Advice for Italian Boys (24 page)

Nicolo closed his eyes and flexed the muscles in his shoulders. He could feel his pulse surging underneath his skin. His fingers clenched. What he wanted, he realized, was to reach over and pull James’s head from his neck. He could feel the veins in his forearms inflating. His jaw and temple ached. He took a slow deep breath and then unfolded his hands.

“Well then,” he said. “You might as well take a picture of
this for the record too.” He was wearing grey sweatpants over his gym shorts. He stood up, pulled his sweatpants down to his knee and placed his leg up on the desktop under the bright, overhanging light for James and Sarah to see.

Enzo slept in on the morning of his hearing. He had worked at the factory until midnight and had been in bed before one, but he hadn’t been able to fall asleep until after two. Just before nine o’clock the sound of a door closing somewhere in the house woke him up. He showered, dressed and went into the kitchen. The coffee pot was upside down on a towel beside the sink. The breadbox held a heel of bread from a loaf made several days before. He called out.

“Ma! Nonna!”

No one was home. His father would have gone to work, and his mother must have taken Nonna out shopping with her.

He got his keys and wallet from the top of his dresser and drove to the Vaughan Bakery, the file that Salvatore had prepared for him to review on the passenger seat beside him. The day was cool and blustery. A dry urban wind carried with it scraps of dust and paper and invisible streams of sharp pollen molecules that invaded his nose and eyes and made his tear ducts itch. He parked and walked into the store, and saw with some annoyance that there was a long lineup at the coffee counter. He joined the back of the queue, quelling his natural, type-A impatience. Nicolo had convinced him to start going to yoga twice a week at the
gym, and he thought that this might be helping him maintain his composure in general.

The woman in the line immediately in front of him—medium height, indeterminate age, straight hair that reached to her shoulders and gleamed brighter than her complexion and so likely was dyed, rumpled navy trench coat overtop a gold sweater, and red wool, kilt-like, knee-length pleated skirt—spun around so abruptly that at first he thought she must have suddenly remembered that she had left the tap running or the stove on and been about to run from the store. But she didn’t step away from the line. Instead she addressed him directly.

“I’m never going to see you again, am I,” she said.

“I guess not.” Enzo was unsure what answer she was hoping or expecting to hear.

“You look like the kind of person that someone could say just about anything to,” she said.

“Yes, I think that’s true,” said Enzo.

“And it doesn’t really matter what I say, since I’ll probably never see you again.”

“I guess it doesn’t.”

“You don’t look as if you’d be easily shocked or judgmental or anything like that.”

It didn’t seem that any answer was required. Enzo glanced at the woman’s face covertly. He noticed that her purse and hands were small. She might be deranged but there was no sign she was dangerous.

“Because I’ve just worked it out. Standing here. I think I’ve finally figured it out.”

Enzo inclined his head in a neutral way.

“See that woman over there, behind me, at the table in the corner, in the yellow coat and thick stockings and ugly shoes?”

Enzo looked and saw, waiting at one of the bakery’s round tables, a woman who fit this description. She was bent over the tabletop, engrossed in a tabloid.

“That’s my mother. She’s waiting for me to bring her her coffee and her toast, lightly spread with margarine, but only if it’s Becel, otherwise it has to be butter, but only if it’s unsalted, otherwise dry, okay? And it has to be whole wheat, but failing that rye or sourdough but never multi-grain because multi-grain hasn’t got any taste or fibre.” The woman paused and drew a breath.

“So, what I realized, right now, standing here, is that I’m never going to make her happy, am I? I’m never going to be able to do it. It’s a mug’s game, right? It’s just not possible. I’m going to fail. Each and every time. It will always be the wrong kind of toast or the wrong margarine or the coffee will be cold or the cream will curdle. Because she’s the kind of person cream curdles
for,
see? That’s just the way it is. And, see, the thing is, I’m forty. I don’t feel forty, and I don’t even think I look forty, because when you think about it, nothing has ever happened to me and so I don’t have as many wrinkles as I probably should have if I’d done all the things I was supposed to have done by now, and I’m not getting fat, but it’s snuck up on me anyway, forty, even though I think I really thought deep down that it wouldn’t happen to me. It’s always that way, isn’t it? You don’t think it will happen to you but then it does. Your friends grow up and get married and move away and have kids and send you letters, you know the kind, the newsletter kind, and they
hand-write something personal in the corner at the bottom, and they still mail them to your
mother’s
house because they know that that’s where you still live, and no one even asks any more what your plans are because it’s pretty obvious really that you’re just going to moulder away, and
she’ll
make sure no one wants you notwithstanding all of the
hints
about grandchildren. She lets them fly, like missiles, when you’ve got your guard down and might even be starting to like her. And then,
kaboom,
like that, she explodes some comment like a bomb in your face. Grandchildren. For God’s sake.”

