God's Mountain (2 page)

M
ASTER
E
RRICO
has me spreading pore-filler on wood and sanding it down. Then I polish the doors of a wardrobe for clothes. How many clothes does this family have? We’re making eight doors, two levels. They call it a “four seasons.” Today I tested the latch on the first door and it fit so well that it made a vacuum sound. The air escaped from inside. Master Errico made me put my face near the door. I could feel the air stroking my cheek. That’s how the spirits rub up against my face.
against my face. They dry away the sweat. Spirits are happy in old buildings. But if someone says they saw them they’re lying. You can only feel spirits, and only when they want.

M
ASTER
E
RRICO
gives space in his shop to a cobbler named Don Rafaniello. I clean up his space, too, around the workbench and the pile of shoes that he fixes. He came to Naples from somewhere in Europe after the war. He went straight to Montedidio to Master Errico’s and started fixing the shoes of the poor. He makes them new again. They call him Rafaniello because his hair is red, his eyes are green, he’s short, and he has a hump on the top of his back. In Naples, it took one look for them to nickname him
ravanello
, radish. That’s how he
became Don Rafaniello. Not even he knows how many years he’s been in the world.

K
IDS DON
’
T
understand age. For them forty and eighty are all the same mess. Once on the stairs I heard Maria ask her grandma if she was old. He grandma said no. Maria asked if her grandpa was old. Her grandma answered no. Then Maria asked, “So there’s no such thing as old people,” and got smacked across the face. I can tell how old people are, except for Rafaniello. His face is a hundred, his hands are forty, his hair, all red and bushy, twenty. From his words, I can’t tell. He doesn’t talk much, and when he does, it’s in a teeny tiny voice. He sings in a foreign language. When I sweep up his corner he smiles at me, making his wrinkles and freckles ripple like the sea in the rain.

H
E
’
S A
good man, Rafaniello. He fixes the shoes of the poor and won’t take money from them. One guy came by who wanted a new pair. Rafaniello took his measurements with a piece of string, made a few knots, and got to work. The guy came back to try them on for size and there they were. They fit like a glove. Rafaniello cares about people’s feet. He wouldn’t hurt a fly, so the flies never bother him. They buzz around him but never land on his skin, no matter how many there are. Master Errico shakes his neck like a carriage horse to get them out of his face when his hands are busy. He even snorts like a horse. I swat a rag around him and they leave him alone for a second.

I
WEAR
sandals even in winter. My feet are growing and this way they can stick out a little without having to buy a new pair. They’re small on me. I sweep the floor in my bare feet, so as not to wear them out. Rafaniello took them one morning, and when I put them on at noon they fit me so well I was afraid they were the wrong sandals. I looked at him and he nodded yes, yes, with his head. I tell him, thank you Don Rafaniè. He answers, “You don’t have to call me don.” But you’re a good Christian. You do acts of charity for the feet of the poor. You deserve to be called don. “No, call other people don if you want to. I’m not even a Christian. Where I’m from I had a name that was almost the same as Rafaniello.” I didn’t say a word. Till then we’d almost never spoken. The sandal leather smelled nice. It had come back to life in his hands. At home Mama complimented me, saying that I was good at getting people to like me. But with Don Rafaniello it doesn’t count. He likes everybody.

I
HEAR
screeches and Neapolitan voices. I speak Neapolitan but I write Italian. “We’re in Italy,” Papa says, “but we’re not Italian. To speak the language we have to study it, like being abroad, in America, but without leaving home. Many of us will never speak Italian and will die in Neapolitan.” It’s a hard language, he says, but you will learn it and be Italian. Me and your mother won’t.
“Noi nun pu, nun po, nuie nun putimmo.”
He’s trying to say “we can’t,”
non possiamo,
but the words won’t come out. I tell him how to say it the Italian way. “Good boy,” he says, “good boy. You know the national language.” Sure I know it and I even write it in secret and when I do, I feel a little like I’m cheating on Neapolitan, so in my head I conjugate the verb “can,”
potere. I’ pozzo, tu puozzi, isso po’, nuie putimmo, vuie putite, lloro ponno
. Mama doesn’t agree with Papa and says, “We’re Neapolitans and that’s all there is to it.”
“Ll’Italia mia,”
she says, doubling the
l
of the article.
“Ll’Italia mia sta in America”
—my Italy is in America. That’s where half my family lives. “Your homeland is what puts food on your plate,” she says, and stops. To tease her, Papa says. “Then you must be my homeland.” He doesn’t want to disagree with Mama. In our house we never raise our voices, we don’t get into arguments. If something bothers him, he puts his hand over his mouth and covers half his face.

