I spent my last week in Mersea preparing a final report. At home I’d carefully labelled and filed all the materials we’d put together, interview tapes and notes, photos and documents, index cards. Sorted like that they seemed an impressive archive, weighty, official, so much more orderly than the work that had gone into creating them, than the community they represented. I wondered what truths or fictions the professor would draw from them; or perhaps they would merely sit gathering dust in some office of multiculturalism, having no value beyond their official one, simply a proof that the government had given its sanction to an ethnic community.
But when I came to write up the report it seemed impossible not to leave out what mattered most, the countless things that were known but never discussed, the truer, finer, more vulgar things, the garish furnishings in people’s homes, what they might say over supper, how they held in their hearts’ fonder remembering until the moment the machine was turned off and they’d sat back in pleased relief at their careful deceptions. The most interesting interviews, the atypical ones, were the hardest to use, didn’t fit any pattern; and the very act of summarizing seemed to steer me toward exactly what I wished to avoid, a kind of panegyric that sifted and levelled all differences into a bland, harmonious whole. I was reduced finally to a sort of doltishness, to stating the obvious, to charts and statistics and glosses that left out a haze of impression and nuance that couldn’t be put into words.
I worked in my room, conscious of being there at a desk while outside my father and the others worked on the farm seeming at once the fulfilment and contradiction of my report. I had set their own tapes apart, Tsia Taormina’s and Tsi’Umberto’s, my father’s, feeling a vague obligation to listen to them, though the days passed and still I kept putting the task off. When my father’s turn had come up in our interviewing I had assigned him to one of the younger workers, Filomena, had half-expected, half-hoped, that he’d decline to be interviewed at all; but then in the cassettes that Filomena had turned in to me at week’s end my father’s had been there, so innocent-seeming among the rest that I couldn’t bring myself to disturb it.
Ultimately it had been Aunt Teresa who’d refused to be interviewed, something that seemed both in character for her and not, simply her usual perversity or perhaps something else, a sort of integrity. She’d refused a platform to speak, to contradict, to call attention to herself, had chosen instead simply to hold her tongue, as if she’d understood how little place there was in this sort of thing for the truth. Perhaps all along I’d underestimated her, had never been willing to concede to her this strength of character. Even her visits to Rita, what she’d told her: seen differently they seemed to fit the pattern of a long, quiet management of our family’s emotions, of the self-denial that had lain always just beneath the surface of her, what might have been the only thing, finally, that had saved us from ourselves.
It was only after I’d finished my report that I listened to the tapes. Tsi’Umberto’s was predictable, the reasonable man, the persona he took on with people, his bad English straining for authority, for the idiomatic, only a small sullenness showing the wariness beneath his responses, the care he was taking to keep them unremarkable. Tsia Taormina’s, done separately in dialect, I almost gave up on, put off at first by her plodding literal-mindedness; and yet there were things that surprised me, perceptions I couldn’t account for.
“It was hard for the kids at first, because of the language and everything. The oldest one was all right but for the younger one it was harder, he said the kids at school made fun of him and things like that. He wanted us to buy him clothes like they had but we didn’t have any money for that in those days.”
But I was amazed she could have known these things, that her sons had had that closeness with her; we had all lived together then and yet I couldn’t fit these moments of intimacy into the strange foreboding gloom that was all I remembered from then.
My father’s tape was an agony. There was none of Tsi’Umberto’s forced reasonableness in it, his voice throughout raw with humility, a single note hanging in it like the hollow after-throb of a bell. The contrast to Filomena’s was almost comical at times, as if their voices had been spliced together afterwards for a gag, Filomena resolutely buoyant and automatic, my father’s responses like a sea she skipped across to reach the safe haven of her questions. There was a palpable warmth that came through when my father spoke about Italy – he grew almost voluble then, almost expansive, a nostalgia I’d seldom seen in him, that didn’t fit the image I’d somehow developed of his having left Italy coldly, without remorse; but then Filomena asked about his family.
“My son came over in sixty-one with my wife, but my wife, she died on the trip.”
A pause.
“I’m sorry, you said your wife died?”
There was a catch in my father’s voice, a stillness.
“Yep.”
Another scratch of empty tape.
“How did she die, was she sick, did she have an accident?”
“She died in childbirth.”
Filomena’s awkward earnestness enraged me, that in a community as small and claustrophobic as ours she hadn’t known these things; and yet I’d chosen her to do my father exactly because she’d seemed the least likely of our group to know.
“I’m sorry about that,” she said, then returned with a quaver to her usual list of questions. I had the impression that if she’d continued to probe, my father would simply have gone on like that to tell the whole story, would have answered every question with the same humbled sense of obligation to the truth.
I thought of removing my father’s tape, his entire file – there was an intimacy in his answers I couldn’t bear, something laid open, not so much in what he’d said as in his simple inability not to speak, that made my mind ache. Yet perhaps in speaking he himself had already made peace with himself, could see his life more whole than I did, less out of the ordinary. There were a hundred different tragedies in our community, and beyond them a hundred scandals, infidelities and betrayals, illegitimacies, an ancient murder; and yet the earth had never split open in the face of them, the people they touched carrying on with their lives, accepted, marked only by the lingering gingerliness others showed around them as if out of respect for human frailty. In the end I put the tape back in its proper place, feeling my father was owed that or perhaps simply wanting to see it there, so innocuous, among the others, apart from its few awkward moments telling, after all, the same story they did, as if time had finally levelled our lives to a comfortable normalcy.