In a Glass House (35 page)

It was just this once that my mother was mentioned to me, though perhaps only because of the distance I instinctively took on now with people who knew me. But all summer long she seemed the spectre that haunted me, the unremembered thing in the memories my interviews stirred, what inserted itself like a shadow between people’s predictable stories and some uncertain admission or truth I wanted to prise from them. Then once,
interviewing a young woman just recently brought back from Italy as a bride, some casual gesture of hers suddenly brought my mother back to me with a sharp fleeting clarity, not merely a ghostly notion of what she might have been but someone for an instant as solid and as real as the woman before me in the present moment. And yet what I felt most strongly in that instant was a sense of loss, the sudden realization that all the rest I knew of her, what I’d somehow imagined still lay whole and intact in me, vivid as life itself, had long ago faded away to mere shadow.

As the end of summer approached a small euphoria began to take me over, the relinquishing that came at the end of things. I drove around to my interviews pleased with the world, Mersea seeming spread out sun-filled and simple and benign like a town from some old television show. It was as if I was creating for myself a stranger’s memory of the place: this was what the town was, would have been, without me in it, a place without pain or humiliation or threat.

One of my final interviews was with an old man from Castilucci who lived with his son along the lakeshore. The house was set back from the road like a Roman villa, and seemed to aspire, with its pillared entrance and arching balustrade, to the pretensions of one; I had seen a hundred variations of it over the summer, this confusion of flourishes, intended somehow to recall Italy though they had nothing to do with the plain stone dwellings people had lived in there. Behind the house long rows of greenhouses stretched toward the lake, blocking a view of it though it seemed held in the sky’s hollowness like a reflection, a
breeze wafting in from it laced with subtleties of texture and smell like forgotten words.

A small boy answered the door, curly-haired and elfin and stern, staring up at me in silent appraisal.

“
Chi è
, Car-men?” An older voice from inside, faltering against the truncated English sounds of the boy’s name. “
Chi è?
”

“It’s a man.”

Coming from the boy the judgement sounded oddly solemn and complete.

The old man had come into view.

“
Vieni, vieni
, you must be the one from the book, aren’t you the one I spoke to? Mario’s son, I remember, I used to chase him out of my grapes down in the Valley of the Pigs.”

Inside, the air was distilled to a comfortable coolness. There was a large family room, surprisingly tasteful and inviting, off the side entrance, but the old man led me instead up a few steps into the kitchen. The boy followed behind, still gazing at me circumspectly, trying to fit me into whatever order of things my arrival had momentarily fractured.

“Your grandson?” I said.

“My grandson’s son! They bring him over sometimes to keep me company. We get along well – with my five words of English and his five words of Italian we never argue.”

He invited me to sit.

“So. What can I offer you? A beer, a glass of wine?”

“Please, nothing, thank you.”

“Well I’ll have one for myself then.”

He went to the fridge and tremblingly withdrew a bottle of wine from it, tremblingly poured himself a glass.

“The young and old,” he said, “they always get left behind. One in a crib and the other in a casket. My son already bought
a place for me, up there on the highway so I can see the lake. Just next to my wife. She died five years ago now, maybe you remember the funeral. Your father was there.”

He was dressed as my grandfather might have been for a trip to Di Lucci’s bar, cuffed corduroy trousers wrinkled tight at the waist by his belt and a white dress shirt whose sleeves were held up by silver armbands, his body shrunken and stooped with age but seeming to hold in itself an old dignity like a memory. But there amidst the kitchen’s gleaming modernity he appeared an anachronism, made merely quaint, nothing in his surroundings reflecting back who he was. Little Carmen, who’d retreated to the front entrance hall, seated on the marble floor there amidst a cornucopia of toys, at home again and content, would never know this man: there in his plenty he seemed the final oblivion in a slow forgetting, taking this world, this house, this luxury, utterly for granted.

I began to set up my recorder.

“Do you mind if I use this?”

“Suit yourself. The truth is the truth, whether you record it or not it doesn’t make any difference.”

It came out that he and one of his sons had lived in Abyssinia briefly in the thirties, settling there after the Italian conquest.