M
ASTER
E
RRICO
has me spreading pore-filler on wood and sanding it down. Then I polish the doors of a wardrobe for clothes. How many clothes does this family have? We’re making eight doors, two levels. They call it a “four seasons.” Today I tested the latch on the first door and it fit so well that it made a vacuum sound. The air escaped from inside. Master Errico made me put my face near the door. I could feel the air stroking my cheek. That’s how the spirits rub up against my face.
Then Master Errico took it apart and covered it. It’s a big job. He’s been tinkering with it for a year. The drawers are made out of beech, the joints are dovetailed. It feels great to run your hands over them. He checks the squaring again and again, greasing the runners until the drawers don’t make a sound when he pulls them out and slides them back in. He says it’s like dropping a fishing line in the sea. They rise and fall silently in his hands. Master Errico, I say, you’re a genius, a fishing cabinet maker.

E
VERY DAY
Master Errico buys the paper
Il Mattino
. It’s an expense, thirty lira, but a man’s got to know what’s happening in the world, he says. He reads some of the news out loud to us: the sword fell out of the hands of the statue of Roger the Norman that guards the Royal Palace. In Genoa there was a big riot between the police
and the factory workers. Master Errico’s voice is strong. The pieces he reads stay with me. On Sundays he goes fishing, dropping a line from a rowboat off the port. All day long he sits quietly in the traffic of the ships going by. He waits until a
sarago
surrenders.
Sarago
swim near the breakwater, believe it or not, beneath the black sheet of water. They’re down there, he says, as crafty as street urchins. There’s an art to robbing them from the sea. For bait you use mussels. One day he’ll teach me. “I’ll learn you,” he says.

S
ARAGO
NEVER
sits on our table. We eat anchovies.
Sarago
is expensive, but Master Errico brings it home every Sunday and cooks it in crazy water. “Heaven and the sea allowing,” he says. He manages by himself. He’s sixty and doesn’t wear glasses. He strains his eyes, and has to measure what he’s going to cut again and again, be careful. The boy he used to have was good, but he
hung out with the Mob when he was growing up and now he’s doing time. That’s how I ended up here. I lend him my eyes. I mark down the inches. Then he calculates how much he needs to cut and corrects the measurement.

I
SPEND
my days cleaning the tools, the machines, getting rid of wood chips, sawdust. Exercising with the boomerang is making me stronger. My shoulders are filling out my shirt, a ripple of muscles presses against the cloth of the back, and there’s a long callus along my palms where I squeeze the wooden handle. In the evening up by the washbasins I throw harder and harder. I go through the whole motion of throwing it and then at the last minute I squeeze, at the end of the run from my shoulders to my arm. My thrust gets stronger. The boomerang is itching to fly away. My palms sweat, giving off a smell of bitter wood, more bitter than
chestnut. No one sees me, only the spirits that blow an occasional dry kiss to my face. The street is noisy even at night, but I’m higher than anyone, up among the clotheslines, where the loudest noise is the boomerang’s edge slicing the air as it passes my ears.

R
AFANIELLO IS
tired. He sleeps badly and his hump is burning. But he’s happy. He says it’s a good sign. He confides in me when Master Errico goes out to buy wood. He tells me his story. He came to Naples by mistake. He had wanted to go to Jerusalem after the war. He got off the train and saw the sea for the first time. A ship blew its whistle and he remembered a festival in his hometown that began with the same sound. He looked at people’s feet, at how many bare feet there were, lots of children like in his town, so skinny, fast, they could be his own. He comes from a hard-luck town that lost all its children. The crowds in Naples remind
him of them. There are so few people in his old town they don’t even say hello to one another anymore. In Naples you could spend all day saying hello to people and go to bed tired just from that.

R
AFANIELLO TOOK
a walk around our city—foreign, yet almost like his own used to be before the war. The same faces, shouts, insults, and curses, and he thought it was strange that he couldn’t understand a word. He touched his ears to see if something was wrong with them. He laughs when he tells me about it. He gave up. The city was foreign. He thought the sea was holding the city back, refusing to let it leave. So he, too, had to stay. He couldn’t walk the rest of the way to Jerusalem, and the ships here set sail for America, not the Holy Land. So he stays, telling himself: I’ll stay for a while. It’s late 1945. There’s a need for shoes. People
want to get married. Naples is filled with weddings. So Rafaniello stays and waits. The stories he tells in the workshop cast a spell on me. I have to pinch myself to get back to work.

E
ACH OF
us has an angel. That’s what Rafaniello says. And angels don’t travel. If you go away, you lose your angel and have to find another one. In Naples he ends up with a slow angel. It doesn’t fly, it walks. Right away it tells him, “You can’t go to Jerusalem.” What do I have to wait for? Rafaniello asks. “Dear Rav Daniel,” the angel answers him, using Rafaniello’s original name, “you will fly to Jerusalem on wings. I’m going to walk there, even though I’m an angel. But you will fly all the way to the Western Wall of the city on a pair of wings that are as strong as a vulture’s.” And who’s going to give them to me? Rafaniello demands. “You already
have them,” the angel says. “They’re in a case inside your hump.” Rafaniello is sad not to be leaving, but happy about the hump he’s been carrying on his back like a sack of potatoes and bones that he could never put down. They’re wings, wings, he tells me, making his voice even softer. His freckles crinkle around his green eyes, which are staring up at the skylight.