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Salvatore Scibona: The End

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Salvatore Scibona The End

The End: краткое содержание, описание и аннотация

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An incredible debut and National Book Award-nominated novel-it's Memento meets Augie March. Didion meets Hitchcock (Esquire). It is August 15, 1953, the day of a boisterous and unwieldy street carnival in Elephant Park, an Italian immigrant enclave in northern Ohio. As the festivities reach a riotous pitch and billow into the streets, five members of the community labor under the weight of a terrible secret. As these floundering souls collide, one day of calamity and consequence sheds light on a half century of their struggles, their follies, and their pride. And slowly, it becomes clear that buried deep in the hearts of these five exquisitely drawn characters is the long-silenced truth about the crime that twisted each of their worlds. Cast against the racial, spiritual, and moral tension that has given rise to modern America, this first novel exhumes the secrets lurking in the darkened crevices of the soul of our country. Inventive, explosive, and revelatory, The End introduces Salvatore Scibona as an important new voice in American fiction.

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He mustered all the charity and patience within himself and whispered, “You must understand, my dear. They’re trying to stick their filthy fingers in my mouth and look inside.”

D’Agostino leaned back on his heels, out of the shadow of the awning, raised his face to the sky, then glanced behind himself, then turned again to Rocco. You would think, he said, that the government could at least read the identification tags that, like everybody knows, you wear in the service at all times, wouldn’t you?

In a sense, Rocco had to acknowledge, he could understand where the government was coming from, seeing as this boy they’d found was, according to the gentlemen from yesterday, in fact wearing the god tags of a Mimmo LaGrassa, and the serial number matched the one Rocco’d kept in his wallet since Mimmo had enlisted, which he kept the number for just such an occasion — rather dog tags he meant to say — and the height was the same.

He turned to the girl and said, “Satisfied?”

“I would very much enjoy an apple fritter,” she entreated.

He looked at the newspaper. He was full of rage and shame. He was saddened that Chiara should see him this way.

So the gentlemen from the Marine Corps, D’Agostino pursued, just to make clear, had said to him, “We need you to come identify”—like they were confused and they didn’t know — and here the paper made it out like this information was confirmed?

Why ask him about the newspaper? He didn’t write it.

D’Agostino looked up again, and back again, and forward. And how tragic, really, because the gentlemen from the Marine Corps had never used any words like, for example, We are sure or We confirm?

“Or a marmalade crescent?” said the girl.

Well, you might say, “I confirm that the moon is made of green cheese,” said Rocco, but if the moon isn’t in fact made of green cheese then you haven’t confirmed anything, because how could you be sure of a statement that was false? And so on and so forth.

Chiara flitted off on tiptoes, as little girls will do, or else she could not abide his sin.

Somewhere a bicycle bell was rung.

Or else it was a desk bell somebody was beating to demand service. A version of what he’d said to D’Agostino, mangled, doubtless, had permeated the host, and they didn’t like it. They maybe disbelieved him.

D’Agostino excused himself and peeled off in the direction of the bell. Others followed. Soon there was a wholesale dispersal of the verminous crowd. A few wished him courage, told him to keep his eye alive, and disappeared. Probably they were ashamed at having been so mistaken — probably.

In short order, all of the faces were facing away from him but one. They scattered into the side streets and the places of business along the Eleventh Avenue, but for one old woman who was making her way through the tangle of bodies in his direction. She was in the widow’s uniform — the black shoes, the black dress, the black purse. She came closer.

She said, “Mr. LaGrassa, you will come please to my house for lunch at one o’clock.” She held a clothespin, which she methodically snapped.

“I have to go to—”

“They told me where you have to go.” She held up a hand. Her name was Marini.

“I have to change my oil.”

“Change your oil. Wash your hands thoroughly. Climb onto my front porch. Knock on my door. Et cetera.”

In truth, he was starving. He said, “I guess I’ll come, then.”

“What is that, ‘I guess I’ll come’? What is that?”

He was standing now, in the sunlight. He looked up. He saw what it was that had snagged D’Agostino’s eye when he had looked up. A girl in a ratty yellow sun hat had ascended, by means not readily discernible, to the top of a telephone pole, where on a small plank she sat reading.


How long do you have to live in a place before you notice it? The whole morning was a dream. Around every corner was a view that should have been same old, same old, but today impressed itself on his mind as if for the first time and for all time. As in, Look, there’s a kid licking the streetcar tracks, wearing short pants — only it seemed to Rocco that he’d never seen the tracks or a child in short pants before and he was never going to forget this. As on a day when the ruler dies and everybody, without even trying, holds on to the slightest speck of mental lint from that day for years. As in, I was squirting blue sugar roses on a wedding cake when Loveypants popped the alley-oop door and whispered, “Harding went to Alaska, and now he’s dead.” And she had a tiny bit of snot dangling from her one nostril. And right away he knew it was going to be that dangling bit of snot he would remember. Today, with no apparent excuse, the neighborhood was full of these bits of snot, so to speak. A boy alone, eating a banana on the steps of the church. It must have been not going to work that did this. He had a bird’s-eye view of the forest for the trees. He went to Bastianazzo’s and got his cup refilled with the watery coffee available at that establishment. Bastianazzo himself pretended to be too busy ironing his aprons behind the counter to talk to him. He drifted about the streets awhile, noticing so much and considering the city itself, which he was about to depart for the first time in so many decades.

He liked to go up onto his roof in the summer and look at the city. He would straddle the peak and use the chimney crown as a table for his gin glass and his ashtray. Up there you could count on a breeze in the summertime, and when you are the baker and it’s summertime you will pay dearly for a cooling breeze. The house was on the tippy top of Elephant Park, and from there he could see the thousand glittering lamps above the highway, the spires of the many churches, the mills expiring their sulfurous clouds, the rim of the lake to his right. The city was a mammoth trash heap — even the lake was brown — but it was an honorable place. It put pretty to one side. Nobody ever came here to have a good time. It was a place for people who had quit being children. It was a place to be employed for a period of a half century and thence to pass out of this life. That nobody regarded it as anything else made it unique in his limited experience and sacred.

At home, he put on raggedy clothes. He drained and refilled the oil in the crankcase of his car, rubbed his hands with turpentine, washed them with soap, got back into his good duds, and walked to his luncheon appointment.

The woman Marini’s house stood directly behind his store and shared his alley, but he had never been inside. She was not of his class. Her husband had been a small-scale manufacturer of women’s shoes and evidently had left her with enough to live in a certain elegance as long as she pleased. There was a rumor that she earned other income from an illicit source, but Rocco didn’t need to believe it. Wasn’t the magic of compound interest illicit enough? Her own shoes, as it happened, were strictly plain Jane. She had been living in this very house for at least ten years by the time Rocco himself was born. She was ninety-three years old.

She came from Lazio; however, her enunciation of the Italian language was barren of regional influence and pitiless, as though each word were a butterfly she was shooting out of the air with a pistol. One could hear that she had learned her English from the German people who had lived here years ago. Today it was the Sicilians, such as Rocco himself, who prevailed. Then it would be somebody else. God is great.

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