Set This House on Fire (6 page)

“He was coming from the left,” I said, “which I think you’ll be able to tell easily from the position of the Lambretta. I couldn’t
help
hitting him. It’s not my fault, anyway. In the meanwhile the man lies there dying. Would you be kind enough to tell me where the ambulance is?”

“Nome?”
he asked genially, ignoring the question.

“Peter Charles Leverett,” I said, spelling it out.

“Nato dove e quando?”

“In Port Warwick, Virginia, 14 April 1925.”

“Dove
Port Warwick, Virginia?
Inghilterra?”

“The U.S.A.”I said.

“Ah, bene. Allora, vostro padre? Nome?”

“Alfred Leverett.”

“Nato dove e quando?”

“In Suffolk, Virginia, U.S.A. I don’t know when, exactly. Make it 1886.”

“Vostra madre?”

“Oh, for Christ sake,” I said.

“Che?”

“Flora Margaret McKee. San Francisco, California, U.S.A. Put down 1900. Listen, could you tell me when the ambulance is coming if it is and, if not, whether it would be possible to put him in one of those cars or trucks and drive him to Naples? I think he’s in a grave condition.”

To try to get anything across to him was like casting notes in bottles upon the limitless deep. In his kindly, bland, unruffled fashion he kept scribbling in his ledger, examining my passport and papers while the fierce sun beat down on us and the crowd shuffled and stirred upon the margin of the crossroad like murmurous watchers at some heathen ritual. At its focus, flat on his back, asprawl in sacrificial repose, di Lieto lay with his tangled sweet look of liberation and racking ecstasy, eyes half-closed and dreaming, attracting flies. Speaking of California, the cop went on cheerfully, his wife’s uncle lived there, or so he believed, in a place called Vilks Bari, where he earned a good living as a worker of mines. Was I aware of that place? And was it near Hollywood? Now in regard to the man in the road, he continued, trying to allay my distress, I would be in severe legal trouble indeed, as I no doubt already knew, had the Lambretta approached from the right instead of from the left, which, from the evidence at hand—the skid marks, the position of the victim and of the Lambretta itself —it no doubt had; as it was, I was free to go at any time, provided I could put my car into operation, provided too I supply him with my next address in Italy (a detail, since I most certainly would not have to go to court, the indications of blame being so overwhelmingly in my favor); as for the man himself, di Lieto—“Fessacchiotto”—he had been spoiling for such a disaster for ten years (had I not been told by someone already about this thieving simpleton—his fingers, his streetcar accident, his eye?) and he had no one but himself to reproach if he should die on the spot, though it is true he was not an evil man, and death is bitter,
in verità,
even for imbeciles.

“Basta, Sergente!”
I said, almost sobbing.
“L’ambulanza!”

Just then we turned our eyes toward one edge of the crossroad, where there was a sudden commotion. A rickety truck drew to a halt beneath a tree. Down from its sides clambered a mob of men and boys, led by a cruelly gnarled old hag who struggled like a wounded bird across the sunlit space of ground, fell at di Lieto’s side, and there on her knees began to howl noisily and piteously.

“Luciano! Luciano!” she wailed. “Luciano-o-o!
Che t’hanno fatto? Povero figlio mio!
Luciano-o-o! Come back, my sweet, come back, come back! Again the monsters have tried to finish thee! Look up into mamma’s eyes, Luciano. Just once, Luciano! Don’t let the monsters finish thee, angel. Show mamma once again thy dear sweet eyes!”

“È mezza matta,”
the sergeant whispered. “She’s always been a little cuckoo. She’s his grandmother but she brought him up as a son.” He seemed awed by the show, and a little uneasy. “All those other people are his brothers.”

Infected by this awful grief, the crowd became hushed, stood transfixed at the roadside. For a moment the woman knelt silently, fumbling with her chin. A curious breeze came up, instantly chilling, and a gritty whirlpool of dust and leaves churned past us, billowing up, blossoming, flushing out of the weeds a flock of starlings which exploded from the meadow full-tilt and in raucous outcry, windmilling around us on the dusty blast. In white tatters the old woman’s hair came flying loose, her black shawl went adrift from her shoulders, and a piece of newspaper came tumbling end over end through the arena, where, alone now, she and her grandson seemed like actors storm-swept by some diminutive and marvelous tempest; then the wind died, the old woman recovered her shawl, and the birds fled chattering across the fields.

