by Nino Ricci
John caught my eye as if trying to gauge my intent.
“I served here during the war,” he said finally. “Like your soldier.”
I could go on or not. I had the sense that he would answer every question I put to him truthfully, that I could slowly transform him back into the man he did not want to be. Or perhaps he would simply rise and disappear again as he had twenty years before.
“Rita will be wondering about us,” I said.
We started back. It was night now, the streetlamps casting their bit of yellow light in the narrow street. It had grown cool again, almost chill, some of the houses we passed showing the glow of fireplace fires in their windows.
“Perhaps we’ll be leaving soon,” John said.
“Yes.”
“Will you stay on here?”
“For a while, I think. I’m not sure.”
He seemed more a stranger, oddly, now that the thing was certain, this man who had changed irrevocably the course of my life and yet about whom I knew almost nothing. I wasn’t sure what sort of a pact we had made, how safe he imagined his secret was or whether I intended to keep it.
There was still a light on in the second-floor window when we came to the house. We paused outside the entrance.
“You know I wouldn’t do anything to hurt her,” John said. “I think you know that.”
“Yes.”
But I wasn’t sure any more if I’d done the right thing, who this man was I would send Rita off with, or how I, who had made such a mess of things, could be trusted now to decide her best interest.
XXX
Rita’s bedroom door was open when I went up.
“Is that you?” she said.
She was sitting up in bed with a book, still dressed though with a blanket over her legs against the cold, an old woollen thing that I’d borrowed for her from Luisa.
She shifted a bit when I came to the door, pulled the blanket in.
“How was your drink?”
There was a small tightness in her voice, as if she’d been concerned after all about our going off alone.
“It was all right.”
“Just man to man, I guess.”
“Something like that.”
I’d remained standing at the threshold of her room.
“You can come in if you want.”
I sat in the room’s only chair. Rita raised herself up a bit on the bed, folding her legs beneath her and draping her blanket around her shoulders.
“John said you might be leaving soon,” I said.
“Oh. I guess we haven’t really talked about it.” But she didn’t contradict him. “There was an idea we had. It’s a little crazy, but I suppose we’d have to leave pretty soon to do it. About going home by sea.”
“He didn’t mention it.”
“To see where I was born and all that. It’s kind of symbolic. John has a friend in England who works for a shipping company who’s going to try to fix something up.”
The thought of her on a ship in the mid-Atlantic filled me with a peculiar despair. I had an image of her alone at the ship’s rail gazing out over endless grey sea as I had years before, of the salt spray against her skin, of the great tomb the ocean was where somewhere our mother’s bones lay.
“Will you land in Halifax?” I said.
“I’m not sure. Wherever.”
“You might end up in Argentina or something.”
She smiled.
“Maybe.”
I could meet you there, it was on my lips to say. Everything would be different there, on the other side of the world: there would be palm trees and pampas and endless sky, December summers, anonymity. It almost seemed possible for a moment, this fantasy, that we could leave everything, everyone, behind, every unanswered question, and start again.
“I guess I haven’t been all that helpful to you here,” I said. “There’s so many things –”
“It’s okay. I didn’t expect answers from you.”
“All the same. There are things we never talked about.”
“What kinds of things?”
“I don’t know. Your father, for instance.” My voice had gone thick. “Your real one.”
“Why? Do you know anything about him?”
“Maybe. A few things. Nothing for certain.”
“Is that why you’re here?” she said. “Is that what you’re looking for?”
“Partly.”
A shadow seemed to have fallen across her.
“So what have you learned?” she said, though with a note of warning in her voice as if she was trying to discourage me from going on or was testing me, knew more than she was saying.
“A few things. That he wasn’t from around here. That he was just someone passing through.”
“What else?”
“That he might have gone to Canada. That he planned to meet our mother there, to run off with her. With us.”
“It sounds a bit romantic,” she said.
“A bit.”
“I guess things would have been pretty different for us if our mother had lived.”
“Yes.”
“But you’re saying he might still be there somewhere.” She wouldn’t look at me now. “In Canada, I mean.”
“Maybe.”
We fell silent. Rita rose and went to the balcony door and stood looking out into the night, her blanket still around her shoulders.
“John and I talked about this once,” she said. “About my father. Whether I’d want to know who he was.”
“Oh.” There had been the warning tone in her voice again. “And what did you say?”
“I said I wasn’t sure.”
“Why?”
“It’s just how I felt then, when he asked me.”
I could see the reflection of her face in the glass of the balcony door, inscrutable, hovering like an apparition against the darkness outside.
“I’ve thought sometimes about kids who were adopted who find their real parents when they’re older,” she said. “What it must be like for them.”
“And?”
“I’m not sure. I suppose it can be good if that’s what everybody wants. You hear stories of how great it is. But then I think of what it would be like to be a daughter again. Maybe failing at that. Or maybe just not wanting it enough. Or not thinking the other person did.”
