She wonders whether chaos can be avoided.
The first time I saw a dead body, a girl of eight lay in a coffin, clad in her First Communion gown. Ringlets framed her heart-shaped face, and her cheeks were dusted a pale rose blush. She had a headpiece with a veil tucked beneath her hair. Her folded hands clutched a prayer book and a rosary that wove through her fingers.
A year older than me, she had drowned at the Alderwood Pool. My mother dragged me to the viewing against my father’s expressed command. He thought the exposure to a deceased child would frighten me and inspire nightmares. Mom held my wrist and nudged us in front of others waiting to pay their respects. We knelt at the pew placed before the casket. She pulled me forward, forcing me to touch the cool, lifeless hands. In the mourners’ receiving line, Mom introduced me to the grieving young mother as her greatest blessing. The woman covered her eyes and wailed.
My father found out about our jaunt. Someone he knew had attended the viewing and mentioned my mother’s appalling lack of decorum.
He boxed her ears when he got home from the espresso bar.
As a young girl, I repeatedly asked my father for the story of Rizzoli: Walking back from the fields after another harvest day, my eight-year-old father led the way back to their house on Via Rosello. His preteen sisters and Gennaro followed at a short distance. They strode single file, taking a route along a dirt path bordered by high grass. Rizzoli, their German shepherd, snarled and barked. The dog leapt in front of dad, knocking him to the ground. A snake hidden in the tall greenery struck, biting Rizzoli’s hind leg. My aunts yelled. Sofia grabbed her brother’s elbow and heaved him away from the viper. Gennaro swore and stomped on the snake. Rizzoli lay on his side, panting out last breaths. Nonno cried as their animal guardian died.
My father would relate the cliff-hanger in three short sentences, ending with, “The dog was finish.”
Each retelling, I pleaded for details. I wanted to live surrounded by stories, even scary ones.
“Who can remember? Was long times ago.”
In my mind, I stitched together a narrative of his undocumented past, but too many missing puzzle pieces baffled me. “If you died, I couldn’t be born. You couldn’t be here. I couldn’t be here. Then we couldn’t be talking—”
“You wouldn’t be bothering me—”
“Papa, how did that girl drown? How come no one saw her? No one saved her.”
He frowned. “Oh, Chickpea. I don’t know. Let’s take a walk to the Sunday store. Maybe the owner has new Richie Rich for you reading.”
I wondered about my dad’s fate, twice saved by Germans. The other was human: a soldier retreating through southern Italy as the Allied forces advanced. The Battle of Monte Cassino waged for six months until the occupying troops pulled up stakes and withdrew. Whenever they could, the withdrawing forces deployed a scorched-earth strategy, destroying everything in their wake.
The soldier saved my father from another soldier, a comrade gone crazy. Mussolini was dead. The platoon was beating a frantic path north through hostile territory, the blood-rich soil of Samnium.
One early morning, on the way to the fields, my six-year-old father, fourteen-year-old Rocco, Femia, her sister and their mother, Lina, stumbled across the platoon. Lina, my great-grandmother, pushed the boys behind her. Shielding them with her body, she stood defiant. She would not see her future, all her hopes destroyed.
One dishevelled young man advanced with his rifle drawn and aimed at the old woman and the children. He swung the barrel back and forth, unsure who to kill first. Another man stepped forward and signalled for the gun to be lowered. He negotiated through hand gestures, mimed eating to ask for food and pointed west to ask for directions.
The women handed over their bread.
The calm soldier directed the women and boys to stay put. He drew a finger across his own throat to demonstrate what would happen if they ran into my father and his family again.
Three years into my move west, I had a basic routine: I went to classes when I could muster the energy during the week and worked one day of the weekend at a gift shop. I spent the rest of the time sleeping or hanging out with friends.
Each Sunday my father would telephone, reciting a litany of my mother’s transgressions. Then my mother would shout from the downstairs extension that she was sick of tolerating us, how we’d made her crazy. If they were particularly contentious, my parents would call separately, yelling at me about how impossible their life together was without my company. The phone in the living room would ring in the middle of the night or at five in the morning, waking my roommates, putting me in perpetual-apology mode. To my isolated mom, everything was urgent news she had to share, including the fact that she found underwear on sale at Bargain Harold’s and wanted to mail the polyester briefs express post. I tried to stop answering the majority of their calls. I wanted to wean them off immediate access. Why couldn’t they modernize and learn to leave a message on the newfangled technology: an answering machine.
