by Nino Ricci
His eyes had begun to tear; he pulled a handkerchief from a back pocket to wipe them. I’d heard so many stories like his over the summer, had each time sat through them in the same awkward silence – there seemed no adequate response to them, no way of assuaging a pain that was so general. But the old man recovered in an instant, as people did, this gift they seemed to have, to be able to touch the bottom of a painful thing and emerge from it whole a moment later.
“Mbeh, you didn’t come here to watch an old man cry.”
The rest of the interview unfolded more predictably, his life in Canada seeming in comparison to his past like a retirement in some pleasant holiday country, comfortable and uneventful. Canada was his home now, he said, was the only place he fit in.
“I’ve been back to Italy twice now, but no more. I stay with my daughter in Rome and she won’t speak to me in dialect, she says I sound like a peasant. And in the village it’s just as bad. Everything has changed there – Italy has progressed but here we still think the way we used to twenty years ago.”
I asked if he had any old documents or photos we could use for the book. Older people were often reluctant to lend us these things, fearing some danger to themselves if their photos were reproduced; but the old man disappeared with an air of pleased intent into the house’s gloom and returned a moment later with a yellowed shoebox tied with string. He’d put on a pair of glasses; one by one he went through the items in the box, scrutinizing each from a distance through narrowed eyes and then handing it on to me. His old Italian passport; an identity card from Fascist times; three or four packets of photographs; a medal his son had earned in the Abyssinian war. A glint of silver at the bottom of the box caught my eye – a coin, an old one lira, I recognized it at once. I reached for it and a thrill passed through me like a premonition: the coin was the same as the one I’d been given years before by my mother’s friend Luciano, the same year, 1927, the same nick in the eagle’s wing that he’d said had stopped a bullet from entering his heart during the war. For an instant time seemed to falter and warp.
“I had a coin like this once.”
“Mbeh, they were common enough once, before the war, a lira was still worth something then.”
“No, I mean exactly the same, the same year, the same mark like that on one side.”
“Oh that, of course, it sometimes happened like that back then. One year all the twenty-cent pieces had the king’s ear missing. You couldn’t spend them to save your life, people said they were bad luck. With this one it was different, it was good – people made up stories about it, that Mussolini made it like that to protect himself from the pope, all sorts of things, you know how people thought back then. I never believed in all that foolishness – I kept it like that, as a souvenir. You can take it if you want, I don’t have any use for it now. If I gave it to Carmen there he would lose it in half an hour.”
I weighed the coin in my hand. A child’s acquisitiveness stirred in me, an old belief in the magic of possessions.
“You don’t mind?” I said.
“Not at all, please, take it. Maybe it’ll bring you better luck than it brought me.”
But when I had pocketed it I felt peculiarly burdened, as if something until then chimerical, evanescent, had become suddenly mundane; whatever meaning I might attach to it now would be merely a kind of conceit, an indulgence.
Carmen followed us to the door, slipping past the old man to look up at me still vigilant, still unconvinced. I imagined him having seen me pocket the coin from his great-grandfather’s box, having followed me now to bare his silent resentment. I had robbed him of his story, whatever fiction the old man might have spun out for him in passing on to him the coin. But in the thrill of departure even Carmen forgot himself, waving goodbye, goodbye, as I backed down the drive.
“Buona fortuna in Africa!” the old man called out, holding Carmen’s tiny hand in his trembling one like a flower.
XXVI
I spent my last week in Mersea preparing a final report. At home I’d carefully labelled and filed all the materials we’d put together, interview tapes and notes, photos and documents, index cards. Sorted like that they seemed an impressive archive, weighty, official, so much more orderly than the work that had gone into creating them, than the community they represented. I wondered what truths or fictions the professor would draw from them; or perhaps they would merely sit gathering dust in some office of multiculturalism, having no value beyond their official one, simply a proof that the government had given its sanction to an ethnic community.
