by Marco Rafalà
Rocco didn’t look that much older than the young German soldier I’d killed with the stone-and I recognized the fear in him of being made to feed the lower appetites of our nature. “Do not worry,” I said. “There will not be another war like that one, not for a long time yet.” And then I asked him how long until the end of his service, and he told me his service ended in June, and he shifted gears and drove on through the countryside in silence-his white-knuckled grip on the steering wheel never loosening.
He dropped me off at the Greek theater. I thanked him for the ride and wished him luck. Then I set out on foot with my pack slung over my shoulder and followed the directions Don Fiorilla had given me. I did not think I would see Rocco again.
17
At Saint Anthony’s that night-the night of the Easter Vigil-Salvatore did not remember me at first. On the steps of the rectory, we shared wine and conversation. When he asked if I’d known an Italian soldier who’d left his journal in the bunker, I felt that madman Krause staring me down again. My fear, my desperation—the price of running was higher than I’d ever imagined. So I lied to Salvatore. What else could I do? He was older now, but inside of him crouched that same little boy who had begged his father to take my pistol all those years ago at the mouth of the cave.
Later, I stood in the back of the church and watched the service and listened. The priest brought light to those who waited in the pews in darkness. He chanted the Easter Proclamation. But Salvatore wasn’t sitting in the church with his sister. He didn’t hold a candle lit from the candle carried by the priest. Salvatore sat alone in his bedroom-his silhouette in the square of dim light from the top-floor rectory window. He watched a fog move through the streets, hugging the stones, and I watched him from the stony church steps. Two bombs had torn apart his family, and one had come from me, from the knowledge he found in my careless words. Without that, could he have destroyed the statue? Would he have ever thought to even try? I carried the weight of those questions alone, not knowing where his guilt began and mine ended.
That April, I used my savings to buy our way to Middletown, Connecticut-that was Salvatore’s choice, his Little Melilli, the boy in him believing that the world could give you a second chance. We moved into an apartment the church had found for us-a two-bedroom on Ferry Street in the Sicilian neighborhood on Main Street’s north end. Salvatore and I had jobs and Nella had school. We minded our own business. We didn’t bother other people. We kept our heads down and worked hard, not wanting too much from life except for a quiet one. My life was honest work now, the hard labor of construction. Building roads and bridges built me anew as it covered me in a sackcloth of sweat and concrete dust. For Salvatore and Nella, the world was an as yet unnumbered possibility. Seeing this for them made me see it for myself, a sight I had not enjoyed since childhood, since before the Balilla. A vision of my life as infinite.
In this part of Middletown, in the tenement blocks of the North End, parents spoke to their children and to each other in the regional dialect of Melilli. On these stoops, women traded gossip and comfort while scolding their children misbehaving in the streets. Men, smoking too many cigarettes, played cards on overturned vegetable crates and argued with their hands as much as their words. On these streets, fierce love-the only kind of love a Sicilian knew how to express-was always on display.
I didn’t miss the old country, but there were days when Salvatore scuffed at the cement with his boots and shook his head in wonder at how anyone could cover up and hide away so much good soil. Days when Nella came home from school and slumped on the sofa, fingering her Saint Sebastian medallion. Once I found her in the kitchen, eyes closed, nose pressed into the yellow petals of an early wildflower. “It doesn’t smell the same,” she murmured. Then she shook off the thought and placed the flower in a mason jar of water on the counter.
The three of us, in the days and weeks that passed, we formed our own family unit, our own little village in the larger one around us. I slept on the sofa bed with my pack stowed away behind the backrest-imagining my service in the war behind me. My war dreams nothing more now than groups of boys fighting in the playground over a swing set. But each night I’d startle awake in an unvoiced panic to the sounds of Salvatore, panting and calling out from his nightmares. I’d throw the sheets off and plant my feet on the carpet, holding a jittery vigil in the dead of night, and I’d listen to Nella, in the other room, shifting in her sleep, her footsteps padding to her brother’s door, her voice small in the dark. “Turiddu, are you all right?” she’d say, and his voice, gruff like a parent’s voice when scolding a child, “Go back to bed, Nella.” Then he’d punch the pillow and untangle himself from the sheets, the box springs squeaking.
