How Fires End

by Marco Rafalà

  At first I thought she was asking the stars, and I laughed, saying, “They won’t answer.”

  She pinched my arm and said, “I was talking to you, stupid.”

  I slapped her hand away.

  “Those men,” she said. “They were looking for someone. Was it you?”

  I sat up and hugged my knees. “If you knew what I did,” I said. And I felt as if I had something caught in my throat. I tried clearing it. Then I spit into the sea. “You have to promise,” I said, “never to tell anyone. Not even a priest, not even at confession.”

  She put her hand on my shoulder and said, “I’ll never tell a soul.”

  So I whispered my crimes in her ear. The little clouds my breath made rose away from me, out over the sea. What harm could a few dark clouds do out there? I watched them go because I could not look at my sister.

  Nella cried.

  I wanted to comfort her, but she scooted away from me. “Where was that worthless saint when the twins died?” I said.

  “I want to go home,” she said.

  “You can’t,” I said. “Those men who came after me up at the farmhouse, some had guns, and one of them-I don’t know who-shot our parents. Maybe Cardella or Nunzio, it could have been any one of those men. There’s no going back.”

  She bundled herself up with her arms across her chest and sobbed. Suddenly, a shoe clocked me in the head, and I turned around. The boat wobbled. We held the sides to steady ourselves.

  “Filthy little hooligan,” a man yelled from the edge of the pier. “Get out of there.”

  I pulled on Nella’s arm, but she wouldn’t move. I had to drag her from the boat. At the pier, the man grabbed my wrist. He smelled like a fish merchant.

  “Are you all right?” he asked my sister.

  She kicked him in the shin. He howled and grabbed his leg. The two of us ran down the wooden planks and into the maze of dark city streets.

  Drunks staggered by, holding arms out against buildings for balance. A prostitute wearing a white nightgown stood in front of a half-opened door and made a come here gesture at me with her finger. We turned into a narrow winding alley between crooked rows of old buildings. All the roofs had collapsed long ago. I spotted a door. Its hinges creaked when I pushed it open. The room was as big around as the dirty mattress on the floor. The fisherman’s one-shoed clop, like a limping horse on the cobblestones, drew near. I peeked out the door and saw him talking with the prostitute. She pointed at the alley.

  “That whore gave us away,” I said.

  “What’re we going to do?” Nella asked.

  “I’ll lure that old seahorse far from this place.” I put my fingers to my lips to stop her from protesting. “I’ll come back,” I said. “I promise.”

  “But what if you don’t?” she whispered.

  “Then go to work in the morning,” I said. “I’ll find you there.”

  I put a stone in my pocket.

  Nella touched my arm and said, “The delicatessen, it’s at the end of the market on Trento.”

  I ran out the door, knocking over the garbage on my way. As I rounded the corner at the other end of the alley, I saw that the fisherman had taken the bait.

  I stopped several times under lampposts and marked the poles with the pointy end of my stone. Then I waited for the fisherman to see me before running off again. At the bridge to Ortygia, I yelled, “Stupid donkey. Over here!” The crazy man waved his arms and shouted obscenities. I crossed over into the Old City. The streets became narrower. I walked between the tunnels of houses, marking each corner that I took, this way, then that-right into a dead end. I crouched behind some garbage cans and waited. All the little noises of the city sounded like a man coming after me. Shadows moved on the far wall. They took on the shapes of wild stallions with fish tails-beasts of mythology.

  I came out from behind the garbage and peered around the street corner. Jets of water washed over nymphs, seahorses, and other strange creatures carved into the stone basin of a fountain. It stood in the center of a large piazza. Moonlight reflected on the pool. A fine mist wet my skin. The statues were beautiful. I drank from the fountain and splashed water on my face. When I looked up from the pool, I saw the main road that led back to the bridge. And on the other side, I thought I saw my sister.

  “Nella,” I called. But she didn’t hear. So I ran after her, my shoes echoing through the narrow streets. Her pace quickened, she turned a corner, and I lost her. Then a light turned on in a window overhead, and a man shouted down into the alley, “Stay away from my daughter.”

