God's Mountain (12 page)

A
T THE
end of the day I close the shop. I accompany Rafaniello home. I take his arm. He walks with difficulty. Don Rafaniè, in a few months things have started happening fast, you and your hump, me and my job. My body’s grown, my voice has gotten deeper. Where are the two of us running to? I ask, and with his little voice he answers, “Where I’m from we tell a joke about a rider who’s having a hard time staying on a horse that’s galloping through a field. A peasant asks him where he’s going and he shouts back, ‘Ask the horse.’ ” I smile, I don’t get it, I laugh anyway. Rafaniello is so light you can pick him up. His bones must be hollow. There’s air in his jacket. I see the curve of his folded wings and pass my hand over him to cover them better. In Naples people call the hump a
scartiello
. They think that stroking it brings you good luck. People are always putting their hands on Rafaniello’s hump without asking permission. He lets them. “In my hometown they called me
gorbùn
and no one would even brush against me.
Here I like the familiarity that people have with my hump. I don’t think I’ve brought anyone good luck, but all those strokes have helped me. They’ve awakened my wings.”

D
ON
R
AFANIÉ
, I could use a few strokes on my throat to get my voice back. My old voice is dead and my new one is stuck. He smiles and tells me that my voice will come all at once, and it’ll be strong. He tells me a story. “When I was coming down into Italy after the war, I was walking along a country road when behind me I heard a terrifying scream, a harrowing cry, a begging so heart-rending that it made your ears bleed. I set my bags on the ground, turned around, and for the first time ever saw a donkey pulling a cart and a man beating it. The animal was straining its neck. With its
harness tight and the bit in its mouth, it was howling in pain, so loud you could hear it for miles. If only I knew how to pray that way. In the Scriptures there are many passages about donkeys. It’s a revered, hardworking animal. But its cry is useless, gigantic, something between it and God, it excludes mankind. It was May. My ears had had enough of the war, enough of horrible sounds. Inside my hump I felt a chill. All of a sudden my eyes were brimming with tears. Throughout the war my eyes had been dry. It took a country road in Italy and the cries of a donkey to awaken them. When your voice comes out it will have the force of a donkey.” Thank you for the blessing, Don Rafaniè. The dark voice I’ve got now makes me sound like a conspirator. Did you know, Don Rafaniè, that the Naples soccer team has a donkey on its banner? It must be because whenever there’s a goal the crowd at the stadium shouts as loud as a donkey. I heard the shout of the stadium once when I was walking by and tears came to my eyes, without my realizing it. That cry was overwhelming. It
was more important than scoring a goal, more powerful. In the meantime our conversation had brought us to his room. I lit his candle and we said good night with a nod of our heads.

I
GO
up to the washbasins to practice. There isn’t much of a moon, just a flicker of a fishtail over Vesuvius. It’s too low to use as a target. I aim for a higher star, close my good eye, go through the motions of throwing, counting out the number of attempts in my head till I reach two hundred. The boomerang is curved. My shoulders make a curve and my wrist makes one, too. All together they’re going to combine into one big push forward. A combustion of muscle and nerve will unleash a long spinning hurl that will split heaven and earth. The boomerang is hot, sharpened from all the throws I’ve held back, waiting for my fingers to
open so it can rise through the darkness. My bad eye sees the sky close up. What will it take to fly? I think of Rafaniello and already see the sky lowering its drawbridge to let him and the boomerang pass. Every night it’s a little lower and then all it will take is a jump from the terrace to reach it. The sky itself will beat your wings, Don Rafaniè, you won’t have to make any effort, just keep them open. With my bad eye I get a good look at what’s going to happen in the future.

E
VEN IN
the cold I sweat as my muscles whip through the air. A few swift caresses dry my face. The spirits like to lick the body’s salts, enjoying the taste of freshly squeezed life, whipped into a froth. But when the body bleeds, they want no part of it. They rush to stop it, to press against the wound, drying cuts in a second. My bad eye takes aim at a star in the sky directly above
the Castel dell’Ovo, a point to remember on the night of the thirty-first.

M
ARIA WANTS
to go to the movies, to the Lux, where they’re showing a picture with Totò. Totò is in the desert, shouting, “This tremendous African sun,” and we laugh. Why do we laugh? Because we’re at the movie theater sitting in the back, because we waited, standing, until two seats were free, because it’s the first time that we’ve gone somewhere together, because the darkness tickles us, because sometimes people just laugh, so we laugh too at the voice of Totò that gets his mouth so out of joint when he speaks that he has to knock his chin back into place. Maria laughs the hardest. After everyone else has stopped she keeps on laughing, and her laughter makes them crack up all over again. Nothing very funny happens in the movie but
everyone laughs at Maria’s laughter, which she releases like a machine gun, in short broken bursts. A man sitting in front of us starts laughing so hard right after Maria that it sounds like he’s choking. He sucks in his laugh with a wheeze, as if he were ready for the hospital.
“Chisto mo’ more.”
This one’s gonna die, a woman behind us says, but nothing stops him, he’s pissing himself, and when he comes up for a breath, Maria surprises him from behind with another peal of laughter, and he cracks up again with a pained whinnying, “He-he-he,” and the theater bursts out with another volley that’s got nothing to do with what’s happening on the screen.

