Advice for Italian Boys (7 page)

Nicolo was overwhelmed by this vision. He had no means to express the way he felt. “No,” was all he said, speaking around Enzo’s moan. “This is your daughter. Or your son. And Mima’s. It isn’t Ma’s. It isn’t anyone else’s. So long as you’re the father, marrying Mima is the right thing to do. We know her. We know her family. I don’t think you two will have any worse chance than anyone else has starting out. Ma and Pa didn’t even meet until the day before they got married. They’ve worked it out. You guys will too. That’s what people do.”

“You’re not the one who’s got to get married,” countered Enzo. He scowled and pushed his fist hard against his chin and rubbed the rough stubble until his knuckles hurt. The bright tunnel of his future was narrowing and darkening, finally, inexorably. There would be no burnished lights, no dinners on tastefully mismatched family china on reclaimed pine tables, no lakefront cottages with a collection of battered canoes and small sailboats in the boathouse, no civic honours or inherited riches or bursts of unearned glory.

“What are you afraid of?”

“It’s not what I expected,” said Enzo. “This wasn’t what I had planned.”

“It
will
be different from what you expected,” said Nicolo. “But it could be better.”

“It’ll be worse,” Enzo lamented. He rubbed his whiskery face hard once more and his elbow struck the remote control on the arm of the sofa.

The television flared into life. The weather channel. A woman wearing a close-fitting, short-sleeved knitted top the colour of milky coffee, her light fine hair pulled smoothly away from the ledges of her cheekbones, was crisply announcing a sixty-percent chance of rain that afternoon. Enzo rested his elbows on his thighs. He leaned toward her, and Nicolo felt how keenly he longed to fall through the screen, so close, so transparent, so tantalizing, into another world. She was—Nicolo could see this—perfect, and as unattainable to Enzo as the sun and the moon and the stars. Nonna came into the room on her silent slippers with her coffee pot in one hand and the little pot of warm milk in the other and leaned over to refill their cups, first Enzo’s and then Nicolo’s.

“
Sposa bagnata
,” she said, and pointed through the window to the skies in which the morning’s undecided clouds were gathering and thickening into grey, doughy mounds heavily weighted with the absolute certainty of coming rain.

Nicolo turned his head and saw that Enzo had tears in his eyes.

E
very Sunday, Nicolo’s mother and father get up and go together to the earliest Mass at St. Francis of Assisi parish church over on Stevens Street at the corner where it crosses Lyon Avenue, the break-of-dawn Mass for the few most fervent, die-hard congregants. Nicolo’s mother is out of bed first. Yawning in her once-white terry slippers and with her ancient pink quilted housecoat with the pilling cuffs and fraying hem belted snugly around her waist, Paola pads to the kitchen and makes coffee for the two of them, Canadian coffee, measured with a brown plastic cone-shaped scoop from a large red and green tin with a snap-on plastic lid. She uses the electric plug-in coffee maker that sees service only on this one morning of the week. This is the
start of the weekend for Nicolo’s father; he switches off the twirling red, white and blue pole outside of his barbershop on Saturday evenings, and on Tuesday mornings he starts it up again, giving a polish to the chrome knobs at the top and bottom with a chamois rag. On Sundays Massimo wears his good pants—the crease pressed crisply during the week by his mother, who wields the iron like a weapon—a clean undershirt and suspenders. He pushes his feet into the rubber boots that he keeps just inside the side door, and carries his mug of coffee, which Paola has splashed with cream, outside where he conducts his weekly survey of the perimeter of the house. He checks, depending on the season, for an accumulation of leaves in the gutters, for flaking paint, for snow packed into the basement window wells, for any sign of incursions by weather, mice, rats, raccoons, or neighbours’ children or pets, anything that is or soon may be in need of his ministrations. He hitches his pants fractionally upward with his free hand as he rounds each corner of the house, and his gait is stiff, such is his swell of pride in his welltended domain—his fruit trees planted on the south side of the house blanketed at the roots with rich mulch, his eight staked garden plots, two rows of four, or four rows of two, depending on how you count them, his sweet compost pile steamily rotting and caving in on itself, his tightly lapped pressure-treated siding without open knots or warp or wane, his sturdy garage with its two sash windows, one to the west and one to the east (he cleans the panes weekly with vinegar and handfuls of crumpled newspaper), his padlocked garden shed, in which his tools hang on a pegboard, waiting for his hand, and, on a wide workbench that he made himself out of
the discarded boards of a fence torn down by a neighbour, rows of nails and screws and other bits and pieces sorted by size and function and stored in the red and green coffee tins that Paola passes on to him when empty, his neatly stacked woodpile, a half-cord or slightly more of wood that he buys from a place north of the city from species that burn well without too much spark or smoke or ash—maple, beech, ash and larch—wood that has been cut and trimmed and split by his three strong, grown sons, his lawn and the ancient push mower that keeps the grass in submission.

