IT WON’T happen again, I tell her, but not in Neapolitan. I tell her quietly so she’ll calm down. Today I’ve learned something about myself, something sad in the middle of my good luck at being with Maria. Not everything is good about my body growing. Something evil grows up alongside it. Alongside myself, alongside the strength of my arms to free the boomerang, grows a bitter force capable of violence. A sulfur pond has started boiling inside my head, making my thinking evil. Is this what men suddenly become? Someone makes a bad move, you blow your stack, and out comes the evil blood. Papa comes home. Maria asks him if tonight he’d like pizza, we’ll go get some at Dirty Gigino’s, who makes the best pizza in the neighborhood. Right away he says yes, a pizza margherita. Same thing for us. So we lay the tablecloth on the marble table in the kitchen. When we come back we’ll eat it while it’s still hot. He’s tired. Today he worked in the bottom of the hold without a break, something the older workers don’t do. He sits down with the newspaper on his knee. The lightbulb is twenty watts. He tries to read, straining his eyes.
THEN WE go out, saying see you later. He doesn’t answer. He reads, moving his lips to follow the words. Maria and I know how to read better than him. It’s not fair. We, the late-comers, who had the luxury to study, we know more than a strong adult man who made sure his whole life that we didn’t want for the basics and who was always respectful to his wife. I close the door behind us, letting Maria out first. I feel honored by my father, who has to move his lips to read. Marì, we have to buy the best pizza in Naples. “We wouldn’t go out for less. At the very least the best in Naples, then we’ll see if it isn’t the best in the world.” Maria, I tell her, I care for you. “Those are my words. You have to use your own,” she answers, leaving me looking stupid once again.
DIRTY GIGINO is making pizza for all of Naples. There’s a crowd in front of his store. It’s cold and he’s standing there in his undershirt slapping the dough around and spinning it absentmindedly. He calls out to the crowd, “Song ‘e ppizze ‘e sott ‘o Vesuvio, nc’è scurruta ‘a lava ‘e ll’uoglio.” He’s saying that there’s as much oil on his pizza as there is lava running down the slopes of Vesuvius. This way people don’t mind waiting as much, because they work up an appetite from Don Gigino’s exaggerated words. They call him dirty—‘o fetente—because he has a beard and sometimes you find dark hairs in your pizza. He wears a beard because his face is scarred. I stand off to the side on the sidewalk. Maria goes up to the counter and lets her voice be heard good and loud: “Don Gigì, three of your pizza margheritas ’cause we want to cheer ourselves up,” she shouts out in the midst of the crowd, letting loose her fresh, flirtatious side. “Nenne’, i’ m’arricreo quanno te veco.” I cheer up whenever I see you, Don Gigino responds from the counter, with his dark beard, eyes, and hair, dusted in flour like an anchovy. He rushes us ahead of the others, handing us three pizzas, one on top of the other, with wax paper in between. He shouts for everybody to hear, “Facite passa’ annanze ‘a cchiù bella guagliona ‘e Montedidio!” Make way for the most beautiful girl in Montedidio! and Maria makes her way through the crowd and takes the pizzas from the hands of Don Gigino, who even tells her she can pay for them another time. “Cheste m’e ppave ll’anno che vene.” Maria, walking tall and brash from the honor, comes to me, puts her arm in mine, and we walk up to Montedidio with people’s eyes on our backs. It’s so important to be two, a man and a woman, in this city. He who’s alone is less than one.
ON THE street firecrackers are going off and people are rushing home to get ready for the party. The pizzas are smoking in Maria’s hands. Her footsteps sound like wood. I realize she’s wearing high-heeled shoes. It’s just that I saw Maria was taller and didn’t look at her shoes. At first I thought that she grew quickly from one day to the next. Now I see the heels, but I still know anyway that she’s taller, even without them. We race forward. Quickly we find ourselves high atop Montedidio, where we can look at the stars face-to-face. Don Gigino sees us and lets us pass in front of all his customers, because he sees us running, growing and running. Maria is taller. Her figure has shot up from a girl’s to a woman’s, everyone who sees her notices. I don’t say a thing. Whatever she does is fine with me.
AT HOME Papa’s asleep with the newspaper on his legs. I take it away, he wakes up, looks around himself in a daze, passes a hand over his face, and says, “I thought I was at your mother’s bedside.” Maria doesn’t give him time to think about it. “Supper’s on the table,” she calls, clattering the plates. I take my jacket off, set the boomerang on the table. “You’ve still got it? So you liked it. I’d forgotten,” and while he cuts himself a slice of the juiciest pizza in Naples and maybe in the world, he asks me whether it flies. “Like pizza in the hands of Don Gigino,” Maria answers, but he’s already chewing and has forgotten. I tell him how Don Gigino served us before all the other people who were waiting. “He used to do the same for us. Don Gigino likes seeing married couples,” he remembers, without thinking. He drinks a glass of wine, pours one for Maria, says that he’s not going to stay up until midnight. He cracks a walnut, crushing it in his hand, chews it with relish. Mama liked almonds, there aren’t any, I didn’t buy them. At the table you need a little mourning.
HE TOOK a colleague’s shift. Tomorrow he’s going in for another guy, who’s staying home on New Year’s Day. He wants to work and wear himself out. He says he’s really happy to come home to a hot meal. He gets up, says good night, and then at the kitchen door turns around and says, “Thanks for the pizza.” Maria smiles at him and my eyesight gets blurry. I swallow, turn around, pick up the boomerang, and squeeze it to calm down. Everything is moving too fast, I can’t manage to keep up, everything changes from one hour to the next. He said, “thank you” for so little, even though the life he knew is over, and outside they’re setting off fireworks, making one year new and throwing out the old one, and with all his heart he’s still inside the years that have passed, that are thrown out, they’re all mixed together. I start clearing the table. Maria washes the dishes and outside the merrymaking grows. For one night the city imitates Vesuvius expelling fire and flame. We turn the light out, look out at the other windows, look down on the street.
ON MY chest the boomerang beats against the pulsing of my blood. Maria places her ear between my shoulder and neck and repeats softly, “Boom, boom, your heart’s even racing when you’re still. Inside your chest a rascal is throwing stones against a wall.” I close my good eye. The balconies and lighted windows across the way recede even more, becoming street lamps in the dark. Boom, boom, to live you have to have a pulse, to fly, to break away from the earth, to ascend the sky on air, a strong pulse. “Boom, boom, boom,” Maria continues. Her voice draws blood to my stomach, saliva to my mouth. Maria, I tell her, at midnight I’m going up to the washbasins. I’m going to throw the boomerang. “I’m coming with you.” Rafaniello will fly and all the spirits will come to see him off. Our spirits are curious. They’ll want to brush against a flying shoemaker. Spirits don’t know how to fly. They can only create a little breeze. Firecrackers are going off on the street. Maria doesn’t hear what my dark voice is saying. She’s thinking of her blood. “The wine was good for me. It’s the first time I’ve had it, it’s good. I liked the way he poured it. He held the heavy flask steady and made it come out very slowly.”