Island of Divine Music (2 page)

About three weeks after she’d written Gratiano’s letter a policeman came to the barbershop, and Rosari heard that an Englishman had been kidnapped from the local hotel. She swept the floor and averted her eyes. Her father told her to go upstairs and make the soup, but she wanted to hear the conversation, so she knocked over the glass filled with combs and spent another five minutes cleaning up after herself. She heard the men laugh, whistle, and cluck their tongues, but she didn’t catch much of what they said.

In the books beautiful women were sometimes kidnapped by scoundrels and rescued by knights or gentlemen. Gratiano was far
from a scoundrel in her eyes, and some Englishman at the hotel was hardly a beautiful woman, so she hadn’t really sensed that her use of the word in the letter could amount to something like real kidnapping until now. It had seemed more likely that the word might have other meanings when used in other contexts. She prepared the soup with the wife of Fratelli the barber and brought it and the bread out to the steps where the three families usually ate in the heat of the day. There were twelve altogether, the wives and children of the two other barbers spread out along the shade of the busy street, and they all spoke of the kidnapping now, the three barbers, sworn to secrecy moments before by the carabinieri, having spilled the beans to their wives and children instantly.

Among the more urbane of the criminal society, particularly
la mano nera
of Napoli, a prekidnapping note such as Rosari had written was common practice. The wealthy victim was given a chance to put his things in order, prepare his family and finances for the inevitable, perhaps even pack a few necessities. Resistance was, essentially, futile. Organized criminals of the South could afford to extend this courtesy with little risk, and the families of victims generally paid the ransom, which was never exorbitant, immediately. But this Englishman’s father hadn’t followed custom; rather, he’d sent twice the ransom to local military and police, who had arrested Gratiano and his partner in the bar where they and the Englishman had been sharing a chianti and playing pinochle. The word on the street was that they would soon hang from a tree in the piazza, but that the judge was waiting to arrest a third conspirator first because,
clearly, neither of these men could write their names, let alone the kidnap note found on the victim.

Rosari felt sick and asked to be excused.

For three days she didn’t eat, and Lazaro sent for one of the local fortune-tellers to diagnose her illness. The old woman poured olive oil into a bowl of water and gasped at the shape it took on the surface. Lazaro, Claudia, Fratelli the barber’s wife, and two of her children gasped and cried out as well, although none of them knew what the shape signified. Herbs, entrails, and other measures were recommended, but before Lazaro went to get a few coins for remedies the girl pulled him close and, weeping bitterly, confessed.

The room fell silent. Then the fortune-teller shrugged and said, Well, that would do it.

Lazaro applied for work permits to America and Argentina that very day. He would work in a steel foundry, a coal mine, a gaucho ranch, a fort surrounded by Indian tepees, anywhere, yes. And he could read and write, and he was a highly skilled barber trained by the army outside Roma when he was a youth, and he had no physical ailments, and no, he had no . . . He paused, then reported that he had no wife, that the woman had died two years previous, but that he did have one child still living with him, just a little girl. Only a simple little girl who tried to help out around the barbershop, but, bless her heart, she was very slow and stupid, poor thing.

For the next few weeks Lazaro forbade his daughter to hold a book or a newspaper. When she delivered the linen she had to turn down the romances offered by the merchants’ wives, and sometimes
she told the ladies that she couldn’t read and had only been looking at the drawings. Articles about the kidnapping and the trial lay curled on the barbers’ chairs, tempting her like the serpent in the garden, and opinions about the case were aired by the magistrates of the piazza and the orators of the street corners while their hair sloughed off their heads and fell onto the floor, but Rosari kept her mouth shut. Some said that the Englishman wanted to drop the charges and had found the experience a lark rather than an ordeal, but that his father and the police saw the matter differently. Others claimed that the police, emboldened by the infusion of money and the rhetoric of a British prefect from Rome, had suddenly remembered that Gratiano and Umberto were already under suspicion for previous crimes, particularly for perforating the bodies of a dishonest landlord and a known child molester with butchers’ knives and dumping the same into the Tyrrhenian Sea.

