Earthquake I.D.

by John Domini

  Paul however joined the Holy Family. The middle child found a stretch of Mom-space that Dora or Sylvia had left uncovered, perhaps pressing in on his knees, a penitent. The eleven-year-old was one more grinding discrepancy between what Barb needed to do and the way she must’ve looked. This mess was more like theater than ever.

  But the boy went for Pop. Paul got hold of his father’s twitching head.

  Among the children Paul was the one who took after Mom, the most Italian, and not so much for the spongy silk of his hair or the glinty espresso of his eyes as for his hands: expressive hands, mindful. Since the trouble over this past winter, the boy’s hands had been more articulate than whatever he’d had to say. And anyone with so close a view as Barbara’s, here above Paulie and Jay, might’ve thought that, every day since last winter, the child had been working towards today’s laying-on of hands. They spidered across Jay’s dripping face as if each fingertip held a pair of kissing lips. When the boy reached under his father’s chin the gesture recalled the bearded passer-by from a minute ago, the man who’d butted in to check the pulse. And when Paul began speaking, Barb at first only saw the lips moving. Subtle lips, feminine. Like he was the one whose mother had been born in Torre del Greco.

  Yet if Paul looked like a local, he sounded like he came from the far side of the moon. Barb noticed the hitches in Jay’s breathing, and she knew what they might mean, but she still couldn’t begin to make out whatever it was that Paul had begun to murmur—though at the same time, his dreamer’s babble struck the mother as familiar. Perfectly familiar: any stay-at-home parent would recognize the curve of her boy’s preteen back, the spells he was casting. If this were all a Christmas presepe, nobody made it so more than Paul, because just then he was the only genuine kid on the scene, the only one who still could project a living mystery over Mother and Father and the rest. Paul was more the youngster than the immobilized girls at Barbara’s hips. If you gave him balsa wood, he’d put up a whole metropolis.

  “Ma guarda,” someone declared behind her. “Poverino. Pazzo.”

  Poor boy? Crazy? Maybe the middle child’s response was the only one that made sense. Paul worked with his father’s head in ways that seemed to encompass every fevered zig and zag of Barb’s last few minutes. He’d slid unafraid into the epicenter, with soothing fingers. Keeping up his just-audible babytalk, the boy patted back and forth across the face, the gore. When a fresh trembling racked the head, Paul cradled the jaw and unhurt ear, surprisingly strong. At last he settled on a bizarre dual hold. One hand touched the center of the crushed temple, seeming to poke down the wedge of exposed membrane, while the other reached into the half-open mouth. All the way in, this child reached, prying apart the man’s teeth until he could get a grip on the tongue. Barb couldn’t miss it, Paul had the tongue, and she suffered another gag reflex. The image of the city as a diseased love-bite flared again in her mind’s eye, and it paralyzed her, while at her hips the girls lifted their faces. Dora and Sylvia made small noises, disgusted, fascinated, like the neighborhood voices behind them.

  Dio…Ma che pazzo…

  Paul maintained his soggy two-handed grip for perhaps half a minute. His murmurs never let up, and finally Barbara picked out a few words.

  “This, this is all he needs,” Paul said. “J-Just a touch, that’s all.”

  The boy sounded winded, but otherwise the same as he had for months now, his voice on the verge of breaking. Barbara’s first response came in the wrong language, “Poverino.” As Paul let go of his father’s head, his small fingers glistening, she still couldn’t move.

  “Paul?” she managed. “Paul, I can’t believe…”

  “C’m, C’mon.” He faced her. “What’s everybody getting so, so, so upset about? Soon as Pop went down I could tell that this w-was a-all he needed.”

  Paul and she were so close that the boy’s white shirtfront brushed against Barb’s shaming nipple, and with that the mother regained her mobility and a sense of priorities. Lifting her hands from her husband was like lifting weights, but Barbara sat up and wrestled the cup of her bra back into place. She took her boy by the shoulders.

  “Paul, we don’t want to disturb him. Can’t you see he’s badly hurt?”

  He was winded, gulping, lost. Barbara thought of her two older sons, their hopeless effort to follow the thieves.

