by John Domini
“Everybody’s having a ball,” Barbara said.
The girls needed some time, over the clipboard, and as they worked a TV broadcast unit pulled to a screeching halt on the marina boulevard. One of the news programs must’ve had a stringer posted by the castle. The first out of the vehicle was a woman, limber and young with a lot of hair—who else but Maddalena? She hoisted a camera to one shoulder, in fingerless gloves. Barbara didn’t need to think about it. As Maddalena approached the checkpoint, the mother huddled with the Franciscan cop, making sure the camerawoman too would be allowed inside. When the twins started prodding Mama with the clipboard, she made sure to sign on-camera.
“Also NATO needs to know,” Barbara told the cops loudly, while passing the board to the reporter. “You be sure to call NATO.”
“Si, certo.” The policeman was trying for eye contact with Maddalena. “Don’t worry, signora. There is nothing inside that can harm you.”
Easy for him to say, out here in the sun. Once the family was past the security gate, dell’Ovo appeared gloomier than ever. For the last two or three hundred years the castle had been a husk, little more than a postcard backdrop, but still it cast an oppressive shadow. The walk into the fortress gate took Barb and the others between dingy guardhouse rooks that bristled up top with guns. Their footsteps echoed beneath the twitter of radiophones. Farther on, even with a policeman leading the way, the castle passages kept forcing john Junior to duck and Maddelena to protect her camera. Also the place gave off a stink, now sulfur, now sea-sewage, now the sweat of unhealthy bodies. The holding cell for the strikers was up on the second floor, or maybe the third.
Or maybe—where? The mother should’ve gotten used to this by now, the sensation that she was starting over, taking her first steps into the city. Was dell’Ovo the third recurrence of the nightmare? The fifth? Barbara hardly seemed able to count, as she stood before the ward’s metal detector. She tumbled back into muzzy jetlag and all she could be sure of was that she’d found the source of the castle’s stink, the gates of a plague-ridden city.
In time it occurred to her that the smell might’ve triggered her flashback. That first day, there’d been Jay’s spatter and drool, his exposed brain. She blinked, she spoke up. “Maybe the girls, my little girls…they should wait outside?”
Her answer came from within the ward, people she couldn’t see, with accents she couldn’t place. Men, men’s voices. They were saying something about therapy.
“Please,” she said. “One thing at a time.”
Therapy, they replied. Grief management: the men beyond the metal detectors had the same vocabulary as Barbara had picked up at the Sam Center. She caught the phrase “International Red Cross,” then “interaction with children.” Maybe she recalled hearing that nothing helped to keep up a person’s spirits so much as playing with children, or maybe she heard it now, from the Shell of the Hermit Crab. Dogs were also good, and items from home, the kind of souvenirs these guys had received from her husband. Barbara didn’t so much nod as try to shake off the déjà vu, the wrinkles in her thinking, and she couldn’t fail to notice the mini-cam at her shoulder. The oblong silver box whirred in her ear.
Maddalena remained quick on the uptake as ever, and the hunger strikers were eager for attention. What better press than pictures with children? Now too Barbara felt additional pressure, a jostling from behind the camerawoman. Felt like John Junior, poking her shoulder blade.
“Hey,” he said. “Chris and me, we got the girls.”
Barb gathered herself and moved in, noticing first the rigging underfoot, the floor pads and extension cords. As for the layout of the kitchen-sink hospice, that eluded her a while. The gray prison blankets turned the beds to ojetti votivi, though in their case the point of the praying was hard to decipher. The IV units seemed more of the same, dangling shapes that might be hearts, might be mittens, might be masks. Also the mother’s revived bewilderment called up images of the Underworld, a catacomb beneath the Roman Naples. One of the strikers had his bed set high, like a head of household front and center in the family crypt.
Later Barbara wondered about how quickly she’d headed for that raised bed. She wondered how her urgency had affected the children. Paul and the others had hesitated, once they got inside the metal detector. She could understand that she’d wanted to get away from the cops and the camera. As for the doctors, she hardly saw them; she’d come to the castle to make things happen. Still she wondered at how quick she was to lay hands on an unconscious African who looked half mummified.
