by Erri De Luca
MARIA HUGS me, leaning her head against my neck. We speak to each other in whispers. She says, “You get bigger every day and I’m holding on to you so that I can grow quickly, too. Only yesterday you didn’t have these muscles on your chest. Only yesterday you weren’t so right for me.” I don’t know about yesterday. Today’s already gone by, planed into the blond shavings of larchwood, the shape of the planer indented in my palm. And only toward the end of the day does my hand return to its place around the boomerang and around Maria’s shoulders. Yesterday is the part of the scroll that’s already been written on and rolled up. Maria, I ask, is this the ammore they talk about in songs? “No,” she says, “love songs are too gloomy, a lot of sloppy weeping and teardrops. Our ammore is an alliance, a combat force.” Our intimate talk flies into the wind, which tears it from our mouths.
IN THE dark we can make out the figure of a person on the roof buffeted about by the wind, calling out Maria, Maria. It’s the landlord. She goes tense beside me and doesn’t answer. I slip out of the blanket. I grab the old man by the lapels with the force of the boomerang in my arms and push him away. He keeps calling Maria and bumps into me as if I were the wind, as if he couldn’t see. He’s coming back this way, says Maria. Without a word I bounce him off my hands which are getting stronger and stronger. The boomerang under my jacket pushes him, too. The wind grabs me by my shoulders and sends me hurtling into him. I move him backward with a jolt, and beaten back, he staggers forward. I’m ready for him again and I pick him up like the arc of the boomerang. I don’t see his face. I look as far as his jacket and aim for his chest. With the last push I slam him against the door to the stairway, which opens up behind him. He realizes there’s nothing left to do, doubles over in pain from the blows to his chest, from Maria, I don’t know, he doubles over, sits down, and cries. I see a defeated old man, beaten outside and in, and still I feel no pity. I go back to Maria, who’s standing up. She puts her cold arms around me and forces a frosty kiss inside my mouth, tooth to tooth. Her shivering begins to pass.
THE OLD man is a goner. He’s got the curse of the dog that licks the rasp. I saw him crying, Maria. “I saw him crying, too, between my legs.” We gather up the blanket, leave the roof, shut out the wind behind our backs. She says, “You’ve gotten rid of him forever.” Away from the open air her voice rings out harshly in the stairwell. On Christmas Eve, she says, we’ll stay together at your house and have our own party without any adults, just us two allies. All right, I say, with my pay from Mast’Errico I’ll buy the capon and the potatoes. “I’ll make cookies and get all dressed up.” I open her door with the keys, go downstairs, pass in front of the landlord’s apartment. My hands are still burning. I notice a button that got caught in my sleeve and drop it on the ground in front of his door.
WHILE MASTER Errico is counting out my week’s pay in my hand, he asks if my mother is feeling better, if she’ll be home for Christmas. I shake my head no. “So, you won’t be having eel?” No, Master Errico, eel’s too difficult. It even slithers away after it’s been cut. I’m buying capon. I ask him if he’s going fishing tomorrow. “Depends on the weather.” Then Rafaniello tells me to never ask a fisherman whether he’s going out. They guard their plans jealously. If they talk about them it brings bad luck. It’s only afterward that they talk about the fish they caught. Rafaniello knows Neapolitan. He says it resembles his native language. To him Italian’s like a piece of fabric, a garment draped over the naked body of dialect. He adds, “Italian is a language without saliva. But Neapolitan’s got spit in its mouth that helps you stick your words together. Stuck with spit: for the sole of a shoe it’s no good, but it makes a good glue for dialect. In my language we say the same thing: zigheclèpt mit shpàiecz; glued with spit.” He makes me repeat it so I can write it on the scroll. I ask him what he’s doing on Christmas Eve. He’s not doing anything. He’s not a Christian. I invite him over. I tell him I’ll cook capon, without saying a thing about Maria. He thanks me, his smile wrinkling his skinny face. The fresh green of his eyes sparkles among his red freckles. His smile breaks to respond to the invitation by saying no.
