WE USED to walk along the promenade by the Villa Comunale when the shoreline fishermen were hauling in the big net. There were six men to an end, all tugging together. The oldest one kept time, shouting heave-ho. The rope snaked from shoulder to shoulder, dragging the sea into land. The net came closer, wide and slow, while the two lines piled up in loops on the street. When the net came in, the fish sparkled, their whiteness leaping, flapping their tails by the hundreds, the net unloaded on dry land the pile of life stolen from the waves. Papa would say, “Behold the flames of the sea.” The smell of the waterfront was our perfume. In the peace-fulness of a summer day, when the sun was down, we’d stand there wordlessly, close to each other. We used to do it until last year. Until last year I was still a child.
THE SMELL of the port has risen all the way to our alley, and I forget my sadness. Master Errico saw how far away I looked and told me to drink some octopus broth. “Te magne ‘a capa e metti giudizio”; eat one and it’ll set your head straight. There’s an octopus vendor at the top of the opposite alley. The only thing he sells is, ’e purpe. Master Errico knows him, knows that he looks for octopus between the square stones of the outer breakwater. “He doesn’t fish for them,” he says. “He goes to pluck them out with his bare hands, like a breeder. He feeds them mussels. The octopus take comfort. He shucks the mussels, and the octopus come right up to him and eat out of his hands. He knows each and every one of them. He calls them by number. He wades into the water, says a number, and an octopus comes up and sticks to his hand. He kills them without hurting them, and the octopus that you get from him doesn’t need to be tenderized. Even the big ones are already tender. He doesn’t sell the little ones, the purpetielli, just the big ones. Go to him and drink the broth.”
AT LUNCHTIME Rafaniello tells me stories about when he used to live in his hometown and was called Rav Daniel. When he was a boy he was apprenticed to a shoemaker, too. The shoemaker was mean, nothing like Master Errico. He didn’t teach him the trade. Truth is, he hid everything from him. Rafaniello had to spy on him. The rest was taught to him in a dream by a shoemaker from the Holy Scriptures of his people. He would come at night and teach him the shoemaker’s art. When Rafaniello was a boy he used to study after work, falling asleep on the open religious books. So it was easy for a saint to come out of the books to help him. The shoemaker in his dreams was named Rav Iohanàn has-sàndler, Master John the shoemaker, and he showed him the art that his boss wouldn’t teach him. “I learned the shoemaker’s trade in the Talmud,” a big holy book from his hometown. Don Rafaniè, you even went to school in your sleep, you never get any rest. At night I can’t figure anything out. Even if Fortune came by with the lottery numbers in her mouth, I’d tell her come back tomorrow. At night I don’t exist for anyone. I sleep like a dead man. My eyes reopen at the same point where I closed them. Every morning is a resurrection.
WE SIT down on the shoe bench. He rubs his hump against the wall. I massage it a little for him. Under his jacket the bones are moving, the wing bones. We confide in each other. I tell him: Women give birth in the front, you’re giving birth in the back. “Men don’t have the honor of giving birth,” he replies. We eat sitting close to each other. He rinses out his mouth and spits, like he does when he’s about to say saintly things. “In my town I was reading the Psalms where you find the question, ‘Who shall ascend into the hill of the Lord?’ and the answer says, ‘He that hath clean hands and a pure heart.’ Then our area was struck by the war. It came from the west, crushing us, burning alive the land and the people. They were enemies I didn’t know we had. I hid underneath animal dung, under a floor, in an abandoned limestone quarry. I resisted, without knowing why I wanted to live while everyone else was dying. I rebelled against dying and cursed it so I could live. I hid, ate, and drank all kinds of things, like boiled tree bark. I stole honey from beehives, drank my own urine mixed with snow. Job’s wife tells him, ‘Curse God and die.’ But I didn’t. Job didn’t either. I didn’t curse God and I’m not dead. The war cleansed my heart and washed my hands with lime. When it ended I was ready to ascend into the hill of the Lord.”