“But if you could know. It might make things clearer.”
“What things?”
“Where you come from. Your past.”
“You and I are different that way,” she said. “It’s hard to explain. It’s as if you were born in the past, you have to go back to it, but when I was born the past was already over. It’s not the same thing for me, to look back. It’s not where the answers are.”
“But your coming here. And this boat trip. It’s the same.”
“Maybe you’re right. Or maybe it’s just curiosity. Not really wanting to know, only playing at it.”
I wasn’t sure if I should go on. She seemed at some level to know where I was leading and yet everything in her was resisting my spelling the thing out, as if she and John had some pact between them, had made a decision to keep the thing forever known and not, like some bond that would be broken the instant it was acknowledged.
She was still staring out into the night.
“You’re part of it too, in a way,” she said. “I don’t know how to put it. You and me. Not having to think that there’s someone I have to keep that from, what happened between us.”
“There’s Elena. There’s Mrs. Amherst. It wouldn’t be any different.”
“It’s not the same somehow. They’re not my family. I don’t know how to explain it.”
There was something in her voice that made me fear for her suddenly. It was as if she were drawing a line, a limit of what she could bear, of the secrets she could hold. Perhaps it was not my place after all to force this thing on her, to meddle with whatever it was she and John had established between them.
“It
doesn’t matter,” I said. “We don’t have to talk about this. Maybe you’ll feel different later on. When you’re older.”
“Maybe.”
It had begun to rain again, a few dull splats hitting the glass of the balcony door and then more until Rita’s image there seemed to be melting in the wet. She had pulled the blanket tight around her shoulders, huddled up to the rain and dark as if to a fire.
“There’s something you should have,” I said. “Marta gave it to me. A picture of our mother.”
“Does she look the way you remember her?”
“No. Not really. Plainer, I suppose. More human.”
“I was trying to imagine what she was like when we were in that woman’s kitchen yesterday,” she said. “With all those old women gathered around. If she would have ended up like them if she’d stayed here.”
“Maybe. Maybe she wasn’t as special as I remember her. Just a woman who had an affair.”
“I guess it’s not as if she was the only one,” Rita said. “When I saw that wheel at the museum – I suppose I could have ended up like that.”
“That’s what her father wanted. To put you in an orphanage. But she wouldn’t agree to it.”
It sounded like some fate out of a fairy tale that she’d been saved from. All her life, even now, had that quality to it of narrow escape, of being on the verge always of being reclaimed from the normal, workaday world into strangeness.
She had turned from the window.
“So can I see that photo?”
I fetched it from my room. With Rita there before me, I could see the clear connection between them, the spectral sameness of their features as if the woman in the photo were some preliminary model of which Rita was the final version. Even the eyes were the same, the black-and-white ones of the photograph and Rita’s blue, the same gaze as if there was something just beyond the obvious, the everyday, that they were fixed on.
“She looks so serious,” Rita said.
“Yes, it’s odd. It’s not how I remember her.”
It was eerie to see the bulge in my mother’s dress, to think of Rita unborn there, of this single portrait we had that was all the proof that we had ever formed a family. I thought of everything that was missing from it, the fathers who weren’t there, the child unborn and the other forgotten one, already dead, who I’d never known.
“She looks sort of ancient,” Rita said. “I don’t know how to put it. Not old but like someone who wouldn’t have fit in somehow if she was still alive.”
“Maybe that’s it. Maybe that was what made her special.”
The photo was still in the old frame that Marta had had it in, just a plain wooden thing whose glass had a small imperfection near the bottom, a tiny almond-shaped bubble.
“You should keep this,” I said. “It’s probably the only photo of her.”
“No. It means more to you than it could to me. I would always feel, I don’t know. Like I couldn’t live up to it somehow.”
It was getting late. Outside the rain was still falling.
“I think we should probably be going in the morning,” Rita said. “There’s a train out of Campobasso for Rome around noon.”
“If that’s what you think.”
I felt the urge again to touch her, to hold her, here in this room with the rain outside and the dark, the black night, as impenetrable as the past, as much the element we moved in. I had the sense that when she left this time, something would be over between us definitively, that there would be no going back to it.
“Goodnight, then,” I said.
“Yes. Goodnight.”
We stood facing each other, she with the blanket still clasped around her, and I touched my fingers, the palm of my hand, to her cheek, to her brow. She closed her eyes, standing perfectly still as if to let me read her like Braille, to memorize her. Her eyes were still closed when I leaned in to kiss her brow and left the room, shutting her door behind me.
XXXI
I awoke around dawn to the continuing patter of rain against my balcony door. For a moment, in the room’s wash of grey light, I wasn’t certain where I was, back in my apartment in Toronto or simply in a sort of limbo without dimension, without future or past. For a long time I lay awake under the sheets unable to drag myself up into the morning’s damp cold, listening to the noise of the rain outside, the repetitive scrape of a branch against the balcony rail as it swayed in the wind.
