What Hell Is Not Read online

  ‘Don Pino! How are you?’

  She moves lithely. Her presence doesn’t belong to this place. She seems to be above it all.

  ‘I’m fine. What about you, Lucia? Did you finish that book?’

  ‘Yes, you need to give me a new one.’

  ‘I have it here with me.’

  Don Pino opens the bag he always carries with him and he hands her a novel. She takes it hesitantly. Then she rushes to the corner of the room and grabs a book that she gives back to Don Pino. Her hair leaves behind a silken whirlwind in her wake.

  ‘You keep it.’

  ‘Really? Can I?’

  ‘Yes, it’s a gift.’

  ‘I really loved Dickens. It was like I was walking through the streets of London.’

  Her eyes shine like sunshine on the morning sea.

  I’ll be in that city in just a few days and I’m wondering, considering how big the book is, whether he lent her Oliver Twist or David Copperfield.

  ‘This is Federico. He’s a student of mine.’

  ‘Hi.’

  ‘Nice to meet you.’

  My face is already warm because of how hot it is outside and I can feel the temperature and my embarrassment rising another degree. I’m just hoping that she won’t notice if I stay out of the light. Her hand is slender but her handshake is firm.

  ‘What do you study?’

  ‘Classics. I just finished my fourth year.’

  ‘Everyone who goes to Classics High is super-nerdy. They think they are better than everyone else.’

  ‘What high school do you go to?’

  ‘Teachers’ High.’

  ‘Do you want to be a teacher?’

  ‘Among other things. What do you want to be?’

  ‘I don’t know yet. I like words.’

  There are certain things that you don’t really understand even when you say them yourself. My answer makes her smile in a fleeting instant of light.

  ‘What’s it about? Which city does it take you to visit?’ she asks Don Pino as she points to the book.

  ‘It’s the story of a boy who lives by himself in a city where the sun is always setting. St Petersburg. It’s the city where Dostoevsky was born. He loved that city more than any other place in the world. One evening, that boy meets a woman on a bridge. She is crying. They talk late into the night. But it’s not night because there is a constant light there. So they decide to meet every night on the same bridge to talk. He falls hopelessly in love with her. Or, at least, that’s what he thinks. And then . . .’

  It wasn’t Don Pino who answered her, for the record. I was the one who answered her. I’ve fallen prey to a terrible disease that one of the girls at school calls the ‘Petrarch syndrome.’ Our teacher has ruined Petrarch with hours and hours of lectures on the poet and his love of books. He was one of the first to have his own private library. He took it with him everywhere he went, and some of his books were true one-of-a-kind works at the time. I never go out without a book in my hands and my room is a disorderly library. If I’m going to spend money, it’s going to be on a new book, even if I’ll never read it. In owning books I find a joy that I call ‘libridinous’: Arousal created by the presence of a book and by its accessibility combined with distance, since I still haven’t read it.

  ‘And . . .?’ Lucia asks me with a look of amazement on her face.

  ‘Read it!’

  ‘This one is worse than you, Lucia,’ Don Pino interjects.

  ‘Where is this city?’

  ‘In Russia,’ I answer.

  ‘And how do you pronounce the name of the author?’

  ‘Dostoevsky.’

  ‘Have you read his books?’

  ‘He’s one of my favorites.’

  ‘Why’s that?’

  I start thinking again about the summer between middle school and high school. I was as bored as a jellyfish on the open sea and I was sick of hearing how high school would be more interesting and more challenging. I opened a copy of Crime and Punishment that we had at home. And everything became more interesting. Not because of high school. But thanks to that book. That novel confined me to my room for many afternoons in a way totally different than the other books I had devoured up to that time, like The Lord of the Rings and The Neverending Story. Crime and Punishment didn’t seduce me. It repulsed me. It scared me.

  I enjoyed reading it because of how harsh it was, a transgression not sweet but rather dangerous. At every turn of the page, I was expecting to discover the umpteenth hallway in the labyrinth of the human heart. I couldn’t believe that there could be so many things in someone’s soul. So many dark and light things at the same time. Then I read ‘White Nights’ because it was short and because I thought that the character was my literary alter ego, holed up in his attic as he dreamed of a love as perfect as it was unattainable.

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘You don’t know a lot of things for someone who studies Classics. But you like words and books. I love books that describe faraway places and distant cities.’

  Lucia says this with a smile. She seems accustomed to saying what she thinks, without hesitation.

  ‘How are the Little Orlando rehearsals going?’ asks Don Pino.

  ‘Great, but we still need a Charlemagne.’

  ‘We’ll find someone. You’ll see.’

  ‘How can I play the part of the queen if there is no king? I’m also having problems with the lyrics. Sometimes I can’t seem to find the right words.’

  ‘Can I come and play soccer with you, Don Pino?’ asks one of the children out of the blue.

  ‘I wanna come too!’ exclaims the other automatically, even though he hasn’t understood what they are talking about.

  ‘Of course. Come with Lucia. That way your mother can have a little bit of time to herself.’

  ‘Only if they are good.’

  ‘We’re always good!’

  ‘Are you sure about that?’

