Presence: Stories Page 8

  “What’s the matter with you?” Appello asked.

  “Why?”

  “The way you’re looking at him.”

  “I want to talk to him.”

  “Well, talk to him.” Vinny smiled.

  “I can’t speak Italian, you know that.”

  “Well, I’ll ask him. What do you want to say?”

  “Vinny—” Bernstein started to speak and stopped.

  “What?” Appello asked, leaning his head closer and looking down at the tablecloth.

  “Get him to talk. Anything. Go ahead.”

  Vinny, enjoying his friend’s strange emotionalism, looked across at the man, who now was eating with careful but immense satisfaction. “Scusi, signor.”

  The man looked up.

  “I am a son of Italy from America. I would like to talk to you. We’re strange here.”

  The man, chewing deliciously, nodded with his amiable and amused smile and adjusted the hang of his jacket on the nearby chair.

  “Do you come from around here?”

  “Not very far.”

  “How is everything here?”

  “Poor. It is always poor.”

  “What do you work at, if I may ask?”

  The man had now finished his food. He took a last long drag of his wine and got up and proceeded to dress and pull his tie up tightly. When he walked it was with a slow, wide sway, as though each step had to be conserved.

  “I sell cloth here to the people and the stores, such as they are,” he said. And he walked over to the bundle and set it carefully on a table and began untying it.

  “He sells cloth,” Vinny said to Bernstein.

  Bernstein’s cheeks began to redden. From where he sat he could see the man’s broad back, ever so slightly bent over the bundle. He could see the man’s hands working at the knot and just a corner of the man’s left eye. Now the man was laying the paper away from the two bolts of cloth, carefully pressing the wrinkles flat against the table. It was as though the brown paper were valuable leather that must not be cracked or rudely bent. The waitress came out of the kitchen with a tremendous round loaf of bread at least two feet in diameter. She gave it to him, and he placed it flat on top of the cloth, and the faintest feather of a smile curled up on Bernstein’s lips. Now the man folded the paper back and brought the string around the bundle and tied the knot, and Bernstein uttered a little laugh, a laugh of relief.

  Vinny looked at him, already smiling, ready to join the laughter, but mystified. “What’s the matter?” he asked.

  Bernstein took a breath. There was something a little triumphant, a new air of confidence and superiority in his face and voice. “He’s Jewish, Vinny,” he said.

  Vinny turned to look at the man. “Why?”

  “The way he works that bundle. It’s exactly the way my father used to tie a bundle—and my grandfather. The whole history is packing bundles and getting away. Nobody else can be as tender and delicate with bundles. That’s a Jewish man tying a bundle. Ask him his name.”

  Vinny was delighted. “Signor,” he called with that warmth reserved in his nature for members of families, any families.

  The man, tucking the end of the string into the edge of the paper, turned to them with his kind smile.

  “May I ask your name, signor?”

  “My name? Mauro di Benedetto.”

  “Mauro di Benedetto. Sure!” Vinny laughed, looking at Bernstein. “That’s Morris of the Blessed. Moses.”

  “Tell him I’m Jewish,” Bernstein said, a driving eagerness charging his eyes.

  “My friend is Jewish,” Vinny said to the man, who now was hoisting the bundle onto his shoulder.

  “Heh?” the man asked, confused by their sudden vivacity. As though wondering if there were some sophisticated American point he should have understood, he stood there smiling blankly, politely, ready to join in this mood.

  “Judeo, my friend.”

  “Judeo?” he asked, the willingness to get the joke still holding the smile on his face.

  Vinny hesitated before this steady gaze of incomprehension. “Judeo. The people of the Bible,” he said.

  “Oh, yes, yes!” The man nodded now, relieved that he was not to be caught in ignorance. “Ebreo,” he corrected. And he nodded affably to Bernstein and seemed a little at a loss for what they expected him to do next.

  “Does he know what you mean?” Bernstein asked.

  “Yeah, he said, ‘Hebrew,’ but it doesn’t seem to connect. Signor,” he addressed the man, “why don’t you have a glass of wine with us? Come, sit down.”

  “Thank you, signor,” he replied appreciatively, “but I must be home by sundown and I’m already a little late.”

