Where She Has Gone

by Nino Ricci

  “Ah, well,” he said finally. “All that was so long ago now.”

  He stood a moment in silence. I wanted to hold him there but couldn’t think what more to say.

  “You’re sure you don’t want to go to confession, then?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe not this time.”

  “Well, it’s up to you.”

  He gave me a final, scrutinizing look.

  “If you want,” he said, “you should come by some time. I’m here. We can have a little glass together.”

  “That would be nice.”

  He moved off toward the front of the church. At the foot of the altar he went down on one knee and made a slow sign of the cross, then made his way up the steps of the chancel and disappeared through a side doorway.

  People had begun to filter into the church, old women who came in alone, a few families with children. Two altar boys emerged from the chancel door to light the candles at the altar: apparently a service was about to begin. As more people arrived and the pews started to fill, the church took on an air of waiting. Outside the sun was just setting, darkness coming on like a hush; someone switched on the church lights, but their dim glow seemed only to round out the coming dark.

  The old priest emerged and began to go about his preparations. He was dressed in his robes now and looked more sombre than before, more estimable, weighted with the gravity of his office. There were a dozen careful arrangements to be made, the missal to be turned to its page, the chalice to be checked, the water and wine to be set out. All the years, all the centuries, these little rituals had been gone through, back to primitive midnight rites whispered fearfully around a fire – they seemed poignant now, though I’d long ceased to connect to them, seemed like the feeble attempt to reduce the vastness of things, the darkness, to a small, domestic order. The priest went about them with an air of pleased, solitary attentiveness; in a moment everything would be in its place, and his work could begin.

  From somewhere above us the initial tentative notes of the introit sounded, and we rose. This had always been the moment for me, because of that first communion of voices, that rising up, when faith had felt truly possible, when it had seemed to hover before me almost graspable, almost mine. I was singing now, the words came: I was a child again in a small village church in Italy; I was a child at St. Michael’s in Mersea. What had I wanted then, what would the boy that I was have seen in the man I’d become? All that longing and hope, what had it come to? My head was filled with a rush of images, my whole past seeming to tumble through me like something being taken away, that there was no going back to; and then I was crying.

  My god, I thought, my god, what have I done?

  XII

  The traffic was flowing again along College when I came out, the barricades removed and aftermath debris from the procession littering the sidewalk and curb like washed-up flotsam. In the doorways of the coffee bars, middle-aged men in suit coats stood smoking and talking, feet planted solid and broad as if they’d come out to survey their dominions after a storm. All along the street these clusters were repeated at intervals like an endless proliferation of village squares, the tiny bars with their counters and stools, their dim, bluish light, the men outside. The bars were like factories the men spilled out of, were made by, like secret societies where they practised or learned a certain laugh or shrug, a certain movement of hands, the way smoke curled away from the end of a cigarette.

  I caught a snippet of Italian outside one of them, my own dialect.

  “I never cared for that sort of thing, back then. You only know afterwards.”

  I walked back to my apartment. For a long time I sat in my darkened living room staring out the corner window onto College. I hadn’t eaten all day, but by now was well past the point of hunger: it was as if my body had ceased sending messages to my brain, was only this shell I carried with me, without desires or rights. I imagined going on like that till I had slowly stripped myself of every physical need, had become simply a point of undesiring awareness. All day, every day, a hundred petty wants formed the substance of my life: I wondered what blank space lay beyond them, what clarity things would have there.

  The streetlights from College cast strange shadows in the room, gave objects a protean look. I had the sense that someone had been here in my absence; but everything was in its place, nothing had been disturbed.

  There was a knock at the door. It was Sid.

  “Going over to Rita’s?”

  I had forgotten: it was Rita’s birthday.

  “I don’t know. I’m not feeling great.”

  “She’ll be pissed if you don’t show up.”

  He gave no sign that anything was out of the ordinary. There was something at once reassuring and chilling in this, as if he were presenting like a trick mirror the false reflection of a world still in place.

