On Earth as It Is in Heaven Read online

  ON EARTH AS IT IS IN HEAVEN

  DAVIDE ENIA was born in 1974 in Palermo, Sicily. He has written, directed and performed in plays for the stage and radio. On Earth as It Is in Heaven, his first novel, has been translated into eighteen languages. Davide lives and cooks in Rome.

  davideenia.org

  ANTONY SHUGAAR is a writer and translator. He is the author of Coast to Coast and I Lie for a Living, and the co-author, with the late Gianni Guadalupi, of Discovering America and Latitude Zero.

  ON

  EARTH

  AS IT

  IS IN

  HEAVEN

  A NOVEL

  DAVIDE ENIA

  TRANSLATED FROM THE ITALIAN

  BY ANTONY SHUGAAR

  textpublishing.com.au

  The Text Publishing Company

  Swann House

  22 William Street

  Melbourne Victoria 3000

  Australia

  Copyright © 2012 by Baldini Castoldi Dalai editore S.p.A., Milano

  Copyright © 2013 Baldini&Castoldi S.r.l., Milano

  Translation copyright © 2014 by Antony Shugaar

  The moral rights of the authors have been asserted.

  All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright above, no part of this publication shall be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the publisher of this book.

  Originally published by Baldini Castoldi Dalai editore S.p.A., Milano, 2012

  First published in the United States by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014

  This edition published by The Text Publishing Company, 2014

  Page design by Abby Kagan

  Cover design by Text

  National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry

  Author: Enia, Davide 1974- author.

  Title: On earth as it is in heaven : a novel / by Davide Enia; translated from the Italian

  by Antony Shugaar.

  ISBN: 9781922079374 (paperback)

  ISBN: 9781921961540 (ebook)

  Subjects: Boxing—Fiction. Boxers (sports)—Fiction. Families—Fiction. Sicily

  (Italy)—Fiction.

  Other Authors/Contributors: Shugaar, Antony, translator.

  Dewey Number: 853.92

  CONTENTS

  PART ONE

  THE SHARK FISH GOES TO WAR

  PART TWO

  THE BATTLEFIELD

  PART THREE

  WELCOME BACK, FEROCITY

  ON EARTH

  AS IT IS IN

  HEAVEN

  here I stand

  at the peak of my beauty

  still on my feet

  hands spattered with blood

  in front of me the dark grain of her mulberry mouth

  and she takes my bloody fingers and raises them to her lips

  and kisses them

  one by one

  her name is Nina

  she is my love

  she’s nine years old

  There are two of them in the boxing ring.

  One weighs 145 pounds, stands five foot five, and is twenty-six years old.

  The other one? Nobody knows his weight and it doesn’t matter how tall he is, he’ll grow.

  No one has bandaged his wrists, he’s wearing boxing gloves, he’s bouncing on his toes in the ring.

  He’s nine years old.

  There’s a man at the far end of the room, smoking and talking on the phone.

  “Zina, don’t worry, he’s with me, everything’s fine, half an hour, no more, and we’ll be home, ciao.”

  He hangs up the phone, picks up a paper from the table, and studies the horse-racing odds, looking to place a bet on an unforgettable trifecta and win big enough to turn his life around, at least for a couple of months.

  At the edge of the ring, leaning on the ropes, a man with a flat cap on his head yells: “On the count of ‘three.’”

  The other boxers stop doing push-ups and turn away from the heavy bag.

  “One, two, three.”

  The kid keeps a comfortable distance from his opponent. His footwork is beautiful to behold: the tips of his toes leave the ground together and touch down in unison.

  At the far end of the room, the man who’s smoking slaps the back of his hand against the newspaper.

  “What a fucking trifecta: Asansol, Regulus, Mastiff the Third—I’m making this bet right now.”

  He tears out the page, stuffs it in his pocket, and comes over to the ring.

