by Erri De Luca
“The Fascists had disappeared. There wasn’t a black shirt in sight, they had all been dyed gray. It was the color of nuncepenzammocchiù’—we’re not going to think about it anymore. In Naples they forget the bad as soon as a little good arrives. And they’re right. A nice round of applause for the Americans and then we carry on with our business. But we were the ones who deserved applause from them, for having cleared the field. With them I started to dig up bombs. I brought you along today to show you because this used to be my job. There were lots of them, stuck in the strangest places. One in ten hadn’t exploded on impact. I even removed some from the cemetery. We would dig all around it, then the bomb squad expert came to defuse it or, in really bad cases, to set it off. I did it for a year, it paid well. Between us workers we used to call them eggs. They were the eggs of war left behind to hatch.
“Some exploded while the rubble was being moved. With a blow of the pickax a worker loosened a stone that gave just the right tap to the fuse. And so the war lived on in eggs that hatched later. Not even a finger could be found. The shifted air killed the guy next to him, too. It destroyed his internal organs. Outside he looked healthy, inside he was a mess. I’m telling you these things so that one day, if you become president and they want to make you sign your name to a war, and you’ve uncapped your pen and are about to put your signature on the paper, all at once you will remember these events and maybe, who knows, you will say: I’m not signing.”
• • •
“Me, president? I can’t even put two words together.”
“Yes, you. Why not? You know how to listen. This is the prime quality of someone who has to speak.”
“Don Gaetano, you’re confusing me, I’ll never give orders to anyone, but I will never forget your words. Didn’t it frighten you to work with bombs?”
“Nowadays I wouldn’t do it. In those days you felt you had a duty to help put the destruction behind us. I was right for the job, I didn’t have anyone. No one would have grieved for me. It’s a thought that makes you lighter. With me there were heads of households who had to earn their wages with shaking knees. With each blow of the pickax they called out to their saints. Some of them were doing the work because valuable stuff could be found under the rubble. When something precious turned up you were supposed to give a shout and hand it over to the foreman. It was the rule of war, profiteers had hell to pay, but some guys took the chance anyway and hid stuff.”
• • •
From our perch on the bluff you could see the tail end of the bomb. There was a guy in uniform bustling about.
“He does the defusing. You can tell the fuses are in good shape, not rusty. When you unscrew it there’s the risk of a spark. Once a bomb was stuck inside an elevator shaft. You couldn’t demolish the surrounding wall, you had to be lowered from above and defuse. The American explosives expert didn’t want anything to do with it. I volunteered, I knew the system. If you pay me what he gets, I’ll go. They lowered me with a rope and I did the unscrewing and extracting. It was as quiet as a hideout. It was winter but down there it was warm. I was stuck between the bomb and the elevator cables, but comfortable. They had cleared the building, they were waiting for me. I relaxed, it was better if I took longer, to make it seem more difficult. I nodded off and when I woke up I didn’t know where I was. Two hours had gone by, I pulled the rope and they hoisted me up, very slowly, since I was holding the fuse in my arms.”
• • •
In front of us the explosives expert was shimmying up and down the bomb’s back. I saw Ahab on Moby Dick.
“Don’t think bad thoughts,” said Don Gaetano, who had heard.
“He’s got it.” We saw the man stand up and walk away with something in his arms. We went back home. It was a Sunday afternoon in September, the crowd went down to the shore to breathe good air. We walked uphill to the alley. We turned around to see the city before wandering home. In the middle of the bay an American aircraft carrier was anchored, surrounded by a hundred small sailboats racing each other between the buoys. The sea was all around but they were crowded into a small space. Don Gaetano’s stories were abundant, too, and they fit inside a single person. He used to say it was because he had lived below, and stories are water that flows to the bottom of the slope. Man is a basin that collects stories, the lower he is the more he receives.
In the building they started asking Don Gaetano, “Did you hire an assistant?” I delivered the mail, filled in for him when he had to make a service call to an apartment.
