Salvatore Scibona - The End

A gull encountering a fish on the beach, she considered, will first dig out its eyes, which are softest and easiest of access and provide a clean route to the brains, which are soft, too. Is that why we look to the eyes? If I look you in your eye and you flinch, do you suspect me of plotting where to aim my spoon?

It was akin to Protestant conversion, this swerve, seeing the light and so on, only in her case she saw the darkness. She did not say, I will die in hopes of being reborn. She said, I am dying! She was vain, and exaggerated, and let her arms swing around her while she talked, and was too up-to-date American to stay in her mourning clothes longer than four or five years (she’d graduated from peasant to petty bourgeois the first time she took money for her services), but by 1928, thirteen years after Nico died, she hadn’t changed them yet, and why should she? They were a becoming badge. She looked good in black. She was both the genuine article and a fake. A European wouldn’t understand how to pull that off. To a European you were either wearing the clothes that belonged on your body or the clothes that belonged on someone else’s. But an American — yes, she was an American now; you couldn’t touch her, not with your scruples or your history or your handwoven stockings — went to a masquerade ball wearing her own linsey-woolsey housecoat as a costume. You have not become an American until you have learned to impersonate yourself in a crowd.

Ice water did not curdle the juices of the stomach, she discovered, by drinking it nervily and waiting. Why, that was only a prejudice, common among those of her nationality and insisted on by Nico for all his days. To think that for centuries Aristotle had peddled the canard that women had fewer teeth than men — and they bought what he was selling! she was mad! — when anybody might have opened up and counted. Thus false doctrines were impaled by her and — even at this late date, for sixty-five, sixty-six, sixty-seven, were so old, were so much older than she’d planned to live, should have been deep into the intransigence of the downward slope — were trampled under her feet, along with false likes and dislikes, raisin cakes and their kind.

Honor is for those who hold themselves responsible to a kernel of unchanging self. Alas. None of that for her.

While dressing she considered her fattening but still meager breasts, which Nico had only half-playfully jeered. They were like what? Like miserable, withered medlars (yes, medlars; he’d missed out, good): a medlar, which is only a small, spotted, unlovely orb, yes, but is perhaps unique among fruits in that it is inedible until it starts to rot.

Soon, said Death. And she began to sum up, to tie contrary judgments together with a phrase and put them to one side. In this way she discarded old remorses and confusions and made way for last things. The phrases ranged from promulgation of a settled rule to abstraction, code, euphemism, sophistry, baby talk. As to sin: There is no such thing, and yet I will pay; alcohol: whenever you please, but no liquor before five o’clock; how her dead would receive her in paradise: not bearing fruit baskets; the significance of the tower far in the distance, across an ocean of grain, that recurred in her dreams: Avert your eyes, look at the grass; her vanity: “ Ye have the poor always with you, but me ye have not always”; the past: Strictly speaking, it does not exist; her means of income: to the good, sweets, to the others, mutton. She needed one for the cause of the swerve. A phrase. All this had happened over ten years. And she was so grateful. Character wasn’t fate. No one else, in her experience, had demonstrated such a shift so late in life. She needed a phrase.

She waited for the humiliation and incapacity of old age, but the curse had passed her by. A Hebrew had mistakenly stricken the posts of her door with lamb’s blood and the Lord had skipped her house. Against any part of her did not a dog move its tongue. Oh, well. Probably she would fall down the cellar stairs and smash her skull. The good fortune of her new life suggested that death, though soon, would be only a swift blackening of mind. Fine. When Nico died, she had believed she would be trapped forever in the past. Only she could no longer sympathize with the self who’d felt this way. She laughed at it. She laughed!

How about: I laughed at myself, with scorn?

Midwinter. When all the autumn fruits have been consumed, and everything you eat is cooked or caked in salt, and all the world is dead. A pulpy something sweet would mean so much. Only a little. You find the medlars in the root cellar in a box of sawdust. Finally gone to mush. They were no good for anything before — he’d missed out. Too bad.

Now, about summing up: Not everything can be accomplished with a phrase. It would have been self-defeating and anyway impossible to condense into a few words all the refinements she had produced over forty years of study and practice in her trade. She had elaborated her methods from crude hand-me-downs (her grandmother’s tools were a root broth, heavily salted, and a bellows), to a precise, well-tried, and sterile science. The prospect that all her advances would evaporate at her death was a poison she tried to absorb stoically, with the help of a palliative phrase: “All the daughters of musick shall be brought low,” she said, but was dissatisfied. Her stoicism finally failed her, or she failed it, as more and more her pride prevailed and she began to change her view. Resignation wasn’t worth the effort; the right phrase existed but might take years to find; action, in this case showing someone what she knew while her brain still worked, was easier than inaction.

Therefore I shall seek an apprentice and heir, she said. But the an was misleading. There was only one person she wished to ask. She had long intended to pass all her wealth to one special girl, and if she was going to give away her expertise as well, she saw no one else to whom she’d rather give it. The wet human feelings this implied were repulsive enough that to keep herself from being made sick by them she screwed herself to her more selfish motives.

Envy, for example. For this particular girl and for no one else she felt the species of envy, rare except among the old, that expresses itself in the desire to be replaced by someone and consequently improved by him. Here she discovered herself on the farthest frontier of egoism, which was funny, because egoism was the very vice that the girl, in replacing her, would best have corrected.

This was not to say that the girl in question had no I or wasn’t, like the rest of us, in constant conversation with it, but rather that, in a trait Mrs. Marini had coveted since before the girl had lost her milk teeth and which she’d somehow maintained through her adolescence, she didn’t seem to know it was her I with whom she was speaking. Birds of prey, horses, snakes, bears, and elephants all give one this impression; dogs, bugs, fish, squirrels, chickens, and human beings, in general, do not.

Anyway, practically speaking, the choice as it currently appeared was to ask Lina, the Montaneros’ daughter from Eighteenth Street, or to drink the poison and be forgotten.

A phrase?

She was hale, flat chested, inward. All things, perhaps not coincidentally, that were less and less true of Mrs. Marini herself.

She was the elder of two girls, of whom there would have been many more and sons besides, no doubt, starvelings all, had Patrizia, the mother, not availed herself of Mrs. Marini’s counsel some decades ago. The younger, Antonietta, or Toni, had lately married and moved to California.

So long.

They knew better, her mother and Mrs. Marini both, than to trust in oaths like I will return to pay visits, I am not lost to the deep. America is the deep. Elsewise, why did you come? Lina, on the other hand, already twenty years old and beaten to the finish by her younger sister, faced dimming prospects of marriage. The parents had made a sloppy error to let Toni marry first, and Mrs. Marini told Patrizia so, who agreed; however, the father. . the father — but over him Mrs. Marini preferred to pass without comment. Not that Lina seemed to mind or make any effort to vend herself. There are compromises we make in the authenticity of our expressions for the sake of attracting men to us, Mrs. Marini argued. Men did not notice Lina, but whose fault was that? One needn’t give oneself over to the licentious fashions of the day. One might simply train one’s bodiless hair in curls. Lina’s flannel skirts might keep her warm, but flannel did not describe the leg to the viewer, and she had many long years ahead to be warm.