  The twenty-six-year-old fighter is named Carlo. He’s focused: his guard is up, his legs are bent, his gaze is trained directly on his opponent’s eyes.

  The kid feints to the right and then makes a surprise leap to his left. He’s not even aware of the moves he makes; he just makes them. Carlo maintains his defensive stance. He’s locked up tight, like the front doors of a church in the middle of the night. The instant the kid touches down, he throws an uppercut with his left glove. Carlo blocks the punch with his right elbow. The man in the flat cap at the edge of the ring is about to shout something but the words catch in his throat: unexpectedly, without warning, the kid has converted the uppercut into a double punch.

  His left glove just grazes Carlo’s face.

  He gave it a shot.

  He failed.

  The smoking man issues the order without feeling: “Drop him.”

  The front doors of the church open wide.

  Carlo unleashes a cross that slams into the kid’s cheek, sending him to the mat.

  A couple of seconds later, the kid gets to his feet, staggers, and loses his balance immediately.

  He clenches his teeth to keep from toppling over again.

  The man in the flat cap asks him: “You know how to jump rope?”

  “My head’s spinning.”

  “That’s not what you were asked,” the other man points out, calmly, exhaling a stream of smoke from his mouth.

  The man in the flat cap has the eyes of the hunter just as the shot’s about to be fired.

  “I don’t know how to jump rope.”

  “Teach yourself.”

  The kid pulls off his gloves, steps out of the ring, picks up a jump rope, and does his best. He gets it wrong every time.

  “So,” the man who’s smoking says to the man with the flat cap.

  “You saw it yourself, he threw a double punch.”

  “And he’s got a pair of feet on him.”

  “Yeah.”

  “The time has come.”

  “Like father, like son.”

  “See you tomorrow, Franco.”

  The man with the cigarette in his mouth takes the jump rope out of the kid’s hands after watching a series of unsuccessful attempts.

  “You’ll learn to do that, too, in time. Now let’s go home. Listen to me carefully, you can tell your mother everything that happened, except the part about me taking you to the gym. Swear it.”

  The kid swears.

  “But tell your grandpa everything.”

  “Can I?”

  “Not can you, I’m telling you you have to.”

  They leave the gym just as the man named Franco, whipping the flat cap off his head, shouts at the boxer named Carlo to feint to the left and block that right uppercut, again, do it again, you miserable son of a bitch, again.

  Outside, the sound of police sirens comes wailing through the hot, stagnant air. Little knots of people stand in the shade pointing to someplace in the distance. One person tells the version of events he overheard, someone else asks questions, another person ventures an answer, a
nd everyone crosses themselves at the word Mafia.

  The man who’s smoking walks along with his hands in his pockets.

  He answers to no one but himself.

  He never turns around.

  His name is Umbertino.

  He’s my great-uncle.

  The nine-year-old kid is me.

  PART ONE

  THE SHARK

  FISH

  GOES TO WAR

  No, it’s the way I say it is. The first time you fuck, the string tears off.”

  Nino Pullara was adamant. He was the oldest, the tallest, the strongest boy in our gang. He was bound to be right.

  “That’s how it is, my cousin Girolamo told me, he’s already fucked twelve times, he’s fifteen, and the first time the string on your cock always breaks.”

  “Does it hurt?” asked Lele Tranchina; he knew that asking if something hurts was a sign of weakness, but he didn’t give a damn.

  “Yeah, it hurts, it bleeds, but Girolamo says that if you fuck the way you oughta, it feels so good that the pain don’t matter.”

  Rebellious teenagers with jackknives have carved slogans into the benches in the piazza.

  THE POLICE SUCK

  GOVERNMENT = MAFIA

  LESS COPS, MORE HEROIN

  Nino Pullara pulled out a pack of cigarettes, lit one, passed it around.

  “Gerruso, you dickhead, when you inhale, you have to hold all the smoke in, otherwise you don’t feel a thing, and there’s no point to smoking.”

