The End (39 page)

It was too dark in the cabin. The light from the gangway made it feel only darker. If he had any money at all he would have traded it away only to fall back asleep.

Wrath,
he had written again, and had drawn a line underneath and circled it.

“Your sense of culpability continues unabated,” the priest said, “notwithstanding that you may have meditated for many years on your sins and confessed them sincerely. Sin is layered on sin. Each layer gives the lie to a more fundamental and abstract layer. There is an
eidos
of sin, of which all these others are representations. You feel you are on the hook for something you wish you could express and cannot.”

The thing to do was to keep out of his mind the desire to sleep, to eat something. To think of desires would soon lead to feeling them.

“The myths of Adam and Eve’s disobedience and of original sin itself aren’t postulates you must take on faith, from which postulates you derive your morality. They are allegories for something we cannot precisely articulate because we cannot precisely see it because it is so close to us.

“In fact, we have
empirical
evidence that we are broken.
Behold,
the psalm says,
I was shapen in wickedness. Behold,
as in, Look, look at it, you don’t have to take anyone’s word for it, you see it for yourself, if darkly. The story is a
post festum
story that we invent in order to describe mythically the supernatural source of the experience. We know in the darkness of our hearts that it is not any sinful act that condemns us but the form of sin—which is coextensive with the form of the human being—that condemns us. In our dreams we experience the infiniteness of the emptiness that awaits us, and we know it to be irrevocable. We cannot be free of the emptiness that is our fate and continue to be what we are.

“And yet our Lord promises us redemption.”

And yet right now, in the cabin, Ciccio could hear his feelings, as if from a distant source; they were the ringing in the ears after a great explosion.

The priest had wiped the spittle from his mouth with his handkerchief. He said, “It would appear therefore that when we are redeemed, we shall cease to be ourselves.”

Ciccio was fearful from knowing that he was hungry and knowing that he didn’t know how he was going to eat again.

All his far-flung mental roads led back to a central question, and he didn’t know if it was the right question, the real question, or only a question that he was tricked into asking by the flawed lens through which he had to look at things. And the question was this: In order to do what I am built for doing, must I dispose of myself?

He thought again of salmon, and of the males of so many insect species who mated, if they were lucky, only to have their heads bitten off in the heat of the act, or mated in midair and fell dead to the ground. That was the baker Rocco, whose heirs Ciccio had never met in fifteen years of passing him every day on the street. The baker was a he-wasp, built to fertilize the queen and die: The swarm he fathered would never know him or care to know him. A world would open up, but only after the founder was dispatched.

Ciccio cast his eyes about the cabin, trying to find something to take in, something physical to notice, and perceived only that it was dark and that he was alone. This was a momentous moment, the final escape—which years from now he would think of as the first escape—and he wanted something to remember it by, a perversity, like the baker’s perfumed leather oil. That Ciccio could see only what was not there, no light, nobody to talk to, meant that years from now he would remember this only as a script of thinking, like the amnesia days on the farm. A wife, maybe, whose face as yet remained insensible, would ask him to tell her what it looked like inside the train when he woke up in Mishawaka, Indiana, the first time he left his home state, at night in the train that would at length lead him to her, and he wouldn’t remember anything about it. He would remember only the colorless face of the dying priest who had told him months earlier that his best hope was to disappear.

Then there were stops in South Bend, and in Michigan City, and in Gary, as the morning light began to hone the edges of the shapes outside the window. He harbored within himself, despite himself, the shamefullest emotions about the country as he watched it moving by him, his home country, to which he belonged regardless of his desire to belong to it. He loved shamefully the names of the states as children love their mothers. He loved the shapes of the states.
Oklahoma,
he said in his mind, two long
o
s, two short
a
s, and wanted to know if there would be anyone to whom he could disclose, ever, the tenderness of his feelings, in all their callowness, when he said this word. There was something he wanted to say out loud. There was a word he wanted to listen to. There was a used-car lot flying past him with a hundred plastic yellow pennants flapping, and the prices were painted on the windshields of the cars.