Nella would linger at the door-even after he chided her-her palm flat against the wood. “Oh, Turiddu,” she’d say, “you promised.” The squeak of the box springs and creak of the hardwood floor allayed my disquiet. He’d come to the door, stand in the slant of light from his room, and tell her that he had not forgotten, that he was trying his best, and that this was all he could promise her. Then they’d both settle back into their beds, their breathing easing into a steady rhythm, the night passing uninterrupted until morning.
There was freedom in the sounds of those two siblings sleeping safely, freedom in the gravity of it. Because I was a part of them-the good, the bad-and they, me. And with them, in the duty of looking after them, my life again began to feel full. But like all hungry men who finally sit down to a good meal, I imagined I could have more.
One night, sitting up on the sofa bed under the soft light from the side-table lamp, I wrote Maria a letter.
I’m in America now. I brought two war orphans from Sicily with me-Salvatore and Antonella-my own version of a family. You would like them. Salvatore, he is a remarkable young man, eighteen, with a talent for gardening. And Nella, she does well in school. She is fifteen years old and already smarter than me, I think.
I’ve missed you, Maria. I made a terrible mistake, I know that now, and I hope you can find it in your heart to forgive me. Life here, it’s a good life, finally. One day, I’ll have my own café like Silvio’s. You’ll see. It will be our own little piece of Rome. Please, say you’ll come.
18
In May, during the Saint Sebastian festival, we sat on the stoop of our building and watched the band advancing down Ferry Street ahead of the men in white who carried the statue. Crowds of people came out of their homes and lined the sidewalks, crying out the saint’s name, crying out, “Pray for us.” Women and their children rushed into the street as the statue passed, clapping in time with the music as they joined the parade. Men ran up to the band with cups of wine. The organetto player dropped out of the tune first, knocked back the drink, took up his squeezebox, and found his place again in the Sicilian peasant song. The marranzanu player dropped out next. He tossed back the wine with a flick of his wrist, held the jaw harp against his parted front teeth, and played the hypnotic, droning melodies of his instrument. Each musician took his turn with the offered wine, with some of the players stumbling their way back into the song.
I stood up to check the mail for the second time that day when Salvatore held my arm and said, “It’s Sunday.”
“Beh, a man can’t stretch his legs on Sunday?” I said.
“What are you waiting for that you keep checking the mail?”
“Nothing,” I said. “I told you, it’s my legs, I can’t sit down too long.” Then I nudged Salvatore’s shoulder and motioned with my chin at the parade. “Let’s go,” I said. And we picked ourselves up and followed the crowd as it turned the corner onto Gilshannon Place, and then Green Street and Main Street, looping all through the Sicilian neighborhood. The music warbled and faded, the tempo slipped, but then the tune wheezed its way into a crescendo in a fit of drunken delight at the steps of Saint Sebastian Church.
Salvatore took his sister’s hand. They watched the men carry the statue into the church. The bells rang out from the recessed
niche in the facade in honor of the saint’s return. The peal of the bells brought Nella to tears. She leaned into her brother’s shoulder and whispered in his ear.
“Will you come inside with us?” Salvatore asked me.
We were first in line for the veneration of the statue, the first to pin money on the red sash tied around the statue’s waist. Salvatore fumbled with his wallet. His sister steadied his hands. Together they pinned a ten-dollar bill to the sash. Then Salvatore placed his palm over the chest, as if he felt a heart beating beneath the plaster. “Pray for me,” he said.
Back outside we bought squeeze cups of Italian ice. We stayed for dinner, eating big plates of lasagna with grilled sausages, peppers, and sweet onions on a long folding table set up under a tent on the church grounds. We stayed for the late Mass celebrated by the Bishop of Norwich. And we walked home under a clear night sky, lit up with stars and a shining half moon.