  “Badly hurt?” one of the girls asked.

  And her two oldest, how were they doing? Barb found Chris and JJ hanging back as before, out of their depth on the first day in town.

  Mama, did you say Papa was badly hurt?”

  Girls, Barbara thought, he could be dead already. At her knees the big body had gone slack.

  “C’mon, guys,” Paul said. “A-all he needed was a little touch. A little p-pep talk, maybe too.”

  “Paul, please.” Her voice was a load likely to spill. “What’s got into you?”

  “But couldn’t you tell that was, that was a-all he needed? Couldn’t you just, just feel it?”

  The crowd surrounding them remained subdued, keeping a distance.

  “Badly hurt, Mama? Badly hurt?”

  “I could feel it,” Paul repeated. “I just knew.”

  “Hey,” Jay said, sitting up. “What’s all this on my face? Anybody got a mirror?”

  He sat up, on the raised step that passed for a sidewalk. Frowning, swabbing his eyes, Jay propped his broad back against the palazzo wall and stretched out his hefty legs where he could, fitting them around the kneeling Barb, around the two erupting girls and out to the feet of the crowd. Everyone had been startled a step closer, maybe a couple of steps, just like that. Meanwhile grunting and frowning, a big American doing his best with aging joints and a spreading belly, Jay settled himself just in time for Syl and Dora to tumble hard into his lap. “Papa!”

  They hit the man with such force that dried blood flaked off his face and spattered their tender hair.

  “Hey,” Jay said. “Easy there. Looks like Papa might be bleeding.”

  The crowd was noisy again, recharged. The family too was a different animal. Barb wobbled back onto her haunches, back until she would’ve fallen if her two oldest hadn’t sunk down behind her, Chris and John Junior coming into the huddle with faces slack and wowed while the twins went on cuddling Pop. Only Paul didn’t fit the pattern, Paul again, finding a place apart along the wall. Barb sank into the heavy smell of two teens who’d been up the block and back, of her own 360-degree whirling, while before them Jay fell into a scab-flicking match with two eight-year-olds. The impossible coagulation dotted the mother’s kneecaps and skirt.

  But Paul kept separate, rather prim on his knees. His shirt remained white except for street dust and his look was weary but serene. Told you so.

  Barbara would’ve fallen if not for her two teenagers, and she couldn’t seem to get a decent look at her husband’s injury. Hadn’t the thieves cracked his skull open? She had no trouble remembering the welling blood, the bulging viscera. Could a touch and a whisper really have fixed it? A touch and a dream? Certainly her Jaybird appeared, against the clean white mortar of the repaired lower wall, as handsome as ever. Jay’s looks had if anything improved since he’d hit forty, his hair richly Mediterranean and his face flexibly Irish. At times his head suggested one of those noble and tragic officer’s portraits from the Civil War.

  But before Barbara could finish her examination, a local got in the way. The interloper might’ve been the same as before, he had the goatee. This time the mother could peg him as a professional type, and more than likely a doctor. With those glasses, those wattles beneath his beard, he looked to be pushing seventy. As he once more reached for Jay without asking, an old man with a task, his stare metallic, Barb had no choice but to acknowledge it had all taken place the way she remembered. The head-wound had been real, and divorce was the only solution. The blow could easily have killed her husband, or it could’ve left him strapped in a wheelchair and brain-damaged—all threats to which the Lulucitas should never
have been exposed in the first place—all of it no less of an actual alternative life than her own twenty years as a good wife and mother.

  Under the old man’s spectacled stare, the twins broke off the scab fight. When he reached the father’s neck, Jay tucked his chin. “Hey!”

  He tucked his chin and hiked his shoulders. An owl, Barb thought blackly. You have the nerve to call me an owl.

  “A moment please.” The man’s accent had a touch of the British. “A moment only, signore. I need the pulse.”

  “The pulse?” Jay got one arm around the girls. “What, like I’m dying?”

  “Papa, don’t joke.” Sounded like Sylvia. “We were worried.”

