by Nino Ricci
‘Ma scusi, signora,’ he said, scratching his chin, ‘I know that as long as I get paid it’s none of my business—’
‘Then drive!’ my mother said. ‘The only mistake I made was that I didn’t leave this hell a dozen years ago, when I had the chance. Drive!’
Cazzingulo seemed about to speak; but finally he shrugged, reached forward to start up the engine, and lurched into gear. Through the rain-streaked side-view mirror I had a last glimpse of the villagers—some of them had begun to move now, drifting like wraiths towards the edge of town; though no one raised a hand to wave goodbye to us, the way they did when other families left the village. But in a moment we had gained the high road, Cazzingulo taking the curve without stopping and shifting into a higher gear, and Valle del Sole had disappeared from view.
XXVI
To the sea, to the sea. A bus ride down pitted, mountain-slung roads, the bus stopping in every town and village until it was crammed with other passengers, day labourers in home-spun jerseys and cracked hobnailed boots, freshly shaven soldiers in sharp-creased khaki, adolescent town girls who covered their mouths when they spoke, to hide their lipstick. Long switch-backed descents into raindrenched valleys, then the sudden grinding churn of the gears and groan of the engine as the driver urged the bus up another rise, up and up, into gloomy cypress forests and small stony villages still crusted with snow.
After several hours of hard mountain the land began by slow degrees to ease into gentle rolls, and finally the bus rumbled onto a wide highway of smooth black. Above us the clouds which had followed us the whole journey gave way now to widening swatches of blue; and beside me the hardness in my mother’s eyes melted slowly into runners of quiet tears, which she hid by turning to the window and bringing a discreet hand up to wipe at her cheek. ‘Napoli 13’ a sign read, and in the distance the almost perfect lines of two great triangles of earth rose up towards the sky, the Vesuvius; and moments later we were into the outskirts of the city, driving past billboards and streetside markets and great smouldering heaps of garbage. Gradually the streets narrowed, hemmed in by mottled pink buildings a dozen stories high and increasingly crammed with cars and carts and people, until finally the bus came to a lurching stop in an enormous square where the traffic formed almost a solid sea, and where boys my own age, crooked-toothed and barefoot, went from car to car hawking cigarettes and fruit and glossy-covered magazines.
We spent the night in a dim, brown-walled hotel room, a picture of the last supper hanging over the bed and curtains of dirty red velvet draped over a window that looked onto a garbage-strewn alleyway. My mother had hardly spoken since we’d left Valle del Sole, and all night long she twitched and turned, as if wrestling a phantom, the bulge of her belly dragging the sheets away from me and leaving me exposed to the room’s cold. Towards morning I slipped into a familiar dream, one I had had a hundred times before in Valle del Sole: my mother and I were in a dark passageway, slowly feeling our way along the walls in search of a way out, hoping to slip unseen past the hunch-backed guardian who inevitably barred our way. Tonight, though, the hunchback did not come; but at some point, reaching out into the darkness, I realized with sudden horror that my mother was no longer beside me.
But someone nudged my shoulder then—my mother, still in bed next to me.
‘Wake up, Vittorio,’ she whispered. ‘It’s time to go.’
Outside, it was still dark. My mother and I had a breakfast of bread and cheese from the food she had packed, then went down to the lobby. My mother exchanged a few words with the man behind the counter there; he went out into the street and returned a few minutes later with a small, gaunt-faced man with a clot of blood in one eye.
‘Oh, signó’,’ he said, grinning at my mother and winking his bloody eye, ‘so you’re going to America, eh?’ The two men dragged our trunk from a storage room behind the hotel counter, carrying it out into the street and lifting it onto the roof of a battered Cinquecento, where they secured it with ropes passed through the car’s open windows.
The gaunt-faced man drove us through the city, keeping up a steady stream of banter in a thick, rounded dialect I couldn’t understand. The city was quiet now, great palazzi looming up out of the morning shadows on either side of the streets like silent sentries. I drifted off to sleep in the car’s back seat; when my mother woke me our driver and a man in a stiff red cap were lifting our trunk off the roof onto a cart. We were at the port: not a hundred yards from us, at the pier, was a great ship taller than any of the buildings I had seen in the city, a leviathan of blue that stretched half a mile along the pier. Beyond it, under a pale early-morning sky, was a crisper blue, stretching smooth and picture still as far as the horizon, the blue of the bay and the sea.
