The End (14 page)

On this corner the smoke of coal in a furnace was predominant, on this next corner the smoke of nuts being cooked on a charcoal grill, on this next one the smoke of a barrel of rubbish that the leather-faced madman named Pierangellini was burning to warm himself.

The air was dank and stimulating, and the smallest pellets of water darted through it and pricked her face.

That woman there, hawking a cage of puling piglets from the back of an ice wagon, carried her fat in front of her, in the middle, like a man.

He would put his fingers, washed or unwashed, on whatever part of her he pleased, whenever it pleased him to do it, for the rest of her life, until he should die. Despised by her or no. The fingers intolerable, while she made a face for him to see of something sweet in her mouth. Her body filth-smeared, the body she had scrubbed and polished and hidden away to give only to him.

She needed to say to Donna Costanza, as her mother would, with her face, Everything is coming together at once, yes; but also, Everything has gone to shameful pieces.

Once Lina had explained what had happened and explained her feelings with her face, then Donna Costanza’s lips began to twist as though she was struggling to smother a rising sneeze, and her gray and mottled teeth were exposed to the air. It was a face of hatred. But for whom?

Lina wanted to go inside, but Donna Costanza made her stay out, although it had become dark and was cold, and told her to walk along the trench, where the men continued digging in the muck, now by the light of hurricane lamps.

With a look, Lina said she was frightened and ashamed.

But Donna Costanza said that, even so, she must walk along the trench, where the men looked up at her, a pretty young thing at night, accompanied only by a widow carrying a purse and a string of songbirds, tied together at their necks, that she had bought from a boy in the street for their supper.

Now, as she did this, Lina felt no less frightened or ashamed, and with her face she said so. And Donna Costanza, who always spoke aloud and rarely needed to speak with her face, nonetheless this time seemed to say with only the slightest raising of the lids of her eyes: Carmelina, it is this way. You must break. He will recline, perhaps even stinking of alcohol through his skin, and point to a piece of clothing you will be wearing. And you will take it off.

Then, once it had become very cold, Donna Costanza led her away to her house. But she didn’t hold Lina’s arm, as she otherwise would have done; instead, she walked at a distance off to her right as though in some way Lina had failed her.

The birds were already plucked and singed. It was difficult to say what kind they were. Grackles, she supposed. Donna Costanza roasted them over the fire while Lina chased a housefly around the dining room with a clump of scarf in her fist.

The baker Rocco was in the alley. She saw him in the window. He was holding in place a clapboard that had fallen off the rear of his building, and one of his young sons held a nail while another hammered it with brisk, confident strokes. Snow fell on them.

On the floor of the fireplace, the blackened fat of the birds smoked.

The two women also ate chicory from the yard.

Mrs. Marini was careful to cut away the meat from the legs and breasts of the birds on her plate. However, the distress of spite and the reversal of her hopes had made her ravenous, and she finally ate the ribs, too, cracking them between her jaws and swallowing them, hoping to quell her rioting stomach. They were Umberto’s bones, she imagined.

“Father will buy that farm now,” Lina said.

Mrs. Marini made a Victrola-cranking motion in the air, meaning it had been many times that she had heard this distasteful song before.

“He can use the dowry money to buy the oxes he needs,” Lina said.

“Oxen.”

“Oxen. He’ll make it up to me. You misunderstand him. He’s faithful to us.” Lina was terribly overexcited. Her arms had gone white, and the green veins were visible through the skin. Her look was dreamy, but the dream was perhaps the kind in which one does disgusting things and then tries to hide them from the police.

“I find this whole arrangement medieval, frankly,” Mrs. Marini said.

Lina looked at her.

“I had hoped you would marry above your station, which the promise of this country makes a reasonable goal,” she said. “It’s as though I had some priceless stamp and he mailed it.”

The fly landed on the table, and Lina at last killed it with her hand.

Mrs. Marini said, “He’s sold you cheap, aren’t you proud of him?”

“No, please.”

“What’s its name, your peasant master?”

“Mazzone, Vincenzo. Please don’t.”

“Your children will misspell your name on your grave now.” Mrs. Marini had organized all of the heads of the birds on the lip of her plate so that their beaks hung over the edge, as though straining to peck at the crumbs of bread on the tablecloth.