Don Gaetano knew how to do all kinds of repairs. He had a steady hand guided by sure instincts. Under his fingers the damage would disappear, it was nice to see. Even if the right material or tool was missing, he still did the repair.
“Don Gaeta’, a draft comes in under the window, it gives me kidney problems, what do they call them, i dulori areonautici—airrenaulic pains—and that guy, the carpenter, doesn’t want to come.” The answer was emergency relief.
“Don’t get discouraged, there’s always a remedy. And if there isn’t, does that mean when the handkerchief maker dies, we won’t be able to blow our noses anymore? I’ll be there in a second.”
There was a more insolent version. “È muorto chillo ca faceva i cànteri, e nun putimmo cchiù caca”—The guy that made the chamber pots is dead, and we can’t take a shit anymore. Don Gaetano preferred the handkerchief version. He would take a sheet of newspaper, wet it, then press it into the crack where the draft came through. It was better than putty.
• • •
I used to study at night, school was easy, I understood the subjects. They were boxes, what I put in, I found. At seventeen I didn’t know any girls. I held in my thoughts the little girl on the third floor who with the passing years had grown up inside me. On the street I would look at the girls, searching for the one who might be her. She had multiplied into various possibilities. She was the destined one, but destiny can lose its way, it’s not a sure thing that has to happen. Destiny is rare. One day I looked at the third floor and she was gone. A silence descended over my whole body. I spoke softly, breathed softly, walked on tiptoe, in response to the closed blinds the idea came to me to avoid making noise. The explorations, the search for buried treasure, also came to an end. You can see it was the third-floor window that drove me to adventure.
“You should have been born in the Middle Ages, in the times of the knights-errant,” is what Don Gaetano, who could hear my thoughts, used to say.
But this is the Middle Ages, too, I would reply mentally. The city contains every era. The building and its tenants are the Middle Ages, which has slipped its legs into the trousers of the present. In the city they’re still voting for the king: not the king of Savoia, they’re voting for Ruggero the Norman.
• • •
There were regular interruptions of our afternoon games. The widow on the second floor used to ask Don Gaetano to come up, things needed fixing in her house. Don Gaetano would leave me in charge while he went upstairs with his toolkit. She was a beautiful woman whose hair was as dark as September blackberries. She dressed in full mourning and used to speak in a hoarse voice from behind her black veil. Another regular visit was from the count who was gambling away his possessions at the club. All he had left was the one apartment where he lived. His wife, a good seamstress, made clothing at home while he went out to gamble. He hadn’t worked a day in his life.
“Never, Don Gaetano, never has a member of my family had to work for a living. Who am I to dishonor a family tradition?”
“May the day never come,” Don Gaetano would reply.
“Does the boy know how to play cards—E ’o guaglione sa giocare?” he would ask.
“No, he’s a mozzarella.”
“What a shame, but you, you are in a class by yourself, I don’t know a single player who’s as good. Would you do me the honor of being my scopone partner? We’d break the bank at the club, the two of us.”
There was no way it was going to happen, b
ut the count would still insist.
“I’ll cover any losses and we’ll split the winnings. With you at the club I’ll make a killing. Grant me the honor and the satisfaction.”
Don Gaetano would defend himself by saying he wouldn’t be allowed in a gentlemen’s club, to make amends he would invite the count to play a hand with him in the loge. He knew it would never happen. The count, accustomed to this reply, would decline and say good-bye. In his wake he left a gust of aftershave that tickled the nose. Don Gaetano used to say the club was a cabal of crooks where dupes like the count were fleeced without realizing it. “They’re so cunning they can steal your pants without removing your shoes.”
• • •
Don Gaetano used to miss the nature he had gotten to know in Argentina. The plains where herds roamed freely, the lightning that struck “to the beat of the tarantella and the earth was the heavens’ dance floor.” “Being an orphan was natural, everyone was an orphan, animals and men on a plain as vast as an ocean. Bandits, defrocked priests, anarchists, Irishmen: Argentina relieved hearts of the burden behind the journey, gave room to the human will. The solitudes regulated your breath before the horizon. I had run away down there without knowing how to light a fire, Argentina taught me to stake my claim, to survive. Which is not the same as to live, to merely pass the time. Survival’s goalpost is the end of the day, a good place to set up camp, water for the horse, and kindling for the fire.