HE TOLD me the rest of the story the next day, while outside it was raining. All the good clean water got wasted, running down to the sea without anyone putting out a kettle to catch some for pasta. Donna Speranza, the caretaker, collects the May rain. She says that it’s good for the eyes. Rafaniello’s tiny voice accompanies the water running down the alleyway. It’s flowing, too. “Along with me, other people of my town emerged from their hiding places. They, too, had been rubbed with lime and made ready for the ascent. We headed south, descending toward Italy, a country that stretches far into the middle of the sea, so beautiful that it’s a shame it ends and doesn’t go farther. We try to embark for the land inscribed in our holy books. We have no passport, no rights, we are the living whom death has rejected. The English close off the sea. They don’t let us go. I have an evil thought. ‘You can keep your hill, keep your Englishmen in Jerusalem, make them your chosen people.’ So He changes his mind. He takes away the English and plays a joke on me for punishment. He takes me to the mount of the Lord, but it’s in Naples. It’s true that here they know how to make perfect copies of antique furniture, luxury watches, and packs of American cigarettes. But copying the mount of the Lord is going too far. It can only be in Jerusalem. Here on top of the hill where you could see the sea and the peak of the volcano, you could fit a panoramic terrace, not the footstool for the feet of God. But they called it Montedidio, the hill of the Lord, and while they were at it, they called the hill next door Montecalvario, so that makes two,” Rafaniello says, and he takes it for a joke, because you have to accept playful punishment, since sometimes God sets men straight by tricking them, that’s what he says. “With all due respect, the Holy Land doesn’t have franchises. In the meantime I’ve stayed here, on the slopes of another hill of the Lord, like a tourist who made the wrong booking.” It must be because of his tiny voice. It must be the effort required to hear every word that makes me hear them again, as I write them, by ear, on the scroll of paper I keep in the evening, punctuated by the driving rain that keeps me away from the washbasins.
A FOREIGN shoemaker knows how to speak Italian so precisely that I’m moved, thinking of my dad who struggles to learn and doesn’t know half as many words as Rafaniello. Did your Italian vocabulary come to you in dreams, too? I ask him. No, he says, he got it from books, reading Pinocchio over and over. I read it, too, I tell him, happy to have found something we’ve done together. He says that in his town Pinocchio would be named Iòsl and would be made out of wood, his whole life dedicated to his creator. “Now you know of my life as Rav Daniel and of the lives of the people from my town who are no longer here. Those who die leave history as a legacy to their children, to their relatives. My people left it to me and to some others. I’m telling you this because I’ll be leaving before long, when this hump of bone and feathers finally cracks.” Don Rafaniè, tell me about Jerusalem, about this place we can’t copy. He cleans out his mouth, spits, then says that he still doesn’t know, but someone told him, “In the city of Jerusalem, death is afraid of being swallowed by life. It’s the only city in the world where death is ashamed of its existence.” He closes his eyes, rocks his neck, he’s already there. It must be a special place, Jerusalem. In Naples death isn’t ashamed of anything.
RAFANIELLO LIKES garlic and oil, not tomato. From his bread with vegetables to my bread with anchovies, the lunch hour goes by. He says I’ve got secrets. He can read my mind, so I don’t say anything. He asks how my mother is doing. I haven’t seen her for a month. Papa doesn’t want me to. He says she’s under a tent with tubes attached and only he can go. To change the subject I say, you know, Don Rafaniè, you took the same journey as Saint Patricia. She wanted to go to Jerusalem, too, and a storm forced her to land in Naples. I tell him the story of the saint. She died young in Naples and left behind miraculous blood. It liquefies and solidifies all the time, even mor
e than Saint Gennaro’s blood. This gets Rafaniello’s interest. Do you want to know how they got Saint Patricia’s blood? One night a worshiper broke open her tomb and with a pair of pliers removed a tooth from the saint to keep as a relic. Though she had been dead for a hundred years, she started to spit blood from her gums. They collected it in glass jars and that’s how the miracle was born. Don Rafaniè, things happen here that if you tell people about them, they think you’re crazy, but they happen anyway. Naples is one big secret. “This is a city of blood,” he says, “like Jerusalem.” I know, I know, people are obsessed with blood here. They put it in their curses, in their insults. They even eat it cooked and then go to worship it in churches. Women are always going around saying, “ ’O sang,” bloody this and bloody that. Even the sauce we eat on Sundays is so dark, so thick, it looks like blood. Rafaniello is amused at the mysterious voice I’m using. Mysterious because it’s hoarse.
