The Women of Saturn Read online

  In the early 1950s, when most other families were hoping to find a way out of the village, Lucia’s family had no relatives overseas to sponsor them. Comare Rosaria faced a despondent husband, two ineffective and unemployed sons, and Lucia, who spent her days on her balcony embroidering her trousseau and making eyes with Don Cesare’s nephew, Totu.

  “Once girls started wearing high heels and nylon stockings,” Mother says, “who would pick olives? It still hurts me to think of those beautiful olives rotting on the ground.”

  Outside the hospital, we run into Filomena, a distant cousin of Lucia’s husband, Pasquale. She confides that Pasquale, ten years older than Lucia, has been very jealous. Filomena criticizes Lucia’s move to the city to be with her daughter against her husband’s wishes.

  “Surely she should have known her husband by now,” Filomena says in the elevator. “Could she not have made other arrangements?”

  The corridor near Lucia’s room is packed with family and close friends. Her older brother, Alfonso, is there, greeting people, repeating the story that everyone has already heard. He had met his sister and her husband at their mother’s home to help them make peace. Everything seemed to be going well. He left the kitchen to make a phone call. When he returned, Lucia was unconscious on the floor, Pasquale gone.

  The hospital staff at the Jean-Talon Hospital is used to Italians filling up patients’ rooms during visiting hours. They allow only two visitors at a time. When our turn comes, Mother and I walk into the room timidly. Lucia lies unconscious on the bed, connected to tubes and a catheter, her face half-covered by a respirator mask, visibly swollen. Short wisps of tinted hair with grown-out roots spread out on the white pillow, between the head bandages, like reddish brown spiders with grey dots. I didn’t expect to see a stranger, even though I hadn’t seen Lucia in years. What had happened to the spirited woman with long, dark curly hair? I looked for the beauty mark below her lip, half hidden by a plastic tube.

  Her mother sits next to her bed, oblivious of the people coming and going. She moves her head back and forth, grieving for her daughter, in the old Calabrian custom, wailing in a singsong trance. Oh Lucia, Lucia mia … cchi te capitau a ttie … Oh Lucia, Lucia mia….

  It would be considered impolite to pay our respects and leave. We make our way to a small waiting area at the end of the corridor. Only the women sit there. The men walk around the corridors or look for a place to smoke. If they sit with the women, they might have to talk about what brought them here.

  The women smile warmly at Mother; she is well-liked and respected by all of our paesani. She’s especially admired for having raised two children by herself, her husband having died young. In their eyes, our family has done very well for itself, except maybe for the fact that I am still unmarried. My living arrangement with Sean has never been made very clear to them.

  The women are Lucia’s age, maybe only a decade or so older than me, but they look and carry themselves like middle-aged matrons. These are the women who scamper out of buses on their way home from factories around Chabanel Street. In drab clothes, and with no hint of make-up, nondescript, invisible, they rush home concerned about the evening meal, the washing, the ironing, the preparing of lunches for the next day. This routine is rarely broken for the sake of a leisurely outing intended solely for their own enjoyment.

  These were once the young women in Mulirena I used to meet in the evenings when I went out for a stroll with the girls in my neighbourhood: Lucia, Tina, and Aurora. With the pretense of getting fresh water at the communal fountain, the Funtanella, they also exchanged glances and love notes with their sweethearts. They were as preoccupied by their appearances and boyfriends as young women everywhere. Sitting across from me is Rosalba. Her family had lived next to the church. Rosalba had looked after the kindergarten kids, and had been my Catholic Action group leader. She had also played the mother in a play about Saint Bernadette; I had been the saint; Aurora, the Virgin Mary.

  I remember these women sitting on their balconies, embroidering sheets and pillowcases with delicate little flowers, hearts, and butterflies. They once daydreamed of sharing those worked linens with a soulmate. How many have found one? Lucia certainly hasn’t. Now in their early forties, they have become efficient, selfless, almost asexual housekeepers, whose personal aspirations and desires are never worth talking about—silly, insignificant nonsense next to the needs of their families.

