Solitaria (2 page)

This program, via satellite, is seen simultaneously in all the countries of Europe and the Mediterranean basin.

Our answering machine receives approximately 40,000 responses a year.

July 17, 2002

Found Murdered in Fregene: Who Was He?

Around 10:30 a.m. on July 12, 2002, during the demolition of an old villa, the excavation team who were removing trees from the property discovered the skeletal remains of a man. Forensics have determined the man died in the 1950s of gunshot wounds to the head. He is Caucasian, 178 centimetres. No one has come forth to claim the body, nor has anyone of this description ever been declared missing in these parts.

As best as can be determined, he was wearing a grey sweater, black pants and dark shoes at the time of his death.

Also found were the following items:

• a thin gold wedding band

• a bullet casing

• a pewter chain on which hangs a
mano fico
amulet, engraved on the back with
V + T Forever

Results from the autopsy will be available in the coming days.

If you have any information regarding the identity of this victim, as well as any information regarding the circumstances of his death, please call the number at the bottom of your screen.

Vancouver, July 25, 2002

Middle of the wedding ceremony, guests hushed and weepy.

“Repeat after me...” the minister says, and a hummingbird slams full-tilt into the plate glass window facing the lake. The bird's small body quivers on the gravel path, its feathers iridescent, like neon fish. David's friend, Joe, and his almost-wife falter mid-word, their eyes fixed on the trembling creature. No one moves.
Better to pretend
. David thinks of the word, ‘hummingbird': an Americanism. The birds don't hum; the rapid beat of their narrow wings produces the sound, makes them appear to be in constant motion. This one is lying on its side at a most unnatural angle. David's chest expands.
Enlarged heart
:
A compensation for increased need.
He sighs. Concentrates. This is Joe's wedding; this is a happy occasion and that's that.

Later, after the kiss and the pronouncement, David steals outside, but the bird is gone. Cleared away, no doubt, by the diligent hotel staff. He would rather believe the bird regained its senses and flew away. In the window, a postcard backdrop of sky, water, and trees. How easy to mistake reflection, he thinks, catching sight of himself as a stranger, a forty-six-year-old man in a tuxedo, hair dark and wavy. A slender man with bleached green eyes and a cynical disposition women find attractive. A man who goes to weddings, dinner parties, lectures, and movies on his own; who is not afraid of solitude.

“See anyone interesting?” The bride emerges from the side door, her puffy white dress clouded around her.

David smiles, startled. “Not even looking.” Annie is always trying to match him up with someone, as if he were a shoe. She doesn't understand that David is perfectly happy. As happy as anyone can be with a series of e-romances and a lover who lives thousands of miles away.

“You plan to spend the rest of your life on your own?” Annie says, her tone all sympathy and pity.

“I have Bernette,” David says, “we're good,” though it sounds fake even to him. Bernette is his long-distance girlfriend, a serious young woman who teaches in the Women's Studies Department of a small private university southeast of Chicago. A couple of months ago, on a lark, he googled “Long-Distance Relationships,” and came up with an advice site in which he read that the most important aspect of long-distance relationships is
“to have a solid time in the future for when the long distance part of the relationship will end, no matter the time length. Without it, the relationship can begin to mold into something that is always distant — even with great communication. With it, each person can see the point at which the distance will end, and work harder to keep emotions readily available.”
He and Bernette have never discussed this solid time. Their relationship is built on a series of small impermanent futures — we'll go on holiday; I'll come to visit — carrots dangled at the end of a long stick.

Annie clamps her small hand on his forearm. “You hardly see each other. What are you getting out of it?”

“My freedom.” David smiles through clenched teeth.

Annie stiffens and pulls back her hand. She thinks he's dismissing her marriage, and maybe he is. “Freedom's highly overrated,” she says. “You're kidding yourself.”

“That's your version,” David says.

