Me, You

  In the sky the rockets of the saints were exploding. An uncontrollable reflex made Nicola lower his head. He quickly raised it again but at the next explosion ducked once more. I kept my head up, knowing nothing about gunfire or how one feels under the real thing. My anger looked on the pyrotechnic artillery of the festival as a good omen. My anger was arrogant compared with the recoil from the blasts that bent Nicola’s neck, his physical memory of attempts against his youth exposed to a bomb-filled sky.

  “They were not like us, each one of them saw himself as part of a larger body. They were proud of that body. They obeyed the way a finger obeys the brain. They were no longer men as we understand them but men like replacement parts. They only felt right in uniform. They called prisoners pieces when they counted them. All other peoples were inferior to them, including us Italians. We were under their orders, but there were some awful things they couldn’t make us do. We remained men, soldiers by force who couldn’t wait to take off their uniform, stop fighting, return to work. I kept thinking about the fishnet that had cost me a year’s work and was still new. And I ached with jealousy to think that someone else might use it, that my wife might sell it in order to eat. She didn’t. During my hours off duty I fished in the river with a rod. I suffered so much heartache then, that ever since I never wanted to use a rod again. I used to bring my catch to my adoptive family, bless them wherever they are.”

  He was eager to explain himself and searched for expressions in Italian that he translated from Neapolitan. He shook his head from the strain. I was receiving a legacy of words that I stored in the jumble of my thoughts and in the confusion of my desperate need to reply.

  To change the subject I asked him if he was going to the festival. I would be going later with Daniele.

  “Me too, later, I’m taking the family.”

  Those of the group still remaining on the island had made a date to meet and pushed into the festival as a tight unit. All the inhabitants came to stroll through the few streets. It was early evening; the lanterns strung along the way made the sky pale. Caia held my arm and complimented my clean shirt. “I have shoes on too,” I said, mockingly showing off my sandals. I saw that chipped piece of tooth emerge, making her smile all the broader.

  The crowd broke up our group. The two of us clutched each other’s arms to avoid being separated. Caia asked me to buy her a cone of cotton candy. To be heard over the clamor, she raised her voice in a child’s squeal. She grasped the cone, plunged her face into it, and finished it in a flash. I removed the little granules of sugar stuck to her cheeks. She was joyful the way one is when a childish mood comes over a grown person, when a child’s wriggle takes hold of the feet, making them want to scamper about. She pulled my arms, trying to run right into the mob. I pretended to struggle, to be panting for air, and wiped the palm of my right hand across my temples all the way to the back of my neck. At one point, she shook her head and whispered in my ear, “Tateh, I know you’re here, there’s no need for any more signs.”

  Her game with me struck me funny and brought forth a throaty laugh I had never heard from myself before. It was warm, slow, and came in short bursts. I felt it deep inside, heavy, filled with affection for my little Chaiele in the midst of the festival. She heard my laughter and instantly leaned her head against my shoulder. Above us the explosions started up again, no louder than champagne bottles uncorked in the sky.

  She tried the shooting gallery, firing a compressed air gun at balls in a cage. Then she wanted a little doll no bigger than her hand, and I remembered to buy a cork for the demijohn. We came across Nicola and his family. I greeted him from a distance, but he didn’t notice me. Then we ran into my father, who in his distraction and without his glasses greeted only Caia. She laughed because not even my father recognized me. I was transformed and no one knew who I was.

  “Tonight only I know who you are at this festival.”

  “I’m Tateh?”

  “Yes.”

  “Of course I’m Tateh. Tonight I am your father and you are my little Chaiele, and I know how to say your name the way he did, Chaiele.”

  “You have to be Tateh. The teeth of a fish even engraved the Yiddish t of tateh on your hand.”

