“My dear, I have never heard spoken since a word in my mother’s tongue. My darling, I forsook it for the promise of you.
“Outside, I can see a wagon with the words George D. Francesi, All Phases Building on the side, and its mules are asleep on their feet.
“Here, I’ll cut up the roast myself into the tiniest pieces and put them in your mouth. And you try to chew them.
“Of all my sins why this one? is a reasonable question to ask. Why the stepping from the weeds onto the platform and then onto the train that I knew would carry me away? After all, there are — are there not? — the spirit remains of several hundred oleaginous children in the cellar. Why not save my regret for them? I know the answer. Shall I be brutal? I saw most of their faces, most of them had faces. I’ll tell you, if you eat something. Here, sit up now. Seeing as I pulled you onto the chair and wheeled you in here so you could eat properly at a table, it’s the least indulgence you could grant me. I’ll cut you the thinnest sliver of fat the way you like. There we go. I slip it in between your lips. You don’t have to chew, just swallow it like a gull does. Listen and I’ll tell you why not. You’ll say it’s fatuous, but it’s what I think: They couldn’t speak. They are hypothetical in my mind because they couldn’t speak. You might think they scream, but they can’t scream. No, there is only one truly permanent mistake — I have found and often remind myself — and that is when a person throws away his faith in the Lord.
“I have had only one truly permanent desire, and that has been, is, to lift the thin dark screen between me and you.
“Then there was another train, north to Genoa, and in every town where it stopped a different man boarded and pushed a cart through the corridor and repeated with impossible rapidity what I understood at first to be the words mandarins, sandwiches, oranges, nuts. Each man, as the train continued up, up, toward the north, said the words differently, until I was in Genoa, where I did not know what the man there was saying, and I looked into his cart and saw that it was pears and fennels he was selling. And I had to point with my lips closed, like a foreigner. I took a fennel and my empty bottle and yellow case and myself off the train. And I sat on the bench carving the fennel, ravenous and peeling off its folds. Nineteen, unknown to anybody, weeping. I could see the gulf from the bench where I was sitting, and, do you know, I had never seen the sea before. And what I felt about the sea was not at all what I’d intended to feel. I felt hopeless. As in the dreams I had as a girl in which I was a ghost among living people who tolerated my harmless haunting of them but neglected to acknowledge that I was there. There was the gulf, and the sea extending beyond it, and they were mutely real and complete, whereas I was what, was what kind of a thing? I was a fleeting thought the mind that the sea was might light upon and then forget. I was a notion. I would pass out of existence when the physical world’s bleak, perpetual, unspeaking mind no longer observed me. I had had at home a provisional, theoretical persistence, and now I’d given it away, even such as it was, or killed it. There were around the buttons of my blouse the thinnest flanges of gold, and a child approached me asking for a stalk of the fennel, and as I held the fennel with one hand and tore off one of the curving stalks with the other, the child — it had no sex, its hair was long, it had no shoes — ripped one of my buttons right off me. And it ran between two cars of a train that was stopped, and then was gone.
“There were men I thought must be Arabs, they were so dark-skinned, selling chestnuts in paper cones. How ridiculous, to sell for money what anybody can pick out of the dirt!
“I remember clearly him saying, Mariannina’s uncle, and also know he did not say, ‘You have thrown my faith to the dogs.’ This was more than thirty-five years ago, but the event resides in the center of my brain like the speck of sand in a pearl. I know it’s there, but because I can’t perceive it directly I can’t know whether he said ‘your faith,’ or ‘my faith,’ or ‘our faith.’ And the difference is crucial, is it not? Other days I am convinced he did not say ‘faith’ at all, but ‘fate.’
“Once, I dreamt that I was a little girl rinsing my feet in a river when a boy poked his head out of the current. The boy was you, Nicolo. You had a fish’s tail and brilliant blood red gills on the sides of your head. You were naked in the water, and I was naked, too. You gave me a lecherous look. Then you gripped the edges of the rock where I was sitting, opened your jaws wide, and slowly began to swallow me from the toes up, in one piece; and I let you do it.
“Inside you, I felt the tingle of the bile on my skin. I touched the sleek walls of your stomach with my toes. You had reached my hips when I heard a gunshot. Then I knew it wasn’t a gunshot but a door slamming and that this was a dream from which I was about to wake up. But I wanted so badly for you to finish me off. In the dream, I saw that you had been shot in your scaly back and your blood was leaking into the river. And I knew that you were about to die; and I believed that when I woke up you would be dead, so I must try very hard to stay asleep; but I felt myself waking up all the same. And you paused, severed me across my chest with your teeth, wiped your lips on your arm, and asked me with your sweet boy’s voice, ‘Coco, will I be dead when you wake up?’ And I stroked your copper curly hair, and I felt my blood go cold.
“When I awoke I was so cold. I felt so small. In the bedroom, the darkness was a liquid in which everything was submerged. I could not find the candle with my hands. And I firmly knew that you were dead. You had taken all the useful parts of me into the grave in your stomach.
“Then I heard the squeal of the pantry door opening. I thought it could only be an intruder in the house, banging around in the kitchen — because you were dead, you see. You hadn’t stayed out playing cards, and you weren’t coming home and slicing a piece of cheese in the pantry to eat with a plum on the porch, as you used to do late at night, creeping courteously so as not to wake me. No, I had lost you.
“I felt my way along the parlor walls to the kitchen. I did not speak; the one I believed was an intruder did not speak either, although I could faintly see him moving about in the room. I found the lamp and the matches on the counter. I lit the wick and lowered the chimney over it, pressing the sleeve of my nightdress to my smarting eyes. I wound the wick down a quarter of a turn. I moved my trembling sleeve away from my face. The cupboards shone and were yellow and hopped menacingly in the lamplight, and I heard the intruder approach me.
“Then — as when you spy the shadow of a fish, imaginary and flat, beneath the surface of a stream; and suddenly, cracking the elemental border, the fish flings itself into the crisp and luminous air, twisting with life — from the blackened bottomless depths above the lamp, your ruddy face leapt to my eyes. And you kissed me.
“Maybe that piece is too big to swallow. Here, let me take it out. Maybe you’d like the applesauce first. I know how you like your sweet, my sweet. I’ll mix in the brown sugar. You don’t even have to chew. Just open your throat and lean back your head and let it slip down like birds let fish fall down their gullets. You planted the trees yourself, the apple trees. And I mashed the apples through the mill just today. There isn’t a single seed, I promise.
“I had received the letter from you that I had so long awaited, but I had never heard of the place where you wanted me to go. So while the nuns were in the courtyard taking their bedding off the line, I sneaked into the library of the convent school and found the atlas page for central North America. Then I heard them coming, and I tore out the page. And I put the book back on the shelf, and I ran away. Late that night, I crept into the lemon orchard behind my father’s house. The odor of the blossoms in that orchard was the ideal of sweetness. There was a high, dazzling moon. I scoured the map, but all I could find was Iowa, Iowa was right there in the middle. And I did not know you well enough to know if you would be careless about such a thing, about writing the right letters of the name of a place in the right order.