Her stomach appealed for more.

She knew that soon she would say something indiscreet, unnecessary, and hateful and that later she would feel a modicum of remorse, which she would truss and dispose of like this:
Fatti maschii, parole femine
(“manly deeds, womanly words,” the motto of the state of Maryland).

“I expected you would be loud and make a scene but later on you’d be kinder to me,” said Lina.

“In fact, I am too disgruntled to raise my voice,” Mrs. Marini said. Cattishly she smoothed her thinning hair. “Did you know that two years ago he had it in mind to buy a different farm? But your mother said he must wait until you and your sister were married so that you wouldn’t have to be spinsters on a croft once they died. And did you know that he said he intended to go, with you three or without you? That those were his very words? And that your mother and I had to hide the money in another bank to foil him? There’s your ‘faithful’ for you.”

The uneaten bird on Lina’s plate bathed in its cold juice, on which a skin had formed. “Yes, I did know that,” Lina said impatiently.

“And, and, he’d already bought the bell for the cow!”

“No, it was a gift.” Lina pulled on a hank of her shapeless hair.

Mrs. Marini was extremely annoyed.

“I know all about that,” Lina said. “But it’s finished now. And he’ll be happy. But I hoped you would say something else. I hoped you . . .” She flushed and her little ears flared.

Two or three more nasty, discrediting revelations percolated against the lid of Mrs. Marini’s brain. “Oh, what do you want out of me?” she asked.

The girl’s face was open, charming, perfect, utterly stupid, and loving.

“Please don’t be disgusted by me,” Lina said.

“Why in heavens not?”

Lina rubbed a piece of the fly off her hand with her napkin. She said, in a burst, “Won’t you come with me, at least?”

“When?”

“Saturday. When I meet him.”

Umberto would be outraged.

“Certainly!” she exclaimed.

As regards making Lina her apprentice, only an hour before Mrs. Marini had believed in the idea passionately, but having thrown herself into action after many months of brooding, only to see competing events turn her intentions awry at the last moment, her resolve, being passionate, cooled and, once Lina had been married for several years, no longer seemed so pressing. For the time being, it even seemed in poor taste, because Lina and Vincenzo were unable to conceive a child.

“Sophist,” Nico said in an undertone, but again it was not really him.

Mrs. Marini had lowered herself by a long rope to the floor of the crevasse in her mind. Fungi sprouted from the viscous cavern walls. A yeasty ooze enveloped the feet of her dead, who paced away down here, along with a few unappeasable, carping previous selves. One of them wore a Nico mask, but Nico never came.

“
You’re
the child,” said the one in the Nico mask. “You’re a child, and you’ve always been a child. You wanted to be the one who prepared the marriage, but you were upstaged. Then you threw a tantrum.”

“Impostor,” she replied. “Don’t think I’m fooled. He was not so smug.”

It was really her self of about 1920 who was talking to her, from the period after he had died but before the swerve. It ably wore the dangling jowls of the Nico mask and hoisted up the shaggy brows in mock surprise to emphasize a word as he would do; however, her hair of that time (thick still, but colorless) overflowed the edges of the mask like a frizzled mane.

“She was a glabrous, faithful, sexless thing, which offended you. So as punishment you made her walk where the goons could look up her slip, and then you tried to rake muck about the father. When that didn’t satisfy you, you took away the job she didn’t know she was about to get.”

“You always had to be the one and only,” her sister sneered, in a linen smock and
her
leggings, kicking the ooze.

“Why not simply say you changed your mind? I know why. Because you lacked rationale,” said the voice in the mask. It was such a compelling impersonation that she wished she were taken in by it. “You insist on rationale. Then your disappointment over the shabby groom presented itself as a distraction you might twist into an excuse.”

“You are a petty cuss,” her mother said in the dialect of the town of her youth, which Mrs. Marini had had no occasion to speak in fifty years.

Here is how she met her husband.

In her town, in Lazio in 1876, a platoon of soldiers under the new king was squatting in the palace of the duke, who had lately been expelled. The local boys challenged them to a footracing tournament. She was sixteen. Her mother forbade her to go and watch, but she defied her.

