The Women of Saturn Read online

  Later that evening, I decided not to ask Luigi or Giuseppina if they had seen Lucia come to bed the previous night. If they had noticed her absence, they would have mentioned it. I didn’t care anymore if she had spent the night with Nicodemo. It was her words from the day before that hurt me most. In her eyes, my mistake had cost her her freedom. But I had failed her in another way. On my return from the trip to Rome with my family to get our visa, I never told Lucia that we had spent time with Totu, and that he confessed the reason why he drove away from the elopement. It was not out of fear as many thought, but from the humiliation of the act itself. He told us that he was committed to the Communist Party that would bring Italy into the future. He loved Lucia, but she would always remind him of the medieval ways of life in Mulirena and he wanted no part of it. It would be less hurtful for Lucia to believe that her elopement had failed because of me, than to know that Totu left her because he loved Rome and his Party more than he loved her.

  From my berth, I looked around the cabin as everyone prepared for another night of troubled, queasy sleep in our rumpled up sheets that smelled of vomit and blood. If only, I thought, I’d wake up in Mulirena the morning after. Armando, Nicodemo, Giuseppina, the two whining brats, the Rock, the plague, and the seasickness would have been nothing but a bad, jumbled-up nightmare.

  11. DAYS NINE AND TEN

  IT WAS AS IF MY ARGUMENT with Lucia the day before had never happened. When Lucia and Armando went for their usual walk, I didn’t follow them. Even though the weather had turned colder, the sun was strong enough in the middle of the day for me to sit on deck and read. Armando had promised to give me a prize if I could prove to him I had read the whole book. I wanted to impress him. With about two hundred pages left unread, I cheated and went straight to the end. Not only are Lucia and Renzo reunited, but, “Before the first year of marriage was over a fine baby saw the light…”

  Renzo spends many a night recounting his adventures to his brood and the lessons that he learned from his misfortunes. He and Lucia come to the conclusion that “when trouble comes, whether by one’s own fault or not, confidence in God can lighten them and turn them to our own improvement.”

  Having read the ending, I felt satisfied. I spent the rest of the day skimming the boring parts I had skipped previously.

  The next day, the sea was calmer, the air sharper and clearer. I spent most of the morning on the first-class deck going back and forth in the book, preparing for Armando’s quiz. I went straight to the top of the stairs where I knew he would pass, and waited for him.

  “I came to tell you I finished the book,” I said.

  “Good,” he said,” If you wait for me here, I have something for you.”

  After a few minutes he came back with a card in his hands. “I won’t have to test you. I believe that you finished the book. It’s impossible to find a medal on this ship, though, but take this as a souvenir.” It was a postcard of the Rock of Gibraltar.

  “I didn’t write anything on it, because I want you to remember the place and not me when you look at the card.”

  “Thank you,” I said.

  “This card makes you officially a woman of Saturn,” he said with pomp and a flourish

  I looked at him with expectation. I wanted him to speak to me about Saturn again.

  “Let me explain what being a woman of Saturn really means. Because you’ve crossed the ocean on this ship, your life will never be the same. I don’t mean your life will be better or worse, only that you have been transformed by the voyage. Remember that the Saturnia is inspired by Saturn, but, Caterina, only you can choose what type of woman you want to be. Saturn, the planet, can make you gloomy, saturnina, as we say in Rome, but Saturn the god can make you strong.” He pinched my cheek, and he was off. “I have to run. Everyone is beginning to eat like wolves again, and the dining room looks like a zoo.”

  The colour postcard of the Rock was beautiful. A bright ray of sunlight shone on one side and was reflected in the water. White seagulls perched on its edges and the waves around it were white and foamy like clouds. But that was not how I remembered the Rock. The place in the postcard was clear and sharp-coloured, a place one could easily see and touch. What I remembered seeing was a blurry and mysterious mountain that, no matter how hard you reached for it, would always recede beyond your grasp. Even Armando had doubted he’d ever get to that place.

