Salvatore Scibona - The End

The mind of Ciccio Mazzone was an unruly animal. He could not explain why it would buck or leap or chase some innocent creature that wasn’t truly there at moments when the world outside the brain-pan gave it no clear impetus for doing these things. In any case, here were the events being recounted in his mind at the present moment:

At the siege of Yorktown, in 1781, when the Americans were trying to free themselves from the British, Lafayette and a French army had come to the Americans’ aid. One hundred thirty-six years then elapsed. Lafayette, Washington, George III, Cornwallis, all had died. Their children and grandchildren had died. The Germans were beating up on the French, and the Americans decided to get into the Great War and defend them. John Joseph “Black Jack” Pershing, the American general, landed in France. The story was that he then traveled to Paris and visited the crypt where the old hero was buried in soil brought from the United States, and one of his aides, Colonel C. E. Stanton, said aloud, “Lafayette, we are here.”

To Ciccio Mazzone the significance of this was that we may perceive ourselves to be careening aimlessly through space, when in fact distant events have thrown us into long, elliptical, cometlike orbits, far from our origins, and eventually we will circle back on people whose lives preceded and gave rise to our own. We may recognize them immediately. Or else we may meet a stranger for the first time and, while shaking his hand, feel vividly that an ancient obligation has finally been kept.

“I’m going to show you how to take care of your feet,” the old man said. “Pay attention and don’t forget how I’m doing this.”

His glasses were fogged. He took them off, inserted one of the stems between his teeth, and rolled up the sleeves of his shirt. He stripped Ciccio of his sodden socks and cuffed his pants. Then he seized Ciccio’s feet and plunged them, with his own hands, into the stinging water.

The old man shifted his weight from knee to knee, the lenses dangling from his jaw while his white hands and Ciccio’s white feet reddened in the pot. Hands and feet were then pulled from the water, and the old man began his work.

Each of the toes was pinched individually and rolled between the meaty fingers. He scrubbed the dead skin from Ciccio’s heels with a brush and picked the rot from between the toes, flicking it into the water. The webbing between the toes was cracked, and the old man’s fingers were crooked.

He dropped the feet back into the water for a minute and stretched his hands. Then he lifted the feet out again and jammed his thumbs into the arches. He squeezed and stretched, kneading the balls of the feet, and isolated a long tendon, the existence of which Ciccio had been unaware, and rubbed it down and pulled it straight.

Ciccio hadn’t realized how stiff and cold his feet were until they began to loosen and warm. His foot was held in both of the old man’s hands, was wrung by them, then released suddenly, and he could feel the blood go.

Meanwhile, in a distant quarter, the mind of Ciccio Mazzone was chasing Lafayette. Marie-Joseph-Paul-Yves-Roch-Gilbert du Motier, marquis de Lafayette. Some decades after the Revolution he’d taken a tour of the states and everywhere he went they named towns for him that persisted to the present. From this trip, he took home to France a box of American dirt so he could be buried under it.

Now, Ciccio would have liked to talk to Lafayette. Maybe Lafayette could have answered some questions he had. Because this thing of taking the American dirt home but still wanting to be buried in France, this was the act of a man who was really cut in half, like Ciccio was cut in half (but what were his halves?), and had found a way — the shipping of the dirt — of turning an idea into a real thing. Like these pods at the bottoms of Ciccio’s legs were only ideas to him, they were kind of unlikely locomotive machines that translated electrical impulses and muscle contractions and logarithms into swift forward motion, but the old man was saying, They are feet, they are feet.

The new road to Ashtabula was freshly, soundly paved, a four-lane superhighway, white with salt, that shortened the trip to the farm from two hours to one and led them along the lakeshore, through the ashy manufacturing and port towns, rather than through the corn and hog tent counties to the south, as the old roads did. As the truck flew over the surface, the frigid air whiffled into the vents, through the simmering foils of the radiator under the dash, and out over the shoes of the two men inside, saturating the cab agreeably with warmth. The younger man, Enzo, who drove, resembled his father in the slight flatness of his crown, in the furrows that had begun to show at the corners of his fleshy mouth, and in his thick, mangled hands, on which the skin was too scabrous for hair to grow. However, both his father’s eyes looked squarely forward, unlike his own, and the nails of the fingers were better cared for.

The old man thrilled at any chance to ride in the truck. Likewise, he adored the machine itself and kept watch over it in spare hours lest passing children molest it in the driveway. He touched its body only with gloved hands. It was the most valuable piece of merchandise anyone in his family had ever owned. The vibrations from the floorboards, he said, did more for his feet than any previous therapy he had devised.

It was the twenty-third of December. They were going to have another working Christmas, but Enzo preferred it that way. The boy had been at the farm a week already, paring vines. Patrizia had driven her wreck into the city to retrieve him the day school let out. But there was plenty of work that still needed doing. All the vineyard posts had to be repounded and the rotting ones replaced before the ground froze.

The truck glided across Painesville and Perry without stopping while Francesco Mazzone gnawed an apple core and likened it to the mealy ration apples he had eaten at the end of the war, which led him to the broader topic of wartime shortages, and finally to wartime losses, a subject Enzo had taken pains to evade. The old man, once launched on his narration, enunciated it definitively, as though he had given it many times before to strangers on buses, ships, and trains. He was an easy talker and had no secrets.

Enzo already knew from one of the letters that, due to the Allied invasion and the shelling of Naples and the surrounding towns, the civilian population of his village had abandoned it and spent four months living in caves in the hills. The occupying Germans, aware they couldn’t hold the village, busied themselves booby-trapping doorknobs, irons, bidets, light switches, kitchen gardens, shoes, corpses, mansard doors, birdcages, and jewelry boxes, hoping to slow the Allied advance. The chapel where Enzo had been confirmed was destroyed when, upon the arrival of the Allied troops, a boy ascended the belfry stairs and set the bell ringing. The letter, sent in early 1945, neglected all but the most critical pieces of personal news. It was addressed To the Bearer of This Letter and had been dictated, like all the others, to Enzo’s sister Giulia, who wrote it on faded blue paper dating from the early years of the Fascist government. Enzo knew the paper well; it had been given to him by a teacher in school, and he’d left it behind. It would be profoundly appreciated, read his sister’s handwriting, if the gentle bearer of this letter would be so good as to pass it on to Mazzone Vincenzo, if such a person is known to him. Enzo remembered the letter in detail, although he had read it only once and thrown it immediately in the trash.

“All winter we ate walnuts,” the old man said. “Nothing but walnuts. Your nephew Filipo, who you never met, stole about ten bushels of walnuts from the German commissary. He was discovered and executed, with a shot, here, in the spine. But, see, they didn’t know where he’d hidden the walnuts. There were six of us. Your mother, Gregorio, your sister, her husband, her daughter, and me. Filipo was the seventh, Giulia’s boy. We all had terrible coughs, we were cold. Moreover, there had been seven of us and then there were six.