The Bottom of Your Heart (2 page)

 

He sensed her as she approached, silent and lithe as a stray cat, and crouched behind him. He didn't turn around, didn't take his eyes off the line of people awaiting their fates just a few yards away. There was a surreal silence as the sun set, filling the July sky with flame and color. She stared out, over his cap, at the greasy seawater and the dinghies milling around the big ship like flies around a horse.

“I wonder where they're going,” she murmured.

He shrugged.

“To America. Don't you know that they're going to America?”

“Yes, to America,” she replied, still whispering as if she were in church. “But where? America is so big. And then, once they get there, what are they going to do? Where will they go? What are they going to eat? They have children, you can see them. The children have to eat all the time, or they'll starve.”

He said nothing for a while. He was chewing on a blade of straw.

Then he said: “Before anywhere else, they'll go to Palermo, to Sicily. They'll load more people, more or less as many as they're loading here. And the ship came here from Genoa; if you look carefully, you can see there are already other people on board, every so often one of them peeks out, see? The people who boarded in Genoa have taken all the best places, then the Neapolitans take the places that are left over. And the Sicilians just have to take what they get.”

“How do you know all these things?”

“Gennarino told me. His father's a stevedore, he loads crates onto the ship. The people who are leaving give him a little something extra, to make sure nothing gets broken. He's wearing a black hat, you see him? At the far end of the ship.”

She gently caressed a hawser, as if it were an animal.

“That's not what I wanted to know.”

“Then what?”

“What I meant was . . . I mean, they're leaving. They're not coming back. What are they going to do? What language are they going to speak in America? What are they going to eat?”

He shifted suddenly, in annoyance.

“Is that all you ever think about, food? They're leaving to get rich, to get a better life. What do you think: they don't eat in America? They sure get more to eat there than here. These people are beggars, miserable wretches, whatever they find there is better than what they're leaving behind. Because what they're leaving behind is nothing. Nothing at all.”

She didn't react. She just went on stroking the hawser. A large rat poked its head above the big coil of hawsers she was crouching next to. She stamped her foot on the ground and the rat turned and ran, with a faint squeak.

“Food's not all I think about. I think about those children and those women following their husbands who are following who knows what. And I think about the ones who stay behind. Just look at them.”

Right behind the departing passengers was another group: children, women, and especially old men, dressed in more ordinary garb.

Parents, wives, sons and daughters who would wait, probably in vain, for the emigrants to put aside enough money to send for them, or else until they admitted defeat and sailed home, hungrier than when they left.

“I'd never make you sail away alone. I'd come with you. Either both of us, or neither of us.”

He turned his head slightly, seriously.

“I'm learning a profession. And I'm good at it, you know I am. I'll always have plenty of work, and we'll have enough money. We don't have to leave, if you don't want to.”

The silence was broken by a short blast of the ship's horn. One of the sailors whistled, and those who had been sleeping sat up with a jerk.

A little boy burst into tears; his mother took him into her arms. An old woman, standing in the crowd of those who weren't departing, plunged her face into her apron. From this distance, you couldn't hear her sobs, but you could see her shoulders shaking.

He went on: “But wouldn't you want to go? To see what America is like? To see if we can do it too, if we can go live among the Indians? They say that it's a place that's bigger than any other, that there are strange animals no one has ever seen before.”

The sun was setting fast, but the air grew no cooler. She wiped away a drop of sweat.

“No. I want to stay at home. The people who are leaving are weak, they're the ones who can't make it here. But
I
can. I want to make it.”

He was silent. He spat out the straw and picked up a rock.

“Then why do you come down here, when the ships set sail? If you don't want to leave, why do you come?”

“Because you come. Because I know you like it.”

“That's the only reason?”

A man and a woman were embracing at the foot of the gangway. They weren't crying, they spoke no words of reassurance or tenderness. They clung tight to each other, in despair.

She whispered: “No. That's not the only reason. It's also to remind myself that I'm not going to be forced to leave here so I can find something to eat. That I'm going to live well here, at home, where I belong. Because I'm not weak. I'm going to make it.”

She was just a girl, and she'd spoken so quietly that it was almost impossible to understand the individual words; but he turned to look at her as if she'd shouted in his ears.

“If people are happy together, if they love each other, if they have a family, then any place can be their home. There's no reason to fight, is there? You just go wherever you're happiest, that's all.”

She said nothing; she just went on staring expressionlessly at the couple embracing in silence and the black hull of the ship looming behind them.

“I'm going to be happy,” she murmured. And she started to nod, slowly and forcefully, as if she were listening to a voice from within telling her just how to do that. “I'm going to be happy. I know I will. I have it written in the depths of my heart.”

I'
m going to be happy, thought Enrica. I'm going to be happy.

The air in the closed interior of the steamer was unbreathable, so she'd stepped out onto the deck. But the hot wind brought no relief, and the smell of diesel fuel coupled with the rolling of the deck made her seasick; for the thousandth time she wondered whether she'd made the right choice.

I'm going to be happy, she repeated to herself firmly. She even whispered it, without realizing it, and a fat woman looking green around the gills stared at her curiously.

The last few months hadn't been easy. Shy by nature, she'd had to force herself to build, painstakingly and patiently, a friendship with Rosa, the childhood governess of the man she'd fallen in love with.

Had she fallen in love? Yes, no question. She was more than certain. Because love, Enrica thought to herself, is a physical thing more than a state of mind. You can measure it by the beat that your heart skips every time he lays his eyes on you, and by the extra little surge in the next beat, when you realize that there's a tenderness welling up in those eyes. Love is the heat that you feel on your face at the idea of placing your lips against his. Love is the sinking feeling in your belly when you spot his silhouette at the window, on a dark winter evening, glimpsed from across the street, through the rain.

