Street of Riches

by Gabrielle Roy

  It lay very close to a small village called Buena Vista or Bella Vista. The property included an orchard containing principally orange and avocado trees. A little withdrawn from the coast, it had a view over the ocean, and one could also glimpse, but very far off, mountains covered with snow. A small house stood waiting for my uncle and aunt. The garden was completely sheltered from the wind, with exposure to the best sunshine of the day. For the moment, however, the most distressing question was whether my aunt Th^r&ina would be able to stand the trip. Her heart was much weakened. And that winter the rest of us back in Manitoba would aslc ourselves, from day to day, "Is Theresina ever going to arrive in California?"

  "Often," my mother would say, "it is at the very moment

  when one's lifetime desire lies within reach that it is suddenly snatched away!"

  IV

  She got there, but shaken by the trip, stubborn, already old -true enough—and she refused, as it were, to believe she was there. None the less, she at last began to shed her sweaters, her heavy quilted and interlined skirts, her headband, an old gray muffler that had traveled with her from Manitoba.

  And her last and dear child, Rachel, whom we had never seen, wrote us: "We had believed—we had all believed—that Maman was a fairly stout person, on the well-rounded side, eh! Well! When we had taken off the flannel garments which she wore over very nearly all parts of her body, the knitted clothing, and then still more layers of flannel and knit goods, oh, Aunt Eveline! We then realized that of Maman herself there remained almost nothing! ..."

  But, without letting on too much, they watched how this tiny old woman would react when she saw a nature, a country, a sky that would not be hostile to her, that—quite the opposite—had been made to her order. My uncle, Rachel, Roberto, all were eager to see my aunts face when she really became aware of God's creation. But they gave no hint of it: my aunt was put out of sorts whenever anyone noticed the brief moments during which she was still a little joyful.

  The day came at last when my aunt dared venture into the open air with her hands and face uncovered.

  And if the tiny kingdom of God then before her eyes in the least resembled the post card view of it that we received, it must be granted that it was a fine summary of what God could create when His preoccupation was to rejoice the eyes of men.

  To the left there was a path bordered with eucalyptus, and the air was made wholly pure by their big, disheveled leaves. On the other side there were bushy rhododendrons and poin-settias. And then, beyond other masses of plants, far away, my aunt surely could glimpse the sea. They told her that this was the Pacific Ocean, that here it deserved its name, and that its langorous waves washed up on the beaches shells from distant isles, perhaps from HawaiL They led my aunt toward a garden chair so placed that Th6r6sina could see the valley and water merely by moving her eyes a little. Above her armchair waved syringa branches in bloom.

  Two or three times she came back to sit beneath the syringas. They found her there one day, her eyes wide open and staring fixedly forever. And in Theresina's blue eyes, there was a deep questioning, as though in leaving this world my poor aunt's soul had asked itself, "Why? But why?"

  About the meaning of this "why," though, we never agreed in our family. Some claimed that my aunt must have asked God why she should die now that she had arrived; others felt that, looking at the snowy mountains, it was Manitoba that she saw once again, loved and sorrowed for, perhaps, as always; and thus that she had asked herself why she was here, and not there, in her own land, to die.

  There cannot exist a better place to abide in than the tiny cemetery attached to the old Spanish mission of San Juan Capi-strano. A wind as light as a child's breath stirs a little the wild leaves of the eucalyptus. The pepper trees trail, delicate as the shroud covering the body of a dead young girl, their long, fine foliage. Of no great height, and the color of Mexican pottery jars, a wall of baked earth surrounds this garden; this primitive masonry is called "adobe"; transpose two of its letters and you get "abode," a dwelling place. And here indeed is the habitation of thousands of swallows.

  Every year, on the seventeenth of March exactly, and at a set hour as well, they arrive there. Spectators who have taken their places near at hand somewhat ahead of time, await the squadron. At the appointed hour, the sky darkens toward the sea; the whirlwind of birds takes shape, and, on the dot, the swallows dive into their home in the cemetery.

