The Size of the World

by Joan Silber

  We knew from the newspaper that bombs were falling on Palermo and Messina. My father said it was smart of us to live in an unimportant town. In the early spring Vincenzina walked around the square with me every day, when the almond blossoms were shedding and the plum trees were showing white. We were home eating oranges when Signor Roselli from the post office knocked on the door. Anyone could tell from the phlegmy way he said Buon tarde, with his head down, that he had a telegram.

  Piddu or Enrico? we all thought. I tried not to wish against Enrico—he was a good boy, with hair like a sheep, who loved pranks—I tried not to ask for anything and to hold the moment like the burning coal it was. We made Vincenzina read the message, and when she said Giuseppe Fabiano Tommaso, my mother shrieked, but I was still thinking, Are those all his names? Couldn’t it be another Giuseppe? Why not?

  THE AMERICANS KILLED HIM. I knew that at once and later we heard it was true. My mother was angry that the government couldn’t send him back to us to bury, and my father said, “What difference is it to Piddu now?” I tried to think of Piddu as someone who’d escaped his body. My mother and I went to church every morning for him. To think about Piddu in the prayers made him feel less gone, so I thought I would do this for the rest of my life. Let God get sick of hearing his name, let Him.

  God was always the same, it didn’t matter to Him who lived or died. Only we had to live with our smallness. For a while I really could not stand the chatter of other people. I thanked all the neighbors for whatever they said and they just kept saying it. When Umberto came to the house with his family, he was a little scared of me and hovered at some distance. I was a creature in a ditch and could only look at him out of one eye. But when I woke up in my room in the night I still thought of him with longing, and I didn’t like feeling despair and lovesickness both at once. I would have forgotten Umberto if I could have.

  We kept the store closed for a week, and when we opened it again, one of the customers who tried to wheedle a discount out of me was a neighbor who used to buy plenty before the war, when some uncle in Brooklyn was sending him cash. I didn’t like to think I was a spiteful person but I took pleasure in saying no to him.

  In May we heard that North Africa was lost—all the Italians and Germans there surrendered to the Allies. I cursed the news—my father said he had no idea I knew those words—how could he joke when we were hearing that Piddu’s dying had done no good at all? My mother said it probably meant that Enrico would be sent home. She had entirely forgotten that she’d ever thought about anything but family.

  Giuseppe Sneaky was riding in a freight car on the train back from Palermo when planes began to drop bombs on the city. He was terrified that the train might not move fast enough to get away, but it did. He heard the thunder of the planes doing their work in the dark; he saw the smoke and the glow when he couldn’t see the city in the distance below. My father said the Americans would be on the ground in Sicily soon, they would land on the shore from their ships. My sister got word that her husband was back in Sicily, on the other side of the island, bivouacked in a church, and wasn’t that good news? It was hard to know what was good.

  ON A VERY HOT DAY in the worst part of the summer, a man sent by the mayor made us close the store. Everyone had to stay at home because the war was coming to our town. The flies buzzed inside the house with us—my father liked to call this a Sicilian concert. We could hear big trucks coming up from the road below, rattling through the streets. I waited for the sound of shooting, but my father said, who would they shoot at? We were nothing but locals, harmless nobodies. My mother wouldn’t let me go out, even when we heard shouting and bells ringing in the piazza. What were they shouting? They were cheering the Americans!

  By the time my family let me out, all my cousins had taken every bit of the chewing gum and wrapped candy that the soldiers threw at them, and there were no cigarettes left to take back to my father. But the next day, a soldier in a khaki uniform came into the store. He wasn’t tall enough to be an American but he was. And he spoke to us in Sicilian! He said, “Hello, you have sausages?” He wanted food—well, who didn’t? He was with a whole brigade from Brooklyn and lots of them could speak. “You have to go to the salumeria for sausage,” I said. “But they don’t have any either.” He was an ugly boy with sunglasses, too weak to look into the sun.

  My parents didn’t let me out very much during the sweltering weeks when the Americans were walking around our town. The little I saw made me wonder whether Piddu had gone with hookers when he was in North Africa. I hoped those women (who in our town were rough and mean) had been nice to him. By the end of July we heard that the king and the Grand Council had fired Mussolini and had him arrested. They could do that to Il Duce? “Well, they did,” my father said. The Fascist Party office near the piazza was already abandoned, like a barn where all the animals had been sold off. By the fall the Americans were gone from our town, chasing the Germans to the mainland.

  My sister kept waiting to hear from Antonello, who had been somewhere on our island, but where was he now? No one was telling. In September the king said the war was over, by way of saying we were surrendering. My mother said she had a dream that Enrico was a pigeon on a roof, which meant he was coming home soon.

  In Sicily the fighting was done. The rest of Italy was still a battlefield the Germans were killing to keep. One morning my father came running into the store to tell us that on the radio he heard the newscaster say Italy had now declared war on Germany. “What are they doing?” I said.

  My father said, “They want to be friends with the right people.”

