Abstract
This article focuses on the third novel of Nino Ricci's trilogy about Italian immigration in Canada. More precisely, taking my cue from the theme of nostos in the sense of a search for a fully-fledged identity, I will analyse the way that Where She Has Gone dramatizes the protagonist's predicament in terms of personal conflicts, psychological trauma and sexual ambiguities. Vittorio Innocente is a hero whose life seems to be split between Canada and Italy: this is at the origin of his personal crisis which is characterized by a deeply ingrained sense of peril. In many respects, the main point of the story is represented by the protagonist's return to Italy where he intends to meet all those people who knew him. In fact, he left for Canada as an eight-year-old boy with his pregnant mother who died during the journey after giving birth to a daughter named Rita. While living in Toronto, Vittorio has an incestuous relationship with his younger half-sister Rita, who was the fruit of their mother's adultery in Valle del Sole (Molise). The most dramatic moment of the diegesis takes place when Vittorio meets Rita in Valle del Sole as both are returning from Canada by different routes. Significantly, by looking into their mother's past, they both decide to give up their tormented relationship. The protagonist's journey back to his native village can be seen not only as that of an intellectual in search of his own roots but also as a compelling wish to meet, after many years, his own historic and socio-cultural past in order to better understand his unresolved life as well as his role in Canadian society.
With this third book, entitled Where She Has Gone (1997), Nino Ricci concludes his trilogy. As in the other two novels (Lives of the Saints, 1990, and In a Glass House, 1993), the events continue to be seen through the eyes of Vittorio Innocente. From a narrative point of view, this strategy guarantees textual continuity and cohesion by effectively giving the trilogy the structure of three stories chronologically linked to one another according to a precise logico-actantial line. Following Vittorio's limited gaze burdened with memories, Where She Has Gone concludes the diegetic question without actually closing the circle for good, since there is no way of coming to terms with the past. Together with this absence of a real epilogue, Where She Has Gone can be read as a laborious attempt to comprehend the present by including in the development of the diegesis the story of Rita, Vittorio's sister, born on the ship bound for Canada.
Why is there this focus on the female character who also gives the novel its title? An answer may be found in the narration of the relationship between Vittorio and his sister, eight years his junior. It is grounded in a psychological complexity culminating in incest. Consequently, brother and sister find themselves living in a condition of total moral, psychological and social transgression resulting from a sort of primitive disorder which has set their life-stories in motion. Hence the urgency to come to terms with the question of identity which is in itself unsustainable.
In fact, despite being children of the same mother, a bond persists between them that – as we will see – develops in an ambiguous and, from Vittorio's point of view, destructive and self-destructive way. How should we interpret incest? Is it simply a sexual perversion or is there a motivation linked to the painful story of migration? The first fact that emerges – and this can be seen in the second novel – is the separation of Rita from her brother which follows Vittorio's father's refusal to recognize as his daughter a child born out of an illicit relationship shrouded in secrecy and culminating in an unsolved enigma. Rita is adopted by a Canadian family, the Amhersts, where the separation becomes a sort of identity change or cultural transition in which Rita is deprived of her Italianness. This means that she is no longer ‘perceived’ by her brother Vittorio as a sister, consequently his gaze is that of a man deprived, in many ways, of the emotional bond of their common origins. The perspective undergoes a change with the death of Mr Amherst which somehow marks a moment of transition in Rita's life: We drove back to Mersea for the funeral. There was a viewing the night before at the funeral home, Mrs. Amherst sitting in stony composure between Rita and Elena in the receiving line yet seeming afflicted beyond words. The casket was open but they’d been unable to hide the jaundice of Mr Amherst's skin. It felt indiscreet somehow to see him like that, shrivelled and yellowed like a dried reed, so much slighter in death than he’d been even in life. (Ricci, 1998: 33)
The death of her adoptive father seems to leave Rita in a state of psychological weakness, while her stepbrother, now mature, cannot help but be attracted by Rita's beauty and charm, a girl in her early twenties full of vitality, eager to know life and to live it to the fullest. On a subliminal level, the distance between Vittorio and Rita becomes the stimulus to reach the opposite shore. Vittorio wants to bridge the gap. On a personal level, linking past and present becomes possible only by imagining a total physical and psychological overlap with the ‘lost’ sister. Vittorio strains towards the realization of a desire carried to its extreme consequences; he, as a man, will cause his sister Rita to lose her virginity: ‘[…] and then we were kissing. There seemed no decision in this, just giving-in to the darkness, to the falling’ (Ricci, 1998: 70).
