Advice for Italian Boys (11 page)

“Yes, there will be birds, of course,” said Cara. “And many other forms of wildlife too. You will find that after the eventual closure of any landfill the entire spectrum of flora and fauna and animals and plants will be represented.”

Paola stood up again, surprising herself. “No, I mean now.” She could feel the burn of Nonna’s white-hot thoughts and something of Nonna’s outrage spilled over into her as well. Such a thing had never happened before. There were more words and they came tumbling out. “There are hundreds, no, there are thousands of them. Seagulls. They’re like rats, dirty, grey, and they’re everywhere. Worse than rats. All over the neighbourhood. Why do you think are they way up here? So far from the water? They come for the garbage.” She had more that she wanted to say. She wanted to convey the fullness of her indignation. She was riven with frustration that her words were so few and so feeble. She had no official title and no swinging ponytail and no props. At her side Nonna nodded.

Cara frowned. “Yes,” she said. “Birds of all kinds are a natural part of the eco-system that springs up around a landfill.”

“And there are actual rats, too.”

Thank heavens. Someone else, a man at the back of the room, had spoken. Paola fell into her chair. Cara folded her arms across her chest.

“And the smell,” said a woman. “It’s everywhere. It’s foul. The smell of rotting garbage. You can’t get away from it. It gets into everything. The clothes on the line. We can’t sit in our garden. We have to keep the windows shut. Even in the summer—
especially
in the summer.”

“Every region should have to deal with its own garbage. That would be fair.”

“Many measures are taken to manage and diminish the risk of undesirable odours,” said Cara. “And in fact, recorded complaints are down by well over one-hundred percent from five years ago.”

“What is the effect of this stuff, this leachate or whatever it’s called, on the groundwater?” asked a man. “Where does it go? What’s in it?” Cara’s face wore an expression of determined patience.

“And what about our children? The seagulls scavenge at the dump and then dive-bomb them in the schoolyard. My daughter had one land and peck on the ponytail holder in her hair. They’re filthy, vermin. Like the woman said, nothing more than rats on wings.”

“We’ve taken the city’s garbage up here long enough. We’re fed up.”

“When is this thing going to close for good?”

“We’ve all heard the rumours. It’s not going to close, is it. Is that the plan? Is that what this is all about?”

“We bought some bottles of wine two years ago to celebrate closing this place for good. That wine will be vinegar before we ever get to drink it.”

Nonna stood up. “
Tuttu ’u munnu è paise
,” she said.

Cara turned and stared at her. “Pardon me?”

“
Tuttu ’u munnu è paise.
Is all one and is all the same country.” Nonna spoke firmly. Then she nodded once to indicate that this was all she had to say.

Paola opened her mouth to explain, but closed it again without speaking. She knew what Nonna meant—that it was important to treat the entire world with the respect due to one’s hometown—but there was no simple way she could think of to convey this message to the others. Once again, she felt thwarted and baffled, and she realized, looking at Nonna, how much more frustrating this must be for her mother-in-law, who had almost no one left who could
understand her, to whom she could make her needs and wants and fears known. She reached her arm around Nonna’s shoulder, surprised at how much frailer the woman felt than she appeared. Nonna’s flesh was soft on her bones, and her bones felt insubstantial, as if the years were hollowing them out, making them ready for flight.

Cara clapped her hands together, once, twice, her expression intensely pleasant. “I think,” she said, “I think that you are all ready for the second stage of this citizen’s orientation and information program. I would like now to extend a personal invitation to each and every one of you to take a real-live tour of the actual landfill in operation. Tours are being offered to interested participants completely free of charge for a limited time only. For your convenience and at your option, fully guided tours will take place on various dates, all of which are listed on the sign-up sheets at the front of the room. Please have a look at the list on your way out, and put your name, telephone number and address on the sheet beside the time that suits you best. Please rest assured that all of us here at the transfer station will endeavour to meet all of your scheduling needs.”

