Chapter One
Rosa Elisabetta Meandro, in insubstantial light, entrails in flames.
Rosa Elisabetta of the hammertoe, Rosa Elisabetta of the corns. Rosa
Elisabetta of the afflictions. She has hinted about the nature of
her sufferings to certain persons up the block, certain persons on
Eleventh Street, Brooklyn. Emilia, whose son sells the raviolis, for
example. She has whispered to Emilia about the colitis. She has
indicated problems relating to her gallbladder. Stones. Also
headaches. These headaches begin with visitations, with rainbows,
celestial light, an inability to remember numbers. Rosa Elisabetta
might smell the overpowering perfume of cocktail onions, after which
there is Technicolor. Two or three days sick in bed, lower than a
dog is low. If she’s enumerating the complaints for Emilia, there is
the colitis, there are the corns, there is the pancreas, there are
the headaches. At least four things. Gas, though it’s not proper to
talk about it. On nights when the garlic has not been properly
sautéed according to the cuisine of her ancestral homeland, Tuscany,
then there is also the gas. Perhaps it is correct to include this in
the list of complaints, assembled at 6:13AM, as she burrows down
further into bedcovers, into the folds of her four-poster. She
doesn’t know how much longer she can resist the cramps, the
pressurized evacuation of her last meal and everything else eaten in
the past twenty-four hours, everything, at least, that has not
already been evacuated. Best to be pleasant about it; this is what
Emilia said when Rosa Elisabetta Meandro was telling her about the
scabs. There are these scabs that don’t heal; when she gets a cut,
saws into herself accidentally in the kitchen, dicing vegetables,
there is the mineralization of the cut. The cut doesn’t heal, not as
it should. What’s that all about? She was also going to tell Emilia
about the halitosis, that day, which she can smell by cupping her
hands and attempting to exhale and inhale quickly, while lying in
the four-poster. It is no longer the smell of the garlic sautéed,
nor is it the smell of the cocktail onions, nor is it the smell of
port wine, nor is it stewed peppers. It’s some new smell, and this
is what Rosa was trying to tell Emilia the other day, no doubt about
it. The look in the eyes of Emilia was a look of pity, which is a
look that makes Rosa Elisabetta Meandro irritable, though she tries
to be pleasant, and this righteous anger, even in the dawn light
ebbing into the garden apartment through the windows facing the
street, is a refreshing sentiment, a motivator, as she breathes out
cupping her hands.
Consider the formidable Rosa Elisabetta of the past. Consider the
archaeology of her phases. Kingmaker in the civic politics of the
Fourth Ward, parader with infant ghouls and vampires on Halloween,
soup kitchen volunteer; Rosa Elisabetta, institution. Dignified
mother of the block, guardian of the parking spaces of longtime
residents of the neighborhood, protector of the community, of local
parishes, registrar of voters. Once she was all these things. A
lover of families. As she enumerates them, however, Rosa Elisabetta
can feel the sweat pooling in the folds of her abdomen; she can feel
cramps beckoning from south of her equator. What was it that Emilia
surely wanted to say about her bad breath? Maybe nothing. Her father
had bad breath. Foul breath. It was his guts. She was there with the
priest, such a nice priest, and the breath of her father smelled
like a gizzard. She won’t talk to Emilia anymore. How can anyone
think such a thing? The cupping-hands experiment does not bear out
results. Nothing at all like the smell of death.
She held the little children in the day care center while their
mothers worked in Manhattan. She sang songs to these children, songs
by important American singers from the age of big bands. Not one of
these little children said to her: Your breath smells like something
died in your mouth. She liked to present the boys with chocolates;
she liked to warn them about the dangers of amorous contact. She
told the little boys and girls: Avoid becoming in- flamed. Never be
alone in a room with a man who is too thin. Never walk near an
idling automobile if it has tinted windows. Next she would speak of
the constellations, how the constellations were catalogued during
the Roman Empire. She knows about the Roman Empire from her father
and his father, and she knows about it from the priests in the
schoolyard of Dyker Heights, where she lived as a girl. She also
once watched a miniseries on the subject of the Roman Empire. The
emperors poisoned one another. The emperors knew a lot about poisons.
She lifted and carried children, kissed them on their dirty necks.
It is not right that Emilia from the ravioli store should even
consider saying anything about the colitis, the gas, the headaches,
the corns, the scabs, the breath, or the hair that is falling out.
Or the blindness, or the incipient deafness, or the fact that Rosa
is too skinny. Her dresses hang off her, like sheets draped over
furniture in shuttered houses.
The cat is disturbed by a migrating foot from his spot in a spiral
of bedclothes at the end of the bed. The cat resembles the
black-and-whites of civic policing, but she does not like the name
her daughter has given him and will not utter it. The animal hops
gamely to the floor, waits. Will Rosa feed him? Now Rosa Elisabetta
smooths her threadbare nightgown over her legs, pulls an old pink
sweater from a squeaky dresser drawer just opposing, and wraps it
around herself. Winches herself up on swollen knees and hips. This is
her submission to the order of aging and infirmity. She knows what
is to come now, how long it will take. She passes across the
hardwood floor with its inlays of cherry and mahogany, into the
sitting room, careful to avoid stacks of reading material beside the
chair, some large stacks, in front of the French doors leading out
to the garden. She flips on the television on the way past, 6:21AM.
