Salvatore Scibona - The End

Where was her quarry, her lamb, her pot to put her gold in?

There she was.

See her? A girl flitting over a bridge of bowed planks that spanned the sewer trench. Lina waved wildly, as though she also had come into the street in search of someone and it was Mrs. Marini she hoped to find.

“Here I am!” Mrs. Marini called in an ecstasy of self-esteem.

“Narcissus,” said Nico’s voice. “Sun Queen.”

Not to be abject in concession to him, but a phrase was in order, something to redirect her feelings outward and focus her wits. She said aloud, but softly: “Make a fist and show me where your brains are.”

Lina waved again with her hat, vigorously, so that its pheasant feather was knocked askew.

Gray in her dowdy flannels. One misstep would send her ten feet down into the muck.

Here, kitty, kitty, beckoned the deep underneath, as the planks bounced.

Let her turn today to the happiness that all existing things share, dead or living. The chimney flues and the blinders on the dray horses, and the great pipes, wide enough to walk through, that were stacked in the avenue waiting to be buried, and she herself, a girl in the street, all shared the fate of existing in this time and place. She had waited at the door of the someone else she was sure to become for so long, like a dog under the porch while it snows. But this afternoon at last the past and the future coincided in the present moment. Her completion, which had lived behind this door from the beginning of beginnings, would at last, at last, impose itself, and the footfalls inside were audible and approached the door where she was waiting. The somebody else who she would become had eyes that would meet her eyes and claim Lina as her own and obliterate her at last. You, Lina would tell her once the door opened, have always been the only one — and now we have met: because Father has found someone to marry us.

Things were moving quickly now.

She was in the street, in search of Donna Costanza, who would help slow the things down and point to each one and explain it.

Along the sidewalk, the men talked closer to one another than the women because the brims of their hats didn’t get in the way, as hers did.

In the trench in the street, six men in coveralls were having their picture taken while they ate their working supper — though it was late and the light was poor; and the meat was stuck in their whiskers; and on the great timbers, which were like a parlor wall in the great trench where the pipes would go, they had tacked drawings of girls in the nude.

Boys in striped breeches showed their ribs through their thin shirts as they swung from the tree branches. It was too cold to go around without a coat, but the boys did as they pleased. They might swim in the creek bare-ass, daring her to watch. She didn’t watch anymore, openly from the bridge, with her legs dangling under the rail. Nowadays, she worked.

The man her father had found had already seen her photograph, for which she had borrowed her sister’s wedding dress. It was a piece of ingenuity of her father’s, so that no one could mistake the photograph for the kind men pass in trenches at suppertime. But she had not believed that the picture would work until today, when her father revealed that it had achieved its purpose. The man was two years in the union, could read and write, although not yet in English. A bricklayer from the countryside east of Naples whose one eye lazed. Fear not the mother, her father said, meaning the man’s mother. The mother would stay in Europe. Lina would be the mistress of her own house.

Someone in a double-breasted coat, with the flag of America stuck in his hatband and in his horse’s harness bells, drove past and told the street it must try his brand of soda pop. And a thin-lipped girl slouched on the seat next to him, dourly waving to the crowd that did not pay her any mind.

A woman stood on a plow while a man behind the wheel of a flivver dragged it through the remains of the charity vegetable garden.

A man sold potatoes from a steam cart in front of the pharmacy. Lina had never needed to enter the pharmacy, because her health was excellent. All her pieces worked, her father had told the man, whose name was Vinciuzzo — but she shouldn’t use dialect names or presume affections.

Her husband-in-waiting was a latecomer. Her father said that when he showed the man proof of her penmanship and her addition and subtraction, the man had noted that she didn’t draw a line across her sevens, as Europeans did. In other words, her skills would be her dowry. Her father would not have to pay him to have her married, as he had Mr. Schaeffer to take Antonietta off his hands. He had sold her by not having to pay, so now he and Mother could go and live on a grape farm in the country, as he had always wanted. And in this respect, Lina was proud.

She hoped the new man would let her wear her skirts above her shoes so that the hems didn’t need so often to be mended. She wasn’t finicky, but she hoped his teeth were sound. She wondered which language they would speak in the house and with the children.

Her life had been like the clay that she and her mother and her sister dug out of the creek bed and molded around a turkey or a capon at Christmastime, careful to make the mold in the shape of the bird inside, like a sarcophagus; and they baked it all slowly, and took it out to cool, and painted feathers on it with whitewash — and eyes with shoe polish, and its wattle with her mother’s lipstick — and waited for her father to come to the table and say that he blessed it, and the three of them, and Saint Joseph, his patron, and for him to hold the hammer and smash it. While they cheered and the steam came out.

She would meet the man-in-waiting on Saturday. And if she accepted him — she could not see why she would not accept him — then he would be the one, a month from now, for whose sake she would paint the case around herself and let him smash her.

Everything was going to commence at one time with a smash. It was fitting, it seemed impossible and right, that she would be introduced to her completion by something that otherwise was a crime.

Donna Costanza was not at home and so could only be making the passage in the street, pacing monkishly, as she did. Lina’s feelings were so severe now, and she knew there were some disclosures Donna Costanza had held back, waiting for today, about what she must do for her husband and what she mustn’t ever do to him. Her mother wouldn’t do that. Her mother watched more and spoke with her face. But sometimes Lina was betwixt and between, and Donna Costanza could be trusted to explain.

Her father had met with this man, and even kissed the sides of his face, as he must have done to seal the agreement — even though the man was saying in so many words that he was going to lift her clothes off her and touch her underneath. Her mother had given a look that said, It is this way. And nothing else. As though for her father to have to watch as people greeted her on the arm of this man with the horrible laughing knowingness in their eyes, as though her father’s simply agreeing to it because it was this way, because it had always been this way, would alleviate his shame.

She could move about freely only because everyone knew to whom she belonged, like a bicycle you might leave unchained anywhere you pleased because a thief would have no place to ride it without being called a thief by everyone who saw him. But now there was a middle time that Donna Costanza, she hoped, might help her with, when her father had relinquished his claim to her and she didn’t belong to her father or yet to anyone else.

The married women shouting to each other in the street, and the ratty laundry flapping over her head, and the spoiling fruit in the carts, were all so filthy and pure and perfected because they had all met now. And her mother had shown with her face today that now all of Lina’s parts would come suddenly into order, as though a rope was pulled tight.