The Unfinished Angel Read online

  Many tourists come to this part of Switzerland, but most of the tourists are stubborn and only want to speak their own language, very loudly. They will inspect a menu and then say to the waiter (in English or Swedish or Japanese): “What it means? WHAT IT MEANS?”

  The Swiss people are used to this. They don’t swat the tourists on the heads with the menus. Mostly they don’t say rude words or spit on the ground. No, they smile politely and manage to explain calmly, either in the tourist’s language or by an incredilish movement of their hands, what it means.

  This impressifies me.

  When Mr. Pomodoro goes into the pharmacy hoping to find some nasal spray and asks for puzzo di naso, the Italian-speaking clerk does not fall in the aisle laughing because Mr. Pomodoro has asked for “nose stinky.” No, the kindiful clerk does not even feel the need to correct Mr. Pomodoro; instead the clerk smiles politely and reaches for a bottle of spruzzo (not puzzo) di naso. Maybe the clerk will laugh after Mr. Pomodoro leaves, but she will not laugh in front of the person who does not have the right words.

  I loaf this. I loaf it very much.

  In the tower, with the hungry childrens, I am wishing I had some of these Swiss peoples with all the words. Zola and I are trying to understand what the childrens are saying. They speak very fast, zoomzoomzoom, so fast the words fly out of their mouths and disappear into the air before you can catch them with your own ears.

  I tell Zola she will have to do the talking. The childrens won’t be able to see me, and they might be frightened if Zola talks to an invisible someone. They will think it is a ghost. Or that she is kookoo. Only one young boy seems to sense my presence. He stands near me and stares and blinks his eyes as if the light is too bright, but it is dark in the tower room beneath the balcony, with only the starlight and moonlight outside the small window.

  This boy puts his hands forward as if he is parting the air. “Wow,” he whispers. He stands on my robe. This is hokay; many times peoples have stood on me. Animals, too. They do not know what they are doing. It does not hurt.

  There are three girls and five boys. The youngest, who is maybe five, is the “wow” boy; the oldest is a boy about ten or eleven. Most speak a little English. They are all dirty, from head to foot, and dressed in odd combinations of old clothes and newer ones, and in clothes too small or too large. I recognize, on one girl’s head, an old scarf of Signora Mondopoco. The youngest boy wears the weathered hat of Signora Divino’s deadened husband.

  The childrens are not related to each other and do not all speak the same language. They are straggled together, maybe from an orphanage in another country. It is hardness to understand everything that is jumping out of their mouths.

  In quiet voicing, Zola asks each one’s name. I loaf this, that she does not treat them like a herd of sheep. She wants to study each face and say a name. The boys are Paolo, Manuel, Stefan, Franz, and Josef. The girls are Terese, Rosetta, and Nicola. Zola hears each name once and does not forget it.

  Once we know their names, we start to see their peoplealities. The youngest one, Josef, is all eyeballs and interest. He says “Wow!” and “Was ist das?” The smallest girl, Nicola, says, about once an hour, “Be nice to me! Be nice to me!” Rosetta is so quiet, always glancing down shyly, her hand clutching a torn piece of cloth which she occasionally rubs against her cheek.

  Franz is maybe a little confused. If anyone speaks to him, he repeats, “Glocken, glocken, glocken.” I think this means “bells, bells, bells,” and I do not know why he is saying this. The other childrens don’t seem to find this odd, though.

  Terese is impressified with Zola and imitates the way Zola stands, the way she holds her head and moves her arms. It is not a mocking way. It is as if Terese is trying out what it would be like to be Zola.

  Then there is Stefan. He does not say much but clomps around making strange faces and noises, to make the others laugh. They do laugh at him sometimes, but Stefan is the one with the saddest eyes of all.

  Manuel is jumpy, like a hot bean. Noises, moths, shadows, all these things stiffen his arms and shoulders and even his hair, if you can find this believing. Lastly, there is Paolo, the oldest boy, who is maybe Zola’s age. He has a smart head and a watching eye.

  Zola says to Paolo: “Tell them we will bring food.”