  Vinny translated, and Bernstein told him to ask why he had to be home by sundown.

  The man apparently had never considered the question before. He shrugged and laughed and said, “I don’t know. All my life I get home for dinner on Friday night, and I like to come into the house before sundown. I suppose it’s a habit; my father—you see, I have a route I walk, which is this route. I first did it with my father, and he did it with his father. We are known here for many generations past. And my father always got home on Friday night before sundown. It’s a manner of the family I guess.”

  “Shabbas begins at sundown on Friday night,” Bernstein said when Vinny had translated. “He’s even taking home the fresh bread for the Sabbath. The man is a Jew, I tell you. Ask him, will you?”

  “Scusi, signor.” Vinny smiled. “My friend is curious to know whether you are Jewish.”

  The man raised his thick eyebrows not only in surprise but as though he felt somewhat honored by being identified with something exotic. “Me?” he asked.

  “I don’t mean American,” Vinny said, believing he had caught the meaning of the man’s glance at Bernstein. “Ebreo,” he repeated.

  The man shook his head, seeming a little sorry he could not oblige Vinny. “No,” he said. He was ready to go but wanted to pursue what obviously was his most interesting conversation in weeks. “Are they Catholics? The Hebrews?”

  “He’s asking me if Jews are Catholics,” Vinny said.

  Bernstein sat back in his chair, a knotted look of wonder in his eyes. Vinny replied to the man, who looked once again at Bernstein as though wanting to investigate this strangeness further, but his mission drew him up and he wished them good fortune and said goodbye. He walked to the kitchen door and called thanks to the girl inside, saying the loaf would warm his back all the way down the mountain, and he opened the door and went out into the wind of the street and the sunshine, waving to them as he walked away.

  They kept repeating their amazement on the way back to the car, and Bernstein told again how his father wrapped bundles. “Maybe he doesn’t know he’s a Jew, but how could he not know what Jews are?” he said.

  “Well, remember my aunt in Lucera?” Vinny asked. “She’s a schoolteacher, and she asked me if you believed in Christ. She didn’t know the first thing about it. I think the ones in these small towns who ever heard of Jews think they’re a Christian sect of some kind. I knew an old Italian once who thought all Negroes were Jews and white Jews were only converts.”

  “But his name . . .”

  “‘Benedetto’ is an Italian name too. I never heard of ‘Mauro’ though. ‘Mauro’ is strictly from the old sod.”

  “But if he had a name like that, wouldn’t it lead him to wonder if . . . ?”

  “I don’t think so. In New York the name ‘Salvatore’ is turned into ‘Sam.’ Italians are great for nicknames; the first name never means much. ‘Vicenzo’ is ‘Enzo,’ or ‘Vinny’ or even ‘Chico.’ Nobody would think twice about ‘Mauro’ or damn near any other first name. He’s obviously a Jew, but I’m sure he doesn’t know it. You could tell, couldn’t you? He was baffled.”

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sp; “But, my God, bringing home a bread for Shabbas!” Bernstein laughed, wide-eyed.

  They reached the car, and Bernstein had his hand on the door but stopped before opening it and turned to Vinny. He looked heated; his eyelids seemed puffed. “It’s early—if you still want to I’ll go back to the church with you. You can look for the boys.”

  Vinny began to smile, and then they both laughed together, and Vinny slapped him on the back and gripped his shoulder as though to hug him. “Goddam, now you’re starting to enjoy this trip!”

  As they walked briskly toward the church the conversation returned always to the same point, when Bernstein would say, “I don’t know why, but it gets me. He’s not only acting like a Jew, but an Orthodox Jew. And doesn’t even know—I mean it’s strange as hell to me.”

  “You look different, you know that?” Vinny said.

  “Why?”

  “You do.”

  “You know a funny thing?” Bernstein said quietly as they entered the church and descended into the vault beneath it. “I feel like—at home in this place. I can’t describe it.”

  Beneath the church, they picked their way through the shallower puddles on the stone floor, looking into vestibules, opening doors, searching for the priest. He appeared at last—they could not imagine from where—and Appello bought another candle from him and was gone in the shadows of the corridors where the vaults were.

