by Nino Ricci
“Maybe we should get under the covers,” I said.
We fell asleep cradled against one another like children. In the first haze of sleepfulness what I felt to be holding her, to have her there in my bed and be able to run a hand if I wished along the whole, smooth plane of her body, was the sort of matter-of-fact elation I felt on first waking from dreams of flying: there was always a moment then when the thing seemed truly possible, because of the way in the dream it had come about not like some miracle but like the slow working out of mathematical law, something that had had to be worked toward, tested, refined, till at last my heaviness gave way to willed, precarious flight.
But then as I fell deeper into sleep, further and further away from the place where we’d been together, where things had made sense, the horror began to take shape. It began with just a gnawing at the back of my mind like the onset of a fever dream, the scrambling search for a solution to a question that refused to take solid form; and then gradually it grew into a kind of panic. I was running, running, through deserted night-time streets, down subway stairwells, through dim, blue-lit passageways only just wide enough to slip through; and there was something I was moving toward or away from, it was never clear which, something inevitable and large, unnameable, but also, in a way, banal, all the more horrible for that.
I awoke, with a start, toward dawn. Rita was still beside me, turned away now and sprawled face-down like someone who had fallen from a building. Her breathing was rhythmic but shallow; once she sucked in her breath as if at some sudden fright, then resumed her regular rhythm again. I could smell her there beside me, a complex mixture of sweat and sex and a soapy, milky scent that made me think of how her pillow had smelled when we’d slept together as children years before.
I slipped out of bed to the bathroom. There was blood on me from her, I saw now. There were smears of it on my fingers, on my thighs; in the morning there would be dried stains on the covers and sheets. I tried not to think of what this meant, how dire, perhaps, this made things. I remembered the wedding jokes about bedsheets when I was a child in Italy, how strange they had struck me then, how brutal a thing they had made marriage seem.
I went back to bed, my hand going out instinctively to test the sheets, expecting wetness; but they were dry. Rita shifted as I settled myself, pulled herself in, away. She had turned again, so that her face was etched out in greys and whites against her pillow; what I saw there for an instant were my own features, the set of her jaw, of her cheeks, could read in the placement of muscle and bone my own genetic code.
For a long time I lay awake turned away from her toward the window, staring into the brightening dawn. A few scudding clouds left behind from the night’s rain gradually dispersed, leaving behind a clear, northern sky that held the intimation of sunrise like a great blue-dipped bowl. For a while, before the traffic increased, I could make out a sound of birds, tiny, industrious whistles and chirps like the coming to life of some vast, miniature household.
At some point I felt Rita stirring beside me and instinctively closed my eyes to feign sleep. The bed creaked, then the floor, and then I could feel her weight rising up from the mattress, hear the rustle of clothing as she went through the clothes on the bedside chair. She went into the living room to dress: I could picture with each sound, each hiss and whoosh of cloth, as she slipped on skirt, stockings, blouse. There were a few minutes of silence then, the moments when I should have gone to her; and then finally the sound of motion again, of furtive footsteps across creaking hardwood, of a closing door.
XI
When she’d gone I fell into fitful sleep, fighting consciousness like a swimmer refusing to surface. My dreams were the shattered remnants of dreams, without centre: images flashed, took on portent, but resisted coalescing into meaning. There was no question now of solutions, only this frenzied rushing-by like the brain short-circuiting, sending out random impulses that the unconscious still tried to arrange into a whole.
When I awoke, finally, to a haze of spring light through the window, it was only eleven. I felt a despair at how little time had passed while I’d slept. For a long time I lay in bed in a kind of paralysis – there seemed no possible next action in my life, no gesture that could move me forward. It was as if I’d come to the point in a story where it retreated back to the unwritten void: this was the end, everything had already happened, there was nothing left to be done.
