Miracle at St. Anna

by James McBride

  The boy, lying beneath the bust of St. Anna, opened his eyes. The giant was gone. It seemed silent. He looked up and saw Arturo standing over him. “We have to go,” Arturo said.

  “Am I going to heaven?” he asked.

  “No. You’re going to Forte dei Marmi.”

  “Where’s that?”

  “I’ll show you.”

  “Who’s there?”

  “Your father.”

  “Is my father the giant?”

  “No, your father’s Ettore. Remember him?”

  And suddenly, the boy did. He remembered it all. He remembered everything. And it suddenly came to him that he was not going to be allowed to remember any of this, that all of the life forces in the world made it so that some things needed forgetting in order for life to continue; he understood that there are some things that demand forgetting; he realized that the innocence that God reserves for children had been conferred upon him and would soon leave him, and that the intolerable tragedy of war would be forever etched in the memory of others but not in his. He understood at that moment that St. Anna di Stazzema would become merely a memory, a dry fig in the wind tunnel of history, the place forgotten, a museum perhaps, the 560 victims never truly revealed to the world, lost even to the Italians who would take up residence in the village just months after the war. He realized that the Negroes were merely vessels to lift him from his past memory of pain to his present of future happiness, that St. Anna would not let him remember such pain, their pain, his pain, any pain. He would forget it all. He knew it instantly the moment he touched Arturo’s hand, whom he also realized he would forget, for God would not allow him, the sole survivor of that singular church massacre in a war filled with massacres, to linger in such pain. It would be gone, they would all be gone, and he was glad.

  But it was going to be hard, he thought as he grabbed Arturo’s hand and began to run down the road, past the Germans who were now fleeing, past the lone American survivor, Hector, who lay hiding at the window of an adjacent house, past Renata, who lay riddled with bullets, and the sobbing old man Ludovico, who stood over the body of his only, beloved daughter, to forget the man who was chocolate, the chocolate giant who wept tears of soda pop and made it his birthday just by turning his head, who taught him how to be invisible.

  EPILOGUE

  THE LAST MIRACLE

  It was a warehouse fire in Canarsie, Brooklyn, the fourteenth in as many months, set by the mistress of the four-term congressman from that very same district, that kept young Tim Boyle of the Daily News from following up on the story he broke about Hector Negron, the Harlem postal worker who snapped that December morning of 1983. But Boyle’s story about Hector’s murder of an innocent customer and his possession of the missing head of the Primavera from Florence’s Santa Trinità bridge shot around the world, as these things sometimes do, and then was almost instantly forgotten, replaced by fresher and newer atrocities. Boyle, for his part in breaking the Canarsie story wide open, was promoted from the coal mines of the newspaper’s city desk to the political affairs desk in Washington, D.C., where he flourished, bringing down several congressman in sex scandals and later landing a cushy talking-head job at an NBC affiliate, where he bombed.

  Meanwhile, Hector had not spoken a word to the cops since his arrest and was transferred to Manhattan’s Bellevue Psychiatric Hospital, where he spent several weeks in isolation while psychiatrists tried to figure out why and how, during his WWII service, he’d managed to gain access to a priceless artifact, and even more important, how he’d shipped it home—oh, and by the way, why he’d kill somebody, too. Hector wasn’t telling, and after the Italians arrived to claim the head, it seemed a moot point. The city of Florence, knowing how swiftly the winds of democracy in America could change with the tide of public opinion, hastily dispatched two representatives to retrieve their lost artifact. We want no problems, they said. We just want the head. After some initial wrangling with a couple of museums and the State Department, the statue’s head was packed in a wooden box the size of a milk crate and whisked back to Italy, where the furor over what to do with the remnants of the four statues on the Santa Trinità bridge continued, and the head sat in a vault—or so everyone thought.

