On Earth as It Is in Heaven (20 page)

There were two of them working in the kitchen. The other cook came from Brescia, a city in northern Italy. His name was Paolo Terenghi but he said to call him Pol, the Italian spelling of the American pronunciation, like an Italian movie star. You couldn't understand a thing this northern Italian said, his pronunciation was cavernous and he spat out well-masticated but completely unfamiliar words and phrases. For the most part, the two men communicated through gestures, to their immense mutual satisfaction. Pol was an expert at processing and stuffing vegetables. Rosario imitated him, studying the way he cut them and transformed them with heat. These were months of silent lessons. Pol was broad-chested and had a prominent pot belly. He guzzled beer and braised the meat. They worked morning, noon, and night, six days out of seven. On his day off, Rosario spent the morning walking around this chilly Germany, then he'd go back to his rented room and carve wood. His friend Nenè wouldn't have liked it, this gloomy country. When Rosario was weary, he'd gaze at the cactus he'd brought with him from Sicily: if anything, the thorns stood out more sharply, but the plant expressed no opinion, it didn't seem to mind the weather. Then my grandfather would resume his work: the rocking horse he was carving for my father was taking shape. He was not going to come home empty-handed.

It happened a week before the inferno. A chisel was missing from the carpentry shop. All the prisoners were called to report. Either somebody produced that chisel or they'd all be punished: a whole night on their feet until the tool was turned in.

The ones who had access to the carpentry shop were D'Arpa and Marangola, who worked there, and Melluso and Iallorenzi, on their daily janitorial shifts. All of them denied stealing the chisel, and all the other prisoners claimed to know nothing about it. The guards were especially irritated by this solidarity, and they threatened brutal repercussions.

Melluso broke ranks and took a step forward.

“What do I get if I tell you?”

“
You get to stay alive
.”

Guards and inmates, one and all, bore the marks of war on their faces, wrinkles and creases. The faces were drawn: masks of weariness, every day a little wearier of this constant contest for survival. The eyes of victims and executioners were equally dead.

“Too bad, I don't know a thing.”

Melluso stepped back into line.

A hasty, angry search began. When nothing turned up, the search turned increasingly violent. Searching was hard work. Sweat streamed.

The chisel was found in Iallorenzi's duffel bag.

He fell to his knees, swearing he knew nothing about it, it wasn't his fault, someone had framed him.

The guards were unyielding. Despite Mino Iallorenzi's protestations, he was hauled off by main force. As they dragged him out of the dormitory, he wept, swearing he was innocent. It reminded Nicola of the squeals of a hog being taken to have its throat cut.

That was the last time they ever saw him.

“And you know what the absurd thing was, Davidù?”

Nicola Randazzo didn't look at me. His eyes were fixed on the full glass of wine that his hands still hadn't raised to his lips.

“The one who stole the chisel really was Iallorenzi after all, D'Arpa told me so. Iallorenzi had made a bet with Melluso, just to do something different for a change. He was planning to take it back to the carpentry shop the following day. Melluso knew all about it, but he never turned informant, honor to his name. If you're a slave, the hatred you feel for your jailer is greater than anything you can feel for a fellow prisoner. People hate those above them and beneath them, never those on the same level.”

“What happened to Iallorenzi?”

“A prisoner's life was worth less than a chisel.”

Everyone was punished. Outside the barracks, everyone standing, no way to sit down or move away to defecate or urinate. They spent the night in the throes of bodily cramps and the stench of organic fluids released more out of exhaustion than any real need. At dawn, they were wrecks, dehydrated, filthy, demoralized, and with another day of work awaiting them. Still, they stubbornly survived. They were plants in the desert. They challenged a rainless sky with the insolence of their very existence.

Rosario decided to turn his back on Germany during a lunch shift. For the second time since he'd started working there, he decided to try something a little different on his own, a Sicilian dish,
pasta alla trapanese
: raw tomatoes with garlic, toasted almonds, and a drizzle of olive oil. It was the south in all the fullness of its elementary flavors. A customer demanded that the tomato sauce be cooked. The boss strode into the kitchen.

“What's this crap?”

Rosario went straight up to the customer in the dining room.

“Is there some problem?”

“Raw tomatoes on pasta is slop you'd only feed to pigs.”

The man talked like Santin, he must have been a Venetian emigrant.

“That's the way this dish is made, if you don't like it order something else.”

The Calabrian flew into a rage on the spot.

“How dare you speak that way? You better beg the customer's forgiveness and get straight back into the kitchen, immediately, and cook the sauce just as the Gospel says.”

“No. That's the way this dish is made.”

“As far as I'm concerned, you can get out of here and go back to the street where I found you, you goddamned good-for-nothing no-account Sicilian.”

Rosario looked at him without moving a single muscle in his face. The Calabrian couldn't meet his gaze and dropped his eyes, looking at the floor. Only then did my grandfather take off his apron, fold it, lay it over the back of a chair, walk to the cash register, take out the pay he had coming, slide the cash drawer shut, walk into the kitchen, put on his winter jacket, walk back through the dining room, and leave the restaurant. Pol came running out of the kitchen after him, in search of an explanation.

“Pol, I'm sorry.”

“What do you mean?”

“I've finished the rocking horse. I'm going home.”

The next day, Pol quit, too. They took the train back together. Pol got off in Milan and took the next train for Brescia. Rosario rode the length of the Italian boot, all the way to the toe, such a long trip that it felt as if the train would never get there. After fifteen months spent working in Germany, he had a little money in his pocket to feed and clothe his family, a suitcase full of heavy winter clothing, a cactus, and a wooden rocking horse.

