The End (25 page)

The old man thrilled at any chance to ride in the truck. Likewise, he adored the machine itself and kept watch over it in spare hours lest passing children molest it in the driveway. He touched its body only with gloved hands. It was the most valuable piece of merchandise anyone in his family had ever owned. The vibrations from the floorboards, he said, did more for his feet than any previous therapy he had devised.

It was the twenty-third of December. They were going to have another working Christmas, but Enzo preferred it that way. The boy had been at the farm a week already, paring vines. Patrizia had driven her wreck into the city to retrieve him the day school let out. But there was plenty of work that still needed doing. All the vineyard posts had to be repounded and the rotting ones replaced before the ground froze.

The truck glided across Painesville and Perry without stopping while Francesco Mazzone gnawed an apple core and likened it to the mealy ration apples he had eaten at the end of the war, which led him to the broader topic of wartime shortages, and finally to wartime losses, a subject Enzo had taken pains to evade. The old man, once launched on his narration, enunciated it definitively, as though he had given it many times before to strangers on buses, ships, and trains. He was an easy talker and had no secrets.

Enzo already knew from one of the letters that, due to the Allied invasion and the shelling of Naples and the surrounding towns, the civilian population of his village had abandoned it and spent four months living in caves in the hills. The occupying Germans, aware they couldn’t hold the village, busied themselves booby-trapping doorknobs, irons, bidets, light switches, kitchen gardens, shoes, corpses, mansard doors, birdcages, and jewelry boxes, hoping to slow the Allied advance. The chapel where Enzo had been confirmed was destroyed when, upon the arrival of the Allied troops, a boy ascended the belfry stairs and set the bell ringing. The letter, sent in early 1945, neglected all but the most critical pieces of personal news. It was addressed
To the Bearer of This Letter
and had been dictated, like all the others, to Enzo’s sister Giulia, who wrote it on faded blue paper dating from the early years of the Fascist government. Enzo knew the paper well; it had been given to him by a teacher in school, and he’d left it behind.
It would be profoundly appreciated,
read his sister’s handwriting,
if the gentle bearer of this letter would be so good as to pass it on to Mazzone Vincenzo, if such a person is known to him.
Enzo remembered the letter in detail, although he had read it only once and thrown it immediately in the trash.

“All winter we ate walnuts,” the old man said. “Nothing but walnuts. Your nephew Filipo, who you never met, stole about ten bushels of walnuts from the German commissary. He was discovered and executed, with a shot, here, in the spine. But, see, they didn’t know where he’d hidden the walnuts. There were six of us. Your mother, Gregorio, your sister, her husband, her daughter, and me. Filipo was the seventh, Giulia’s boy. We all had terrible coughs, we were cold. Moreover, there had been seven of us and then there were six.

“We would sit on the lip of the cave, truly like savages, filthy, with nothing to do. The boredom was worse than the fear. From the mouth of the cave you could see Giuseppina Fiorentina’s orange grove. But we had heard that there were bombs in the branches of the trees, and mines in the grass. We watched the fruit become fat, and then dry, and then fall to the ground. And we ate nothing but the walnuts. And after the war we learned that it was Fiorentina herself who had led everyone to believe the grove was mined, so nobody would steal her precious mandarins and clementines. I don’t think the Germans even knew it was there. She made everybody believe this, and then she went back into town to save her music box, and they found her afterward in her bedroom with her arms blown away. It was boxes where valuables could be kept that were the first things—that is, the first things in which they installed the traps. They started to do it even before we left our houses. The first things were jewelry boxes and music boxes and armoires.

“In any case, later it was March and the wild asparagus was in season. Our house had been cleared of traps by an Australian who was working with the Allies. There were five bombs just in our little house, which I’m sure you recall. We were all very poorly nourished. But your mother had somehow acquired a cup of cream. This was, I can’t tell you, a feast, just to have a cup of cream, and the Americans had given us this cheap pasta, and so your mother went out in the morning to look for asparagus to complete the meal. The zone was supposed to be clear, where they found her, but obviously it wasn’t clear.

