On Earth as It Is in Heaven (6 page)

“If you don't I'll break your ass in half.”

“So will I,” added someone else.

“And maybe I'll join in.”

“Me, too.”

Umbertino looked up, spread his arms wide, and offered his breast up to the clash of battle.

“Let's go.”

There were eleven of them. No one moved a muscle.

In that silence, it was impossible to hear anyone breathing, no rumors of war.

My uncle's hands clenched into fists.

“How'd you feel?”

“It felt like nothing I'd ever felt in my life.”

“What do you mean?”

“I felt as free as a murderer.”

They couldn't make up their minds to attack him.

That wasn't right.

What was missing was battle.

What was missing was blood.

What was missing was slaughter for everything to be perfect.

Umbertino made perfection attainable.

He cursed the uncurseable.

Umbertino cursed Rosalia, patron saint of Palermo.

He was as calm and unruffled as the August sea.

“Now come at me, you assholes.”

Emotion overwhelmed all sense of strategy. All eleven of them went for him, lunging as one. A pack without a leader. They attacked him, ready to devour him, without a glimmer of understanding that the prey wasn't him. They were the prey.

He used his fists.

He needed nothing more.

The men collapsed the way sand collapses.

He drove his fists into the flesh of one and then of the next and then of yet another.

A ravening and contented beast.

The fight hardly lasted a minute.

He shattered arms, jaws, ribs, teeth, cheekbones.

When it was over, five men lay sprawled on the ground, and six others stood staring at Umbertino. My uncle looked at his hands and in them he read the future.

He found Mariù with the red hair two days later, at the Sant'Orsola cemetery. She wore a filthy dress. He called her by name. She turned around and failed to recognize him. He explained to her that fucking her had saved his life. She pretended to find that interesting. The story came to an end and was followed by a silence that failed to fill anything up. He came straight to the point and asked her how much. She named her price.

“Too much.”

“How much do you have?”

They went past the last row of headstones, behind the larch trees. As soon as he was done, Umbertino stood up, buttoned his pants, and left without a word. He never saw her again.

He was the first boxer in my family.

Il Negro
.

No one knew what his real name was.

Umbertino met him during a street fight. A round of bets was placed, and on the basis of how much money was in the pot, a prize was set aside for the winner, and when the word was given, fists began to fly. Umbertino was the last man standing, all his adversaries were flat on the pavement. That's how he made a living until the middle of 1945. He was twenty-one years old, his fists were deadly weapons, and he had no technique whatsoever. That's how matters stood the day he met
Il Negro
.

When he spoke
Il Negro
's name, Umbertino paused in mid-sentence. He listened to the silence that followed the name he had uttered. His respect for his maestro is a sentiment that has remained intact, despite the passage of time.

Il Negro
landed in Sicily with the U.S. Navy. Less than a week later, he deserted. He spent his days in the taverns of Palermo, soaking up alcohol like a sponge.

“Of course, it's not like he went unnoticed, Davidù, he was completely black. Why didn't they come arrest him, you ask me? Shit, first they had to catch him, and even if they caught him, they'd still have to stay on their feet.
Il Negro
was too damned murderous, he bruised my ass red, white, and blue.”

In their first fight,
Il Negro
punched him so hard and long that Umbertino fell in love with him then and there. He was skinny and gnarly and he reeked of booze. My uncle was bigger, stronger, and soberer. A heavyweight up against a middleweight. It should have been no contest. Instead, not even a minute into the bout, there was no mistaking the foregone conclusion—and it wasn't the one everyone expected. Umbertino couldn't lay a glove on him. Big as he was, all it would have taken was a punch, a single roundhouse and he would have decked him. But the other guy was a grasshopper. He kept hopping out of the way. Umbertino couldn't seem to get him in his sights. He'd throw a right cross and with an agile hop
Il Negro
was already somewhere else. The instant that Umbertino pulled his fist back toward his torso to recharge it for another slug,
Il Negro
's fists were hammering away at his face, his chest, his forearms. He'd never met anyone as fast as that. Umbertino stayed put, feet flat on the mat, dealing out punches in all directions.
Il Negro
danced around him and disfigured him. No, he wasn't a grasshopper. He was a butterfly. After seven rounds, Umbertino had a shattered eyebrow, a swollen upper lip, bruises on his chin, a cut over his left cheekbone, and pristine knuckles on both hands.
Il Negro
just kept fluttering. His feet made no noise. The bout ended in the tenth round; Umbertino hadn't had the chance to land a single punch.
Il Negro
took the money, clenched it in his fist, and said: “Booze.” Umbertino was devoured by shame. He lunged at him and grabbed him by the arm.

