God's Mountain (11 page)

I
PUT
the furniture outside. Donna Assunta the washerwoman opens her ground-floor apartment and starts hanging out the wash. This morning there aren’t many
people about. The sun is out and they’ll dry quickly. Good morning, I tell her. She asks how it is that we’re open for Christmas. The furniture has to dry, too, Donna Assù, not just the clothes, I answer. She went to midnight mass. Father Petrella gave a nice sermon. He said that the rockets being shot into space go nowhere. They get lost in the sky. But the comet came close to Earth to announce the birth of the infant, the
bambeniello
. “More than this, what more could we possibly want from the stars? He spoke well, kid, quickly quickly, like he always does, but really well, and you should come to church. You don’t want to grow up like some hoodlum. The last apprentice that worked for Master Errico never went to mass and now he’s at the Poggioreale prison. Be smart, kid,” Donna Assunta says, pinning the clothes to a line half as long as the alley with her chapped red hands. I nod yes with my head. She tries to think of the right words for me. Then she walks away and I mutter a spell to keep me out of
Poggioreale:
“Sciòsciò, sciòsciò.”
I also say
“cananóre,”
which I just learned.

I
SPEAK
with Rafaniello. Today we’ve got the time. Don’t you ever miss your hometown? I ask. His hometown doesn’t exist anymore. Neither the living nor the dead remain, they made all of them disappear. “I don’t miss it,” he says. “I feel its presence. In my thoughts and when I sing, when I fix a shoe, I feel the presence of my hometown. It comes to visit me all the time, now that it doesn’t have a place of its own. In the cries of the waterman ascending Montedidio with his cart to sell sulfur water in earthenware jars. I can hear a few syllables from my hometown even in his voice.” He quiets down for a while with nails in his mouth and his head bent over the sole of a shoe. He sees that I’ve stayed near him and continues: “When you get homesick, it’s not something missing, it’s something present,
a visit. People and places from far away arrive and keep you company for a while.” So when I start feeling like I miss someone I should think that they’re present instead? “Exactly, that way you’ll remember to greet every absence and welcome it in.” So when you’ve flown away I shouldn’t miss you? “No,” he says, “when you start to think of me it’ll mean that I’m with you.” I write down what Rafaniello said about homesickness on the scroll and now it’s better. His way with thoughts is like his way with shoes. He turns them upside down on his bench and fixes them.

P
APA CAME
home to change his shirt and found Maria there. She told him that she was there to straighten up the house and give me a hand. He thanked her, got a change of clothes for Mama, and left. He came by the shop to see me and didn’t say a word about Maria. His eyes were glazed from fatigue. I don’t ask, he doesn’t
say. His alliance with her is tighter and I’m not included. My alliance with Maria shuts us off from the world, too. Change happens, but especially to us. Who else has a face as crumpled as Papa’s? Who else has a hump that’s sprouting wings? Who else has a body ready to throw a boomerang? And now, of all times, Maria has broken away from an old man’s filthy hands and been held by my hands, smoothed by sawdust, on the highest rooftop in Montedidio. When the fishnet gets closer to shore it starts to weigh less and can be pulled in more quickly. The same thing is happening to us. Even the scroll is winding up more quickly, drawn in by the weight of what’s already been written.

I
TAKE
Rafaniello with me to the rooftop where the washbasins are. He hobbles up the stairs. He doesn’t know how to walk. He leans over the bulwark, looking south and east. He opens the whites of his eyes, making
the green circle pop out. It’s not long now before we’ll be saying good-bye. I ask him what he’s thinking. It’s noontime on Christmas. Everyone’s at home. We’re the only ones outside and the sea air is shining. Staring out without looking at me, he says, “We have a proverb that says, ‘This is the sky and this is the earth,’ to indicate two opposite points. Up here they’re close together.” You’re right, Don Rafaniè, if you jump off the top of Montedidio you’re already in the sky. “It’ll take a few jumps and a big push. When you fly in your dreams you’re weightless. You don’t have to convince your strength to keep you up high. But when you add in the wings and the body, you have to be prepared to climb the air. You need something powerful to blast you away from Earth. I’m a shoemaker, a
sándler,
they used to say in my hometown. I fix shoes, I know feet, I know how they’re supported, how they manage to balance the whole body towering over them. I know how useful the arches are, the hardness of the heel, the spring inside the anklebone that accompanies long jumps, wide jumps, high jumps. I know the suffering of the feet
and the pleasure of being able to stand on any kind of surface, even a tightrope. Once I made a pair of buckskin shoes for a tightrope walker in the circus. Here in Naples I’ve learned that feet know how to sail. I’ve repaired shoes for sailors who have to withstand the rising and falling pendulum of the sea. Feet brought me as far as Montedidio, they saved me. My people say that the wolf’s got something to eat thanks to its feet, not its teeth. I even have a hump that weighs down on me, so what is such an earthbound creature doing, flapping his wings in the sky below the stars?”

