Rosa, I have a confession to make. That’s why I’m talking to you, why I’m holding your picture, the one from Henry’s thirteenth birthday party. Today I broke my promise. Today I told Henry. Let me explain.
Remember when we first came to see our property in King City? Yes, you’ve heard this part before, but let me tell it again, don’t talk back. You read me the sign on Jane street — you knew some English: Population 1,000, Growing with Canada. “A country still growing,” you said, shaking your head and laughing. I laughed too, though I didn’t really understand. You’re smarter than me, I admit. You stared at the empty land the government sold to us for two hundred dollars, pointed your finger at it and said, “Mario, here we build a home.” I was so happy that I ran into the land doing cartwheels and back flips, ignoring the thistles and milkweed. When I returned my face and legs were scratched, remember?
“Mario, you are crazy,” you said, “this is Canada now. You must never reveal your past. You don’t want to be sent back, do you?” I listened to you, when did I not? Maybe it would have been better for both of us if I hadn’t. Maybe I would have been kinder to you all these years, maybe the strength of my hands would have exhausted itself in the tight grip of another funambulista like myself. I bite my hand for every time I hit you.
So I became a Canadian. I learned the right size ring-dog to attach to a chain, the allowable tension for two-inch cabling, the cracking heat of cinder-blocks and the minimum air pressure for an earth mover’s tire. I waded into swamps and tied chains to trees, I dug gullies for pipes along Highway 401 and stood next to the heat of fresh asphalt in the midday sun. I came across a dusty moth big enough to smother my face in its clothy wings.
I had accidents that could only happen here: a buzzsaw flew out of my hand and sliced some flesh from my arm; our lawnmower tipped over and shaved off half a finger. You know it well.
I never once let on I was an acrobat, that I knew how to kip, spin and fly through the air, hang from up high and land on the strongman’s shoulders after doing two somersaults. All these years I fought the urge to break into a handstand during lunch time or balance myself on a tall branch or leap off the back of a truck with a full body flip, pick up my equipment and walk away as if nothing happened. I was the Paisano. I accepted this, just as you accepted other things, wasn’t that the way? You must have known I longed for the ache in my knees from hanging on the trapeze, the pounding in my head when I dove in the air like a bird, that I needed to feel my legs hurt from the good pain of exercise and not the bad pain of work, I wanted to feel my calves bulging, watch the muscles beneath my thighs arch like dolphins, listen to the long applause of a crowd. Forget that, you said this is Canada.
Ah. This is Canada, a blessed country. You can tangle your fingers in strands of grass and tear off the top layer of earth like lifting a wig from a head. In twenty-four hours it’s grown back. I cleared acres and acres of thistle, tore up and replanted trees, transformed an angry swamp into a serene golf course. I gave this land shape, I subdued it. When I drive along the Fifteenth Concession or Jane Street I’m in the company of trees I’ve planted. Grass is green because of me. But I don’t know how to help Henry grow into a man. For this, I need you.
*
One night I had to go searching for him. I found him playing on the small pond at King’s Cross Estates. The kids park their parents’ expensive cars to light up the pond, engines running, high beams shining against their hockey shirts. These are nearly men that Henry plays against. I watched for a while. They threw him to the ice, they slashed the stick from his hands, pushed him off the pond and into the snow where he sprawled forward on his skates, trying to keep his balance, hands waving like a windmill. Why did you buy him the equipment? I see the ice skates which cost me two weeks of work for that Milanese Natale, who values only the strength in my legs and the width of my back, and I wonder how you ever convinced me to give you the money. You had your ways, Rosa, you had your ways. Now he’s bought himself the shoulder pads. He has the knobby-fingered gloves, the hard plastic helmet, and now the bulky shoulder pads. This isn’t a sport, this is a costume party.
Yesterday, on the way home, I hit him again. I’d already slapped his face when I walked straight out onto the pond to get him, you know me. Someone said something about eye-ties and Mussolini but I ignored that, I’m not that crazy. Eye-ties, you see? Henry will always be an Italian, never a Canadian. When we came home I tried to make it up to him. I wrapped black electrical tape around his hockey stick. “This stick,” I told him, “she has more cracks in it than the Sistine Chapel.”
“Yeah, and she’s that old, too,” he replied, shaking his long brown hair the way he does when talks back. Welts rose up on his face. “At school they think we’re poor.”