I CLOSE the workshop an hour early, a little before the stores close, and go out to look for capon at the butcher’s and potatoes at the vegetable pushcart. “All of Naples is in the street,” says the washerwoman, leaning out the window of her ground-floor apartment. She brought in the clothes on the line. The crowd was banging into them, getting them dirty. “Simme assaie, nuie simme tropp’assaie.” Too many of us, way too many of us, says De Rogatis, the music teacher, waiting in line outside the fish shop for them to wrap his live eel. “I want to pick my own,” one woman protests to the fishmonger. “They’re all the same, ma’am,” he shouts back, holding the slithering thing by its head. A woman drove down the alley in a car and hit Don Gaetano the tailor, who was sitting on a stool on the curb, mending a pair of trousers by the light of the street lamp to save on electricity. She ran into him and the stool, sending them rolling down the street. There were shouts, the woman fainted, everyone rushed over to give her a hand. Don Gaetano was left on the ground, in a daze. He still didn’t know what had hit him and kept asking, “What happened?” In this crowd you don’t feel the cold. It’s better than a coat. At the door Donna Speranza the caretaker is the first to greet me, “Merry Christmas, kid.” An even better one to you, Donna Speranza, I answer, and show her the beautiful capon I bought.
I ENTER the house. A cold so still and silent you want to jump into bed. I sprinkle salt and pepper on the capon and put it in the oven with the potatoes. A blast of heat. In the kitchen I can hear the radio from the house across the way. On Via Santa Maria della Neve an elderly woman went out in the street and threw into the air all the coins she had collected from panhandling. A crowd gathered and the police intervened. The blood of Saint Andrew of Avellino liquefied. Far from Naples, in America, they made a young man president. The Russians sent a dog up in a rocket. The Americans sent a monkey instead. I turn off the lights and look outside. It’s Christmas. Rooms are lit and families are sitting down at the table. On the table I’ve set places for the boomerang, the capon, and Maria with her cookies. In the past year I never dreamed of asking so much. It happened by itself, without my wishing it. My grown-up body, Maria’s mouth, Rafaniello’s wings. So much abundance arrived without asking, except for Christmas. With the lights out I feel the spirits caressing my neck. They move about better in the dark. I use the light of the street lamp to write, leaning against the railing of the balcony. The sound of my pencil on paper captures the noises of the day.
WHEN SHE knocks on the door I put away my scroll and turn on the lights. In she comes, wearing a red dress, perfume, and carrying cookies fresh from the oven. “Tonight we’re going to make love,” she says, “facimmo ammore.” I’ve cooked capon, I tell her, with new potatoes. She lets her nose lead her to the kitchen and pushes me in the same direction. The room is dark. Maria places her arms around me from behind. She holds me tight, doesn’t turn me around. She plants kisses on the back of my neck, the same spot where you grab a puppy, she tickles me, I hold in my laughter. Then she kisses my throat. It tickles inside. The scent of her perfume enters my nostrils. It smells like a Christmas tree, stronger than the smell of the capon in the oven. My mouth waters. I’m embarrassed that while she’s kissing me all over my body I’m standing there swallowing and don’t even have an appetite. Where is the water in my mouth coming from? Maria holds me from behind and moves her hands up and down my sides. She moves them from my face to my throat, to my chest, and lower, where I don’t dare to look. I keep swallowing, hoping she won’t notice. She’s breathing heavily, squeezing, unleashing her beautiful force on my body, laying the freshness of her hands on the hardened muscles that grow tense as they wait to respond to her.
SHE SAYS, “You’re so strong.” She keeps her arms around me and rubs her face against my back. Then she turns me around and presses me up against the wall. I bang into a skillet that’s hanging th
ere; she laughs, pushes me. Now I can embrace her, too. She’s washed her hair. It falls on my face, like fresh clothes on the line, dark and loose. Her hands hold my face and press kisses against my open mouth. I don’t know what to do with my hands. I try to break away from her a little and I place them on her breasts. Then I rub her. She gets warm and then just like that we take off our clothes and are naked on the kitchen floor and I have just enough time to turn the oven off so the capon won’t burn. Maria leads, I follow. She positions me on top of her where she wants me, and I realize that I don’t know where my piscitiello is. She’s got it and is rubbing it between her legs. I can’t reach it. I let her lead me. She lifts me up and lowers me, making a wave. I open my eyes and see her closed eyes below me, her mouth open, her dark hair scattered all around and the wave tosses, and I try to stay balanced, what an effort it takes to squeeze and hold, this is what beauty must be, then I feel a bolt unleashed from the top of my body, as if the boomerang were rushing out of my piscitiello, an “oof” of amazement comes out of me, she grabs my back even tighter and gives off soft short breaths into my ear and I make movements that don’t belong to me.
