PAPA LEFT with a change of clothes for Mama, wrapped up in a paper bundle under his arm. I turn the light off. I’m alone. It’s cold. I squeeze the boomerang in my hand and warm myself. Of course I remember the Solfatara Volcano in Pozzuoli, Papa. You took me there one Sunday, without Mama, who couldn’t stand the stench and doesn’t wear perfume. We took the streetcar as far as Bagnoli, then went the rest of the way on foot. It was drizzling, raindrops as fine as pinheads tickling the calm sea and the tar-mottled beach. Under the umbrella I walked at your pace. I had to rush. I didn’t pay attention to the puddles and my feet got wet. Outside the entrance the air was already heavy with sulfur. We went in, Papa, and you started reading one of the signs out loud: The solfatara is a volcanic exaltation. The right word was exhalation, but I didn’t correct you. When a volcano dies, it exhales its final warmth in green brimstone salts the same color as Rafaniello’s eyes. We arrive at the crater, which is sunken into the plain. A silent smoke rises from the crusts of earth. A pond of mud boils, bubbling on the surface. Papa closes the umbrella. The steam from the solfatara stops the rain. The only sound is of shoes touching the ground. With no city movement around me I feel a little dizzy.
I SEE a black butterfly. I read the names written below the plants near the crater: laurel, myrtle, arbutus. At one fumarole I remove my shoes and let my trousers dry. The earth is hot. It feels good on my back. A smell of burning rises from the bottom of my trousers. Too late I realize that the seat of my pants is scorched. Papa laughs, but he stops when he realizes that Mama will have to fix them. We circle the crater. I pick up green stones that are good for writing, like chalk at school. I think I still have them somewhere. If I find them I’ll bring them to Rafaniello to see if they match his eyes. On the way back Papa buys Mama a cut of musso, boiled calf’s lip. That’s how we are going to apologize for the trousers. Then we go up the hill to Montedidio. The students of the Nunziatella Military Academy pass us in their gold-buttoned uniforms, with white-handled dress swords hanging from their belts. Their clothing glares next to the shabby clothing of the crowds around them. They’re kids, a few years older than me, walking with their chests out and not looking anyone in the face. It must be awful to set yourself apart from other people that way, shunning them. At home Mama didn’t say a thing about the trousers or the musso, no scolding and no thanks. So we’re even.
27
RAFANIELLO’S FACE is all crumpled. He didn’t sleep. The wings broke through the shell of his hump. It cracked like an egg, without bleeding. His jacket’s gotten fuller. He says he’s managed to open the wings. They’re bigger than a stork’s. He’s decided to wait for the night of fireworks. In the meantime he’s practicing in his room at night. The fireworks in Naples used to scare him, reminding him of the turmoil of war. “This time they’ll be bidding me farewell.” I tell him that I’ve made my decision, too. I’m going to throw the boomerang the same night. The boomerang’s wings are ready, too. “How much time do we have left?” he asks. Two weeks. From my pocket I take one of the brimstones. It’s the same color as your eyes, I say. He holds it up against the light. “Fire and brimstone. It rained fire and brimstone on Sodom and Gomorrah. Green eyes, red hair. The Heavenly Father made me look like an ember.” I wonder if his eyes are really green. What’s more, I say, they’re lit like teardrops, not brimstone. Rafaniello is getting to the bottom of his shoe pile. People have been coming by to pick them up. He’s not accepting broken ones anymore. Now everyone’s wearing shoes in Naples.
I HELP Master Errico plane some larch boards. They give off a scent of resin, a smell that clears your sinuses. Master Errico looks at the first planing and shakes his head. “We can’t use the machine,” he says. “We have to finish it by hand.” He shows me the drops of resin and says that they’re hard and would break the blade of the planing machine. Larch resin dries as hard as a rock. So I learn to move the hand planer, following Master Errico. The larch shavings are blond and not very curly. It’s like giving the wood a crew cut. At noon I realize that a feather has fallen under Rafaniello’s bench. I pick it up. It’s so light I can’t feel it in my palm. Don Rafaniè, I’m going to hold on to this to remember you by. “You’re right to say ‘hold on to’ instead of ‘keep.’ To keep is presumptuous. To hold means you realize that today it’s yours and tomorrow who knows. Hold on to the feather as a keepsake.” I think of the boomerang. I hold it tight, then I have to let it go. I take it out of my smock. Look at it, Don Rafaniè, it’s so well made that it can fly, too. We chew our bread and friarelli and stare at the boomerang. He stops eating and asks me very seriously what kind of wood it’s made from. Acacia, Don Rafaniè, a hardwood. His breath catches in his throat. He coughs loud and spits up some friarello, then he calms down and rocks back and forth in his chair, repeating, “Acacia, acacia,” with tears in his eyes, his face as red as his hair, a crunching of bones behind his back.
28
AS I write this on my scroll I can’t remember how to say it in Italian: did he break out in tears or did the tears break out? Who could tell at noontime? I didn’t and couldn’t understand a thing. I waited next to him without eating. I didn’t look at him. I waited. He finally managed to clear his throat and make a different sound, more like laughter, a laughter more silent than the tears that had come before. He laughed and made me laugh just to see how it cracked him up to repeat the word acacia, strangling the sound of the a and laughing, laughing hysterically, and I laugh with him, thinking that if Master Errico were to come in now and find us like this, he’d throw a bucket of cold water over us to make us stop. Rafaniello calms down and I’m happy since the laughter gave me back my appetite. I finish my bread and friarelli in four bites. I arrange the boomerang under my jacket near the feather that fell from Rafaniello’s wings.
29
AT THE washbasins in December the wind gets all blustery, sweeping up the dirt on the ground, polishing the nighttime sky, drawing off the heat from the houses. The boomerang is going wild. It burns the air that will carry it on its flight. My arms can’t control it. It’s like a wing with feathers. I wind myself up to toss it two hundred times with one arm, two hundred with the other, and I don’t get tired. I’m a thrower and have to force myself to wait. There’s the dark side of the moon. Maria stares at the giant lid over Montedidio, spellbound. I’m obsessed with the sea and think all the shiny points on its surface are a school of anchovies. With my broken voice I imitate the cry of the fishmonger when he comes by with a basket on his head and a scale around his neck calling out: “ ’O ppane d’o mare”; bread of the sea. “Quiet, you’re making me think of the smell of fish,” says Maria, who can’t stand fish and would just as soon leave it in the sea. On the highest rooftop in the neighborhood she and I are keeping watch over the city. Sitting close to the ground against the bulwark, covered by the blanket, we pass the time, accomplices of the wind that mocks the television antennas and empty clotheslines. It whistles overhead, discovers our shelter, and gives us a push to bring us closer together.