Salvatore Scibona - The End

Mrs. Marini said, “Go ahead.”

Ciccio turned to the baker. He said, “He’s alive as long as you know he’s alive.”

“Yes.”

“It’s so, even while it isn’t so.”

“Yes.”

“I wish I was older,” Ciccio said, looking down at his lap. “I wish I could think better. I mean, that’s a beautiful idea—”

“No, it isn’t, it’s disgusting,” she said. “Look up when you talk.”

“It’s a beautiful idea,” he went on, raising his chin a little, “but I just don’t know how to believe it. I feel like, if I was smarter I could believe it—”

“ Were smarter,” she corrected.

“Were smarter. Or if I were somebody else.”

Mrs. Marini didn’t need any shining idea. That was all over. God might or might not be great. She had no evidence either way. She did, however, have ample evidence that the tempter, the prince of the silly world through which she had taught herself to walk backward, was very great indeed.

She loosed a long guffaw, haughty, at both of them. “Dead is dead is dead is dead is dead is dead,” she said. Then she put some cheese in her mouth.

She breathed out, long and deeply, her lips closed, and the spirits from the bottoms of her lungs moved over the chewy mass of cheese inside her mouth and up into her sinuses, which in turn perceived the most wondrous mild, living scent. It was like the smell of a man’s armpit just after he’s taken a bath.

Their three places were set at one end of the grand dining-room table. The window behind them let out on the alley that Mrs. Marini’s house shared with Rocco’s store. Some kids were out there throwing faint, pleasant firecrackers at the pavement. Then one of them set off a toy bomb that rattled the windows in the sashes and made Mrs. Marini’s ears ring.

At the table, they all three flinched.

When Mrs. Marini opened her eyes again, everything was as before except that at the far end of the vast void of the table, a figure was seated, tall, with brilliant red hair and an air of utter self-possession, as though even the table belonged to him.

Neither the boy nor Rocco, who went on talking, appeared to know that the figure was there. She looked at them both, making a little smile each to each, and glanced back to the far end of the table. The figure had not moved. It fixed her with its gaze. Its thick hair was curly, and sweat poured in great streams down the sides of its lovely face.

“That’s just a better mask than the others,” she told it. “I’m not so easily taken in.”

It wore a sleeveless undershirt. Its legs were dapperly folded in a way that showed her one of the knees above the surface of the table, so she saw that it was even wearing the military pants — black with red trim — that Nico had worn the day of the race.

“Leave me alone,” she said, her nose twisting.

The figure was out of breath. She saw that the head wasn’t merely sweating, it was soaked, as though it had just been dunked in the fountain. It looked not through her but at her, a ruthless look, glib and entitled. It extracted from its pocket the playing cards she had given him for a prize.

“Go away!” she cried.

But it only looked down and shuffled the cards.

“Oh, please go away, please,” she said. “I have been having such a nice time. If I — oh, please don’t make me talk.”

Its skin was clean and fresh and rosy, the eyebrows were trim, the mustache was blond and curled up at the corners. It dealt itself a hand of cards, panting heavily.

“Be good to me, please, and leave. Please. Oh, please. Please. Please.”

Its hands began to shake as it turned over the cards. When it looked up at her again, tears beaded from its eyes. She looked to the eyes, windows of the soul, route to the brain, and felt the terrible long-lived longing in her stomach to go to them and suck them out and swallow. To go to him and eat him up and keep him. To go and sell all she had and buy him. To lay her fortunes at his feet and follow him across the world and out.

She said, “No, but I mustn’t.”

“I thought you’d been waiting all this time so we could talk again,” he said.

Her resolution failed her, but only momentarily. “Yes, I have — but this isn’t the time.”

“Oh?”

“The time was forty years ago.”

“Oh?”

“What’s the use of apologizing, Nicolo? It’s unseemly. It doesn’t fix anything. You missed out — I wish you had known me later on.”

The radio twittered from the parlor. The baker split another peach and passed half of it to the boy.

The figure wiped the tears from its face with its handkerchief and blew its nose. As it hastily got up to leave, it knocked over the chair and bent low to right it, but the boy and the baker didn’t see. The figure passed through the doorway, slow and young, its slick white shoulders gleaming.

Mrs. Marini turned to the baker. She said, “I’m afraid we’ll have to be going out now.”

Even today, sixteen and one half years after the fact, his sister dead, his store sold, his archive of Confederate correspondence donated to the county public library, his concordance burned, his flower garden on the bluff behind the house collapsing season by season into the lake, the house leaking rain in every room, the woman herself dead, surely — since how else has he for sixteen and one half years been denied the fulfillment that is his by right, of being called, in words spoken out loud not by himself but by somebody else, by a person living in the world out there, the thing that he is — even this afternoon, trapped in the throng of bodies in a street carnival not three blocks from the café where he had whiled away the hours, poisoning himself with sugar, ardently believing he would be found, he still casts his eyes about for the face that will know his face, for the woman who will recognize what he is and point her finger, opening her mouth to speak, and call him by his name.

The jeweler knows that the undiminished desire to be accused by name by this woman is the proof that he has failed. That gable roof with sides that are shallow in slope at the top and steeper below is a gambrel. The short sleeveless dress with a row of buttons up the spine that the little girl in front of him is wearing, against whose backside the force of the crowd is pressing his legs, is a pinafore. He has a name, too, that could save him from himself, that could turn him into a word if only she were to see him and call him by it. Then all would be lost at last. He could surrender the long-held hope to hold a thing, a thing in his hand, and leave it at that. He would no longer have a material hand in which to hold the thing. But she isn’t here, surely, she’s dead — the instrument of his salvation — he killed her, surely.

He’s been coming to this carnival every August for five years, but she has yet to show herself, and his hope is waning.

He has stood at the washroom mirror calling himself by the name his father shared with him, but the words only stuck to the mirror. Another person was required. Look at these people, the girl in the pinafore with her pink legs, the ten thousand others forcing him up against her; they are at least not alone in having names, like the gambrel roof, or the samovar in the café. Only he is nameless, real, among them.

At night, as a boy in the winter in Kentucky, warming himself by the potbelly stove in the cabin, his uncle showed him how to put a double bend in a saw by pushing it against the toe of his boot, and how to strike it with a hammer and control the note its vibrations made by bending it further and unbending it and striking different parts of the bigger bend. He practiced playing it at home, in the woodshed of his father’s house by the lake. He taught himself to play “My Sister, She Works in a Laundry” and “The Mule Skinner’s Song” and “What Was Your Name in the States?” and “Pharaoh’s Army Got Drownded.” And he made up his own tunes, in love, as he would never love anything else, with the queer, trembling, human sound of a shaking piece of steel, and he taught himself to bow it also, with the bow of his father’s fiddle. Then his father’s cousin, who picked banjo in a hillbilly band at a saloon on Saturday nights, persuaded his parents to let him go just once and play with them.