The Islands of Divine Music by John Addiego

Author:John Addiego [Addiego, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction, General, Families, Family, Italians - United States, Family Life, United States, Italians, Sagas, Italian American Families, Italian Americans, Cultural Heritage
ISBN: 9781932961546
Publisher: Unbridled Books
Published: 2008-10-01T04:00:00+00:00

Well we are home we walk all day for that arturo leave and mama is much in anger. The world is not over and I am happy you are fine and me tambien, well it’s the way the wiener wobbles. Mama says we will soon leave this place for good. With much love I hope you are happy. Even in the city of rocks many brite flowers find a place to grow.

On a cool November evening seven years later Penny stood before a Mexican bakery in San Francisco. A group of sugar skulls peeked from the windows of a hacienda made of dough or gingerbread. She knew enough Spanish to translate the icing on the building: Dia de los Muertos, Day of the Dead. It made her think of the six days when death had hung so close to them all, her mother sitting before the TV, her brother in some silent world of his own, her father when Paulie had joined the marines, and how unreal that time seemed now, after its passage, compared with the very real and daily reports of death from Vietnam, with the real problems in their lives. As she stood before the plate glass she imagined the baby and his mother peering from a window in a city made of stone, an ancient city carved into a cliff, leaning at the end of the world.

Penny had only heard from Jesús twice in those last seven years, and the last letters she’d sent had come back unopened. Mother and child had been on the move, mostly in the Rocky Mountain states and the Great Basin, in desolate towns full of work crews, oil fields, mining operations, dam construction. Penny didn’t know Jesús had taken up his drunk mother’s burden and, at the age of twelve, sneaked into taverns with her, dressed in her clothes, in order to take men’s money. He was a convincing transvestite, a slim-hipped Latin beauty with scarlet lipstick and turquoise eyeliner, and it amazed him how easily these men, who spent months in danger and drudgery in order to mail money home to their wives, who spent all day sweating and moving machines with their callused hands, could be fooled into stuffing ten-dollar bills into his. And then there were the men who saw through the costume and called him a queer and paid to enter him from behind. For Jesús there was that sudden frightening violation with its attendant thrill of pain and its disgusting pleasure mixed with the pain. There was a debasement and acceptance of what is most dirty and wrong and deeply pleasurable about being a human being, that most basic giving over of himself to another. He was a queer. He was something men fucked and told jokes about and talked about lining up against a wall and shooting, ridding the world of them. One evening their cruelty nearly killed him, much in the way it had nearly killed his mother: he was stripped and sexually assaulted, then beaten and left for dead in a parking lot.

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