Objects of Worship Page 6

  Clinging to the memories and experiences of my father and my brother — which cascade through me, changing me — I hold my twin tight. “I missed you.”

  “Go,” Bernard repeats.

  I fly away.

  THE SEA, AT BARI

  In Bari, the pizza marinara was more delicious than in Rome. Not only did some Roman pizzerias add melted cheese to this classic cheeseless pizza (probably to satisfy the expectations of tourists), not only did most of them skimp on the garlic (again, no doubt to avoid offending tourists’ underdeveloped tastebuds), but the oregano was not allowed the time necessary to flavour the tomato sauce; it was simply thrown on top of the pizza.

  But in Bari . . . the pizza marinara surpassed Mario’s expectations: heavily laden with garlic and covered in tomato sauce from which wafted a strong yet delicate aroma of oregano.

  Whenever Mario remembered Bari, a complex emotion — part nostalgia, part loss, part happiness, part dread — nipped at his heart. Perhaps, Mario thought, some emotions did not have names — at least, not in English or Italian. Perhaps it was better to let emotions permeate us without needing to name or fix them. It let them live. Mario felt in short supply of living, lasting emotions. He was hoping this trip would change that.

  The only other time he’d visited Bari was twenty-five years ago — the summer he turned five. For his birthday, his grandparents had thrown a party, inviting a bunch of Italian children who could not speak English. Mario’s Italian was limited, but he had fun with the other kids anyway. For dinner they’d all eaten cheeseless pizza — at the time, it had struck him as very odd, this absence of cheese.

  Much odder, though, were the events that transpired that night. The dream. The hallucination. Yet, he’d travelled from Toronto to Rome to Bari in search of this phantasm.

  His flight had landed in Rome — there were no direct flights to Bari from Canada — and he’d decided to spend a few days in the legendary capital. He soon tired of the ubiquitous tourists and the pandering, crass tackiness. All that history turned into a theme park for bored vacationers desperately searching for something to pass the time. There was beauty in Rome — the cityscape as seen from atop the Castel Sant’Angelo; the lush majesty of the Villa Borghese; the piazzas of the historic centre and their boldly opulent fountains; the cats lounging among the ruins of the Area Sacra di Largo Argentina — and, more strikingly, some sort of simmering primal paganism that infected even the Catholic Church, whose Roman expression bespoke a fleshly, breathing, essentially present god rather than the more theoretical deity of Canadian Catholicism. The urgent demeanour and portentous voices of the monks, priests, nuns, and God knows what other orders of robed Catholics wandering through Rome’s streets implied an impatient divinity who did not tolerate laxness from his servants.

  The first-class, nonsmoking coach from Rome to Bari smelled like the bedroom of a bedridden chain-smoker whose sheets hadn’t been changed since she’d died in her sleep, peeing herself as she expired. A permanent stench of stale tobacco permeated everything in Rome and, Mario suspected, throughout Italy. The heavy odour had hit Mario as soon as he entered the airport lounge in Rome following his transcontinental flight.

  Despite the malodour, his train seat was comfortable and the service courteous. In front of him sat a strikingly attractive twenty-something Italian, with creamy skin, large expressive brown eyes, and dark wavy hair that stopped at the shoulder. Her beauty was not the bland, sterile look of cover models; her features composed a fascinating landscape of subtle asymmetries. She spent the trip sinuously swinging her head to the music of her iPod. Her face was turned at an angle that let him appreciate her beauty for almost the entire five and a half hours it took to reach the port city from the capital. He suspected that she was conscious of being admired and chose that position to facilitate their unspoken arrangement: letting him get an eyeful while she feigned unawareness and avoided any compromising eye contact. She disembarked at Giovinazzo, one stop before Bari, and let slip a subtle, knowing smile in his direction as she got up from her seat. The headphones never left her ears, though.

