“Can you tell me those details?”
He is quiet for a moment, as if unsure to go on. “We go back a long time, Caterina. Remember Piazza Don Carlo and the lazy afternoons there? You used to sit on your doorstep by yourself and play there for hours, so serious, so intense.”
“Yes, remember when Professore Nucci called it Piazza d’Amore?”
He takes my hand and holds it for a while. “I always thought it was such a boring place, that nothing ever happened there, until you dig deeper … and look under the surface, as I did last summer. I dicovered it was anything but….”
Antonio pulls his chair next to mine and for the next hour recounts what he had learned from his uncle on his last visit to Mulirena, the summer before. He had gone to bury his father and finally make peace with him as well as with his uncle, the man that had been like a second father to him. Don Cesare had rehashed events from the past.
Some of the revelations stun me; others, confuse me. I also wonder whether they are all true or simply Totu’s attempts to justify his actions as a young man. He takes great delight in the retelling, and I also can’t help but feel that he has told me these stories too readily, maybe to divert attention from my request to respond to my prose poem and my unasked questions about his relationship with Lucia just before her assault.
“Thank you for sharing all this with me,” I say. “Do you think Lucia had hopes of a reconciliation with you?”
“I can’t speak for Lucia,” he says.
I try to rephrase my question, “What would you do if Lucia came out of her coma?”
“The prognosis for someone in her condition is not very good,” he says sadly.
My questions may be premature, and I don’t press him anymore, but in spite of his prognosis I leave with a sense of hopefulness that a happy ending may still be possible.
Back in my classroom, I reconstruct the complex web of stories I heard so I won’t forget any details.
The secondary characters, Aurora and her parents, Micu and Paola, and Lucia’s husband, Pasquale, had played important roles in the village tale, yet had been given such little space in my own writing. With Antonio’s latest revelations, the pieces of the puzzle are slowly fitting in. Still, I’m amazed that events that happened in a remote village years before continue to impinge on the present lives of some of the characters, motivating their actions and reactions and precipitating some of their downfalls.
What might Pasquale and Micu be up to, at this minute, huddled together in the farmhouse in Mulirena? Are they talking about how futile their lives have been?
51. PASQUALE AND MICU
SIX HOURS DIFFERENCE BETWEEN TIME zones means that it is already bedtime in Mulirena while people in Montreal rush home from work through Halloween-decorated streets. Just as thoughts of ghoulish party accoutrements swirl around the commuters’ heads, the wheel of memory turns relentlessly for Pasquale and Micu, causing them to think about their plight after years of passivity as secondary characters.
Shut inside a humid farmhouse, the two men have taken to drinking and commiserating their shared misfortunes. Life had not been fair to either of them, they agreed. Wasn’t it strange how the same people had meddled in the stories of both their lives? They had been born in different towns, lived on different continents most of their lives, and yet found themselves together at the end of their roads, sitting under the same crooked umbrella, trying to keep warm and dry as constant drips of rain leaked from the roof over the fireplace. They had eaten cold roasted chestnuts for dinner, washed down with Micu’s heavy homemade wine. The host had been too lazy or too drunk to cook and Pasquale was still unaccustomed to the chore of preparing a meal in someone else’s house, and in a ramshackle farmhouse at that.
How long could he last, living like this? Even with all of his experience in construction, Pasquale had to admit that insulating the stone hovel before the winter, to the Canadian standards to which he was now accustomed, posed an impossible challenge. Maybe he was getting old and soft, or maybe it was his arthritis acting up, but never, in Canada, did he remember the humidity seeping into his bones as it did when he moved away from this fireplace to go pee or go to bed at night.
Yet, this is what he had dreamed of most of his life in Canada—coming back home to the mountains. He imagined his acquaintances back in Montreal in their comfy, heated dens, their wine cellar, stocked with all the cheeses, salami, and meats that money could buy. He cursed his brothers for having swindled him of his house in Serra San Pietro, and his wife and her family for having cheated him out of a life in Montreal. He had no friends, no family, and now, no home.
