In a Glass House (40 page)

In the summer following the second year of my placement he had returned to Ghana, hopeful that elections there might bring some improvement that would make it possible for him to remain. We exchanged addresses, promised letters, future visits; but then a few days before fall term began he returned. I happened to be in the lorry park in Ikorita on some errand when his bus came in, saw him from a distance as he stepped from the bus’s undignified closeness, his travel-dirtied clothes, his tattered suitcase, the patch of sweat that darkened the back of his
shirt; he seemed suddenly lonely and old like some road-wearied pedlar, reduced like that by the humiliations of African travel, by the prospect of returning again to his twilight life in this strangers’ country. I thought of skirting him but then he caught sight of me, seeming for once to forget his awkwardness at being caught out.

“So you see I’ve come back after all, you thought you’d got rid of me!”

And when I came up to him he wrapped an enfolding arm around my shoulder in spontaneous affection, caught up in the fullness of his sad pleasure at seeing me again. I sensed the heads turning around us, the smiles, for an instant all the lorry park seeming to focus in on this single odd moment of feeling as if to confirm it in its rightness.

The letters from my father had eventually begun to dwindle. All along they’d seemed to suffer more than most from the mails, months elapsed sometimes between their Canadian postmarks and their arrival; and now it had begun to grow difficult to discern any continuity from one to the next, any accumulation, each seeming merely a kind of repetition, working out the same formula of greeting and complaint. He’d had some argument with Tsi’Umberto, he didn’t say over what; he was considering selling out his share of the farm to Rocco and Domenic; he’d been in hospital for a pain in his chest, he didn’t say what had caused it. At one point in my second year he’d written at length about a heavy snowfall that had caused some sort of breakage in the greenhouses.

I’d had the impression from his tone that the farm was on the verge of imminent collapse; but then his next letter had made no reference to what had happened, moving on to other matters, other complaints. These lapses made it seem as if his problems had little reality outside the first moment he wrote of them, perhaps true in all their intensity in that instant, in the blunt insistence of the written word, but then dissipating afterwards into the general flux of his life.

What had remained consistent was only his tone, the constant sense of upheaval, its underlying inducement to guilt – it often seemed to me that that was the point, not some new honesty between us but this other veiled language of accusation. Out of the blue once he mentioned he’d gone in for confession: “I made my peace,” he said, “but there are some things the priest doesn’t know, only God knows.” But all this seemed melodrama somehow, the lurking ominousness, the implication that his life was on the brink of some dissolution – a single crisis might have caused me concern, but this steady stream of them suggested he was simply carrying on with his life much as he always had, selecting from it for me only what fit some unspoken working out of old grievances and pain.

Then toward the last months of my third year at the school I got a letter from him that truly unsettled me. He’d begun in the usual way, greetings and family news, then gone on to some sort of conflict he’d had with the Italian club board; yet there was a strange buoyancy in his tone, a sort of hovering remove from
things as if he himself were absent somehow. I grew aware of a creeping incoherence, shifts of thought I couldn’t quite follow, that seemed to slip for an instant into a kind of darkness – he went on for nearly a page about this problem with the club and yet I couldn’t grasp the essence of it, all his referents secretive and sly as in a whispering, boyish plot, “those people,” “the others,” seeming to wind toward some vague final coming together that was never reached. Then at the end no formal closing, untypical, his last sentence simply dropping off into empty space without so much as a punctuation mark.

I had a premonition then of his death, the idea he’d seemed to be urging me toward all along, then discounted it at once as something that couldn’t come true exactly because I’d imagined it, was merely my reflex attraction to doom, my reaching always toward the simplest most dire solution to a problem. But the sense of his absence lingered, the feeling that the person who’d written his earlier letters, who might have been reached, had crossed over now into some new remoteness. I began a letter to him in English but was afraid of some misunderstanding, began one in Italian but felt reduced in it to the merest commonplaces – we hadn’t so much as a language between us, had always been forced, especially in our letters, to some compromise, my simplified English, his careful Italian. It occurred to me, exactly now when it seemed already too late, that perhaps all along I’d misread him, missed some crucial clue, had mistaken for maudlin what had been merely a lack of skill, such a little thing as that, the uneasy forcing of emotion into the unwieldiness of an unfamiliar idiom.

In the end I wrote back to him in my usual tone, careful and bland, thinking somehow to anchor him with my own normalcy, touching on some of the things he’d said as if to make
him, myself, believe in the sanity of them; yet I sent the letter off without any faith that it would have effect. I thought of writing to Aunt Teresa as well but then reasoned that there was no point, that I would be home soon, that if something had happened I would have heard, though at bottom I was vaguely afraid of the letter’s falling into my father’s hands; and afterwards, when the worst had happened, I guarded the strange illusion that it was somehow best that I hadn’t written after all, that to have put the thing into words would have been a kind of incrimination, proof that it had been foreseeable and yet we’d done nothing.

The next news I had of my father was in fact of his death: I came home from class to find Richard Harmond waiting for me on my verandah, so transparent in his awkwardness that I thought again my first expectation must be wrong, that bad news couldn’t come in so obvious a package.

“It’s your father.” He was unable to bring himself to say the actual words, letting his flushed silence stand in for them. “They said they would try to hold the funeral until you got back.”

I had the strangest feeling afterwards, not of relief or inevitability as I’d expected but a kind of disorientation, a nausea as at the thought of something unnatural or evil. Richard sat with me an hour or so in my house, touchingly solicitous, volunteering information though I asked for none, was uncertain what I was permitted, what could pass under the circumstances as normal.

“It was your aunt that called Ottawa, I think. They didn’t really say what had happened.”

“Ah.”

“Was he sick or anything that you knew?”

