I thought he was looking for money. That made me think of the handkerchief twisted between my breasts. Which, I guess, had me glancing down to them. Carlo saw me, so he looked at my breasts, too. The heat again gathered under my collar.
Not because Carlo was looking at my breasts. Because Carlo was looking at me look at my breasts in front of Benedetta. And while neither of them had a clue I had a handkerchief filled with tuition money resting between them, the fact of its existence, while we discussed stealing burlap sacks, the price of flour, and making use of worn-out shoes, made me feel like a liar, like my decision to help the neighborhood children had strings, like, like . . .
“I don’t suppose you have a shoelace?” Carlo patted another pocket. “For these shoes. I only have one.”
Shoelace. Not breasts.
Well, why was he looking at them then if he only wanted a shoelace? I dug into my pocket, for the shoelace Don Sebastiano had tossed at me the day he wanted to remind me of my obligations. I tossed it at Carlo. “Here.”
He picked it up. “Know what, Fiora Vicente? I’m thinking you would be wasted being a typewriter girl. You always have what is needed. You’d be better as a nurse.”
Nurse. Ha. Like because I’d put in weeks cleaning snot, I’d want to spend the rest of my life cleaning snot. “And look at you, talking everybody into giving you their money while you take credit for helping the neighborhood. Your time spent shoemaking is likewise wasted. Better you run for councilman.”
He tossed the shoelace at Benedetta. “Only if being councilman means I can get free meals at your restaurant.”
Benedetta tossed the shoelace back at him. “I don’t want a restaurant.” She peeked, corner to corner, like maybe the Fates would hear. She leaned in, her attitude conspiratorial. “I want a bakery. Not like those tiny pastries selling across the street. My bakery would only produce the best. Cucidati big as your fist. Filled with the freshest of figs. Honeyed nuts like I remember from my nonna’s kitchen. The most tender, most delicately flavored, most irresistible of spongata, with layers so flaky you’re tempted to peel them away and eat them, one by one.”
She threw back her head and laughed. “I’d eat at least three of those every day. Before dinner.” She pinched a cheek and dropped her voice. “Don’t tell the doctor.”
“We won’t, signora, but a bakery is not enough. It’s not near enough. You are like Our Lord Jesus Christ in this kitchen, feeding the masses with loaves and manicotti.” Carlo kissed his fingers up to heaven. “And so deliciously. No. A restaurant is your true heart’s desire. A restaurant is what you get. I feel it.”
“You can’t feel anything, Carlo Lelii. You are not like our Fiora. Look what happened with that little girl. How she saved her. Fiora knows things.” Benedetta tapped her temple. “Despite all her modern thinking.”
Carlo turned to me. “Is that true, Fiora Vicente? Do you know things? Are you truly your mother’s daughter?”
His face was friendly, his tone respectful. Like being my mother’s daughter was a matter of pride, not pain. “Sometimes, I know something. Not often. I can touch things, in the right moment. I sometimes get an impression. I am nothing like my mother. Not . . . talented.”
Carlo appeared to take my words seriously. “You are talented. You are still untried. Keep practicing. Someday, when you most need them, your talents will see you through.”
I didn’t want to argue with him. Not with the three of us so cozy. But the conversation made me sad, reminded me of all I could no longer take for granted. I went back to my mending.
Benedetta turned another loaf out onto the table. “I know, let’s do something fun. We are all working too hard. Who has an idea?”
Carlo squared his shoulders. “Let us put our hands together and make a solemn oath. We shall each never fail the other. In word or deed. We will always be there to help, no matter what the other needs. And when times are good, we will remember to celebrate. With Signora Bruni’s delectable pastries if at all possible.” He stretched his hand over the table, and I knew he meant for me to take it.
There are those moments in our lives we count as the time before, and the time after. Carlo stood there, palm out, the expectation I’d finally put mine in his, live in the world of the normal, the conventional, so electric the air sparked.
The moment passed. I took Benedetta’s hand, and placed it in Carlo’s.