But when I came to write up the report it seemed impossible not to leave out what mattered most, the countless things that were known but never discussed, the truer, finer, more vulgar things, the garish furnishings in people’s homes, what they might say over supper, how they held in their hearts’ fonder remembering until the moment the machine was turned off and they’d sat back in pleased relief at their careful deceptions. The most interesting interviews, the atypical ones, were the hardest to use, didn’t fit any pattern; and the very act of summarizing seemed to steer me toward exactly what I wished to avoid, a kind of panegyric that sifted and levelled all differences into a bland, harmonious whole. I was reduced finally to a sort of doltishness, to stating the obvious, to charts and statistics and glosses that left out a haze of impression and nuance that couldn’t be put into words.
I worked in my room, conscious of being there at a desk while outside my father and the others worked on the farm seeming at once the fulfilment and contradiction of my report. I had set their own tapes apart, Tsia Taormina’s and Tsi’Umberto’s, my father’s, feeling a vague obligation to listen to them, though the days passed and still I kept putting the task off. When my father’s turn had come up in our interviewing I had assigned him to one of the younger workers, Filomena, had half-expected, half-hoped, that he’d decline to be interviewed at all; but then in the cassettes that Filomena had turned in to me at week’s end my father’s had been there, so innocent-seeming among the rest that I couldn’t bring myself to disturb it.
Ultimately it had been Aunt Teresa who’d refused to be interviewed, something that seemed both in character for her and not, simply her usual perversity or perhaps something else, a sort of integrity. She’d refused a platform to speak, to contradict, to call attention to herself, had chosen instead simply to hold her tongue, as if she’d understood how little place there was in this sort of thing for the truth. Perhaps all along I’d underestimated her, had never been willing to concede to her this strength of character. Even her visits to Rita, what she’d told her: seen differently they seemed to fit the pattern of a long, quiet management of our family’s emotions, of the self-denial that had lain always just beneath the surface of her, what might have been the only thing, finally, that had saved us from ourselves.
It was only after I’d finished my report that I listened to the tapes. Tsi’Umberto’s was predictable, the reasonable man, the persona he took on with people, his bad English straining for authority, for the idiomatic, only a small sullenness showing the wariness beneath his responses, the care he was taking to keep them unremarkable. Tsia Taormina’s, done separately in dialect, I almost gave up on, put off at first by her plodding literal-mindedness; and yet there were things that surprised me, perceptions I couldn’t account for.
“It was hard for the kids at first, because of the language and everything. The oldest one was all right but for the younger one it was harder, he said the kids at school made fun of him and things like that. He wanted us to buy him clothes like they had but we didn’t have any money for that in those days.”
But I was amazed she could have known these things, that her sons had had that closeness with her; we had all lived together then and yet I couldn’t fit these moments of intimacy into the strange foreboding gloom that was all I remembered from then.
My father’s tape was an agony. There was none of Tsi’Umberto’s forced reasonableness in it, his voice throughout raw with
humility, a single note hanging in it like the hollow after-throb of a bell. The contrast to Filomena’s was almost comical at times, as if their voices had been spliced together afterwards for a gag, Filomena resolutely buoyant and automatic, my father’s responses like a sea she skipped across to reach the safe haven of her questions. There was a palpable warmth that came through when my father spoke about Italy – he grew almost voluble then, almost expansive, a nostalgia I’d seldom seen in him, that didn’t fit the image I’d somehow developed of his having left Italy coldly, without remorse; but then Filomena asked about his family.
“My son came over in sixty-one with my wife, but my wife, she died on the trip.”
A pause.
“I’m sorry, you said your wife died?”
There was a catch in my father’s voice, a stillness.
“Yep.”
Another scratch of empty tape.
“How did she die, was she sick, did she have an accident?”
“She died in childbirth.”