  We went off arm in arm, she pulling me a little and I a little tipsy from the festival, from her, from the game between us that was going full sail. Her hand clutched mine where the moray had sunk its teeth. I felt tired and was afraid I was coming down with a fever that could rob me of the strength to get to the fire. I even saw one of the Germans who had been at the pizzeria but he wasn’t at all aware of us, and I felt the cork for the demijohn in my pocket, and no, I was not tired. Caia was leaning heavily on my arm, shifting her weight onto me so that she was light, and she moved her feet as though she were dancing, or marching, making me list to one side. And I took on her weight and shuffled along at her festival, those last hours before her departure, before losing sight of her forever. I suddenly had the impulse to pick her up and lift her onto my shoulders. From a merry-go-round came the refrain of a popular song: “I’ll never forget you, lovely Piedmontese girl, you’ll be the only star that shines for me.” And I was able to pick her up because she had become light and I heavy.

  No one took notice of me the whole time I was in the crowd. A few people said hello to Caia. The mob was pressing and at times we came to a complete halt. That was when she took the opportunity to kiss me on the cheek; my skin puckered where she had placed her lips. I returned her kiss, placing mine on her hairline at the top of her forehead, and under my palms I felt the beat of her life pulsing in her temples. “Nu, nu,” the pulses of your blood beat under my hands, in this mob I am yours, but so much yours, Chaiele, that I will never be able to belong to anyone else.”

  “You, mine,” she told me, and pulled me, saying, “Come!” because something attracted her elsewhere.

  Near the merry-go-round Daniele was talking to two foreign girls and making them laugh. Caia had confetti all over her and had become a little girl. As for me, my head was spinning with thoughts like, I’ve waited so long, Chaiele, to take you to a festival, to wander around the stands, to hold you close. It seems to me that I’ve been yours since the beginning of time, nor is this our first time. Is that how it is for you too, to become aware at the apex of happiness that there was a before and that this is a repetition? But I didn’t say any of this, not wishing to disturb her childlike state, and wishing rather to follow her to her final pirouette of gaiety, until she fell into my arms fast asleep.

  We were approaching the open stretch of the pier and the jetty of the isthmus that leads to the castle. A band was playing on a platform. On a pedestal stood the figure of a female saint. Pinned to her robe were bank notes and slips of paper with writing on them. Caia led me to the plaster saint covered with strips of paper as she was covered with confetti and said, looking at her, “Don’t I resemble her, Tateh?”

  “The way life resembles a mannequin. You are alive, Chaiele, you are alive in the midst of a festival, and this store dummy is a poor imitation of your beauty. You are alive, Chaiele, and for one evening so am I, close to your life.”

  It was a solemn, resonant voice that came from a wooden throat, as from a guitar case. Even if I cleared my throat, it didn’t bring back my own voice.

  “Yes, yes, Tatehle, I am alive, that’s why my name is Chaie, because it means life. It was you who gave it to me.”

  I read the lines written on the white slips pinned to the statue’s robe. They were thanks for blessings received. One slip contained a line from the Bible: “Thus let all thine enemies perish, O Lord, but let those who love Him be as the rising sun in its might,” Judges, Deborah. All your enemies will perish, my Chaiele, they will perish in this way, I thought, touching the cork in my pocket. She also read the slip and asked me in a little girl’s voice, “And will you always love me?” distracting me from my thoughts about the fire and making me reply, “Like the rising sun in its might.” And she laughed again with her
chipped tooth. I closed my eyes, overcome with fatigue, and leaned against her.

  “Good-bye, Tateh.”

  When I heard her voice taking leave of me I roused myself and turned around, but Caia was still there holding my arm. Behind the statue I managed to get the frog out of my throat. My adolescent voice returned and my fatigue passed. I felt restored to myself, a relief mixed with emptiness. I was a boy again, light in years, once again uneasy about being with Caia, a name that means life, and until a moment ago I had known that, but at that moment I was surprised by it. I was surprised by everything. She had detached herself from her weight on my arm, from her childhood astride my shoulders. Caia was once again grown up, and the gratitude she had expressed earlier was now far away. The void on my arm informed me that I was once again myself.