  But when my aunt died, there had long been no free space in the San Juan Capistrano cemetery.

  My uncle offered a large sum to the prior, yet he refused all the same. Every inch of this garden had been taken for many years, said he; moreover, the famous enclosure, said he, was in the process of becoming a sort of museum.

  Then patiently, maybe with a few tears—he imagined that he had caused his wife's death by dragging her to California -my uncle briefly told Ther&ina's strange story; how she was born in one of Canada's coldest provinces; how, as ^t little girl, she had never been able to go to school more than a few days at a time, even though she would have liked to acquire book learning; how, at parties during her youth, she could not dance,

  which later on had made dancing seem to her frivolous and reprehensible; in short, my uncle pleaded so well that the prior of San Juan Capistrano grew perplexed. While gently moving the branch of a pepper tree, he seemed to be considering the extraordinary destiny of my aunt, born Th6r6sina Veilleux, and even the coldness there had been all through that life! ...

  Then he hinted that perhaps . . . perhaps they might dig a grave above another very ancient one; there were some dating back to Spanish days, two hundred years before—maybe even longer—thus, the prior was saying, the family of this dead person, most likely extinct, could not take offense, or the dead person either, reduced as he was to a few dry bits of bone. . . . He himself, the prior, in his white robes, seemed to imagine very well that for this dead Manitoba woman there could exist no better burial than within these walls so long baked by the sun.

  And this is why, over the grave of my aunt Theresina Veilleux, all day long the birds sing.

  Vltalienne

  A-

  t the time, we had on top of our Bell piano, amidst photographs of Georgianna, of Gervais as 1 .an academy student, of myself, and I know not what other pictures, but long since in the position of honor, a sort of blue pitcher with two handles and a long neck—a flower vase, I imagine, but in which we no longer put anything, to spare the poor relic, which was badly battered. Its varnish was scaling; the chipped top of the vase revealed the white, friable material—probably plaster—of which it was made. I loathed it and dusted it without giving it much heed; one day I chipped it even more by knocking it over on the piano. Maman came rushing to see what had happened. She looked at me almost angrily.

  "Butter fingers!" she cried. "Can't you be careful of my Milan jug?"

  I was about to answer when I realized that Maman's anger, assuredly like many people's, was no more than wearisome regret, the accumulation of many hurts in her heart. And then 1 recalled how the Milan jug had come into our home

  In those days I was still a very small girl; it was before Alicia's death; it must even have been before Odette said good-by to the world. Every month my father would proudly bring us what we needed to live . . . and to indulge a few notions as well. I think that we were very happy, since we had only the most ordinary worries: thus, would the fine empty fields west of our house remain so ? One day or another should we not see rising there some wretched structure which would cut off our view and shut out our lovely early sunlight? Up until then it invaded unhindered all our windows on that side, and there were several of them that faced east; in those days care was taken to face the windows of a house tov/ard the warmest sun of the day. Yes, I believe this was then our most serious worry: would we lose our sunshine!

  But for the time being few people were tempted to come live in our section; it had its back toward town; its face, as it were, turned toward the fields .
. . and those empty fields near

  us remained open to our uses. Papa had obtained from the city hall permission to make a vegetable garden there. Farther on there was a space to play at Sioux Indians and ambushes; and beyond there was even more room, which Monsieur Gauthier, our neighbor to the east and a marble worker, employed for his own purposes: for months on end he would leave lying there cruciform stones, which the wild hay would finally half conceal, or at times cherubs and monuments of Manitoba stone, the extraordinarily pure white Tyndale stone. In sum, to the east of us there was a stretch of tilled soil, then an area of brush where stood our small children's tents made of burlap bags, and, a trifle farther, a gentle cemetery without any dead. A few of the headstones, unfinished or perhaps spoiled by Monsieur Gauthier, remained there indefinitely, their epitaphs hanging in suspense: To the pious memory of . . . good wife . . . good mother. ... On some of them you could still decipher, upon the darkened face of the stone: Deceased at the age of twenty-two years, three months, fourteen days. Was it not odd ? In those times they calculated to within a single day the span of human life!

