How Fires End

by Marco Rafalà

  Maria looked up from the newspaper. “Vincenzo,” she said. “Where are you?”

  “Here.” I walked back and sat down. “I’m right here.”

  She reached across the table, took my hands in hers. “Only a part of you is with me.”

  The low throbbing of my hangover grew, pulsing as if powered by the beating of my heart in my throat. The lingering din of air-raid sirens and antiaircraft guns sounded in my head. Sicily all over again. No medicine could ever dull that headache, and even if such a pill existed, I would not swallow it. Other boys younger than me, and some older who had seen combat in Africa, deserted or surrendered. For those men, the sirens howled a warning, but for me and men like me, we could not resist their lure.

  “I love you, Vincenzo,” Maria said. “We can make a life together now, a home, a family. You love me, don’t you?” Her eyes watered.

  I didn’t answer because I didn’t know how to find the truth in the words she wanted to hear.

  Maria dabbed at her eyes with a napkin, crumpled the wet tissue in her hand. She gave me a stone-blank stare. All the warmth in her face drained away. “I thought you were a better man,” she said. Then she folded the newspaper and tucked it under her arm. She took one last sip of her espresso and stood up from the chair.

  Without another word, she walked out of the café.

  After the last customer left that evening, I walked the dark streets to Maria’s house and stood outside her building, the curtains of her second-floor bedroom window glowing in a dim light. I rushed up the flight of stairs, knocked on her door. “Maria,” I said. “Maria, let me in.”

  “Go away,” she said through the door. “Please, Vincenzo, just go.”

  Outside, I paced the cobblestones. If only Maria had left well enough alone, left things the way they were. If only she hadn’t asked of me the impossible. I approached the stairs again, my stomach churning. I pictured her thick black curls, her shoulders like weathered marble. The look on her face when she’d left this morning, like she had seen through to the dark place I felt inside me even now.

  Maria’s light went out. I turned away, remembering all the times we had stumbled down these streets on our way home from the café, our heads and hands pressed together, as if together we could hold back the past.

  I spent the night reorganizing my pack. The clicking of the high heels of the staggering prostitutes and the voices of their drunken customers echoed from the street below, filling the four walls of my little room. At sunrise, I pulled a chair up to the window and watched the orange light catch in the clouds. I watched men and women leave their homes to earn a day’s wage, or to find one. Then I opened the café, made espresso, and stepped outside with my cup, waiting for the delivery of black-market goods from the boy on his bicycle.

  13

  The weeks that followed were filled with the lives of the men and women who came to Silvio’s café. They came in the morning before work, they came on their lunch hour, and at night they stayed almost until closing. There were young men and couples, old and new. There were grandfathers who sat outside marking the time they had left in this world by the position of the sun and moon. Smoke curled around their yellowed fingers, cigarettes burning out in their hands. I waited on them all, smiled, and made conversation, my life moving in step to the rhythm of their lives. But I was not a part of them.

  On the second of May, the German army in northern Italy surrendered. That night, I saw Maria-statuesque Maria-for the first time since the day she left. She passed the café, walking hand in hand with another man. In that moment I wanted nothing more than to beat him to death with a stone, the passion of the jealous Cyclops. But Maria was even more beautiful than the nymph Galatea. And I would not risk making their love immortal by taking this man’s life.

  Everything I had tried to forget was there, in her. It was in the way the black curls of her hair bounced against her back, the way she tilted her head just so. In my mind, she had sprung from the chiseled stone of some ruined temple, and that was where she had gone. Back to stone. She was a cruel trick of the gods or perhaps a god herself, a mere myth, nothing more. But there she was, as warm as flesh, and I was the one who was cold.

  She glanced at me and abruptly turned away, leaning into the man’s ear. I was a ghost to her, standing in the window twisting a damp dishrag in my hand. Just another one of the missing or the dead.

  When the war in Europe ended, I slung my pack over my shoulder and bid Silvio farewell. I found work as a truck driver in Naples, smuggling cigarettes the length of Italy from the Gulf of Taranto in the south to Trieste in the north and into the Balkans. Anywhere but Rome. I went where the work took me, long hours driving alone in the cab with nothing but music on the radio.

  I roamed through landscapes decimated by men who had labored long hours in the pursuit of destroying what other men labored longer to build. I slept in boardinghouses overrun with these men. Creatures who, like me, wandered the Earth to find some distant corner of it free from troubled dreams.

  In the end, there were other women-late at night on rainy streets or in run-down bars thick with the unsettled and the lost-but none like Maria. Other families who shared their bread and wine and stories with me, but none like Raphael’s family. I didn’t know then what became of them. But the debt I owed, the pain I felt in my knee, I understood now how to repay it-how to finally live with that pain.

  14

  Silver-gray olive trees lined the terraced ridge, pockmarked with neolithic caves. My feet still knew the way up this ancient path that Salvatore had led me on when he was just a boy. It overlooked the mountainside cluster of homes and the church of Saint Sebastian. Off in the distance, the waters of the deep bay between Augusta and Syracuse glistened in the sun. The people of Melilli called this bay by its ancient name, Megara-a Greek colony ruined and rebuilt many times over many catastrophes, until the Romans came and destroyed it for all time-but outsiders knew it as the Gulf of Augusta.