His own father had nothing compared to this, had only fettered and entailed title to a small stone house pitched on the dark side of the road that ran uphill into the mountains, two rooms, unheated, no water, a privy over a fetid hole out back—there was nowhere left to dig that hadn’t been used and reused for generations—two ancient iron pots, a patched tin pan and a half-dozen chipped, mismatched dishes, ropestrung bed frames for the two beds, a few rusted tools, a patch of rocky earth to till a kilometre away by foot, often no shoes or boots or else a pair or two to be patched, shared and handed down, a bitter morning drink made with ground and roasted chicory roots and consumed on the doorstep in the thin early morning sun while the smell of real espresso imported from Brazil drifted over from the Gagliardis’ expansive three-level house two doors up and across the street; the village had been too small for the rich to keep themselves separate from the poor.

Nonna sleeps in on Sundays and her snores contain a rattle of reproach against her ostensibly devout son and daughter-in-law. She had a noisy breach with the priest at St. Francis
of Assisi ten years ago and in its aftermath stopped going to Mass as a matter of pride and principle. “
Preti e cauci ’nculu, vijatu chi ni tena
,” she said. Priests and kicks in the backside, blessed is he who has neither one. And “
Piscia chiarru e ’ncuuo a lu miericu!
”—one of her
proverbi
that has no possible translation, but having the sense, roughly, of the expression “piss off” directed in particular toward one’s so-called betters. She made exceptions only for weddings, funerals—especially funerals—and baptisms, although she hedges against the potential peril to her eternal soul by sending Nicolo twice a year to make an anonymous donation of five ten-dollar bills drawn from her tiny war widow’s pension. She has managed to convey to Nicolo as she silently counts out the money into his palm that although he is not to mention her name, he is to leave the priest (the third successor to the role since the one whose reproach about Nicolo’s younger brother Enzo’s non-attendance led to Nonna’s dramatic departure) in no doubt about the identity of the donor.

On Sunday mornings Nicolo’s mother and father carry out their routines in peaceable silence. They drink their coffee without more than the briefest of exchanges, although their fingers may brush together when Paola hands Massimo his cup to carry outside and in this passing contact is enfolded the whole of a conversation of which they know every tone and nuance. The house is warm and silent. They place their empty cups, rinsed once quickly under a brief stream of water from the tap, on a folded dishcloth in the sink. They dress with careful attention. Paola sheds her soft, faded, fraying housecoat and puts on satiny underpants and bra, both of a matching mocha hue. She drapes and fastens
one of her two good dresses, the navy blue one with the slim self-belt, or the red one with a wave of gathers at the waist from which the fabric drops in a slimming cascade as fluid as falling water around her hips. She pulls on stockings and places her black shoes beside the front door. She combs and pins her hair in a heavy knot behind her head. Massimo wears his black pants, and a white shirt that has been ironed and starched by Nonna and hung on a wooden hanger in the closet that he shares with Paola. He knots a careful tie under his chin. At the door wait his solid black brogues, the ones the boys bought him a few Christmases ago, so sturdy that no one in the family would have been in any doubt at all, had the question been raised, that, with Massimo’s customary care and frugal use, these shoes will be on his feet when he is laid out in his coffin—even the shoelaces are barely worn.

Massimo can never look at these good shoes without seeing his own father’s brown, callused feet with their thick nails, ridged, dented and black-edged; his father, Peppino, had not worn shoes until he was ordered at age nineteen and a half to go north to the town of Tarsia to help guard two thousand rounded-up Jews at the Ferramonti internment camp. Afterward, near the end of the war, out of fear of reprisal, he had thrown the shoes and uniform that he had been issued into the river Crati. It was the morning of the day that the camp was liberated by British and Canadian troops—strong boys who advanced in confident ranks, long-legged, pale-haired, red-skinned—and although he had longed to keep the shoes, which had thick soles and strong laces, instead he had walked home barefoot, a journey of five days, mostly at night, wearing civilian clothes he stole from a pile behind the camp laundry
in order to blend in with the local citizenry who thronged to the camp to watch the tall soldiers arrive. He kept his homeward steps on pace with a silent song.

Filomena mia, fammi nu vutu, Fammillu no mi vaiu pe surdatu.

Fammillu no mi vaiu pe surdatu.

Mi vaiu a Catanzaru e m’u m’indi votu.

Filomena mine, say a prayer for me, So that I won’t have to go to be a soldier.

Say it so that I won’t have to go to be a soldier.

I’ll go as far as Catanzaro and then come back to you.

Peppino’s bare feet bled at first, and at night he dug soft, powdery clay from the riverbanks and applied it to his cuts and blisters to draw out any infection. His feet got blacker and coarser and tougher as he trudged closer to his wife Filomena, with few stories that he could ever bring himself to tell her except that the prisoners had taught him, an unlettered peasant and their jailer as well, how to read, starting with the backs of cigarette packages and then moving up through scraps of old newspapers to books, real books, including parts of the Bible, but only the older stories. For some reason the Jews’ Bible had in it nothing from the gospels of saints Matteo, Marco, Luca or Giovanni, or from the letters of Paolo to the earliest Christian flocks right there in Italy, up in Rome where everything, as he had thought, had begun.

