Island of Divine Music Read Online Free PDF Page B

Nobody.
    He accepted the miracle. Maybe he remembered the story, told by another Italian shoe shine before the earthquake, about a woman in the old Sutro Baths at the Cliff House. Sperm, thrashing madly upstream in public pools, could make things unsafe for women anywhere outside their own bathrooms. Maybe he took it the way he received the columns of sunlight finding him through morning fog on a long walk to the liquor store on Grant, as something too beautiful to ask questions about.
    One night he decided that God had slipped between Maria’s thighs while she slept and planted His seed with a penis as thin as a thread of gold. God’s penis was incredibly thin, but it was also unbelievably long. It stretched through the open window of their flat on Green Street, past the top of the Coit Tower; it reached down from the sky, where a full moon hung beside it like a testicle filledwith celestial semen. Giuseppe chuckled as he found his way to the toilet in the dark. God has only one ball, he said to himself.
    The marriage turned out better than Maria had expected, due in large part to Giuseppe’s impotence, but also to his generosity. He gave her money for nice clothes and food, for movies and tickets to the Funhouse and Playland at the beach. He watched her make dolls out of cornhusks and yarn. That first summer, learning that she craved fresh cherries, he walked a few miles with her to the Japanese Tea Garden and picked his fedora full amid bonsai maples and miniature pagodas.
    In many respects she was still a child, coerced at an early age into selling her body and her childhood. A pimp named Mañuel had seen her potential and made her a lucrative product. He injected her with drugs, raped and sodomized her, beat her with his fists until she thought of the dark water and the peace of falling from the Golden Gate. It was the unborn infant who saved her, who gave her a reason to find a way to live.
    News of the pregnancy put the frosting on Giuseppe’s disgrace. What could there be under the sun to shock and disgust you more than this? his children wanted to know. But the birth inspired a sea change. Without plan or announcement his daughters and grandchildren came to Green Street with gifts, with ravioli and a whole salmon and fig cookies for the mother, with a flannel bunting and bibs for the baby. They held the child and marveled at his beautiful skin, the same as his mother’s, at his perfect oval face and black eyes. They took Maria shopping at Macy’s and made her eat so her hips and breasts could get bigger. Francesca’s daughter Susan struggledto understand Maria’s Spanish, even the name of her son. Hey-Zeus, you call him?
    Sí,
Jesús, she replied.
    He’s a little miracle, that’s for sure.
    They babysat while Maria went to the Funhouse and flew down the wooden slide on a potato sack or lost herself among the mirrors. They scolded Giuseppe for being a skinflint, and they threw out his liquor bottles. They shook their heads and sighed, imagining the old man’s faux virility. They walked around the kitchen holding the little miracle to their breasts, singing old show tunes.
    O ne morning between three and four Giuseppe had trekked out of bed to the toilet when he heard a rattling. Somebody was trying the door. He stood behind it a moment, then cleared his throat. The rattling stopped.
    Hey, Giuseppe whispered. He thought it might be old Desiderio, locked out for the night by his angry wife.
Che cosa?
    A man’s voice on the other side spoke in English and Spanish. He said he was Maria’s family. Giuseppe opened the door.
    The fellow was young with slicked-back hair, and he kept sniffing like he had a cold. Giuseppe made espresso. The two men tiptoed around the kitchen to Maria’s bedroom door, where they could see mother and babe sleeping. The man sniffed and chuckled. His hands and eyes moved constantly. They returned to the kitchen.
    Giuseppe pulled the salmon, two feet long and stiff as a plank,from the