  “But it makes me want to cough.”

  “Because you’re a total pussy.”

  As long as we let him stay in the gang, Gerruso would put up with anything: we could kick him, spit on him, scratch him. He was so resigned to the idea of being beaten to a pulp that he didn’t even resist anymore. The fun of beating him up was starting to fade.

  “When I grow up,” Pullara continued, “there’s two things I wanna do. The first is fuck Fabrizia.”

  “The one at the bakery?” asked Danilo Dominici, wide-eyed.

  “That’s her.”

  Fabrizia, seventeen and spectacular, a pair of firm tits. After she took a job there, the whole neighborhood started buying bread at that bakery.

  “I’ve never seen so many men willing to do the shopping,” my grandmother Provvidenza had quipped.

  “I’m definitely going to fuck Fabrizia, but only after my string’s torn off.”

  Pullara was boasting with the confidence of someone who’d already turned twelve.

  “What’s the second thing you wanna do?” asked Guido Castiglia.

  Guido Castiglia never missed a trick. Guido Castiglia wasn’t someone you wanted to cross. One time he asked Paolo Vizzini for a stick of chewing gum, and Vizzini said uh-uh, he wasn’t giving him any of his gum. Castiglia didn’t say a word, didn’t blink an eye, just walked away. Two months later, Vizzini fell out of a carob tree and landed on his left leg. His flesh was all ripped up, and you could see clear through to the white of the bone.

  “Help me! Help me!” he was shouting.

  Guido Castiglia appeared on the dirt lane.

  “You want me to go get help?”

  Vizzini begged him.

  “Hah, that’ll teach you: next time give me the stick of gum.”

  And he left him there, his leg fractured, crying like a little girl.

  “What I want is to have the same job as my dad: at a gas station.”

  Pullara’s statement resounded like a decree. His voice rang with a tone that underscored the inexorable future awaiting him. No job could compare with working at a gas station: there you sat in the shade, immersed in the magical scent of gasoline; a dog tied to a chain to keep you company, and, if you got bored, you could always beat the dog with a stick; in the back pocket of your pants, a fat, impressive wad of cash.

  “I want the same job as my dad, too,” Danilo Dominici announced. “It’s great, you’re always outdoors.”

  His father paved streets.

  “Me, too; I want the same job as my father. He’s a traffic cop.”

  We all glared at Gerruso with hatred: being a traffic cop was pathetic, they didn’t even have sidearms.

  “Gerruso, look over there.”

  The minute he turned around, Pullara landed an open-handed slap on the back of his neck. Then he turned to look at me.

  “What about you, Davidù? What kind of job you want?”

  I spoke the first true words that came into my head, without stopping to think.

  “Me? Oh, I don’t know, I’m not like you guys, you all want the same jobs as your dads. Me, I can do whatever I want, I’m luckier than all of you: I’m pretty much an orphan.”

  In front of my house I saw my grandmother, seated on a bench in the shade of the jacaranda tree. She was smoking a cigarette, leaning comfortably against the rusty green backrest.

  “Light of my life, come sit next to me, Grandpa’s upstairs, he’s cooking lunch for you.”

  “Mamma’s not home from the hospital yet?”

  “No. It looks like a bomb went off on top of your head.”

  She started laughing, between a hacking cough and a mouthful of smoke.

  Grandma smelled of tobacco and chalk.

  She was an elementary school teacher.

  She taught me to read and write.

  I was four years old.

  She had pestered me.

  “Davidù, shall we learn how to read and write?”

  Every goddamned day.

  She was relentless, and I finally gave in. In part because she promised that once I learned, she’d teach me how to burp on command.

  She was as good as her word.

  “What did you do today?”

  “At school, nothing, the teacher let us draw because she’s working on our report cards, then in the piazza me and my friends talked about when we would be grown up.”

  “When we will be grown up.”

  “Okay, but you knew what I meant.”