“At first I was in Buenos Aires, teaching Latin to the children of rich emigrants, then I followed an Irishman who was traveling to the plains to raise sheep. Then I broke away from him, too, and played the guest of nature and its abundant charity. I was worth one, the number assigned to each life, without any guarantee it would be saved. I could drop to zero any day, longevity had to be earned.”
• • •
“On the plains of Argentina I became acquainted with fire. I saw it ignite under the thunderbolts, hide itself and slither under the cloudbursts. Then it would depart in the darting of a glowworm under folded grass, stick out its head, curl into a ball with the wind, hurl itself against a bush and dance on top of it. I saw it chase animals, seize birds in the air. I saw its orange back climb the hills, preceded by the trumpet of black smoke that races ahead of an attack.”
When he spoke about Argentina Don Gaetano would use another language and a second, more throaty voice. The words that came out of him were more agitated, nervous, chomping at the bit.
“I would skirt the brushfires. The hunting was good but the main thing was that they fascinated me. The air was acrid, the eyebrows singed. The horse snorted in fear but the fire was proud and held fast. It leaves the earth black and white, sucks the marrow from the colors, depletes the green, blue, and brown. At night I headed back to camp, the flame I lit picked up the brushfire’s scent and called out for it to come. At dawn I would snuff it out, trampling it to the last embers, and the fire hated me because I was its master, it couldn’t stand the fact. It is a master of the ambush, suddenly bursting out on the opposite side, advancing even against the wind. It snarls when it’s entrapped.”
Don Gaetano’s eyes became enchanted when he remembered.
“I had not been acquainted with fire. I was born when the volcano was emptying its force into heaven rather than earth. From the rooftops bagfuls of ashes were swept up. That’s what I was told, that ash is heavy and makes ceilings collapse if it accumulates. Then I saw it again in Naples, lit up by the bombs. The bombs also crashed down from above like thunder, but they burned people and houses, not the plains.
“I didn’t recognize it. It resembled men, it was isolated, rarely passed from one house to the next. I watched it rage, extinguish, leaving walls and even books still standing. Just some slight charring on the cover, it only consumed the title. Books are sea urchins, they stay closed and compact to withstand the fire. Bombardments are human fires, one of our imitations. I stared at it anyway, and wouldn’t have made a move to put it out. Watch out for fire, guaglio’, because it calls, draws you close through enchantment and makes you dumb.”
• • •
“It’s over here that we’re nothing, packed together in the alleys. Over there when my path crossed another man’s, he was either a blood brother or a murderer. Argentina was the patria of refugees, anyone who had escaped from somewhere could stop watching his back.
“I traveled by horseback escorted by butterflies. Millions of butterflies flew close to the ground to let us run in their shadow. The carpet of their shadows fluttered around the horse’s hooves, I rode on a flying plain. At night I would tie the animal to my leg if I couldn’t find a tree or a rock. I would wake up in a new place, pulled by the horse looking for grass.
“In Argentina I forgot. Every new thing that I learned erased something from my earlier life. I started hearing people’s thoughts. At first I took them for voices, I thought solitude had gone to my head. Then I found out they were the thoughts of others. There was nothing I could do to shut them out. Knowing thoughts is being in the loge, in your pocket you carry the house keys, you’re the gatekeeper. You know the sad thoughts, the troubles, the crimes. You’re not the confessor, you can’t absolve them. From the inside humanity is frightening, flesh to be roasted in hell. And you have to act as if you didn’t know. Nature in Argentina is what made me what I am, it gave me its safe-conduct. Nature turns a boy into a man and you don’t know it yet.”