The conductor—it was a different conductor now, but he wore the same monkey cap with the lacquered black visor—teetered by, steadying himself on the headrests of the vacant seats down the aisle of the cabin, calling, “Chicago, Chicago, Illinois, approaching. Union Station. Chicago.”

He wanted to say the name of the city he came from, this word that would meanly preserve him to hear. But he screwed up his nerve and got off the train.

PART FIVE

The Present Moment 1915

22

I
remember the weeds bending against my legs, the sun aglint on the slag between the train tracks. I had with me a bottle of water, but it wouldn’t be enough, I had so far to go. I could refill it once I got to Rome, only one did not drink the water of other towns. I took three steps in the direction of returning to my father’s house. I had nothing to eat. But I stopped and turned. From behind the trees, a three-tone steam horn cried out in alarm, and I heard the methodical sounding of the engine bells.

“God has not forgiven me for stepping back onto the platform. I had a suitcase made of pasteboard and it was yellow with age. The man in the ticket office looked out his little window at me, and I got on the train backward, but I kept my eyes on him so that I would not look directly up at the town and lose my resolve. I had seen him before. He was the uncle of a girl I knew in school. He had his eyes on me as a mob has its eyes on the condemned. And there was the rumble of the wheels turning against the rails, and the steam hissing. A rat dragged the rind of a yellow melon across the slag at the foot of the platform. The man opened his mouth and spoke to me. There was no one else I could see. I know that he did not say, and at the same time I remember clearly him saying, ‘You have thrown your faith to the dogs.’

“I was nineteen years old. I had never left Lazio, to say nothing of leaving Europe. And I thought nothing of the fact that what he said, he said, of course, in our dialect, in the private language of our town. No, I thought nothing at all of that. But in the ear of my mind I have, as if in a phonographic recording—although I also know he did not say precisely what I remember he said—the voice of that man, Mariannina’s uncle, saying in dialect, ‘You have thrown your faith to the dogs.’ Here is what we call a mother tongue. Think of the physical tongue of your mother. Think of your father’s kisses on that tongue and how the kisses precede you into the world.

“My dear, I have never heard spoken since a word in my mother’s tongue. My darling, I forsook it for the promise of you.

“Outside, I can see a wagon with the words
George D. Francesi, All Phases Building
on the side, and its mules are asleep on their feet.

“Here, I’ll cut up the roast myself into the tiniest pieces and put them in your mouth. And you try to chew them.

“Of all my sins why this one? is a reasonable question to ask. Why the stepping from the weeds onto the platform and then onto the train that I knew would carry me away? After all, there are—are there not?—the spirit remains of several hundred oleaginous children in the cellar. Why not save my regret for them? I know the answer. Shall I be brutal? I saw most of their faces, most of them had faces. I’ll tell you, if you eat something. Here, sit up now. Seeing as I pulled you onto the chair and wheeled you in here so you could eat properly at a table, it’s the least indulgence you could grant me. I’ll cut you the thinnest sliver of fat the way you like. There we go. I slip it in between your lips. You don’t have to chew, just swallow it like a gull does. Listen and I’ll tell you why not. You’ll say it’s fatuous, but it’s what I think: They couldn’t speak. They are hypothetical in my mind because they couldn’t speak. You might think they scream, but they can’t scream. No, there is only one truly permanent mistake—I have found and often remind myself—and that is when a person throws away his faith in the Lord.

“I have had only one truly permanent desire, and that has been, is, to lift the thin dark screen between me and you.

