It was too dark in the cabin. The light from the gangway made it feel only darker. If he had any money at all he would have traded it away only to fall back asleep.
Wrath, he had written again, and had drawn a line underneath and circled it.
“Your sense of culpability continues unabated,” the priest said, “notwithstanding that you may have meditated for many years on your sins and confessed them sincerely. Sin is layered on sin. Each layer gives the lie to a more fundamental and abstract layer. There is an eidos of sin, of which all these others are representations. You feel you are on the hook for something you wish you could express and cannot.”
The thing to do was to keep out of his mind the desire to sleep, to eat something. To think of desires would soon lead to feeling them.
“The myths of Adam and Eve’s disobedience and of original sin itself aren’t postulates you must take on faith, from which postulates you derive your morality. They are allegories for something we cannot precisely articulate because we cannot precisely see it because it is so close to us.
“In fact, we have empirical evidence that we are broken. Behold, the psalm says, I was shapen in wickedness. Behold, as in, Look, look at it, you don’t have to take anyone’s word for it, you see it for yourself, if darkly. The story is a post festum story that we invent in order to describe mythically the supernatural source of the experience. We know in the darkness of our hearts that it is not any sinful act that condemns us but the form of sin — which is coextensive with the form of the human being — that condemns us. In our dreams we experience the infiniteness of the emptiness that awaits us, and we know it to be irrevocable. We cannot be free of the emptiness that is our fate and continue to be what we are.
“And yet our Lord promises us redemption.”
And yet right now, in the cabin, Ciccio could hear his feelings, as if from a distant source; they were the ringing in the ears after a great explosion.
The priest had wiped the spittle from his mouth with his handkerchief. He said, “It would appear therefore that when we are redeemed, we shall cease to be ourselves.”
Ciccio was fearful from knowing that he was hungry and knowing that he didn’t know how he was going to eat again.
All his far-flung mental roads led back to a central question, and he didn’t know if it was the right question, the real question, or only a question that he was tricked into asking by the flawed lens through which he had to look at things. And the question was this: In order to do what I am built for doing, must I dispose of myself?
He thought again of salmon, and of the males of so many insect species who mated, if they were lucky, only to have their heads bitten off in the heat of the act, or mated in midair and fell dead to the ground. That was the baker Rocco, whose heirs Ciccio had never met in fifteen years of passing him every day on the street. The baker was a he-wasp, built to fertilize the queen and die: The swarm he fathered would never know him or care to know him. A world would open up, but only after the founder was dispatched.
Ciccio cast his eyes about the cabin, trying to find something to take in, something physical to notice, and perceived only that it was dark and that he was alone. This was a momentous moment, the final escape — which years from now he would think of as the first escape — and he wanted something to remember it by, a perversity, like the baker’s perfumed leather oil. That Ciccio could see only what was not there, no light, nobody to talk to, meant that years from now he would remember this only as a script of thinking, like the amnesia days on the farm. A wife, maybe, whose face as yet remained insensible, would ask him to tell her what it looked like inside the train when he woke up in Mishawaka, Indiana, the first time he left his home state, at night in the train that would at length lead him to her, and he wouldn’t remember anything about it. He would remember only the colorless face of the dying priest who had told him months earlier that his best hope was to disappear.
Then there were stops in South Bend, and in Michigan City, and in Gary, as the morning light began to hone the edges of the shapes outside the window. He harbored within himself, despite himself, the shamefullest emotions about the country as he watched it moving by him, his home country, to which he belonged regardless of his desire to belong to it. He loved shamefully the names of the states as children love their mothers. He loved the shapes of the states. Oklahoma, he said in his mind, two long os, two short as, and wanted to know if there would be anyone to whom he could disclose, ever, the tenderness of his feelings, in all their callowness, when he said this word. There was something he wanted to say out loud. There was a word he wanted to listen to. There was a used-car lot flying past him with a hundred plastic yellow pennants flapping, and the prices were painted on the windshields of the cars.
The conductor — it was a different conductor now, but he wore the same monkey cap with the lacquered black visor — teetered by, steadying himself on the headrests of the vacant seats down the aisle of the cabin, calling, “Chicago, Chicago, Illinois, approaching. Union Station. Chicago.”
He wanted to say the name of the city he came from, this word that would meanly preserve him to hear. But he screwed up his nerve and got off the train.
PART FIVE. The Present Moment 1915
22
I remember the weeds bending against my legs, the sun aglint on the slag between the train tracks. I had with me a bottle of water, but it wouldn’t be enough, I had so far to go. I could refill it once I got to Rome, only one did not drink the water of other towns. I took three steps in the direction of returning to my father’s house. I had nothing to eat. But I stopped and turned. From behind the trees, a three-tone steam horn cried out in alarm, and I heard the methodical sounding of the engine bells.
“God has not forgiven me for stepping back onto the platform. I had a suitcase made of pasteboard and it was yellow with age. The man in the ticket office looked out his little window at me, and I got on the train backward, but I kept my eyes on him so that I would not look directly up at the town and lose my resolve. I had seen him before. He was the uncle of a girl I knew in school. He had his eyes on me as a mob has its eyes on the condemned. And there was the rumble of the wheels turning against the rails, and the steam hissing. A rat dragged the rind of a yellow melon across the slag at the foot of the platform. The man opened his mouth and spoke to me. There was no one else I could see. I know that he did not say, and at the same time I remember clearly him saying, ‘You have thrown your faith to the dogs.’
“I was nineteen years old. I had never left Lazio, to say nothing of leaving Europe. And I thought nothing of the fact that what he said, he said, of course, in our dialect, in the private language of our town. No, I thought nothing at all of that. But in the ear of my mind I have, as if in a phonographic recording — although I also know he did not say precisely what I remember he said — the voice of that man, Mariannina’s uncle, saying in dialect, ‘You have thrown your faith to the dogs.’ Here is what we call a mother tongue. Think of the physical tongue of your mother. Think of your father’s kisses on that tongue and how the kisses precede you into the world.