On Earth as It Is in Heaven (5 page)

“But he did gesture for me to come sit next to him. There was room to sit down, I was on my feet by that point, he didn't seem to have the slightest interest in standing up, so I sat down next to him.”

“Did you talk to each other?”

“Do you really think we talked, Davidù? I asked the occasional question, and he would mumble, dip his head, things like that. Nonverbal communication. ‘Were you in the war?' and he'd dip his head in my direction. ‘And where were you stationed?' and silence. ‘Do you smoke?' and he'd shake his head no. ‘Wait, are you sure you're not mute?' and then he'd smile, but softly, and never a sound that passed his lips. Why I didn't start slapping him is still a mystery to me.”

“You were head over heels in love.”

“No, knucklehead. Really, I was just curious about him. Seeing that he hardly bothered to look at me, I pulled out the book I was studying for my exam, Lucretius's
De rerum natura
, because back then, school was serious, if you wanted to teach elementary school you had to know Latin. It's important to know Latin, in that language you'll find the past of our own language, its whole logical structure. Come on now, declension of
rosa
.”

“I don't want to.”

“Come on, I told you.”

“
Rosa
, first declension:
rosa
,
rosae
,
rosae
,
rosam
,
rosa
,
rosa
.”

“
Lupus
.”

“Grandma, you were telling me about Grandpa.”

“Latin is important, very important.”

“
Lupus
, second declension:
lupus
,
lupi
,
lupo
,
lupum
,
lupe
,
lupo
.”

“Good boy. Now, where was I?”

“The book.”

“So, I pull the book out of my purse and the minute I open it, Davidù, I swear to you, I felt his gaze pierce me through.”

“Grandpa's.”

“He was staring at me with a new expression.”

“Like how?”

“I couldn't say, Davidù, but in that instant his gaze had a light to it that was—how to put this?—gentle and sweet.”

“And you fell in love.”

“Yes.”

He had taken her fingers in his hands, as carefully as you would pick up a green sprout, and yet as desperately as you would if you were grabbing the only handhold that stood between you and a deadly fall.

“Teach me to read and write.”

And in the presence of that unexpected revelation of vulnerability, when faced with the humility of that unexpectedly straightforward request, the instant the fragile reed of his voice fell silent, Provvidenza found that she, once so facile and fluent, was suddenly at a loss for words. She was simply smiling at the man who would become her first pupil, the silent love of her life.

“Whores, all bombs are whores.”

Salvo Pecoraro was cursing; his house was gone. The bedroom where he'd been born, the round table made of dark wood, the cane-bottom chairs, the bed with a wrought-iron headboard, the photograph of his mother, Assunta, may she rest in peace, amen. Nothing had survived. To clutch at material certainties is not of this life. Umbertino watched him dig through the rubble. The surrounding buildings were intact, only Salvo Pecoraro's house, bull's-eyed by the bomb, was gone now, collapsing in upon itself, dying a mortifying death. It had not been transformed into a myriad of fragments hurtling murderously in all directions. Amid misfortune, a memorable piece of dumb luck.

Umbertino had lost his own house four days earlier. A chunk of stone weighing an eighth of a ton from the building across the street entered the house without so much as knocking, and went on to demolish the kitchen, the bathroom floor, two load-bearing walls, the bedroom where, fingers knitted behind the nape of his neck, my great-uncle would lie dreaming of women with clean, fragrant skin. The dining-room balcony remained intact, with his mother's red geraniums still proud and present, as if nothing had happened. Those flowers reminded him of the lipstick traces left behind after sex. Umbertino decided that shrapnel and hurtling fragments just weren't his friends. He'd been saved from death in that explosion because he was elsewhere, fucking. That realization filled him with pleasure. He even managed to smile in the face of what from that day forward and forever after would no longer be his home. The only relative who remained to him, his sister, my mother's mother, had been evacuated to Terrasini, a small village twenty miles away from the city. He had chosen to remain behind: I'll survive, don't worry about me, Sis, I always get by. He had no one to answer to. He was the sole master of his fate. He was almost nineteen years old.

He asked a stranger for a cigarette with a glance and was given one, ducked his head in thanks, lit it, sucked the smoke into his lungs. All around him, people were digging, cursing, finding friends, consoling one another, weeping, and shouting that all bombs are whores.

But bombs aren't whores.

Bombs don't have feelings.

Whores, on the other hand.

They have feelings, and how.

Feelings to spare, if not to sell.

Not all whores, of course.

But some of them.

Some of them could be entrusted with a life during a bombing raid and keep it intact. They'd give that life back, all sweet-smelling and safe.

The way Giovannella the whore did.

She had told him that she'd gladly give her life for him.

And in fact.

It happened one night. The bombs were raining down out of the sky. Yes, it's true, it was the grip of my uncle's hand that pulled her along in an exhausting panting race to the door of the bomb shelter, still mercifully left open. But when the air turned incandescent and the sound drilled into the ears so furiously that it made you lose your balance, it was Giovannella who shoved him to the ground, just as an eighteen-inch-long section of shrapnel tore into her chest, coming to a halt inside her love-warmed heart. Giovannella flew backward, fell to the ground, and slammed her head against the smooth stone slab of the road's surface, but it didn't matter—she was already dead. Umbertino couldn't seem to get out a single word. Not a single word of love.

It's not time that creates the hierarchies of love. One might feel a once-in-a-lifetime, precious love for a prostitute met just two weeks earlier and then lost, just like that, during a hail of bombs falling from the heavens. And since all around him he heard cursing, screaming, thundering collapses, weeping, roars, and sirens, Umbertino decided to say to hell with all the sounds of war, caressed Giovannella's still-warm forehead, carefully closed her eyes, and went away, leaving her there. The dead cannot save their own lives.