  But one evening Papa came home full of excitement, bringing us overwhelming news. "Just guess," said he gloomily to my mother.

  Maman could not guess. 'The lot next to us is sold," said Papa.

  And, what was worse, someone was going to build a house there. The buyer, Papa said, was an Italian, newly come to this country.

  "An Italian!" cried Maman. "As long as he's no Sicilian bandit!"

  The very next day, scarcely giving us time to get used to the catastrophe, men came to dig a cellar in this soil next to ours and, for our taste, too close to our house. Still, the cellar's dimensions were restrained; the house that was to rise there perhaps would not greatly cut off our sun.

  We were not yet entirely reassured when there stepped off the tram linking us to Winnipeg a broad, tall man with dead-black hair, his eyes likewise black and shining, sporting a black mustache with twisted ends, a large man in blue work clothes and a broad straw hat. who came to begin building all by himself the house next door. Lumber had been delivered; in a twinkling the man with the mustache had laid out a dozen planks and begun nailing them together, meanwhile striking up

  no Street ot Riches

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  a song in Italian; Maman said it must be something from an opera. During a pause in the singing, Maman spoke to him from our porch; she learned that his name was Giuseppe Sariano, that he was a carpenter by trade, and that this time he was working as his own boss; yes, it was his own home he was putting up. Then we heard him singing louder than ever.

  Thereupon Maman asserted that he seemed a fine man, and she persuaded my father to "sound out" the Italian.

  "Above all, try to discover" Maman urged him, "whether he intends to build as high as we."

  My father talked for quite a time with the Italian, who could not reply to the least question without jumping from one foot to the other, turning now east, now west, and agitating his entire body. Papa came back, and by his pace we could see that the news was good. And in fact, Papa was laughing to himself; he did not laugh much in his life, but that day his shoulders shook a little as he hastened to bring back to us what the Italian had said.

  At first, Papa having asked him, "Do you intend to build a large house? . . ." the Italian had jumped up and down and announced: "Si . . . si . . . very fine . . . very big house!" . . . "As large as mine?" The Italian had looked appalled. "Oh no! Oh, la, la! Not a castle; I have a very small wife, not very strong, tiny, tiny. She would be lost in your chateau. . . . And then my small wife would die keeping up, cleaning so large a place. But all the same I'm building big!" Overjoyed at Papa's interest, the Italian had pulled out of his pocket the design he himself had made for his home.

  Recollecting it, Papa was again seized by a gentle gaiety. "Have you any idea," he asked Maman, "how big this house will be? .. . About the size of our kitchen, as nearly as I could judge. . . . No, come to think of it, I imagine one could fit two of them into our kitchen...."

  "Probably in Italy," Maman remarked, "that would pass for a large house."

  It turned out in fact to be a humble and pleasant wooden bungalow, without any upper floor, and we enjoyed watching it take shape, since it would never hide from us our view or our sunlight.

  Was it then, or a little later, and because he did lis no harm, that all of us together took to liking the Italian ?

  In any case, from the very first day, and on all the days that followed, I spent almost all my time watching him work,

  through a chink in our board fence; and at home no one seemed annoyed at my almost incessant reports. Indeed, up to that point our sympathy for this man was based upon very little: he was erecting a small house, he had a tiny, tiny wife who soon would be leaving Milan and would arrive when the house was completed; moreover, he sang operas. Papa, however, must have thought that this was sufficient to justify friendship, for suddenly he informed Maman: "Suppose I gave him the plum tree!"

  This was a fine small tree the roots of which were in our land, but which bore its branches, its fruit, and all its upper trunk on the other side of our fence and hence over the Italian's property. And Papa did as he had said he would: he went in person to present the tree to the Italian.

