Runty Russians, too—one sees them about, flap-flapping in their pajamalike costumes. But the barefooted sailors on the beach, the three I saw reclining there, profiles set against the sundown, seemed mythical as mermen: more exactly, mermaids—for their hair, striped with albino streaks, was lady-length, a savage fiber falling to their shoulders; and in their ears gold rings glinted. Whether plenipotentiaries from the pearl-floored palace of Poseidon or mariners merely, Viking-tressed seamen out of the Gothic North languishing after a long and barberless voyage, they are included permanently in my memory’s curio cabinet: an object to be revolved in the light that way and this, like those crystal lozenges with secretive carvings sealed inside.
After consideration, “Thunder on Cobra Street” does become decipherable. On the Heights there is no Cobra Street, though a street exists that suits the name, a steep downhill incline leading to a dark sector of the dockyards. Not a true part of the Heights neighborhood, it lies, like a serpent at the gates, on the outmost periphery. Seedy hangouts, beer-sour bars and bitter candy stores mingle among the eroding houses, the multifamily dwellings that architecturally range from time-blackened brownstone to magnified concepts of Mississippi privy.
Here, the gutters are acrawl with Cobras; that is, a gang of “juvenile” delinquents: COBRA, the word is stamped on their sweatshirts, painted, sometimes in letters that shine with a fearful phosphorescence, across the backs of their leather jackets. The steep street is within their ugly estate, a bit of their “turf,” as they term it; an infinitesimal bit, for the Cobras, a powerful cabala, cast owning eyes on acres of metropolitan terrain. I am not brave—au contraire; quite frankly, these fellows, may they be twelve years old or twenty, set my heart thumping like a sinner’s at Sunday meeting. Nevertheless, when it has been a matter of convenience to pass through this section of their domain, I’ve compelled my nerves to accept the challenge.
On the last venture, and perhaps it will remain the last, I was carrying a good camera. The sun was unseen in a sky that ought to either rumble or rain. Rackety children played skip-rope, while a lamppost-lot of idle elders looked on, dull-faced and drooping: a denim-painted, cowboy-booted gathering of Cobras. Their eyes, their asleep sick insolent eyes, swerved on me as I climbed the street. I crossed to the opposite curb; then knew, without needing to verify it, that the Cobras had uncoiled and were sliding toward me. I heard them whistling; and the children hushed, the skip-rope ceased swishing. Someone—a pimpled purple-birthmark bandit-masked the lower half of his face—said, “Hey yuh, Whitey, lemmeseeduhcamra.” Quicken one’s step? Pretend not to hear? But every alternative seemed explosive. “Hey, Whitey, hey yuh, take-muhpitchawantcha?”
Thunder salvaged the moment. Thunder that rolled, crashed down the street like a truck out of control. We all looked up, a sky ripe for storm stared back. I shouted, “Rain! Rain!” and ran. Ran for the Heights, that safe citadel, that bourgeois bastion. Tore along the Esplanade—where the nice young mothers were racing their carriages against the coming disaster. Caught my breath under the thrashing leaves of troubled elms, rushed on: saw the flower-wagon man struggling with his thunder-frightened horse. Saw, twenty yards ahead, then ten, five, then none, the yellow house on Willow Street. Home! And happy to be.
LOLA (1964)
Yes, it seemed in every respect a curious gift. An appalling one, really. For I had already a sufficiency of pets: two dogs, an English bulldog and a Kerry blue terrier. Moreover, I have never been partial to birds; indeed, I’ve had always rather an aversion to them: when, on a beach, sea gulls swoop and dive, I am (for example) very liable to panic and run. Once when I was five or six, a sparrow, having flown through the window of my room, became trapped there: flew about till I was almost faint from an emotion in which pity figured but fear predominated. And so it was with some dismay that I received Graziella’s Christmas present: an ugly young raven with wings cruelly clipped.
