The Day Before Happiness

by Erri De Luca

  Then the greengrocer came by with a delivery for the lady on the top floor and called out from the courtyard as usual for her to lower the basket.

  “Signora Sanfelice, Calate ‘o panaro. Signora Sanfelic-eee!”

  Turning to me: “Nun ce sente cchiù, s’adda fa’ n’apparechhio p’e rrecchie”—She can’t hear anymore, she needs to get an aid for her ears.

  “A hearing aid,” I tell him, for the sake of saying something and giving him someone to speak to.

  “Yes, a jeering aid, Signora Sanfelic-eee!”

  At his third shout the woman either heard or someone knocked on her door to tell her to lower her basket.

  “Nu mumèe”—Just a sec. What Signora Felice calls a sec is more like an hour. In her mouth the “second” starts off well but never ends. Don Gaetano says she has a trumpet of a voice that wakes the souls in purgatory.

  “Lower the basket.”

  “Just a sec.”

  “Just a second,” I add, to bring the word to an end.

  “The basket,” the greengrocer shouts hoarsely.

  “Just a sec,” you hear descending from the open window. The woman’s voice has lost the “-ond” of the second, for now she only lowers the “sec-.”

  The greengrocer loses his patience and calls out again.

  While waiting he says: “The lady can’t find her basket. Why doesn’t she keep it by the window?”

  Her neighbor in the apartment facing hers shouts at her to look under the sink.

  A full-throated trombone of an answer: “Nun ce staa”—It’s not there!

  “Look behind the stove!”

  “Nun ce staa. Concettina moved it. She straightens up and things disappear.”

  “Signora Sanfelic-eee!” The greengrocer starts up again with a choked voice he’d like to choke her with.

  Right on time: “Just a sec.”

  “Just a second,” from me.

  Finally a cry of liberation fills the courtyard: “She’s found it, she’s found it.”

  “Thy will be done,” a voice intones, shutting the window, followed by the closing of the other participating windows.

  • • •

  “See you Sunday”: Had I seen her or was it a vision? What, am I getting visions now, of Saint Anna appearing to me? I’ve turned eighteen: now is not the time to start getting visions. She came, she really did. Couldn’t she have waited a second? No, not for a second, otherwise I’m going to start sounding like Signora Sanfelice: “Just a sec.” It was Anna, behind the window once again. I didn’t even smell her scent. I didn’t even hear her voice: I recognized the word Sunday from the movement of her mouth. The look on my face must have been idiotic.

  I went to the mirror to see the face that had seen Anna. Eyes popping, hangdog mouth, uneven jaw: the portrait of an idiot, confirmed. I looked like the astonished shepherd in the Christmas crèche.

  Don Gaetano came back.

  “I’ll make you coffee.”

  “No, I already had some at the widow’s.” He was refreshed. “You look like your father. You’re thin, bony like him, but he was one big twisted nerve, he scattered sparks from his bones. His body acted as a dynamo with the air. You look like him, but a calmer version. It’s the same chassis, but with you the engine is improved.”

  He was answering my thoughts, he heard them all.

  • • •

  “Don Gaetano, since yesterday when you told me about him I can’t settle down. Ever since I was a child I imagined I was a fragment of this building, my father was the building, my mother the courtyard. I used to rummage through every corner, so I would get to know them. It was a version that kept me company and made darkness my friend. Since yesterday I’ve been going around trying to find whom I should resemble.”

  Don Gaetano listened while doing the cleaning up, interrupted by the passing by of tenants. We were used to it and picked up where we left off.

  “Now I’m no longer a fragment of this building, now that it’s gone you can see that it’s missing. I’m like everyone else, a child who resembles a couple of people. I don’t want to be a son, I want to remain a fragment. If you don’t mind, I think I resemble you. Not by heredity, but by imitation, I do the things you teach me and so I get closer.”

  Don Gaetano passed me the job he was doing. He was connecting the electric wires to a Christmas light, to attach to the outside door.

