The Hayloft

My First Love was at the age of 11, in 1922, for Gina "the African," the young wife of old Hercules Santi, the image maker and sacristan of our church of San Rocco. Gina was called the African because her skin was a deep tint of greenish-brown hue, seeming of smooth lava or lignum vitae. Hardly more than a girl, she stood out among the Hoboken peasant women as a shining figure of precious substance. Her heavy hair, draping about her shoulders, was the bluest black. Her eyes were radiant light purple, her features perfect and her body that of a full-blossomed nymph.

Everyone but Hercules knew that her mother, "the Red Parasol," had been the professional whore of Vasto, home town of the paisanos in Italy. Upon arriving in Hoboken, Gina and her mother, sporting as always a tassel-fringed red silk parasol, were ostracized. It was no secret that Gina's father was the infidel Negro olive grower who had gone to Vasto from the Italian Somaliland in Africa. When the white-maned and bearded widower Hercules took his child bride to the altar, the paisano women made the sign of the cross and decreed that nothing but evil could result from the mating.

Across the street from our tenement was a large barn, encompassing Hercules' statuary studio, smithy shop and stable. There was a stone-cobbled courtyard, and to the rear was the vine-veined Victorian house with upper and lower verandas, and a widow's walk on top of the mansard roof.

Also with Hercules lived his 90-year-old blind mother, Rachel; Giovanni, his retarded son; and his husky adopted teenage son, Innocente. Innocente's real father was my mother's widower brother, Carlo. Uncle Carlo would urinate anywhere; hence he was called "Piss-Piss." In Tony's saloon next to Hercules' place, Uncle Piss-Piss was the unrestrained prince of smut and practical jokes. His pranks were legend. He was the Charlie Chaplin of the paisanos and would do anything for a laugh.

Besides making plaster religious statues, Hercules did ornamental ironwork and horseshoeing. The smithy shop had a cinder-sprinkled dirt floor, forge, shoeing bench and battered anvil. The memory of it evokes the smell of horse manure and acrid smoke, and the callous-gelatin odor of hot horseshoes charring into hoofs.

Hercules was in his 60s and was built like Michelangelo's The Creation of Adam. He had a great open, shaggy, amazed face. He was as a child with us street Arabs. He told us that in his youth he had run away from his father's statuary bottega in Vasto and roamed the world with a circus, performing feats of strength. He would take a new horseshoe, twist it straight and say to us kids, "Gentlemen, you are looking at the strongest man in the world, Hercules the Great!"

He showed us age-yellowed posters of himself and his first wife, Elena. She had been a bareback rider, and a fall from a horse while pregnant was the reason his son Giovanni was born mentally defective. He was proud to display his tremendous muscles and let us feel his marble-hard biceps.

But after dwelling upon the building of the body, Hercules would say in his soft voice, "Mighty muscles alone is not man's power. The greatest strength is love. Match your muscles with a clean mind and mercy. Injure not even the fly, for Our Father made him also."

Each day Hercules carried his son, Giovanni, out of the house and seated him on his wheeled soapbox on the veranda. Despite heat or cold, Giovanni wore sneakers, fedora, a bundling of sweaters and a muffler beneath a long green overcoat. He was in his 40s and undergrown.

When anyone entered the courtyard, Giovanni would call, "Who are you? Whhyyy?" He would pedal his feet against the soapbox and trumpet, "I-I-I knnowww...! I-I-I-I-I-I knnnoooowwwwww!" The paisanos compassionately referred to him as "I-Know."

When I was eight years old, playing near Hercules' manure pit, I fell in, floundering in the rain-soaked horse manure. Hercules and Innocente rushed from the studio upon hearing my cries and pulled me out. Hercules told Gina to bathe me and wash my clothes. She laughingly took me to the bathroom and removed my stinking overalls and shoes. I tried to hide my privates and kept backing away as she soaped me. She chuckled, threw off her clothes, got into the tub, sat, and made me stand facing her. I was terrorized by the thrilling pleasure of (continued on page 152)Hayloft(continued from page 127) her hands. I cringed but could not stop looking at her lovely polished dark-dark flesh.

