Solitaria (16 page)

“Did you know, for example, that after Vito swindled the town and Sandro bailed him out — this much is true — he didn't (as Piera believes) go to Milan to work? You see how easily truth is distorted. Vito and I, being the oldest boys, had always followed politics and discussed them with Papà, who we understood had been an anti-fascist when it wasn't fashionable to be one. We considered communism the only viable alternative, and daydreamed ourselves in Yugoslavia helping to create an utopia. After Vito swindled the town, and Sandro wanted to send him to Milan to work, Vito decided to join the Yugoslav communist party and the community of volunteers who would build Tito's railway from Samac to Sarajevo. He was smuggled across the border under barbed wire, at night, the Iron Curtain already in place. How distant yet familiar those days and ideologies appear today.

“I can see by the surprise in your faces that not only had you no idea of this, but that the Vito I'm describing is a totally different brother from the one in Piera's story, and perhaps in each of your stories. The Vito of my youth is idealistic, though impractical. A thrill-seeker. Finding himself in self-imposed financial ruin, he chose a greater danger. This was Vito. He thrived in a trajectory of peril, always searching that place between Scylla and Charybdis.

“Sandro knew where Vito had gone, but did not tell anyone. Papà had forbidden us all to speak to him or about him. As well, there was an absurd rumour that the Yugoslavs captured Italians and turned them into canned meat, or put them into concentration camps. Superstitions. The madness of ignorance. Perhaps, too, Sandro hoped that through this experience, Vito would change his character. And it was a life-altering experience. I can tell you all this, because I followed him there. Yes, while Papà thought I was studying at the university, I went with Vito, because I wanted to change the world, to believe in a greater cause; I could not live without an ideal.

“Vito and I worked side by side, digging the earth with our hands, using wheelbarrows to transport it place to place. We had no bulldozers, no fancy machinery, only the determination and vision of youth — 350,000 volunteers from all parts of the world — united in one cause. It was beautiful, beautiful. One of the most marvellous periods of my life.

“Did Vito's character change through this unorthodox education? I wish I could say it had. Vito worked, but that didn't stop him from other activities. I don't know how or where he got money, but he always had cigarettes and card games. He seduced young peasant women along the track, promising them marriage, then moving on without a thought about their reputations, about their ruined lives. There were plenty of brothers and fathers who would have happily shot Vito, and I wouldn't be surprised if this is exactly what happened to him. Sandro might have told some story to Piera, to keep her quiet and happy. Those were such different times, you have no idea, in your modern world, and your virtual universes.

“Those days, we lived a harsh reality, a frightening hunger, fear a close companion. In the end, Vito and I had to escape in late September, 1948 after the
USSR
unilaterally annulled its treaty with Yugoslavia. For me, one of the principal tenets of communism was internationalism — a world in which everyone would be equal, a world without borders, without war. When Vito and I realized that the Yugoslavian communist party was in conflict with this ideal, we voted against them, and so were expelled from the party.
What irony that the Yugoslav communist party didn't want to be under the authoritative rule of the Soviets, yet they employed authoritarianism within their own party.

“We found ourselves suddenly persecuted; many dissidents were arrested, charged, condemned to years in jail; and many sent into concentration camps. All this in 1948. Vito and I were so intoxicated with the leftist movement that we decided to go to the Hungarian border to join the Soviets. We learned, however, that it was virtually impossible to cross into Hungary because the guards shot people on sight, and so in the end, we decided we'd better return home.

“This was not easily accomplished, you understand. Vito and I were hiding in the house of a sympathizer, and we had no papers with which to leave the country. Despite the danger, one night Vito took the train to Zagreb, and through his charm and his ways and his contacts, he managed to get us repatriation papers and visas, which I'm sure Sandro ended up paying dearly for. We crossed the border into Italy, worried that we might be shot as others had, papers or no papers. However, we experienced only a long delay — a couple of anxious hours in view of the Italian police.

“Sandro arranged everything — my return to the university, Vito's job in Milan — and we resumed our lives, having emerged from behind the Iron Curtain, both with experience and confidence and knowledge so different from others'. We had been protagonists while others watched or did nothing.”