The line was moving very slowly. There seemed to be a problem with the Gaggia, behind which three of the staff had gathered with their heads together over a spiral-bound manual.

“So, it’s up to me, right? Because why do I put up with it?”

“I’m not sure.”

“I don’t have to do it. I’m forty years old, for Christ’s sake. I can do whatever I want. What’s stopping me? And, you know, I do know what I want. I’ve always wanted the same thing and it’s not so hard. It’s not too much to ask. It’s doable in fact.”

“What do you want?” Enzo was genuinely curious.

“I’ve decided that if I’m not going to be married, and at this point, let’s face it, it’s not very likely—like lightning it would have to be for that to happen now, if you see what I mean. If lightning isn’t going to strike, then I want to rent one of those small apartments above a store down on St. Clair. It could even be a studio. The smaller the better. A kitchen or kitchenette that I can clean in five minutes flat. A room with a rug and a couch and a table and a bed. A dresser and a closet
for my clothes. And the kind of window you can lean out of. That’s the important part. You can lean out the window and you’re not so high up, only on the second storey, so you can watch the people walking by underneath and you can really see them, you know, and if they’re talking loud enough and the traffic’s not too heavy you can hear what they’re saying to each other. The best would be over top of a coffee shop that’s open early in the morning but not too late at night, you know, the kind that everyone comes to. And a corner grocery store a block away where you can buy everything you need, fruits and vegetables and canned goods and cereal, and even things like yogourt if you check the date to make sure it hasn’t been there too long because those kinds of places don’t go through a lot of yogourt. And a dry cleaner where they know that this is your
favourite
pink sweater, and not just some woman’s sweater that isn’t important to her, and so they take special care. They take special care because it’s mine and they know that I live down the street in the apartment over the cafe, the one with the window. And when they walk by on Saturday afternoon they know that they can wave up at me and I’ll wave back. That’s what I want. That isn’t too much to ask, is it? I have the money. It’s not a question of money. I have my job and they pay me enough to have my own apartment. How much can they cost—the small ones down on St. Clair?”

“I don’t think they cost that much.”

“Right. So what I realized is that if it’s going to happen, I need to do it now. Right now. And if I wait for the coffee to be ready and the toast to be toasted then it will be too late and it will keep on being too late until either she’s dead or I am and in either case it’s still going to be too late.”

Enzo nodded. “That sounds right to me,” he said. It was true. He was convinced.

“So, is it okay if I give you this money?” The woman handed him a five-dollar bill. “Would you mind? Because it seems as if I have to go, and I know I’ll feel guilty, but I’ll feel a little bit less guilty if she’s at least had her coffee. Just ask for medium with double cream for here. You can keep the change or put it in the tip jar, whatever you like. Don’t worry about the toast, because if you order that for her you’ll only get it wrong. Trust me, I know.”

Enzo closed his hand around the money. The woman didn’t check his face for assent. She seemed to have assumed his complicity, and her mind had already moved on to the next step in the logistical course that she was unfolding in front of herself like a map. She snapped shut her purse and walked away from the queue, which had at last started to advance, and out through the glass door of the Vaughan Bakery. The pneumatic mechanism closed the door slowly and quietly behind her.

Over at the transfer station, Paola and Filomena were taking their first steps as part of a wobbly oval of people forming in front of the main truck entrance. Each participant hoisted a sign stapled to a short wooden stake.
WE WON’T TAKE ANY MORE
, Paola’s sign read. On Filomena’s, in her own hand, was the single word
BASTA
!—Enough! A call had been made to Paola the night before. Sonia Zhu, a
woman who lived a block and a half from the landfill, had been collecting names and telephone numbers at each of the information sessions and she was the one who had put out the summons.

Over the weekend, a methane-fed fire had flared up in several inadequately compacted portions of the southeast quadrant of the landfill, deep under the more recent surface layers, and, despite the combined efforts of five surrounding fire stations and an expert flown in from central New York State, and notwithstanding the declared elimination of various hot spots, the fire continued to smoulder under layers and layers of debris, emitting smoke and occasionally shooting up flames in areas the fire specialists had announced were under control. Who knew what toxic substances were being released into the surrounding air, infiltrating homes and the tender growing lungs of children and babies, contaminating homes and gardens and streets and schools? Sonia asked. Officials from the Ministry of Environment had been seen coming and going, ferried in and out of the front gates in their efficient little cars, and there were heavy equipment operators too, wearing white hazmat suits, working around the perimeter of the problem areas, digging trenches with large, cantilevered machines. “It’s past time that we made our views known,” Sonia had said on the phone.