She lifted me out of the tub and toweled me dry, pulling me against her sweet stomach and breasts. And first love stirred within me.

In those days, Italian tenement kids had to earn their salt in the spare time from school. When I was 11, Mother got me a job with Hercules. Hercules said to Mother, "Annunziata, I will pay little Pietro five dollars a week and teach him the art of image making. He will be as a cherished son of mine." Work never appealed to me, but I welcomed the opportunity to be near my secret passion, Gina the African.

The studio was like a workshop in heaven, where saints and angels and their wings and limbs were frozen chalky white and still until brought to life with paint. When no one was there I would climb the ladder to the hayloft above, and hide in a straw-camouflaged and forgotten slatted crib. I would lie there and watch what went on in the studio. I felt like God, who sees all. One afternoon as I was coming down the ladder, Innocente came into the studio. He grabbed me and beat me, saying, "If I ever catch you in the hayloft, I'll break your goddamn sneaky neck!"

So after that I used to creep up to the hayloft unseen from the stable. It was the limbo for damaged statues. Among the hay were Moses, St. Michael spearing the dragon, the Pietà, and stacks of sacred limbs, all layered with dust and connected by cobwebs.

Hercules was working on the Twelve Apostles for our church of San Rocco. The process was slow and detailed from the clay life-size model, the making of the separate gum forms, the pouring of the plaster, the stripping and smoothing of the seams, and finally the curing of the damp statues in an insulated vault fed with great heat.

The pastor, Don Savonarola, came often to view the work. A rabid reformer, he was aptly named. Lean, intense, he looked more like a Devil than a priest.

My father was a sanguine man. About the pastor he said to Mother, "A priest is still a man until castrated. It's not the good Apostles Don Savonarola is taken with. Those fanatic eyes of his burn for Hercules' young black beauty of a wife, Gina the African.

One Sunday Don Savonarola was in the studio discoursing to Hercules upon the Apostles as though he had known them personally: St. Peter was impulsive, St. Paul castigated homosexual and incestuous Christians, this saint was humble, that saint was wiser, and so on.

I heard I-Know calling me from his soapbox perch on the veranda to take him to the toilet. I wheeled him into the house. As we passed the kitchen, blind old Rachel was at the cook stove, and in a corner Gina and Innocente were kissing.

Later, we were at the dinner table and I-Know, spaghetti slipping through his fingers and his face smeared with sauce, sang out, "Don Savonarol-aaaa! Innocente kisses Momma Gina. You'd like to kiss her to-ooo. I-I-I knowwwww!"

Don Savonarola reddened. "Imbecile!" growled Innocente. "You belong in the crazy house!"

Gina laughed, and Hercules apologized for poor I-Know.

The following day, after school, I was alone with Innocente in the studio. He handed me a dime and told me to go to the movies. I said I didn't want to go to the movies and that I took orders only from Hercules.

He got me by the throat. "Listen, you turd, if you don't keep your tongue in your head I'll rip it out. Beat it!"

I left, went around the corner, came back through the alley and went up to my spying place in the hayloft from the other side of the barn.

Hercules and Gina came into the studio. She complained that Innocente was churlish and offensive. Innocente quarreled back. Hercules placated them. He was leaving for the afternoon on business. After he made sure Hercules was gone with his horse and carriage, Innocente embraced Gina, kissed her mouth and jabbed his hand up under her skirt.

