Solitaria (25 page)

Piera smiles. “A story made up by someone who doesn't believe in magic,” she says.

A young couple approaches, laden with cameras and backpacks, their faces determined, she unfurling a map while he flips through the pages of a guide book, as if they are afraid to trust their eyes. They look at David, then at Piera, curious. Rude, rude people, she thinks, averting her eyes. No one has any manners any more. She steps back and veers, unsteady, lightheaded, as if she has just stumbled off a carnival ride. Outside in the piazza, the temperature is thirty-seven degrees and rising. David senses her distress, and steers her into the church's cool cavernous air.

“Let's sit for a moment,” he says, sliding into a pew.

She sits down beside him and sighs. Saints and angels stare back at her, their stony eyes accusing. She closes her eyes and sees them all clearly — her brothers and sisters, her mother and father, friends, neighbours, strangers, God — all pointing fingers at her. She imagines herself bloated with sins, banished to a mountaintop, hollow horns glistening in the sunlight. If only it were that simple.

All around, tourists come and go, frantically clicking their cameras in an effort to capture beauty, history. She watches their casual indifference. What will they see when they return home? Marble saints and gods on pedestals? The epitome of suffering? Will they even recall the towns and cities they've tracked through? The cathedrals and basilicas and chapels that cover half of Italy, their monumental significance to those who live here, whose lives unfold, whose rituals occur inside them, from baptism to death? Click. Click. Click. A procession of eyes unseeing.

A priest emerges from a tall narrow door at the side of the altar, a lit candle in his hand. Piera crosses herself and motions to David. They walk out, without turning back. In the portico, Piera stops and slides her hand through the open mouth once more.

“Everything I've done, I've done for love,” she says again.

“Are you trying to convince me or you?” David asks.

Piera shakes her head. “You don't understand,” she says. She withdraws her hand intact. Sins disperse like dust motes in the air. She wants her version told, though knows that too often, the good turns bad in the retelling, and the bad turns comical, so that memory is reduced to trivial sentiment — black-and-white and devoid of the subtle shadings of the human heart.

They take a taxi to the Lepanto Metro, and while they wait for their bus, they stop at a small pizzeria for lunch. David phones Marco to tell him the car is parked at the station.

Then Teresa is on the line. “Piera? For the love of God, where are you?” she says, her voice high-pitched.

“It's David. We're fine. Don't worry.”

“You must come home,” Teresa says. “This has gone far enough! I'm going to go to the police.”

“Please, Teresa, calm down,” David says. “There's no need for the police. I promise we'll be back tomorrow night.”

The bus is late. The early morning, the long train ride, and the anticipation are manifesting in Piera's legs. They sit in a corner café and wait. It's late afternoon, and still the heat is dense, sweltering.

Fregene is only an hour's bus ride away, a coastal city north of the Tiber. Once on the bus, they each turn to their private thoughts. Piera thinks of the marvellous weeks she spent here with Sandro and Aldo and Clarissa, so long ago. Her stomach feels queasy, as if she were on the edge of something — joy perhaps, or sorrow. Once they turn off the freeway, everything is both familiar and strange, in the way that memory plays tricks — she recognizes the road meandering through green countryside, dotted with yellow broom, but doesn't recall the tall fences; the rickety wooden bridge that flaps and creaks under their weight is a bridge she remembers made of stone; and the thick pinewoods that date to Roman times are now reduced to a ribbon of green that thins out as they near the town, until the pines become a straggle edging the road.

Gone are the open fields, the modest cottages. In their place, a quadrant of pink and white villas rise like an architect's rendition, precise, landscaped, fenced, and gated; the former glorious breadth of underbrush morphed into an ugly, barren cityscape.

They step off the bus and look around.

