Read The Invisible Mountain Online

Authors: Carolina de Robertis

Tags: #Fiction, #Sagas

The Invisible Mountain (3 page)

BOOK: The Invisible Mountain
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Not all lives begin that way. Look at Ignazio Firielli. He never disappeared or reappeared or had a village call him miraculous. He did have his day with magic, once he was a grown man far from home, but even then it was for a single day that only served the purpose of forcing him toward love. That’s how he told it, anyway, years later, to his grandchildren—especially to Salomé, listening, smiling, fatal secrets tucked away. He would say the sight of a certain woman made magic spring from his hands. It was only as a carnival performer, bumbling through tricks in a gaudy suit. But memory is an expert at sleight-of-hand: it can raise up things that glitter and leave clumsiness and pain to be swallowed by the dark.

Before Ignazio knew a thing about magic, or Uruguay, or women born from trees, he knew Venezia. He held Venezia in his body: the canals, vast, veinlike; the lilting brass of his language; the smells of brine and basil and freshly cut wood in his family home. Above all, he knew gondolas. It was the family business to make gondolas of every size and style. Arcs of wood leaned beside the window; he could trace them with his hands and eyes and know where he belonged. Their shapes could keep a person gliding on the surface of the water, he could not drown, he would not drown, surrounded by planks and prows, gondolas for fishing, for coupling, for heading to the market, and, most of all, gondolas for taking the dead to the tomb-ridden Isle of San Michele.

Gondolas linked Venetians to their dead. Gondolas linked Ignazio to his dead. A history of death and gondolas lived buried in the corners of his home. When Ignazio was eleven, his grandfather revealed the past as they sat alone in the workshop. Nonno Umberto was not usually loquacious. He spent long hours by the window, bony hands at rest, swaying in the rocking chair he’d carved as a boy. He stared out at the houses reflected on the water, at linens on clotheslines, calm, quiet, no matter how loud the shouts got in the kitchen. He was deaf. He pretended to be deaf. Ignazio was never sure which one was true. He came and sat on a low stool at Nonno’s feet, in search of calm or at least a pretense of it, and finding, one day, the telling of a story, slippery, secret, as furtive and as heated as confession.

Long ago, said Nonno, the Firielli family made a modest living building simple gondolas. They had done this for centuries, and assumed they
would do it for centuries to come. He was born into the business. He grew up. He married. He had seven children, and his family also lived among saline slabs of wood in raw states of formation. It was a bad time for Venezia. Cholera ran rampant; no one had enough to eat; corpse after corpse swelled the cemetery of San Michele. “The Austrians.” Nonno Umberto gripped a fistful of the quilt on his lap. If the quilt had been alive, Ignazio thought, it would be choking. “They had blood on their hands. They took from us and let us rot.”

Sun streaked the walls and fell on the skeletal boats around them. Nonno stared out the window. Ignazio stared out also, and he saw the old-time Austrians, big men with monstrous faces, wearing crowns, reclining in a gondola and laughing at beggars on bridges and shores. In the kitchen, the shouting continued, his mother, his father, a slap, a fall, more shouting.

Nonno went on: the revolution came. It was 1848. Venetians chased out Austrian rule. Umberto and thousands of others danced on the cathedral steps until the sun came up. The city churned with hope: freedom was theirs, they were independent, Venezia would be restored. For a year that was true, and then the Austrians returned. Cholera flared back up and burned across the city. Within six months, six of Umberto’s seven children had died of cholera. Four daughters and two sons. Only Diego survived (“your father, Ignazio; your father was the only one”). On the night that his last sister died, nine-year-old Diego went silent and said nothing for two years and thirty-seven days. On that same night, Umberto sat beside his silent son, empty as a rag that has been wrung over and over. The undertaker arrived, shrouded in black, his face masked in a hood with slits for eyes. He stared at young Diego through the slits.

“Don’t look at my son,” Umberto said.

“It won’t harm him.”

“Don’t look at him.”

The undertaker raised his hands. Umberto punched him and the man reeled back and Umberto punched him again until the hood lay flat and crushed against his head.

“May fever take your house,” the undertaker shouted. “May you all rot.” He stumbled out without the girl’s body.

