The hairs on my arm prickled. “You mean Luke?”
“Luciano, yes. He has not told, I think. But he has told me. I understand why he has not told his brother. Luciano Moretti is a good man, but he is very traditional. I do not think he would understand. You and David are boyfriends, I understand. I am very fine with this. My mind is very open. David, he is like cousin to me. We are famiglia. So Daniel, you and I, we are like cousins too, yes?”
“Sure.”
Before I could retreat, Antonio launched forward and gave me an impassioned, fraternal hug, his hand between my shoulder blades, pressing his torso hard against me. “I am unbelievable I am in Canada,” he exclaimed, stepping back. “I am so happy to be here.”
“I’m glad you could visit.”
“I wish to eat your poutine.”
“What? Oh, okay.”
“We will drink your maple tree syrup?”
“For sure.”
“We will go see your hockey game?”
“Antonio, you’re only here two weeks. The hockey season doesn’t start until next month.”
“No hockey game?”
“No hockey game.”
“Aah.”
“But,” I said, “we can visit the Hockey Hall of Fame, if you want.”
“Yes?”
“And we are going to celebrate.”
“Yes!”
David climbed the stairs and looked from one of us to the other. “What’s all the shouting?”
I raised the wine bottle in one hand and the three glasses in the other. “We’re celebrating.”
Tears of joy welled in Antonio’s eyes. “Viva Canada!” he cried.
David clapped both of us on the shoulders. “Welcome to Canada.”
On the day Antonio was to fly home, I was genuinely sad to see him go. David and I were able to take some time to show him the city. The three of us went to Wonderland together, and the Toronto Islands. But for someone who’d never travelled outside of Sicily in his life, Antonio was surprisingly skilled at finding his own way around. He went up the CN Tower (taking a selfie jumping on the famous glass floor) and visited the Toronto Zoo (where his favourite animals were the penguins). Toward the end of his stay, he even took a bus on his own and made a day trip to Niagara Falls. His only disappointment came when he discovered Avril Lavigne had moved to Los Angeles and was newly married to the lead singer of Sum 41.
“Now,” he said sadly, “she is California Girl.”
The day of Antonio’s departure, David was tied up at work. But I managed to clear my morning and volunteered to borrow Liz’s car and drop him off at the airport. I pulled up to the busy departures terminal and hauled his luggage out of the trunk.
Standing on the curb, Antonio handed me my Blue Jays cap.
“At customs,” he said, “David welcomed me to Toronto with your baseball hat. I wear it every day I am here. Thank you. Now I give it back to you.”
I took my cap, rumpled and faded, and examined it in my hands. He had worn it every day he was here. Grandpa had bought me this ball cap when he’d taken Pat, Liam and me to a game at the SkyDome on our sixteenth birthday. If Antonio hadn’t returned it, I would’ve asked for it back.
“You’re welcome,” I said. “Here.” I reached into the glove compartment and retrieved a brand-new blue and white Jays cap. “This is for you.”
Antonio’s eyes widened. I put it on his head for him, squeezed his shoulder and stepped back. “Now you have your own.”
After that, Antonio hugged me, kissed me on both cheeks, shouldered his backpack and picked up his luggage. The truth was, he was starting to miss his family back in Sicily, especially his three-legged dog Pepi. He’d be home just in time for the start of the olive harvest. In a few days, David’s mom would be returning to Canada. The summer was all but over.
“Daniel?” Antonio said. “You have never travelled away from Canada?”
“No. I’ve never had the chance.” I shrugged. “I guess I’ve just been too busy.”
“Ah, yes, you are in school. You will be a good doctor one day and you will help others.”
I stared into Antonio’s face. “Thanks.” I wanted to add: med school was expensive, I was perpetually broke, I couldn’t afford to travel. But just beneath the surface I knew the truth: I was afraid. I was afraid to leave grandpa, afraid to leave my brothers. What if something happened to them? In Toronto, I was just a few hours’ drive from Sudbury. If I went away, who would watch over the family?
“It is a good thing, to travel,” he said. “You must try.” We observed the taxi cabs and shuttle buses rolling past. “I hope one day you and David will come to Torretta. It is not Toronto. It is very small village in the mountains. But it is my home.”