A twenty-four-inch monitor that she bought used from a newspaper
advertisement. The static of the picture assembling. She doesn’t
have time to look because all at once she is doubled over,
indelicately emitting pollutants, she’s awake and will be awake,
clutching at her insides. She can hear the device, the old
television set, from the bathroom. The volume is calibrated to allow
this pleasure. Its music is generous from the agony of the bathroom.
She bolts the door, leaving the cat on the other side. She begins to
weep as the tremors begin. She weeps for the indignity. She hopes
she will not bleed. She worries that it will not stop. She could
live with it for a while, the colitis, if only she didn’t bleed. She
reaches for a magazine on the tank. The wallpaper in the bathroom,
floral print, is peeling, and there is paint flaking from the
ceiling. She tries to pretend that the concerns of the magazine are
her concerns. Allegations about the outgoing president and his wife.
His wife’s lesbian secret. A powerful weight-loss program has
enabled certain celebrities to shed up to seventy pounds. One chubby
actress had her stomach stapled, live on the Internet. Will Rosa
Elisabetta faint? Perspiration courses down her brow. She has
fainted in the past. An awful embarrassment, the fainting, because
then her daughter or the Polish woman who comes to clean will find
her on the floor. Another actress, this one too thin, needs to put
some weight back on, drinks milk shakes that weight lifters drink.
Just the ticket. She thinks she can hear them talking about it on
the television. Weight loss. Rosa throws the magazine into the
claw-footed bathtub. Her face is slick. The cat is mewling outside
the door, beckoning. There is a moment of pain, but then she attends
instead to the soothing television voices. In the morning she likes
to have on the perky one, the perky one, because the perky one keeps
at bay the fear of death, but it doesn’t sound as though she
remembered to turn on the perky one, it sounds as though she got the
one with the speech impediment. She likes the one with the speech
impediment because he might explain things properly. But she prefers
the perky one. She is comforted by all overheard voices, especially
on mornings like this. And these voices are mixed with discussions
from the past, in her head, enmity between her grandfather and her
father, for example; she has been known to have a conversation with
her estranged husband while shitting her brains out.
She will need someone from the neighborhood to keep an eye on her
parking space. She has no car, but still. People are moving in,
young people, they don’t even know. Your car is secure for a total of
six days through the kindness of neighbors. The young people don’t
understand until they have lived here as long as she has lived here,
forty-six years. If she catches one of these young people trying to
take her parking space, no matter about the colitis, she will give
him or her a talking-to. From time to time, she has put on her robe
and pulled open the door and called up the steps in the darkness.
“Take your car back to Omaha! Don’t you come around here again!”
Imagine taking people’s spaces when these people have lived here
since before your parents were born. They move into the
neighborhood, these young people, and the girl doesn’t even have a
ring on her finger. Honestly. That first September her daughter was
in college, she put an advertisement in the paper, apartment to let,
like in the old days, when the floozy from the bar performed an
incantation on Rosa’s husband. Just like then, renting the room.
Except this couple calls to see the apartment. No wedding rings.
They are different colors; one is a black man and one is an Italian
girl. She shows them around, the original balustrade, cast iron,
painted black, finials. She makes remarks about southerly light; she
makes remarks about original moldings and plastering; she speaks of
the Romanesque and Italianate uses of brownstone, things she has
been told to say by a Realtor on Seventh Avenue whose services Rosa
did not retain. She doesn’t say anything to this couple that she
wouldn’t say to anyone at all, treats them as she would treat
anyone, makes pleasantries, even when the black man is offering his
know-it-all comments about wiring in the building, asking if the
wiring has been rewired since the building went up. When exactly.
She says, “You ought to see the garden, honey,” ushers the girl back
onto the patio, through her own apartment. She has the tomato vines,
some basil and parsley, painted daisies, cone- flower. Warm,
everything flowers later into the season. Rosa takes the girl by the
shoulder, in the dappled sunlight of the patio, where she used to
hang the laundry, and she says to her, “I figure out who your mama
is, I’ll call her, and I’ll tell her you were here with that man,
and I will help her give you a talking-to. So now you get your black
boyfriend and you get out of here same way you came in; don’t let me
see you on this street again, do you hear me? And you better hope
none of the boys on this block saw you with that boyfriend, not if
you want to make it to the subway in one piece.”
There are couples like this on the block now, all sorts of couples,
and the boys on the block, who used to have a sense of honor, they
don’t do a thing about it. Maybe the neighbors all treat these
couples to a look of chastisement on the way past, but that’s the
end of it. A disgrace. Rosa Elisabetta herself is no longer the kind
of person who lives on this block. Rosa is a specter, a revenant of
a Brooklyn past, someone buried under layers of sediment, which is
why she has the smell of death on her.
