The Islands of Divine Music Page 3

  Unlike her father the barber, unlike herself, Giuseppe had no education and few words. Printed words were like ants on a tablecloth, numbers something you grabbed with the tips of your fingers. He was twice her age when they met, an old wolf prowling strange, foggy hills for food or women, who knew? He worked the leather tannery and he carried towers of baggage and shined shoes in hotels for the rich, and she thought he knew only three or four words in English and maybe only fifty in Italian. In a breadline, the week they met, he was barely able to say, Stew, please.

  They married in the courthouse when she was five months pregnant, and lived with her father, who wheezed under his blanket. Their first child, a boy named Giuseppe, was stillborn, and they all wept for two days until the earth split in pieces under their feet, and the city caught fire.

  The earthquake made their beds skate and block the door. Rosari, Lazaro, and the Benedetti family, who shared the room, howled as the building swayed like a ship with the escape hatch blocked. By the time they made it outside, Telegraph Hill was on fire.

  Giuseppe was shining a rich man’s shoes in front of the Majestic Theater on 9th and Market when the seismic convulsion changed his life forever. With a mixture of terror and awe he witnessed the enormous brick edifice, with its roof seventy-five feet above the floor, burst open like a pig on a spit. He stood holding his box of rags and wax as the theater collapsed, as the clay bats missed his head by inches, by a miracle. America was burning and falling around him. God was telling rich and poor alike: He was not pleased.

  Rosari never knew that Giuseppe communicated with God because he never mentioned it. He was stoical, conciliatory. The death of his namesake babe was a punishment from the Lord, as was this earthquake. God spoke to Giuseppe in signs, and the destruction of San Francisco was meant to show him by way of example how to make money in America.

  Rubble needed to be cleared. Charred and half-toppled houses needed to be demolished to open lots for new buildings. Giuseppe was not a big man, but he became enormous in his strength. He was sinewy and tall for an Italian peasant, and he could swing a sledgehammer like an ape. He sold the box and shoe wax and became a wrecker.

  The city smoldered, the family moved to a basement on Columbus Street, and Giuseppe made money by way of destruction. He attacked houses and toppled them like trees to make room for new construction. He chopped down buildings with a hammer, destroyed banks and offices. He removed the citadels of the rich from the face of the earth, returned the broken towers, wrought of brick and wood, to dust.

  And as he worked they had six children, and America went to war with Italy, and wine was illegal to buy. Giuseppe became the father of Narciso, Francesca, Ludovico, Grazia, Mary, and Joe, and he destroyed buildings by day and made wine in his backyard with a cast-iron press by night. He took off for work out of town for months at a time, leaving Rosari to care for the children and the invalid father, who wheezed and barely moved. He wandered and found work and came back with money, rarely telling Rosari what he was about. Whenever he could, he took the oldest boys out of school to clear piles of rubble, but Rosari put her foot down with the youngest. She kept little Joe in class because she knew he had a gift.

  The family moved to a house on the Southern Pacific tracks in the East Bay, and Giuseppe planted a garden and bought chickens, rabbits, and a goat. He bought property for fifty dollars at county auctions, worthless swamp that some attorney on the East Coast didn’t bother paying the tax on, and his family went without groceries for a month. In Italy, only the wealthy land barons could own property, but in America, Giuseppe was no longer a peasant. With the help of his literate children, he signed ownership contracts, magical documents stamped with gold seals.

  The tales of his strength grew among family and neighbors. Giuseppe would break walnuts on his biceps and bend dimes with his teeth. He broke the bones of three men who tried to steal his money in Oakland. There was nothing on earth he couldn’t move when he was angry. A family in Richmond, hearing a ferocious noise of growling and shrieking, stepped outside to witness an entire house moving down the street. Giuseppe had jacked it onto skids and was pushing it to a vacant lot.

  By the time America went to war again with Italy, Giuseppe’s sons had made a business of building instead of wrecking, and he found himself wandering more and more in the hills of San Francisco, drinking with old Italians and listening to God. He often felt directed by God to visit certain places or do certain things, and this was how, somewhere in midcentury, his private thoughts took on strange biblical proportions.