19
Three weeks later, I found a letter from Rome on the kitchen table. It had been a long, hot day on the job-unseasonably hot for early June, according to the foreman. My shirt stuck to my back, the armpits stained and damp. Salvatore won the coin toss and took the first shower. I stood in front of the fan on the counter, pinching the edges of the envelope.
Nella stood at the sink, washing and slicing radishes for the salad. “Who’s that from?”
“An old friend,” I said. I picked a cherry tomato from the bowl.
She slapped my hand away. “After dinner will you help me with my English?”
I nodded yes, poured a tall glass of water, and sat outside on the stoop. Beads of water condensed on the glass. The letter from Silvio, written on paper as thin as the skin of an onion, stung my eyes just the same. Maria had come by the café, married and happy with a beautiful daughter and another child on the way. The train does not pass two times, Silvio wrote.
There was more in the letter about how his health was failing, how his two girls and their husbands would soon take over the business the way he had from his father. Silvio was at least seventy by then. Around the age my parents would’ve been.
I sat on the stoop a long time, folding and refolding the letter, tracing a finger along the edges of the paper until I’d given myself a paper cut that did not bleed. I might have sat there forever, a granite monument, if Nella hadn’t come out to tell me the shower was free.
When I didn’t get up, she asked, “Is it bad news?”
She dug the toe of her shoe into the doorjamb rot, her long black hair pulled back into a messy bun, her cheeks flushed from the heat, her eyes-fierce eyes the color of walnuts-aging her far beyond her fifteen years. She was almost a woman grown, with a delicate beauty like the statue of the saint restored after its destruction.
“Someday you’ll find a good man, and you’ll start a family of your own,” I said.
Nella’s face darkened. “I don’t want children,” she said. “I won’t bring our family’s curse on them.”
After dinner, I helped Nella with her homework at the kitchen table. She was in the eighth grade at Saint Sebastian School, and all the kids in her class were a year or two younger. That didn’t bother her. Nella was determined to learn the language so she wouldn’t have to repeat the grade again.
We puzzled over the pronunciation guides in her lesson book together, the way English words were spoken and the way the words were written. When we’d had enough of knock and knife and knight and all the others, Nella went to bed and I walked up the street for a drink.
The café was long and smoky with a low tin ceiling painted white. Men hunched on stools at the mahogany bar, their backs curved like the blades of sabers. A pair of young men sat at the small front table, talking and laughing too loud. One of them tall and lanky, the other thick and pear shaped.
At the bar, I ordered a shot of grappa and took Silvio’s letter from my jacket pocket. The bartender, an older man with thin gray hair framing a shiny bald spot on the top of his head, raised his eyebrows at the paper in my hands. “A woman?” he asked in Italian.
I held out my glass for another shot and then another, stumbling through the story of my time in Rome after the war.
“But you are here now,” the bartender said.
“Beh, here I am. You lose one thing, you gain something else.” And the more I drank, the more I ran my mouth and said things better left unsaid.
“Melilli, you say?” The lanky young man from the front table leaned against the bar beside me. How long he had been standing there, I did not know. “You look familiar,” he said.
“You must be mistaken,” I said.
“Constantino,” his friend called out to him from the table. “It’s late. We should go.”
“This man says he knows Turiddu,” Constantino said. “But that’s impossible. Isn’t that right? You must be seeing ghosts.”
I pushed my drink away, unable to finish it. “Let’s step outside,” I said. I took the young man by the elbow and led him out the door. Despite my drunkenness, or perhaps because of it, I had him up against the brick wall with my left forearm pressing on his Adam’s apple before he knew what was happening. “Better you forget what you think you know,” I said.
He held up his hands. “Take it easy.”
I let him go. He walked calmly back into the café, where his friend stood wide-eyed at the window.
