Solitaria (18 page)

On the bad days — and there were so many of these, I don't want to remember — I closed myself in the bedroom, shutters down, head ready to explode. During these episodes, I didn't want Sandro to go out by himself, even though I didn't want him in the room with me either. Sometimes he went anyway, and when he returned, we fought horribly; other times he stayed home and moped, while I felt guilty for having kept him from his friends. We quarrelled horribly then too. The migraines continued and Sandro took me to a series of marvellous doctors who prescribed painkillers and tranquillizers. I took everything gratefully, if only so I could have a respite from pain.

In late summer, Vito sent me a letter.
I must see you
.
Papà won't let me come home.

I told Sandro I was going to visit my parents, and took the train — an hour — a box of meats and cheeses and fruits in my arms. I had not been there for months. I knocked at the open doorway, shy suddenly, as if I didn't know whether to enter as I'd always done, whether I'd be welcome or not.

“Piera, come in out of the sun,” Mamma said in her normal voice.

I sighed, put the box on the table, and hugged her. Mamma didn't move away exactly, but her muscles tensed slightly. “I've brought some things,” I said.

Mamma nodded, but didn't open the box. She appeared to be more present, perhaps due to being forced to resume her mother role. Papà was bent over, pouring olive oil from a large cask into bottles, and didn't even turn around and say hello. Only Daniela was her former self, running toward me, arms open. I held her tight, so tight she squirmed out of my grasp.

“Is Clarissa at home?” I asked Mamma, who shook her head. “Is everybody studying?” I said brightly to Mimí and Renato.

“Yes, yes,” Mimí said, “I'll show you.” She went to get her school book. Renato leaned back in the chair, and watched me. He raised his hand, pointed his index finger at me, and mock shot.

“Papà,” I said. “Is everything all right?” I waited, but he was still bent over the oil. An immense migraine began in my head. I closed my eyes and pressed my fingers against my temples. “Papà?” I said again.

He turned then and looked at me. “Of course everything's all right,” he said, his tone hard. “Do you think life stops just because you're gone?”

“I didn't mean anything,” I said. “I was just…”

“I have always provided for my family,” Papà said.

Mimí returned with her book, and I listened to her read while Renato chased Daniela around the room, shooting hundreds of imaginary bullets into us.

When I left, they all appeared sullen and no one had opened the box or thanked me.

I walked up the hill towards the railway station. I had arranged to meet Vito halfway, in the abandoned house at the side of the steps leading up to the school. I had not had an opportunity to speak to Mamma about Vito, about letting him come home. Papà's words swirled in my head. He might think he can manage, I thought, but look at them: the mound of mending, the mouse-foraged cheese hanging from the rafters, Clarissa gone who-knows-where, Mimí's hair uncombed, and Renato and Daniela like savages in that room. Mamma distracted, her eye cast only towards Papà ever since the incident with Agata. Papà was a very sexual man, you see. And she understood this, and no longer trusted him. And so, when he went to work in the field, she was anxious, distracted, and would go out, unexpectedly, in the middle of the afternoon, leaving behind the children in benevolent neglect, as if certain to catch Papà in a compromising position.

The closer I got to the abandoned house, the more lightheaded I felt, as if the altitude had changed.

The house was in various states of decay. Among the stones, lichen and grasses had taken root; three-quarters of one wall had been dismantled and taken away; someone had built a crude fire-pit in front of the door, black stones and ash.

Vito emerged from the dark as I approached the house, moved towards me. I stepped back, my heart hammering.

He stopped in the doorway. “You look well,” he said.

“You too,” I said, staring at his anxious face. He wore a pale yellow short-sleeved shirt and black trousers. We stood for a moment, then I said, “I tried to speak to Mamma, but Papà was there…”

“It doesn't matter,” he said.

“I'll have Sandro speak to him. Maybe Papà will listen —”

“I had to see you,” he said.

I stepped back, the words themselves a threat. Kept my voice light. “It's good to see you too —”

“Piera,” he began, his hands on my shoulders.

I took a deep breath and pushed him away. “I'm sure Mamma will speak to Papà and he'll agree,” I said.