  No one was angry on behalf of Piddu, but I couldn’t stand thinking what a dirty trick had been played on him. Now Mussolini had managed to get himself to the north of Italy and set up his own new republic there. I didn’t think Piddu would’ve run to his side—Piddu wouldn’t have done anything he didn’t have to—but how could he have been asked (and they were asking) to fight with the Allies? Lucky Piddu: he was beyond it. The dead don’t have bodies to pledge to anyone, and we envy them this. None of us knew where my brother Enrico was, or Antonello either.

  The invasions had made a mess of the wheat fields, and we had no flour for bread. We made fake coffee from chicory and ugly dried roots. Breakfast was a dismal part of the day, especially in the damp of November. It was on one of these mornings that my brother Enrico—still in his Fascist infantry hat—walked into the house, with his sheep-hair grown bushy and his face much bonier and his jacket wet from the fog, and my mother screamed with delight. When I hugged him, he said, “Look at what a fat bug our Nunzia is,” and I thought he was the old Enrico, but he was not.

  He let us kiss him and stroke his hair and he laughed silently when we asked questions. My mother made a special dinner—rabbit stewed with raisins and lemon—and she was very happy when Enrico ate a lot of it. Eating it seemed to occupy his attention; you had to call his name to get him to look up. I was going to tell him there was a cockroach on his fork (his favorite trick with me) but I thought better of it. Neighbors came in to greet him while we were having our gritty coffee, and they hugged him with real feeling, but then they hung back and didn’t know what to say.

  It was the same a few days later when Enrico went back to work in the store. The old women reached over to clasp him and say how well he looked (which was not true), but there was none of the loud, jubilant fuss I’d seen before. No one was putting his medals on display in the town hall either. Enrico shrugged when anyone asked questions and he looked disheartened and embarrassed.

  IN THE WINTER my sister heard that her husband was alive and unhurt—he was a prisoner of war in America, in a place called Massachusetts (none of us could get this name right). He wrote that the weather was cold but being a prisoner was a lot better than being a soldier and they were letting Italians cook in the dining hall on the air base. He was hoping to be able to stay after the war and to bring Vincenzina over.

  My sister was so excited that she
could hardly stand herself. All her listlessness was gone; she was a creature of itches and fits and visionary deliriums. A riot of perfections was beaming into her mind—I had not known she wanted all these things or found daily life in our town so narrow and dull. It made me sorry to see how joyous she was to think about leaving the rest of us.

  And who would Vincenzina talk to in America? Only Antonello would be her age. All the cousins’ cousins over there had sailed before 1924, when the Fascists passed a law against emigrating. “You’ll be lonely as a toad,” I said. I was never leaving my parents. I knew that much.

  IN MARCH WE HAD the Feast of San Giuseppe, my brother’s name day, and when I watched the bonfires at night, I talked to Piddu in my head about how smoky it was. We didn’t have bread to bake into the shapes of angels and flowers, but all the women in our part of town had made an altar with a bower of myrtle branches hung with lemons and oranges. Look how nice, I said to Piddu. No one knows what to do with the dead and I didn’t know either. I kept wanting to give Piddu something, and maybe the shadow of the dead produces in us a shadow kindness. I was a little in love with the beauty of this, but I saw already how it would stay inside my head, all that unused kindness, curling on itself.

  MOST OF WHAT WE had to do that year was figure out how to eat. My brother Enrico went out very early in the morning and gathered snails, and my mother and I cooked them with garlic and oil. Along the road outside town were wild greens—scratchy weeds, but why not?—that tasted less bitter with something salty on them. We had dried beans for soup, we were really all right. My sister was the one who complained because she was thinking about eating in Massachusetts.

  I thought Umberto forgot about me, and maybe as the months went by I forgot him a little too. His father was a town cop, and who was there to pay him now? I stayed at home more, with Enrico working in the store, and my mother and I had our quarrels about whether I was scratching the floor with my mop. In the next valley people had sacked the town hall and burned all the land records, and everyone knew there were robbers on the roads. My parents were afraid about the store.

  We kept running out of different items—matches, flour, thread. Piddu could have found us what we needed on the black market. Piddu would have kept the store safe too; he would’ve known which men to have a word with. Piddu could have fixed the radio antenna, after a storm blew it down. Enrico and my father rigged up a substitute antenna with the rusted springs of Piddu’s old bed, but everything sounded fuzzy. The music too. At least we weren’t listening for Mussolini’s speeches every week. I had heard his voice tell us the Americans were greedy slave masters whose downfall was coming. Now nobody wanted such a downfall and I supposed I didn’t either.

  IN APRIL OF THE next year we saw photos of the corpses of Mussolini and his men, shot first and then hung upside down from the scaffolding of a gas station in Milan. Claretta, who they said was Mussolini’s mistress, had her skirt tied with a rope so it didn’t fall past her knees. Someone had not wanted the crowd to see her nakedness, and this made me wonder if it was better, in this life, to be a woman, no matter what anyone said.

  Umberto started coming to the store again; they sent me to the back when they saw him because they knew he was looking at me. His voice was gruff when he asked for a pound of salt. He was a sober sort of boy, upright and quiet. What a beautiful love I had for him, in all my swooning ignorance; no feelings could have been less tainted or more intense. And to him too I was a dove, a flower, a ray of light. It wasn’t false either, this untested longing—it was as true as anything and more necessary, the small blue point in the heart of all flame.