Benedetta’s hand fluttered, resting uneasy. She was married. Carlo was not. This was not done. I put my hands over both, covered them top and bottom, making a circle of trust. “Like the Three Musketeers.”
They looked to each other, then to me, the color going high in their cheeks. “Like in the story,” I added.
The awkwardness passed. Carlo straightened. “Yes. Of course. The Three Musketeers.” He raised his hand, lifted all of ours with his. “Carlo.”
Benedetta did the same. “Benedetta.”
And me. “Fiora.”
We held our handclasp high between us, reaching until we couldn’t reach anymore, myself on tiptoes, and Benedetta steadying herself against the table’s edge. Up, up, up. Our hopes, our dreams, our certainty of the future.
“To Carlo’s shop.”
“And Benedetta’s bakery.”
“And Fiora, the best typewriter in the world.”
Our hand clasp broke, and I imagined our wishes like butterflies.
Carlo spotted Benedetta’s camera, the Brownie, on its shelf. “We should commemorate this great moment. All of us. Together. United by snot.”
Benedetta stepped to the side. “You and Fiora should.” She lay a hand over the baby bulge. “Nicco wouldn’t like it.”
Carlo stopped his examination of the camera. “Why wouldn’t Nicco like it?”
I answered for her. “Nicco thinks it would be bad luck to take a photograph of the baby before he is born.”
“Ah. Then we won’t. You and I will stand in front of Benedetta and she can look between our shoulders. Then Nicco and every superstition will get its due.” He turned to Benedetta. “All right?”
She nodded, her smile blossoming ear to ear.
Carlo set the camera on the table and paged through the instruction manual, sounding out the English when he got stumped. “Depth of field.” He looked up. “What is that?”
“Nicco told me it means the camera requires a certain distance to be in focus.” Benedetta touched a finger to the end of her nose and extended her arm, like she was measuring a yard of fabric. “Longer than this I think. Or the photograph will be blurred.”
Carlo tapped a finger to the table. “We need the proper tool. Something we can use to flip the lever and expose the film from a distance. What can we use? Everybody think.”
Benedetta handed over her longest wooden spoon. Carlo contributed his buttonhook, and I grabbed the lace I’d given him for the shoe off the table. It took us a few minutes, a couple of false starts, but finally we had an apparatus that would work—a shoelace dangled from the end of the spoon and tied on its opposite end to the buttonhook. Next we got the hook under the lever, dumped the verbena out of all those iron rings the old man had hung around Benedetta’s apartment, and used the rings to weight the camera and prevent it from shifting. The spoon would extend Carlo’s reach, and once we were all arranged, he could lift the spoon, drawing the shoelace taut, which would pull on the buttonhook and move the lever.
We were a team, a group, united in purpose. The sickness would end. The war would be over. My brothers would return, along with Benedetta’s husband, wearing their medals, back from fighting the Kaiser. We would feed them beautiful meals, and the men would go off together, leaving Benedetta and me to picnic in the park, the baby on a blanket between us. The old man would be well, his hair halolike in the sunshine. Even the Lattanzis could come, the signora unable to be a sourpuss over the soup because Benedetta had taught me to make it with plenty of garlic. Then the boys would launch their airplane. Farther and faster and high as they wanted.
/>
We turned on every light in Benedetta’s apartment. We removed every shade. We created day where there was none, providing our own sun to arrow through the aperture, and ourselves, hands clasped triumphantly over our heads, Benedetta looking between my and Carlo’s shoulders, to project on the film.
With love, with faith, with the promise of tomorrow.
Click.
Followed by knock-knock-knock. “Signora Bruni. Signora.”
Etti. At the door.
He stood in his nightshirt, wide-eyed and trembling, and pointing toward the stair.
The newfound energy our celebration had released steam-engined me down the steps. I hit the lobby with barely a thud and flew through the Lattanzis’ open doorway, Carlo close behind.
The next moments happened in stop action, much as the upside-down market flickered in my attic. Bits and pieces of remembrance that to this day sometimes visit me in order, sometimes helter-skelter.
Fipo. On the floor. Curled in on himself. Writhing.
