Now down in the Metro, nearly deserted, he found a little folded paper inside his eyeglass case. It was a note written on a tiny white circular sheet, like a communion host, perhaps slightly larger. He unfolded it, knowing that it was a message from her: she always left him notes written on her own delicate stationery. He read the words, printed in a Catholic schoolgirl’s writing: Tonight I’ll step out on the balcony and open my mouth, each snowflake a drop of your semen. He considered it for a moment, folded it back up and ate it: he usually disposed of the evidence immediately, even when, as in the subway car, there was no trash can.
By five o’clock in the afternoon it was completely dark and he was already back home—his house felt increasingly like a shirt that was out of fashion. Between the girls’ excitement and the TV news announcement that buses throughout the county would stop running at nine o’clock, the Argentine babysitter was hysterical. He sent her home with a generous tip.
He played the video to see if he could recognize in the shots taken at the skating rink the men they would later identify as the owners of the pickup stuck on the snowdrift. The screen was too small and the throng of skaters too thick for him to spot them. The one thing he was sure of was that they had filmed the moment when they freed the truck from the pile of snow, so he pressed the fast forward button.
The owners of the truck had caught their attention before they even knew who they were. At the shopping mall they would have passed by unnoticed, but at the skating rink filled with white people coursing over the white ice among the white monuments, they stood out scandalously. They were four heavyset guys who looked very much alike and called each other güey—“dude”—something only a Mexican would say.
When the girls got tired, long before the two-hour skate rental was up, actually a little too quickly, considering the long ride on public transit from the suburbs, he took them to have some hot chocolate at the cafeteria across from the skating rink. They waited until they warmed up again before heading back to the Metro. On their way there, they saw the fat guys again, walking along like four giant penguins in their high-visibility jackets.
In a low voice he mentioned to his older daughter how clownish the four men looked. It was thanks to people like that, she told him, that kids at school gave her a hard time for being a Mexican’s daughter. The fat men kept walking until the next block where they stopped in front of the pickup truck. One of them took the keys out of his pocket with boyish pride while the others joked around. It can’t be, he said to his daughter: my Mexican brothers are the owners. God only knows how they got it up on that snowbank, but there’s no way they can get it down and drive it out of there. His youngest daughter had gotten a little bit ahead of them; he shouted her name so she would stop: he wanted to enjoy the spectacle of the fat guys watching the traction fail on their cowboy pickup.
He pulled out the video camera and shot the scene, which he now watched again with disbelief: without any of them having to give orders, the four tubby figures soon stopped fooling around and separated; each took up a position at a corner of the pickup. The one with the keys in his hand—who had stayed in front, on the driver’s side—counted to three and they began to rock up and down in the snow, first raising the truck’s front bumper for a brief instant, then the rear: after each bounce, they whistled to signal the next movement. In less than ten seconds—he counted them as he watched the video—the truck had been freed from the snowbank and was back on the pavement. The four Mexicans took off their jackets and got into the cab, where the driver had already been running the heater. It was obvious that, once, inside the truck, they went off having just as much fun as they’d been having outside: they were what they were.
In that moment the image went all shaky for a few seconds before he himself appeared in the frame. It seemed that his daughter had asked him for the camera, or that he had handed it to her, because he could see himself searching through his wallet for their Metro tickets. When he looked back at the camera, his face wore a bitter expression; he said that he couldn’t stop thinking about his Odyssey, stuck fast in the pristine suburban snow.
He took a swallow of his gin and tonic, thinking that if they were already onto the third game of the World Series, it was just a question of weeks, a month and a half at the most, before it started snowing again. He watched himself with disgust, gesturing within the plasma screen, and said: Now cracks a noble heart. Good night, sweet prince. He shut off the camera.
Grand Finales
THE EXTINCTION OF DALMATIAN
Fortune came to Tuone Udina on his rock, almost twenty years after he lost his hearing. Gnarled and dry, somewhere between green and gray, every afternoon while the good weather lasted he sat on a crest of rock that the biting iron air off the Adriatic Sea had stripped bare of life.
Night was settling in with imperial majesty when a man appeared, coming toward him, dressed with ridiculous formality for the rather rugged world of the island of Veglia. Barely protected by the jacket and vest of his tight, brown, woolen suit, it was obvious that he was freezing cold, but he gestured calmly and courteously, as if speaking to someone else. Udina didn’t have much basis for comparison, but the difference between his visitor’s almost excessively polite gestures and the rough manners of the man whose sheep he cared for was, at the very least, disquieting.
