiness I’d felt when I picked up the pottery shards, knowing my water jug would never be made whole again. But I kept that all to myself, figuring that what I remembered, he’d want to forget, and that it wouldn’t matter anymore now that we had found each other. All the past hurts, the drought, the yearnings were coming to an end, and all would be healed.
When we finally made it back, I rushed to drop Totu off on the corner of Jean-Talon and Côte-des-Neiges. As he got out of the car, I pulled out my sea voyage story, and timidly gave it to him. He seemed surprised and, in a rush, folded it, then stuffed it into his jacket pocket. He told me he’d call me soon and thanked me for having been such a “good little guide.”
“It’s what I do best,” I said, and he squeezed my knee as he left the car.
I was disappointed that we would not spend the evening together. I drove away with a heavy heart.
But instead of driving back east, I circled around the first side street, and parked strategically, in full view of the traffic-heavy intersection and Totu waiting at the bus stop. I figured he’d be meeting Chantale. When a blue Impala honked and then stopped, my jaw dropped. I saw Lucia open the passenger seat door and Totu jump in.
I felt fresh resentment for the willowy woman with the heart-shaped painted lips and head of feathery curly hair that framed her tiny face like an aura, who was, once again, cheating on her husband and getting in my way.
For days, for weeks, for months, I waited by the phone for the call he had promised me. I reviewed each moment of our day and wondered what I might have done or said to offend him or put him off. Had I been too cheerful, too quiet, too yielding to his touch? Maybe I had become too Canadian for his taste, or maybe I had remained too Calabrian. If love was more than he had to offer, why couldn’t he just call me—as a friend—to talk about my writing? When I gathered enough confidence to call him, and ask about my manuscript, he apologized profusely and told me he had lost it. I recalled the folded bulky envelope protruding from his jacket pocket, and I had been afraid it would fall out. Maybe he dropped it in Lucia’s car. Could she make out her name in the writing if she found it? Maybe they too went to the mountain and laid on the flaming ground. Could the manuscript be buried in a bed of autumn leaves? It was my only copy and it had meant so much to me, but he must have thought it pretty unimportant if he misplaced it so easily and I and didn’t even think to offer an explanation.
Then, at the end of October, all my hopes were crushed when I heard that he had entered into a civil marriage with Chantale, and that he would be settling in Montreal with her.
Oddly enough, when I tried writing about our day together, I felt as humiliated by having been led too easily down the treed path by Totu, as I felt guilty about having deceived Lucia on two counts: by desiring Totu for myself, and by what I had revealed in my story about her. Lucia had trusted me with her indiscretions and I had betrayed her just to show off to Totu, who deserved neither of our affections. The childhood guilt of having been so inept at helping Lucia in her elopement plans resurfaced again, even if I knew how irrational that guilt really was. I couldn’t help but imagine Lucia’s heartbreak when she heard about his marriage. I had only desired him for a while, but he had been her first—and maybe only—love.
I wrote a prose poem in a trance, and I couldn’t decide whether to write it for myself or Lucia. So I wrote it for both of us. I felt bound to her by the same pain I knew she was suffering. When I was done, I threw everything in a box, and put it out of sight.
PART IX
OCTOBER 24-27, 1980
49. A SETTLING OF ACCOUNTS
THE JOURNALIST GREETS ME EFFUSIVELY. “What a nice surprise, Caterina. I can still call you Caterina, right? Or do you prefer Cathy now that you have an English fiancé?”
“It doesn’t matter what you call me, Totu. Or do you prefer I call you le Grand Antoine?”
“Ahh, the beauty of Canada and our multiple identities! But no one calls me Totu anymore. Call me Antonio; Antoine sounds odd coming from you, and,” he scratches his head, “Le Grand Antoine … you remember that?”
“I don’t forget anything,” I say. I point to the Journal de Montreal on his desk. “Why are you doing this? Is the letter even real?”
“Caterina! I’m offended by that question. Of course the letter is real. I actually spoke to Pasquale by phone before he sent me the letter. Pasquale went
to my uncle and asked him to reach me.”
“So, Don Cesare has gotten into the action … again. I should have known.”
“It’s too good a story to let die. It just landed in my lap,” he says, a mischievous smile on his face.
“But this is not just a story. These are your paesani, your friends.”
“Paesani, yes, but not necessarily friends. I’m a journalist after all. What could I do?”
“You could have handed Pasquale’s letter to the police without splashing it all over the Journal with your personal spin, which may or may not be correct. Why the interview?”
“Because truth is not only stranger than fiction, in this case, it’s stronger, Caterina. If I had plotted the story, I couldn’t have come up with a better scenario. Pasquale’s decision to fly back to Italy is the perfect resolution to this sordid tale. A lot of truth will come out of this, and I’ll be vindicated.”
“So, that’s what you’re really after—vengeance—family vengeance at that, after all these years! Getting back at Alfonso for all his past offences toward you? Is that what this is about? Blabbing all over the city and claiming to be interested in the truth! Your timing makes me wonder whether this has anything to do with your political agenda and PQ friends.”
“I don’t think in terms of friends or enemies when I investigate the news, only ideologies. What I do have is a deep hatred for those incompetent crooks in our community who claim to represent me, but only look after their own wallets, and for those who walk all over others. Or, maybe you want to speak on behalf of your fiancé’s Liberal friends? I understand he might be running in a by-election.”
“I don’t give a damn about my fiancé’s friends. But I’m afraid of people getting hurt by your insinuations. Reputations can easily be ruined by gossip. You, of all people, should know that. Some innocent people may be hurt, especially Angie. You remember Lucia and … Angie, don’t you?”
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