On Earth as It Is in Heaven (21 page)

The rift was left unmended. Franco quit the boxing gym and left Palermo. He was barely twenty. He started boxing for a living. He turned professional. Was there a purse? Then he signed up for the bout. He manipulated his own physique to hopscotch from one category to another. And so it went, as he punched his way up the peninsula and finally made his way to Germany. There he fought five matches, but it was the last two that he recounted with the greatest delight. Determined to win a purse worth a heap of deutsch marks, he started fighting as a heavyweight. It was his next-to-last fight on foreign soil. To bulk up to the minimum required weight for the heavyweight bout, he ate bread and cheese, six times a day, for twenty days running. He needed to put on fifteen kilos. The opponent was a squat, rocky Spaniard. It was a violent fight, but Franco's agility stood up well against the Iberian's sheer power. Umbertino's teachings had come in handy, and then some. It was a draw. They split the prize money and headed off, each in his own direction.

In Heidelberg the purse was smaller, fewer deutsch marks, because it was for a lower-ranked category, the one Franco really belonged in. He'd need to lose fifteen kilos in twenty days. He went to the sauna and he worked out fully dressed: two undershirts, two shirts, two pairs of pants. Sweating, shedding fluids, drinking no water. If he wanted to get the money that even a loss would entitle him to, he needed to come to his weigh-in with his body in proper condition. As long as he could stay on his feet long enough to fight, well, after that who cared? At night he bought a peach. He'd stick a straw into it. Whatever he could suck out of it was his dinner.

“I only had one round in my legs. Just one. Then I was bound to fall to the mat all by myself. There was only one way I was going to earn all that money for myself: win in the first round.”

And sure enough: KO. TKO, to be exact, in two minutes and thirty-seven seconds. He cut the challenger's eyebrow, making it impossible for the match to go on. Every time he talked about it, Franco would add some new detail or other. A painful punch, a weave and a feint that a choreographer could have turned into a ballet, the footwork of his attack so blindingly fast that the referee never even saw it. On the strength of his formidable photographic memory, Franco mixed an increasingly minute array of details into the broth of his story. The color of his opponent's shoes, the roots of his hair, the way his nostrils flared when he inhaled. But the way the story ended never varied: “If only Livia had been there to watch, but no such luck.” It had been his moment of glory. What followed was a string of defeats that made clear the time had come for him to go home. All he needed now was a job in Palermo so he could start a family.

“The truth is that there are times when hard knocks in the head can be good for you.”

From the train station he went directly to the gym, with his suitcase still in his hand.

Umbertino was tormenting his students, as usual.

“
Buon giorno
, Maestro.”

“You're dead to me.”

“I've come back.”

“I'm thrilled.”

Franco swallowed all the pride he had left.

“Maestro, please forgive me, I was wrong, I apologize, take me back to work with you.”

“You, as far as I'm concerned, can go dick around somewhere else, anywhere you want. Get out of here.”

“No.”

With two quick leaps, Umbertino was standing before him.

“Give me a single reason, Franco, just one reason, why I shouldn't club you to death, right here and right now, in front of everyone.”

“You're training people wrong, Maestro.”

He'd gotten it off his chest: the burden he'd been carrying for so long. The fact that he'd lost at the national championships was partly his maestro's fault, too.

Umbertino ended class, tossed all the boxers out of the gym, gave Franco a pair of boxing gloves, and climbed into the ring with him.

Umbertino stood there bare-handed.

“Can I tell you something first, Maestro?”

Franco decided he had no choice but to play all the cards he held. He talked about the hook-uppercut combination. He broke down the dynamics of the punch: the way the arm rose vertically until the punch landed, the thrust of the legs, and, especially, the twisting torque of the opposing foot. Umbertino never taught this move because he'd never noticed it: his body executed it naturally, unconsciously. Franco showed him new offensive and defensive patterns and moves. He described training methods he'd learned elsewhere: differentiated abdominal workout sessions, jumping in place with a tennis ball clamped between the feet, weights and sprinting circuits. All of them exercises that
Il Negro
would have liked.

“You have one round to convince me, Franco, just one round.”

But it wasn't true. Umbertino had already made up his mind. Franco's movements were more cunning, self-aware, in-depth, and thought through. He'd noticed it immediately, the minute Franco had walked through the gym's front door. Umbertino broke three of his ribs just to teach him a lesson. He wasn't going to let someone abandon him just like that, overnight, without making sure he paid the consequences.

Franco started working as his deputy. After two months, Umbertino gave him permission to address him with the informal
tu
. Franco was gifted; he had an exceptional eye. He focused on details that my uncle had never really noticed. He'd lost at the nationals for one simple reason: Franco wasn't Umbertino and the bout had been planned according to my uncle's natural rhythms. In his pilgrimage north the entire length of Italy and into Germany, Franco had developed a profound and refined understanding of boxing. He noticed details and worked to fit them into a larger framework until their underlying logic made sense to him and, what's more, he was capable of explaining them to others. Between Umbertino and Franco, Franco was the one with a vocation for teaching.

My mother was seventeen years old when she was orphaned. My maternal grandparents, whom I never met, died one after the other in the span of just one year. These things happen.

“So I moved to your house, that is to say, my sister's house, your grandmother's house, your mother's mother's house, Jesus, I'm getting mixed up with all these family ties. Your mother was solid as a rock. She managed to finish school and her nursing course and got a job immediately.”

In the hospital everyone said that she had a boundless talent for veins, no one could touch my mother when it came to giving injections. Whenever she had to give a kid a shot, the first thing she did was show him the syringe, reassuring him all the while.