  I put the postcard in my book. They’d both be a reminder of the voyage. I couldn’t really tell if there was any truth in what he had said about Saturn, the planet, and Saturn, the god. In time I hoped to learn more about them. With Armando it was difficult to tell what was real and what was not, but he had been the first besides my mother to call me a woman.

  12. DAY ELEVEN

  DURING THE LAST TWO DAYS of our crossing, I hadn’t followed Lucia around anymore. I sat in the lounge by a window looking at the ocean, anticipating the joy of the arrival, while she went for long walks on her own. When she was with Armando, they laughed at one another like two playful friends, each making jokes at the other’s expense. She had shown Armando a picture of her husband—a smiling man of small stature, with dark, curly hair, sitting on the hood of a big car. Armando joked about her learning how to drive the car, and about spending time in her big, new home, like a signora Americana, while he would have to keep on crossing the ocean, cleaning up after seasick passengers. Nicodemo was never far from the group, though he didn’t participate in the bantering. I saw Lucia give Armando her address written on a small piece of paper. Armando put it in his uniform pocket and I wondered how easily he’d lose it.

  Father would not be meeting us at the port, but Lucia’s husband was expected to be there. Lucia showed up for lunch dressed in the new brown wool suit that she had reserved for meeting him. Around her neck, she wore a scarf that I had never seen before, blue and bright yellow, with a picture of the Rock of Gibraltar.

  “What a beautiful scarf,” Margherita commented. “I’m sorry I didn’t buy one from the Moroccans. I’ll never get the chance again.”

  “That’s why I bought it,” Lucia said, touching the silk scarf with satisfaction. She glanced at me, smiling as she said it, still in the habit of censoring me from revealing her lies. I knew she had not bought it herself, and she knew that I knew. The way she caressed her scarf and the look on her face made me think that receiving it had made her feel special too. So I smiled back at her to assure her that she could trust me with the small deception. I never told her or anyone else that Armando had given me a gift.

  When land became visible, we joined the other passengers on the third-class deck. I kept my hands inside my coat pockets. Though we could see our breath rise up in the air, and though the cold was sharp and icy, it was not as impossible to endure as we had thought. As the ship neared the port, I looked for signs that this was Canada, especially for snow. I saw patches of white in the fields beyond the port, but the ground on the pier was clear and cement grey. The trees and bushes were thin, bare, and also grey. Our first view of the harbour was of a place different from any I had ever seen before. But nothing about it stood out or made Luigi exclaim in awe.

  “These buildings are not that high. They look like boxes made of cardboard,” he said.

  Halifax seemed flat and empty compared to the noisy chaos of Naples. It was what was missing that made it look so different—no mountains, no castles, no colour, little noise, few people. Some men were working around the pier in heavy jackets, wearing hats that covered their ears, but there were no large crowds of onlookers waiting for us. The people on the deck were just as quiet as we were, as if they didn’t know whether to be happy or sad.

  The ship moved slowly towards a large building. It had a number, 21, above its wide entrance, and I smiled at the coincidence of the inverted 12, for our twelve-day trip that would end in Montreal the next day.

  I watched in awe as the ship aligned itself with a bridg
e that opened directly into the large hall of the pier. I was surprised that we would not be setting foot on the dock. I felt like a Geppetto being swallowed by a whale. I went down with Luigi to get Mother.

  Mother’s slow walk kept us behind everyone else. I watched the sea of people move toward the open mouth of Pier 21. From here, we would all be going in different directions, Montreal, Winnipeg, Toronto, Saskatoon, Windsor, and other places we had never heard of before. None of us really knew what our new lives would be like, but we all held the same hope that a bright future awaited us.