The teakettle overturned in the sink. The stove’s burner hissing. Stench of singed hair. Matches scattered across the floor.
A tableau I did not need to be sensitive to understand, did not need my mother’s talent to figure out. “He’s burned.”
Turn on the tap. Splash of cold water.
Carlo. Strong. Steady. Fipo in his arms.
Me. Turning off the gas, throwing open the sash, setting the kettle upright.
But what comes back to me most profound about those first moments, and the next minute, was the silence. Especially from Fipo, clenched and clawing. The scene turned surreal, seeming like one of the curtain’s projections, but instead of the projection being splashed across the wall in my attic, this projection splashed across the Lattanzis’ kitchen. A kitchen I’d left clean and orderly two hours before. Any moment the credits would roll, the lights would come up. Fipo would return to his sleep, and the rest of us to our fun.
Benedetta broke through my isolation. She rushed to Fipo. Ran a hand over his forehead, a finger across his cheek, then checked his arm. “This doesn’t look too bad. You’re a lucky guy. Next time, don’t touch the stove.”
Next time. “What were you doing?”
Fipo slumped forward, teeth chattering.
Carlo indicated the kettle. “Making tea, I think.” He looked over Benedetta’s head at me. “I can take him now. You should stay with the signore and signora.”
The silence frothed like a pot coming to boil. All this fuss and not a word from the bedroom. Not a sneeze, not a cough, not the tiniest complaint. I turned toward their door, the distance to it seeming to double and triple. “Fipo.” His name came out plain, raked clear of emotion. “Why were you making tea?”
He let out a wail, choked and chilling and dripping with grief. “To make Mamma feel better.”
The film finally sprocketed through its reel, the end of the celluloid flip-flip-flipping.
No.
Eighteen
The hours that followed the Lattanzis’ deaths wandered one into the next, wearying and weak. There was the old man and Carlo and other strong men, with blankets and stretchers, and paperwork none of us knew who should sign. The doctor took charge, speaking with them in the corner. He slathered Fipo’s arm with ointments and salves, asking over and over, “Why did you leave them alone?”
They were fed and nightshirted, tucked into their beds. The stove was cold, the nightstands set with water, and hankies, medicine, and tea. All was well when I left. The boys already sleeping. They were none of them alone. Why did I need to be there?
I stopped answering the doctor’s questions. He didn’t stay long anyway. I returned to what I knew. I washed dishes and did laundry, worried the furnace might go out, that the gas bill needed to be paid, not wanting the boys to return to blood or snot or the lingering stink of death.
“Carlo will go with the Lattanzis to the undertakers.” The old man spoke to me as if from a great distance, as if I listened at the door, ear pressed to the wood as I had the first night I’d met him, cold and hungry and uncertain as hell.
He pulled the Lattanzis’ medicine bottle from my lips, replaced the cork, and slipped it into his pocket. “Do not worry. Carlo will make sure they are seen to. We will arrange for a service later.”
It didn’t matter. I didn’t care. The Lattanzis were nothing to me. Neighbors for a few weeks. Reminders of all I was not, all I did not have, how little I’d been left. Obligated by their grudging charity. And responsible for their prolonged suffering.
I gathered the market basket. We needed potatoes. And lentils. Whatever the market might have. I needed to get out, breathe air on the other side of the walls of the Lattanzis’ apartment. Air that was a little less thick, a little less oppressive, a little less a reminder of all I never should have done.
But the people in the market had returned to suspicion, with head tilts and glances, and poorly hidden gestures. They half-whispered, one after the other, variations on a theme. “First the DiGirolamos, now the Lattanzis.”
I returned to the apartment, defeated. My short-lived victory, withered. I crawled up to my attic, curled on the bed, and watched the upside-down market proceed in its five-minute forwardedness. A forwardedness which may as well have been ten minutes before, or three days hence, because . . . “Nothing changes, because nothing changes.”
I wound the Big Bens and fell asleep.
The next morning, the old man knocked on the attic door. “Carlo is waiting for you.”
To place cool compresses, apply poultices, do dishes, clean laundry, scrub floors. “Tell him to go ahead. I’ll join him later.”