To describe a relationship conducted along the lines of normality and psychic linearity, Ricci uses language characterized by opacity, non-clarity and allusiveness, all ambiguous elements that find expression in the darkness of the decisive and traumatic embrace. The narrator recalls the event as if they were both characters in a dream: We were still falling. There seemed no distance between us now, just this awful relinquishing as if everything were unfolding at once unreal and yet inevitable, having nothing to do with us and yet what our lives had always been moving toward. (Ricci, 1998: 70)
The joining of their bodies becomes dominated by a dark force that cannot be held back, deflected or opposed in any way. It is only a question of receiving it and making it act in the respective bodies: I entered her. For an instant then when we were looking directly into each other's eyes, when what was going on with our bodies seemed merely the adjunct to this moment of unblinking sight. […] Then I came and it was as if we had suddenly dropped to earth again. (Ricci, 1998: 71)
Vittorio describes the ecstasy of the embrace from his viewpoint and having returned to earth after the orgasm, his eyes open on reality, and the discovery of his sister's virginity: I slipped out of bed to the bathroom. There was blood on me from her, I saw now. There were smears of it on my fingers, on my thighs; in the morning there would be dried stains on the covers and sheets. I tried not to think of what this meant, how dire, perhaps, this made things. (Ricci, 1998: 72)
From the diegetic point of view, incest, in addition to being something obscene and embarrassing, is at the origin of the personal trauma experienced by Vittorio who, while continuing to yearn for physical proximity with Rita and for the sexual relationship to be permanent (with its relative jealousies and anxieties), with equal strength he aspires to end this interpersonal ‘aberration’ precisely because it is wrong and based on a destructive ritual. For her part, Rita bears in her personality all the scars – as yet unhealed and maybe even incurable – of an anomalous personal history. In fact, in the crucial years of her childhood, instead of the security and warmth of a family in a normal environment such as that of the typical Italian family with its strong parent–child bond, Rita endures a disordered, hostile upbringing, which leaves her unable to function emotionally and socially.
Rita struggles to determine her identity, which in turn prevents her from fully understanding her role in the present, since psychologically she feels she is living a peripheral existence in a world without a centre. In other words, she always feels on the verge of being lured by a centrifugal force that aims to destroy her in her social, cultural and sexual dimension.
In the first part of the novel, we find Rita living with her friend Elena, who loves dressing and behaving like a boy, and this creates a sort of terrifying relationship with the other sex which is exacerbated by the ambiguous father-figure with the double identity of stepfather and unknown biological father. Both are negative figures: the former wicked and insensitive, the latter a representation of non-assumption of responsibility. It follows that Rita cannot accept affection that is not from a person of the same sex. In this context of psychological confusion and relational difficulties, enters Vittorio who, in his sister's eyes, does not embody the negative man sedimented in her memory but instead the brother with whom she shares a mother, the brother in whom it is natural to confide and entrust her psychological weaknesses and social fragility. In this sense, Rita the woman leans on Vittorio the man, because their bond stems from their Italian roots and their being united by a destiny made up of social difficulties and relational complications. For both, however, Canada has by no means turned out to be that new world, that promised land on which Italian emigrants projected all their hopes for a new life made of financial security and human dignity.