  ‘We’re not always good. But mostly we’re good! We’re good more minutes than we’re bad!’

  ‘Well, okay then!’

  We laugh. I watch Lucia laugh. Her profile in that small, cluttered room seems like a port. I don’t know why but I want to read her ‘White Nights’ even though I don’t know her and we have nothing in common except for a book.

  As we head back, Don Pino is stopped by a woman.

  ‘Father, would you be so kind as to bless my son? Maybe that way, he’ll find a job.’

  ‘Is he looking for a job?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Well, then I’m going to give him a kick in the pants! Not a blessing!’

  We walk along in the spongy June air and the street swallows up our feet. I can’t stop thinking about that crucifix I saw in the church.

  ‘What does it mean “to give your life for your friends”?’

  ‘It means that you protect them and make their lives better with your own.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘With your time.’

  I look around me without focusing on anything. I feel like I’m stuck in my inner traffic. Too many thoughts haphazardly parked.

  ‘And with ice cream,’ adds Don Pino with a smile.

  ‘I don’t think I’ve ever turned down an ice cream in my life, which has admittedly been short. Ice cream’s almost up there with books, if you ask me.’

  As I answer, I linger on the pauses and emphasize the most important words with a very serious look on my face.

  ‘Here in Brancaccio there’s a guy who makes ice cream so good that it could raise the dead.’

  ‘That’s impressive, coming from a priest!’

  ‘Do you remember the time we took that trip to Monreale?’

  It’s one of the things that made the school year not a total waste. You always learn the best things outside of school. 3P came with us and so did our art teacher, a skinny waif of a man who could make a painting come to life like in Kurosawa’s Dreams. He was the one who showed that movie to our class and the
fallout was devastating.

  ‘After St Sophia in Istanbul, it’s the largest mosaic in the world. And the largest in the West. Six thousand four hundred square meters of tiles subdivided into 130 enormous scenes and single figures, all immersed in a sea of gold that peels away the texture of the stone and transports the viewer into the paradisiacal light of God. The Duomo was built like a great theological study of light. It was conceived so as to follow the light of the seasons. The light reaches its greatest intensity on December 21, with the winter solstice. And it reaches its lowest intensity on June 21, with the summer solstice. It’s illuminated all year long by physical and metaphysical light so that the light shines on the Byzantine-era gold of the tiles on the right day of the liturgical calendar,’ our teacher explained.

  ‘What’s the liturgical calendar?’ Gianni asked me.

  ‘What do I know? It must be something to do with the Church.’

  ‘The world is safe where the light shines. It frees the world from darkness. Nothing is left to chance in this building. Unfortunately, the windows are covered up and so you don’t get to enjoy the scientific precision in play here. Whenever you hear people talk about the Middle Ages in disparaging terms, you can answer that nobody today would be capable of such scientific, technical, and theological mastery. The first tile in this allegory of light was set in 1174.’

  ‘Allegory of light? What does that mean?’ asked Gianni again.

  He holds me (rightly, I might add) to be the greatest expert on the useless encyclopedia of rhetorical figures that you find in literary anthologies.

  ‘It means that the light represents something other than the light itself.’

  ‘And what does that mean?’

  ‘Maybe, if you shut up and listen . . .’

  Gianni raised his middle finger and it wasn’t intended as an allegory.

  ‘The Duomo of Monreale, the cathedral, and San Giovanni degli Eremiti share the astronomic alignment with the winter and summer solstices. The temple was meant to be the physical representation of the teachings in the images: God is the creator and the architect of the world and man has been called upon to be the same. To distinguish between dark and light and create order out of chaos.’

  The mathematical laws used in their construction were based on the language that God had used for creation. Anyone who entered had to walk along a path of purification through light, and the stories on the wall marked each stage of this progression. It culminated in the eyes of Christ Pantocrator from which everything flows and returns, just like the lines from Dante’s Paradiso, as Don Pino pointed out:

  The glory of He who moves all things

  Seeps through the universe and shines

  In one part more and in another less.

  ‘I really can’t stand Dante,’ Gianni started up again. ‘Inferno is okay. Just okay, though. But Purgatory is like boredom via suppository. And Paradiso? Let’s not even go there!’

  ‘Petrarch is much better, I know.’

  ‘Petrarch is like taking a laxative.’

  Don Pino snaps me out of my freewheeling, anarchic flow of memories. They are capable of absenting me from the present, causing me to lose my way.

  ‘Just think of the tiles that make up those mosaics. First they are millions of tiles separated from one another, each with their own color, shape, and imperfections. Then they come together to compose an image. The image of God. We are like those tiles, each one of them arranged next to another, and together they make up God’s mosaic in the world.’

  ‘But I don’t really care so much about being part of a mosaic. I’d like to understand something about the little tile itself.’

  ‘And how can you, if you don’t consider them as a whole?’

  I had thought I’d fulfilled my duty by going to Brancaccio. But now here I am, lying on my bed and thinking that I need to go back, because Don Pino has asked me to. I should be thinking about my summer vacation and going to the beach. I should be thinking about England and not about that priest. And I shouldn’t be thinking of Lucia, either. But there are certain thoughts that we don’t think. Those thoughts think about us, just like words from songs that pop into your mind for no apparent reason. Those are the thoughts that I fear the most, boats that arrive in the port without warning. You can only imagine what cargo they carry and where they come from.