  “It’s probably early,” I said.

  “I thought we could grab a bite.”

  He had a bottle of wine tucked under one arm. It was the wine, somehow, that seemed to make my going inevitable, the simple covenant it represented, that Sid had chosen it, planned his evening, that he’d been able to do these things as if they mattered.

  “Just let me change,” I said, though in my bedroom I simply sat several minutes on the edge of the bed, then got down the bag that held Rita’s watch. It didn’t seem right to arrive empty-handed – it was just a watch, after all, just a gift, a box wrapped in gold foil. I had the sense that Sid knew I had it there in my closet, that he was waiting to see if I would leave it behind, if I’d so clearly incriminate myself.

  It was only when we were outside that I noticed a strange, subtle energy coming off Sid.

  “I dropped some acid,” he told me, and flashed me his exaggerated, happy-face smile.

  We ate at one of the more expensive Chinese places on Spadina. Sid had a metal flask in the inside pocket of his leather jacket from which he kept pouring small shots of whiskey into our tea. He ordered three dishes to start, sent one back because it was cold, ordered two more but then hardly touched a thing, sampling a bite or two and finally pushing the dishes aside with a satisfied air as if he’d in fact cleared them down to their final scraps. From the back room the waiter and the manager looked on, but Sid ignored them.

  The whole time he kept up a steady stream of talk.

  “On me,” he said, when we got up to pay, pulling a crisp hundred from his wallet.

  We walked up through the market to Rita’s street. I had an image of her house dark as if in mourning, the party cancelled, the door locked to bar us entry; but already from down the street I could see the lights, hear the thump of music. The front door was open, a handful of women I didn’t recognize clustered around the stoop there. The women looked like replicas of one another, loose-jeaned and mannish, conspiratorial. They made just the slightest accommodation to let us by, a sort of bristling as if we were a gust of wind blowing through.

  “Evening, ladies,” Sid said.

  Inside, laughter, music, smoky heat. The pocket doors into Elena’s bedroom had been opened to join it to the centre room: women and more women, some of whom I’d seen at the house before but a host of others as well, among them a scattering of older women with a professorial look. A few heads turned as we came in, someone smiled, wryly; and then just the same indifference that had greeted us on the stoop, that air of charged exclusivity that I recognized from Elena’s kitchen gatherings.

  Sid looked completely unfazed.

  “Let’s grab a drink,” he said, and began to make his way to the kitchen.

  I hadn’t spotted Rita. But then suddenly Sid was veering off toward the corner of the living room: we were at her back.

  “Hey, birthday girl,” he said.

  She turned.

  “Oh.” Her eyes had the panic of a trapped animal’s. “I didn’t see you.”

  “I had to drag your brother over.”

  “Oh.”

  She looked wrong, completely wrong. She w
as stoned, it seemed, her pupils had the telltale dilation; and then her make-up was overdone, her clothes were out of character. She was wearing high heels and a sleeveless black dress with a slit up one side – it was as if she had wilfully, self-punishingly, set out to stand apart from the rest of the crowd.

  “Hello, Rita,” I said.

  “Yeah. Great. It’s great you could come.”

  Her eyes refused to focus on me. It was only now that I understood what I’d hoped for, that a message would pass between us, that we would say, yes, this thing is possible, we have chosen it.

  She was standing beside a tall, older-looking man, as far as I could see the only other male in the place.

  “This is John,” she said.

  “Oh.”

  “I think I’m going to the washroom.”

  We were left standing with John. Sid still had his wine tucked under his arm.

  “I guess we men should stick together,” he said.

  “Ha, yes,” John said, a little awkwardly.

  “I’m Sid. And this is Victor, Rita’s brother.”

  “Yes. I gathered that. She’s spoken about you.”

  So he was the one Rita had talked about on our trip to the Falls. But this was a man old enough to be her father, in his late fifties perhaps, or early sixties. His speech had the slightest accent, a small stumbling over like a lisp.

  “Are you one of her professors?” I said.