The tape filled with baffling voicemails—both my parents spoke to the recorded voice as if I was listening in real time: “Eufemia, hello? Pick up the phone, it’s Mamma. Hello? Why you no answer? You no there? Where you go?”
My plan backfired. My mother left rage-filled rants and spewed invectives. Sometimes she would still refer to me as my father’s whore. I breathed a sigh of relief that none of my roommates understood Italian and purchased a beige push-button phone for my room so I could grab the receiver as soon as it rung.
Nothing good ever comes of the witching hour—between 3 and 4 in the morning—the time believed to be when most people are likely to die. It was half past the supernatural time slot when the phone on my nightstand jolted me out of a dream. Dazed with sleep, I murmured a hello-do-you-know-the-time-here?
My father was on the line. He sounded shattered. His normal baritone voice shook as he whispered feverishly. “I can’t take no more. Come home. I’m finish. Come home and take care of your mother.”
He’d been feeling off for months. His high blood pressure needed constant monitoring. Physically weakened and mentally feeble, he collapsed at work after a delusional hallucination that Christ was deeply disappointed in him. Convinced he’d offended God, my father was sent home from the factory and told no one what transpired: not his sisters, not his nephews, not me.
The strain in his voice should have snapped me awake. I stretched but didn’t sit up, didn’t shake myself out of slumber. “Papa? What’s happening this time?”
“I can’t take no more. I take already so much.”
I repeat the words he spoke to me as a child. “Don’t worry. It will be okay.” I promised we’d talk and make a plan while I was home. Easter was a few days away, and I would be home for a visit after exams.
That was too late. It was too late. He’d waited too long, he said, and hung up.
I cradled the receiver and crashed out, falling back asleep shortly after turning onto my other side.
Noon the next day, I remembered the call, remembered it wasn’t a strange dream. My heart raced as I recalled the disturbing timber of my father’s voice, his anguished tone. I ran to my room and seized the receiver, dropping it on the floor.
My mother answered.
“Mamma, is everything okay?”
“Sure. Why?”
“Where’s Papa? Let me talk to him.”
“Oh, who knows where he went?” She said all my favourite dishes were being prepared for my upcoming trip.
“Tell Papa to call me as soon as he gets home.”
He didn’t.
I called again a couple of frantic hours later.
My father reluctantly got on the phone. His voice was flat, and he denied making the desperate call, cutting me off when I reminded him. “We’ll talk when you’re home.”
Two weeks later, I boarded a red-eye flight to Toronto.
My cousin Vince came to the airport with my father to pick me up.
“What’s going on? Is everything okay?” I couldn’t even remember the last time I saw my cousin. It was always my parents greeting me at Pearson.
Vince kissed me on both cheeks. Chatty as a statue, he barely spoke during the car ride back to south Etobicoke. I caught his gaze in the rear view mirror, and he looked away.
“Can someone please tell me what’s going on? Is everybody okay?”
“Sure everything is okay now you here.” My dad turned around in the front passenger seat to squeeze my arm. He pinched my chin and noted I was plumper than I’d been at Christmas, when he and my mother had come out to the West Coast. In four months, he’d grown paler and less puffy. He’d lost a lot of weight. His hands trembled. He was fifty-one, and I thought: How did he get old so fast?
Vince dropped us off. “Maybe we should go see a movie while you’re here. I’ll call you.”
My mouth fell open. I stammered a reply. “Sure. That would be nice. Thank you.”
My father hesitated before unlocking the door. “Try not to upset your Mamma.”
There was a new aspect to his familiar worry-lined forehead. A factor in his weary expression I’d never seen before: he was afraid.
“Okay, Papa. Tell me. Cosa sta succedendo?”
“Nothing. No say nothing. Don’t make her angry.” His eyes held mine with undisguised panic. I thought back to the phone call and cursed myself for being lax. After years of basic boot camp on the home front, dealing with disastrous skirmishes, it turned out I couldn’t recognize when a real crisis was about to hit. All the clues had been there: his tremulous voice, the dramatic weight gain and loss, the talk of preparing a will.