  “Who is ‘we’?” Paolo asks.

  “Um. Me and a…a…helper.”

  Helper? Now I am the helper of Zola?

  “Tell them,” Zola says, “not to steal anymore. They could get in trouble. We will try to get them what they need. No stealing. Stealing is bad. Okay?”

  Paolo zips into a swirl of words in the languages of the childrens. Then, to be sure everyone understands, he acts out sneaking around and stealing something; he pretends to eat the something. Then he shouts “No! Molto bad! No!” and he chops himself in the head and falls onto the ground. “Bad!”

  Stefan thinks this is a game. He pretends to grab something and then clonks himself in the head and falls onto the ground. “Bad! Bad!”

  Terese laughs; Rosetta cries; Nicola says, “Be nice to me!” the rest look puzzled.

  It is going to be a long, long night.

  What Is Time?

  PEOPLES, WHY ARE they so compelsive, no, what is the word, propulsive, no, obsessive, yes obsessive! Why they are so obsessive about time, and why they think it is like a cake you can divide into pieces, why? Why they have to have seconds, pinutes, hours, days, weeks, months, years, decades, sentries, on and on, tick-tick, whoosh there goes two seconds, whoosh, two more. What, they are thinking time is going somewhere? Where it is going, I ask you, where?

  Listen. You hear any ticking? No. You hear just the world being the world. You see any clocks in the sky? You see calendars on the trees?

  Zola, she keeps asking me time questions, like: How long will the childrens stay in the tower? How long will the childrens sleep? What will they do when morning comes? How many hours, how many pinutes, what time, when, ack, ack ack!

  Hokay. Hokay. I am calmed down now. Hokay.

  This was a problem last night: Childrens have to go to the toilet. Goodly, there is a toilet in the basement, but still they have to go up and down the narrow creaky stairs to get to the toilet and when you flosh the toilet it makes a noise like a frog burping. So all night long there was creak, creak, crickle, creak, BURPLE BURP, creak, creak, crickle, creak. Then a tiny quiet. Then creak, creak, crickle, creak, BURPLE BURP, creak, creak, crickle.

  And whenever I hear the creaks and the burples I am fearing that Mr. Pomodoro will wake up and think there is a burglar in the house, and what if he has a gun and tries to shoot the burglar who isn’t really a burglar but is a children going to the toilet? So all night long, I am going up and down the creaking stairs with the childrens to protect them.

  Maybe peoples will tell you that the night has eight hours or seven hours or wentever, but I tell you there are long nights and short nights, not same-number-hours nights, and this night was a very, very, very, very long night. Goodly, though, Mr. Pomodoro did not wake up. Neither did Zola, which I found a tiny bit annoying because wasn’t she the one so worried about the hungry childrens?

  When I am finally draping myself in the gauzy hammock on the balcony, and the pink headfore of sun is peeking over the mountain, Zola bounds up through the trippy-trap doors and into the rooms below bringing bread and cheese, and then she zips up to the balcony. She is wearing three dresses: blue over pink over white, and green socks and green shoes and six or nineteen ribbons in her hair. It looks more attracting than you might think.

  The childrens snore on. They don’t even wake up for the food or for more creaking to the toilet. They are tired from all that down and up the stairs all night.

  “Angel!” Zola says. “We’ve got to get busy!”

  “What? What are you talking about?”

  “Are we telling anyone about the children? And then what? What if someone takes them away to an orphanage? That’s where they were, Paolo says.
A bad orphanage. But not in this country. And then they lived in ditches. Ditches! What’s the plan?”

  “Plan?” She is expecting me to have a plan?

  “What’s next?”

  “Next?”

  “Angel! Are you having a hearing problem?”

  And she goes on, “When should…” and “What time will…” and myself is woozy sleepy and I want to go lie down in the pasture of the goats.

  Paradise

  “BEHOLD,” I SAY to Zola. “Behold the sky, pinking with morning. Behold the soft white moon going to sleep now. Behold the blue mountains, so tall, all around us, with the white snow far up on the tops. Behold the green trees and the yellowy stone houses and the rock paths terracing up the mountainsides. Take a big bulp of air. Ahhh. Behold the towers of the churches. Behold the lake down there at the feets of the mountains, so green and silver, so still. Take another big bulp of air. Ahhh.”