That night, lying on the pull-out sofa in a drunken melancholy, I touched the glow of the streetlights that cut across the living room. The room swayed. The scene in the café, the bartender, the altercation with the lanky young man-it all seemed hazy and distant, unreal. Snapshots from a dream. One of Salvatore’s nightmares clouding the grappa. The trouble at the bottom of the glass.
Maria, she was gone to me. The mother to some other man’s children. I had been so brash as to try to grasp at the vision of my life as infinite, the one Salvatore and Nella had made me want to believe in. But I’d found instead a wall, built by my own hands, unintended yet still impenetrable. On the other side was the life I could’ve had, but for who I was and what I had done, what I could not leave behind. Salvatore and Nella, they were all I had left in this world, all the world would ever let me have. They were all that mattered.
20
The following Saturday at Public Market-the Italian grocery store on Main Street around the corner from where we lived-Salvatore wandered the vegetable aisle, inspecting the green and red peppers, the artichokes and string beans, the cauliflower and broccoli, the yellow and green zucchini, and the meaty Roma tomatoes. “These are good,” he said, taking two heads of cauliflower and holding them up to his nose. “But they’re not fresh.”
“What are you talking about?” I said. “They have good food here.”
“I’ll have my own garden someday,” Salvatore said. “Then you’ll taste the difference.”
“That’s a day I look forward to.” I eyed the capicola, the soppressata, and the other deli meats at the end of the aisle in the back of the store. “I’ll pick up some cold cuts.”
At the meat counter, old Sicilian women in black dresses and black shawls, with dark upper-lip hair, waited for their orders in the line ahead of me. They talked in whispered tones about a boy who’d cursed his family and took into his heart the malocchio-the evil eye. One of the women pointed with her whiskered chin at Salvatore among the vegetables, picking potatoes from a wooden basket. She made the mano di cornuto-the horned hand-from her clenched left fist hanging at her side. The other women made the sign of the cross. They talked but kept their distance.
In the afternoon, I sat with the young priest at the rectory on Washington Street. Don Salafia listened while cleaning the lenses of his black-rimmed glasses with a tissue. Then he put on the frames and told me how he was disappointed in my lack of judgment with the bottle. “Boh, what can you do?” he said. He pushed his glasses up the bridge of his long nose with his first finger and answered himself. “You can do nothing about the past,” he said. “My papà, God rest hi
s soul, he was from the old country, and he used to say that what happened over there didn’t matter. It’s what you make of your life here that counts. The good people of Middletown, I know they feel the same.” He patted my shoulder, indicating our conversation was at an end.
As he held the front door open for me, he said, “Constantino and his friend are here to make new lives, like the three of you. They are not looking for trouble. That was a different time, a different world.”
I spent late nights at the café with the hope that I’d run into Constantino again, but I never saw him or his fat-bottomed friend-the one who was shaped like an old mother. Nights at home, the wall clock in the kitchen ticked away the seconds of every minute, every ticking second twisting in my gut, a countdown to the Devil’s hour when Salvatore cried out from his sleep and Nella came to his door to quiet him.
21
That summer, Salvatore and I worked on an overpass on Route 9, south of Cromwell, with a construction crew of Sicilian Americans born and raised in Middletown. We had been on the job two months when the foreman, Fat Joe Corvo, introduced a fresh crew of men. The first was Frank Lombardo, a local. Frank stood about five feet with a stocky build. He had a thin mustache and a crop of wavy, dark hair cut close around the ears and the back of his neck. The second and third I recognized from that night in the café-the long-limbed Constantino Cardella and the thick Roberto Santangelo. The fourth young man stood a few inches taller than the others, well built with a serious face. He looked familiar, but I couldn’t place him until I heard his name: Rocco Morello.
Salvatore and Rocco stared at one another like they’d each seen in the other a long-dead enemy returned to the world of the living.
“I got to get that forklift working,” Salvatore said. He never took his eyes off Rocco.