Micu drank his vinegary wine from morning to night, oblivious to any bodily discomfort and to his own fetid smell. He didn’t know any better. He’d never travelled beyond the confines of the province, except during his military service. He had spent the last twenty-odd years in this farmhouse, keeping warm in front of this same fireplace, and he had never seen fit to repair the leaky roof. Tiled roofs leak all the time. You move one tile, you disturb a dozen others. Better let them be.
The only bond between the two men was the rancour they felt toward those who had played tricks on them, especially Alfonso. Pasquale figured that finally he had nothing to lose. It was time to settle scores, if for no other reason than to show the world that he was not the imbecile life had made him out to be. He came to this farmhouse on a hunch that Micu, the senile drunkard, might talk about Alfonso and the past.
Pasquale knew of the ancient quarrels between Lucia’s family and their relative, Don Cesare, over politics, the use of water, and the right of passage over the same farmland and house in which he now slept with Micu. Alfonso never hid his scorn and jealousy for Don Cesare’s widowed brother-in-law, Gennaro, who looked after the land as if it were his own. In gatherings, especially amongst men, Alfonso often liked to tell of how he let the peasant Micu discover that his wife was having an affair not with Don Cesare as everyone thought, but with the soft-spoken Gennaro that no one had suspected. Alfonso told of the tryst in the old casale by the river with relish over and over again to his friends in Montreal, especially punctuating that the quiet but sneaky Gennaro was the father of the holier-than-thou snob of a journalist that poked fun at the community leaders who formed Alfonso’s entourage in Montreal. Not only did Totu’s father, Gennaro, have an affair with the peasant Micu’s wife, but Totu himself seduced that same peasant’s daughter, Aurora, who most likely was his half sister. So much for his moral integrity!
“I heard you had wanted to shoot both Totu and his father years ago. Why didn’t you?” Pasquale asks.
Micu opens his eyes. “What good would it have done me and my family? Alfonso made me a partner in his export business, so instead I left Don Cesare and Gennaro to fend for themselves.”
Pasquale becomes agitated. “He made you a partner? The import/export business was my idea. I was his only partner. When I first set foot in Montreal, there was nothing worth buying in the food stores. The bread was like a white sponge, the cheese was yellow, and they had baloney for salami. What shit! And the oil made from corn looked like piss. You couldn’t find an Italian grossetteria if your life depended on it.”
“Ma, what’s a grossetteria?” Micu asks, slightly more awake now.
“A store, where you buy food,” Pasquale replies.
“Ah, alimentari. You talk funny. I don’t understand half of what you say.”
“That’s because I also speak English and French. How many languages do you speak?”
“Eh, how many languages do I need on this farm?”
Pasquale continues, raising his voice, “I could have started a cheese company right there in Canada with all the money I sent Alfonso while he still lived here. Instead he let the Montreal Sicilians beat me to it. He and my brothers sucked me dry, but if you can’t trust your own brothers, who can you trust?”
“Not
your own wife, that’s for sure,” Micu says.
“Nor yours,” Pasquale answers. “How many of your children were Gennaro’s?”
“On that, I can put my hand in the fire,” Micu says. “The children all look like me.”
“I also thought my daughter looked like me until Alfonso planted a doubt in my mind,” Pasquale retorts. “A doubt is worse than knowing for sure, and to think I moved my wife to the country in Laval so she’d be away from her old boyfriend in Montreal.”
“I did the same with my wife—moved her here.”
“But my house is a palace compared to this shack.”
“It’s a shack because Alfonso never sent me enough money to finish rebuilding it properly, and I thought he was such a big shot there.”
Pasquale gets up, wrapping the blanket around his shoulders, “Sure, sure, he became a big shot because of me. I introduced him to all the important people: How could I know that he would marry one of the Vaccaro daughters, become best friends with Jack, and take over the project that I had been working on?”