Through the window I could hear the traffic on College, the dull roar of engines, the clack, clack of streetcars as they crossed over the switches at Spadina. Every few minutes the clacks repeated themselves as another car passed, giving a rhythm to the traffic like the relentless thump of a heart beneath a roar of blood. I had an image of my body laid out like the roads, the tracks, of the endless network of things stretching away from me and which I formed the meaningless centre of, the streets leading to highways, the highways to other cities, on and on to take in the whole wearying edifice of the world.
There was a single stain of blood on the bedcovers, and then a smaller one on the sheets. They were tiny, really, not much bigger than coins. Somewhere, in my dreams, I had imagined awaking in gore as if after a murder; but instead there were only these pinpricks of purple-red.
From the bedroom doorway came a beckoning of late-morning light. It was the light that I moved toward, finally: it seemed to bathe everything in a quality of remembrance, to say, these were the rooms I once lived in, this was the life that I led. It was possible to reconstruct things in that way, to quell the panic, to touch my hands to coffee cups, kitchen faucets, cupboard doors, as if they were real, to reassert an order over things. I poured coffee into a cup as I once had; I tasted the bitterness of it on my tongue. Everything could unfold in the usual way; there was just this gap to account for, this doubling over, the sense that every feeling, every act, was itself and only the memory of itself.
I sat at the kitchen window, staring out. Eddy the superintendent was patrolling the sidewalk along Huron, prowling outside again, in his furtive, casual way, now that the weather had changed. As I watched, he ambled to the corner of College, hands in the back pockets of his denim overalls, and gazed for a long moment in each direction; and then apparently satisfied that nothing threatened there, he turned into the sun and raised his arms in a lazy, feline stretch. He seemed to take the sun in like some liquid on him, some tangible balm, for an instant alive only to that sensation, to the sun shining warm on his skin while his muscles stretched.
Coming back toward the building, he looked up at my window. For an instant he seemed to stare right at me, right through me. There was no greeting, just that hard, assessing stare. Perhaps in the glare of the sun he hadn’t seen me, had seen only the mirrored dark that daytime windows gave back. But there had seemed to be knowledge in his look, some kind of message that had passed. I had a sudden sense of being monitored, under surveillance, not anonymous here as I’d imagined but the focus of a careful, calculated attention.
The panic had started again. I felt the need to do something, act, to get away from the apartment. I tried to slip out via the fire escape, but Eddy caught sight of me from his lawn chair outside the front entrance.
“Hey, Vic,” he said, cool, as if nothing had happened.
There was something wrong in the quality of the day, a strange conjunction of the sultry, springtime warmth, the bitter sun, and an uncertain slowness to things. I wandered into the market and instead of the usual Friday bustle the streets were deserted; it was as if the apocalypse had come, as if time had ended after all, and the slowness I’d felt was the world’s mechanism winding unnaturally down to a stop. There were packing crates piled at the curbside, green garbage bags, heaps of rotting vegetables, and then just the desolation of empty sidewalks and closed shops. Up ahead a door shot open at a cafe, a hole in the wall where the market’s derelicts and dealers collected; for an instant laughter rang out into the street, but then a hand pulled the door closed again before anyone had emerged.
/> At Bathurst Street, I came on the straggling fringes of a crowd that seemed to be converging on Little Italy. A police cruiser was angled across College, two burly officers in sunglasses and shirtsleeves lazily redirecting traffic. In the cleared street beyond, people were moving in twos and threes toward some kind of gathering further up. Past Manning, barricades had been set out along the curbsides, people lined up behind them apparently awaiting a procession or parade. From a distance came the deep, mournful sound of a brass band, a sound of singing; but the procession itself hadn’t appeared yet. I moved into the crowd, seeking a vantage point, open space. But the further in I moved, the more the crowd thickened, until the passageway through it had narrowed down to a single person-wide corridor.