“Teach me to box.”

Il Negro
shook him loose, spat on the floor, and went off to get drunk.

That was the first lesson.

Humiliation burns worse than the punches you take.

“That was my first real boxing match. I thought that a fistfight was just a matter of strength. Hitting harder, hitting meaner. But not only did
Il Negro
's punches grind you down, they were beautiful to behold. What destroys you is precision, not just strength. He'd destroyed my face. He had to become my maestro, there was no other way.”

He searched all of Palermo. He found him at the Taverna Azzurra.
Il Negro
was getting drunk on Sangue di Cristo wine. His hands were shaking. He was so befuddled that it would have been child's play this time to lay him to waste.

“You understand, Davidù, there in front of me, reduced to a wine-soaked rag, was the man who had clobbered my face with fists that felt like a couple of bricks.”

“So what'd ya do?”

“What could I do? The only reasonable thing: I swallowed my pride and went over to talk to him.”

Il Negro
hated everyone. White, yellow, black. Everyone. He took my uncle on as a pupil only because he gave him the right answer at the right time.

“Teach me your movements, your feints, all your technique, come on, teach me how to box.”

He wouldn't so much as look at him. He reached out for his glass of wine. Umbertino grabbed his wrist just as he grabbed his wineglass.

“Crying all over yourself like this is for women.”

“Is there a manly way of doing it?”

“Sure, while you're crying you can always beat someone bloody.”

Il Negro
trained him till he could barely stand. He taught him that when you throw a punch, it doesn't start from the arm, that you don't plant your foot on the ground—it should barely graze the floor, that sliding motion gives you room while keeping your eyes on your opponent's. He changed the way Umbertino walked and how he held his shoulders, his posture. He positioned him in front of a mirror, telling him to punch the empty air over and over again, following a specific sequence of crosses. He showed him how to release muscle tension by jumping rope. He decided what and how much Umbertino could eat. He forbade him to drink water at the end of each sparring session. He prohibited alcohol. Once in a while, laughing hoarsely, he would throw an empty beer bottle into the air, and the instant the broken glass littered the floor, “Take off your shoes and jump all over it.” That's how Umbertino learned to land on the mat lightly: by slinging his feet onto broken glass.

Il Negro
transformed his body. That's how my uncle became so agile. He was a heavyweight forced to become light on his feet because he was being trained by a middleweight. But the real metamorphosis was taking place inside his head. Day by day, Umbertino clad himself in an increasingly glacial calm, the result of a growing self-awareness. He was learning to fully appreciate his talent for mayhem.

Il Negro
taught him to do push-ups and knee bends. He taught him a series for the abdominals, the upper, middle, and lower, then the dorsals and the extensor muscles. He designed choreographies of attack and counterattack just for him, strategies for occupying the center of the ring. And, more than anything else, he made him run. Speed, resistance, sprints. In the hot sun and the pouring rain. Before and after sparring sessions. In the morning, first thing. Every goddamn day, several times a day, until he fell to the ground, cramping, vomiting from the effort, trembling with sudden spurts of diarrhea. Still, in spite of everything, he went on running just the same. My uncle possessed an indestructible will.

