Island of Divine Music (20 page)

And maybe death was only a kind of sleep like this. Maybe the hand-painted signs on the loading dock reading
Indian Property
and
Red Power,
the people pounding a flat drum and singing, the heat of the bonfire soaking into his bare arms and legs were also a dream. Jimmy cursing, Paulie shivering in the arms of a young woman who looked exactly like the boy’s sister Penelope in some crazy hippie-Indian headband, Narciso dancing a jig by the fire, a sixty-three-year-old
paisano
capering to Indian music in a blanket and argyle socks, spinning around with his arms out like bat wings, displaying his jockey shorts in the flickering light.

Maybe the stairway and the woman, too. The music of the island beat like a drug through his blood vessels, echoed as he groped along a crumbling concrete wall. He followed her across a catwalk in the darkness above the circle of singers and drummers, and near the top of a guard tower she touched his hand, and in the dim light she looked like his wife. When he called her by that name she smiled, and his heart lifted into the heavens like a gull, and her black and ghostly white hair filled with the wind, and her small feet floated above the surface of the earth.

Janine

J
anine Verbicaro awoke her third morning in Italy, on the train from Rome to Reggio Calabria, sensing the imminence of death. She had the meningitis symptoms, and they were progressing rapidly: splitting headache, neck so stiff she could barely move it, fever chills, a general ache throughout her body. She knew she needed treatment, but what could she do now that she was on the train to the hinterlands? Upright in a crowded compartment, she’d slept with her mouth open and head bent over a rucksack. The Italian family squeezed beside her, skinny little bug-eyed man, plump, scowling wife, and four squirming kids aged about seven to one, had tried to keep a little distance from the sick American girl most of the night, but now it seemed that they had given up. In fact, one of the tots played with her hat, and the man pressed his bony knee into her leg and snapped his Italian newspaper across her pack. He flicked on the small lamp, and Janine’s vision of the world outside was perceived through a reflection of her own face on the glass, a narrow face with a prominent nose, small chin, and dark eyes. She stared at her face and the passing hills visible through it, the limestone
and twisted oak, and thought of God, and death, and transient beauty, and how much she’d like to place her thumbs beneath the Adam’s apple of the little man next to her and squeeze.

Italian men, by genus, by her second day in the old country, ranked somewhere between gopher snakes and poodles. In her first hour among the seven hills and hundred fountains of Roma, her ass had gotten pinched five times. This low estimation didn’t encompass the men of her own family, however; nor did it extinguish the romance she had for the country of her progenitors. Mascagni’s Cavalleria Rusticana, Albinoni’s Adagio for Strings, and another Italian romance she couldn’t name played over and over in her mind, the strings and harps in slow waltz time, swaying as the train swayed, winding its way along the rugged coast as her life followed its own winding path to its end.

The youngest grandchild in a large clan of American descendants of Italian immigrants, Janine wanted desperately to love Italy. The grandfather had died when she was a baby, and the grandmother, Rosari Cara Vebicaro, whom she idolized above all others in her family, was nearly a century in age now, in the mid-1980s, in Ronald Reagan’s America. What Janine hoped for was an epiphany, an escape from the ugliness of her own culture, some holy moment in the old country, followed by a chance to come home and share her vision of Calabria with her little
nona,
who had been raised there. Now, stroking her pained neck, she thought a phone call to California might be her only chance of expressing this moment of illumination before death intervened.

I
n her California bungalow, Rosari Verbicaro had a long-legged stove under which slept a scruffy toy poodle named Pepe, the third such in a succession of dogs with the same name. Her oldest daughter, Francesca, leaned over a pot above the dog, and the light through a prune tree in the window moved across the poodle’s snout and the daughter’s legs and the wall like water in the old woman’s memory, like the ocean reflected off the cliffs and grottoes of Calabria. She drifted into reverie while her daughter chattered and stirred. Swaddled by a quilt, the old woman sat in the rocker and remembered a day walking along the beach with her mother in Italy nearly ninety years ago, and she sighed loudly. What is it, Ma? Francesca turned to ask, alarmed.

What?

You all right?

