To Make Death Love Us (18 page)

But he was a
Depression kid insomuch as he never knew what it was to have enough to eat and clothes
bought new just for him until the war came on
in 1938 and offered jobs for all.

The Giambelli
family had a way of happiness about them. They knew how to make a joke out of bitter
disap­pointments, hard times, and personal tragedies. They even joked about the fact that, with
so many kids yelling and screaming around the house, Marco was ten years old before anyone
realized he couldn't talk or hear.

They said how lucky
Marco was not to have to listen to the constant uproar around the place.

That wasn't true,
of course. It was just a joke. Marco received special training at the city school for the
handi­capped from the time he was six years old. He could speak a mile a minute with his fingers
by the time he was ten, and could read lips with fair expertise half a dozen years
later.

When he grew into
manhood, most people didn't know about his affliction, thought him shy and somehow wise in his
silence. That's one of the fictions men live by. "Still waters run deep," and so on and so forth.
On the other hand, when they found out he was a deaf-mute, they thought he was stupid. That's
another fiction men live by. Humans haven't become truly enlightened. They've just learned the
word.

Marco had a man's
growth by the time he was sixteen. Just as well, for the war took all seven of his older brothers
before the government got around to limiting the amount of blood and sacrifice one family could
make. The family way of happiness died with the last of them. Old man Giambelli aged thirty years
in thirty days.

He lost the light
in his eyes and began to ail. It was no sickness of the body but of the spirit.

Nevertheless, it
took the body's strength from him. He couldn't work at his trade as long or as hard as he once
could. He was a carpenter and a brick layer.

Then he wasn't
either, anymore.

His sons, but for
Marco, were dead. His daughters, but for Tessa, married and making families of their own, and the
old man was ready to die himself. And he did one day in the middle of May.

Marco arranged for
the funeral and arranged for the sale of the big house. He settled his mother and Tessa into an
apartment in the same neighborhood so they wouldn't have to make new friends. He kissed them both
and, de­spite their tears, went off to join the Merchant Marines.

He saw what there
was to see. His mates liked him. They would tell him tales when his eyes were elsewhere and in
this way he served as confessor to the irreligious and lay analyist to the emotionally crippled.
They poured out their troubled souls to the broad back of him and felt comforted for it.
Sometimes, he turned around when one of them was in midconfession. He read their eyes and knew
how afraid they were even though they immedi­ately stopped off their mouths.

He had his deepest
conversation with a dying man who'd been crushed by a falling crate on the docks of Tel Aviv.
He'd lifted the heavy burden from the man's crushed chest single-handed. When he took the man in
his arms, his own arms were trembling with the effort. As he gazed into the Jew's dark and
grateful eyes—grateful to be held while dying—he felt his own chest contract upon itself as
though it had been crushed. Felt it stagger in its breath against the restriction of some great
weight. Looked into the dying man's eyes and saw the reflection of his own imminent
death.

A doctor explained
to him by signs and writing upon a prescription pad that he had suffered a heart attack. It was
described as the result of coronary ischemia and the expe­rienced pain as angina pectoris.
Predisposing factors were
smoking,
obesity, hypertension, and a sedentary manner of life.

Marco smiled softly
and joked with his eyes at the doc­tor, who shrugged his shoulders and laughed aloud. For, in his
forty-second year, Marco did not smoke and had never done so. Neither did he drink wine to excess
and drank nothing else at all. He was not fat by any means and his great strength was certainly
some small evidence that his life was far from sedentary.

"Hypertension must
be the villian," he wrote on the doctor's prescription pad and stared at him with admira­ble
calm.

He left the sea
because of that conversation he'd had with the dying Jew on the docks. The man who was—he later
discovered—a displaced person from the Ukraine, told him with his eyes that he was dying far from
home. That
homelands
were not home. The place of the heart alone was not home. It was
heart and smell and the mem­ory that is in touch and taste and sounds—even when there are no
sounds to be remembered but only the sight of things that made them. Marco left the sea because
he didn't want to die in some strange port as the Jew had, or in some strange land or on the
breast of the sea itself.

He went home to
Newark, New Jersey, to the flat where his mother and Tessa lived. He moved in with them and
became the dutiful son.

His mother looked
around to find a wife for him. Her friends had gone. The neighborhood had turned black. The world
had turned while she wasn't looking. Marco let her know he wanted no wife but still she tried,
writing letters to his sisters in other parts of the country, to her own sisters and brothers and
to a hundred cousins scat­tered over the face of America and Italy. She was happy doing it. It
gave her a reason to say hello to all the people she hadn't heard from in so long. Gave her
reason to
confront them with their
neglect of her. See how she had never complained, would not complain even now? Nor ask for help?
But this was not for herself. It was for Marco, come home from the sea and wanting a
wife.

Marco found work in
the great produce market that served the city. He was a valued employee because he could lift
more than three men. He wasted no time gossip­ing. All in all, he was a worker raised to the
worth of six workers.

He liked the loamy
smell of celery with the dark earth still buried in the creases of the stems. He bit into
toma­toes warm from the sun and was very well pleased. He ate watermelon cold and cob corn hot,
cooked on the pierced steel drums that gave warmth to the early mornings of the autumn. He filled
his mother's house with fruits and vege­tables.

He bought a
television set for her—and himself—en­closed in an ornate wooden cabinet. It was a joy and an
amazement to him. He would watch and laugh because he didn't have to care about all the separate
deaths he witnessed there.

