Roof and Sky
BY VALERIA PARRELLA, TR. SONYA GRAY REDI
“Peace and good music to all.”
—Enzo Avitabile, Resistance Party
Robinson Park, Naples, September 28, 2002
tuna + crane = reptile
fly + whale = ?
I lift my chin and glance at the paper of the guy on my left, but all I see are a bunch of tiny boxes still blank. So I turn to the guy on my right, but that bastard has placed his whole forearm along the questionnaire’s length. I whisper to him, “Number fifteen?” but he doesn’t respond, won’t even look at me. He just clenches his invisible shield in his fist and keeps on writing. And how he writes! I look around, surrounded by desks, chairs, and job candidates, thousands of us all hunched over in rows and lines beneath this circus tent like we’re playing a giant game of Battleship. I’m L48: badly hit, nearly sunk. So nothing, then. I note on my hand that I’ve skipped question fifteen and proceed. I mark my hand because paper isn’t allowed; it’s either the desk or my hand.
When the man from city hall says we have five minutes left, I hear a few anxious sighs before I return to question fifteen.
So quickly, quickly—a fish plus a bird make a reptile. So far, this is clear. I take it as an indisputable fact at this point, which means an insect and a mammal make… an amphibian? It seems the amphibians, the mollusks, are missing. Then there are those that look like worms but reproduce asexually, so they’re something else…
I don’t have time: that man from city hall has been peremptory. When he utters “Stop” into the microphone, we act like we’re in a brain teaser tournament, we have to put down our pens and wait for the proctors to collect them. This means I have about one minute to write a category of a living thing in this blank space, so I shamelessly turn towards the guy on my right and nearly stand to peek over his arm. A proctor spots me and begins crossing the hall to yell at me, fine me, slap my hands, disqualify me from the tournament, who knows? But the guy defends himself on his own. With the anxious face of a thirtysomething whose sweat is causing his glasses to slide off his nose, he turns towards me and goes, “What the fuck are you copying?”
I widen my eyes and shout, “THE WHALE!”
And the proctor: “L48!”
But our voices are drowned out by the microphone. “Stop writing. Thanks, everyone. The results will be published online on our website and in the official newsletter on October 14th. Good day.”
A shitstorm ensues as everyone gets up from their little chairs and spits on their hands to clean off the ink.
Exhausted, L49 falls back into his seat. Wiping away his sweat, he gives me a surly look, but I’m happy because he was afraid me. We were in the first group of seven thousand, and the M-Zs are coming this afternoon, but he feared me and had to grip his shield the whole time.
I could’ve snatched his spot. There are ten spots, and he could’ve come in eleventh. If I had managed to copy his answer, the tenth could have been me.
The other fourteen thousand don’t exist for two like us.
God forbid, if only it were worth it, we’d hang onto the trolley so as not to go on foot: we have to get up to this building’s attic, up to where the stairs end, to the place where, when it rains, it pours so even our hands get wet.
They all turn their phones back on before assailing the buses, but I keep walking until I reach the parking lot since I took half the day off anyway. Whenever our godmother Carmela would catch us studying, she’d advise us in dialect, “Learn how to fix cars!” And maybe if I’d listened to her back then, I wouldn’t be working for seven hundred a month in a store where the opening hours are precise and the closing ones are not.
I slalom around dog crap until I reach the Edenlandia amusement park. From there, a wall runs to the end of the street; it imprisons all the rides, zoo animals, and eucalyptus trees in Robinson Park and ends at the Overseas Exhibition fairgrounds with a giant ad for EverythingBride.
I sit on the guardrail in the parking lot and wait for the buses to leave. I watch them, and sometime between the C25 and 47 Express, I spot a poster. I cross the lot to reach it. Enzo Avitabile at the Resistance Party: a celebration to commemorate the Four Days of Naples. While I’m still reading the fine print, I call Emilia, detain her, and shackle her to the evening. That way, not only will dear Enzo sing “Roof and Sky” to me tonight, but I’ll reconcile myself with this neighborhood, which I only visit to take job exams and see Napoli’s losing soccer matches.
Change of itinerary: instead of catching the 180 and heading straight home, I opt for the longer route and make my way through the city.
The longer route requires a metro, a funicular, and another metro. Between transfers and sections on foot, it takes about an hour and a half, but today I’m not in the mood to deal with the addicts on the bus, especially since I’ll find them outside my building anyway.