MARIA SLOWLY comes to a stop. I’ve tired her, I’ve hurt her, I don’t know. What did we just do, Marì? “We made love,” she says. So this is love? This is what you taught me? “No,” she says, “I don’t teach you. I just start, you do the rest.” Making love must be mysterious, it happens by itself, I think. In the meantime my piscitiello is back in its usual place. “Arò si’ gghiuto?” Where did you go? I feel like asking it in Neapolitan, but I don’t. “Now I feel better about all those times that this disgusted me,” Maria says in a small voice, without all the usual toughness in her words. She’s gotten hungry. We get up from the floor and put our clothes back on. She fixes her hair; I keep the light off. The kitchen has a little heat from the oven and we’re still warm with love. We serve the capon with potatoes, sitting close to each other, side by side. We eat with our hands, bumping our elbows into each other, then we look and laugh at each other in the dark catching light from outside. We put our napkins around our necks, a few burps escape our lips, the boomerang is at the table with us. She puts the new potatoes in my mouth, I pretend I’m choking, we sop the bottom of the pan with our bread.
“IT’S NICE to be just the two of us and no one else,” Maria says with her mouth full. Our eyes have gotten used to the dark. We put a blanket over our shoulders and eat the almond cookies. She made a lot and we eat them all. None are left over. “Next time I’m going to make a pie,” she says. In the meantime, from the house next door, bagpipers start to play a song. The family invited them up to make a little music. We can hear it clearly. It must be so loud in their house that they have to cover their ears. We rub our messy mouths together and lick each other like cats. Later on we get into bed, my little bed in the closet. We fall asleep wrapped around each other so tight that whoever wakes first will have to wake the other to get free. Our bodies are tied in a knot.
DON CICCIO the caretaker was speaking with a tenant, saying that last night the landlord went crazy, knocking at the door to Maria’s house for an hour. The neighbors woke up and got into a fight with him. On the second floor we didn’t hear a thing. Even though it’s Christmas I’m going to the workshop to open it anyway. Painted furniture dries better in the air. Rafaniello arrives after me and starts to work at his bench. The wings are filling out his jacket, bigger than his hump. How do they stay closed up in there? No one notices, no one catches it with their eyes. Master Errico can tell straight away if a sharp corner is off square by even a millimeter, but he wouldn’t even look up if Rafaniello walked in one day without his hump. We’re alone in the workshop. It’s a nice day and Master Errico’s gone off fishing for sure. Rafaniello asks me how the boomerang is doing. I take it out of my jacket and give it to him. He pretends to sniff it and then kisses it. I look, but I say nothing. Both the wood and Rafaniello have gotten lighter.
I PUT the furniture outside. Donna Assunta the washerwoman opens her ground-floor apartment and starts hanging out the wash. This morning there aren’t many people about. The sun is out and they’ll dry quickly. Good morning, I tell her. She asks how it is that we’re open for Christmas. The furniture has to dry, too, Donna Assù, not just the clothes, I answer. She went to midnight mass. Father Petrella gave a nice sermon. He said that the rockets being shot into space go nowhere. They get lost in the sky. But the comet came close to Earth to announce the birth of the infant, the bambeniello. “More than this, what more could we possibly want from the stars? He spoke well, kid, quickly quickly, like he always does, but really well, and you should come to church. You don’t want to grow up like some hoodlum. The last apprentice that worked for Master Errico never went to mass and now he’s at the Poggioreale prison. Be smart, kid,” Donna Assunta says, pinning the clothes to a line half as long as the alley with her chapped red hands. I nod yes with my head. She tries to think of the right words for me. Then she walks away and I mutter a spell to keep me out of Poggioreale: “Sciòsciò, sciòsciò.” I also say “cananóre,” which I just learned.