“So he also double-crossed you? Complimenti.”
But why had Alfonso—that sly fox—let Micu become the rightful owner, with legal papers and deeds, not only of the farmhouse but also of the extensive land that Pasquale had thought would eventually belong to him and his wife? Pasquale wants to know.
“The farm was my dowry. You had no right to give it away,” Lucia had yelled at Alfonso on the night they had all ripped at each other. “I’ll tell your wife why you did it.”
Since Lucia had gotten into her head to move in with her mother in Montreal, Pasquale was obsessed by the thought that she might leave him for good. His friend, Nicodemo, had warned him that Lucia had visited her old boyfriend at his office and then attended a fundraising dinner for him. Was the old flame being rekindled?
When Alfonso called him to a meeting, Pasquale had hoped it was to talk some sense into his sister, but Alfonso had other motives, and all Lucia harped about was the old farmhouse. Alfonso’s temper then flared up and all hell broke loose.
Why did Alfonso turn so violently against his own sister after she brought up the old farmhouse? If Pasquale could sift the past with Micu, some stubborn granule of truth might give something or someone away. Pasquale had enough evidence to destroy Alfonso’s business in Canada; he’d only feel fully revenged if he could also hurt Alfonso in his personal life.
“Then why did you shoot at Totu years after all the talk about your daughter?” Pasquale asks Micu.
“I saw a man with Lucia and I thought it was Alfonso. The shot was meant to scare Alfonso off the property. Totu simply happened to be at the wrong place at the wrong time. You know, you too were born a cornuto,” Micu answers.
“I was born a disgraziato,” Pasqule says. “That has been my destiny.” He reflects for a while. “I don’t understand … the property belonged to my wife.”
Micu was falling asleep. He slurs, “Old stories. I’m going to bed.”
“Tell me. I like old stories.” Pasquale insists. He wants to keep Micu awake. “I have stories about Alfonso to bust your head. Do you know what he did in Montreal during the Olympics?”
“No. They had the Olympics in Montreal?”
“You’re so ignorant! Well, Alfonso and his friends boasted for months about how they drove their trucks loaded with material into the Olympic sites and drove right out to unload at their other residential projects. I have the names of the city workers who collected bribes. And you know who is also involved in all this?”
“How the fuck would I know?”
“Never mind. Wait till I tell the journalist.”
“And are you not involved in all this?”
“They kept me out of it. Alfonso always treated me like a cafone, and to top it all, at the end, he called me a cornuto.”
“You should be used to that name by now.”
“All along I thought it was always about the journalist. But this time, Alfonso kept on talking about one of my friends who wanted my wife to go live with him … so he could also have her sign some papers for his properties … said she owed it to him since he was the father of her daughter, my daughter! They talked as if I wasn’t even there.”
“So that’s why you hit your wife in the head?”
“No, I only slapped her once and ran away.”
“So who did it?”
“Can’t say for sure, but I’ll give some information when I contact the journalist in Montreal.”
“Why? Is he not the one I shot in the leg? Your wife made you a cornuto twice and you laugh at me? At least I got something from Alfonso,” Micu says.
“It doesn’t matter anymore. The journalist is the only person I know that will use the evidence I send him.” Pasquale takes his arm out from under the blanket, pours himself and Micu another glass of warm wine, and sits down. “Now tell me, Micu, why did Alfonso give you this dump of a farmhouse on a silver platter?”
Micu, wrapping his worn-out coat around his shoulders, says, “This house may look like a dump to you, but at least it’s mine. I’m not such a cornuto after all. You can go back to Montreal and tell everyone how I got it.”
52. VENETIAN MASKS
ALL THE NATIONAL PAPERS AND TV news have reported the allegations about the soon-to be-appointed Senator, Alex Di Principe. It seems the party men have huddled together in support of the man who as a Member of Parliament has worked relentlessly to raise funds and boost the fortunes of the federal Liberal Party in Quebec, and helped beat the separatists in the referendum. The Liberals form a majority government, and they have nothing politically to fear for the moment, except possibly losing the upcoming by-election.