  By 1952 when I returned to Melilli, this wide-open bay had turned into a major oil and gas port. Tankers and tugs and pilot boats dotted those blue waters. Refinery smokestacks cut into the evening sky like the spires of some new church. A breeze whistled from deep inside the cave where I had met Raphael and his family. I stepped through that dark mouth of the Hyblaean mountain range. The mountain sighed like a ghost that couldn’t go to its rest until it had told its tale to the living.

  My flashlight shone on a small ring of stone singed by fire. At the deeper end of the cave, in the arc of my sweeping light, stood a firewood rack with timber cut to lengths. I carried logs back to the ring. Then I dragged a jumble of dead branches from outside, piled them up in a heap, and got a fire going. Firelight flickered off the limestone walls and disappeared where the ceiling vaulted into darkness. A rhythm of shadows mirrored the dance of the fire.

  I sat on a stool and warmed my hands over the flames. Still I heard the rising and falling breath of the mountain coming from the low back passage. The draft felt cool on my face. I stooped through the tunnel and entered the cave-art chamber. The porous limestone wall had trapped the pigments of this prehistoric painting. The diminutive lines dulled by time like the delicate fluted bones of another age dug out of the earth. The augury of their saint fixed on a rock face, his heart put out by Roman arrows.

  15

  The sun dipped behind the mountaintops far in the west, bathing Melilli in a citrus light. Crows speckled the sky. Pairs of old men strolled the narrow streets, smoking cheap cigarettes. Peasants returned from the fields with braying donkeys hauling carts into the lower village. The grocery had closed for the evening. A baker swept the floor of his bakery, pausing at times to drink from a clear bottle. I knew what this man was after-the courage to face his troubles. He wanted God to come to him and whisper into his ear all the answers he would need in his lifetime.

  Inside, I set my pack at the foot of the countertop, pulled a stool close, and sat down. The baker set out a tray of cookies
and cannoli and long, thin loaves of bread.

  “Nothing for me. Thank you.”

  He took his bottle of grappa and a shot glass from the shelf behind him, and placed them on the counter in front of me. “That kind of day,” he said. He did not smile. He nodded without changing his hard expression. Like stone. It was sharp, and I thought it could never change. “You are Italian,” he said, filling my glass.

  “From Rome.” I nodded.

  The baker took a glass for himself and filled it. “To your health,” he said.

  We drank, and then he asked me about my leg. I told him that I was injured in the war. Then I pushed my empty shot glass toward the baker, and he filled it. I could feel the grappa more than my bad knee now. “Do you know where I can find Raphael Vassallo?”

  The baker looked out his shop window. “I don’t know that name,” he said.

  “But I met him here during the war.” I swished the grappa in my glass, downed it, and pushed the empty glass toward the baker for more.

  He took up his broom again. “We’re closed,” he said.

  As I left, I passed a fat man wearing a long black coat. “They’re closed,” I told him. But he smiled and waddled in anyway. His coat was unbuttoned, and through the opening, I saw the white tab collar of his clergy shirt.

  In the piazza, I looked over the ruins of the old church of Saint Sebastian. The freestanding facade stood among the rubble like a gray monument to the martyr. Weeds grew around the outer boundary and through crevices in the rough-hewn limestone. The 1693 earthquake had destroyed this place. People felt that quake as far away as Malta. It cracked foundations, collapsed homes, demolished some forty towns, and killed thousands of men, women, children, and livestock but not the statue carried here. That statue, it didn’t have a scratch on it. Not a one. And the survivors, they called it a miracle. So they rebuilt Saint Sebastian’s church-bigger than the first one. Sicilians were a stubborn people, a passionate breed. The qualities of rocks and ashes. It was what made their soil rich. Some called Sicily an island on a sea of light. I thought of it as a fire extinguished, cooled, and hardened into stone.

  16

  The sky darkened. The land and sea set against a blood-orange horizon. An evening fog moved into the lower village, shrouding trees, houses, and the old cemetery in an eerie stillness. A light rain tapped out its rhythms on the tiled rooftops like distant drums marching out a war beat.

  The priest from the bakery stood outside the church with a tall, lanky young man, preparing the Easter fire in a rusty tin drum. A refurbished American army jeep pulled into the piazza. The young man wiped rainwater from his face with the sleeve of his jacket. Then he strolled across the way and banged the faded white star on the hood of the vehicle. The driver climbed out of the jeep. “Constantino,” he said. They shook hands and hugged one another. They looked close in age. Their low conversation, a whispering echo that died along the mountainside.

  “Signore,” the priest called out. He beckoned me to follow him. Inside the church, he dipped his hand into the basin of holy water and crossed himself. Then he waddled down the center aisle under a painting on the wood-paneled ceiling of their saint, praying while angels took his crown, helmet, bow, and arrows to the Madonna. I followed the priest to the side altar where the painted statue-chipped and pitted-stood under a domelike canopy carved from limestone into an ornamental crown with four twisting columns of gilded vines. Before I was aware that my arm was moving, my hand touched the statue’s rough, chalky surface.