  As Mario emerged from Bari Centrale station, a pungent yet pleasant fragrance overwhelmed the by now too familiar tobacco stench: the briny smell of the sea, an odour he’d never forgotten. It instantly transported him back to that fateful summer spent with his now-deceased maternal grandparents. Despite what had happened here, Mario’s mind often wandered back to that fifth birthday, to that delicious pizza, and to a memory of telling himself, as he lay in bed that night waiting for sleep, that he was having the happiest summer ever with the best grandparents any boy could ever have. He couldn’t remember the emotion itself, but he yearned to. He had not known its like since.

  There was a hollowness near his heart where his feelings for his grandparents had once existed. His fingers found that hollowness and pressed against it, as if something could still be found there. There were many such inner cavities in his chest. He felt them like tiny black holes that inexorably sucked the empathy out of him and banished it to some void, barren universe.

  Mario left his map in his trouser pocket and let his nose guide him. As he was about to step outside the station parking lot, something soft gave under his shoe. An unwelcome odour reached his nose.

  Mario swore. Bad enough that his feet ached from walking for three days on the rough cobblestones of Rome — and now this! He located a bench, sat down, and examined his sandals: the dog excrement had lodged itself in the grooves on the sole of the left shoe. Both sandals were in generally bad repair, anyway. Rome had inflicted as much damage on them as it had on his now blistery feet. He threw the footwear into a nearby garbage can and, barefoot, continued walking.

  The street ahead looked like a commercial strip. He’d have no trouble finding a shoe store. He was, after all, in Italy.

  Mario located several shops that, in theory, could have solved his shoe problem. However, in Bari, stores closed for a few hours mid-afternoon. Mario had two choices: continue on barefoot or wait an hour or two sitting on a bench in the town’s pedestrian shopping strip, bustling with clerks on their breaks.

  The lure of the sea was too powerful. He knew that if he waited any longer he would get fidgety and grumpy. So, onward. In less than five minutes, his destination was in view.

  The sight stunned him into motionlessness. He gazed at the Adriatic Sea; it felt as if a part of him were stretching out toward the water, as if his skin no longer defined the limits of his identity.

  He crossed the boulevard to reach the sea itself. He had to jump a low stone fence to get to the beach. He was not the only one who had done so. Along the entire length of the shore, people sat on the massive stone blocks, arranged haphazardly, that created a rough barrier between the sea and the land. Some people had cast fishing lines, a few were picnicking, most were simply sunning themselves.

  Mario found a small, shallow pool of seawater lodged among three of the blocks. He stepped into that little portion of the Adriatic Sea. The water provided welcome relief from the stinging pain of his blisters.

  He closed his eyes and let himself be engulfed by the odour of the sea. It brought back a shadow of some lost emotion. A sense of comfort he could barely remember, hadn’t experienced since early childhood.

  But just as the emotion was almost beginning to be vivid enough to be savoured, that dreadful memory of being swallowed up by the water gripped him so solidly that, even though he knew he was hallucinating, he couldn’t snap back to reality. Instantly, he saw it, just as he’d seen it then: the monster.

  He felt again its cold, clammy fingers clutching his five-year-old body, that prickling sensation of the monster’s fingertips hooking into his flesh.

  With a start he opened his eyes and found himself back in the present, fresh tears on his cheeks — the first tears he’d shed in twenty-five years.

  After the pizza, there was ice cream. Lots and lots of ice cream. Chocolate. Vanilla. Neapolitan. Butterscotch. More containe
rs than he could count. As it was his birthday, Mario was allowed to eat as much as he wanted. Excited by the rare permission to indulge, the boy didn’t know when to stop.

  He’d had difficulty falling asleep when, at midnight, his grandparents insisted on putting him to bed. All that excitement. All that food. All that sugar.

  He did sleep eventually, but woke up less than an hour later. Through his window, in the darkness, the boy smelled the sea — so different from anything in Toronto. Not even Lake Ontario smelled anything like this. The new odour captivated him; every day he wanted to go play in the water, but his grandparents wouldn’t allow it.

  In his pyjamas, Mario jumped down onto the street from his bedroom window. He followed the smell to the seashore.