“Then there was another train, north to Genoa, and in every town where it stopped a different man boarded and pushed a cart through the corridor and repeated with impossible rapidity what I understood at first to be the words
mandarins, sandwiches, oranges, nuts.
Each man, as the train continued up, up, toward the north, said the words differently, until I was in Genoa, where I did not know what the man there was saying, and I looked into his cart and saw that it was pears and fennels he was selling. And I had to point with my lips closed, like a foreigner. I took a fennel and my empty bottle and yellow case and myself off the train. And I sat on the bench carving the fennel, ravenous and peeling off its folds. Nineteen, unknown to anybody, weeping. I could see the gulf from the bench where I was sitting, and, do you know, I had never seen the sea before. And what I felt about the sea was not at all what I’d intended to feel. I felt hopeless. As in the dreams I had as a girl in which I was a ghost among living people who tolerated my harmless haunting of them but neglected to acknowledge that I was there. There was the gulf, and the sea extending beyond it, and they were mutely real and complete, whereas I was what, was what kind of a thing? I was a fleeting thought the mind that the sea was might light upon and then forget. I was a notion. I would pass out of existence when the physical world’s bleak, perpetual, unspeaking mind no longer observed me. I had had at home a provisional, theoretical persistence, and now I’d given it away, even such as it was, or killed it. There were around the buttons of my blouse the thinnest flanges of gold, and a child approached me asking for a stalk of the fennel, and as I held the fennel with one hand and tore off one of the curving stalks with the other, the child—it had no sex, its hair was long, it had no shoes—ripped one of my buttons right off me. And it ran between two cars of a train that was stopped, and then was gone.

“There were men I thought must be Arabs, they were so dark-skinned, selling chestnuts in paper cones. How ridiculous, to sell for money what anybody can pick out of the dirt!

“I remember clearly him saying, Mariannina’s uncle, and also know he did not say, ‘You have thrown my faith to the dogs.’ This was more than thirty-five years ago, but the event resides in the center of my brain like the speck of sand in a pearl. I know it’s there, but because I can’t perceive it directly I can’t know whether he said ‘your faith,’ or ‘my faith,’ or ‘our faith.’ And the difference is crucial, is it not? Other days I am convinced he did not say ‘faith’ at all, but ‘fate.’

“Once, I dreamt that I was a little girl rinsing my feet in a river when a boy poked his head out of the current. The boy was you, Nicolo. You had a fish’s tail and brilliant blood red gills on the sides of your head. You were naked in the water, and I was naked, too. You gave me a lecherous look. Then you gripped the edges of the rock where I was sitting, opened your jaws wide, and slowly began to swallow me from the toes up, in one piece; and I let you do it.

“Inside you, I felt the tingle of the bile on my skin. I touched the sleek walls of your stomach with my toes. You had reached my hips when I heard a gunshot. Then I knew it wasn’t a gunshot but a door slamming and that this was a dream from which I was about to wake up. But I wanted so badly for you to finish me off. In the dream, I saw that you had been shot in your scaly back and your blood was leaking into the river. And I knew that you were about to die; and I believed that when I woke up you would be dead, so I must try very hard to stay asleep; but I felt myself waking up all the same. And you paused, severed me across my chest with your teeth, wiped your lips on your arm, and asked me with your sweet boy’s voice, ‘Coco, will I be dead when you wake up?’ And I stroked your copper curly hair, and I felt my blood go cold.

“When I awoke I was so cold. I felt so small. In the bedroom, the darkness was a liquid in which everything was submerged. I could not find the candle with my hands. And I firmly knew that you were dead. You had taken all the useful parts of me into the grave in your stomach.

“Then I heard the squeal of the pantry door opening. I thought it could only be an intruder in the house, banging around in the kitchen—because you were dead, you see. You hadn’t stayed out playing cards, and you weren’t coming home and slicing a piece of cheese in the pantry to eat with a plum on the porch, as you used to do late at night, creeping courteously so as not to wake me. No, I had lost you.

“I felt my way along the parlor walls to the kitchen. I did not speak; the one I believed was an intruder did not speak either, although I could faintly see him moving about in the room. I found the lamp and the matches on the counter. I lit the wick and lowered the chimney over it, pressing the sleeve of my nightdress to my smarting eyes. I wound the wick down a quarter of a turn. I moved my trembling sleeve away from my face. The cupboards shone and were yellow and hopped menacingly in the lamplight, and I heard the intruder approach me.