“I dunno, he had some pains in his chest.”

“Maybe that was it.”

There was a flight through London the next morning; Richard had already made the arrangements. I had only to pack, to take whatever I needed and leave the rest for him to ship home afterwards. He offered to stay to help me with my packing and then bring me back to Ibadan with him for the night.

“You could use the phone there, if you wanted to call home.”

I wondered how reasonable it would be for me to refuse these things, felt reassured at the small relief that seemed to pass through him when I did.

“I guess you probably just want to be alone for a while.”

“Yeah, I think so.”

“I wasn’t sure if you wanted me to speak to anyone at the school. If you want I can wait till after you’re gone.”

“Okay.”

I spent the evening alone. I ought to have been going around, taking my leave, the adult thing, ought at least to have spoken to Mr. Tsikata; but I couldn’t bring myself to disturb anyone, be disturbed, wanted only to hold the still quietness at the centre of me till I’d understood what it seemed to be urging me toward.

In the morning Richard came before dawn. The students had already begun to rise; I could hear their distant morning sounds from the dorms, the sleepiness of voices, the dull patter of a thousand hurried feet as they moved toward the exercise grounds. In the sky the stars had only just barely begun to pale in the morning twilight: I seemed to be leaving as I’d come, from dark to dark, stealing away like some scuttling sea thing beneath the wrinkling surface of the day.

My father had drowned in our irrigation pond. No one mentioned suicide and yet it seemed the word behind every other one, every condolence, every silence. The silence was the oppressive thing, at our house, at the funeral home, the long procession of solemn mourners before the closed coffin, reduced to a mute, awkward restraint in the face of our humiliation. I learned only the barest facts of what had happened, that he’d gone missing one day, that Rocco had found him several days later in the pond.

He had begun to build a new house. The old wooden greenhouses had been levelled and a pit hollowed there for the basement, trenches and poured concrete already sketching out its ghostly outline. He’d never mentioned the house in his letters and yet obviously he’d planned for it, set money aside, imagined a future in it. Already weeds had begun to crop up in the yellow soil that had been dug down to, a skid of blocks tottering there at the edge of a trench in abandoned waiting.

At the funeral Aunt Teresa wore black. She cut a stern figure, anachronistic, staunch and forbidding like the dark widows of
Valle del Sole; but she was the one in control of things, who seemed to hold us together dignified and whole, coolly efficient and restrained as if my father’s death had been merely another of his childish excesses. It was Tsi’Umberto who appeared most stricken, his face a perpetual grimace as if his pain were a physical thing, unremitting – I’d never seen him like that, so broken, seemed to see my father in him suddenly, the same rawness of emotion, the same humility.

Rita was there, alone: I saw her emerge from the church as we were being arranged into cars for the procession, didn’t recognize her at first and then felt a start when I did at the instant’s transformation she underwent from young woman to sister. She was dressed in a grey suit, elegant and severe, dark nylons leading down to the small adult rise of her heels and her hair pulled back into a bun, a few loose strands hanging free from it over her brow as if in last girlish dishevelment. Now that she was there live before me the veiled complexities of our letters seemed a kind of indiscretion.

“I’m sorry about what happened and everything.”

There was still the familiar tentativeness in her voice; yet something had changed, some old deference been diminished, her adolescence seeming to have been peeled away to reveal this self-possessed adult underneath, with her stranger’s blue eyes, the intimation in them of all the things about her I couldn’t know.

“Maybe you could call me in a couple of days or something,” she said. “If you wanted to talk or anything –”

“Okay.”

But the following day I came down with malaria, my body still remembering the distant life I’d been leading a few days before. It hit hard and swift, a sudden drop into the darkness of it, seemed to have been coiled patient inside me awaiting this
moment of weakness; I grew delirious, the world become a single dizzying pain, was aware of people moving around me but couldn’t shape an identity for them, was aware of speaking but as out of a dream. I couldn’t find the place in my mind that divided nightmare from waking; and then finally I slipped into a kind of sleep but my mind continued to race, seeking not a solution but a question, an equation whose answer was zero, an infinite series of numbers that would slowly collapse on itself till it came to nothing. In the morning the fever broke, my mind slowly groping back toward clarity; and then the symptoms began again, the creeping chill, the sudden drop again into the fever’s darkness.

I went on like that for days, lost track of things, was aware only of the landscape of my illness, my islands of sudden clarity and then my descent, the awesome pain there, the strange dreamy urgency of my thoughts. I had the sense people had turned against me, was relieved every time I grew aware of Aunt Teresa bringing in food, fresh clothes, wiping the sweat from me with a careful, undeserved humanity; but then the moment she’d gone I’d begin to suspect again some abandonment. Several times I was taken out to the hospital for injections, seeming enfolded then in the bright friendliness the world had put on to hold me; but afterwards I played out the scenes of what had happened as if to find in them some smiling duplicity, the moment that was wrong.

When the fever broke, definitively, I came into a strange euphoria, surfacing to it as into sudden daylight. For a day or so I went on like that, my mind scoured, without contents, a transparency merely for the world to pass through; but then slowly a structure of things began to take shape there again, my first buoyancy giving way to a gloom as if I’d awoken from a dream
of calamity only to find after the initial relief that the calamity was real.

“Your sister called,” Aunt Teresa said.

It was the first time I could think of that she’d ever called the house.

“What did she say?”

“She just wanted to know how you were, that’s all. I told her you were sick.”

But I put off calling her back, wanting only to close out the world, to be sound again.

Aunt Teresa and I began to talk. She would be at the kitchen table in the morning when I awoke, sipping her coffee there, seeming to wait for my company as out of the lingering habit of not being alone.

“You know how he was, he was never happy, he could never forget what had happened. That’s how he was made.”