My mother had a lunch feast on the table. I protested; it wasn’t even nine o’clock. She dished out a bowl of pastina and pushed provolone, crusty bread and olives in my direction. My father said little. He watched my mother’s every move like a mouse sizing up a cat. She pestered him to eat as well, but he dismissed every offer. His hands shook as he drank a glass of water that he insisted on getting for himself. His chin quivered so much that splashes dripped onto his shirt.
I’d never seen anything like it: his jitteriness unnerved me. I knew my father craved peace, harmony and stillness, but now his body betrayed him. His movements jumpy and unsteady.
“I’m not flying overnight ever again.” I hadn’t caught any rest on the flight.
My mother cleared the table. “Your bed is made. Go sleep.”
I woke an hour later to my father pacing anxiously up and down the hallway outside my bedroom.
“Come sit outside with me. We can talk there.”
I splashed cold water onto my face and followed him to the picnic table in the backyard. Outside, a bright, sunny morning heralded the blossoms of a balmy spring, hotter than a West Coast April.
I sat down across from him. “Papa, really, what is happening? Why is everyone acting strange? I haven’t seen Vince in six years.”
“First, cross your feet like this.” He demonstrated.
“Why?”
“If you don’t, she might hear us.”
“Who?”
He looked around the yard and then looked down at my slippered feet. I crossed my ankles.
“Mamma. She can still hear us when she’s not here. Maybe even from ten, twenty, a hundred kilometres away. She can hear everything we say to each other. You have to keep your ankles crossed for what I’m about to tell you.”
A sour taste overwhelmed my mouth. I hadn’t brushed my teeth. I wrapped my arms around my waist. I tried to focus on my father’s words while grappling with my inner voice: no. no. no. no. no. no. no. no. no. no. no.no.no.no.no.no.no. Not this. Not him too. He can’t get sick. Please God, no.
“Over Easter, I was very sick. I was in St. Joe’s Hospital.” He explained: he’d collapsed again. This time he ended up in a psych ward.
“What do you mean again? When did you collapse the first time? Why didn’t anyone call me? You were in the hospital, and nobody called me?” In shock, my pitch rose. All the muscles in my back and neck stiffened. This had to be rock-bottom. The lowest blow. My dad in jeopardy and no one in my family’s inner circle of cousins, aunts and uncles filled me in? No one.
“Shhhh-shh-sh! Zitte! Don’t get upset. Keep your voice down. Let me finish before your mother comes back.”
Malocchio had sent him to the hospital. The evil eye, the curse that escorted our family through life.
“Papa, come on. You can’t really believe that.”
But he did and he always had, the belief so old, so embedded in the history of Southern Italy, passed down through every generation. In our family, the deadly malevolence caused by others was considered fact, not fiction. Spell-casters had spread virulent illnesses again, using sorcery identical to that which had slain his eldest sister as a toddler, his mother as a senior. He laid out his proof: Nonna Femia’s planned trip to Canada for my First Communion had been curtailed when she took ill and died. He reminded me that I’d been afflicted too, as an infant. Of course I wouldn’t remember, but my Aunt Sofia had removed the hex.
He described heaven-sent hallucinations as my mind strove to catch up. My gut churned with terror. I put my hand on my chest to calm myself, to still my quickening heart rate. Two mentally ill parents. I was doomed.
He blamed his mother-in-law, Sapooch, and his toxic marriage to her malicious daughter. They cursed him repeatedly, had tried to destroy him. He was full of self-recrimination for talking openly and often about his dissatisfaction with my mom. He said, “Mamma is extremely dangerous.”
I stared at him, stunned. “You’re just figuring this out now?”
My six-foot father—the malnourished kid who grew up to be a sturdy man—had an imposing physical presence, especially for people who didn’t know how tenderhearted he was. And yet he trembled in terror.
Unsympathetic and unforgiving, I thought, no: my father could not lose his marbles. He had to pull himself together. I stood up to go back inside. “This is bullshit.” I couldn’t bear to look at him.
