"A Silver Jaguar" by Carmelinda Scian
Photo Credit: Verhalenhuys, obtained and licensed through Unsplash
A Silver Jaguar
A mantle of white roses drapes over the shining black coffin like a beautiful white shawl on an ebony dress. Pina stares at the milky petals and thinks they are too virginal, too luxurious, for death. She’s surprised at the size of the crowd, surprised at how people have braced the freezing rain pelting the earth with heavenly vengeance since last night. But she says nothing toTeresa. Why begin the conversation all over again? The worn-out iteration bringing back the feeling of rusty barbed wire around her heart. Father Onori, bald head reflecting the glow of the lights above, begins saying the rosary. Two old women dressed in mourning black stand at a short distance to his right. They finger the beads of their rosaries with devout care, repeating the Ave Marias and Padre Nostros in Italian louder than he does. Their voices fill the room like some baleful incantation. Pina doesn’t recognize them. Perhaps they are relatives from Italy or simply consummate funeral attendees going from funeral to funeral trying to appease death. She’s heard of such women—widows and mothers.
Pina and Teresa remain standing by the entrance door to the large room. They try hiding behind a white pillar topped with a basket of burgundy and white mammoth chrysanthemums. Pina searches for familiar faces. Teachers, pupils with their families, Mrs. Primucci, sitting on the front row, friends and neighbours of Constanza Pina met through the years. Unfamiliar faces too. Curious, surely, wanting to know—to comprehend— why Constanza died before her time, so undeservedly. A victim, they’ll likely say to one another. Si, si, a victim of greed and bad intentions. It was the shock, poor woman. That did it. Imagine your best friends betraying you!
Pina wonders if she’s talking out loud, a habit she’s fallen into lately. Last week, rows of eager eyes, as she looked up from her desk, pencil in hand, not sure what she was using it for, baffled looks on tiny faces, as though a ghost had entered the room. The next day, Mrs. Primucci called her into her office. “Pina, why don’t you take the rest of the week off?”
There had been complaints from parents.
***
Teresa hasn’t said a word since they’ve arrived. Didn’t say much in the car either, Pina going out of her way to pick her up at her house on Caledonia Road, the traffic infernal on this icy winter morning.Teresa sat straight, silent, like a black exclamation mark on an empty page. She’d stared, as though in front of her was the answer to their enigma. Yes, yes, problem solved, lives returned to normal. There, there, absolution shining like the star of Bethlehem pointing the way to salvation. Sure, sure…
It’s okay, Pina thinks, it’s okay. She can handle Teresa’s aloofness, her silences. She’s handled everything else God or the Devil has sent her way. More like the Devil, God couldn’t be that cruel. How could He have created the world just to watch it writhe in pain?
Teresa steps forward and stands in front of Pina. She repeats Father Onori’s Padre Nostors and Ave Marias with the same concentration as the two women in black. A direct plea to heaven. Pina stares at Teresa’s slim, straight back, thin brown hair always a little pillow-messy, matching a voice so threadlike it’s as though she needs permission from the world to be heard, be allowed in. But Pina has seen the fox in her, seen how Mrs. Primucci exempts her from yard-duty each winter due to her fragile constitution. That was what Mrs. Primucci said once when the topic came up at a Christmas party. Then there are her twin boys, the miraculous bridge keeping her away from volunteering in after-school activities. Pina has never shared these thoughts with anyone, never with Constanza, now lying quietly in the black coffin. After all, the three women have been friends since childhood, growing up in the St. Clair area, parents paisanos from Serra San Bruno, a mountain town pouring out hundreds of sons of impoverished families searching for cornucopia on the other side of the world. Trust wasn’t a word the three friends tossed around like some plaything. Trust was a pillar—a shield—standing guard against the sudden tumbles of life, tumbles so familiar to Pina she can’t imagine life’s breath without them.
