The Unfinished Angel (3 page)

I
L
B
EASTO

I
forgot to say about
il beasto
. First, I tell you that I am in peace with the birdies and the froggies and the toads and the kittens and the puppies and the lizards, all of those creatures, just like I am in peace with the mountains and the trees and the flowers, but let's not get too mushy. I tell you that so you know that I am not like the peoples who hate everything and complain all day short or long. Those peoples are sad.

Il beasto
is the dog of Signora Divino: a bitsy poky dog you might accidentally step on, a barking, nippy-snappy noise
macchina.
The noise is bigger than the dog. The noise makes you want to kill it.

Like this it goes, just when you are enjoying the air and the mountains of view:
arf, arf, arf, arf, arf, arf, arf, arf, arf, arf, arf, arf, arf, arf, arf, arf, arf, arf, arf, arf, arf, arf, arf, arf, arf, arf, arf, arf.
Then it stops and you are so happy for the quiet that you could cry. But you are only happy for a minute because there it goes again:
arf, arf, arf, arf, arf, arf, arf, arf, arf, arf, arf, arf, arf, arf, arf, arf, arf, arf, arf, arf, arf, arf, arf, arf, arf, arf, arf, arf.

Peoples in the village try to tell Signora Divino that the dog's
ar
f
ing makes them crazy in the head, but Signora Divino is without enough ears. She says, “What? I can't hear you. What?” And so people stand there barking like the dog and she says, “Whatsa matter with you?”

Zola and Mr. Pomodoro are not happy with the
arf, arf, arf
of Signora Divino's
beasto
. They want to kill it.

Zola stands on the balcony of her bedroom and shouts down at the
ar
f
ing
beasto
: “Be quiet! Shut up! Stop it! I'm going to kill you!”

Mr. Pomodoro stands on the balcony of his bedroom and shouts down at the
ar
f
ing
beasto
: “Be quiet! Shut up! Stop it! I'm going to kill you!”

And Signora Divino, without enough ears, gathers slugs in her garden and brings them and the snakes into the yard of our casa when she thinks we do not see.

M
R
. P
OMODORO

I
am not sure what to make of Mr. Pomodoro. Because he is so tall and linky and rubbery, he seems sometimes like a boy, knocking into tables and doorways, his big muddy boots clomping on the tile floors. He will smile one minute and frown the next, squinch his nose, tilt his head left and then right, scrunch his mouth.

Other times, he appears more like a man: He spreads books and papers and archno-techno drawings on the table and makes notes with his sharpened pencil. “Mm” and “ah” and “erm,” he mumbles. He tapples rapidly into his dimputer,
tapple, tapple, tapple,
pauses, looks up, ponders the ceiling, resumes tappling.

When Zola wanders in and out, he is offlivious to her. She seems accustomed to this. He is not ignoring her, exactly. It is more as if he can only do one thing at a time. I think maybe she enjoys the freedom. I don't know why I have that impression; maybe it is because she does not seem sad or miserable or in any way unhappy.

Today, for instance, Mr. Pomodoro finishes his reading and tappling, turns off his dimputer, stands up, and goes to the bottom of the staircase. He listens and then he climbs the stairs and clomps down the hallway, stopping at each room and briefly gazing in.

At Zola's doorway, he sees her sprawled on the floor with her feet up on the bed, a stack of paperback novels beside her and one in her hand, which she is reading. On the cover is an island with a single palm tree and footprints in the sand.

Mr. Pomodoro stretches his rubbery mouth, cracks his knuckles, says, “Well, then,” and moves on down the hall. I don't think they are mad at each other, Zola and Mr. Pomodoro. It is more as if he does not know quite what to do with this colorful child and is relieved that she is content to be on her own.

Downstairs again, Mr. Pomodoro unpacks a few things from one of the many boxes stacked by his desk. He unwraps a small photo, smiles at it, takes it to the mantel, and places it beside the one of the boy. It is a photo of a young woman, maybe twenty. Mr. Pomodoro presses a finger to her picture and then turns to the little boy's picture and does the same.

I am about to float on up to my balcony when I notice Mr. Pomodoro return to his desk and open one of its deep drawers. I slap my headfore! What I see inside reminds me of a tale Zola told me. When was this? I don't remember. Before the shad problem.

