Accordion Crimes (2 page)

“To New York. My wife and children, all of us were going, yet two months ago, think of it, only two months, my wife became a wooden plank, transfixed by an evil illness, and now only the boy and I go. She is not dead, she lives, yet cannot move. It was our plan to go to La Merica, start a small music store for instruments and repair. I am an accordion maker, also a little of a musician, you know, I can play for weddings, saints’ days. I know a hundred songs. An accordion maker knows how to make the instrument show its voice. But constructing the accordion is my destiny. I understand the instrument, I have a feeling for it. Also I can repair other kinds—a cracked violin, mandolins, a torn drum.”

He opened the case to show the instrument’s sleek lacquer, the polished buttons. He sounded a flourishing chord, sprinkled a few drops of notes to illustrate the superiority of the tone to this young man, not to play, because the grave condition of his wife made that unseemly. It seemed he had to behave as a widower. He returned it to the goatskin case slowly, tied it closed.

“Very nice! A very beautiful instrument! I have cousins who play, but they have nothing so fine as this. One of them, Emilio, was wounded last year by a man so engorged with jealousy that he later perished from apoplexy. Perhaps you will do well in New York! Perhaps not. New York attracts Italians from the north, stuck-up
Liguri.
The place is full of them! Many musicians there, many accordion makers! There is already an enormous music store on Mulberry Street where they sell piano rolls, everything, books, gramophones, mandolins, sheet music! In New York the winters are savage, the flesh freezes on the bone, there is snow! Winds of a ferocity not to be imagined! There, in old buildings, Sicilians live as close as straws in a bundle! New York? Everything is cold, noise and rush! I have stayed in New
York for a year! Unbearable! It was in New York that the crazy one’s brother was dragged to his death by a horse, a horse maddened to fury by arctic temperatures! You should do what I am doing—I am going to Louisiana, to New Orleans! The climate is as soft as baby’s flesh! The soil, blacker than the pupil of the eye, of incredible fertility! Sicilians are there in every kind of work! The shrimp and oyster boats! Tremendous opportunity! No music store such as you describe! The place cries out for one! The people of this city love music! The Gulf is a cornucopia—shrimp of such a size a man can hold only two in his cupped palm, oysters as large as cakes and as sweet as honey, fish of every kind, and a rich nut, the pecan, which grows wild everywhere! The fruit boats give work at once! You can quickly earn enough to make your music store! Think of it! You get off the ship, walk down the dock and get a job in two minutes carrying boxes of oranges! The man hiring you speaks Sicilian, he understands you! Before you sleep on your first night in La Merica you have earned money, more money than you’d see in a week, in a month, in Sicily! But maybe you have relatives waiting for you in New York, perhaps you have cousins and many brothers, perhaps you have
connections
who will help you battle the immense music store on Mulberry Street? Perhaps you already have enough money to open your own music store at once?” He lit a cigar, offered one to the accordion maker who took it with effusive thanks.

No, no, they had no one, he said, rejecting the detested brother-in-law, Alessandro, with his face like dirty clothes. He did not want to see him, that Antichrist. After all, that one was not blood of his blood. No, he said to the young man; his son was not particularly musical, but he was strong and good in mathematics. Whether boats or music stores, he would be useful. The accordion maker leaned forward, asked, what
more of Nov’ Orlenza, of Luigiana? Were the inhabitants truly inclined toward music? The aromatic smoke formed a cloud around their heads.

Greenhorn, thought the young man. One more among thousands and thousands and thousands. He did not count himself.

All the way to Palermo, the train jerking down the long incline to the sea, the young man amused himself by extolling the delights of Louisiana, inventing musicians who, for lack of competent repairs, played broken husks of instruments, were forced to sing
a cappella
because there were no accordions to accompany them, until the accordion maker did not know how he could have considered New York’s wolflike cold and crowded tenements, a New York inhabited by the braggart Alessandro—who, alone of all people on earth, persisted in calling him “Chicken Eye”—when a city of desperate musicians awaited him. In Nov’ Orlenza he would work at anything, unload bananas, juggle lemons, skin cats, to put every scudo—
penny
—aside. In his pocket he had the name of a boardinghouse and a map drawn by the young man on the train who had already sailed on another, swifter ship—so many ships left Palermo for America. The young man had sworn he would meet their ship in Nov’ Orlenza, help them find their way. The map was only if they missed each other.