Paola signed her name and Nonna’s on the schedule, and then took Nonna by the elbow and guided her outside to the car. After Paola started the engine, she had to crank down the window and clear the windscreen, which was partly obscured by sheets of paper that had managed to escape over the chain-link fence from the landfill into the parking lot. She glanced at them—someone’s printed resumé, scrawled with handwritten editing comments in red ink, grimy from contact with who-knew-what in the landfill and with the
powdery outline of the sole of a boot on the back of the last page. She didn’t like to drop the papers back outside onto the pavement, so she folded them together and dropped them onto the floor in the back seat.

“
Sporchezza,
” sniffed Nonna. Filthy.

A
lthough Nicolo’s psychology textbook is large and heavy, it has developed a habit of travelling in the house to odd spots. He has found it in the basement powder room that no one uses, on the floor beside the rubber plant in the living room, and beside the wood bin on the small covered porch at the back of the house. On its cover is a deeply shaded picture of a striking young person, although the image has been created so that it is difficult to tell whether it is a man or woman. His or her hair has been cut short or pulled back, and the features and clothing are shadowy and indistinct, so the sex is impossible to discern. This person’s large, red, stylized heart is shown, as if it has been scooped out of the chest and pinned on to
the front of the black, velvety textured, collarless shirt like a medieval blazon, and it is divided like a puzzle or heraldic shield into irregular quadrants, which are labelled via a dim dotted line
a, b, c
and
d.
Due to some transparency in the way the artist has depicted the person’s brow, the brain can be seen as well and it is also divided into segments, marked
i, ii, iii,
and so on. No key, however, is provided. The image might be symbolic, Nicolo suspected, of how psychology seeks to understand the human heart and brain, but he had not quite resolved this, and he still believed that it might be possible that more advanced students could, if asked, tell him the names of the divisions in the picture and their function. Nicolo understood too, although not yet clearly, that his own heart and mind were divided in a not dissimilar manner, and that he was sometimes one thing and sometimes another. An example of this is how he felt about still living at his parents’ house in his early twenties.

Living at home signified, within his community, that he was a dutiful son to his parents, a good grandson to his nonna. But he is teased about it at work. James at the front desk calls him not “Nicolo” or “Nick,” but “Momma’s Boyo,” passing it off as a nickname and not ill-intended, but there is more than a lick of malice in the way he says it. Nicolo sees that there is something stunted in James, not just his height, but something else, something he reads as a historical, irredeemable lack of being treasured when being treasured was important—and when is it not?—and so Nicolo doesn’t rise to James’s derision, but pretends to take it as casually as it is ostensibly offered. His client Clarissa teases him too about living at home, but gently and kindly. She is genuinely curious about how this must be
for him.

“What if you want to bring someone in, you know, at night at the end of a date?” she asked him one day. “Isn’t that awkward? Could she come down afterward, in the morning, and have coffee at the kitchen table with you and your parents and share the newspaper and eat some toast and talk about the weather?”

Nicolo laughed. “I can’t imagine that ever happening,” he said. “I just wouldn’t do that to them. My mother would probably be okay. I think she’d just pour out another cup of coffee. But my dad would be stunned. He wouldn’t know where to look or what to say. And my nonna would rush out to find a priest, drag him in by his collar and have us married off right there in the kitchen. You can’t imagine the drama.”

“So how do you manage, then?” Clarissa persisted.