  I ran from there as fast as I could go. It didn’t matter where my legs took me, only that they took me far from trouble.

  By the time I slowed down long enough to catch my breath, I had gotten myself so turned around that I couldn’t tell north from south. The streets were empty and quiet. I tried following the smell of the sea on the air, but I couldn’t find my way back to the water. I wandered most of the night, never seeing the markings I had left behind. And as the houses became less densely packed, I gave up the search. Nella was a smart girl. She would stay the night in that derelict house and go to work in the morning just like we’d planned. When it was light out, I’d find my way and meet her there.

  I left the road and sat under an olive tree. In the distance, I spotted an almond grove in full bloom. But it wasn’t time yet for them to blossom. I figured this was my mind playing a trick on me with some white stone. But I felt curious, so I crossed the field and another road. I found seats cut into the white, stony hill in the shape of a half moon. I sat down in one of the rows, pleased with myself for having reasoned out the deception. A lizard scurried over the seat in front of me and down the aisle, on its way toward the remains of a stage. Even in the dark, I could see that this old Greek theater stood in ruins with the stonework crumbling and falling apart. Lizards performed here now.

  Looking out over the ridge, I saw the flowering almond trees again. And I rubbed my eyes, trying to blink away the vision. Still they stood just beyond the theater. Then I heard my brothers’ laughter, echoing from that place. I jumped up out of my seat. They said my name in whispers from those trees, and I knew it was a lie, but I wanted it to feel real. So I followed their voices with my arms out in front of me, trying to catch hold of their bodies. They led me into an abandoned limestone quarry to the mouth of a large cave shaped like the cavity of an ear. Their laughter came from inside.

  “Hello,” I called out. And my voice joined their voices in an echo. I listened to it fade. A cool breeze came from within the cavern. I explored its winding spaces, its high, smooth walls, and my footsteps sounded like soldiers on the march-Roman guards. The cave had multiplied me into a legion.

  17

  A hand on my shoulder woke me. Daylight streamed in from the cave mouth, and a priest stood over me.

  “What’re you doing here, a boy your age?” he said.

  I jumped up and backed away from him. “How did you find me?”

  “Find you?” the priest said. “You were shouting in the Ear of Dionysius. The whole of Syracuse can hear you from this cave. Come with me to the rectory, and I’ll tell you the story.”

  I looked at my shoes, the soles worn through at the toes. “I don’t care to hear it,” I said.

  “What do you care for then?”

  “I want to see my sister.”

  “Where is she?”

  “She works at a delicatessen on Trento.”

  “Ah, in the market. Yes, I know it well,” he said. “I’ll send for her.”

  “I want for us to have a warm bath and a good meal,” I said.

  “Then you and your sister shall have both,” he said.

  “And maybe a new pair of shoes,” I added.

  The priest laughed. “What is your name? I am Paolo Giovanni.”

  At the rectory, I washed up and ate fried eggs and sausage with the priest. The busy sounds of the city-merchants pushing two-wheeled carts, horses clopping over cobblestone stree
ts-battered against the shuttered windows like a storm. A car engine sputtered and died. Two men argued.

  “What were you dreaming?” Don Giovanni asked.

  “I don’t remember,” I said.

  “Well, you’re safe here at Saint Anthony’s until we can contact your parents. Where are they?”

  I told him the story my sister had made up, that my father died in the war, that there’s no work in the village where I’m from, so my sister and I do little jobs in the city to bring money home for our sick mother. He asked me the name of the village, drumming his fingers on the table when I stumbled for an answer, so I covered up my lie with another one.

  “My parents were both killed when the British came,” I said. “I take care of my sister now. We’ve been on our own ever since, living on the streets and finding small jobs to do.”

  “There is room here for the both of you,” the priest said, “if you’ll work for it. What kind of work have you done?”

  I looked at my hands and said, “I helped my father tend an orchard.”