At some point I heard Rita stir next door, then her footsteps on the stairs, the sound of her and John in low conversation in the kitchen. When I came downstairs their packed bags were already sitting by the door, the room gloomy and tense with the air of departure.
John had got a fire going in the fireplace.
“So Rita told you about our plan,” he said, awkward. “About returning by sea.”
He seemed to want to assure me, to let me know again that Rita was safe in his hands, that nothing had changed. He spread a map out to show me the route they would take across the ocean, their possible points of departure. He had done this once before, he said, on a merchant ship carrying oil from the North Sea.
“They have a bit of space sometimes for passengers. Or perhaps you work a bit.”
It seemed his element, the sea, where he belonged. He had that mark on him of the exile, of someone who couldn’t quite bear the weight of the world; even now, from here, he was running again, making his quiet escape.
They needed to use the bath at Marta’s. I went up ahead of them to set the water warming in the bathroom’s small electric heater, then sat minding Marta in her kitchen as they each came by in turn.
“So they’re going,” Marta said, though I hadn’t mentioned this.
“Yes.”
She gave a small, satisfied grunt, as if everything had turned out as she had foreseen.
“It’s just as well.”
They had to drop their rental car off in Campobasso before catching their train. I offered to drive in with them in my own car to see them off at the station, but we all seemed anxious now to be free of each other, seemed to have reached the point where there was nothing more that could be comfortably said.
“It’s a long drive,” John said. “With the weather –”
“Yes, of course, you’re right.”
The rain was still coming down in a steady drizzle as they loaded their trunk, the slopes surrounding the village lost in a haze of low cloud. The village looked like an enchanted place cut off in the mist like that, a pocket of the past only some magic spell could get you away from, where I was being left to languish now while Rita returned to the present, to what was real, what had to be got on with. She had only been a visitor here, in the past. I thought of my own trip to the sea years before, of the great immigrant ships at the port, those black-toothed chestnut vendors with their little pots of glowing coals. How the bay of Naples had looked from the sea, no larger than a cup you could hold in the palm of your hand, until it had disappeared from view and the only vista was the endless blue of water and sky.
There was a moment as John finished packing the car when Rita and I were alone in the kitchen. I had a flash of panic then, as if I were a parent who had failed to take proper precautions for a child, was unwittingly sending it off to some doom. Outside, John was fussing with things in the trunk, his hair slicked from the drizzle, his beard dripping rain.
“You don’t have to worry about me,” Rita said.
We both seemed aware of John outside, of this stolen moment when something ought to transpire between us, when some message ought to be passed.
“Maybe I’ll see you in a month or so,” I said. “You’ll be home by then?”
“I think so.”
John appeared in the door.
“I think we’re ready,” he said.
We didn’t kiss or touch. There was only the instant our eyes met as the car pulled away, the way they’d met sometimes in the schoolyard when we were children, the furtive glance that acknowledged the shame and t
he love of being siblings. As the car disappeared around the corner past the square I noticed Luisa watching from her own front door.
“You never brought them by,” she said.
“No.”
“And now they’ve gone.”
And up on the road that rose out of town the car appeared again briefly, a glint of metal, before vanishing in the mist.
The rain let up around noon. The fog had settled into the village by then, but after the rain had stopped it took on an eerie glow as if somewhere not far above us the sun had emerged. Through the kitchen doorway the street outside looked brilliant and white like some passageway to the beyond, a vapoury curtain of stilled, refracted light.
I went out. Up the street, an old woman was struggling up from the steps that led down to her stable, carting a bundle of dried gorse; from an alleyway a loud, riding-lawnmower-sized tractor appeared with a red wagon in tow and headed toward the square; a few houses over, two hands emerged from the fly curtain of a doorway bearing a water-filled basin, thrust the water out into the street in a silvered arch, and retreated again. Then for a moment the street was perfectly quiet again, deserted, as if all of these gestures had been choreographed exactly to lead back to this silence. Spread over everything was still the strange light-infested mist, the village nestling itself against it as though settling in for some infinite, heavenly sleep. Minute by minute the light increased and yet the mist did not disperse, until it seemed that the village, the whole mountain face, must dissolve in its ghostly white.
I walked. Up to the square first, deserted, past the bar, which seemed more often closed now than open, though when I was a child it was open daily from early morning till late at night. Up the steps that led to the church: I had not been inside since I’d arrived, though when I tried the door now it was locked. I tried to get a view in through the side windows, with their bits of stained glass, could make out the Stations of the Cross, the gaudy statues of saints in their arched niches along the walls. The space looked so intimate and small, with room for little more than a dozen pews. It was hard to believe how vast a place it had once occupied in my imagination, how it had seemed God’s very home, though we had been just us insignificant few score who had huddled together there.