  He scraped the skin of his hands and feet climbing over the big stone blocks that bordered the sea.

  He stood on one of the big blocks and stared down into the darkness of the water. Without another thought, he stripped off his pyjamas and let himself fall into the sea.

  A few hours later, a bit after dawn, an old man who habitually fished on the shore every morning found the unconscious boy floating on his back. Mario was quickly brought to the hospital, where they pumped his lungs, shaved his scalp, and bandaged the big gash on his head (a permanent scar would form on the top left side, a bit to the back).

  When he awoke in the afternoon, his grandparents stood over him, worry sculpted onto their wrinkled faces.

  Mario screamed.

  For the rest of his stay in Italy, another three weeks, the boy screamed himself awake every night, but he could never explain why.

  At first, his grandparents thought the boy was having nightmares of drowning, that he was afraid of the sea. But they caught him trying to sneak back to the shore. Mario insisted he had to be let back into the water.

  “But why, Mario? What do you want there?” his grandmother asked in her heavy Italian accent.

  In an icy and emotionless voice, the boy answered: “I want it back. What it took away from me. I want it back.”

  No matter how she questioned him, he could not or would not be more specific. They had to lock his bedroom at night and keep a vigil over him in the daytime, lest he risk drowning himself.

  His last few weeks in Bari were uneventful. Mario no longer exhibited the unfailing exuberance that had been so characteristic of his personality. Instead, all day long, he sat and stared seaward from the kitchen window, refusing to play or talk, often simply ignoring his grandparents.

  When the young Mario had arrived in Italy, he’d been jovial, affectionate, and playful, but when his parents returned from their seminar in India they’d found a morose, taciturn, and withdrawn child. He barely greeted them. He could no longer tolerate their touch. In fact, he could barely stand their presence and did not hesitate to tell them so, in those cold tones his voice had acquired. Even returning home, to reunite with his friends and toys and comics, failed to lift his mood.

  His parents, he knew, mourned the boy they had lost that summer, regretted leaving him all season, blamed themselves for the change in him.

  Everyone agreed, as he overheard repeatedly: it was as if he were another person entirely.

  The young Mario no longer cared for any of his pre-Bari friends and spent the next several years in isolation. His parents attempted to enroll him in various activities — swimming, painting, free-form dance, jazz orchestra — but they were no match for the stubbornness of their son. Only adolescence, and the consequent rage of his hormones, forced him out his shell. At age thirteen, he began to notice girls: the shapes of their bodies, the bounce of their hair, the aroma of their skin. He dreamed about them and woke up with his groin moist and sticky. He had no idea what to say to these girls, or how to approach them. All he knew was that he had to get closer to them, smell them from up close, see more of their bodies, touch them.

  To the delight of his parents, he joined the track team. Tall and lithe, Mario was a natural runner. Track was the only coeducational extracurricular sport at his school.

  His attention soon focused on one girl in particular: Lindsay Barron, who was almost as tall as Mario himself, whose hair was so long it reached the small of her back, whose elegant face he could not stop daydreaming about. At every practice, he would stare at her, but they had never even exchanged a greeting.

  A month after Mario started practicing, the coach recruited him for the regional competition, enrolling him in the 200-metre sprint. Mario won the race, by almost half a second. His was the only gold medal his school garnered that semester.

  As a result, Mario got to know Lindsay Barron much better. And other girls, too. Many other girls.

  His first night back in Bari, Mario left his hotel room at 1:30 a.m. without having slept. He dressed lightly — a bit too lightly for the temperature, but he did not want to be encumbered by too many clothes.

  Quickly, he made his way to the shoreline. He climbed on the blocks and looked around. Bari was deserted at this hour. Good.

  He stripped.

  Below him, the sea beckoned.

  He hesitated for hours, fear holding him back. He had lost part of himself the last time he’d ventured into these waters. What made him believe he could regain whatever he had lost by immersing himself again? What if he lost more of himself?

  Or, worse, what if nothing changed?

  Before the first hints of dawn brightened the sky, he put his clothes back on. By then, Mario was shivering. Whether from fear or from cold, he could not tell.