Why wouldn’t I be? Keep stirring or it’ll spoil.

Francesca laughed. And this was when there interposed upon the reverie and the watery light of a California morning the shape of a huge spider. It moved like a black hand gathering yarn. Holy smokes, the old woman said. Frankie, there’s a
tarantella
come to get you.

The daughter, who was also an old lady, screamed and dropped the ladle. Pepe barked and ran around her legs a few times, finally settling on the ladle. The spider crept up the pipe from the stove, up toward the high ceiling. Rosari told her to get the broom and whack
it, but Francesca cowered behind her mother before summoning the nerve to approach it. By then the beast was high on the back of the old stovepipe. Watch you don’t knock dust into the pot, Rosari told her.

A
t that moment Janine wrapped a wool scarf around her pained neck and stepped from the coach onto the soil of Calabria. It didn’t look at all like the crumpled map she held, or feel like the fantasy she had fostered. The station was dull, drained of color, and it stank of raw sewage. The first impression didn’t portend well. Janine was intuitive, random-abstract, and she relied on portents. She was artistically gifted but a little wobbly with directions and helpless with foreign languages. She wasn’t very good at math, either, and converting dollars to Italian lira and figuring out how to get to the ancestral village from a station where nobody seemed to understand English was daunting. Nevertheless, and in spite of her father’s advice about hiring a driver, she decided to rent a motor scooter for some indecipherable amount of money, from a man with eyes like her Uncle Ludovico’s, and drive to the little hill town.

She stuffed her map into the rucksack against a long baguette, her dictionaries, her sketch pad, and her men’s shaving bag filled with prescription drugs and naturopathic remedies. She pulled the mannish roadster cap down to her eyebrows and throttled the scooter. A cluster of men gave her advice and directions about operating the Vespa. So far the men of the South weren’t the pigs of
Rome, but they all seemed to regard her with an expression somewhere between predation and disbelief. Who was this weird, rich American woman in a man’s pants and hat? In her midtwenties, and yet she was childless, unmarried? Perhaps they could see the Italian in her face and guess that she was here to see family. Perhaps they could see something in her eyes which revealed how weird she really was.

The city had cobbled streets with chuckholes and piles of pig dung, and she maneuvered among these obstacles without turning her head because of the spinal meningitis. She made blind turns, once nearly crashing into a Volkswagen truck heaped with vegetables, and headed out of town. At the first fork in the highway she took the wrong turn.

An hour later she came around a bend and saw a town built on and into cliff walls. Janine was so startled she killed the motor and got off. Muddy brown brick and mortar were slapped over the precipice, making it difficult in places to distinguish between the work of man and the work of God. Shuttered windows seemed to open out of the earth. Clotheslines stretched across chasms, from stunted pine to rusted balcony. She took out her sketch pad, her loaf of bread, and some cheese she’d bought en route.

Janine had a fine hand and a facile talent with visual arts, and her work attracted the interest of a couple of women trudging up the road who rested from their labor of balancing firewood on their heads to peer over her shoulder. She guessed they were mother and daughter, the latter a beautiful woman in her twenties with a long, delicate nose and bushy eyebrows which accentuated a mischievous
look. What did that look mean? She couldn’t understand a word they said. She gestured, they spoke, she shook her head and shrugged, they laughed. The young woman leaned over her, the loose sleeveless dress billowing in a warm gust of wind, and Janine inhaled the aroma of the girl’s bush of armpit hair. Taking the scarf off her head, the woman shook her black hair out and posed coquet-tishly. Janine drew her face quickly, as she had done the faces of children and old men in Rome the previous day. She smiled at her own work before handing it over.

She helped carry the firewood to their home in the cliff village, piling much of it across the saddle of the Vespa and standing on the running board. This evoked a lot of stares from the men in the piazza. The older woman and two men of her age took her by the elbows and led her to a dinner table for a feast which lasted almost three hours. It appeared that a dozen neighbors or relatives followed and joined in as they ate, including an old matriarch who took the seat of honor at one end, and all the while the family of eight or a dozen laughed and spoke while Janine and the young woman, whose name was Marie, exchanged furtive glances across the table.