They climbed the ladder to the hayloft. A few feet from where I was hiding, Innocente spread a horse blanket upon a mat of hay. They undressed and lay down. Her gleaming dark coppery skin and his white muscular body entwined. Towering above them was the statue of Moses. Innocente entered Gina and they rolled and contorted. The greyhound in the stable below began to bark. They kissed and bit and pumped and spasmed, and lay relaxed in the sunlight from the gable window. Sparrows flew in and chirped upon the horned head of Moses. Under the searching rays of the sun Gina's breasts were flawless pendants, her soft belly inviting, and blueblack was the nest of hair between her thighs. I could see the tiny transparent bubbles of sweat about her lips and jeweling her private hairs. I clutched my brittling middle. What I did I keep to myself.

Innocente got up and quickly dressed. "Gina, get your clothes on," he said nervously. She yawned and stretched.

"You were in a hurry to come up here, and now you want to race down."

"Uneasiness about the old fellow always comes over me when we've done."

"Hercules is incapable of suspicion. My husband is simple and good."

"Do you have a cozy sentiment for the old fellow?"

"Be fair to Hercules. Your father, Piss-Piss, has done nothing for you. You owe your life to Hercules."

"To hell with Hercules and Piss-Piss, too." Then he demanded, "After me, why do you still service the old man?"

She shrugged. "First you enjoy me, then you question the gift like the green youth you are."

He slapped her face and shouted, "Whore! I see his white beard in bed with you—I wish him dead for it!"

• • •

I was feeding wood into the stove that supplied the heat for the curing vault when suddenly Innocente picked me up by the shirt front and asked meaningfully, "Did you ever see me touch my stepmother?"

"Of course not, Innocente!"

"Have you stayed out of the hayloft? Don't lie to me, you little bastard!"

"I don't go up to the hayloft anymore—I swear to God!"

"I don't trust you. If you spy and say anything about me, here's what I'll do to you!" He carried me to the curing vault, thrust me in and slammed the door. The airless heat was unbearable. I became hysterical. He let me out and threatened, "That's a taste of what you'll get if you ever try to make trouble for me!"

On an afternoon off, I was back in the hayloft, safe in my crib before Gina and Innocente came up. When they were through making love, they talked.

Hercules would never get wise to them, Gina said, as long as he was led to believe that they could not tolerate each other.

"Innocente, our dangers are but two, the invidious tongues of the paisano women and the jealous starved soul of the priest, Don Savonarola, whose desireeaten eyes denude and wish to possess and destroy me."

To my consternation, I heard they intended to be in the hayloft until the following morning, because Hercules had gone to Pennsylvania with his wagon and dray horses for plaster of Paris.

The spring daylight left the gable window, and in swift moves the setting sun first pinked and then touched with silvery blue the big Moses above the lovers. There was the orchestra of quitting whistles from the factories. Dusk came, followed by night. I could dimly hear a phonograph singing, "There's a little bit of bad in every good little girl...they're all the same..." Hercules' mother, blind Rachel, came to the stable, fed the greyhound and shuffled back to the house.

In the pearly glow of the moon, the lush hair between Gina's thighs, the small bushes of her armpits and the long hair of her head were a lustrous jet. Her (continued on page 170)Hayloft(continued from page 152) eyes were wells of purple-and-white flowers, and her flesh was shimmering gold blackness against which her full mouth was vermilion, the sex-swollen nipples of her breasts livid carnelian.

Clouds curtained the moon and my vision was bounded by darkness. I sensed them as they loved and rested, their breathing harsh and rasping, then blending into long strengthless sighs. In-nocente arose and urinated somewhere, and then Gina. My insides were pressing for release. I didn't dare cause any sounds. I feared that Innocente would discover me and put me into the heat-curing vault to die cooked and suffocated. I heard the tolling of San Rocco, the wild laughter of Uncle Piss-Piss from Tony's saloon on the corner nearby, the trolley, the distant clanking freight trains, ships' whistles on the Hudson River, mice and birds in the loft, and the hoofed movings and making wind of the horses in the stable below. Father was out in the street calling for me to come home and cursing a blue streak in frustration.

Gina and Innocente were in exhausted sleep, but I couldn't leave without stepping on them. I had to stay in my trap.