“You remember, honey, how they did it in Italy.” The judge had finished his dogged twenty minutes on the recumbent bike and, mopping his neck, joined them on the mats. “We saw all those young people in Florence, remember how it was, along that road up on the hill beside Fort Belvedere?” He sat on a mat and stretched gingerly in the direction of his toes while describing to Nicolo a walk that he and Clarissa had taken during their two-week honeymoon after their mid-September marriage. An evening stroll had taken them past a long line of cars parked at the side of the road—small, older-model Fiats, Alfa Romeos and Lancias—many with newspapers taped over their rolled-up windows, some of them rocking gently from side to side or back and forth, the closed windows humid with breath. He and Clarissa had smiled at each other and blushed. He had wrapped his
hand around hers, had drawn her slender hand deep into the pocket of his new brown suede jacket that she had helped him choose in the market; he had never bought anything before from a market stall. He remembered that he had been grateful for the support of the high, firm bed in the middle of their overpriced room with a pizza slice of a view of the old city, a
letto matrimoniale
but a little envious too of the young couples hidden from sight behind the newspapers and tape, wistful for their supple, valiant, semi-public exuberance. He recalled also the steady warmth of Clarissa’s hand inside his jacket pocket; he had been so lonely before meeting her, although he hadn’t known it until she spoke to him at a dinner party twenty months after his wife Linda passed away of a cancer that had worked quickly and ruthlessly—it was only three months, ninety-one days from a diagnosis delivered in a manner that left no doubts and no possibility of deliverance, to the dimmed hospital room in which Linda’s long breaths slowed and then fell into silence. At this party, Clarissa had been seated beside him, and as he fumbled with his hosts’ good cutlery, their excellent silver fork and heavy knife, over lamb and roasted parsnips, she turned her face like the sun toward his and reached over and touched his wrist, and asked him not what he did, but how he did it, how he could ever bring himself to decide, how he determined which actions deserved censor or reward, what punishment to mete out and for which crimes, to whom he would give the benefit of a second or third or fourth chance, how he knew who had done what, how he managed to live with any mistakes that might have been made. He hadn’t understood how frozen he had become, how hoary, how crusted over in
that soul’s chill, that enduring winter, before she turned her beams toward him at that party, where everyone was chatting and where his friends’ wine and food were plentiful and excellent, and he began, right there, in the centre of that noisy, candlelit dining room, first to speak and then miraculously to thaw into this belated, unlooked for, luminously redemptive spring.

In bed sometimes, embracing this new, prized wife, he summoned up images of the Italian couples in their parked cars. They were shorter, overall, the Italians, he had noticed. Maybe natural selection had somehow favoured the genes of those who could disrobe and accomplish the act and then recompose themselves within the confines of compact places. His mind would float, trying to determine how they could possibly manage it: front passenger seat tipped back, accordioned across the back seat, kneeling? Who crouched over whom, breasts or penis or stomach or buttocks suspended? If you could make it work, it could be, perhaps—he could almost appreciate this—quite thrilling. The accommodating give and take of the suspension of the vehicle, the scent of leather, perhaps, in the better class of vehicles, the belts and constraints and compromises could be…And at this point his concentration was usually lost in what he felt simultaneously as both a dark implosion and a bright explosion. Small in scale, of course. He had few illusions of the range and likely effects of his aging love craft, but obvious nonetheless to Clarissa, who would pull him closer to her and whisper “My darling, my love” into the greying margins of his hair. He would rise afterward and stride into the bathroom to urinate, and his body,
out of pride, out of joy, would produce what it otherwise could not, a loud, thick, ringing stream, as thick as a rope, as warm as his heart and as fragrant as straw, resounding inside the bowl like the pealing of a church bell on the day of resurrection.

Now Clarissa creased her elegant nose and laughed. “Not Nicolo,” she protested. “Not our Nicolo. He would never do anything like that.”

She had, as it happened, made love many times in the back seat of a very small car with no heater and few comforts during her last year of high school, and she remembered the inconvenience of it, never quite knowing how to arrange her limbs or his, cracking her head or knee or ankle bone against glass or metal or gearshift, the murmured requests—“if you could just”—and apologies—“oops, sorry”—and the difficulties when the act was finished: wrinkled, disordered clothes, no ability to wash, no place to stretch out and luxuriate if all had gone well. Afterward, a sock or panties would always elude discovery, only to be shaken out of a pair of jeans or from the sleeve of a sweater at home that night or a few days later.

She had fewer romantic illusions than Alden did. She had been the only child of a single mother and had had no father nor husband nor son before Alden, and so he was everything to her. She tried to keep this from him because she didn’t want him to be unduly burdened by the component of her love that was hunger, that was pure need. He had fallen in love with her and she recognized that his love had cured her of something that she couldn’t describe. It wasn’t simply that she had been lonely before she met him. It had been some
thing deeper than loneliness, more fundamental, an ache in her bones. She felt when she looked back as if she had been starving for him.