“We have chosen to ignore the rumours completely,” a spokesperson declared. “No one takes a third-rate journalist with an overactive imagination seriously.” However, the federal Opposition party won’t let the revelations go unnoticed, and jumps on the chance to grill the Liberals about the questionable reputation of their main “bag man” in Quebec. In the House of Commons, during question period, a member from Calgary asked for an inquiry about Di Principe’s past association with known criminal elements. Photographs of Di Principe in the company of Jack Russo and other mob figures who are rumoured to be at war with each other, and are alleged to have manipulated the construction trade for years, have made the rounds in newspapers across the country. An editorial in La Presse reiterates its call for a Commission to investigate corruption in the construction industry and powerful construction union, especially regarding the cost overruns of the beleaguered Olympic stadium, still without a roof, whose expense is still borne by the citizens of Montreal. Other editorials call for Di Principe to explain his close ties to those individuals suspected to be involved in high-level collusion in the awarding of city contracts.
One Toronto editorialist writes, “This will set back the Italian community in Canada by a generation.” I’m incensed. Is the labour and contributions to this country by thousands and thousands of honest working Italians over a generation completely erased by the wrongdoings of a handful of mobsters and other greedy characters? Many dishonest officials and bureaucrats of other backgrounds have been caught red-handed in corruption. How come their actions are not seen to reflect on their cultural groups?
Unexpectedly, Sean shows up at the apartment on Thursday late afternoon. My insides are still in knots whenever I think of our last conversation. I have waited for him to make the next move and here he is, carrying two large clothing bags, our costumes for the ball, as if nothing has happened. Mine is a long, hooped dress in brocade and a tight-fitting bodice with adjustable strings; his: tights, a long tail coat and frilly shirt. Both come with wigs and Venetian masks. Angie is in the kitchen and I don’t want to say anything to Sean in front of her.
“What are you supposed to be?” Angie says.
“Cathy’s
is actually a Marie Antoinette costume, but with a mask she can pass for a Venetian lady, Desdemona, and if I wear the black mask, I can be Othello.”
“Who are they?” Angie asks.
“A Venetian woman and her husband. The woman was killed by her husband out of jealousy,” he says.
“Her too?” Angie answers and leaves the room.
I wait till she closes the door behind her. I turn on the volume on the TV. “You can’t expect me to go through with this farce,” I say.
“I’m sorry if J.P.’s comments insulted you the other night,” Sean says in a whisper. “But you’re not going to end our relationship for that. J.P. and I had drunk half a bottle of Scotch, besides the wine. He spoke out of line, but he did it for my own good.”
“The revelation hit me in the face, and I’ve been walking around like a zombie for a week.”
“What revelation?”
“You’re using me, Sean. All of my plans, my dreams to start a new life with you … with a new bed … feel desecrated. I had dreamed of a love nest, but I now feel deceived.”
“The drama is coming out now. Italian opera all over again. Vesti la giubba,” he starts singing. “Sometimes you have a way with words,” he laughs. “Love nest … desecrated bed … who holds on to these notions anymore?”
He stops talking when Di Principe appears on the screen. He is being interviewed on the six o’clock news. Di Principe also laughs off the allegations against him. “Anyone who knows the geography of Italy will see that the Veneto region I come from is very, very far from Sicily and Calabria.”
“What the hell is that supposed to mean?” I ask, furious.
“The idiot!” Sean says, walking nervously around the room. “He should have kept his mouth shut. It would all have been forgotten by next week.”
“I’m not going to forget,” I say. “And you still think I’m going to attend this party to celebrate his appointment, after all that has happened, and dressed as a Venetian on top of that? Maybe J.P. can wear my dress and be your date. With the wig and the mask no one will notice.”
The Women of Saturn Page 27
