The
people waiting for the train were all old Italians. One by one, they came
down the stairs to the platform, while I gave them each a toothpick. I
strolled the platform, with a wad of toothpicks in my fist, tapping them
against my other fist into shapes of houses, cars, breasts and tommy-guns.
No one noticed my creations. Each person reached for a toothpick without
saying a word. I gave the last toothpick to a gaunt old woman in a half-length
mink coat with a large gold brooch on the collar, shaped like a tiger-lily.
I tastefully placed her toothpick between the petals. I noticed that she
had no teeth.
We were lined up
in front of the station. I was not sure whether this was the right place
to catch the train, so I walked down the street. When I came back, the
train had left. My two bags were slumped beside the waiting-room window
where several old Italians had been playing cards. The stationmaster said
the train left half an hour late.
It could not have
been more than a few minutes since I walked down the street to where the
bell-captain paced in front of the hotel and looked up to the room above
the entrance. A young woman was sleeping behind the drawn curtain. It
was 5 o'clock in the afternoon. She slept with her head flat to the mattress
and both pillows arranged to block the shaft of light that danced in the
middle of the room through the opening where the curtains had refused
to overlap when she had tried to pull them tight. She wanted simply to
lie down for a few minutes before her lover came. She had fallen fast
asleep.
Around the corner
in the side street, Carlo Vacca the baker slid seven loaves onto the oven
bricks. He stepped back, lit his foul little pipe, and folded his arms.
Passing the bakery
on his way to the hotel from the train station to meet the woman sleeping
in the room above the entrance, her lover pressed his hands into the silk-lined
pockets of his long camelhair overcoat. He thought at first of his mother's
Persian-lamb jacket which she wore with her open-toed shoes and gray suede
gloves to go shopping in the winter. The aroma from the bakery flowed
over his brain. He watched his grandmother kneading dough, her forearms
white with flour, her face a dandelion gone to seed. He sat at the kitchen
table drawing her picture in her red apron and enormous black shoes.
Across the square
was the apartment I had left dirty. On my way to the station, the landlord
had called me into his office. He told me that Mrs. Castagno, in the apartment
below mine, had complained about my garbage oozing through the fire escape
onto her rose garden. I told him he was an insect the size of a giant
pig. I spat on the floor in front of him.
In the grass under
the tree outside the landlord's window, a fat squirrel's tail was a beautiful
orange feather. The squirrel leapt onto a piece of bark and nibbled it,
but the piece of bark was not food. The squirrel fell over to kick the
bark, as if the bark were another squirrel. The winter afternoon hung
from the tree above, like a sorrowful song from another time.
I arrived at my
apartment with my luggage. The kitchen sink was full of greasy water.
I reached in and pulled the plug and let the water out. The sink was filled
with playing cards, toothpicks and plastic circus animals.
I watched the sun
go down over the buildings I could see from my living room window. Night
came quickly. I needed to go outside once more, before unpacking my luggage
and getting ready for bed. I went downstairs for a walk around the block.
I walked up the alley behind my building, to the windowless wall adjoining
the alley. The constant shadow on the wall was of a round object I could
not identify. It was cast by a streetlamp beyond a chain fence. One of
the fenceposts clearly formed part of a shadow, but the shadow of the
round object above and slightly to the right of the shadow of the fencepost
did not originate with any round object between the wall and the streetlamp.
I had failed to notice it for a period of many years, but it came to my
attention, quite suddenly, one night in late autumn when I was returning
from one of my walks. With increasing clarity and ever more intricate
subtlety, I began to realize that the round object existed only in my
imagination, while the shadow it cast was factually present on the wall.
Either I had created both the object and its shadow, or I had created
only the object, with the consequence that it would cast a shadow whenever
the streetlamp was lit.
I was turning these
possibilities over in my mind, trying to think of other possibilities,
as I came around behind my building on my way back to my apartment. Mrs.
Castagno's lights were off. Either she was away visiting her son the optometrist,
or she was asleep in her apartment dreaming of the garbage dripping from
my fire escape. Wherever she was, she was probably asleep and dreaming
of eggshells and orange peels blossoming from her rosebushes. For a moment
she realized how beautiful they were. They made her happy. Her anger at
me released itself into the night air surrounding her dream. I looked
at the shadow on the wall. The round object was my own head wearing a
top hat. The rest of me had broken into a jaunty two-step, poking the
wall with a cane, then stopping and standing still.
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