The End (11 page)

“No no no.”

“—suddenly I am the long-lost. I am Mark Twain. One night with their husband and they have second thoughts. They want a return to normalcy, Grandma, the butter churn.”

“No, but—”

“Pull yourself together, for Chrissake.”

“I’m in some very delicate business these days. Let me not hang details around your neck. It’s enough to know that at the very heart of this business is something that I have to have all my powers about me.”

“I’m plain of face. I could be anybody.”

A tabby cat with a live swallow in its jaws sprung from a rock below them onto the sill of the cliff, squeezed itself under the rail, and padded away across the bright grass.

“I am a man of firm beliefs,” Rocco said. “Such as love of my country; the power of prayer; the belongingness of wife with husband, and children with their father.”

“And now you’re corrupted. That’s the confession you feel compelled to make. Like as though it hasn’t ever occurred to anybody before to open their heart to the old man under the tree and pretend he is the dearly departed whatever-the-relation.”

Rocco peered into the gaping mouth of the freezer, but he saw only what was promised—three tubs, brown, pink, and green, in a shallow, frosted box.

“I am not corrupt,” Rocco said.

“And yet you think corrupt thoughts.”

“I’m very, very faithful, sir. What I’m trying to explain is, I
have
to know you. If you have the face of the person, that means you
are
the person.”

The ice cream man closed the freezer hatches, turned aside, and made four neatly spaced and phlegmy sneezes into his handkerchief. Rocco blessed him.

“Something in my face—thank you—evidently expresses, Please come over here and unfold your regrets,” he said wearily. The sneezes had taken something out of him, a reserve of spiritual force necessary to maintain the cocksure veneer. There was a suggestion of pleading-ness in the voice. Rocco felt certain now that he was faking.

“And you know me. We know each other. If you give me a second.”

“No . . . ,” the man said, trying to sound lackadaisical, making a grandly dismissive gesture in the air, a shoo-fly gesture in which the hand, at the top of the arc, snapped to one side as if only barely tied to the wrist, a move Rocco had no doubt he’d seen before.

Unless the feeling of wanting very deeply to have no doubts could resemble the feeling of having no doubts itself.

“At least once, we’ve seen one another. I think.”

“Jesus Christ, this fucking ragweed over here.”

“Unless our Lord has led me astray.”

“They actually planted it, if you can believe that. It’s part of the landscaping, is what they told me, the park rangers, when I asked them why not mow it down.”

In the moss beneath the hedges, the cat stood with its forepaws on the swallow’s neck and tail and bit into a bunch of feathers and ripped them off, while one of the wings methodically slapped its face.

“You never lived in Ohio anywhere, or in the Nebraska?”

“I’m going to sneak in here at night with a can of turpentine and a match, is what I’m going to do.”

“Unless I’m deceived this whole time,” Rocco said.

“All summer it’s the grass pollens, the windblown corn rusts.” He sneezed four times more, fluid leaking out of every opening in his face. “And the fungus spores.”

“The things that I absorbed for so long,” Rocco sputtered, “for I don’t know why.” The sun was on his back, and a caddis fly alighted on his belly.
Thumpety-thump
went his heart.

It didn’t matter what he had done or failed to do. He didn’t see what he saw. He was not where he was. He felt so hungry and light-headed and confused that he wasn’t hungry.

And yet I have my pink scoop on top of my green scoop on top of my cone, he considered, licking them, as he crossed the grass and then the pavement again and stood at the rail on the lip of the gorge and watched again the falls falling, the shapeless mists rising up.

His streak was over. He had no possessions worthy of note. His parents had long since gone to their long home.

He was fifty-seven years old.

PART TWO

All the Daughters of Musick Shall Be Brought Low 1928 - 1936

5

F
or thirteen years after the death of her husband, Costanza Marini had lived alone. She was now sixty-eight. Death beckoned. And that was really too bad, because, having been anxious in her youth, disappointed in maturity, and then desolate in middle age, she had recently made a conspicuous turn: In what she expected were her final years, she found herself in possession of powers she had long ago given up hope of acquiring. It was a windfall. She had become happy—no, exuberant. While she slept, a storm had knocked the fruit out of the trees.

