The End (26 page)

He was so tired.

Something warm and analgesic was suffusing his brain. The effect was like the stuporous, chemical ease that follows sexual release, and it led him toward the fathomless sleep of early marriage. The sleep of the thousand years.

Nine years passed.

He had come home from work. How many times had he come home from work? He had told the boy to run him a bath. He had asked the boy where his mother was, and the boy had said he didn’t know.

In the corner of Enzo’s vision, his father’s sleeping head jerked upright. “My God, wake up!” the old man cried.

Enzo looked again for the white stripe along the right side of the road and found it. But it was two stripes, and they were yellow. He was driving in the wrong lane.

Brilliantone.

Stand up so I can beat you.

Ad astra per aspera.

Momentum? Momentum is easy. Momentum, on a perfectly frictionless surface, is equal to the mass of the object times the speed.

He engaged the brake, and yet the truck continued its forward motion. Headlights growing brighter by the millisecond. The wheel was turned from side to side, and yet the truck kept on going, straight as the road, and struck the opposing vehicle face on face in an exclamation of shrieking metal and glass.

Sleep.

Up the highway, down the highway. He washes, you dry. Close the mouth when chewing. Close the light when leaving the room.

I was eleven. There was an uncle, the name was Gregorio, who leased me from my father at grain-cutting time, and who I loved better than all the others. He had left to fight in the war against Turkey and returned with a collection of postcards depicting the cities of the north in painted colors, one for each of us. But for me, secretly, there was another gift, a silver cutlass taken from the Turk he killed in Libya, my finest possession. I used to keep it in a hole in the ground in a wooden box, under a medlar tree.

Today, the two of us were walking home. We had been out from sunup taking in his wheat. The scythes, we left in a shack by the field. Our feet were bare. The heat, even now, at twilight, was incredible. We were starved and thirsty when we reached the final slope and the bell tower in town came into view, far off. Then we were hopping downhill, along the path, going faster, then faster.

Then we were running, both of us. The stones pricked my feet but it didn’t matter, we were running. When at the foot of the hill we hit the main road, we were at a sprint, the both of us, shoulder-to-shoulder. It was impossible to go any faster. But then I did.

I pulled away, breathing in the dust. I was young and fast. I was alone in front. My determined feet were small and weightless. The ground gave out under me.

13

M
rs. Marini and Patrizia drove downtown to pick up Lina at the train station on New Year’s Eve. They walked across Public Square and into Erie Station Tower and rode the elevator to the secondary basement, where toilet paper and butterscotch candy were stuck to the concrete and everywhere they looked, colored people of every age and tint crowded the platform, making them both anxious to get out of there. The block signals down the track turned green, and a locomotive arrived from Youngstown with what seemed to be actual blood and animal parts on the cowcatcher. Another train pulled in, from Baltimore, and an aged colored woman stepped into the gangway, holding her hat to her head. Then she seemed to see it was not the way out, went back inside the car, and emerged a minute later at the side door, goggling at the throng on the platform, tremulously touching her hat as though to reassure herself it was still there, until another old colored woman called to her and rushed to her and took her bag. A tall white woman, biting her lip, wearing a blue coat with a mink-neck collar, was engrossed in a movie magazine, on the back cover of which a grinning, mustachioed Western actor testified that Luckies Taste Better. Somebody tried to sell them a chocolate bar. What appeared to be a perfectly good man’s boot stood upright, shiny, in a rubbish can.

Earlier that day. Mrs. Marini paid the undertaker and bought herself a Danish pastry at Rocco’s on the way home. Once inside, she kept her long johns on and wore a stocking hat in place of her hair. She couldn’t remember a chill that had lingered so long and defied so many means of throwing it off. She made herself wear a shawl—and she despised shawls. The urge to wear a shawl is the body’s advice that you had better get your paperwork in order and unhide the petty cash so your heirs won’t miss it. She drank half a gallon of steaming water with lemon, but it passed through her too quickly to do its work.