The stranger stopped and stood between Tuone and the valley, his back to the sea, looking up at the peak of the hill whose shoulders ran through the rock. Safe from the world in his deafness, the shepherd stared fixedly for a time at the man who moved his arms like a young woman while he talked: his marquesa’s fingers—fat, clean, childlike—pointing now and then toward one place or another, his eyebrows moving up and down precisely in time with the long, slow rhythm of the mustache bristling above his lips; every so often he pushed his eyeglasses up against the bridge of his nose. And then he’d stopped moving, was looking down; rubbing the sole of his small, finely tooled leather boot against the grass as if he’d stepped in some shit and his life depended on his scraping it off. Then he combed his mustache with the tips of his fingers, scratched his perfectly trimmed beard, or ran his tiny infantile index finger between his neck and the celluloid collar fastening his shirt.
Udina had never been able to guess the age of city people, for which reason he never knew who was respectable and who owed him respect; for that reason, and because he didn’t like the disconcerting looks they gave him while he talked, he’d stopped taking the ferry that carried the villagers to the better-stocked island of Rijeka. On Veglia, with patience and without opening his mouth, he could obtain the frugal sustenance a shepherd requires. Now he paid attention because his visitor was sure to be wealthy. Hands folded in his lap, nodding his head every so often, he kept on looking at the man as if he could really hear him. Conscious of the fact that his naked, purple, toothless gums looked revolting, he didn’t smile even once. After a while, however, he was distracted by a glimmer from out at sea, the last rays of sunlight glinting off the smokestack of the weekly steamer that connected Rijeka with the mainland port of Dubrovnik.
Tuone did not find his hermit’s life disagreeable: in fact, he considered himself lucky for having gained the protection of a Croatian landlord during the atrocious weeks of the War of the Brothers. No one among his family or friends in the town had survived the marauding bands of soldiers who purged the island of Dalmatians when the rumor spread that the government in Vienna was conspiring with them. Losing his hearing was the small price he paid for the privilege of being able to go on watching the glorious evening sky over the Illyrian islands: he wasn’t in the village during the extermination campaigns, but a sheep fell into one of the mines loaded with gunpowder that the partisans had buried in the fields atop the cliff. He was approaching to rescue it when it set off the detonator.
Coming to his senses a short while later—the sun had not yet reached the zenith—he checked to see if he was missing any body parts. He stood up and moved his arms and legs to ma
ke sure they obeyed him. He wiped the mud from his face and stood there a moment staring at the blast crater. Then he rounded up the sheep that had run off. The whistling sound that held on like the last lone dweller inside the passageways in his head gradually faded away to silence.
When he returned to the village many years later—the heir to the farm convinced him that he could do so without danger—no one understood him when he spoke. He figured that he’d lost his diction and his ability to properly modulate his voice. Without too much sadness he resigned himself to gestures—he’d never had much to say anyway.
A drop of saliva falling on the back of his hand brought him back to the stranger, who was looking with horror at Tuone’s open mouth. Closing it carefully to avoid hurting his gums, he wiped off the drool with his left sleeve and got up from his rock. He nodded his head and called the sheep with a whistle whose shrillness he could not hear. He was climbing the hill, his back to the orange horizon of the sea, when he felt the visitor’s hand on his shoulder. He turned around and looked at him with absolute patience. The man repeated the same series of gestures and, sliding his eyeglasses up to his forehead, took from his pocket a piece of paper with something written on it, which he then held out in front of Tuone’s eyes. Udina raised his arms to signify that he didn’t know how to read, then continued walking uphill. Now and again he turned around—upon reaching the highest part of the hill; as he changed direction to take the dirt track that separated the olive groves from the vineyards; when passing through the gate into the barnyard—to confirm that the visitor was following a few steps behind him, staring obstinately at the ground.
While he was checking the barn door he decided to confront the man, if he was, in fact, still waiting for him, so he strode out decisively to the edge of the barnyard and faced him with his arms crossed, either to extract an explanation, despite this being, after all, impossible—or perhaps to scare him away. The man pointed to his mouth. Then, opening it and closing it exaggeratedly, he made a rather grotesque show of the action of speaking. Udina calculated that the problem could be eloquently resolved with his fists, but the night had now fallen completely and he could just as easily slip away. He lowered his arms and walked off to the cave that he had lived in during the war. As he approached the woods he quickened his step and managed to lose the stranger.
Early the next morning, the shepherd emerged from the far side of the woods with feline caution. He followed the long path to the farm and took the risk of moving the sheep out through the gate that opened directly onto the main road: the young owner didn’t usually come up to visit the fields except on the weekends, so there was little chance of being caught breaking the rules. He followed the rocky path to approach the coastline pastures from the other side. Followed by the sheep, he climbed the flanks of one of the mountains that isolated the place from the rest of the island. From there he made sure that the stranger wasn’t waiting for him at the back gate of the field. He continued confidently toward the sea and spent the day in peace, avoiding his rock. Not finding an appropriate lookout from which to watch the declining afternoon, he returned early along his usual path. The stranger was waiting for him, red from the cold, leaning against the ancient stone wall that protected the vineyards. He was wearing the same clothes as the day before, except for his footwear: some army boots that stood out conspicuously beneath the cuffs of his pants. The consequences of the sheep getting into the vineyard or the olive grove were much more serious than putting up with the visitor’s gesturing for a little while. So Tuone kept on walking.