  “Ah,” the priest said. “So you know your way around a garden.”

  He took me to the courtyard and pointed out the sweet peas whose blossoms needed tending and bushes that needed pruning.

  “Why did you feel the need to lie?” Don Giovanni asked.

  I knelt down, tightened the laces of my shoes, and said, “I was afraid you’d send us to an orphanage.”

  He placed his palm on the crown of my head and said, “They are overcrowded. We have space for you right here.”

  Then he led me to a small plot of land tucked into a corner of the courtyard. “We want a vegetable garden here,” the priest said. I knelt and rubbed the soil between my fingertips. He told me I could start that day, and showed me to my room.

  18

  That first year at the rectory, I made a vegetable garden, the best one I could. I planted tomatoes, peppers, and zucchini in the spring and artichokes, onions, and asparagus in the fall. My sister left her job in the Old City and worked in the kitchen. She had the room across the hall from mine on the second floor, both little more than closets. I often sat by the casement window eyeing the cars and people below. This was the best hiding place in all of Sicily. During the day I worked, and at night I read the Bible, most often the Book of Job. God took everything from him, and still he believed. I never understood why.

  One night, while having dinner alone with Don Giovanni, I asked him about it. “That’s really a question you would have to ask Job himself,” he said. “But if I had to guess, I would say that Job understood that God had His plan. Job had a choice, like all of us, and he chose faith. Is there something you’re grappling with, Salvatore?”

  I pushed a piece of roasted zucchini around my plate with my fork. I could feel him looking at me, so I had to answer. “No, just understanding, Father.”

  “Perhaps if you came to Mass like Nella,” Don Giovanni said. Then he commented about how the tomato sauce was very good. I thanked him and told him it was my father’s recipe.

  “If you ask Him,” Don Giovanni said, “God will help you. But you have to ask Him.”

  I wanted to believe that living in the rectory and working for the church made up for what I’d done, but the nightmares of the twins, those terrible dreams, they never stopped, and every time I left the grounds, every time I opened those doors, it felt like the whole of Syracuse knew my secret, as if the cobblestones sensed the added weight I carried and whispered my crimes on the wind.

  19

  For my fourteenth birthday, the last day of April 1948, Nella baked an almond cake. She dusted the top with icing sugar and then scattered toasted almonds over it. We sat together with Don Giovanni. I told him that I would not prepare for the sacrament of confirmation this year, or any year.

  Don Giovanni furrowed his brow, drank his coffee, and said, “I don’t understand.”

  “He can’t,” Nella said. “He’s not in a state of grace. Not after what he did.”

  I dropped my fork. It clattered on the plate. “Thank you for the cake,” I said. I pushed the plate with my half-eaten slice away from me. Then I got up from the table, walked out of the rectory, and sat on the back steps. The trees were still bare. And I thought of my father’s orchard, coming into bloom, and the color it made.

  Later that night, I snuck into the kitchen for another slice, but my sister had thrown the cake away.

  20

  At fifteen, I put a boy in the hospital for making my sister cry. She had turned twelve the day before and insisted that she no longer needed me to walk her to and from school. I allowed it since the school was near the convent, three blocks away.

  That day, I took a break from my work and sat on the stoop of the rectory, enjoying the afternoon sun, when she ran, crying, around the street corner. Three boys-younger than me by a year and a half-followed her. I’d seen them around the neighborhood before and didn’t like the way they looked. The one in the lead, Aldo Fabrizi, teased her for being a war orphan. And he said other things, dirty things about how she looked older than most girls her age. She opened the little gate, ran past me, up the stairs, and into the house. The heavy door banging shut behind her. I charged Aldo like a bull, pushed him across the narrow street and into a pile of garbage in the alley, where I sat on his chest, punching his face until my knuckles bled. His friends shouted their support, but if Aldo landed any blows, I couldn’t feel them. I was too crazy in the head.