He had not owned shoes of his own after that, except for the local style of sandals with thick leather soles, until he
died, aged fifty-one, of a twisted, septic bowel, in agony, but relatively quickly, which was a sure sign of God’s kindness and mercy, everyone told Filomena, who listened to these reminders of God’s grace with her head bowed to conceal her expression, and closed her hands into tight fists in order to feel the pain of her fingernails digging into her palms. Her acid silence made her tongue swell inside her mouth. She acquired during the week following her husband’s death a hard-edged ball of disappointment and thwarted sensual longing that settled in her chest and had never thereafter been dislodged or dissolved. Having no one else to blame, she had laid her loss at the feet of the bungling, ineffective God of southern Italy.

Shortly after, she began encouraging Massimo to leave. She knew that her only son would send for her once he was settled, and after that, the God who had not lifted so much as a finger to take care of her good, devout husband could look for her all over Calabria as hard as he wanted, she would not be there to be found. At the last minute she took Paola with her. Paola was not the most beautiful of the neighbourhood girls, but she had been left with no one—her father gone first, of black lung from his years working in the Belgian mines, and her mother not six months after, of a broken heart—and Filomena saw that she might do for Massimo.

Dressed, brushed, polished, Paola and Massimo leave the house as quietly as possible. They pull the door softly, softly
shut behind them. They do not want to risk waking any of the house’s sleepers and they want even less for anyone to express a desire to come with them. This is one of the few times during the week when they are alone together. They close the door behind them with care. When they walk down the path to their car, Paola rests her hand on the warm sleeve of Massimo’s jacket. Massimo opens the car door for her, and he cradles her elbow as she slides her bottom into her seat. Paola’s scent (shampoo, face powder, a lingering suggestion of coffee) mixes with Massimo’s (aftershave, deodorant, shoe polish, fresh air) inside the rumbling car that conveys them the eight blocks to the church. Paola inclines slightly toward Massimo’s shoulder as he negotiates the car around a right-hand turn. He swells taller, larger, with pride in her, his own, attractive, competent, steadfast wife.

They are young, after all, younger than you might imagine. Paola was only eighteen when their first son was born. She is forty-four now, and Massimo won’t be fifty for three more years. Paola knows of someone, a near neighbour, a few blocks to the east, in one of the smaller houses east of the old mill pond, who gave birth a month ago to twin boys at age forty-eight. She hasn’t seen the babies, but she has heard reports of their birthweights—five and six pounds—and complexions—fair like their mother. Almost anything remains possible for Massimo and Paola, even this.

Massimo’s hair is still black and thick and it has receded from his forehead by no more than the breadth of his thumb, and although Paola’s waist has expanded by several inexorable inches, her breasts are almost as high and full as the day she was married. Massimo still interests her, thrills her
sometimes. Her own heart can surprise her, spilling like an overflowing glass of wine without warning some mornings when she looks at him. Her emotion rises sometimes like a flush into her throat, where Massimo has observed it pulsing. In bed, Massimo can’t gaze on his wife’s naked, unguarded face without perceiving her affection. He makes love to her in the night under the blankets, beneath her cotton nightgown, in full darkness, his hands on her large brown nipples, to keep his great fortune doubly and triply safe and secret. He falls asleep at night with his head in the deep valley between the tenderest inner slopes of her wonderful breasts and he hears the ocean in her heartbeat. She lies against his back with her fingers threaded in the curls on the thick skin at the nape of his neck, her thighs tucked inside the hot crook of his legs, and feels like a fragrant pink shrimp floating snug inside its tough and resilient shell. Her three sons. Her husband. Her heart is almost entirely filled with them.

Nicolo doesn’t go to Mass on Sunday mornings. He wakes up hours later, usually after nine o’clock. What pulls him from sleep is the scent of Nonna’s strong, dark coffee hiccuping in the espresso pot on the front of the stove, and the clattering noises she sends forth from the kitchen. He can also hear his parents talking to each other. They have returned from Mass—unburdened of their trivial sins, forgiven, shriven, blessed, renewed—and they are lifting the heavy oak dining
room table between them and ferrying it to the far side of the room underneath the lace-curtained window. “Careful.” “Watch your foot.” “Hold it one more minute while I…” “We can put it down here.”

Nicolo hears the doors to the stereo cabinet pulled open, the snick of the magnetic clasp being pulled apart, a reverberation of the doors of the veneered wooden cabinet as they reach the outer limit of their hinges. The sound of hands fumbling with a record or tape. And then the music begins. Waltzes mainly. Foxtrots. Quicksteps. Sambas sometimes. Occasionally a rumba, or the exotic to-and-fro of a tango. The sounds of a weekly hour that begins slow and ends with something fast-paced and difficult—salsa, mambo, merengue or swing. This is what Nicolo and his brothers think of as classical music, the music they heard on Sunday mornings when their parents came home from Mass, shriven and sinless, and, still in their church clothes, cleared an open space in the dining room, the largest room in the small one-storey house, and danced.