My mother and I followed our porter to a counter where a numbered label was pasted onto our trunk and it was hauled away by two thick-armed men who grinned at my mother through rotting teeth and called something out to her I couldn’t understand. Despite the early hour the port was alive with motion, blank-faced porters in their red suits and stiff caps crisscrossing the pavement with trolleys and handcarts, moustached men in work clothes lounging at dockside on wooden crates, black-toothed vendors peddling castagne, baked chestnuts, shouting in their thick, rounded accents, ‘Oh, castà! Cald’ e saporí! Venite signó’ e signó’! Casta!’ Amidst the porters and workers and vendors moved a floating mass that seemed cut adrift, lost and directionless, men in stiff dark suits and white shirts, women in bulging flowered dresses, children in Sunday outfits that strained at their wrists and ankles, rope-tied suitcases and overstuffed handbags and lumpy burlap sacks strewn all over the pier like the ruins of a war. Here and there whole families were bedded down on the dirty pavement with bundled undershirts for pillows and thin coats for blankets; and from all along the mile-long pier came the great collective wailing of a thousand agonized goodbyes, women and men alike crying and clutching their sea-bound relatives as if seeing them off to the very bowels of hell.
‘Scusi, do you know where we board?’ My mother had come up behind a pale-khakied carabiniere who was leaning against a steel post, one thumb cocked under the strap of his rifle. Without looking over at us he made a vague gesture with his chin.
‘Di là, signó’.’
But now his eye had caught my mother’s swollen belly. He turned slowly, then leaned forward finally to pick up my mother’s suitcase.
‘Venite con me.’
He led us down the pier, along the length of the great blue hulk parked there. Yard-high white letters spelled out a name along the ship’s flank: SATURNIA. But the paint around it was cracked and peeling, splotched here and there with lesions of rust.
‘What class?’ the soldier said.
‘Third.’
We stopped finally near the ship’s stern, at the foot of a gangplank crowded with boarding passengers.
‘So la signora is going to America,’ the soldier said.
‘Sí.’
The soldier looked my mother up and down a moment, nodding slightly, then shifted the strap of his rifle with a broad slow swing of his elbow.
‘Beh,’ he said finally. ‘Buona fortuna.’
‘What a precious one he was,’ my mother said, when he had gone. ‘He might at least have offered to carry our luggage up to the deck.’
But it was a long time before we had made our way up the gangplank, the line ahead of us, five or six feet abreast and tangled with bags and hampers and suitcases, moving at a snail’s pace. When we’d finally reached the deck my mother moved to the side of the line, the other passengers making way for her to pass, and collapsed exhausted onto her suitcase. We could see now what was causing the delay: the boarding area had been cordoned into a funnel, at the head of it two tired-eyed young officers in blue uniforms and stiff caps checking documents as passengers filed through a narrow gap in the ropes.
As my mother and I watched, a squabble broke out. While one of the officers inspected the papers of a grizzled old man in
a coarse black suit, a muffled cackle arose from the large covered hamper the old man carried under one arm. When the officer removed the hamper’s lid, a chicken popped out its scrawny head.
‘Scusate, signore,’ the officer said, in polished Italian, ‘but you’re not allowed to bring live animals aboard without a special permit.’
But the old man did not seem to understand, and hugged the hamper obstinately to his breast. The officer explained the regulation again, and placing a hand on one of the hamper’s handles he gestured out towards the pier, suggesting the man try to sell the chicken to one of the traders there. But the old man seemed to grow suddenly frightened, as if he’d understood that he would not be allowed to board, and grasping at his hamper he tried to make a dash through the narrow gap in the ropes. The officer tugged sharply on the handle he still held in an effort to restrain him, and the hamper tore free from the old man’s arms. In a moment its contents were flying across the deck—grain, clothes, a loaf of bread, a provolone, and the scrawny-headed chicken, which flapped its wings wildly in a vain effort to remain airborne, sending up a flurry of downy feathers, before it crashed finally with a squawk to the deck and began scrambling between the legs of the oncoming passengers, its claws slipping and scraping against the deck’s metal floor. In a moment the deck was in an uproar, the officer and the old man pushing their way furiously through the crowd, women and children shrieking and shrinking back from the chicken’s mad flapping.
