All the bells in the church were tolling.
Rocco needed some air.
In the ceiling over one of the coal bins was a pasteboard scuttle he’d painted many years ago to match the surrounding plaster. He climbed atop the bins, popped the scuttle from its frame, and, with considerable effort, hoisted himself into the bakery attic. The heat was nauseous. He was blind until, with his hat, he screened from his eyes the hole of light emanating from below. The source of light thus obscured, a cloud of airborne dust appeared, thick and twinkling. As he caught his breath, he saw the dust stream into his mouth and swirl out of him. Wood shavings and what appeared to be dry lumps of chewing tobacco covered the attic floor, the leavings of a roofing crew from the 1890s who had never bothered to clean up the job. It was damn hot up here. His skull vibrated in sympathy with the noise from outside.
Crouching, and careful to balance himself on the joists, he made his way to a ladder in the attic wall. It was flaked with rust, and the mooring bolts were loose in the blocks, and the ladder shook as he climbed to the trapdoor in the rafters.
He emerged in the rooftop twilight and breathed. The music, if you could call it music, was close by and deafening. He twisted his head around, and wouldn’t you know, peering over the wall that formed the top of the façade stood five girls and a little boy. He held out hope that Chiara was among them.
“How did you get up here?” he called to them, brushing the spi derwebs and sawdust from his pants.
“We climbed,” one of them said. There was a run in her stocking and a fresh, bloody scratch down her leg. She didn’t turn to address him.
“What did you climb?”
“I don’t know.”
“You don’t know.”
“The wall, I guess.”
“You have a cut, little miss, on your leg there,” he said, pointing, but she didn’t answer him.
He approached the ledge and observed the tumult below. He was wet with exhaustion and defeat. One two three four five. No Chiara. Sigh. And the boy.
“It’s always the same,” another said, disconsolate. “Why is it always the same?”
“It’s opposed to be the same,” said the boy.
They meant that year in, year out, the procession was always the same.
Then one of them jolted upright. Then the others. The first poked the air. “Look!” she said. “Look at the shines!”
All told, the procession was five blocks long. The Virgin now teetered at Eleventh Avenue and Thirtieth Street. An empty space of half a block, which people had historically enjoined themselves from entering, followed the band. At the edge of this space, a colored woman and a colored man were dancing.
Shortly, they were joined by some other colored men and colored women, not too many, about seven. They were clapping, he could see, and doing a slow-stepping, herky-jerky dance, invisible, as one is in a crowd, so they surely believed, while the fevered, dissonant music kept playing. Funny. They weren’t in the conventional man-to-woman, two-by-two embrace, nor even holding hands. They were nine, now, out of maybe twenty thousand, pretty inconspicuous even from up here, and upon more careful observation they were all young people, even teenagers, although one more, a girl younger than the girls on his roof, tried to wrest herself from the grip of a white-haired, squat colored lady and join them.
The children, renewed in their boredom, commented wearily in phrases of forced adult courtliness on the multitude. “Maria, Maria, but we are in so many,” one said.
Rocco had to envy the colored kids down there, dancing with the herd and by themselves at the same time as though they weren’t obliged to pick one or the other. Either they were naïve, or he had made a needless choice. If he were ever put in jail, he hoped they wouldn’t let him have a window.
A white-haired colored man in a tan suit and black tie was hissing, it looked like, beside the squat lady and pointing at the dancers and then back at his feet, furious. And Rocco had to shake his head at this poor, forbidding fellow so much like himself.
Somebody smacked the lone tuba player on the back, Rocco saw this, and the mighty instrument turned around like a stag in the brush.
Then — he could see this happening, he actually watched it happen — the remainder of the back row of the brass turned as one man, saw the Negroes dancing, and turned forward again. They in turn tapped the shoulders of the drummers, who turned and craned to see. And this smacking of the back and craning to see progressed row by row up the band at terrific speed. As you watch, from high banks above, a stick make its way down a river. And the band kept playing — they saw, they passed on the news, and kept playing. And he could see this news, this stick, passing up the procession into the pack of barefooted, black-clad women, where it splintered and spread radially through the procession and the wider crowd.
It struck him that the original tuba player had seen what was taking place and then had kept on playing. The man was flattered. But it struck him also that the barefooted women couldn’t see through the band to see what he saw. It struck him that the news worming its way through their midst was seventh-hand, eighth-hand, ninth-hand, tenth-hand.
As though he stood outside of time with the children on the bakery roof and saw, all at once, the past (at Twenty-second Street, where the Negroes were dancing); the present (right beneath him at Twenty-sixth, where the men in the band were telling one another what they had seen); and the distant future (farther up the avenue, where no one could be trusted and the original moment was lost).
He saw it progress to the Virgin, and he saw the Virgin stop and the rest of the procession stop. And the clergy conferring in the distance. And the altar boys milling, confused. Then another message appeared to pass back down the hill, this time by means of yelling with the hands cupping the mouth. Everybody having stopped. And finally the music stopped. Only by now there was no dancing, either. The Negroes had vanished.
And the violinists tucking their bows under their arms, wiping their foreheads with their neck towels.
The parade then did an unprecedented thing. It lurched backward down the hill. The old ladies sat on the curb and reshod themselves and got up and followed the musicians back into the church. And the Virgin was carried into the church as well, none too slowly. And the men on the roof of the movie theater were packing the fireworks, unexploded, back into the crates and handing the crates down a ladder and into a truck in the alley.
Wait, wait. The feast was over. Something had happened and the feast was called off. How did they all know it was called off? What had happened? Had everybody seen it but him?
The kids on Rocco’s roof were crying because, he supposed, no fireworks. The generators in the ball field coughed and fell silent. The lights on the carnival rides disappeared. There was a frenzied commotion at the streetcar stop way down on Sixteenth Street. To his right, on Twenty-sixth, he saw that woman Testaquadra drag two children by their hair into a house and throw the door shut behind her.
As though time were moving in reverse. The procession was supposed to go to the top of the hill, veer toward the cemetery, circle back all the way down the hill by way of Chagrin to Eighteenth Street, and return uphill toward the church. Instead, it moved from one moment (Thirtieth Street) backward in time down the hill on Eleventh, backward to the church again, hurriedly, in disarray.