Paola had hesitated. Massimo and the boys were out and could not be consulted. Nonna, however, insisted that they go. She put on her sweater and shoes and brought Paola the keys to the car.

The sign was much heavier than it looked, particularly when the wind caught it and tried to wrest it from Filomena’s
hands or flatten it into the ground. The rough wooden stakes bristled with splinters. Filomena, two paces in front of Paola, gripped her sign tightly and she turned around every few minutes to make sure that Paola was holding hers up high enough. Filomena brandished her sign upward with each step. “
Basta!
” she cried out with perfect timbre and timing. The cameraman sent over from the local Italian news station had just started to roll his film and a news reporter was picking her way closer in her high heels, her head inclined into the swirling wind, which carried in it dust and scraps of paper and dried leaves. Paola gulped at the brisk air and stepped up so that she strode abreast with her mother-in-law. She allowed her sign to flutter diffidently alongside Filomena’s.

“
Forza,
” said Filomena encouragingly, and then again more loudly, “
Forza.
”

“
Forza!
” cried Paola. “Enough. We’ve had enough!”

I
t wasn’t until Nicolo was driving to the law school that he realized he should have met Enzo at the house and brought him to the interview. On the highway, he passed two cars at the side of the road. There had been some sort of minor collision and the drivers had pulled over to exchange licence numbers and insurance information. Enzo’s situation seemed to him somewhat like theirs—a short span of inattention, a brief departure from the rules—but with much more serious consequences. Because of abstract notions of justice and fairness, decisions that would affect Enzo’s life profoundly would be made without regard to his background and circumstances. No one would think to ask questions about his mother or his father, about where they came from, what the
implications for them might be. Wouldn’t a humane system manage to take all of this into account?

He stopped at a gas station and phoned, trying to reach Enzo at home in case he was running late and hadn’t left the house yet, but no one answered. Nicolo got back in his car and drove quickly the rest of the way downtown. He followed Pietro Salvatore’s directions and was able to find a parking spot a few blocks away, and then navigate the quiet halls of the law school to the dean’s office without too much difficulty. Pietro was already in the waiting area, which appeared to have been carefully staged as if for a drama, with a cluster of chairs and tables and table lamps, a floral arrangement of outsized red and orange blossoms on spearlike stems, and legal magazines and journals arranged in a precise fan on a polished sideboard. The furniture, the walls and doors, were all glossy with paint or polish, and solidly made. The upholstered chairs were of different sizes but each had carved wooden armrests and ornate legs. They reminded Nicolo of chess pieces.

Pietro was wearing beige slacks with a perfect crease, a navy blue polo shirt and a jacket. He stood beside a broad window that looked out over a view of rooftops and a small courtyard in which students walked back and forth in pairs and alone. Nicolo greeted him and sat down on one of the chairs. The interviews had been scheduled at least two hours apart to minimize the risk that the impugned students would encounter one another coming or going, but the earlier interview must have started late or run long. Five minutes after Nicolo arrived, a young woman emerged from the inner office, pale and red-eyed, flanked by her parents, both
of them looking stiff with worry, and a woman in a tailored suit who seemed to be her lawyer. The student pressed her lips together and shook her head at Nicolo while her parents and the two lawyers conferred.

“They’re brutal,” she said in a husky voice. “I warn you. They’ll tell you that you should be open and honest and forthright and all that, but don’t believe it. They twist everything you say against you.”

Her lawyer came across the room and placed a hand on her shoulder, and then the group moved out to the corridor.

“Where’s Enzo?” Nicolo wondered aloud.

“He’ll be here.”

Pietro didn’t sound anxious, and it occurred to Nicolo that at least part of the lawyer’s fee was earned for exactly this—the calm set of his muscles and his measured tone of assurance.

Several minutes ticked past, each one punctuated by the audible click of an ornate wooden wall clock with a long pendulum. A thin young man, assistant to the dean, came out twice to ask whether Mr. Pavone had arrived. At ten minutes after the appointed time, Enzo came through the door.

“Sorry,” he said. “Something came up that I couldn’t get out of.”

Nicolo’s eyebrows pulled closer together. He hadn’t expected to see Enzo looking so unperturbed.

“You’re ready?” Pietro asked.

