Solitaria (3 page)

“She says she'll talk to you and only you,” Clarissa says, a tightness in her tone.

When his mother speaks of her sister Piera, it's always with slightly pursed lips, with a permanent tone of disapproval. It's more than bias, David thinks, it's something historical. “But that's ridiculous,” he says. “Why would she choose me, when she hasn't seen me in years? What do I know about her life?”

“I think that's the point,” Clarissa says. “She says we're all biased against her. She
adores
you and thinks you'll be impartial.” She pauses.

David hesitates for a moment. Although he hasn't seen his aunt in many years, he knows her adoration flourishes through the mask of distance, his flaws invisible. “I'm not finished the term,” he says, uneasily. “Besides, I promised Bernette a holiday together before the new term begins.”

“This is a family emergency,” Clarissa says. “And Bernette's lived without you long enough that another couple of weeks won't matter, believe me.” She pauses. “We're all going home for the funeral service. Please. I need you to come with me.”

After he hangs up, Julia glances at him. “Everything ok?”

He nods.

She shrugs and returns to her reading.

He opens his email and searches for Bernette's last message, dated three days ago and buried among thirty others. It outlines flights and destinations, hotels and car rentals, prices and dates. Bernette wants them to sign up for a three-week eco-tour in a Third World country. She has included numerous links to various organizations and causes. David sighs. The eco-tour itself sounds interesting. The prospect of three weeks with Bernette, however, fills him with anxiety. In the nineteen months they've been in this relationship, they have spent only one week together, during the academic convention where they first met. Since then, they've had regular email, phone sex, and the odd weekend.
Relation ship
, he thinks, as if they were on a journey without destination, stuck in a high-priced condo on the Residensea, aimlessly navigating the waters of the globe. Their romance is largely based in text, and words uttered across phone lines and cell towers.
I love you
, they sign off.
I miss you
. David is no stranger to e-love. Long-distance romance equals desire fuelled by frustration. Intimate knowledge often burns the fire out. Solid time.

He composes a warm email, telling her about his uncle Vito, and how he must accompany his mother to Italy and doesn't know when he'll return. Family business. Perhaps they could try for the eco-tour during the Christmas holidays? Or next spring, before the rainy season?

He rereads the email, trying to imagine it from her perspective.
I love you. I miss you
. He clicks on the Send button.

“Do you want to have a drink later?” Julia asks when he stands up.

“I wish,” he says. “I may have to go to Italy.”

“Italy?” she says, smiling widely. “Poor you.”

“I'm serious. It's a family emergency.”

“Oh, David, I'm sorry —”

“It's not like that,” he says, and explains about his uncle.

“You should definitely go,” Julia says when he's done. “Don't worry about a thing. I'll take your classes. There are only a couple to go.”

“Would you? You're an angel,” he says. “I won't expect you to mark anything. I'll take care of them when I come back.”

He's in his thirty-second-floor bachelor suite in Vancouver's West End barely an hour, when the phone rings. “You must be kidding,” Bernette says.

He laughs. “I wish. I couldn't make up something like this.” A pause. “I'm sorry.” He imagines her standing in front of a window in an apartment he's never seen, a thin thirty-eight-year-old woman, with brown cropped hair.

“I've been so looking forward to seeing you,” Bernette says, her voice soft. She sighs, and he hears the disappointment in that breath.
Dis - appointment
, he thinks, how appropriate.

“I have too. Look, I promise, as soon as I'm done in Italy, I'll fly out and we'll spend some time together.”

“You've been saying that all summer,” she says, a little edge to her voice.

“You
know
how busy I've been.” He takes a deep breath. “We've been over all this already. Please try to understand.”

“Are you seeing someone else?”

“That's ridiculous,” he says. “How could you even ask?”

“All right,” she says, “if it's so ridiculous, why don't I come with you to Italy? Then you can do your family thing and we'll be together.”

Now it's his turn to sigh. “It's much more complicated than that,” he says. “I haven't seen the family for years, and we're dealing with a tragedy here. I just don't think it's a good idea —”

“No, you wouldn't,” she says.

“It's family business,” he says. “It's not as if we could travel around together. I'll be in a house the whole time. Besides, we'll be speaking Italian. You'd be bored.”

“You don't consider me part of your family.”

He has no response for that, because she's right. Why do these uncomplicated e-romances always turn into torturous scenes of accusations from which he can't really defend himself?

“Can you excuse me a moment?” he says. “My other line is ringing.” He clicks the hold button, without waiting for her reply, and lets out a long sigh.

When he returns to the line, she has hung up.

Three days later, David and his mother Clarissa land at Fiumicino Airport just before noon, exhausted by the nine-hour flight from Vancouver to Heathrow, the three-hour wait, and the two-hour flight to Rome. They stand by the luggage carousel, dully watching bags slide down the ramp, bags that appear uniformly black, bags that belong to everyone but them. Soon, Clarissa gathers a crowd of admirers, begging for autographs. She is a diva, a soprano who has sung in every opera house in the world, with every tenor of renown. She is revered here in Italy. “
Piacere
,” she says, signing tickets and itineraries, until their bags are loaded into a taxi, and soon they are on a train, heading to Belisolano, to her mother's hometown.

