Salvatore Scibona - The End

“Maybe.”

“Nobody will beg you now,” Patrizia said.

“Me, or a piece of cheese?” Mrs. Marini said.

“You can’t make me ashamed.”

“Shame is useless,” Mrs. Marini said. “Get rid of shame.”

“Okay. Sure.”

“Just get rid of it.”

“I’m not ashamed.”

“It is debilitating and ex post facto and useless.”

“You won’t make me apologize,” said Lina.

“You will, though.”

“I absolutely will do no such thing.”

Mrs. Marini said, “I ask that you give me that.”

“Go ahead.”

“Please.”

“Please what?”

“Please apologize to me,” Mrs. Marini said.

“No.”

“Good, fine, thank you. I accept. But apologies never kept me company. Apologies never tied your shoes.”

Her house — rather, Vincenzo’s house — looked as though it had recently been in order but then an extremely fastidious person had been directed to turn it into a pigsty. Newspapers, schoolbooks, and a table lamp formed an inelegant obelisk in a corner of the front room. The dining-room and kitchen chairs had been left upturned on the tabletops, as in a restaurant after hours. Twine strung around brass tacks in the window jambs held back the dusty curtains. The air was thick with bleach.

They found a note from Ciccio on the icebox beginning, To Whom It May Concern, saying that he planned to spend the night at Ricky’s.

Mrs. Marini went home. Lina and her mother rolled off their stockings and got on their knees to scrub the kitchen floor. Midnight came, and it was 1953. Evidently her husband’s hair had gone white; she found it on the pillow of his bed.

The next morning, the three women spread out the contents of Lina’s bags on the kitchen table. A snowstorm whistled about the house. Her mother said, “Where are the rest?”

“These are the rest,” she said.

“Where are the rest of your clothes, Carmelina,” Mrs. Marini said.

“These are all the clothes I have.”

They boiled water in three pots on the stove. Mrs. Marini measured the black dye powder and dumped a cup of salt into the pot for the cotton and another into the pot for the wool.

Lina had made nearly all the clothes from the leavings of the home-economics room at the school in Casper, and none of the patterns or colors mattered to her.

They did not dye her nylons or handkerchiefs.

You want a why. But there is no why. You want a depiction complete with flora, sunsets, How deep was the snow in the blizzard of ’49? How was the furniture arranged in the cell where I slept in the dormitory? These are the faces of the friends I knew there; but no such depiction is forthcoming, too bad, no artifacts by which in later years to verify that I was there and my recollections are credible, no way to disprove your suspicion that I simply was, then was not, and now am again since I departed the train onto the platform. I want to be a line that extends and ravels and at length intersects itself again, a path that can be retraced stepwise, but I am not, I am discontinuous.

Another cavelike day elapsed before the snow broke and she was able to climb Vermilion Avenue to the mortuary carrying two suits of Enzo’s, one of which was for the father, who was to be cremated in it and sent home in a steel urn. As she left the mortician’s office, the blaze of white winter sun on the snow was like a chemical explosion that left spots on her field of vision, so that she could hardly make her way for squinting and could not tell if the commercial district of the neighborhood had decayed or been revived in her absence. Peering through a gap in her fingers, she noticed a familiar storefront, lacking a sign but evidently open in spite of the storm, and went in.

The bell on the door of the bakery tinkled, and the curtain flag of Ohio was pulled aside as the baker Rocco emerged, rattling a piece of candy across his molars.

“Tell me,” he said roughly, snapping open a wax-paper bag.

“Two crescents, please. Marmalade.” She opened her change purse, but there were only dimes and pennies.

Below the chalkboard where the prices were listed hung a photograph of a handsome boy, clean shaven and dreary-eyed, wearing a white military hat and smiling coldly. The photograph had been ardently colorized — the American flag in the background painted in, the lips purpled; the flush of the cheeks was girlish.

A note above it on the chalkboard read: Prisoner of Our Enemy 832 Days Consecutive So Far.

“Otherwise?” the baker said.

“Nothing, thank you.”

“Forty-six cents, if you can find it in there.”

But she couldn’t, and had to ask him to put one of the crescents back.

“This is Montanero, if I’m not mistaken. I heard you had gone off to the Wyoming,” he said. “Sorry that I forget your other name.”

“Charlotte,” she said automatically. It was her alias. She never used it again.

Ciccio finally spoke the word he had seen typed all over the vineyard. “I’ll have to absquatulate,” he said.

Exactly when he made up his mind to let his mother have the house on Twenty-second Street, he couldn’t say.

Everything had gone to hell. Everything had gone to hell in a flash. Since it was everything that had gone to hell, you’d think nothing new could go there, and since it was to hell that everything had gone, you’d think it couldn’t sink any farther, but not so.

Regarding the three days after the crash, he suffered from a selective kind of amnesia: He had no sensory record of that time, but he remembered ideas and emotions perfectly. He could remember feeling liberated, and not jubilant but, he had to say, happy; the calamity was a meal for the mind. But he couldn’t remember what he had been physically doing, in what physical place, while he was thinking. He knew he had been on the farm; it wouldn’t have been too exciting, whatever he was up to. Eventually he asked his grandmother, who told him he’d been in the vineyard, on snowshoes, tying vines sunup to sundown. He wouldn’t come inside for lunch, which she had had to drive out to him on the tractor.

To be delirious from Latin was to have turned out of the furrow, as a plow.

When the record of his physical memory picked up again, he was standing in the snow in the vineyard sharpening his spring shears with a rattail file. He heard a clitterclatter in the distance; he looked up and saw his grandmother’s salt-encrusted AMC truck hugging the shoulder of the highway, heading north into town. Where was she off to? Then, at dinner — dinner was bread and boiled winter squash (the physical world had returned to him, with its yellows and slimies) — he asked her what she’d gone to town for. She told him she was sending a wire to his mother. This was on the twenty-ninth of December, 1952, a date that would live in infamy. Everything had already gone to hell, and then the next morning they got a telegram at the farm from his mother saying that she was going to come to the funeral.

How amusing. Well, no, frankly, it wasn’t amusing. His grandmother understood the gist of the telegram, but she made him read it out loud anyway. How was he to interpret that other than as his grandmother saying, “You’re welcome to visit here, kid, but I won’t take you in”?

He was a boy standing on a trapdoor.

His mother wasn’t planning to rent a bed at the YWCA, like any courteous vagrant would do; instead they’d decided without consulting him that she would stay — guess where — in his house, as though it were her house. Hell was getting crowded.

No way his mother thought he’d stay in the house if she was living in it.

They were trying to put him on the street, was what they were trying to do.