  Usually talkative and jovial, Tina comes to sit next to me, her eyes moist. A whispered conversation begins.

  “She might be in a coma for a long time, if ever she’ll come out of it,” Tina says, wiping her eyes with a tissue.

  “Madonna mia! Who would have believed it?”

  “When she was young, in Mulirena, she could have made love to anyone she wanted,” says Tina. “Making love for us didn’t mean what it means for us here, Cathy.”

  The women all laugh. “In Mulirena, we made love without touching each other,” says Rosalba.

  I remembered well the hours that young men spent beneath a girl’s window, speaking to each other in facial gestures. When messages had to be sent, they pitched notes to each other. This was how couples “made love,” or what in North America is called “courting.” No wonder that living together before marriage is still an unthinkable concept for these women.

  A lull falls over the waiting room, until Rosalba asks, “I hear the girl has given her mother a lot of trouble. She takes after her father’s race.” Then she asks Tina, “Did she ever tell you anything bad about him?”

  “What could she say? We all know what our men are like,” Tina answers.

  “One has to find a way with them,” Filomena says, and then goes to join her husband in the corridor.

  “Did she get offended?” Tina asks. “Look at what Lucia got compared to what she could have had, all because of the malicious tongues in the village.”

  No one has mentioned Totu’s name, but we all know what Tina refers to.

  “I saw the journalist at the travel agency this summer,” Tina says. “The woman he had been living with left him, he told me.”

  I shiver, involuntarily. I remember the day on the ship when Lucia demanded I never mention Totu’s name again. By flippantly nicknamimg him “the journalist” since his arrival to Montreal, my paesani have unintentionally bestowed on Totu a new identity that has somehow erased his old one from my mind.

  “He hasn’t lasted long with anyone,” Rosalba adds. “He and Lucia made love for a long time,”

  “He practically wore out my door, leaning against it for so long,” Tina says. “When I looked out from my window, I was able to know what time it was by his long shadow on the pavement. Piazza Don Carlo was never the same after they broke up.”

  “But did he leave her or was it the other way around?” Rosalba asks. “I never really understood what happened.”

  “Things got tangled up,” Mother says. “She had no choice but to leave. They just weren’t destined.”

  “And Aurora,” Rosalba says. “The poor girl. All the things they said about her. She had to run away to Argentina to get away from all the talk. We haven’t heard much about her.”

  “It’s as if people disappear after they go to Argentina,” Tina says. “We were all in such a rush to leave. What did we think we would find?”

  “We found the Superstyle factory,” Rosalba says laughing. “Remember the factory, Cathy? You worked there too, one summer.”

  “How can I forget?” I reply. “I cut threads at the finishing table with a bunch of Syrian ladies … for fifty cents an hour.”

  “They didn’t pay much, but the work was light.”

  “Those were other times,” Mother sighs. “We had no choice.”

  “Grazie a Dio, things have changed now,” says Rosalba. “I’m going to be quitting soon too. There aren’t as many Italians left in the factories anymore, yo
u know. They’re full of black people now. They come from Haiti, from … from … I don’t know where they’re all coming from, but they’re coming in herds.”

  Mother replies, “The world is a wheel, gira e rigira.”

  “Se, se, Teré, you’re right…. They have to eat too.” The women laugh and then resume their whispering. The sound of Comare Rosaria’s wailing can be heard coming from the patient’s room. I close my eyes and remember Lucia as a young woman, exchanging furtive glances with Totu from her balcony. He always tapped me on the cheek as he passed by my doorstep where I use to sit, play, and watch.

  We remain silent in the waiting room, each absorbed by our own thoughts, until Mother suggests it’s time to leave. Outside the hospital, I’m in a daze, confused as I try to remember where I have parked the car. We walk a block on Jean Talon Street toward the Italian church—the hub of the Italian community in this part of town. Next to the bakery, florist, and travel agency there’s a café where a group of men, some of whom were at the hospital, are sitting, smoking and gesticulating animatedly.

