SARAGO NEVER sits on our table. We eat anchovies. Sarago is expensive, but Master Errico brings it home every Sunday and cooks it in crazy water. “Heaven and the sea allowing,” he says. He manages by himself. He’s sixty and doesn’t wear glasses. He strains his eyes, and has to measure what he’s going to cut again and again, be careful. The boy he used to have was good, but he hung out with the Mob when he was growing up and now he’s doing time. That’s how I ended up here. I lend him my eyes. I mark down the inches. Then he calculates how much he needs to cut and corrects the measurement.
I SPEND my days cleaning the tools, the machines, getting rid of wood chips, sawdust. Exercising with the boomerang is making me stronger. My shoulders are filling out my shirt, a ripple of muscles presses against the cloth of the back, and there’s a long callus along my palms where I squeeze the wooden handle. In the evening up by the washbasins I throw harder and harder. I go through the whole motion of throwing it and then at the last minute I squeeze, at the end of the run from my shoulders to my arm. My thrust gets stronger. The boomerang is itching to fly away. My palms sweat, giving off a smell of bitter wood, more bitter than chestnut. No one sees me, only the spirits that blow an occasional dry kiss to my face. The street is noisy even at night, but I’m higher than anyone, up among the clotheslines, where the loudest noise is the boomerang’s edge slicing the air as it passes my ears.
RAFANIELLO IS tired. He sleeps badly and his hump is burning. But he’s happy. He says it’s a good sign. He confides in me when Master Errico goes out to buy wood. He tells me his story. He came to Naples by mistake. He had wanted to go to Jerusalem after the war. He got off the train and saw the sea for the first time. A ship blew its whistle and he remembered a festival in his hometown that began with the same sound. He looked at people’s feet, at how many bare feet there were, lots of children like in his town, so skinny, fast, they could be his own. He comes from a hard-luck town that lost all its children. The crowds in Naples remind him of them. There are so few people in his old town they don’t even say hello to one another anymore. In Naples you could spend all day saying hello to people and go to bed tired just from that.
RAFANIELLO TOOK a walk around our city — foreign, yet almost like his own used to be before the war. The same faces, shouts, insults, and curses, and he thought it was strange that he couldn’t understand a word. He touched his ears to see if something was wrong with them. He laughs when he tells me about it. He gave up. The city was foreign. He thought the sea was holding the city back, refusing to let it leave. So he, too, had to stay. He couldn’t walk the rest of the way to Jerusalem, and the ships here set sail for America, not the Holy Land. So he stays, telling himself: I’ll stay for a while. It’s late 1945. There’s a need for shoes. People want to get married. Naples is filled with weddings. So Rafaniello stays and waits. The stories he tells in the workshop cast a spell on me. I have to pinch myself to get back to work.
EACH OF us has an angel. That’s what Rafaniello says. And angels don’t travel. If you go away, you lose your angel and have to find another one. In Naples he ends up with a slow angel. It doesn’t fly, it walks. Right away it tells him, “You can’t go to Jerusalem.” What do I have to wait for? Rafaniello asks. “Dear Rav Daniel,” the angel answers him, using Rafaniello’s original name, “you will fly to Jerusalem on wings. I’m going to walk there, even though I’m an angel. But you will fly all the way to the Western Wall of the city on a pair of wings that are as strong as a vulture’s.” And who’s going to give them to me? Rafaniello demands. “You already have them,” the angel says. “They’re in a case inside your hump.” Rafaniello is sad not to be leaving, but happy about the hump he’s been carrying on his back like a sack of potatoes and bones that he could never put down. They’re wings, wings, he tells me, making his voice even softer. His freckles crinkle around his green eyes, which are staring up at the skylight.
THE ANGEL repeated itself, because humans have to be told everything twice. “You’ll fly there on your own wings and be making shoes alongside Rav Iohanàn hassàndler,” whom we call Don Giuvanni the shoemaker. What was your hometown angel like? I asked him. It knew how to make vodka from snow, he answered. I know what snow is. There was a snowfall in ’56 that cleaned up the city. Naples was never whiter. “Snow doesn’t clean, it covers, making everything the same. It doesn’t sweep anything away,” Rafaniello instructs me, and I hold my tongue.