At Piazza Amadeo, I stop for a coffee and switch from the metro to the funicular. I square my shoulders and mind the two-inch gap.
When the funicular arrives, I walk briskly: I don’t want anyone to realize that I’m taking the scenic route on purpose. It’s a restrained hurry, though, not the frantic hurry of people who live on those American streets, the kind that have signs with numbers rather than names.
The streets of my neighborhood resemble the ones in American films, where taxi drivers dart across lanes like they’re crossing a chess board. Except, for us, there isn’t even a shadow of a taxi.
I hurl myself into the last car and enjoy the AC in the silence of anonymity. I get to Vomero. When I exit, I’m more relaxed, more composed, and the song that I forced Emilia to listen to three times in a row when she dropped by the store starts pounding away in my head.
It was the second time she visited. She’d returned to exchange some headphones she’d bought on her first visit because, according to her, the aluminum parts picked up the infrared: she could no longer hear well. She wanted them to have a long cord, much longer, and for the cord to be light blue or metallic, at least—definitely not black.
So I told her, “Just try them out. I’ll budge on the color, but listen to how they sound first.” I stuck “Roof and Sky ” into her headphones. I made her listen to it three whole times. She kept her eyes closed. I watched her while ripping the tape off some cardboard boxes, and I thought about my attic apartment, which is like that, with the roof right above, then suddenly the sky.
Diving into the metro headed for the hills, I yank my ticket from my pocket: my trip has taken seventy minutes so far. I’m about to run out of time, but it doesn’t matter, I can easily make it to the hospital district on what’s left. From there on out, nobody asks anyone for a ticket.
My neighborhood has the same number as a law: 167. One day I’ll check the legal code and find out what it says.
Architecture students sometimes ride the bus just to look at the buildings. Never daring to get off, they snap pictures from their windows like Japanese tourists, with their jaws dropped. The shapes and creativity blow them away. I live in one of these creations. L48/167/LOT 11/ BLOCK 20/ STAIR A/9TH FLOOR/BROKEN ELEVATOR. It looks like either a pyramid or a sail. And the sail facing it is built so close that even the sun can’t squeeze through, so the rain stagnates in puddles, and mosquitoes torture us till November. A web of clotheslines links the sails.
“Mom, where does our house end?” I would ask.
“Right up to where the clothes are hung.”
So, in the dark, I’d tug the pulley to push my socks a little further.
God forbid they go down in the middle of the street. I could meet God on the tracks.
Keep an eye on me: I don’t know how to cross. I felt lonely, so I ran away from school.
“Excuse me, but what’s happening?” I pull her by her jacket towards me.
“Wait. Don’t we want to figure out what’s happening?”
“Aren’t there enough people already? Don’t we want just to go in?”
Emilia frowns while I pay five for me, plus five for her, and drag her in; in the meantime, people keep rushing to the entrance, and Emilia’s frown deepens with each person who passes. Some guy frames the problem so beautifully, as a matter of principle, that he barely needs two words to galvanize Emilia, who exclaims triumphantly, “He’s right!”
Yes, he’s right, but so am I, who only want peace and good music. While we’re stuck, I recognize the guy beside me, who looks as bewildered as I am.
“You were at the exam this morning, right?”
“Oh, yeah, at the evaluation.”
“How did it go?”
“Same as always. Did you do the technical assistant one?”
We discover that we have the same last name, minus a letter, and we’ve crossed paths many times over the past two years—always, only in the pre-selection rounds.
“The best one, though, was in Rome for that parliamentary clerk position.”
“Oh, yeah, so meticulously organized!”
I lose myself in the memory of that dim auditorium, the electronic badge that made you feel as if you were already an employee, the New Age music.
“They put that on to relax us,” I say.
Yeah, you couldn’t bring water, cough drops, or tissues (if your nose was runny, you had to use your wrist, like in elementary school), and you could only go to the can once the exam was done. But they played New Age music, so we’d be relaxed.
“I just got back. I spent the season working at a construction site in Modena.”
“How much did you make?”
“Somewhere between a thousand and twelve hundred.”
“And what was the foreman like?”
“I never met him. He surveilled the site from a helicopter. If you saw a helicopter, that was the foreman.”
We say goodbye like two mates forged not by the same team or political party but by combat—guerilla combat.