  “Eh, look who’s here,” Tina says.

  A tall slim man with a slight limp gets up from his chair. I haven’t spoken to him in ages.

  “Let’s cross the street. I don’t feel like talking,” I say. From the corner of my eye, I get a glimpse of his silhouette looking our way, waving a hand at us. Mother and Tina wave back. I pretend not to see him and start the car.

  17. THE JOURNALIST

  LUCIA’S CALL AT THE END of June and then Angie’s appearance in my class in September had already disturbed the still waters of memory held back by years of willful forgetfulness. The visit to the hospital and then the wave of the hand brought up undercurrents of bitterness that unresolved resentment often breeds.

  When I get home from the hospital, Sean is still out and I eat alone. I have no one to talk to about the day’s events. But what would Sean understand about centuries-old courtship rituals, codes of conduct, sense of family obligations that resurfaced for me at the sight of Lucia in her comatose state? He would probably make some sarcastic remark about love and marriage, Calabrian style.

  I mindlessly watch the late evening news until a picture of Lucia’s husband appears on the screen and a reporter gives an account of the police investigation on his disappearance. Pictures of the café torched on the same day as Lucia’s beating appear soon after. A writer of a book on Montreal crime offers his views on the battle of control between Mafia families. He predicts that more action is to be expected in the next weeks. Then a long report follows on the investigation of the cost overruns in the construction of the Olympic Stadium. The PQ government has promised that it will open a commission to investigate the bidding process in the awarding of public contracts, and further discredit the Liberals who had been plagued by scandals in the years leading to their defeat by the separatists.

  These stories, placed one after the other, give the impression that they are somehow connected. I prepare for bed and look for something to read in the den.

  The stash of old books I brought from Italy still hold the faint smell of Mulirena and that other world that refuses to be relegated to a folkoric village past to be recounted in amusing anecdotes, but has claimed a presence to be reckoned with. Seeing Lucia has left me with the disconcerting feeling that her life, having taken such an ugly turn, had continued, after the landing, thornier and more complex than we had anticipated.

  The boat journey itself had been very confusing for me, a young girl barely out of childhood, immersed as I was in the story of one chaste Lucia while following another one, a flirt, around the ship. I tried recreating that trip once to show to my so-called friend from Mulirena, “the journalist,” when he first arrived in Montreal.

  He was an academic, highly educated in Italian literary criticism. He had studied and worked in Rome for years as a journalist before his move to Montreal, so it was not surprising when he found similar work in this city. Looking back, I smile as I realize how brash and naïve I had been to bring him my juvenile writing. He claimed to have lost my story before even reading it, and thus never commented on it.

  The lady he married, Chantale, was a Quebec poet and a staunch sovereignist, and he quickly prescribed to the same ideology. For a while, he wrote for a local Italian paper, and contributed a column in the French paper La Presse under the name Antoine, French for his real name, Antonio. He still uses that name. Neither his marriage to Chantale nor his collaboration with the Italian paper lasted long. After only a couple of years, he separated from both to work independently. He started his own community magazine, Arte&Cultura, in which he criticizes and lampoons Italian Canadian community leaders, and now and then still contributes articles to the mainstream French papers on diversity, ethnicity, identity politics, and the new buzz concept, multiculturalism. He shares an office with a travel agency near the Italian church, and he supplements his income by moonlighting for the agency.

  I don’t subscribe to his magazine, but I usually read it at my mother’s. His column on art and culture in the city is mainly focused on literary criticism of Italian and Quebecois writers. He’s especially harsh on the mainstream Canadian literary establishment as well as local Italian Canadian writers, often ridiculing them. In an article on minority writing he wrote a year or so ago, he pontificated, “The immigrant experience story has been done ad nauseum. It’s time we transcend the voyage and move on to other themes.”