The pancreas, the problem with the pancreas, and the corns, and
other complaints. She thinks, I will no longer drink the vin
ordinaire, I will only drink the white wine and the Communion
wine. Voices in the next room, gathering to speak of such
terminologies as grave uncertainty, political instability,
intervention of the courts, none of it particularly clear to Rosa.
She pays the most attention to the school board and the city
council, the social clubs, and she only pays attention to these
because in the old days she paid attention to them when her father
and her father’s friends had an interest in politics. They knew how
to look after what was theirs. She would give out leaflets over by
the subway. Now she’s not even sure who is running for the school
board, if there is even a school board candidate.
Like trying to evacuate pieces of glass, like glass or maybe pieces
of your brain coming out of your posterior, bits of your insides,
bits of your organs, like your pancreas, for example, or the
gallbladder. Black bile, green bile, stones. All the humors. Such a
stink. She moans, while the voices debate about concession and
recount, and so Rosa resolves not to give in herself and reaches
into the cabinet underneath the sink, if she can just reach from
where she is, where she keeps a special something. At the exertion,
another molten river floods from her. Usually after an hour or so
she feels better. When it is clearing itself up, she doesn’t really
need the bottle, the quart bottle purchased from the criminals at
the bodega. Doesn’t like to patronize them, because they do not ask
after her family. She’s sure that they are selling illegal drugs to
schoolchildren, but nonetheless, there’s the fact of convenience.
The mildew smell is nauseating, too. When the Polish lady comes, she
will have to tell her about the smell. Rosa Elisabetta doesn’t know
if she’ll be able to keep down the malt liquor. Sometimes she spits
it up. Sometimes she has to spit up some of the malt liquor in order
to calm her stomach. Into the sink, sometimes into the tub. It’s
like in the miniseries about the Roman emperors. One fellow, he had
the sour stomach, and then his grandmother fed him. Rosa unscrews
the cap on the malt liquor, a feverish chill overtaking her; she can
hear the chatter from the next room, beautiful and serene now that
she’s unscrewing the cap of the malt liquor. The voices sound like
birds. The flocks of Prospect Park in spring, like that rooster that
was crowing in the park last summer, someone left a rooster in the
park, and it was doing its job in the mornings. She decides to risk
the malt liquor. Everything is nauseating on a morning like this,
the old tile floor in the bathroom of the brownstone, the mildew,
the stink, the interracial couples of the neighborhood, the diaspora
of her contemporaries to Long Island and to Westchester, to the
state of Florida. She drinks deep, gags, drinks more, gags. Drinks
more. Rosa Elisabetta, the last person in this neighborhood to have
officiated in stickball and to have carried lasagna next door when
people moved in, the last person to have drunk red wine out of jugs
at the block party, where the priest came by and made jokes about
baseball. They all drank wine, her family drank wine, even as a girl
she drank wine, her friends had wine on Sundays at church, and no
one worried about whether the priest was molesting anyone.
Rosa Elisabetta won’t allow herself to be pushed out of her own
neighborhood, where she raised up a daughter by herself and grew
old. The neighborhood where she learned the one thing she learned,
that a daughter was what God had promised. The perfection of
daughters, daughters running in the park, daughters playing on the
swings, daughters at the zoo, daughters smelling hyacinth in the
botanical garden, smelling lilies. She made a dress for her daughter
out of gingham, put up her daughter’s hair in pigtails, took her
over to the neighbors to ask if her daughter was not the prettiest
girl on the block. She raised a daughter and worked in the
principal’s office of the elementary school, and no one can take her
parking space away from her.
Replenishment of fluids. Vital to her condition. She knows what a
flat cola will do for an elementary school child in the throes of a
stomach complaint. She knows how to stop a nosebleed and how to
apply a tourniquet. She will stay here until she has replenished.
The malt liquor is half empty, and she is feeling as though she
might be up and around before noontime after all. She is starting to
feel like a matriarch, like a God-fearing Catholic. So she reaches
back and toggles the lever, to flush away the bits of her that she
has ripped loose, and the toilet gurgles darkly after clearing only
a portion of the evidence. “Oh, don’t tell me. Don’t you dare tell
me.” Yet while this anxiety about plumbing – like anxiety about all
home maintenance issues, and anxiety about medical issues, and
anxiety about automotive issues, and anxiety about political issues
– weighs heavily on Rosa Elisabetta, a fresh bout of muscular
contractions overtakes her, and she can do nothing until its
temblors have coursed through her. Then, coated with sweat and
smelling like malt liquor, she reaches over, runs the tap, as if the
sound of the tap will help, maybe the sound of the tap, instead of
voices talking about the state of Florida, and she gets a handful of
water, spills it across her face. It splatters the neckline of her
nightgown and her sweater. She hates the color of her towels. She
avails herself further of the malt liquor. She will finish the
bottle.
(Continues…)
Little, Brown
Rick Moody
All right reserved.
ISBN: 0-316-08539-1
Excerpted from The Diviners
by Rick Moody Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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