  In all the hubbub and fuss, the poor sap who’d walked into the post office wearing a big diamond on his wedding ring and whose face was lifted from his skull by Hector’s .38 was practically forgotten. He turned out to be a mechanic from Kingston, New York, named Randy Mitchell, and had Tim Boyle of the Daily News not been dispatched to snoop around the Brooklyn congressman’s literally smoking underpants he might have discovered that Randy Mitchell was born Rodolfo Berelli of the tiny town of Valasco, just two miles from St. Anna di Stazzema. He might have discovered that Rodolfo Berelli had come by boat to America with the wave of immigrants that had pushed their way in just after the Second World War, with half a million lire in his suitcase and tiny bags of salt stuffed into his pockets and his socks, salt that turned out to be worthless in America.

  Rodolfo, like Hector, had buried the war, and even in the moments before he died, he did not understand why Hector pointed the gun at him. He thought that he’d stumbled into a bungled robbery at the post office. It was only at the very last instant, when Hector turned his head slightly, revealing the lopped-off ear, surgically repaired but still mangled beyond anything resembling normalcy, that Rodolfo realized the moment he had always dreaded had finally come to pass, that as Peppi, the great partisan of the Serchio Valley had promised him, even as Rodolfo and his paid Gurkha accomplice had choked him to death and strung his body from a bathroom shower fixture to make his death appear a suicide just weeks before the war ended, the Black Butterfly had exacted his revenge, even from death, as he had promised.

  In those last moments, Rodolfo did not resist, for he had come to realize during that war that it was not his destiny to become like the great painters and poets of Tuscany whom he’d admired, like Paolo Uccello and Giovanni Pascoli, but to be like Iago, the sly fox who engineers the death of Othello for personal gain, only to meet his own awful fate. The money he had gained for arranging Peppi’s death had bought him his passage to America, but not much more—half a million lire was nearly worthless in America. The 560 dead at St. Anna di Stazzema he saw in his dreams each night. They visited him individually, not dead and burned, but alive, quite whole, and smiling. The children sat in his lap and toyed with his ears, the mothers chatted easily with him about the impossibility of doing laundry by hand, the fathers told him jokes and laughed with him, slapping him on the back. And each dawn, just before he woke up, they would burn before his eyes, drying up like toast, their skin roasting and crackling like fried bacon as the flames ate them alive, and he would burst awake in a cold sweat, his nostrils still smelling the burned flesh, the taste of blood on his tongue.

  He lived a depressed man in hiding, a man in subterfuge, his past as well camouflaged as the priest whom he had once been disguised as in his clever attempt to bring the Americans to St. Anna di Stazzema, before Peppi and the others discovered the truth about his treachery. He was a mystery to his simple American wife, a small-town girl from upstate New York who lived for bingo and The Jack Benny Show. His two kids were strangers to him, his son a draft dodger who joined the protests against the Vietnam War, his daughter a college dropout who moved to Ohio and picked up spare change posing in nudie magazines for a while before marrying a dairy farmer. He was disconnected from them, and oddly enough, it was his tragic death that brought them together, for they came to realize after he died that they had never truly known him, and in not knowing him, realized that they had never known one another. The three became a true family then, talking to one another in ways they hadn’t done ever before. That was all the good they got out of him, which, when you consider his history, was a lot.

  But Hector got very little. He sat in Bellevue for weeks as prosecutors and psychiatrists pressed him, trying to make him talk. He saw no sense in it. He’d buried the
war. He saw no sense in going back. He had no children, no wife, no living relatives; he was bereft of dreams. Even his late wife, before she died, knew little of his war service. Hector had spent most of his life after the war coming home from work, flopping on the couch, drinking beer, and watching years of television movies that lionized white GIs, who became part of WWII American lore and myth, so much so that in his daily drunken stupors Hector began to believe that perhaps what had happened to him during the Second World War had not happened at all; that perhaps the coloreds and Puerto Ricans were only quartermasters and cooks as the history books said they were, that the fifteen thousand colored men of the 92nd Division whose lives were ended or changed forever by what historians nicknamed “The Little Battle of the Bulge,” the Christmas Day attack on the Serchio Valley that decimated Sommocolonia, Barga, Castelvecchio di Pascoli, Fornaci di Barga, Tiglio, and several other Tuscan towns, were actually something that he’d created in his mind, that perhaps he’d dreamed it all.

