Where She Has Gone
Read Where She Has Gone Online
Authors: Nino Ricci
INTERNATIONAL ACCLAIM FOR
Where She Has Gone
“Elegantly written.…
Where She Has Gone
casts a spell of its own, a spell of fierce beauty and tragic loss.”
–
Financial Post
“Ricci’s poetic prose and fluid plot create a tense and beautiful story whose sad ironies achieve resolution in a haunting conclusion.”
–
Publishers Weekly
“[His] wisdom lies in the trust he has put in his characters: the world is explained in their terms.”
–
Ottawa Citizen
“The novel’s nuances of plot and self-discovery have a way of sneaking up on the reader from behind – elusive at first, then grand in their claims on the imagination and consciousness.”
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London Free Press
“Ricci’s work is the search for the fine lines, the borders which define truth and fiction, the imagined and the real, the soul and the body where one creeps ‘inches’ into the other like the invading roots of a chestnut tree causing ‘a gnawing … like hunger.’ … Bravo.”
–
Winnipeg Free Press
“His gentle, hands-off touch works beautifully. The full verisimilitude of Ricci’s world flourishes anew.… [A] brilliant study of the way shame is passed down through generations.”
–
Boston Globe
“Ricci’s prose flows smoothly and conjures vivid images.… [He] is a skilled craftsman.”
– Regina
Leader-Post
BOOKS BY NINO RICCI
Lives of the Saints
(1990)
In a Glass House
(1993)
Where She Has Gone
(1997)
Testament
(2002)
Copyright © 1997 by Nino Ricci
Cloth edition published 1997
Trade paperback edition first published 1999
All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, or stored in a retrieval system, without the prior written consent of the publisher – or, in case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, a licence from the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency – is an infringement of the copyright law.
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Ricci, Nino, 1959-
Where she has gone / Nino Ricci.
ISBN
0-7710-7504-9 (Emblem Editions)
eBook ISBN 978-0-7710-7656-5
I. Title.
PS
8585.
I
126
W
43 2004
C
813′.54
C
2004-905542-9
We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program and that of the Government of Ontario through the Ontario Media Development Corporation’s Ontario Book Initiative. We further acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council for our publishing program.
The English translation of lines 5–10 from the poem “Antico inverno” (“Ancient Winter”), by Salvatore Quasimodo, © Luciano Rebay, are taken from
Introduction to Italian Poetry
, ed. Luciano Rebay. Reprinted by permission of Luciano Rebay.
SERIES EDITOR: ELLEN SELIGMAN
Cover design: Terri Nimmo
Cover image: © Nancy Landin / Millennium Images, UK
EMBLEM EDITIONS
McClelland & Stewart Ltd.
The Canadian Publishers
481 University Avenue
Toronto, Ontario
M
5
G
2
E
9
www.mcclelland.com/emblem
v3.1
for Erika
The birds were looking for millet
And were suddenly of snow;
So with words:
A bit of sun, an angel’s halo
And then the mist; and the trees,
And ourselves made of air in the morning.
–
SALVATORE QUASIMODO
“Ancient Winter”
I
n another order of things, less fraught, she might have said, Tell me a story, the way people did around a fire late at night. And I would have told her this: Back before you were born, before any of this had begun, a mother and son lived alone in a stony village overlooking a valley. Just outside the village stood an old chestnut tree where it was said that someone, some criminal or wounded lover, had hanged himself. The other villagers kept their distance from it, and wouldn’t gather up the nuts it dropped, with their spiny husks, in the fall. But the mother was not so particular, gathering the nuts up in her apron and bringing them home to roast them. Afterwards, when things turned out as they did, when a daughter was born though there had been no father to make her, when the mother had died giving her life, the son had a dream in which a tree was growing up out of his belly, a great blossoming thing whose inconvenience to him, however, was only in the slight gnawing he felt in his stomach like hunger because of the roots inching into him.
Was I the tree? she might have asked then. Was I the daughter? And I would have said, It doesn’t matter, it was only a dream, it was only a story.
Or I might have said this: On our farm in Canada, there was a chestnut tree that someone had planted behind the
barn. Every year my father threatened to cut it down, because in all our time on the farm it had never once produced any flowers or fruit. But finally one spring, already long after you’d left us, it sent out a profusion of small white buds that turned to nuts in the fall. It was as if the tree had understood how tenuous its existence was, and had gathered up all its resources to hold out to us this offering, this bit of hope.
She would have asked, Was there really a tree? Did it happen that way? And I would have said, That was one way it could have happened. And the yes and the no, the precision things took on in the plain world, would not have mattered so much, only the story, that bit of hope.
I saw Rita again toward mid-September, in Toronto. Autumn was just settling over the city then, the light giving itself over to September’s peculiar half-tones and the trees that lined the city’s sidestreets showing the first tinctures of russet and gold. In little more than a month the autumn colours would already have given way to the grey-limbed monotony of winter; but now the whole city seemed on the brink of some revelation, some last redemptive sigh before the winter’s cold and snow.
Rita had started school at the university downtown and was living on campus with Elena, their residence tucked away at the heart of the ivied island of quiet the campus formed in the city centre. It was early evening the first time I went by for her, sunset lighting fires in the leaded panes of the residence windows. Inside, trim young men in blue jeans and young women in cardigans and pleated skirts came and went, the air electric with the first tense promise of the beginning of term.
The door to Rita’s room was open. At my knock she turned from the mirror she’d been staring into, the gold shaft of a lipstick bright in one hand.
“Hi, stranger,” she said.
She looked indistinguishable from the young women I’d passed in the halls, fresh-faced and blithe, her hair pulled back in a ponytail to set off the red of her lips, the blue of her eyes, like tiny gifts. Outside the oppressive familiarity of our home town, what had kept us children there, all our sibling confusions seemed made small.
“So you finally made it up to the big city,” I said.
