Let’s talk about this. I was born in New York City on December 7, 1924. The Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor on my seventeenth birthday. I joined the Army when I turned eighteen. I lost the bottom half of my left leg when I was nineteen, in the Battle of Anzio. I was back in Rome two years later, after the liberation. I wore my pants leg pinned up. I would no more wear a false foot than I would a false mustache or a false nose. People can take me as I am.
Italy was like anywhere else. After the war factories tried to diversify out of war machines into everyday civilian stuff: canoes, bicycles, tent poles. I even got a precision-machined racing crutch from Caproni (who had made bombers for lots of people including Mussolini), but they went back to making planes exclusively after that.
My wife was a Roman girl. She kept the books for her father’s auto shop and left early each day in time to cook me meals that would have made an emperor weep. (Both the job and the evening meals were unusual for the time. Most Roman wives in those days spent their time manufacturing children and midday meals.) I knew exactly how good I had it: work, a little free time, a loving wife, delicious food.
When we were still childless after a couple of years I was secretly thankful. I was fearful of change and wanted things to stay exactly as they were. I suppose that satisfaction must be a sin. Perhaps it’s a form of pride. I should have talked to our priest and gotten straight with God. You have to be ready to accept whatever He throws at you. You have to be light on your feet (or in my case, foot). But I was in a complacent state of sin so when cancer took my Caterina I went straight to hell.
I spent the first two weeks crying. A little crying would have been fine. Italians are supposed to be emotional, right? But my crying went beyond that. I ended up in the hospital with a needle in my arm, just to keep my fluids up.
The doctors turned me over to my in-laws and I drove them away with rages. A little rage–like a little crying–would have been fine. But I was loud, mean and violent. Caterina’s brother Sandro finally slapped me so his mother wouldn’t have to, and they all hunched their shoulders and slowly walked away. I couldn’t blame them.
My employers had granted, and extended, and re-extended compassionate leaves but eventually they also ran out of patience, so I spent every day alone in my apartment with endless cheap Sardinian vodka. I used to stare at the vulture on the label and watch the glass fill itself and empty itself, over and over again, all day long. My hair turned white in six months. Am I too old to travel to Sardinia now? I want to find the distillery and piss on the walls.
When the money went out I took to sleeping rough. I wasn’t the only one-legged veteran on the street, but I may have been the only one from the winning side. I was a skeleton. I stank. I stole. I ate garbage.
I was standing in front of the Trinità dei Monti in the pouring rain. I was hopping on one foot, waving my crutch at the sky. Even Job never stooped to hopping. I cursed God. I cursed the devil. I cursed the earth. I cursed the sky. A bolt of lightning struck my crutch and ran through my body and straight down the Spanish Steps. My clothes caught fire. I fell on my face.
When lightning passes through your body it leaves a trail of cooked meat from where it enters to where it exits. It’s just a roll of the dice whether anything vital gets roasted. In my case I have quarter-sized stigmata on my right palm and the soul of my left foot. Did I say my left foot? When I woke up, naked and smoking at the edge of the piazza, I found that my last remaining possession, my beautiful Caproni crutch, was melted and shriveled. My left foot was itching worse than anything I had felt before. I staggered to my feet.
The rain had stopped. A thin crowd flowed through the piazza. No one looked at me or even turned their heads. I waved my arms and got no reaction from anyone. I jumped in front of a little old nonna. She crashed into me, knocked us both down and her artichokes rolled all over the street. Three passersby helped her up and re-packed her bags for her. She limped off crying.
I walked off in the direction of my old neighborhood, dragging my burned foot to subdue the itch. I raised my hand to everyone I passed, just to see whether anyone would wave back. I had heard stories, on troop ships, of cities in China and India where madness is venerated and the mad are ignored out of respect. Perhaps Rome had a similar tradition? As I walked past a shop where I had often bought clothes, I decided to step inside and test the limits of this phenomenon. No one acknowledged me as I entered. No one questioned me as I selected underwear, socks and a suit. No one protested when I walked out the door wearing my stolen merchandise. The pattern repeated all the way down the street as I stole shoes, a hat and an umbrella. I had to serve myself at the ice cream shop, and the kid working there didn’t meet my eyes even when I accidentally brushed against his uniform and left a green pistachio smear.
In my itchy new clothes I stood on the sidewalk outside our old building and looked up at the windows of our former apartment. No tears this time, and the lightning had burned the alcohol from my body. I just stood there, all dried out. Then I turned and began to walk toward the sea.
In Civitavecchia I walked unimpeded and seemingly unobserved aboard a ship bound for Dover. I spent the voyage in an unused stateroom which grew filthier by the day, unvisited by the service staff. I sat at a different table each night, eating from the plates of my companions and leaving their wineglasses well alone.
In Dover I boarded a ship bound for New York and repeated this performance. By the time we arrived I had eaten enough bland sole and roast beef for a lifetime. I walked straight to my childhood corner cafe and ate an entire plate of bucatini out from under a fat uncle. I drank his mineral water and set off in search of companionship. I recognized a few of the older whores on the street. They were girls I grew up with but none of them gave me a first–let alone second–look, so I walked further uptown.
A copper-haired woman with bloodshot eyes was dining alone at a sidewalk table. With trembling fingers she dug a pill bottle out of her purse. I sat down beside her and put my hand on her thigh. She dry-swallowed her pill and twisted her hip so my hand rode up but she didn’t look at me or otherwise acknowledge my presence. We sat that way for a long time. Finally she dropped some money on the table and stood up. I watched the line of her back and fell into step behind her.
She stumbled around the corner and into the middle of the next block, scratched at her building’s front-door lock until it opened and slipped through without looking back. I squeezed through the last few inches and followed her shaky progress up four flights of stairs. Her door looked like a door: scraped and carved and with dents all over the bottom quarter. She rested her forehead against it for a moment. Then she found her key and opened the door.
We went straight to bed. She kept her eyes firmly fixed on the ceiling as I lifted her skirt and fumbled with her stockings and girdle. She breathed evenly all the way through. I might as well not have been there at all. When we finished she sat up, turned her back and swallowed another pill. With her legs hanging off the bed, she slowly slumped until her head hit the pillow. I let myself out. She had never once looked at me.
All through that fall I made myself at home in the city. I drank tea with millionaires and borrowed their clothes. I slept beside socialites and watched them in the bath. I spat in the vodka at a communist conclave and I pissed in the punch at a banker’s ball. Late one evening in a restaurant on Mulberry closed to everyone but a single lonely gangster, I pulled his pistol from his pocket and set it on the table between us. Then I dipped my finger in his Barolo and drew the sign of the cross on his forehead. He dabbed his lips with his napkin, left the restaurant, walked a mile straight west and drowned himself in the Hudson.
Late that November I saw the copper-haired woman again. She was clear-eyed and sure-footed, visibly pregnant and brightening the entire block. I placed myself in the center of the sidewalk, straightened my tie and lifted my hat. She wrinkled her brow, shrugged as if to herself, turned around and walked the other way.
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