  Manfredi comes into my room, without knocking, as usual.

  ‘Hey Poet, what’s all this melancholy going on in your room? It’s like the attic of one of those young bohemians who died young from sadness and TB.’

  ‘Since when did you start working in the “other people’s business” department?’

  ‘Poets either die from TB or from love. Which one is it?’

  ‘Sometimes they just die from the overwhelming desire to smack someone in the mouth.’

  ‘You’re all talk,’ says Manfredi. He smirks like De Niro in The Untouchables and pretends that someone is holding him back and keeping him from jumping me. He’s obsessed with that film and he especially loves the scene where they are having lunch and someone’s brains get splattered all over the table with a baseball bat.

  ‘Would you please leave me alone?’

  ‘What’s the matter with you, brother?’

  ‘There’s nothing the matter with me. Nothing.’

  ‘There’s more something in your nothing than you’re letting on. And you know it.’

  He’s right. But this time, my ‘nothing’ is just a way of alluding to something that I can’t wait to tell him so that I can get his advice. It’s just that I need to figure out what is happening to me before I let someone explain it to me. For once, I want to be the first one to arrive at the appointment with myself and I don’t want anyone else to get there first, even Manfredi.

  ‘Are you coming to the concert with us?’

  ‘Of course I’m coming.’

  ‘Well, you better get a move on.’

  I had forgotten about the concert tonight. It’s only the biggest event of the summer, and I forgot all about it. What’s wrong with me?

  Chapter 16

  ‘The priest is hiding the cops. Believe me. With all these people coming and going.’

  So decrees the captain of the Brancaccio crew.

  ‘Are you sure?’ asks Mother Nature.

  ‘He even went on television. And if the journalists get started, we’re finished. They will make us look like assholes.’

  Mother Nature remains silent and keeps thinking about the words uttered by the man from Corleone: ‘We need to break that priest’s balls. The kids like him too much.’

  In Brancaccio, it’s Mother Nature who gives the orders.

  Mother Nature and his brothers are part of a Trinity and they control the neighborhood like Father, Son, and Holy Ghost: One of them gives the orders; one looks after their finances; and one pulls the trigger. The only difference with this earthly trinity is that you need to substitute the word ‘love’ with ‘respect,’ the perfect synthesis of loyalty and fear – something even God can’t afford.

  ‘I eat and I make it so others can eat.’ That’s their motto. And it’s something that not even a Holy Father, with his Daily Bread, can guarantee.

  The Corleone family has given them its blessing to rule over Brancaccio, and they have been grateful for the opportunity to do so after Michele ‘the Pope’ Greco’s hold on power began to slip in 1984. They are known as ‘the Boys.’ And they are the definition of the term. They know everything. They see everything. And they do everything. With the help of others: The Brancaccio crew, including the Hunter.

  They are young and determined. They are the family’s new muscle. The Mafia capo is the god who knows and decides. He is the eyes, the mind, and the word. He exercises pure power.

  The three of them bear down on those streets like a low sky. They guarantee protection even when the price that you pay is sometimes asphyxiation.

  Power is control. There is no such thing as good power that loves its
subjects. Power is necessary. It ensures balance and survival. And when no one is going hungry, there’s little reason to complain.

  ‘Are you ready?’

  ‘Whatever you say, Father.’

  Mother Nature pretends to be counting money.

  ‘He didn’t even want the spare change we offered to fix the roof at the school. You know how stubborn he is. He even found the money to build his center, though we had doubled the price. He’s one hard-headed priest. After they marched for Falcone, we blew up the van from the construction company that was working at the church. But he just keeps on going . . .’

  ‘Is the rest of him as hard as his head? Let’s soften him up a little bit. Just like they do with octopus. But we need to make sure that we get him by his tentacles. And let’s give his friends a little massage, too.’

  Chapter 17

  It must be the fifteenth time that I’ve reread the same page. Sometimes I feel like my brain has been jailed for so long that not even books can succeed in unlocking my imagination. There’s always a word stuck edgewise between the words on the page that continues to make me lose my train of thought. Or could it be that it puts me on a train of thought that leads me back to my own self? Lucia. I need to keep reading this truly interesting book while the music in the background deadens the noise coming from the street. I need to dream about my trip to England and concentrate on what I need to pack. Lucia. I need to stop losing control of the words that I am thinking. I need to find the way to do it. Lucia. I must. Lucia. I must. Lucia. I’ve had enough!

  Even though I am a series of thoughs, my head is filled with thoughts of love. Maybe it’s because love is what unifies the threads, the pieces, and the fragments and molds them into gold. And love always waits to ambush you, just as day turns to night. Love with a capital L, as Petrarch wrote, like a hidden god that you suddenly discover in your room waiting to mess everything up and give you that sinking feeling in your gut. When that happens, all you can do is lie on your bed and stare at the ceiling, listening to some melancholy song on the radio, about how even raging war can’t take away from the love felt inside.