  He drank heavily over the years, staying dark in his mind. His only contact with the reality of what he once saw was the statue head, which lay buried in a shoebox in his closet, which he’d picked up off a sweet and gentle dead man whom he had been afraid to love, a reminder of a miracle of a tender and sweet little boy he had once seen, or thought he’d seen, rise up like an angel and float away from death—or did he see it at all? He was afraid to remember. He didn’t want to talk about it. The prosecutors finally gave up, and the murder case limped to trial without much notice, shuffled to the back pages of the New York papers, confined to one paragraph, lost in the constant flow of fresh-breaking child murders, psycho bombers, arsonists, and madness that are the meat and bone of New York journalistic life.

  So it was with little fanfare that a tall businessman with an Italian passport and papers listing business addresses in Rome, Versailles, and the Seychelles islands, off the coast of South Africa, arrived in New York City and headed directly to the offices of the powerful legal firm of Carrissimi, Brophy, and Biegelman, who promptly dispatched a young attorney to attend Hector’s bail hearing—the young attorney carefully chosen to give the impression that this was one of the firm’s pro bono charity cases, though in actuality, the Italian businessman was among the firm’s most powerful and richest clients, and the attorney handpicked and carefully briefed—on pain of death if she screwed it up—to give carefully worded instructions to the judge, himself a former member of the same law firm, who curiously chose not to recuse himself from the case, that Hector’s bail of two hundred thousand dollars would be guaranteed by the firm through a trust fund they had established for their pro bono cases. The judge bought it, and in doing so earned the unenviable task of explaining to the press two weeks later how Hector had managed to drum up two hundred thousand dollars’ bail, obtain his passport, and flee the country. He essentially vanished, was rumored to be in Italy of all places, or perhaps South Africa, but it was never known, for the day Hector Negron shuffled out of Superior Court in lower Manhattan accompanied by his young attorney, he was never seen again in New York City or on the shores of America. (The judge, by the way, later recovered, running for the office of senator and later for Congress, where he served four consecutive terms as the representative from New York’s second district.)

  Hector, for his part, never remembered the bail hearing, or the hasty night flight to South Africa by private jet, stopping only once, to refuel in Tel Aviv. By then, the sleep apnea that had plagued him during the war was full-blown and he had been cut loose, freed from reality by the sight of the Italian partisan who’d killed the German during the war and was, by Hector’s account, responsible for the death of so many people as well as his own sweet release from normalcy. He had been trapped at St. Anna for two days after his comrades died, hiding in a house, eating rations off the dead German soldiers around him felled by American bombers, until the 92nd Division troops, led by Colonel Jack Driscoll himself, arrived, the colonel later personally pinning the Silver Star for bravery on Hector’s chest. But that was gone from him. He wanted to forget it all. He was in a fog, brought on by Bellevue Hospital’s drugs and the terror of his own memories. Only days after his arrival in the lovely, peaceful surroundings of the Seychelles, where attendants in floppy skirts and sandals brought him lemonade and rare fried fish, pasta draped in melted cheese and olive oil, did he come to his senses and realize that he had not died.

  For the first few days, he said nothing. He sat on a beach chair staring out into the ocean not far from a young man clad in a robe and bathing suit who also sat nearby on a beach chair, reading Shakespeare in Italian, sometimes napping, snapping awake with a start and a shudder that told Hector that he too had been a soldier someplace. The stranger sat beside him every day for several hours, and after several days of waiting for the stranger to speak, Hector finally broke the silence. He spoke not to the man, but to himself, for something about the stranger stirred something deep inside him, and he felt himself forced to utter a revelation that he’d never revealed to anyone, including himself.

