WHEN SHE knocks on the door I put away my scroll and turn on the lights. In she comes, wearing a red dress, perfume, and carrying cookies fresh from the oven. “Tonight we’re going to make love,” she says, “facimmo ammore.” I’ve cooked capon, I tell her, with new potatoes. She lets her nose lead her to the kitchen and pushes me in the same direction. The room is dark. Maria places her arms around me from behind. She holds me tight, doesn’t turn me around. She plants kisses on the back of my neck, the same spot where you grab a puppy, she tickles me, I hold in my laughter. Then she kisses my throat. It tickles inside. The scent of her perfume enters my nostrils. It smells like a Christmas tree, stronger than the smell of the capon in the oven. My mouth waters. I’m embarrassed that while she’s kissing me all over my body I’m standing there swallowing and don’t even have an appetite. Where is the water in my mouth coming from? Maria holds me from behind and moves her hands up and down my sides. She moves them from my face to my throat, to my chest, and lower, where I don’t dare to look. I keep swallowing, hoping she won’t notice. She’s breathing heavily, squeezing, unleashing her beautiful force on my body, laying the freshness of her hands on the hardened muscles that grow tense as they wait to respond to her.
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SHE SAYS, “You’re so strong.” She keeps her arms around me and rubs her face against my back. Then she turns me around and presses me up against the wall. I bang into a skillet that’s hanging there; she laughs, pushes me. Now I can embrace her, too. She’s washed her hair. It falls on my face, like fresh clothes on the line, dark and loose. Her hands hold my face and press kisses against my open mouth. I don’t know what to do with my hands. I try to break away from her a little and I place them on her breasts. Then I rub her. She gets warm and then just like that we take off our clothes and are naked on the kitchen floor and I have just enough time to turn the oven off so the capon won’t burn. Maria leads, I follow. She positions me on top of her where she wants me, and I realize that I don’t know where my piscitiello is. She’s got it and is rubbing it between her legs. I can’t reach it. I let her lead me. She lifts me up and lowers me, making a wave. I open my eyes and see her closed eyes below me, her mouth open, her dark hair scattered all around and the wave tosses, and I try to stay balanced, what an effort it takes to squeeze and hold, this is what beauty must be, then I feel a bolt unleashed from the top of my body, as if the boomerang were rushing out of my piscitiello, an “oof” of amazement comes out of me, she grabs my back even tighter and gives off soft short breaths into my ear and I make movements that don’t belong to me.
MARIA SLOWLY comes to a stop. I’ve tired her, I’ve hurt her, I don’t know. What did we just do, Marì? “We made love,” she says. So this is love? This is what you taught me? “No,” she says, “I don’t teach you. I just start, you do the rest.” Making love must be mysterious, it happens by itself, I think. In the meantime my piscitiello is back in its usual place. “Arò si’ gghiuto?” Where did you go? I feel like asking it in Neapolitan, but I don’t. “Now I feel better about all those times that this disgusted me,” Maria says in a small voice, without all the usual toughness in her words. She’s gotten hungry. We get up from the floor and put our clothes back on. She fixes her hair; I keep the light off. The kitchen has a little heat from the oven and we’re still warm with love. We serve the capon with potatoes, sitting close to each other, side by side. We eat with our hands, bumping our elbows into each other, then we look and laugh at each other in the dark catching light from outside. We put our napkins around our necks, a few burps escape our lips, the boomerang is at the table with us. She puts the new potatoes in my mouth, I pretend I’m choking, we sop the bottom of the pan with our bread.
“IT’S NICE to be just the two of us and no one else,” Maria says with her mouth full. Our eyes have gotten used to the dark. We put a blanket over our shoulders and eat the almond cookies. She made a lot and we eat them all. None are left over. “Next time I’m going to make a pie,” she says. In the meantime, from the house next door, bagpipers start to play a song. The family invited them up to make a little music. We can hear it clearly. It must be so loud in their house that they have to cover their ears. We rub our messy mouths together and lick each other like cats. Later on we get into bed, my little bed in the closet. We fall asleep wrapped around each other so tight that whoever wakes first will have to wake the other to get free. Our bodies are tied in a knot.
DON CICCIO the caretaker was speaking with a tenant, saying that last night the landlord went crazy, knocking at the door to Maria’s house for an hour. The neighbors woke up and got into a fight with him. On the second floor we didn’t hear a thing. Even though it’s Christmas I’m going to the workshop to open it anyway. Painted furniture dries better in the air. Rafaniello arrives after me and starts to work at his bench. The wings are filling out his jacket, bigger than his hump. How do they stay closed up in there? No one notices, no one catches it with their eyes. Master Errico can tell straight away if a sharp corner is off square by even a millimeter, but he wouldn’t even look up if Rafaniello walked in one day without his hump. We’re alone in the workshop. It’s a nice day and Master Errico’s gone off fishing for sure. Rafaniello asks me how the boomerang is doing. I take it out of my jacket and give it to him. He pretends to sniff it and then kisses it. I look, but I say nothing. Both the wood and Rafaniello have gotten lighter.
I PUT the furniture outside. Donna Assunta the washerwoman opens her ground-floor apartment and starts hanging out the wash. This morning there aren’t many people about. The sun is out and they’ll dry quickly. Good morning, I tell her. She asks how it is that we’re open for Christmas. The furniture has to dry, too, Donna Assù, not just the clothes, I answer. She went to midnight mass. Father Petrella gave a nice sermon. He said that the rockets being shot into space go nowhere. They get lost in the sky. But the comet came close to Earth to announce the birth of the infant, the bambeniello. “More than this, what more could we possibly want from the stars? He spoke well, kid, quickly quickly, like he always does, but really well, and you should come to church. You don’t want to grow up like some hoodlum. The last apprentice that worked for Master Errico never went to mass and now he’s at the Poggioreale prison. Be smart, kid,” Donna Assunta says, pinning the clothes to a line half as long as the alley with her chapped red hands. I nod yes with my head. She tries to think of the right words for me. Then she walks away and I mutter a spell to keep me out of Poggioreale: “Sciòsciò, sciòsciò.” I also say “cananóre,” which I just learned.
I SPEAK with Rafaniello. Today we’ve got the time. Don’t you ever miss your hometown? I ask. His hometown doesn’t exist anymore. Neither the living nor the dead remain, they made all of them disappear. “I don’t miss it,” he says. “I feel its presence. In my thoughts and when I sing, when I fix a shoe, I feel the presence of my hometown. It comes to visit me all the time, now that it doesn’t have a place of its own. In the cries of the waterman ascending Montedidio with his cart to sell sulfur water in earthenware jars. I can hear a few syllables from my hometown even in his voice.” He quiets down for a while with nails in his mouth and his head bent over the sole of a shoe. He sees that I’ve stayed near him and continues: “When you get homesick, it’s not something missing, it’s something present, a visit. People and places from far away arrive and keep you company for a while.” So when I start feeling like I miss someone I should think that they’re present instead? “Exactly, that way you’ll remember to greet every absence and welcome it in.” So when you’ve flown away I shouldn’t miss you? “No,” he says, “when you start to think of me it’ll mean that I’m with you.” I write down what Rafaniello said about homesickness on the scroll and now it’s better. His way with thoughts is like his way with shoes. He turns them upside down on his bench and fixes them.