I
WRITE
his words to hear them again, not to remember them. I close my good eye, and while I write on the scroll in a crooked scrawl the voice of Rafaniello rustles again, together with the rustling of the spirits. “Wings are good for an angel, heavy for a man. The only thing
a man needs to fly is prayer. Prayer climbs above clouds and rain, ceilings and trees. To fly is a prayer. I was crooked, a bent nail, twisted toward the earth. But another force turns me around and pushes me upward. Now I have wings, but to fly you have to be born from an egg and not from a womb, hatched in a tree, not on the ground.” He leans over the bulwark, his wings beating against his jacket, I can’t help but reach out to stop him. When I touch him he turns around and steps back down. His whole face is smiling but not his eyes. They are the eyes of a bird, motionless, lost in the middle of his face. Underneath my jacket the boomerang grows warm. I pat it approvingly.

A
S WE
go downstairs the sound of smashing plates comes from the landlord’s apartment. Rafaniello stops and without knowing who lives in the house says, “This man is drunk on his own blood.” Is that the curse of
the dog, Don Rafaniè? He says yes and a cold jolt passes through my kidneys. I was the one who pushed him away from the roof toward the stairs. I struck him with open hands. I drove him away, I deserve to feel a chill in my back. I climb down the stairs after Rafaniello while the sound of smashing plates continues. Maria’s at my house wearing an apron. She’s waiting for me to return. She’s preparing a sauce with onions. Her eyes are swimming in tears. She laughs. Don Ciccio the caretaker knocks on the door. We show him into the kitchen. He sits down with us and starts to speak. “Your families are falling apart and you two have gotten together. You’re still children but you’re doing the right thing. You have to help yourself. Here in Naples you grow up quickly.”

D
ON
C
ICCIO
speaks softly, with his hands together on the table and his beret on his head, even indoors. “I’ve known you and Maria since you were in diapers, I know
what you’ve been through.” Maria stares at him, breathing hard through her nose, a sign of anger. “Marì, if at home there’s no one to protect you and they get you in trouble instead, then no one can help you. The same thing happened in my family. It was wartime, there wasn’t enough to eat, my little sister went up to that apartment and put bread on our table. Marì, don’t look at me like that. Don’t get all worked up if I tell you that I know what you went through. Now you have this boy here. A good boy, hardworking, he respects his elders, even confides in that foreign shoemaker, Don Rafaniello the hunchback, with that hump on his back as big as he is. You’re right to be together. But do the right thing. Don’t rush, you can’t get married or live in the same house yet. Start off by getting engaged. Let other people know your intentions, otherwise you’ll cause a scandal and your parents will have to step in. Even if right now they don’t know you’re alive, when people start talking they’ll turn against you. I’m telling you this because I like you and you’re doing
the right thing, Marì, I’m glad that you’re not going up to that apartment anymore.” Don Ciccio said the last words with a catch in his throat and his face turned red.

