by Nino Ricci
V
In October of my second year in Canada my Uncle Umberto and his family came from Italy to live with us. The house took on a different smell then, with so many people crowded inside it, a smell of staleness and sleep. I slept with my cousins Rocco and Domenic on a bed in a corner of the living room; the others shared for a time the two bedrooms, Tsi’Umberto with my father and Tsia Taormina and her three-year-old, Fiorina, with Aunt Teresa, till finally we walled up the porch as a bedroom and my uncle and aunt moved in there.
In Italy my uncle’s family had lived out in the countryside near Belladonna, where Tsia Taormina came from, a tiny village far from the high road in the valley beyond Castilucci. Their distance from town had seemed to me then to mark them like a physical deformity; I’d thought of them always as backward, thickheaded, and felt a kind of revulsion now when they moved in with us. Tsia Taormina was the worst, with her strange lumbering dialect – she seemed a cipher to me, a blank, a person without form or substance, as though something crucial had been left out of her and all her actions were only mimicry of what real people did, with no power to make an impression on the world. She was kind to me, and yet in her kindness I never felt any comfort – she’d give me candies sometimes out of a bag she’d brought with her from Italy, but the wrappers were sticky and yellowed with age, and the candies had an odd sickly-sweet liquid inside. In the house she quickly became a kind of drudge, no one taking her into account, Tsi’Umberto speaking to her only to insult her, and even Aunt Teresa, though she was much younger, assuming from the start a blatant condescension: within a few weeks she’d gradually turned over to her all the housework, and then when the new bedroom was built she insisted the baby be moved in there as well, saying it was easier for Tsia Taormina to look after two children than for both of them to look after one. But Tsia Taormina gave no sign of noticing these affronts, merely continued on in her simple-minded good humour as though she had no sense of her own humiliation. It was this blindness that seemed most unforgivable in her, even in the impartiality she showed the baby, the way she treated her with the same plodding efficiency and care as she did her own Fiorina as if she saw no distinction between them, looked after them both merely out of the blind instinct of a mother; I kept waiting to catch her out in some oversight or mistake, though she was the only grown-up in the house now who ever showed the baby the least affection, who didn’t treat her as if she were invisible.
Tsi’Umberto, more heavy-set than my father, with a wide round face that gave him an air of expansive good humour, seemed to make up for Tsia Taormina with his own unfailing self-assertion. Yet in him as well I sensed no centre finally, no way of pinning down what was true in him. He appeared oddly anxious to please us at first, even the contempt he showed toward his wife and sons somehow intended for our benefit, to show us he was a part of us and not of them; but through the winter he grew gradually more irritable and grim, seeming to lose interest in us, putting on his good humour then only for guests and beginning to show the same disowning toward the rest of us that he showed his family. In the spring, when he gave up his job at the factory to help us on the farm, the arguments started – clandestinely at first, in short quick bursts directed mainly at Aunt Teresa and usually having to do, perversely, with some perceived slight against his wife. But since Aunt Teresa always answered him with the same off-hand manner she had with my father, was like a smooth surface Tsi’Umberto’s anger couldn’t take hold in, by the summer the longer arguments had begun, the ones with my father, arguments that went on sometimes for days or weeks and from which we had no respite until Tsi’Umberto and his family finally moved out of the house some two years later.
One of the first of these was over a Portuguese man, Vito, whom my father hired that summer at the beginning of the bean season. Vito had worked for us the previous year before my uncle had come, seeming to transform the farm then, rattling up our drive every morning on his old CCM bicycle, his legs working like pistons, and then the day taking shape around his manic energy as if impelled by it. My father told the story one night at supper of how Vito had killed the neighbour’s dog, had seen something moving through the field and run to get the shotgun from behind the seat in my father’s truck.
“Pom! before anyone could stop him. He must have got it into his head he was going to have a nice roast that night – who knows what he thought he’d seen. Then when he saw it was the neighbour’s dog he didn’t come to work for two days. I brought him a few pounds of meat after but he wouldn’t eat it, he said I’d got it from the dog.”
Tsi’Umberto laughed at this story with the rest of us, smoking at his corner of the table with the pleased, languid air he sometimes put on after supper.
“Mbeh, we’ll keep him until the beans are finished,” he said finally, as if simply adding to the story a logical conclusion, “and then we’ll find someone else.”
“What are you saying?” my father said. “You’ll never find another worker like him.”
“Dai, you see the way he is. Anyway there’s lots of Italians who need work, I don’t see why we have to go hiring strangers.”
“Italians, they’re the worst – all you’ll find now are the old women who can’t get work in the factory. They talk nonsense all day and then if you try to tell them anything you never hear the end of it.”
But already it was as though Tsi’Umberto wasn’t listening. He seemed to discover his opinions himself only the moment before he uttered them, yet once he’d found them he’d retreat into them as into a fortress, sitting inside them with a self-righteousness that allowed no guilt or doubt to weaken them, as if his stubbornness itself was its own justification, something he could hold before us like a trophy at the end of every argument.
