On Earth as It Is in Heaven (3 page)

The whole shop burst into laughter.

“Shit, I done picked the wrong trifecta yesterday, oh well, what the hell,” my uncle observed without a hint of irritation.

Now that Tony had had a laugh, he seemed more relaxed. He began using the straight razor on the old man's face.

“Listen, you all want to know how I found out he was gay? I swear it's God's own truth, on my mother's sainted head: he told me himself. He said: Now, friend, I happen to like men.”

“No!” exclaimed the customer with the mustache.

“Yes.”

“This world is going to hell.”

“Right.”

“They're the curse of all creation,” murmured the old man, but gently, because if he moved his jaw too much he might get a new crease in his face. A straight razor doesn't take indignation into account.

“But wait, it gets even worse. Then I realized that this monster had gone and offered me a drink from his bottle of beer. The selfsame bottle he'd been drinking from all this time with his diseased mouth, I mean.”

“So then whaddya do, Tony?” the old man asked with vivid concern.

The barber faltered for a moment. He squinted, raised the razor, and decided to go ahead and confide in his little audience.

“From that infected bottle of his, I had gone and taken a drink.”

“Fuck! Disaster.”

“Fuck is right.”

“Infection!” said the old man, in a shrill voice.

The straight razor hovered in midair, a warning.

“Listen, I'm gonna tell you the truth, I was terrified. That momo-sexuality of his might have infected me, an oral infection straight from the bottle. I was terrified.”

“So what
did
you do, Tony?”

“What do you think? First things first: I broke that bottle right over his head, that piece-of-shit queer.”

“Good work, Tony!”

The old man's voice had regained confidence; breaking bottles over the heads of faggots is the behavior of true men.

“I thought I was 'bout to lose my mind.”

“I can imagine.”

“I had to do something to cure myself, immediately. So I thought it over and . . .”

Tony looked around, as if he were taking care to shield the information from prying ears. He pronounced each syllable solemnly.

“. . . and I realized that I had to get cured, sooner than right this second, and so . . .”

Each person in the barbershop listened with a heightened intensity. Tony filled his lungs to give greater emphasis to the rest of the story: the old man's ears craned in the direction of the barber's mouth to capture the words of revelation at the earliest possible moment; the customer with the mustache stood up and began tapping his foot to an irregular beat. Only Uncle Umbertino remained unruffled. He read his racing sheet and blithely ignored everything and everyone. A burning curiosity to learn whether and how poor Tony had recovered from this momosexuality swept over me, just as it had all the others. I lowered my magazine.

Tony kept his eyes fixed elsewhere, staring out the shop window.

“I.”

He reckoned the time needed for his words to clarify. Each time he sensed that the tension had become unbearable, he deigned to dole out another word or two.

“Done.”

The old man's neck craned tautly; the mustachioed customer's foot trembled.

“Went to see.”

Tony watched us. When the silence had grown deafening, he laid down his ace.

“Pina.”

“The whore?” the old man and the man with the mustache cried in chorus.

“Yes.”

“The whore in Vicolo Marotta?” they sang out in unison.

“Yes.”

“One has the bedroom filled with mirrors?” they drove home the point.

“Yes.”

At last Uncle Umbertino folded up his racing sheet and laid it on the pile with the others. Tony had one more spectator now. Flattered, he went on with renewed zeal.

“‘Pina,' I told her, ‘I gotta make love now, right this second, or else I'm in danger of catching a bad case of momosexuality, and that right there's a fate worse than death, iddnit?'”

“Blessed words of truth,” the old man decreed.

“Luckily, I thought of the perfect remedy: get me a good fuck right then and there and get cured of that disgusting mess. These fucking queers, they all just need to be killed.”

“Blessed words of truth,” the old man seconded. Apparently, by the time you come to the end of your life, you're so tired that you have the same thoughts over and over again and you just go on repeating them.

