Salvatore Scibona - The End

The rest of the band was standing — the fiddlers and the fellow with the harmonica and the old man they all called “Sir,” whose name he never learned, were all standing while they played. Only he, the youngest, sat in a chair, while he struck the saw with a ball-peen hammer.

He had never bowed it in the presence of others. The saw played with the hammer was clothed; the saw played with the bow was naked, the sound unobstructed by the clash the hammer made. And when in the woodshed in the presence of no one else he bowed it, he himself was naked. Bowing the saw was a simple thing he had that he could do, all his own; it was the pure act, of which the other, the playing of it with a hammer, the version others were allowed to witness, was an imperfect replica.

But the men knew he knew how to bow it, and they put the screws on him. And he didn’t want to. It was not for others to hear. But if he bowed it for others he might find that this was the way in, the way through, you had to expose your innermost to the outside. I address myself finally to the material world and its citizens and become part of it and one of them. So he agreed, yes, he would do it.

And the moment came, the signal, when Sir hopped into the air and brought both feet down on the stage. He slid the hammer under his chair. The others took their instruments away from their faces, and he drew the bow along the untoothed edge of the saw, knowing the audience was there but unseeing it with the glow in his eyes of the coal-oil lamps in the apron of the stage.

He was more than naked. The sound in the presence of other people ripped him up the middle, showing to the open air the wet things inside that composed him, that turned food and air into the self he was.

Then, from someplace beyond the wall of light, came the keen of somebody laughing at him.

Yet he did not stop playing or leave his seat.

When Sir clapped at last his boot on the stage, the band picked up the tune again, sewing him up somewhat, giving him some clothes to wear. They played through midnight, until the saloon closed. His cousin walked him home through the black streets. He climbed the stairs to his room.

The bishop in his miter (those two bands of cloth, hanging down the back of it like the pigtails of this pink-legged girl, are lappets) and the priests processing up the street, the young boys in cassocks, the men in long white linen albs chanting solemnly in Latin, the statue of a mulatto on a platform (a mulatto is so called because his blood is mixed as a mule’s is), and this flock of crones, in black, barefooted, murmuring over their beads (an assemblage of starlings is a murmuration), and the big, clumsy band playing so solemnly even though they are out of tune and off beat, all bring back to him the way that night in the saloon as a boy he had struggled manfully to express with the bow and the saw the solemnity he felt inside him, the solemnity of a human self, and had succeeded only in making something that was laughable. In the same way, this, the pageantry, the murmuring in a dead language, the gaudily bejeweled midget half-Negress these people are worshipping as if the icon were holy instead of standing in for something that was holy — all this is in fact solemn and in fact also mistaken, absurd, laughable.

The crowd seems to know it, as there are those among them praying, pinning money grimly to the ribbons that drag along the pavement behind the Negress’s palanquin, and those also clapping and singing and laughing full-throatedly. The men carrying the idol are almost as white as he is; they are even dressed in white, they don’t know that they’re out of place in this place, like the idol they’re carrying, like the woman whose face he is searching for in the crowd.

And it comes back to him now that, walking home through the dark streets, silently with his cousin, making his way as one used to do at night by the light of the celestial bodies, he had asked himself, Why did I keep playing, why was I, am I, not ashamed to have been thought mistaken, laughable, absurd?

He asked his cousin, “Did you hear that person laugh? Was it a man laughing?” And his cousin said no, he was mistaken, it wasn’t a laugh, it was a woman singing along, she was merrily singing the tune he played.

And later that night, mounting the stairs to his room and hearing the click, click, click of his hard-soled shoes on the wooden steps and regarding even the clicking as the solemn expression of his solitude, he was struck by how solemn, in fact, it was when regarded by his own mind, and how also the very same self-solemnness when observed by the mind of another would be laughable.

But he felt a solace in this: that what is solemn to me can be laughable to you and still be no less solemn. Because the person he believed had laughed at him, or else had sung merrily along with him, was still, of necessity — he promised himself not to forget, but he did forget— looking right into him, apprehending the self that he felt, that his name failed adequately to name. As misery and mercy are the same, the first being what God wishes you to feel and the second the version of empathy he feels for you when you are miserable.

If she wasn’t dead, she would be nearly middle-aged by now. Her face could be among the faces of the white women murmuring in their black clothes, whom he is studying one by one as they pass. The crowd is so dense, the street so narrow, that children have climbed the curbside ginkgoes and sweet gums, the telephone poles, the gutters, up there where it must be cooler and the air must be moving instead of stagnating sickeningly in the heat, as it does down here with him among the crowd. There is a bakery with little girls on the roof and a boy and a miserable-looking man in a full suit staring at the backs of the legs of one of the girls as the jeweler was doing before.

If she wasn’t dead, she could call him by his name — will no one ever call him by his name again, sweetly? — but there is a crucial and mundane obstacle in the way of the fulfillment of this hope:

Sixteen and one half years ago, he had climbed up off the parlor floor, poured himself a glass of water, sat down again on the sofa, introduced himself, and asked her what her name was. But she didn’t answer. And he introduced himself again, courteously, asking if she might do him the favor of repeating his name back to him — hoping this way he could be fixed, at least in the universe of words, completely, could be turned into a word so that at least, if he couldn’t be real, he could be not alone. But her eyes were closed, her face was a slack red mask. And he doesn’t know if she didn’t repeat his name for him because she had heard but refused, or because she was already dead or unconscious from the knock of her head on the marble edge of the coffee table, in the parlor there, with an ashtray on it, and an unfinished hand of solitaire.

Night was falling, amid the mass of people and the merrily singing horns.

Solemnity is comical and comedy is solemn. As is evident from these whitish people praying to a Negress, as if she were in fact the thing she only symbolized, and from these Negroes who are, look at them, taking one another’s hands to dance now in the solemnly empty space behind the band that forms the end of the procession up the avenue.

As was evident also when laughing David, dressed only in a linen ephod, danced before the solemn Ark of the Lord to the sound of the singing of the Israelites and the sound of lyres, lutes, tambourines, cymbals, and castanets. And also when Ham, the son of Noah and the father of Canaan, saw his father passed out from drinking and naked in his tent, and went out and told his brothers, thinking it was funny, but they did not see that the nakedness of their father could be laughable, too, and went into the tent backward, a cloak on their shoulders, and covered him, with their eyes averted.