The mother held up the drawing of her daughter, and the audience oohed and ahed. Although Janine understood almost none of the language, the expressions and gestures of the people at table were so familiar that she felt she’d already heard this entire conversation and understood it perfectly, sitting among her aunts and uncles in her grandmother’s house many nights near the San Francisco Bay.

I
n California, the spider walked across the kitchen wall again the next day when another daughter, Grazia, was having coffee and feeding the old woman porridge. Rosari’s second daughter threw a pepper mill at it. Pepe ran from the room and knocked the screen door open, and the tarantula scuttled quickly following the racket. Grazia charged and barely missed ending its life with a frying pan.

Rosari watched the spectacle and realized that it wasn’t after Francesca, or Grazia, or even Pepe. It thinks I’m ready to kick the bucket, she told her daughter.

You’re not kicking any bucket, Ma.

Oh, yes, I am, Little Sally Sunshine. The
tarantella
knows it, too.

He’s the one who’s kicking the bucket, Ma. Next time he sticks his nose out I’ll squish him like a grape.

The little old woman stared at the wall. Her white hair was so thin it floated above her scalp like a baby’s. She touched her daughter’s hand. You know what your father did? He brought home these bananas which he would eat like a monkey, she said.

Papa?

He climbed like one, too. You ever seen him pruning the trees? A gorilla with his bananas.

Not my papa, the daughter admonished, trying not to laugh.

That’s the way he did things. He tears down a house with the big hammer, and you see him swing up there like Tarzan of the Apes and shout he wants his lunch.

Grazia laughed and shook her head. She was the smallest and most jovial of the daughters, a lively swing dancer, even in her late sixties, mother of four children, grandmother of seven. So, he yells for lunch?

Yes. I threw him a banana. What’s your son up to?

Which one?

I forget the names.

They’re fine, Ma. They’re busy, all three of them.

So, he finds one right there one day, and he jumps so high you think he’s a bullfrog.

I don’t understand. Grazia tried to feed Rosari more porridge. He finds what, Ma?

One of them, come on the banana boat. Oh, you don’t think that one knows?

Knows what, Ma?

It’s my time.

Don’t say that, Mama. It’s his time, not yours.

Hey, what do you think I am, Methuselah? He knows.

J
anine slept in the family’s cellar, and when she woke it seemed that her spinal meningitis had evolved to Hodgkin’s disease. Her neck was no longer so stiff, but its glands were swollen, and she was sweating and feverish, and her skin felt itchy. She had other symptoms as well: weakness, fatigue, weight loss. She consulted the dogeared medical dictionary and wondered if she’d need to go back to Rome for the radiation therapy. It was all a matter of time and luck.

The mother and daughter could see that she wasn’t well, and they made her drink something bitter and lie under a pile of blankets. They showed her photographs of the young woman, and from these she started to piece together a story: Marie was the widow of the man in the wedding picture featured on their mantel under black bunting, and Lucia, the toddler who usually balanced on her hip and squished pasta in her fist at the table, was her daughter, not her sister. Straight, knocked up, married, widowed. Damn, thought Janine, what a waste. She herself had only dated a few guys and then, in college, a few girls, far from home and the eyes of an enormous extended Italian American family in the Bay Area. Her sexual orientation was a Rosetta stone hidden in some cave, unknown to the parents and aunts and cousins who kept setting her up with eligible bachelors, though she hoped, she imagined, that her little grandmother somehow understood.

Marie leaned over Janine and sponged her brow, and the sad beauty of that face, the look of so many Italian women who hold their young and their dying loved ones like Mary holding Jesus in the
pieta,
stung her to the quick. Then that mischievous sidelong glance, that hidden joke, and the little pinch to her cheek: What was the woman thinking? Janine’s heart fluttered in its cage.

The symptoms changed to severe abdominal cramps and diarrhea that afternoon. It was now reasonable to assume that she had Crohn’s disease instead of Hodgkin’s, given the evidence. This was a relief of sorts. However, further reading informed her that cholera was a possibility, too, especially in this part of the world.