“Luciano, angelo mio,”
she moaned softly,
“perchè non dici niente, perchè non mi guardi?
Speak, child. Look at mamma. Luciano, I see thy legs twitching. Rise up on them and walk, angel; don’t lie here like this in the road …”

Suddenly she seemed to falter; kneeling there, she raised her eyes from di Lieto and gazed slowly around the crowd, examining each face with a sudden, haunted, tigerish, homicidal look which, even before it lit upon me, caused my insides to squirm in panic. In some way I felt the first breath of her fury before it actually struck: at that moment when in seersuckers and in tourist’s espadrilles, sun-glassed, crew-cut, and with an aspect of northern barbarity like an autograph upon my face, I tried vainly to squeeze behind the sergeant—when she spied me, scrambled to her feet with unbelievable nimbleness, and charged across the road toward me in a black floundering onslaught of execration and doom.

“Svedese! Farabutto!”
she yelled.
“You’ve
done this to my boy!
You
ran him down with your machine, you wicked monster! May you burn in
hell!”
A quick apologetic breath went upward from her lips—
“Dio mi perdonir
—but she bore relentlessly down, gathering new wind, new imprecations, lunged past the flustered sergeant, and thrust a palsied, castigating finger like a gnarled twiglet beneath my nose. “Swede!” she cried. “Evil man! I know you and your kind. Don’t try to hide your face from me. Look at him!” she said, with a gesture for the crowd. “Look at the man! Look how he shivers and shakes with fear. Ha! Now he knows he can’t hide his crime. Speeding through our town, running down innocent people with his machine!” She turned back to me, her whole face—sunken eyes, moles, wrinkled cheeks, wild white hair—all aquiver and ablaze with terrifying wrath. “I know your kind! It was one of your kind who ran down the wife of poor Luigi Lucatuorto in Portici four years ago last Easter. In the springtime of life, too, a strong handsome girl with a sick father and four hungry children to feed. A lovely girl, big, healthy, minding her own way, struck down like a dog by a monster. You know about this? Tell me! You know? Not one lira did she collect, either, though her collarbone was broken and her back weakened for life!” She paused, turning toward di Lieto, and began weeping again. “Look there. What are you going to do about
him
now? What are you going to do about Luciano? Bleeding there, dying. An innocent boy who never once in his life caused anyone a moment’s trouble or harm.” Wheeling to me, she renewed the assault in a black outburst of fury. “A young innocent boy, I tell you! All of his life suffering at the hands of monsters! Don’t stand there looking like a big fool! What are you going to do about him? What are you going to do about Luciano?”

“I don’t know, signora,” I began, “I’m terribly sorry—”

“Shut your mouth, Swede monster!”

The sergeant put a gentle, placating hand on the woman’s shoulder. “
Senta, nonna. Non è svedese. È americano.”

“Quiet, too, Bruno Ferragamo!” she cried. “I know you! They’re all Swedes! They came here during the war, when Luciano was only a child. Remember those bombs? Do you have so short a memory? Remember how they came, raping and bombing and destroying? You remember as well as I,
Sergeant
Ferragamo,” she sneered, “or you should, you Communist! How Luciano lay there in the road after the bombing, his poor legs broken beneath him and bleeding, all crumpled and torn there and crying his eyes out, with his poor arm beneath him, which he has never recovered from. Oh what a sad day!” For a brief moment her voice sank down, cracked and reminiscent. As we watched her and fidgeted, there was a trumpeting noise far down the road, and the dim sound of tires sizzling, as of some vehicle moving at great speed. “Oh what a dark day. With the bombardments and the smoke all around and the bricks toppling all around us. Oh what a terrible day. I remember how I was cooking when the first bombs came. I wouldn’t get out. I wouldn’t get out, I tell you. Though they begged me and pleaded with me. I wouldn’t go. I stayed there cooking. And then the bombs. With the bricks falling all around and the smoke coming up and Anna Teresa there screaming. Oh what a day! Then I ran out into the road. There was Luciano lying there, the poor child all crumpled up and bleeding. His legs broken! His arm beneath him! Crying and moaning! Crying,
‘Nonna, nonna,
I hurt! My legs hurt me so!’”

“Listen, signora,” the sergeant put in gently, “it was a streetcar. … And I’m not a Communist,” he said in an aside to me.

