by Nino Ricci
I had a coin that I’d got a few years before from an old man in Mersea, a pre-war one lire, the exact duplicate, down to a flaw on one side from the minting, of one I’d been given as a child by a friend of my mother’s and had lost. The coin seemed now the symbol of everything that had vanished from my life, in every respect the same as the first except in the important one of being the actual physical thing, what had passed from hand to hand, what could have proved the reality of a certain moment or person or place. It hardly seemed possible sometimes that a life could go on at all with only such phantoms of phantoms to lend it credence, with almost nothing that could ever be nailed down for certain. Yet that was what matters always came down to, to faulty recreations of things that had themselves perhaps only been tokens, that hadn’t been adequate even in their first moment of meaning to take in the fullness of the world that they’d strained to represent. I set the coin aside now to bring with me, a shibboleth; perhaps something would accrue on it that would make it cease to be simply a copy of a lost original.
I brought a few boxes of belongings to Elena’s for storage. Her apartment seemed even emptier than usual, with the damp, cavernous feel that our house on the farm used to take on in summer, the sense of not being quite lived in. She and I hadn’t talked much about my trip: I had tried to put it as a spur-of-the-moment thing that Rita and I had arranged when Rita had phoned: but she seemed to have understood that there was more to it than I would say, and that made any casual reference to it awkward.
“I’m not sure what you guys hope to accomplish there,” she said.
“I don’t know. I was born there. It’s normal to want to go back. Maybe things are different for you.”
“You mean because I’m adopted. Because you think my parents left me in a trash can or something so why would I want to know about that.”
“That’s not what I said. I just meant –”
“Forget it.”
She was feeling abandoned, had that angry, restless energy she took on when she couldn’t admit she was hurt. Getting close to her when she was like this was like scratching at an irritation, not knowing if you would soothe or inflame it.
“You’ve never talked about your parents,” I said. “Your real ones, I mean.”
“You’ve never asked.”
“So I’m asking.”
She gave a half-laugh.
“Here we go. True confessions.”
“We don’t have to do this,” I said.
“No. Fine. It’s not as if it’s some deep, dark secret. They didn’t molest me or anything like that.”
“So you knew them, then.”
“I was with them till I was five. I guess my dad was a bit of a drunk and he smashed me around a couple of times. End of story.”
“And they took you away.”
“Yeah, well, you know how they did things back then. Very quiet. I doubt my folks ever even knew what hit them. Then they moved away and I never heard from them again.”
“And you’ve never tried to find them?”
“Why bother? They probably feel bad enough as it is. And then I’m sure they’d be really pleased to find out their daughter’s a lesbian. It would be just one more set of people I’d have to lie to.”
“Maybe they wouldn’t care about that.”
“Wouldn’t your family?”
She was getting an edge in her voice from having revealed too much. There was a hard look in her eyes that in a different person, one less wilful, might have been a prelude to tears.
“I ought to get going,” I said.
“Sure. Send me a postcard.”
She saw me to the door. There was a mat there where a pair of Rita’s winter boots had sat since her departure.
“Are you still seeing Suzanne?” I said.
“I suppose. Not really. It’s pretty casual.”
“Oh.”
She laughed.
“I guess you thought lesbians mated for life.”
“Something like that.”
We stood awkwardly a moment but then both in the same instant reached out for a sort of hug.
“Hope you find what you’re looking for,” she said.
I hadn’t told my family yet about my going. When I was a child, a return was always a matter of a certain ritualized formality like a funeral: those returning would sit in wait in their kitchens or rec rooms the night before their departure and all evening long people would come to them like petitioners with their envelopes or little packages to be carried back to their relations. It had always struck me how little joy there had seemed to be in these events, as if a return were a matter of grave risk or threat or as if it were a sort of judgement against those who remained behind, a source of quiet humiliation. Once I had gone with my father to see off his cousin Alfredo: he had brought a small package with him wrapped in brown paper and string to be passed on to his mother, but he hadn’t been able to look Zi’Alfredo in the eye as he’d handed the parcel over to him. It was probably merely some token, a shawl or a piece of cloth that my Aunt Teresa had picked out; but my father had carried it as if all his shame, his own failure, inability, to return was somehow enclosed within it.