In retrospect, the turn’s success had depended on her failure to notice it until it was complete. Consciousness had sabotaged her past efforts at reform so consistently that she didn’t bother to blame it anymore. It couldn’t help itself. Surgery required that the surgeon be awake and the subject etherized; operating on her own mind, she only woke herself up halfway through and made matters worse. Reform, she had slowly become convinced, was impossible. Fatalism was true. These were the tenets of a religion to which she had every intention of staying faithful. But the religion had a flaw that would prove its undoing.

It was so all-embracing that it used her every observation as evidence for its claim: Her pudding wouldn’t thicken—why? Because it had always been the fate of this pudding to be thin. Therefore, eventually, why observe? Why be conscious? Why not sleep? And at last, she slept, firm in her faith in misery, finding nothing new to contradict it, and envisioning her death with a growing interest and fear.

For the turn that then ensued and changed so much, she had to take at least some credit. Although she’d been asleep, yes, and hadn’t
done
anything to herself, she still had had the absence of mind to stay asleep and not to take heart until whatever force was acting on her had finished its work. She was like Saint Peter walking on the sea, only the moral of the story was upside down. She could do it so long as she believed she couldn’t do it and was afraid.

Her expression at social gatherings during married life was one of regal dispassion, the face of a sleepy predator. In fact, she was abashed and so let the men talk, congratulating herself for being bored by them. She was impervious to the suffering of others and did not weep at the theater or at funerals. She did not pity the poor, the halt, or her husband, Nico, as he declined. “You are cold, cold, cold,” he said. Maybe so. She took his word for it. She could hardly feel the lack of what she had never known in the first place.

The question arose after he died whether she was naturally ill formed in these ways or had learned her, her—the word was
callousness
—over a long marriage and might unlearn it. An intractable widow she knew, a muleteer’s wife, still treated herself and guests at lunch to raisin cake, for which she professed a passion while from her own piece she picked all the raisins; she disliked raisins; it was her Angelo who had liked the raisins. Those women were so stupid! But when Costanza Marini did the same things they did, she was no more forgiving than before, of them or herself. Where was her nerve? The ability to speak the truth to ourselves must have been the advantage that the adaptation called consciousness evolved to exploit. But the truth, over and over and over—that she was a sneerer and a scold, heartless, timid, fated to die alone—wasn’t only bleak, it was fatiguing. Where was her pride?

Four years into her widowhood, Satan visited her in her garden. She was on her knees, yanking the quack grass out of the spinach. Iridescent flies dappled the carcass of a bass in the furrow. “Egoist!” said the tempter. “Despair!” To despair is a sin. But, true enough, she had no hope. She could not remember having hoped. “Die!” said the devil. She was never to speak of this episode to another soul, but she really saw him there. He was dressed like Young Werther, in a blue jacket, yellow vest and pants, and tricorn hat, and he spoke with a German accent. Her transformation was in fact slow and continuous, but if she’d had to point to an emblematic moment, a swerve, it would have been that morning with Satan in her garden. For she had straightened up her back, quaking, as he tried to lay her low, and she surveyed him head to foot in his absurd outfit; her eyelids peeled back into her head; her chest jumped with a gush of air; the skin under her hackles itched piercingly—and she laughed at him. “Don’t laugh at me!” he snapped. But he was ridiculous. What he was saying was ridiculous. She herself was ridiculous. She was fifty-nine. Her health was sound. The hem of her skirt was in the mud. “I am a fool!” she said aloud, and tightened the laces of her shoe.

In conversation she became an interrupter. Her brows swelled. The wizening of her neck she emphasized with tight-fitting collars, the better to show the glazen skin of her cheeks, jaw, forehead, and nose. In a daguerreotype—of her husband and herself in the 1880s—that presided over her bedroom, her bones were already asserting their ownership of the face. The eyes were dull and recessed. (In fairness to the goose in the picture, her infant son, Alessio, had lately died; however, your pity did her no good; she would lay other eggs—except, as it happened, she would lay no other eggs at all.) Look at the eyes now! Black globes, protuberant, fat. There was another animal in the mask than before. Why, she wondered, do we always look to the eyes?
Windows of the soul,
she disregarded as fanciful. No, it’s the eyes themselves, to be exact, that look to the eyes. They are as competitive in their vanity as we are.

