On Earth as It Is in Heaven (13 page)

“Rosà, hold on, as soon as you get out there's water for you.”

Everyone turned to look at the cube and under the white moonlight they saw something they never would have believed possible. A skinny finger protruded from the airhole and waggled, up and down; then it was withdrawn, not to be seen again. Rosario was still alive. The water had not been sacrificed in vain. The prisoners sensed such a charge of adrenaline in their bodies that without even thinking about it they all joined together in a primitive shout of jubilation, arms raised and fists clenched. They exulted as if the Italian national team had just scored a goal. They were prisoners but they were still alive. Rosario must and would return to their ranks. His survival had become a reason to hold out.

The third day seemed to stretch on forever. As soon as day dawned, the prisoners started pestering the guards, asking when Rosario would be freed, how much more time until he was let out, come on, he'd been in there three days already. “Twelve hours,” they replied. “Ten and a half hours.” “Nine hours.” The iron cube was the vanishing point, attracting all eyes. Hold on, Rosario, they thought. There were even a few who managed to murmur the words. They would have shouted them but they didn't have enough saliva to emit any sounds.

There were five hours to go now. An officer walked into the prisoners' enclosure. He spoke in his incomprehensible language. He noticed that everyone was looking over at the iron cube. He laughed out loud, and then froze everyone in place by speaking in perfect Italian.

“
Nessuno è mai sopravvissuto all'isolamento
.”

No one has ever survived solitary confinement.

He walked out of the enclosure but stayed close to the barbed wire, watching as the vessels of their hope all sank, one after another.

There were four hours to go. The prisoners' gazes swung from the cube to the pot of water. D'Arpa understood that there had been a shift in the wind. He filled his chest with air and then bellowed out a resounding, hoarse, creaky howl, the air scratching as it rushed past his vocal cords. When he was done emitting that shout, he was in so much pain that he gagged and then vomited blood. Something had broken in his throat. What Francesco D'Arpa had shouted was this: “
Rosà, faccìllo vìdiri ca sì vivo
.” Rosario, show us that you're still alive. No finger protruded from the air hole, there was no movement of any kind. Blind despair descended into the heart of each prisoner.

Dario Tomasello was a peasant from Bronte. He walked toward the pot of water, determined to have a gulp of it. D'Arpa didn't even give him the time to communicate with gestures. A straight punch to the stomach doubled him over. Tomasello fell to his knees and then tumbled over onto his side. Lieutenant D'Arpa assumed a stance in front of the pot of water and glared at his fellow prisoners. The meaning was unmistakable to one and all: they were going to wait for Rosario to emerge from solitary confinement, and they'd better stay quiet or D'Arpa would unleash his fists in order to protect Rosario's water.

Outside the fence, two guards were smoking. Neither of them gave the slightest thought to the prisoner in solitary confinement. By now, they assumed he was a goner. Still no news about Nicola Randazzo.

The soldiers made the rest of the time go by in the only two pursuits that remained to them: surviving and staving off insanity. The heat was surreal. When two guards approached the iron cube to open it, everyone got to their feet and trooped over to the barbed-wire fence.

The padlock was removed with gloves, it was so hot. As soon as the cube was opened, they glimpsed Rosario, hunched in the fetal position. He wasn't moving. An officer arrived and kicked him with his boot. No reaction. The noncommissioned officer addressed the prisoners: “There's no way to survive solitary confinement.” He pointed to Rosario. The man had burn marks all over his body: back, arms, and legs. Francesco D'Arpa felt his lips quiver and his eyes well up with tears, but before he even had a chance to wonder how it was that his body still possessed any fluids at all he saw what he saw next and at that instant he lost all self-restraint and dropped to the ground and wept and bawled louder and longer than ever before in his twenty-seven years on this earth. Rosario's inert body was confirming the prisoners' defeat; they'd placed their bets on him and they had lost. The English officer perceived their growing, throbbing despair and, without looking down, he added, in Italian: “
È morto
.” He's dead. And it was at that exact instant that, from that heap of skinny motionless flesh, unhoped-for, unexpected, and blessed, there rose, toward the heavens a finger, supported by an elbow and a wrist: Rosario's forefinger, erect, pointing skyward, in defiance of death and solitary confinement, in defiance of the enemy and in defiance of God. He was still alive and the enemy could go fuck themselves and all the prisoners were hollering, they'd placed their bets on him and he had come in a winner and so had they and D'Arpa was sobbing and the soldiers were hugging one another and the guards were all looking on in admiration at that forefinger, alive and standing at attention.

Rosario's body was brought back inside the barbed wire and laid on a pallet of clothing, in the shade next to the wall. D'Arpa dipped a corner of his shirt sleeve into the water and started dabbing moisture onto Rosario's lips. They were dry, cracked, minuscule. His tongue was tough and leathery, the inside of his throat was covered with sores. There was no hurry. One drop after another. This was the only way to get him to drink.

His forehead was scalding hot, his whole body was on fire.

He had a raging fever.

Francesco D'Arpa covered Rosario with three shirts. He went to the fence and started shouting.

“A doctor, a doctor.”

He coughed up blood, but went on shouting.

“A doctor.”

This was the first time anyone had survived the iron cube. Even the enemy saw fit to accord him the honor due. When my grandfather was loaded onto the stretcher to be taken to the infirmary, the prisoners saluted the patient's exit by getting to their feet, every last one of them except Melluso.