The day before their departure two remarkable things happened, the first of which came in the form of a court summons. Father and daughter had just packed what they could into a trunk and two sheets made into shoulder sacks when a scrawny officer told them to follow him. They walked on stiff and trembling legs behind the little man’s quick strides, a train of the other barbers’ children, some nosy neighbors, and a few unemployed curiosity-seekers hitching behind. The little man ordered the others to stop at the foot of the steps, then led Rosari and Lazaro into the courthouse.

They descended a dank, smelly stairwell to the row of jail cells. The top of Umberto’s bald head could be seen at the end of a blanket
where the big man slept with his face covered. A stink of piss and excrement came from one end of the dark corridor, and Rosari pulled her scarf across her nose. The little officer had them raise their arms and, begging their pardon first, he patted their clothes, then led them to Gratiano.

The criminal sat in sleeveless shirt and suspenders, an unlit, hand-rolled cigarette between his lips. He put on his coat and fedora after he looked up and saw the visitors. Even in the squalid jail cell, with his rumpled clothes and the bruised and swollen skin about his eye and nose where the interrogators had left the mark of their work, he looked, to Rosari, the most handsome man in the world.

I wanted to thank you for your kindnesses to me. They are letting me say all the farewells I wish, he said in a husky voice. His eyes darted to the policeman, who stood a few yards off, then turned to Rosari’s. He continued in a whisper, You should never worry about nothing, and he made a gesture indicating that his lips were sealed. Then, in a louder voice, he told Lazaro to be thankful for having such a little jewel of a daughter, and he tapped his forehead with his index finger. What I would give for such a mind.

God bless you, Gratiano, Lazaro exclaimed through his tears. He made the sign of the cross and kissed the criminal’s hand. Tomorrow I take this little jewel with me to America.

Ah! Gratiano’s eyes filled with tears. America!

They were crying when they stepped into the brilliant light and noise of Naples, and drying their eyes when they got back to the barbershop, where the second remarkable thing happened. A
scrawny, hunched woman sat on the steps beside Fratelli the barber’s wife. The woman’s black dress and head covering hung about her bones, and though her drawn face was vaguely familiar, her eyes were the most foreign things Rosari had ever seen. These eyes had lost most of their hue, as if some brush with the sun had singed them. Nevertheless, Lazaro knelt beside the woman and repeated the word
Eleonora, Eleonora.
This was the name of Rosari’s mother.

She seemed a kind of zombie. Her gestures were stiff and slow, her eyes more in the world of the dead than that of the living, and Rosari was scared of her. There was some debate that evening about whether she should stay in Naples with Claudia, whose mother-in-law clearly didn’t want her, or come with her husband and youngest girl to America. The mother, sitting stiff as a mannequin on Lazaro’s bed, said very little during the debate. Fratelli, who threw his weight around the shop and apartment, said in a loud voice that if he were Lazaro, he’d throw the woman back out on the street, and Lazaro stood with arms folded and said that he was considering doing just exactly that. He assumed an uncharacteristic air of severity, standing with arms crossed and chin thrust out. At one point he paced with hands behind his back, a soldier wearing a barber’s apron as his uniform, and turned suddenly to point his scissors at his wife. I have not yet decided, he told her, what we shall do with you.

In the morning they started for the wharf. No decision had been made, except that Lazaro allowed Eleonora to carry one of the bundled sheets. She trailed behind her husband and daughter, bent
under the burden. When they reached the gate, Lazaro produced papers, and the agent snorted at him.

It says here your wife is dead.

A mistake, Lazaro said. Look, I have our marriage certificate, and that’s her. You don’t believe me, ask her. Ask our daughter.

The agent stared at Eleonora. She looks wrong, he said. She looks touched in the head. They might not let her into New York.

Rosari suddenly cried and clung to her mother’s arm while the woman stood stiff as a statue. The line pressed them from behind as people leaned close to witness the drama.

I don’t know if she’s touched in the head. I’m a barber, Lazaro said, I’m not a doctor. Are you a doctor?