AT THE washbasins Maria tells me that the old man came over with some pastries. Her mother went out to buy some coffee and he started up with his begging, saying that if she didn’t come to him he’d die. “So I told him, go ahead, die. A lot of people younger than you die, you can die, too. His face turned from gray to red. He made like he was going to grab me. I ran around the table and he couldn’t get me. ‘You’re mean,’ he said, and started breathing so heavy he foamed at the mouth. Then he stopped, put a hand on his forehead, calmed down, and left. He left the pastries behind and we ate them.” Maria says that he’s dying, that he looked death in the face when she told him to die. All it takes is one word to wipe a man out. Maria knows a lot of things. For instance, she knows that she’s stronger than an adult. I’m scared of adults. She isn’t. She even attacks them. It must be because she’s a girl and she’s known disgust. She’s thirteen and her breasts are growing faster than my boomerang muscles. She lets me touch them. They’re firm. She says, “They’re yours.” My piscitiello gets hard and my mouth waters. She asks if I want her hands. I say no, Maria, don’t do the same things to me you do to the old man. She says okay, you’re right, we should make love, but she tells me in Neapolitan, “Avimma fa’ ammore,” with two ms because that way it’s tougher, more real. And I say we’re already doing it. She says no, she means another kind, the kind where both of us are naked in bed like married people.
IT’S CHILLY at night by the washbasins. The clouds in the sky fan out like a fishbone. To feel warmer I practice harder, doing more turns. The Christmas month is at the door. During the day bagpipers come up to Montedidio. Maria brings a blanket to the roof. We sit on the ground and cover ourselves. When we’re done talking, she pushes her mouth right on me. That’s how we say good-bye. No good nights, no see you laters, no till tomorrows. Nothing. A kiss on the mouth and we’re all right. I practice a little more. Right away the boomerang gets hot. The wood trembles, ready. It slices the air, pushes against the sky. I keep my feet far apart so I won’t lose my balance when I start the release and suddenly stop short the flight of the boomerang. My right and left arms grow at the same rate, like Maria’s breasts. The written part of the scroll gets longer. I don’t read back. I can see that it’s heavy. The part still to go is getting lighter. Maria doesn’t know that writings about her are inside the scroll.
THE LANDLORD came by to pick up Master Errico’s rent. Master Errico saw him coming and said, “Vene chillo che tene.” The keeper is coming. He means that some men work and do things, and others just keep, they’re owners and they don’t do anything. The landlord doesn’t say a thing. He’s feeling low. He’s got the blank look of someone who just got out of bed. Master Errico says nothing except, “good morning.” He pays with the money he has ready. When the landlord leaves he says, “Something’s eating the old man. Greedy as he is, this is the first time he hasn’t counted out the money.” I ask if he’s really so greedy. “Greedy’s not the word for it. He’s got a virgin hand. No one has ever managed to pry his fingers open.” For Maria’s sake I added my own two cents, saying that he was an evil man. Master Errico immediately reprimanded me. “Listen, kid, talk behind someone’s back and their ass will answer you.” I was so embarrassed I slapped myself. Either say it to his face or keep quiet.
THE REST of the day I was thinking about Uncle Totò, whom I never knew. He was killed at noon one day in front of the main post office when an airplane dropped a bomb. Papa was his older brother. When he used to go down to the docks he would take Totò with him as far as the sidewalk on Via Medina, where Totò used to shine shoes. The bomb cut him in two. Papa ran from the docks after the bombing and found Totò at his usual spot. The shoeshine stand remained intact. My uncle was cut in two. It was July. There was dust all over the bodies of the dead and not a single fly. They were dead, too. This detail stuck in my father’s mind and he repeats it whenever he wants to remember Uncle Totò. Every year Papa brings me with him to lay a flower on the common grave. The cemetery is a zoo for the dead. They’re locked up inside. I went with Papa and Mama to the zoo one autumn day. We brought along stale bread. I gave some to the elephant, who took it from my hand with his trunk, so delicately it was like a caress. Papa was happy to hear me say the names of the stranger animals. There was some bread for the hippopotamus, too. I dropped a piece into its open mouth, which was as wide as a closet. Papa collected berries from the eucalyptus, a name he can’t pronounce. He says “calìppeso.” He keeps them in his pocket. He likes the smell and sniffs at them when he’s in the hold of the ship.