  We joined the others, who were already at the foot of the pier. They were eating watermelon and spitting the seeds at their feet. Daniele introduced the two German girls, who seemed nice and spoke a funny kind of English. Caia was very nice to them, speaking German and serving as interpreter for the rest of the evening. It was fascinating to watch her move from one language to the other, switching the sentences as they arrived and departed. I told her she was like a stationmaster and I would have liked to give her a whistle. She replied that trains had been her passion as a child and that she had made her father laugh when she told him she wanted to run a train. “Now you make languages travel,” I said.

  “Yes, those of others.” A little naked doll peeked out of her pocket.

  Daniele had his eye on one of the German girls and proposed going to see a movie at the open-air theater in the pine grove. On the island there were no closed movie theaters. It was unusual to opt for a movie, since there was always something better to do, but Daniele didn’t want to end the summer with yet another serenade on the beach. Caia was a remarkable interpreter. Her German was a birdsong. In her mouth it melted into crisp syllables where consonants collided. It became a language that could joke and warble. Caia’s voice managed to cleanse it in my ears. She knew how to handle wounds.

  Daniele turned into a tour guide and showed the island to the two guests: stray dogs, oleanders, solemn turds left by the horses that drew the carriages, the bar that had the best gelati, pignoli to crack open and offer on the palm of the hand, taken by the fingers of the foreign girl who slowly selected the tiny nut from the center of the hand, thereby prolonging the contact for another second. The festival vanished in a buzz at our backs, and all together the group walked back up the road to the pine grove, untroubled by the impending good-byes. Daniele was a master at gags. Bursts of laughter rained down from the sky along with the flaming ribbons of the last clustered stars. The tallest pines left only a stripe of sky high up. We walked in the middle of the road to stay out in the open.

  We came to the arena, as the opening between the trees was called, with its rows of folding wooden chairs and a screen that rippled in the wind, making waves on the faces of the actors. They were showing For Whom the Bell Tolls. Daniele sat next to his favorite. I did not find a seat next to Caia but in the row behind her. She turned around, gesturing for me to put my arms across the back of her seat. I did so and she laid her head on them and I watched the film in the most uncomfortable and most delicious position of my entire life. The smell of her hair heavy with the festive crowd and the noise, my fingers sticky with pine resin, the sky stretched out above, descending to the ground in a puff of warm breeze: it was air and scent to breathe in and never again exhale. I inhaled it, blocking out all other senses. I remember little of the film, the breathless beauty of a wartime love.

  Caia was leaning on my arms and I was so close to her that her hair was just inches from my eyes. For a while she would watch the film, then look up at the night that roofed the movie house. She would turn away from the story by leaning her head back slightly, bringing it closer to mine. I would then press my forehead against it and while she opened her eyes wide to the darkness of the sky, I would close mine in the back of her neck. I listened to the beat of the pulse in my wrist which was holding up her head. I felt the emptiness around us. We were a tight cluster of grapes about to be picked. The cluster trembles at the arrival of the harvesters, the stem vibrates with pain at the sound of the nearby scythes, but not us; we were steadfast and ready for the hand that would pluck us from that summer to make of us the fruit of a harvest.

  At the end of the film, when Daniele’s German girlfriend began to cry and someone else reached for a handkerchief and blew her nose, I wanted to say that there was nothing to cry about, that the two people in the story had shared a love, and that tears were a mistake because it was right, it was right like that. Caia rose up from the chair and my arms felt bare, but also free to move, no longer bound by the duty to serve as her support. The group broke up in last farewells, yawns, wisecracks.

  “You’re a good cushion.”

  “And you’re a rascal.”

  Seeing him head toward the beach arm in arm with the German girl, someone called out, “Daniele, don’t you know you live on the other side?” Before taking leave of the summer crowd, I managed to say without lowering my voice, “Good night, Chaiele.”

  I was alone. In my numbed arms a repressed strength was building up. My stomach muscles were so hard I could count them under my fingers. I was ready.