“She had come home with this cream in an aluminum can and she was, truly, wailing with happiness, you know as she would do. We put it in the pantry to keep it cool. We felt like having a celebration, and I had two cigarettes. I can’t remember how I got my hands on them. I can’t remember, either, why we smoked them this way, but in any case we didn’t smoke them one to each, we smoked the one together—we passed it between us, very romantic—and then we smoked the second one the same way. She departed. I smoke a lot now. I didn’t used to. I enjoy these American cigarettes very much.

“Close your window a minute while I light this.”

Enzo slid his window up and the old man struck his match.

“An American soldier came to our door. Someone told him where to find our house. I had never seen an American up close before. I thought he would be much taller than he was. I didn’t know what he was saying but it was late in the afternoon and your mother had been gone for many more hours than I had expected, and I knew in my bones what had happened. I went to the bedroom to get my good shoes. Then I left the house with the American. He led me to a small room at the school. There were a lot of Americans there drinking that thin coffee you have and painting all the tables and chairs in the room with green paint. The fumes of the paint made me light-headed, but perhaps I was already unwell. They must have known who I was, because they stopped talking when they saw me. One of the soldiers could speak a little of some kind of Calabrese. I understood him enough to know what they were taking me to see. He led me down the corridor.

“I was outraged that they had not cleaned her face. I simply couldn’t believe it. Her face was painted with mud. They didn’t even put a blanket or a sheet on her body. Her leg was missing. The whole leg. I remember I looked about the room, but I couldn’t find it. It was as confusing as if my own leg were missing. The American from Calabria offered me a cigarette and I told him to get me some water and a towel for her face, but he just pointed the cigarette at me. I told him very clearly to get me a water bucket and a towel, and he left the room. Then I sat down and waited for him to come back. I looked underneath the table for the leg, but of course it wasn’t there. After perhaps half an hour, he returned—with a cup of tea. That was when I left and went home. I got what I needed from the house and went back to the school.”

When they arrived at the farm, Francesco Mazzone answered a question that had puzzled Enzo for twenty years: Why was no one able to grow respectable wine grapes in Ashtabula County? The soil was too good. It was evident even in December that the summer vegetation was rife and the topsoil must be very dark and rich. The old man assumed they had plenty of rain, which they did. These plants would hardly have to work for their livelihoods and would throw off an abundance of useless foliage. What you needed was rocky soil, poor precipitation. The plants had to feel they were in danger of dying off so that they would put all of their energies into producing fruit. No amount of pruning could correct for the soil, and no grape with any depth of flavor would be produced unless the root was made to suffer. He allowed it was suitable terrain for table grapes.

He listened with interest while Patrizia described the myriad pests that yearly afflicted her crop and the expense of the sprays she had to buy to destroy them.

The strain of carrying her big, unequal breasts had begun to twist her back, and her neck was bowed like a stalk holding up a heavy flower, but still her step was long and quick. Her white braids were tied with locks of her own trimmed-off hair and pinned to the back of her head under a heavy bonnet. She wore a widow’s black dress, although she had no way of knowing what had become of Umberto, whom she referred to using the term that described his relationship to the person with whom she was speaking: “your father-in-law,” “your grandfather,” or even “your old acquaintance.” She did not refer to Carmelina or Toni at all.

It snowed Christmas Eve, while the boy slept on a cot in the kitchen and the two men went to bed on straw mattresses spread over the floor of the parlor, by the stove. Enzo was conscious all night long; the straw blades pierced his nightshirt, and his father’s raucous snores abused him like a harangue. He rarely slept through the night in his mother-in-law’s house, anyway, although usually it was the quiet that disturbed him.

Eventually he crept outside wearing his rubbers and the brown merino coat he kept at the farm—an elegant garment, a hand-me-down, belonging originally to Mrs. Marini’s husband, that Enzo had misused by allowing the dander of Patrizia’s rabbits to penetrate it. The air was still and nearly warm, and the thick snow traversed it cautiously, as if trying to escape notice, although it covered everything and rose to his knees. He dipped his hand in it and brought it to his mouth and ate, and felt the cold course in his veins.