Piera searches through memory: a church, a square of green — the Public Pinery — that summer week, the scent of cones. Simple pleasures. Clarissa and Aldo beside her, ambling amidst the tall, tall pines, surrounded by purple mallow, turtle doves questioning the air with their
who who who
, the ground a depression, the sky immense, a turquoise sea shimmering behind wispy forage swaying in the breeze. But the pinery, too, is fenced now, an unnatural division of nature, and she thinks about boundaries and for a moment, can't recall why she's here. She hesitates, the heat thick in her lungs, and when she closes her eyes, sounds swirl in her head: a stubborn car engine turning over, a woman repeating a child's name, two young girls' laughter, a ball bouncing on the sidewalk, the bells of the church pealing the hour, her own breath raspy and laboured.

“Are you all right?” David says close to her ear.

Papà? Aldo? The voice both familiar and strange.

She opens her eyes. The pines have become a shadowed forest, dense, savage. Everything unfamiliar. She thinks she must have come to the wrong city. The young man is watching her, a small frown pleated between his eyebrows. “Zia Piera, you all right?” he repeats.

Piera's legs tremble, ready to buckle. She nods. David takes her arm all the same, and walks her to a bench.

“You must be hungry,” he says and pats her hand. “I'm sorry. I don't know where the time's gone. It's almost eight o'clock.”

“I'm fine, really,” Piera says, but her voice is meek. “We must go to the house.”

“We'll go right after we eat.” David stands and peers up and down the road. “Come,” he says. “I see restaurants further along the beach.” He helps Piera to her feet, and together they walk the two blocks toward the water, while Piera names plants and flowers: date palms, white, pink and red oleanders, poppies, yellow marguerites, eucalyptus, broom, and fragrant white jasmine in wild hedges along the road.

They cross the street and enter Lido, one of the beach establishments. Pay the fee. Once, all the townspeople had access to the beaches, but in the thirties, the fascists privatized everything and leased the beach to
stabilimenti,
who built parking lots and restaurants surrounded by high wire fences. Now there is hardly any spot where one can reach the water without buying a ticket.

“I'm fine now,” Piera says, once she's seated and has her breath back.

David looks a little doubtful. “Do we have a plan?” he says.

Piera nods. “We have to do this my way. I will tell you everything in due course.”

After supper, when they step outside, Piera is startled by the near dark. She fumbles in her purse until she finds her old travel alarm — yellowed white, with thick phosphorescent numbers. She bought it when she suffered from insomnia, so she could watch time in the middle of the night, the moment eternally elusive. It was better than worrying, better than trying to solve her daylight problems which stretched endlessly into the present, even when they had occurred years before. 9:34 p.m.
It's late
, she thinks.
Late
.

“
Davide
, don't waste your life,” she says.

“I'm certainly not trying to,” he says, startled.

“Poor Sandro,” she says.

They head along the beach, a few more steps. David walks beside her, his hand under her elbow. He is quiet, as though he can hear her heart hammering in her chest. The night is dark enough to disappear into. Up ahead, they surprise a couple entwined on a blanket at the edge of the deserted beach. The man reluctantly withdraws his lips from those of a woman whose hair is unruly with vibrant sensuality. They turn their heads, mumble “Sorry,” though Piera is not. She can imagine herself lying here, mouth parted, dress unbuttoned, breasts exposed.

They walk on, feet plowing the sand, their shoes filling, until she says, “Here it is.” She stands in the lozenge of light emanating through the curtains of the downstairs windows. She imagines Aldo on the couch, or maybe at his desk, his fingers ever busy, but no, that was a different place, a different time… she closes her eyes and wishes herself into a distant decade, that time with Vito, an open car and her hands fluttering like butterflies.

“Are you sure?” David says beside her. “It doesn't look like the one on
TV
.”

When she opens her eyes, she sees it is not Aldo's house after all, but another establishment.

“You're right,” she says. “I've confused it. It's somewhere here.”

They turn and walk on, searching for the house, for that place so vivid in Piera's memory, until they come to the gate, the yellow police tape.

“Here it is,” Piera says, although it's in such a state of entropy, were it not for the
TV
program, she would never have recognized it. On the windows, heavy iron grates lean at odd angles. “You climb the gate first, and help me over it.”

