Arturo's Island Page 11

  A confused impulse, to laugh, to look at her, to not look at her, bewildered me. I felt her eyes, confident and protective, above me, and that gave me a funny and wonderful contentment. After a while she resumed hesitantly, smoothing her hair:

  “And so as soon as you’re grown up, you’ll leave . . .”

  “Yes!” I said. And only at that point, in reaffirming my plan so emphatically, did the thought of her come to mind: What part would she have in the future travels of the Geraces, father and son? Resolutely, I decided: “She’ll wait alone on Procida!” But she herself didn’t seem to consider her fate.

  She stood there looking at me, her eyes brimming with intimacy and childish ancientness, and reminding me, at the same time, of starry nights on the island and Immacolatella. And after another concentrated silence, she again observed, as if she were unable to resign herself to such an idea:

  “And so you’ve spent your whole life without a mother!”

  The Ring of Minerva

  Raising my head, I said proudly, “When I was one month old, I could already stay on my own! Once Silvestro went to Naples, to see a national championship soccer match, and I stayed alone for a whole day. He had attached the unbreakable bottle with the nipple around my neck, and he put me on the floor, on some rags, so that I wouldn’t fall.”

  “Who was Silvestro?” she asked.

  “He was someone from Naples, who stayed here until he was called for military service. A friend of mine! He’s the one who gave me milk.”

  “What! He gave you milk!”

  “He raised me on goat’s milk.”

  “Ugh!” she noted with deep indignation. “Goat’s milk! it doesn’t even have a human taste. And how did you manage to grow up so handsome! In Naples they say that milk from goats and sheep is good only for goatherds and shepherds. If there was sheep cheese on the pasta my brother wouldn’t eat it. And that soldier, what sort of Neapolitan could he be! To give you goat’s milk. And think! If we’d known it! Some years my mother’s chest hurt because of all the milk she had! If we could have known that you were here on Procida with a goat, we would have brought you to our house and you would have grown up with us!

  “Oh, at our house we would have taken good care of you! We’re so many women there! It takes women to care for a child! But! That Silvestro! So he was a male; but even though a person is male, he could still be less ignorant! Giving you goat’s milk!”

  When she said that soldier, that Silvestro, her voice sounded inexorably hostile, as if (besides deserving her contempt for having given me goat’s milk) that unknown nurse of mine, from the first instant, at my mere mention of him, had roused in her a complete antipathy. I resented that tone; I couldn’t allow my first and only friend to be insulted with impunity.

  “Silvestro,” I proclaimed emphatically, ardently, “is one of the best Neapolitans! And meanwhile you should know that he wasn’t a soldier, he had the rank of corporal in the army; and if he had stayed in he would have become a sergeant. He was one of the leaders of the whole army, and he was also a soccer player, a center forward on a Naples team. He’s my faithful follower! It’s more than eight years since he left, and we haven’t seen each other, but he never forgets me! He’s sent me several postcards in that time: last year he sent one from Caserta, which was also signed by his fiancée, and a master sergeant, and the sergeant’s sister. And on December fifth, for my birthday, he sent me one in color, with a picture of a rose and a horseshoe. He never forgets to send me good wishes on my birthday every year. I’ve saved all his postcards.”

  She listened to me intently, but with some dismay, as if, in spite of her evident admiration for every word of mine, she still couldn’t get rid of that unexpected hatred she had conceived against Silvestro.

  “And I also got a present from him,” I went on, “years ago, when I turned ten. He sent it to me through a fullback from Naples who was coming here on an outing: it’s a German cigarette lighter, one of those authentic contraband ones, without the government stamp. Unfortunately, the flint is used up, and here on Procida you can’t find a refill.

