The End (40 page)

“Then—as when you spy the shadow of a fish, imaginary and flat, beneath the surface of a stream; and suddenly, cracking the elemental border, the fish flings itself into the crisp and luminous air, twisting with life—from the blackened bottomless depths above the lamp, your ruddy face leapt to my eyes. And you kissed me.

“Maybe that piece is too big to swallow. Here, let me take it out. Maybe you’d like the applesauce first. I know how you like your sweet, my sweet. I’ll mix in the brown sugar. You don’t even have to chew. Just open your throat and lean back your head and let it slip down like birds let fish fall down their gullets. You planted the trees yourself, the apple trees. And I mashed the apples through the mill just today. There isn’t a single seed, I promise.

“I had received the letter from you that I had so long awaited, but I had never heard of the place where you wanted me to go. So while the nuns were in the courtyard taking their bedding off the line, I sneaked into the library of the convent school and found the atlas page for central North America. Then I heard them coming, and I tore out the page. And I put the book back on the shelf, and I ran away. Late that night, I crept into the lemon orchard behind my father’s house. The odor of the blossoms in that orchard was the ideal of sweetness. There was a high, dazzling moon. I scoured the map, but all I could find was Iowa, Iowa was right there in the middle. And I did not know you well enough to know if you would be careless about such a thing, about writing the right letters of the name of a place in the right order.

“I like this. I like how quiet it is now. You and I sitting alone in a quiet room. You don’t have to talk. Just tilt back your head and swallow.

“If I met someone from my town, would I still be able to speak in dialect with him? I don’t think so. You made me speak the national language like they do in the army, or, I suppose, in the king’s house. I used to feel so embarrassed, like I was putting on airs, when I was first learning to talk the way you wanted. I said to you, ‘For the love of God, I am not from Sienna, I am not a baroness.’ But I was ashamed.

“When we were first married I was so unhappy. We had running water and two rooms to ourselves, and the coal was delivered every month to our building, into a bin in the landlady’s stable. It was so much more than I had hoped for. But I couldn’t bear to look you in the face. And once, you came home from the shop, and it was late, and I had put out boiled beans and fresh broccoli and some chicken necks for your supper. And you washed your hands and face in the kitchen sink, and you sat down to eat. And you watched me as you related the plain innocences of your day, but I could not look up. And you told me to look up. But I couldn’t bear it. And there had been months of this. And you stood up and came to my side of the table and told me, perched enormously over me, to look at you. And I would not do it. And then you struck me with the back of your hand, hard, on the side of my head, so that I could feel my hairpin cutting me. It wasn’t too hard. And you asked me why I wouldn’t look at you. And I said I didn’t know. And you said, ‘Why did you say you would marry me and come all this way, and do it, too, marry me, if you didn’t want me?’ And I should have said it wasn’t true, I should have said I did want you. But instead I told you the truth. I said, ‘You aren’t what I expected.’

“You dashed out of the apartment. I heard your feet going so fast down the shallow stairs that I was afraid you would fall. Then, in fact, I heard you stumble and I heard your body fall down to the landing. You had probably hurt yourself, but I didn’t get up to see. And then I heard your feet going more slowly down the rest of the stairs. And I heard the big door come open and the din of the street gushed up to our rooms. And then the slam of the door. And then silence.

“I like to do only the one thing at a time. Today, for example, I know I should have put the roast in by three, but I had cut out the blouse pattern from the bolt of organdy, and I had told myself I would finish stitching the sleeves before I did anything else. There, done. I like to have a little box and to take everything out of the box and then put everything back in. There, done. I like to read a book from one cover to the other. I like to read every letter inside it and then close it. Therefore, having embarked on the sleeves, I did not so much as peel a carrot for supper until I had finished them. Therefore, having embarked on supper with you, I am going to stay here until you eat something.