“I’d like that,” I said. “One day.”
“Now you say to me, ‘Bona partuta.’”
“Bona partuta.”
“That is how you say bon voyage!”
“Bona partuta, Antonio.”
Backing away, Antonio began to sing in a clear, strong tenor, “Leaving on a Jet Plane.” I’d never been serenaded before, much less in such a public space. Passers-by stared. Two teenage girls took photos. Just before vanishing into the terminal, Antonio shouted: “Daniel! I leave gift for you and David. It is inside coffee table.” Then he was gone, buoyed away by the endless tide of humanity.
On the drive back down the 427, I managed to grind the gearshift only once. After high school, Pat had spent six months backpacking across Europe. A few years later, Liam drove his Jeep to the west coast and back. When Grandpa was younger, he’d sailed as far as Russia in the Canadian Merchant Navy. I’d yet to even step outside the province.
Back in the loft, I looked inside our dented steamer trunk and found a manila envelope. I debated whether I should wait for David to open it. But the envelope was unsealed, so I slipped out the contents.
It was a thin photo album with a dark blue cover. Since returning home, David had shared with me dozens of stories, facts he’d learned about Sicily, his family, and the farmhouse where his mom had grown up. He’d also shown me hundreds of photographs he’d taken, many of which he’d posted on Facebook. But these were different. Each page held only one 5×7 image, carefully mounted and captioned in thick black ink. For a long time, I sat on the couch, passing from one to the next.
Davide con Tintin e Milu. The first was a photograph of David, sunburnt and squinting in a wide straw hat, his face speckled with points of light. He was holding two baby goats, one under each arm, brown and white, with big floppy ears and dangling little hoofs. Behind him, past a stone cistern, rose his grandparents’ two-storey manor, a traditional masseria, bordering the banks of a dry stream shaded by a citrus grove. Paths led under ivy-wreathed archways through the vegetable and herb gardens. On the far side of the farmhouse, I could just make out the many rows of olive trees. Here they were three kilometres from the nearest village, and twelve kilometres from the sea. David had told me the farm had been in the family five generations. David’s grandparents Pasquale and Sia still lived on the property with two of their daughters, Bianca and Romy, and their granddaughter Carina. Pasquale De Luca had been going deaf and blind now for many years, but every day he still ventured out for his morning walk around the boundaries of the farm.
Davide e Silvia, San Vito Lo Capo. A photograph of David and a girl in a black bikini, posing hip-to-hip on a sand bar, sparkling wet, holding out a crimson pebbled starfish. Someone outside the frame was pointing, a blurry hand with a wedding band. I recognized this girl as the neighbour’s granddaughter Silvia Sabatini. She clutched David’s shoulder, her eyes dark as almonds, her other hand cupping his wrist. Rose-coloured light washed their half-naked bodies, flinging long shadows across a rocky beach. Silvia had appeared in many of the photos David had taken. The friendship between the De Lucas and the Sabatinis dated back to the Second World War, during which time both their farms had been destroyed and then rebuilt. Silvia’s breasts were small like a
pples, her legs long and her shoulders broad. She might have been a track-and-field athlete, or a mountaineer. As it stood, she’d just completed her final year as a student in the Department of Agriculture and Forestry Science at the University of Palermo.
Davide con Nonna e Nonno. David in the vineyard holding a basket while his grandma Sia cut a bunch of grapes from the vines. Her eyes were hard and bright, deep-rooted in a driftwood face. This woman rarely ever spoke about her past. Hers was a family shrouded in mystery, gossip and precipitous flirtations with scandal. Now days would pass before she might speak aloud at all. She was nineteen when her entire family was killed during the Allied invasion of Sicily. It was a well-known story how a wounded soldier from the 1st Canadian Infantry Division encountered her tending the chickens in the bombed ruins of her father’s farmhouse. That soldier was an Italian-Canadian named Pasquale De Luca. After she’d nursed him back to health, he swore he’d return after the war to marry her. When he kept his promise, he was shocked to discover he already had a two-year-old daughter named Isabella. In Biblical times, an unwed mother might have faced death by stoning. Sia managed to keep her firstborn by posing as a war widow, an elaborate and dangerous deception in which the Sabatinis were complicit. It was Sia’s own grandfather who had planted the olive trees, but it was her “second” Canadian husband who planted the vineyard. Far in the background, I could see Pasquale De Luca, in round dark glasses and a buttoned vest, walking arm-in-arm with another man with an enormous moustache, Salvatore Sabatini. In the photograph, Salvatore’s head was turned, his left hand resting on Pasquale’s forearm, his mouth bent intimately to his companion’s ear.