On Christmas morning, oranges, grapefruit, and cheese were exchanged as gifts. Patrizia had crocheted an afghan for Ciccio out of a drab yarn she had bought for a nickel at an estate sale.

After breakfast, they dressed and went out. Patrizia drove the tractor at a crawl through the snow, while Enzo and the boy stood in the high wagon it pulled, each swinging behind him an enormous oak mallet that he brought down on the tops of the posts as they passed them. The old man followed on foot in the rut of one of the wagon wheels, delighting in the snow, the like of which in depth he had never seen.

The vineyard under snowfall looked like a sheet of paper on which a single word had been typed, and typed again, and again, and again; until the ink in the ribbon failed and the word, at first so distinct, could hardly be read.

What was the word? For Ciccio Mazzone, to whose bored and erratic mind it occurred that the vineyard under the snow looked like a page and the identical rootstocks and locust posts like the same letters endlessly repeated, the word was a phony Latinism, an American invention meant to sound like it came from the noble Romans, although it probably came from a West Virginia riverboat pilot or an itinerant preacher; the word meant “to flee” or “to abscond,” but he would rather not speak it until he was on his way out of this fucking place, if you don’t mind.

For his father, on the other hand—who watched the boy with satisfaction as the great hammerhead sailed behind him, twisting his back as it went, until with a little upward heave the boy pitched it over his head—the word, if there was a word that repeated itself across the white page of his mind, uninvited and unremitting, was not, in fact,
bastard,
not anymore, not for ten years, at least; nor
Carmelina,
sorry to say, he had given up on that; but
sleep.

Sleep, said the posts when he pounded them, as he inhaled the sulfurous fumes of the diesel engine and tore a frozen shoot off one of the vines and chewed it.

Two nights later, Enzo and his father headed back to the city. Ciccio stayed at the farm. The old man’s return train for New York was to leave early the next morning, and Enzo thought of the soft springs of his bed at home with love and hope.

The roads had been cleared after the Christmas Eve snow shower, but now it was snowing again. Shortly after the men drove away from the farm, the snow turned to rain. The highway was black and shimmered under the headlights. After tomorrow, it was unlikely Enzo would ever meet Francesco Mazzone again.

The windshield wipers were beating like mad. Enzo saw the road less distinctly than the rain itself—the glowing atoms that emerged from obscurity in the near distance, hung there for a fraction of a second, and then shot at him by the millions.

“Now, about the boy, there’s something I should explain—,” he began, and turned his head.

His father’s posture was rigid, as always, and his heavy arms were folded tightly against his ribs. But the rumpled eyes were shut, and the head was bowed in sleep.

Enzo could faintly make out the white stripe on the side of the road, along which he was guiding the truck.

He had parked the old Buick by the curb, he had climbed the stairs. His socks had been soaked through since lunch. He was never to forget that he had gone into the apartment—right through the front room, and then directly to the bedroom—opened the bureau, and changed his socks. Only then had he strayed back into the front room and found her on the floor behind the coffee table, her face pressed against the ottoman. Somehow she had fallen, evidently, and somehow, in falling, her dress had been hiked up over her behind. Which for some reason was naked. And somehow, evidently, she had hit her head, because she was unconscious, on the floor there, with the bleeding, although he could locate no bruise on the head. She had fallen and had been bleeding seriously, the blood was on the Oriental, and she was unconscious. He had carried her to the bathroom, her little legs were limp and slick, and put her in the tub, bending the knees so the feet would fit inside. He stood up, scanning the room, for what? A hairbrush—her hair was a mess—and didn’t find one. He ran to the kitchen, looking, for what? A rag. He had been utterly at a loss as to what had taken place. There had been a water glass, strange, a single water glass drying on the rack by the kitchen sink. It wasn’t Lina’s way to leave glasses out; she dried them and returned them to the cupboard. He had filled the glass with water from the tap and had drunk it down.