O
UTSIDE THE
theater everyone’s happy, even though it’s raining and no one thought to bring an umbrella. An old man laughs when he remembers the laughter. A
woman says,
“Accussì adda essere ‘o mbruoglio int’o lenzulo, c’adda fa’ spassa’!”
That’s how the shenanigans between the sheets should be, they should make us laugh! Neapolitans call the movies the shenanigans between the sheets because the real word is too strange, they have a hard time saying it, and they’re afraid they’re going to stutter,
“Cimetanocrafo.” ‘O imbruoglio int’o len-zulo
is more to the point and better describes how a movie is a trick of light projected on a screen, a sheet. Maria places her arm in mine and we walk in the rain, refreshed by our laughter. At home on the bed in the closet it’s crowded, uncomfortable. Maria says, “We’re better off here, we’re warm.” She means we don’t need to take advantage of the big bed. We make space for each other, one inside the other, and fall asleep cuddled up after a good dose of kisses. I’ve learned to relax my lips. I used to keep them as hard as a callus.

M
ARIA DOESN
’
T
mind my smoky voice. She says she likes it, that she wants to hear it when we’re kissing each other. Ask me something and I’ll answer, I tell her. She laughs, saying, “Do you know my name?” I answer but she insists. “Repeat my name, repeat it,” and I kiss her and say her name and it’s love all over again and she likes it so much when I say her name that she thrashes and sobs with her whole body. Maria must be a magic name. She goes straight from kisses to sleep in the time it takes for my
piscitiello
to go back down. I no longer have to ask,
“Arò si’ gghiuto?”
Where did you go? Now I know. I say her name a few more times, and she breathes in through her nose, swallows, and snores ever so softly.

I
WAKE
up. She’s in the kitchen. She’s boiled some water and she’s pouring it over a coffee filter. At her house they use a moka machine that makes the coffee come out the top. I tell her that if the coffee goes up it’s already tired when it arrives. Maria laughs. Very funny, she says. Truth is, I was only sharing an affectionate thought about coffee that I’ve only just gotten to know and that I like a lot, black with no sugar. I leave money on the table to buy what’s missing from the kitchen. I put on the boomerang, my working jacket, and go down to the shop to open the gates. Mama, I think as I go downstairs, hurry home because I’ve got to ask you some stuff about women. It’s cold. A northern chill in the stairwell makes me close my eyes, and I realize that the answer is no. Papa arrives at the workshop. Master Errico walks up to him. He’s crying. I stand there with the broom in my hand. I squeeze it tight and keep my good eye closed so that I’ll see everything out of focus and I won’t see Papa’s face. He’s ashamed of
crying in front of me. Master Errico takes the broom from my hands, pulls it away from me. We go out. He closes the workshop in mourning and goes to the hospital with us. Mama’s not there. They’ve closed her in the coffin. I keep my arms close to my chest so that I’ll get some warmth from the boomerang. The smell of
sfogliatelle
comes from a nearby bed. A man opens up a bag of pastries and offers us some. That’s when the teardrops burst, now I know how to say it in Italian, because they come out and burst from your eyes with a shot from inside, a shot that forces them out.

M
Y FATHER
’
S
stopped crying. His face is drained. He pays no attention to the people who come and speak to him and shake his hand or mine. I keep my good eye half closed and make myself look the way I’m supposed to
for the procession of people from Montedidio. Then Maria arrives. She goes straight to Papa, takes him by the arm, and accompanies him outside. He goes with her quietly to get some fresh air and I stay behind to stand guard over the body of my mother, who didn’t even want me to see her. Maria’s parents came back home to get their suitcases. When they didn’t find her, they left her some money and asked Don Ciccio to look after her. They have to take an emergency trip, they’ll be back soon. “They’re in trouble,” says Maria, who heard about my mother from Don Ciccio. She did the shopping and came home to prepare something hot for us to eat. We leave the hospital. Papa’s in the middle. He doesn’t once look up from his feet. We guide him down the narrow sidewalks, where people are packed together as tight as olives in a jar. He’s gotten thinner, and lets himself be moved about by us and by the wind that slaps our faces and makes them tougher.