She read hysterical murder stories, and history, and the Bible itself, which in her youth was a sin to read, and English literature, untranslated, deep into the night, so that sometimes she slept until noon. Now, Nico had let her read. In fact, he bought her texts on diseases of the blood, anatomy, nutrition, tokology, and hygiene. And he used his acquaintance with the dean of laboratories at the university across the bridge to procure a seat for her in the back row of lecture halls, where ladies were invited to sit and take in, if not comprehend. It was hardly pure husbandly kindness for him to do all these things, since he profited from her industry as much as she did. Still, if she wasn’t in bed with her hair up and books closed by nine o’clock, he moped, and what a disgrace to see that, how it wounded her pride to watch her husband debase himself by entreating her. The surplus from her income he would not let her spend, so as not to call attention. But she spent it now, damn him, and his hoarded treasure, on cheese and the opera.

A gull encountering a fish on the beach, she considered, will first dig out its eyes, which are softest and easiest of access and provide a clean route to the brains, which are soft, too. Is that why we look to the eyes? If I look you in your eye and you flinch, do you suspect me of plotting where to aim my spoon?

It was akin to Protestant conversion, this swerve, seeing the light and so on, only in her case she saw the darkness. She did not say, I will die in hopes of being reborn. She said, I am dying! She was vain, and exaggerated, and let her arms swing around her while she talked, and was too up-to-date American to stay in her mourning clothes longer than four or five years (she’d graduated from peasant to petty bourgeois the first time she took money for her services), but by 1928, thirteen years after Nico died, she hadn’t changed them yet, and why should she? They were a becoming badge. She looked good in black. She was both the genuine article and a fake. A European wouldn’t understand how to pull that off. To a European you were either wearing the clothes that belonged on your body or the clothes that belonged on someone else’s. But an American—yes, she was an American now; you couldn’t touch her, not with your scruples or your history or your handwoven stockings—went to a masquerade ball wearing her own linsey-woolsey housecoat as a costume. You have not become an American until you have learned to impersonate yourself in a crowd.

Ice water did not curdle the juices of the stomach, she discovered, by drinking it nervily and waiting. Why, that was only a prejudice, common among those of her nationality and insisted on by Nico for all his days. To think that for centuries Aristotle had peddled the canard that women had fewer teeth than men—and they bought what he was selling! she was mad!—when anybody might have opened up and counted. Thus false doctrines were impaled by her and—even at this late date, for sixty-five, sixty-six, sixty-seven, were so old, were so much older than she’d planned to live, should have been deep into the intransigence of the downward slope—were trampled under her feet, along with false likes and dislikes, raisin cakes and their kind.

Honor is for those who hold themselves responsible to a kernel of unchanging self. Alas. None of that for her.

While dressing she considered her fattening but still meager breasts, which Nico had only half-playfully jeered. They were like what? Like miserable, withered medlars (yes,
medlars;
he’d missed out, good): a medlar, which is only a small, spotted, unlovely orb, yes, but is perhaps unique among fruits in that it is inedible until it starts to rot.

Soon, said Death. And she began to sum up, to tie contrary judgments together with a phrase and put them to one side. In this way she discarded old remorses and confusions and made way for last things. The phrases ranged from promulgation of a settled rule to abstraction, code, euphemism, sophistry, baby talk. As to sin:
There is no such thing, and yet I will pay;
alcohol:
whenever you please, but no liquor before five o’clock;
how her dead would receive her in paradise:
not bearing fruit baskets;
the significance of the tower far in the distance, across an ocean of grain, that recurred in her dreams:
Avert your eyes, look at the grass;
her vanity:
“ Ye have the poor always with you, but me ye have not always”;
the past:
Strictly speaking, it does not exist;
her means of income:
to the good, sweets, to the others, mutton.
She needed one for the cause of the swerve. A phrase. All this had happened over ten years. And she was so grateful. Character wasn’t fate. No one else, in her experience, had demonstrated such a shift so late in life. She needed a phrase.