The Fortunate Pilgrim - Mario Puzo [107]
The painted red nipples, the rounded belly with roll of fat, the neat black triangle and two long columns of heavily powdered thighs all served the purpose. When the whore threw off her robe and presented that body, the blood rushed to Vinnie’s brain with such force that he had a headache for the rest of the evening.
The embrace was formal, an earnest pantomime, the woman sinking back on the coverleted bed, Vinnie drawn over her, falling to one knee, braking his body down into the vise of scissoring limbs.
He was lost. Flesh; flesh hot soft against his own; melting wax; warm, yielding, sticky clinging meat without blood or stringy nerves. His body, separate tissue, chambered, soaked up what that meat distilled. His stretched taut frame impressed itself upon that wax which depressed with the shape of his own bones and in one blinding moment he was free, reprieved from loneliness.
That was all. His fellow clerks waited and they all went out for a Chinese dinner, and then a movie at the Paramount or bowling, topped off with late coffee in the Automat. As the clerks found steady girls or became engaged, they would not stop coming to the hotel, but they cut the evening short afterward to visit their girl friends. Defanged.
For Vinnie it was like the food he ate, the bed he slept in, the money he earned, part of the necessary routine of life to stay alive. But as time went on he felt himself becoming separate from the world around him and its inhabitants.
CHAPTER 20
WHERE WERE THOSE wretches who cursed America and its dream? And who could doubt it now? With the war in Europe, English, French, Germans and even Mussolini lavishing millions for murder, every Italian along the western wall of the city had his pockets full. The terrible Depression was over, a man no longer needed to beg for his bread, home relief investigators could be cursed down the stairs. Plans were made to buy houses on Long Island.
True, it was money earned to help people kill each other. The war in Europe made all the jobs. So grumbled those with a fresh head begging for troubles. But in what other country could even the poor get rich on the world’s misfortune?
Natives of the south, Sicily, Naples, the Abruzzi, these Italians on Tenth Avenue did not concern themselves about Mussolini’s winning the war. They had never loved their country of birth; it meant nothing to them. For centuries its government had been the most bitter enemy of their fathers and fathers’ fathers before them. The rich had spat on the poor. Pimps of Rome and the north had sucked their blood. What good fortune to be safe here in America.
Only Teresina Coccalitti was displeased. She could no longer declare her sons not working in these good times, and she had been kicked off the home relief. Now she went about secretly, buying great bags of sugar and tins of fat and endless bolts of cloth. She said mysteriously to Lucia Santa, “There will come a day—ah, there will come a day . . .” but then she zipped up her mouth with her fingers and would not say another word. What did she mean? True, there was a military draft, but only one boy from Tenth Avenue had been called. Nothing grave.
Lucia Santa was too busy to let the Coccalitti’s words buzz in her head. Floods of gold were washing over the tenements. Children were working after school. Sal and Lena had part-time jobs in the new drug factory on Ninth Avenue. Vinnie worked seven days a week. Let the people in Europe kill each other to their hearts’ content if that was their pleasure. The village of Lucia Santa’s parents was so small, the land so worthless, that none of her relatives could be in danger.
Only that scoundrel Gino did not work. But this was his last summer of idleness. He would graduate high school in January and there would be no more excuses. There was no profit in asking friends to find him jobs. Lucia Santa had tried, and Gino always