She wrapped an afghan over the shawl. (Abjection; serfdom.) She exercised by pacing from the kitchen to the parlor to the bedroom to the parlor to the pantry, up the stairs, down the stairs, down again into the cellar to shovel more coal into the furnace. Back upstairs. (Her hip! Suffering!) Her face was gray and her fingers were blue. She was determined not to let a certain party see her like this.

She positioned a chair over the register in the kitchen floor. She opened the dictionary on the credenza. She rubber-banded the crossword to the cutting board in her lap. The pen was in hand. The clock said 10:17. She gave herself twenty minutes.

Work fast. Scan for capital letters in the middle of clues, indicating facts, indicating only one possible answer.
Capital of Yemen. Dog of Thin Man. Joseph of Gori.
No loafing now—
Sanaa, Asta, Stalin
—or you missed the point.

An enchanted moment came, an erotic flash, at fourteen across: eight letters; second-to-last letter an
a;
the clue,
Baloney.

She was a naked woman reaching into a tree, plucking a plum from the branch.

Claptrap.

She had trouble with thirteen down: ten letters,
An image that bleeds through.
She had
nti
in the middle. Last letter,
o.
What were they talking about? Then
pe
at the beginning. Was it
pentimento?
She consulted the dictionary. She had not known it counted as an English word.

On filling in the last letter, with two minutes to spare, she felt the familiar triumph. She had defeated the puzzle writer. But triumph was succeeded immediately by hopelessness. She often felt this when the puzzle was done. The paint repented and gave up the image it was hiding. The crossword faded, and underneath was the day’s agenda. None of this was helping her color.

She needed a plan.

It came to her.

She would stew herself. She left her hat on the hair of one of the plaster heads in the lavatory downstairs. She took a detective novel with her to the bath and sunk into the tub. She refreshed the water every ten minutes, draining a little and refilling, reading the book cover to cover, until she could have peeled her toenails out of their slots. Sweat stung her eyes.

She tossed the book onto the toilet seat and pulled herself to a standing position with the rails Vincenzo had, to her zealous and futile protestations, bolted into the tile. Microscopic machinists had tunneled into the flesh of her leg, filed the ball and socket of her hip to a glassy finish, and painted them with Vaseline. She could’ve run a marathon, but she had more pressing business. Her wristwatch on the toilet seat said it was 3:03. She toweled off the mirror and observed her moist, bald head. Her victory over the cold was absolute. She could’ve fried an egg in her palm, but she had business.

She dried herself. She had to get a move on. Patrizia and Ciccio were due any minute to pick her up and go to the station.

She pinned her wig, an extravagant black pouf, to what was left of her hair. She had the smallest possible moment of regret while putting in her earrings. What with so many years of metal dragging at her earlobes, the holes weren’t piercings anymore, they were dragged-down gashes in the cartilage. Had she known she would live this long, she would’ve waited to pierce her ears until she was fifty. But, then, if she’d waited to pierce her ears, Nico would never have had occasion to buy her all these earrings to begin with.

Very good. Her hair was on straight, her taupe rayon stockings were clipped up, her color was high. The image in the mirror showed its teeth. She saw a spark at the edge of her mind. It was an idea, at first distant and indistinct, and it was shooting toward her like an arrow in a dream. It was a hideous idea, but she was not culpable for having conceived it, because it had attacked her from the outside. She hadn’t thought it up, it had thought itself onto her; however, she could not help but recognize that it was indisputably true. The idea was that she would outlive them all.

Her purse was black. Her dress, of course, was black; all of her dresses were black. The open-toed mules she picked from the closet—she was impervious to cold now, she wanted to look harumscarum and regal at the same time, the queen of Hell—were black. She hadn’t set foot outside of her house in any other color since 1915. She hadn’t set eyes on Lina, her lamb, her little lover Lina, since 1946. She painted her face up strikingly. She sharpened her cheek-bones into scimitars. She didn’t want to look good. She wasn’t vain, merely. She wanted to look terrifying. She practiced the countenance with which she would greet Lina on the platform. Was she more frightening with her arms folded or at her sides? The sneer, she found, was less effective than closing the lips tight and dilating the nostrils. Don’t show the teeth until you are moving in for the kill.