  “I am the last one,”he said. “I was the only one left. Me and the old man who had all the rabbits. His daughter died, and when he saw her dead, he died of sorrow.”

  The young man rose. He had become tall now. The years after the war had not been kind to him, years of starvation, watching his peasant father struggle and eventually commit suicide, unable to process the lingering bitterness of the war. He had become a race car driver for a while, daring death, defying it, tempting it, and it was his lack of fear that had made him rich. He attacked safety problems like a kamikaze pilot, developing his own line of safety products, products that turned things on and off, moved them up and down, buttons that turned on safety bags, knobs that loosed straps and belts, hoses that blew air, held you tight, loosed life-giving oxygen, strapped you in, kept you safe, freed your hands, turned you over from one side to another so that you’d breathe again. He flipped businesses as if they were pancakes, piling them up like steaks on a plate as they multiplied, one, two, three, ten times, because there was no risk in business, no risk in life, no risk in losing money, no risk in anything. People paid him gobs of money to control their risk, because they did not understand that there was no such thing as safety, no such thing as control. St. Anna di Stazzema had been safety, St. Anna had been control, and control, he had learned, was death. Safety, he had learned, was the greatest risk of all, because safety leaves no room for miracles. And miracles, he had learned, were the only sure thing in life.

  But whom to explain that to? They would not understand. They did not want to understand. Hector, the young man knew, was one person in the world who did understand.

  “You are not the last,” he said. “There was one other.”

  A small cloth satchel sat beside the young man’s lounge chair. He picked it up, and his fingers undid the string wrapping it. Even before he finished, Hector knew what it was, and the old Puerto Rican, his body aged and torn by arthritis, rose out of his chair and fell into the arms of the young man, who dropped the head of the Primavera onto the sand and hugged him tight, holding the fragile elderly man as the chocolate giant had once held him, and as Hector’s bitter tears of release fell on his shoulders, they both realized they had finally found what each was looking for. They had found yet another miracle, and they were finally free of the last one.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  This book began many years ago, when I was a boy of about nine, sitting in the crowded living room of my stepfather’s brownstone in Fort Greene, Brooklyn. My stepfather and his brothers, Walter, Garland, Henry, and their friend Missouri would sit around a table under a bare lightbulb drinking Rheingold beer and Johnny Walker Red on Saturday nights, flinging tall tales across the room like bullets. My uncle Henry, a World War II veteran, was my favorite. He’d sit at the table, clad in porkpie hat and suspenders, cigarette in his teeth, his glass full of whiskey, telling jokes that made the men guffaw, while my sister Kathy and I sat
under the table bleary-eyed and sleepy, waiting for our mother to show up from work. Invariably, Uncle Henry would fill up on joy juice, grab me affectionately by the ear, and holler, “Boy . . . back in the war, the Italians, they loved us! And the French . . . oh, la, la! We was kings over there!” My sister and I would roll our eyes as he rattled off another old war story. The stories had no meaning to me then, and I barely remember them. He spoke of fires that lit black forests, and frozen dark bodies stiff with cold, and jeeps that flipped on their sides and burned while he ran for his life. What I remember most about the stories were not the stories themselves but rather Uncle Henry’s pride. He spoke with such pride. He was so proud of what he’d done.

  It took the better part of thirty years before that pride shook me awake one night and began to spin itself into the web and labyrinths of characters who now inhabit this book. They came alive on their own, without prodding, through the stories of the many men and women, from both America and Italy, who shook the demons of their memories off long enough to sit down and reveal to me that same pride that my uncle Henry had. These men and women have a moral character and fiber that, sadly, is missing in our world today, where the level of social progress is measured not in leaps and bounds of moral justice and thirst for knowledge but in the feet and inches of television ratings, survival shows, and video games that teach our children war in a world where 125 million children go to bed hungry every night and real wars are waged on innocent civilians by hidden terrorists who call these murders righteous acts of God.