God's Mountain (5 page)

I
N THE
dark Maria comes up to the washbasins. She doesn’t touch me. She doesn’t tempt my
piscitiello
away from my body. She told the landlord she’d had enough. He took it badly and threatened eviction. Maria’s parents owe him back rent. Maria spat at his feet and left. She plucked up her courage. Just became a woman and already she knows disgust. I’ve had it with this game, she said, of him calling her princess, dressing her in the clothes of his dead wife, putting precious things on her, and then touching her and asking her to touch him back. Now she doesn’t want it anymore because I’m here. I’m here. It makes me feel important. Till now my being around or not didn’t make a bit of difference. Maria says that I’m here. Before you know it, I’ll realize that I’m here, too. I wonder whether I couldn’t have realized this by myself. I guess not. I guess it takes another person to tell you.

S
ITTING DOWN
on the ground below the wall near the washbasins, Maria makes me put my hands on her breasts. It’s a little crooked, uncomfortable, but I leave them there. The dark bangs over her forehead pick up a fresh breeze from the east. It dries her face. We look at each other without saying anything for long minutes. I didn’t know that it was so nice just to look, to look at each other closely. I squeeze my good eye shut. With the other one I don’t see as clearly, but my nose wakes up, taking in the sweaty odor of Maria and the bitterness of the wood from the boomerang in my arms. She shuts one of her eyes, too, and then switches to the other and we stare at each other and then burst out laughing at the faces we’re making to change the light in our eyes. Tonight she told me, “I care for you.” I care for her, too, but I don’t know how to express it so well and I can’t even answer. So I say nothing.

T
HE LANDLORD
went knocking on Maria’s door. She opened and he begged her, begged her, begged her on his knees to go back to him. Maria went “ntz” with her tongue and pulled her head back, spitting out the word
no
. From the kitchen her mother asked who it was, then the landlord started making a scene like he was going to send for the bailiffs from the courthouse to confiscate the furniture, and her mother begged him not to, got on her knees, too, and Maria was the only one who wasn’t on her knees and who knew that the knees were wasting their time since she would never go back to the old man. I ask whether her mother knows about our visits. She doesn’t answer. She opens her hands and plants a kiss under my nose. “You’re my boyfriend, my family. If they evict us I’ll run away and come to your house.” Being boyfriend and girlfriend gives you heavy thoughts.

T
HERE ARE
still clothes on the line. Someone might be coming to take them down. “They’re mine,” Maria says. “I brought them up as an excuse to get out of the house. I’ve started washing, ironing. That way Mama can go look for rent money.” How is it that your family can’t manage to pay the rent and is better off than mine? I ask. They get mixed up in gambling, the lottery, the numbers, football pools. They’ve got debts, she says. “But I’m not bringing the back rent to the landlord anymore. He counts it up and says it isn’t enough. She can go.”

M
ARIA DOESN
’
T
go to church on Sundays. She says that she can’t tell her confessor the things she’s seen, she can’t ask for Communion. I tell her that the landlord
goes to church, confesses, and receives the host. “He and the priest are the same age. Between the two of them they work it out. What I need is a thirteen-year-old confessor who knows about disgust, who knows what it’s like to be our age, who knows that we’re puppets in the hands of grown-ups, that we don’t count for anything.” The Heavenly Father sees Maria, I tell her. “Yeah, He sees everything, but if I don’t take care of fixing things myself, He just sits there and watches the show.” I can only bite my tongue at her blasphemy. I turn red, as if I were the Heavenly Father who saw and did not help.

M
Y THROWING
muscles get harder. Now I’m here for you, we’re engaged, I say, and for that matter, Maria, what do people do when they’re engaged? “They make
love, get married, run away together,” she says, sure of herself. I don’t ask her again. It’s enough for me that she knows. We look at each other. Our eyes are wide because of the dark. She cracks a smile and the tip of my
piscitiello
moves by itself. When she opens her mouth and shows me her teeth I get itchy and hot down there. I slip my arm around her shoulder, squeeze a little. It’s the first time that I’ve touched her, that the moves have come from me. Maria rests her whole head on my arm, I can’t see her face anymore, the itching of my piscitiello calms down. I feel a huge force inside. Practicing for the big throw has even given me a muscle to hold Maria. She stands up, gathers to her breast the clothes hanging on the line, and pushes her neck forward for a kiss good-bye. Then I go with my mouth aimed right at hers, so we’re equal. Boyfriend and girlfriend make the same moves.

A
T THE
workshop I take the boomerang out from under my jacket and leave it in plain sight. Master Errico squeezes it, turns it around, sniffs at it. “It’s thick,” he says, then he spits on top and rubs the saliva in with his thumb. I’m shocked by his familiarity. The boomerang is ancient, it’s foreign, it’s a weapon. How dare he do this? He shows me the spot where he rubbed, it’s turning violet, he puts his mouth over it. “It’s full of tannen. It’s acacia.” I tell him how I got it. It’s not good to work with. It’s too hard. You could break a planer on it. You couldn’t even carve a crutch out of it. It’s not good for the stove. It must be good for something, but he doesn’t know what. He gives it back to me and gets an electric shock as he lays it in my hand. He jumps in surprise: is it electric? I didn’t feel anything, I lie, because I’m used to the tingling of the boomerang. Master Errico makes a dark face like he does when he
doesn’t understand why something went wrong. Then he comes out with his motto:
“Iamme, vuttammo ‘e mmane”
; let’s go, get a move on it.
“ ’A iurnata è ‘nu muorzo.”

I
LEFT
the boomerang near Rafaniello. The mountain of broken shoes starts to dwindle. In his hands they walk away by themselves. The grease makes them shine; you smell the scent of happy leather. At noon, when Master Errico goes to lunch, the poor come by to pick up their repaired shoes. With the arrival of the first cool evenings their troubles seem to get worse. They cover themselves in army blankets, two jackets, or all their shirts if they’ve got nothing else. “Don Rafaniè, the Heavenly Father is gonna make you rich as the sea,” they say to repay him in words for what they
can’t pay in money, along with blessings for his health, or against gossips and the evil eye. “May you be protected from fire, earth, and evildoers,” “May gold rain from your hump.” Rafaniello is happy. He says that blessings are worth more than money because they are heard in heaven. Curses are heard, too, he says, and spits on the ground to rinse his mouth of the sad word.

A
MAN
who sells combs on the street left his shoes with Rafaniello and went away barefoot. He comes back to pick them up, sits down, and unwraps the dirty rags from around his feet. Rafaniello takes out the shoes. The man can’t recognize them they look so new. He hugs Rafaniello, hump and all, giving him a big squeeze. It hurts Rafaniello because of the wings pressing on him from the inside. The comb seller brought along a basin.
He fills it with water and washes his dirt-caked feet, making them clean again out of respect for the pair of shoes perfumed with grease and polish. He does it for Rafaniello, who always recommends cleanliness. He wants to give him a comb made out of bone, but it would take a copper comb at the very least to straighten out the wild red mop on Rafaniello’s head. He hugs and kisses him again and then leaves, singing out to Montedidio the cry of his trade that makes me laugh:
“ Pièttene, pettenésse, pièttene larghe e stritte, ne’ perucchiù, accattávene ‘o pèttene,”
which sounds all right in Neapolitan, which is always happy to be insolent, but you wouldn’t buy a hairpin from someone who went around saying in Italian, “Combs, combs, thick and thin, even you little nitpickers, buy yourself a comb.” His voice is loud and from down the street we hear him cry, “Don Rafaniello the shoemaker is the master of all masters and even makes the lame walk.”