On Earth as It Is in Heaven (38 page)

He slipped a hand into his pocket, pulled out two cigarettes, lit them both, and handed me one.

“After you win a match, what you need is a nice cigarette.”

We smoked in silence, looking each other in the eye the whole time.

Maestro Franco came in. He asked me how I felt, when I was born, the exact street addresses of my home and the gym, his own wife's name, and what my uncle's favorite proverb was. When he was finally convinced that I was capable of thinking and understanding, he tousled my hair with his rough hand.

“Kid, what we learned today is that, even when you have all the reasons in the world to let someone hit you, fists always hurt like hell. And the lesson is that it's far better to punch than be punched. It's a good thing that, aside from the fall, you were the only one to score points, especially in the third round. Don't worry, kid, it won't be long now before they're all sucking our dicks. Tomorrow we'll analyze today's bout carefully. But right now, go take a shower, you smell like a goat.”

The person they extracted from the rubble of the carpentry shop wasn't D'Arpa. It was another prisoner. Both his legs were shattered. He said that when the bombing started, he'd been alone in the carpentry shop, he had no idea where the boxer was, what he needed was a doctor and some morphine.

The carpentry shop, the camp hospital, the dining hall, the munitions dump, the infirmary, the firing range, the fence, the barracks, the machine shop.

There was nothing left.

Everything was burning.

The heat was intolerable.

Eyes were watering from the smoke and dust.

Rosario and Nicola were wandering in search of their friend.

They asked everyone they met: “Have you seen D'Arpa?”

Whenever they heard someone calling for help, they started digging.

The two of them had pulled twenty-one people out of the rubble, and five of them were still alive.

No one could give them any useful information.

As the minutes clicked past, as if in some blessed belated harvest, survivors started coming out of the woodwork, some of them unhurt, most of them wounded.

“Have you seen D'Arpa?”

Some had no idea who he was, others hadn't seen him, and a few swore that they'd seen him run for cover at the camp hospital. Rosario and Nicola headed there. There were three soldiers moving rocks. Some of the rocks were covered with blood. There must have been a number of poor souls underneath. Everyone dug together, with total disregard for rank, hauling beams and rubble aside, recovering lifeless bodies, some of them naked, others still in uniform. The twelfth dead body they pulled out of the rubble was D'Arpa's. His fists were still clenched, his mouth was filled with dust, his eyes were wide open, and there were cuts and wounds all over his body. Rosario gently lifted him over his shoulder and set off. Randazzo followed him. The others let them go without a word and went back to digging through the wreckage. My grandfather walked out the front gate. He was going to bury Lieutenant D'Arpa outside the fence, in soil slightly freer than the dirt inside a prisoner-of-war camp. Nicola managed to find two pieces of wood with which to dig a grave. With hard work and determination, they managed to make a hole; they eased their friend's dead body into it and then covered it back up. They stamped down the dirt vigorously and covered it with a blanket of stones meant to protect that particular burial site. Nicola constructed a rudimentary cross with wooden sticks and metal wire and he planted it between the stones. Rosario touched the cross and then sat down beside it, cradling his forehead in his hands. At last, he managed to cry, weeping in silence, a profound lament, as long and deep as the war itself.

“I just remembered that I fell down once myself.”

“Gerruso, this one last story and then that's it, we've got to get some sleep.”

“It was at my first communion.”

“You fell in church?”

“I was dressed in a white tunic, from head to foot, I was a sight to behold, my mother made it for me out of her wedding dress. We didn't have enough money to buy a new one. She'd left it a little too long for me, so when I went up to take my first communion, my shoe got caught in the hem and I went head over heels onto the floor.”

“You see that you've fallen down, too? Then what happened?”

“I just lay there.”

“You didn't get back up?”

“I burst out laughing and everyone around me started laughing with me, the other kids, the nuns, my father, my mother, the priest, everyone. That's why I thought that falling was a good thing, the church had become a house of happiness. After you fell, were you happy?”