Nicolo’s first understanding of the anatomy, the plumbing, the tubes and protuberances of sex had come from a series of drawings his older brother Enzo learned at recess at school and reproduced, inaccurately, out of scale, in crayon on scrap paper for his two younger brothers at home. Five-year-old Enzo paid no attention at all; he saw only scribbles. Nicolo at seven was entranced. He watched Enzo draw a line like a forking branch inside an arching heart-shaped outline.

“What’s this?” he challenged, and Nicolo correctly read from Enzo’s grinning excitement that this was a sort of illicit riddle.

“A bare-naked woman bending over,” Enzo announced without really waiting for Nicolo to try to guess. He spat in his excitement, his mouth wide.

Nicolo, caught up in his brother’s giddy glee, rolled around with him on the floor giggling and repeating, “A bare-naked woman.” “Bending over.” “Showing her bare bum.”

There were others, drawings of long fried eggs with three yolks of different sizes that were really “between a woman’s legs,” and many variations on fatly inflated sticks, raised up like hammers overtop of paired bulbous circles, or plunging into the curious fried eggs.

“This is how they do it when they do it!” cried Enzo.

He almost shuddered beneath the weight of all that he knew, at the splendour of his drawings, and at his generosity, he at nine imparting to Nicolo, who was entirely undeserv
ing, such expansive knowledge of these, the greatest mysteries of the grown-up world. He himself hadn’t had access to such opportunities at Nicolo’s young age.

And then, several weeks later that same spring, the boys were outside knocking a fraying tennis ball around with their hockey sticks when a yellow dog came loping along their street, a stray with bony hips and matted fur and no collar. They had never seen it before and didn’t see it ever again afterward. The lone dog came toward them and then, nervous of the sticks the boys held, hurried its pace, veered wide and galloped past, but not so quickly that the boys missed seeing clearly a swollen purple object, its
thing,
knocking against the hair and bone of its hind legs.

A store of new words was learned over the next couple of years, schoolyard words, street words, rude words, acquired from dubious sources, known to be not allowed, not even half understood. But the discovery by Nicolo and his brothers of the magazines at the back of Massimo’s beloved and carefully kept barbershop, concealed under the sink behind a stack of towels, was vastly greater in scale than any of these. The boys were eleven, eight and five or so, and they had been left at the closed, locked store for a couple of hours during a snowy Sunday afternoon while their parents visited a neighbour who was in hospital following surgery, her head shaved, black-edged stitches showing the place where an as-yet-unanalyzed polyp had been removed from behind her ear—certainly not a sight to which the boys should be exposed. To keep them occupied and out of trouble, they had been given soft rags and paste, and told that they should dust the baseboards and polish the chrome of the barber
chairs and the stainless-steel taps and sinks. The three of them made a cursory job of this chore and then began an unsatisfactory game of hide-and-seek. The shop was small and there were too few places to hide. Only younger Enzo could fit in the cupboard that concealed the pipes underneath the sink at the back of the store, and when he was pulled out by the collar of his shirt, the magazines came sliding out with him.

Young Enzo took no interest in the magazines; he was in the thrall of the comics that were kept in plain sight on a table at the front of the shop. There were a dozen or so of them and the boys had leafed through them so often that the comic books were as soft and limp as cotton. Enzo had committed to memory the main action, and was now studying the background details: the licence plates on the cars, the clothes that the parents wore, the books on bookcases with their indecipherable titles, the signs on stores, and the shape and colour of the food dished out at the school cafeteria or at the restaurant where the characters went for milkshakes and hamburgers.

Nicolo and older Enzo were, on the other hand, keenly interested in the magazines from under the sink. There were ten or a dozen of them, every page filled with drawings and cartoons, almost all of which had naked women in them, surrounded by jokes and stories and letters. This was another world entirely, one in which women seemed to exist solely so that they could display their ample breasts and thighs, and plunge plumply into bed with any man that happened to be near—their neighbours, bosses, co-workers, and with mechanics, dentists and—especially—door-to-door sales
men. These women wore tight sweaters and short skirts, or bikini tops and cut-off jeans, and they had eye makeup and lipstick on even when they were doing something normal, such as washing the dishes or shopping or driving a car. All of these activities led to the same thing—
it,
in bed or in the back seat of a car or on couches.