  Zola is leaning against the balcony wall, smalling—what is that word again?—oh, smiling! Zola is smiling at the paradise around us.

  “Zola, peoples is running around like chickens and they forget that—”

  Pocketa-pocketa-pocketa—

  “Eww,” Zola says. “What is that noise?”

  “It is the noise of the wall-making man at the school of Pomodoro. Wait! Wait!”

  “What?”

  “That’s it! The hungry childrens will go to the school of Pomodoro, and—childrens can live at the school, right?”

  “Well, older children can—he wasn’t planning on having young children boarding there, and besides—”

  “No besides! Is perfect! Perfect!”

  “But—”

  “No butting! Is perfect!”

  “Angel! He is going to find a lot of reasons why the children would not be able to go to the school.”

  “How many childrens he has already enrolled in this school?”

  Zola studies the snow on the far mountains. “I couldn’t say for sure.”

  “Guess. Appiximately. A hundred? Two hundred? Seven hundred?”

  “I don’t have the exact figures—”

  “Appiximate! I am trying to understand if there is space for the childrens.”

  “Well, there aren’t actually confirmed enrollments for everyone yet.”

  “Zola, for how many is there the confirming?”

  “Let me see. There might be, I think, maybe four.”

  “Four hundred students? And how many beds?”

  “No, four students. Four.”

  “Four?”

  The Nature of Papas

  PAPAS ESPECIALLY DO not usually like surprisements, unless it is the gold falling in the laps or the horses winning the races. Papas can react very badly to surprisements, this I have seen, like when Signora Divino’s husband was a papa and his son said, “Papa, the car went into the lake.” This was a surprisement that Papa Divino did not like and he went very much loudly crazy.

  Usually the mamas are standing there saying, “Now, now, let’s calm down, shh, shh, no need to throw the chair out the window, shh,” which is what Signora Divino often found herself saying. And when the papas do calm down, the strange thing is they are very soft in the heart and they are just glad their childrens are alive and well.

  When Zola goes to get Mr. Pomodoro to show him the childrens, I am thinking maybe we should have prepared him first. This will not be a good surprisement, and where is the mama to calm him down?

  But here is the funny thing that happens: Zola leads Mr. Pomodoro into the first tower room, where all of the childrens have gathered to eat the bread and cheese. As soon as Mr. Pomodoro enters the room, Josef, the little wow-boy, runs to him and grabs his knees and says, “Papa! Papa! Papa!” and then shy Rosetta runs to him and does the same, and the rest of the childrens gaze at Mr. Pomodoro with big, round eyes, very black, like the eyes of kindly puppies.

  And Mr. Pomodoro does not throw a chair out the window or anything like that. Instead, he stands there with the childrens hugging his knees and he weeps. Just a little bit. And very quietly.

  The Nature of Signora Divino

  NOW IT IS true that Signora Divino and her grandson, Vinny, sometimes make me want to throw pinecones or to pinch them slightly, but I need to tell you more so you will understand why I watch over them.

  I am there when Signora Divino is born. I am summoned because she is stuck inside her mama. It takes a lot of flishing here and there and much calming of the air and the midwives, but at last the baby is delivered. Her name is Marianna DiPuccio. Her lips curl up at the sides in a friendly way and her wee mouth is puckered as if to give a kiss or make a bubble. I like this little baby and I stick around to be sure she is hokay.

  Such a funny child, like she will ask a tree if she can borrow a twig, and she will burst into song in the middle of church, and she will tell you everything you might want to know about fairies or dinosaurs. Sometimes she is an impish child, too, sneaking chocolates and bringing worms into the house. I like to be in her energy. So much laughing and goodwill.

  I am there for her wedding to Signor Divino and when their son, Massimo, is born and while he is growing up and losing the car in the lake and taking flying lessons and many things like that. And I am there when the son marries Bette and when they have a son, Vinny. Signora Divino is so happy to have a grandson.

