The Shoemaker's Wife(158)

“Thank you for taking care of me, Enza.”

She turned to him. “You’ve been a terrible patient.”

Ciro laughed. “I know. Come and sit with me. I just want to look at you.”

Enza sat next to Ciro on the bed. He reached out and took both of her hands. She closed her eyes and felt the warmth of them. Enza loved Ciro’s beautiful hands; for all the hard labor he had done all of his life, he still had the long, lovely fingers of a musician or a painter.

His hands had created art. She had watched when he measured leather, suede, and silk, cut patterns, sewed shapes, and pressed the assembled boot he had sewn against the brushes. She could spend hours watching him make shoes. It was theater to her; every movement of his mastery had meaning and magic to it.

His hands had fed them. She had watched as he deftly carved stelline in delicate quick movements to make soup for their baby. Sometimes he made cheese, an elaborate operation that turned milk and rennet into ropes of mozzarella.

His hands had protected them. The hand that had first taken hers in the dark on the Passo Presolana was the same hand that eventually cradled her newborn son. The same hands that had encircled her body for the first time when she became his wife. “I’m going to miss your hands, Ciro. What will you miss?”

He looked up through the skylight, as if some bird would sail past with a ribbon in its beak, an aphorism written upon it in Latin, like the scrolls held by the cherubs over the tabernacle in San Nicola. Ciro knew what he would miss about this world, but he didn’t want to share it with his wife. He didn’t want to acknowledge that the life he loved so dearly and desperately was ending. But there was also part of him that wanted her to know. So he said, “I love the straight seam of a cut of good leather. I like to make shoes with my hands. I like the feeling when I’ve polished a pair of boots I’ve repaired and the lemon wax is fresh, and I look at the boots and think, I’ve made some fellow’s long walk into that mine more comfortable. I’ll miss making love to you, and knowing, after all these years, that there’s always something new about your body that delights me all over again. I’ll miss our son, because he reminds me of you.”

“I want you to pray, Ciro.”

“I can’t.”

“Please.”

“When I was in France, I was talking with a man in my regiment that I respected so much. His name was Juan Torres, and he had a wife, and three daughters. He was Puerto Rican, and he talked a great deal about one of his girls, Margarita. He would tell stories about her, and we would laugh, and he would remember.”

“You told me about him, honey. But you never told me how he died.”

“One night, when we were talking, we could hear the grind of the tanks in the distance, and he stood up to see what was coming toward us. We were so involved in our conversation, he forgot he was in a trench, and that there was a war going on around us. He was just a father telling a story about the daughter he loved, as though we were at a bar, and passing time on any ordinary Friday night. I reached up to pull him back down, and he was shot.

“He died soon after, and I buried him. On my way to Rome after the war, I wrote to Margarita and told her that the last thing her father said was how much she delighted him. I can’t pray to God to save myself, when others haven’t the luxury.”

“Papa.” Antonio appeared in the doorway. He took in his mother and father, and a look of concern crossed his face. He didn’t know whether to enter the room or run away, and a great part of him wanted to run. The moment Antonio had dreaded was approaching.

“There’s room here.” Ciro patted the side of the bed.

Antonio slipped off his shoes and lay next to his father. Enza reached across Ciro’s frail body and held her son’s hand. Ciro placed his hand on theirs.

This was the legacy of the only child: no matter how old he grew, there was always room in the bed for him. Antonio was the sole focus of the mother and father, as much a part of their relationship as they were for one another. Their small trinity had been sacrosanct, and it would always remain so. They had keenly observed their boy, and they had been better for it.

“Antonio, be good to your mother.”

“I will.”

“And take her home to the mountain. My brother will help you. Write to him.”

“I will, Papa.”

“Enza, you’ll go home with our son?”

“Yes,” she said softly.

“Good.” Ciro smiled. “Antonio, I am proud of you.”

“I know, Papa.”

“And remember that I always will be. I can’t believe that out of all the angels in heaven, God decided to send you to me. I’m the luckiest man you will ever meet.”

Antonio nestled against his father, as he had when he was small. He buried his face in his father’s neck, not thinking his father very lucky at all.

Enza got up and went to the kitchen. She lifted the sterile needles from the pot, filled the syringe with morphine, snapped the needle into place, and went back to her husband.

Antonio wept quietly into his father’s shoulder now, as Ciro encircled his son with his arms to comfort him. Ciro was now so weak, he could barely hold his boy.

“I’m going to give Papa a shot, honey,” Enza told her son. Antonio sat up and looked away, holding his father’s hand. Antonio had not been able to abide the needles these last weeks, and was heartsick as his father needed them administered more and more.