“Not that I wanted to go off into the bush, mind you, I wanted to go to America like everyone else. But in those days you couldn’t even cross the road without the government’s permission, so I said I’d go wherever they sent me. Then we found out the land they’d given us was even worse than what we’d left behind.”

I told him about my own upcoming trip to Africa.

“Well, maybe for a young man like yourself it’s all right. But I already had one toe in the grave by the time I got there, I had nothing but bad luck there from the start. We farmed a bit, did
this and that, tried to send a little money home; but then the war started up again and my son was killed. I could understand that, he was a soldier. But my other son, my youngest, when I came back to Italy, that was hard for me. It was a little thing – some of the boys found a plane that had fallen and started to play with the guns, and a bullet got him. I thought I couldn’t go on after that. But it was hard for everyone then.”

His eyes had begun to tear; he pulled a handkerchief from a back pocket to wipe them. I’d heard so many stories like his over the summer, had each time sat through them in the same awkward silence – there seemed no adequate response to them, no way of assuaging a pain that was so general. But the old man recovered in an instant, as people did, this gift they seemed to have, to be able to touch the bottom of a painful thing and emerge from it whole a moment later.

“
Mbeh
, you didn’t come here to watch an old man cry.”

The rest of the interview unfolded more predictably, his life in Canada seeming in comparison to his past like a retirement in some pleasant holiday country, comfortable and uneventful. Canada was his home now, he said, was the only place he fit in.

“I’ve been back to Italy twice now, but no more. I stay with my daughter in Rome and she won’t speak to me in dialect, she says I sound like a peasant. And in the village it’s just as bad. Everything has changed there – Italy has progressed but here we still think the way we used to twenty years ago.”

I asked if he had any old documents or photos we could use for the book. Older people were often reluctant to lend us these things, fearing some danger to themselves if their photos were reproduced; but the old man disappeared with an air of pleased intent into the house’s gloom and returned a moment later with
a yellowed shoebox tied with string. He’d put on a pair of glasses; one by one he went through the items in the box, scrutinizing each from a distance through narrowed eyes and then handing it on to me. His old Italian passport; an identity card from Fascist times; three or four packets of photographs; a medal his son had earned in the Abyssinian war. A glint of silver at the bottom of the box caught my eye – a coin, an old one
lira
, I recognized it at once. I reached for it and a thrill passed through me like a premonition: the coin was the same as the one I’d been given years before by my mother’s friend Luciano, the same year, 1927, the same nick in the eagle’s wing that he’d said had stopped a bullet from entering his heart during the war. For an instant time seemed to falter and warp.

“I had a coin like this once.”

“
Mbeh
, they were common enough once, before the war, a
lira
was still worth something then.”

“No, I mean exactly the same, the same year, the same mark like that on one side.”

“Oh that, of course, it sometimes happened like that back then. One year all the twenty-cent pieces had the king’s ear missing. You couldn’t spend them to save your life, people said they were bad luck. With this one it was different, it was good – people made up stories about it, that Mussolini made it like that to protect himself from the pope, all sorts of things, you know how people thought back then. I never believed in all that foolishness – I kept it like that, as a souvenir. You can take it if you want, I don’t have any use for it now. If I gave it to Carmen there he would lose it in half an hour.”

I weighed the coin in my hand. A child’s acquisitiveness stirred in me, an old belief in the magic of possessions.

“You don’t mind?” I said.

“Not at all, please, take it. Maybe it’ll bring you better luck than it brought me.”

But when I had pocketed it I felt peculiarly burdened, as if something until then chimerical, evanescent, had become suddenly mundane; whatever meaning I might attach to it now would be merely a kind of conceit, an indulgence.

Carmen followed us to the door, slipping past the old man to look up at me still vigilant, still unconvinced. I imagined him having seen me pocket the coin from his great-grandfather’s box, having followed me now to bare his silent resentment. I had robbed him of his story, whatever fiction the old man might have spun out for him in passing on to him the coin. But in the thrill of departure even Carmen forgot himself, waving goodbye, goodbye, as I backed down the drive.