  Nearly thirty years old, Mario lived alone. He no longer spoke to his family. He hadn’t even seen his mother and father since his eighteenth birthday; he methodically ignored their repeated attempts at contact. Call display was such a useful tool.

  Once, for three months, he had lived with a girl: Valérie, a French immigrant whose accent he’d found charming. Her long legs, also, had not escaped his notice.

  They were both twenty years old at the time. But, like all the high-school and college girls before her, she soon grew irritated with Mario.

  He would not hold hands with her when they walked. He insisted on separate bedrooms. He never asked any questions about her life, her dreams, her days. Unless they were having sex, he rarely touched her at all.

  Never before had he lived in such close quarters with anyone, and he resented the incessant intrusion on his solitude that resulted from life within a couple.

  It wasn’t that Mario disliked Valérie, but, save for her physical beauty, which he enjoyed admiring, and for her usefulness in satisfying his sexual needs, there was nothing about her that held his attention. In that, she was not unique. Mario showed no curiosity about anyone at all — ever.

  His second night in Bari, Mario spent in bed, but not asleep. He cursed himself for his cowardice. Why had he come all this way, if not to jump in the sea? To return to the spot where everything had changed for the worse?

  His exhausted body finally succumbed soon after sunrise. Mario had spent forty-eight hours without sleep.

  He woke at midnight, refreshed and reinvigorated, after seventeen hours of slumber.

  After the inevitable breakup with Valérie, Mario’s success with girls faltered. When he graduated college, he stopped seeing girls altogether. Not because he was no longer interested in having sex with them — he still found them beautiful — but he had never been the one to make the advances. They had come to him: attracted by his fit body, his athletic prowess, his height, his thick dark hair, his full lips. With Mario removed from the bustle of school life, such opportunities disappeared.

  Routine settled over his life: he jogged in the morning; went to work as a clerk at City Hall during the day, stopped by the grocery store on the way home, cooked his dinner, read in the evening, and masturbated to internet porn before dropping off to sleep. Weekends and holidays were much the same, with household chores or outings to museums and art galleries to fill the daytime hours.

  Occasionally, when Mario heard peo
ple converse, he would marvel at how they seemed so involved in what their companions were saying. He wondered what it was that made them so interested in each other, and he felt momentary pangs of jealousy.

  He decided to try. Maybe interest in others came with practice.

  On his twenty-ninth birthday, he joined cupiddating.web and arranged a few dates. After a handful of disasters, he gave up. It had proved to be a fruitless exercise. His profile had filled up with negative comments from the girls he met through the system.

  “He’s cute, but WARNING: he’s, like, the dullest guy EVER!”

  “He NEVER asked a single question. He didn’t want to know anything about me. He kept staring at me like I was a painting or a statue or something.”

  “The only question this dumb loser asked me was: Can we go have sex now? Like, get real, you creepy Ken doll!”

  “What a shame that such a cute guy is nothing but a BORING WEIRDO!!!”

  And so on.

  The third night, Mario again visited the seashore. Again, he stripped. This time he did not hesitate: he immediately stepped down into the cold water. He was surprised at how shallow it was. He remembered it being so much deeper. Seaweed laced around his ankles. Had he after all simply hit his head and imagined everything?

  A few metres out, the bottom dropped much lower. Mario dunked into the water and swam. He followed the shoreline covering every possible place where the monster could have lurked.

  Again and again, he swam the length of the area where the incident occurred.

  Even if the monster were real, would it have waited for him here for more than two decades? It could even be dead. If it had ever lived.

  What had he expected?

  While he shivered under the hard blast of hot water in his hotel-room shower, he concluded that he had, indeed, hit his head, that the monster did not exist — had never existed — and that its cold fingers had been nothing more than strands of seaweed.

  This return to Bari was Mario’s gift to himself for his thirtieth birthday. The date itself fell on his last full day in the city. He had spent a week there. The next morning, the train would take him back to Rome. That night, his flight would take off for Canada.