I
N SPRING
I was still a child and now I’m in the middle of things I can’t understand. Don Ciccio is right. Here you have to grow up quickly, and I do, I run. Rafaniello, Maria, the boomerang, I chase after them, in the meantime the scroll is winding up, all written, and I’m not going to Don Liborio to look for another leftover roll. Maria is seated across from Don Ciccio and doesn’t say a thing. In the pot the sauce is simmering on a low flame. She takes my hand from under the table and puts it on the napkin together with hers. I look at her but she looks at Don Ciccio. “Now you tell me, Don Ciccio,
m’o ddicite mò
?” Maria jumps from Italian to Neapolitan, which leaps from her mouth with the force of a slap.
The shorter Neapolitan is, the more razor-sharp it gets. Don Ciccio swallows in silence. Maria enters back into the fold of Italian. “Don Ciccio, would you like to eat with us? A plate of spaghetti?” Don Ciccio stands, thanks her. He has to go back downstairs to his office. “Be careful. I spoke to you like a father, since there’s no fathers around here anymore.” Maria turns back to the stove. I accompany Don Ciccio to the door, shake his hand, and thank him for his interest. “Be careful, kid, be careful,” he says, and fixes his hat as he descends the stairs.

I
N THE
kitchen Maria says that no one should come between us. I tell her about the broken plates. “Obviously he’s got too many.” Marì, he’s gone crazy. “No, he’s just jumping the gun. You’re not supposed to break your old things until the end of the year. He’s breaking them now. He’s the landlord, isn’t he? The owner of
the whole building. What are a few plates to him?” She pours sauce over the drained pasta. We sit down and eat beside each other. Our legs touch. I know that she’s right. No one should come between us.

I
N THE
workshop Rafaniello finishes the last pair of shoes. He can’t sit still at his bench. He raises his head, looks around the room, his eyes alarmed, and becomes even more birdlike, left behind by the ones that migrated. He won’t be coming down to the shop anymore. On the night of the thirty-first we’ll meet up by the washbasins, we’ve agreed. He asks me how the boomerang is. It’s always with me, Don Rafaniè, I keep it ready to fly. He jerks his neck toward the door. I turn around just as Master Errico comes in. “
’A ricciola guagliò,
this morning I caught a sea bass in the waters off Santa Lucia. It was still dark. I was trawling a loose fishing line and she caught me, she caught me, tugging
so hard she cut my hand,” and he showed me the bloody red cut. “I gave her some slack so I wouldn’t break the hook, which was tiny. I let her wear herself out, and when she was tired I brought her in a little at a time, and when she was right up alongside the boat I lifted her up with the harpoon. Three kilos! Three kilos, kid! The sun was just breaking over the sea and the bass was shinier than the dawn. I’ll be eating fish for a week. I’ll leave the sarago alone until the New Year. This morning I’m going to cook the head. It’s this big,” and he measures it with his hands. Between his two palms he leaves enough space for a soccer ball.

I
COMPLIMENT
him. You’re a specialist, Master Errico, a fishing cabinet maker. He likes that I call him a cabinet maker, but he shrugs it off. “I’m just a carpenter who likes to fish. Nothing special about that. You want to hear something special? Papele the sailor, the
one who walks around with the basket of fish that he catches fresh every morning, well, one beautiful day during the war he went out to sea and came back with chickens. That’s right, he was fishing for chicken! He went up to his customers with a basket full of chickens. ‘Papè, did you change jobs?’ they asked. ‘No,
signùri,
I go out to sea every day.’ Truth is that the Americans had arrived days after our uprising and ordered a halt to all fishing because of the danger of German mines in the bay. Papele went out with his boat anyway. He went right up under the American ships and they threw chickens into the sea that they’d been keeping under ice. That’s how Papele became a chicken fisherman.”

M
ASTER
E
RRICO
’
S
in a good mood. He’s doesn’t say hello to Rafaniello right away, but then he says he’s going to send a slice of sea bass his way. “Look at how the wardrobe has dried. It’s all set.” We screw in the
hardware, handles, keyholes, and hinges. With the milling machine he prepares the slot for the lock. I bring the piece close to the machine. My good eye is careful, I keep my bad eye half closed so it can rest. We’ll deliver the wardrobe after New Year’s. While we’re working I ask him about Don Ciccio, whether he was a good man, too. “Good and brave. He was just a kid during the war and he helped the resistance fighters in secret. He ran errands for them during the bombardments, when no one was on the streets. I never saw him come down to the air-raid shelters.” I also ask him whether he remembers Don Ciccio’s sister. “What do you know about Don Ciccio’s sister, kid?” Not much, Master Errico, I only know what he told me, that she ran errands. “Her errand was to go to the landlord, a married man who was free with his hands. She was a girl, a beautiful little girl.” He lights his half cigar, meaning he has nothing more to say.