Salvatore Scibona - The End

Once, when she was a child, her mother had sent her to Donna Costanza’s garden to pick some leaves off the laurel tree for a stew, but she had misunderstood and had come back with a branch as long as her arm, saying she had been asked for only a little, but, look, she had found so much. And her father had scolded her mercilessly and held her by the scruff of her neck as he conveyed her along Chagrin Avenue with a brush and a pot of tar and showed her how to graft the branch onto the tree again. His intention was to instruct her that as much as possible she must strive to keep things from going to pieces.

On this corner the smoke of coal in a furnace was predominant, on this next corner the smoke of nuts being cooked on a charcoal grill, on this next one the smoke of a barrel of rubbish that the leather-faced madman named Pierangellini was burning to warm himself.

The air was dank and stimulating, and the smallest pellets of water darted through it and pricked her face.

That woman there, hawking a cage of puling piglets from the back of an ice wagon, carried her fat in front of her, in the middle, like a man.

He would put his fingers, washed or unwashed, on whatever part of her he pleased, whenever it pleased him to do it, for the rest of her life, until he should die. Despised by her or no. The fingers intolerable, while she made a face for him to see of something sweet in her mouth. Her body filth-smeared, the body she had scrubbed and polished and hidden away to give only to him.

She needed to say to Donna Costanza, as her mother would, with her face, Everything is coming together at once, yes; but also, Everything has gone to shameful pieces.

Once Lina had explained what had happened and explained her feelings with her face, then Donna Costanza’s lips began to twist as though she was struggling to smother a rising sneeze, and her gray and mottled teeth were exposed to the air. It was a face of hatred. But for whom?

Lina wanted to go inside, but Donna Costanza made her stay out, although it had become dark and was cold, and told her to walk along the trench, where the men continued digging in the muck, now by the light of hurricane lamps.

With a look, Lina said she was frightened and ashamed.

But Donna Costanza said that, even so, she must walk along the trench, where the men looked up at her, a pretty young thing at night, accompanied only by a widow carrying a purse and a string of songbirds, tied together at their necks, that she had bought from a boy in the street for their supper.

Now, as she did this, Lina felt no less frightened or ashamed, and with her face she said so. And Donna Costanza, who always spoke aloud and rarely needed to speak with her face, nonetheless this time seemed to say with only the slightest raising of the lids of her eyes: Carmelina, it is this way. You must break. He will recline, perhaps even stinking of alcohol through his skin, and point to a piece of clothing you will be wearing. And you will take it off.

Then, once it had become very cold, Donna Costanza led her away to her house. But she didn’t hold Lina’s arm, as she otherwise would have done; instead, she walked at a distance off to her right as though in some way Lina had failed her.

The birds were already plucked and singed. It was difficult to say what kind they were. Grackles, she supposed. Donna Costanza roasted them over the fire while Lina chased a housefly around the dining room with a clump of scarf in her fist.

The baker Rocco was in the alley. She saw him in the window. He was holding in place a clapboard that had fallen off the rear of his building, and one of his young sons held a nail while another hammered it with brisk, confident strokes. Snow fell on them.

On the floor of the fireplace, the blackened fat of the birds smoked.

The two women also ate chicory from the yard.

Mrs. Marini was careful to cut away the meat from the legs and breasts of the birds on her plate. However, the distress of spite and the reversal of her hopes had made her ravenous, and she finally ate the ribs, too, cracking them between her jaws and swallowing them, hoping to quell her rioting stomach. They were Umberto’s bones, she imagined.

“Father will buy that farm now,” Lina said.

Mrs. Marini made a Victrola-cranking motion in the air, meaning it had been many times that she had heard this distasteful song before.

“He can use the dowry money to buy the oxes he needs,” Lina said.

“Oxen.”

“Oxen. He’ll make it up to me. You misunderstand him. He’s faithful to us.” Lina was terribly overexcited. Her arms had gone white, and the green veins were visible through the skin. Her look was dreamy, but the dream was perhaps the kind in which one does disgusting things and then tries to hide them from the police.

“I find this whole arrangement medieval, frankly,” Mrs. Marini said.

Lina looked at her.

“I had hoped you would marry above your station, which the promise of this country makes a reasonable goal,” she said. “It’s as though I had some priceless stamp and he mailed it.”

The fly landed on the table, and Lina at last killed it with her hand.

Mrs. Marini said, “He’s sold you cheap, aren’t you proud of him?”

“No, please.”

“What’s its name, your peasant master?”

“Mazzone, Vincenzo. Please don’t.”

“Your children will misspell your name on your grave now.” Mrs. Marini had organized all of the heads of the birds on the lip of her plate so that their beaks hung over the edge, as though straining to peck at the crumbs of bread on the tablecloth.

Her stomach appealed for more.

She knew that soon she would say something indiscreet, unnecessary, and hateful and that later she would feel a modicum of remorse, which she would truss and dispose of like this: Fatti maschii, parole femine (“manly deeds, womanly words,” the motto of the state of Maryland).

“I expected you would be loud and make a scene but later on you’d be kinder to me,” said Lina.

“In fact, I am too disgruntled to raise my voice,” Mrs. Marini said. Cattishly she smoothed her thinning hair. “Did you know that two years ago he had it in mind to buy a different farm? But your mother said he must wait until you and your sister were married so that you wouldn’t have to be spinsters on a croft once they died. And did you know that he said he intended to go, with you three or without you? That those were his very words? And that your mother and I had to hide the money in another bank to foil him? There’s your ‘faithful’ for you.”

The uneaten bird on Lina’s plate bathed in its cold juice, on which a skin had formed. “Yes, I did know that,” Lina said impatiently.

“And, and, he’d already bought the bell for the cow!”

“No, it was a gift.” Lina pulled on a hank of her shapeless hair.

Mrs. Marini was extremely annoyed.

“I know all about that,” Lina said. “But it’s finished now. And he’ll be happy. But I hoped you would say something else. I hoped you. .” She flushed and her little ears flared.

Two or three more nasty, discrediting revelations percolated against the lid of Mrs. Marini’s brain. “Oh, what do you want out of me?” she asked.

The girl’s face was open, charming, perfect, utterly stupid, and loving.

“Please don’t be disgusted by me,” Lina said.

“Why in heavens not?”

Lina rubbed a piece of the fly off her hand with her napkin. She said, in a burst, “Won’t you come with me, at least?”

“When?”

“Saturday. When I meet him.”

Umberto would be outraged.

“Certainly!” she exclaimed.

As regards making Lina her apprentice, only an hour before Mrs. Marini had believed in the idea passionately, but having thrown herself into action after many months of brooding, only to see competing events turn her intentions awry at the last moment, her resolve, being passionate, cooled and, once Lina had been married for several years, no longer seemed so pressing. For the time being, it even seemed in poor taste, because Lina and Vincenzo were unable to conceive a child.