Erri De Luca - God's Mountain

MARIA SLOWLY comes to a stop. I’ve tired her, I’ve hurt her, I don’t know. What did we just do, Marì? “We made love,” she says. So this is love? This is what you taught me? “No,” she says, “I don’t teach you. I just start, you do the rest.” Making love must be mysterious, it happens by itself, I think. In the meantime my piscitiello is back in its usual place. “Arò si’ gghiuto?” Where did you go? I feel like asking it in Neapolitan, but I don’t. “Now I feel better about all those times that this disgusted me,” Maria says in a small voice, without all the usual toughness in her words. She’s gotten hungry. We get up from the floor and put our clothes back on. She fixes her hair; I keep the light off. The kitchen has a little heat from the oven and we’re still warm with love. We serve the capon with potatoes, sitting close to each other, side by side. We eat with our hands, bumping our elbows into each other, then we look and laugh at each other in the dark catching light from outside. We put our napkins around our necks, a few burps escape our lips, the boomerang is at the table with us. She puts the new potatoes in my mouth, I pretend I’m choking, we sop the bottom of the pan with our bread.

“IT’S NICE to be just the two of us and no one else,” Maria says with her mouth full. Our eyes have gotten used to the dark. We put a blanket over our shoulders and eat the almond cookies. She made a lot and we eat them all. None are left over. “Next time I’m going to make a pie,” she says. In the meantime, from the house next door, bagpipers start to play a song. The family invited them up to make a little music. We can hear it clearly. It must be so loud in their house that they have to cover their ears. We rub our messy mouths together and lick each other like cats. Later on we get into bed, my little bed in the closet. We fall asleep wrapped around each other so tight that whoever wakes first will have to wake the other to get free. Our bodies are tied in a knot.

DON CICCIO the caretaker was speaking with a tenant, saying that last night the landlord went crazy, knocking at the door to Maria’s house for an hour. The neighbors woke up and got into a fight with him. On the second floor we didn’t hear a thing. Even though it’s Christmas I’m going to the workshop to open it anyway. Painted furniture dries better in the air. Rafaniello arrives after me and starts to work at his bench. The wings are filling out his jacket, bigger than his hump. How do they stay closed up in there? No one notices, no one catches it with their eyes. Master Errico can tell straight away if a sharp corner is off square by even a millimeter, but he wouldn’t even look up if Rafaniello walked in one day without his hump. We’re alone in the workshop. It’s a nice day and Master Errico’s gone off fishing for sure. Rafaniello asks me how the boomerang is doing. I take it out of my jacket and give it to him. He pretends to sniff it and then kisses it. I look, but I say nothing. Both the wood and Rafaniello have gotten lighter.

I PUT the furniture outside. Donna Assunta the washerwoman opens her ground-floor apartment and starts hanging out the wash. This morning there aren’t many people about. The sun is out and they’ll dry quickly. Good morning, I tell her. She asks how it is that we’re open for Christmas. The furniture has to dry, too, Donna Assù, not just the clothes, I answer. She went to midnight mass. Father Petrella gave a nice sermon. He said that the rockets being shot into space go nowhere. They get lost in the sky. But the comet came close to Earth to announce the birth of the infant, the bambeniello . “More than this, what more could we possibly want from the stars? He spoke well, kid, quickly quickly, like he always does, but really well, and you should come to church. You don’t want to grow up like some hoodlum. The last apprentice that worked for Master Errico never went to mass and now he’s at the Poggioreale prison. Be smart, kid,” Donna Assunta says, pinning the clothes to a line half as long as the alley with her chapped red hands. I nod yes with my head. She tries to think of the right words for me. Then she walks away and I mutter a spell to keep me out of Poggioreale: “Sciòsciò, sciòsciò.” I also say “cananóre,” which I just learned.

I SPEAK with Rafaniello. Today we’ve got the time. Don’t you ever miss your hometown? I ask. His hometown doesn’t exist anymore. Neither the living nor the dead remain, they made all of them disappear. “I don’t miss it,” he says. “I feel its presence. In my thoughts and when I sing, when I fix a shoe, I feel the presence of my hometown. It comes to visit me all the time, now that it doesn’t have a place of its own. In the cries of the waterman ascending Montedidio with his cart to sell sulfur water in earthenware jars. I can hear a few syllables from my hometown even in his voice.” He quiets down for a while with nails in his mouth and his head bent over the sole of a shoe. He sees that I’ve stayed near him and continues: “When you get homesick, it’s not something missing, it’s something present, a visit. People and places from far away arrive and keep you company for a while.” So when I start feeling like I miss someone I should think that they’re present instead? “Exactly, that way you’ll remember to greet every absence and welcome it in.” So when you’ve flown away I shouldn’t miss you? “No,” he says, “when you start to think of me it’ll mean that I’m with you.” I write down what Rafaniello said about homesickness on the scroll and now it’s better. His way with thoughts is like his way with shoes. He turns them upside down on his bench and fixes them.

PAPA CAME home to change his shirt and found Maria there. She told him that she was there to straighten up the house and give me a hand. He thanked her, got a change of clothes for Mama, and left. He came by the shop to see me and didn’t say a word about Maria. His eyes were glazed from fatigue. I don’t ask, he doesn’t say. His alliance with her is tighter and I’m not included. My alliance with Maria shuts us off from the world, too. Change happens, but especially to us. Who else has a face as crumpled as Papa’s? Who else has a hump that’s sprouting wings? Who else has a body ready to throw a boomerang? And now, of all times, Maria has broken away from an old man’s filthy hands and been held by my hands, smoothed by sawdust, on the highest rooftop in Montedidio. When the fishnet gets closer to shore it starts to weigh less and can be pulled in more quickly. The same thing is happening to us. Even the scroll is winding up more quickly, drawn in by the weight of what’s already been written.

I TAKE Rafaniello with me to the rooftop where the washbasins are. He hobbles up the stairs. He doesn’t know how to walk. He leans over the bulwark, looking south and east. He opens the whites of his eyes, making the green circle pop out. It’s not long now before we’ll be saying good-bye. I ask him what he’s thinking. It’s noontime on Christmas. Everyone’s at home. We’re the only ones outside and the sea air is shining. Staring out without looking at me, he says, “We have a proverb that says, ‘This is the sky and this is the earth,’ to indicate two opposite points. Up here they’re close together.” You’re right, Don Rafaniè, if you jump off the top of Montedidio you’re already in the sky. “It’ll take a few jumps and a big push. When you fly in your dreams you’re weightless. You don’t have to convince your strength to keep you up high. But when you add in the wings and the body, you have to be prepared to climb the air. You need something powerful to blast you away from Earth. I’m a shoemaker, a sándler, they used to say in my hometown. I fix shoes, I know feet, I know how they’re supported, how they manage to balance the whole body towering over them. I know how useful the arches are, the hardness of the heel, the spring inside the anklebone that accompanies long jumps, wide jumps, high jumps. I know the suffering of the feet and the pleasure of being able to stand on any kind of surface, even a tightrope. Once I made a pair of buckskin shoes for a tightrope walker in the circus. Here in Naples I’ve learned that feet know how to sail. I’ve repaired shoes for sailors who have to withstand the rising and falling pendulum of the sea. Feet brought me as far as Montedidio, they saved me. My people say that the wolf’s got something to eat thanks to its feet, not its teeth. I even have a hump that weighs down on me, so what is such an earthbound creature doing, flapping his wings in the sky below the stars?”