Something had clicked into place inside me. I was moving forward instead of running away. I was moving my hands with a speed I'd never possessed before. I was attacking, and I meant to hurt someone.

Nina's voice on the telephone.

I couldn't silence the sound of it.

“No, Gerruso, I wasn't happy.”

My gloves were shooting out, returning, then punching again. No time to waste on repetition. Right, left, another right. The blank sheet of the ring was being filled with my words and my words alone.

Mauro Genovese was incapable of bringing home any attack.

The match ended with a victory, on points, for me. Two rounds to one.

“Aside from the fall, it was your best fight yet, Poet.”

I was raging.

While I was fighting, I thought of Nina crying at the other end of the phone line.

“I know.”

I'd never been so powerful.

The ringing of the home phone interrupted our dialogue.

“Will you answer that? Please.”

The telephone sat on a low circular mahogany table in the living room. Before I could place the receiver against my ear and hear my mother's voice on the other end of the line, the glitter of a shard of glass in the middle of the room caught my eye.

There's no amount of cleaning you can do.

The shards always show up later.

“No, Mamma, no, don't worry, I'll tell him.”

Gerruso was bouncing on the tips of his toes.

“Was that your mother?”

“Yes.”

Pupils dilated, arms hanging limp at his sides, fingers in constant movement.

“Is there news about my mamma? How is she?”

In his dark brown pajamas, he looked younger than his eighteen years.

I laid a hand on his shoulder.

“I'm sorry.”

His head kept moving back and forth, as if he were nodding to himself as he accepted the enormity of what had happened. Without warning, he rushed into the kitchen, donned his white apron and his pink gloves, picked up the dishes, put them in the sink, turned on the water, and squirted in dish soap.

His voice was a broken thread.

“Maybe I just didn't get them clean enough.”

The road to hell is paved with shards of glass and crockery.

You have to walk on it barefoot.

I picked up the phone and dialed the number.

“Hello?”

“Nina.”

“What do you want now?”

“Something happened.”

Nicola had waited for the weeping to end. The cross, in the moonlight, cast a serene shadow over the stones of the grave.

“You know what, Rosario? I could tell you that it's useless to sit there talking to the dead, that it would be more useful to go back to the camp and help dig. But that's not what I think, you have every right to do what you feel, especially now that D'Arpa is dead.”

“Francesco.”

“Sorry, what did you say?”

“His name is Francesco.”

Nicola's right forefinger started tracing lines in the dirt. He performed the movements with concentration, his eyes attentive, his brow furrowed. His mouth uttered the sounds that his finger was sketching, for the whole length of the line. Once he had written the word out, he checked it and checked it again. As soon as he was persuaded that it was written correctly, he called Rosario over.

“Is that right?”

My grandfather looked at him with defeated eyes.

“I don't know how to read, Nicola.”

“Don't worry, it must be right.”

And, pointing down, he told my grandfather the word that he had written in the dirt: FRANCESCO.

Then he found a sharp rock, pulled away the rocks at the foot of the cross, uprooted it, and patiently began to carve into the wood, copying the name in front of him.

“It's right for us to add the name, you were right. The way I imagine the angels, they can read all languages.”

He was concentrating. He couldn't make a mistake on his friend's headstone.

“Do you like ants, Rosà? When I was a kid, in the country where I grew up, I'd spend whole afternoons watching ants climb up the olive tree. Always in line, always one behind the other. Once I crushed an ant, just to see what would happen, maybe they'll leave it there, an obstacle, or else they'll steer clear of it and change their path. Instead, I barely had time to kill it before its fellow ants had picked it up, thrown it over their shoulders, and were carrying it along, climbing their way up the bark to their den high up in the tree.”

“To eat it.”

“Does that matter? We eat our memories, come to that.”

He reread the name three times in a row, running his finger over the letter that corresponded to the sound he was uttering. Then, after replacing the stones, he again planted the cross.