  Bernstein stood—everything was wet, dripping. Behind him, flat and wide, rose the stairway of stones bent with the tread of millions. Vapor steamed from his nostrils. There was nothing to look at but shadow. It was dank and black and low, an entrance to hell. Now and then in the very far distance he could hear a step echoing, another, then silence. He did not move, seeking the root of an ecstasy he had not dreamed was part of his nature; he saw the amiable man trudging down the mountains, across the plains, on routes marked out for him by generations of men, a nameless traveler carrying home a warm bread on Friday night—and kneeling in church on Sunday. There was an irony in it he could not name. And yet pride was running through him. Of what he should be proud he had no clear idea; perhaps it was only that beneath the brainless crush of history a Jew had secretly survived, shorn of his consciousness but forever caught by that final impudence of a Saturday Sabbath in a Catholic country; so that his very unawareness was proof, a proof as mute as stones, that a past lived. A past for me, Bernstein thought, astounded by its importance for him, when in fact he had never had a religion or even, he realized now, a history.

  He could see Vinny’s form approaching in the narrow corridor of crypts, the candle flame flattening in the cold draft. He felt he would look differently into Vinny’s eyes; his condescension had gone and with it a certain embarrassment. He felt loose, somehow the equal of his friend—and how odd that was when, if anything, he had thought of himself as superior. Suddenly, with Vinny a yard away, he saw that his life had been covered with an unrecognized shame.

  “I found it! It’s back there!” Vinny was laughing like a young boy, pointing back toward the dark corridor.

  “That’s great, Vinny,” Bernstein said. “I’m glad.”

  They were both stooping slightly under the low, wet ceiling, their voices fleeing from their mouths in echoed whispers. Vinny held still for an instant, catching Bernstein’s respectful happiness, and saw there that his search was not worthless sentiment. He raised the candle to see Bernstein’s face better, and then he laughed and gripped Bernstein’s wrist and led the way toward the flight of steps that rose to the surface. Bernstein had never liked anyone grasping him, but from this touch of a hand in the darkness, strangely, there was no implication of a hateful weakness.

  They walked side by side down the steep street away from the church. The town was empty again. The air smelled of burning charcoal and olive oil. A few pale stars had come out. The shops were all shut. Bernstein thought of Mauro di Benedetto going down the winding, rocky road, hurrying against the setting of the sun.

  [1951]

  Please Don’t Kill Anything

  That beach was golden toward sundown. The bathers had all gone home when the wind got brisk. Gulls were diving just beyond the breakers. On the horizon they could see four stubby fishing boats moving in a line. Then she turned toward the right and saw the two parked trucks and the fishermen hauling on a net. “Let’s see if they caught anything,” she said, with the swift surge of wonder that swept through her at any new sight.

  The trucks were battered and rusty, with open backs, and the one they came upon had about twenty-five big, sand-sprinkled bass and small bluefish piled at the tailgate. A man in his sixties was sitting on the truck, holding a rope that was wound around a winch at his side. He nodded to them pleasantly and drew on the rope to keep it wound tightly around the turning winch. At the water’s edge another man kept watch over the net, piling it in a heap as it was drawn out of the water.

  Sam glanced at the fish as they arrived at the truck and knew she would be startled. She saw them, and her eyes widened, but she even tried to smile in congratulation to the old man who drew on the rope, and she said, “You catch all these?”

  “Yup,” he said, and his eyes warmed at her beauty.

  “These are all dead, aren’t they,” she said.

  “Oh, ya,” the old man said.

  She had an excitement in her eyes as she looked, it seemed, at each individual fish to be sure it wasn’t moving. Sam started talking to the old man about the probability of a good catch in the net now coming into shore, and she was drawn into the conversation, and he was relieved that her eyes, the color of the blue sea, were calmed.

  But now the old man moved a lever, and the winch speeded up with a rising whine, and he was exerting himself to keep the rope taut. The winch on the other truck also turned faster, and the two net-tenders on the beach moved rapidly from the trucks to the edge of the water, hurriedly piling up the incoming net. Now they could see the curving line of cork floats only a few yards away in the water.

  “Why do you pull so fast?” Sam asked the old man. “Are they fighting the net?”