I LISTEN to his stories. I want to tell him that I can fly, too, but only over Naples. I want to tell him how you do it, how you position your body, that it’s all in the eyes; when you look up your body goes up, when you look down, it goes down. I want to tell him what I learned in a dream, but I stay quiet. I only know how to float on the air. He does the serious stuff with the wings. Then Master Errico comes back. I throw out the rough boards but the splinters don’t hurt me anymore. My skin’s gotten as tough as leather. Rafaniello’s stories pump my bones full of air and make me cheerful, as cheerful as a flier. In the evening by the washbasins my arms want to fly away with the boomerang. I check my thrust and holding it back makes my new muscles stronger, shaping them like a slingshot.
7
MASTER ERRICO says that fishermen don’t know how to swim. Swimming’s for vacationers who jump in the waves for fun and lie in rows under the sun. The sun is only good for people who lie there without moving. For someone who carries the sun around on his back from early morning to night, the sun is a sack of coal. Like Rafaniello’s hump, I think. I think but I don’t say. I’m just a shop boy. I can’t go around saying what I think to my boss. And if I keep my mouth shut he keeps telling stories and the day goes by faster. Fishermen go to sea in a motorboat or a rowboat and don’t even get their faces wet. They wear berets on their heads that don’t come off in the wind. The old men at the docks smell like tobacco and sweat, not salt. On Sundays they all come out in white shirts. There’s not much fish in the bay. To catch some they have to stay in a boat all day. I’d like to learn more about the sea. I don’t know it. I see it but I don’t know it. Master Errico likes talking to me. His last assistant got sick of listening to him. He’d keep on talking, but “a day is a morsel,” he sighs. To end the conversation he says that sea salt is as bitter as sweat, and neither is any good for pasta.
FROM THE darkness by the washbasins Maria emerges. Her thirteen years are more mature than mine. She’s already got a grown-up body. Three inches below the bangs of her short black hair is her mouth, which is fast with words. I can almost see the words spouting from her fat lips. Her smile opens up her face from ear to ear. Maria knows how to move like a woman. I stand in front of her and my stomach feels empty. I’m hungry for bread, to take a bite out of her slice of bread and butter. She offers me some. I say no. She’s discovered that I practice with the boomerang. She’s curious. She hears me climbing the stairs, passing by her door. She comes closer. The evening is warm and scented with chocolate, oregano, and cinnamon. I sniff at the air. It’s French perfume, she says, rolling the rs in her throat.
IT’S DARK. I grip the wood of the boomerang and show it to her. Maria knows what it is, knows what it can do. “But you don’t let it fly. Why don’t you throw it?” I’d lose it. “It’s no good if it doesn’t fly.” I don’t know how to answer her. I come up here to get myself ready for a single throw. One night my arm will be strong and I won’t be able to stop and then the boomerang will fly. I think for a while and say, You keep canaries on your balcony and don’t let them fly. I keep my boomerang locked up, too. “But they sing,” Maria says. The boomerang whistles, I say, and make her place her ear close so she can hear the sound of the wind being sliced by my throw. Don’t be scared. She laughs. She opens the hand that I have tight around the boomerang and touches my fingers. I gulp. The boomerang’s in her hands now. Wow, I can’t believe how heavy it is, she says, and gives it back to me. Heavy? It’s a wooden wing, how can it be heavy? She insists that it’s heavy and that it burns, too. She knows why I’m practicing, she touches my shoulders. “You’ve gotten strong since you started to work.” I lower my eyes. Maria takes the hair hanging over my forehead and pulls it up. “Look at me when I talk to you.” It’s dark and Maria’s getting bold with me. She’s a little taller and her breasts are already sticking out. I stand still for a while, then I pry her fingers from my hair. She walks away, turns around, and says, “Come back this time tomorrow. I want to tell you a secret.” I stay there by myself. The night air is refreshing near the washbasins rinsed clean with soap flakes. This is where the mothers wash the dirty clothes and their children’s cuts. I take the clothes off the line and go downstairs.