  When Don Giovanni pulled me out of the alley, with a hard grip for a priest, Aldo didn’t move. He had one eye closed and the other half opened, a swollen, bloodied face, and a broken nose. His friends helped him get to his feet. He had an arm around each boy’s shoulder as they brought him inside the rectory, setting him down on the sofa. Don Giovanni called his mother, and then he told me to go up to my room and wait for him. Aldo’s mother arrived with the carabinieri later that night, and they spoke with Don Giovanni in his study.

  Nella knocked on my door.

  “It isn’t locked,” I said. I sat on the windowsill, looking down at the alley across the street.

  She came in with a damp washcloth and cleaned my bruised fists. Then she sat at the foot of my bed with her arms around her knees, bent up to her chest. “Will you walk me to school tomorrow?”

  “Yes,” I said. “And I’ll walk you home, too.”

  She let out a long breath, put her chin on one of her knees, and said, “This isn’t home.”

  “I know.”

  Don Giovanni entered without knocking.

  I looked at his reflection in the window and asked, “Will the boy be okay?”

  “The pig deserved it,” Nella said. “The foul mouth on him.”

  “Nella, please leave us,” Don Giovanni said.

  When she left, he shut the door and told me that the church agreed to pay for the boy’s medical bill. Then he slapped me. I had seen his hand in the window coming at me, but I didn’t move away from it. My eyes watered from the pain, and he told me that if I did anything like that again, he would send me away to the orphanage.

  The next day, while weeding the garden, my hands felt strange-rough and unknown to me. The lines on the palms looked like the scars from skin sewn together by an unsteady hand. Like my hands had been stitched together from some strange skin. I made a fist, released it. The bruised knuckles still red and sore from the fight. I picked a scab and watched the cut fill with blood. I dug the fingers deep into the good soil like roots looking for water.

  I only wanted these hands to cultivate life.

  21

  Don Giovanni knew that Nella and I came from Melilli. He knew what I had done. I never figured out when he discovered my secret or how. But I’ve always suspected Nella broke her promise to me in confession.

  It came out one evening after dinner. Don Giovanni and I had coffee while Nella cleared the table. “Aldo’s nose has healed,” he said. “I thought you should know that he forgives you.”

  “Then
he is stronger than me,” I said. “May I be excused?”

  “No, you may not,” Don Giovanni said. Then he reached across the table and took my hand, searching my face. “It would be better for you to go to confession,” he said.

  I pulled my hand away. “I will not.”

  He locked his fingers together in front of his face and said, “Thank you for the meal, Nella. I’d like to speak with your brother alone now.”

  “Yes, Father,” she said. She glanced at me and then hurried out of the room.

  Don Giovanni touched his forehead to his locked-together hands. Then he raised his head, looked at me over the knuckles, and said, “Tell me, Salvatore, how is it possible that your family once carried the strength of the soldier-saint in their blood?”

  “That’s just a story,” I said. “It’s not real.”

  He put his hands-palms down-on the table and got up from the chair. “The stories in the Bible are real,” he said. “Are they not?”

  “That’s your profession, Father. I wouldn’t know.”

  Don Giovanni brought his empty cup into the kitchen. “Sebastian was a real man,” he said from the sink. “A sainted man. His exalted spirit-”

  I got out of my chair, knocking it over as I stood up. “It was just a statue,” I said. “Emanuele and Leonello, they were real.”

  My fists clenched, and the fire in my stomach gave me heartburn. But I had my garden and my sister to consider, so I held my breath, righted the chair, and let the air out of my lungs little by little.

  “I’m sorry, Father,” I said.

  He stood in the doorway with a towel draped over his arm. “Your soul is like a pot of water boiling down,” he said. “Do you understand, Salvatore? Let me help you.”

  “You’ve been good to us, Father,” I said. “Good to me. And I thank you for that, but working in the garden is all the help I need.”

  “If you won’t make confession here,” he said, “go back to Melilli. Make the pilgrimage to Saint Sebastian’s shrine and pray for his forgiveness. Ask him to pray for you. I’ll go with you if you like. I’ve discussed this with Don Fiorilla. There will be no trouble.”