  I looked at the women stepping down nervously from the movable, shaky ramp into the cemented ground of the huge receiving hall, helped by Armando and the other stewards: Giuseppina, who could have enjoyed her late years in her familiar surroundings, but had selflessly made the trip for her daughter’s sake; Margherita, with her small child connected to her hip, looking around the hall to find her bearings, smiling as she had when I first saw her. There were so many other women like her, holding on to older parents or children of all ages. These women had all been strangers to me when we boarded, but now I felt a deep tie to them. The pained look they had carried on the boat had magically disappeared. Most knew that they’d be expected to work in the factories of large cities, in farms, or at other menial occupations alongside their men; they looked forward to it with courage and with joy.

  I turned my gaze to Mother and she smiled at me. The day before, she could hardly stand up by herself. She still had to hold on to us, but by the look on her beaming face, I knew she had already put the suffering of the crossing behind her.

  I saw a short man, wearing a heavy winter jacket and ear muffs, walk toward Lucia. He must have recognized her from her photo, since he came straight to her and shook her hand. Lucia wore her non-smiling look. He took her arm and moved on, ahead of us. I could tell by Lucia’s stiff walk that she was not very happy. Her husband was even shorter than he had seemed on the photo, and his legs looked really funny and skinny under the jacket that seemed inflated like a balloon.

  Everyone seemed to be in a real hurry to move ahead. A line of attendants directed us toward a row of benches. We couldn’t keep up with the others in our party, and we inched our way slowly forward. A smiling woman in a uniform stopped us and gave us kids a brown paper bag each. We stopped to look inside the bag and found an apple, some crayons, a colouring book, and a pair of woollen mittens, which we put on right away. “Grazie,” Mother said weakly. She crossed herself as we took hold of her arms again. She still wobbled and looked around her, maybe disoriented at being still indoors.

  “When will we land?” she asked.

  Luigi and I looked at one other and laughed. We answered at the same time. “Ma, we’re here already.”

  13. DAY 12

  PASSING CUSTOMS TURNED OUT TO be the easiest part of our journey. None of our luggage was opened or searched. A customs officer with a red, freckled face and white eyelashes stared at us for a while, and then, without even asking any questions, stamped our passports with “landed immigrant” and gestured to us to go on.

  Pasquale had slipped through the gates to meet us at the pier. He tried to explain to the customs official that he had come to translate for us, but he seemed to have problems being understood, and had to show his identification papers.

  “No one speaks French here. In Montreal, they all speak French,” he said irately before being told to wait for us to clear customs.

  While waiting to board the train in the cavernous immigration office, Pasquale offered to buy us something to eat. “There’s nothing good to eat on the train and it’s a long ride,” he said.

  Mother took out some dollars that Zio had given her in Naples, and she asked Luigi to go with Pasquale to buy some bread. The two came back with a loaf of sliced bread, and three bottles of Coke. Mother squeezed the bread, which was the whitest and softest bread we had ever seen, and said: “But it’s not cooked.”

  “That’s the way bread is here,” Pasquale said. “But in Montreal, we finally have some good Italian bakeries.”

  Lucia had resumed her silent demeanour and said nothing as Mother cut up the red apples from our lunch bags with my brother’s penknife.

  When we finally boarded the train, it had started to snow softly. It was only five in the afternoon, but it was already dark, and once inside, we could not see out the windows. The moist, thick glass reflected only our tired faces. We still had a long way to go—many of us were going to Montreal; others were headed even further, for Windsor, Toronto, Thunder Bay, Winnipeg, Vancouver.

  The train slogged along slowly, stopping suddenly every few miles amid open fields. People wondered whether there was some malfunction, since it took as long as an hour at a time before the train would start up again.

  “At this rate, we’ll get there for Easter,” Mother said.

  We all felt hungry. Mother took out the small sopressata that Paola, Aurora’s mother, had given me on the last day in Mulirena, and cut it into thick slices. She offered it to Pasquale and Nicodemo who sat next to each other. Nicodemo had introduced himself and the two men had started a conversation in a thick dialect about Pasquale’s family and friends back home. They discovered they had many common friends in Montreal as well. Pasquale wrapped the spongy white bread around each slice as he spoke and ate it heartily. We all did the same.

