The Shoemaker's Wife(45)
Massimo Zito took good care of the workers. Occasionally the men received the leftovers from first class, so Ciro sampled his first croissant, steamed asparagus, and boiled shrimp.
The men were allowed to bathe at the shift change before dawn. They climbed up to the second tier of the ship and, in an area cordoned off by bamboo screens, used one of the fire hoses as a showerhead and lye soap to scour off the coal dust. By the end of the week, Ciro noticed that the lye soap could not strip all of the coal-dust residue off his skin. His hands, face, and ears had a gray pallor where the dust had embedded itself in his pores. He understood why his fellow workers looked far older than he, when they were actually close in age. This was brutal work that took a toll on the body immediately.
Ciro pulled on a clean jumpsuit in the deck changing area before returning down to the pit. He took a moment to look out over the water. As the sun rose over the Atlantic, the sea took on a glistening coral patina. The distant horizon appeared fringed in gold. Ciro lit a cigarette and took a long, slow drag off it. It was his sixteenth birthday that morning, and he took a quiet moment to celebrate it.
“Two more days,” said Luigi Latini, who had worked beside Ciro in the pit from the first day. Luigi was from the south, the province of Foggia on the Adriatic. He was of medium height, and built like a sturdy square box. At twenty, he looked out for Ciro like a reliable older brother. Luigi had a small nose and large brown eyes, which gave him the appearance of a thoughtful rabbit.
“It’s almost over, Luigi.” Ciro handed him the cigarette.
“Where are you going?”
“I’m meeting a family who has sponsored me. They live in Manhattan. How about you?”
“I’m going to Mingo Junction, Ohio. My parents made a match. I’m going to marry Alberta Patenza,” Luigi said as he handed the cigarette back to Ciro.
“Have you met her?”
“Only her picture. Che bella.”
“Have you written to her?”
“Oh, yes, many times.” Luigi said.
“You seem worried for a man who has a beautiful girl waiting for him.”
“What if she’s brutta? You know, there are stories. Parents make a match through letters, and they switch the pictures. Suddenly Philomena is replaced by Graciela. That sort of thing. You could end up with a faccia di bow wow when you thought you were getting a princess.”
“I hope that doesn’t happen to you.”
Luigi shrugged. “If it does, I run.”
Ciro laughed. “If you can run as fast as you shovel coal, you’ll do all right.”
“In photographs, Alberta’s nose is small, like mine.” Luigi rubbed the ridge of his nose with his fingers. “I need to keep this nose in the family. If I marry a girl with a big nose, then I have big-nosed babies, and I don’t want that.”
Ciro laughed. Luigi wasn’t the only man with a list of what he wanted in a wife. Ciro had been amending his list since he first noticed girls. He didn’t much care about her nose, but he did want a girl who was sweet, kind, and moved through the world with grace. She had to be beautiful, because like any work of art, beauty reveals new aspects over time. “You will have your small-nosed babies, Luigi,” Ciro said, taking the last drag off the cigarette before flicking it into the ocean. The orange tip flashed then went out in midair. “Everyone should have what they want.” Ciro leaned against the railing and remembered who had given him that bit of wisdom. Enza Ravanelli of Schilpario. The sky was cobalt blue the night he kissed her. He had been carrying a shovel exactly like the one he used to load coal into the pit of the SS Chicago.
Ciro had begun to notice the overlapping themes of his life. The seemingly disparate pieces of his experience weren’t so separate after all. Happenstance and accidents didn’t seem so random. The mystery of the connections intrigued him, but he wasn’t going to agonize about them, and he had not yet reached an age where he was interested in analyzing them either. He figured that all the threads of his experience would eventually be sewn together, taking shape in harmony and form to create a glorious work of art. But who would sew those pieces together? Who would make him whole? That was something Ciro thought about a lot.
Before he went to sleep, Ciro thought about girls instead of praying. Girls were a kind of religion to him. He visualized their sweet charms and the haunting details of their beauty, black eyes obscured by a tulle veil, a graceful hand on the stem of a parasol, or Concetta Martocci’s small ankles the night he caught her with the priest. These fleeting memories soothed him, but lately, as he drifted into sleep, his thoughts had gone to Enza Ravanelli, whose kiss he remembered with particular delight. When he thought of Enza, he didn’t imagine her lips, her eyes, or her hands. Rather, he saw her in full, standing before him in the blue night air, every aspect of her beauty revealed in the light.
Chapter 10
A GREEN TREE
Un Albero Verde
The morning the SS Chicago pulled into the docks of lower Manhattan, it felt to Ciro as if a champagne cork had been popped over New York City, drenching the harbor in gold confetti as sprays of sea foam showered the decks. Even the tugboats conspired to make a smooth transition as they nudged the ocean liner deftly into position without lurching or grinding against the pilings. The bellows of the horn and the cheers of the passengers lined up on deck seemed to give the ship its last shot of steam as it docked in the harbor.