There was deep silence fretted by Innocente's raucous snoring and the dog's intermittent growling below.

Hercules came back. The dog was agitated. He whispered to the dog. He could not help but hear Innocente's loud snoring. He went into the studio, lighted a candle and came up the ladder. His white-maned head appeared at the top of the ladder. He held the candle up high. In its flickerings he saw his naked wife and stepson. Gina had her hands under her head, her long legs widespread. Innocente slept face downward on Gina's breasts, with his leg flung over her hip. Hercules stared. His mouth dropped open. His face seemed to turn into rotten crumbling stone. His head swayed from side to side in denial. He mumbled a prayer, blew out the candle, quietly descended and left with his horses and wagon.

At daylight Gina's mother, the Red Parasol, called up to the hayloft, cautioning Gina and Innocente.

"Jesus, I slept like Lazarus," said Innocente. They hastily made love, dressed and left.

I caught hell from my tearful mother when I got home. I went to the toilet, had breakfast and went to work in the studio.

Hercules returned with a bewildered look, but he said nothing. We unloaded the bags of plaster from the wagon. My father came up behind me and said through gritting teeth, "So you try to run away from home and become a bum like the American kids, heh? Next time don't come back—and if you do you will remember the taste of my hands for the rest of your goddamn sweet life—you betcha!"

Next time came a few weeks later. Again, while observing the lovers from my crib in the hayloft, I learned that Hercules had left on another overnight trip and I would be stuck there until the following morning.

Innocente said, "There's something dreadful about the old fellow's kindness. His eyes go through me. He pretends he doesn't know about us. Let's take his cashbox and run away before it's too late."

"No, later you will want a finger-in-mouth Madonna and reproach me for not having been virgin. And you'll always see Hercules in our bed. Let things be. Destiny answers all things."

This time I did not escape the frantic wrath of my parents. Mother restrained Father, and made me kiss the rosary and tell the truth. Mother deplored the facts, but Father grinned. I had to go to confession over the matter. It was not I who had enjoyed the alleged sinning. In the confessional, as I spilled it all to Don Savonarola, I could not see him, but he groaned as if taken with a fit.

Saying my penitential "Our Fathers" and "Hail Marys," the only feeling I had was that of having betrayed the woman I loved, Gina, to the cutting paisanos and merciless Don Savonarola. A paisano secret had the life span of the May fly. Father and Mother blabbed to the paisanos who, because of the enormous horns Gina the African and her stepson had rooted into the image maker's forehead, crowned Hercules with the stigmatic nickname of "Il Cornuto."

If a paisano put the horns on the husband of an American woman, it was a notch in his virile gun and cause for pride and hilarity. As they considered the American a savage, they reasoned that horns were becoming and appropriate headgear for him. But the worst and most awful thing one paisano could do to another was to give him the disgraceful horns.

Don Savonarola, as was expected of him, would have to heap fuel upon the violation of the paisano code and the flames of their gossip. From the pulpit he ranted about the Seventh Commandment.

He shrieked, "God is more explicit against this vice than against any other! Against it He uttered His voice to Moses on the top of the mountain, 'Thou shalt not commit adultery!'"

The paisano women could never accept the fact of Gina's superior beauty and they severely bruited the situation in the house of Hercules. The men, however, salaciously envied Innocente and licked their chops at the mention of Gina the African.

Uncle Piss-Piss epitomized the pagan satyr in the illiterate paisano. In spite of the background of 2000 years of belief in the Trinity and all the saints, when it came to sex, Piss-Piss had no more control of his bestiality than a desire-frothing dog in the street. He got it into his head that he, too, along with his son, Innocente, should have a go at Gina the African. In Tony's saloon he bragged about having "cut my teeth" in Italy on Gina's mother, the Red Parasol, and wagered that he could also get "between her daughter Gina's legs!"