  “Mangiamu all’americana,” Luigi said. We all laughed as we sipped our Cokes and ate our sopressata in a sandwich, American style.

  “This you won’t find in Montreal,” Pasquale said of the salami.

  The stop-and-go pace of the soot-covered train lasted all night long.

  “I’m surprised. We have better trains in Italy,” Luigi said.

  “That’s because in Italy we had Mussolini,” Pasquale said.

  Tired as we were, we slept most of the night. In the early morning, my brother and I were transfixed by the snowy winter landscape—nothing but fields, farmhouses, and barns that seemed covered in white cotton sheets, like furniture in deserted mansions, but in the deep freeze of February.

  “Where are all the people?” Luigi asked. “No wonder they want immigrants. Look at all this empty land.” I feared the home that awaited us in Montreal would also be a ghostly barn buried in snow.

  When we finally arrived at Windsor Station, there was no one waiting on the platform. Like the pier in Halifax, this train station led us indoors with no crowds jostling to see loved ones arrive. Meanwhile, the rest of the passengers cleared and disappeared, and we even lost sight of Pasquale and Lucia. We were looking around and feeling lost, until I spotted Father running down from a staircase toward us. He had pushed his way past guards at the arrival’s gate when he didn’t see us come up with the rest of the passengers.

  “What happened to you?” Father asked Mother. “You’re all bones.”

  “It’s a miracle I’m still alive,” Mother said, and crossed herself.

  We went up the stairs and were met by a horde of people, waving, calling out our names, while a guard kept pushing them back. Everyone was there: my aunt, uncle, Tina, and cousins. We all hugged, kissed, and cried.

  When we finally walked out into the street to wait for our ride, I watched car after car move smoothly and quietly with lights flashing in the sleek wet pavement. All the tiredness left my body as I raised my face to the night sky and closed my eyes to feel snowflakes falling lightly on my face.

  PART III

  OCTOBER 4-5, 1980

  14. SEAN AND J.P.

  SEAN AND J.P. HAVE SPENT the morning, sitting in the living room, poring over newspaper clippings, drinking coffee. The kitchen is spotless; the bedroom still in a state of total disorder. Yesterday morning, I had dumped garments on my bed, oblivious to the tragedy that had developed at Rosaria’s home. Then, too distressed to tidy up the room in the evening, I simply piled all the clothes onto a chair. My fixation with app
earance is a frivolity I can never rise above, a personality flaw that niggles at me as I return the clothes to my overstuffed closet.

  I keep thinking about Lucia and worrying about Angie. Reconstructing the voyage here from a distance of time and place has been easy; it is the present that is a mystery to me. That long ago day, when her new husband reached out for her on the dock in Halifax, Lucia took on the same stony disposition she had adopted after the night that she and Totu had tried unsuccessfully to elope. On the ship, I saw glimpses of her old, spirited self while Armando and Nicodemo flirted with her, then watched her turn stiff again when she met her husband. I wonder if she has lived in a self-imposed coma from the day she met her husband for the first time to the evening of the blow-to-the head incident. Have there been any tender moments between them?

  I walk into the den and notice that J.P. has also put the den in order. The re-arranged books on the shelves lining the room are a tell-tale sign of his presence. J.P. may have skimmed through some of the books while trying to fall asleep. He’s jealous of my library, he often tells me. One of the reasons he likes staying over at our place is the chance to leaf through the unusual selection of old books.

  Whenever J.P. comes to town, I’m on edge, making sure everything is up to par. I prepare for his visits, buying the best cuts of meat, the best cheeses to go with the wines that Sean researches and chooses. Yet my efforts always feel inadequate.

  “He’s discriminating. He’s always lived well,” Sean says about J.P.’s tendency to criticize breezily the quality of foods and wines. Sean keeps reminding me that J.P. can afford the best hotels in Montreal on his expense account, but he chooses to stay with us out of friendship.