“Yes. Absolutely. Are you?”

Enzo and Pietro knocked and were admitted into the inner office, and Nicolo sat and waited while the clock consumed the successive minutes of first one hour and then most of
another. He had planned to use the time to study for his psychology final, and he had brought the textbook and his notebook with him, but he was unable to switch his attention from the process that was unfolding inside the dean’s office. No sounds could be heard through the heavy door. He practised a meditation technique that he had learned at the gym. Sitting as straight in his chair as possible, he concentrated first on slowing his breathing. When he had achieved a steady in-and-out rhythm, he summoned up an image of weights stacked in the weight room in a sturdy pyramid stand. He pictured himself reaching out and lifting each one in turn, from the lightest two-kilogram weight up to the heaviest. He imagined the muscles in his body moving together flawlessly and he saw himself clearly, picking up ever heavier weights, each in a single, smooth motion, starting with a crouch, shifting his feet and pressing the weight upward, and then shifting his shoulders, bending his knees and pulling his body under the weight, catching it with locked arms overhead while squatting, and finally locking his arms and standing up with the weight raised overhead.

When Enzo and Pietro finally came out, Nicolo could feel the strain in every muscle.

“They’ll make the decision quickly,” was all that Enzo told him. “Within a few days.”

Nicolo could read nothing in Pietro’s expression.

“It went well enough,” Pietro said, and then, enigmatically, “I suspect that your brother will have to decide what it is that he really wants to do.”

After they left, Nicolo followed Enzo’s car north through the streets. Enzo kept a steady pace and hit a green light at
almost every intersection. Nicolo stayed close behind, cruising through a few late yellows. At home Enzo pulled up into the driveway and Nicolo parked on the street. They met at the front door.

Both felt, as they entered, the unexpected emptiness of the house. They heard none of the sounds that a house with people in it contains, no rustles or creaks or any of the subtle rhythms of purposeful movement, of tasks and conversation. There was no sign that their mother, father or nonna had been there since early that morning. Enzo checked the garage: his father’s car wasn’t there. Nicolo dialled their older brother Enzo’s telephone number. No one answered. Nicolo and Enzo met up again at the front door.

“Hospital?” Nicolo suggested. They were both thinking of Nonna.

“We might as well check. We can take my car.”

They drove in silence to the hospital and parked at a meter near the emergency room entrance. In the triage area a dozen people waited to be seen, most of them enduring the delay resignedly. At the far end of the room, a television flickered local news. No one seemed to be watching it. One man wearing jeans and a denim shirt, with a rope laced through his belt loops and tied in a loose knot at this stomach, was pacing the length of the room gesticulating and muttering anxiously. “Barry Bonds, Barry Bonds, Barry Bonds,” he repeated. “Miller Park, Miller Park, Miller Park.” He wrung his hands together, spun on his heel, swung an imaginary bat through the air and then turned to stride in the other direction.

Nicolo dodged the Barry Bonds man and asked the nurse at the front desk whether any Pavones had been seen
or admitted. She pecked at the keys of her computer, compressed her lips and shook her head. “I’m sorry. We have no one by that name,” she said.

Nicolo turned toward Enzo, who was in the corner, watching the television. “They’re not here,” Nicolo told him.

“Look,” Enzo said, directing his gaze to the screen.

“That’s…Nonna,” said Nicolo. “And Ma. What are they doing?”

“Exercising their democratic right to peaceful protest is what it looks like. Over at the landfill.”

“Are those
police officers
behind them?”

“It looks like it. We’d better go over and find out what’s going on.”

They were forced to park on a side road several blocks from the landfill and walk the rest of the way. The main street was lined with parked cars, and traffic was filtering in slowly, some cars trying to get through, others slowing to see what was happening, still others looking for a place to pull over. People on foot were making their way along the sidewalk that ran along the north side of the street toward the commotion at the landfill gates. A sweet, skunky compost-like smell grew stronger as Nicolo and Enzo drew closer. A queue of garbage trucks stretched from the gates back into the street. The truck motors had been left idling and the drivers leaned against their front bumpers or gathered in groups of two or three discussing the situation.

“This is bullshit,” one was saying loudly to his colleagues as Nicolo and Enzo pressed past. “I haven’t got all day here. It’s not as if I don’t have a job to do and a wife and a kid to get home to. Does anyone stop to think about that? Garbage
isn’t pretty, but until people stop making it, it has to get picked up and hauled away. Where do they think it’s going to go if it doesn’t get brought up here?”