“The ant that I killed was carried off as if in a procession, it looked like the cart of Saint Rosalia at the Festino. Since then, I've always done my best to avoid killing ants. It would be nice to carry the graves of those we love with us wherever we go. Ants are so strong that they can. We have to find a different way of doing it.”

Rosario's eyes were a paler hue than usual, crying had washed away any and all filters. But the breath in his throat was calm again.

My grandfather had risen to his feet.

Nicola understood that he was ready.

“I'll wait for you there,” he said, and walked over to the place he had indicated, leaving him alone to say his final farewell.

My mother told Gerruso's father that he ought to let him come to the bout, it would distract him to see me fight. It would make him feel better.

“Unless . . .”

She suddenly blushed. Truth is a scurvy plant, irritating, bristling with thorns.

“I understand, Mamma, I understand.”

I respected the fact that she hadn't said it.

I was two years younger than my opponent.

The odds being given were against me.

The national finals had become a curse for my family.

A couple of hours before the weigh-in, Gerruso left the sports arena with my uncle.

“Did he take you somewhere to eat?”

“No.”

“Will you tell me where you went?”

“I can't, it's a secret.”

“You have a secret with my uncle?”

“Yes.”

“He's my uncle, not yours, come on, tell me where you went.”

“Secret,” he said, pointing with both hands toward his trouser pocket.

“What do you have in there?”

In answer, Gerruso let loose a profound, extended yawn.

“Are you tired?”

“A little.”

“Try to get some rest.”

From the moment he'd been given the news of his mamma's death, he hadn't been able to shut his eyes. Umbertino had driven over to pick us up, not twenty minutes after my mother's phone call. He'd taken us to my house. Gerruso said that he wasn't sleepy and he spent the whole night in the living room with Umbertino, watching horse racing on TV.

I slept like a rock.

“If I was a woman, by now I'da already made up a well-rested face.”

“Eh?”

“You know how women always put on makeup? There. Maybe I coulda used makeup to paint a fresh face.”

“There's no makeup that erases exhaustion.”

“Oh, yes, there is. Women have different makeup for every occasion. My mamma used to get made up every Sunday, for Mass: she painted her cheeks, she put on her hairspray, and she went off to church. I've seen Nina do her face, put on her lipstick, pencil in the eyebrows on her forehead, stuff like that. Hairspray, now, she never used that. Nina always used to put on makeup when she was going to see you.”

“Really?”

“Yes. Women are strange creatures, did you know that? They're crazy.”

“Goddamned truth.”

“If you watch them when they're putting on makeup, they get all upset, ‘What are you looking at?' ‘Go on, get out of here!' they'll scream. But then, in the middle of traffic, in a crowd, they decide they have the wrong makeup on, they'll pull open their purse, pull out a tiny hand mirror, they always have one with them, and they paint their faces, super-fast, in front of everyone. Did you ever think about it?”

“To tell the truth, no, I hadn't.”

“There you see, my thoughts are growing up; now that my mother's dead, I must be more mature.”

My opponent in the fight for the national title was called Renzo Ceresa. He was Sardinian, twenty-one years old, and nicknamed “
Bentu Maìstu
,” after the mistral wind that blows out of the northwest, unexpected gusts that cut to the bone, chilling.

“Poet, what are you thinking about?”

“About when a fight begins.”

The hall filling up, the referee calling the boxers into the ring, the bell sounding, the clock starting to run.

The last chapter of a much longer story.

“Do you ever miss your father?”

“Yes.”

“But you never even knew him. I knew my mother. I have lots of memories of her, you only have words. Was he a good boxer?”

“That's what they say. I miss never having seen one of his fights.”

“What I miss is my mother when she would take my temperature when I had a fever. She never yelled at me when I was sick. She'd come to my bed with a bowl of stew with potatoes and put a pillow behind my back. She'd put the thermometer under my armpit, it was always cold and it tickled me and made me laugh. When she checked it she'd hold it between her hands as if it contained life itself. You're such an expert on missing people and things, can you tell me if I'll miss her lots?”