The agent lifted his head toward the ceiling and asked no one in particular why he had to deal with lunatics.

Look, she disappears and comes back two years later like this. What am I supposed to do?

The agent shrugged and shook his head. Then he stamped their papers and sent them aboard.

T
hey sat in the perpetual racket and stink of the ship’s engine and the closeness of too many bodies. When allowed, Rosari went on deck with Lazaro while the mother remained seated on their belongings in the steerage hold, her knees drawn up and her face resting on her arms. It was late fall, and the Mediterranean sky glimmered like the gold-leaf dome of some Byzantine temple, but
after they passed Gibraltar into the ocean a seasonal change took hold. Sky and sea turned coal gray, and North Atlantic winds stabbed them with invisible blades of ice.

Against reason, the mother now stood on deck and stared into the green-and-black face of the deep until husband and daughter found her and led her back to the hold. Sometimes she took off her head scarf and revealed the thick curls of what had once been waist-length hair now chopped to her earlobes. For a moment she might weep and let her family hold her, but more often she sat cold as marble or pushed their arms off her body. She might say a word or two about America, but mostly she’d stare off in silence with eyes that reminded Rosari of those on the sun-faded frescoes painted many generations ago on the walls of Santo Giovanni back home.

Somewhere beyond the British Isles, after days of sky dark as the sea, the ocean began to push the boat like a child on a swing. Water splashed against the high portals. The several hundred strangers sat upright like children awakened from a nightmare, barely daring to move or speak, as the ship swung from side to side. The vessel’s joints creaked, and the engine wheezed like an asthmatic. Moans and prayers started to mingle with the ship’s complaints, and for hours Rosari clung to her father and tried to engage her mother’s cold arms as well, but Eleonora sat like a stone, and in the brief flashes of lightning her face appeared rapt, as if absorbing a beautiful music from afar.

At dawn Rosari awoke to her mother’s gentle voice. She sat up and let Eleonora lead her through the softly swaying floor of bodies
to the dark and icy stairway. Her mother spoke to her as she had years ago, in a sweet and animated voice. She spoke of their great adventure, their journey to a new world, and when she thrust open the door to the deck it seemed that Rosari was either deep within a dream or that she and her mother had indeed just crossed into some other world.

Eleonora stood on deck with her head uncovered, her face radiant, and the sky fell as white jewels onto her black hair. She lifted Rosari’s hand, and they danced slowly through the snow, a substance Rosari had never seen before, a phenomenon which seemed to her then the flight of a million angels come to guide her mother and herself to a new life. And as the snow fell a celestial music, as of glass rubbing on silk, came down from the sky and lifted her heart.

For the remaining days of their voyage Eleonora spoke and moved with great animation. Lazaro stared at her in astonishment. The woman tended sick children and seemed equipped with special insight regarding all manner of ailments, prescribing various foods and administering healing treatments with her hands. Her beauty shone among the frightened and weary passengers like a fountain of snow in a black and leafless forest, but her eyes remained faded, as if buffeted by some otherworldly light, and her words made little sense in conversation. Often as she spoke father and daughter exchanged looks, and more than once fellow passengers touched their foreheads and nodded to each other.

The ship chugged through a fog that occasionally conjured a few gulls or even the voices of seals, and then one day the engine’s
racket stopped and the passengers gathered on the deck. America, they whispered to each other, was just over there, and they stood on deck a long time waiting for America to appear, the families clutching bundles, pressed together for warmth. After several hours a small launch appeared, and then others. The people were loaded onto them and carried into the fog.

Rosari’s first view of America was nothing like the savage wilderness filled with Indians or the modern skyline of New York in her imagination. What she saw through the gauzy fog looked like a Russian castle trimmed with an icing of snow. The striped towers of Ellis Island made her think that they might soon be riding huge sleighs pulled by reindeer across America. Her father would cut the hair of a Russian prince while she and her mother helped the czarina choose which satin dress and which broach to wear, and Gratiano would escape from his jail and join them in America, where they would all dance in the snow with the Russian royalty.