The senses in which Lina was at fault were too many to list, but that didn’t stop her. There was the disappearing with no trace and no word for days and days. There was thereafter the word every couple of years communicating little more than that she was alive and in a lunar Western outpost working in the kitchen of a school, and then, of all places, in Pittsburgh. There was the reasonable if not demonstrable hypothesis that, Enzo and his father having reportedly been dead tired before they left the farm, they may both have fallen asleep, if only for a second, which never would have happened if Lina had been in the car. She never fell asleep in cars. She would have kept Enzo awake or driven them home herself, because she wasn’t proud and careless behind the wheel like he was. There was the little matter of leaving her boy with no mother. There was the husband who said, Thick or thin. There was the mother whom everybody else had already abandoned. There was the man in the other car, who was also killed, and Lina would have talked Enzo awake or driven herself. There was the no reason ever given, to anybody, not in a letter, not in a phone call, for leaving. There was Mrs. Marini’s own theory that there never had been a reason, only a decision, made and executed in a single deft, unmeditated stroke. There was Costanza Marini. There was, What about her? There was, I gave you my heart every day for thirty years. There was, Even when you pass a dead dog on the road, you pay it the courtesy of a backward glance. There was, I drove you from my thoughts, I did not say your name while you were away.

She may have reserved her severest judgment for the sins, committed by someone else, of which she happened to consider herself most guilty, but that wasn’t the point. She wasn’t interested in extenuating circumstances or Christian psychology or petty tolerance. She was interested in driving a stake of fear into Lina’s heart. The Lord would have his opportunity for retribution in due course. Meantime, there was a price to be paid down here, at home.

She was plucking her eyebrows before the bedroom mirror when Patrizia and the boy arrived. Ciccio came in and sat on the bed, expressing curiosity as to what she was doing to her face.

“I don’t come out of the package like this, you know,” she said.

He said, “What do I know about cosmetology?”

“Did you tramp snow on my rugs?”

In the mirror, she saw him lift his stocking feet for her approval.

He said, “Are you sick or something?”

“No,” she responded.

“You look sick. Pardon me saying it.”

Patrizia shuffled into the bedroom, tinkling her keys. Her face was swollen and splotched. Mrs. Marini checked Ciccio’s face in the mirror, but it was a weird and peachy mask of health and goodwill. Then he left the room. Patrizia looked at her sideways as she continued to lay siege to her brows. From the other side of the house she heard Ciccio repeatedly opening and closing the icebox.

“Are you hungry?” Patrizia yelled toward the doorway.

“No,” he called back.

“Are you playing with my icebox door?” Mrs. Marini asked.

“Yes,” he said.

“Do you like the noise? The clicking noise?”

“Yeah,” he said feebly.

He did that before church, when she made him go, and before returning home when his father had a list of chores waiting for him, and before the penmanship practice to which she used to subject him in the afternoons. It was his way of asking to be left alone.

She faced Patrizia and made a coquettish smile.

“Don’t start, Costanza,” Patrizia hissed. “You be nice.”

“I’m nice,” she whispered, leering. “I’m always nice. I’m so very, very nice. Don’t you think I look nice?”

Come to think of it, her strategy would come off much more smoothly if Ciccio were left at home. Too bad Patrizia insisted on driving. She wanted Lina to herself.

“Let him stay here,” she said.

“He’ll go,” said Patrizia. “He wants to go.”

“We’ll have to smoosh together in the cab, which will be hot and disaccommodating.”

“He likes trains,” Patrizia insisted.

“We’ll smoosh and think of the trouble with the shifter.”

“When he was a baby, he had the toy trains that he pushed on the sofa and the driveway, and he made the train noises. Remember? He had the stripy hat I made him.”

“A passenger car. A sedan.”