Davide con le Zie. David with his two aunts Bianca and Romy in the manor kitchen. Blue ceramic tiles armoured the walls beneath shelves brimming with jars, spices and colourful cookware. The three stood at a wooden table, their faces flushed from the heat, grinding parboiled tomatoes in two food mills. At any moment, zia Bianca, with her heavy-set jaw, unibrow and booming laugh, might serve up espressos thick as crude oil, or grilled swordfish crusted in pistachios, or deep-fried arancine stuffed with ragù.
As a midwife, she’d helped deliver almost one thousand babies in the course of her career. Not only was she the family genealogist but she was the local historian. It was Bianca who pointed out to David how Palermo was considered by many the most conquered city in the world. “Ours is an island shaped by a dozen cultures over three millennia,” she explained. “Sicilians are African, Greek, Arab, European, Italian.” She clasped his face in her hands. “It makes us who we are, never forget, this openness to whatever may come our way. As your nonna used to always say: Vivi e lascia vivere! Live and let live!” Zia Romy was the younger of the two, soft-spoken, willowy and fair. Fresh basil and onions harvested from her gardens spilled from baskets onto the counter. Romy once was a school teacher, born and raised in the northern heart of Verona. Children were drawn to her like bees to bougainvillea. Eighteen years ago, Romy and Bianca adopted their newborn daughter Carina. But for the last twenty-one years, the pair had shared the same queen bed on the De Luca farm.
Madre e Figli. For many minutes, I studied the face of a woman I knew to be in her sixties, except in this image she looked twenty years younger, barely recognizable, wearing a strapless blouse, her unpinned hair falling in silver waves about her bare shoulders. She was laughing open-mouthed, her head flung back, her arms around the waists of Luke and David on either side. Each man had a different father, but the family resemblance was still uncanny. Both had their mother’s broad mouth and patrician nose, their dark features limned in white gold. I knew this woman as Mrs. Gallucci, but in this photograph she was Isabella De Luca, philosopher and feminist, Officer of the Order of Canada, returned to her childhood home near Palermo by the sea. Many family secrets had been unearthed in the time since her return. Only this summer, she had learned that Pasquale De Luca was in fact not her stepfather. It took many days for Isabella to fully understand and accept this revelation. In the background, glistering dawn fountained through the century-old olive grove, casting a lens flare over their heads, three numinous spheres of rainbow light.
I sat back in the couch and closed the album in my lap. I rested my palms on its cover.
I thought back two weeks to the first night of David’s return. After we’d gotten Antonio settled and parted ways, I asked David about Luke. He didn’t answer right away, but sat in the passenger seat of Liz’s car resting his arm outside the open window. It was late, the bars and restaurants had closed long ago and the city streets were mostly empty. A luminous rain blurred the cool skyline. Darkened storefronts gleamed beneath the street lamps and scattered neon signs.
When I glanced at David, he nodded. “He showed up,” he replied. “Like he said he would.”
Luke Moretti had in fact joined the De Luca family reunion hours before David realized he’d even arrived. David told me how he first spotted Luke Saturday midday grilling beef skewers, a glass of beer in hand, assembling an enormous platter of smoky meat from which passers-by helped themselves. Two swarthy men, one fat the other skinny, stood close by smoking cigarettes, observing Luke’s technique. As David watched, Fat Man clapped Luke on the back and sauntered away, while Thin Man refilled his tumbler. Luke glanced up, caught David’s eye, winked and waved. He pointed at Thin Man, who was now sampling some breaded veal skewered on the end of an ivory-handled switchblade. “Cousin Vito,” Luke shouted across the sun-drenched terrace. He gestured and said something to cousin Vito who nodded in David’s direction, displaying a mouthful of crooked gold teeth, and raised his grease-stained knife.
