Island of Divine Music Read Online Free PDF

more than that of a feather.
    Giuseppe’s wife of more than fifty years, Rosari, was informed of the bigamy by their daughter Francesca, a week after the marriage.
    They even got his birth date in Calabria, Francesca said. She leaned over the
Chronicle,
which was spread across her broad lap. Look at that, Ma. It can’t be him. You think it’s him? Or else somebody found his ID in some saloon?
    Rosari pulled on the hem of her black dress. The two women sat facing the street, on the porch of the family house in the East Bay. They were silent for some time. Then Rosari said, Well, that cuts it. Enough is enough.
    Giuseppe’s children and grandchildren were astounded by his September romance across the bay. It wasn’t just embarrassing, even disgusting when you actually thought about it, but wasn’t it also illegal? they asked each other. You think they check the records on people? You think in San Francisco they care if an old goat marries a child? In San Francisco?
    Who is this little gold brick? Who is this home-wrecker? Francesca shrieked.
    I thought Pop was the home-wrecker, her older brother, Narciso, answered.
    Precisely where Maria came from was unclear, but it was said she had family who tended sheep and rainy farmland for a land baron in the red-and-green mountains in the Oaxaca department of Mexico. Her older brother had sneaked into California with her and died from a foot infection soon after. The
curandera
who attended the ailing boy with herbs and incantations realized a week before hisdeath that there was nothing to be done to keep him alive, and she told Maria this on a fog-shrouded summer morning on Valencia Street, stirring instant coffee at the card table. The girl, then only fourteen, decided that afternoon that she would have to become a prostitute in order to survive.
    She was dark and exquisite, even at that age, with deep eyes which flowed into a fierce anger and then, instantly, ebbed into the sorrow of a confused child. Hustling for a dope peddler named Mañuel near hotels, bars, and nightclubs in North Beach cost her the little affection and sympathy she’d had from neighboring women. She endured their vitriol, avoided their church and markets, and slept frequently in unlocked cars. Her hatred of men, of their rankness and animal minds, almost matched the disgust she felt toward the small, elegant body she was trapped inside of.
    A woman who also worked Broadway and North Beach found Maria’s marriage to Giuseppe the funniest thing she’d seen in years, but Maria saw little humor in the undertaking. She listened to the need of the child inside her. To Giuseppe she was a virgin and remained so, in spite of the pregnancy, throughout their years together.
    It may have been senility. It may have been the overwhelming purity of her beauty in his eyes. Some of the family attributed it to vermouth and closed the book there. Regardless, Giuseppe had not felt such harmony with the world around him, the eucalyptus trees and junipers, the carved stones, the gleam of oil on the bay at dusk, for as long as memory. And God had often dealt Giuseppe a mysterious hand, giving him bread for destruction instead of craft, makinghim appear the rake in the bars and social clubs of Little Italy with a wife conveniently stirring pots across the bay when, as He and Giuseppe only knew, he’d been struck impotent some twenty years earlier after an injury and a disgusting encounter in the Tenderloin. And now God had told Giuseppe Verbicaro, brittle-boned old sinner with a limp sex, drinker and dreamer with a big fedora and wandering brogans, to provide for this angel.
    Maria’s cappuccino-colored skin, her sudden laughter and eyes black as midnight, made him smile like a baby. The smell of her hair was from another world. So when she informed him that she was with child, about two months after the courthouse wedding, he asked simply how and by whom. She answered with a steady voice:
Dios sabe
and
Nadie.
God knows.