The summer sky abruptly darkened. I looked up. Smoky dense clouds stretched across the horizon, momentarily hiding the sun.

“A storm,” I said.

“You know how I feel about you,” he said.

“You must never write to me again. I am a married woman. If my husband ever found out…” I faced away from him, staring up at the quickly forming clouds in the sky. “Promise me you'll stay away.”

“I can't,” he said, circling my waist with his arms, his lips at my neck.

I leaned against him for a moment. His hands pressed into my ribs, and I clasped them in mine, and faced him. “Please,” I said. “Don't make this any more difficult than it is.” I bit my lip. “If you care at all about me,” I said, “you'll promise.”

He bent towards me, but I quickly turned my face away.

He stepped back then, our hands still clasped.

“Say it.”

“I promise,” he replied.

I drew my hands out of his and quickly ran up the path to the station, without looking back, terrified I'd change my mind. The train was late, and I waited, anxious, weepy, trying to compose myself. Thunder sounded, and I looked up again: white towers, flat-based mounds with cauliflower tops suspended in the eerie violet light.
Hail.
As if motivated by some inexplicable force, all the children on the platform burst into cries.

I ran back down the hill as pellets of ice began to drop from the sky, bounce off roofs, walls, the ground like a bed of lice.

Mamma stood in the doorway, staring out. “We must help Papà. Ovidio! Ovidio!” she called.

“Papà,” I said. “Papà.” We ran full-force to the field.

The storm lasted only fifteen minutes, enough to split the grapes, to drain them into the earth, the year's harvest destroyed. Papà sat on the ground and cried.

“What more could happen to us?” he whispered. “What have we done to deserve all this bad luck?”

In the distance, the shriek of train brakes.

“Oh!” Mamma said, touching her throat.

Papa raised his head. “Mamma, where's Daniela?”

Mamma looked around, shielding her eyes from an imaginary sun. “With Piera,” she said.

Papà and I looked at each other and began running.

Daniela's death was instant and silent. On seeing the bloody mass at the side of the tracks, Mamma passed out.

When she awakened, Mamma lay paralyzed on the left side, but still lucid. She looked at me and gave me a lovely, careless smile. “See, see that plant, Piera? It's about to flower. I planted it for you. Take it. Take it.”

After a while, we sent Renato for the doctor. Why did we wait? We were so stupid, all of us. But those were different times. There were no
TV
programs to explain the workings of our bodies, there were no magazines with instructions on nutrition or preventative medicine. As well, we had barely survived during the war, and proper diets seemed a luxury aimed at movie stars and the wealthy.

We waited, Papà pacing at the foot of the bed, Mamma lying there, unconcerned. I looked around, bewildered by the old furniture, the mound of mending, the round of cheese hanging from a rafter. How had they gotten to this state? Or perhaps they were simply living as they always had, and I, blessed with comforts, now could see the desperation in their lives. Only a few months before had I realized that Mamma and Papà had no heater, so I had bought them a cast iron wood stove that they could cook on and heat the house with.

The doctor arrived, took Mamma's temperature, listened to her breathing, and squeezed her hand, though it lay inanimate on the bed beside her. He gave her a blood thinner and called a specialist.

We waited. Mamma began to cry. Papà held her hand and murmured sweet words in her ear. A new doctor came and said, “But it's a knife that cuts both ways: if we give her blood thinners, she could have a heart attack; if we don't, she could have another stroke.”

And so, we did nothing. At noon, she went into a coma. When I retell this now, it sounds as if we were negligent, incompetent. We spent a week, waiting, while Mamma slowly resurfaced. We spoke to her to encourage her, but she did not respond except to Papà's sweet words. “My dearest,” he would say. “Everything will be fine, my darling.”

She could no longer understand everything. Some moments, if we closed our eyes, she would almost sound like herself; other times, she babbled incoherently. It was heartbreaking to see her change so completely. We were all despairing, thinking that she might die.

One morning, after seventeen days, Mamma woke up and started to sing as she used to before the weight of us all silenced her. In between, she would say, “I want to get up. I want to get up. I want to go out.”