It was learned later that during an absence of both Hercules and Innocente, Piss-Piss got himself royally drunk, went into Gina's house, exposed himself and proudly proffered his prize. Gina put lumps on his head with a rolling pin. He vowed he would get even. For his failure he had to buy spaghetti and wine for his pals in Tony's.

Gina was helping us work on the statue of St. Philip. Don Savonarola came into the studio. His tall, ascetic figure, round clerical hat, cassock, black gloves, his long, pale face with the disturbed satanic eyes, created an uneasy atmosphere. A messenger boy brought a package for Hercules. Gina unwrapped it and removed the lid from the carton. Inside was a pair of horns, the same horns that had been on the mirrored wall behind the bar in Tony's saloon. The horns protruded from the top of a bull's skull. Tied to the tips of the horns were small paper Italian and American flags. Don Savonarola gulped and flushed. Crushing tears came from Hercules. He covered his face with his great hands. Gina dispainfully flung the horns into the trash can. "What significance are we to derive from this insulting buffoonery!"

Innocente said boldly, "Another would-be joke from that besotted animal, Piss-Piss, who calls himself my sire!"

Don Savonarola said grimly, "Certain sins cannot be kept from God—nor the good paisanos...!"

Gina turned on him tigerishly and shouted, "And you, don't hide any longer behind the crucifix! Answer me! Do you claim with the paisanos that I have lusted with my stepson? Have all of you seen something with your own eyes? What know you with your veiled words? Look to your thinly disguised desire of my thighs! And the smelly paisanos to their ugly, misshapen, stink-hipped wives whom no one wants! I read you, Don Savonarola! Your eyes have raped me on every occasion! You want me! You do and undo! Why don't you come right out and say you want me in your bed!"

Don Savonarola whispered hoarsely, "Confess and repent! Evil woman, purge yourself of the Devil and beg Christ's forgiveness!"

"Your Christ and my Christ are not the same! Repent yourself, hypocrite!"

Hercules shuddered and moaned, "What shall I do? What shall I do?"

"I'll tell you what to do, old man!" cried Gina, "The farce is finished! Get a rope and hang yourself!"

She swirled her skirt and ran back to the house. A minute later we heard her playing her guitar and singing with abandon.

Don Savonarola crossed himself and stalked out. Innocente went sullenly about his work. Hercules told me to go home. As I left, he was raking his white beard in astonishment and mumbling, "This insufferable light of day must end. Too much, too-too much is this light...!"

Later, when I came out of our tenement, there was commotion across the street in front of the studio. The policemen could not force the door. They broke a window; one climbed in and unlocked the door.

Gina and her mother came to the studio. I ran and followed Gina. Hercules was hanging from a rafter above three Apostles. Bonnetlike, the bull's skull and horns, still with the penny Italian and American flags on the tips, was strapped on his white-haired head. He had climbed to the hayloft, looped rope around a rafter, fastened the other end around his neck and jumped. The weight of his huge body had cracked and sagged the rafter. His eyes had bugged from their sockets; his face was coal-blue; his tongue was sticking out and swollen, and blood and foam had streamed from his eyes, ears, nose and mouth. Innocente was found on the floor of the heat-curing vault just inside the door. His young face was still fixed in the expression of the horror of death. His fingers were shredded from the vain attempt to break through the bolted door. When I had left the studio, only St. Matthew was in the vault. With Inno-cente's body, beside St. Matthew was also St. Thomas. Hercules must have told Innocente to wheel St. Thomas into the vault, and then closed and bolted the door.

When they had put Hercules and Innocente in mortuary baskets, Don Savonarola arrived. As Don Savonarola prayed over them with his self-righteous vindicated "Death is the wages of sin" look. Uncle Piss-Piss pointed to Gina the African, screaming, "Your black body is my son's grave!" Gina held her head high, and in her defiance of Don Savonarola, Piss-Piss and the paisanos, she never looked more beautiful.