What happened.
At the end of the tenth and final round of the championship fight, the hall echoed with whistles and catcalls. Disapproval manifests itself best in hysterical and out-of-control reactions. The faces of both boxers were a mess. Blood everywhere. Ten rounds for a total of one fuck of a lot of pain received and inflicted. His opponent had sprawled out on the canvas twice, in the second and fifth rounds. My uncle had never gone down, and yet his face hadn't been so badly battered even in the fight against
Il Negro
. When the referee read out the decision, the sprinkling of applause in the hall failed to drown out the insults. In his own corner, Umbertino had no one with whom to share his defeat. He left the ring without taking off his gloves. He walked down the hall through a rain of jeers and spit, entered the locker room, closed the door behind him, took off his gloves, and started to wreck the place.
What had happened.
First round. The two boxers were sizing each other up. His opponent was slow to block a left hook. My uncle connected twice, the first hook to the cheekbone, the second to the temple.
Second round. An uppercut that emerged from a left feint. His opponent took a punch to the chin. He dropped to the mat, as did his two front teeth. He got back to his feet. He could take a lot of punishment, the information they had on him was checking out. Umbertino kept his distance for the rest of the round. Everything was looking good.
A manager in his corner could have offered some tips. Could have helped him to modify his strategy. That's why you have one, to suggest new ways to attack. To lend a shoulder to lean on. But his corner was empty.
Il Negro
had dumped him, just a few steps short of the summit. He'd have to do it all on his own.
End of the third round. He'd only taken a few shots, just to prove to himself that he was much faster than his opponent.
He gave no interviews. After destroying the locker room, he left dressed in a tracksuit, without even taking a shower. He crossed Palermo at a dead run, bag slung over his shoulder, legs devouring yard after yard, heading for the sea. He yearned to lose himself in a fight, stop thinking entirely, punch to kill. He reached Cape Gallo. That's where he was forced to stop, the road had come to an end. The blood mixed with sweat had turned his face into something nightmarish. On that cloudless night, the glow of moonlight reflected on the surface of the sea only increased his rage. He'd lost the fight. He couldn't seem to get over it. God, what he'd have given to cross paths with any human being at that moment and beat him to death. His prayers were answered. There was a man sitting on a metal bench. A leer dating back to the time of falling bombs sliced Umbertino's face in two. Five eerily silent strides and Umbertino was standing in front of him.
“What's the matter, can't you see the water anymore? Eh? You want me to move? So why don't you try and move me? Eh? What are you doing, you moving instead, you little pussy? Do I disgust you, all scratched up the way I am? What, are you scared? Are you disgusted? Eh?”
His hands were clutching at the air. Come on, answer me rudely, do something, anything, a gesture, a word, anything at all, come on, just let me kill you.
Nothing.
The man sitting on the bench didn't move.
That's not what my uncle was expecting. He wanted to breathe in the man's terror, feed off his fear. He wasn't looking to vent his anger. He wanted to destroy. He cocked his arm to unleash a blow that contained all the might he possessed.
What happened next was something he never could have imagined.
Suddenly both of the man's hands were pressed against his. Of course, they wouldn't have stopped the blow, they weren't a sufficiently solid shield.
That wasn't the point.
Umbertino hadn't seen that attempt at self-defense coming. There were only two people that fast on earth, as far as he knew. And one of them was him. He relaxed the tension in his back. The other was
Il Negro
. That kind of speed couldn't be ignored. It demanded respect. He stared into the man's eyes and recognized that look. It was identical to his own. The look of a survivor.
He felt the sting of the cuts on his face. He was starting to listen to his body again. At the same time, his memory unearthed a scene that he felt certain he'd buried. The first time that
Il Negro
showed him how to work the bag. There are two ways: the first is when the bag is moving away from you, and that's when the punch will be a way of letting off steam, thrown long, your arm opening out wide. The second is when the bag is coming toward you, a punch you throw low, elbows pressed close against your rib cage. Never throw a punch at a bag that's hanging motionless. You have to hit something that's moving, either to knock it off balance or halt its motion. Life is movement, what's immobile is dead. When you hit a motionless bag, all you do is destroy your fingers.