Annie shrugs and goes back inside. David watches her disappear behind the window mirage, thinking,
Romance
is a shatterproof window
. The phrase applies equally to his e-romances, where the screen is a buffer zone between real emotions, and to Bernette, whose distance forms a thick murky glass.

You plan to spend the rest of your life on your own?

It's not a plan, like a three-week holiday — charter a small plane to Everest, chatter-teeth up to base camp, click a few photos, then into that five-star hotel. This is his life and this is how it's going so far. Instead of cultivating a mate (like some exotic orchid from a jungle, or an arctic rhododendron that blooms for a few hours one day a year), he has concentrated on words.

In the evenings, when according to Annie, he should be on spring-loaded dance-floors, sashaying with wonder-women, he is bent over endless piles of English essays he marks night after night, essays written by nineteen-year-olds whose arrogance and ignorance are staggering.

It's not a plan, it's the absence of one.

He's in his hotel room by ten o'clock, minutes after bride and groom hop off their cake and drive away in their tin-can car. They're at Harrison Hot Springs, 70 miles east of Vancouver. Off with the tuxedo, on with the bathing trunks, and down he goes to the outdoor hot pools. The air is crisp, though it's early July. Up here, the narrow lake forms a wind tunnel between mountains. Once the sun sets, except for a couple of weeks in August, the temperature plummets.

He swims the length of the pool twice, then perches on one of the ledges moulded to resemble natural rock, and looks up. Directly across, the hotel's tower: a succession of glass patio doors, like a multi-screen
TV
, as if one story were not enough.
Short Cuts
. Many of the drapes are open, either because the room's occupants have forgotten that despite the mountain in front of them, there are pools below from which people can view their every move, or because they don't care about privacy any more than exhibitionists who install cameras in their homes and project their dull, generic lives onto the Internet.

Soon, couples arrive — wedding guests giggling and chasing each other around like children finally emerging from their adult
hoods
. They squeal, laugh, jazz into each other. They splash, race, kiss underwater, as if
they
were the newly-weds. When one couple starts kissing passionately on the ledge two feet from him, David gets out of the water and patters up to his room.

He's brought a set of English essays to mark.
“Get a life,”
Joe and Annie would say if they knew
.
He sits up in bed, opens the first one and begins reading, “True wisdom comes only after you have learned to fear God.” He slams the essay back into its pile, and dumps the pile onto the rug. The last thing he needs right now is faulty logic. He flicks off the light, slides open the glass doors, and parts the curtains. Flakes of conversation, trickles of laughter waft into the room, disembodied. He moves back to the bed, where he can see out but not be seen. In front of him, the dark, imposing mountain face.

At 2:14 a.m., he is awakened by the rhythmic banging of a headboard against the wall behind his head. He opens his eyes, turns over, listening. A couple making love, their voices amplified in the dense silence. “Come on,” the man is saying, over and over, as if trying to coax the woman somewhere. She responds in hyper moans that sound both forced and theatrical. He turns on the light, sits up. Picks up the receiver and dials Bernette's number.

“Hello?” Her voice is sleepy. High-pitched, childlike.

They live in different times, he thinks. She's always hours ahead of him, her future, his past. Divisions and codes. What was he planning to say? Phone sex. Now, her vulnerable voice silences him.

“Hello?” she says again. This time her voice is more awake, almost alarmed.

He hangs up slowly and carefully. Turns out the light and lies in bed thinking about Bernette. Two marvellous years of nothing. They hardly know each other. Three times this past year, they've met in a city mid-way between their homes and fucked for a weekend. Weak. Weak. End.

The college is a quadrant of concrete and glass in prime downtown space, too hot in spring, summer, and fall, too cold in winter. At the centre of each building, a circular open space — glass-domed, six storeys high. A simulated tropical outdoors, with its fig trees and yuccas and palms strategically placed beside cedar benches, as if to say
you're in California, in a mall, an airport
.
Listen to your heels on the marble tiles. You are privileged. You are our clients.