  “Davidù, it’s not enough for someone to understand the things you say. Words need to be treated with care. What did Grandma teach you? What are words?”

  “The expression of our thoughts.”

  “Why do we use the future tense?”

  “To give a direction to our plans and hopes and all that kind of stuff.”

  “Bravo, light of my life, if you were a little older I’d offer you a nice cigarette.”

  “Why aren’t you upstairs with Grandpa?”

  “I wanted to smoke in blessed peace, as if it were six forty in the evening.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “It’s something I’ve done since I was a girl. Back then, the war was still going on and the Americans had reached Capaci. They were giving away chocolate bars and cigarettes. I met this soldier, Michael. He gave me my very first pack of cigarettes, in exchange for a dance.”

  “Did you kiss him?”

  “No, silly. Back then I had a job, I’d already been working in Palermo for a few months, at the city library, and I was studying for the civil service exam.”

  “Because in those days, civil service exams were tough, you always tell me that, Grandma.”

  “I even know Ancient Greek.”

  “The story, Grandma.”

  “The library is next to the church of Casa Professa. Bombs hit them both during the famous raid of May 9, 1943. In the wing of the library that was still intact, I spent the day archiving books that had been dug out of the rubble. I wrote down title, author’s name, missing pages. Bombs don’t just sweep away people, houses, and hopes. Bombs erase memories, too. When the workday was over, I leaned against the sycamore tree in front of Casa Professa and lit my favorite cigarette, the six forty evening cigarette. I’d leave the workday and my job behind, savoring that nice pungent taste and relaxing, from the first puff to the last. While I smoked, the crowds streaming into and out of the Ballarò market kept swelling. Back then, the market was especially crowded at the end of the day. So
crowded you had to hold your packages high over your head to get anywhere. The houses didn’t have refrigerators back then, and they had to sell everything before it went bad, so they cut prices in the evening. The kids would stand in line to buy salt, playing rock, paper, scissors. The women gossiped about love affairs and girls who had eloped. Here and there, a man, scented with cologne, stood in line for potatoes, singing the first few notes of an aria and winking at anyone who met his gaze. I couldn’t say how many cigarettes I smoke every day, twenty, maybe twenty-five, but the one I really enjoy, my favorite one, is the cigarette of six forty in the evening, and even when it’s not six forty in the evening, say right now, I pretend it is, I stop whatever I’m doing, I walk away from everything and everyone, I savor my cigarette, and to hell with the world.”

  Grandma taught her pupils bad words, too, secretly; she said it helped prepare them for life. “Life is more than verbs and arithmetic, it’s mud and dirty words, too, and knowledge is better than ignorance.”

  A police car came toward us, slowed down, looked us over, drove by, and went away.

  On the bed, a note from my mother, in her distinctive nurse’s handwriting.

  “Your uncle wants you to go someplace with him at 4, he’ll come by to pick you up, goodbye, light of my life.”

  In the kitchen, Grandpa was cooking lunch. Whenever there were strangers around, he was practically mute. Grandpa Rosario talked only to me and his old friend Randazzo. He worked as a cook.

  “What are you cooking?”

  “Pasta ch’i tenerumi.”

  He blanched and peeled a tomato, then sliced it. Grandpa’s hands were lightning fast.

  “How do you know how long to cook everything? Are there tables, like for multiplication?”

  “You just have to learn to get the ingredients right.”

  “And how do you learn that?”

  “By getting them wrong.”

  On the shelf in the dining room stood a photograph of my parents on their wedding day. My father’s right arm protectively encircled my mother’s shoulders, his hair was parted to one side, his suit was dark. He was smiling. In his blue eyes there was a fierce note of hope; he could hardly have known he’d be dead within the month. In the photograph, my father was as handsome as his nickname implied: the Paladin. Mamma wore a white dress and held a red rose. Her eyes were shut as she breathed in the scent of the flower: serene, a definitive serenity.