Il Negro
spoke Italian. His father was a Lucanian emigrant and a complete bastard. Someone stabbed his old man to death when he was just seven in a fight over women; so much the better, he deserved all eight inches of the blade that plunged into his heart. His mother was black. She cleaned house, worked variously as a cook and a streetwalker, and did anything she could to put bread on the table. She died of scurvy when he was twelve.
Il Negro
explained to Umbertino that in America there are couples like his parents, of different colors, that they are few in number, and that being born into such a family is terrible luck. He told him that his boxing skills were noticed by a Campanian emigrant in the street one day.
Il Negro
was fighting with a young Irishman who objected to the sight of a Negro walking on a public sidewalk, and he was pounding the Irishman's face in. He was thirteen years old. He walked into the gym as a nobody, but when he left he was a champion. He said that it would be feasible, if challenging, to teach Umbertino to box, he had grit and talent and maybe, someday, who could say? He added that it was beyond anything the Good Lord ever intended, though, to teach Umbertino to speak English. That's when he stopped talking and ordered him to start running.

Il Negro
was twenty-seven years old and there wasn't a mark on his face.

“You should have seen him box, Davidù. He moved toward the center of the ring, jumping and turning like a racehorse, stretching his neck to uncrick it, raising his right guard, and then suddenly, as if by magic, he was gone, and a butterfly had taken his place. Was all that work worth it? If only you could have seen him even once.
Il Negro
didn't box.
Il Negro
floated; he flew.”

His first fight with
Il Negro
as his trainer came seven months later. It was held just outside of Palermo, in Bagheria, in the courtyard of a school, with only a few spectators. His opponent was a father from Siracusa, age thirty-three, tipping the scales at 298 pounds, with broad shoulders, giant hands, a hairy chest, and good eyes. Umbertino was no longer the trash-talking youngster who until just seven months earlier was slaughtering citizens in the alleyways of Palermo. He'd discovered new muscles. He was acquiring an impeccable technique. He danced on the tips of his toes and he was damned fast. He fought like a veteran, focused and measured. His maestro had made a few offhand comments to the effect that he might actually have a shot at winning something big.

Il Negro
didn't show up in Bagheria. Umbertino never found out why. He finally tracked his maestro down late that same night at the Taverna Azzurra, drunk as a skunk. He sat down at his table without asking a thing. He sat there in silence, watching his maestro steadily destroy himself. The minute
Il Negro
finally passed out, Umbertino threw him over his shoulder and carried him home.

He'd won the fight by a knockout in the second round. The Syracusan's eyes were two puddles of blood.

Il Negro
stopped drinking, cold, the next day.

“He was all boxer in his head, so when he set out to do something he just did it, in a way that left everyone else with no option but to suck his dick.”

He was there for Umbertino's next twenty-one bouts.

Unlike many other trainers, he almost never said a word. When they met at ringside between rounds, he'd ask: “How are you doing, Umberto?” The arrogance of the answer was enough to reassure him.
Il Negro
delivered his orders with a calm that would brook no transgressions. Generally speaking, his instructions never varied: to take a specific punch in a specific part of the body in order to test his opponent's power.

“And then?” Umbertino asked.

“Kill him.”

Twenty-one bouts.

Twenty-one knockouts.

Il Negro
explained the rules of boxing to him and the underlying logic of the division by weight into different categories. Umbertino trained and listened.
Il Negro
told him which attacks scored points and which didn't and which ones were necessary to demolish the opponent's fortress. Umbertino got better and stronger, growing from one fight to the next.
Il Negro
told him the story of the finest fights in a career—his career—that had been interrupted when he was drafted. He taught him to understand his opponent by the way he used his feet. Umbertino went on disfiguring every boxer who dared to challenge him.
Il Negro
told him about Billy Bob Bartelli, also known as “The Wizard of Brooklyn,” and Foster “The King” Monroe, a redheaded Scotsman with the finest footwork he'd ever seen. He confided in Umbertino the story of when he fought for the middleweight title and lost.

“What about you, Umbè?”

“What do you mean, what about me, Maestro?”