God's Mountain (13 page)

M
ARIA MAKES
a
maccheroni
frittata. I set the table. Papa sits down stiffly on the edge of a chair. His hands are on his knees. This way they can keep still. He’s leaning over his legs a little. Teardrops break away from his nose and drop straight to the floor. Maria turns the frittata out onto his plate directly from the skillet, saying, “It’s ready.” Papa moves his chair in and quietly eats his whole portion. Maria sees the empty plate and fills it again without asking him. He finishes it. The more he chews the more the muscles in his face, his eyes, and his brow start to move again. Maria says that the shopkeepers raise their prices at Christmas and take advantage of people who want to make a good impression once a year. “We have to do the shopping in mid-August.” The only thing Papa pays attention to is his plate. He cleans it with a piece of bread. Then he stands up and says he’s got to go to the porters’ cooperative to start working again. He tells me to buy a flask of
wine, leaves me three hundred liras. Maria clears the table, washes up, puts things away. Maria does things quietly, proving that she knows how to run a kitchen and that even with a sad life you have to keep busy. At least that way there’s no dirt, which would be one more offense. Instead everything’s in order, even with tears in your eyes.

T
HE AFTERNOON
is free. I tell Maria that we should go to Mergellina, where there’s a pier that stretches into the sea. At its far end is a lighthouse and a reef, where you can be outdoors without the city around you. I want to go there because the houses, the streets, everything stops, and suddenly Naples is gone. The open sea and the crashing of the waves conceal it. All you have to do is walk down the pier. Maria puts on her coat. Her scarf is already hanging on the door. Her readiness
soothes my bones. On the promenade I buy her a pork-fat-and-pepper
tarallo
. The wind carries away our warmth. We get it back by walking quickly. Not many people dare to take the walk. American soldiers in rubber shoes hurry by. The aircraft carrier in the bay is the only ship that doesn’t move on the choppy sea spiked with whitecaps. Maria looks at the American soldiers and says, “They’re a beautiful race but they’re always running, running for nothing, for no reason. We Neapolitans have to be thrown out of our homes by an earthquake before we start running.” Maria, why don’t we run, too? “Noooo,” she says, and with her arm she pulls me back into step with her.

A
T THE
Mergellina pier the riggings on the sailing ships are whistling. The dogs are scared. They hide under the fishermen’s boats in dry dock. The two of us are the
only ones to go out on the pier that juts into the middle of the dark sea. The boulders of the breakwater throw water in the air, the waves crash, stop short, and split apart by the bucketful. The boomerang underneath my jacket trembles in the forceful air, pressing its electricity against me. I’d like to throw it against the sea, the north wind, the aircraft carrier, and everything that moves, but not at my mother, no, she can no longer move. Stand still, all of you, stop in your tracks for a minute: if only I had a sliver of voice in my throat to make myself heard, a voice that the wind could spread over the city and make it stand still for a minute. Maria holds my arm tight. I don’t slip away from her, don’t remove the knot of my fist from the handle of the boomerang. At the end of the pier the lighthouse is the farthest point from the city, which seems to have come to a stop. I’m pleased to see it quiet for a minute. A few lights flicker from the island across the bay, from the towns on the coast. Naples’s shoulders are protected from the wind and you can’t hear a thing. I swallow big gulps of sea air. Maria says, “Let’s go back.”

P
APA RETURNS
home for supper. He sees the wine and before pouring himself some to drink he tries to explain, in Italian, “As long as she was alive I guarded her life, I snatched her away from death day and night.” He drinks it down and says sharply,
“Mò nun pozzo fa’ niente cchiù.”
Now there’s nothing more I can do. Maria nods her head. I’m just happy that he’s searching for peace. He stayed with Mama till her last breath, and didn’t want to go one step farther, not even to the cemetery. He pours himself another glass, asks if we’re drinking, too. Maria says yes, I say no. She sips a couple of drops from the glass to taste it. Papa tells her, “That’s not a sip, it’s a breath. You’re teasing the wine that way.” Maria makes up for it by draining the glass with a flick of her wrist. We eat slowly, you can hear noises from the other homes. Papa drinks, passes his hand over his face, rubs his forehead. “Thanks for the supper.” He gets
up, says good night. In bed we lie close to each other but don’t embrace. She says that her blood is running but it’s not a cut, it’s a change that women go through. She drank the wine to get her blood back. Before falling asleep, she says the precious words, “I care for you.” As usual I don’t know what to say in return.