  And one day, a day of blue sky and spring breezes, Massimo tells his mama and papa to sit on the terrace with Vinny and watch the sky and maybe in an hour or so they will see something beautiful. And so Signor and Signora Divino and their two-year-old grandson, Vinny, sit on the terrace in the afternoon sun and they enjoy the air on their faces and they watch the sky.

  They hear a humming sound, the drone of a small plane, and they turn as the plane enters the valley between the mountains. Vinny claps his hands. He loves planes.

  And then Signora Divino knows. “It’s Massimo!” She waves elaborately. She sees the yellow scarf of Bette, Massimo’s wife. “Look, Vinny! It’s your mama and papa!”

  The plane flies lower and dips its wings toward the house of the Divinos. Oh, it is exciting to see! Signora Divino calls to the neighbors. “Come, come, look! It’s Massimo!”

  The plane soars to the end of the valley, rises and turns elegantly, heading back toward the local airport to the west. Such a day! Such blue sky and purple mountains so sturdy and silver lake so calm and still. Such a day!

  And then bip-bip, an odd noise, a stuttering bip-a-bip-bip and a narrow plume of white smoke and a loud banging and the jerking of the plane and Signor and Signora Divino and their friends shouting, “No, no, no!” and little Vinny clapping his hands.

  Bip-a-bip-bip whirrrr. The plane regains its course and dips over the mountain as everyone strains to see and listen. Is the plane in good form? Will it crash? Will it make it to the airport?

  All they hear is a low drone.

  “Is normal?” Signor Divino asks no one in particular. “Is good?”

  Signora Divino slumps into a chair and remains like a flour sack, limp, mute.

  Signor Divino and a neighbor race to the airport. An hour later they return with the triumphant Massimo and Bette.

  “Whew!” Massimo says. “Whew! There must have been an angel watching over us!”

  Ho boy! Not just “watching,” but flishing and flailing and swirling the air currents!

  “Papa, Papa!” Vinny says.

  Massimo sees his mother, aflump in the chair. “Mama?” Massimo says. “Mama?”

  Signora Divino cannot speak. The shock has been too much. For two weeks she does not speak. When she hears the drone of a plane outside, she covers her ears and crouches.

  And then one day, she speaks. “I make ravioli,” is what she says, and on she goes, but she is not the same. She seems hard on the outside, but inside is soft and fragile like an egg. When her husband dies later that year, the outside gets harder and the inside softer.

  Now her son, Massimo, and his wife, Bette, are in
America for three months. They are thinking of moving there, to Virginia, where Bette’s sister lives. Her sister wants to open a school, an international school. Signora Divino thinks this is crazy idea.

  And now Mr. Pomodoro says he is opening an international school right here, in Switzerland, and she thinks the whole world is looloo. Why can’t Mr. Pomodoro go home and Massimo and Bette come back and open their school here, so Vinny and Massimo and Bette could stay close by and Signora Divino would not be alone? Why?

  I protect the Signora if I can. If I pinch her and Vinny or throw pinecones, it is only because I do not want them to become crooked and bitter. I want them to remember what it is like to think, “Such a day!”

  A Bigga Mess

  SO, WE HAVE the childrens from the chicken shad in the tower, clinging to Mr. Pomodoro’s knees, and he sees their big black soft puppyful eyes, and little Josef is saying, “Papa! Papa!” and outside is the pocketa-pocketa-pocketa and the arf, arf, arf, arf, arf.

  Mr. Pomodoro does his best. He goes in search of the mayor of the commune, but the mayor is in the Canary Islands on holiday, so then Mr. Pomodoro searches for the vice mayor, but he is away at his fishing cabin, and so round and round Mr. Pomodoro goes, trying to find someone to give the permission to sort out the childrens.

  The police decide it is their job, and they want the passports of the childrens, but of course the childrens are not walking around with passports. They don’t know what the policeman is talking about.

  “We don’t have any credit cards,” Paolo says.

  “Not credit cards, passports. PASS. PORTS.”