They think we’re poor because his hockey stick is cracked. I told him I went to school barefoot, shared schoolbooks with my three brothers, wrote on both sides of the paper with a pencil no bigger than a bean, and wore the same pair of pants for the whole year.
“Yeah, well this is Canada, dad!” he shouted before I’d finished. I slapped him. “I hate soccer!” he shouted, “I hate Italy! I hate you!”
I wish you were here to tell him stories. About Giacomo Sorcanera beating Marietta because the newborn baby had blues eyes like his brother’s or about Filomena Sapone who suckled her five-year old in the village square. Words would pour out of your mouth even though the asthma tired you, your eyes would burn, your breath would shorten but you’d keep talking.
You were my Sicily, Rosa.
From you Henry learned about Niccolo Ciccavo, who went to jail four times, each time earning greater respect, about the Candeloro family who sold their land to send their only son, Luigi, to Rome to become a doctor and how Luigi lost all the money in a single Scopone game; Verdone Perrili who promised to wait until his mother died to get married but died before she did; Battista Lo Posto, the village philosopher with five different kinds of sleeplessness; Giacinto Barleta who when the Russians put a man into space, dug a small hole in his father’s grave and shouted him the news. Now you’re gone. Sicily is gone.
Sometimes he crawls into my bed and calls your name. I cannot have him sleeping on your side Rosa, I cannot bear another heart beating next to mine, so I kick him out. I am not a good father. Was I good husband? Didn’t I make you happy? Remember when you hit me over the head with the Virgin’s Meditations book? “You’re right, Rosa,” was all I said. You weren’t afraid of me, even after everything. Henry’s eyes are large and brown like yours, with long eyelashes that I’ve never seen on a boy.
My English is worse. I don’t watch television because of the empty sofa. Sometimes Henry has to remind me to do the shopping. I’m no good in the supermarket which has so many things. I always choose the wrong thing, so I bring Henry along because he knows what to buy and how much. He’s smart when he wants to be..
*
I hope you will understand me now Rosa when I tell you how it all happened. Yesterday me and the new boy from Alberta cleared an area of forest to make way for a radio antenna. That Albertan, he’s muscular, a true Canadian, he’s something to behold, with a lithe waist, a haughty demeanor and broad, confident shoulders. In a circus he’d be the strongman.
We walked deep into the forest, until we reached a tall oak tree with a red ribbon tied to it. Yellow fungus grew on trunks like bloated tongues; an army of ants trooped along the frayed edge of a decaying log. I inhaled the dusky odor of the leaves and damp forest. Suddenly I grabbed hold of a branch and swung up the trunk. I started to rise higher and higher, reaching, angling, clawing, like climbing the metal rungs of the trapeze post, remember? Leaves brushed against my face, my hands grew red from clenching the coarse wood, the dank wetness of the tree closed in on me like a blanket. I climbed until I could no longer hear the Albertan shouting at me to come down. Up there the darkness gave way to a sun big as Canada. Trees covered the land in a haze of green. I reached the crown of the tree and it swayed from my weight. I wanted to do something crazy Rosa. I wondered how many somersaults it would take to fall to the ground, I wondered if I could leap across to the neighboring tree with a one-and-a half gainer or if my hands would slip when I reached the branch. Then I heard something and looked up.
A large bird flew in slow circular movements as if it had all the time in the world. It coasted in the air, soaring round and round, graceful in its solitude. A single, faint flap of its sizable wings was enough keep it aloft. It seemed charmed.
“Eh, paisano Tarzano!” The Albertan was shouting. I started to climb down. The taste of bark was still strong in my mouth and my face stung from the leaves. When I reached the bottom I felt light. The bird had lifted something heavy from inside me, Rosa. And what I did next, I couldn’t help. I did a flip. Right in front of the Albertan. And then two more. He asked me where I learned to do that.
“In Sicily,” I told him. But that wasn’t how they found out about my past. I told the police myself. No wait, don’t protest. Listen.
*
When I returned from work that day the circus was still inside me. I took off my steel-toed construction boots, the jeans with the thick red-checkered lining you bought for me at the IGA, ungreased my hands and naked, a thick-legged, hard-butted beast, rummaged through the attic for my old uniform. I found the leotard and sweatshirt, the one that says “Il Grande Roncali” on the back. I hunched my body to slip into the straps and I straightened up gently to make sure the material didn’t rip. The stitches yielded up a smell of sweat from a hundred ancient performances. The uniform snuck into my crotch and suffocated my thighs, but the old thing held. Not a perfect fit but still a fit.