The man must’ve started starving before the others. The apocalyptic reek came worst from him, and Barb recalled something out of her schoolgirl reading about missionary work, something about how the glands broke down as the body lost fuel. She could feel the patient’s breaking down when she took his hand. The palm was moist but cool, and up at the elbows the skin bunched like the sleeves of a long john. His hospital shirt couldn’t hide the fence-lines of ribs and shoulder, and the bones of the face were prominent as well. He might’ve been handsome a week ago. Now his features had darkened like a gum-caked penny and, even as he took this morning riposo, his scooped cheeks stretched his lips to the point of exposing his teeth. And there was another pressure on his face too, a stranger business. Fist-sized packs of cotton had been taped against the corners of the striker’s eyes.
Barbara bent nurse-like. She cradled the hand, a lone sandal found rotting by some Congo roadside, and touched his eye-sockets’ padding.
“Mom, careful.” Chris stood at the foot of the bed. “That stuff, he needs that.”
Barbara put a finger on the dreaming face.
“You remember,” Chris said. “That cotton, that’s so he can see.”
Himself more than arm’s length from her, Chris was the only child to have ventured in. Beside him stood Maddalena, with her camera at her eye.
“Mom, don’t you remember? They explained it on the news.”
What Barb remembered came, again, out of her schoolgirl preparations for becoming a saint. The African’s cottony blinders were to help with double vision, one of the symptoms of starvation. But was this any way for a woman to visit such a needy place? Knowing next to nothing? Could that have been why she’d lunged so eagerly to this poor man’s side, that same half-baked Samaritan impulse?
Now a doctor approached, his white wrap suggesting a toga. He too had something to say about striker’s head. Signora, gli prego. . The formal third-person pronoun straightened Barbara up.
Five patients, men, occupied beds set in two rows. Also she spied a kind of fortified stretcher, with padding and straps, standing against the wide room’s second door. Not that this exit needed additional protection. The door was bolted and padlocked, and an armed guard sat beside it in a mammoth chair. A cop on a throne, he made three altogether in the ward. The other two were at the detector. Thanks to them, the NATO Vikings had seen no point crowding into the ward. They remained out beyond the archway, slouched against the cool tufa of the corridor, their helmets off and their semis at their feet. Closer to the mother roved a pair of medical staff, checking either the IV’s or a flat-screen monitor hooked to one wall. Barbara felt chagrined to see all the technology, nothing like a chapel full of ojetti and even less like a catacomb. But on the other hand there were the figures in the beds, flesh and blood and nearly naked. Smaller guys, like a lot undocumented immigrants, they could’ve worked as galley slaves or salt miners. Everyone had some icon around his neck, finger-polished and wafer-thin. Then too, while none of the other strikers were so far gone as Barbara’s, they all had that twitchy underfed quality she’d seen in a number of clandestini. Certainly it was neediness that linked these members of the Shell, not race. Only Barbara’s man and one other came from south of the Sahara, and one was something like Macedonian or Kosovar; he passed for white.
As she watched, the protesters kept breaking into smiles. Spooky smiles, really: their cheeks were already going slack. They grinned for Mad
dalena’s camera, of course, and out of the giddiness of malnutrition. Then too, they must’ve been enjoying the pick-me-up that their Red Cross inspectors had mentioned, the pleasure of the family’s company. That much the mother could understand, but there remained bewildering business everywhere, such as this IV at her elbow. What good would it do to give this man fluids? Also she couldn’t tell what sort of scars those were across the sleeper’s cheek. Could’ve been a ritual marking, the crescent moons of initiation.
If she could be sure of anything here, it was the effect on her children. They’d fallen in behind Chris, breathless and slack-faced between the rows of beds. John Junior had buttonholed one of the doctors, but Barb couldn’t hear him. His voice was as small as the creak of the cops’ leather.
Dora was the first to move closer. “Mama? Is he dead?”
Barb lost the girl in the mini-cam’s spotlight.
“That, that guy. Is he dead?”