Now more than twelve years have gone by, for that was Christmas morning, 1952. I was living then in Sicily on a mountainside; the house, placed amid a silvery olive orchard, was made of pale pink stone; it had many rooms, and a terrace with a view of Etna’s snowcapped summit. Far below one saw, on sunlit days, a sea blue as a peacock’s eye. It was a beautiful house, though not very comfortable, especially in winter when north winds sang, shouted, when one drank wine for warmth and even so the touch of the stone floors was cold as a dead man’s kiss.
Whatever the weather, winter-withered or sun-scorched, the house would not have been quite habitable without Graziella, a servant girl from the village who appeared early each morning and stayed until after supper. She was seventeen, a stocky young lady too sturdily built: she had the legs of a Japanese wrestler—slightly bowed, with bulging calves.
Her face, however, was pretty as could be: eyes brown and gold as the local home-brewed brandy; rosy cheeks; rosier lips; a fine dark brow; and black hair brushed smooth to the skull, then secured in that austere position by a little pair of Spanish combs. She had a hard life, and in an amused, uncomplaining fashion, complained of it constantly: a father who was the village drunk, at any rate one of them; her mother, a religious hysteric; and Paolo, her elder brother—she adored him, though he every week beat her and robbed her of her wages.
We were good friends, Graziella and I, and it was natural that at Christmas we should exchange gifts. I gave her a sweater, a scarf and a necklace of green beads. And she, to repeat, presented me with a raven.
I have said it was ugly. It was. An object both dreadful and pathetic. No matter the risk of outraging Graziella, I would have set it free at once had it been capable of fending for itself. But the wings had been very closely cut and it could not fly; it could only wobble about, its black beak agape like the jaws of an idiot, its eyes flat and bleak. Graziella, having climbed high into the dour volcanic slopes above Bronte, had captured it in a ravine where ravens thrive, a valley of stones and thorns and deformed trees.
She said, “I caught it with a fishing net. I ran among the birds. When I threw the net in the air two of them tangled. One I let go. The other, this one, I put in a shoebox. I took it home and cut its wings. Ravens are very clever. Smarter than parrots. Or horses. If we split its tongue, we can teach it to talk.” It was not that Graziella was unkind; she simply shared the indifference of Mediterraneans to the sufferings of animals. She grew quite cross when I refused to let her mutilate the bird’s tongue; in fact, she lost all interest in the poor creature, the well-being of which now became my own unhappy burden.
I kept it shut away in a spare, unfurnished room; kept it locked there like a mad relative. I thought, Well, its wings will soon grow out, then it can go away. But the New Year came and went, weeks passed, and presently Graziella confessed it would be six months before my Christmas gift could once again ascend the skies.
I loathed it. I loathed visiting it; the room was the coldest in the cold house, and the bird so forlorn, so impeccably sad a sight. Yet awareness of its loneliness forced me there—though at the start it seemed to enjoy my visits rather less than I did: it would stalk into a corner and turn its back on me, a silent prisoner hunched between a bowl of water and a bowl of food.
In time, however, I came to feel my presence was not unwelcome; it ceased to avoid me, it stared me in the eye and, in a rough, unmusical voice, produced friendly-seeming noises: muted cawings. We began to make discoveries concerning one another: I found it liked to have its head scratched, it realized how much its playful peckings amused me. Soon it learned to balance on the rim of my hand, then to sit upon my shoulder. It grew fond of kissing me—that is, gently, with its beak nipping at my chin, cheeks, an earlobe. Nevertheless, I remained, or imagined I did, somewhat repelled by it: the funereal coloring, the bird-feel of its feathers—distasteful (to me) as fish skin, snake hide.
One morning—it was late January, but spring comes early to Sicily, and the almond trees were in flower: a mist of scent and bloom drifting across the landscape—one morning I arrived to find the raven had absconded. The room in which it lived contained French doors leading into a garden; during the night the doors had somehow come undone; perhaps the sirocco, which was blowing then (bringing with it gritty bits of