Filomena’s awkward earnestness enraged me, that in a community as small and claustrophobic as ours she hadn’t known these things; and yet I’d chosen her to do my father exactly because she’d seemed the least likely of our group to know.
“I’m sorry about that,” she said, then returned with a quaver to her usual list of questions. I had the impression that if she’d continued to probe, my father would simply have gone on like that to tell the whole story, would have answered every question with the same humbled sense of obligation to the truth.
I thought of removing my father’s tape, his entire file – there was an intimacy in his answers I couldn’t bear, something laid open, not so much in what he’d said as in his simple inability not to speak, that made my mind ache. Yet perhaps in speaking he himself had already made peace with himself, could see his life more whole than I did, less out of the ordinary. There were a hundred different tragedies in our community, and beyond them a hundred scandals, infidelities and betrayals, illegitimacies, an ancient murder; and yet the earth had never split open in the face of them, the people they touched carrying on with their lives, accepted, marked only by the lingering gingerliness others showed around them as if out of respect for human frailty. In the end I put the tape back in its proper place, feeling my father was owed that or perhaps simply wanting to see it there, so innocuous, among the others, apart from its few awkward moments telling, after all, the same story they did, as if time had finally levelled our lives to a comfortable normalcy.
XXVII
The morning of my departure my father drove me to the depot. He had dressed, though it was a work day, in his after-work clothes, a loose summer shirt, old suit pants, his good shoes, the two of us alone again as in our old Sunday rides to church in the car’s intimate closeness.
“Does this bus from here going to take you all the way up to Ottawa?”
“I have to switch in Toronto.”
“Ah.”
He had a habit of leaning into the steering wheel as he drove to cradle it like a child, with the gesture now the sleeve of his shirt hiking up to reveal the flesh of his biceps, pale against the tauter bronze of his forearms, vulnerable and unformed like a teenager’s. I had the sense suddenly that in all the years I’d known him I’d never once dared to look at him squarely, to hold him whole in my sight, even now feeling merely this impression he was beside me, this peripheral blur, his arm on the wheel, his weight pressing down the cushioned velour of the seat.
“Do you have some kind of address or something if we have to write to you?”
“I don’t really know exactly where I’ll be yet. I left a phone number for the people in Ottawa with Aunt Teresa – they’ll know how to find me if you need to.”
A pause, the small tensing of resentment in him.
“It seems funny to me, you don’t even know where you’re going.”
“It’s not that, it’s just I don’t have the exact address yet. Anyway I’ll send it to you as soon as I have it.”
But I hadn’t imagined writing to him, had thought of this departure as somehow complete, no lines leading back.
At the bus stop there were a half dozen others waiting on the sidewalk, a few teenagers, a young man with a crew cut in a university jacket, two women in the stiff skirts and high-collared blouses of Mexican Mennonites, their baggage two bundles wrapped in blankets and twine. My father helped me lift my bags from the trunk, a duffel bag, an overstuffed backpack, what I’d whittled myself down to.
“You don’t have to write only every six months,” my father said. “My English isn’t that good to write, you know that, but I can manage all right to read it. Maybe your aunt can write in English.”
“You can write in Italian, I’ll understand it.”
We stood a few minutes in silence. My father looked at his watch.
“Looks like it’s late,” he said.
But a minute later the bus rolled around the corner. My father, wallet in hand, went up to the driver as he stepped down.
“How much for Ottawa?”
“Hold your horses, buddy,” the driver said, moving past him. “Let me get these bags on first.”
His insolence stung me but my father seemed oblivious. When the driver returned my father peeled off a few bills for my ticket and then handed a sheaf of wrinkled fifties and hundreds to me.
“Something for the trip.”
I wadded the money awkwardly into a pocket.
“Thanks.”
I was the last to board. I wanted only to be gone but sensed the emotion welling in my father, the need for a gesture. I had only to embrace him, to brush my cheeks against his, the usual ritual of parting; and yet I had never done such a thing, couldn’t bring myself to do it now though my whole body felt impelled to.
