Salvatore Scibona - The End

Two ancient foreigners are arguing at the bar, in suits worn pale at the elbows and shoulders and knees.

The jeweler touches the room with his eyes, telling himself the name of each object he settles on in an effort to reattach himself to the material world.

That little beam over the door is a lintel. He says this to himself, and he feels better. Lintel has occurred twice so far in the concordance, if memory serves.

His mother’s hope was that he would use the names to affix himself to the world. As in, You do not see the mayapple until you know that’s what it’s called, and then you see it everywhere, the words teaching you to love the things they name. But this isn’t why he’s telling himself, That’s a samovar, that’s a pencil sharpener. He never used the words as his mother intended. He uses them to keep material things at bay. And by now, in fact, the words have replaced the things themselves.

But there are moments when his nostalgia for the world of a potbelly stove, bull thistle, Dreema Hannibal behind the church in Prestonsburg, holding his little hand in hers while no one saw, of his mother dipping the comb in the water of the washbasin and parting his hair while the two of them observed in the mirror — moments when his desire to hold a thing, a thing in his hand, to impress himself again with the dumb objectness of it — is so piqued he will do anything his imagination tells him in order to achieve it.

He wants the world and not the name of the world.

But every time he tries to descend on a hammer, or an amethyst, his interior voices start asking him, What is the word for that? What do you think it means to lift an amethyst in your fingers? Telling him, Get back to work. Telling him, Put that hammer down, you’ll break something.

And, finally, the private argument is always, always, Should he do this, or shouldn’t he?

So that he must ask himself if he dares stir the sugar in his tea.

(He does not.)

If he dares refill the oil in the lamp.

(He does not.)

If he dares lift his head from the pillow and watch his sister depart the room.

(He does not dare lift his head.)

So that every mere wish to hold a key, a thimble, a saw, and to leave it at that, collapses into accusation, counteraccusation, shame, and dread.

So that this morning, with the glass from the watch case glittering on the toes of his shoes, the jeweler’s hammer in the jeweler’s grip as if this were fitting, and then charging down the street, and then on the streetcar, the old solution — as backward as the problem — presented itself to his mind, once more, sweetly, like the promise of custard after supper.

Does he dare step off the streetcar?

He does step off the streetcar.

Does he dare follow this woman home, a whistling, unlucky woman he has never met before, with a burlap onion sack on her shoulder as she goes up the street now? (We will all have our misfortunes.)

He does follow her.

The old promise, the repudiated dog that loved him. Saying, There is a thing, wrapped in its name. Go on, catch it.

Then, afterward, he wanted something sweet. He walked down the block toward the main avenue. It had begun to snow. In an alley two girls were trying to balance another, much smaller girl on the back of a dalmatian. He paused on the sidewalk in front of a tiny storefront window where pastries were displayed, and intricately decorated cookies in the shapes of summer fruit. It was some kind of café or tavern. Inside, the space between the bar and the wall was just wide enough for a man to walk through if he turned himself sideways. The jeweler bought three of the cookies and a newspaper. He sat at the far end of the bar and waited for them to come find him.

He is waiting for them at the bar, which gleams this way, this beautifully, because of the beautiful name of the substance enveloping it— shellac. A word of which records are made, and then music is etched into the records. A word over which he has been compelled to pause before, aghast at how lovely it is, and yet how it shows his own unlovely face back at him. Which word, in one of its verb senses, means “to thrash soundly.”

ASaturday. Enzo Mazzone was on the job until six o’clock. When he got home, the dishes were still in the sink, a pack of cigarettes was missing from the utility drawer, the radishes were not picked, the peppers were not picked, the beans were not limed, the lettuces were not weeded, the boy was nowhere to be found.

Wood spoon in hand, he prowled the backyards, stalked across the ball field behind the church, down the railroad tracks, under the bridge, over the bridge, down around the perimeter of the Chagrin Avenue woods, whacking his head with the spoon as the mosquitoes fed on him. With the right wind he could have smelled his prey. He sneaked up the alley by the bakery and out in front of Mrs. Marini’s house, but the boy wasn’t there.

The old lady was sitting on the banquette of her screened front porch in a bushy black wig, shucking corn over a laundry kettle.

“Enzo!” she shouted through the screen. “Come here.”

“Give him up,” he commanded. He was standing in her begonias, right up at the rail of the porch.

“But I don’t have him.”

“Habeas corpus,” he said.

“He wasn’t here earlier. He’s not here now.”

“I want his head. Do you understand?”

“Come up here. I’m like a judge, where you’re pleading your case at the bar. He’s a nice boy. Leave him alone.”

Enzo went inside the cool, dim, bugless enclosure. He opened a lawn chair and sat down, extending his hand in the direction of the kettle.

“Keep your grubby hands off my corn,” she said.

“What’s all this? You hate corn.”

“Dom LaMana had garden surplus. He thinks he was doing me a favor. This, this enormous basket of chicken feed he carried fifteen blocks in the sun. The sweat on the top of his head, you should have seen, it was like a fountain. I disguised my true feelings out of courtesy.” She gave him a wide-eyed look that Enzo took to mean, Please take this corn off my hands.

“I have the colitis. I can’t eat corn,” he said.

“Perhaps Ciccio—”

“The boy gets nothing,” he interrupted. “The boy starves.”

She went into the house and brought him half of a salami sandwich, a wilted salad, a fork, and a limp linen napkin.

Enzo surmised it was all left over from the boy’s lunch. He insisted she disclose his whereabouts as he pushed the sandwich into his mouth.

“Don’t think you can bully me,” she said. And then in English, “Go find your fink someplace else.”

She suggested that if he were to clean his hands thoroughly she might permit him to help with the corn, so he went inside and scrubbed the grease and mortar out of the cracks in his hands. He had expended the day laying brick for a suburban shopping center, three stories up and as long as a city block, without a single angle or window, like the tomb of a dictator. He worked more slowly than years ago but accomplished twice as much. He was a shining piece of modern engineering these days, fleshless and precise, an unerring machine.

He went back out. The trees overhanging her porch were lush, the sun was not too bright, the wind had a taste in it, a vegetable sweetness. Down the block people were hosing down their driveways and sidewalks. Next door, Larry Lombardi was using an electric gizmo to trim his azaleas.

“Left,” Mrs. Marini said.

Enzo offered his hand for her inspection. She pulled the fingers apart, glowered at the cuticles, the stained and swollen eminence that opened and closed the thumb over the palm, the blood blister beneath the nail on the middle finger. She said, “Is this as clean as they get? Did you use the brush?” His left pinky didn’t work, it stayed erect when he made a fist. He had been made to register as an alien of enemy nationality during the war; the clerk tried to get his fingerprints, but the tips of his mortar-worn fingers were as blank as glass. He couldn’t put a spiral on a football because he couldn’t get a purchase on the skin.