  On the porch Maman waited to learn how the Italian would receive the gift. And Papa reported that the Italian must be sentimental after the Italian fashion; the moment he knew the tree was his, he had fingered it, stroked its bark; he had even kissed it, saying, "I am owner of a tree! No sooner do I set foot in Canada, you may say, than I get a tree—full grown and bearing fruit! Heaven is with Giuseppe Sariano." That was the way with Italians, said Papa; they bubbled over for no good reason; they overdid things.

  Did this effervescence of our neighbor win us completely? Did it set the example? Maman began to wonder whether he had brought anything to eat with him, whether it would not be appropriate to send him some hot soup. ... I would go flatten myself against the hole in the fence; then I would come back to inform that others that the Italian had his food in a small tin box, that at this very moment, his back against our wooden fence, he was eating bread and raw onions and drinking a red liquid straight from a bottle. Once I had passed on the news, I returned to keep an eye on our man. As far as I could make out, he was rather badly shaved; not only his beard and his skin were dark, but also the tiny hairs he had in his ears and nostrils. For my inspection I had a quite adequate hole in one of the boards; as for him, I don't think he was able to see me—at most my eye glued to this opening in the fence. Right now he was asleep, stretched out on the grass, his straw hat over his nose. From the edges of his lips, shaped in something like a pout, slight sounds emerged. A bit of straw must have been tickling him somewhere; from time to time he made an effort to turn over, but he was too sound asleep to succeed, and each time 112 Street ol Riches

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  he fell back with his belly upmost. I wondered what I might do to increase the well-being of so nice a man from Italy. Papa did not seem to me to have been generous enough, for, after all, the plum tree did not have to be given; it was already there, leaning over the Italian's land. I was determined to offer far more. And then I thought of Papa's small strawberry bed.

  Few people in our city, and most likely in all Manitoba, had succeeded in growing any as plump or as sweet. Yet alas! Papa knew each of his strawberries individually: two fine ones, red all over and almost at the point of perfection, another still white on the face away from the sun, five or six more not nearly ready to eat. There was no way to filch any of them without his noticing it. Not that Papa was stingy with his strawberries. He merely liked to reserve for himself the pleasure of one fine day bringing us a small cup filled with them, which he would place on the table, remarking with false modesty, "There are really not enough of them to be worthwhile, just sufficient to give you a taste!"

  So that day, that I, also, might give pleasure, I shattered discipline. I wen
t and chose the tw;o large strawberries which were at their best, and then for good measure—because two would not do without a third!—I plucked the fruit that was a trifle white on one side. It was munificent! Three strawberries for one single person! Never had I purloined more than one at a time for myself. But our Italian was so large a man! I moved toward him, my three strawberries in the fold of my turned-up dress.

  He was still asleep, and his open mouth emitted blasts of air which bent the hair overhanging his forehead. I put one berry in his mouth, then another, whereupon his Adam's apple gave an alarming jerk; perhaps he was beginning to taste the fruit, or else he had almost choked. Be this as it may, since his mouth remained open, I hastily shoved into it the third berry. This, however, was the least ripe; I should certainly have begun with it and finished with the best.

  The Italian wakened completely. He yawned a little, beating the air with his arms. I was crouching in the grass, examining him from close by. When he opened his eyes, he saw mine watching him. At the same instant he surely must have tasted the last strawberry I had just slipped into his mouth The other two, sadly enough, must have gone straight down; but this one he seemed to recognize for what it was. He sat up in the grass, laughing and stretching his arms a little. And he said, as though

  it were my name, "Strawberry! Little Strawberry! Charming little Strawberry!"

  I instantly liked being called Strawberry, perhaps because I so little resembled one, with my ever-drawn, pale small face, the circles round my eyes, my barked knees. Petite Misfere suited me better. But how I liked this other name, as though I were good to eat! Then I asked the Italian, "Are you a Sicilian bandit?" "Bandittor