Love is something physical. And she was in love.

The absurd thing was that the whole time she'd always sensed, in her heart, on her skin, in her gut, that he loved her too. And during the long months in which he had watched her from the window and she had awaited a single gesture, a word, she'd wondered why he hadn't declared himself. Was there another woman?

The only way to find out was to talk to those who knew him, and there was only one person who fit that description, namely his elderly governess, his old
tata
, a modest woman, only apparently bad-tempered, who'd welcomed Enrica's desperate appeal with pragmatism, telling her how much she hoped Enrica's wish would come true, and sooner rather than later, too, because Rosa was tired and afraid that her young master would be left alone, once she was no longer around to look after him.

Now, on the deck of the steamer, as Enrica clasped her hat to her head with one begloved hand, and pressed a scented handkerchief to her nose with the other, she struggled to remember the enthusiasm and trepidation she had felt when she first set foot in his home. At Easter she had felt she could sweep aside any obstacle, that—with her innate calm and patience—she would be able to claim her desired place, beside the lifetime companion she had chosen in silence, in the privacy of her bedroom, reading and rereading the first awkward letter that he had sent her, in which he asked her permission to greet her when they met.

She had cooked for him. With Rosa's help, she'd put together a meal with all the dishes he loved best. She'd picked out a dress, a perfume, a pair of shoes. She'd even planned out the topics of conversation. She was ready; she felt like the woman she most wanted to be.

She gulped back a sob that was rising in her chest. She felt sorry for herself when she thought back to that night. He'd never shown up at all, and there she had sat, stiff and silent, while Rosa, embarrassed and sad, watched her from the kitchen door, not knowing what to say. Finally Enrica had gotten up and gone home. Later, when her fear for his safety won out over her mortification, she'd stood watching at the window until she'd heard a car pull up in the street below, and she'd seen him step out of the car with a chauffeur holding the door; she'd been able to make out a silhouette in the car's cab and, in the silent night, she'd heard a woman's laugh. That woman.

That was when she'd made up her mind to be happy in spite of him.

If he preferred the other woman, she could hardly blame him. She'd seen her once, at the Gran Caffè Gambrinus, and she could hardly ignore her beauty, her style, and her elegance. Rosa had said in a contemptuous tone that she was a fallen woman, one of those who smoke in public and flirt with everyone, but Enrica knew how difficult it was, for a simple schoolteacher like her, to complete with someone like that other woman.

Enrica's mother—who never missed a chance to point out that when a girl reaches the age of twenty-four she can officially call herself an old maid, that her younger sister (younger!) had not only been married for over two years but already had a son, while Enrica seemed fated to a future of miserable loneliness—watched her with unconcealed and growing concern, and this pained Enrica intolerably, especially now that she couldn't even lay secret claim to a love she believed was reciprocated. Her father, so similar in temperament to Enrica, quiet and gently determined, understood that if he spoke to her about it he'd only wound her further; and so he watched her surreptitiously, helplessly, sympathetically sharing in the sorrow that he could see on her face.

Shielding her glasses from the sea's spray, Enrica told herself that yes, she'd made the right decision. She couldn't stand the prospect of a long hot summer, of having to duck her head every time she walked past his window; struggling to keep from looking across the street on afternoons when she tutored students forced to take makeup exams in the fall; doing her best to sidestep painful chance encounters with Rosa in the grocer's shop downstairs. What could she tell the old woman? That she didn't think she was up to fighting for the man she loved? That the weapons of seduction, which that other woman seemed so expert in, weren't part of her arsenal? That she was so cowardly and resigned that she was willing to step aside, so long as it put an end to her suffering?

And so she'd stopped by the teachers' college where she'd taken her degree and inquired whether they knew of anyone who might be looking for a teacher. Was she running away? Yes. She was running away. From him. From herself. From what she wished had happened and hadn't. From the stagnant life she hadn't been able to escape.

She'd thought it over long and hard, and decided that this was the best solution. They called them “temporary climatic colonies”; they were designed to ward off tuberculosis, one of the diseases that threatened children's health. Give a sick child to the sea, and the sea will give back a healthy child, ran the slogan; who could say if that were true. In any case, it was a way to offer fresh air to those who couldn't afford it, and an opportunity for the Opera Nazionale Balilla, the Fascist youth organization, to do some summertime proselytizing. The director of the college, who remembered Enrica as the best student she'd ever had, had given her a hug and promised that she'd make sure she was first in line if any openings presented themselves. Sure enough, a few days later the director had sent for her.

Enrica's father had objected; he'd rather have kept his daughter close. But her mother had supported her, in the hope that a new setting might offer a chance to meet new people.

So now Enrica found herself aboard a ship steaming toward the island of Ischia, twenty miles across the Bay of Naples, where a summer colony was currently missing one of its teachers; the last one had been discovered to be scandalously pregnant, though unmarried. Apparently fate wanted to second her decision to put as much distance as she could between herself and those sorrowful green eyes that appeared to her every night in her dreams—when, that is, she finally managed to get to sleep after tossing and turning for hours.

She squinted into the sunshine, gulped, and tried to distract herself by admiring the view. She recognized Pizzofalcone, the Charterhouse of San Martino, Castel Sant'Elmo standing atop its brilliant green hill; along the coast, the handsome façades of the palaces of Santa Lucia and Castel dell'Ovo, which stretched alongside the water like a long stone finger. Further back, Posillipo tumbled downhill toward the bright blue waters of the bay, with its court of a hundred fishing boats returning after a night out on the water. The city, teeming and treacherous, assumed a stirring beauty from that vantage point, and she felt a twinge of homesickness. Enrica wondered what people who are forced to emigrate must feel when they sail away and turn to look back at that spectacular view, knowing they may never set eyes on it again.