“Honey,” the mother managed, “you all told me, dell’Ovo, you told the driver too. This place, it’s like—don’t you remember St. Anthony’s Rest? I warned you, don’t you remember? It’s like at St. Anthony’s.”
“Like at St. Anthony’s.” Sylvia tiptoed up behind her sister. “Some people are very sick.”
“You all said, all of you.” She focused on a point between the two girls. “You knew what was going on in here, but you all kept saying you wanted to.”
The girls didn’t quite nod.
“I can’t tell you everything,” Barb said, “about what’s going on.”
Chris joined his sisters, sidling past the camerawoman. “But like, come on, you know what’s going on here.” The boy had taken on a different voice, non-professorial. “Dora, Sylvia, you remember, like, the bad Italian laws? How hard it can be when people come to a new country?”
Barbara let the fifteen-year-old explain, figuring the one she had to worry about was Paul. The younger boy stood between two hospital beds, and after Barbara’s first look, for a shivery moment she thought she should turn everyone around and march them out. It was one thing to have the children visit the sick and aged. Barbara had been raised that way, talking about her schoolwork with a bedridden aunt, or taking the chair beside her father’s mother at the Sunday table, though the old woman couldn’t do more than blink and mutter over her plate. But the way Paul was looking just now, here on the second story of Castel dell’Ovo, that shook her. He’d lost his American-Kidness, his elbows tucked, his torso clenched. His clothing turned him into an undertaker. Like that, the mother started thinking of alternatives, get ‘em out, Torre del Greco. Except—she’d seen the boy that way so often, these days. Lately he’d shown his mother a look like that, what? Twenty times? Twenty-five? Her Mr. Paul had tensed up and zoned out even while he lay listening to fairytales. And what was Barbara doing here if she was going to get all timid and cross-wired again? Why had she gone visiting Cesare everyday and having revelations under his ceiling if it wasn’t to wangle precisely this detour and assert her new power?
With her free hand, she dug in her purse and fingered up her rosary. She kissed the big central bead and then bent once more over the raised bed beside her, the slow suicide. No sooner had she started, of course, than Maddalena closed in.
“Oh, you are so good,” said the younger woman, behind her camera. “La Mama Americana, so very good.”
Was she talking morals or mediagenics? Barbara huddled close enough to gag briefly on the smell, the dysfunctional sweat. She could see, too, that the man’s cotton headgear had gone snot-yellow where it touched his cheekbone. The doctors needed to change the dressing. Meanwhile Maddalena’s spotlight stayed with her; the newswoman found the best angle, on the opposite side of the bed. How was Barbara supposed to pray under these conditions? How could a rosary make things better, anyway? Again the dell’Ovo venture felt nutty or worse, even as she noticed the awe in her two youngest, visible out of the corner her eye. If Chris weren’t with them, Barb realized, Dora and Syl would be hanging on to Mama’s dress. They’d probably start praying along. Back in Bridgeport, they’d helped a couple of old-timers sing a round of Dona Nobis Pacem. And the twins weren’t the only ones moved, just now, by Barbara’s hesitant Hail Mary. Also the African’s papery lips began twitching. The mother realized this might be delirium, but she tried to make a connection, to restore the strength in her spirit muscle, bending even closer. Yet this only left her aware of her cleavage. Maddalena had the front of Barbara’s summer dress squarely in the middle of her frame. All around her, La Mama Americana confronted a perverse mirror image. She was the one who needed to pack her eyes in cotton.
She kept at it, be-with-us-now-and—and close enough to give the leper a kiss.
So another brand of hypocrisy began to gnaw at her: the way the African was dying. He’d been at his physical peak, a warrior, and his collapse had nothing to do with a gunshot or a virus, nor even the earthquake. Rather the owner of this human engine, fully operational as recently as when the Lulucitas had landed in Naples, had willed its breakdown. And wasn’t that how a person became a saint? They renounced the world and denied their own flesh? Barbara was holding the sweaty hand of a saint. Every time he gave a labored exhale, she shared his breath.
