Theophilus North (32 page)

“You mean that I should do that now?”

“Oh, yes—now.—And, by the way, ask her to dinner Thursday night at the Muenchinger-King.”

He left the room.

As I went out the front door I shook hands with Carel. “This is the last time I shall be in this house. If you have an opportunity, could you express to Mrs. Granberry and Mrs. Cummings my admiration . . . and affection? Thank you, Carel.”

“Thank you, sir.”

Mino

At the bottom of Broadway, at a corner of Washington Square and across the street from Old Colony House, there stood a store that I visited daily. It sold newspapers, magazines, picture postcards, maps for tourists, toys for children, and even Butterick patterns. It was very Ninth City. It was run by one family, the Materas—father, mother, son, and daughter took turns serving the public. I was to learn that their name was far more complicated; when the parents emigrated to America they adopted the name of their birthplace to simplify the formalities at Ellis Island. They came from the desolate impoverished part of the instep of Italy's boot that the government of Rome and—as we are told in Carlo Levi's fine book
Cristo si è fermato a Eboli
—God forgot. The title does not mean that Christ stopped at Eboli to enjoy the environs, but that in despair He went no further.

I love Italians. My friendship with the Materas began with my attempts to ingratiate myself by speaking their language, however haltingly. I barely made myself understood. I then tried the Neapolitan dialect even more haltingly (yet how I relished it!), but the dialects of Lucania are impenetrable to the outsider. We conversed in English.

High among the glories of Italy are the mothers of Italy. Their whole self is delivered over to husband and children. Through sheer selflessness they become wonderful selves. Maternal love there has no element of possessiveness; it is a hearth-fire of astonished wonder, ever renewed, that those lives are bound up with their own. It can be just as dangerous for the growing girl and especially the growing boy as devouring maternal love—so often prevalent in other parts of the world—can be; for what young person can wish to break away from the warmth and support of all that devotion, laughter, and cooking?

Mamma had love and laughter to spare. I stopped in at the store daily to buy my New York paper, and pencils, ink, or other incidentals. I bowed to the parents with due deference and to the children with comradely liveliness and before long came within the orbit of Signora Carla's generous heart. The Materas were of a dark complexion (the Saracen invaders of Calabria). Rosa, twenty-four, seemed to be unaware that some might regard her as plain; helping her parents and brother was quite sufficient to fill her life with buoyancy. Benjy, twenty-two—when. it was his turn to mind the store—sat cross-legged on a shelf beside the cash register. All spoke English, but all non-Italian names seemed equally unpronounceable to Signora Matera; the only ones she knew well (and revered) were “Presidente Vilson” and “Generale Perchin.” Except very occasionally I am not going to attempt to reproduce the
signora's
pronunciation. After a certain time we cease to notice a valued foreigner's “accent”; the communications of friendship transcend the accidents of language.

One late afternoon I returned to the “Y” and was informed by the desk clerk that a lady was waiting for me in the little reception room off the lobby. What was my surprise to discover Signora Matera sitting majestically at ease, with a six-weeks-old clipping of my newspaper advertisement in her hand. I greeted her delightedly.

She was amazed. She waved the clipping. “
You . . .you
are Mr. Nort'?”

“Yes,
signora
. I thought you knew my name.”

She repeated with heart-felt relief: “
You
are Mr. Nort'!”

“Yes,
cara signora
. What can I do for you?”

“I come for Benjamino and myself. Benjamino wants to take lessons with you. He wants to study Dante with you. He makes money; he can pay you very well. He wants to read Dante with you for eight hours—that is sixteen dollars. You
know
Benjamino?”

“Yes, indeed, I know Benjamino. I see him almost every day in your store and I often see him at the People's Library where he is surrounded by dozens of books. But, of course, we are not allowed to talk in the library. Tell me about him. Why is he always up in one place by the cash register?”

“You did not know he is a cripple? He has no feet.”

“No,
signora
, I did not know that.”

“When he was five he ran into a train and lost his feet.”

Her memory of that terrible occasion was all in her eyes and I met it; but she had lived so many days since in wondering astonishment and love of her son that the grief had been transmuted into what she was about to tell me. “Benjy is a very bright boy. He wins prizes every week. He does all the puzzles in the papers. You know how many papers and magazines we have. He wins all the contests in the advertisements. Checks come in the mail every week, five dollars, ten dollars, once twenty dollars. He wins clocks, bicycles, big cases of dog food. He won a trip to Washington, D.C.; when he told them he was a cripple they sent him the money. But that is not all.” She pointed to her forehead. “He is very smart. He makes up puzzles for the papers. Papers in Boston and New York pay him to send them puzzles—arithmetic puzzles, joke puzzles, chess puzzles. And now something new has happened. He has invented a new kind of puzzle. I do not understand it. He makes patterns of words that go up and down.
Sindacatos
want to buy them for the Sunday papers.—Why do they call them
sindacatos
, Mr. Nort'?”

“I don't know.” (To her,
sindaco
meant a mayor or town magistrate. )

“How much schooling has he had,
signora?
”

“He went through grammar school—always top of his class. But the High School has stone steps. He goes to school in his little wagon, but he did not want the boys to carry him up and down those big steps twenty times a day. The boys like him very much;
everybody
loves Benjy. But he is very independent. Do you know what he did? He wrote to the Department of Education at Providence to send him the lessons and examinations that they have for students in hospitals—for TB students and paralyzed students. And he passed High School, top of his class. They send him a diploma with a note from the Governor!”