The old woman came alive from her reverie like someone startled out of sleep. “What streetcar? Shut up, Bruno Ferragamo! Shut your antichrist Communist mouth! I’ll not have you policemen lying about Luciano and putting the poor innocent boy in jail! While you allow these monsters to run over innocent people in the road. Like this one here! Have you forgotten the bombs so soon? How they came up from Salerno shooting and sacking the towns and raping, when we were living in Torre del Greco. Have you forgotten so soon? Filthy cabbage-eaters! Drinkers of beer! Remember that one, the English one, who took poor Lucatuorto’s wife in the ruins and ravened her there and left her there bleeding and dying, her with four hungry children to feed and a sick father to care for, he so sick and all. What has happened to your memory,
Sergeant
Ferragamo? Luciano, who has never hurt a soul in his life. Luciano, the tenderest of boys, the kindest, who once took a sparrow whose wing was broken—a sparrow, mind you—and nursed him till he was well and grown. Now you would leave Luciano to suffer at the hands of monsters like these!” She rose up on tiptoe, bristling with fury, and set both of her hands to shaking an inch from my chin. “You! Have you too forgotten the bombs? Have you too forgotten the oath I swore that day when I picked up poor Luciano from the road! ‘As the Blessed Virgin stands as my witness in heaven,’ I said, ‘they shall suffer and be punished for their sins before God!’ Bombing and sacking our home in Torre del Greco! Raping! Stealing! Taking poor Lucatuorto’s wife in the ruins and ravening her, her with a sick father and four hungry children to feed!
Invasato! Mascalzone!
Wicked monster! Swede! May you burn in hell! God forgive me.”

Then I found myself too shouting, abruptly and uproariously and on the verge of tears, my Italian deserting me, uttering strange sounds which I just dimly realized were in my native language: “I’m sorry, lady! I’m sorry! I’m sorry! But I didn’t bomb your house! I didn’t bomb your house!”

Down the road the trumpeting noise approached bellowing, grew louder and louder with the sound of some Gabriel’s horn blowing flat ruptured notes of glory: the ambulance appeared in a rack of dust and gravel, trumpeting senselessly even as it halted at the crossroad, and as my voice rose hoarse and unhinged in vain encounter with the outrageous din.
I
didn’t bomb your house! I didn’t bomb your house!
I kept trying to say, but found my lips struggling with broken wisps of air, sent flying on the wind by the shocking horn, which thundered on and on.

And then it was all over. The scene dissolved before me as if suddenly and mercifully drowned: the old woman, whisked away by her grandsons, gone; people, policemen, trucks, cars, all gone; the lot of them vanishing in hot stampede after the ambulance and the ravaged di Lieto—broken, dead or dying, I knew not what, but at last nobly borne to the sound of illustrious, tragic horns which rolled over the sunlit countryside, diminishing, intoning rich mingled notes of triumph and grief.

On the shore drive between Salerno and Amalfi, just before the road turns off for the long steep ascent to Sambuco, there is a large sign painted on a wall. It is written in bold letters of black on white; the words are in English—

BEHOLD ABOVE YOU
THE PALACIAL VILLA OF
EMILIO NARDUZZO
OF
WEST ENGLEWOOD, N.J., U.S.A.

—and one’s eye, impelled by spontaneous obedience to this mandate and in swift search of some majestic dwelling place, roves skyward up and through the high hanging slope of vineyards and orange trees and blinding red poppies, to a ridge of land thrust up like a hatchet blade against the sky: there fixed in the rock is a structure the size and shape of an Esso station, sporting portholes for windows, painted an explosive blue, and flaunting at its proud turreted roof half a dozen American flags. Narduzzo’s villa is not listed in Nagel’s
Italy,
but it is in its own way one of the marvels of the coast. After the wondrous drive itself, with its raw green pinnacles and peaks, its cliffs coming down from dizzying heights into a tranquil cobalt sea, the effect of Narduzzo’s villa could not be more upsetting or dissonant if one were to blunder around a turning into West Englewood itself.

I mention this because now in trying to recall the rest of that afternoon I am able to remember practically nothing, until the moment when I must have been shocked into something resembling consciousness by the sight of Narduzzo’s house. Of my departure from the crossroad I do remember backing the car out of the ditch where it had landed and with a signpost prying away the fender, which had wrapped itself around one front tire in a crumpled embrace. I remember too the whole front end of the car: a ruin of splintered chrome, broken metal, headlights knocked wall-eyed, and in the middle of the mess, faintly silhouetted, the ghost of poor di Lieto, his rear end outlined unmistakably in the poised half-crouch of a jockey. And from somewhere underneath there still trickled thin streams of water and grease and oil. Yet although the car seemed to work and though I set out again, at ten miles an hour, the rest of the trip remains only a shadow in my mind of some dim but incomparable misery. It was the sign and villa which brought me to my senses. I stopped in the road with a jerk and in a billow of steam, my distress all suddenly devoured—as I turned my eyes away from the hideous starspangled villa—by the beauty spread out before me.