Salvatore Scibona - The End

“You never lived in Ohio anywhere, or in the Nebraska?”

“I’m going to sneak in here at night with a can of turpentine and a match, is what I’m going to do.”

“Unless I’m deceived this whole time,” Rocco said.

“All summer it’s the grass pollens, the windblown corn rusts.” He sneezed four times more, fluid leaking out of every opening in his face. “And the fungus spores.”

“The things that I absorbed for so long,” Rocco sputtered, “for I don’t know why.” The sun was on his back, and a caddis fly alighted on his belly. Thumpety-thump went his heart.

It didn’t matter what he had done or failed to do. He didn’t see what he saw. He was not where he was. He felt so hungry and light-headed and confused that he wasn’t hungry.

And yet I have my pink scoop on top of my green scoop on top of my cone, he considered, licking them, as he crossed the grass and then the pavement again and stood at the rail on the lip of the gorge and watched again the falls falling, the shapeless mists rising up.

His streak was over. He had no possessions worthy of note. His parents had long since gone to their long home.

He was fifty-seven years old.

For thirteen years after the death of her husband, Costanza Marini had lived alone. She was now sixty-eight. Death beckoned. And that was really too bad, because, having been anxious in her youth, disappointed in maturity, and then desolate in middle age, she had recently made a conspicuous turn: In what she expected were her final years, she found herself in possession of powers she had long ago given up hope of acquiring. It was a windfall. She had become happy — no, exuberant. While she slept, a storm had knocked the fruit out of the trees.

In retrospect, the turn’s success had depended on her failure to notice it until it was complete. Consciousness had sabotaged her past efforts at reform so consistently that she didn’t bother to blame it anymore. It couldn’t help itself. Surgery required that the surgeon be awake and the subject etherized; operating on her own mind, she only woke herself up halfway through and made matters worse. Reform, she had slowly become convinced, was impossible. Fatalism was true. These were the tenets of a religion to which she had every intention of staying faithful. But the religion had a flaw that would prove its undoing.

It was so all-embracing that it used her every observation as evidence for its claim: Her pudding wouldn’t thicken — why? Because it had always been the fate of this pudding to be thin. Therefore, eventually, why observe? Why be conscious? Why not sleep? And at last, she slept, firm in her faith in misery, finding nothing new to contradict it, and envisioning her death with a growing interest and fear.

For the turn that then ensued and changed so much, she had to take at least some credit. Although she’d been asleep, yes, and hadn’t done anything to herself, she still had had the absence of mind to stay asleep and not to take heart until whatever force was acting on her had finished its work. She was like Saint Peter walking on the sea, only the moral of the story was upside down. She could do it so long as she believed she couldn’t do it and was afraid.

Her expression at social gatherings during married life was one of regal dispassion, the face of a sleepy predator. In fact, she was abashed and so let the men talk, congratulating herself for being bored by them. She was impervious to the suffering of others and did not weep at the theater or at funerals. She did not pity the poor, the halt, or her husband, Nico, as he declined. “You are cold, cold, cold,” he said. Maybe so. She took his word for it. She could hardly feel the lack of what she had never known in the first place.

The question arose after he died whether she was naturally ill formed in these ways or had learned her, her — the word was callousness —over a long marriage and might unlearn it. An intractable widow she knew, a muleteer’s wife, still treated herself and guests at lunch to raisin cake, for which she professed a passion while from her own piece she picked all the raisins; she disliked raisins; it was her Angelo who had liked the raisins. Those women were so stupid! But when Costanza Marini did the same things they did, she was no more forgiving than before, of them or herself. Where was her nerve? The ability to speak the truth to ourselves must have been the advantage that the adaptation called consciousness evolved to exploit. But the truth, over and over and over — that she was a sneerer and a scold, heartless, timid, fated to die alone — wasn’t only bleak, it was fatiguing. Where was her pride?

Four years into her widowhood, Satan visited her in her garden. She was on her knees, yanking the quack grass out of the spinach. Iridescent flies dappled the carcass of a bass in the furrow. “Egoist!” said the tempter. “Despair!” To despair is a sin. But, true enough, she had no hope. She could not remember having hoped. “Die!” said the devil. She was never to speak of this episode to another soul, but she really saw him there. He was dressed like Young Werther, in a blue jacket, yellow vest and pants, and tricorn hat, and he spoke with a German accent. Her transformation was in fact slow and continuous, but if she’d had to point to an emblematic moment, a swerve, it would have been that morning with Satan in her garden. For she had straightened up her back, quaking, as he tried to lay her low, and she surveyed him head to foot in his absurd outfit; her eyelids peeled back into her head; her chest jumped with a gush of air; the skin under her hackles itched piercingly — and she laughed at him. “Don’t laugh at me!” he snapped. But he was ridiculous. What he was saying was ridiculous. She herself was ridiculous. She was fifty-nine. Her health was sound. The hem of her skirt was in the mud. “I am a fool!” she said aloud, and tightened the laces of her shoe.

In conversation she became an interrupter. Her brows swelled. The wizening of her neck she emphasized with tight-fitting collars, the better to show the glazen skin of her cheeks, jaw, forehead, and nose. In a daguerreotype — of her husband and herself in the 1880s — that presided over her bedroom, her bones were already asserting their ownership of the face. The eyes were dull and recessed. (In fairness to the goose in the picture, her infant son, Alessio, had lately died; however, your pity did her no good; she would lay other eggs — except, as it happened, she would lay no other eggs at all.) Look at the eyes now! Black globes, protuberant, fat. There was another animal in the mask than before. Why, she wondered, do we always look to the eyes? Windows of the soul, she disregarded as fanciful. No, it’s the eyes themselves, to be exact, that look to the eyes. They are as competitive in their vanity as we are.

She read hysterical murder stories, and history, and the Bible itself, which in her youth was a sin to read, and English literature, untranslated, deep into the night, so that sometimes she slept until noon. Now, Nico had let her read. In fact, he bought her texts on diseases of the blood, anatomy, nutrition, tokology, and hygiene. And he used his acquaintance with the dean of laboratories at the university across the bridge to procure a seat for her in the back row of lecture halls, where ladies were invited to sit and take in, if not comprehend. It was hardly pure husbandly kindness for him to do all these things, since he profited from her industry as much as she did. Still, if she wasn’t in bed with her hair up and books closed by nine o’clock, he moped, and what a disgrace to see that, how it wounded her pride to watch her husband debase himself by entreating her. The surplus from her income he would not let her spend, so as not to call attention. But she spent it now, damn him, and his hoarded treasure, on cheese and the opera.