“Wonderful!”

“Yes, God is good to us!” she said and burst out laughing. She had long steeled herself not to weep, but one has to do something.

“Does Benjamino want to go to college?”

“No. He says he can do studies by himself now.”

“Why does he want to read Dante?”

“Mr. Nort', I think he has played a trick on me. I think he knew all the time that you were the Mr. Nort' in this advertisement. I think he liked the way you talked to him. He has many friends—school friends, teachers, his priest; but he says they all talk to him as if he were a cripple. I think he thought you knew he had no feet, but you did not talk to him as if he were a cripple. The others pat him on the back and make loud jokes. He says they don't talk to him
natural
. Maybe you talked to him natural.” She lowered her voice. “Please do not tell him that you did
not
know he had this trouble.”

“I won't.”

“Maybe he wants to learn what Dante says about people who've had accidents—about why God sends accidents to some people and not to other people.”

“
Signora
, tell Benjamino that I am not a Dante scholar. The study of Dante is a vast subject to which hundreds of men have devoted a whole lifetime. Dante is full of theology—
full
of it. I know very little theology. I'd be ashamed. A brilliant boy like your son would ask me questions every minute that I couldn't answer.”

Signora Matera looked stricken. I can't endure calling forth a stricken look on an Italian mother's face.

“
Signora
, what time do you all go to church on Sunday?”

“The seven o'clock Mass. We have to sell the Sunday papers at eight-thirty.”

“I have a Sunday morning appointment at a quarter before eleven. Would it be inconvenient if I came and sat with Benjamino at nine o'clock?”

“Grazie! Grazie!”

“No lesson. No money. Just talk.”

I was punctual. The store was filled with customers buying their Boston or Providence Sunday papers. Rosa slipped out of line and led me through the door connecting the store with the house. Finger on her lip, she pointed to the door of her brother's room. I knocked.

“Come in, please.”

His room was as small and neat as a ship's cabin. He was sitting cross-legged on some pillows at the head of his bed. He was wearing a trim sea-captain's coat with silver buttons. Across his knees was a drawing-board; this was also his workroom. A carpenter had built shelves on three sides of the room, including those at his right and left within reach of his long arms. I saw dictionaries and other works of reference and piles of paper ruled with grid lines for the making of puzzles. Benjy was a very handsome fellow, his large head covered with curly brown hair and his face lit up by his Saracen-Italian eyes and the Matera smile. But for his accident he would have been an unusually tall man. His level gaze and deep bass voice gave the impression of his being older than he was. For me there was an armchair at the foot of the bed.

“Buon giorno, Benjamino!”

“Buon giorno, professore!”

“Are you disappointed that we aren't going to read Dante?” He made no answer, but continued smiling. “I thought of Dante yesterday morning. I drove out to Brenton's Point on my bicycle to see the sunrise. And

L'alba vinceva l'ora mattutina,
che fuggía innanzi, sì che di lontano
conobbi il tremolar della marina
.

Do you know where Dante says that?”

“At the beginning of the
Purgatorio
.”

I was taken aback. “Benjamino, everybody around here calls you Benjy. That sounds a little too street-corner and ordinary for you. May I have your permission to call you Mino?” He nodded. “Do you know of anyone else who was called Mino?”

“Mino da Fiesole.”

“What was ‘Mino' probably short for in that case?”

“Maybe Giacomino—or Benjamino.”

“Do you know what Benjamin means in Hebrew?”

“ ‘Son of the right hand.' ”

“Mino, this is beginning to sound like a classroom examination. We must stop that. But I do want to go back to Dante for a moment. Did you ever take the trouble to learn any passages in Dante by heart?”

The reader may think this was reprehensible on my part, but one of the rewards of being a teacher is watching a brilliant student display his knowledge. It is like putting a promising young racehorse through his paces. A good student enjoys it.

Mino said, “Not very much—just the famous passages, like Paolo and Francesca or La Pia and some others.”

“When Count Ugolino was locked up in the Tower of Famine with his sons and grandsons, without food, and days and days went by—what do you think that much-disputed verse means:
‘Poscia, più che 'l dolor, potè il digiuno'?
” Mino gazed at me in silence. “How would you translate it?”

“ ‘Then . . . hunger . . . had more power than . . . grief.' ”

“What do you think we are to understand?”

“He . . . ate them.”

“Many distinguished scholars, especially in the last century, think it means ‘I died of hunger which was even stronger than my grief.' What makes you think as you do?”

Suddenly his expression became one of passionate intensity. “Because the whole passage is full of
that
. The son says to his father, ‘You gave us this flesh; now take it back!' And all the time he is talking—in all that ice at the bottom of Hell—he is gnawing the back of his enemy's neck.”

“I think you're right, Mino. The nineteenth-century scholars refused to face the cruel truth. The
Divine Comedy
was translated in Cambridge, Massachusetts, by Charles Eliot Norton and again by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow—with notes—and by Thomas Carlyle's brother in London; they refused to see it as you do. It should teach us that Anglo-Saxons and Protestants have always misunderstood your country. They've wanted the sweetness without the iron—without the famous Italian
terribilità
. Evasion, shrinking from the whole of life. Haven't you found people pretending that you never had an accident?”

He gazed at me earnestly, but made no answer. I smiled. He smiled. I laughed. He laughed.

“Mino, what do you miss most because of the accident to your feet?”

“That I can't go to dances.” He blushed. We both burst out laughing.

“If you'd lost your eyesight, what would you have missed most?”