God's Mountain

by Erri De Luca

  RAFANIELLO 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.

  EACH 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.

  THE ANGEL repeated itself, because humans have to be told everything twice. “You’ll fly there on your own wings and be making shoes alongside Rav Iohanàn hassàndler,” whom we call Don Giuvanni the shoemaker. What was your hometown angel like? I asked him. It knew how to make vodka from snow, he answered. I know what snow is. There was a snowfall in ’56 that cleaned up the city. Naples was never whiter. “Snow doesn’t clean, it covers, making everything the same. It doesn’t sweep anything away,” Rafaniello instructs me, and I hold my tongue.

  I LISTEN to his stories. I want to tell him that I can fly, too, but only over Naples. I want to tell him how you do it, how you position your body, that it’s all in the eyes; when you look up your body goes up, when you look down, it goes down. I want to tell him what I learned in a dream, but I stay quiet. I only know how to float on the air. He does the serious stuff with the wings. Then Master Errico comes back. I throw out the rough boards but the splinters don’t hurt me anymore. My skin’s gotten as tough as leather. Rafaniello’s stories pump my bones full of air and make me cheerful, as cheerful as a flier. In the evening by the washbasins my arms want to fly away with the boomerang. I check my thrust and holding it back makes my new muscles stronger, shaping them like a slingshot.

  MASTER ERRICO says that fishermen don’t know how to swim. Swimming’s for vacationers who jump in the waves for fun and lie in rows under the sun. The sun is only good for people who lie there without moving. For someone who carries the sun around on his back from early morning to night, the sun is a sack of coal. Like Rafaniello’s hump, I think. I think but I don’t say. I’m just a shop boy. I can’t go around saying what I think to my boss. And if I keep my mouth shut he keeps telling stories and the day goes by faster. Fishermen go to sea in a motorboat or a rowboat and don’t even get their faces wet. They wear berets on their heads that don’t come off in the wind. The old men at the docks smell like tobacco and sweat, not salt. On Sundays they all come out in white shirts. There’s not much fish in the bay. To catch some they have to stay in a boat all day. I’d like to learn more about the sea. I don’t know it. I see it but I don’t know it. Master Errico likes talking to me. His last assistant got sick of listening to him. He’d keep on talking, but “a day is a morsel,” he sighs. To end the conversation he says that sea salt is as bitter as sweat, and neither is any good for pasta.

  FROM THE darkness by the washbasins Maria emerges. Her thirteen years are more mature than mine. She’s already got a grown-up body. Three inches below the bangs of her short black hair is her mouth, which is fast with words. I can almost see the words spouting from her fat lips. Her smile opens up her face from ear to ear. Maria knows how to move like a woman. I stand in front of her and my stomach feels empty. I’m hungry for bread, to take a bite out of her slice of bread and butter. She offers me some. I say no. She’s discovered that I practice with the boomerang. She’s curious. She hears me climbing the stairs, passing by her door. She comes closer. The evening is warm and scented with chocolate, oregano, and cinnamon. I sniff at the air. It’s French perfume, she says, rolling the rs in her throat.

  IT’S DARK. I grip the wood of the boomerang and show it to her. Maria knows what it is, knows what it can do. “But you don’t let it fly. Why don’t you throw it?” I’d lose it. “It’s no good if it doesn’t fly.” I don’t know how to answer her. I come up here to get myself ready for a single throw. One night my arm will be strong and I won’t be able to stop and then the boomerang will fly. I think for a while and say, You keep canaries on your balcony and don’t let them fly. I keep my boomerang locked up, too. “But they sing,” Maria says. The boomerang whistles, I say, and make her place her ear close so she can hear the sound of the wind being sliced by my throw. Don’t be scared. She laughs. She opens the hand that I have tight around the boomerang and touches my fingers. I gulp. The boomerang’s in her hands now. Wow, I can’t believe how heavy it is, she says, and gives it back to me. Heavy? It’s a wooden wing, how can it be heavy? She insists that it’s heavy and that it burns, too. She knows why I’m practicing, she touches my shoulders. “You’ve gotten strong since you started to work.” I lower my eyes. Maria takes the hair hanging over my forehead and pulls it up. “Look at me when I talk to you.” It’s dark and Maria’s getting bold with me. She’s a little taller and her breasts are already sticking out. I stand still for a while, then I pry her fingers from my hair. She walks away, turns around, and says, “Come back this time tomorrow. I want to tell you a secret.” I stay there by myself. The night air is refreshing near the washbasins rinsed clean with soap flakes. This is where the mothers wash the dirty clothes and their children’s cuts. I take the clothes off the line and go downstairs.

  MAMA SLEEPS a lot. From one day to the next she comes down with jaundice. She’s as yellow as old garlic. I dip my bread in cold milk. I’m not allowed to turn on the gas. Papa’s gone off to get medicine. He has to look all over Naples before he can find a pharmacy that’s open at ten o’clock at night. I keep the boomerang near the kitchen table. It’s always with me, or on me. At work I keep it under my jacket. New things are on the way. Rafaniello, Maria, the strength I’m getting at the washbasins. The boomerang comes from the sea. It has to fly. In the meantime it’s building the muscles of a kid who still smells like an ink pot at school. He’s been working since June with a carpenter and he writes down the new happenings in his life with a pencil on a scroll of paper given to him by the Montedidio print shop, left over from a big reel of newsprint. I turn the scroll and can already see things written down from the past, things that roll up before my eyes.