“Do you miss it all?” David asks her when they're settled in their seats. Clarissa retired five years ago, and now gives private voice lessons to protégés, and does the odd
TV
appearance and recital. “The fans, the glory?” David spent his childhood with nannies backstage, in hotel rooms, while they travelled the globe. Then came boarding school, and later university. By then, Clarissa was so well-buffered by handlers, the only fans and glory he saw were on
TV
.

Clarissa smiles. Ageless, her beauty natural — the smooth olive skin, the large sparkling eyes, her full lips. She has her hair streaked to hide the grey, and is not an ounce above her normal weight. Of course, she also has a personal trainer, and a room full of cosmetics. “Sometimes,” she says. “Other times, I wish I could be anonymous.”

The train pulls out of Roma Termini, crosses the city through backstreet railyards surrounded by graffitied walls and buildings:
That's Amore! Welcome To Romayork!
A universal language of exaggerated puffy lettering, three-dimensional words crying out anti-everything slogans, gang signatures leaving their mark. Here and there, even advertisements are graffitied onto stone walls, an infiltration, like buying nose-rings at The Bay.

“It's changed,” Clarissa says, “yet still the same. I love this city. This country. Home.” She sighs. “This is your motherland.”

David stares out at the Roman walls, the archways; ruins sweep past quicker than he can fathom. Six rows of pines, low buildings in yellows and reds, the roofs warm terracotta. Then suddenly, five minutes out of Rome, the city gives way to open fields, vineyards, olive groves, an expanse of green. He has no sense of Italy as a motherland or fatherland, although he spent many summers here as a child. “
Your
motherland, you mean,” he says.

Clarissa waves her hand in circular motions, dismissing his statement. “Inside,” she says, tapping her chest, “don't you feel the pull of your roots?”

He smiles. Now that she's here, Italy is home, though she hasn't touched ground in this place herself for years. In Canada, her version of Italy is one of colours and shapes, one that lacks the stories of human interaction, the past being something she does not discuss. Clarissa lives in the present and the future. She ignores the past, not through any conscious denial, but simply through neglect. How is it possible that she had no feelings for all she left behind? How could she not speak about her own mother and father, her own brothers and sisters and friends in Italy? David used to wonder. How could she not think of his father — of the nebulous affair that produced David, and that she has always refused to discuss?

“My roots are very shallow,” he says. He imagines them tangled around him, exposed.

“How can you say that?” she says. “After all the summers you spent here. Zia Piera would die of heartbreak to hear you.”

He shrugs. “I was a child.” A small guilt tugs at him, because she's right. He thinks about those summers that began when he was three or four, and continued until his early teens. The large dark house, the inner garden, the walls that kept him in. Even then, already, Piera was solitary, demanding, a scrupulous guardian protecting him from imagined risk.

“She loved you more than anything,” Clarissa says.

A swarm of birds trail the sky.

The oppressive heat of memory hangs between them. He does recall Piera's devotion, her joy at seeing him, despite the rules, the strict codes of conduct, her love a large, encompassing burden. He pats Clarissa's hand. “I know. It's true,” he says. “I loved her too.”

“I should have made you come more often,” she says. “I should have made you feel the earth in your bones. This is home.”

He lets her words hover in the air. He stopped coming when, in his early teens, Zia Piera would not allow him to leave her house and garden unaccompanied. She didn't want him spending time with his cousin Marco. Teresa's son. Vito's son. Marco the heartbreaker, who had already begun to gamble at fourteen. How attractive he seemed back then, with his easy laughter, his packs of cigarettes, his magazines of girls — all forbidden to David, who was twelve.

“
You
are my home,” he says, and smiles.

Clarissa sighs, but it's a happy sigh. She settles back to nap.

She did her best, David thinks. Her concession to the past was to enrol him in weekly Italian lessons so he could write letters to Zia Piera — letters at first dictated by Clarissa, then written in his own voice, and finally when he stopped visiting her in his teens, letters written by him in his mother's voice. By then, Piera had receded in memory as people do when they're absent too long. Her letters continued for a while, mawkish and too familiar for his comfort. By the time he completed his university degree, he had stopped writing to her altogether, except for Christmas and birthday cards.

It's surprising to him that Clarissa is exhibiting this nostalgia. She is the consummate traveller, the woman whose home is everywhere and nowhere. She is rarely still, rarely what David calls
contemplative
. His childhood memories of her are fragmented, a series of departures and arrivals, marked by longing in between. Zia Piera was the constant, the bedrock, while Clarissa was unpredictable, unavailable.

All around him on the train, people read newspapers and books, speak into cellphones, all disconnected from each other despite their proximity. He thinks of Bernette thousands of miles away; he thinks of his uncle Renato, who lives in Australia and never comes home; of his father, who knows nothing of his birth, who could be the man sitting in the next compartment; of his mother and himself in Canada. People Without Borders. We are all scattered, he thinks, our family like organic shrapnel blasted across continents.