The boys and the soldiers ran one-on-one sprints from the palace steps across the weed-ridden square. They were stripped to their undershirts, barefoot for fairness because the soldiers had only their boots and the boys wore light sandals. At the end they ducked their heads in the spray of the fountain. There was a crowd. She would be seen. That someone in the crowd should betray her to her mother may have been her preeminent aim, but no one seemed to notice her.

Two officers—lean, redheaded brothers from Bologna named Marini—faced each other in the championship round. She carried in her pocket a deck of laminated playing cards, a gift from her father’s mother that she resolved to present to the winner. However, as it happened, the victor was carried off on the shoulders of his comrades, and instead she gave the cards to his brother.

7

S
ixty years later, Mrs. Marini was riding in the rear of a car that crested the last of many gradual slopes and began its descent into the murky predawn countryside of the Cuyahoga River valley. She had not traveled outside the city limits since the summer of 1905, when Nico had taken her on a train to a resort hotel in Sandusky. A quartet had played on a dais in the hotel dining room. All of the better restaurants still employed real musicians at that time. The two of them ate the most succulent galantine of duck, and waded in the lake, and slept under a silk coverlet in a light, airy room.

The old car in which she now rode had once ineptly aspired to the middle class (the imitation marble of the footboards was actually linoleum), but, judging from the racket inside and the indefatigable jolting of the machine at every speed, it had long ago learned its place. However she was not an authority. Lina sat in front, and her Vincenzo guided the car through the mud and gravel of the uneven road. They had been married for seven years.

The car suffered the inclines terribly: The engine made pitiful screams and repented the affectations of its youth and begged Enzo’s forgiveness; but he was immune and pressed it onward. Nico, Mrs. Marini recalled, had always treated their horses with humanity and grace.

She wished one of them would turn around and talk to her. Her throat emitted a harsh noise to no avail. The car was a 1924 Buick Roadster. She had tried to forget this useless datum and therefore had failed. In general she considered it extravagant that urban working people should own cars, but this was only a clamorous old thing with rubber patching in the canopy, and Enzo did the repairs to it himself. The young couple lived in a two-bedroom hot-water apartment, a clean place of recent construction in Elephant Park, five blocks from her house. The three of them often went on excursions to hear live music played or so that Mrs. Marini could buy Lina something pretty downtown, while Enzo smoked in the department store lounge and studied the newspaper. Enzo offered to drive but always eventually deferred to her preference for the trolley.

Since Lina and Enzo had no children still, their expenses were modest. Lina maintained her position at the overcoat shop on Twenty-fourth Street, and Enzo’s talent for staying employed in the present time of hardship, which had produced a boomlet in Mrs. Marini’s own business, was remarkable.

They were heading to the wretched grape farm so that Enzo and Lina could help Lina’s father trim the wretched vines and Mrs. Marini could confer with Patrizia, who had sent so many invitations through Lina for Mrs. Marini to pay a visit that she had begun to disregard them, with continually greater ease, until the previous week, when Lina implied (it not being her practice to speak directly of interesting things) that an urgent matter had arisen and her mother, who had no telephone, required Mrs. Marini’s advising right away. Her egoism thus engaged, Mrs. Marini agreed at once. Lina did not, on examination, seem to know what the matter was.

Mrs. Marini tilted her eyeglasses so that the stems pinched her temples and the image outside came into focus. She had hoped that a hardy agricultural scene would alleviate her present cynicism, but what she beheld was not agriculture. Agriculture was the domination of a landscape by the hand of man. What she saw were budding woods that crowded to the edges of every open place as though a barricade held them back from the orchards and the shorn acres of pale, busted stalks and mud. (It was April.) Every meadow, in its squareness, manifested a persistent human attention. It was evident out here that Ohio had recently been a single, dense forest, open only where the rivers drained it, and would rather be so again. Even from the faces of the bluffs, the trees protruded, laterally. She was living in a barely domesticated country. Certainly there were those who found, in the same scene, a grid of cornfields plundering the poor, wild trees, but her priorities were the other way around. Savages and sylvan paradises did not interest her, even in literature. She was a city girl. She wanted to read about civilized people corrupting one another. She did not want your Zane Grey. Give her a swimming pool, and it’s poisoned. Setting was ancillary. Who poisoned the swimming pool? That was what she wanted to know.