Salvatore Scibona - The End

“So I’m mistaken?”

“It’s a trick I do. Do you want to know what it is?”

“Yeah, I would.”

“It’s a device I’ve devised,” Rocco said. He inquired of himself why he had presumed to dispose of his own waste on the boy’s plate. His self responded, This is one of the gestures of which a man may avail himself to say to a boy or a younger man, I am the boss, but I like you.

“Here we go. Let me have it.”

“If you want to know, I’ll tell you.”

“Faster, please,” the old lady said, stabbing a knife in the cheese.

“The man fills my tank with gasoline. I keep the change in my pocket. When I get home I slip the silver down there into the tank. When eventually the car is defunct, I drop the tank, I cut a hole, I collect my change. Here is the money for the next car.”

“You sit down,” Mrs. Marini said, unscrewing the pit from her peach, “you take a nap, you go to the dining car and you buy a sandwich. Isn’t that a good time?”

Rocco begged leave to smoke. The boy was dispatched in search of an ashtray.

The conversation turned to the war and the recent cease-fire and then to a curious story that he was surprised to find she had failed to notice in the Voice of the People and the Reserve Gazette: Immediately after the armistice, the North Koreans had agreed to release a number of United Nations captives in advance of the general prisoner exchange. (Rocco had had no way of knowing if Mimmo would be among them.) But once the initial exchange was actually carried out, about a dozen prisoners of the promised number were unaccounted for—

The boy, having delivered the ashtray and a box of matches, pulled out his chair, whereupon he was regarded by the old lady, who adjusted her eyeglasses.

“What? I’m interested,” he said.

She lifted a hand.

“I have something to add.”

She lifted the hand another inch, and the big boy plodded to the kitchen, from where Rocco then heard the washing of the dishes.

A week had followed with no further news. Then recently they’d published interviews with the first round of released prisoners, who described the conditions in the camps: to eat, cracked corn, one cup daily; men kept for weeks in underground cells too small to stand up or lie down in; death from untreated wounds, malnutrition, dysentery. The North Koreans and Chinese had forced them to smoke marijuana and tried to brainwash them with respect to thieving imperialists, glorious revolution, inevitable victory of the proletariat. There were colored and white soldiers together in the same huts in subzero temperatures without firewood, but it was with the colored prisoners that they had made a special reeducational effort. For example, the colored soldiers had been made to watch news footage that depicted how the police at home were handling certain crowds of colored people involved in political demonstrations.

Some of the colored prisoners finally capitulated. They were offered houses, young wives, and jobs in Red China, where they could live out their lives in a workers’ paradise, and they accepted. And this handful of individuals represented, it would appear, the prisoners missing from the original exchange. Wasn’t that something.

The funk of August midafternoon now permeated the dining room. From outside, the beginnings of the feast crowd in the avenue rumbled.

How sad, Rocco concluded, and it just went to show that, unfortunately, it was true what one heard so often repeated, that a Negro did not have the patriotic feelings of a white person.

“You or I,” she said, “would never think of leaving our native soil for a home, a spouse, an occupation on the other side of the world. The idea would never enter our heads.”

“Well, now.”

“Not on pain of death.”

“Wait, wait. You misunderstand me. I have two points. My first point is that there is moving away, and then there is to defect, to make treason against the home country, and so on and so forth.”

“I contributed cheerfully with my tax dollars to the destruction of Cassino not ten years ago, which is in my home province.”

“That’s different. That’s not the same, and that’s different.”

“Two points you said you had.”

“It’s not the same, and I move on in any event to my second point, which is that these people were brought, but you and I came. Which there’s a difference. If I’m a colored person, do I salute the flag? Who knows.”

“In fact, the importation of slaves to this country was outlawed in 1808,” she said, sucking her teeth.

“I’m having a day today where I can see the big picture,” he said. He was not in control of his mouth in the usual way. The uncooked contents of his brain were transported so quickly out of his mouth that he had to listen to himself to find out what he was saying. There was one Rocco outside, in the world, holding forth. And there was another one down in here, observing the proceedings, feeling awake and asleep at once, and feeling — what was the word, how could you say it? — joy. However, he did not feel it at this precise moment. He’d been feeling it a couple of seconds ago, before he’d noticed. And he wanted to not notice it again, the joy, if that could be done, to not know it, to lose it and thus to get it back again, like a Christian does with his dignity when he puts his faith in the Lord.

“Let me say politely that you are seeing the little picture,” he said, “such as picking nits over somebody that was brought versus somebody that his grandfather was brought. In the big picture, let me say politely that you are just talking like certain people.”

“Which people?”

“The people who say, Let the sparrow mate with the crow, and so forth.”

Ciccio came back into the dining room with a dish towel around his neck like a scarf.

“Ciccio has been listening?” she said.

“More or less,” said the boy.

“Ciccio may now describe his opinion.”

“Yesterday,” he said, “in the early paper I saw an update, like, how that most of the ones that defected were white guys. One of them who got out said the ones who stayed were sure there was going to be a Communistical revolution worldwide, even right here in our own country, like, in a few months. So they figured they’d just cool their heels in China and wait for America to go socialist.”

“Your conclusions?” she said.

“They want to betray the government of the USA but not the place of the USA.”

“Very good. Now then”—she turned to Rocco—“my reading tells me that the sparrow and the crow cannot mate, as they are different species. However, mulattos, such as in the Caribbean they have many, demonstrate that black can mate with white and produce offspring. Therefore black and white are the same species and your metaphor has collapsed.” When the boy had come in she’d stopped speaking in English, but now she was switching from Italian to English and back again from one sentence to the next. “You are confusing physically impossible with morally repugnant. What you really meant to say when you said ‘mate’ was ‘live side by side with,’ which is distasteful enough.” A corner of the tablecloth was pulled taut by her twisted fingers.

“All this time, you know, I’ve never been inside your house,” Rocco said abruptly.

“Oh, that can’t be!” she said. “Oh, Mr. LaGrassa, I’m so ashamed. I thought at least — it can’t be!”

“On the porch and in the garden a few times but not inside.”

“I’m full to my eyes with regret,” she said. “I’ve never been in your house either.”

The only untidiness about this room was that the window looked out on the peeling, mud-splattered eyesore that was the rear of his bakery. He had looked at his own reflection in the other side of these windows — while he had the day’s first smoke, early in the morning, when all her lights were out and the blinds were pulled — maybe each day for the last thirty years.