  That night I sucked gasoline through the rubber hose from the tank of my father’s car, filling the demijohn with five liters. I stoppered it with the cork and hid it. I did not go to the pensione for a final inspection, so as not to risk Daniele’s return to our room before me. It was Caia’s last night on the island. We had left each other with an appointment for the next day. I would carry her suitcase to the pier and we would walk together one more time.

  Daniele came home late, completely disheveled. He had scored with the German girl and wanted to talk.

  “Funny, one night you get into a fight with Germans and the next you make love with a German girl who’s bright and amusing. What bizarre people.”

  “It could be that the children are better than the parents,” I replied. “But look at you, you look as though you got into a worse fight tonight. That girl avenged her compatriots.”

  “You’re right, it was a terrible vengeance, I can hardly stand up and my neck is full of bites. I couldn’t help laughing at the memory of the night before. I tried to tell her that we got into a fight with Nazis. Hearing that word, she made a face of disgust and said Scheisse, meaning shit, Caia explained to me. A propos, you disappeared in the middle of the festival. I thought the two of you had gone off to say good-bye.”

  His familiarity suddenly struck me as inappropriate.

  “No, we were surrounded by the crowd and we walked around the stands. But what about you?” I asked, to get Caia out of the conversation. “How did you meet the two girls?”

  I didn’t want anyone to talk about Caia again. I would have erased her from everybody’s mind to keep her apart from the jumbled memories of a summer. I wanted to be the sole custodian of her name.

  “It was easy, they couldn’t make themselves understood by a vendor about the price of a brush. I intervened as interpreter. He was ripping them off. Then I offered them a slice of watermelon and finally you arrived with Caia and we had an official interpreter.”

  Once again a drop of acid rose in my throat at the sound of her name. I would have liked to correct him and tell him that her name was Chaie—Chaiele for me—and that even he, Daniele, had come close to her without knowing her. I went back to my diversionary tactic: “They were all alone, there wasn’t anybody with them?”

  “Completely alone. They arrived just in time for the festival. They come from Cologne, a city still in ruins, much worse than ours. It seems that after the war the only things still surviving were the cathedral and the Rhine. They grew up playing hide and seek in the rubble. They’re fun. Marion was wild for kisses. Pity I’m leaving tomorrow.”

  Yes, leave, travel with Caia, ta
ke her to the train, in safety. What will happen here won’t be able to touch her. She will be far away, she will be sleeping when a boy descends from his house at night to set a fire. It will be a fire far from her, from the losses she suffered, it will be a fire that won’t compensate her, won’t remove a single thorn. It’s her father’s fire. Chaiele, you wanted me to be like this, you gave me another name, you brought about unknown gestures in my body and a blood bond with you. I entrust you to Daniele; he will take you to safety before the fire.

  Thoughts, decisive thoughts, were taking root in the center of my brain while I sat on the bed not listening to the end of that older boy’s account of his evening. Good night. I grew up in the wake of your suffering, but before knowing you I spent a year asking books in what century I was living, and on what ground I trod. Meeting you was like the sun splitting my skin and the rough rocks hardening the soles of my feet. You made another skin grow over mine. You gave me access to the world by calling me yours. When you have left I will show what I’m capable of with my fire. It’s not mine, I inherited it. I inherited your mourning along with the action that another father did not take in his lifetime. I inherited his debt, a fire in filial hands. You, Chaiele, called me Tateh. I accept it herewith. Tomorrow night I will be your tateh and I will burn your persecutors. It may be late to stop them, but it is only now that am I alive.

  “Good night. Come on, let’s go to sleep.”

  “Yes, Daniele, good night to you.”

  Day came, and with it the sirocco that raised dust as high as the eyes. I left a note for Daniele, “See you at the port,” but I couldn’t get myself to write “with Caia.” I was at her house early and was astonished that she was all ready to go. She said good-bye to her hosts, to the friend who had offered her that summer holiday on the island in exchange for her kindness at boarding school. She had left a beautiful gift for her. It was only then that I realized Caia must have means. I was the object of a few discreet witticisms about being her cavalier, but, like a good valet, I maintained my reserve. We left amid farewells and I expressed surprise over her single suitcase.