Salvatore Scibona - The End

Federica arrived at noon with her armaments. The glinting, metallic materialness of them — an attitude of ancient authority and craft — their hingelessness, was sickening.

And sickeningly beautiful. Some of them (one in particular, a scoop) spoke their functions openly, in grunt words. Others suggested only purposeless, calibrated violence. But she couldn’t deny there was something beautiful here, timeless and human. A collection of simple levers shaped to fit the shape of women.

The cheese they ate at lunch after the salad was an Emmentaler, imported from Switzerland, with a musky taste so subtle Mrs. Marini could pick it up only if she exhaled through her nose while she chewed. It did not really go with the peaches, but the peaches were seasonable, and, anyhow, the niceties of cuisine were lost on her guest of honor. The baker had not eaten a raw green leaf in five years, he said. She thought the caverns of his mind must be very dark and cold. She imagined they were made of sandstone and inside them, prehuman creatures clad in animal skins sat in the dirt scratching pictures of bison on the wall with sticks and sacrificing their infant children to invented gods.

Ciccio had brought the baker an ashtray and the two of them were talking about the burning of Washington by the British during the Madison administration, an event of which Rocco had never heard.

Was there any greater pleasure, she wondered, than to sit by an open window in the summertime, and drink a little, and talk?

All of a sudden Ciccio was telling them some kind of riddle.

Rocco sipped his wine and put the glass back on the table. Then he spat out the answer: “Objects descending from the clouds!”

“Oh, good, a game,” Mrs. Marini enthused.

The skin of Rocco’s yellow-green face had darkened from the booze and heat. He folded his arms over his bulbous stomach, as the sweat showed through his shirt, the sleeves of which were rolled above the peeling elbows, so that white flecks of him had come off and freckled his rumpled blue tie. He won another round of the game and laughed out loud. She had not heard him laugh before. It was a smoker’s laugh, percussive and followed by a little fit of wheezing.

“Cry for help,” Ciccio said. “Play with the rope and the bucket.”

“Things to do in a well,” said Rocco, and laughed again, slurping his wine.

He was a loquacious drinker, even expansive; she wouldn’t have guessed. Ciccio asked how many of the states he had seen.

The baker peered into his spidery eyebrows and drummed the fingers of his smoking hand one by one mechanically on the tabletop. “Nine,” he responded. Then he drew some figures in the air. “Do you know, it was forty years ago this year I arrived on our shores? It was at New Orleans, in the Louisiana. March twenty-third, 1913. Easter Sunday or the Monday following, I can’t remember. The earliest Easter in a hundred years. I couldn’t trade my currency because of the holiday. A city of believers, New Orleans. But I didn’t stay long.”

“What did you eat on the first night?” she asked. “Everybody remembers that.”

“Brown rice soaked in broth,” he said. “Out of a tin cup. Then I got on a train. Northbound. North-northwest. Straight into the heart of the continent — that would be five of the states right there — toward the Nebraska. I made a wrong turn coming out of the toilet and found myself in first class.”

Someone in the street shouted, “Ice cream! Lemon ice! Lemons!”

“There was a woman wearing a dog, I thought it was a dog on top of her hair,” Rocco said. “There was some kind of balm on the leather of the seat cushions that went all the way up my nose, and to this day if I smell it, there I am in the cabin. Midday. Rattle rattle, that was the tea service. Pressed copper on the ceilings. But the leather, that smell!”

The boy was mesmerized.

“Oh, it was just Newcomb’s neatsfoot oil. We even used it on our shoes,” she said.

“I kept a pet squirrel in the bachelor’s hotel, in a city that I couldn’t pronounce the name, and I went to adult education classes at the settlement house. I had an idea of everything improving. A little more food all the time, a heavier coat. My lungs were sound, my back was sound. Omaha. I couldn’t say the h, and then I could. Every part of me was pointed to a shining idea.”

“Ideas are trash,” Mrs. Marini said.

“I agree,” said the boy, shaking off his trance.

“Ideas aren’t really there,” she said.

“Of course they are. Like”—the baker paused, groping inwardly, then gestured up at the blank plaster of the ceiling—“the Holy Spirit, for example.”

Ciccio looked at her, waiting to hear what she would say.

“The Holy Spirit is for children and savages,” she said.

“I had a shining idea before my mind’s eye,” said the baker, “of the man I would become in the end.”

Ciccio sat up straight. He lifted his chin from its usual evasive slouch. The mismatched features of his mongrel face seemed briefly to align. He said, “Mr. LaGrassa, I think your son is dead.”

“Francesco Mazzone!” she hissed, spanking the table.

“You don’t have the first goddamn notion what you’re talking about,” Rocco told the boy. “Or yes you have, but it’s the first notion and nothing after. What is dead to a Christian?”

“Rude!” she exclaimed, but Ciccio wouldn’t look at her.

“I mean, this is kind of all a charade, right?” Ciccio said. “I mean, it’s kind of make-believe.”

She thought the baker was about to strike the boy. He stretched himself across the table, reaching, showing the back of his hand, but he only tapped the breast pocket of Ciccio’s shirt, three times confid ingly with his apish knuckles. It was a gesture of uncommon, obtuse, and misplaced affection, and Ciccio might have recoiled in response. Instead Ciccio looked down at the hand with interest, even admiration, as though he were the famous dog that had licked the hand of the surgeon vivisecting it. “You have a shining idea, too, my boy,” the baker said. “Everything seems to spin, am I right? But it spins around something compact in the middle. Or you’re in the dark in a dream, but you’re moving straight in one direction, like on a train in a tunnel. You don’t see the way out but you feel there’s a way out. Don’t you believe you’re pointed at it? I was supposed to work in steel when I got here, but the position fell through. Then I was a baker for twenty-nine consecutive years of days. I thought that was going to be the end, but I was wrong. That’s fallen through as well. God is great. He has something else in mind for me, and I know what it is. Daylight waiting on the outside of the tunnel when I get there, I believe. Everything else will be stripped away. But you know what? I will be the father of three sons. I’d know that even if I didn’t believe it.”

Rather than being a birther and a rearer of sons, Mrs. Marini had been a what, a dry goose, and a snuffer-out of sons. Bluntly, a dismemberer of them. And had been one so long it was impertinent to ask anymore whether that was the glowing goal to which she was always aimed, as in Rocco’s formulation, or whether instead her soul had been shaped by her work, as Rocco’s hands had been shaped by his. He weighed perhaps half as much as the boy, but the hands were three times as thick.

“What is dead to a Christian?” he repeated, pointing at the boy.

Ciccio’s tumid Adam’s apple bounced.

“Dead is dead,” Mrs. Marini said, taking the boy’s side again.

“To you he is dead,” said Rocco, “and to you he is dead, but to me he is alive.”

There was a pause. Ciccio looked at each of them, inquiring with his eyebrows whether it was his turn to speak.