After the incestuous embrace, Vittorio and Rita find themselves lost in an area where everything seems shrouded in fog, and their respective lives, instead of becoming simpler, paradoxically become more and more enmeshed in a tangle of conflicting emotions. It is no coincidence, however, that Vittorio's first thought turns to the possible practical consequences of the intercourse: The thought formed that she might be pregnant: there would be doctors then, procedures, lies, some monstrous thing taking shape inside her. I didn't know what would be worse for her, carrying that alone or sharing it with me, admitting the sordidness of it, the horror. (Ricci, 1998: 122)
The words leave no room for doubt: Vittorio, a mature man, knows that he has done something ‘sordid’ to his sister's body, he has inflicted a permanent wound, and that he is the ‘horror’. For this reason, consumed by anxiety, he feels the need to be close to his sister, although he is well aware of how difficult it is, at this point, to clarify the terms of their emotional relationship: I waited. Everything had to be lived through now, every consequence. Even standing here outside this building in the cold, this crazy shadowing: it seemed part of a story already fixed, where every turning had been laid out in advance to lead exactly here, to this moment. In a minute or ten Rita would emerge and I would confront her or not, we would come to some new understanding or stay imprisoned in inchoate emotion; and each instant it would be the story deciding, propelling us forward. Perhaps there was only this tyranny, with nothing to choose, no moment to say, We will do things differently. (Ricci, 1998: 122; emphasis mine)
How can Rita extricate herself from these tangled images and the distorted perception she has of herself and her emotional state? At this point, the nostos comes into play, the return to the homeland, an attempt to resolve the uncertainty surrounding her identity, a pathway of clarification of her history. Ultimately, albeit taking different routes, the return to Italy for both is an extreme attempt to clarify their roles in their social and interpersonal relationships. Both are fuelled with a compelling desire to return to their roots and, even more, to define the enigma of their sexual relationship by trying to read the signs of a past in which they hope to find some sort of explanation if not the definitive answer.
It is clear that Vittorio and Rita need a direct confrontation with the past. As we have said, Vittorio organizes his trip to Italy with the idea of discovering his roots. Now in his thirties, he feels the need to probe what triggered his mother's adultery. He is driven by two desires: to return to where it all began, which implies a confrontation with the visible, that is, with the landscape and the people of that landscape in the hope of reactivating memories; and a particular urge to uncover the invisible, the intimate reasons for his mother's betrayal and the origin of a new life, that of his sister Rita, something he will only be able to understand through a reading of the past that goes beneath the surface of village gossip. It follows that the nostos unfolds on two levels – the visible and the invisible – which together will constitute, in a non-disconnected way, the experience of return. This return takes on a darker psychological hue because Rita too decides to return to Europe and to include Valle del Sole in her European journey. This is not her birthplace, but it is where her story as a ‘rejected’ woman originates. Hence, the narrator's trip to Italy is told from Vittorio's point of view with an attempt to include his sister's opinions as well. This is possible, from a narrative point of view, not with the adoption of an omniscient narrator (excluded from the limited point of view of the narrator), but through their conversations.
The most disturbing aspect of the story is, therefore, the new encounter between two people linked by an unspoken sexual bond, which becomes increasingly ‘explosive’ as events unfold. Rita is not travelling alone but with a friend of German origin who plays a merely secondary role in the diegesis: John is in fact a passive character who seems to have no problem with the intimate bond between Vittorio and Rita. Not surprisingly, when they choose their rooms in the old family house, John is relegated to the ground floor, while Vittorio asks his sister to sleep in the room next to his, probably intending to have sex with her, a ‘sacred’ union consumed in the house where everything began.
It would not be going too far to surmise – even though the narrating self does not reveal the whole truth of the experiential self – that Vittorio still desired a perfect physical union, a return to the womb as it were. In any case, the allusions of the text highlight the traits of a twisted personality searching for clues, like a detective, to reconstruct the truth about his mother. And in this exploration of himself Vittorio, the problematic intellectual, questions the meaning of human destinies – how a choice can determine the path of an individual: ‘[…] all the trappings of this different destiny I might have had if a single decision had never been made, if my father had never packed his bags, and set out’ (Ricci, 1998: 173).