  Jay let the man do as he wished, while what felt like everyone within walking distance leaned in for a closer look. Someone in the crowd said “Miracolo,” or perhaps four or five of them did, as the doctor probed the formerly broken temple and the woman with the video-camera bent in for a close-up. The girls in Jay’s lap couldn’t help but turn towards the whirring, and Barbara too, blinking back at the mechanical blink of the red recording light. A bloody electronic pulse as unrelenting as the anger that remained the closest thing to clarity she’d found.

  Meanwhile however her husband had other worries. Jay had begun to run his hands over the stones nearby. In another half a minute, in spite of the doctor’s ministrations, Jay was searching the area in earnest.

  “Where’s the bag?” he asked.

  He shook off both the old man and the children and hopped up into a squat, agile enough to make the crowd shuffle back.

  “The bag? The credit cards, all our ID? The passports—hey, Barb!”

  Cocked as far from him as her knees would allow, she braced herself against his look. He wasn’t an owl now, not up on all fours like this, his eyes rimmed in browned blood. Barb instead saw some earthbound nocturnal scavenger, a coon over garbage. And she was nothing but tooth and claw in return. Jay might still be confused but not her, no longer; she’d torn through to the end of everything. This morning she’d at last found the guts to admit how bad things had gotten back in Bridgeport.

  If he’d asked her something, Barbara had forgotten the question. She’d lost the feeling below her knees.

  “Barb?” he called. “Hey, where is it? What happened, anyway? Why is everyone staring at me?”

  Wrong, Jay. Barb granted that she was staring at him, and the kids too. But otherwise he was woefully wrong, this man she needed to speak with in private, just as soon as possible. Everyone else in that close-packed block, both the gang down on the stones that smelled of manure and the stay-at-homes up in the windows flung open amid the morning laundry—everyone else, including the lucky one with the camera and the now-empty-handed doctor and a tall woman in too much jewelry who may have been Barbara’s whispery love-angel (the mother caught glimpses of them all, in her antsy paralysis)—everyone else was looking at Paul.

  Chapter Two

  Whenever Barbara had imagined the end of her marriage—and today she was coming to realize how often she’d done it—she’d pictured it happening anywhere but Italy. Americans in Italy, that was a different story. A story with a happy ending, in which some tightly-wound Anglo arrives in this sultry country, more than halfway to Africa, and rediscovers the joy of sultry, of a steaming meal and an eventful bedtime. Barb had seen the movie a hundred times. The refinement of the French horns as the branches of the fig tree ripple before the Renaissance tower…the rekindling of an Iowan’s kisses as the setting sun winks between the Roman brickwork…Often the romance blossomed in some high-collared era a few earthquakes previous, Henry James, whatever. Or the chilly figure in need of a snuggler’s renewal might be British, made no difference. Once they undid that first button, Italy was the opposite of divorce. It was a country, Barbara came to think, for someone like Jay’s mother.

  For Grandma Aurora, the love-tomato never lost its juice. The old bohemian had gone so far as to promise, as the family prepared for the journey, that she would “jet over soon.” She wanted “a taste of that dolce vita.”

  Today as Barb cooled her heels in some sort of downtown health clinic, repeatedly failing to wangle so little as five minutes alone with her husband-for-now, she had time to understand his mother. Should Aurora Lulucita sashay into the examination rooms this very minute, she wouldn’t even need to touch up her eyeliner and lipstick in order to vamp for someone like Dottore DiPio, here. DiPio was the one who’d put Jay though those hurried examinations out on the dusty cobblestone, and after that the old medico had taken over. He’d overridden any suggestions from the police who’d arrived on the scene, and cowed the ambulance drivers as well, showing such an eagerness for the case that Barb recalled her mother-in-law. Aurora too was seventy-something, yet still fired by a craving that blew past any notion of embarrassment.