“Oh, hey, so now what?”
The answer took the form of a question, uttered in a faint voice.
“Do you know how to swim?”
Umbertino's mind was beginning to clear.
“I'm a fabulous swimmer.”
The man tilted his head forward, in a sign of assent.
Umbertino stripped off his clothes and dived into the sea.
It was March. The water was freezing. Excellent, that would wake his body up and wash away the blood. The salt would disinfect the cuts. Taking a swim had been a good idea. Stroke after stroke, his swimming style changed from raw fury to pure harmony.
Fourth round. Punch and move away, one leap at a time. There was still a long time to go. Too long.
Fifth round. He let fly with a left hook, catching his opponent full in the forehead. The other man dropped to the mat. The referee counted to six. The other man stood up.
He could win whenever he chose.
Umbertino was a furious reed, indifferent to the river's flow.
Sixth round. By this point he was taking punches, and that was about it. A hook to his jaw, countless uppercuts to his abdominals, a right cross that connected with his nose. There was blood on his face again. This was a different fight. Seventh round. My uncle was no longer attacking. He took a long series of punches to his sides. During the eighth round, his left eyebrow was laid open. In the ninth round his upper lip was cut. It didn't matter. It didn't prove a thing. He thought about Giovannella. She wouldn't have been proud of him. Oh well, that's life. When the gong rang ending the tenth round and the match, the audience was worked up into a demonic frenzy.
The referee read the decision. Umbertino had lost the title on points.
But no one had ever explained to him that the higher the goal, the more disastrous the fall. The instant the referee proclaimed his defeat, the roots of the cane plant were cut away, and Umbertino's sanity and tranquillity went drifting downstream.
“I felt . . . no, it wasn't that I felt, no. I was. I was alone. I didn't even have a trainer in my corner or a woman to go home to.”
“Did you cry?”
“In my way; I broke everything in sight.”
“No, I mean in the sea, when you were swimming.”
“. . .”
“Uncle.”
“Yes.”
As the water streamed over his skin, my uncle's thoughts regained some kind of order. The signs began to illustrate shapes possessed of a meaning all their own. The grand overarching design emerged, crystal clear, necessary. Umbertino reversed course, swimming for shore now, considering what needed to be done from that point forward: open up a fine new boxing gym, there wasn't a fucking thing even close to that in Palermo, the plan would proceed as established, the sea washed away anger and blood. The cuts on his face would heal and scar, the damage to his pride would remain invisible, it was just a matter of training himself to get over defeat, that was all. By the time he emerged from the water, his gaze had regained its razor-sharp edge. The predator had just changed packs. The light of the moon cast his shadow across the rocks. The man sitting on the bench went on staring intently at the sea. Umbertino sat down beside him, without drying off. He told him everything. Without shyness, without shame.
Il Negro
, the bombs, the prostitutes, the championship fight he lost, the bets, the plan for the boxing gym, Giovannella.
Before getting up, he asked him: “What is it you keep staring at so intently?”
Rosario looked him right in the eye and told him.
Umbertino got up from the bench, got dressed, and picked up his bag.
They parted without another word.
The sun no longer burned their skin. It had penetrated their cores, darkening the color of their flesh.
“We're flesh and sunlight, now,” Lieutenant D'Arpa liked to say.
“We look like natives,” Melluso would reply.
The night was greeted as a welcome liberation from the heat of the day.
Rosario, lying on his cot, hugged his rib cage, running his fingers up and down the staircase of his ribs. Eyes closed and index finger wide awake, counting them every night. Now he knew that he had twelve ribs on both his right and left side.
For the past month, every goddamned night, there had been air raids. As soon as it became clear that the bombing runs were spaced two hours apart, the bodies of certain soldiers learned to fall asleep after the last roaring sound of an aircraft, only to reawaken with surprising efficiency about twenty minutes before the next raid. But not everyone could manage that trick. Only the lucky ones. Among them, there were no cases of hysteria, no sudden outbursts of rage.