David takes the stairs to the fifth floor, where the English instructors' offices are located. Every few months, everything they are and do is assigned a new buzz phrase. This month, they are
curriculum providers
and what they do instead of teaching is called
facilitating the delivery of materials.
Like longshoremen directing cranes. Poetry over there, CanLit to the left, essays to the right, adjectives and misplaced modifiers straight ahead. They use the chalkboard and overhead projectors to facilitate the facilitating.

In their own minds, the instructors are educators — all of them have spent on average nine to eleven years at university specializing in a subject they now try to teach to these
clients —
these eighteen-year-olds, straight out of high school, gelled and spiked and tinted, pierced and braided, in platform shoes and flared pants, fringed suede jackets and knee-high boots, who stomp around insisting their knowledge is equal to their instructors', insisting it is their constitutional right to get passing grades because they've paid the money
, and the client is always right.

David and another instructor share an office large enough for two desks and two bookcases. On the wall beside his desk, David has taped an innocuous screen-print of the Beatles, bought at a student art sale, something that cannot be construed as being in any way offensive to anyone. Years ago, when he first started working here, he'd hung a print of
The Marchesa Casati
by Augustus John in its place, having been captivated by the painting since he first saw it at the Art Gallery of Ontario. A couple of years later, after one of the college's numerous forums on
What Constitutes Sexual Harassment
?, David wondered if a female student could stare at the mysterious Marchesa and read sexual invitation. He took the print home, and kept his office door propped open at all times during office hours.

“Take a look at this,” his office mate Julia says, and hands him a booklet,
Teaching Excellence
, subtitled,
Teaching With Hospitality
. The first line reads: “Fortunately, hospitality is practiced more than it is preached. A cardinal academic virtue, hospitality is essential in the classroom…”

David imagines himself in a tuxedo, moving elegantly around the classroom offering trays of adverbs, racks of gerunds, mixed-metaphor salads, free-verse entrees, garlands of sonnets, double-dactyl desserts, and terza rima cappuccinos. He shakes his head. “I don't know about you,” he says, “but I will not be hosting guests, or offering accommodation or entertainment. I have not invited these students to dinner. They are
not
my friends.”

Julia laughs. “Where in our job description does it say ‘host'?”

David rolls his eyes.

“Let's draft a memo to the union,” Julia says, bold-writing in air.

“Let's launch a support group for instructors who don't want to become hosts,” David says.

“Let's get our inhospitable butts kicked out of here,” she says.

David and Julia are kindred souls, both sick to death of new-age methodology, terminology, and euphemisms, of students who arrive at university inflated with twelve years of hospitality and feel-good learning, students with no critical thinking skills. Now and then, he and Julia have a drink after work. Once Julia invited him to dinner, but he declined, afraid to alter their friendship.

“I feel really burned out,” David tells her. “I don't know how much longer I can tolerate this bullshit.”

She nods. “I know what you mean.”

They both smile sympathetically, then Julia looks away.

He swivels to face the window and stares at the grey backdrop against which rise skyscrapers whose flat glass surfaces reflect the swirling clouds. He has a small, unobstructed view of the harbour, though today even the water appears murky.
Cinereal
, he thinks, conjuring a sediment of ash. He likes Latinate words, because they are inextricably linked to his childhood, to the Italian language he learned before he went to kindergarten. Rain drizzles as it has for the past four days, and he imagines in the street below the monotonous spray of tires on pavement.

His cell rings. He glances at the caller
ID
. His mother, Clarissa.

“They've found my brother Vito,” she says. “Murdered. In Italy. And all these years, we never knew.” She is distraught and crying.

“Slow down, Mom. I thought Uncle Vito was in Argentina.”

“Well, obviously, he's not.”

Slowly, he gets the details. His aunt, Piera, the only one who claims to have received regular letters from her brother Vito, has locked herself in her bedroom, and refuses to speak to anyone, including her sister-in-law Teresa, who lives one storey below her.