M
ASTER
E
RRICO
and Rafaniello said good-bye to each other when I wasn’t there. It’s the last day of the year. Tomorrow’s a holiday, so today we have to work hard. We put all of the rough wood for the upcoming jobs through the planer. We make a lot of noise but today the neighborhood doesn’t pay us any mind. No one sticks their head into the shop to ask Master Errico if he can keep it down, if he can do it later, because someone in the house that night didn’t get any sleep,
“nun
ha potuto azzecca’ uocchio.”
In an alley you try to run the machines at a time that doesn’t disturb anyone. Today everyone’s busy getting ready for the holiday so they don’t mind the screeching of the blades that shave millimeters off the boards and splinter them into sawdust. Master Errico double-checks the squaring, corrects it, divides the finished boards by their grain. He grumbles about the lumberjack, who didn’t cut the lumber during the right phase of the moon and now the wood is weak and bleeding resin. Master Errico tells me that Rafaniello is leaving, he got himself a ticket to sail to the Holy Land because he’s a worshiper of Jerusalem. People don’t get their shoes fixed in Montedidio anymore, he says, nowadays they buy them new or they’re given to them by the mayor at election time, one before and one after the vote. I forget everything, think of work, and bury myself in sawdust. The boomerang is on my chest, beating against my heart. We don’t even stop for lunch. We stop at four o’clock, when evening
has already fallen. We wish each other a Happy New Year. Master Errico gives me double pay. “You earned it, kid, be well.” Do you shoot a gun at midnight? I ask him. No, he says. He stands on the balcony, smokes a Tuscan cigar, and watches other people’s fireworks. He likes the Roman candles. “Don Ciccio sets off the best Roman candles in Montedidio.”

I
SHAKE
the sawdust off my clothes, beating myself like a rug. The boomerang bumps against my ribs and rustles like the wings beneath Rafaniello’s jacket. I think of him. Tonight the flight of the boomerang will accompany him. At home my writing reaches the end of the scroll. A few more turns and nothing more will be left. I have to hold the scroll open, since the written part pulls it closed. I sharpen my pencil and wait for Maria,
who’s gone out. She comes back out of breath. She went up to her place to clean up and to get a change of clothes. The landlord was waiting for her at the door and threw himself on her right in the middle of the staircase. She didn’t shout. She kicked him in the shins and got away. “If you had been there you would have thrown him down the stairs,” she says. She’s agitated, frightened. He was holding her tight with his hands and his breath stank. He’s out of his mind, but she defended herself. My thoughts become dark, my nerves frayed, wound tight from the boomerang. They want to shove and slap everyone in sight.
Maria, nun succere n’ata vota.
It won’t happen again. These grim words come out in my Neapolitan voice. I show my ugly side. It’s the first time, so I don’t know what kind of a face I’ve just made, because Maria takes it in her hands and says, “Don’t act like that. Forget about it. It’s over already. It was nothing, I shouldn’t even have told you.” She looks for my eyes and I don’t know where I put them because she tells me, “Look at me, look me in the face,” and moves
my face until I let go of the dark thoughts, look at her, take her wrists, and give myself two slaps in the face with them, clenching my teeth. She gets scared and hugs me and now yes, now it’s all over.