Rosario asked Nicola Randazzo if he would mind letting him count his ribs for him. The other man agreed. Rosario's fingers explored his rib cage. If men have the same number of ribs, then their bodies are equal. It's the mind that must be different.
“Nicola, you have to find a way to get some sleep.”
“But what about the bombs?”
“Sleep.”
“If I don't?”
“You won't live to see next week.”
“Why would you say such a thing?”
If he had been someone who liked to talk, he would have explained that they were at war, that if they wanted to survive they'd have to surpass their own limitations, that the mouth eats rice but dreams of meat, the mind eats nightmares and dreams of eternal rest. But eating a handful of rice is just as necessary as having nightmares: it helps to keep you from dying.
“Eating is how you satisfy your appetite” was all he said.
By the third consecutive week of nightly raids, nearly everyone had become accustomed to the roar of aircraft. There were only three cases of hysteria, of soldiers who couldn't seem to sleep. After a month, the air raids stopped. The shifts of sentry duty were intensified. Double shifts. Watch out for everything, hope to see nothing.
“I don't give a crap what anyone says, tomorrow I'm going to fuck a whore not once but twice, and if she dares to say a word, I'll cut her face.”
To heighten the theater of his pledge, Vincenzo Melluso sank the blade of his knife into the embers. When he removed it the blade was as straight as before; it makes no difference to a knife whether it's plunged into coals or into flesh.
The sky above them was so big and full of stars that it really did look as if it were curving around the earth.
“Asshole of a peasant, why don't you tell us exactly what you're going to do to your whore tomorrow?”
Melluso had tossed the question in Randazzo's direction, to see the hot flush explode across his face; Nicola didn't like to talk about women and fucking.
“Randazzo, are you blushing? But why? Is it because you'd rather find a negro hung like a donkey in your tent some night, instead of a whore?”
Melluso had never much liked black guys, even though he'd never seen one back in Palermo. Before enlisting, Melluso was a layabout, he didn't even have a job. He wasted time the way some people waste paper. The war was his first real job.
The silence of Africa surrounded the soldiers, seeping into them like the hot sun.
“No doubt about it, all this silence, a guy could lose his mind, right, Santin?”
Santin was from the continent, from up north near Verona, where they don't have salt water. Santin would talk about the taste of dirt, and tell how his father, Gilberto, before starting any job, pruning, sowing, or watering, would chew some dirt, savoring the taste; sometimes he'd spit it out, other times he'd swallow it. His father never talked much. He'd taught him to listen to nature.
“I happen to like silence.”
Santin was big and strong, with the taurine neck and broad hands of someone descended from generations of farmers.
“Oh, hey, you mute, you could take a swim in all this silence.”
For the past couple of weeks, Melluso had made a habit of insulting Rosario. “The mute here, the mute there, the mute this, the mute that.” And the mute, faithful to his name, made no reply. Melluso threw a rock at him, hitting him on the shoulder. Rosario slowly turned around.
“Look, the mute is looking at me, I'm shitting my pants now,” said Melluso. Then he waved a fuck-off in his direction and poured himself a cup of tea.
It was Mino Iallorenzi, the son of a blacksmith and the grandson of a blacksmith and a blacksmith himself in the Acqua Santa quarter of Palermo, who broke the silence.
“Well, all the same, it's just not right that you can only fuck a whore once.”
“Then you do the one and only smart thing you can do.”
“And what would that be, D'Arpa?”
“Iallorenzi, do I have to teach you everything?”
Lieutenant Francesco D'Arpa was a Fascist fundamentalist. Born in Monreale into a family of large landowners, he had an enviable command of logic. He said that a problem can be defined as such because a solution exists, and since there is always a solution, the problem actually doesn't exist.
“Iallorenzi, give yourself a good hand job, oh, fifteen, twenty minutes before you fuck her, so that practically speaking with the whore it's already the second time, and the second fuck always lasts longer than the first one.”