  The grandmother however was all about man-chasing; this doctor on the other hand wanted to track down a miracle. He’d had the Lulucitas brought to this—what would you call it? A palazzo put up a good two hundred years ago, converted now to slapdash cubicles and unexpected staircases. Here DiPio had proprietary rights. He made sure to get the family’s local phone and address, by hand rather than on computer, using the long, whip-crack L of formal European penmanship. He asked again and again about the head wound, the exposed cerebral membrane. At times it seemed like the questions arose directly from the doctor’s goatee, if not from a cluster of neckwear beneath that unruly salted bush. DiPio wore not only a crucifix, but also a medallion of the former saint Christopher. Whenever he wasn’t touching somebody else the old man was fingering this bric-a-brac, though in time he impressed Barbara with a formality of bearing at odds with his free-handedness. After a couple of hours in the man’s clinic, she had to conclude he had little in common with her sensualist in-law. He might be Neapolitan but he was no teeming Sophia Loren, nor any hot-lipped stud, aglow before a pizza oven. Rather, the family’s new caregiver was so God-minded, he’d fingered his Mr. Christopher until it was flat and dark.

  And Barbara couldn’t help but think of the God she herself had in mind, her change of spirit, toughening now like the spatter from Jay’s wound turned to scabs on her shirtfront. Her notion of the divine no longer seemed to dwell in high-minded and softhearted figures, the canon of saints she’d grown up with. Years ago, after her mother had run away, young Barbara had worked through a full five hundred rosaries each for Sister Teresa and Brother Francis. She’d kept the tally in her fifth-grade composition book. But this morning she’d seen such gentle profiles hacked off the church frieze. She’d hacked them off herself, with each blow of the hammer and chisel swearing allegiance instead to the sexed-up monster of the ancient temples. A god with lightning down his pants, and pitiless once he got started.

  DiPio’s beard, kinky, bobbing, presented a thousand miniature question marks. Herself, she no longer had the patience.

  She didn’t like the confusion about her name, either. Today everyone Barbara spoke with, not just the doctor but also the police, turned their name into something she’d never heard before. In the States the word tended to sound Hispanic, starting like Ricky Ricardo calling his wife and then coming down hard on the next-to-last syllable, that lascivious “si.” Or you got something flat and Midwestern, cramming “lullaby” and “cheetah” into a wet growl. In Naples however the name took the emphasis on its second syllable, which sweetened and lengthened and sang out from the whole mouth. Around DiPio’s downtown clinic, everyone used the new pronunciation, L’-looo-shee-tah.

  To Barbara, it sounded like babytalk.

  “Signora L’looo-she-tah,” asked a detective in plainclothes, “do you know the word scippatori? Here in Naples it means a thief on the street. Ship-pah-torr…”

  The mother thought of slapping the man’s solicitous face and shouting the filthiest slang Italian she knew. She’d gone through six time zones in two days. Anyway the whole point of the policeman’s patronizing blather was that the investigation woul
d likely get nowhere. The detective went on to say that the attackers must’ve been rookies at this sort of thing. A job like this morning’s would’ve been too risky for anyone experienced at the smash-and-grab—anyone connected to the Camorra.

  “Here in Naples, do you know signora, the Mafia is the Camorra?”

  “A professional,” another cop put in, “a camorrista, he would never have hit your husband so badly. You understand? He would not wish a murder.”

  “And he would never be so stupid as to, to do injury an American.”

  Did Signora L’loo-she-tah understand that in Naples, a person can see at once if you are American? “We can see it in the shoes or the makeup, in the way you carry your hands.” And did she understand that, if an American is hurt, the NATO might get involved? The Sixth Fleet is quartered here, signora. The NATO. Also these days we have the UN Relief, more Americans…

  John Junior, bless him, cut the man short. “So Pop was hit by amateurs?”

  The attack looked like the work of amateurs, yes, and therefore the authorities couldn’t count on their usual stool pigeons. “Also, signora, think of it. In Naples now 15,000 are terramotati. They are without homes, for the earthquake.” With so many new hardscrabble cases, the detective went on, the old mobster hegemony could no longer claim a piece of every street hit.

  “In other words,” JJ said, “you’re clueless.”

  The plainclothesman appeared to know the expression. His gaze hardened.

  “It used to be,” the big teen went on, “the police and the crooks were friends. Everybody got their coffee at the same place.”

  “JJ,” Barbara said.

  “That made it easier, back when you were all friends. In those days you guys would’ve had half a clue, when somebody nearly kills my father.”