  When Giuseppe was seventy-nine years old he decided to marry Maria Guadalupe Diego, a seventeen-year-old prostitute from the Latino barrio of the Mission District. He stepped out of Molinari’s on Columbus, a little tipsy, and stood on the steps of the church overlooking Washington Square. This was when he first got the notion that God wanted him to remarry, as he stood on the steps and watched the pigeons circle the spires and fluted alcoves overhead. And even though Giuseppe was currently married, God told him it was time to do it again.

  Maria was working North Beach when she spotted Giuseppe shuffling across the park in a forty-year-old, three-piece, pin-striped suit. Two months pregnant by God only knew which salesman from Tulsa or sailor from San Diego, she heard the child speak to her and express its desire to live. This was three days before Mañuel and one of his girls were supposed to take her for the abortion. She lay on the grass in Washington Square watching a cloud the shape of a woman’s face while two men played a flute and a clarinet, and the child said, I want this from her stomach. Hijo, she thought, I need a husband. Some rich old geezer who will leave me alone.

  When she approached Giuseppe on the church steps three pigeons hovered inches above his hat and shoulders. Maria began to ask for directions, but laughed unavoidably when the birds landed on the old-timer’s hat and shoulders. He shook his head and arms, then found himself laughing, too. A few minutes later they were speaking a mixture of Spanish, Italian, and pidgin English, punctuated by Giuseppe’s extreme chivalry.

  My wife has passed away, he lied in Italian because this was what God probably wanted him to say. As he brushed a tear from his eye, his gold-plated wristwatch flashed.

  I am so very sorry for you, she lied in Spanish. She wore a white dress and leather sandals. A blue rebozo draped her head and shoulders. The consoling touch of her small hand on his was no more than that of a feather.

  Giuseppe’s wife of more than fifty years, Rosari, was informed of the bigamy by their daughter Francesca, a week after the marriage.

  They even got his birth date in Calabria, Francesca said. She leaned over the Chronicle, which was spread across her broad lap. Look at that, Ma. It can’t be him. You think it’s him? Or else somebody found his ID in some saloon?

  Rosari pulled on the hem of her black dress. The two women sat facing the street, on the porch of the family house in the East Bay. They were silent for some time. Then Rosari said, Well, that cuts it. Enough is enough.

  Giuseppe’s children and grandchildren were astounded by his September romance across the bay. It wasn’t just embarrassing, even disgusting when you actually thought about it, but wasn’t it also illegal? they asked each other. You think they check the records on people? You think in San Francisco they care if an old goat marries a child? In San Francisco?

  Who is this little gold brick? Who is this home-wrecker? Francesca shrieked.

  I thought Pop was the home-wrecker, her older brother, Narciso, answered.

  Precisely where Maria came from was unclear, but it was said she had family who tended sheep and rainy farmland for a land baron in the red-and-green mountains in the Oaxaca department of Mexico. Her older brother had sneaked into California with her and died from a foot infection soon after. The curandera who attended the ailing boy with herbs and incantations realized a week before his death that there was nothing to be done to keep him alive, and she told Maria this on a fog-shrouded summer morning on Valencia Street, stirring i
nstant coffee at the card table. The girl, then only fourteen, decided that afternoon that she would have to become a prostitute in order to survive.

  She was dark and exquisite, even at that age, with deep eyes which flowed into a fierce anger and then, instantly, ebbed into the sorrow of a confused child. Hustling for a dope peddler named Mañuel near hotels, bars, and nightclubs in North Beach cost her the little affection and sympathy she’d had from neighboring women. She endured their vitriol, avoided their church and markets, and slept frequently in unlocked cars. Her hatred of men, of their rankness and animal minds, almost matched the disgust she felt toward the small, elegant body she was trapped inside of.

  A woman who also worked Broadway and North Beach found Maria’s marriage to Giuseppe the funniest thing she’d seen in years, but Maria saw little humor in the undertaking. She listened to the need of the child inside her. To Giuseppe she was a virgin and remained so, in spite of the pregnancy, throughout their years together.