The gates were blocked by about two dozen protestors, almost all of them women, stretched in a line from one side of the entrance to the other, arms linked. Their signs lay at their feet. Nonna was in the middle and their mother was to her right. Nonna’s hair was windblown and her coat was misbuttoned so that the left side drooped at the hem. She glanced short-sightedly about her and appeared impatient. Beside her, their mother was neatly dressed in slacks and a zippered coat that ended at her hips. A filmy kerchief was knotted at her neck. The corners of the scarf fluttered around her face in the wind. She looked embarrassed but determined. Behind the line of protestors a smear of greasy-looking smoke rose into the air from a distant zone of the landfill. The wind tugged the sooty streak across the sky, away toward the west. Massimo was off to the side of the gate, in a cluster of husbands, all inclined toward each other, conferring. He shook his head when he saw his sons approaching.

“They say they aren’t leaving,” he said. “The police have talked to them, and then the manager came out, but they won’t go. Some of those guys with the trucks sound like they might start something up, you know, to get something happening. It sounds as if a woman who handles public relations is coming over.”

“Can’t they get those trucks to turn off their motors?” said Enzo. It was difficult to make himself heard over the noise.

“
Hell no, we won’t go,
” the band of protestors called out.

A ponytailed woman wearing a navy skirt and a short
sleeved white cardigan approached the blockade at a brisk pace. She held an orange megaphone. Lifting it to her mouth, she called out something that could not be heard. A man in a brown suit sprinted to her side and flipped a switch on the side of the megaphone, and the woman tried again.

“Most of you know me,” she began, addressing the picketers. Although her voice was amplified, her tone was warm and direct, almost intimate. “In fact, I hope that all of you, or at least many of you, would agree that we’ve established a relationship of trust, or at least, we’ve built up some rapport, I like to think, over the past weeks and months. In any event, what I would like to say is that I have a few things I’d like to share with you and I hope you will hear me out.

“We at the Vaughan transfer station would like you to know that we have some messages, some key messages, which we want to pass on and that we hope will help to clarify the current situation in which we find ourselves, and ensure that everyone’s needs are understood. The important thing, I think you will agree, is not to lose momentum. We already have a positive dialogue going and the dialogue just needs to be given a chance to continue. I have no doubt that with goodwill on both sides—”

“It’s a dump!” someone on the line called out—a broad-hipped woman wearing a print housedress tied around her waist. “It’s a
dump.
It’s not a landfill, and it’s not a transfer station, and it’s not a recycling plant, and it’s not a goddamn pie. It’s a dump. Let’s start out by all agreeing to call it what it is. It’s a dump. Okay? A garbage dump.”

The woman with the ponytail took a slow breath. She chewed her lower lip and then her upper lip. “Okay,” she
said, finally. “It’s a dump. A state-of-the-art dump. Does that help? Will that help us get back to engaging in a positive and meaningful dialogue?”

“It’s only a dialogue if you
listen
to us. You have to pay attention to what we have to say. You can’t just tell us what to think,” someone else said. It was Paola. Her voice was loud, but unsteady. Nonna nodded emphatically at her side, and Paola took a deep breath and began to speak again, but she was interrupted.

“Okay.” The ponytailed woman held up her free hand, palm forward in a gesture of capitulation. “We’ll listen. We agree to listen. We’ll engage in a two-way dialogue.”

“And you have to take sign.”

This time it was Nonna who had spoken. She unlinked her arms from Paola on her right and the woman in the dress who had spoken first on her left, and she stepped forward. She bent down, proud, stiff-backed, and selected a sign from the pile at her feet. She handed it to the young woman with the megaphone.

“Here,” she said. “You take.”

The woman took the placard in her hands. In order to do so, she tucked the megaphone under one arm and it responded with a loud
squawk.
A few people in the crowd of onlookers laughed.

Seeing the breach in the line, and perhaps sensing a change in the overall mood, the driver of the nearest truck leapt into his cab. He engaged the gears, and with a loud grinding noise the truck began to move slowly, at a walking pace, toward the demonstrators. Most of them took a step backward, spreading farther apart, and the line began
fragmenting near the open gates. The driver honked his air horn, producing a deafening claxon sound. He pressed on the horn again, and it felt to the observers as if the earth shook slightly under their feet under the mass of the advancing truck, which was so heavily loaded that garbage spilled out of its sides—coffee grounds, plastic margarine tubs, cereal boxes, carrot scrapings, crumpled tissues, the spilling electronic innards of a radio or other domestic machine. Two or three people at the margins of the line frayed away.

Massimo, Nicolo and Enzo pressed forward and began to push through the crowd ahead of them.