Promises, offerings, repentances, pleas made to a God she’s not sure exists, have brought no relief. The razor news of her father’s accident, Pina only fourteen then, was the beginning. Her mother’s shrieks tearing open the very ground Pina had stood on, placing a rusty bolt on her unfurling youth. The image of her father on a stretcher pouring out of the ambulance, like refuse spilling out of an overfilled garbage bin, has never left her. It’s there when she wakes, there when she goes to sleep at night. Later, that stronzo Carlo—piece of shit— arriving home one dawn with the smell of another woman. Pina had waited up all night for her man. She’d feared an accident, death, even an arrest. There’d been signs in the shadows she chose not to notice, muted phone conversations, strangers at the door, Carlo’s tailor made suits and shinny loafers costing way beyond their means. He called himself a product-manager but still hadn’t held a job since their marriage a year earlier. Days spent in the back room of Gatto Nero on College Street where fortunes were made and lost. “Get out,” Pina yelled that night. “Out of my house, my sight, my life.” He did. He moved in with the woman whose smell he’d brought home. They went on to have three sons.
Pina now averts her eyes from the white roses, turns and gazes at the hall’s large window behind her. The freezing rain and maddened winds pelt the glass with such force, she fears it will shatter. She imagines shards of glass clinging to her long hair, her coat, her memory, forever reminding her of this February day. She shudders. Teresa is so absorbed in father Onori’s prayers, she seems oblivious to the storm. Pina feels as restive as a mouse when sensing danger. Perhaps it’s the lack of sleep lately.
Last night the hours crawled like a sloth. 4 a.m. and sleep’s diaphanous fingers still refusing to caress her. Pina turned the clock on its face on the night table.
There…Time lost in a vacuum.
Nights are bad for her. It’s at that violet time when the world slumbers that the ravaged demons appear. Relentless, merciless, always wanting more. Last night, the bile in her erased the fortress of laughter she erects in the day. Teresa announced that she’s moving to Woodbridge and transferring schools in June—they’d taught together at Saint Clara’s Public School for twenty-five years. “Oh, life is easy for Pina; she laughs it away,” her friends say. She bolted out of bed, averting her eyes from St. Antonio de Padua her mother insisted she hang above the headboard. And hit the bedroom wall with her fist.
Bam!
She caressed her knuckles and tightly squeezed her lids to hold back the tears. She’s known ever since she was a child that the Campanos are a cursed people. Sangue maladetto, her mother calls it, spitting three times each time she says the name to ward off the evil lurking above them. “No luck, the Campanos have no luck,” her mother constantly reminds her, though she’s never said why.
Pina turned the clock on its face on the night table.
There…Time lost in a vacuum.
***
Now Pina counts the flower arrangements surrounding Constanza’s coffin. Thirty-six. She’s trying to keep her mind from shattering into pieces. This hall of death reminds her of a garden of sorts. A living attempt to subdue the blow of the fatal scythe. Teresa remains silent. Is she crying? Pina can’t tell; her face is turned away. Pina never cries, not even when that stretcher delivered the spectre of her broken father or the night she threw Carlo out, pitching his tailor made suits and shiny loafers out of the bedroom window, or when Mrs. Primucci delivered the news of Constanza’s death. “The private detective was the ultimate blow,” she’d said. Pina and Teresa had stood facing Mrs. Primucci who sat at her desk, large bosom stopping the two women from approaching any closer. Two convicts, they’s felt like two convicts receiving a life-sentence. Teresa had hurried out in tears, her silence dished out to Pina as a punishment served on a tray of blood and guilt. Just when Pina needed a warm hand on her back.“The heavens will condemn us,” Teresa finally said as she lurched toward her car in the darkening parking lot.
Yes, the private detective had been Pina’s idea. But what was there to be done?
Six months had gone by since the winning numbers were announced and Constanza still insisting that Aadarsh, the owner of the variety store across the street from Saint Clara’s Public School, had thrown the ticket into the garbage bin under the counter. She’d seen him do it with her own eyes. “My very eyes,” she said.