It was less than a week before my departure when I called Aunt Teresa.
“I’m going away,” I said. “To Italy. I thought you should know.”
I could never tell with my aunt from what set of mind she would respond to me out of the competing ones that seemed to play in her head. She could be smug or gruff, could put on an informed, cynical tone that appeared to come from her church group or revert to an old-world atavism and incomprehension as if a gap of centuries divided us. Or sometimes she responded with perfect, lucid understanding.
“It won’t be easy for you,” she said. “People remember things.”
“I know that.”
“Go to your Aunt Caterina, outside the town there. She always had a lot of respect for your mother.”
There were only a few days to wait. All that remained in my apartment were a backpack and duffel bag full of clothes, a mattress, a kitchen table and chair. I spent my days reading novels and drinking coffee in cafés like an exile living a spare but leisured life in some foreign city, awaiting the revolution or coup that would send me home.
It only occurred to me at the last moment that I had to make arrangements for my car. I took it in to a used-car dealer just up the road from my apartment who looked it up and down, impressed with the bulk of it. It was only eight years old but already had the look of an antique, of a car you drove only for show.
“Pretty hard to move a car like that these days,” the dealer said.
“It was my father’s. He hardly drove it.”
He offered eight hundred dollars. By the time the paperwork was done, someone had already parked the car on the lot amidst the rest. A sign in the windshield read SINGLE OWNER, as if my own brief tenure of it had been erased.
Two days later, possessing little more than I had arrived with twenty years before, I got into an airport cab and started back.
XX
I awoke out of groggy airplane sleep just as the Italian coastline was coming into view, a curving strip of gold against the swimming-pool blue of the Mediterranean. Tiny white-crested waves were breaking against the shore; tiny ships, trailing thin lines of wake like spittle, were heaving out from a dozen ports. Beyond the coast, the country stretched out hilled and green, with the moment’s illusion that it was something I could possess whole and entire in a glance, if only I had eyes enough to take it in.
On our final approach, the plane swung around to follow the shoreline. The beach there was dotted with bits of colour, red and yellow and blue, from hundreds of beach umbrellas lined up in orderly rows in the still of early morning like mock soldiers awaiting some humorous war with the sea. The umbrellas made it seem like we were arriving in a permanent holiday country, a place that had never known hardship or work, as if those of us who had fled here years before had been fooled somehow, bee
n packed off on our grim ocean voyages while behind us the bands played and the streamers waved in the wind.
At the passport control a young man in khaki thumbed through my own with a languid circumspection, his eyes resting for an instant on the details of name, place of birth, but then moving on with what seemed an almost wilful withholding of any welcome as if to say there was nothing special in me, he saw dozens, hundreds like me every hour. He stamped a corner of a page with a small box of almost illegible print, “Roma Fiumicino” and the date. I’d heard stories of young men who’d been conscripted into the army on their return here; but the officer seemed to have no interest in me of that sort, I was free to go, his eye had already turned to the next person in line.
The bus into Rome followed an expressway through rolling countryside and then threaded its way through the city’s outskirts toward the centre, past warehouses and factories, highrise apartment blocks, older low-rises in stucco with iron gates that gave fleeting glimpses into plant-green courtyards. Finally we passed through the walls: it was as if we’d burrowed through the concentric rings of a tree to the ancient core. Great palaces and churches loomed up; ruins were strewn about like abandoned construction sites. As we rounded the curve of a wide, car-choked avenue, the Colosseum suddenly reared up to one side like an apparition, a massive ghostly array of arched hollows and ancient brick that hovered briefly in view and then disappeared again as the bus veered around a corner and barrelled up a sidestreet.