“My consciousness is like a very bright light I shine on one thing I have in my mind or on another. Often the light is shining too directly on something and it begins to dry up right in front of my mind’s eyes. There was a you I had in mind for three years, while you were in this country and I was in the other one. In the orchard, staining the map with my oily finger, I could not think of you directly. I could not see you. I could not call to mind the exact sound of your voice. You existed only along the edges of my thought and so could be beautiful. And then—it seemed very sudden—I was living in those two rooms with only you. And I did not love the you across the table. And I was looking down at my feet, trying to remember the face I had had along the shadows of my mind in the orchard, because I wanted to say to my heart, Look, they are the same man. But I could not remember that other you, that idea you.

“Everything I look at head-on, think of directly, give a name to, turns to stone.

“You were not what I had expected. It was at least as bad as you feared: You were a disappointment to me. Unless you open your eyes and tilt back your head, I will tell you something else. I will do it.

“I will do it.

“You are still a disappointment to me.

“I want to take my remorse for feeling this way and put it in a little box and close it. My darling, I have been trying to close it these many years. And yet there is the emotion, unclosed, unclosable; and there is no
There, done,
ever, there is more in the shadows sometimes, and sometimes less.

“You could say I have no right to notice my heart’s feeble follies, these elusive regrets I feel for an honest confession confessed unkindly, when my conscience has vastly bigger fish to fry. I have practiced and perfected and take pride in my facility with a vicious act for which I take money. I’ve tried to find remorse in myself for this, but where is it? If I wanted to, I’m sure I could invent a defense, but I would only want to if I felt remorse.

“Why must everything be explained? Why must we say ‘because’? We name our reasons for doing, we tell ourselves these private fables, all the time knowing they are at best incompletely true.

“Once, you were eating a pear, you were scraping the meat off the core with your teeth. You were being very meticulous, as you are. (We were walking arm in arm from the theater, where we had made a game of whispering made-up translations of the words of the play, which we had not understood.) We were talking, and I made a joke in English, my first one, that you had pared the pear to the bone. And you laughed. And then you popped the core in your mouth and chewed it and swallowed it down. And later we wondered why you had done that. What had come over you, to eat the core of the pear, stem and all? And here is what at long last, two nights later, after we had given up on the hope for an explanation, you said, snatching sense (such as it was) from the jaws of nonsense (so to speak): You said, ‘I did it on purpose.’ Which was not a because at all, we both knew. But it was the answer.

“My darling, my penance, my consolation, I do not love mess, as you once said I do; I only feel everything and also its opposite, and often I feel them at the same time in the same part of myself. You were falling down the stairs, and I hoped you would keep falling and also that you would climb back up to me and close the door behind you when you came in.

“I wish it would stop raining. I wish those mules did not look so piteous, asleep on their feet, the rain pelting them and also rising as steam from their gray sides.

“I return again and again to my father’s house on the evening after I left it. Darkness falls. As it is October and it is early in the evening, there is a weak shower, which will pass soon. Here are the vegetable skins rotting in our garden. There are the lanterns of the last people coming off the vineyards in the hills. In the house, my mother is pulling a chain to draw a piece of wood over the window to keep in the heat. She assumes I am on my way back from my father’s father’s mother’s house, where I told her I was going. I am late, however. I have, alas, been caught in the rain, she supposes. I am often late. (In fact, I am by now already in Rome, at the station, and the emaciated cats are slinking among the rubbish heaps.) My father and my three brothers and my five sisters and my aunts and grandfather come inside and wash the dirt out of their hands in the same kettle of water. My absence is noted without alarm. Look at them, wet and stinking, they are all already dead, and they don’t even know it. They’ve all already been transformed into my ideas of them, as you may be someday should I outlive you. There is so little light in this room that they all of them stoop over the soup bowls to see what they are eating.

“Now, what I want to know is this: When I turned them into phantoms of my thinking, and in so doing endowed them with loveliness, did I do good by them or bad?