“It’s not right,” he said, and there was the hard finality in his voice that showed he’d found his place and was ready to set there now like cement. “I’m not going to have people say we give work to foreigners before we give it to our own.”
My uncle’s accusals would seem to close around my father like a cage, make him lash out with an uncontrol that then gave my uncle the upper hand, that added the force of indignation to his stubbornness. Yet it was my uncle’s anger that surprised me, continuing to build as if it had no limit, for all its theatricality remaining raw in him many days after an argument, his wife and his sons bearing the brunt of it then in his insults or in the sting of his belt, while my father’s by then had already long retreated, drawn inward as if it had turned against him. In the end it was always my father who made some concession: after the beans Vito was let go, though in the fall Tsi’Umberto said nothing more about hiring Italians, seeming content instead when we fell behind to let Rocco and Domenic and me miss the first month of school.
It was a source of disgrace to me to start school late, those terrible first moments boarding the bus, going into class, especially now that I was saddled with the added disgrace of Rocco and Domenic. I’d had to bring them into the office when they’d arrived from Italy the October before, Sister Bertram, drawn and pale after her illness, talking there with Father Mackinnon when we came in.
“I don’t see how these people expect them to learn anything if they keep them at home to work half the year.”
Rocco and Domenic had both been put back two grades as I had, Rocco into grade five and Domenic into grade three. Their first months at school I spent bitter with the shame of them, couldn’t bear sitting with them on the bus, always got on after them so I could choose a place away from them, couldn’t bear the sounds of their voices or how they walked or how they looked, their wide-legged corduroys and button flies and the crooked haircuts their mother gave them. They seemed oddly misproportioned to me, Rocco muscled and wide-shouldered but with his mother’s tiny weasel-like head, Domenic broad-faced like his father but his body spindly like a comic-strip character’s; and I held their awkward looks against them as if their own thick-headedness had caused them, held against them the way they remained stolid inside th
eir strangeness like things unaware of themselves or of the impression they made.
In his first weeks Rocco threw up several times on the bus. His vomit had the stench and consistency of soured corn meal, puddling in the aisle and beginning to run under the seats until Schultz finally stopped to clean it. But Rocco seemed put out only by the fact of his getting sick; the rest he took as a kind of joke, making comebacks in Italian to the other boys when they insulted him and afterwards laughing at home about the uproar he caused. Everything was like that for him – he continued to make his sandwiches with our crusty homemade bread instead of the store bread I made Aunt Teresa buy, said he preferred it, continued to sit where he pleased on the bus without regard for the hierarchies and insults of the older boys. When the Massaccis had first moved to the 12 & 13 Sideroad and begun to ride the bus I had avoided them, setting my lunchbox on my seat when they got on so they wouldn’t sit next to me; but Rocco made friends with them at once, talking to them in the crudest dialect though the older boys harangued them, he and Domenic closing themselves off with them in their own small oblivious world. For a while the older boys simply stopped paying them any attention; and then gradually they began to engage them, almost curious, almost friendly.
“You know what wop means?” Rocco said when he’d begun to pick up some English. “It means nice Italian boy.”
After that the word became a running joke between him and the other boys; one of them, the ringleader of sorts, took to calling Rocco his good buddy, draping a beefy arm around him then like a protector. But Rocco seemed merely amused by this new friendliness, as if it only proved how foolish the other boys were.
In all this I was left with nothing, no reward for trying to follow out what seemed the careful, ruthless logic of fitting in. In the first month or so of school after Rocco and Domenic arrived my mind would twitch like a nerve each time I found Domenic waiting for me at the back doors at recess, sullen and expectant there in his awkwardness and aloneness; and unable to bear him once, I simply pushed him hard against the wall of the school to be away from him, feeling a lightness as my hands shot out against him as if something caged in me had been set free. But there was a look in his face just before he crumpled to the ground, a grimace like a soundless scream, that seemed not so much pain as the sudden understanding of how things were between us. I felt betrayed somehow, in that instant and then afterwards when other kids sided with him when the teacher on duty came, felt I’d been tricked into thinking he was nothing, that I could release my hate on him without consequence. Later, when he’d begun to make other friends, to avoid me, every small success of his seemed an accusation. In the spring he gained a kind of notoriety at marbles, devising special games for them with shoeboxes and tin cans and collecting Mason jars full of them, steelies, boulders, peeries, trading them sometimes for chocolate bars or bags of chips that he’d bring home for his sister or himself. He won a peery once with a tiny bird frozen into the centre of it as in mid-flight, though he simply turned it over to his sister as if to show how easily things came to him now.