“
Buona fortuna in Africa!
” the old man called out, holding Carmen’s tiny hand in his trembling one like a flower.

I spent my last week in Mersea preparing a final report. At home I’d carefully labelled and filed all the materials we’d put together, interview tapes and notes, photos and documents, index cards. Sorted like that they seemed an impressive archive, weighty, official, so much more orderly than the work that had gone into creating them, than the community they represented. I wondered what truths or fictions the professor would draw from them; or perhaps they would merely sit gathering dust in some office of multiculturalism, having no value beyond their official one, simply a proof that the government had given its sanction to an ethnic community.

But when I came to write up the report it seemed impossible not to leave out what mattered most, the countless things that were known but never discussed, the truer, finer, more vulgar things, the garish furnishings in people’s homes, what they might say over supper, how they held in their hearts’ fonder remembering until the moment the machine was turned off and they’d sat back in pleased relief at their careful deceptions. The
most interesting interviews, the atypical ones, were the hardest to use, didn’t fit any pattern; and the very act of summarizing seemed to steer me toward exactly what I wished to avoid, a kind of panegyric that sifted and levelled all differences into a bland, harmonious whole. I was reduced finally to a sort of doltishness, to stating the obvious, to charts and statistics and glosses that left out a haze of impression and nuance that couldn’t be put into words.

I worked in my room, conscious of being there at a desk while outside my father and the others worked on the farm seeming at once the fulfilment and contradiction of my report. I had set their own tapes apart, Tsia Taormina’s and Tsi’Umberto’s, my father’s, feeling a vague obligation to listen to them, though the days passed and still I kept putting the task off. When my father’s turn had come up in our interviewing I had assigned him to one of the younger workers, Filomena, had half-expected, half-hoped, that he’d decline to be interviewed at all; but then in the cassettes that Filomena had turned in to me at week’s end my father’s had been there, so innocent-seeming among the rest that I couldn’t bring myself to disturb it.

Ultimately it had been Aunt Teresa who’d refused to be interviewed, something that seemed both in character for her and not, simply her usual perversity or perhaps something else, a sort of integrity. She’d refused a platform to speak, to contradict, to call attention to herself, had chosen instead simply to hold her tongue, as if she’d understood how little place there was in this sort of thing for the truth. Perhaps all along I’d underestimated her, had never been willing to concede to her this strength of character. Even her visits to Rita, what she’d told her: seen differently they seemed to fit the pattern of a long, quiet management of our family’s emotions, of the self-denial that had lain
always just beneath the surface of her, what might have been the only thing, finally, that had saved us from ourselves.

It was only after I’d finished my report that I listened to the tapes. Tsi’Umberto’s was predictable, the reasonable man, the persona he took on with people, his bad English straining for authority, for the idiomatic, only a small sullenness showing the wariness beneath his responses, the care he was taking to keep them unremarkable. Tsia Taormina’s, done separately in dialect, I almost gave up on, put off at first by her plodding literal-mindedness; and yet there were things that surprised me, perceptions I couldn’t account for.

“It was hard for the kids at first, because of the language and everything. The oldest one was all right but for the younger one it was harder, he said the kids at school made fun of him and things like that. He wanted us to buy him clothes like they had but we didn’t have any money for that in those days.”

But I was amazed she could have known these things, that her sons had had that closeness with her; we had all lived together then and yet I couldn’t fit these moments of intimacy into the strange foreboding gloom that was all I remembered from then.

My father’s tape was an agony. There was none of Tsi’Umberto’s forced reasonableness in it, his voice throughout raw with humility, a single note hanging in it like the hollow after-throb of a bell. The contrast to Filomena’s was almost comical at times, as if their voices had been spliced together afterwards for a gag, Filomena resolutely buoyant and automatic, my father’s responses like a sea she skipped across to reach the safe haven of her questions. There was a palpable warmth that came through when my father spoke about Italy – he grew almost voluble then, almost expansive, a nostalgia I’d
seldom seen in him, that didn’t fit the image I’d somehow developed of his having left Italy coldly, without remorse; but then Filomena asked about his family.