  MASTER ERRICO sings. When he works hard he starts up with a song and doesn’t stop. He consumes it. Rafaniello sings, too, but silently, inside his throat. He doesn’t move his lips much and is holding a dozen shoe tacks for soles in the corner of his mouth. I can hear him even over the voice of Master Errico, which gets louder as the day gets longer and stops at noon, lunchtime, when the room is lit by a ray of sun that splits it in two. The sawdust rises in the air to meet the visiting light.

  Rafaniello sings nice, even when the buzz saw or planing machine is going. I can always tell if he’s singing or not. What songs do you know, Don Rafaniè? I ask. He used to know a lot of them
; now he only sings one. I was taught not to ask too many questions and to keep my curiosity to myself. He lets a little silence go by, enough for me to ask a second question, then he answers. He says that he only sings one song, and just a few verses. The words are a good-luck wish for building a kind of house where you pray. A church, I say. No, a house where you read, you study, and you say a prayer. Rafaniello smiles, he wants to end our conversation. The day is a morsel, and there are plenty of shoes to fix.

  MASTER ERRICO squints because of the dust, because of the risk of getting a splinter in his eye. He’s got crow’s-feet from the strain of closing them. Rafaniello’s eyes are moist. He dries them with the back of his hand. He’s started to confide in me. Don Rafaniè, you look like you’re crying. “It’s the air in here,” he says. “It’s the glue. It’s Montedidio wringing out my eyes.” And he dries them. He says that all eyes need tears to see. Otherwise they get like fish eyes, which don’t see anything once they’re out of the water, and they dry up, blinded. Tears are what allow us to see. They come without being forced by crying. I nod yes with my head and feel two teardrops pinching at the top of my nose, trying to come out. They’re tickling me to make me cry. I turn around quick, blow my nose into my hands, throw the snot down on the ground into the sawdust, sweep it up. I have to force myself because I’m ashamed and I throw in a bit of Neapolitan, which always comes in handy. “Che chiagne a ffà?” I tell myself. What’re you crying for? I spit on the ground but the two teardrops well up anyway. Master Errico notices. “Guagliò to scorre la parpétola.” Kid, your eyelids are leaking. He tells me to come out of the back of the workshop. He sends me out to get a half jar of axle grease at Don Liborio’s print shop. On the street I can see more clearly. The fruit peels, the gills of the fish, the swordfish split in two, the tin plate of a beggar who stands up all day long and doesn’t sit down because the passersby are standing, and they hate to see panhandlers getting too comfortable on the ground. Rafaniello’s right. All it takes is two teardrops to clear your eyesight.

  DON LIBORIO gives me the grease and tries to goose me, to grab my piscitiello. I can’t do anything about it. There’s not much he can do anyway. I’m strong and can slip out of his grip in a snap. He’s heavy, slow, and tries to goose all the guys. He chuckles more like a dove than a man. He runs the print shop by himself. None of the guys wants to get near him. People know, but they mind their own business, and Don Liborio is someone who does good deeds. He paid for the wedding gown of an orphan who had no dowry. And people say that no one ever died from getting goosed. “Quanno è pé vizio, nun é peccato.” No harm done when it’s done out of habit. That’s how they see it. Master Errico sends me there because he knows Don Liborio will give me the grease. But he tells me, “Come back quickly, don’t be wasting time with him.” So I come back quickly. Don Liborio’s got a habit of grabbing guys’ crotches. That’s what turns him on. He gave me the scroll of newsprint that I’m writing on. Walking along, I lose the effect of the teardrops. Everything looks dirty. I hold the boomerang close to my chest. Who knows what Don Liborio would have felt if I had stuck it down my pants. That night, at home, it’s quiet. Mama is sleeping. I eat a little bread dipped in milk. We don’t cook without her. Papa chews on some bread, oil, and tomato. I say good night and climb up the stairs to practice and to take the clothes off the line.

  MARIA COMES upstairs, too. We sit down under the bare clotheslines. I’m all sweaty and the boomerang is hot from all the air it’s sliced. Maria touches me. She doesn’t say anything. She touches me, first around my body and then over my trousers. I don’t know how to make any moves. I just look. She grabs me in one place and I have trouble keeping my eyes open. I want to close them, to breathe deep, but I force myself not to give in. I keep them open so that I can at least reciprocate with my eyes, since I don’t know how to do anything else. It’s dark. I look at her serious face. She moves her hand around on the same spot. I don’t understand what’s happening down there. She doesn’t look at me. I don’t take my eyes off her face. I don’t look to see where she’s touching me. She’s stroking something that’s mine. It’s not the same piscitiello that Don Liborio touched. It’s in the same place, but it’s some other flesh that’s grown out of me to meet the strokes she’s making with her smooth hands. Then Maria isn’t looking at her hand anymore. She’s looking at me looking at her, and slowly, slowly she starts to smile, and when I see her smile, I feel like I’ve been punched in the stomach, a coughing inside my flesh, a fling of the boomerang that’s slipped out of my hands and emptied me.

