There was no funeral wreath on the Pinelli door. What he saw there, and he gasped in horror until his vision cleared through the blinding snow, was a Christmas wreath instead. He was glad, hurrying away in the storm. Sure I’m glad! Who wants to see anybody die? But he wasn’t glad, he wasn’t glad at all. He wasn’t a star for the Yankees. He hadn’t come by chartered plane. He wasn’t going to Florida. This was Christmas Eve in Rocklin, Colorado. It was snowing like the devil, and his father was living with a woman named Effie Hildegarde. His father’s face was torn open by his mother’s fingers and at that moment he knew his mother was praying, his brothers were crying, and the embers in the front-room stove had once been a hundred dollars.
Merry Christmas, Arturo!
Chapter Eight
A lonely road at the West End of Rocklin, thin and dwindling, the falling snow strangling it. Now the snow falls heavily. The road creeps westward and upward, a steep road. Beyond are the mountains. The snow! It chokes the world, and there is a pale void ahead, only the thin road dwindling fast. A tricky road, full of surprising twists and dips as it eludes the dwarfed pines standing with hungry white arms to capture it.
Maria, what have you done to Svevo Bandini? What have you done to my face?
A square-built man stumbling along, his shoulders and arms covered by the snow. In this place the road is steep; he breasts his way, the deep snow pulling at his legs, a man wading through water that has not melted.
Where now, Bandini?
A little while ago, not more than forty-five minutes, he had come rushing down this road, convinced that, as God was his judge, he would never return again. Forty-five minutes – not even an hour, and much had happened, and he was returning along a road that he had hoped might be forgotten.
Maria, what have you done?
Svevo Bandini, a blood-tinted handkerchief concealing his face, and the wrath of winter concealing Svevo Bandini as he climbed the road back to the Widow Hildegarde’s, talking to the snowflakes as he climbed. So tell the snowflakes, Bandini; tell them as you wave your cold hands. Bandini sobbed – a grown man, forty-two years old, weeping because it was Christmas Eve and he was returning to his sin, because he would rather be with his children.
Maria, what have you done?
It was like this, Maria: ten days ago your mother wrote that letter, and I got mad and left the house, because I can’t stand the woman. I must go away when she comes. And so I went away. I got lots of troubles, Maria. The kids. The house. The snow: look at the snow tonight, Maria. Can I set a brick down in it? And I’m worried, and your mother is coming, and I say to myself, I say, I think I’ll go downtown and have a few drinks. Because I got troubles. Because I got kids.
Ah, Maria.
He had gone downtown to the Imperial Poolhall, and there he had met his friend Rocco Saccone, and Rocco had said they should go to his room and have a drink, smoke a cigar, talk. Old friends, he and Rocco: two men in a room filled with cigar smoke drinking whiskey on a cold day, talking. Christmas time: a few drinks. Happy Christmas, Svevo. Gratia, Rocco. A happy Christmas.
Rocco had looked at the face of his friend and asked what troubled him, and Bandini had told him: no money, Rocco, the kids and Christmas time. And the mother-in-law – damn her. Rocco was a poor man too, not so poor as Bandini, though, and he offered ten dollars. How could Bandini accept it? Already he had borrowed so much from his friend, and now this. No thanks, Rocco. I drink your liquor, that’s enough. And so, a la salute! for old times’ sake . . .
One drink and then another, two men in a room with their feet on the steaming radiator. Then the buzzer above Rocco’s hotel-room door sounded. Once, and then once more: the telephone. Rocco jumped up and hurried down the hall to the phone. After a while he returned, his face soft and pleasant. Rocco got many phone calls in the hotel, for he ran an advertisement in the Rocklin Herald:
Rocco Saccone, bricklayer and
stonemason. All kinds of repair
work. Concrete work a specialty.
Call R.M. Hotel.
That was it, Maria. A woman named Hildegarde had called Rocco and told him that her fireplace was out of order. Would Rocco come and fix it right away?
Rocco, his friend.
‘You go, Svevo,’ he said. ‘Maybe you can make a few dollars before Xmas.’
That was how it started. With Rocco’s tool sack on his back, he left the hotel, crossed the town to the West End, took this very road on a late afternoon ten days ago. Up this very road, and he remembered a chipmunk standing under that very tree over there, watching him as he passed. A few dollars to fix a fireplace; maybe three hours’ work, maybe more – a few dollars.
The Widow Hildegarde? Of course he knew who she was, but who in Rocklin did not? A town of ten thousand people, and one woman owning most of the land – who among those ten thousand could avoid knowing her? But who had never known her well enough to say hello, and that was the truth.
This very road, ten days ago, with a bit of cement and seventy pounds of mason’s tools on his back. That was the first time he saw the Hildegarde cottage, a famous place around Rocklin because the stone work was so fine. Coming upon it in the late afternoon, that low house built of white flagstone and set among tall pine trees seemed a place out of his dreams: an irresistible place, the kind he would some day have, if he could afford it. For a long time he stood gazing and gazing upon it, wishing he might have had some hand in its construction, the delight of masonry, of handling those long white stones, so soft beneath a mason’s hands, yet strong enough to outlast a civilization.
What does a man think about when he approaches the white door to such a house and reaches for the polished foxhead brass knocker?
Wrong, Maria.
He had never talked to the woman until that moment she opened the door. A woman taller than himself, round and large. Aye: fine-looking woman. Not like Maria, but still a fine-looking woman. Dark hair, blue eyes, a woman who looked as though she had money.
His sack of tools gave him away.
So he was Rocco Saccone, the mason. How do you do?
No, but he was Rocco’s friend. Rocco was ill.
It didn’t matter who he was, so long as he could fix a fireplace. Come in Mr Bandini, the fireplace is over there. And so he entered, his hat in one hand, the sack of tools in the other. A beautiful house, Indian rugs over the floor, large beams across the ceiling, the woodwork done in bright yellow lacquer. It might have cost twenty – even thirty thousand dollars.
There are things a man cannot tell his wife. Would Maria understand that surge of humility as he crossed the handsome room, the embarrassment as he staggered when his worn shoes, wet with snow, failed to grip the shining yellow floor? Could he tell Maria that the attractive woman felt a sudden pity for him? It was true: even though his back was turned, he felt the Widow’s quick embarrassment for him, for his awkward strangeness.
‘Pretty slippery,