After we were done eating, Grandma started doing the dishes.

“We waited for him on Track Three at the main station. Me, your father, and Randazzo, who had come to help us with the luggage. It had taken your grandfather more than fifty hours to get back home from Germany. It had been more than a year since the last time we'd seen him. The minute he stepped off the train, I started waving my arms in the air.”

“How did Grandpa look?”

“Skinny.”

“That's not what I mean, Grandma.”

“Tired, after fifty hours on a train.”

“Come on, Grandma.”

“I understand what you want me to tell you.”

“Exactly. Did he kiss you?”

“No.”

“I don't believe you.”

“Listen, when he came home—”

Her voice cracked, like a sheet of paper tearing. Her eyes were focused steadily on the bottom of the sink, as her left hand twisted the faucet shut.

“Grandma, are you all right?”

“It had been such a long time since we'd seen each other. Fifteen months is a long, long time. I'd written him so many letters. He sent back three. He wrote in block print, it was still so hard for him to write.”

“What did he write you?”

“His impressions of Passau: the snow is white and when the sun shines it's blinding, on Sundays after Mass they eat a white
würstel
, I learned how to make baked rabbit with apples. That sort of thing.”

“Watercolors.”

“That's right.”

“So what else? What happened when he got off the train?”

Grandma's forefinger started tracing small circles in the suds of the dish soap. With every circle, the finger sank a little deeper into the suds. When it touched a plate, the sound of the contact was muffled by the depth of the rinse water.

“Your father burst into tears. He hadn't recognized him. He couldn't remember. I felt myself die inside.”

“And Grandpa?”

“Then he took a step back, set suitcase and cactus both down on the pavement, and put the present in front of the kid.”

“And Papà?”

“He grabbed at the present, always a little prince.”

“And Grandpa?”

“A smile on his face, but still keeping his distance.”

The finger had stopped, by now the regular circular movement had made it possible to see beneath the suds. There were dishes. They were white. We'd always known it, we'd just forgotten.

“We were in the train station, there were so many people all around us. You know what your grandfather's like, never says a word, never does a thing in public, and when I say nothing I mean nothing, likewise mute when it comes to displays of affection, you know. But instead, right there on the platform, your grandfather took my face between his hands.”

“He kissed you!”

“No.”

“Like fun, he didn't! He kissed you! In public! In front of everyone! Jesus, girl stuff.”

“Listen, stupid: first of all, displaying one's emotions isn't just something girls do. And if you really want to know, he didn't kiss me.”

“I don't believe it.”

“The kid started crying again.”

“He did?”

“Maybe because he saw my face in Rosario's hands, what do I know. Your grandpa took his hands off me immediately. Then he noticed his friend and they shook hands.”

“Didn't they hug?”

“He didn't hug me, so you think he hugged Randazzo?”

“Oh, come on, what does that have to do with it, you're a girl.”

“What do you use for brains? Anyway, in the end, Randazzo came home with us, right here, and he insisted on carrying the suitcase himself. You know what the first thing your grandpa did was?”

“He kissed you.”

“No. He planted the cactus.”

“And my father?”

“He was playing on his rocking horse.”

“Even then, he was already the Paladin.”

“Right.”

In the train station, Provvidenza held my father, still in swaddling clothes, in her arms. The child observed everything, immersed in an attentive silence. The train would cross the sea and steam the length of the mainland until it reached distant Germany. Rosario thought of his friend Nenè.

“It always rains in Germany, Rosà. When it's cold you could freeze to death, wear your pajamas under your pants. And one piece of advice: you'd do better never to pee outdoors, because if your dick freezes it'll snap off and you could be left dickless for the rest of your life.”

That's what Nenè would have said.

The thought made him smile.

There was so much talk about this Germany where there's a job for everyone.

People said that finding a position was easier, there wasn't all the Mafia you have down here, in that Germany up there.

One way or another, he'd make ends meet.

He always got by, that was for sure.

But it was the ones he was leaving behind in Palermo who filled his heart with sorrow. His wife and his son. He wouldn't be there, whatever might happen, a sudden thunderstorm, the onset of the sirocco, the kid's first steps.

Standing on the platform by the tracks, caught in a mass of strangers, Rosario was about to say goodbye to his own life, once again.

“I'll write you, Rosario, always. You, if you can find time, you write me, too, my love?”

My grandfather had a suitcase full of the warmest clothing he'd been able to afford, a train ticket in his pocket, and a cactus in a burlap sack. Provvidenza blinked back her tears but it was obvious that she wouldn't be able to hold out for long. The moment of departure had arrived. The conductor bawled out the final boarding call. Rosario set down his suitcase and the burlap bag.

“Put your arms around me.”

“There are people.”

“I know that.”

They embraced for all the world to see, and in that moment their bodies forged a contact that would be this hot and despairing only once more in all their lives.

Maestro Franco, too, emigrated to Germany.

“It was after I had a falling-out with your uncle, in the aftermath of the match with D'Angelo, the half-Marchigiano, half-Neapolitan boxer.”

Once they'd won the regionals, they tried for the nationals. It seemed like Franco had a decent shot at the title. In the first few fights, excellent boxing: not much pain suffered, plenty of pain inflicted. Then he ran up against Roberto D'Angelo, who was, simply put, a better boxer than him. After the fight, in the locker room, Franco and Umbertino had a knock-down, drag-out argument. Bitter words flew on both sides. Franco insisted that the tactics had been defective, while Umbertino shouted that that was bullshit, the strategy had been perfect and Franco simply hadn't been up to the task of implementing it, thereby making a mockery of Umbertino's work and his good name.