  “No, no, we did a class together, that’s all.”

  Someone turned the music up. Sid leaned in to John’s ear and shouted some comment at him, to which John responded with a nod and what might have been a smile or a grimace; and then Sid launched into a long monologue I couldn’t follow, talking, gesticulating, John bending his ear to listen with the same nods and uncertain half-smiles. He looked entirely out of place here, uncomfortable, embattled, but also resigned, as if some complex sense of duty obliged him to remain. There was something about him that seemed not quite right – his clothes, perhaps. They were normal enough, even stylish – beige chinos, an off-white cotton blazer – but looked just slightly overly rumpled, overly worn.

  Sid had stopped talking.

  “Ah,” John said. “Yes.”

  We stood a moment in silence.

  “How about we get that drink?” Sid said.

  I followed him to the kitchen. Elena was standing outside the kitchen doorway in conversation. Her eye caught mine and she nodded, just that small condescension of greeting.

  “Must be the famous lesbian sister,” Sid said.

  So Rita had told him things.

  “Yeah.”

  “Are you feeling all right, buddy? You look a little pale.”

  “It’s just a flu or something.”

  He had opened his bottle of wine.

  “Down this,” he said, pouring me a glass. “It’s good for the soul.”

  We stood at the edge of the living room. Rita was at the far end of the space now, near the front window, in conversation with a largish woman in a bulky sweater who looked like her glaring opposite. She was not pulling her look off at all, visibly self-conscious, unnerved, her whole body drawn into itself as if she felt every eye in the place was on her. Her dress was cut low in the back to reveal a half-moon of pallid skin spotted with acne. I wanted to go up and drape a jacket around her, lead her away.

  “I have to use the can,” I said to Sid.

  In the bathroom I sat for a long time on the edge of the tub. I had made a mistake in coming; everything had been a mistake. Our trip to the Falls, my coming here to this city, back to the remote, barely accessible confusions and half-formed emotions of childhood – it was all like some endless equation I strained to find the answer to, whose variables I was forever hammering into place only to find that the whole had reverted again to chaos. It was madness, what had happened; and the only way forward was through further madness.

  The bathroom was littered with evidences of Rita and Elena, plastic shower caps on a hook, rows of mascara and lipstick, perfumed soap, bath oils, a few hairs on the floor. It had an air at once intimate, private, yet neutral, the one room in the apartment where Rita’s and Elena’s shared life seemed still compatible, where they might have been children again. I thought of Rita taking her bath here with her oils and soaps, stretched out naked in the tub, possessing her body yet taking it utterly for granted.

  There was a knock at the door, then a woman’s voice.

  “Hey, what’s going on in there, your thing get caught?”

  Then laughter.

  “Maybe he’s playing with it.”

  “Who is he, anyway?”

  “I think it’s Rita’s brother.”

  “Hey, Rita’s brother. Cute sister you’ve got.”

  When I came out, a group of them was clustered outside the door.

  “He must feel like he’s in Holland,” one of them said, though not unkindly. “Lots of dykes.”

  I looked for Sid. Somehow he’d managed to insinuate himself into a group of four or five women in the living room.

  “I’m not telling you I’d do it,” he was saying. “But maybe that’s more a social thing because of the way I was raised.”

  “Whoa. Mr. Philosophical.”

  And yet it was clear he’d won them over, the group of them focused on him as on some mascot or prize.

  Rita passed around us making her way to the kitchen. Then for a moment she was alone there. I came up to her as she was bending into the fridge and instinctively reached out to touch her. She flinched.

  “Oh. It’s you.”

  “Look, Rita –”

  But the thing seemed impossible. She stood at the fridge door, inert, half-turned from me, and for an instant the same repulsion, the same spasm of loathing, seemed to pass through us, the kind of loathing only siblings could feel, intimate and humiliated and searing.

  Sid came into the room.

  “Hey, guys, what’s up?”

  For the first time he was showing an edge beneath his casualness, the need to know what his status was.