  I sat down to continue. From behind he placed a hand on my shoulder.

  “You’re a man, you should know how things stand. You don’t resemble me, I grew up without parents, but if someone had let me know who they were, I would have searched high and low for them.”

  From his pocket he pulled out a package, long and narrow, wrapped in newspaper.

  “This is for you, open it.”

  “A gift, Don Gaetano? A gift for me?”

  It was the first time a gift had happened to me. I kept holding the wires to the light in my hand.

  “Open it.”

  I put the work down, touched the package, realized what it was. I swallowed without saliva. I unwrapped it and squeezed the bone handle of a knife. Don Gaetano took it and swept the blade over the hairs on his wrist to show me how sharp it was. He folded the blade back into the handle.

  He handed it back to me and asked me to open it. The blade came out smooth, effortless.

  “You have to carry it, it has to stay with you. It has to be a pair of underwear, without it you’re naked. Close it now and stick it in your pocket, tenants are coming.”

  “This is an important gift, I have to repay you.”

  “You will repay someone, not me. When the time comes, you will give a knife to a young man and you will have paid your debt. I got my first from a sailor who left it on the ground after a brawl. I picked it up, gave it back to him, he left it to me.”

  • • •

  In the city everyone had a knife in his pocket. I knew but I had never wanted to have one myself. Now that it was in my pocket, it obviously had to stay. Because I was a city kid, not because I was a man. The passage from boy to what came after was something other people knew. For me I was the same as before, twisted in thought, an apprentice of everything.

  “You won’t use it to slice bread, to clean your nails. You’ll use it to defend yourself. When you find yourself against the wall, unable to take a step back even if there is room, then you’ll grip it, holding it like this, low, right between your legs.”

  He showed me the position.

  “And you’ll look in the eyes of the adversary who’s come to block your way. You won’t take your eyes off his pupils.”

  Don Gaetano realized I was staring him in the face.

  “It won’t happen, but that’s what it’s used for, only that. It’s life insurance.”

  I nodded yes with my head and went back to the wires.

  • • •

  The old man from a basso at the top of the alley dropped by. He knocked on the glass, Don Gaetano let him in. He was dressed shabbily, a patched-up jacket and a faded beret. He removed it out of respect, told Don Gaetano that his wife had been in bed for three days.

  “Nun pozzo e chiamma’ ’o miedico, nun ce stanno denari—I can’t call the doctor, we haven’t got the money. Putesse veni’ ‘stu giuvinotto vuost’ che è studiuso ’e libri?—Could your boy come, since he has book learning?”

  Don Gaetano looked at me.

  “I study Latin, not medicine.”

  “Sempe studiuso siete e ne sapite cchiù ’e nuie ca simmo senza scuola”—You’re still a student, you know more than us, we never went to school.

  There was no way out, I went with the man, who thanked me over and over again.

  I went into their home, into the stench of misery, acrid and smoky. On a bench three women were mumbling the rosary. The old woman was laid out on a cot, moving her lips mechanically, eyes closed. I touched her forehead, a fever. I lifted her bedsheet, there was a stench of sores, the beginning of ulcers around her heel
s.

  “Bedsores,” I said softly.

  Behind me one of the three asked what I’d said.

  “La paga di subbito”—Better pay up.

  “Oh mamma mia,” said one of them in reply.

  “Giuvino’, vi pavammo oggi a otto”—Young man, we’ll pay you eight days from today.

  “What do you think he is, a pizzaiolo, that you pay eight days from today?”

  I told the old man we needed bandages and ointment. I went to the pharmacy. I was happy to have some money in my pocket. I bought what was needed, recommended by the pharmacist, including pills for the fever. I went back and treated the sores, which were just beginning. The pill was tough, she’d never swallowed one before. I went to the baker, he gave me a slice of bread, I made a little ball out of the soft part with the pill inside, and in this way she took it.

  The rosary continued, pleased it had produced an intervention. The old man wanted to kiss my hands, we had a tug of war. I told him to keep giving her the pills and left.