 

We were up in the tower, me and Zola, smashing figs. We watched her father as he packled in the garden below. Zola says, “Angel, Angel, I will tell you about a boy. Would you like that?”

Truly, I have no grand interest, but it is a lazy day and so I say, “Tell away.”

Zola licks fig juice from her fingers. “There once was a young boy with nine brothers and sisters. His family lived in a crowded, crumbling house at the bottom of a hill. There was never much food to eat in that house with all its children, but one day his father brought home a box of chocolate-covered cookies. Have you ever eaten a chocolate-covered cookie, Angel?”

“Me? No, no, I don't eat cookies.”

“Oh, but they are supremely delicious!” Zola says. “So the papa of the young boy brought home a box of chocolate-covered cookies, and he proudly set them on the counter and went upstairs to wash.”

“Uh-oh,” I say, because I know this is not a good thing. I can see what is coming. I have been around awhile.

Zola puts her hand out dramatically, as if she is stopping the wind. “Now the little boy knew not to touch the cookies. He knew that his papa would later open the box and allow each child to take precisely one cookie. Oh, Angel, how the boy longed for those cookies. He could hardly bear that he would have just one. He wished his father had never brought home the box at all. It was too awful to think of having to wait for the cookie, just one cookie, and that would be all.”

At this point, Zola sighs and pauses, contipilating the sad situation. “Oh, Angel, the little boy snatched the box of cookies and fled to the basement and ate the cookies, all of them. He could not stop himself. They were so good, so perfectly delicious, so, so,
chocolate.”

“I knew it, Zola. I knew he would eat those cookies.”

“Yes, Angel, yes. Later, the boy confessed, of course, because he was an honest boy, and he got a whipping.”

“I was afraid of that, Zola.”

“Yes, well. That is that. But now the boy is a man, and in his house he has a desk, and in his desk is one deep drawer, and in that one deep drawer he keeps mounds of chocolate: chocolate bars, chocolate candies, chocolate cookies! So many chocolates!”

“I understand this, Zola.”

“Angel, any time of day or night he can select a chocolate something, but he does not make a pig of himself. Why do you think he keeps all those chocolates hidden in the drawer when he does not gobble them up?”

“Ah, Zola, ah. This I have seen! So many peoples have the secret drawers—or sometimes closets or boxes—and they have the little somethings in them. I am not talking about collections, like coins or knickle-knackles. I am talking about stashings of food or strange things—like Signor Rubini, you know him? The square man from up the hill?”

Zola presses her fingers to her lips. “The one who sits on the red bench, with his wool cap in one hand and his cane in the other?”

“Yes, yes, that's Signor Rubini. He has a secret drawer, and in it he has dozens and dozens of pairs of navy-blue socks! Is true. He cannot
wear
so many, but he
needs
so many because when he was a child he was always cold, especially his feet, and now he has the secret stash of socks for, for, how you say? For insurance, maybe?”

“Ah,” Zola says. “Aha! Insurance!”

 

I had forgotten the chocolate-drawer story of Zola's until I see Mr. Pomodoro open a deep drawer in his desk, and inside, what do you think? Chocolates! Boxes of chocolate-covered cherries and chocolate-covered almonds. Chocolate cookies and chocolate bars, stacks of them. Mr. Pomodoro opens the drawer, gazes inside, and removes one chocolate-covered cherry. He eats it slowly.

I have already seen what Zola keeps in the top drawer of her desk. She keeps rocks: jagged rocks, smooth rocks, big rocks, little rocks. From time to time, she opens the drawer, selects a rock, turns it around in her hands, studies it, and then returns it to the drawer. I feel as if she is collecting pieces to make a mountain. Is this insurance?

Zola also has another secret drawer. In it, wrapped in a piece of blue silk cloth, are feathers: mostly slenderly, gray or white. I wonder about these feathers. What kind of insurance do feathers offer?

M
Y
T
ERRITORY

W
hat exactly is my territory? I don't have the information. Maybe it is the whole village, maybe only part of the village, maybe one family, maybe one person, but which one? Who is going to tell me? I am never seeing other angels, not even when I float north and visit the goats. Where are all the angels?

And how does Zola know what angels are supposed to do? Why is she always telling me I'm supposed to know this and that?

Today Zola says to me, “So, no swords?”