What would have been his fate in Valle del Sole? If his father had not chosen to emigrate and had stayed in that God-forsaken place, what would his life have been like? And if his father and mother had not decided to separate, although it had only been for the period necessary to prepare the crossing for his wife and son Vittorio, what would have become of Rita? She would never have been born and everything would have taken another direction. However, Vittorio's return, traumatic as it is, seems to reveal much more than a mere journey down memory lane: Everything was as I remembered it and not, was familiar in some wordless, visceral way and yet utterly foreign and shrunken, too tangible somehow to be real. This was what it came down to, my past here, this barren room, these desolate objects, like a museum's depiction of how things might have been. (Ricci, 1998: 184; emphasis mine)
Revisiting that intimate and personal space has dragged up more reflections on what his life could have been: the adjectives barren and desolate highlight the dysphoric nature of the encounter with the house where Vittorio had come into the world about three decades before. At the same time, together with his refusal to see what is right under his nose and the silence that surrounds him, he listens to the voices of the past which remind him that here in Valle del Sole it all began – his life, his history, his places, his images and his fantasies: It was growing clear that she had kept the place up ever since it had been left empty, no doubt in some sort of perverse fidelity to the wishes of my grandfather, who had promised me at the time of my departure, though I was only a child then, that the house would be waiting for me should I ever return. It had been to Marta that my grandfather's care had been entrusted when my mother and I had gone. (Ricci, 1998: 185)
Since Vittorio and his mother's departure, Marta, Vittorio's cousin, has been looking after the house. Even Marta is a negative presence in Vittorio's eyes. She has taken his ancestral home even further from his desires and his sensitivity as a man divided between two worlds: ‘I was left alone. The place seemed infected by Marta's strangeness, by this weird sense of mission with which she's maintained it’ (Ricci, 1998: 186). Here too, a word gives a particular meaning to his reflections: infected. The world he has returned to, the house in which he believed he would find his lost happiness, has been contaminated by his cousin and nothing is, nothing can be as Vittorio had imagined it. Reality has betrayed the expectations of his imagination; he cannot drive out these thoughts and he finds himself no longer able to smile; he cannot see a joyful version of himself.
From the point of view of the narrative, the two-layered approach shows how the experiential self that returns to Molise to understand the enigmas and tangles of its past remains itself an enigma. No tangles are unravelled. In the narrator (that is, the voice of the speaker now telling a past story), we note that not everything is expressed with the clarity with which he himself wishes to investigate the origins-of-life journey. At this point, the problem emerges relating to how the narrator censors certain segments of his past and his personality so as not to reveal the true reasons for the incest. In fact, this important element of the narrative brings to the fore the trauma of a young man who, while still a child, found himself in Canada living with a father who was anything but affectionate. Undoubtedly, he has developed a series of defence strategies to counter this psychological isolation. Two strategies are evident here, two behaviours that we could define as the paradigm of distance and the paradigm of nearness. In fact, even though we are given no details as to how or when, what we do know is that, for some years, Vittorio worked in Nigeria. This decision to move away from Canada lays bare his rejection of the people and places that featured in the first part of his life in Canada. The distance, of course, also concerns his sister Rita who, at least on the surface, would seem to play a peripheral role in the relationship both with the past and with Canadian culture.
It goes without saying that all of this is part of the control the narrator wants – and must – exercise over all the hidden truths. The sensation conveyed to the reader is that Rita is a peripheral presence in Vittorio's life, but in fact she is central to it. In this way, after the distance implied by the separation, we can see how the idea of proximity is uppermost, in the form of a physical union with the 20-year-old sister. The fact of her proximity is associated with that of an unconscious desire fuelling a psychological tension that reaches its climax in the incest scene. All this would seem detached from the nostos but it is actually an integral part of it precisely because, by possessing his sister, Vittorio deludes himself that he is possessing the past and dominating it through Rita. She, in turn, represents a sort of embodiment of sin from a paternal viewpoint, while from Vittorio's perspective Rita is no longer her mother's sin but, in a certain sense, his own sin.