Of course, I didn’t. Not that day. Not the next day. Not the day after. The market moved along as it lately did, listless and lackadaisical, and like it didn’t much like having to keep putting up the pretense.
The door to my attic opened, sending light from the old man’s part of the apartment up the stairs. The upside-down market bleached. The door closed. The market returned. Steps approached. I presumed the old man. I wiped a tear-filled wad of self-reproach from under my nose, pulled the covers over my head, and pretended to be asleep.
The old man pulled the covers off me. “Get up, Fiora. No hearing person could possibly sleep with all that clock ticking.”
Not the old man. Benedetta. Blinking the way the old man did until he got used to the level of light.
I shoved the Big Bens under my pillow and sat up. Straightened bedcovers. Shoved hankies under the mattress. Embarrassed by the piled collections the old man had stored in every available space, collections I’d never bothered to arrange. “What are you doing here?”
“I’ve been leaving the door to my landing open. You haven’t passed once to use the bathroom, so I came upstairs because I have to know. Are you peeing in a cup?”
I stopped trying to make my attic resemble Benedetta’s homey surrounds. “I hold it until I figure you’re asleep.”
She put her hands on her hips. “Does it hurt to do that?”
A little. “I don’t drink a lot of water.”
That statement seemed to amuse her. She gazed at the projection, then walked to the inverted rooftops, ran a high finger along the topsy-turvy trolley tracks. She turned. The pie lady upended a basket of squash on the swell of Benedetta’s belly. “Why is everything upside-down?”
I explained. “Like your camera.”
Benedetta raised her arms over her head and out to the sides, circumscribing her own bubble. She pointed to the curtain, to its single open aperture. “All this . . . illumination, comes from that?”
The curtain bent light in ways, in those days, I had no vocabulary to describe. Sent it into the future. Trapped it in the past. Until Benedetta’s question, I’d never thought of the curtain as producing light. To me, it more redirected the dark. “Yes,” I told her.
“But it only shows you what you see every day. Go outside, stand on your head. It would be the same. How do you tell fo
rtunes looking at what you can see from your window?” She walked to the curtain, examined the embroidery. “So beautiful. But what makes it magical?”
Tell her? Not tell her? Would the curtain care? “The projection is not what is happening now. It is what will happen five minutes from now.”
“Five minutes?”
“Yes.” I wound the old man’s Big Ben next to Mamma’s. They tick-tick-ticked at the same pace, five minutes apart.
“I don’t understand. Just set them to the same time.”
“I’ve tried. No matter what time I select, my mother’s Big Ben is always five minutes ahead of the don’s.”
Benedetta peeked behind the curtain and out the window. She put the curtain back into place and looked at the projection. She peeked out. Looked back. Peeked out.
Looked back. “It all looks the same.”
“It’s more obvious when people are on the street.”
Benedetta took a few seconds, hands folded over her bulge and lips pressed together, like she didn’t want the wrong words to slip past. “I don’t have big ambitions, no big plans to leave the neighborhood, go to Atlantic City on my own. But I’m not a simple village girl. I read. I think more than you. I keep up on the news of the world, and the happenings in the blocks around us. You don’t have to tell me fables.”
“It’s no fable. The curtain is special. I don’t know how it works, exactly. I mean, I’ve been learning but not a whole lot and there’s still so much I don’t know, but it can manipulate things.”
“Things?”
“Space. The air around us. Time. Scrunch it up, or make it longer. Like how it’s been feeling. You know. Humid and . . . heavy. Too warm.” I explained a little more, waving my arms and wondering if making an illustration might help. “Etti has noticed it, too.”
“Etti and you are blaming the curtain for the weather.”
“No. Yes. I mean. The curtain . . . does stuff.”
“What kind of stuff?”
“I know it sounds impossible, but watch. See, I undo a second flap, and the market goes away. Like opening photograph film to the light.” I undid a third flap and a fourth. Spiraling outward until all the flaps were undone. Then I stepped away and turned toward the ceiling slope. “Watch.”
The Infinite Now Page 15