“What is sword?”

Zola slaps her headfore. “You must be a very young angel.”

This is making me mad. I am hundreds of years old, and she is just a puny few-years-old people. Maybe ten. Maybe twelve. Maybe eight.
Puh!

Zola says, “Angels used to fight, you know. They weren't always sweet and loving and peaceful.”

She thinks
I
am “sweet and loving and peaceful”?

So Zola tells me a story about a fearsome battle between angels and evil beings. The angels rode flying white horses and slashed swords and threw thunderbolts. They were strong like warriors, and they defeated the evil beings in a long and mighty battle.

“Those were some amazing angels,” Zola says. “Do you do anything like that?”

“Like what?”

“Like ride flying horses and slash swords and throw thunderbolts.”

She isn't kidding. I can tell she really wants me to say yes, and I am even considering saying yes because then she will be impressified with me, but before I can answer her, she says, “Are angels dead people?”

“What? What? No! I am not a dead people. I am an angel! A people is a people and an angel is an angel!”

“Okay, okay,” Zola says. “Take it easy.” She runs a finger along the stone ledge, tracing a vein in the rock. Then, just when I am calming down, she says, “Are you a boy angel or a girl angel?”

“What?” I don't know why she is making me so fidgetated. I am not used to peoples seeing me, and I am especially not used to peoples asking me questions. Usually the peoples who see me are the ones who are in great dangering or are very sickly. They smile on me. I make them peaceful.

Zola is studying me. “It's hard to tell. You could be a long-haired boy or a sturdy girl.”

“I am an angel,” I say. “I thought you knew a lot about angels. I am not a boy or a girl. I am angel. Angel. Angel!”

“Ah,” Zola says, nodding, her chip-chop hair flicking up and down. “It's just that in churches, you know, sometimes the angels are women in long dresses, and sometimes they are babies, and—”

“Oh. Churches. I do not know about all those angels.” This is something very confusing to me. Zola is right: Some are women and some are babies, and it is a puzzlement because never I see these angels in real, only in stone and in paintings. Do some angels look like this? Am I supposed to look like that? I ask Zola what I look like.

“What you
look
like?” she says. “Don't you know what you
look
like?”

“How would I know?” I say. “In a mirror I behold white fogness. Do I look like white fogness to you?”

“No, no,” Zola says. She is studying me carefully with the eyes with the large black poppils. “You look like—now don't get mad—you look like a person—”

“No! Not a people—”

“Well, wait, not exactly, no, no. You have the shape of a person, and a pleasing face—”

“Pleasing? Attractiful?”

“Yes, pleasing, I would say. The robe, hmm, is a bit long and crooked. . . .”

I hold out my arms. “It is?”

“Yes, but it's also sort of regal. You know what ‘regal' is?”

“Of course, like king, like queen!”

Zola is trying to peer around behind me. “Where do the wings go?”

“Wings? What wings?”

Zola frowns. “Don't you have wings? I thought for sure, that first time I saw you, that you had wings.”

I feel like I am going to bust into the tower walls and crimble into a thousand pieces. “I do not have wings.” I say it slowly so that I do not sound too mad, but I am feeling hurt. “I am not a bird. I am an angel.”

“Okay, okay, calm down,” she says.

I am about to reassure her that I am perfectly calm when we hear
boom, boom, boom-de-boom, boom, boom, boom-de-boom.
It is Vinny on his drums. Then we hear
arf, arf, arf, arf, arf, arf, arf.

Boom, boom, boom-de-boom—

Arf, arf, arf—

Zola leans over the balcony wall. “Be quiet! Shut up! Stop it! I'm going to kill you!”

If Zola had a thunderbolt, I think she would throw it.

S
WISHING IN THE
N
IGHT

T
hat night, after I check on the childrens in the chicken shad and beam them warm beams and see if they have found the figs I have left for them (they have), I wait until dark and then I flish into all the casas and apartamentos and sprinkle over the heads of all the sleeping adulterinos the knowingness of the hungry childrens. It takes a long time, but I am happy when I am done.

Now the peoples will do something, because peoples take care of other peoples, especially childrens, right?

I return to my hammock on the balcony just as the rosy headfore of morning begins to rise over the mountain. It is quiet, perfectly quiet, with only the sounds of mountains and trees humming.