I stopped, finally, near the steps of a church. People were tiered up behind me on the steps, craning to watch as the head of the procession rounded onto College from a sidestreet. The procession was led by four men on horseback dressed in the armour of Roman soldiers; behind them came a line of men in ragged robes, their hands bound and their waists linked by rope. For an instant I thought I’d stumbled onto a film set, so incongruous did this vision seem amidst the shops and coffee bars of Little Italy. One of the horses balked at the sight of the crowd as he rounded the corner, whinnied, took a step back; a suited man came in from the sidelines to calm him, and the procession continued.
It was Good Friday, I remembered now; this was a Passion play. I had seen them in Italy as a child, had a sudden vivid recollection of the smell of horses on the air, of the clatter of hooves against cobblestone. In my father’s town the procession had ended on a windswept hill above the cemetery – I had an image of a half-naked Jesus actually roped to a cross and raised up there. That couldn’t be right, the barbarism of that. But still the image persisted, the grunting heave of men as they lifted the cross into its hole and Jesus splayed and sweating against a background of graves.
The first grouping of prisoners had passed. Behind them came a small brass band and a choir of mainly older women in widow’s black, an island of village anachronism within the greater anachronism of the Roman procession; and then children dressed as angels, parish groups, floats, more choirs and bands. The floats formed representations of the Stations of the Cross – the condemnation to death, the meeting with the Virgin, Veronica wipes the sacred face.
Two more prisoners came into view, these bearing crosses, their robes torn to leave exposed patches of shoulder and thigh; and then Jesus. Three soldiers preceded him bearing lances and three trailed him with whips, holding back an entourage of wailing women and children in peasant’s kerchiefs and robes. He seemed an unlikely Christ, slightly balding beneath his crown of plaited twigs, his features the plain, grizzled ones of some local factory worker or mason; but an odd intensity radiated from him. His cross was two planks of rough wood crudely bound together with rope; he looked genuinely strained beneath the burden of it, his muscles taut, his face beaded with sweat. Next to me I saw a girl of sixteen or so make a sign of the cross as he approached, and was moved by this depth of belief in someone so young.
Coming to the intersection of Grace Street, Jesus fell. An audible gasp rose up from the crowd. Some of the women following behind had rushed forward to help him, but the soldiers held them back; and as the crowd looked on Jesus struggled slowly upright again beneath his cross. The hem of his robe was dirtied where he’d fallen – there was a stain of asphalt there and then what seemed a stipple of blood at one knee. He continued on several more paces and then fell again, fully this time. Once more the women rushed forward, keening; once more the guards held them back. The crowd craned to see what had happened, pressing up against the barricades, and for an instant then it all seemed real, the keening women, the crush of the crowd, and Christ lying prone on the asphalt among the streetcar tracks of College.
The crowd had pushed in. I felt elbows, limbs, pressing against me, but there seemed no individual they were attached to, only this shapeless mass that stretched unbroken now for several blocks in either direction. People closed in in front of me, cutting off my view of the procession, and then something happened up ahead – perhaps he’d fallen again – and the whole crowd surged forward an instant and then back like a wave, a single entity. A panic took hold of me again, a nausea like a forced submersion under water.
“You okay?”
It was a woman in front of me; I had stumbled against her. I must have blacked out for an instant.
“A little dizzy.”
“You need some air.” Focused, no-nonsense. “Maybe the church is open. You should sit down.”
She led me up through the crowd on the church steps, keeping a distance between us but with one hand in the crook of my arm to guide me. A few heads turned toward us as we passed, then away. I had the sense that we were invisible somehow, that this was a thing that concerned only the two of us.
She tried the church door. It opened.
“I guess they wouldn’t lock up a church on Good Friday,” she said.
She was in her thirties perhaps, a bit matronly, with short-cropped blonde hair, blue eyes, dressed in jeans and a bright purple windbreaker. The windbreaker seemed like a marker, something setting her apart.
“I really appreciate this,” I said.
The noise and glare of outside had given way to dim stillness. Dots of colour swam before my eyes in the sudden shift from brightness to dark.
