Salvatore Scibona - The End

“Don’t let them turn you into something you’re not.” That was his homespun father again. Ciccio would have been far more comfortable with himself if they had just made him keep memorizing tidbits from the Baltimore Catechism — that was the method of the nuns in junior high, and he had remained mostly immune. (He had not been turned into a papist knucklehead, like so many Irish and Poles. He had maintained the cynicism of his people respecting the double-dealings of the Church.) Instead, in the high school, the priests were on a crusade to grind him into the earth with work.

It must be understood that he was a boy on a trapdoor, and the latch of the trap had been pulled, and he had fallen, and he had somehow landed in a place where old European gentlemen were razing him in order to rebuild to their specs.

The catechism was, implicitly, out. Understanding, feeling competent to discuss the assignment, were out. Clarity was out. Usefulness was out, but that was old news. Declaratives were out. Interrogatives were in. Confusion and fear. The subjunctive and the conditional were certainly in. They were the beating heart of in.

He was made to memorize what Aristotle had said about something, and then what Saint Paul had said about it, and then what Thomas Aquinas had to say by way of fitting them together. But on the exam he had to disagree with Aquinas and make a point-by-point case for the disagreement. It was another one of their dissembling SJ tricks. They knew that as a teenager he was engineered to disagree, so they commanded him to disagree, for which he had to resent them, he wanted to resist them; and where was the most obvious outlet for his resistance? Why, agreement, of course, with Aquinas. In this way they were making a Thomist out of him despite himself. Or some of them were; the others, the paradox crowd, were trying to turn him into a Lutheran, maybe.

Not that he had the first idea of what that would mean, to be a Thomist, what credo he would be following.

Is it clear why he was looking for a credo to follow? Could you maybe cut him a break for taking it all so seriously?

An untranslated eighteenth-century copy of the Summa Theolgiae, all dolled up in still-green lambskin, occupied seven feet of shelf space over the chalkboard behind Father Manfred’s lectern. Now, there was no question of reading, much less of getting, this seven-foot-long idea, but there was the promise in it of a universe to get lost in. Short of joining the monastery, he was not going to read even 10 percent of Aquinas. But he’d read enough to have gotten lost in the thicket; he could say he’d read enough to have forgotten what was supposed to be the inspiring genius of the man’s thought, and to be lost made him afraid, which felt righter than nothing did.

He read in the afternoons, on the hallway floor between Mrs. Marini’s spare bedrooms upstairs, lying on a bath towel. It was the only place in the house free of the distraction of sunlight. Once, having fallen asleep, he woke up to her softly jabbing his ear with the toe of her shoe. The pages of his Selected Aquinas were folded irregularly under his head.

“This is not Ciccio who reads, this is Ciccio who lays about,” she said. She pointed an accusing finger, not at him, but at the book. She said, “It escapes you whole hog, I bet.”

He said, “I’ll tell you what, I understand this just well enough to miss the point.”

He asked Father Manfred what it would mean to be a Thomist. Would he take another name, like the nuns did? But that was a joke. Manfred said the best illustration he could think of was something he’d read in the seminary:

Picture a seascape, he said. Now picture the sky over this sea. In the deep distance it becomes difficult to tell the sky and the sea apart. There is a thin strip at the horizon, a middle space, a third space, where the other two realms appear mixed-up. This is the Thomist view of what a person is; a person is what happens when the material (the sea) and the spiritual (the sky) intersect.

Well and good, Ciccio thought. From the shore it was often difficult to say where sky ended and water began. But what did it mean that he knew that in fact the sky and the surface of the water did not meet, that it was just an illusion that they met? It implied that a person was either material or spiritual or neither. Sorry. It made no sense.

They were killing him with work. He didn’t know what they were trying to turn him into. But he didn’t know what he was, either.

March. There was the smell on the air of mud drying, of the everywhere mud of late winter drying up at last. What was the smell like? It was like the faint, bitter odor of a bin of roofing nails.

Young Mazzone was on his way to school, briskly, wide-strided, on the cusp of running. He was on the cusp of running because he had the blues, and the SJs were making him over in their image, and when they had the blues they took long walks at high speeds to purge the blood of base fluids. He was hopping a little as he went. He was the merest bit out of breath, which was good.

His route downtown, Saint Ambrose Boulevard, was the straightest shot west from Elephant Park, but it was only sporadically paral leled by proper sidewalks. Most of the way he had to toe the curb or else slop through the mud alongside, where road salt had destroyed the grass. The cleaner route took half again as long. A streetcar jangled down the median. The boulevard was asphalt in the outer lanes, brick in the inner, and gravel down the middle, where the tracks ran. Where houses remained, they were fantastic multicolored ruins with porch-roof posts that no longer reached the sagging porches, with windows busted in, each one, for sport, with scoliotic chimneys, with doorways missing the doors or boarded up, with trim that had once (you could see through the peeling white) been painted three or four carefully patterned pastel tints. Gargoyles instead of aluminum downspouts drained the gutters and spoke of the kind of money he was pretty sure didn’t exist anymore. The houses did not, any of them, show the first sign of sentient life. Dark vines with showy pink buds grew up the walls and into the windows. Terra-cotta roof tiles dappled the gardens. It was a village of gingerbread houses someone had left outside to be tramped by the dog, to be eaten by raccoons, or to go to pudding in the rain.

Farther on, the boulevard veered north along the lip of a sandstone quarry and through a huddle of unpainted shanties where the Syrians had used to live; and then some colored people had lived there, but recently they had moved away, too. Then the road cut through a meadow that you could see had, years ago, been farmed — the earth was leveled out and there was a rock wall to one side where someone had piled the glacial debris. Sugar maples and scrub sumacs hemmed the meadow in, plotting its overthrow. A beech sapling grew straight out of the top of the wall.

Then, past the meadow — he checked his pulse, he sped up — the rail line forked to the south, and nearly all the auto traffic merged onto the new U.S. highway, and the road narrowed to two brick lanes.

After a hundred yards, it emerged on the lip of a great, sloping cliff.

And he had to stop here — how could he not stop here, daily, the scene sort of inflicting itself on him? Four hundred million years ago, the place where he stood was a seabed covered with a sheet of mud. The mud hardened, was covered with new mud that hardened, and so on, and became, by the time the sea receded, a vast cache of wafer-thin layers of shale beneath the surface. Then recently the river had cut it open, and then a glacier had followed the river’s path and widened the gap into a broad valley walled off by the cliff. Below him, the brittle black shale lay sloppily stacked, like an enormous palisade of burned newspapers. And he could see this mud-colored river down in the valley, convolving from the southern woods into the open plain beneath the cliff, where the vast, decaying, ash-bedecked, enchanted city arrayed itself, alive and sulfur smelling, this city, his home.