Remember when you pointed to the telephone wires along the roads and said “We’re in Canada now, you see Mario, every house has a telephone?” When I stared at the wires all I could think of was walking across them. When we had just arrived such a feat would have been easy to perform. My muscles were less bulky and my balance was as sensitive as a gyroscope. How many mornings had I stared at them from the bedroom window?
I went outside and sat beneath the post. I looked at the knots running up it. After all those years in the forest, I can read a tree, even a naked one like the post, I can imagine the branches full with life, I can picture the serrated edges of the leaves, the veins on each leaf. I was already a third of the way along the post before I realized what I was doing. I was climbing up like a caterpillar, using the ghosts of the knots as meager footholds, my arms and legs working in automatic union like they should. I didn’t care anymore, Rosa, do you understand? I didn’t care who found out. Halfway up I stopped for a breather. The plastic cones that held the three separate telephone lines taut looked like small white birds. I climbed some more.
Finally I was up. The tip of the telephone pole across the street rose above the wires like a mast. There was no safety net below. Foolishly, as if I were still the young acrobat, I stood. A gust of wind caused me to careen forward, and for a moment I imagined the ground rushing up to my face, the bright September sky and trees tumbling around me. But I didn’t fall. Arms spinning in the air like propellers, one leg unhinged, the other slipping, I crouched into myself, hugged my knees and instantly regained the blessed center of my personal gravity. It’s one thing to climb up a living birch and know that you might pass through soft wet leaves and branches, and at the end, land on a fat floor of humus; it’s another to be standing in the wind atop a skinny telephone pole with nothing but three invisible wires between me and the hard earth. Fifteen years Rosa, fifteen. I am allowed a little fear, no?
I saw the top of our A-frame, the chimneys rising from the King’s Cross Estates, and the cypresses around the small cemetery where we buried you and I remembered the smell of clove in your mouth when I kissed you for the last time. I stared at the post across the street and then I imagined the next post, lost somewhere in the trees; I imagined a whole fleet of them stretching clear across Canada, connecting King City to Vancouver. The idea that a massive grid of posts and wires connected the vast empty spaces of Canada would make you happy, Rosa, you who loved the telephone.
That’s how my courage returned. Bastardi! I shouted. Come to Canada, come to King City, come see the construction worker walk across the sky, you, Schwartz and your cows, you, Currans and your eleven carrot-headed children, you, Natales, and everybody who ever thought I was just a paisano, come see me now, come see Il Grande Roncali. And you know what? They did.
First came the Hobson boy. Next, three of the Curran girls showed up, pedaling their bicycles furiously toward me, their dresses ballooning in the air, their fiercely braided hair bouncing like rope around their shoulders. And Schwartz too, driving his Gravely along the side of the road, knees sticking out like a grasshopper.
“Roncali,” he said, twisting his head up, “what in the devil are you doing there dressed like that?” I don’t think he ever turned his head up so high in his life, I could almost hear the folds of flesh in his neck creak.
Lights flashed. The Mounties — a carload of them — halted behind Hobson’s pick-up. From above they all looked the same, the same shiny shaved faces, brown hats, tight-fitting shirts and riding pants with a black stripe down the seam, the kind of pants Il Duce himself like to wear, remember? One of them returned spoke through the megaphone attached to the squad car’s roof. Officer Fred Colson. Don’t you love those Canadian names? Roy Farquahar, Richard Eckersely, Brian McDougall; what about real names, like Giacobbe Losurdo, Antonio Ranocchia, Baldovino Sciarappa, names that fill your mouth when you say them, names that are alive, warm, names that reveal a story. Henry Roncali!
“This is Officer Colson. Would you please return to the ground?”
He said this as if he was asking for more milk in his coffee. In Sicily if a man climbed a telephone post, children would shout, the priest would perform a blessing, the old women would cross themselves, maybe the carabinieri would shoot a rifle into the air, and afterwards, afterwards the whole village would have earned still one more story to tell its children and grandchildren.
Then I heard Henry’s voice. He was scared, his voice was accusing, insistent.