I SPEAK with Rafaniello. Today we’ve got the time. Don’t you ever miss your hometown? I ask. His hometown doesn’t exist anymore. Neither the living nor the dead remain, they made all of them disappear. “I don’t miss it,” he says. “I feel its presence. In my thoughts and when I sing, when I fix a shoe, I feel the presence of my hometown. It comes to visit me all the time, now that it doesn’t have a place of its own. In the cries of the waterman ascending Montedidio with his cart to sell sulfur water in earthenware jars. I can hear a few syllables from my hometown even in his voice.” He quiets down for a while with nails in his mouth and his head bent over the sole of a shoe. He sees that I’ve stayed near him and continues: “When you get homesick, it’s not something missing, it’s something present, a visit. People and places from far away arrive and keep you company for a while.” So when I start feeling like I miss someone I should think that they’re present instead? “Exactly, that way you’ll remember to greet every absence and welcome it in.” So when you’ve flown away I shouldn’t miss you? “No,” he says, “when you start to think of me it’ll mean that I’m with you.” I write down what Rafaniello said about homesickness on the scroll and now it’s better. His way with thoughts is like his way with shoes. He turns them upside down on his bench and fixes them.
PAPA CAME home to change his shirt and found Maria there. She told him that she was there to straighten up the house and give me a hand. He thanked her, got a change of clothes for Mama, and left. He came by the shop to see me and didn’t say a word about Maria. His eyes were glazed from fatigue. I don’t ask, he doesn’t say. His alliance with her is tighter and I’m not included. My alliance with Maria shuts us off from the world, too. Change happens, but especially to us. Who else has a face as crumpled as Papa’s? Who else has a hump that’s sprouting wings? Who else has a body ready to throw a boomerang? And now, of all times, Maria has broken away from an old man’s filthy hands and been held by my hands, smoothed by sawdust, on the highest rooftop in Montedidio. When the fishnet gets closer to shore it starts to weigh less and can be pulled in more quickly. The same thing is happening to us. Even the scroll is winding up more quickly, drawn in by the weight of what’s already been written.
I TAKE Rafaniello with me to the rooftop where the washbasins are. He hobbles up the stairs. He doesn’t know how to walk. He leans over the bulwark, looking south and east. He opens the whites of his eyes, making the green circle pop out. It’s not long now before we’ll be saying good-bye. I ask him what he’s thinking. It’s noontime on Christmas. Everyone’s at home. We’re the only ones outside and the sea air is shining. Staring out without looking at me, he says, “We have a proverb that says, ‘This is the sky and this is the earth,’ to indicate two opposite points. Up here they’re close together.” You’re right, Don Rafaniè, if you jump off the top of Montedidio you’re already in the sky. “It’ll take a few
jumps and a big push. When you fly in your dreams you’re weightless. You don’t have to convince your strength to keep you up high. But when you add in the wings and the body, you have to be prepared to climb the air. You need something powerful to blast you away from Earth. I’m a shoemaker, a sándler, they used to say in my hometown. I fix shoes, I know feet, I know how they’re supported, how they manage to balance the whole body towering over them. I know how useful the arches are, the hardness of the heel, the spring inside the anklebone that accompanies long jumps, wide jumps, high jumps. I know the suffering of the feet and the pleasure of being able to stand on any kind of surface, even a tightrope. Once I made a pair of buckskin shoes for a tightrope walker in the circus. Here in Naples I’ve learned that feet know how to sail. I’ve repaired shoes for sailors who have to withstand the rising and falling pendulum of the sea. Feet brought me as far as Montedidio, they saved me. My people say that the wolf’s got something to eat thanks to its feet, not its teeth. I even have a hump that weighs down on me, so what is such an earthbound creature doing, flapping his wings in the sky below the stars?”
I WRITE his words to hear them again, not to remember them. I close my good eye, and while I write on the scroll in a crooked scrawl the voice of Rafaniello rustles again, together with the rustling of the spirits. “Wings are good for an angel, heavy for a man. The only thing a man needs to fly is prayer. Prayer climbs above clouds and rain, ceilings and trees. To fly is a prayer. I was crooked, a bent nail, twisted toward the earth. But another force turns me around and pushes me upward. Now I have wings, but to fly you have to be born from an egg and not from a womb, hatched in a tree, not on the ground.” He leans over the bulwark, his wings beating against his jacket, I can’t help but reach out to stop him. When I touch him he turns around and steps back down. His whole face is smiling but not his eyes. They are the eyes of a bird, motionless, lost in the middle of his face. Underneath my jacket the boomerang grows warm. I pat it approvingly.