At home we worked together in the greenhouses after school, leaf lettuce during the fall, tomatoes during the winter; but then in the summer I was left home again to look after Fiorina and the baby while the others went out to the fields. The house took on a torpor with only the three of us there as if time were suspended, every hour interminable; cut off like that I seemed to have no way to judge what was normal, wavering always between a childish boredom, resentful at being left behind, at having to do girls’ work, and the fear of some catastrophe. The baby disturbed me sometimes, with her eerie passivity and silence, seemed to have taken into herself the blankness with which others regarded her. She could hardly be called an infant now, could walk, could speak, yet there remained an inattention in her like a newborn’s; if I tried to get her to talk she’d ape things I said but with a mumbling distraction, turning them inwards like a private conversation. I took to calling her Rita, the only syllables of her name she was able to manage, whispering them to herself sometimes like an incantation; but often she’d fall into moods like trances, lost in her secret games with the toys, a doll, a beaded cushion, that Tsia Taormina had made for her, oblivious then to any attempts I made to get her attention.
With Fiorina she was more responsive – Fiorina acted the mother with her, rocking her, combing her hair, played hiding games that brought out in her sometimes the ghost of a smile; and yet there was something off in all this, a hint of pretence. I caught Fiorina hitting her once, not in anger but with a kind of deliberation or righteousness, as if she were administering a punishment, and though I myself had often come to the point of hitting one or the other of them, still I felt a kind of rage at this presumption in her. After that I noticed her growing increasingly bullyish and manipulative, condescending as if she’d understood finally the difference between herself and Rita; and yet Rita continued to respond to her in a way she wouldn’t to me, caught up somehow in this strangely subtle dynamic Fiorina had established between them. I had no control over them: when they were getting along, lost in their private games, a calm settled over the house like sleep; but then some sudden petulance in Fiorina would disturb the balance and leave Rita crying sometimes with a fierceness that frightened me.
I emerged from these days, the isolation of them, as from a soundless dark, dazed somehow by the return of the others, the complex mundane world they brought back with them. Day by day they grew more alien, seemed to share the same strange features that made them different from me, that set us apart as surely as if we’d come from different countries or spoke a different language – they made me think how in Italy I’d regarded people from Castilucci as backward, peculiar, their features then always seeming to bear the proof of their strangeness, their lumbering gait or flattened faces, the watery, muted sound of their speech as if their throats were clogged with mucus. And yet I was no longer certain what choice I’d made to set myself so apart from them, whether my exclusion was something I’d willed or that had simply come about by a kind of inertia. Whole evenings began to pass when I didn’t exchange a word with any of them; and the longer my silences went on the more impossible it was to break out of them, to make the simplest gesture or utter the simplest sound without feeling a hollowness at the centre of me. I wanted to sit inside my difference and shelter myself there as if to protect it, wanted them to feel some punishment in it that would show up their own hideousness, this crippled family we formed. But then sometimes they appeared so at ease with themselves, lax with fatigue as they were, good-humoured, solid and real in a way I wasn’t, each of them finding their place so instinctively in the mysterious shift and flow of their conversations, that it seemed I had nothing to put against them finally to show I was better than they were, that there was nothing inside me that was true, not even the silent hate I bore against them.
VI
The Italians held parties from time to time at the Rhine Danube Club, sudden distillations of us from out of the wide anonymous landscape we’d been scattered through into the crucible of the club’s barn-like hall. It was odd to see all the half-familiar faces from Valle del Sole gathered together there as in some old photograph, people still carrying on with their air of village unconcern though it seemed out of place now amidst the starched tablecloths and careful place-settings, the blue-eyed servers in their tight bodices and flowered dresses. Now and then some boy I’d known back in Italy would catch my eye with a newcomer’s furtive hopefulness, whatever divisions there’d been between us back then seeming levelled in the diminishment of being together here in someone else’s country; yet finally nothing would come of these past connections, always the lingering shame in me of what my mother had done and then some larger disjunction I couldn’t account for, the not remembering somehow who I’d been in that other life.
Aunt Teresa, though, seemed to thrive at these parties. Once the music came on she switched from partner to partner through to the end of the night, her laughter
sometimes bursting into the sudden lull between songs so that for an instant the whole hall seemed to focus on her. She was our ambassador, her own normalcy somehow washing away some mark from the rest of us, the thing that excused my father’s reclusion, Tsi’Umberto’s menacing friendliness when he drank. I’d watch her sometimes from the edge of the dance floor, retreating there after the other boys my age, most of them from Our Blessed Virgin School on the other side of town from St. Mike’s, had sifted into their gangs and cliques; and sometimes she’d see me sitting alone there amongst the old women and take my hands suddenly to dance, waltzing me around the floor with the same air of girlish abandon I’d known in her in Italy.
Then finally at one of these parties she spent the whole evening with a single partner, tall and boyish and lean, with a long wave of blondish hair he’d run his fingers through awkwardly after each dance to brush it from his eyes. Though I’d never seen him before there was already the air of casual familiarity between him and my aunt of some longer acquaintance. Tsi’Umberto seemed to know him as well, coming up to him at one point and clapping an arm around his shoulder, his voice booming with drunken heartiness.