***
The forlorn scent of the chrysanthemums war with Pina’s own thoughts bringing to mind other deaths, other funerals, other moments when she’d wished she was dead. The blanket of multi-coloured chrysanthemums thrown over her Dad’s grave ten years ago: golds, reds, whites, burgundies, soundlessly shouting in that indifferent sun. She’d cursed the sun, cursed its callousness, as she held on to her stooping mother, Pina now the matriarch, the one taking care. Spadefuls of fresh dug-up earth, waiting, as they arrived at her father’s final berth, pre-prepared, ready, death so organized, no room for mistakes. The fresh mound standing next to the snow covered graves looked vain, improper, assaulting. As her father was dropped into the ground, Pina turned to face the other way, trying to ignore the priest’s prayer, “May the Lord which frees you from sin save you and raise you up…”
How banal the priest’s words had sounded, her father folded into a wheel-chair for years after falling down a seven-storey elevator shaft. Pina just fourteen. Every morning, she and her mother, calling on all their strength, lifted him from the provisional bed (brought into the small living room every evening) and onto the black obstruction called a wheelchair. In the evening, they moved him from the wheelchair onto the bed. Forza, forza, her father called out, trying to impart the strength siphoned off his own body onto the wife and daughter he now couldn’t look at for the pity and alarm in their eyes. Pina always looked down, as she struggled to lift the crippled interloper that had replaced the handsome hazel-eyed groom in the grey striped suit in the fading wedding photograph her mother still hung above the TV.
***
Pina made lists. She began making these lists after her father’s death. It was then she stopped praying every night to San Antonio de Padua, as her mother insisted she do. What was the point? Surely the saint was busy with more deserving people. A colour TV, like all the other kids in school whose fathers brought home a weekly pay-cheque; a new green dress she’d seen in the Eaton’s catalogue for the school-prom in June; an invitation from Carlo with the Elvis swirl and swagger to be her escort.
Tenebrous pleasures, these long lists became. Most things were out of her reach but it helped slow down the demons populating the landscapes of her slumber for the last thirty years or so.Then a year ago, the lists swelled with the honeyed thought of nearly two million dollars coming her way: a silver Jaguar with a silver interior too. Why not? A new velvet burgundy living room set she saw in Homes and Gardens. Something rich and lush matching the coltish energy still running through her veins, making her appear younger than her forty-five years in spite of the grey streaks invading her long, black hair. A new roof and verandah for her mother’s crumbling two bedroom bungalow on Dufferin Street, and a trip back to Serra San Bruno so her mother could revisit relatives and paisanos. Since Pina’s father’s accident, the compensation cheque her mother received every month never stretched beyond food and bills.
At first Pina and Teresa were sure Constanza was playing a joke by not announcing their win. She was fond of little pranks. Car keys hidden at the end of day replaced by an invitation in their coat pockets for a lasagna dinner at her home. Tim Horton’s coffee coupons hidden in their winter boots. They knew she was lonely. Her husband had been squashed against a wall by a truck at his construction site years before. No children. But now weeks had turned to months and not a word about the millions she was surely stashing away. Soon, the joke was syphoned awaywith mistrust and anger.The Toronto Sun had recently begun publishing the winning numbers. Surely Constanza knew this. Yet she kept insisting that Aadarsh had thrown the ticket in the garbage bin under the counter, “Before my very eyes.” Surely Constanza knew that her two friends knew the winning numbers: they’d been choosing the same ones based on their birthdays since they began buying Loto tickets years before.
Constanza stopped frequenting the Staff Room, eating her lunch at her desk. Two months ago, she vanished from school altogether and the word had it that she’d ended up in the hospital with heart problems. Telephone messages were unreturned, knocks on doors unanswered.
***
Pina hasn’t heard a word Father Onori has said. She never thought much of priests, anyway. What do they know about life, hiding in their celibate parish cocoons. The two old women in black are quiet now, dark, untrusting eyes following the priest’s every move. He turns to face the coffin, hunched back to the silent audience, as though they are not welcomed into his private sanctorum. He bends over and sprinkles the white roses with holy water, Nel nome del Padre, del Figlio e dello Spirito Santo…
“Amen,” the two old women add before he does.
Pina ponders on the idea of friendship and its perilous scaffolding. Like fine crystal, one careless handling and the whole thing shatters into unfixable fragments. All that caring and sharing, and now the three friends are as distant as stars in the wide firmament.