In the silence of
his mind, he had come to think of death without the attendant cacophony of grief. The word lay on
his tongue, the sound and taste of the word. It was like the earth around the roots of
vegetables, slightly sicken­ing with the odor of decay but rich and robust all the
same.

His mother died,
suddenly in the night, and he cried for the first time at death and loss and doubt of
immortality. He cried because he wanted to. Because it was a good thing.

His sister was
quiet around him, for there was no sense to talk when she lived with a brother who couldn't
hear.

She was a practical
girl—forty-seven—was Tessa. A Mr. Lombardi, a widower, came calling.

He came every night
for two weeks and Tessa fed him homemade Italian dishes. Marco sat with them and nod­ded and
smiled as they spoke together. He wondered if Tessa was trying to snare Mr. Lombardi into
marriage. If so, why had she waited so long before seeking a husband? For the sake of her mother?
Perhaps. More likely she had no need of a husband when her mother was alive to speak with. If he
could hear and talk, she probably wouldn't be looking for a husband now. But she was. That soon
be­came clear.

He stayed away
deliberately a few nights. This was to give Tessa an opportunity to show Mr. Lombardi she had
gifts other than cooking and for him to show her that he had appetites for things other than
fettucine. When a man and woman are very young and caught up in old-fash­ioned ways, they can
defer bed until after marriage.

At least, that's
the way it used to be. But when a certain age is past, they like to know there's good temper and
fair skill before yoking up for the long haul.

Apparently, Tessa
had learned a few lessons along the way. They announced their marriage and Marco looked around
for a place to stay. He worried about it. He'd never really been alone ever in his life. The
presence of other humans was always near.

It was on a day
when he was giving it his deepest consid­eration while lifting several crates of cabbages, that a
young man tapped him on the arm. Marco stood there holding the heavy weight and watched the
fellow's lips.

The flashy, smiling
talker was waving his hands—one was scarred and twisted—as he described the wonders of the open
road and the pleasures of the carefree life. He turned away to gesture a path through the crates
and
stacks of produce and his voice was,
therefore, lost to Marco. But he'd heard enough—read enough—to decide it would be no bad way of
life. Much like going out to sea, going from port to port, with none of the danger of dying out
there on the breast of nowhere. If another attack or any other illness took him, he would surely
have time enough to make his way back to the city of Newark, changed as it was, and die within
sight and smell of his "neighborhood."

It was, wondrously,
three days before Will Carney real­ized that the man he'd hired to do the heavy work and perform
as a Strong Man was a deaf-mute. Somehow, it pleased him and he tried to reckon a way to make the
handicap work into an act of some sort, but no special thought ever came to him. Enough, then, to
bill him on the canvas and the throwaways as "MARCO, THE SI­LENT SAMSON."

Marco found
Paulette and Serena wonders beyond imagining, though he was put off by their imperfections. The
Colonel was another matter altogether. The nicely molded figure of the little man fascinated him.
He won­dered if he would be buried, when he died, in a child's coffin.

If so, he would
carry it, and the little man inside it, all by himself. He could not imagine why there was
something monumentally symbolic in the act when he thought of doing it.

He dwelt upon the
matter of his own death, and that of others, quite frequently. But since he could never speak of
it to anyone, no one ever knew the terrible cast of his thoughts.

People seemed so
wild-eyed intent upon living when death was mentioned or seemed near. They were, perhaps, more
afraid of it than he. At least, Marco seemed patient in the waiting for it. Fearing after his
death and for his sick heart didn't change the Strong Man's ways one bit. Never had. Never would.
Marco was glad in the great strength of his arms and legs. Glad in the silence and warmth when he
took a woman to bed. Glad in most ways.

Now he sat bolt
upright in the grip of the greatest pain of all. Whatever special fate had awaited him had come
upon him now. It was a fitting end to a life that had been as strange as his own. Almost a dream
ending, the mad girl that had begun this crazy night, the long, terrifying plunge down the
mountain side, down into a black no­where. It was clear from the first he'd been slated to die
caught out on the empty breast of nowhere, far from home. Marco had once thought nowhere was a
sea.

Now he knew it was
a mountain.

Serena cried out
involuntarily in the dark, her dream telling her more than she wanted then to know. She knew it
was over for Marco, that in rendering Will Carney un­conscious, Marco had performed the final
task she had saved him for. She had hoped he could help them still more.

I am sorry, Serena.
Marco's thoughts touched hers. It is my time and even you, with your strange wonders, can not
hold me. I am going into the pain, the last pain.

Serena wept
silently in the dark. Let me help you. I'll ease the pain. There will be no pain. I will make
death love you.

And she went deeply
inside him with her dream, shap­ing it for him and him alone, in his last minutes.

At Marco's feet the
tawny sands ran to touch the softly lapping waves which stretched westward to be lost in
the
blue haze of the horizon. He stood
in the curve of the bay, staring into infinities of distance as absolute as the view.

He seemed to be
waiting for a ship. He sensed that was his purpose for being there. The sun shone as if it were
the first day of the world. There was a sense of strangeness and wonder. Of wrongness, too, but
it did not seem im­portant. It was not quite the world he lived in, but it seemed a fair
world.

With the silent
wind came the long ship, oars sweeping it in a headlong rush toward the beach.

Marco looked down
at himself and found himself dressed in a rough, woolen toga and heavy, leather armor. His right
hand held a short sword of burnished metal. On his feet were rough sandals of crude
design.

Now that was
strange, very strange, but no stranger than the ship that made for the beach, a ship the like of
which had not been seen upon the sea for hundreds of years.