Giovannella had never asked him for money. She really loved him. Umbertino was handsome, with a harsh and melancholy beauty. When she undressed in front of him for the first time, Giovannella felt a hint of shame to be seen naked. Maybe I'm not so beautiful after all, she thought to herself. She was seventeen years old. It was a single instant, a tiny fragment of time, that made her fall in love all the more, one of those rare moments remembered forever, expanding in one's memory. It was an unexpected, unclothed pirouette that Umbertino performed in front of her. Giovannella the whore laughed with the fullness of her lips, her eyes, and her heart. What came next—my uncle's rough embrace—dispelled all doubt, all fear, all shame. Their kiss was shameless, moist. The way it ought to be. And they loved each other. It lasted two weeks. Fourteen days. Fourteen nights. A roaring, sweaty, passionate love. Happiness within reach.

Then the bombs came.

In Palermo, there were corpses everywhere. Every courtyard, every street, every family was mourning a loss. Umbertino felt his own shoulders, once so broad and powerful, suddenly narrow and become measly. His shoulders had failed to protect Giovannella.

That's war, he told himself.

It happens.

The only way to outsmart war is to survive.

Don't let yourself get attached to anything.

Or anyone.

Follow your instincts.

He started to spend practically all his time with whores. One had already saved his life. Now another did. A certain Mariù, flaming red hair just like Giovannella. She was the one he was fucking when a two-hundred-pound chunk of concrete thundered into his bedroom but failed to find him in. Mariù the whore. He'd been looking everywhere for her for four days. Slowly. Like in any self-respecting exodus. In no particular hurry. One step after the other. Rain soaks you, wind dries you out. The road to Golgotha is always an uphill climb.

There was no way to bury people anymore. They'd already used all the wood to make coffins. There were no tools left to dig graves. Dead bodies were abandoned, heaped on top of one another. The corpses were rotting. Insects danced on them. The streets reeked of death. The center of every square was piled high with rubble from collapsed buildings. Sometimes, if you dug down, you might find a human limb.

In Borgo, a man was singing: “Down will come cradle, baby and all.”

He might have been thirty. Clutched tightly to his chest he held a hand attached to a ragged shred of arm, which had been severed below the shoulder joint. The end of it was white: a jutting bone. That was all that was left of his daughter. The man was singing, wobbling back and forth, back and forth, then an epileptic fit swept over him and he stopped singing. When they came to his aid, no one paid any attention to the arm that tumbled into the dust.

Umbertino came to a halt for a few seconds too long in a place he couldn't seem to recognize. He lacked landmarks. He raised his eyes and saw the light of the sky. A curse welled up in him from the depths of his heart. He managed to tamp it down. That's not the sort of thing you do if you want to survive, you have to train yourself to feel nothing. He went on walking but after seven steps he stumbled over all that remained of a leg. It was crawling with flies and worms. My uncle said to hell with all his resolutions about self-control and let out a mighty curse, a furious despairing oath, inveighing against everything and everyone, with the sole exception of Saint Rosalia.

It made him feel great.

The house with the rose garden was in Piazza delle Sette Fate. A perfect place to take women. But now it was gone, struck by a bomb one afternoon while a March downpour was pounding the city, sudden and fierce. Water was manna from heaven in those days of misery. So everyone ran out into the street to gather as much water as they could. Almost immediately, an unexpected air-raid siren announced an impending attack. The sound ripped through the air, scattering the joy of standing upright in the rain. Bombing raids at this time of day—what fresh hell was this? As the fear rose, they gathered pails and basins and hurried toward the nearest shelter, where those present were counted, and as time passed, they prayed, hoped, embraced, and swore.

The sky darkened with aircraft and, in the space that separates Palermo from the clouds, the bomb had already been dropped. In the instant of impact, it created a small sun that struck the falling rain, forming a beautiful rainbow, and then the house with the rose garden no longer existed.

The silence of Piazza delle Sette Fate was shattered by a roar drawing closer, as Umbertino cursed all the saints on their crosses.

“Did you know what was gonna happen next, Uncle?”

“How the fuck could I, Davidù? I'm no fortune-teller.”

“Were you afraid?”

“You want the truth?”

“Obviously.”

“I was just dying for it to happen. Wasn't nothing I wanted more: fists crunching into ribs, the fury of battle.”

“But how'd you know, Uncle?”

“Same way you knew.”

“Instinct?”

“Blood don't lie.”

At the sound of that avalanche of curses and oaths, the people who were in Piazza delle Sette Fate stopped excavating. Maybe it was just tension, or perhaps it was a sincere desire to defend the faith, or else the simple need to let off steam. For those who were digging in the piazza, that stream of profanities was more than they could take.

“Shut your mouth,” a voice called out in warning.

Umbertino slowed to a stop. Enveloped as he was in dust, no one could sense the actual dimensions of his body.

But his voice.

Firm, calm, sharp.

Like the well-honed blade of a knife.

He savored that silence. Then he let loose again, cursing God and the Virgin Mary.

Sensing his contempt, everyone decided to forget that under the rubble there might still be something to find. Or perhaps it was simply that the time to stop digging had come. Their hands hurt and their lungs burned.

“I told you once: Shut your mouth.”

“And if I don't?”

They wiped their eyes to get a better look at the man on whom they'd be taking out their violent impulses. His outline was vague, hard to see.