“Boys, I look her straight in the eye and, 'fore we started to fucking, I said something to her that I never say to a whore: ‘Pina, go rinse out your mouth, 'cause that's where I gotta kiss you, it's out the mouth that a disease can get going, you get me? I took a drink of beer from the same bottle as that faggot, come on, hurry up.' And Pina did things right, boys, she rinsed her mouth, nice and clean, even used toothpaste, and the minute she came back I shoved seven feet of tongue down her throat, fuck, I'd never even kissed my wife that deep.”

“And then?”

It was Umbertino who spoke. He'd gotten to his feet without my noticing. I never saw him move.

“And then, seeing as I'm a gentleman, I can't exactly go into details, let's just say that I cured myself by fucking her like heaven above, and I needn't say another word to you men of the world.”

Tony the barber was chuckling complacently, unaware of something that had become clear to everyone else. My uncle was there, in his shop, because of what had happened, the subject of Tony's story. He moved toward Tony soundlessly, light-footed in a way that no one would have expected from a man of his bulk. Leaping, little steps, quick and silent. When he loomed up in front of him, Tony vanished, hidden from view by his shoulders.

“Listen up and listen good, you dickhead, I'll tell you exactly how the story ends: you tripped, you fell, and shitty luck that you were having, you broke your arm. Or you broke your leg. Take your pick.”

“I don't understand.”

A second later, Tony was on his knees, keening in pain. My uncle's right hand was crushing the fingers of his left hand.

“Tony, it's either you can't understand, or you won't understand, which is worse. You tripped and fell, now take your pick: an arm or a leg.”

Tony was sobbing. The old man and the mustachioed customer said nothing and did nothing, it was all they could do just to breathe.

Umbertino raised his left fist.

“Uncle.”

My voice was calm.

Tony managed to mumble a single word: “Stop.”

“But when Pina told you to stop, whaddya do, Tony, did you stop?”

He snapped Tony's left forearm with a single motion: his left hand grabbed Tony's elbow, his right hand grabbed Tony's wrist, he twisted both hands, crack.

“Now you remember, Tony, you tripped and fell, uh-huh? You broke your arm. Someone call this boy an ambulance. Davidù, let's get out of here. This place stinks of shit.”

I was so overwhelmed that I forgot to leave the magazine. I didn't know a forearm could snap like that.

“You didn't see nothin', right?”

“Right.”

“Swear to it.”

“I swear.”

“What's that you're holding?”

“A magazine, it was in the barbershop.”

My uncle leafed through it carefully.

“Good boy, nice stuff you read; just don't let your mother catch you.”

“Why not?”

“What do you mean, why not? It's a dirty magazine, if your mother catches you, she'll yell. Listen, here's what we do, I'll hold on to it, and when you wanna look at it, you just come see me, we good?”

Without waiting for my reply, he folded it in half and stuck it in his back pocket.

“Uncle, who's Pina?”

“She's a sort of friend of mine.”

“What's that mean?”

“Well, let's just say she's cooked me dinner, once or twice.”

“She a good cook?”

“Not as good as she used to be.”

The street was cordoned off by a line of police cars.

“Another killing?” Umbertino asked an officer. The policeman lowered his head without saying a word.

I spoke to my uncle under my breath. I didn't want a cop to hear what I was saying to him.

“Why'd you take me with you to see the barber?”

In his face, not even a speck of joy.

“You were the only one that could stop me.”

“From doing what?”

“You want a delicious ice cream?”

“Yessss!”

I ordered a cone, with pistachio and mulberry gelato.

“You heard him,” Umbertino told the ice cream man. “A nice big ice cream cone with pistachio, mulberry, and whipped cream. Lots of whipped cream.”

“But Uncle, I don't want any whipped cream.”

“It isn't for you.”

He devoured the whipped cream in a single bite.

Outside the front door, unexpectedly, we ran into Grandpa. Umbertino lengthened his stride and approached him. I hung back, it was too hot to hurry. Cars went past, the passengers looked around, their faces sweaty behind the closed windows. Umbertino and my grandfather shook hands, in complete silence. Then Umbertino came back toward me at a dead run.