  “Naw,” the old man said, “just want to keep her taut so they mightn’t jump over and git away.”

  The waves were breaking into the net now, but they could not yet see any fish. She put her two hands up to her cheeks and said, “Oh, now they know they’re caught!” She laughed. “Each one is wondering what happened!” He was glad she was making fun of herself even if her eyes were fixed in fear on the submerged net. She glanced up at her husband and said, “Oh, dear, they’re going to be caught now.”

  He started to explain, but she quickly went on, “I know it’s all right as long as they’re eaten. They’re going to eat them, aren’t they?”

  “They’ll sell them to the fish stores,” he said softly, so the old man at the winch wouldn’t hear. “They’ll feed people.”

  “Yes,” she said, like a child reassured. “I’ll watch it. I’m watching it,” she almost announced to him. But in her something was holding its breath.

  A wave receded then, and with one pull the bag of the net was drawn out of the surf. Voices sounded from both trucks; it wasn’t much of a catch. She saw the tails of small bluefish writhing up through the net (“They’re standing on their heads!”), and a great bass flopping, and sea robins trying to stretch their curved umber wings, and one flounder lying in the midst of this tangled rubble of the sea. She kept pointing here and there at a fish that had suddenly jerked or flopped over, and called out, “There’s one! There’s another one!”—meaning they were not dead yet and, he knew, must be rescued.

  The men opened the net and pulled out the bass and some bluefish, tossing the sea robins onto the sand and the flounder, and two blowfish, which immediately began to swell. She turned to the old man on the truck and, trying to smile, she called to him with a sharpness in her voice, almost a cry, “Don’t you take those?”
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  He drew an old man’s warmth from the glow of her face and the startling shape of her body under the striped jersey and the beige slacks. “They’re no good, ma’am,” he said.

  “Well, don’t you put them back?”

  The old man seemed to hesitate as though some memory of guilt had crossed his mind. “Sure. We put them back”—and sat there watching his partner, who was picking good fish out of the net and tossing the winged fish right and left onto the sand.

  There were now about fifty sea robins on the beach, some of them gulping, some perfectly still. Sam could feel the tension rising in her, and he walked over to the nearest fish and, feeling a tremor of repugnance, picked it up and threw it into the waves and came back to her. The pulse of its life was still in his fingers. “If I had something to hold them with,” she began.

  “You can’t throw all those fish back,” he said.

  “But they’re alive!” she said, desperately trying to smile and not to separate herself from him.

  “No, they’re dead. Most of them are dead, sweet.”

  “Are they dead?” she turned and asked the old man.

  “No, they ain’t dead. Most.”

  “Would they live again if they had water?”

  “Oh, sure, they come to,” he said, trying to assuage her but not moving from his place.

  She took off one sandal and went to a fish that was writhing and tried to flip it into the water, but it slipped away. Sam came over and picked it up and flung it into the sea. He was laughing now, and she kept saying, “I’m sorry. But if they’re alive . . . !”

  “It’s all right,” he said, “but they’re mostly dead by now. Look.” And he picked up one that was motionless; it felt flabby. He threw it into the water, and it arched itself as it struck, and she cried out, “There! It’s swimming!”

  Defeated and grinning, now that he saw the fishermen watching him with smiles on their faces, he went about throwing all the sea robins back into the water. He sensed that even with their smiles the men were somehow held by her insistence, and as he threw the slimy fish in one by one he saw each fish separately, each straining for its quart of sea, and he was no longer ashamed. And there were two fish left, both sea robins with white bellies and stiff umber wings and the beginnings of legs sprouting from both sides of their necks. They were motionless on their backs. He did not bend to pick them up because she seemed prepared to sacrifice them, and he went back to her, feeling, somehow, that if he let those two die on the beach she might come to terms with this kind of waste. For he had had to open the window at home, once, to let out a moth, which ordinarily he would have swatted, and while part of his heart worshiped her fierce tenderness toward all that lived, another part knew that she must come to understand that she did not die with the moths and the spiders and the fledgling birds and, now, with these fish. But it was also that he wished the fishermen to see that she was not quite so fanatic as to require these two last, obviously dead, sea robins to be given their chance.