Solitaria Read Online Free PDF Page A

they’re absent too long. Her letters continued for a while, mawkish and too familiar for his comfort. By the time he completed his university degree, he had stopped writing to her altogether, except for Christmas and birthday cards.
    It’s surprising to him that Clarissa is exhibiting this nostalgia. She is the consummate traveller, the woman whose home is everywhere and nowhere. She is rarely still, rarely what David calls contemplative . His childhood memories of her are fragmented, a series of departures and arrivals, marked by longing in between. Zia Piera was the constant, the bedrock, while Clarissa was unpredictable, unavailable.
    All around him on the train, people read newspapers and books, speak into cellphones, all disconnected from each other despite their proximity. He thinks of Bernette thousands of miles away; he thinks of his uncle Renato, who lives in Australia and never comes home; of his father, who knows nothing of his birth, who could be the man sitting in the next compartment; of his mother and himself in Canada. People Without Borders. We are all scattered, he thinks, our family like organic shrapnel blasted across continents.
    He assumes Zia Piera will have a bare-bones story to tell that will answer the question: why did you tell us your brother Vito was living in Argentina, when in fact he has been dead for almost fifty years?
    Roman aqueducts flit by, still in use now, two thousand years later. How different Italy is, how alien from Canada where things are built for planned obsolescence.
    During the 1960s, when it was very fashionable to modernize, square ugly buildings sprang up next to ones a thousand years old, their windows skeletal teeth in mock smiles. Roman roads laid with large near-white limestone blocks were concealed under black asphalt to facilitate the burgeoning travel of multiple-car families. Now, the Italians have declared all this a travesty, and are going about removing every blemish on their historical landscape. Many cities do not allow cars into their historic centres.
    He wonders how long it’ll be before anything close to this awareness of history will permeate North America. His own city, Vancouver, is in constant mutation, buildings rising and falling. From month to month, the cityscape altered, the old vanquished. Glass towers loom beyond the false fronts of old houses, beyond the fake town squares and church spires of malls.
    The train lurches around a corner, and he recalls spectacular train crashes on the evening news, and how they always occur on these fancy high-speed trains. A small town flits past, like a mirage or a marriage .

    They step off the train in Bari into a stifling furnace of forty-one degrees. The idling engines exacerbate the heat, and make it difficult to breathe.
    â€œZia Clarissa!” A man steps forward and embraces her. “Marco. Teresa’s son.”
    â€œI know who you are,” Clarissa says. “It hasn’t been that long.” She holds him at arm’s length. “You haven’t changed a bit.”
    Marco laughs, and David is startled to hear his own laugh, to see himself reflected in his cousin’s angular face and deep-set green eyes.
    Marco turns to David and holds out his hand. “David.” He reaches for their bags. “Do you remember me?” He smiles. Marco is a couple of years older than David and a centimetre taller.
    â€œOf course.” Those early summers in the garden, two cousins playing marbles. And later, bicycle rides to the fields, cigarettes, Zia Piera’s disapproving eyes.
    They drive the freeway for most of the half-hour trip to Belisolano, a farming town of just over 10,000. Many small farmers in the Puglia region live in large urban centres and commute to their land. As a result, the countryside appears sparsely populated, a contradiction to the high-density population statistics.
    On the drive, Clarissa and Marco catch up on news. Clarissa has not seen Piera for