I
T WON
’
T
happen again, I tell her, but not in Neapolitan. I tell her quietly so she’ll calm down. Today I’ve learned something about myself, something sad in the middle of my good luck at being with Maria. Not everything is good about my body growing. Something evil grows up alongside it. Alongside myself, alongside the strength of my arms to free the boomerang, grows a bitter force capable of violence. A sulfur pond has started boiling inside my head, making my thinking evil. Is this what men suddenly become? Someone makes a bad move, you blow your stack, and out comes the evil blood. Papa
comes home. Maria asks him if tonight he’d like pizza, we’ll go get some at Dirty Gigino’s, who makes the best pizza in the neighborhood. Right away he says yes, a pizza margherita. Same thing for us. So we lay the tablecloth on the marble table in the kitchen. When we come back we’ll eat it while it’s still hot. He’s tired. Today he worked in the bottom of the hold without a break, something the older workers don’t do. He sits down with the newspaper on his knee. The lightbulb is twenty watts. He tries to read, straining his eyes.

T
HEN WE
go out, saying see you later. He doesn’t answer. He reads, moving his lips to follow the words. Maria and I know how to read better than him. It’s not fair. We, the late-comers, who had the luxury to study, we know more than a strong adult man who made sure his whole life that we didn’t want for the basics and
who was always respectful to his wife. I close the door behind us, letting Maria out first. I feel honored by my father, who has to move his lips to read. Marì, we have to buy the best pizza in Naples. “We wouldn’t go out for less. At the very least the best in Naples, then we’ll see if it isn’t the best in the world.” Maria, I tell her, I care for you. “Those are my words. You have to use your own,” she answers, leaving me looking stupid once again.

D
IRTY
G
IGINO
is making pizza for all of Naples. There’s a crowd in front of his store. It’s cold and he’s standing there in his undershirt slapping the dough around and spinning it absentmindedly. He calls out to the crowd,
“Song ‘e ppizze ‘e sott ‘o Vesuvio, nc’è scurruta ‘a lava ‘e ll’uoglio.”
He’s saying that there’s as much oil on his pizza as there is lava running down the slopes of Vesuvius. This way people don’t mind waiting as much,
because they work up an appetite from Don Gigino’s exaggerated words. They call him dirty—
‘o fetente
—because he has a beard and sometimes you find dark hairs in your pizza. He wears a beard because his face is scarred. I stand off to the side on the sidewalk. Maria goes up to the counter and lets her voice be heard good and loud: “Don Gigì, three of your pizza margheritas ’cause we want to cheer ourselves up,” she shouts out in the midst of the crowd, letting loose her fresh, flirtatious side.
“Nenne’, i’ m’arricreo quanno te veco.”
I cheer up whenever I see you, Don Gigino responds from the counter, with his dark beard, eyes, and hair, dusted in flour like an anchovy. He rushes us ahead of the others, handing us three pizzas, one on top of the other, with wax paper in between. He shouts for everybody to hear,
“Facite passa’ annanze ‘a cchiù bella guagliona ‘e Montedidio!”
Make way for the most beautiful girl in Montedidio! and Maria makes her way through the crowd and takes the pizzas from the hands of Don Gigino, who even tells her she can pay for them another time.
“Cheste m’e ppave ll’anno che vene.”
Maria, walking tall and brash from the honor, comes to me, puts her arm in mine, and we walk up to Montedidio with people’s eyes on our backs. It’s so important to be two, a man and a woman, in this city. He who’s alone is less than one.

O
N THE
street firecrackers are going off and people are rushing home to get ready for the party. The pizzas are smoking in Maria’s hands. Her footsteps sound like wood. I realize she’s wearing high-heeled shoes. It’s just that I saw Maria was taller and didn’t look at her shoes. At first I thought that she grew quickly from one day to the next. Now I see the heels, but I still know anyway that she’s taller, even without them. We race forward. Quickly we find ourselves high atop Montedidio, where we can look at the stars face-to-face. Don Gigino sees
us and lets us pass in front of all his customers, because he sees us running, growing and running. Maria is taller. Her figure has shot up from a girl’s to a woman’s, everyone who sees her notices. I don’t say a thing. Whatever she does is fine with me.