So we picked her up, dressed her, and set her down at the table. She was reborn into a second life, a tranquil state — Eden — the sweetness and happiness of being.

Daniela's death and Mamma's stroke so close together created a monumental grief none of us could surmount. The children dispersed, unwilling or unable to face the silent house, the tracks which now forever symbolized a severing. Renato stayed out long hours with his friends, Clarissa took Mimí with her to Bari, and Papà, grief-stricken, sat beside Mamma all day, stroking her hands and back, murmuring encouragements. He was totally defeated, his back curved, his eyes perpetually moist.

Requiem Mass for Vito Santoro

The choir will perform

Verdi's Requiem

Featuring Mr. Santoro's sister

Clarissa Santoro

Saturday, August 3

8:00 p.m.

World-famous soprano Clarissa Santoro has returned home after a sixteen-year absence, to bury her brother, Vito, whose body was recently discovered in Fregene. Our sympathies with the family.

May they find peace in God's love.

Belisolano, Italy, August 3, 2002

While everyone is at the requiem mass for Vito, Piera sits in bed, her memento box on her lap. Instead of listening to Clarissa's singing and the priest's droning voice, she has spent the last two hours crying over
Two Women
, Moravia's film about a mother and daughter raped by Germans during the war. It makes her yearn for her own mother. She reaches inside the box and pulls out a fragile roll of paper, which she gingerly unravels. Inside lie two fragments of a rusted embroidery needle her mother kept to neutralize bad luck.
See a needle and let it lie, sure to rue it by and by
. According to her mother, sewing utensils — especially needles, pins, and scissors — were endowed with dangerous properties. One could not give a friend a packet of needles without removing one needle and pricking the recipient; a broken needle presaged a friendship in jeopardy; when not being used for sewing, scissors were to be hung on a nail to keep them out of harm's way and to ensure the house was protected from evil spirits; one must never walk by a pin without retrieving it. As a child, Piera believed these superstitions because Mamma could give specific examples of the misery that had befallen those who had not heeded the warnings.

In the memento box, a small green book bulges with remedies, not only for physical ailments, but also for
malocchio
— the evil eye. Mamma's world was populated by spirits and devils and angels and saints and gods and everything in between. She believed in the possibility of everything. For her, curses and miracles were not charming folklore, but dynamic forces that determined her family's paths. Piera longed for a return to these times, when she was blessed with faith, when anything was possible.

Mamma's miracles were all-inclusive of everything good, and by extension, implied that the world was evil and dangerous: her miracles included good weather and health, Papà's job, wild dandelions, or peas, easy births, and so on. She was thankful for everything, as if it had been bestowed on her not by chance or worth, but by divine intervention.

Piera takes the sharpest of the two needle fragments, and pricks her arm. A droplet of blood surfaces. She licks it off. Then, she rewraps the embroidery needle and sets it in the box beside her bed. She uncaps a small bottle and squeezes a few drops on her tongue, then lies back and waits for divine intervention.

A light breeze puffs up the bottom of the flimsy curtain across her balcony door. She closes her eyes, and her room fills with the sounds of laughter and talk, car horns and tires on pavement.
Where has everyone gone?
She is not thinking of her siblings now, but of all the people she has loved and cared for…
Mamma, Papà, Vito, Aldo, Clarissa, Renato, Mimí, Daniela
. She takes a piece of paper from her bedside table and writes their names in a circle. There. There, she thinks.
Mamma, Papà, Vito, Aldo, Clarissa, Renato, Mimí, Daniela
.

The repetition of the names becomes a mantra, a mandala, her mother and father and brothers and sisters spinning on the page, waiting. She pauses at each name, closes her eyes and imagines each one's features not as they are now, but as they were when she was a child — their innocent eyes, their smiling mouths.
Piera
, she writes on the page, in the centre of the mandala. She is the heart, surrounded by her family's names. Or maybe she is held there captive. Constrained.