• • •
I knew nothing of nature, of the body. I had grown up dry, hungry, my only release was the soccer games on Saturday afternoon and a practice session in the middle of the week. The sea was the Santa Lucia rocks, nature was what ended up in the net.
From time to time I would see the bay from the curve of a road on a hill. All that beauty, invisible to those who lived inside it, didn’t seem possible. We were fish in the net and around us was the wide-open sea. I tried to find our alley but couldn’t make it out, the streets were packed too close together. There we lived without knowing how much light and air was swirling one meter above the city. From the curve on the hill nature created a semicircle of land with Vesuvius in the middle. Nature existed if seen from a distance.
One Sunday Don Gaetano took me to the top of the volcano.
“You have to make his acquaintance, he’s the master of the house, we are his tenants. Anyone born here has to pay him a visit.”
• • •
We climbed past the broom trees, then over stony ground. We came to the edge of the crater, a mouth as wide as a lake, where the drizzle from the cloud evaporated before touching the ground. The summer cloud drenched us, covering us in sweat and rain. There was peace in this pillow of mist, a tense peace that centered the blood. On the volcano’s edge, once the climb was over, I realized I had a hard-on. I walked away from Don Gaetano with the excuse I had to pee. A few steps downhill into the crater, I locked myself inside the density of the cloud and released my lust, scattering it over the compact ash. Don Gaetano called out to me and I found him. “It’s nature, guaglio’, when you’re alone in one of its forsaken spots and you know yourself.” I was in a daze, the cloud had taken me into its bath, blown its steam in my face and held me inside. Open or closed my eyes saw the same thing, a veil over my lids and white blood that rose to the tip of my sex. It was nature and I was learning it for the first time. I had woken in a sweat other times, but inside the cloud I was the one doing the touching and pushing. On the way down we burst into the open air of the sun, which dried our clothes.
• • •
I brought to the table some fish I’d caught by dragging my net. Don Gaetano appreciated it and knew how to cook it. He made fun of me. “The same thing today, we’re eating unlucky fish, the ones who had the misfortune of going for a stroll on your watch.” He thought I needed experience at sea. He knew a fisherman at the Mergellina harbor who had moved to Ischia. He arranged for me to go on an outing with him. I got on board the last ferry of the day. From the dock next to us the emigra
nts were departing, I was going on a cruise. I was disoriented, with my hands in my lap, not knowing where to put them. The crossing confounded my senses, the smokestack blew squid ink against the setting sun, the engine’s vibrations tickled my skin, my bites into a calzone broke me away from the city for the first time. I said good-bye with my eyes to the distance that was separating me. There is a farewell in those two hours of crossing, happy or sad I couldn’t tell.
• • •
I landed on the island in the evening. At the dock a short stout man wearing a beret was waiting for me. He made me smile saying, “Quanto si’ lungo, vicini facimmo ‘miccia e ’a bomba”—Look how skinny you are, next to each other we’re like a fuse and a bomb.
We went to the shore, pushed his boat in, and reached the open sea with the oars. It was an evening that widened the pores, wherever I cast my eyes I was amazed. No moon, the stars were enough to see in the distance. The island’s lights were lost behind us. Above and ahead the sky abounded with galaxies. From the courtyard of our building you couldn’t see how great a mass there was. Studied at school, the universe was the table set for guests with a telescope. Here it was hung out for the naked eye and it resembled the mimosa tree in March, blooming in clusters, bursting with uneven dots thrown haphazardly into the foliage, so dense they covered the trunk.
They descended all the way to the edges of the boat, I saw them between the oars and above the beret pulled over his head. That man, the fisherman, paid the heavens no mind. Could a man really get used to it? To being surrounded by stars and not even needing to shake them off? Thank you, thank you, thank you, said my eyes, for being there.
Farther out he said, “Give it a try,” and handed me the oars. Long, to be pushed standing up, face to the prow. He told me to aim for a promontory. He started to unwind a long line from which every meter or so a sinker and some bait would drop.
