Salvatore Scibona - The End

“They call it an infantry because it’s made up of children,” commented a Nico-ish voice, but she ignored it.

Then she turned the paper over to read the other items.

“Ooh!” she exclaimed. “I know that name!”

It was the fifteenth of August, Assumption Day.

The name she had read was Mimmo LaGrassa. Three weeks after the armistice had been reached, and one day before he was to be released from a prisoner-of-war camp, he had died in Korea. He was the son of the baker Rocco.

How dreadful.

Well, not really. She hardly remembered the dead boy. She hardly knew Rocco. She still regarded her day with blithe curiosity. Instead of invoking sympathy, reading this article only made her feel certain close-to-home affections more sharply. They were caramel affections, from which she would have liked to unstick herself with a phrase, but none was at hand. She had noted these affections before and had diagnosed them by means of an elaborate analogy:

All people, having reached a certain age, developed presbyopia. Muscles in the eye weakened over time and the lenses lost their elasticity. It was not to be confused with hyperopia, although both implied an inability to see clearly what was near. Similarly, in Mrs. Marini’s experience, all people, having reached a somewhat later age, regardless of the temperament of their youths, became sentimental. In many cases the tender emotions of the later years were directed merely inward, at the old person herself. Often, however, she had found, this increase of tenderness was directed outward, toward other people or toward the visible, living world as such. According to her optometrist, all very old people who boasted that they didn’t need eyeglasses (often illiterates) were faking. She suspected but could not demonstrate that this increased sentimentality had a causal relationship with the disorder, so common among the elderly, that was characterized by the slow onset of amnesia and madness, and thence eventually to death. Therefore she tried to steer clear of circumstances in which her ever more heightened faculties of pity were likely to be excited. However, with Ciccio living in her house, that was more difficult to do.

She made a good-faith effort to distract herself with the news of the day but, reaching the sports section, was distracted from her distraction. She successfully refrained from rereading the article about the baker’s boy but then removed her shoes and put on slippers so as not to wake Ciccio as she climbed the stairs to his room. His door was ajar. His flattop was crimpled against the pillow. He had to sleep crookedly on the bed, with his legs folded up, because his body was too long for the mattress. (Lincoln, having been shot, was carried out of Ford’s Theatre and into a nearby boarding house, where, because of his extreme height, he had to be placed diagonally across the bed in which he died.) She knew that to watch this boy sleeping was to ingest a microscopic volume of cyanide, but among her faculties that were in decay was the discipline to avoid scenarios she well knew might lead to the ruin of her mind.

At length, he awoke. His face was red from the pressure of the pillow; his eyes remained closed as he sat up; his pajama shirt was too small under the arms.

She backed out of the doorway before he could see her scrutinizing his head and descended the stairs. She went out to refresh herself in advance of the midday heat. She felt both disgusting and giddy as she paced beneath the flapping Assumption Day banners on the avenue.

The bakery was closed. Scandal! When, by seven in the morning, had it ever been closed? But given what she’d read in the paper she ought to have known it would be closed. About twenty people conferred on the sidewalk. Very soon there were twice as many, then twice as many again. She was surprised so many intended to offer Rocco their condolences. She would have thought people would avoid him. Nobody knew him well. But company loved misery, so it appeared.

Then Rocco appeared, suddenly, among them, while the clock in the church was tolling. He wore a little bowler hat that was thirty years out of date and a woolen winter suit with vertical stripes that belonged on a financier from the gay nineties rather than on his peasant self — stunted, sallow, with fearing blue eyes that were like jewels in a coal bin. He tried to tell them it was all a misunderstanding, that his Mimmo was very well, that it was a fiasco, a bookkeeping error, a fraud, a boondoggle, but no one believed him.

… When, while trying to solve a simple problem, such as how to distract a distractible teenaged boy for a summer afternoon, a simple solution proved elusive, the most common mistake was to entertain progressively more complex schemes. One must keep one’s wits about one. One must await. First and foremost one must have one’s eyes open for shifting circumstances, especially seemingly unrelated circumstances, which might contain the simple seed of the simple solution that the Fates would later appear to have had in mind all along.

She had turned away from Rocco with the rest of the crowd and pointed herself homeward when at last patience and flexibility of mind paid off.

The solution was not to send Ciccio away, but to send herself away and take him with her. Federica would have to do the procedure on her own.

All Mrs. Marini needed, then, was an occasion to tether the boy to herself from one o’clock until nightfall. It came to her. She paused, turned, and headed back through the dispersing crowd as step-by-step her quandary tied itself into a bow. She reached the baker and told him he must come to lunch at her house that afternoon. He demurred, sipping at his empty coffee cup and waving her off with the saucer. She asserted herself. At last, he accepted. She hurried back up the avenue.

Federica didn’t need her anymore, she knew what she was about. Mrs. Marini’s own role of late was only to keep the client calm, to coo at her sweetly, and if Freddie needed a hand, Lina could lend it as well as any other cool-witted woman. Lina was already going to be in the house; she was a quick study. And then the next time Lina could, yes, why, yes, the next time Lina could — the blood rushed in her prickling eyes— yes.

She could realize her forgotten ambition of years ago: Lina could succeed her.

“But, but. .,” stammered the fraudulent ghost in the shaggy Nico mask.

“I have won!” she said, suspending her disbelief about who it really was and throwing her arms about its hairy neck. “Love me!”

“I do love you, Coco,” it said, submitting to her kisses and elevating its monstrous brows as it said “do.” (However, Nico would never have said that, any more than she would have said it herself. He would have simply kissed her once, hard, on the mouth, and told her to go on talking, while he sat across the table and listened intently. That was his way, to sit and listen, chewing a piece of fruit. But she was ninety-three years old, and the poor creature who was his wife and longed so much to talk to him again was imprisoned in the crevasse. Whatever she had wanted to say to him had long ago withered on its stalk, been plowed under the ground, been eaten and excreted by worms, and sprouted again in strange and unexpected shapes.)

By the time she got home, Ciccio had given up waiting on her for his breakfast and had fried his own eggs, five of them. The shells were in the sink, along with the crusts of half a loaf of white bread; he did not like seeds. She explained Rocco’s misfortune. Curiously, the boy made no response and only went on feeding shamefacedly at the coagulated mound on his plate.

In order to do their share to help him, she and Ciccio would entertain the baker for an afternoon, understood? Rocco was acutely unwell and so, necessarily, in an egoistic frame of mind. Their job was to give him something outside himself to think about. Was she making herself clear? She trusted that Ciccio had no other plans for the afternoon.