  I LOOK for it and it’s lying there on the ground, nearby. Maria stops, gets out a handkerchief, dries her hand, of what I don’t know, maybe of sweat, like I do after practice. My blind right eye also got wet from straining to keep it open. Then I look down and see flesh that I’d never seen before, a long dry tube, a little crooked, where my piscitiello used to be. If it weren’t for Maria, who is all calm, I’d be screaming from the shock. But she’s there and plants a kiss on my lips, under my nose. I’m nice to her, quiet. I don’t ask what happened. Above us the clotheslines cut the August sky into ribbons. I’m glad that there aren’t any sheets or balconies above us. We’re on the highest rooftop in Montedidio.

  “I DO this to the landlord,” she says. Do what? It bothers me to hear the name of the landlord, the most annoying person I know. He asks the tenants, “When will you pay me,” when other people can hear. “When will you pay me?” he says real loud, to embarrass them.

  “What I did for you I do for him,” Maria says. I hold my tongue so I won’t say anything stupid. “Tonight I wanted to touch a clean body, look at a face that looks back at me, that respects me. Now you’re my boyfriend and I won’t let the landlord touch me anymore. I won’t do anything for him, not even if he throws us out of the building.” Is that what he said, that he would throw you out? “No, that’s what my mother says, because we’ve got debts. People come around to our house to ask us to pay up.” I keep quiet, even if I don’t understand everything. I can see that Maria is happy to stay with me up by the washbasins. She even likes the boomerang. She acts like she’s going to throw it, gets a shock, and shrieks with joy and amazement. How can I play with it when it’s so heavy? It can’t be heavy, I tell her, it’s made for flying. “Are you going to make it fly?” Yes, I tell her. She asks when; I still don’t know. “When you do, can I come, too?” I don’t answer. The boomerang isn’t a toy. It’s a big secret. When it flies it’ll break away from my arm, in a farewell to all the muscles it helped build. It’ll make a lot of noise. It might hit someone; they’ll look for the culprit. Who does the boomerang belong to? And they’ll come up here on top of Montedidio and I’ll answer that it was me, I was the one who threw the boomerang. I keep these thoughts to myself. Maria can’t know them. She takes my head in her hands, places it on her breast. I feel the swelling of her flesh pushing her breath out and the tough beating of her heart. It sounds like someone knocking on the door, and I want to answer, Come in.

  MARIA BREATHES deeply. My head rises and falls on her breast. She says that now it’s all right, that now she’s doing what makes men happy, but she’s doing it for me. This way it’s nice. Not like the nasty old body of the landlord, moving on top of her. Maria’s body shivers, shudders, as if she’s shaking out a tablecloth. She opens her eyes. I see her face turn sad. So I take the boomerang, place it so that its tips are pointing down, and pull my lips into a frown with two fingers, in a caricature of her face. Then I turn the boomerang around so that its tips are up. It turns into a smile and I smile, too. Maria comes behind us, the boomerang and me. Her mouth widens and opens her face. She embraces my head. When she loosens her arms from around me, she leaves.

  RAFANIELLO RUBS his hump against the wall. It’s itching him. He works quickly. He has to finish repairing the shoes of the poor. Winter begins in August, is what we say. Shoes make a big difference to your health. They come to him with worn-out, unmatched clogs. He fixes them and recommends
that they wash their feet. Shoes last longer when your feet are clean. It’s all right to wash them in the sea. There aren’t many fountains in Naples. Rafaniello doesn’t mind the smell of rotten leather, sores, or blackened feet. His nose must be sainted. But Master Errico can’t stand the stench, so he’s always making him move the bag of shoes from one corner to another. I help Rafaniello, but I have to hold my breath when I throw the bag over my shoulders.

  He huddles over his work. His red freckles are brighter when his green eyes are calm. He tells me that at night his wing bones squeak inside his hump. They’re trying to move and they hurt. It’s starting.

  ACCORDING TO his calculations there are two thousand kilometers of flight from Naples to Jerusalem. You think you can fly that far over the sea? He doesn’t answer me. You have to build yourself up. You should eat like migratory birds do before they leave. Then I think to myself, without telling him, that if everything goes well he’ll make it to Castellamare di Stabia, on the other side of the Bay. They’ll mistake him for a vulture, shoot him, and stuff him with straw. What an awful thought. No, no. Rafaniello will circle the world on fresh wings, he can make it, as long as he eats something more hearty. Beat yourself a couple of eggs. With a little sugar they’d even give me the energy to fly. Rafaniello looks at me with his wide green eyes. “From the way the wings are moving they must be huge.” We go back to work, him with nails in his mouth, me with the broom. I clean up his area, and when I’m behind him I hear a crunching of bone in his hump and think of the boomerang. It’s itching to fly, too. I’ll have to introduce them. He told me the secret of his hump and I still haven’t confided in him.