  It may have been senility. It may have been the overwhelming purity of her beauty in his eyes. Some of the family attributed it to vermouth and closed the book there. Regardless, Giuseppe had not felt such harmony with the world around him, the eucalyptus trees and junipers, the carved stones, the gleam of oil on the bay at dusk, for as long as memory. And God had often dealt Giuseppe a mysterious hand, giving him bread for destruction instead of craft, making him appear the rake in the bars and social clubs of Little Italy with a wife conveniently stirring pots across the bay when, as He and Giuseppe only knew, he’d been struck impotent some twenty years earlier after an injury and a disgusting encounter in the Tenderloin. And now God had told Giuseppe Verbicaro, brittle-boned old sinner with a limp sex, drinker and dreamer with a big fedora and wandering brogans, to provide for this angel.

  Maria’s cappuccino-colored skin, her sudden laughter and eyes black as midnight, made him smile like a baby. The smell of her hair was from another world. So when she informed him that she was with child, about two months after the courthouse wedding, he asked simply how and by whom. She answered with a steady voice: Dios sabe and Nadie. God knows. Nobody.

  He accepted the miracle. Maybe he remembered the story, told by another Italian shoe shine before the earthquake, about a woman in the old Sutro Baths at the Cliff House. Sperm, thrashing madly upstream in public pools, could make things unsafe for women anywhere outside their own bathrooms. Maybe he took it the way he received the columns of sunlight finding him through morning fog on a long walk to the liquor store on Grant, as something too beautiful to ask questions about.

  One night he decided that God had slipped between Maria’s thighs while she slept and planted His seed with a penis as thin as a thread of gold. God’s penis was incredibly thin, but it was also unbelievably long. It stretched through the open window of their flat on Green Street, past the top of the Coit Tower; it reached down from the sky, where a full moon hung beside it like a testicle filled with celestial semen. Giuseppe chuckled as he found his way to the toilet in the dark. God has only one ball, he said to himself.

  The marriage turned out better than Maria had expected, due in large part to Giuseppe’s impotence, but also to his generosity. He gave her money for nice clothes and food, for movies and tickets to the Funhouse and Playland at the beach. He watched her make dolls out of cornhusks and yarn. That first summer, learning that she craved fresh cherries, he walked a few miles with her to the Japanese Tea Garden and picked his fedora full amid bonsai maples and miniature pagodas.

  In many respects she was still a child, coerced at an early age into selling her body and her childhood. A pimp named Mañuel had seen her potential and made her a lucrative product. He injected her with drugs, raped and sodomized her, beat her with his fists until she thought of the dark water and the peace of falling from the Golden Gate. It was the unborn infant who saved her, who gave her a reason to find a way to live.

  News of the pregnancy put the frosting on Giuseppe’s disgrace. What could there be under the sun to shock and disgust you more than this? his children wanted to know. But the birth inspired a sea change. Without plan or announcement his daughters and grandchildren came to Green Street with gifts, with ravioli and a whole salmon and fig cookies for the mother, with a flannel bunting and bibs for the baby. They held the child and marveled at his beautiful skin, the same as his mother’s, at his perfect oval face and black eyes. They took Maria shopping at Macy’s and made her eat so her hips and breasts could get bigger. Francesca’s daughter Susan struggled to understand Maria’s Spanish, even the name of her son. Hey-Zeus, you call him?

  Sí, Jesús, she replied.

  He’s a little miracle, that’s for sure.

  They babysat while Maria went to the Funhouse and flew down the wooden slide on a potato sack or lost herself among the mirrors. They scolded Giuseppe for being a skinflint, and they threw out his liquor bottles. They shook their heads and sighed, imagining the old man’s faux virility. They walked around the kitchen holding the little miracle to their breasts, singing old show tunes.

  One morning between three and four Giuseppe had trekked out of bed to the toilet when he heard a rattling. Somebody was trying the door. He stood behind it a moment, then cleared his throat. The rattling stopped.

  Hey, Giuseppe whispered. He thought it might be old Desiderio, locked out for the night by his angry wife. Che cosa?

  A man’s voice on the other side spoke in English and Spanish. He said he was Maria’s family. Giuseppe opened the door.