  “Through that same fullback, I sent him a gift of a cameo I’d found on the beach (a foreigner must have lost it), a magnificent stone, engraved with the head of the goddess Minerva. He wrote me a postcard saying that he’d had a ring made, and that he’ll always wear it on his finger: so that’s another reason he can’t ever forget me. Besides, that fullback also told me: ‘You can be sure that Silvestro will always remember you. Often, talking about one thing and another, you hear him name Arturo, Arturo, as if everyone should already know who he is, this Arturo! And every so often he says: I wonder how he’s grown up. One day I’ll have to make a trip to Procida, and go and see him.’

  “But,” I continued regretfully, “because of his work it’s hard for him to leave Naples. He has a trusted position as a guard at a construction company: a very good job, I think! He lives in a cottage that can be dismantled, and it moves along with the company’s jobs, now here, now there. Once, for more than a year, he was in Pozzuoli, where the fields of fire are; and another time he was right opposite the Port of Naples for about six months, where the battleships and the torpedo boats and the transatlantic liners dock. Who knows where he is now! In his last card he just sent good wishes, without any information.”

  At these concluding lines of my speech, she seemed reconciled with Silvestro, at least for a moment; and, lighting up with childish pleasure, she proposed:

  “You know what we’ll do? One day we’ll take the steamer for Naples, along with your father, and go and look for him. That way you’ll see the Port of Naples, and the transatlantic ships; and you can also see Pallonetto, where my house is.

  “In Pallonetto,” she added grandiosely, “even the little boys are all soccer players! There they have fubballe games on all the streets! A sailor friend of ours, who’s called Andonio, went traveling all over the world, and he says that nowhere can you see so many boys playing as there!”

  Her eyes rested on me with a gaze full of regret. “Yes, it would have been nice,” she observed, “if when you were a kid we were already relatives, like now! Then, certainly, we would have known right away, in our family, that you’d had such a fate: to be a newborn without a mother! And then my mother and my godmother and I would have come, with a pretty basket lined with feathers and silk, and we would have carried you off to our house!”

  And she explained to me that at her house I would never have been alone, because her house, in Naples, consisted of just one room, and the door opened directly onto the street; so although sometimes you might be alone in the house, the people passing by would keep you company.

  As I listened to these failed plans of hers, I wanted to laugh, because I remembered the story Silvestro had told me: about the time my mother’s relatives had arrived at the Casa dei Guaglioni, and he, fearing that they would take me away, had hidden me in the pasta-storage chest. Yes: but, I thought, they hadn’t arrived with a feather-and-silk-lined basket; if my nurse had seen these other relatives coming with such a noble basket, maybe he would have let me go with them!

  In the Moon’s Reflection

  While I was thinking that (but without letting any of my thoughts slip out), sitting on the floor, she came and sat on her suitcase, facing me. And so, a little higher than me, with her chest straight and firm, her head leaning toward one shoulder, and her hands laced around her knees, she continued her argument, as if she were telling a story whose very impossibility captivated her. Her voice (by now familiar to me), that of a girl not yet adult, had the sound of a wonderful, brotherly, almost bitter incredulity:

  “If you’d lived there with us,” she said, “you’d have had a completely different life. I would have taken care of you, and carried you. What do you think? Even as a child I knew how to hold a baby. Of course! Because our house was a factory! And I held them all. I could even jump rope with the baby in my arms!”

  “Tell me,” I asked at this poin
t, “how old are you?”

  “I turned sixteen in October. And you?”

  “I turned fourteen in December,” I said. And in my mind I calculated: “So she’s sixteen and three months. When I was born, she was two. And she claimed that at that age she could carry me in her arms!” But I didn’t point out this implausibility, and let her continue, without saying anything.

  “You could be one of our family, like another brother. We have a big bed, that can hold as many as six, eight people! You could sleep there, too, with us. And if your father, after traveling on his own, came to see you, and it was late at night, he could sleep at our house, too, if he wanted. Because our bed has two mattresses: one mattress could be put on the floor, for us to sleep on, all together. And the bed, then, could be left entirely for him.”