THE CAGES have names outside, animals inside, standing there. That’s how they fight back, standing still and refusing to give us any satisfaction. Only the wolf keeps going in circles, out of homesickness and to get some exercise inside the cage. He stares off into the distance, even if there is no distance before him. He’s running around waiting for a hunter, a savior, is what I think. The dead are caged animals, awaiting resurrection. Uncle Totò is a wolf, eager to run far away from Via Medina ever since the day they locked him up. I’m older than he ever was. His life ended before he was ten, one day short of his birthday. He never went to school. That’s why Papa cares so much about education, so that I won’t be held back by the street, so that I won’t be stuck there.
NICE COOL evenings come, buffeted by the wind that ascends the Vomero and San Martino hills and passes over Montedidio before rubbing against the sea. I wait for Maria to come up to the terrace. I practice and look at the sky to find a target. I’ll throw the boomerang, closing my good eye and opening up the bad one so that I can stare into the distance without crying. Later on, Maria and I scour the starry sky, our noses in the air. She says it’s a lid; I say it’s a fishnet, and every star’s a knot. She says that we’re the same height. Even those of us on the ground seem to float in the sky like buoys.
CHRISTMAS COMES. At Maria’s house the creditors knock on the door and make a scene. On the stairwell you can hear the screaming. Her mother won’t open up, her father’s gone out. Papa comes home at six when I warm up his coffee. I drink some, too. He doesn’t say a word. When Mama was around I used to drink coffee substitute. Now he wouldn’t even notice if I started smoking. Grown-ups withdraw into their troubles and leave us behind in houses that don’t make a sound. We only hear ourselves, which is a little scary. The spirits rub against my face in the empty kitchen and soothe me. The boomerang is always against my skin and it warms me. Its wood holds so much heat it must have been grown in a pan of sunlight. Maria bundles herself up against the cold with me and an overcoat. I’m upwind from her so I shield her. Christmas is coming, Maria says. Let’s buy a chicken and cook it. Who needs them. It’ll be the best Christmas of all. I’ll bake some cookies, she says, and plants a kiss on my cold hair. The north wind rains kisses down upon me.
PAPA INFORMS me that on Christmas night he’ll be in the hospital with Mama. This disease is something between them. My job is to take care of the house and wait. I’m waiting. For the flight of the boomerang. For it to break away after my shoulders have gone through the motion
s of throwing it and go hurtling off into the darkness, for it to smack against the stars, against what Maria calls the lid and I call the fishnet. I feel strong enough to throw it into the clouds. The boomerang is getting lighter, getting ready. It won’t be long now. In the meantime Rafaniello is looking more like a bird. He’s getting thin, the bones are poking through the skin of his face. Don Rafaniè, you’ve got to eat. Bread, oil, garlic, and onion aren’t enough. The trip is long and you’re traveling in winter. The other birds have already come and gone. I know, he replies. In his hometown in September he saw the storks join together in the sky to go to Africa. They pass near Jerusalem. “Inside my head the eye of a stork is breaking through to show me the way.” When’s it going to be? I ask. “When the wood of the Ark of the Covenant flies, that is what the angel told me. I’m keeping myself ready for the night of the end of the year. The Neapolitans throw old things out the window. Without realizing it, one of them’s going to throw out a piece of the Ark.” Then he adds, in a birdlike voice, “He’ll throw it out because the Ark no longer holds the tablets of the Law, the Ten Commandments.” He’s right, I think. That night no one will notice Rafaniello’s flight.