I look around and find Emilia embedded in a small group and spouting off like a machine gun; meanwhile, the cops have already apprehended some people who’d let themselves get carried away. Suddenly I remember the fly-and-whale affair, so I turn to ask my mate, but he’s already disappeared in the direction of the stage.
I buy two beers in the hopes of softening up Emilia. I manage to drag her to the concert area while she, her face alight, lectures me on public peace, the Italian Authors and Publishers Society, and weed in industrial doses.
At long last, we sit down on the grass. It’s damp, but the air is warm, and we’re surrounded by people.
For tonight, the ladies from the neighborhood who live behind these walls have brought their chairs from home and planted them in the ground. A little old lady has slipped off her sandals and is now tapping her feet to the beat of the backing band. It’s a song by Metallica.
I’m moved, thinking: Emilia is here, and somewhere over there is Enzo Avitabile, and I brought these two together, and it really is a lovely September.
No, really—a September so beautiful that when I take a deep breath I can still smell, among the clouds of weed, the scent of eucalyptus.
Roof and sky: you can either jump or fly.
I spotted his curly head sneaking a peek from behind the stage, probably trying to gauge if there were enough of us for him to start counting off when someone shouted from the entrance like he was calling out to a friend.
Then everyone started running, scattering throughout the park. Those who were nearest rushed towards us and pressed us against the fence. To avoid falling, we started running too.
It wasn’t the kind of charge that collapses on top of you like a wall: every cop had begun a personal manhunt.
I see Emilia stop, wanting to understand. But I yank her by her jacket: beatings hurt. And besides, beatings can’t be explained.
By now, we’ve reached the wall, and our only option is to climb it and, once on top, jump down to the other side. I’m holding her up from below, and I can feel that her jeans are damp from the grass and beer. I see her on top, then I no longer do.
My personal cop is loaded with a nightstick, so I place my feet where I can in the tuff. He could easily climb up here with us, but he won’t come by himself with all of us here. Perhaps he doesn’t even care enough to do so. When I’m almost at the top, he breaks my foot with a single hit, and I lose my shoe. But I don’t feel pain: you can either jump or fly.
While I’m in mid-air, between the wall and the ground, I hear a roar.
Half a yard later, I land on my side on the cement roof of a cage.
It takes me a minute to realize that I’m in the zoo, and that this is still my life, the same as fifteen minutes ago. The others, friends and animals, stare up the wall from below and can’t figure out where we’ve popped up from.
I sit on the cage and listen to them talk. In the aviary, the birds make a desperate racket. Emilia gets mad because we ran away. I decide that she has a shitty temper. Then I hear the roar once more: What if I’d fallen into the lions’ den?
They say it’s obvious we’re here, and now they’ll come looking for us. I think they’re kidding themselves—maybe they would if they actually wanted something from us. I bet they could chase someone all around the park and still never come up here.
Shit-tempered Emilia finally looks my way and asks me how I’m doing.
Good, I tell her, even though my foot hurts terribly.
“Wait—I’ll move the trash can closer so you can come down.”
“No, I want to smoke a cigarette first. What are we dealing with anyway?”
“A tiger. But we ran off just like that, without understanding…”
Since she was little, Emilia has been accustomed to understanding, while I have been accustomed to running away.
God forbid we’d become kids again: with a ladder against the wall, we’d sit on the balcony with our legs sticking out of the railing. What time is my dad coming tonight?
I don’t want to come down, not now that it’s apparent that I’m out of breath, my heart’s racing, and I’m afraid to lower my sock. Actually, I can’t even look at my foot because in my foot, there’s a suffering I didn’t deserve.
I want to smoke a cigarette while I’m up here, in the time it takes to gather myself to understand why this tiger and I have ended up like this.
I can hear it pacing beneath me—it must weigh a ton. It makes me want to see how it’s built and how it can live here. To look it in the eye. I sense the animals panting around me; the nocturnal intrusion has agitated them. A helicopter flies overhead at some point, and the people below get worked up, worrying it’s the cops coming for them. It makes me think of my mate’s foreman, who only exists in a helicopter, and those of us who only exist here, at all the exams and all the construction sites. I consider this beating that I paid five bucks for, plus five for Emilia, when it hits me: whenever I start thinking about absolutely everything, to the point that I’m incapable of focusing on any one thing, I feel a thread of fear, one that can be seen and touched. With that thread, I tie the only shoe I have left and come down.