After lunch, they all retreat upstairs for an afternoon rest. Clarissa stops in the hall between her door and David's, her hand on his arm. “I can't get used to this napping in the middle of the afternoon,” she says. “Do you want to go for a walk?”

He smiles in complete agreement. “Much healthier for us, that's for sure. I wondered when you'd want to wander out and see your childhood haunts.”

“I have no tolerance for nostalgia,” she says. “Besides, I don't think of this town as any more particular than any of the others we lived in or around when I was a child. By the time we moved here, I was spending most of my days in Bari, taking voice lessons.”

Downstairs, they cross the street and head towards the highway, which leads out of town, and beyond which lie olive groves and vineyards. The sun is high, shop fronts rolled up, and the street nearly deserted. Now and then, someone emerges from a home to press Clarissa's hands, to welcome her back into a past she refuses to own. How warm they are, David thinks, even to someone who has abandoned them. “
Piacere, piacere
,” she says, smiling. A pleasure.

They walk along the narrow cobbled sidewalks, dust rising in their faces. When they reach the edge of town, Clarissa stops, takes off her hat, and fans herself. “I'd forgotten how hot it is. No wonder everyone sleeps.”

“Do you want to go back?” David asks.

“No, no. I want to show you something.” She puts on her hat, and points to the road ahead.

They continue walking until buildings and villas recede and they are surrounded by fields. The air is still, and the sun brilliant. At either side of the road, steep banks lead down into a wide gulley of wild undergrowth and stunted trees. “This is the Lama S. Giorgio,” Clarissa says. “It's a protected nature reserve.” She stops and frowns. “At least, I think it's here.” She slips off her hat again, and wipes her brow.

“What exactly are we looking for?” David says.

“Come on,” she says. “We have to go down there to see it.”

They scramble down the bank, hand in hand, running shoes slipping here and there, among leathery, broad-leaved shrubs, gnarly olives and fig trees, laurels and mints, and stop finally in the shade of an old oak. “Look,” Clarissa says, turning David to face the road which now is high above them.

The road crosses the top of an ancient Roman bridge which spans the entire gulley. “See those arches?” Clarissa says, pointing to the four openings large enough for a car to drive through. “At one time, water would come rushing down here. This was a river during the rainy season.” She smiles at him. “You see? This past interests me.”

“It seems so… deserted,” David says, thinking that in Canada, a small piece of a Roman bridge would be preserved in a museum, garner
oohs
and
aaaahs
and admission fees for viewing. Here, the past exists with the present. No glass between them.

“There's something else,” Clarissa says. “A secret.”

They walk to the stone walls, blackened by lichen, pockmarked by centuries of rain and wind. David imagines water rushing toward them, unexpected. It reminds him of a time years before, when, fleeing a short-term romance, he drove south from Vancouver into Nevada and took a rafting expedition on the Colorado River. He loves the desert, the burnished landscape, yellow and red, the sagebrush bristling between stones, the air hot, like here. He feels at home inside the wide expanse of nothing. The guide drove him down a ribbon of road to the water's edge where the raft awaited in the shadow of the Hoover Dam. David caught his breath at the magnitude of the concrete structure restraining a lake. He wondered how quickly he'd drown if the gates opened unexpectedly. Clarissa is examining the edges of the arches, her hands sliding across the stone structure, her face excited.

“Here!” she says. “Look.”

He bends down to where her fingers point to SV + CS incised inside a heart, stone edges rounded by wind and water. “Zio Sandro,” he says. “I don't understand. Had he declared himself to you, then? Why wouldn't he have asked for your hand in marriage? Did you have an affair with him? Is that what you're trying to tell me?” Every pore in his body is open; hair tingles at the nape of his neck, as if he were about to be deluged.

“He didn't carve this. I did.” Clarissa slides her hand across his forearm, and tells him how, when she heard the news of Piera's upcoming wedding, she dispatched Renato to Sandro's house, with a note asking Sandro to meet her here. She takes a deep breath, strokes the stippled stone, as if to recall the moment through touch. “I declared myself to him,” she says. “I was in love with him.” She sighs, flushing, as though embarrassed at the memory. “Oh, he was gentle in his rejection, of course. But he wanted Piera….”