  • • •

  Don Gaetano was settling a fight between two tenants. One complained that her upstairs neighbor was hanging out her laundry so it would drip on top of hers, which was almost dry. It was a simple enough matter, but they had to scream about it so the whole building would know. Don Gaetano listened to the two squalling throats, ready to tear each other’s hair out.

  They had started from the balconies and he had invited them to bring it down to the loge. As I got there they were going at it, already hoarse. I sat back down at the table to connect the wires. There were often paste-ups because there were so many of us, one on top of the other. They happened because of friction. They’re called paste-ups because they have a sticky adhesive that slimes the words and pushes them toward the hands, and then it takes a solvent to divide them. Don Gaetano used to say, “The donkeys quarrel and the wagon breaks.” For quarrels between women he offered a magic potion: a cup of coffee.

  They made up with each other. Don Gaetano’s coffee had legal powers, it was the Supreme Court. It settled disputes. To add my own two cents to the success, I turned on the Christmas lights. They hugged and left arm in arm, telling each other their secrets.

  “Don Gaetano, what do you put in the coffee to get this effect?”

  “’A pacienza, I put in some patience. It’s a root that grows in our alleys. They needed to let off some steam, to get out of the house, find someone to listen to them.”

  • • •

  The days of the week passed by, December had arrived. The volcano wore snow on its summit, at night the north wind made ice on the ground and crystal in the sky.

  “Pare ’nu cummoglio di preta turchese”—It looks like a blanket of turquoise: the second-floor tenant, Professor Cotico, a retiree, had dedicated himself to poetry. He would compose, then he would drop by the loge to recite the verses he had just written. The north wind inspired him.

  “Friddo ’a matina, che spaccava ll’ogne”—So cold in the morning it split your nails.

  “Prufesso’, this has already been written and set to music, the verses are by Ernesto Murolo.”

  “Really? No sooner does a guy finish writing a verse, then out pops someone who says, ‘I was there first.’ But gentlemen, poetry is not a streetcar where the first to arrive gets a seat and all the others have to stand. Poetry is not a foot race where you have to come in first. Every day is born innocent to poetry, a person wakes up and renews it.”

  “Yes, of course, the early bird rewrites The Divine Comedy.”

  “Don Gaetano, you are too harsh a judge. Listen to this other verse:

  e pure a mezzogiorno

  ’o friddo s’accaniva senza scuorno

  even at midday

  the cold persevered unabashed.

  “That one is all yours, prufesso’, no one can take it from you, you can put your copyright on it.”

  “Well it was about time!”

  • • •

  That autumn I got to know the tenants. From the loge you could see them passing one at a time, so they stood out from each other. The loge window was a magnifying glass for stamp collectors. They were less interesting than the characters I read about in Don Raimondo’s books, but more specialized. Each of them had given himself a persona to stand out from the others and not disappear into the mass of people we were. Faces competed to differ from each other as much as possible, and so did all the voices and hellos and habits. They responded to a law: thou art unequal, distinguish thyself from one another. They applied it scrupulously. One person had a canary (canarino) on the balcony, the next-door neighbor put out a goldfinch (cardellino), so the downstairs neighbor got a cross between the two called the canary-goldfinch (’o ’ncardellato). A well-to-do woman had three medium-sized dogs and she took them on walks with three long leashes that twisted around every obstacle in the alley. The old man from the basso, the one who had come about his sick wife, used to place his chair in front of the door to have a smoke. Every time without fail the dogs would surround him with their leashes and end up moored to his chair, shifting it and making it totter. After untangling the leashes, in the wake of the woman roaring on in her descent, you could hear the comments of neighbors across the way: “The signora is out hunting once again.”

  • • •

  Cummoglio, the accountant, is an unlucky businessman. He comes from a family of button manufacturers, buttunari, ruined by the dawn of the zipper. Before the war he had started selling wooden iceboxes, but had to close because of competition from the refrigerator. Patiently he shifted into the wool mattress business just when spring mattresses were making their debut.