  MY ENGAGEMENT DIDN’T come about till after the war was over. I had just had my seventeenth birthday when Umberto’s parents came to talk to my parents. Umberto’s father was a policeman once again and had gotten Umberto a job with him. I’d never been alone with Umberto, but I’d seen more of him than most girls did of their intendeds because I worked in the store and wasn’t kept in the house. The next day, my father asked me what did I think and I hid my face in my hands. Relief and delight made me act like a dope.

  That Sunday, Umberto and I took our first walk together on a path outside town, with the bare slopes of the mountains rising up all around and sheep clogging the roads. My mother and Vicenzina came with us and helped with the conversation. Afterward, I thought about any comments he had made (he liked chestnuts cooked burnt! he didn’t like cats!) and I tilted each piece back and forth, a tiny mirror of my future. For the two years of our engagement, I lived in a fog of unspeakable anticipation. Very late at night, Umberto would stand in the street under my window and call up my name, like an owl. I would cover myself with my shawl and let him try to say praising things in his shy, stiff way. He was most touching when he was a little strained, a little out of his element. My engagement was a long introduction to understanding things like this.

  NOBODY HAD ANY money after the war. When Umberto practiced shooting at a tree with the other cops, scroungers came afterward and dug up the ground for metal shells they could sell. We were better fed than most people, and we were still eating odd-colored pasta made with bean flour. My sister was waiting to go to fat America. I felt sorry for my sister. The two Giuseppes made up funny stories about Antonello’s adventures with American girls. At my wedding, I had a place set for Piddu. It was just a chair covered with flowers—white and pink roses, very pretty, twining around the back, tied with long satin ribbons—and on the table, his army picture where a plate of food would have been. Everyone in the town understood that I could never have married without this. My father said, “Piddu likes a good party.” I got a little drunk and imagined I was giggling at Piddu’s jokes. (When he saw Enrico dancing, wouldn’t he have said he looked like a grasshopper?) I didn’t forget Umberto—he was the face I could hardly look into, the sharp fear and the thrill, the serious side of my wedding.

  YOU CAN’T EVER KNOW what being married will be like. I was lucky. Umberto had decided on me a long time before and the quiet obstinacy in his nature met me as devotion. It was very heady to be his lily. And I couldn’t have known before that the embarrassment I was so afraid of would fade with the onset of desire. The whole obvious course of things was a beautiful surprise to me.

  We had our own house—cramped as a hut and dark inside—and I spent my days keeping it fresh and neat and making foods I thought Umberto would like. Every bit of work I did was charged with the impatience of longing for Umberto, and he was home by midday. At the table he would nod at what I’d made, in his gruff satisfaction, and tell me about the intrigues in the police department and then go off to work again. On days when I did the laundry, I couldn’t keep from looking at each intimate item of Umberto’s. I didn’t know how Vincenzina had endured four years away from her husband.

  But our poor Vincenzina had a surprise in the mail. The American Consulate told her she had to come to Palermo for a medical examination—for her visa (her visa!), which was being processed. And what if (my mother said) she didn’t pass the exam? Antonello’s mother said, “Everyone knows the girl is healthy as a cow.”

  I was jealous because I had never been to Palermo. My sister went with her mother-in-law and they stayed with a cousin of someone in our town. Vincenzina came back telling us about the churches with domes like red hats and the vendors who had rhymes for what they sold. She was leaving on a ship in a month. Her husband sent her a dress to wear in America; it had shoulders with little pads and a smooth, full skirt. It looked very odd in our town. I thought Vincenzina’s excitement was a cruelty to our parents—who already had one son they’d never see again—but I wanted these last days to be good between us. Vincenzina had taught me to sew and recited naughty jingles to me and showed me the steps of dances; she was my only sister.

  Enrico said her outfit looked like what a donkey would wear. I was glad to have him to titter with. And what had taken Antonello so long? I knew I had a better husband, and I was grateful I didn’t have to go anywhere.
I didn’t want to be Vincenzina, not for a second. I had what I wanted, and I knew that was rare in this world.

  MY HUSBAND LIKED TO READ. I could read fine, but it wasn’t something I did for pleasure. Umberto had gone to school a few years longer than I had, and at night he spent hours with a book he had about the Romans. After Vincenzina left, I was a little bored and went more often to visit my mother. My mother guessed when I thought I was pregnant (she was always guessing, but this time she was right). After all the crowing from her and the hot broth she immediately made me drink, I wondered if I was away from my husband too much.

  But I already knew. Umberto was fine as long as you let him be alone when he wanted. If you interrupted, a rougher, meaner side of him came out. He could not have been more gallant and more protective of me in my pregnancy. He wouldn’t let me carry anything heavier than a melon and he made me wear a shawl and a hat if there was the slightest breeze. But he didn’t want me chattering at him. He said, “A man has to be deaf when a woman is talking.” I was petulant sometimes in my pregnancy but I was happy too.