David has never seen her look so exposed. He swallows against the lump forming in his throat. “Oh, Mom, I'm sorry,” he says, uncertain how to respond, what to do. All the yearning for her disclosures dissipates in his confusion. She is supposed to be the impenetrable mother, not someone sharing her secrets.

She shakes her head, and he can see her face hardening. “Don't get sentimental on me,” she says. “It's nothing. A schoolgirl crush.” She kicks the stone arch repeatedly, as if to remove the yellow dust from her shoes.

“Why have you never brought me here?” he says.

She turns to him, surprised.

“I don't mean here, I mean Italy, the family. Why?” He thinks of rushing water.

Clarissa shakes her head, shrugs. “You can see how your aunt is.”

“What does that mean?” he says. “What's happened between you?”

Clarissa sighs. Tears form in her eyes. “You only see this side of her — the sad, abandoned Piera.” She wipes her sleeve across her eyes. “You don't understand anything.”

“How
can
I if you won't tell me anything?” he says.

“W
e are a family of thwarted desires,” she says, passionately. “Look at Piera, Teresa, Marco, Mimí, Fazio. Listen to the current of their frustrations. Look at
me
,” she says, and grasps his shoulders. “Even in Canada, Piera's voice is constantly in my head, refuting what I say at every opportunity. But the truth is that we have all lived how others wanted us to; the choices we made were not our own, though we made them nonetheless.” She gives him a little shake, then drops her hands.

He is startled into silence. Not once has it occurred to him that his mother would do anything she didn't want to do. He wonders if she's being overly dramatic, the whole family starting to fray his nerves. “Mom—” he begins.

“
I've been a terrible mother,” she says, and when he tries to protest, she holds her hand up, like a traffic cop, arresting him in his tracks. Then she turns and walks away.

By the time they've climbed the bank and reached the road, Clarissa's emotions are safely restrained, her face serene, untroubled. David thinks of flash floods and warning signs. He hates to admit it, even to himself, but he's relieved; he's never been comfortable with lavish emotional displays. They both sit on an outcrop of rock, take off their shoes, and pick off the burrs accumulated from various nettles.

He wants to ask her about his father, but instead he says, “Tell me about Marco. Isn't he a little old to be living with his mother?”

“Marco and Teresa have a symbiotic relationship,” Clarissa says. “Like so many people, really.” She slides her feet back into her shoes and does up the laces. “Marco acts as man of the house; Teresa probably supports him on some level.”

“Doesn't he work?” David asks, surprised.

“He works part-time jobs, that kind of thing,” Clarissa says vaguely. “But I gather he spends more than he makes.” She pauses. “Maybe gambles a little too.”

“Now I understand!” David says. “That's why Zia Piera doesn't like him.”

“It's not that she doesn't like him,” Clarissa says. “It's that he's too much like his father, and for this, Piera will not forgive him.”

“Poor Marco,” David says. He puts his running shoes back on and laces them up.

Clarissa laughs. “Don't feel too sorry for him. He always has a girlfriend or two on the go, a little money — even if it's Teresa's — and a mother to do everything for him. It's the ideal life.”

“Maybe,” David says dubiously. He can't imagine living with Clarissa, taking her money. He's thinking like a Canadian now. Men here live with their mothers well into their thirties. He needs to better familiarize himself with the culture of his roots, he thinks.
Familiarize
.
Familiar eyes
.

At four o'clock, the shops roll up their aluminum shutters, unlock their plate-glass doors, and let in customers for the brisk evening business. Clarissa and David arrive in the midst of the bustle. Shopkeepers emerge to greet Clarissa. They're shy behind their aprons and delighted smiles. “My parents knew your father,” they say, or “I heard your Violetta. Unparalleled!” Some bring
CD
covers for her to sign. “Will you sing for us, Signorina Santoro?” The town is abuzz with her name. It takes Clarissa and David a half hour to get back to Zia Piera's, where they find the
Chi L'Ha Visto
van parked outside. The announcer and cameraman scramble out, trying to speak to Clarissa, who waves them away. “I need a moment to collect myself,” she says, and firmly shuts the door behind her and David.