Salvatore Scibona - The End

“Slattern!” Mrs. Marini said.

“Go away! You’ll break the glass,” Enzo said.

“Malingerer!” Mrs. Marini shouted, banging with her knuckles on the window.

Lina sped through the intersection. The momentum carried them to the crest of an incline. She shifted the transmission into neutral, and the car sailed down the Eleventh Avenue hill, into Elephant Park.

They saw Mrs. Marini to her door and went home.

Enzo had left the apartment windows open in the morning, and now all the rooms were cool and damp, but they left the windows as they were; it was the first spring night that year warm enough for sleeping in the fresh air. They took off their clothes and pulled back the linens of the bed and lay down. The mattress was new and hard. The starch in the sheets and pillow slips was fresh.

She was alone with him at last.

Soon after Lina was married, she had put on fifteen pounds. She had done it deliberately — with a boiled egg before bedtime and a sweet pastry from Rocco’s every afternoon — in an unsuccessful effort to become pregnant. She had been indifferent to eating for so long that she had wrecked her ovaries, it seemed. Donna Costanza said that was probably what she had done. “Or else you bought a faulty stag,” she chortled.

Anyway, Lina was pretty now. She really was. She had had the luck to collect her new weight where it was most in need: in her hips, backside, bust, fingers, and cheeks — which had always been depressed before but now were convex, as though the heads of two spoons were turned upside down.

Marriage had exposed her true figure, but this was only the most obvious of many unexpected changes, some of them quite abstruse, that it had brought about and that she herself didn’t notice until events made them self-evident.

She damned her father to hell, and felt the rightness of this deeply, and would have said it to his face if she had gone to see him again — which she refused to do — before he left for Siracusa that summer.

She was cheerful, attentive, direct, nervous only regarding her hair, which was too fine to hold a permanent wave and was prone to knots and wrinkling. Her signature on a check was compact, loop-less, leftward slanting, distinctive but illegible. Her command of the cursive z s was poor, so that no two of them were identical, the first always improved upon by the second, which pleased her.

The overcoat shop went under. These days she did piecework at home — draperies — for a Jew in Fort Saint Clair. She didn’t have to work at the kitchen table, at least, as her mother used to do among the corsets that she would sell to a wholesaler downtown. Instead there was a spare bedroom where Enzo had built dummy rods in all the walls so that she could hang the drapes and see what she was doing. Earlier, he had stenciled the walls with a design that was supposed to be a toy locomotive but looked more like a steaming pot on trivets. The single window looked out on the creek and the trolley stop across the bridge, so she could watch for him coming home. She could also see Bastianazzo’s from here, and the men going in for newspapers and coffee. There was no one to talk to in the little room, so she listened to the radio. She had never been alone very often before, and now when she went among other people she felt simultaneously relaxed and invigorated by the contrast with the way she spent her days. Her own income was modest, but Enzo was foreman now, and, anyway, having no children they could afford to eat well and sometimes go to a concert. They were in good stars to have any income at all these days, as Enzo said.

Doors open before you on their own once you have found your true figure, her mother said. She said it in a gesture: They were at the farm a couple of years before her father betrayed them. Her mother brushed her hands down Lina’s rounded sides with pleasure as Lina was leaving, and then, although no wind could be heard, the storm door blew open spookily. Her mother pointed at it and said, “See what you can do?” Donna Costanza, on the other hand, was more indelicate and said to her while they were walking in the crowd at the Assumption feast, “You’re more striking now that you’re someone’s meat.”

Lina’s digestion was magnificent. If she wanted, she could eat fresh curds and then a grapefruit and go ride the trolley.

This, while her Enzo’s intestines rebelled against nuts, ice cream, even apple skins. When they went to a show, he bought her a lemonade and a chocolate bar from the concessioner, but nothing for sale there sat well with his stomach, so he smoked throughout the picture to blunt his hunger and bit the heel of his hand with pity at the climax and shouted.

On their way home, at Bastianazzo’s, where they would stop, he drank a demitasse of baking-soda water along with his coffee. She loved him. His suffering and shame (he had little schooling, and the accent of his English was inept, and he desired a son with every breath; he was thirty-three) were almost invisible and therefore were to her mysterious, perhaps infinite, and he approached, wanting her and no one else.

She was not a woman in a dream anymore. She was no longer Carmelina, daughter of Montanero, waiting to be the wife of someone and the mother of someone. Her name was Carmelina Mazzone. She was the wife of that man there, Mazzone, Vincenzo. She was definite, like letters on a page. And her mother looked at her as if to say, You are all turned out now, you are completed.

The eyes of others didn’t pass over her face obliviously, like before; they stopped, as if caught.

As when a gust blew open her overcoat while she was carrying a heavy bag across a bridge, and the blouse beneath the coat was thin, and her hardened nipples showed through the fabric. .

Someone loitering on the bridge, looking down at the current, glances up and sees when she passes behind him. His helpless eyes are caught. He is tall, extraordinarily white of face, impeccably shaven. He wears a dark worsted-wool coat, a small red book poking out of the pocket.

She is carrying an onion sack on her back, and he takes notice of this. Snow falls. What a day to be out of doors in a coat that won’t stay closed.

She passes him, and his poor eyes are snagged, his neck slightly twisted behind him. She was always hypothetical before to him, a faceless notion, but now she’s real, present, irrefragable, distinct. He watches her go. He may elect to follow her.

He does not know her name. But she is right there. There is no missing or mistaking or misgiving.

How it thrills him to think of another person at last, and not of himself. To begin a sentence with She. To be awake.

There. A woman with a sack on her back.

She crosses the street. Her coat has come open again. Catch her while she catches you. She won’t last.

Before too long Lina would become yet another person, with another name, of her own devising — similar to the current, married one, essentially a translation, more in line with the names of the people among whom she would find herself. However, she was not among them yet, and in the meantime she had every reason to believe that Carmelina Mazzone was permanent. She had no cause to suspect that all of this was only an interlude.

The man on the bridge watches her ascending the hill. She is stooped by the weight of an enormous sack on her back, so touchingly like a mule, like an enduring animal that slowly carries on its back a burden as large as itself.

It would be impossibly sweet and satisfying to follow her. The sweetness of saying “she” is the intimation of somebody else, of something else that’s really out there being real, that isn’t an idea or a ghost but a person, definite, completed.