It follows that for Vittorio, returning to Valle del Sole and meeting his sister in that geographical space means returning to the origin of his sin. But, at this point, the twisted calculations of the experiential ego fail because the sister explicitly declares that she prefers to discontinue the relationship which she knows to be founded on a perverse emotional basis. In this way, Vittorio's project is not fully realized because she refuses to give herself to her brother here in the ancestral home as she had done before in a moment of psychological weakness. The paradigm of remoteness returns, with Rita's departure with her friend John from Molise leaving Vittorio on his own to converse with the truths of the past while surrounded by authentic human presences that mingle with his memories and their ghosts. Significantly, self-discovery implies incurable pain that makes Vittorio a sort of stranger in a foreign land, unable to believe, afraid to look deeply into his soul and profoundly affected by certain encounters. The meeting with Luciano, a person of great experience and humanity, belonging to the past, takes on a particular relevance when Vittorio in his bewildered state goes looking for some psychological support. He visits him in his restaurant in Castilucci, and with cutting objectivity Luciano tells him that he is on an impossible mission: ‘Anyway, why do you want to go digging up all these old stories?’ Luciano said. ‘What's past is past, it only hurts your head to go thinking about it’. ‘I just thought things would be clearer to me now’, I said. ‘You know what it is about the past. It's like a woman – from far away it looks like a lovely thing, but then the closer you get the more you see the imperfections’. (Ricci, 1998: 211)
The wisdom of his old friend is something more than a mere piece of advice. What Luciano suggests to Vittorio is that instead of trying to be a detective it is better to observe the scene from a distance because proximity will only bring out the ‘imperfections’ that compose every life and every community. But, in the same conversation, speaking of himself, Luciano describes a community and a village in which everything was not beautiful and gratifying as it appears in the memories and myths conceived by those who do not know the real facts. Vittorio discovers that Luciano himself went with other women and had an illegitimate child. It turns out that the sin of which his mother was guilty of had nothing to do with the war or soldiers passing through the village. The war had been over for years and not a ghost of a soldier had ever been seen in Valle del Sole.
After this revelation, the negative myth of the German soldier takes a further blow: his mother's betrayal was actually sustained over time. Left alone by her husband, she took on the condition of a widow, understood as a woman who has ‘lost’ her husband. Again, the paradigm of proximity, here understood as the discovery of hidden truths, opens Vittorio's eyes, showing him a much more prosaic reality (that of betrayal), founded in a conscious maternal rebellion – in a certain sense, a defence of her very femininity. It is clear that, in the opposition between distance and proximity, like the juxtaposition of past and present, we can identify a destructive element. In fact, just as Vittorio is unable to mediate between his past and his present, equally he will not be able to find a middle ground between the desire for distance and the yearning for proximity. Against this background of jarring contrasts, he moves northwards, getting further and further away from the centre he seeks, more and more detached from the scene of his desiring ego. In the epilogue, self-destruction in the form of suicide takes a hold of him without, however, turning out as he intended.
If we look at the novel from the point of view of space, it is easy to see how, even on a level of geographical organization, Nino Ricci manages to represent a disintegrated topography of a universe without a centre that corresponds to the inane journey of the protagonist. As often happens in novels that tell of Italians migrating to America, space takes on a very important cultural value; the very idea of travel always implies a spatial dislocation which very often involves a series of elements that refer to the paradigm of transition. Vittorio and Rita are souls in transit.
In the case of Where She Has Gone, geography constitutes a deep element since the narrative is structured over a series of explicit and implicit displacements in space. It is no coincidence that the protagonist appears to be the classic hero on the move, who struggles to put down roots wherever he stops, owing to an inner restlessness born of a psychological matrix whose many facets he is unable to see. In fact, Vittorio is presented, from the very outset, as a narrator in search of a good reason to attribute continuity to an otherwise discontinuous, intimately incoherent and fragmented life. After the short prologue, the first chapter immediately gives us a geographical location and an image of a woman: 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. (Ricci, 1998: 1)
The place is Toronto, and Toronto immediately evokes the image of Rita. What does the narrator tell us in this particularly dense opening passage? Together with the detailed and somewhat romantic description of the landscape, the text reveals his obsession, that of recovering a sentimental relationship with his sister Rita; and it takes just a few lines to announce that this is precisely what he has in mind. Why Rita? It is evident that in his mind Rita evokes two conflicting spaces: his native village in Molise and Toronto. Between these two spaces lies the journey: Rita was born on the ocean crossing and this crossing seems to have the same dramatic complexity. Rita, above all, evokes everything that could have been (the domestic space) but was not. This is the space that Vittorio yearns to physically regain and possess completely through the above-mentioned physical connection with his sister. Therefore, behind this traumatic urge to act against convention and against the law of blood lies the dominant desire to reconstruct this lost space.