  “This is plaster,” I said.

  The priest studied me. “The real statue is not for public viewing, not anymore,” he said. “We only take it out for the May festival.” He walked past me, and I followed him to his office. He sat behind his wooden desk and poured olive oil from a tin into a bowl. Then he took a loaf of bread from a brown paper bag, broke off the heel, and handed it to me.

  “Thank you,” I said. I tore into the dark, crunchy crust and read the nameplate on his desk.

  “Why are you here?” Don Fiorilla asked. He took a piece of bread for himself and dipped it in the oil. “Pilgrims come in May to see the statue,” he said with his mouth full of the oiled bread. “But you, you are no pilgrim.”

  When I finished telling the priest who I was and why I had come, he stood up, walked to a large wooden door, and took a ring of keys from his pocket. They jingled in his hand until he found the key to the bolt. Then he opened the thick door. A locked gate of elaborate ironwork blocked a narrow staircase that disappeared into darkness. “I know the family you are looking for,” he said. “I baptized them all.” He took another key from the ring and unlocked the gate. “Come,” he said. “Their story is at the top of the stairs.”

  The priest tugged on a string hanging from the ceiling of the staircase. A dull light came on. He put one foot on the first stair, pulled on the wobbling wall-mounted handrail-the flathead screws turned in their brackets, squeaking loose from the wall-and he hauled himself up, took a breath, and then continued. I climbed the steep, creaky staircase with my arm against the wall for support, my lousy knee throbbing each time I set my full weight on it.

  At the landing, the priest took out a handkerchief and mopped his brow. Then he unlocked another door. Several ornate archway gates blocked our passage. He found each key with great care and patience, unlocking one gate after another. In all, there were seven, counting the one at the foot of the stairs, seven gates protecting a small dusty chamber beyond. When he entered, he pulled a string to light the room.

  The statue stood locked up in a cage bolted to the wall. The stone figure looked old beyond time, like the dried-up skin of a frail man nearing the end of an impossibly long, hard life. Necklaces, medallions, and pendants all hung from around its neck in a chain-mail shirt of gold. And a red cloth with the saint’s name embroidered in gold thread was wrapped around the feet.

  Don Fiorilla bowed his head. His chin disappeared into the folds of his neck fat. He rested his praying hands on his enormous belly and spoke softly about the statue, how it came to them and what happened to it. While fingering rosary beads in his pocket, he told me about the Vassallo family, that Leonello and Emanuele, Raphael and Giuseppina had all died because of the war and what it had left behind. He told me just enough so that I would see what I needed to see-two lost children standing at the foot of my need for redemption.

  A faintness overcame me, and I fell back against a support beam. Dust snowed down from cobwebbed rafters. The muscles in my bad leg seized up and I sank to one knee. Flakes of dust settled in my hair and on my shoulders and at my feet. The dirt had passed out of those upper shadows, sifted through the low light cast off from the naked bulb.

  The priest touched my arm. “What’s wrong? Can you stand?”

  When I shook my head no, Don Fiorilla withdrew his hand in terror. He turned to the statue, made the sign of the cross in the air, and mumbled a prayer.

  “You misunderstand,” I said. “I got shot in the war. The leg, it’s never been the same.” But the priest wouldn’t listen. He believed that I was sensitive to the sacred presence of the statue. Like the bearers in their folktale, he thought I felt the weight of its divine power.

  Don Fiorilla kissed his hand, wiggled the fingers between the cage bars, and touched the statue. He told me where I could find Salvatore and Antonella. His eyes watered. He fingered the rosary beads again and shifted his weight from one leg to the other. “I’ve prayed for them,” he said. “For years I’ve prayed, and now those prayers have been answered. You will take them away from here to America. You will help them build a new life, a better life.”

  I dug into my pack, fished out the map of Sicily. It fluttered in my hands from my hand tremors and tore at the edge of the crease line. I added the names Raphael and Giuseppina Vassallo, Emanuele and Leonello Vassallo. I had failed them, too. Then I stood, stretched out the kink in my calf muscle.

  Don Fiorilla clapped and exclaimed a miracle with his wrinkled, smiling face
. Then he grabbed my arm in a firm grip and said, “Don’t tell anyone who you’re going to see in Syracuse.”

  Outside, Don Fiorilla introduced me to Rocco Morello-a son of Melilli, home on furlough from his military service. A fortuitous turn, the priest called it, and with great enthusiasm arranged for the man to do him this one small favor: take his friend Vincenzo to Syracuse and hurry back.

  We drove out of the piazza and down the mountain through the fog that had settled in the low places around Melilli. The light rain stopped. Pipework and oil drums from the refineries in the bay towered over the little fishing villages along the coast. I looked out at the wild horizon of wine-dark sky and sea. I held the windshield and leaned my head into rushing salty air, refreshed by orange blossoms from the valley.

  “Did the Allies give you that lame leg?” Rocco asked me.

  I brought my head back inside the jeep and patted the dashboard. “This is a fine American machine,” I said. “I think you got a better deal out of the war than I did.”