“Don’t be like that,” my father pleaded. “We’ve always gotten along. We always understood each other. You’re in danger here. We need to help each other. You have to understand—”
Resentment snuck into my heart and hardened, crystallized into rage. “What I understand is that now I have two crazy parents. One was more than enough. One was more than I could manage. Do you understand that? Do you understand what you put me through when you were sane? And now you want to lose your mind? No.”
I shouted so loud I fried my vocal cords.
My father’s expression crumpled. His bottom lip quivered as he struggled to reply. He removed his glasses and pressed his palms against his eyes. He needed my help, and I shunned him. The image of his crestfallen face haunts me still.
Our neighbour hurried out into their yard to see who was causing the commotion. I could see the surprise on her face that for once it wasn’t my mother.
I thought about all the times my dad left me alone in the house with her. Nights when she terrified me with her ranting, screaming like a soul possessed by a demon while she took a hammer to the mirrored cabinet in the upstairs bathroom. The times I hid in the closet and under the bed while she roamed the hallway threatening to torch the place with me in it.
I turned my back on him and stormed inside.
We spent the next days circling the subject whenever my mother went to Mass. My father urged me to pay closer attention and begged that I be extra cautious in my dealings with people. I couldn’t know when I might encounter malevolence, since many evil people adeptly shielded their true nature.
“Tu ne capisce. You don’t understand. Some people live to make other people suffer. People who make you see the moon’s reflection in water and make you think it’s really the moon in night sky. You’ll drown before you realize who you’re dealing with. People like your mother love to destroy everyone around them.”
I was slow to fathom that my father had been quietly battling a delusional state before experiencing a complete breakdown. Even my mother—an acutely deranged woman—had avoided the psych ward.
The twelve days of my trip spanned an eternity. One night, after another failed attempt to talk to me about curses and people filled with malevolent intent, my father paced the upstairs hallway all night. My nervous system buzzed with worry. I’d hear him muttering to himself, and then he’d stop, open the door to my room and call my name, checking to see that I still existed. At midnight. At one, then two, then two-thirty in the morning. At three, during a pause in the pacing when my father went downstairs, I moved mom into my room so she could lock the door. We were both still awake, anticipating the worst. I took the spare bedroom across the hall. He returned half an hour later, and when he found my door locked, he banged on it.
I sat up and called out, “Papa, stop. Please go to bed. Can’t you see what you’re doing?”
He looked in and didn’t recognize me. “What are you doing there? Who’s in your room?”
“Mom is. Papa—”
He shrieked, calling on God and Femia to help. “Dio, aiutami. Mamma, aiutami. I’m supposed to be better. I wanted to be better for Eufemia’s visit.”
I scrambled to untangle myself from the bedsheets while he hollered. He repeated his cry for guidance like a mantra, bellowing at the ceiling. I reached him and put my hand on his arm, hoping to transmit calm.
I thought: please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please God, you deaf bastard, don’t take my father. He’s all I have.
My mother sprinted into the hallway. “Ma va fanculo, disgraziato—”
I wedged myself in the space between them, and we crashed, my mother’s head knocking into my nose. I barely felt the sting. They hammered each other, kicking and slugging from side to side, trying to avoid me.
“Get out of the way, imbecile. This doesn’t concern you. This is about me and your father—”
I pounded on her chest to push her back, but my mother enraged contained the strength of five boozed and ornery strapping young men looking for a fight to thrash their anguish into another soul.
My father kept lunging at her from the side. I shored against his efforts with my elbow, jabbing it repeatedly behind me into his ribs.
She punched past me to wallop my father. She screamed. “Who’s the sick one now? It’s you, it was always you. I married a crazy man.”
I slapped her hard across the temple. “Shut up. This is all your doing. Congratulations, you drove someone crazy.”
“So it’s only me you have a problem with. You can’t hear his insanity.”
“Shut your fucking mouth. I swear to God, you shut the fuck up, or I’ll shut you up forever, understand?”
How would I explain matricide to the police? No doubt, the phone book-sized file they had on my mother—the constant shoplifting, the assault charge from the onsite nurse at dad’s factory, the restraining order issued to keep Aunt Sofia safe—could provide context. Maybe even a motive. Perhaps, after I committed the homicide I could pen a poignant suicide note:
Dear Toronto’s Finest,
I stuck a fork in my mother because she was done. Then I offed myself. In all honesty, this madness is bullshit. While I fantasized about the potential decades spent in prison serving as a well-deserved writing retreat, I’m plum tuckered out.