  “I’ve got to bring these drinks out,” Rita said, and was gone.

  “Everything okay with her?” Sid said.

  “I don’t know. Yeah.”

  “A little heavy on the make-up, I’d say. It’s not her style.”

  I noticed now the cake that had been set out on the kitchen counter. HAPPY 20TH, it read.

  “I have to go,” I said.

  “It’s up to you. I think I’ll stick around a bit.”

  I passed John on the way out. I had the sense suddenly that he’d been keeping an eye on me the whole time I’d been there.

  “You’re not feeling any better?” he said.

  “Sorry?”

  “Your friend. He said you weren’t feeling well.”

  “Yes. No. It’s just a cold or something.”

  “Ah.” He seemed to want to hold me there, to impart something to me. “Well. Perhaps we’ll see each other again.”

  Outside, I realized my head was spinning. I was dimly aware of feeling feverish and sore, but still with the sense that my body had nothing to do with me any longer, was just a burden, something I might slough off at any moment if I could only find the way to unshackle myself from it. It was like reaching a point just beyond pain, just beyond the bearable. In Africa, once, I’d walked for miles in sub-Saharan heat stupidly trying to make my way to a remote Dogon village; and at some point the weight of my pack, my aching muscles, the desperation in me at having gone wrong, had given way to this same dizzy feeling of detachment, the sense of floating in the present moment without recourse.

  Along the street, the windows of the houses shone with curtained light. Each window was like an eye I passed by: this was where I was not, each seemed to say, curled in front of a television or fire with children, a lover, a wife, my life staid or nearly over or still all quivering possibility.

  One of the neighbourhood’s regular street people had come out to squat in the door
way of a College Street bank, the mysterious burgeonings of great stuffed garbage bags and burlap bundles tied with twine heaped up behind him. He was one of the crazy ones, a regular at the psychiatric institute across from my building, moving in and out of it like the cats we’d had on the farm who’d hole up a few weeks in the warmth of our boiler room, then run wild again. Eddy called him José, which simply might have been some private joke of his since the man didn’t look especially Latino, didn’t look like anything at all except a street person, with that generic look street people had, the acned skin, the clotted hair. Sometimes he would spread out bits of paraphernalia on the sidewalk before him like fetishes, a broken picture frame, a candle stub, a chipped statuette of the Virgin.

  He was rocking on the balls of his feet, rocking and rocking.

  “Spare any change?”

  No eye contact, no sense of connection, the words coming out like a sort of tic. He pocketed the coins I handed him without looking at them.

  “Thank you.”

  In my apartment, the feeling again of intrusion, of a presence. I checked every room: nothing. I was dreamy now with fever, truly ill. I was vaguely aware that the bed was contaminated in some way but wasn’t sure how to deal with it; in the end I spread my sleeping bag over top and crawled inside. It was only as I was turning out the light that I noticed the parcel on my desk, what I must have been clutching the whole evening like a talisman to bring it back to where it sat now, Rita’s gift.

  XIII

  I threw up several times in the night, stumbling from my bed each time the churning began in my stomach to kneel half-dazed at the toilet while I retched. In the end I was reduced to dry heaves mainly, though they seemed to still for a few minutes the world’s mad reeling; but back in bed it would start again. In my confusion I imagined I was in a storm at sea, that I was back on the ship that had brought me to Canada, crawling up to my bunk while beneath me my mother sighed and slept slowly bleeding to death.

  At some point in the night, a real storm started up. Rain, wind, through the slit I’d left open in the bedroom window; I had the presence of mind to pull the window shut but the room seemed to have ingested the storm by then, seemed filled with an incessant rustling of paper and a mad ringing like the clashing of a thousand glass pendants. Outside, blue light flashed against a wash of black, light and then thunder, a great gnashing and scraping of fissured sky. I was a boy again, thinking the world a tiny ball and the sky a vast firmament that enclosed it: with each flash, each peal, the firmament cracked and for an instant heaven’s forbidden light blazed through.