  I succumbed to laughter, and she echoed me. But her laughter ended in a childish sigh that was scarcely repressed: as if, in telling her story, she had become fond of it, and had no desire to abandon it. She smiled at me then, with a kind of protective sadness. And meanwhile her eyes, serious, affectionate, and knowing, seemed to apologize by saying to me: “I have a stupid mind and I’m fantasizing; but, in my consciousness, I never forget reality.”

  “Ah! At night,” she concluded, “my mother and my godmother and I would sing you some lovely songs so you’d go to sleep happy . . . You’d eat with us every day. And the celebrations, the anniversaries, always together . . .”

  We were silent. And then the quiet that had fallen over the island at evening (the din of the north wind had subsided almost completely) increased in the room: so that you really seemed to hear the present passing of the minutes, through the fabulous distances of time, like a great calm breath that fell and then rose, in a regular rhythm. She was sitting there on her suitcase, in a tranquil posture, full of peace and innocent majesty; and I, in front of her, half lying on the floor, was listening without thoughts to those beautiful flowing sounds of night. At a certain moment, I heard her voice observe:

  “The light from the lamp’s gotten lower,” and I answered:

  “It’s the signal that it will go out soon. Every night it goes out for a minute, when the shift changes at the power plant.”

  She became silent again; and for a while didn’t move from that inspired concentration. Only, a second before the light went out, she looked at me, and again broke the silence with a phrase that was a childish observation, lacking even a meaningful logic; but for that very reason, perhaps, it echoed like a mysterious response.

  “And to think!” she said. “During that time, when your father every so often mentioned Arturo, Arturo . . . And to think that that Arturo was you!”

  When the light went out, a faint lunar reflection appeared in the room, through the dusty windows. I lay down on my back on the floor, lazily. I glimpsed, beyond my stretched-out body, the seated shadow of the bride, like a statue; and, my head upside down, I looked at the opaque window behind me, imagining the thin crescent of the new moon that behind the glass was descending through the sky as if along a thread. The darkness in the room lasted only a few seconds; but in those few seconds I returned, unexpectedly, to relive a memory. It belonged to an existence that I must have lived in very distant times—centuries, millennia before—and that only now rose up again in my mind. Although not completely clear, it was a memory so truthful and sure that for a moment it carried me out of the present!

  I was in a place that was very far away; what the town was I don’t know. It was a clear night, but the moon wasn’t visible in the sky: I was a hero and I was walking along the shore of the sea. I had received an insult or was in mourning: maybe I had lost my dearest friend, it’s possible that he had been killed (this I couldn’t now remember clearly). I called to someone, and I wept, lying on the sand; and a very large woman appeared, who was sitting on a rock a few steps from me. She was a child, but still her entire person had an imposing maturity; and her mysterious childhood seemed not a human age but, rather, a sign of eternity. And it was she whom I had called, that was certain, but who she was I could no longer remember: whether an oceanic or earthly divinity, or a queen I was related to, or a seer . . .

  I wasn’t aware of the instant that the light went on again; I was almost asleep. The bride recalled me:

  “Artù!” she said. “I wonder what time it is now?”

  And so that was the first time she called me by name.

  I roused myself and sat up; and immediately returned to the present, and the lighted room, with the bride sitting on the suitcase. I answered:

  “It must be around six-thirty, because it’s around that time every day that the shift changes for the electricity.”

  She jumped up from the suitcase:

  “Six-thirty!” she exclaimed. “But then we’d better get the fire lighted, for dinner tonight!”

  I let her know that, in fact, in our house we never lighted the fire at night: every morning, Costante cooked the evening meal, too, and surely today he had done as usual, leaving dinner ready for us on the sideboard. But in a tone of self-importance and fervor, she insisted that she wanted to light the fire, to warm the food and maybe cook the pasta. So we went down to the kitchen.