And so the accordion maker veered onto a fatal course.

At Palermo he hesitated. The ship passage to New Orleans was more expensive than that to New York. He had planned to use the savings from not purchasing passage for the paralyzed wife and the daughters to give him a little sum toward the music
store. Yet he bought the tickets, forty American dollars each, for he conducted his life as everyone does—by guessing at the future.

The Palermo wharf boiled with immigrants. The accordion maker and Silvano stood apart, the trunk between the man’s feet, the instrument on his back. Already he dreamed of himself in the whitewashed shop, his tools on the table before him, looking over a list of orders for accordions. In the background he imagined a vague woman, perhaps the paralyzed one restored to action, perhaps a milk-skinned
americana.

Silvano was repulsed by the moil on the wharf. It was as though some great spatula had scraped through Italy and deposited this crust of humans on the edge of the oily harbor, the squirming crowd a thousand times greater than at the train station. Everywhere were people standing and bending, a man wrapped in a dirty blanket and dozing on the stones, with his head on a suitcase and a knife in his lax hand, crying children, women folding dark coats, anxiously retying cords around scarred cases, men seated on baskets of possessions and gnawing heels of bread, old women in black, scarves knotted under their bristly chins, and running boys, clothes flapping, insane with excitement. He did not join them, only watched.

Hour after hour the noisy, dragging mass shuffled up the gangplank onto the ship lugging bundles and portmanteaus, parcels and canvas telescope bags. The line of people hitched along the deck to a table where a pockmarked official counted off groups of eight, families sundered, strangers joined, all the same to him, gave the tallest man in each group a numbered ticket that signified their place at mess call. These eight, familiar or unknown to one another, were bound together by this meal ticket over thousands of miles of water. In the
accordion maker’s group was a disagreeable old woman with a face like a half-moon, and her two jabbering nephews.

The accordion maker and Silvano descended three levels to the men’s quarters, long tiers of berths like wooden shelves in a warehouse. They had the top boards, a slot where they slept and stowed everything: the trunk and the accordion, the rolled-up sheepskin and the grey blanket. Oil lamps cast a phlegmy glow, shadows that swayed like hanging men, cast an uneasy, twitching light that raised doubts and encouraged a belief in demons. They had seen the steady calm of electric lights in Palermo.

(The smell of kerosene, bilge, metal, marine paint, the stink of anxious men, of dirty clothes and human grease, mixed with the briny flavor of the sea, etched Silvano’s sensibilities, a familiar effluvia later on the Texas shrimp boats, and not even the rank stench of crude oil and gas in his roustabout days in the early decades of the new century erased it. For a while he worked on the tank farm fire crews, shooting cannonballs into fiery storage tanks to release the oil into the circular ditches around each of them before it exploded. He went on to Spindletop, Oklahoma’s Glenn Pool, caught a glimpse of Pete Gruber, the King of Oil, in his million-dollar rattlesnake suit, worked down the Golden Lane from Tampico to Potrero to Lake Maracaibo in Venezuela where his game ended as he crouched in the jungle trying to relieve himself and a hostile Indian’s arrow pierced his throat.)

The accordion maker warned Silvano that the passage would be rough, would cause incessant vomiting, but as they drew away from Palermo, from Sicily, from Europe, into the waters of the globe, they entered a zone of fair weather. Day after day sunlight gilded the waves, the sea was calm, without whitecaps or crested waves, numberless oily swells casting off
rags of foam. At night this watery lace glowed and shimmered a luminous green. The ship hissed through the sea and Silvano stared into a sky so deeply colored that he saw swarms of larvae, the gestation of stars or wind, crawling in the purple depths. Each morning the passengers emerged from the ship’s depths like weevils from a stump and spread out in the sunshine, the women sewing and working lace, the men at some handwork, declaring their plans, walking around and around to prevent costive gripe. Nearly everyone ate on deck, avoided the reeking messroom. The ship’s slop metamorphosed into something good as dried tomatoes, garlic, sausages, hard cheese, came out of suitcases. The accordion maker took the calm sea as a sign that his fortune had turned, lit a cigar and enjoyed it, played his accordion in the evenings. Already a few women had smiled at him, one asked him if he knew “
L’Atlantico,
” humming the wavelike melody. He told her he wished to learn it if she would be his teacher.

