Salvatore Scibona - The End

The Negroes are dancing, eight of them, and there is also an old Negro man with close-cropped white hair pointing vehemently at his shoes, and at them, and at his shoes, growling, “You all stop it! You all stop it, now! Get back here, stop it!” Unseeing — the old Negro man unseeing — that the crowd was laughing and clapping its hands to the clamorous, brassy music.

Where has she gone, the girl with the pink legs and the pinafore? You call it a pinafore, a “pinned-in-front,” although the garment, the thing, is buttoned up the back. Which is to say, the name doesn’t need the thing. As the Lord God said there would be light; and a vault between the waters; and on the earth trees bearing fruit, each with its own kind of seed; before the things took form. So that at last, this evening if she were only to see him and accuse him by his name, he would return to the unalloyed natural state that precedes being a thing: being a word. His father was called the same name, and his father, too. His name doesn’t need him.

So that at last, the jeweler having lost track of the girl, night having begun to fall, and he standing at the perimeter of the gap in the crowd in which the Negroes are dancing, a merry-solemn hope emerges from the bottom of his mind: that his name, having preceded him, will succeed him. He wants to laugh out loud in front of all these people — that should a final separation between the thing he is and the name of the thing be at last effected, then his name (the only part of him that can truly be said to be alive) will keep being alive because people, these people here, will want to know who he was, what was his name, and will discover it, and say it out loud.

Gary didn’t come from here. He was born in a suburban hospital on the South Side. But he loved the feast. It gave him a warm feeling. He used to come down here with his mother and dad when he was a boy. Richer people had the summer cottage on Kelleys Island; he had this, these streets, the carnival crowd.

He didn’t speak the language. He knew a handful of dialect words for garden vegetables, kitchen tools, colored people; heirloom words you couldn’t learn from any dictionary. His father was born in a bedroom in one of these tenements. He didn’t know which, and he was never going to know because his father was dead.

Gary was a member of five formal associations: the United Auto Workers, the Veterans of Foreign Wars, the American Legion, his softball league, and the Democratic Party. He had two kids, a boy and a girl. His wife took dictation downtown. Maybe six associations if you counted the Methodist Church, but he went only on Christmas and Easter. He felt he belonged here. In Elephant Park. He felt his boy especially belonged here and needed to be taken to the Feast of the Assumption on an annual basis because they lived in an itty-bitty world of cereal and carpeting and because the boy had two names, a first and a last, one for the little self, one for the big self, the shared identity across centuries and an ocean, a name that, when you spoke it, others connected you with a clan and a place. And in this part of town, when they introduced themselves, they said the last name first and the first name last, and the priority here was unmistakable.

He would die. His daughter would acquire a new name. He wanted for his boy in the years to come to say their name and feel the completeness of self that Gary felt when he said it. He had cousins who agreed it was the least they could do to take their boys down here and watch what happened, participate instead of just hearing about, preserve this thing of ours that’s slipping away from us.

Their family name was Ragusa. But some of the cousins spelled it Ragosa, so nobody really knew.

He tried to make his boy eat these deep-fried artichokes he’d just bought from a street vendor and the boy gagged, but the kid had to eat, so Gary bought him some taffy, individually wrapped in six colors, manufactured in Delaware. There were people handing out prayer cards, which were, he didn’t know, in Latin probably, and the kid wanted to know what do these words mean, and Gary had to say, “I don’t know.”

There were all manner of different peoples down here for the feast these days. There were Slovaks and Serbs and Chinese, even. And he was annoyed because they didn’t belong here like he did.

The boy groused about how crowded and how hot, and Gary wanted to explain how the boy was meant to appreciate. How they were participating now in this idolatrous thing. The men were going to carry a statue through a street with music thrumming and torches alongside and manic chanted prayers, and it was going to transport them all into the deep past.

The client, sitting on the oilcloth with which Lina had covered the bottom half of the bed, bent to remove her shoes. Lina put them on the floor, the toes under the bureau, out of the way. Then the client asked her aunt to leave the room while she undressed. Outside, a man selling fruit raised his voice over the voice of the crowds. Federica asked should she and Lina leave the room, too, and the client said she didn’t know what difference that would make.

Rocco was dying in Mrs. Marini’s lavatory. Maybe they’d made him drink too much and he was on his knees before the commode. Meantime, Ciccio was carrying on about Manifest Destiny and the War of 1812. They were in her kitchen in their street shoes, waiting for Rocco to finish whatever he was doing so that they could make their passage through the feast.

The boy said, “Look, it’s not like we would have had to conquer every little town in Manitoba. There was no Manitoba. The game was all about Montreal. If you cut off their supply channels from the British, the other little cities to the west would have fallen off, and we would have picked them up. We could have been bigger than Russia.”

A spool of kitchen thread sat on the counter. She’d used it to sew up the braciole for lunch. She opened the cupboard, intending to put it away, but then she had a better idea. “Get me a scissors,” she told him.

His mouth drooped with remorse. He felt the loss of the arctic empire personally. She unwound a length of string and had him cut it off. Then she rolled it and deposited it in her pocket and put the spool in the cupboard.

The baker strode up the darkened corridor, faceless and stately in the abstracting shadows with his great shoulders and narrow hip bones. Then he came into the disillusioning light. His wavy hair was mussed. Water had splotched his coat, and his gray, uncreased trousers were roughly cuffed at the hems, as though he had shrunken since the time the trousers fit him well. He tried to grin, the little eyes blinking in the sun, his hands dripping. And they departed.

They lost him inside of two minutes. The crowd was immense. She knew they’d lose Rocco, but he was now expendable. She waited for Ciccio to get a couple of feet in front of her and then tied an end of the string around her wrist. Then she yelled at him to slow down and not to forsake her.

“Give me the paw,” she said.

“Which?”

She made a wave of indifference, the string dangling, and he offered a whole arm, looking off into the crowd, as if it were help to steady herself that she was asking him for, which she was insulted that he’d presume. She tied the loose end of the string to his wrist.

“This is a leash of some kind,” he said, looking down.

“As you wish.”

“But I wanted to—”

“What did you want to?”

“Me and Nino were—”

“Was our plan unclear to you in some way?”

“Rocco’s not with us. We lost him.”