  The Great Leaders

  For that evening, Costante had left us roasted rabbit and potatoes cooked in oil; but, looking through the other compartments of the sideboard, we found a package of store-bought pasta, a jar of purée, and a piece of cheese, and she declared that with these ingredients we could also have pasta with sauce for dinner. Rummaging in the kitchen, she also found some dry twigs, a bucket of coal, and the matches, and, contented, decided that she would light the fire right away and start the water, waiting for my father before she put the pasta in. Then she repeated the same request she had already made upstairs: that I not leave her alone, in this house that was still unknown to her. And so, after taking from the drawer a book that at that time I was reading in the kitchen while I ate, I lay down there on the bench. But on that unusual evening I didn’t have much desire to read; and I leaned idly on my elbows, the book in front of me, and didn’t even open it.

  The bride, preparing to light the fire, began to sing, and I was startled at hearing her voice, which, in singing, became sharper and wilder. She went back and forth from the woodbox to the hearth, with fierce, impetuous movements; she was frowning, and had assumed a quarrelsome expression. It seemed that, for her, the lighting of the fire was a kind of war, or celebration.

  Not finding a bellows in the kitchen, she began to blow on the coals herself, with great energy; and I was reminded of an illustration of the Crusades, in which you saw the north wind, represented as a curly-headed archangel, in the act of blowing on a fleet. Thanks to her blowing, the coals finally lighted; and then, to stir up the flame, she grabbed the front hem of her skirt with both hands and began to wave it furiously, like a fan, in front of the hearth. She raised a great burst of sparks, but she continued to wave her skirt with the violent energy of a gypsy dancer, and meanwhile she sang at the top of her lungs, forgetting all her timidity, as if she were alone, at home in Naples.

  She sang not with sentimental abandon but with a bold, childish roughness; certain high notes recalled some bitter animal cry—maybe a stork, or a nomadic desert bird. The coals were now blazing, and, lowering her skirt, she went to the sink and ran water into the pot, still singing. I can remember a line of one of those songs (they were songs in Italian, not in Neapolitan dialect—and completely new to me), which she uttered in the following way:

  Maybe every apache has his dagger drawn.

  Curious, I asked what “apache” meant (I had never heard of the gangsters and molls that I later found in hundreds of other songs), and she replied that in fact she didn’t know herself. She then explained that almost all the songs she knew she had learned listening to the radio belonging to a neighbor. This was someone who had made a lot of money in trade, and could afford certain expenditures. But she was a good Christian! Every time she turned on t
he radio, she raised the volume to the maximum: and that way all the residents of the alley, standing peacefully in their doorways, could hear the songs.

  In the midst of these conversations, the bride, having finished her preparations, came and sat on the floor near my bench. She observed the book that, still closed, lay before me, and laboriously, like a half illiterate, she read out the title:

  LI-VES OF THE GREAT LEA-DERS.

  “Lives of the Great Leaders!” she repeated. And she looked at me in awe, as if, by the sole fact of reading such a book, I myself deserved the rank of great leader. So she asked if I liked to read. I answered:

  “Yes! Of course! Obviously I like it!”

  Then, chagrined, but still with a sort of fatalistic resignation (like someone who recognizes a fact for which there is no hope or remedy), she confessed to me that she, instead, disliked reading: so much that when she was a child and went to school she cried every morning as soon as she saw the book in front of her. In school, she had gone to the end of second grade and then stopped.

  In her house in Naples, there were books: there was a big novel, which her godmother had given her, and also the schoolbooks of her sister, who was in third grade. But, ever since she was a child, she had concluded that reading books was only a penance, with no advantage. To her it seemed that in books there was only a confusion of words. What was the value of all those words written there on a page, dead and confused? Besides the words, she didn’t understand anything else in a book. That was all she managed to understand: some words!

  “You,” I said, “talk like Hamlet.”

  I had read, in Italian translation, the tragedy of Hamlet (in addition to those of Othello, Julius Caesar, and King Lear), and I absolutely did not approve of the behavior of that character.