Salvatore Scibona - The End

Maybe Patrizia likes it here. Who knows?

They used to converse with only their eyes, as women will do among young children. Patrizia had had a gift for identifying what Mrs. Marini had eaten last by the way she held her cards during canasta, how often she reorganized her hand.

“You are so exasperating,” she complained to the wrecked crossword.

Patrizia stared spiritlessly into a saucepan.

Mrs. Marini stood to set the table. She had given up. She was through.

She opened the cupboard and recognized the gaudy china she had given away. She said, “I forget. Which glasses do you use?”

Eventually to forget the names of the streets. Leaving now meant never coming back. Wanting to keep in her brain the exact words her mother had used in forbidding her to go to the race but having already forgotten them. Wanting to keep the shrillness of the woman’s voice; though, remarkably, she could not call it to mind even now. One bottle of water. Phrasing the telegram she would send in New York to the man who’d said that he would wait for her, a man she would never have met if his brother had been ever so minutely slower of foot. Stepping on and then back off the platform. Then turning and seeing that nobody else was waiting there for the train. Nobody else was checking the clock. To her right, the opening in the trees from where the train would come; to her left, the opening where it would go away. To leave now meant that this was the last picture she would have of the place in her mind, that she would always think of it as looking the way it did that afternoon, and her mother, father, sisters, brothers, aunts, as looking just the way they had at lunch that day. None of these people would ever die. They would be fixed in Lazio, in time. She would send no address. She would receive no news. To leave now was to keep them.

“Umberto wants to go home,” Patrizia said.

“Marvelous,” Mrs. Marini said. “We’ll make a party. I’ll get all the best things. You can stay with me until you get a house.”

“His brother in Sicily died. There weren’t any children, so Berto inherited the house. I use the ones with the cherries on them,” she said, pointing into the cupboard.

“Which house? In Siracusa? What do you mean?”

“It’s like the last time.”

“Which last time?”

“With me or without me.”

“Oh, I see.”

“With me or without me.”

“And then?”

“Or the teacups. It doesn’t matter.”

“But it’s not our affair,” Enzo said. “It’s not our thing to decide.”

“It’s not, excuse me,” Lina said, “it’s not his to decide, either.”

Umberto cut a leg off the rabbit and passed it to Lina.

Enzo said, “We cannot—”

“You’re a married man, who, therefore — what a burden — can’t just act like he’s eighteen and move to another country because he feels that way,” Lina said. “Because — what a weight, what a pity —he has a wife and a family and a house.”

“But I have another house,” he said.

Mrs. Marini said, “Twenty-four years.”

“Because,” Lina said, “excuse me, but there is a person at this table who never wanted to come to this country in the first place. But you said she was coming, so she came. And who never — Mother never wanted to move out to this paradise of donkey labor in the first place, but you said she was going. And she went without a word of complaint. Not a groan. Nothing.”

Enzo stood up and spooned the pasta into the bowls.

“Why don’t you say something, Mother?”

“Donna Costanza, do you want more of this sauce?” Enzo asked.

“Don’t raise your voice to your father,” Patrizia said.

Mrs. Marini put her thumb and forefinger together. She said, “A bit, thank you.”

Umberto said, “Where’s that cheese?”

“Look at your wife seven years ago,” Lina said.

The plate of cheese was passed from hand to hand.

“Things happen between married people that you don’t understand them from the outside,” Enzo said. “As you know.”

“Twenty-four years, Berto,” Mrs. Marini said.

Patrizia chewed. Her hands sat in her lap. She looked at her food.

“Look at Mother seven years ago,” Lina said, “and look at her now.”

Outside, Mrs. Marini could see that the sun had gone down. The vineyard was dim. There was a stripe of pink left in the sky.

“My wife didn’t say why she’s not coming,” Umberto said. “She’s welcome to come. Tell them why, Patrizia, go ahead.”

“Welcome,” Mrs. Marini said, “is a word you use for strangers who want to come into your house.”

“Tell them. Speak.”

“Will you pass that cheese?” Patrizia asked.

“Answer me.”

“I don’t want you to go.”

“That’s it. No other. . thinking. No ‘I like this here,’ ‘I prefer that here.’ Just ‘I don’t want you to go.’”

“This rabbit came out nice,” Patrizia said, “if I say it myself.”

“If you like rabbits, we can get rabbits.”

“If you prefer for us not to discuss this,” Enzo said, “if it’s a private thing.”

Patrizia swallowed. “It’s a little stringy, but it was the biggest one.”

“If you want me to drop it, Mother — but no, I won’t,” Lina said.

“There is room in my house for both of us and rabbits and visitors,” Umberto said.

Mrs. Marini said, “ My is what you call your house when you are an unmarried person or your spouse has died.”

“No, go ahead, talk,” Patrizia said. “This cheese is beautiful, or else I’m just deprived.”

“You see? You see what she does?” Umberto said. “It’s good cheese, Vincenzo, thank you.”

“Why should she have to give reasons?” Lina said.

Enzo picked up his loin of rabbit and headed toward the door to the back porch.

Umberto addressed his plate with bewilderment. “This is my own child who speaks in such tones to her father.”

Enzo stopped in the doorway.

“And who’s going to wash your floor,” Lina said, “and cook your supper and trim your beard?”

Umberto tapped a thick steel serving spoon against the table and closed his eyes.

Enzo went back to the table and sat down.

“It’s a natural thing that when a man is old, he wants to go back to his home. Your aunt will have to find someplace else to go. That house has been my property for a thousand years.” He tapped the spoon on the edge of Lina’s plate.

Patrizia fixed her eyes on Umberto, and Mrs. Marini could see, for the first time, something icy in her face.

Lina put her hands under the table and pushed her body into the back of her chair, slowly. She moved her tongue across her teeth.

“You’ll see,” Umberto said. The spoon tap-tap ped against Lina’s plate. “This Enzo will want to go back, too. Give him some years. He wants the sea, the la-de-la ”—the tap, tap, tap of the spoon—“the songs, his father’s house that belongs to him.”

Enzo was watching Umberto and his lips disappeared into his mouth. He may have begun to stand up again, because he looked preternaturally tall. He loomed over the table. His right eye strayed to the side. It gave Mrs. Marini the impression that he was watching everything in the room at once.

“Your mother’s dead, Berto, and your father, and your brothers,” Mrs. Marini said. “There’s only your sister-in-law, whom you will unhouse. All of your friends are over here.”

He adjusted his grip on the spoon.

Enzo’s one eye watched Lina’s plate while the other leered out the window.

There was something bare but restrained in the way Patrizia was watching her husband.