God's Mountain Read Free

My palms sweat, giving off a smell of bitter wood, more bitter thanchestnut. No one sees me, only the spirits that blow an occasional dry kiss to my face. The street is noisy even at night, but I’m higher than anyone, up among the clotheslines, where the loudest noise is the boomerang’s edge slicing the air as it passes my ears.
     
     
    R AFANIELLO IS tired. He sleeps badly and his hump is burning. But he’s happy. He says it’s a good sign. He confides in me when Master Errico goes out to buy wood. He tells me his story. He came to Naples by mistake. He had wanted to go to Jerusalem after the war. He got off the train and saw the sea for the first time. A ship blew its whistle and he remembered a festival in his hometown that began with the same sound. He looked at people’s feet, at how many bare feet there were, lots of children like in his town, so skinny, fast, they could be his own. He comes from a hard-luck town that lost all its children. The crowds in Naples remindhim of them. There are so few people in his old town they don’t even say hello to one another anymore. In Naples you could spend all day saying hello to people and go to bed tired just from that.
     
     
    R AFANIELLO TOOK a walk around our city—foreign, yet almost like his own used to be before the war. The same faces, shouts, insults, and curses, and he thought it was strange that he couldn’t understand a word. He touched his ears to see if something was wrong with them. He laughs when he tells me about it. He gave up. The city was foreign. He thought the sea was holding the city back, refusing to let it leave. So he, too, had to stay. He couldn’t walk the rest of the way to Jerusalem, and the ships here set sail for America, not the Holy Land. So he stays, telling himself: I’ll stay for a while. It’s late 1945. There’s a need for shoes. Peoplewant to get married. Naples is filled with weddings. So Rafaniello stays and waits. The stories he tells in the workshop cast a spell on me. I have to pinch myself to get back to work.
     
     
    E ACH OF us has an angel. That’s what Rafaniello says. And angels don’t travel. If you go away, you lose your angel and have to find another one. In Naples he ends up with a slow angel. It doesn’t fly, it walks. Right away it tells him, “You can’t go to Jerusalem.” What do I have to wait for? Rafaniello asks. “Dear Rav Daniel,” the angel answers him, using Rafaniello’s original name, “you will fly to Jerusalem on wings. I’m going to walk there, even though I’m an angel. But you will fly all the way to the Western Wall of the city on a pair of wings that are as strong as a vulture’s.” And who’s going to give them to me? Rafaniello demands. “You alreadyhave them,” the angel says. “They’re in a case inside your hump.” Rafaniello is sad not to be leaving, but happy about the hump he’s been carrying on his back like a sack of potatoes and bones that he could never put down. They’re wings, wings, he tells me, making his voice even softer. His freckles crinkle around his green eyes, which are staring up at the skylight.
     
     
    T HE ANGEL repeated itself, because humans have to be told everything twice. “You’ll fly there on your own wings and be making shoes alongside Rav Iohanàn hassàndler,” whom we call Don Giuvanni the shoemaker. What was your hometown angel like? I asked him. It knew how to make vodka from snow, he answered. I know what snow is. There was a snowfall in ’56 that cleaned up the city. Naples was never whiter. “Snow doesn’t clean, it covers, making everything the same.It doesn’t sweep anything away,” Rafaniello instructs me, and I hold my tongue.
     
     
    I LISTEN to his stories. I want to tell him that I can fly, too, but only over Naples. I want to tell him how you do it, how you position your body, that it’s all in the eyes; when you look up your body goes up, when you look down, it goes down. I want to tell him what I learned in