Later that night, Umberto woke up to a rustle at the foot of his bed and saw an angel (“I swear it,” he told Ignazio, “an angel, with wings and all!”). Umberto sat for a minute in the glow of silence. Then he asked the angel how his last son might be spared. The angel said
God hears what crosses the water
. A wing tip brushed Umberto’s head, and he fell back asleep. The next morning, he entered his workshop and stayed for three days and three nights without sleeping, and built a funeral gondola that shocked him with its beauty. Four pillars held a ceiling upholstered with lush velvet. He carved his prayers into the wood: ornate crucifixes on each pillar, rolling vines and grapes and fleurs-de-lis, cherubs with their trumpets, a witch tearing her hair out, sylphs engaged in coitus, Hercules weeping on a mountain, and, at the helm, Orpheus with his golden lyre, poised to sing the way to Hades. The day that gondola crossed the water with their last daughter’s body, it caught the eye of a duchess and she commissioned one for her husband, who had died of syphilis. After that, Firielli gondolas carried the corpses of Venezia’s finest dead.

That’s how Nonno Umberto told it. Ignazio listened, surrounded by wood chips, sure that Nonno was a liar. He could not accept his grandfather hammering at a gondola three days straight—when now his arthritic hands barely brought fork to mouth. He could not accept an angel perching anywhere. Nor could he see his own father, Diego, as the small boy mute with pain, when now he was the farthest thing from silent, the farthest thing from small. There always seemed to be too much of him: too much volume, too much hair, too many wine bottles emptying too quickly. Too much laughter at the wrong times (his laugh had claws; it unfurled sharply). He eclipsed everyone—Ignazio himself, his brothers, his sisters, his mother with her broad hips and bullheaded love, and Nonno, with his rocking chair, his window, his corrugated skin, the loosened hold on life that caused him to stop carving, stop trying to shape things, just let them float or sink in their canals.

One summer night, when dinner was over and heat thickened the house, Ignazio reluctantly left childhood behind. It was a Wednesday. He was twelve. From the kitchen came the clanging watersong of his sisters washing pots and pans. His father slid his arms into his coat sleeves. His cheeks were red with wine. Ignazio’s older brothers followed suit and
waited, hands in pockets. Diego Firielli turned to his youngest son and crooked his finger in the gesture of
come
. The brothers laughed. Ignazio flushed and rushed toward his coat.

Outside, their gondola sat, dispassionate, on the water. Ignazio stepped in last. The wind curled on the surface of the canal, and they glided along the water in silence. Diego turned to look at Ignazio with a strange expression, expectant, mocking. The thick bush of his hair blocked out the city behind him.

It was late, even for Venezia, but the house they went to brimmed with light, noise, and women. Red velvet drapes hung to the floor; wine poured freely; languid chords pushed out of an accordion; the women laughed and swayed and rubbed their bodies against men. Ignazio stood in a corner between a curtain and an ornate oil lamp and tried not to look at anyone. He wished the lamp would darken so he could melt into the wall. He stepped farther from its sphere of light, but his father approached, a girl on each arm. “Here,” he said, thrusting one toward Ignazio.

Upstairs, on the stale mattress, Ignazio’s hand shook as he touched the girl’s knee. It was cool and smooth. Her shoulder preened with freckles. Black ringlets fell around her face. She sat, half reclined, on the thin bed. He was afraid of her, uncertain, humiliated by the fact of his own fear. She drew his hand to the hem of her skirt and he did nothing and she rolled her eyes and reached to unbutton his trousers. Two minutes later, as he pushed into her body, he heard his father’s voice through the curtain to his left, grunting rhythmically, and realized that his father could hear him too. What if he made an audible mistake? He groaned in time, his sounds overshadowed by his father, and the girl lay still. She felt like a crushed peach, soft, moist, alarming. His father finished and Ignazio bit the girl’s neck to climax in absolute silence.

It began soon after that. The unraveling. When Ignazio turned thirteen, his voice deepened and his father broke his mother’s ribs. At fourteen, he went to the kitchen one night and saw a thing that itched his skin: his father, seated at the table, sobbing. He made no sound. His glass was empty. His chin dripped with snot and tears. Ignazio crept out and raced to bed, where he lay in the sea of Nonno’s snores, itching, until the sun returned.

Fifteen: Ignazio cut and sanded, carved and built, until his hands grew raw. He rose for work before dawn, and kept on into the night. One night, in his exhaustion, he sawed the tip off his ring finger. Still, the Firielli business teetered on the edge of disrepute. Orders arrived, Diego ignored them, half-made gondolas lay naked and deserted. Funeral dates came and went, their commissioned vessels unfinished. Customers grew wary; the family soups thinned. By the time Ignazio turned sixteen, his brothers and sisters had married, gondola orders had fallen to half, and hunger felt as familiar as the pulse of water under wood.

One night, at the brothel, Diego shattered a chandelier and two wooden chairs. He was thrown from the building and told not to return. The next night, at his father’s insistence, Ignazio brought their gondola to dock at the brothel’s steps.

“Come with me.”

Ignazio shook his head.

His father stepped onto land, drunk, unsteady. He banged the brass ring against the gilded door. He yelled that he would enter. Three guards came out and punched him and then dragged him down the steps. They pushed him into the gondola, which swayed beneath the pressure.