  I was incensed by this dismissal. I had always hoped to someday resume writing, but have I waited too long to write my story? On impulse, I decided to start a conversation with the journalist under my own pseudonym:

  Dear Antoine,

  What are we supposed to do, hide our writing just because others have written about the same topic before us? And why does everything we write have to be labelled immigrant writing? Many other peoples’ stories I’ve read deal with some form of voyage or passage, and every story is different even if the theme is the same. I’ve lived in this country three times longer than in Italy. I don’t feel like an immigrant anymore.

  Rina

  Dear Rina,

  It’s because we live in multicultural heaven. If your name is Italian and your writing has a departure, a voyage, and a landing, it’s going to be labelled an immigrant story, whether you like it or not. The industry, especially academia, thrives on classifications. They classify us in order to keep us in our places.

  As representatives of cultural communities, we jumped onto the multiculturalism bandwagon too readily, I believe. Multiculturalism started off as a political ploy to defuse separatism in Quebec while appeasing us “others.” We have become pawns in the tug-of-war between the two founding nations, and by willingly playing their games, and fitting into the peg they have created for us, we’re unwittingly creating a no man’s land, a third solitude for our artists.

  That answer flustered me. Why does he have to politicize everything? I thought. No wonder he had so little concern for my writing. But how could I possibly write about Lucia and my own experiences without focusing on our departure, our crossing, and our landing?

  Whenever I’ve thought of the lost manuscript, I’ve felt nauseous, as though something that might still be alive is buried somewhere. Yet, until now, I never gave Lucia’s new life any thought, as if her story had ended rather than started in Halifax.

  “They just weren’t destined,” my mother said at the hospital.

  I wonder if Lucia’s blow to the head was a consequence of having resisted the force of her destiny, or of having succumbed to it in resignation. Is one’s destiny worth fighting?

  18. SEAN AND I

  TIRED, I FINALLY GO TO BED, and still don’t fall asleep. I’ve often felt a sense of strangeness in lying in my parents’ bed, next to Sean. This evening I try to understand the feeling. What forces of destiny conspired to bring us together? I, a village girl from the mountains of Cal
abria; Sean, blond, three years my junior, a man of small stature, who had been raised in Winnipeg. What an unlikely couple we make!

  I would never have thought of Sean as a possible husband or even as a casual date if I had met him outside of WLHS. Physically, Sean is not my type. Throughout my adolescence, I had daydreamed about the tall, dark, and enigmatic men who were the staple of the Italian fotoromanzi I collected. When I first read Wuthering Heights in high school, I felt captivated by the presence of the shadowy Heathcliff, and I fantasized about love affairs that swept me up, above the trivial cares of life. Images of the windswept English moors, echoing with the calls of the tormented lovers, merged with remembered stories about ruthless brigands hiding in the Calabrian hills, and about the women who followed them, leaving everything behind for the love of their lives. What would it be like to feel the kind of passion that outweighed the comfort of home, the security of family?

  When Sean and I first became friendly, he seemed surprised that I was not seeing anyone. “A nice Italian girl like you! I’d think you’d be hooked up by now.”

  “What makes you think that all Italian girls are just looking to get hooked up?”

  “I must admit that I haven’t known many Italian girls. I apologize for the cliché,” he said, looking contrite and uncomfortable.

  In truth, since I had turned twenty, there hadn’t been very many knocks on my door or calls for dates. And yet I had been at my prime. I had lost the extra weight that had plagued me in my early teens. I was at my slimmest when I first met Sean—a perfect size eight—what the fashion industry labels as petite, in height, that is. My hips and thighs could use a taller frame, but I can camouflage them with the proper clothes. Thanks to my hairdressing training, I know how to minimize my defects by maximizing my good points. I never wear jeans or flat-heeled shoes. I keep my hair shining and my face well made-up, with the hope that my less than perfect features won’t be too noticeable.