“You had lost the race and had dunked your head and they had carried your brother away on their shoulders when I said, ‘Here,’ handing you the cards, ‘these are for the loser.’ After that I saw you two more times. And there was always the dark screen down between us, although at moments it seemed so close to lifting, I thought my heart would burst. Then I did not see you for three years. I slept every night with your lovely ghost. And when I saw you again I was still so young, and I didn’t know yet that you were not going to be my idea of you. And when I say that you are still a disappointment to me—oh, yes, I am very, very cruel, as you have said I am, but wait—I mean to say: My darling darling, you have killed the past. You have broken my heart. You have given me the present moment.

“Look at me. Open your eyes and look at my face.

“I still remember the first joke in English you made. We were walking up Maumee Avenue downtown to a musical club. We had been married a long time, and Alessio was dead. And you were pestering me, you wanted to kiss me on my ear on the street with people passing. I smacked you and was petulant, but you persisted. You called me a witch, but I was unmoved. The excrement of the horses was everywhere in the gutter. And you said, ‘You wear your heart up your sleeve.’ In a cage in the window above us, a monkey was screaming in a way that was so like a human child screaming that I wanted to go up there and hold it. You moved again to kiss me as we walked, and I pushed you away, and you whispered, almost touching my ear with your mouth, something as vulgar as I have ever heard you say—you remember, what you said you were going to do, the thing you said you were going to do to me, right there on the street, standing. And I said in my thoughts, wishing you could know without having to hear me say it, If you would only refuse me, I would give myself away to you.

“Or have something to drink, won’t you? Won’t you?

“What I wanted most to feel in those days was the exquisite suffering of you going away from me. We were unlike, you and I. You felt what you felt; whereas I, like a scientist, was always trying to know what I felt. I made experiments in my brain like a fool: If this, then how would I feel? If that, then how? My heart was hidden from me, and I believed I had to abuse it to make it give up its secrets. I wanted you, from your own disinclination, to refuse me so that I could comprehend my feelings by suffering them. But you would not withdraw from me and make a space in which I could put my thoughts between us. So I have never known, and do not know now, my own feelings; I only feel them.

“But if ever. If you should ever. Should you ever. If you were to. Were you ever to . . . then the screen would clap down forever on which ideas are painted.

“But you would not refuse me. You took my arm firmly in your brown hand. I was so skinny then and your hand so big that you could wrap your hand all the way around the thickest part of my arm and touch your thumb to your finger. And I said to myself, There is no hope. And I succumbed, was dragged by you into the club and was sat down by you, was thrown into a chair behind a low table with no cloth on it that was strewn with peanut shells and loose threads of tobacco. There were a dozen young men behind the lights on the stage playing violins and banjos; one had a mouth organ, another—a boy, seated—had a saw (a saw!) that he was bending into the shape of an
S,
and bending further, and unbending, and striking with a hammer, and making it make this human noise, plaintive, while an old man, older than you are now, with a white, patchy beard sang, and I did not know the words he was singing (it was English, only it wasn’t English at all), and all of them were standing but the boy while the man sang and beat out the time by stomping his boot resoundingly on the floor, and a Negro asked you what we would drink. And you told him to bring us two bottles of beer, if he pleased. I asked myself, Where was I? I was thirty-one. We had been married ten years. Alessio was dead. I asked myself, Where was I? The boy was smashing and smashing at the saw, making it cry out under the violins, and there were the banjos and the mouth organ and the old man’s yawning foreign voice and his stomping and the stout clapping of his hands. You would not let go my arm. My family were dead. I had killed them. The Negro came with the beers and poured them into glasses. I had no hope of any hope at all. The footlights threw the long shadows of the men up on the green wall behind them. I had no past or home country to return to, and no hope, only this man gripping my arm so tightly, my own hand had gone numb. The men on the stage were leaping, and the old man gave a whoop, and leapt, bringing his boots down solidly on the stage, and the others stopped playing. I saw the boy with the saw slip the hammer beneath his chair as one of the violinists passed him a bow. Then the boy bent the saw deep against the toe of his shoe and drew the bow along the blunt edge of the saw. Everything was quiet but for this. Nobody moved but this boy with his bow and the saw and the Negro carrying a bottle to a table in the front of the club.