He looks at it, skeptical. “I don't know if this is a good idea, Zia Piera. Not only is it dangerous, but we're trespassing.”

“Don't tell me you're so fearful. All you Americans worry about is how dangerous everything is.”

“Canadian,” David says.

“Canadian, whatever. It's a continent. America.”

He climbs up onto the gate, and holds out his hand to help her over. She struggles a bit, but she's amazingly agile. He jumps down to the other side and holds out his arms to catch her.

“Be careful, Zia Piera,” David says, his hand holding her arm. “They've been doing demolition. It's dangerous here.”

“I've seen worse,” she says, smiling. Opens her purse and takes out a flashlight. “And I'm well prepared. See?” she says, and flicks it on. The house looms in front of them, doors and windows open, walls cracked.

“It's creepy,” David says, thinking about Vito's murder.

“No, not to me.” She steps towards the house. “Come on.”

“I don't think we should go inside. It's not safe,” he says. “What are we doing here, exactly?”

“In the middle of the journey of my life,” she says, as if reciting from memory, “I found myself in a darkened room, alone. There were no windows to let in light, no doors to show the way. That room, an omen of my life to come.”

He thinks it's a loose paraphrase of the beginning of Dante's
Inferno
, but he doesn't say so.

“This is the end and the beginning of the story,” she says. “I need to be here.”

He sighs and follows her into the house, wondering if they'll surprise rats or bats. The flashlight's halo captures glimpses of wrought-iron banisters and polished marble tiles in whose cracks sprout tufts of weeds. A mouse scurries into a hole in the plaster. She takes his arm, and clicks off the flashlight.

“When Vito heard of my supposed suicide attempt,” she says in the darkness, “he tried to find me, but no one would tell him where I had gone. They were trying to protect me, because they thought that Vito's constant debts had been responsible for my depression. Vito went to see Sandro, Aldo, and Mimí. He wrote to Clarissa and to Renato, as if Renato would know. He even snuck in to see Mamma one day when Papà went to buy a newspaper, but Mamma knew nothing. However, she did tell Papà that Vito had come looking for me. In the end, it was Teresa who told him where I was.”

“You were here with him when he died.”

She catches her breath. “I should have died,” she says. “My life has been a shadow of a life.”

They remain quiet and still for a moment longer, David intuiting something momentous. Then, she clicks on the flashlight, and they walk through the house slowly, while she delivers a monologue, “This was the living room where Clarissa, Aldo, and I would play cards; this was the study where I used to sit and read poetry; this was the kitchen, this was my bedroom,” as though it were important to reaffix a memory to a space.

They have just entered the dining room when a rumble begins. It's a slow-motion moment, like a movie special effect, the earth trembling under their feet, all around them. And they're falling, falling through the air, sucked down into the earth. Piera screams, imagining for a moment that God has opened up the pit of hell for her to fall into. Her wails echo back at her, mocking. Her hands scrabble at anything solid to break her fall, until she lands feet first, then tumbles to her side, her head crashing against stone. For a moment, she lies there, stunned, fully expecting an apparition — a devil, a phantasm, all the nightmares she's ever had — to come pummelling down onto her. She waits for a scourge of fire to incinerate her. When none of this happens, she opens her eyes. “Davide?” she calls. “Davide?” her voice barely a whisper.

She feels as if she's been beaten, lying on her side, the pain so intense she can barely move. She lifts her head and squints into the darkness. She's in a large damp grotto, ten feet below the jagged edge of the house. Is this the end, then? she thinks. From upstairs, the flashlight sends an eerie obelisk of light into one corner of the grotto.

Then she sees him, lying in the shadows.

“Vito?” she whispers. It can't be. But there he is. She slowly drags herself towards him, and every movement is agony. He is lying prone, still. She can't see his face. All is deathly quiet. “Vito?” she calls again, then stifles a sob. But it can't be. Not again. Perhaps I'm dead, she thinks. She slowly closes and opens her eyes, in a prolonged blink.

He is still there, beside her in the shadows. “Oh Vito, why did you come back?” she says.