Best regards,
Eufemia
They fought and they fought and they fought; sunlight broke through the living room window when I finally crumpled into a heap on my bed and fell into a dreamless sleep.
From the tranquil distance of time and therapeutic intervention, I can re-examine this dreadful scene. Watching my father come unhinged and my mother’s cruel delight. How the last lines of Eliot’s “The Hollow Men”—This is the way the world ends—played on a recorded loop in a corner of my brain that used words and sentences as life rafts. Fragments are written in a journal, but I failed to note how I managed to settle them down before dawn. My memory ends with my father trying to gift me the engraved watch he’d received for twenty-five years of service at his factory. He pressed it into my hands, rambling about not having a will and wondering what would happen to me when my mom finished him off.
Toward the end of the trip, my dad stated plainly that I was selfish and spoiled to stay away from home when he direly needed me. “You had a roof over your head and food on the table. What do you know of suffering?”
I knew exhaustion. I was intimate with fear. I perceived that I lived in British Columbia on borrowed time, borrowed money. Funds I never intended to pay back. The bank vault of transgressions brimming with support I thought my father owed me.
The day before my flight back to Victoria, he told me I would have to live with his death on my conscience.
His health crisis turned out to be diabetes. Unchecked, the disease can cause delirium. He was also diagnosed with severe depression, anxiety and obsessive-compulsive disorder My dad’s doctor prescribed various meds to treat blood sugar levels and high blood pressure. It took thirteen pills a day to stabilize my father’s mental and physical state.
It took forever to dawn on me that his grasp on reality was broken, had changed. For years as a teenager, as I observed the toll my mother’s violence had on us both, I thought all the confusion lay in a combination of language barrier and cultural clash. My mother’s schizophrenia acted as a solar eclipse, blocking my father’s potential for illness.
On the other side of the country, in Victoria, I held myself together with paper clips and potato chips, writing and stuffing my face with junk food. The method, unscientifically proven to produce results, worked for awhile. But there came a day when I couldn’t focus. Months, really. Words abandoned me—scattering like dandelion seeds in the breeze—or I left them. Unable to concentrate, I stopped attending classes and resigned myself to undergrad dropout status. The medication I took for atypical depression shaved fifteen pounds off my slender frame. Compliments poured in. The same pill wiped out my libido and drove a stake in the heart of my relationship. Kevin was from Cobble Hill—an island boy through and through, he loved a fun party, good company and me. We were attached at the groin for four years, loving and hurting each other, before meandering apart like driftwood. In our fifth and final year, our friends thought we’d already broken up because we spent so little time together.
Overtaxed by constant anxiety, I broke many bonds. The small circle of friends I’d managed to acquire shrunk. When I broke up with Kevin, it disappeared entirely. Our connection was in its death throes when another suitor came along. I basked in the glow of his attention and felt buffeted from the lonely sound of my heart pounding loudly late at night, sleep evading me as I attempted to suss out what would become of me.
It was a time of endings, of suspended animation, of shelved dreams and sluggish days spent nursing ancient hurts and numbing old aches. Time and distance healed nothing, as far as I could tell—this stint simply collected adversities and obstacles that distracted me for a stretch.
We cemented the deal: we moved to Vancouver and a couple of years later, I married the suitor. I was twenty-seven and thrilled that I’d never have to go on a date again. Bridal magazines didn’t cover colour schemes that paired autumn weddings with existential dread. I chose my favourite colour for the two bridesmaids’ dresses and the décor: eggplant purple. Our wedding took place on the day of Princess Diana’s funeral. Fifty guests attended, including my dad, Rocco and Colleen. My father flew in on the pretence of a vacation—I couldn’t tell my mother, couldn’t risk the event being ruined. We had a short honeymoon on Bowen Island followed by monthly arguments about money that drained any affection between us. ogether for five years in total, the marriage lasted one revolution around the sun.
My father was relieved when the union ended. “I was worry for you. He no like to work. How can you plan the future with someone so lazy?”
“You should talk. How can you live with someone so crazy?”
“I want for your life to be easier.”
“I wish the same. For you.”