“Davidù, hurry, gimme the keys to your apartment.”

“Ain't Mamma home yet?”

“No, and your grandpa is leaving, come on, let's git upstairs, hurry!”

“I don't want to, I'll stay down here with Grandpa, then I wanna play with my friends on the piazza.”

“Gimme your keys, then, and on the double!”

“Why?”

“I gotta take an Olympic-size shit. Come on, the keys, I'll take you to the piazza afterward, gimme the keys now!”

And off he gallopped upstairs to our apartment. The minute the street door swung shut behind him, Grandpa started talking.

“I came by to bring you some dinner, at work we had leftovers: potato gateau with ground beef filling. Come on over here, now, your face is filthy with ice cream.”

He pulled out his handkerchief, raised it to his mouth, dabbed a corner of it against his tongue, and used it to clean my chin.

“Grandpa, Pullara says that if you want to be a real man you have to get yourself dirty. The filthier someone is, the more of a man he is.”

“Pullara must have his head full of filth.”

“What do you mean?”

“Look out.”

A sudden screeching of tires caught us off guard. Grandpa's hands were already around my shoulders. The car swerved quickly, vanishing down the first street on the left.

“Calm down, Davidù, you can put them down.”

Both my hands had leaped up to cover my face, without my even noticing.

“There's a lot of uproar,” Grandpa mused aloud.

“Uncle said the same thing, the exact same words.”

In the distance, the sound of police sirens was incessant.

“Grandpa, I know what it is: Fabrizia!”

“Who?”

“Fabrizia, the girl with the huge tits, works at the bakery. Everyone's coming to the neighborhood to buy bread; I hear all my friends say that Fabrizia is a hot mama.”

“Do you like her?”

“Fabrizia? Well, she's a girl, I don't know if I like girls, they're always crying, they can't throw a punch to save their lives, they see blood and start screaming, they're weak.”

“They're not weak.”

“No?”

“No. I have to go to the train station to meet my friend Randazzo, why don't you go upstairs?”

“No, I'm going to go play with my friends, ciao.”

The first thing I saw when I got to the piazza was Pullara bent over Gerruso, forehead crammed against forehead. Why didn't Gerruso just stay home? Couldn't he see that Pullara hated him, that Pullara was bigger and stronger than him?

Lele Tranchina and Danilo Dominici had their asses planted on the backrest of the bench and their shoes on the seat. Standing in the sun, Guido Castiglia had both hands jammed into his pockets. His shadow merged into the larger shadow of the magnolia tree. He was observing the scene with the remote indifference of someone watching ants. A couple of yards behind him, a girl. She must have been more or less my age.

No one noticed I was there.

My legs decided not to take another step.

My body was assuming a defensive crouch.

The girl was wearing a light-colored dress with a hem that hung just below her knees.

Red hair.

Pullara was shouting.

“Pass the test!”

Gerruso was whimpering incomprehensibly. Pullara spat a single gob of spit into his face, a gob that clung to his skin without sliding off. Then he ground his forehead even harder, with greater determination, against Gerruso's, shoving him downward, forcing him to his knees. Pullara's voice was piercing and strident.

It was too hot to get as worked up as he was.

“You have to pass the test!”

Pullara pulled a jackknife out of his pocket, opened it, and placed it in Gerruso's hand. He was so sure of himself that it never crossed his mind for an instant that he might be stabbed. Lele Tranchina tried to say something. He couldn't get the words out. Danilo Dominici was white as a sheet. Guido Castiglia kept his arms folded across his chest. The only voice that could be heard in the piazza was the girl's.

She spoke: “Stop it now.” And then, “Why don't you take it out on me?” she went on. “I ain't scared of you,” she concluded.

The last few words rang out for Pullara as a mortal insult.

“Wha'd you say?”

“I ain't scared of you,” she said again. She spoke decisively, firmly, proudly.

Pullara moved jerkily. Like a human hiccup. He was about to lunge at the girl, but thought better of it, went back to Gerruso still kneeling on the ground, and delivered a sharp slap to his cheek.