But beside me my mother was laughing, a full-bellied laugh that brought tears to her eyes.
‘Look at you,’ she said to me when the chicken had been caught and the commotion was over, ‘always so serious!’ She made a face of exaggerated seriousness, eyes squinty, lips pouting, then burst into laughter again and hugged me towards her, pressing her cheek against mine.
‘E’ scimunita tua mamma,’ she said, drawing away and wiping at her tears. ‘Come on, we’d better do our business and find our room, before they throw me off the boat for a madwoman.’
My mother heaved herself up from her suitcase. But as she stooped to pick it up a man in a blue uniform and cap suddenly towered up like a phantom beyond the cordon behind us and leaned swiftly forward to close a thick hand around the suitcase’s handle.
‘Allow me,’ he said, lifting the suitcase easily over the cordon. For a moment I was afraid my mother’s joke had come true, and we were being thrown off the boat: the man standing over us seemed grim and severe, despite his smile, his hard jaw jutting forward like a threat. But in an instant he had scooped off his cap and seemed suddenly transformed, his severity softened by the flecks of grey in his hair, by the wrinkles which brimmed the corners of his eyes like laughter.
‘My name is Darcangelo,’ he said. ‘Antonio Darcangelo. I’m the third mate. May I carry la signora’s luggage to her cabin?’
‘Grazie,’ my mother said, hesitant. ‘Tanto gentile. But you don’t show the same kindness to all the passengers.’
‘Not all the passengers have quite as heavy a load as you do.’
‘Beh, you have a point.’
And a few minutes later, on a nod from Darcangelo, we had passed unhindered through the gap in the ropes. On the other side, Darcangelo checked quickly through my mother’s papers.
‘Molisana,’ he said, looking up from her passport. ‘I thought so, when I heard you talking to your son. Though you speak very well for someone from those parts.’
‘You mean for a peasant?’ my mother said.
Darcangelo blushed.
‘Scusi, I only meant—you see I know very well the Italian they speak there. I come from Termoli.’
‘Ah, Termoli,’ my mother said smiling. ‘You have some nice beaches there, I hear.’
‘Oh, yes,’ Darcangelo said quickly, but then added, recovering his calm, ‘that is, if you like beaches. Actually, when I left home I was so sick of the sea that I wanted to get as far away from it as possible. So I travelled all the way across the country, and before I knew it, there was the sea again. I couldn’t get away from it. It was my fate, I decided.’
Darcangelo glanced at my mother’s ticket.
‘Room 409?’ he said, surprised. ‘But that’s third class.’
‘We were told this was the proper boarding place for third class,’ my mother said.
‘Well, yes—but in your condition. Third class is worse than a hospital. You’ll be with half a dozen strangers and their screaming children. And you’ll have to share a bathroom with half the ship.’
‘That’s better than just sticking your backside over the rails,’ my mother said.
For a second time Darcangelo blushed; but finally he let out a short laugh, as if he were suddenly amused by his own embarrassment.
‘Beh, we can’t stand here holding up traffic all day,’ he said, switching into dialect. ‘I’ll show you your room.’ But halfway down a stairwell that led into the ship, Darcangelo stopped.
‘You know, I’ve just had an idea. We might have an extra cabin in second class. Two beds, one for each of you. And a private bathroom.’
‘It’s kind of you to be concerned,’ my mother said, ‘but I really can’t afford that kind of luxury—’
‘Oh, there’s no question of cost. You see, the captain usually keeps a room open in second class for—well, let’s say a friend. But I don’t think his friend will be coming aboard this trip. Come, follow me.’