  Don Gaetano used to say if he threw a stalk of straw into the water it would sink to the bottom, while others could even get lead to float. His wife, Euterpe, had given birth to twins, my age, named Oreste and Piliade, like the inseparable friends of Greek mythology. They were so alike not even their parents could tell them apart. They deliberately confounded people, the same haircut, same knot of the tie; if one got a cut the other wore a Band-Aid, too. They burst into laughter at the same time. They applied themselves scrupulously to their alikeness. They took advantage of it, trading places and names. They themselves must have believed they were one and the other at the same time. They had put their efforts into being double.

  Signor Cummoglio had given up on telling them apart and he didn’t call them by name. He had given them a collective nickname, I Vuie, You-Two. To that they would gladly answer. If he wanted to call one of them, he would say, “One of You-Two.” Even in the building we called them “the You-Twos.”

  That school year I noticed one difference between them. One of the two could not pronounce the slurred Neapolitan sh, as in shcuola, shchifo, shfizio.*

  He needed to separate them, he’d say sh-cuola. The sh gave him trouble, just a bit. The other pretended to have the same problem, to cover up.

  But sometimes he would forget, that’s when I noticed. I had decided that Piliade was the one who could pronounce the sh while Oreste couldn’t: ’O rest’ in Neapolitan means the remainder. Oreste was missing a small remainder of sameness.

  In class that autumn I started calling them by their names without confusing them. They were shocked that they might lose their twoness. They asked me in private how I was able to tell them apart. I said I wouldn’t tell anyone how, not even them. “You can keep the secret of your name, I’ll keep the one of how I know.”

  It worked.

  I was very reserved, secrets and hiding places were safe with me.

  “We believe you,” one of the two said. They used the pronoun “we” naturally. I had no opportunity to say it and I liked hearing theirs.

  From that moment on I was a danger to them. They avoided me, if I addressed them by name neither of the two replied.

  • • •

  Sunday arrived unattended. And it passed. Anna didn’t come. I spent the afternoon at the loge finishing up a second Christmas light to place over our windo
w. Don Gaetano went out for a walk. The courtyard was filled with glittering light, polished by the chill of the north wind.

  The sun beat against the window glass of the top floors and spattered in rebounds down to the ground. The windows of Naples traded the sun with each other. Those that had more because of their position passed it down to those that had less. They were synchronized. The master glaziers mounted them at a slant deliberately, to increase the reflecting surfaces. Down at the loge, a pile of light arrived that did ten laps before ending up in the hole where I lived. Don Gaetano says it’s a good sign. The sun is fond of those who live on the lower floors where it doesn’t arrive. More than anyone else it loves the blind, to whose eye sockets it gives a special caress. The sun doesn’t like the worshippers who lie out naked under its abundance and use it as a colorant for their skin. It wants to warm the coatless, whose teeth chatter in the narrow alleyways. He calls them outside, makes them leave their cold rooms and rubs them until they smile from the tickling. “It’s a good sign, the sun is fond of you and is sending its regards inside your little room. The windows are its stairway, the light descends them out of affection for you. It’s a sign the sun is protecting you.”

  • • •

  I didn’t wait for Anna outside. If she knocked on the main door I would hear her. I played with the knife. It had a white bone handle, I grazed my cheek with the blade to test its sharpness. I remembered Don Gaetano’s advice, to keep it for protection, nothing else. You shouldn’t get too familiar with a knife, it was a serious tool. Treat it with respect and it will do its duty when the need arises. Play around with it instead, show it off, and it will slip from your hand at the wrong time.

  The knife and men of the South go together.

  I didn’t let myself imagine how I would use it in a dangerous spot. I would improvise. A violent move shouldn’t be premeditated. A violent move was throwing yourself between feet to grab the ball with your hands. Violence wasn’t the kick in the nose but the dive between feet. If I thought about it first I wouldn’t do it. So it must go with the knife. In the event of danger, I will find the defensive maneuver.