She led me to a back pew.
“Are you feeling any better?”
“Yeah. Thanks.”
The church was deserted. She seemed uneasy now at the sudden intimacy we found ourselves in.
“You should just sit for a while.”
“I’ll be okay.”
“You sure?”
“Yes. Thanks again.”
I was left alone. The dizziness had passed, leaving only a faint taste of bile in my throat like the metallic aftertaste of fear. There had been something about the crowd, about being caught like that in its collective energy. In Nigeria, once, when I was teaching there, I’d seen a thief chased down by a crowd in one of the markets – they had beaten him until his clothes had been reduced to bloody rags, overtaken by a kind of frenzy, an impersonal rage that was like a contagion the air had bred.
The church was a cavernous place in Gothic style, though overlaid with ill-considered renovations – dull grey carpeting on the floor, acoustic ceiling tiles above the entrance hall and side aisles – as if someone had tried to scale down its largeness to the proportions of a suburban rec room. But up around the chancel, an older dignity remained, the curving back wall ringed with tall, traceried windows made up of little circles of swirling, blue-tinted glass. The light through the glass bathed the altar beneath in an eerie bluish glow. It was the colour I would have imagined that God would take, not the God of my childhood, the smiling old man in the sky, but the one who knew the crooked byways of things, the back alleys and half-open doors, the mix of darkness and light. I had a sudden sharp pang of regret for the loss of that older God, the simpler one, for my stories of sinners and saints, the hope of some sudden flash that could cleanse things, make them right again. At bottom I had never quite ceased to believe in these things, had only grown distant from them like some subtle turning I’d missed, the point on a path between wandering lost and going home.
Somehow the sun had arched northwards to come to shine directly through the western curve of the chancel’s windows, minute by minute the light increasing there to cast a silvered radiance of direct and reflected light all along the deep well of the nave. Then, as I watched, because of some passing cloud or of some particular angle the sun had reached, there was an instant when the church seemed to take all this silvered light back into itself like a breath, then exhale again. The thing happened so quickly that I wasn’t sure afterwards if I’d only imagined it.
“È venuto per confessarsi?”
Someone had come up silently behind me: a priest.
“I’m sorry?”
>
“Ah. I thought you were Italian.”
“Yes. I mean, I don’t speak it much now.”
“I see.”
He was an older man, watery-eyed and grey-haired and spry, dressed in a simple black soutane and clerical collar.
“So you came to watch the procession,” he said.
“Yes. It was very beautiful.”
“I suppose. If you like that sort of thing.” He gave an odd smile. “Da dove? Which part of Italy?”
“Molise.”
“Molisano, that’s good. I’m from around those parts myself. What was the town, exactly?”
“It was just a small place. Valle del Sole. Near Rocca Secca.”
“Yes, yes, I know it! Just a little hole in the wall, isn’t that it? You must have known the priest there, old Zappa-la-vigna, what was his name?”
“Father Nicola?”
“Yes, that’s it! The times we used to have together in the seminary!”
For a moment time seemed to shift: I was back in a classroom, watching Father Nicola roam the rows of desks as he tested us on our catechism.
“He used to tell us stories about that,” I said. “About the seminary.”
“What, did he tell you about Dompietro?”
“Yes, that was one of them. About the shoe under the bed.”
“Ha, the rascal! That was my story, he stole it from me! ‘Ho, Dompietro, what are you doing under the bed?’ ‘I’m looking for my shoe!’ ”
He was laughing, his eyes bright with tears.
“It wasn’t true, then?” I said.
“Oh, no, Dompietro was just someone we made up like that. Then every little thing that happened, who’d done it? Dompietro had done it.”
I felt a knot of emotion in my chest like a fist that had lodged there. All that past, irretrievable and mysterious and grand. For an instant it seemed that we had unfurled it before us almost tangible, almost real, that it had brought us to the brink of some wonderful revelation.