  The fellow was young with slicked-back hair, and he kept sniffing like he had a cold. Giuseppe made espresso. The two men tiptoed around the kitchen to Maria’s bedroom door, where they could see mother and babe sleeping. The man sniffed and chuckled. His hands and eyes moved constantly. They returned to the kitchen.

  Giuseppe pulled the salmon, two feet long and stiff as a plank, from the icebox and placed it in a pan to thaw. He moved slowly, as if most of his joints were as frozen as the fish, crushing garlic and basil leaves into a bowl. The young man asked why in the hell Maria had chosen him to fleece. Giuseppe didn’t understand his English. There was a pistol, shiny as tinsel, in the young man’s hand. This he understood. What the fuck did this anciano think he was doing? Ancient old man in pajamas holding a fish.

  In the old stories, in the Good Book which Giuseppe couldn’t read, the Lord made a man and a woman and kicked them out of paradise for being nosy. Later, in Giuseppe’s recollection, He sent a child to save us all. It was a strange plan when you thought about it. He gets with child a virgin, then appoints some old man to look after them.

  The young man said he needed Maria because she brought it in fast and because nobody ducks out on him. He laughed. You can buy it on the street next week, if I don’t kill you.

  The gun barrel was less than a yard from Giuseppe’s face. The flat was silent, save the ticking of a clock and the occasional bleating of ships on the bay. Giuseppe wondered what God might have up His sleeve. Was it time for him to die? Was it time for Maria and her little miracle to die? And at that moment the little miracle screamed.

  It was a scream like an ice pick in the head, like a siren to wake the dead out of hell. The young man covered his ears, and Giuseppe made like his old hero, DiMaggio, clearing the bases at Seals Stadium. He made like he was bringing down the house with one swing, with a fish as his hammer. The man’s shiny head cracked like a walnut against the door frame. Blood seeped from his ears and mouth. Maria knelt and picked up the pistol. Gracias, she whispered to Giuseppe.

  He fitted into a large burlap potato sack, but it took both of them to carry him to the pier. Already the produce trucks were arriving with their many gifts from the fields and valleys of California, with dates and avocados, with oranges bright as the sun from the south. And the child on his mother’s hip pointed the way, singing in his own tongue as Maria and Giuseppe slouched under the weight of our world and trudged through the darkness to the water.

  THE PENNY ARCADE
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  Joe

  Joe would have been Giuseppe but for his mother’s trick. Giuseppe and Rosari Verbicaro’s first child, whom they’d named after his father, had died when delivered from the womb. The old midwives were as confused and distraught as the mother, and they searched their brains for reasons. Rosari was too young, perhaps. Rosari didn’t drink enough wine or nanny-goat milk. The mother had her own theory, which had to do with the name and the smoldering temper of her husband, and she insisted on giving the second, also a boy, his own name. He grew to be a beautiful but slow-witted lad, and Rosari succeeded in giving birth to five more after him, three girls and two boys, the last of which Giuseppe demanded to tag his name onto. Rosari nodded, but when the time came for signing the certificate, she smiled and wrote the name Joe.

  By this time, English had invaded the household vernacular of all but the old man, and the children preferred calling the baby Joe, anyway. It took Giuseppe a few years to catch on. He sat at the table after a day of backbreaking work, stewed on homemade wine, while the children were laughing and fighting over the last serving of string beans. When he asked what the boy’s name was, Giuseppe or Joe, Rosari said, in Italian, What’s it to you, old-timer? It worked.

  Joe’s brothers and sisters were all taken out of school in order to work, either to haul debris for the old man or to sew at some sweatshop, but Rosari kept her youngest in class because she recognized his shrewd mind. Little Joe had a better head for math than his elementary school teachers. He discovered the Fibonacci sequence on his own, the wonderful pyramid of relationships, while doodling in his notebook during grammar. He stared at ceilings and buildings and calculated the dimensions, the number of joists and beams in the school. He figured probabilities for an illiterate bookmaker at the dog track when he was ten, the numbers tumbling inside his brain while he groomed and walked the whippets after school, and was given a nickel for his efforts.