She gets up, rummages through the top drawer of her bureau, and pulls out a delicate folded white handkerchief with a red poppy embroidered in the corner. She closes her eyes, holds it against her face, and imagines the scent of her mother as she cut and hemmed and embroidered this handkerchief by the light of a kerosene lamp, and later the Mamma of 1964, when Piera is driving between hospitals — Mamma in one, Papà in the other. And for a moment, they're still alive. She has an immense migraine, hasn't eaten all day. Papà is in the hospital in Noicattaro with yet another bout of bronchitis; Mamma has had a second stroke, and they've put her in a hospital in Conversano. They don't tell Papà for a week or so, until she gets worse. Piera is crazy with worry.

When Papà hears about Mamma, he checks himself out of the hospital against all pleading, and phones Piera. “If you don't come to get me,” he tells her, “I'll throw myself out the window.” He has a fever of 40°C, but he wants to be with Mamma.

When Piera drives up in the white Fiat, he's waiting outside, one hand leaned against the limestone wall. “Papà,” she says, “this is madness. You should not be up.” She rushes around to help him in, but he waves her away. He is frail and exhausted, yet no matter what she says, he will not speak to her. In the car, she talks about Mamma, while he stares out the side window, tears rolling down his cheeks.

And then they are in Mamma's room, and she exclaims, “Ovidio, I've been waiting for you. I've missed you so much. I feel such emptiness without you.” For several days, he sits by her side, and they hold hands like young lovers.

Now and then, Piera has to turn her over, to keep her from getting bedsores. Papà says, “Don't bother her. Leave her alone!”

So Piera shows him the red circle. He says nothing after that, not even after Mamma's third stroke, when she dies, not even a week later, when he's on the brink of his own death.

Her mother's presence now swells into the room, not as a physical being, but as an incandescence, a gateway through which Piera need only step. But before the thought can take root, Mamma begins to fade, like a time-release photo. The colour drains, then details and features slowly, slowly turn to white.
Mamma
! Piera cries, and her voice is that of a child.
Mamma, don't go.
But soon, Mamma is only an outline drawn in the air in front of her, white as sun. Piera's eyes burn, and she begins to weep. Once she starts, she cannot stop the artesian well behind her eyes.

For months now, she's been crying indiscriminately as she watches
TV
. She cries for the atrocities of war, for heroic rescues; she cries overcome by the beauty of a violet, the suffering of a sick bear in a zoo; she cries for those who were abandoned, for those who reunited; she cries for the heartache of the unemployed, for the joy of instant lottery millionaires; she even cries during commercials — at the squeals of small children tasting a breakfast cereal, the delight of housewives discovering a new detergent… She empties boxes of tissues daily.

In the hall outside her room, the sounds of heels tapping on tiles, Clarissa's laughter, Oriana's and David's voices, Teresa. They have returned from the church.

A knock, then the handle turns, but she has locked the door from the inside. “Piera?” Clarissa calls out. “Piera, stop this nonsense and open the door.”

“Go away.”

“This is not about me or you, Piera. This is about Vito. You should be ashamed! The whole town turned out for Vito's mass.”

“I'm sure you were in your glory,” Piera says. She imagines Clarissa dressed in a flowing evening gown, her mouth open, her arms out, everyone clapping.

“Don't think you can bait me. This is about Vito!” Clarissa repeats. “Open this door right now! We have a right to know what's going on.”

“Go away,” Piera says again. Tears flow out of her eyes, drop upon drop, until they form two rivulets, black water flowing, she and Clarissa separate and apart. She sniffles loudly.

“We're all sick of this,” Clarissa says. “Catering to you as if you were some delicate flower.” She sighs, exasperated. “First Mamma spoiled you, then Sandro spoiled you, and now you think you can get your way just by crying. Well, you're wrong. We're not going to go away until you open this door!”

“You were the spoiled one!” Piera cries.

“Me? Who had the perpetual headaches, and so got special treats? Who read in her room all day? Who always got her way by crying?”

“While you were outside playing,” Piera says, “I was inside helping Mamma with the shop.”

“I'm sure you were soooo helpful, Mamma couldn't have done without you. What were you? Four? Three?” Clarissa laughs. “And don't bother telling me about the kerosene and your stupid little hands.”