She’d blundered in here fuming over her family’s comforts, but these young radicals in the old castle, they were the ones who truly rejected the comforts. They embraced the end of everything.
“Some people set an example,” Dora said. “We should pay attention.”
“There are lots of people,” Sylvia said, “who don’t have our advantages.”
Chris, beside the girls, made some hushed reply. But what could the mother tell them, with this mocking skull-face beneath her? The African was himself what her prayer should be, and what’s more, the opposite of whatever Jay and Kahlberg were up to. Whatever those two had going, it was about good meals and the sweet life.
What could Barbara tell anyone? She straightened up, coiling her rosary.
She would’ve abandoned the young man faster—she needed time to herself, out of the ward—except as the mother lay the African’s hand back on his institutional blanket, he gripped her. The dreamer took hold with surprising force, the tendons popping along his shrunken wrist, the muddy sweat grinding into her palms. He never seemed to wake, exactly, but all at once he had her hand cinched tight.
What? How…? Barb was left with pinched knuckles, backing away. She stumbled past her children, towards the metal detectors.
Maddalena was the first to speak. “Signora Lulucita?”
Flexing her fingers, Barb hoped there wasn’t some sort of exit procedure.
“How are you, signora? You can talk to me. How do you feeling?”
And what was she going to do about the girls? Dora and Syl would want to come with. “I don’t know,” Barbara said, “I don’t know what to do about the girls.” She faced the camera, blinding herself again in the spotlight.
“Can you, Maddalena—would you watch them? My girls, that equipment of yours, who don’t you show them what you do with that, just for a minute or two?”
Barb didn’t look for the others. “Just, all of you—Paul, everyone. Please, could you give me a couple of minutes? I’m just saying, Mama needs a little time.”
The girls may have had questions: Mom? She couldn’t be sure, the way this sob gathered in her throat and clogged up her ears. Some third party may have put in a word, one of the patients maybe, encouraging the kids to stay. If Barbara heard the voice, it sounded the way her man’s last grip had felt.
John Junior was next. “Dora, Syl, hey. You know Mama. She’s got to find the Duomo and she’s got to have her Mama-time.”
JJ, lighthearted and able to deal. No wonder Romy had fallen for him. Still Barbara saw only glare-shadows, the same brown as the stains on the starving man’s cotton. She didn’t stop moving till the detectors’ tin skeleton loomed from the blur.
A chill, a hesitation. “I’ll be back soon,”
she croaked. “You know Mama.”
Then she was into the hallway. She kept moving until all she could hear was the echo of her own gagging and spluttering, her moans and whimpers. The grief mounted from the gut and insofar as Barbara chose a direction, it was uphill, the opposite of the way they’d come. She needed unknown passageways and a place to cry. When at last she broke stride, she all but collapsed onto her knees. She slumped into a wall scrubbing her tears into her face, massaging her sockets and brows the way Jay did. God knows how long it took before the air tasted less of suicide and failure.
Eventually all she smelled was the tufa stone, and her head felt likewise porous. The building material, a thousand years old, in fact gave her a kind of comfort. It reminded her that she wasn’t the first woman to start with decent impulses and wind up in a mess. What she’d done by coming to the castle, lying the way she had, acting so selfish, was like having an affair. And back at the Sam Center she’d heard about more than a few affairs, always full of bruises.
Her eyes drying, clearing, Barb spotted an occasional cop on patrol. They weren’t letting I’ Americana run around unwatched. A couple of times she caught the shout of an excited eight-year-old (“Wow, try wide angle!”), not far off. She reached overhead, giving a lengthy, sighing stretch, then got her clothes adjusted and poked along the corridors, trying to think again through the morning’s plan. A couple of times she came up against a barred hallway or padlocked door. These gave her a pick-me-up, a touch of ordinary iron, suggesting she might not be a saint but possessed some reliable backbone herself. She still had strength enough to confront the tenente, Barbara. The scene in the ward—Mary, Mother of God—that would’ve upset anyone. But Kahlberg was bound to bust in any moment now, and she’d still gotten him at a disadvantage.