The luggage was packed and piled right there on the floor between him and Nenè. An insurmountable wall. Just a few more minutes and the story of the two of them would have new and different words.

Nenè was going off to work for a boss in a distant land with a difficult name. Those minutes were the last few syllables of their history together. They shook hands forcefully, like grown-ups. Orazio, Nenè's father, tousled Rosario's hair.

“We have to go, right now.”

The two friends sealed their separation with the only two words possible.

“Ciao, Nenè.”

“Ciao, Rosà.”

Few gestures, even fewer words, but everything clear and exact.

Nenè smiled one last time, picked up his suitcase, and trudged off with his father toward the station, disappearing behind the olive trees.

The day before, sitting on the slopes of the mountain of Cape Gallo, they had looked to the future that awaited them, out beyond the horizon line that stretched across the sea. All around them was silence and September. Rosario sat on his friend's left and clamped the bud of an ear of wheat between his lips.

Without looking at him, Nenè confided: “You know what I'd like? I'd like to steal winter's chill.”

In silence, Rosario listened to his friend's brief confession. As soon as the flow of words came to an end, the two friends rose to their feet and, side by side, they launched into an agile and vibrant race, their feet biting into the road and their arms carried along by the momentum of their bodies, while their eyes, without warning, wept tears.

Twelve days later, army trucks arrived. The prisoners were loaded onto them. They were being transferred. Francesco D'Arpa wrapped his arms around Rosario again and sat next to him for the entire length of the journey. D'Arpa tried to tell him the whole story, but other soldiers chimed in with other details. They added necessary and unique points of view: their own.

“Why?” my grandfather asked the lieutenant.

“You needed water, more than anyone else.”

“Nicola is doing better, they've treated him, he was in the bed next to mine.”

“Apart from the infection in his asshole, he's had a better time of it than any of us.”

“How come you're so strong?”

“I box.”

“Are you a boxer?”

“In my spare time.”

“You saved my life,
grazie
.”

“How did you manage to survive in there, Rosà?”

“I remembered.”

“What?”

“My friend Nenè, the moments we spent together, his last words.”

They saw a long line of elephants and watched as the sky was tinged pink by a passing flock of flamingos. A hyena lying alongside the road and a gnu's carcass enveloped in a cloud of insects. Falling stars and the low trees of the savanna. Two days later, the trucks came to a halt. They'd reached a new prison camp. The trip was over.

“You know what I'd like? I'd like to steal winter's chill, just like that, so that when the sirocco comes, I'd always have a little puff of cool breeze on my skin and in my heart. There are memories, on the other hand, where the only thing I'd want to keep is the few seconds before. The moment before you catch a fish, the moment before you touch a pair of tits, the moment before you taste an orange. Then, if I ever learn to write someday, I'll dream up a whole story of
not
s: the times I didn't leave, I didn't say goodbye to you, I didn't go somewhere far away, I didn't work for a boss, and the day there wasn't a party in the town square, I didn't dance with a woman who was too beautiful to look at, I didn't plant a long, leisurely, flavorful kiss on her lips, and she didn't immediately say to me: Kiss me again, my love. And anyway, I'm faster than you.”

“No you're not.”

“Yes I am.”

“I can crush you whenever I want.”

“Race, from here to there.”

“Let's go.”

And they ran together, away from childhood, side by side, for the last time in their lives.

Nenè won.

Umbertino had finished running through his thoughts. The March evening breeze began to make itself felt. It was time to put his clothes back on. Rosario, sitting on the bench beside him, had listened in silence, never uttering a word.

“And anyway, to boil the sauce down, this is the way things stand: since there's nothing of the kind in Palermo, I'm going to just go ahead and open a boxing gym of my own.”

Even then, my grandfather spoke not a word. The moonlight created a faint glow on his hollowed-out, razor-sharp face. A hawk, that's what he looked like. He looked like a hawk.

“What is it you're looking at?” Umbertino asked him.

Turning his head, Rosario looked my uncle right in the eye. A little shudder swelled his chest, as head and shoulders both rose together, then his shoulder blades sagged again.

“I'm looking back.”

PART TWO

THE
BATTLEFIELD

“But after I'm dead, I'd prefer to be reborn as a wild boar.”

“You understand that you're a real dumb-ass, don't you, Gerruso?”

“A wild boar is happy.”

“How d'ya know?”

“Easy, wild boars don't write.”

“You're saying anyone who writes is unhappy?”

“If they weren't, they wouldn't write.”

“Well, what would the boar do?”

“He'd go out, under the open sky, and grab all the happiness in the forest for himself. It's like you explained to me, the logic of fair trade.”

“You need to stop repeating everything I teach you.”

“You're right, sorry.”

“Anyway, it's true: everything has a price, not even death comes for free, you have to pay for it with your life.”

“That's right, fair trade among animals: they pay for their happiness with the fact that they don't know how to write. They live without thinking about tomorrow; death is like a little wrinkle in their happiness.”

“But why exactly a wild boar?”

“It's very tasty with potatoes. But you're not a wild boar, not at all. Yesterday, during your first bout, I was tryna figure out what kind of animal you might be. Wild boar, definitely not. Camel, no. Gekko, no way, not by a long shot.”

A gleam appeared in his eyes. Using my nickname, he asked what animal I thought I was like when I was boxing.

I said nothing.

You can't talk underwater.

Fish are mute.