“You've always been spiteful,” Piera says. “And self-centred.”

“Mamma was far too lenient with you,”Clarissa says, her voice trembling, “because she loved you more.”

Piera wipes her eyes. She gets up, and steps out onto her the balcony where her geraniums bloom, tall and thirsty in the August heat. How slowly the minutes pass, and how quickly too. The days, long and languorous, thirty-seven degrees, and the Adriatic Sea, if she could drive the few miles out to it, impossibly blue, impossibly inviting.

“Piera?” Clarissa calls. “I need to talk to you.”

Piera hears a new tone in her sister's voice. She comes to stand behind the door. “What?” she says.

“I know I made you a promise, but I don't know if I can keep it any longer.”

“Clarissa, please,” Piera says.

“I mean it,” Clarissa says, softly, then she begins to sing “
Un bel di vedremo
” from
Madama Butterfly
, her gorgeous soprano piercing Piera's heart.

“What is it that you mean?” Oriana's voice in the hall.

Clarissa stops singing. “How long have you been there? Please turn that thing off. Fazio!” she calls down the hall to the kitchen where everyone is assembled. “Come and take your rude daughter away.”

“Oriana, leave us alone,” Piera yells.

“Ciao, Zia Piera,” Oriana says. “Finally we're getting somewhere. Open the door.”

“That's enough, Oriana,” Fazio's voice now joins the chorus in the hall.

Clarissa's soprano rises, plaintive, emotional.

“Go away, Papà! I'm in the middle of filming. Talk to me, Zia Clarissa.” Then as Clarissa continues to sing, Oriana translates as an aside to her camera: “
One fine day, we'll see a strand of smoke / Over the far horizon and the sea / And then the ship will appear…”

“
What's going on?” David's voice now.

Clarissa continues to sing.

“
Do you see it? He has come. / I won't go down to meet him./ I will stay at the edge of the hill and wait and wait…,”
Oriana says.

“Clarissa, please,” Piera says again.

A knock, then David's voice. “Zia Piera, please open the door. There's a commotion out here.”

“
Chi sará, chi sará
,” Clarissa sings. “
E come sará giunto
, c
he dirá, che dirá
?”

She raps once more, then her heels tap away from the door.

“Who will it be? Who will it be? / And as he arrives / What will he say? What will he say?”
Oriana translates, her tone indifferent — already a voiceover to the film in her head. “Zia Clarissa, wait! Will you sing the whole aria for me? I'd like to use it as a soundtrack during our meals downstairs…”

Piera brings her hands up to her cheeks. Her skin is hot and damp. She feels faint and goes back to bed, squeezes a few drops onto her tongue, then lies against the pillows and stares at the
TV
until the voices in the hall diminish, then stop altogether.

She falls into a stupefied sleep, the television voices burrowing into her dreams and creating disorienting memories or nightmares. Before Vito's discovery, before the family arrived, Teresa would come up and turn off the
TV
before she went to bed herself. Without Teresa, Piera leaves the
TV
on twenty-four hours a day, a chattering companion that allows her the illusion of being in touch with the world. She watches travel programs avidly, as well as anything educational, so that despite her fear of flying and of closed spaces, she can travel to faraway places from the comfort of her bed. She has so internalized the television travel that when anyone calls to tell her about a trip they've taken, Piera says, “I've been there too. So beautiful. So —” This is one of the many petty things she and Clarissa have fought about over the years. Clarissa says that Piera is not a participant in her own life, that she is a passive observer while claiming knowledge of everyone else's.

In her own mind, Piera had supplanted her mother. In her own mind, Piera thought of her parents, brothers, and sisters as her children, hers to lead and nudge towards happy lives. In her own mind, Piera erected a large apartment building, so that all her siblings could live near her and adore her for the rest of their lives. In her own mind, Piera was Mother Earth, not a quiet, Zen Mother Earth, but a volatile one — the Mother Earth of Oriana's
TV
documentaries, the one whose fury is unleashed daily in torrents of water, earthquakes, fires, tornadoes, avalanches, volcanic eruptions, and every other possible natural disaster, the one born and reborn from her own destruction.