MARIA HUGS me, leaning her head against my neck. We speak to each other in whispers. She says, “You get bigger every day and I’m holding on to you so that I can grow quickly, too. Only yesterday you didn’t have these muscles on your chest. Only yesterday you weren’t so right for me.” I don’t know about yesterday. Today’s already gone by, planed into the blond shavings of larchwood, the shape of the planer indented in my palm. And only toward the end of the day does my hand return to its place around the boomerang and around Maria’s shoulders. Yesterday is the part of the scroll that’s already been written on and rolled up. Maria, I ask, is this the ammore they talk about in songs? “No,” she says, “love songs are too gloomy, a lot of sloppy weeping and teardrops. Our ammore is an alliance, a combat force.” Our intimate talk flies into the wind, which tears it from our mouths.
IN THE dark we can make out the figure of a person on the roof buffeted about by the wind, calling out Maria, Maria. It’s the landlord. She goes tense beside me and doesn’t answer. I slip out of the blanket. I grab the old man by the lapels with the force of the boomerang in my arms and push him away. He keeps calling Maria and bumps into me as if I were the wind, as if he couldn’t see. He’s coming back this way, says Maria. Without a word I bounce him off my hands which are getting stronger and stronger. The boomerang under my jacket pushes him, too. The wind grabs me by my shoulders and sends me hurtling into him. I move him backward with a jolt, and beaten back, he staggers forward. I’m ready for him again and I pick him up like the arc of the boomerang. I don’t see his face. I look as far as his jacket and aim for his chest. With the last push I slam him against the door to the stairway, which opens up behind him. He realizes there’s nothing left to do, doubles over in pain from the blows to his chest, from Maria, I don’t know, he doubles over, sits down, and cries. I see a defeated old man, beaten outside and in, and still I feel no pity. I go back to Maria, who’s standing up. She puts her cold arms around me and forces a frosty kiss inside my mouth, tooth to tooth. Her shivering begins to pass.
30
THE OLD man is a goner. He’s got the curse of the dog that licks the rasp. I saw him crying, Maria. “I saw him crying, too, between my legs.” We gather up the blanket, leave the roof, shut out the wind behind our backs. She says, “You’ve gotten rid of him forever.” Away from the open air her voice rings out harshly in the stairwell. On Christmas Eve, she says, we’ll stay together at your house and have our own party without any adults, just us two allies. All right, I say, with my pay from Mast’Errico I’ll buy the capon and the potatoes. “I’ll make cookies and get all dressed up.” I open her door with the keys, go downstairs, pass in front of the landlord’s apartment. My hands are still burning. I notice a button that got caught in my sleeve and drop it on the ground in front of his door.
WHILE MASTER Errico is counting out my week’s pay in my hand, he asks if my mother is feeling better, if she’ll be home for Christmas. I shake my head no. “So, you won’t be having eel?” No, Master Errico, eel’s too difficult. It even slithers away after it’s been cut. I’m buying capon. I ask him if he’s going fishing tomorrow. “Depends on the weather.” Then Rafaniello tells me to never ask a fisherman whether he’s going out. They guard their plans jealously. If they talk about them it brings bad luck. It’s only afterward that they talk about the fish they caught. Rafaniello knows Neapolitan. He says it resembles his native language. To him Italian’s like a piece of fabric, a garment draped over the naked body of dialect. He adds, “Italian is a language without saliva. But Neapolitan’s got spit in its mouth that helps you stick your words together. Stuck with spit: for the sole of a shoe it’s no good, but it makes a good glue for dialect. In my language we say the same thing: zigheclèpt mit shpàiecz; glued with spit.” He makes me repeat it so I can write it on the scroll. I ask him what he’s doing on Christmas Eve. He’s not doing anything. He’s not a Christian. I invite him over. I tell him I’ll cook capon, without saying a thing about Maria. He thanks me, his smile wrinkling his skinny face. The fresh green of his eyes sparkles among his red freckles. His smile breaks to respond to the invitation by saying no.
I CLOSE the workshop an hour early, a little before the stores close, and go out to look for capon at the butcher’s and potatoes at the vegetable pushcart. “All of Naples is in the street,” says the washerwoman, leaning out the window of her ground-floor apartment. She brought in the clothes on the line. The crowd was banging into them, getting them dirty. “Simme assaie, nuie simme tropp’assaie.” Too many of us, way too many of us, says De Rogatis, the music teacher, waiting in line outside the fish shop for them to wrap his live eel. “I want to pick my own,” one woman protests to the fishmonger. “They’re all the same, ma’am,” he shouts back, holding the slithering thing by its head. A woman drove down the alley in a car and hit Don Gaetano the tailor, who was sitting on a stool on the curb, mending a pair of trousers by the light of the street lamp to save on electricity. She ran into him and the stool, sending them rolling down the street. There were shouts, the woman fainted, everyone rushed over to give her a hand. Don Gaetano was left on the ground, in a daze. He still didn’t know what had hit him and kept asking, “What happened?” In this crowd you don’t feel the cold. It’s better than a coat. At the door Donna Speranza the caretaker is the first to greet me, “Merry Christmas, kid.” An even better one to you, Donna Speranza, I answer, and show her the beautiful capon I bought.
31
I ENTER the house. A cold so still and silent you want to jump into bed. I sprinkle salt and pepper on the capon and put it in the oven with the potatoes. A blast of heat. In the kitchen I can hear the radio from the house across the way. On Via Santa Maria della Neve an elderly woman went out in the street and threw into the air all the coins she had collected from panhandling. A crowd gathered and the police intervened. The blood of Saint Andrew of Avellino liquefied. Far from Naples, in America, they made a young man president. The Russians sent a dog up in a rocket. The Americans sent a monkey instead. I turn off the lights and look outside. It’s Christmas. Rooms are lit and families are sitting down at the table. On the table I’ve set places for the boomerang, the capon, and Maria with her cookies. In the past year I never dreamed of asking so much. It happened by itself, without my wishing it. My grown-up body, Maria’s mouth, Rafaniello’s wings. So much abundance arrived without asking, except for Christmas. With the lights out I feel the spirits caressing my neck. They move about better in the dark. I use the light of the street lamp to write, leaning against the railing of the balcony. The sound of my pencil on paper captures the noises of the day.