PAPA IS as tall as the wardrobe and just fits under the doorjamb. On the street he cuts quite a figure beside other men. Mama is tall, too, with dark black hair. She’s skinny. In her face you can see her nerves. When a sudden gesture seizes her she’s dangerous. She snaps like a spring, breaking the things around her. She bends her fork while she’s eating if a thought makes her cross. I stopped giving her my hand when we went for walks. Sometimes she’d be lost in her thoughts and squeeze it so hard I would cry. Papa says she’s stronger than him. On the promenade I don’t think any child was prouder than me. Even in front of the sailing clubs where the gentlemen with the money go, in the shadow of my two giants I felt like I had a fortune that no one could match.
WE USED to walk along the promenade by the Villa Comunale when the shoreline fishermen were hauling in the big net. There were six men to an end, all tugging together. The oldest one kept time, shouting heave-ho. The rope snaked from shoulder to shoulder, dragging the sea into land. The net came closer, wide and slow, while the two lines piled up in loops on the street. When the net came in, the fish sparkled, their whiteness leaping, flapping their tails by the hundreds, the net unloaded on dry land the pile of life stolen from the waves. Papa would say, “Behold the flames of the sea.” The smell of the waterfront was our perfume. In the peace-fulness of a summer day, when the sun was down, we’d stand there wordlessly, close to each other. We used to do it until last year. Until last year I was still a child.
THE SMELL of the port has risen all the way to our alley, and I forget my sadness. Master Errico saw how far away I looked and told me to drink some octopus broth. “Te magne ‘a capa e metti giudizio”; eat one and it’ll set your head straight. There’s an octopus vendor at the top of the opposite alley. The only thing he sells is, ’e purpe. Master Errico knows him, knows that he looks for octopus between the square stones of the outer breakwater. “He doesn’t fish for them,” he says. “He goes to pluck them out with his bare hands, like a breeder. He feeds them mussels. The octopus take comfort. He shucks the mussels, and the octopus come right up to him and eat out of his hands. He knows each and every one of them. He calls them by number. He wades into the water, says a number, and an octopus comes up and sticks to his hand. He kills them without hurting them, and the octopus that you get from him doesn’t need to be tenderized. Even the big ones are already tender. He doesn’t sell the little ones, the purpetielli, just the big ones. Go to him and drink the broth.”
AT LUNCHTIME Rafaniello tells me stories about when he used to live in his hometown and was called Rav Daniel. When he was a boy he was apprenticed to a shoemaker, too. The shoemaker was mean, nothing like Master Errico. He didn’t teach him the trade. Truth is, he hid everything from him. Rafaniello had to spy on him. The rest was taught to him in a dream by a shoemaker from the Holy Scriptures of his people. He would come at night and teach him the shoemaker’s art. When Rafaniello was a boy he used to study after work, falling asleep on the open religious books. So it was easy for a saint to come out of the books to help him. The shoemaker in his dreams was named Rav Iohanàn has-sàndler, Master John the shoemaker, and he showed him the art that his boss wouldn’t teach him. “I learned the shoemaker’s trade in the Talmud,” a big holy book from his hometown. Don Rafaniè, you even went to school in your sleep, you never get any rest. At night I can’t figure anything out. Even if Fortune came by with the lottery numbers in her mouth, I’d tell her come back tomorrow. At night I don’t exist for anyone. I sleep like a dead man. My eyes reopen at the same point where I closed them. Every morning is a resurrection.
WE SIT down on the shoe bench. He rubs his hump against the wall. I massage it a little for him. Under his jacket the bones are moving, the wing bones. We confide in each other. I tell him: Women give birth in the front, you’re giving birth in the back. “Men don’t have the honor of giving birth,” he replies. We eat sitting close to each other. He rinses out his mouth and spits, like he does when he’s about to say saintly things. “In my town I was reading the Psalms where you find the question, ‘Who shall ascend into the hill of the Lord?’ and the answer says, ‘He that hath clean hands and a pure heart.’ Then our area was struck by the war. It came from the west, crushing us, burning alive the land and the people. They were enemies I didn’t know we had. I hid underneath animal dung, under a floor, in an abandoned limestone quarry. I resisted, without knowing why I wanted to live while everyone else was dying. I rebelled against dying and cursed it so I could live. I hid, ate, and drank all kinds of things, like boiled tree bark. I stole honey from beehives, drank my own urine mixed with snow. Job’s wife tells him, ‘Curse God and die.’ But I didn’t. Job didn’t either. I didn’t curse God and I’m not dead. The war cleansed my heart and washed my hands with lime. When it ended I was ready to ascend into the hill of the Lord.”
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HE TOLD me the rest of the story the next day, while outside it was raining. All the good clean water got wasted, running down to the sea without anyone putting out a kettle to catch some for pasta. Donna Speranza, the caretaker, collects the May rain. She says that it’s good for the eyes. Rafaniello’s tiny voice accompanies the water running down the alleyway. It’s flowing, too. “Along with me, other people of my town emerged from their hiding places. They, too, had been rubbed with lime and made ready for the ascent. We headed south, descending toward Italy, a country that stretches far into the middle of the sea, so beautiful that it’s a shame it ends and doesn’t go farther. We try to embark for the land inscribed in our holy books. We have no passport, no rights, we are the living whom death has rejected. The English close off the sea. They don’t let us go. I have an evil thought. ‘You can keep your hill, keep your Englishmen in Jerusalem, make them your chosen people.’ So He changes his mind. He takes away the English and plays a joke on me for punishment. He takes me to the mount of the Lord, but it’s in Naples. It’s true that here they know how to make perfect copies of antique furniture, luxury watches, and packs of American cigarettes. But copying the mount of the Lord is going too far. It can only be in Jerusalem. Here on top of the hill where you could see the sea and the peak of the volcano, you could fit a panoramic terrace, not the footstool for the feet of God. But they called it Montedidio, the hill of the Lord, and while they were at it, they called the hill next door Montecalvario, so that makes two,” Rafaniello says, and he takes it for a joke, because you have to accept playful punishment, since sometimes God sets men straight by tricking them, that’s what he says. “With all due respect, the Holy Land doesn’t have franchises. In the meantime I’ve stayed here, on the slopes of another hill of the Lord, like a tourist who made the wrong booking.” It must be because of his tiny voice. It must be the effort required to hear every word that makes me hear them again, as I write them, by ear, on the scroll of paper I keep in the evening, punctuated by the driving rain that keeps me away from the washbasins.