Back on deck Darcangelo led us down a wide aisle flanked with grey doors and small curtained windows, then up a rusty stairwell which led to an upper deck. The aisle here, lined with a long row of dirty white boats that hung in the air like gulls, was bustling with uniformed crew members. Darcangelo led us towards the bow, and knocked at a door on which ‘Capitano’ was stencilled in black.
‘Avanti.’
The room we stepped into was windowless and small and dim, the walls covered in dark wood panelling and the floor in thick brown carpeting. Here and there the panelling had warped away from the walls in long, undulating waves, giving the room a dizzying feeling of motion. On one wall, above a shelf of books and a wooden model of an old sailing ship, hung three large clocks, each showing a different hour.
Behind a huge wooden desk sat a balding, greying man with wind-burnt skin and heavy jowls, a large chart spread out before him. He squinted as we came in, as if the sudden light had caused him discomfort, then brought a hand up to rub the back of his neck. He wore the same blue uniform as Darcangelo; but a double row of gold buttons ran down the front of his jacket, and four gold stripes circled his cuffs to Darcangelo’s two.
‘What is it?’ He surveyed my mother and me with narrowed eyes, as if we might be stowaways Darcangelo had found in the hold, among the olives and provolone.
‘Captain,’ Darcangelo said, looking not at the captain but at a point somewhere above his head, ‘this good woman has tickets for third class. I thought, however, that in her condition she might do with a little privacy. I’ve suggested we put her in 213.’
‘Eh? 213? But my wife—’ But some thought made him suddenly pensive. He leaned back in his chair and brought a hand up to rub his grizzled chin. ‘Hmm. Yes, Darcangelo, I see your point. What room are you in now, Mrs.—?’
‘Innocente. Room 409. I appreciate all this trouble, captain, but I’m sure I could manage—’
‘409? That’s below the water line. It’s an inferno down there. Too close to the boilers. La signora is travelling alone?’
‘As you can see I’m travelling with my son.’
‘Yes, yes, I was referring of course to your husband.’
‘My husband is waiting for me on the other side. He’s been in Canada a few years now.’
‘Oh?’ The captain’s eyes shifted to my mother’s belly. ‘But you’ve seen him recently?’
‘He comes and goes.’
‘Yes. I see. And he knows, I take it, about the little surprise you’re bringing with you?’
‘Oh, yes,’ my mother said, smiling. ‘But I’m s
ure it was a surprise.’
The captain cleared his throat.
‘How long, ah, Mrs. Innocente, before the baby is due?’
‘Five weeks, six—it’s hard to say. With Vittorio I was three weeks late. Maybe this time I’ll be three weeks early. I hope you have a midwife on board. Or a good doctor.’
‘Eh? Oh yes, we have a doctor all right. Yes.’ The captain stroked his chin, distracted; but then he leaned forward again, suddenly peremptory.
‘All right, Darcangelo, give them 213, the key is with the steward.’ He turned back to his chart with an air of dismissal. ‘Good day, Mrs. Innocente, and a pleasant trip. Officer Darcangelo will be glad to help you with anything you need.’
XXVII
Room 213 was small and tidy, a strong perfume smell overlaying a faint whiff of mould and rot. The furnishings—a two-tiered bunk up against the inside wall, two slender-framed armchairs with flowered cushions, a round coffee table with an old brown map veneered over its top, the countries and continents all distorted from the shapes la maestra had taught us—were bolted to the floor, the bolts and clamps plainly visible above the floor’s grey carpet, as if they had been added as an afterthought. On one wall hung a heavy-framed painting of St. Christopher crossing the river, the baby Jesus sitting placidly on his shoulder, a gold sceptre in one hand and a small globe of bright blue and green in the other.
In the bathroom, bright porcelain and chrome gleamed under the white clarity of an electric light. A chain above the toilet sent a rush of water swirling into the toilet’s bowl, and silver taps over the sink and tub brought hot and cold water gurgling down from the faucets at a turn.
‘Don’t worry,’ my mother said, ‘for the next two weeks you’ll get your fill of water. Acqua, acqua, dappertutto. When you get to America you won’t want to see another drop of water for a hundred years.’
My mother closed herself into the bathroom to wash and change.
‘When I’m through we’ll go upstairs to watch when the ship leaves.’