“So I guess I’ll see you in a couple of years,” I said.
“Yep.”
And then I was already on the bus, without so much as a handshake, a touch. As the bus pulled away I had a last glimpse of him lingering there on the sidewalk, a lonely figure I’d never known, seeming still the sad stranger I’d sat beside years before on a Halifax train.
XXVIII
My first vision of Africa, as I surfaced from afternoon sleep to gaze from the window of our plane, wasn’t the endless bush I’d expected but a city of sun-baked mud on the desert’s edge, moulded out of the rusted earth like some child’s creation. Then the wall of heat as we stepped from the plane, the ramshackle airport, a cinder-block shed merely, alone in that blasted landscape like a final outpost; and finally the bus ride into Kano, the road alive with a human traffic like a refugee trail, on foot, on bikes, on tiny scooters and motorcycles that chirred away from the path of our ancient bus like swatted insects, everything suspended in the blaze of desert heat as in a dream.
Our in-country orientation was held in a government teaching college just outside the city, the group of us sequestered there in our whiteness as in some holiday camp. All the rhetoric we’d heard in Ottawa about development work seemed to fall away now: there was no global perspective here, only the nuts and bolts of getting by, basic language training, how to work a kerosene fridge, how to select and slaughter a chicken. There’d been talk in Ottawa about a boycott against Nestlé but here their products were used unthinkingly, the powdered milk and the biscuits, even the coffee, Nescafé instant, imported from Belgium though Africa abounded in coffee.
Some of the older volunteers led groups of us into the city. The heat there, the mud barrenness, gave the sense of a perpetual aimlessness or repose, of a world still awaiting the decree that would set it in motion. Taxis – battered blue Datsuns and Beetles, white Peugeot 504s – barrelled through the narrow streets like rockets, from another planet, the calm splitting open to let them pass and then closing again. We came on a bar, a warehouse of a place in yellow stucco, where a dusty juke box was playing the latest Rolling Stones; but outside you had only to walk a few minutes, into the maze of crooked lanes the city was,
to feel that time hadn’t moved for a thousand years.
In the old market the gloomy alleyways hummed with quick activity, narrow mud stalls leading back into mysteries of secreted goods. The traders, tall and sharp-featured and dignified, haughty, called out to us in Hausa, bature, white man, then gave the air of not caring to sell to us if we approached them. At prayer time, prayer mats were unfurled, activity ceased: we seemed made invisible then by their indifference, irrelevances they toyed with, then blotted out.
Some fifteen of us out of the eighty or so volunteers who had come had been posted in the southwest. On the fifth day we set out before sunrise in an old plywood-floored bus whose back seats had been removed to make way for a large metal drum, of oil or kerosene or petrol, I was never clear which. The drum was part of some private transaction of the driver’s – the field officer who’d come up from Ibadan to accompany us, Richard Harmond, blond and pink-skinned, seeming to exude still the dying glow of a suburban complacence, had made a show of arguing with the driver before our departure; but the drum had remained. The road was pocked with great potholes, craters really, two, three, four feet across; the driver, never letting up speed, careened and swerved to avoid them, though sometimes a wheel caught the edge of one and the drum at the back gave out a liquid groan as it shifted with the jolt.
As we moved south the landscape grew greener, resolving itself finally into a tree-studded savannah; small mud villages and Fulani encampments glimpsed distantly from the highway gave way to towns of more modern appearance, the buildings of sun-faded stucco, the roofs a sea of corrugated tin. At Kaduna we stopped to eat at a lorry park, a great dusty square ringed round with chop houses and traders’ stalls and crowded with taxis and minibuses and mammy wagons. The older buses seemed cobbled together from scraps of old metal and wood, each one distinct, painted in yellows and blues and inscribed in florid lettering with strange slogans, “No condition is permanent,” “God is God,” “Water be for sea.”