By the time we’d arrived home at our loft the rain was coming down harder and we hurried inside. I hauled David’s luggage out of the trunk and carried it ahead of him up the darkened stairwell. After he emerged from a long shower, I towelled him dry and welcomed him back into our bed.
Sex was gratifying and quick. His tongue in my mouth, his lips warm against my stomach, the way his fists gripped my wrists—all of these sensations were familiar to me.
Afterwards, David lay spent with his head resting on my chest. Even now, he kept his side lamp on as if he didn’t care yet for darkness to come. Its muted golden glow cast his features in a chiaroscuro light.
This summer, David told me, his brother and his mother did reconcile. Luke himself had little to say on the matter. But it was David’s mother who had told him, over a glass of Sangiovese during his last hours in Sicily, the intimate details of that reunion.
Even as David first laid eyes upon Luke, she had felt from afar the presence of her eldest child.
On the opposite side of the farm, while touring a noisy flock of relatives from Dijon through the modest vineyard, Isabella De Luca heard how her son Luciano had been so helpful earlier that morning changing the flat tire on cousin Stefania’s husband’s Fiat. Later in the day, someone remarked how it was Luciano who had prepared the involtini alla messinese and had scored the winning point in the afternoon’s bocce tournament. You must mean my son, David, she’d replied. No, no, they meant her eldest boy, Luciano, the stylish one who actually spoke Italian.
Then Isabella put down the potato she was peeling at the kitchen sink. Outside the window, children with sparklers were enjoying a festive birthday celebration. Her niece Carina and others were lighting lanterns illuminating the curving path to the party tents. In that moment, at the farthest edge of the field, she spotted David walking with a strange yet startlingly familiar man. For minutes she stared, long after the two had vanished into the twilit shadows of the olive grove.
Antonio’s uncle, Nicoli Badalamenti, who’d been stacking crates of cucumbers in the adjoining pantry, wiped the dirt from his hands and spoke her name, asking what was wrong. Then Isabella turned and regarded Nicoli’s broad face as if seeing him for the very first time: this man who’d been her childhood best friend, and the secret, first great love of her life.
“My eldest child, the one I had with Michele Moretti
,” she said in Sicilian, “has always been a furbo.”
“Being a furbo,” Nicoli declared, thrusting one thick finger heavenward, “is not such a bad thing.” After that, the half-dozen other women in the large kitchen, chopping eggplants, onions and celery, launched into a fiery discussion of the art of furbizia. Within a minute, every person was shouting over the other.
During this melee, Isabella De Luca slipped away unnoticed, still in her apron, still gripping her sharp paring knife. By the glowing tents, Carina called after her, but Isabella was already halfway across the field, walking steadily. Firelight washed her set features, reflecting in her steely eyes. Trembling, she reached the edge of the olive grove. Four figures stood closely, talking among the low, gnarled trees. They turned, one by one, at her approach. Her son David was the first among them, supporting the arm of his nonna Sia, while his nonno Pasquale exchanged words with the strange man.
“Mamma?” Isabella said. “Papa?”
Despite his cataracts and the twilight hour (and the rundown battery in his hearing-aid), Pasquale De Luca perceived his eldest daughter’s presence, leaned forward on his cane, and beckoned her closer. “Bella,” he said, “look who has joined us after all. It’s Luciano, all grown up.”
For one heartbeat, Isabella saw her second husband Michele before her. She’d often had visions of him since his death, but never so clear or so youthful. But in the next heartbeat, she realized this stranger was slimmer than Michele, and not a vision at all. Michele had been a bull of a man who would haul cement bags on his shoulders two at a time. That man had rudely dropped dead from heart failure, abandoning her to raise a one-year-old child alone. Her third husband Anthony Gallucci couldn’t have been more different: a bipolar, self-medicating postdoc who’d accidentally overdosed on a lethal mix of heroin and gin. No one in Isabella’s family knew this horrible secret, not even her lesbica sister Bianca. She’d told everyone David’s father in Toronto had died from an aneurysm in the brain. When Michele’s seventeen-year-old daughter recruited Tony’s twelve-year-old son into dealing drugs, it was too much, more than even she could bear. In that singular, terrible moment of Isabella’s long and complicated life, she had the strength to save only one of her children.
Tales from the Bottom of My Sole Page 14