Stories of New Orleans began to trickle from the crew members and passengers who had been there or read letters from earlier travelers: a scimitar-shaped city fitted in the curve of the great river where moss hung from trees like masculine beards, where the tea-colored water of the bayous harbored alligators and ebon people nonchalantly strolled the streets, where the dead lay aboveground in marble beds and men walked holding pistols. A sailor taught Silvano the words “
ais crima,
” a kind of rare and delicious frozen confection achieved with a difficult machine and much labor.

The young man on the train had said their language would be easily understood in New Orleans, but in their mess call the old woman who had lived in New Orleans, whose son and family had died of some pestilence, who had gone back to
Sicily to fetch her two nephews and was now returning with them, warned them to cast away their Sicilian dialect, to speak Italian instead and quickly learn American.

“Italians say Sicilians speak thieves’ language in order to plot murder in their open faces. Americans believe Sicilians and Italians are the same and hate them both, curse them as sacks of evil. If you wish success you must master the American language.”

Words to break the teeth, thought the accordion maker. She looked at him as if she read his thinking. “I see in your face that you will not learn it.”

“And you?” he retorted. “You speak it fluently, no doubt?”

“I have learned many words,” she said. “From my son and his children. Now I will learn from my nephews. In America the natural order of the world is reversed and the old learn from children. Prepare yourself, accordion maker.”

On the last days of the voyage, as they rounded the tip of Florida and entered the Gulf of Mexico, the musky scent of land came to them. They had crossed some invisible bar, were no longer departing but arriving. The accordion maker brought his instrument on deck and played, sang in the high, strangling style of the village.

Now we arrive in La Merica—

Farewell to our childhood homes.

Here we begin our true lives.

Here we find money and respect,

Fine houses and linen shirts.

Here we become princes.

A member of the crew sang a comic American song—“Where, Oh, Where Has My Little Dog Gone?”—but the
accordion maker scorned to try it and countered with “
Sicilia Mia.
” His strong posture, his hairiness, his desperate voice and the accordion’s suggestive breathing drew a circle of women and girls around him. Still, he believed in a hell where sinners sat astraddle the heated wards of giant keys and served as clappers in white-hot bells.

They coasted into the delta, breathed its odor of mud and wood smoke under sunset clouds, gold curls combed out of the west, or the powdered stamens of a broad-throated flower. In the dusk they could see flickering lights in the side channels, sometimes hear a gruesome roar—the alligators, said a deckhand; no, a cow bogged in mud, said the woman with the nephews. The immigrants crowded the rail as the quivering ship moved into the Mississippi River, within the pincer of land. Silvano stood next to his father. A red moon crawled out of the east. On the shore the boy heard a horse snort. Hours before New Orleans the odor of the city reached them—a fetid stink of cesspools and the smell of burning sugar.

Nothing went as the accordion maker anticipated. The young man from the train was not at the dock. They waited hours for him while the other passengers disappeared into the teeming streets.

“True friends are as rare as white flies,” said the accordion maker bitterly. Silvano gaped at the black men and especially the women, whose heads were wrapped in turbans as though they concealed emeralds and rubies and chains of gold beneath the winded cloth. They puzzled their way along through the noisy, thronged streets with the young man’s map and found Decatur
Street, but there was no number sixteen there, only charred timbers among rampant fireweed, a gap in the row of frowsty tenements. The accordion maker forced his courage, spoke to an approaching man who looked Sicilian; at least his hair appeared Sicilian.