We were dropped outside Termini station. It was still early morning but the air had grown muggy, overladen with smells – exhaust fumes, the oily odour of asphalt, but also a thousand indefinable hints and half-hints of things as if the air here remembered everything, had never been cleansed. Several cabbies set upon us as we descended, lifting suitcases before anyone could think to refuse them. One, an older man in jacket and cap, hovered nearby as I gathered my bags.
“Taxi?” he said.
I had picked out a cheap hotel from my guidebook, thinking to spend a few nights in the city before going on to the village.
“I’m going near the Piazza Navona,” I said, in Italian.
“Ah, è italiano.” But it was clear from his forced smile that he’d in fact surmised the opposite, that I was a foreigner.
The taxi made its way into traffic already grown frenetic and thick, weaving through its laneless flow, the car wheels thump-thumping against the cobblestone paving.
“Americano?” the cabby said.
“Sì. No.” I had to struggle to dredge up my Italian. “Canadese. But born in Italy.”
“Ah.” He cast a glance into his rearview mirror to get another look at me. “Your first time back?”
“Sì.”
The car shot through vast, fountained squares, past cupolas and colonnaded façades, as if the city was merely so much space to traverse, to make a beeline across. Passing through it, I felt a double foreignness, that of not knowing the names of things, what their history was, but also of not being able simply to take them for granted. I might have been anywhere, just a traveller who’d picked up a few stories of a place, a few words of the local idiom, before arriving there for the first time.
The cabby looked as if he was coming to the end of a shift, his face grizzled and lined with fatigue.
“I thought of moving to Canada myself once,” he said. “It must be beautiful there.”
I didn’t know how to respond. It was like comparing apples and oranges, these ruins and fountains, this stink of history, to a near-odourless newness.
“Yes,” I said.
He lit a cigarette, then offered the pack to me.
“Fumi?”
“Sì. Grazie.”
We drove on in silence. We passed the Pantheon, men in suits walking briskly through the little square that fronted it. Across the way, a small café was just opening up.
“The Pantheon,” the driver said, almost timidly, as if it were some insufficient gift he was offering up.
“Sì.”
At the hotel, he helped me with my bags.
“Watch out for yourself. People try to take advantage. It’s not like before.”
There was an instant when I paid him that we were simply cabby and client again, just another transaction in a long night of them. He thanked me with a nod and pocketed the bills I’d given him with that tinge of shame I’d seen in peasants as a child when they were given a thing by a superior. But then he held out a hand to shake my own.
“Bentornato,” he said. Welcome home.
My hotel was located amongst the maze of sidestreets that came off the Piazza Navona, a narrow, ancient building with an air like that of some faded, small-time society matron, fixed up with marble facing and a bit of canopy at street level but rising up beyond that to rusting balconies and crumbling stucco. Inside, the same contrast was repeated, the tiny lobby done up in gilt and ornamentation but then a narrow stairwell leading up to dim corridors and small, musty rooms like rooms in a boarding house. My own room had a tiny balcony overlooking a courtyard that stank of garbage and food. My first night, I awoke out of jet-lagged sleep to the sound of voices echoing against the courtyard walls – they seemed to be coming up out of a tremendous chasm or well, from some place that was not of the earth, hovering at the brink of meaning like a secret message or code I could not quite make out.
I spent a few days wandering the streets of the city. The concierge at the hotel – just a boy, really, fresh-faced and charming and dapper, dressed every day in the same immaculate white shirts and pleated trousers – made suggestions to me for possible itineraries, tracing the routes on my map and warning me to stay clear of the Gypsies. Half the time, in his zeal to provide me direction, he would make statements with perfect, confident authority that would turn out to be patently untrue, that got dates off by centuries or that mixed the facts or lore of one monument with those of another. He spoke an English sprinkled with American idioms, though he had probably seldom been outside the confines of Rome. With me, because I was someone who had returned, an americano, he showed that same hint of longing I’d seen in the cabby I’d met when I’d arrived, the same instinct to leave this place, to imagine other possibilities. But then I would see him sometimes standing smoking in front of the hotel in his white shirt and polished shoes and he would seem utterly at home here in a way he could not have been anywhere else in the world, as if every cobblestone in the street, every inch of mortar and pocked marble and crumbling stucco the city held, had been carefully placed just to provide him his proper setting.