God forbid we’d make up, or else winter will arrive, we’ll bless ourselves, the bad weather will come, the light will leave, and this fear within won’t let us find any peace.
“I’m only coming down cuz I have to take a leak, so don’t bust my balls by talking politics, all right?”
My foot has become so gigantic I can barely set it down, and Emilia, who also knows everything about medicine and drugs, says it would’ve been better if the skin had broken; that way, the blood would have gotten out instead of being trapped in. I think it would have been better if Enzo Avitabile had played, but I don’t tell her because, like my blood, I prefer to keep myself to myself.
While I make my way around the cage to meet the tiger, I hear Emilia reassuring some guy about my foot.
“What do you mean by ‘foot?’ It’s the mallèous.”
The tiger watches me. His fur is so short and compact that it looks like skin. He fills the cage in a few steps, all the same. I indicate my foot and lift it a little.
“It’s the mallèous,” I tell him, with the same Neapolitan accent.
I search for a willow where I can piss, but when I locate a suitable one, I find a man crying inside it, so I attempt to leave without being seen. And I tell myself that I was better off staying up on the roof.
Finally, I do it against a wall. Afterward, I look up.
REPTILE HOUSE
Rep-tile house: so it’s here that birds add themselves to fish, and beasts mate algebraically. I try to peek through the windows, pressing my face and hands against the glass, but the panes haven’t been cleaned in centuries. They conceal the answers by letting only a weak, unhelpful violet light seep through. It was here, this morning, that the blood of tuna and that of crane mixed to form a clear, precise, acknowledged result.
And I pissed in front of it.
They’re all sitting at the ticket booth. They’ve found chairs, cell reception, and even a ladder so we can climb over the wall and go home.
They’re discussing something, but Emilia sees it’s not worthwhile, so she says nothing and heads towards me.
“You shouldn’t walk on this foot!”
“What do you mean by ‘foot’? It’s my mallèous.”
She doesn’t acknowledge the reference. “What were you doing all this time?” Then, without waiting for an answer, “Want to put your ankle under the hose?”
They’ve called some friends who’ve come out front with their cars, saying the coast is clear, and we can go home.
The plan is: everyone will climb up one at a time, wait at the top, and then move the ladder over to the other side. Those with two feet claim this is an excellent idea.
Once we are all up top, sitting astride the wall, with some facing one way and some the other, dawn begins to break behind Camaldoli Hill, allowing us to see one another face-to-face. I find myself opposite the guy from the willow whose eyes are as swollen as my ankle. I smile at him.
Meanwhile, those friends out front wave at us, teasing and shouting that they’re going to leave us up here.
Emilia leaves me sitting on the guardrail, saying, “Hang tight for a sec.”
I hang tight and watch her vanish behind the newsstand. I think that this girl is truly not tired, and that she can stick the newspapers she knows where.
I’m on the same wide avenue as this morning, on the other side, only this time I wait for the bus. Something starts to move around me, though—it’s a team of street sweepers that advances one yard at a time, chatting. After each section they cover, they switch spots, with the one in front moving to the back like cyclists or migrating ducks. Each driver who passes merges to the left, heading towards Bagnoli and Pozzuoli to work their factory shifts without ever taking the expressway, which costs a dollar and adds up, day after day.
I even picture the fiber optics beginning their shifts this morning, passing amongst themselves forms on which, for every question, there’s a black graphite mark. They read them attentively—number, box, number, box—fourteen thousand times. A terrible gig.
Hung from those fiber optics is us, we’re suspended like socks on a clothesline between buildings, tugged back and forth between computers. When mine arrives at number fifteen, it unhooks the clothespin and lets me fall: you can either jump or fly. While I’m tapping a decent beat on the ground with my good foot, Emilia returns without newspapers and smelling of something sweet.
“Listen,” she says.
“No, you listen—if a tuna plus a crane equals a reptile, a fly plus a whale makes what?”
She wrinkles her forehead: she’s not one to let herself make mistakes.
“Reptile.”
I look at her, thinking that she shot at fucking random.
“Reptile, because it’s the same. Something that flies plus something that swims makes a reptile, right?”
I mull it over. I don’t know if it’s right but at least it’s an explanation.
Then she buries half her head into the paper cone she’s holding and picks up where she left off: “Listen, dibs on the pie crust.”