With one foot on the post and one on the wire, head over my shoulder, I turned slowly to show him my sweatshirt and the name across the back. “Do you think I was born wearing construction boots?” I shouted. He stared with those eyes of his, of yours, the long lashes, the carbon eyebrows, the dark complexion. “This is better than counting the stitches on a goalie’s face, eh?”
After that, which direction was there for me but straight ahead? I extended my arms and stepped with both feet onto the wire. It sagged One of the Curran girls brought her hands to her eyes.Dio Bon! A small wave coursed through the wire, bounced off the post and I bent my knees to absorb the returning hump. This is something I have never done before, walk across a sagging highwire. When I reached the middle I think I was down a foot and I was swaying in a slight horizontal arc. I used all the muscles in my tremulous legs to stop the swaying. I imagined a heavy weight dangling from my waist, holding the symmetry of my body dead center. Step by wobbly step I proceeded to cross the wire. The wire dipped again but I didn’t hesitate, I had mastered the peculiar physics of a loose highwire. So I walked across the sky just as the sun was coming down. It was like the ending of an Italian movie, Rosa. I don’t remember if they applauded when I reached the other side. I didn’t care. I came down, caterpillar fashion. Henry was staring at me with a strange expression on his face, as if he didn’t recognize me.
Officer Colson said simply, “You’re under arrest,” and then asked me to get into the squad car. For disturbing traffic and endangering citizens. What traffic? What citizens? They would have paid for me to do it over again.
I told them everything. I told them that I worked for Mussolini and that the Duce himself used to come watch me perform. That I had pictures of us together. Colson said he didn’t care about my past, do you hear that? And all this time we thought we were hiding a great secret from them.
They asked about the bruises on the boy’s face. I told them it was only a slap. “There’s a slap and there’s a slap,” Officer Colson answered, when he set me free the next morning. He thinks he’s pretty smart with that slap and slap business. This is Canada, Rosa where they can tell a father how to raise his child. Henry stayed with the O’Haras for the night.
It was Barney O’Hara who told Henry about Mussolini. He told him Mussolini was a fascist. He’s right. But what could I tell him? That I was one too? That Benito used to be my hero and the hero of so many others in our village? I showed him the picture, the one where I’m in my uniform, surrounded by carabinieri and soldiers and Il Duce who is shaking hands with me, his chest full of medals. On the back of the picture it said: “Il Grande Roncali e Il Duce.”
“You mean Mussolini,” Henry said, “Is that why you used to hit mom so much?” I wanted to tell him that my grandfather Giancarlo had marked his first wide on her face because she once burned his food and that my father had locked me up in the attic for two days without water because I took the Virgin’s name in vain, but I didn’t. Instead I tore the picture up. We made a bonfire behind the house and burned some things. There was one book with a thick cover that wouldn’t burn, the pages were so glossy. Then, when it caught, the pages turned and one by one. Pictures of our expedition to Ethiopia, soldiers marching through water with their rifles above their heads, drawings of maps, sketches of battle plans. Henry stared while it burned. The pages curled and turned to ash. Then I burned something else, I hope you will forgive me. I took all your clothes, the dresses, the shoes, all your things that stared at me in the closet every morning — they were no longer you, they were empty. Henry didn’t say a word.
Later, when the last embers glowed, he said now that he knew I was an acrobat to show him how to do a kip. Did I have a choice? With palms flat on the ground and elbows back I kipped up and went into a somersault. The first time he tried a kip he fell; the third time, with a little help from me, he made it. He learns fast. He has balance, it’s hereditary.
I told him how I gather all my strength into my legs, Rosa; how I feel my calves and thighs grow tight as a cord. I have legs like the Colossus of Rhodes. At my peak I could rise to a meter and twenty centimeters above ground.
I explained to him the art of the full-body somersault.
The trick is the take-off and the landing. All the horizontal power of the run must be converted into upward motion, I run as hard as I can and then — mmmph! — I hit an invisible wall and lift up into the air with so much strength I think I’ll keep going on forever. This I call the Right Angle of Triumph.
After the run and the lift into the air, I am upside down. The ground is close and threatening with its unforgiving hardness. My feet point to the skies, my hair hangs down and my head is heavy. I turn like a satellite in space, slowly, slowly, and then I come up and meet the earth. If it’s done perfectly I am already standing, standing straight, Rosa, a man.