Teresa takes another step forward, as if she, too, wants benediction. A clean conscience.
But what was there to be done? A private detective was the only option. Wasn’t it?
Pina ponders on the idea of friendship and its perilous scaffolding. Like fine crystal, one careless handling and the whole thing shatters into unfixable fragments. All that caring and sharing, and now the three friends are as distant as stars in the wide firmament.
Father Onori finishes his prayers and solemnly walks out, head bent. The room begins to empty. There’s a kind of shared exhale, as though the relief of an unpleasant duty has been performed. Everyone exits by Pina and Teresa; no one seems to look their way. A whispered crescendo rises in the wide hall, muffled at first, like a soft wind stirring the dead earth in early spring. Voices begin to rise. Who’s going and who’s not going to the cemetery and lunch afterwards at the Piccininni Community Centre. A smug expectation, like an illicit thrill, erupts as friends and paisanos greet one another, exchanging hugs and kisses, the coffin out of sight, death already left behind.
“I’m going home,” Teresa says, wiping her eyes. “If you want to stay, I’ll take a cab.”
Pina didn’t stay.
That was the last time the two friends saw one another.
***
Long after the silver Jaguar was scrapped, after the silver tinsel usurped her hair—now cut in a short blunt—long after the colt bolted from her step, inviting in the arthritis, Pina finds herself driving by Constanza’s old house. She’s not sure which day of the week it is, days mingle into one another without announcement. She stops her black Toyota. Turns off the motor.
October’s alchemy is busy turning the world into reds and golds but Pina reminds herself that gold has never shone for her. Its alchemy was never for her. Capricious fate, that blind exacter, has waited for her behind every dream. She’s happy she has no husband, no children, happy she marks the end of the Campanos’ damned scarlet liquid running through their veins. Damned from birth, her mother once said.
The clock in the car shows 4 p.m.; the sun is beginning to wane. A gust of wind showers the car with tired leaves.
Constanza’s two-storey brownstone looks the same only the green wooden front steps are now cement. The stained-glass with a glowing sun over a cabin still tops the front window.
Pina turns the key in the ignition. Time to go. Then she turns it off again. She stares at the house—a torrent of memories freeze her hand on the key.
“Good,” she says out loud. “Good that that bastard Aadarsh got five years behind bars and had to pay back every penny to the OLG.” A woman walking by with her black poodle stops and stares. Pina rolls up the car window.
The courts took their time.
Too late for Constanza. Pina can’t remember who received her portion of the winnings.
Too late for everyone. Even Pina’s mother was too spent to visit Italy. Pina never did buy the silver Jaguar with a silver interior. Why didn’t she?
***
“Let the dead be dead,” Pina had said to Teresa one week after Constanza’s funeral when she invited her to visit their friend’s grave. “Why scratch a wound?” Pina never visited her Dad’s grave. This saddened her mother, of course, who believed that if you didn’t respect the dead you couldn’t respect the living. Or yourself. Pina had laughed each time her mother said this. Respect. Respect under shovelfuls of earth and a blanket of multi-coloured chrysanthemums!
Would respect have wiped out the wounded animal gaze from her father’s hazel eyes? Given back his legs? His manhood? His life? Removed the curse from their lives?
Would it?
Carmelinda Scian won the Malahat Review Open Season’s Award, the Toronto Star (2015) and a Disquiet Scholarship (2019). She’s been published in Litro, Belletrist, UofT magazine, Prairie Fire, Accenti Magazine, the Fiddlehead, the San Antonio Review, Magnolia, the Antigonish Review, the Hong Kong Review and other literary journals. “Yellow Watch” was nominated for the 2018 Journey Prize. Her first novel, Yellow Watch, published by Mawenzi House Publishers in Toronto, will be launched on September 15, 2022. “River Crossing” has been included Best Canadian Short Stories, 2023 (Bibliosais). Forthcoming publication, “A poem for Your Birthday,” Zone 3 Literary journal.
She emigrated from Portugal to Canada and lives in Toronto.