Salvatore Scibona - The End

“Sophist,” Nico said in an undertone, but again it was not really him.

Mrs. Marini had lowered herself by a long rope to the floor of the crevasse in her mind. Fungi sprouted from the viscous cavern walls. A yeasty ooze enveloped the feet of her dead, who paced away down here, along with a few unappeasable, carping previous selves. One of them wore a Nico mask, but Nico never came.

“ You’re the child,” said the one in the Nico mask. “You’re a child, and you’ve always been a child. You wanted to be the one who prepared the marriage, but you were upstaged. Then you threw a tantrum.”

“Impostor,” she replied. “Don’t think I’m fooled. He was not so smug.”

It was really her self of about 1920 who was talking to her, from the period after he had died but before the swerve. It ably wore the dangling jowls of the Nico mask and hoisted up the shaggy brows in mock surprise to emphasize a word as he would do; however, her hair of that time (thick still, but colorless) overflowed the edges of the mask like a frizzled mane.

“She was a glabrous, faithful, sexless thing, which offended you. So as punishment you made her walk where the goons could look up her slip, and then you tried to rake muck about the father. When that didn’t satisfy you, you took away the job she didn’t know she was about to get.”

“You always had to be the one and only,” her sister sneered, in a linen smock and her leggings, kicking the ooze.

“Why not simply say you changed your mind? I know why. Because you lacked rationale,” said the voice in the mask. It was such a compelling impersonation that she wished she were taken in by it. “You insist on rationale. Then your disappointment over the shabby groom presented itself as a distraction you might twist into an excuse.”

“You are a petty cuss,” her mother said in the dialect of the town of her youth, which Mrs. Marini had had no occasion to speak in fifty years.

Here is how she met her husband.

In her town, in Lazio in 1876, a platoon of soldiers under the new king was squatting in the palace of the duke, who had lately been expelled. The local boys challenged them to a footracing tournament. She was sixteen. Her mother forbade her to go and watch, but she defied her.

The boys and the soldiers ran one-on-one sprints from the palace steps across the weed-ridden square. They were stripped to their undershirts, barefoot for fairness because the soldiers had only their boots and the boys wore light sandals. At the end they ducked their heads in the spray of the fountain. There was a crowd. She would be seen. That someone in the crowd should betray her to her mother may have been her preeminent aim, but no one seemed to notice her.

Two officers — lean, redheaded brothers from Bologna named Marini — faced each other in the championship round. She carried in her pocket a deck of laminated playing cards, a gift from her father’s mother that she resolved to present to the winner. However, as it happened, the victor was carried off on the shoulders of his comrades, and instead she gave the cards to his brother.

Sixty years later, Mrs. Marini was riding in the rear of a car that crested the last of many gradual slopes and began its descent into the murky predawn countryside of the Cuyahoga River valley. She had not traveled outside the city limits since the summer of 1905, when Nico had taken her on a train to a resort hotel in Sandusky. A quartet had played on a dais in the hotel dining room. All of the better restaurants still employed real musicians at that time. The two of them ate the most succulent galantine of duck, and waded in the lake, and slept under a silk coverlet in a light, airy room.

The old car in which she now rode had once ineptly aspired to the middle class (the imitation marble of the footboards was actually linoleum), but, judging from the racket inside and the indefatigable jolting of the machine at every speed, it had long ago learned its place. However she was not an authority. Lina sat in front, and her Vincenzo guided the car through the mud and gravel of the uneven road. They had been married for seven years.

The car suffered the inclines terribly: The engine made pitiful screams and repented the affectations of its youth and begged Enzo’s forgiveness; but he was immune and pressed it onward. Nico, Mrs. Marini recalled, had always treated their horses with humanity and grace.

She wished one of them would turn around and talk to her. Her throat emitted a harsh noise to no avail. The car was a 1924 Buick Roadster. She had tried to forget this useless datum and therefore had failed. In general she considered it extravagant that urban working people should own cars, but this was only a clamorous old thing with rubber patching in the canopy, and Enzo did the repairs to it himself. The young couple lived in a two-bedroom hot-water apartment, a clean place of recent construction in Elephant Park, five blocks from her house. The three of them often went on excursions to hear live music played or so that Mrs. Marini could buy Lina something pretty downtown, while Enzo smoked in the department store lounge and studied the newspaper. Enzo offered to drive but always eventually deferred to her preference for the trolley.

Since Lina and Enzo had no children still, their expenses were modest. Lina maintained her position at the overcoat shop on Twenty-fourth Street, and Enzo’s talent for staying employed in the present time of hardship, which had produced a boomlet in Mrs. Marini’s own business, was remarkable.

They were heading to the wretched grape farm so that Enzo and Lina could help Lina’s father trim the wretched vines and Mrs. Marini could confer with Patrizia, who had sent so many invitations through Lina for Mrs. Marini to pay a visit that she had begun to disregard them, with continually greater ease, until the previous week, when Lina implied (it not being her practice to speak directly of interesting things) that an urgent matter had arisen and her mother, who had no telephone, required Mrs. Marini’s advising right away. Her egoism thus engaged, Mrs. Marini agreed at once. Lina did not, on examination, seem to know what the matter was.

Mrs. Marini tilted her eyeglasses so that the stems pinched her temples and the image outside came into focus. She had hoped that a hardy agricultural scene would alleviate her present cynicism, but what she beheld was not agriculture. Agriculture was the domination of a landscape by the hand of man. What she saw were budding woods that crowded to the edges of every open place as though a barricade held them back from the orchards and the shorn acres of pale, busted stalks and mud. (It was April.) Every meadow, in its squareness, manifested a persistent human attention. It was evident out here that Ohio had recently been a single, dense forest, open only where the rivers drained it, and would rather be so again. Even from the faces of the bluffs, the trees protruded, laterally. She was living in a barely domesticated country. Certainly there were those who found, in the same scene, a grid of cornfields plundering the poor, wild trees, but her priorities were the other way around. Savages and sylvan paradises did not interest her, even in literature. She was a city girl. She wanted to read about civilized people corrupting one another. She did not want your Zane Grey. Give her a swimming pool, and it’s poisoned. Setting was ancillary. Who poisoned the swimming pool? That was what she wanted to know.

Yet as the trip wore on she perceived in spite of herself a more and more powerful intuition of, of — what was the word? she was unsure there was a word — of here-ness. Providence had brought us here, to this of all places, to our remote country. No, but it had nothing to do with the Constitution or the Battle of Bull Run. History, politics, culture, those were her mind’s milieus, and they could not have been more impertinent to this queer intuition, which was neither purely a product of her thoughts nor of the place itself. Fog rose from an anfractuous river that flickered through the beams of a covered bridge they crossed. The spirit of the place pressed itself against her senses, but she was not the kind of creature that was capable of letting it in, of becoming an unconscious part of a vast, unconscious whole. The result was a feeling of sharp physical pain at the base of her neck that rose up the back of her skull, as though a malignant hand were petting her. She was separated, by virtue of being a conscious animal, from the rest of creation, which was unknowing and therefore complete, and therefore irrevocably real. The trees were both in the place and of it. But to know that one was here was to be an awareness amid the limitless unaware; it was to be in a place but never of it, like a pearl in a cake.