Salvatore Scibona - The End

“You’re all mealy-mouthed pitiation and no pity, Costanza. You don’t want to assist anybody. You have been unfitting that child for female kindliness since I exited the scene. Witch. You only want to ready her for witchdom. Twenty is so many years to have. You can’t be serious! See how you conduct yourself, with the lies and the twist ings. Twenty is the bloom of youth, hag. You don’t want to make her rich; you want to erect a monument to yourself. You don’t want her to get married; you—”

“Who will marry her? Give me his name!”

The girl wasn’t in any of the back gardens along Vermilion Avenue, nor in the church.

“You don’t want her to get married. You don’t want some bumpkin digging up your treasure. You only suspect that you ought to desire her benefit above your own, but you’re completely insincere. If you make her a witch, like yourself, all the boys will know and no one will call for her. This is your plan. And, by the way, you won’t be any good at it, the witching instruction. You’ll hector her and embarrass her. It won’t be like teaching somebody to read a newspaper in your boudoir. There will be the matter of your conscious subjects lying there. But I know what you’ll do. You’ll just give them some gas.”

“You are so wicked!” she said.

“No, you are!”

“What entitles you of all people to dress yourself up as my conscience?”

“Introspect and you will observe your incapacity to do a genuine kindness,” he said.

“Stop abusing me, Nicolo!”

But it wasn’t really him, as she had already decided. It was never really him. She might have her silly hopes, but in all honesty if the ghost of the true Nico should ever visit her, she wondered if she could bear to speak with it without ruining all the gains of her later years and turning back into her former, wretched self. There were certain things she dearly longed to say to him — things that had come to her only while she was pushing the gelatinous food between his teeth during his last days, while his kidneys were failing and after his mind was already destroyed — but they could only be said in the past.

She was sure Lina had never indulged any sniping ghosts like this one; however, even if she had indulged them, she would have been able, as Mrs. Marini rarely was, to declare herself innocent at the last, or innocent enough, and march out into the cold autumn air.

There was a bench under the consignment-store awning where the girl and her mother sometimes sat and watched Joseph D’Agostino’s cockatoo through the plate glass and made doilies out of the bleached threads from a burlap bag, but neither Lina nor Patrizia was there.

There was a scent — she passed a woman in the intersection, a mother of nine but slender, clean-complected, the name was, the name was; but she must not try to remember, lest she fail — a smell of soap, hair, and something bitter besides, and it dropped her into a crevasse many ages old, accessible only via the nose and only if the scent was lost again at once: I have opened my sister’s carpetbag to see that she does not take my leggings with her when she leaves us forever tomorrow.

Such was her recent distraction that she’d allowed three days of newspapers to accumulate on her sideboard, a dereliction only of what she owed herself, since no one remained whose conversation demanded a knowledge of the news. The Prussians were departed, and Nico. Her peers were dead. And the age of gripping public events was over. Once women had been allowed to exert their influence at the polls, the nation had been beset by eerie calm. Consider aeroplanes and the Great War and the influenza and the headlong rush to outlaw good times (booze, she meant) that had preceded this, the republic’s least interesting decade. And, as though to emphasize the point, Elephant Park, where until recently a variety of peoples had lived (mostly Germans, agreed, but they were literate, they spent some money now and then on a pretty object that had no use, didn’t they?), had been narcotized over the last ten years by an injection of the unwashed from her own home country. Consequently, the Germans, the Danes, the Croats, and the Magyars had been driven off. One-family houses were divided into threes and fours. The refuse in the streets, the crowds, the rickety children, and barnyard animals tied to mailboxes — she was not pleased. She was like a Jew who had transferred herself to an obscure island in the outer Venetian lagoon and found, to her amazement, once she had grown old, that all her coreligionists had been moved out of the city and into her garden.

The new people had no politics. When Plato had gone to Sicily, hoping to put his political ideas into practice, the locals had sold him into slavery. As far as the new people cared, the body politic included their blood relations and nobody else. Equally and oppositely depressing: The individual also included the blood relations. I was we. The notion that you might sacrifice the good of your sister for the good of the commune was absurd, likewise that you might eat a whole chicken by yourself. She used to be more like them, in her peasant days. But she used to be a wretch.

She was in the street wearing a scowl to keep would-be chatters at bay. Now, if she wanted solitude, why not stay at home? Because she did not want solitude, she wanted the life of the mind, which was best lived in the street. Politics, or the life of others as lived by oneself, was the mind’s natural subject. Conversation was its natural sport. And the dearth these days, which seemed permanent, of interlocutors made her want to spit on — on everybody, on her own shoes!

And the fog gradually thickened into a swarming drizzle under the gas lamps overhead and the girl could not be found.

Mrs. Marini had voted for the first time at age sixty, for Warren Gamaliel Harding and the rest of the Republican ballot, thank you, bearing dearly the memory of T.R., dead almost two years, we would not look upon his like again. Harding seemed okay. Being himself an Ohioan, it would have pressed her loyalty to reject him. Let’s leave Europe to its feckless wars, he implied. Let’s stay at home and grow our corn. “Hear! Hear!” she said. This from a man born in the tall-corn town of Corsica, Napoleonic in name only, between Mansfield and Columbus, so he must have had a sense of humor, too, to advocate such a platform. She pardoned his vote for the Vol stead Act, since he was one of tens of millions to have been swept away in the hysteria for temperance, the backward bacchanal, and she ignored Prohibition anyway. If she’d known they would be so boring, the twenties, she would have voted for Cox—

No, she wouldn’t have. What was she saying? She was determined to get to work finally, but her material was somewhere among the fruit carts, evading her.

“Or else Providence is hiding her from you,” said the voice of one of her dead who lived in the crevasse, “because she is a child.”

She didn’t understand why the Democratic party was allowed to exist; a war had been fought and half a million men killed to expose the Democrats, and still they were among us.

Finally she permitted herself a snoop down Eighteenth Street. But no light glowed in the Montaneros’ hut (formerly a stable), and she paced back up the hill.

That woman’s name was so common, the woman she’d smelled in the intersection, and her plight was so common, and the cut of her coat, and the syncopated bleating of her accent, that Mrs. Marini presumed insipidness in her every particular, which was always unfair, as Mrs. Marini’s profession never failed to remind her, checking her tendency to assume that no other houses enclosed so many mansions as hers did. The woman’s name was Giacoma. The file card had fallen into the bottom of the brain’s drawer, but, here, she’d found it: a syphilitic, from her husband’s dalliances; the last two children were stillborn and blind, respectively; from her adolescent years in Brazil, she had learned to sing sweetly mournful songs in Portuguese.