The Day Before Happiness

  “I know. Yesterday you won at scopa. Your days of learning from me are over.”

  • • •

  The ships of the American Sixth Fleet, the aircraft carrier and its convoy, were leaving the gulf in formation. The light gray of their paint dissolved in the high seas. It was the color of my threadbare jacket. My light gray was going off to sea as well. I would have time to mend the cut in the sleeve and wash away the blood.

  “Let me know about Anna, she’s cured.”

  We didn’t say a word about the fallen youth. Where the knife entered there was no hope.

  “Who knows where they’re going?” I said, in the direction of the warships.

  “Not home, and you neither. You’ll go in that direction.” He pointed to the south and the west. I looked at the books and the notebooks on my knees, good-bye to school, all the lessons were over at once. The city that had taught me, I was losing, Anna, Don Gaetano, the books of Don Raimondo. “T’aggia ‘mpara’ e t’aggia perdere”—I have to teach you and then I have to lose you, the city was pushing me out to sea. I couldn’t continue the life that had raised me, ready as a calzone in the frying oil. It had flipped me over and over, dusted me with flour, and then thrown me into the black skillet. In one of his poems Salvatore Di Giacomo wishes he could be a little fish captured by the lovely hands of Donna Amalia, who will dust him with flour and ’o mena int’a tiella—throw him into the pan. It was happening to me. Donna Amalia was the city and the black skillet was the ocean.

  “Don Gaetano, exhaustion is making me think stupid things.”

  • • •

  We ate at a tavern by the harbor. He gave me the ticket, the documents, the money, his savings.

  “I’ll pay you back. It won’t be like with the knife, that I’ll have to repay with another one. This money I’m going to bring back to you.”

  At random I said the right things. How did I know what I would find in Argentina? What I would do to survive there? Don Gaetano also gave me a deck of Neapolitan cards and a Spanish grammar. We went to take my pictures for the document. Don Gaetano dropped by a print shop to forge the embossed stamp. I boarded the ship at sunset.

  I saw the bay switch on the lights from Posillipo to Sorrento. There were so many white handkerchiefs, waving good-bye to the open eyes of the departing. The persons nearest to me were dripping with tears. Those nearest to me are not in first class, they have no return ticket.

  • • •

  Now I am writing pages on the lined notebook while the ship steers toward the other end of the world. Around us the ocean moves or stays still. They say that tonight we will pass the equator.

  * Neapolitans tend to pronounce the initial s in Italian as sh, hence scuola (school) becomes shcuola, schifo (disgust) becomes shchifo, and sfizio (whim) becomes shfizio.

  about the author

  ERRI DE LUCA was born in Naples in 1950 and today lives in the countryside near Rome. He is the author of several novels, including God’s Mountain, Three Horses (Other Press), and Me, You (Other Press; originally published as Sea of Memory). He taught himself Hebrew and has translated several books of the Old Testament into Italian. He is one of the most widely read Italian authors alive today.

  about the translator

  MICHAEL F. MOORE has also translated Three Horses and God’s Mountain by Erri De Luca, and is completing Not Now, Not Here by the same author. His most recent translations include Quiet Chaos by Sandro Veronesi and Pushing Past the Night by Mario Calabresi. He is currently working on a new translation of the nineteenth-century classic The Bethrothed, by Alessandro Manzoni.