The Fortunate Pilgrim - Mario Puzo [8]
His dazed, impatient eyes saw a circle of old women’s faces, some hairy and mustached. Frantic to be away, afraid the game would end, Gino tried to run. Zia Louche held him like a fly, saying, “Rest—sit with your mother and rest. You’ll be sick tomorrow. Feel how your heart is beating.” And she put her withered claw upon his chest. He pulled violently. The old crone held him and said with ferocious love, “Eh, come è faccia brutta.#8221; He understood she was calling him ugly, and that made him still. He stared at the circle of women. They were laughing but Gino did not know they laughed with delight at his fierce desire, his blazing eyes.
He spat at Zia Louche, the fake spit of Italian women that shows contempt in a quarrel. It got him free, and he was so quick that his mother hit his face only a glancing blow as he sped away. Around the corner, along 30th Street to Ninth Ave-nue, up the Avenue to 31st Street, and then through 31st Street to Tenth Avenue he would go; having traveled the four sides of the city block, he would swoop into the game out of the darkness and with one masterly stroke shatter the enemy.
But as he ran full speed toward Ninth Avenue, a line of alien boys formed a wall against him. Gino pumped his legs higher and faster and burst through, shattered them. Clutching hands tore his shirt, the wind rushed against his face. On Ninth Avenue the boys came after him, but when he turned into the darkness at the top of 31st Street they did not dare to follow. Gino stopped running and walked softly along the stoops. He was on the final side of the square and below him, at the foot of the street, near Tenth Avenue, painted into the dim yellow cones of light cast by lamp posts, his friends scurried to and fro like little black rats, still playing. He was in time.
He rested in darkness and then went very softly, slowly, down the street. In a basement room he saw a little girl leaning against a wall half white, half electric blue. She rested her head against her arm upon the wall, hiding her eyes from the cold, artificial light of the room, empty, deserted behind her. Gino knew she was playing hide and seek, not crying, and that if he waited, the deserted room would come magically alive with shrieking girls. But he did not stop, not knowing he would always remember the girl alone, hiding her eyes against a blue and white wall; desolate, never changing, as if by not stopping he left her there forever, enchanted. He went on.
A dim patch of light made him pause. He shivered. Sitting at the window, leaning out of her street-level flat, an old Irish crone rested her head on a furry pillow and watched him move past her down the empty silent street. In that weak yellow light her head was bony with age, her thin, whiskered mouth bloody with the light of a holy red candle. Behind that feral face, faintly visible in the shadows of her room, a vase, a lamp, and a graven image gleamed like old bones. Gino stared at her. The teeth bared in greeting. Gino ran.
Now he could hear the shouts of his friends; he was near the circles of light on Tenth Avenue. He crouched on the steps of a cellar, hidden, powerful, ready to strike. He never thought to be afraid of the dark basement below or of the night. He forgot his mother’s anger. He existed only for this moment and the moment he would enter the pool of light and shatter it.
High over Tenth Avenue, Gino Corbo’s half brother, Vincenzo Angeluzzi, thirteen years old, brooded to the softened, whispery sound of the summer night that floated up to him. He brooded on his window sill, the long line of rooms behind him dark and empty, the door from the hall to the kitchen securely locked. He was self-exiled.
The dream of summer, freedom, and play had