The man blocked his way and insisted on speaking with him; he pulled out the same paper, holding it up before Tuone’s eyes, and again pointed to his mouth and pantomimed speaking. Tuone waited for him to finish. Then he drew close enough for the man to smell his woodsy odor, and threatened him, shaking his fist before the man’s eyeglasses. Against the visitor’s face, his heavily lined and calloused hand looked, for a moment, like a tree branch. As if to ward off the blow, the stranger lifted his dainty hooves—rosy pink despite his fingertips bruised purple by the cold—took a step back and pulled out a wad of money from inside his jacket. The slightly ridiculous color told the shepherd right away that it was Italian money. He lowered his fist: perhaps now they could understand one another.
The visitor took one of the bills and held it out to Udina, putting the rest of the money into his pants pocket. The shepherd took the bill and studied it skeptically. He knew that in Rijeka they accepted both lire and marks, but he couldn’t distinguish between the different denominations. Then the man picked up a stone from the ground, pointed to it and mimed the action of speaking. As Udina didn’t react, he opened and closed his fingers, making the shape of a duck’s bill, and patted the outside of the pocket where he had put the other money. Tuone thought a little, then barely murmured the word “stone.” The visitor froze like a rabbit, his eyes open wide behind his glasses. A smile formed beneath his mustache, he took out another bill, gave it to the islander, and pointed again to the stone. Udina repeated the word a little more carefully; the man gave him a third bill and a pat on the shoulder. The shepherd pointed to the road leading to the farmhouse and the sheep that were already starting to wander away again. His visitor nodded and made a gesture that Udina interpreted as an invitation to meet there again the next morning. Neither one of the two was moved to touch the other to say good-bye: they both raised their hands, the stranger cordially and the islander somewhat clumsily, the branches of his fingers barely flexible in that moment of civility.
Between the third and fourth days of the Italian’s visit, Tuone Udina made more money than he had earned in his whole life. The professor pointed to some object and Tuone said a word, first as he remembered having pronounced it in his youth, and then slowly, sound by sound. Sometimes he had to repeat it several times, slowly or quickly. When the visitor felt satisfied, he made a note of it and gave away some more money. Then he flipped through his notebook—the pages fluttering in the wind—or laboriously wrote down the new term on the piece of paper that he had showed Tuone days before.
The lire and the shepherd’s good will came to an end at the same time. The visitor thanked him with exaggerated gestures and acted out a little play that was meant to signify his return in a few weeks with more money and a doctor who would heal his gums. The most challenging part of the message was showing the passage of time: in his pantomime, he slept and woke up several times in a row. Udina understood from the first moment but pretended not to so he could enjoy the twisted pleasure of watching a city dweller throw himself to the ground, clap his palms together and place them under his cheek like a pillow, close his eyes, open them, then get back up and do it all over again.
When he returned to his office at the Museum of Archaeology in Rome, Professor Spazzola took his time organizing the information he had gathered on the island. Tuone Udina, the last speaker of Dalmatian, was not only a biological disaster, he was also a mental disgrace. In the scarcely sixteen hours they’d spent together, the shepherd had systematically and diametrically varied the nouns that Spazzola, with seeming carelessness, asked him to repeat from one day to the next. Nothing, or almost nothing, in the few grammatically acceptable expressions that he managed to coax out of him, showed any consistency at all. The majority of the sounds Udina emitted were indistinguishable due to the atrophy of his vocal cords, the impossibility of articulating consonants through his swollen gums, and his basic stupidity. There had been no correspondence—however remote—between his vocal production and the few documents that the Dalmatian rulers produced in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, when they had the opportunity to govern the territory granted them by Rome. The professor had taken one of them with him, copied in modern script in the hope that the shepherd—about whose state of health he had not been notified before the trip—might possibly have learned the alphabet during his childhood in Veglia, which had then been the last bastion of that most defenseless of Romance languages.
Despite everything, the professor was able to resolve some of his doubts about the survival of Latinate vocalization in Illyria. A certain liberality of reflection permitted him to overcome the narrow limits of his frustration and so publish, with great fanfare, an article in a world-renowned Viennese philological journal. A round of conferences—with a decidedly nationalist focus—on the university circuit served him well by spreading through the newspapers the fear of a Romance language becoming extinct, and thus alerting the government. Under the auspices of a gala dinner, the Ministry of Antiquities secured the funds necessary to rescue the last living speaker of Dalmatian from Austro-Hungarian ignorance and oppression and bring him to the imperial city that had once, with greater wisdom, governed the lives of his ancestors.
Tuone Udina never in the least expected that his visitor would return to keep the promise of helping get his gums cured, for which reason he saved the lire for some special moment when he would really need them, and he forgot all about the matter. He put the money in a wooden box and buried it in the back of his cave.
Hypothermia Page 10