Diego said, “You can’t—”

“Shut up,” a guard snarled. Ignazio could not see his face; his massive silhouette turned toward Ignazio. “Can’t you control your father? For God’s sake. For your family name.”

Ignazio felt a hot and creeping slime beneath his skin. He longed to leap into the dark canal and swim very far and never come back. He nodded and pushed the gondola out onto the water.

Six months later, on a cold winter night, Diego cracked his wife’s skull against the wall and loped outside. The canal growled under the wind. From the window of his room, Ignazio saw his father’s shadow teeter on the edge of the canal, then fall as if thrown from an invisible fist.

Ignazio lay silent until he heard his sister-in-law’s cry from the kitchen—
dead, dead, Mamma is dead
. He closed his eyes. His mother flooded across his mind: embracing him at six years old when he’d scraped his knee, her thick breasts covering his ears so that they filled with sounds like the inside of a shell; humming, tenor-low, while kneading dough for gnocchi in the kitchen; watching him as he put his coat on
with his brothers, flesh swollen around her eyes. His chest burned. If his father had not thrown himself into the water, Ignazio could have killed him with bare hands. He heard Nonno sit up in the bed across from his. “Eh? What happened?”

Ignazio spent the next five hours cleaning blood from the walls and the body.

Two days later, Diego’s body washed up at the front steps of a count whose gondola order had never been completed. He surfaced just in time to make the journey to San Michele with his wife.

The corpses crossed the water, thronged by the living. The sky was pale with shock. A fleet of mourners—sons, daughters, wives and husbands, children, great-aunts, uncles, drenched in black—rode their gondolas in an entourage behind the coffins. San Michele loomed before them, with its township of tombs, soaking in the prayers and wails that ebbed over the water.

Ignazio rowed numbly. The world was not the world but a mere painting of itself; apart; impenetrable; all the grieving people only brushstrokes; he in the midst of it, pretending to be real, wearing a life of someone else’s making. Only Nonno Umberto still seemed viscerally true. His breath labored as they disembarked, audible through the drone of Hail Marys. He leaned on Ignazio’s arm. He smelled of soap and vinegar and a bitter trace of sweat.

Sepulchral rows, priestly mutterings, aunts weeping, slate moved aside to lower caskets into ground. Ignazio watched the remains of his parents (man and wife, he thought, killer and killed) sink slowly, together, into the dark. The stone slab groaned as his brothers pushed it back into place, shutting in the dead.

“Ignazio,” his grandfather said. “Take me for a walk.”

They escaped the praying crowd and walked the cobbled path. The tombs of the rich loomed around them, edifices twice the size of the Firielli kitchen, wrought with statues. Sylphs and ancient gods and grieving angels gazed their way. They moved past them to a row of simple tombs, unadorned boxes submerged in the ground. Nonno stopped at one of them. Ignazio read the names etched into marble:
PORZIA FIRIELLI. DONATO FIRIELLI. ARMINO FIRIELLI. ROSA FIRIELLI. ERACLA
FIRIELLI. ISABELLA FIRIELLI
. He chanted them, one after the other, in his mind,
Porzia, Donato, Armino, Rosa, Eracla, Isabella
, his aunts, his uncles, frozen children, unknown ghosts.

“Your father,” Nonno said. He stared at the ground. “You can’t be like him.”

“No.”

“But you have to accept him.”

“He’s dead.”

“Exactly.”

Ignazio kicked a pebble. He nodded blankly.

“Are you going to leave?”

“Leave?”

“You know you can’t stay here.”

Ignazio felt transparent. He did know. Or he had wondered. His mother was gone; the family business was dead; his older brothers fought like vultures for its remnants; his sisters had married away. The house was a hull of shadows.

Nonno Umberto looked immensely tired. “You should go. Our name is cursed. And soon Italy will be at war again.” He bent in closer. Ignazio smelled the tang of his white hair. “Listen. I have a little money in the floorboards, and I’ll send you to the New World if you swear you’ll build something. Gondolas, maybe, or something else, something useful over there, something worth building. Anything. Swear.”

It broke, then, the canvas stretched over the world, and Ignazio was not numb, not in a painting after all: he stood in a raw, unfinished world, surrounded by the dead, exposing a fresh layer of living skin.

“I swear,” he said.

As they turned back toward the burial, Ignazio looked across the water at Venezia. The city sprawled in all its dense, corrosive beauty. Gondolas split the water with their motion, with their silence, with their prows that aimed at faraway lands, at long-backed rivers and broad-backed seas that led to God knows where, to something new.

———

BOOK: The Invisible Mountain
8.14Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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