“It's nothing, take it from me.”

Then she'd turn him around and swab one butt cheek with disinfectant.

“Would you like it better if I give you the shot on the other side?”

While she was swabbing the other butt cheek with a cotton ball soaked in alcohol, she did the injection on the part she'd already disinfected.

“All done.”

The little kids, incredulous, would stare wide-eyed, swearing they'd never felt a thing. She'd fooled me a bunch of times with that trick.

“Uncle, were you still living in the gym then?”

“Sure, it was handy, home and office in the same place. It was more affordable.”

My mother was the only family relation he had left. To be able to spend time with her, he shut down the gym for a few weeks.

“I had the boxers move my things. It was easy: Who wants to try out a new training exercise? Fuck, people will swallow anything.”

It was June. To make my mother happy my great-uncle took her to stay on her favorite stretch of beach, at the Addaura.

“It was a sandy beach, typical woman's choice, Jesus, what a pathetic place.”

When they got there, they found the beach covered with rubble. Someone had built a house a hundred yards up the beach in violation of zoning ordinances. The debris left over from the construction had been dumped all over the place.

“If there's one thing the Mafia lacks, and it's what will eventually prove its undoing, it's an appreciation for beauty.”

That place was truly beautiful. It was sandy, that much is true, so there wasn't even a rock to dive off, but it had a quiet charm all its own. But now it had been reduced to little more than a dump.

Without a word, my mother knelt down and picked up a couple of rocks.

“Let's go home.”

The next morning, she asked my uncle to take her back to the same beach. This time, she took off her skirt and blouse, leaving just the swimsuit she wore beneath. She dived into the water for a quick swim, emerged from the water, and gathered up her clothing and two more rocks. The whole summer went by like that, a dive in the water and two rocks carried away, in a truly long-term clean-up project.

“Did she manage to clean up the whole beach?”

“She did not. My boxers? Half a day and the beach was a pearl again.”

“When did they clean it up?”

“In October.”

“But the summer was already over!”

“Your mother needed to do that work.”

As soon as she finished school and signed up for the nursing course, Umbertino rented an apartment a couple of blocks away from our house, so she could have the privacy she needed.

“After I'd gotten used to living in a normal apartment, I hated to go back to living in the gym. Your mother was capable of living her own life, and after all, Davidù, the Paladin always seemed to be around. At least, if they were going to do things together, they could do them at their leisure, on the bed, instead of having to scurry around who knows where, all uncomfortable in the open air.”

Umbertino never took the place of my mother's father.

That wasn't his job.

He just made sure she lacked for nothing.

One day, before I started boxing, I was playing with an ivory cross, a relic of my mother's father. I was tossing it from one hand to the other. My mother ordered me to put it down this instant; it was fragile and could easily break. I still didn't understand the emotional importance people place on objects, how we entrust our entire lives to them. Ignoring her warning, I went on playing with it. I ventured one especially daring trick and missed the catch. The cross fell to the floor and broke. My mother leaped out of her chair, both cheeks bright red. She began slapping herself in the face, teeth clenched, right hand, left hand, one smack after another. I just stood there, watching her.

Umbertino demanded that the reception for my parents' wedding be held in his boxing gym, and so it was.

“With the money you save, you can take a trip to somewhere far-off and fantastic, like maybe Rome.”

One evening, a week before the wedding, he summoned all the boxers from the various training sessions.

“The Paladin is getting married, let's get busy.”

The boxers repainted the walls, cleaned the greasy floors, brought in potted flowers, found a band, and unleashed their mothers. In the gym there was a bounty of food, all homemade, and enough wine to float a damned boat; Randazzo alone had brought twelve barrels.

Umbertino was already drunk the day before the wedding party, his own Zina was getting married to the Paladin, red wine was in order, authentic and genuine.

“I wore a gorgeous suit with a killer tie, yellow and purple. You'd have thought I was the groom, to judge by how fabulous I looked. Still, the most beautiful one there was your mother.”

He walked her to the altar.

For the first time in his life, he felt unsteady on his legs.

Franco brought Livia as an officially invited guest: they weren't a married couple yet, but they were living together and engaged.

“Already Livia was busting his balls as if they'd been husband and wife for thirty years now. She never shut up. Franco showed up in church dressed to the nines himself, extremely elegant, all the right things. We'd both had suits custom-made by a tailor, Pisciotta by name, the father of one of our boxers: he gave us a considerable discount, we were a couple of fashion plates. Livia, on the other hand, was impossible to look at, she came wearing an all-pink outfit, damn, she looked like a Jordan almond.”

Once the ceremony was over, on the church steps, with doves flying skyward and handfuls of rice showering over the heads of the newlyweds, my mother tossed her bouquet into the air.

Livia, determined to catch it, leaped vehemently.

Standing next to her, with both feet on the long hem of her pink gown, was Franco.

“Livia was left bare-assed, completely exposed: Franco's shoes had split her dress down the middle.”

Livia started furiously beating him over the head with the bouquet: she wanted to run away, disappear, vanish from the face of the earth.

She was mortified to the point of tears.

Franco, motionless, was taking a bouquet beating over the head and doing nothing to stop it. Zina went over to Livia and hugged her tight, while Provvidenza, who had picked up the skirt from the floor where it was still pinned by Franco's foot, used it to cover her behind. Livia was shaking with fury. It would have been less painful to just die on the spot. My mother took her face and framed it in her hands, telling her that the party would be much less fun without her: “Please, hurry home, change your clothes, and come back to the boxing gym.”