In this perspective, the second part of the novel takes on a particular significance, culminating in the plan – never explicitly expressed, however – to return to the place where it all started, in an attempt to construct there a hypothesis of unity both on a physical and spiritual level. Aware of her status as a violated woman, Rita does not allow her brother to have intercourse with her in Valle del Sole, and instead leaves abruptly. In some way she senses that this geographical space was never hers, nor does it belong to her past; it is not the place of her beginning.
It is clear that the narrative design in Where She Has Gone cannot be separated from an analysis of space seen as the itinerary of a mind in search of itself. The failure of his plan leads Vittorio to a rejection of the space of his childhood and this rejection in turn leads to his decision to experiment with other spaces, to look for new topological hypotheses. To corroborate this interpretation there is another biographical element that places Vittorio in a world that is neither Italian nor American: Nigeria. We know, in fact, that before returning to Toronto, Vittorio spent a few years teaching in Nigeria. What was probably an important segment of his life forms a real ‘biographical’ gap in the narrative: nothing is said about this experience in the novel; we are simply given the geographical information.
Vittorio's anguished need for mobility is set against what he really wants, which is a safe dock, a house, where he can honestly say that there's ‘no place like home’ (Ricci, 1998: 26). These are the truly revealing words that he says to his sister when, together with her friend Elena, she moves into the apartment that will be her home, the home of the two friends. In these few words, the narrator reveals his aspiration which is ‘impracticable’, however, because before finding a physical home one must find one's psychological home. For this reason, as we said, Vittorio decides to return to Valle del Sole, in an extreme attempt to save and free himself from a sense of guilt that seems to mark every day of his life: My second departure from Valle del Sole, twenty years after the first, felt more final and more fatal: there had been the future, at least, to drive off into then, all the unknown, limitless world. It took only a few minutes of driving now for Valle del Sole to disappear from view; and then I was on my own again without destination or hopes, with no place left now to go home. (Ricci, 1998: 302)
With his return to Valle del Sole, Vittorio proves to himself that it is impossible to go back to the past: everything changes; the landscape changes, people change, even the narratives change. The only discoveries he manages to make are negative ones. And in this sense Luciano's lesson is a valuable one: the closer we move in to observe things, the more clearly we see their imperfections and distortions. Therefore, the story of the mother and the German soldier is just an invention: the truth behind the origin of Rita's life remains an enigma. Geographical space remains immobile only in our illusions – even this changes with the passing of years and decades. By now desperately alone, abandoned even by his sister Rita, Vittorio goes to London which, in his imagination, becomes the space of the epilogue that he accepts while abandoning himself to the vagaries of fate.
On arriving in London, he asks a taxi driver to suggest a place to stay, not caring where it is or whom he might meet: The hotel he led me into had a stale, animal smell like a private home, a doorway off the narrow lobby leading back into what looked like living quarters, the furnishings crammed tight and the walls overladen with photographs and cheap-looking paintings. (Ricci, 1998: 311)
In a squalid room of a bed and breakfast located in the Victoria Station area, Vittorio tries to take his own life as a solution to his problems: ‘This was my body: for a moment I understood with perfect clarity what it meant to have a body, the wonder and the tyranny of it, the strangeness’ (Ricci, 1998: 313; emphasis mine). Against the tyranny of the body – the same body that possessed his sister inflamed by a kind of primordial instinct – Vittorio chooses the maximum punishment. After all, the aforementioned ‘extraneousness’ of the body would seem to facilitate the path towards the end. The split between body and soul is evident: Vittorio is not simply a person divided between two geographical spaces, but he himself is a divided self. From another perspective, it must be said that this is an act that allows him to avoid facing up to his responsibilities and, at the same time, escape the pain of living in the whirlpool of all the contradictions of his life. But, despite his suicide attempt, Death seems to have long ago decided that his time has not yet come: Vittorio's body will have to continue to live through the conflicts that afflict his soul. Thus, we cannot fail to imagine an experiential self that, once abandoned by the narrator, will continue beyond the last page of the novel to atone for its grave sins. And he will atone for them by living as a hero condemned to wander for eternity.