I had learned from Aunt Teresa that one of my uncles ran a restaurant in the city just outside the centre, on via Catania; but the days passed and I didn’t look him up. There would be all the awkwardness of my father’s death to deal with then, the false, bright conversation, the sitting around with him and his family in some dingy back room while they waited only to get on with their lives. With Valle del Sole it was the same: now that I was actually near the place, within reach, all sense of urgency, of purpose, had left me. It had been nearly three weeks since Rita and I had spoken; perhaps she had already come and gone or had decided not to come at all, had awoken to the full horror of what had happened between us or had simply seen the pointlessness of any coming together. With each day that went by, each passage I made through the city, I felt this leaking away of intention: I could simply remain here in this place, disappear here, and nothing would change, no one would come after me, none of the questions I’d carried with me would need to be answered.
My mother had come here just before we’d left Italy back when Rome had been just that, a place you disappeared in, the young men who came here for work, the women you heard of whose lives, when they arrived here, turned unspeakable. When my mother had come, ostensibly to arrange for our reunion with my father in Canada, I had thought of her as lost somehow, not gone to a physical place that could be reached by a train or a bus but off in a sort of ether or dream world, a place that only an effort of wi
ll could transport you to, or back from. She would have been young then, my own age, pregnant with Rita but still undefeated, walking these same streets that I walked, that had known since then only an instant’s more history. She might easily have vanished then just as I’d feared, met up with a blue-eyed man and gone off to some foreign country or still be living here now in one of these narrow, anonymous streets, poor and grown old and hanging laundry to dry on her balcony rail. Just here, she might have stepped, just here, weighing her options. There was the child she carried with her in her womb, who still had a chance; there was the one she’d left behind. Or perhaps it had never occurred to her to make a choice like that, to settle for less than everything.
Wandering out near the university once, I came on a vast cemetery that had the look of a fairy-tale kingdom, with arched and pillared mausoleums like miniature palaces lined up along broad, white-gravelled avenues. Further afield the graves grew more modest, simple headstones or stelas with a statue here and there or perhaps an oval photograph of the deceased in sepiaed enamel. There were a few Innocentes among the lot, distant offshoots perhaps of the family tree, among them even a Cristina, my mother’s name, though I couldn’t remember now if she’d taken my father’s surname or kept her maiden one as was usually the practice then. But this Cristina had never lived to marry: she had lasted but two days, from April 11 to April 13, 1919. A simple legend at the bottom of the headstone read GOD, GIVE US STRENGTH.
There was a far section of the cemetery that looked a bit shabbier than the rest, a few weeds cropping up here and there and the headstones no-nonsense and modest, the inscriptions so worn that it took me a moment to realize that they were in a foreign script. Some of the stones had small, age-blackened candelabra affixed to the tops: menorahs. One stone, laid flat in the ground, bore beneath its foreign markings a single line in Italian: DIED AT AUSCHWITZ. The stone had sunk slightly into the earth as if to show that there was nothing beneath it, that it was only a marker. There was no way of telling how many of the other stones, with their runic scripts, airy and slight as though already predisposed to the decay of the elements, told the same story. Back in our village, the war our own stories had spoken of had never seemed the palpably evil event that stared out from this empty grave: bombs had fallen, villages had been burnt to the ground, and yet in the retelling, the horror of these things had always had a touch of the light-hearted to it, as if simply to have survived, to have got beyond, had made the horror small. There were those soldiers who had come to our very house, who my mother had joked with, who had shot a spider off the bedroom wall; it was hard to believe that they had been part of the same war that had produced this empty grave.
